Avnet puts extra Resource in the north

Northern exposure: Avnet is giving northern partners a local training centre

Distribution giant Avnet has opened The Resource centre in Cheshire to encourage discussion between staff from its reseller and vendor partners.

The Resource is based at the distributor's Warrington office and has meeting and training rooms, areas for informal conversation, a data centre and a solutions room. Avnet hopes the new centre will instigate more dialogue between sales, technical, marketing and senior management staff.

VARs will have the chance to recreate end users' environments and technology infrastructure to help put together tailored IT packages. Avnet already has a southern Resource centre in Bracknell and the Warrington branch will be the north's first Nortel Executive Briefing Centre.

The Resource will provide the distributor's Warrington facility with a 10 fold increase in bandwidth, allowing it to run more sophisticated applications. Users of the centre will now be able to demonstrate video and real-time data replication simultaneously. Both the Cheshire and Berkshire centres are free to use for resellers and vendors that work with Avnet.

The distributor's director of technology Wayne Gratton said: "Many of Avnet’s vendors have main demonstrations in Bracknell but there are fewer similar facilities for business partners in the north. We are not simply replicating The Resource in Bracknell in Warrington. Our goal is to have both facilities as virtual centres, so everything in Bracknell can be accessed from Warrington and vice versa.

"We have been conscious of meeting green initiatives by not burning power unnecessarily through duplication; the use of provisioning has aided our ability to do this. Finally, having two centres brings the added benefit of being able to simulate distributed systems. The whole concept is very powerful and will set Avnet business partners apart from the rest, wherever they are located.”