Acer Reintroduces Gateway PC Brand To UK Market

Taiwanese manufacturer Acer has brought back the Gateway brand in the United Kingdom and Europe and will target businesses only via a network of resellers.

Acer, which bought Gateway for $710 million last year, will use the brand to sell laptops, desktops, servers with peripherals and will use the tagline "Business First" which incidentally is the name of a service offered by the Swindon College.

The brand never completely disappeared from the US where it shed its cow-related theme and dropped the "2000" from Gateway 2000 earlier in the century. Even in the UK, we have had loads of refurbished Gateway laptops along the way. 

Acer's Divisional director in charge of the Gateway Brand, Antonio Papele, said that the company would operate independently from Acer, with a separate structure, and would have the “agility of a startup but with the funding of a $20 billion company.”

Only desktops and laptops will be offered at launch with servers and LCD monitors available in the second quarter of 2009 with Microsoft Professional Operating systems or Linux. Gateway did not say how and whether it will position itself with regards to its parent company. 

Acer already produces monitor LCDs, Altos Servers, Enterprise storage, Veriton Business PCs and Travelmate Business Notebooks. Gateway products will only be available through resellers and other traditional business to business channel actors who will be able to add value added services. 

The company also presented a range of managed services which will allow resellers to sell rebadged Gateway services including remote asset management and IT infrastructure analysis via the web.

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