PC Retail

As a one-stop software shop for system builders, Nu Soft and its Tekcentre website has a legion of small to medium sized businesses reaping the rewards of its simple system .

The company's practical and direct approach to the industry's demands have put Nu Soft squarely on the map – and also in a very good position to maximise the possible benefits for its target customers and shape its offering into a realistic proposition. For a smaller distie, this is undoubtedly quite an achievement.

The simplicity of the core idea upon which the company was founded has been its central strength. With many of its staff having previous experience in the industry, when the doors opened for business at Nu Soft in January 2004, the central tenets of its philosophy were simple and arresting.

"Nu Soft itself was formed at the beginning of 2004, predominantly as a sub distributor in the software market," explains the firm's Robert Waterman. "We were all working for software retailers and distributors, and we had a lot of clients out there that were system builders, consultants – market professionals that were looking for a one stop shop for software.

"So rather than buying Microsoft from one distributor, Symantec from another and incurring separate delivery charges, we put everything under the one roof, and decided we could offer the full range of software from every single company out there, from the big names through to some of the more obscure software titles that people might only ask for once every five years. It evolved from that into a multi-functional software supplier which is what we do now on a day-by-day business."

Natural growth has led to the company now turning over £5million plus, all the while maintaining its dealings with the core demographic.

"The type of businesses we deal with are small to medium sized system builders, and it's always trade," continues Waterman. "We don't serve anybody outside of the trade market. There are nine of us here, of which five are sales and four are support. We're purely UK and Ireland based, and we haven't really stepped out of that boundary."

Quickly earning a reputation for honesty and excellent customer care has also helped smooth the often rocky road to success for Nu Soft, whose approach to clients is based on solid relationships.

"It's a professional service – we don't work off account numbers," adds Waterman.  "It's a much more personal service that we are offering compared to the larger distributors out there, who might pretend to be your friend, but when it goes wrong couldn't care less."

With the system software market in somewhat of a fluster at the moment thanks to Microsoft's ongoing problems with Vista, the landscape has changed dramatically for Nu Soft, for whom Microsoft plays an extremely important role.

"It's very quiet at the moment," says Waterman. "The market has changed dramatically, I would say, in the past two to three years. People have become more aware of various other options, and with Microsoft putting such massive restraints on the market – chopping and changing operating systems and office packages on a yearly basis, it's becoming very difficult.

"Whereas roll-outs used to happen all the time, and there is always a demand for people to upgrade their systems, those people who upgraded from say Windows 95 or 98 and went over to Windows XP are now very happy to stay with XP, because for them XP is working."

Yet although the market is somewhat difficult at the moment, a positive and upbeat message is still being issued from Nu Soft's HQ, where all eyes are looking to the future and the possibilities that the industry will present in the next few years.

"For ourselves, we're going to be looking very aggressively now at the security side of things, as well as the buy back side of things, as that's where we see margins for everybody and a happy market," concludes Waterman. "We're also looking at second user asset licensing which we really want to get ourselves into, and that's where we see the market ending up. You have to be proactive because if you put your head down and watch it go by, that's exactly what will happen."
www.nu-soft.com