During its New Frontiers conference in Colorado Springs, Colo. last week, Avnet Technology Solutions, an operating division of Avnet Inc., announced three new service levels of support under its OneTech Managed Services line.
The new additions further extend the distributor’s services portfolio for its partners, which Avnet says will lead to further growth and revenue opportunities. Making up Avnet’s OneTech Services offerings are five different service lines which include, consulting and assessment, integration, implementation, managed services and support services. Jack Morris, vice-president of Avnet Technology Solutions Americas for OneTech Services, said OneTech Services are a means by which Avnet partners are able to deliver end-to-end solutions to their customers.
“Avnet’s been in the services business for a number of years now,” Morris said. “OneTech Services lets us drive down pipeline opportunities to our customers.”
For Andrew Parlee, director of strategy and business development at xwave, a full-service business solution provider with offices located across Canada and the U.S., Avnet’s OneTech Services are an important part of the company’s overall business as an Avnet partner.
“In a number of instances, we’ve leveraged (Avnet’s) services to augment or supplement our capabilities, Parlee said. “We’ve used some of their capabilities in areas around assessment, virtualization and consolidation. In some cases and depending on the geography, we’ve been able to leverage their services over and above what we currently have in-house and with our own team.” New to its OneTech Managed Services portfolio are three service levels: availability monitoring, preventative monitoring and remote management capabilities. Each service level provides end-users with 24/7 monitoring and Web-based reporting. Morris said monitoring is a reactive service because it’s a bit more basic in its functionality.
With preventative monitoring, the service detects and identifies problems even before they happen, and lastly, remote management is a comprehensive service offering which resolves errors and proactively performs e-checks on things like backups and anti-virus. The introduction of these new service levels now address the gap that Avnet has previously had in its services portfolio, Morris said.
On top of these services, Morris said partners are encouraged to include their own offerings to further customize the solution for their customers. Regarding margin opportunities, Morris said partners can achieve good service rates when they offer OneTech Services. The service offerings are sold in multi-year contracts and are generally on a three-year term. However, Morris said these agreements are flexible.
“Margins are in the double digit range,” Morris said. “They’re well beyond what they’re currently getting on hardware and software. We tell partners what the street price is and we have a nice buffer built in so partners can make money there. Our whole design isn’t to compete with the partner, it’s to augment them.”
Recently, there has been an uptake in the virtualization and managed services market, Morris said. This even extends to storage in specific industry verticals such as the healthcare market, he adds.
Moving forward, Morris said he’d like to see more partners participating with OneTech Services.
“I also want to expand Avnet’s offerings portfolios where services are focused more on the point solutions,” Morris said. “I’d like to see our offerings extend to thinks like hosted (Microsoft) Exchange, SharePoint and CRM. We’re in a great position now to bring our customers into different verticals than we ever have been before. We want to help our customers sell that end-to-end solution to their customers.”
