Redstone renews vendor bonds

Networking VAR mends fences with Cisco and adds several new vendors to core business

Redstone has thrown its weight behind seven core IT vendors following its recent restructure.

The networking VAR united all of its activities under the Redstone brand earlier this year following a massive restructuring drive that saw its headcount more than halve to 413.

Sales and marketing director Richard Archer said – previous to the reorganisation – Redstone had lost focus on key manufacturers. It will move forward with seven key vendors: Cisco, Extreme Networks, IPFX, Brocade, Aruba Networks, VMWare and EMC.

"The Cisco relationship had been dying on the vine," Archer said. "We hadn't been investing in Cisco and they hadn't been investing in us and the first thing we had to do was to rebuild some of those vendor relationships."

Aruba, EMC and VMware are new partners for Redstone, the latter two of which came on board courtesy of Redstone's recent investment in a shared services platform built on EMC, VMware, Brocade and HP hardware. Meanwhile, the Brocade relationship was gained through its recent acquisition of Fujin.

"We've built a shared services platform fairly late in the day, but this has allowed us to leapfrog the competition," said Archer.

"We built it exactly how VMware think we should have and we were the first to get the vCloud Powered sticker. Having done this, there is a huge opportunity with these vendors in our standard business outside of cloud, because plenty of people are still going to put virtualised servers in their own data centres and run their own SANs."

Archer said the renewed vendor engagements are also designed to keep staff happy.

"If they see the whole world is going towards Cisco UCS and they are being sent on training courses to sell 9500 switches, they get fed up. You need to train them to keep them interested, so we have become properly accredited at UCS level.'