The rough part was the transition from open to authorized, where the number of authorized dealers were pared down.” “We had been purchasing through distribution, getting product in one or two days, and now we were getting product in eight days. That was an adjustment,” recalls Martorana. “When HP was eliminating the Tier 2 program, we were elevated to a Tier 1 distributor if we so chose. That, too, has not been without challenges. As many in the channel know all too well, there has been a great deal of change among HP’s supplier relationships over the last couple of years, so simply noting that in 2015 Digitek is a Tier 1 distributor for HP is impressive. “There are big things happening at Digitek,” says Aaron Dyck, senior director of solutions.Ī big part of Digitek’s success has been its relationship with HP. And although Digitek still sells some storage media - Martorana says it is approximately 15 percent of the firm’s revenue - it has become firmly entrenched in the imaging supplies space. Now an authorized distributor for Lexmark and Xerox as well as HP, Digitek opened a Dallas location last year, and in the past year has increased its square footage for distribution by 50 percent. “Lexmark signed us up a couple of years ago to be an authorized supplies distributor, and Xerox after that. “We grew pretty rapidly at that point and other manufacturers took notice,” recalls Martorana. We pioneered that model.”įrom that point, it was just a matter of time for Digitek. There were a lot of little resellers out there, and we said, it’s great you have these giant distributors for selling to the CDWs of the world, but who’s going to take care of a lot of the smaller dealers? We felt it was a chance to close the gap with the SMB dealer. “That opened the door for us to go after many resellers that wouldn’t really speak to us before, and helped us get onto the scene. “Our dealers could now get credit from HP for puhases they made from us,” said Martorana. That program sought to push marketing programs from HP through to the smaller dealers and give them the attention that may have been lacking from the larger distributors. However it was HP’s Tier 2 program that really put Digitek on the map in the imaging space. It has been a busy and productive six or seven years, however, with loyal customers working with Digitek as it expanded from its Virginia headquarters and into Chicago and California, as well as Columbus, Ohio, with the purchase of an additional storage media company. We haven’t really been a focused player in the space until the last six or seven years or so.” “We’ve been around for a while, but we started with one category and then made the decision to refocus on this channel. We felt that if we could offer them to our customers we could get some traction - and that’s what we did.”įor that reason, says Martorana, Digitek isn’t necessarily a household name in the imaging industry. “That’s when we made a concerted effort to bring on imaging lines like HP, Xerox, and more. “We saw the writing on the wall that the media space was going to be in decline, and meanwhile the imaging supplies market was a multibillion dollar market that was growing,” he says. But Martorana was not content to let that rest. By 2004, says Digitek CEO Paul Martorana, the business incorporated some imaging supplies but was about 70 percent storage media. Although the firm dabbled in certain imaging products early on, it was relationships with companies like Sony, Fuji and Maxell - leaders in the field of storage media at the time - that really grew the business. When it launched it was focused largely on storage media, as the name might imply to those still familiar with the medium. One that is not only existing, but thriving, goes beyond success, and becomes a model of excellence.įounded in 1998, Digitek is such a business. It stands to reason, then, that a business founded in 1998 is a success just by virtue of its continued existence. For every business that has successfully completed a transformation, there may be 20 other empty offices, vacant factories and forgotten names. After all, technology evolves, so it makes sense for a successful business to evolve along with it. It is not an uncommon story in the imaging industry - or any technology-based industry, really - for a business to look completely different today than it did 10 years ago.
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