Avnet launches five specialist units for channel partners

Distributor looks to provide more specialist support to channel partners

Distributor Avnet has launched five global business units with the aim of providing more specialist support to its channel partners.

Some 450 specialists at Avnet will work in the units which will focus on five areas - data centre solutions; cloud solutions; security and enterprise networking solutions; data analytics, cognitive computing and IOT (internet of things) solutions; and mobility solutions.

Patrick Zammit, global president of technology solutions, said: "Avnet is directing significant energy, resources and investments toward the technologies that will define the future.

"We are evolving into a solutions specialist to ensure that Avnet, along with our suppliers and partners, continues to meet our customers' needs in a rapidly changing market.

"It will allow us to capitalise on next-generation technologies while optimising our support for data centre technologies, whether legacy or new."

The EMEA and Americas regions will have an additional sixth business unit, focused on training partners in education services.

Mark Johnson, channel sales director in the UK and Ireland at Veeam, told CRN that the new units demonstrate Avnet's commitment to the "always-on" enterprise.

"One of the most exciting elements of this expansion update from Avnet is the core data centre business unit which will drive specialisation in partners so they can compete with competitors for profitable growth," he said.

"Despite slow current adoption of newer availability-enabling technologies like cloud we expect this to uplift."

"In today's enterprise landscape both Avnet and Veeam share the commonality of having identified industry cloud adoption and evolution as the big growth accelerator of years to come."

All the units will be led regionally to align with local partners, and Avnet said partners can expect to see more proprietary tools, services and solutions released for next-generation technologies.

Ian Moyse, sales director at Axios and cloud expert, told CRN that distributors are having to prove their value and relevance to the channel when it comes to technologies like cloud.

"The challenge for distributors is to redefine their value in both directions of the supply chain - to their customers and their suppliers," he said.

"As a distributor what is the value that you a bring to the cloud provider - because it isn't stock, warehousing and credit line like it used to be - and what is the value that you are bring down to the reseller or customer?

"A lot of the value that distribution had originally added is dramatically changed by this [cloud] model."