For more than 22 years, The ASCII Group, Inc., (ASCII) has been helping resellers realize their vision of higher profit margins. We provide leveraged buying programs, tools, products and services to assist independent information technology resellers in increasing profits, reducing costs and growing their businesses.

Major Events in ASCII History:

1984:

• The ASCII Group was founded in 1984 by Alan Weinberger and a group of 40 computer resellers and is headquartered just outside of Washington, DC in Bethesda, Maryland. Just a year later, we began establishing the first aggregation purchasing agreements in the history of the IT industry with major distributors, including Ingram Micro, SYNNEX, D&H, Tech Data and Merisel. These efforts were later mimicked by the major franchisers of the time such as Computerland, Entre, Micro Age and Inacomp. Our partnerships create value for distributors in the form of increased sales and marketing potential via the reseller channel, while also creating value for resellers via discounted pricing. ASCII is a unique facilitator of this channel model, and today has numerous Volume Purchasing Agreements with major distributors, leveraging the buying power of our solution providers.

• In 1988, Alan Weinberger was named by CRN as one of the top 25 industry executives in light of the growing influence that ASCII had in reinforcing the importance of the reseller in the channel along with the value of our business model to vendors and distributors. Other recipients that year included Victor Alhadeff of Egghead, Craig Burton of Novell, Rod Canion of Compaq, Curt Crawford of IBM, Michael Dell of Dell, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Andy Grove of Intel, Scott McNealy of Sun, Dave Norman of BusinessLand, Pete Peterson of WordPerfect, John Rehfeld of Toshiba, John Roach of Radio Shack, and John Sculley of Apple.

1990:

• ASCII became the first and only IT industry entity to successfully aggregate marketing development funds from WordPerfect on behalf of our membership to create a national ad campaign in publications such as the Wall Street Journal. This ad featured the names of 120 members who contributed to its production and publication.

1995:

• ASCII has always taken a strong stand on manufacturer policies that could have a negative impact on the health of the channel. In 1995, we publicly opposed in the Wall Street Journal a proposal by Microsoft to begin selling fully integrated solutions, including hardware, via their Windows operating system's newly built-in browser. This strategy would have created a direct channel conflict for Microsoft, and would have had a disastrous effect on the IT industry. Shortly after the article appeared, Microsoft ended the program.
• We were approached by IBM to market its OS2/Warp operating system through our channel. ASCII represented the only independent body of resellers who were able to market an alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system.

1997:

• We held the first of our industry leading "Boot Camps" in numerous cities around the United States. Held monthly, members and invited guest solution providers attend a full day session of training with experts in sales, marketing and business processes along with approximately 30 vendors. Many members have found the peer networking alone to be a valuable reason to attend.

1998:

• During the middle of the Microsoft federal anti-trust suit in 1998, four major influencing op-eds were written in the Wall Street Journal on the topic of anti-trust litigation against Microsoft. Bill Gates, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, and Alan Weinberger on behalf of ASCII wrote articles on the side of keeping the federal government out of regulating the computer industry. Bob Dole, Senator from Kansas, and Robert Bork, former Solicitor General, wrote on the side of the government, arguing that Microsoft should be divided up.

2003:

• ASCII opened the first VAR-based channel for Dell. We have a growing volume of business through Dell, which is accelerated by this Volume Purchasing Agreement. This business is indirect, from manufacturer to reseller to consumer.

• That same year, we were COMDEX’s major partner at its fall show, creating five, large solution pavilions called “Innovation Centers.” These Innovation Centers featured member-delivered presentations on IT integration for end-users. ASCII members spoke on integration of solutions from vendors including  IMlogic, Lexmark, McAfee, Mitel, Nortel Networks, OpenOffice.org, Palm, Séance, SonicWall, WebEx, and others. Topics included: security; web services; wireless and mobility; and open source and GNU/Linux software. ASCII and Microsoft were the two largest exhibitors at the show.

2004:

• We co-sponsored with Microsoft and CompTIA TS2 events across the U.S.  ASCII employees and members attended over 200 local technical training and marketing events for independent software vendors and resellers.

2006:

• ASCII teamed with Google in three ways. First, we are listed on Google co-op as the only IT industry partner to help Google make searches for IT products and services more valuable using independent computer VARs and integrators. Second, we are the only IT organization listed that Google users can opt into and thus use our Custom Search Engine for IT products and services. Third, Google is partnering with ASCII to provide special incentives to our members and their customers to start using Google AdWords.