CDW - the reseller that sells to everyone - Born from a classified ad in 1984; the American archetype of the value-added reseller, and the place an F5 lab licence cost 108 dollars and a credit card.

CDW is an American reseller of technology products and services, founded in Chicago in 1984 and headquartered in Vernon Hills, Illinois, with revenue above 22 billion dollars.

CDW began in 1984 as a classified advertisement. Michael Krasny, a former used-car salesman, put a small notice in a Chicago newspaper to sell his own IBM PC; the second person who called asked to be sold a system of his own, and the company that grew from that call became Computer Discount Warehouse, then simply CDW, and by 2025 a Fortune 500 firm with 22.4 billion dollars of revenue and fifteen thousand employees, selling to business, government, education and healthcare in three countries.

It is the American archetype of the value-added reseller, and the contrast with a distributor is worth being exact about. The Versim entry describes a firm that sells only to the channel and never to the end customer; CDW is the other thing, the layer that sells to everyone, and it has been public, private and public again - listed in 1993, bought out for 7.3 billion in 2007, relisted in 2013 - while buying its way into services with Berbee in 2006, into Britain with Kelway in 2015 and, for 2.5 billion in 2021, into Sirius.

What a reseller of this kind makes possible is best shown by a single transaction. In October 2019 a BIG-IP Virtual Edition lab licence, the 10-megabit edition F5 sells for training and evaluation, could be put in an online basket and bought for 108.29 dollars, with a year of the vendor's premium support for 18.99 more, delivered electronically with nothing to ship. Two days later the vendor's own confirmation of the resulting service contract arrived with the reseller's licensing desk in copy. An engineer with a credit card and no vendor relationship at all could stand up a licensed, supported F5 lab for the price of a textbook.

That is the thing to understand about the reseller layer: it is not primarily a source of discount, as the original name claimed, but a source of access. The vendor's contract, support entitlement and licensing all arrived exactly as they would have for an enterprise, because the reseller had already done the part that needs a relationship. The channel entries elsewhere in this section describe distributors and integrators arguing for their margin with labs, logistics and engineers. This is the simplest version of the argument, and it fits on a receipt.

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