Q&A Q&A
Q&A with Jason Chibnall, Managing Director of Hammer Distribution
remembered the unique nature of Hammer Distribution and what we stood for. The response to our return has been overwhelmingly positive, and we have been welcomed back across the market with a great deal of warmth and support. For me, it feels like we have re- anchored the business in its heritage while establishing a solid, modern foundation for our next phase of growth. TR: How has Hammer positioned itself since returning to its original name? JC: We have continued to build on our deep pedigree in storage and storage media, leveraging our long-standing vendor partnerships and established customer base. That has been particularly important over the last 12 months, when the market has been extremely constrained. Our relationships, market knowledge and understanding of our customers have enabled us to secure product and continue supporting them when availability has been challenging. At the same time, we have continued to develop what we believe is a very differentiated approach to distribution. We are an outcomes-driven distributor. Rather than simply asking what product a customer wants to buy, we listen to the system or solution problem they are trying to solve and then use more than one of the technologies in our portfolio to help provide the answer. Around 18 months ago, and going live broadly alongside the Hammer rebrand, we launched AI Works. The proposition was created to help customers who wanted to understand and implement AI infrastructure but were often unsure about where to start. We have built a network of partners with expertise across different aspects of AI, while also providing access to key vendors in the market. That gives customers a way of thinking about their AI journey and, importantly, understanding the infrastructure they need to support it. We have built a portfolio that can address the full AI infrastructure journey. If a customer wants to deploy a complete AI installation in its data centre, we can bring together everything from the non- compute elements, such as racks and
PDUs, through to GPU-centric servers, differentiated storage platforms and high- performance AI networking. We then complement that with our cloud and cyber capabilities. Ultimately, we can help customers think beyond the AI infrastructure itself and consider the business-critical applications they are building, including backup and recovery, cybersecurity and threat detection to protect those applications. TR: How has trading been for Hammer? JC: Like many businesses in our part of the market, we are clearly benefiting from the AI and infrastructure boom. However, we have also been fortunate to be in a position where our vendor relationships, market knowledge and internal expertise allow us to leverage that opportunity and support our customers particularly effectively. Importantly, we are beginning to see significant wins from the solutions side of the business, particularly around AI and data centre-centric solutions. Trading performance has been exceptionally robust, delivering substantial growth across both top-line revenue and overall commercial performance compared to the prior year. We carry considerable momentum as we head toward the close of our financial year. TR: Where is that growth coming from? JC: Our growth is driven by several complementary pillars. The first remains our traditional heritage in enterprise storage media. We hold long-standing relationships with the world’s tier-one storage vendors, alongside an established ability to match critical supply with the right enterprise use cases during tight market conditions. That core business has expanded significantly, with project scale and deployment sizes reaching historic highs. The second major driver is our consultative, outcomes-led model. The channel is increasingly demanding more than hardware fulfilment; partners want a distributor that functions almost like an integrator with a distribution card. We help partners define technical outcomes and curate the multi-vendor stack required to solve them.
Jason Chibnall
It’s been an eventful 12 months since Hammer Distribution’s rebrand on October 1 2025, culminating in DCC’s sale of distribution business Nexora (comprising Hammer Distribution and sister brands Almo, Azenn Connect, CapTech, COMM-TEC and JAM) to private equity firm OneEquity Partners on October 9. In this Q&A, Managing Director Jason Chibnall, looks back over the successes and challenges of the last year and explains why Hammer’s positioning as an outcomes-driven, differentiated value-added distributor has struck such a chord with customers. Technology Reseller (TR): It’s been 12 months since you rebranded back to Hammer Distribution, your original name. How do you feel looking back on that milestone? Jason Chibnall (JC): I personally feel an incredible sense of pride. Returning to the Hammer Distribution name was the culmination of a deliberate two-and-a-half- year journey, and it has been particularly meaningful because so many colleagues have such a deep, fond association with Hammer and its heritage. It also became abundantly clear throughout the process that the channel
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