ANS Group aims at end-to-end with VMware gold status

ANS' Scott Fletcher

Manchester based ANS Group has racked up VMware gold partner status alongside its accreditations in Cisco, Novell and Microsoft in a bid to offer true end-to-end solutions.

Scott Fletcher, chairman and founder of ANS, said the IT and telecommunications solution provider had achieved VMware Authorised Consultant (VAC) Gold status.

“This means we have got six engineers qualified at this highest level over the last six to 12 months,” he said.

VAC partners are qualified to offer VMware-certified consulting services as well as VMware product. The Gold level is designed for partners that can develop and deploy complex solutions in collaboration with VMware.

Technological convergence meant it had increasingly made sense for ANS to aim to offer a more complete, end-to-end portfolio to its customers, Fletcher said.

“Our background was originally in Microsoft services and then we got into unified communications and Cisco over the last two years,” Fletcher said.

“It is becoming more and more of a default standard that people want to virtualise the datacentre, and then we’re seeing more and more that people want to virtualise the desktop and past that even,” Fletcher said.

ANS now claimed what were currently the highest accreditations for four major vendors – Cisco (Gold), Novell (Platinum), Microsoft (Gold) and VMware (Gold).

He believed that ANS was the first UK partner to achieve all four certifications at the highest level – but conceded it had been a costly exercise.

“In VMware and Cisco over the last year and a half we have probably invested £500,000 in accreditations, staff and so on,” Fletcher said.

The company also has certifications in Linux, Hitachi, Citrix and ISS, according to its website.