Value for money

Value Added Resellers (VARs) have been around as long as the computer industry. Traditionally they take products manufactured by someone else (the OEM), add value and sell the new product combination on.

More recently, mid-range or so-called ‘mainstream’ engineering software products have tended to be offered by VARs because of the characteristics of the products and the market. The products — such as SolidWorks, Solid Edge and Autodesk Inventor — tend to be purpose-developed products with high-end functionality, at an entry level, high volume price. Because of the relatively low margins involved, an indirect channel of VARs has evolved to obtain appropriate, geographical coverage.

A combination of distributors such as Man and Machine and localised dealers has proved very cost effective in the past in setting up an alternative sales channel with 2D products like AutoCAD.

A distributor also empowers the total solution by researching and providing a full set of complementary applications to support the core mainstream product and offering customers true hybrid design capability that has hitherto been the exclusive preserve of high-end vendors. This concentrates effort and resources and avoids individual resellers duplicating activities.