ASM Technologies is aiming to fill a “huge gap” in the US software distribution market after launching its first office there.
Serving just 50-60 large VARs and SIs, Cheshire-based ASM characterises itself as a specialist in tail-spend management. It ranked 19th in Oxygen’s Must-Know UK Distributors and Marketplaces 2025,
The new Atlanta office is designed to boost ASM’s ability to serve its resellers and their international customers “wherever they are”, CRO Iain Tomkinson told IT Channel Oxygen.
It adds to ASM’s existing international outposts in Germany and France.
“There’s no-one in the US like us who can do what we do, particularly around tail-spend software,” Tomkinson said.
“There is some crossover with traditional software distribution, but none of them deliver the full range of services across tail-spend software we do.
“There’s a huge gap in the market and we’re confident we can fill that gap.”
“To play basketball, we’ve got to build a basketball team”
ASM had been asked to launch a US presence by “a number of partners” for “several years”, Tomkinson said.
“But the timing wasn’t right,” he said, explaining that ASM needed to get an ERP and CRM upgrade under its belt before considering further international expansion.
“We got the funding in place to do an acquisition,” Tomkinson said.
“However, we’re quite unique in what we do, and if we were to go out and buy someone, it’d be like buying a top-flight American football team and trying to get them to play basketball.
“We’d have to buy someone and then break it to get them to do something different, which defeats the object of an acquisition in the first place.
“We made the call that we wanted to build it from the ground up. If we want to play basketball we’ve got to build a basketball team.”
Although the US launch will initially be supported by a number of its long-standing UK partners, ASM could begin targeting net-new US partners after around six months, Tomkinson indicated.
Under newly installed US Sales Manager Del Harris, it plans to hire 20 US staff by the end of March 2026, he said.
A different spin on tail-spend
Tomkinson said ASM tends to “complement” rather than conflict with other large software distributors such as Climb, QBS Software and Pax8, stressing that its definition of tail-spend or tail-end vendors may differ from theirs.
“Even though people might say they work with tail-end software, it’s not as we do,” he said.
“JetBrains might be called tail-end software because it’s low value and purchased relatively infrequently. But to us, that’s not really what it is. It’s not necessarily low value: it can be a very large strategic order you might buy once every three years.”
Tail-spend management calls for a specific set of skills, Tomkinson said.
“It comes down to commercial awareness of how that spend is managed,” he explained.
“The software we sell is predominantly enterprise focused, so those resellers don’t want to go and self-serve on a £1.5m licence,” he said.
“They want their hand held, they want technical confidence they are buying the right product, that it’s going to be fit for purpose, and that there’s no risk to them commercially.”
Having a US presence will help ASM’s resellers and SIs provide a better global service to the largest UK-headquartered enterprises such as AstraZeneca, Barclays and HSBC, Tomkinson claimed.
“They want to offer that service wherever they operate, and they want it to be unified: same process, same engagement methods, same commercials,” he said.
“Taking on the beast of Silicon Valley”
Founded in 1992, ASM is owned by founder-directors Graham Aspinall and Roger Smith.
“They don’t tend to get too involved in the front end of the business and let me get on with the customer-facing and vendor-facing activities,” Tomkinson said of the duo.
Having turned over £107m in its year to 31 March 2025, ASM is on course to grow its top line by 35-40% in its fiscal 2026 even without the contribution of the new US operation, according to Tomkinson.
“The great story behind this is it’s a British company taking on the beast of Silicon Valley. If we can do this here, we can do it anywhere,” Tomkinson said of the US move.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
