Colorado Springs, Colo. — Less than a year after Access Distribution was purchased by Avnet Technology Solutions, the company’s Sun Microsystems partners have again gathered here at a resort hotel in the mountains for their annual new Frontiers conference.
Access was already the world’s largest Sun distributor and as part of Avnet, a Phoenix-based value-added distributor, partners now also have access to Avnet’s practices with HP, IBM, Symantec and a host of other vendors.
The conference began with executive announcements that see two familiar former Access faces taking leadership roles in Avnet’s Sun practice.
Mike Hurst will run the group as vice-president and general manager of Avnet’s Sun solutions group in the Americas. As well, Anna McDermott was appointed vice-president for Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas.
John E. Paget, president, Avnet Technology Solutions, global, and himself an Access alumnus, said the key message he wants to deliver to former Access partners is one of continuity.
“What’s important for the Access reseller to see is that the relationship they’re used to with Access is the same type of relationship that Avnet provides to all its partners,” said Paget. “Avnet is a very high-relationship, high-value, high-touch kind of company.”
Now coming under the Avnet umbrella, Paget said partners will have access to a broader range of products and greater solutions and support, making it easier to expand their product offerings. As well, Avnet offers more robust financing offerings and strong support in specific verticals, such as health care.
Paget admits that the integration of the two companies has not gone as smoothly as it could have on the IT side, with the integration of the companies’ ERP systems proving particularly challenging. He said he’s confident however that the challenges are behind them.
“Selling Sun is a different rhythm than selling IBM or HP, so we need to make sure that the processes work appropriately, taking the very best of the Avnet tools and integrating those into the right processes,” he said.
Stepping into his new role leading the Sun solutions group at Avnet, Hurst agreed the opportunities available now to the company’s Sun partners are much greater than Access was able to offer on its own.
As part of General Electric, Hurst said Access was never seen as core to the parent company’s business, and GE wasn’t willing to invest in the division. Now, as part of a global VAD, Hurst said the opportunity for investment is there.
“Now we can invest in this business, we can invest in partnerships, and we can invest in partners, and in new vertical areas to accelerate growth for our partners,” said Hurst.
He points to Avnet’s services offerings, in areas such as managed services and application hosting, as things Access wasn’t able to offer its partners previously. As well, tools and best practices around virtualization and assessments, which Hurst said has been an untapped and underserved market in the Sun community.
On the technology front, Avnet is targeting the wireless mobility, VoIP, security, storage and virtualization markets for investment and growth, emphasizing that success will not come from selling hardware or software alone, but by combining the two with services to offer solutions to end-users that solve their business needs.
“We’ve chosen to go to market in a different manner than Ingram or Tech Data, by focusing on the value-added services we can provide in the enterprise space,” said Hurst. “We think we help accelerate time to market for our partners by making it more cost effective for them to sell products that are a little more difficult or challenging to get into. We reduce the barrier to entry, reduce the cost and bring years of expertise, plus world class relationships with our suppliers and their field organizations.”
Bradley Brodkin, president of HighVail Systems, a Toronto-based value-added reseller and Sun partner that came to Avnet through the Access acquisition, said he was one of the partners invited by Access and Avnet to a series of meetings after the merger announcement, and he said he’s been pleased with the process.
“There were some hiccups along the way, but my phone didn’t stop ringing with people keeping me abreast of what was going-on and checking the status of my orders,” said Brodkin. “They really took our bottom line into account before their own. The Avnet acquisition is fantastic; it has really added value.”
The main value Brodkin said he sees is Avnet’s relationships with other vendors, such as IBM, HP, EMC and CA. VMWare is an interesting for them, he said, and the Microsoft relationship is critical because many clients are buying Sun machines to run Windows.
“The main opportunity is that they’re not just a single vendor VAD,” said Brodkin.
