Britannic picks Huawei for £1m network refresh
Chinese vendor bests Cisco and Juniper as comms VAR rolls out SDN-powered infrastructure
Britannic Technologies has given Huawei the nod over Juniper and Cisco for a £1m internal network refresh it is near to completing.
The comms VAR, which is introducing software-defined infrastructure and networking across all its datacentres, went through a tender process to find a preferred product partner last summer.
Britannic Technologies managing director Richard Dendle told CRN his firm picked Huawei ahead of Cisco and Juniper after the Chinese vendor's technology proved "superior across the board".
"It came down to either Juniper or Huawei," he said.
"Juniper is renowned in the carrier space. But Huawei's R&D spend is massive; its budget is bigger than Juniper's revenues. Its road map is crystal clear and we are secured for the next 15 years in respect of the road map."
Dendle added: "Everything from our new optical backbone between datacentres, through to the SDN-powered infrastructure across all our core, is focused on bringing agility, resilience and control to enterprise customers. We recognise that the IT infrastructure for our enterprise customers needs to easily flex and evolve as their requirements need it. The Huawei investment is an enabler for us to deliver this."
Huawei claims its Enterprise Business Group saw 2015 revenues hike 44 per cent to CNY27.6bn ($4.25bn), with 76 per cent of that generated by channels and partners. The Chinese firm now claims to have 300 distributors and VARs and a further 8,000 tier-two channel partners globally.
Britannic, which posted a pre-tax profit of £957,000 on sales of £12.7m in its most recently reported financial year, is currently testing the hardware in the two external datacentres it uses.
Guildford-based Britannic is a Gold reseller partner of Huawei and also a Platinum partner of Mitel.
"We are only one of four Mitel Platinum partners in the UK and the other three are over £100m (turnover) - theirs is by volume," Dendle (pictured) said.
"We are very heavily focused on cloud and managed services. This significant investment in our core and the latest datacentre technology enables us to continue delivering innovative value-added services to our customers and over-the-top applications, in conjunction with world-leading vendors - complemented with our in-house developed applications and integration middleware."
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