A few weeks ago in a Distie Report I criticized Arrow for offering Cloud Services such as monitoring and management that were too similar to regular MSP offerings.
The company called me about my column. The company’s spokesperson wanted an opportunity to explain themselves and its new cloud offering called Fusion.
To my surprise Joe Burke, VP worldwide services for Arrow ECS and Lee Fawcett, Arrow’s VP of Pro Services for North American, agreed with me that there were similarities.
Burke and Fawcett told me that MSP heritage is in monitoring and management with a NOC. With Infrastructure-as-a-Service from Arrow customers would be looking at the same offer. But there is a difference with Arrow’s offer. The value added distributor will be bundling monitoring and management with Web defense for example.
Arrow’s approach here is all about bundling a solution even a customizable solution for the VAR instead of choosing a single option such as disaster recovery or monitoring and management.
What’s important to note about Arrow Fusion Cloud Services is the brand name in my opinion. Both Burke and Fawcett said they chose the name Fusion because they wanted to indicate to the channel that these services can come together in a solution for customers.
I like the idea and I told them as much. VADs like Arrow know they have to be different than the broadline distributors if they want to stay relevant in the channel. Arrow has done that with Fusion. And to a certain degree Ingram Micro has as well with its Cloud Conduit.
I think it shows leadership from Arrow and Ingram to have come out with branded offerings for the cloud.
There is no denying that cloud computing is about to reach juggernaut momentum in the market place. By differentiating itself Arrow may get ahead of this wave. I am willing to bet smart solution providers in Canada and the U.S. have taken notice already.
Christmas comes early for resellers who deal with D&H Canada. The distributor announced this week the launch of its “Business Assurance” program for SMB resellers throughout Canada. The program will provide 300 D&H partners with $5 million worth of credit per month.
The thought here is that the additional credit lines would spur VARs to facilitate new business and in a way shift the channel recovery into overdrive.
I really like this move by Greg Tobin, the GM of D&H Canada. Its shows leadership and it tells the resellers out there that D&H has confidence in them.
Tobin said that an influx of this extent will not only help stimulate growth for a percentage of our customer base, but it will also have an impact on our vendor partners, since this new financial flexibility will translate to product purchases. It’s a win-win situation.
More Westcon moves
It seems as if Westcon Group is making an announcement about operations on a daily basis. Yesterday, the networking distributor created a dedicated global operations organization to help its multi-national partners and customers leverage its inventory, logistics and cross-border capabilities.
The company has promoted Simon Minett to run the new organization.
Minett will be responsible for ensuring that Westcon’s global logistics and sales capabilities are seamlessly integrated across the entire organization and available to vendors, systems integrators and service providers in Europe, the Americas and emerging markets.
The company also announced that Bernie Kelley, vice president of operations, will continue to manage the operations and logistics organization in the Americas and Chris Leeming, vice president business operations will be responsible for Westcon’s global distribution model. Both will report directly to Minett.
Minett said of his new role that Westcon is creating a dedicated operations and logistics organization in response to requests from customers and vendor partners.
As these companies become more sophisticated and dependent on global business opportunities, they will increasingly come to depend on our logistics expertise, global reach and global sales capabilities,” he said.
