New offerings as Simms goes express

The company, which was acquired by Express Data subsidiary Expressonline earlier this year, will rebrand as Expressonline, or Exol. Johnston says Simms has seen revenue triple in the past year and recorded its biggest sales and profit month  in October. Speaking in mid-November, when November figures were not available, Johnston says: "We've hit or exceeded our target numbers for the last seven months." New addition The October bonanza came prior to the company beginning its Huawei sales push – expected to bolster sales figures even further in coming months. Huawei is the company's third core product range, along with Dell and Motion, and Johnston says while he always thought Huawei 'would be pretty big, given what we've seen in the last few months I think the opportunity is larger by a significant factor than what I ever considered'. The company expects to debut another new offering late in the first half of 2012, or early in the second half. While he's coy about what it might be, he says both Dell and Huawei are 'top five in the world in their respective fields'. "Both were major organisations, well established and we opened them up to the reseller channel, bringing two completely new players to them." Ultimately, Johnston expects the company to end up with 'five or six core products, with peripheral, complementary products around them'. "That's enough. At the moment we've got the three core, with peripherals and sometime next year we'll bring in a fourth core product." The company is looking at a couple of areas and always tries to keep its products unique and exclusive. "Discussions are going on, but nothing is close to fruition right now." Express growth Johnston says the July acquisition by Expressonline means 'we're taking the brakes off'. He says the integration of the businesses in Australia 'has gone well.' That same integration procedure will begin in New Zealand during the slower December-January period and is expected to continue through to the end of Q1. The behind the scenes work transitioning to a new network will ensure minimal impact on resellers and customers, Johnston says. "Once we're comfortable with the back-end we will do a switch over at a time which will have least impact on everyone.