ANS bags datacentre accreditations

Mancunian VAR punches above its weight to nab Cisco specialisations

ANS chief executive Scott Fletcher

Manchester-based VAR ANS Group has become one of only seven top-level UK Cisco partners to achieve two of the networking giant's datacentre accreditations.

ANS has achieved the Advanced Data Centre Networking Infrastructure (DCNI) and Advanced Data Centre Storage Networking specialisations. It joins a select band of much larger integrators to achieve the accreditations.

Cisco Gold Partners Logicalis, Dimension Data, Affiniti, BT, IBM and Computacenter have also been awarded the specialisations, making ANS by far the smallest company to achieve them.

ANS chief executive Scott Fletcher told CRN: "We are quite shocked how quickly we have done this. It shows how seriously Cisco is taking us and that our profile is rising all the time. Cisco is also now starting to partner with companies such as VMWare, which allows us to cross sell to that customer base."

The two accreditations affirm ANS's proficiency in selling, deploying and supporting Cisco's datacentre storage networking kit, including the MDS line of directors and fabric switches.

The DCNI specialisation focuses on helping partners sell and implement an end-to-end datacentre offering to commercial and enterprise customers. The Advanced Data Centre Storage Networking accreditation aims to help VARs effectively deploy storage area networks.

John Growdon, director of marketing for worldwide channels for Cisco, added: “As a Cisco Advanced DCNI and Data Center Storage Networking Specialised Partner, ANS Group’s investment in the training and equipment required to provide integrated, collaborative and adaptive storage networking solutions ranks them among the industry’s most qualified."