Viadex launches programme to help partners expand globally

New programme will provide logistics services globally for partners with dispersed enterprise clients

UK-based infrastructure reseller Viadex has launched a partner programme to help channel firms expand their business internationally.

The reseller has itself undergone an international expansion over recent years, with a Singapore office opened in 2015 and a US entity launched last year, adding to its existing UK and South African facilities.

Viadex has traditionally resold virtualised infrastructure solutions into industries including retail and gaming. Having recently closed its financial year, CEO Dino Cooper said he is expecting to see growth of around 50 per cent on the £27.4m it reported in the previous year.

Speaking to CRN, Cooper said the firm has now launched a partner programme to help resellers, distributors and vendors that cannot fulfil business in certain territories.

The Viadex Global Partner Programme provides services around procurement, logistics, importation and inventory management — alongside Viadex's traditional services.

The programme will target partners that service globally dispersed enterprises but that cannot cater for these enterprises in particular territories that they operate in.

"Through our experience we've figured out how to do this and we're now getting vendors coming to us and asking us to help them on these global projects, and we supply it to them as a service," Cooper said.

"We're not buying and selling the equipment — it's a white glove and remote-hand service across the majority of the world.

"We have vendors like Pure Storage, which is an up-and-coming vendor that is growing aggressively and its fastest growth is coming from outside of North American now. If its partners have won a big deal in North America and need to deploy in the Middle East and Africa they effectively come to us and we'll either partner with the reseller or with Pure in those territories.

"Likewise we have North American resellers that have big North American enterprise clients that also require services outside of America."

The overall objective, Cooper said, is to enable partners of the programme to gain "more of a share of wallet" from their customers.

If they had previously been providing services to a bank in London, for example, they could use the Viadex programme to service the bank's operations in territories that were previously too far afield.

Cooper said that even larger resellers and systems integrators (SI) are open to the programme because Viadex is not in direct competition with them for the customer's business, they are just providing a service.

"Certain partners are very closed about what they do and who they work with but others are more open," he said. "It won't be for everyone.

"In terms of where our business is coming from it's the larger SIs and VARs and usually recommended to them from the vendors and distributors."

In terms of distributors, Viadex already has a mature relationship with Ingram Micro globally.

"Ingram Micro are a great partner of ours and we do a lot of work with them on a global basis," Cooper said.

"They're far less agile, so they might be in a region but not in a specific territory in that region where some fulfilment is required for one of their clients, so they turn to us to do that last-mile piece from a hardware delivery perspective."

Steve Pearson, senior director of global business operations ar Ingram Micro, said that the distributor is seeing increasing demand from its global clients to consolidate the number of partners it works with globally.

"We've seen a significant increase in the amount of requests from our global customers to support them in a more cohesive, global fashion and consolidate the number of partners they work with" he said.

"We've done that by investing in resources to leverage our global footprint, but there are incidences where we may not have an operating presence - Africa comes to mind - where we use partners like Viadex. They have local capabilities and import services into the smaller African nations that we just simply don't have coverage in.

"In countries in Africa I also can't on board Viadex as a reseller because I don't have the legal ability to operate there, so what I do is leverage them in those countries where they do have the ability to operate, to support my customers' requirements."