With eight warehouse facilities throughout North America, Hutton prioritizes availability and quick delivery of equipment.

by Jeff Goldman [December 26, 2006]

Hutton Communications was founded in 1967 as an avionics electronics distributor. In 1981, the company shifted its focus to wireless communications. "Since then, we've grown to be one of the largest wireless distributors in the United States and Canada," says Jeff Hall, the company's director of marketing.

Hutton Communications 2520 Marsh Lane Carrollton, TX 75006 Voice: (877) 648-8866 Fax: (877) 762-8274 mailto: info@huttoncom.com

Hall says one of Hutton's greatest strengths is the fact that the company has a full complement of outside salespeople. "We're not just sitting back and waiting for the phone to ring," he says. "We have salespeople out there working with customers on projects, and we have a lot of technical resources that actually go out and travel with our salespeople to provide customers with the proper products for their applications."

The salespeople's technical backgrounds, Hutton says, serve as a key differentiator. "They're salespeople, but they also understand the technology, and most of them have been with us for many, many years and understand wireless," he says. "And they can handle a good portion of the technical questions that come up without having to consult anyone—but they also have a lot of resources if they need them."

Those resources, Hall says, include field applications engineers for microwave and in-building wireless, as well as for tower and steel applications. "And we actually have technical resources that can do site planning path analysis—we have a pretty good complement of resources to be able to do whatever the customer needs to have done," he says.

While some customers know exactly what they want, Hall says the advice that Hutton can provide regarding selection and deployment of equipment is a key strength. "It's all about building a relationship with the customer," he says. "If they can rely on us not only for the sales expertise, the product expertise, but also the technical expertise they're going to buy the products from us."

Making wireless work
The company's equipment covers a full range of needs. "We sell everything that makes wireless work, whether it's a voice network, a data network, even wireless video—anything from the towers to the antennas to the cables to the radios," Hall says. "On cell networks, we don't sell cell phones or accessories for cell phones, and we don't sell Internet service—but we sell everything that makes that work."

Still, Hall says there's a qualification process in selecting the equipment Hutton sells. "We definitely do not carry every product that's out there—that's a decision we made many years ago," he says. "We focus our resources on working with high quality products, good value products, for our customers."

In August of 2006, Hutton Communications acquired Electro-Comm Distributing. "One of the main reasons that we acquired them is because their marketplace and ours are very big complements to each other," Hall says. "We didn't have a lot of customers that overlapped—they heavily focused on point-to-multipoint applications, and did a lot of stuff with wireless ISPs."

In comparison, Hall says, Hutton has in the past been more focused on point-to-point solutions. "We also did a lot of stuff with ISPs, but we did it with more from a backhaul standpoint," he says. "Now, as one company, we have everything that a customer could want from point-to-multipoint applications, as well as all the backhaul stuff."

Pricing and availability
When considered in combination with the guidance and support the company can provide, Hall says Hutton's pricing is extremely competitive. "We're not always the lowest priced in the market; we're not always the highest priced," he says. "Pricing is a very tough subject, but from an overall standpoint, I'd say Hutton is probably one of the most competitive distributors out there."

Hutton runs seven warehouse facilities throughout North America—in Dallas, Texas; Charlotte, North Carolina; Evansburg, Pennsylvania; Joliet, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; Toronto, Canada; and Calgary, Canada—and the company opened an eighth warehouse facility in southern California in early December of 2006.

The point, Hall says, is that availability of product is a key priority. "When you're putting up a wireless network, there are going to be products you need that are very heavy to ship, whether it be a tower or a big reel of cable or something like that," he says. "We want to make sure we can take care of those customers not only from a quick delivery standpoint, but also not charging them an arm and a leg for freight."

As its tagline, the company calls itself your wireless product experts. "We like to feel that we bring value to the supply chain," Hall says. "We're bring that value through not only having products available, but also through technical support and ease of doing business."

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