Stevens in as Avocent goes on reseller hunt

Vendor looking to expand channel reach through new partnerships

Keyboard, video and mouse vendor Avocent has appointed a new regional director to expand its channel reach.

Russell Stevens will head up operations for UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Scandanavia. He is looking for new VARs to boost the vendor’s business.

Stevens told CRN: “We have established a very exciting product roadmap and we are looking to recruit new resellers. We know margins are tight in the channel and we want to assist with revenue streams.”

Resellers will be able to add value through service and support, and Avocent also has an enterprise sales team to feed leads to channel partners.

“We want proactive resellers trying to add value and make additional revenue, because VARs get more than a margin opportunity from Avocent. Ideally we would like to have another 20 to 50 UK resellers on board this year.”

Stevens said the perfect reseller will have customers that have their own data centres and retail operations. This will enable Avocent to get into the 100 to 5,000-seat SME market.

“We only sell through the channel. We plan to aggressively and pro-actively promote our products in the market,” Stevens added.

Colin Parker, marketing co-ordinator at Avocent distributor EDP Europe, said if Avocent can get its channel set up right it will boost business for its current partners.

“All awareness helps as I have not seen much coverage of its products. My only concern would be that more partners at the distribution level could affect our business.

“We shipped quite a lot of Avocent’s products last year, it is good kit and it has introduced a number of new models over the past six months,” Parker said.

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