Avnet Technology Solutions has doubled the size of its Berkshire demonstration centre and kitted it out with new proof-of-concept facilities for a wider range of solutions.

Bill Freeman, a technical manager for Avnet, said the five-year-old Bracknell facility had roughly doubled in size and added facilities for demonstrating networking, security, business applications, virtualisation, display, printing, document management, mobility and storage solutions from a range of vendors.

The centre, dubbed The Resource, was previously dedicated primarily to IBM solutions.

“We have expanded the area vastly and the whole reception area has been completely refurbished – it is much more customer-facing. There are another four or five meeting rooms we are adding,” Freeman said.

“Probably the resource area is at least doubled in size.”

The total cost of the upgrade has been estimated at around £1 million. The name of the game will be to enable Avnet and its partners to demonstrate end-to-end solutions that closely replicate customer environments, he said.

“The predominant vendor is IBM, closely followed by Sun, in terms of both servers and storage and from other companies we have a range of products that are coming in bit by bit,” Freeman said.

The Resource is structured around a reception area that is now separate from that of Avnet’s main office, alongside two datacentre and solution demo areas.

Business partners could use either room to perform local and remote demonstrations, proof-of-concept testing, performance benchmarking, competitive analysis, problem determination, training, application migration, application porting or application versioning.

“We can not only do point product demonstrations but we can actually demonstrate solutions that mimick the multi-vendor end user environment,” Freeman said.

While other IBM demonstration centres existed in the UK, he believed that few offered a similar breadth of possibilities.

“They are generally more specialised, say in Unix servers or storage,” Freeman said.

The Resource will also host workshops, seminars, training programmes and other events in the 90-seat auditorium and six meeting rooms. Partners located further away would be able to participate remotely, he added.

Avnet is an Authorised Independent Training Provider for IBM, and The Resource is the only UK based accredited Sun Solutions Centre outside Sun’s own centre in Linlithgow, Scotland, according to Avnet.