CDW 2014 Annual Report Download - page 7

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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 approximately 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 ranges from discrete hardware and software
products to integrated IT solutions such as mobility, security, data center optimization, cloud computing, virtualization and collaboration. We are
technology "agnostic," with a product portfolio that includes over 100,000 products from more than 1,000 brands. We provide our products and
solutions through sales force and service delivery teams consisting of nearly 4,600 coworkers, including more than 1,800 field sellers, highly-
skilled technology specialists and advanced service delivery 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 sell or include in the solutions we offer. 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 deliver a consistent brand
experience through our established end-market coverage and extensive customer access.
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 enables us to identify the products or combination of products that best address each customer's specific
organizational IT requirements and to evolve our offerings as new technologies develop.
We believe we offer the following value proposition to our customers and our vendor partners:
Our customers include private sector businesses many of which employ fewer than 5,000 employees, government agencies and
educational and healthcare institutions. We serve our customers through channel-specific sales teams and service delivery teams with extensive
technical skills and knowledge of the specific markets they serve. This market segmentation allows us to customize our offerings and to provide
enhanced expertise in designing and implementing IT solutions for our customers. We currently have five dedicated customer channels:
medium/large business, small business, government, education and healthcare, each of which generated nearly $1 billion or more in net sales in
2014 . The scale and diversity of our customer channels provide us with multiple avenues for growth and a balanced customer base to weather
economic and technology cycles.
4
Our value proposition to our customers Our value proposition to our vendor partners
5 Broad selection of products and multi-branded IT solutions
5 Value-added services with integration capabilities
5 Highly-skilled specialists and engineers
5 Solutions across a very broad IT landscape
5 Access to approximately 250,000 customers throughout the U.S.
and Canada
5 Large and established customer channels
5 Strong distribution and implementation capabilities
5 Value-added solutions and marketing programs that generate
end-user demand