Vendor lineage
Westcon-Comstor
The layer between the vendor and the reseller, which decides what is practical to buy in your country.
Westcon was founded in 1985 and Comstor in 1986 in Chantilly, Virginia. They became one company in August 1999, when Westcon bought Comstor for $95M, and the combined business has spent the decades since doing something most engineers have never had to think about: standing between the companies that make networking and security equipment and the companies that install it.
**What a distributor actually does, since this is the first one on this timeline.** A vendor like Cisco or F5 does not want a commercial relationship with every reseller in every country - the credit checks alone would be a business. A reseller does not want a separate contract, currency, logistics arrangement and support escalation with each of the forty vendors in its portfolio. The distributor sits between them and absorbs that: it holds stock, extends credit, handles import and customs, aggregates the paperwork, and trains the resellers on products they have just started carrying.
That last part is the reason distribution appears on a site about teaching at all. **A vendor's certified training is expensive and aimed at the vendor's own priorities; a distributor's enablement is aimed at whatever its resellers are failing to sell.** The two are not the same curriculum, and the second one tells you more about what the market is actually struggling with.
The strategic consequence is the interesting bit: **a distributor decides what is practical to buy in a country.** A product with no distribution in Brazil is not unavailable exactly, but every reseller quoting it must import it themselves, carry the currency risk, and explain a longer lead time to the customer - which in practice means they quote something else. Market share in a region often reflects distribution agreements more than it reflects the product.
**The corporate history is a chain of ownership rather than a chain of invention.** Datatec, a South African group, acquired Westcon in 1998. Westcon added RBR Group in the UK in September 1998 and then Comstor in August 1999 - Comstor having been founded in 1986, sold to GE Capital IT Solutions around 1996, and doing some $500M a year by the time it changed hands. Cisco distribution began in 1999 and Avaya in 2000. The combined company was doing about $1.5B, and $1.85B by 2004.
In 2017 SYNNEX bought the **Americas** business for $600M in cash, plus $30M for a tenth of the international operations, assuming around $190M of debt with up to $200M more contingent on targets. The Americas business had been turning about $2.2B of revenue. Westcon-Comstor's EMEA and Asia-Pacific operations stayed with Datatec, which is why the same brand can be a SYNNEX subsidiary in one hemisphere and a Datatec business in another.
**And a connection worth following.** Datatec ran three divisions: technology distribution as Westcon-Comstor, integration and managed services as **Logicalis**, and consulting as Analysys Mason. So the distributor and the integrator were siblings under one holding company - two layers of the same supply chain, owned by the same people, which is an arrangement worth noticing when you are trying to work out why a particular product kept appearing in a particular market.
1998 RBR Group Limited
A Cisco distributor in the United Kingdom, acquired in September 1998.
The beginning of the Cisco specialisation that Comstor completed a year later.
1999 Comstor $95M
A Cisco specialist distributor founded in Chantilly, Virginia in 1986, sold to GE Capital IT Solutions around 1996, and turning roughly $500M a year by 1999.
founded 1986, Chantilly, Virginia
The Comstor division, which is why the combined company carries both names to this day.
- Company Histories: founded 1985, Datatec's 1998 acquisition, RBR Group in September 1998, Comstor for $95M in August 1999, Cisco distribution from 1999 and Avaya from 2000, and $1.85B of sales in 2004
- Encyclopedia.com: Comstor founded in Chantilly, Virginia in 1986, acquired by GE Capital IT Solutions about ten years later, doing $500M annually; the combined company at $1.5B across two divisions
- SYNNEX SEC filing (5 June 2017): the Americas business at approximately $2.2B revenue and $89M EBITDA for the year to February 2017; Datatec's three divisions named as Westcon-Comstor, Logicalis and Analysys Mason
- ChannelPro: final terms - $600M cash for the Americas, $30M for a 10% stake in the overseas businesses, roughly $190M of assumed debt and up to $200M of earn-out