The North American System Builders Association has merged with rival lobby group IntegratorsOnly.com. The enlarged group has 6,500 members.

The merger makes sense - originally NASBA was set up to represent the top 200 so-called white- box builders, while IntegratorsOnly.com looked after the smaller players.

But manufacturers habitually dish out deep discounts on everything from CPUs to OSes to a handful of the biggest brand-name players, hurting the competitiveness of system builders big and small.

With one lobby group, America's system builders have a better chance of overturning this practice. ®