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At first, Syntrex Inc. of Eatontown seems like a David among Goliaths.
That's because its field is the huge, burgeoning market of office automation. The "Goliaths" include IBM, Wang, Digital Equipment, and, lately, AT&T; plus, there are many other players in the mini and microcomputer games.
However, with 1984 sales over $50 million and an annual growth rate of sales around 30 percent, Syntrex is to small fry. Its marketing strategy calls for finding and exploiting niches rather than going after everything in office automation. And its product line is hardly a "slingshot."
Syntrex, as chairman and chief executive officer Dan Sinnot points out, is dedicated to finding the solution users want, rather than only hardware and softward. By keeping a close tab on what the users want and need through a listening network, and developing the line to fit these needs, Syntrex can initally meet 75 to 80 percent of what a target user wants through specific office automation software.
By contrast, the others in the field, whom Sinnot characterizes as suppliers of tools, typically meet only 20 percent of the users' needs. "We feel more comfortable taking our approach than being a supplier of PC clones," he says, "particularly as these people are having problems with the competitive squeeze by IBM and AT&T."
A second element in Syntrex strategy is picking specific markets. Its most successful, actually is fairly broad -- law firms. "In the 1970s data and text processing was centralized. For example, all word processing came out of a center.
"Now the trend is to distribute office automation throughout a firm, with one terminal...