Westcon-Comstor's David Grant: AWS partnership allows distie to access 'budget-constrained' deals

Grant tells CRN about the additional routes to market opened up by Westcon's latest partnership

Following Westcon-Comstor's signing with AWS under its Designated Seller of Record programme, CRN sat down with the Westcon International CEO David Grant to discuss the implications of the partnership.

This strategic collaboration, unveiled yesterday, is set to redefine the dynamics of the cloud marketplace, offering unprecedented opportunities for both partners and vendors within the Westcon-Comstor network.

Grant shared the reasoning behind the partnership: "We're enabling both vendors and partners to achieve greater scale by benefiting from accelerated transaction time, expanded deal sizes, higher win rates, and shortened sales cycles.

The deal creates an access point to a new set of customer budgets for Westcon, according to Grant.

"By aligning to end-users' shift to AWS Marketplace, partners will be able to win net new logos and drive incremental business by tapping into customers' committed AWS Marketplace budgets, unlocking budget-constrained deals. There is also the opportunity for enhanced customer retention and renewal rates via increased budget availability."

Some of the first vendors that Westcon has already made available via the marketplace include Check Point, CrowdStrike, Cisco, F5, Infoblox, Okta, Palo Alto and Zscaler, CRN understands.

Maximising the AWS opportunity

Grant highlights Westcon's existing connection to AWS, emphasising the new signing as another route to market for its vendors.

"AWS Marketplace offers an additional route for procurement and consolidated billing. In simple terms, we're enabling our partners and vendors to sell to end-users who want to buy in AWS Marketplace to maximise their cloud budget spend.

"In the context of our recent acquisition of AWS advanced service partner Rebura, AWS Marketplace also makes sense for us at Westcon-Comstor as we build a strategy to enable our partners to maximise the wider AWS opportunity as part of a mutually beneficial relationship that drives partner success."

Grant is confident this agreement firmly positions the distie at the heart of the cloud marketplace economy, showcasing its commitment to leadership and innovation.

"It's absolutely an opportunity to demonstrate further value to vendors and partners and will no doubt open new doors for us, attracting new partners to Westcon-Comstor and allowing us to grow our business with existing partners," he explains.

The partnership between Westcon-Comstor and AWS could offering a blueprint for channel expansion in the rapidly evolving cloud marketplace.

In October, the distie announced 15 per cent revenue growth in its H1 results, reaching £1.85bn - a result the company claimed as a record.

Top of Form