ANS climbs Cisco rankings after doubling sales

Manchester VAR enjoys almost $10m annual Cisco revenue after virtualisation push

Sweeney: We have won some of the biggest deals in our history recently

VAR ANS Group claims to be Cisco's second-largest partner for NHS sales after more than doubling the amount of business it did with the vendor in the past year.

During the vendor's recently concluded fiscal year, Gold partner ANS transacted $9.5m (£6.1m) with Cisco – up from $4.5m in full year 2009 (FY09). The Mancunian VAR's managing director, Paul Sweeney, said the firms's focus on Cisco, NetApp and VMware technology has paid dividends.

"A lot of our growth has come from that strategy," he said. "We are now the second-biggest [Cisco] provider in the NHS and we are going up the commercial rankings."

Sweeney added that ANS' sales of Cisco's virtualisation-centric portfolio – including the Nexus family of switches and the UCS server range – had rocketed up of late.

"A lot of the growth is in virtualisation," he said. "We went from virtually nothing to $2.5m dollars [in FY10]."

The new year is also off to a flier, claimed Sweeney, with several meaty contracts already in the bag.

"There have been some really major deals recently, some of the biggest in our history, with some household names," he explained.