Inside ASI-AP

On Friday morning 5th October Keith, Chris (TAK) and I spent a couple of hours in a closed partner briefing session for 4 hand selected Ingram Micro (IM) resellers to invite them into the iMIS/Sun bundle program. These resellers already have customers in the non-profit sector and will be offered pre-configured iMIS and Sun hardware bundles for different size non-profits, along with implementation services from our Singapore AiSP TAK Systems.

Keith and Chris outside the IM head office

Steven from IM gave a great presentation on the market opportunity in the region. Adrian from Sun talked about the new AMD & Intel Sun servers and Windows server options, which is a new market for Sun.

What really impressed me about the Sun hardware was the engineering approach they take to the design of their servers. Sun has its roots in high power engineering and CAD workstations and always had been at the forefront of modern computing. Seeing this now applied to the volume server business – against the likes of Dell, IBM and HP – was impressive.

I gave a presentation that provided a history of ASI, an overview of the non-profit market, and a basic overview of iMIS (the iMIS Value Cycle slides).

We had some good questions that indicated a level of interest from all of the invited partners.

We got a nice tour of the IM facility in Singapore – the head office anyway. Some 300 staff work in the head office and we were introduced to the MD and the Director responsible for the iMIS program offering. IM are a true powerhouse in Asia – almost every piece of IT and gaming goes through the IM warehouses – representing some 1,700 vendors. And because they distribute Xbox – they have Xbox consoles for visitors to play while waiting in reception!

Adrian (Sun) on left, Steven (IM) on right