CDW 2012 Annual Report Download - page 7

Table of Contents
PART I
Item 1. Business
Our Company
CDW is a Fortune 500 company and a leading provider of integrated information technology (“IT”) solutions in the U.S. and Canada.
We help our customer base of more than 250,000 small, medium and large business, government, education and healthcare customers by
delivering critical solutions to their increasingly complex IT needs. Our broad array of offerings range from discrete hardware and software
products to integrated IT solutions such as mobility, security, data center optimization, cloud computing, virtualization and collaboration. Our
product portfolio includes more than 100,000 products from more than 1,000 brands. We provide these solutions through a large and
experienced sales force and service delivery team consisting of more than 4,300 coworkers, including nearly 1,400 highly skilled technology
specialists and engineers.
We are a leading U.S. sales channel partner for many original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) and software publishers
(collectively, our “vendor partners”), whose products we include in our offerings. We believe we are an important extension of our vendor
partners' sales and marketing capabilities, providing them with a cost-effective way to reach customers and maintain a consistent brand
experience through our established end-market coverage and extensive customer access. In 2012, we generated over $1 billion of revenue for
three of our vendor partners and over $100 million of revenue for an additional 12 of our vendor partners.
We provide value to our customers by simplifying the complexities of technology across design, selection, procurement, integration and
management. Our goal is to have our customers, regardless of their size, view us as an indispensable extension of their IT staffs. We seek to
achieve this goal by providing our customers with superior service through our large and experienced sales force and service delivery teams. Our
multi-brand offering approach, which is not limited to any particular brand or product technology, enables us to identify the products or
combination of products that best address each customer's specific organizational IT requirements.
Our customers include private sector businesses that typically employ fewer than 5,000 employees, government agencies and
educational and healthcare institutions. We serve our customers through service delivery teams and channel-specific sales teams with extensive
technical skills and knowledge of the specific markets they serve. This market segmentation allows us to customize our offerings for our
customers, which often do not have the expertise or resources to effectively evaluate and to optimally implement IT solutions. We currently have
five dedicated customer channels: small business, medium/large business, government, education and healthcare, each of which generated over
$1 billion in net sales in 2012. The scale and diversity of our customer channels provides us with multiple avenues for growth and a balanced
customer base to weather economic and technology cycles.
The following table provides information regarding our reportable segments and our customer channels:
For further information on our segments, including financial results, see Note 16 to our consolidated financial statements included
elsewhere in this report.
We offer over 1,000 brands, from well-established companies such as APC, Apple, Cisco, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo,
Microsoft, NetApp, Symantec and VMware to emerging vendor partners such as Drobo, Fusion-io, Meraki, Nimble Storage, Salesforce.com,
Sophos and Splunk. Our coworkers have enabled us to achieve the highest level of certification from major vendor partners such as Cisco, EMC
and Microsoft. These certifications reflect the extensive product
4
Corporate Segment
Public Segment
Customer
Channels
Medium/Large
Business
Small
Business
Government Education Healthcare Other
Typical Target
Customers 100 - 5,000
employees
10 - 100
employees
Various agencies
within federal, state
and local
governments
Higher
education
and K-12
Private and public
hospitals, ambulatory
service providers and
long-term care
facilities
Advanced services
customers across
our channels plus
Canadian
businesses and
agencies
2012 Net
Sales
(in billions)
$4.4
$1.1 $1.4 $1.2 $1.4 $0.6