It’s been a busy week for Westcon and its Cisco-focused Comstor business.
Westcon has ratcheted up its data centre offerings with more security options for solutions providers. Westcon’s security business unit will now feature the entire line of products from Palo Alto Networks.
Never heard of Palo Alto Networks?
Well, you’re not alone, but here’s the opportunity to offer something as an alternative to the top brands in security. This is where the margin potential enhances for solution providers. If you can get in with a new vendor who wants to establish themselves in Canada your profits can be significantly higher. What Palo Alto offers, according to Westcon, is cloud security; again another highly profitable market segment for today and tomorrow.
As part of the Palo Alto Networks announcement, Westcon will offer product training, pre-and post-sales support, and financing to qualified resellers.
Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy, senior vice president of Westcon North America, said that today’s enterprise businesses face a new generation of networking challenges and must be able to run Web-based applications across the network confidently and securely. Security is also of critical importance to IT professionals as they consider cloud and virtualization.
Westcon also named Andrew Warren to lead the Westcon Security division. Warren was formerly with competitor Avnet and will report to Smurthwaite-Murphy.
Westcon’s Comstor division is showing some signs of life after a dormant summer.
Comstor is planning to unveil a new solutions handbook for Cisco resellers that will be formatted for iPads, iPhone and iPods. What no format for the Cisco Cius tablet?
The new solutions handbook will feature more information on Cisco’s Data Center offerings as well as new ways for obtaining product assessments and market intelligence from research firm Current Analysis.
The handbook also contains updated information on Cisco Partner Programs and describes how Comstor can help partners achieve certification.
Arrow shoots for the cloud
Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions is expanding its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) portfolio with a public cloud solution for servers and storage.
This announcement is part of Arrow’s Fusion professional services program. The public IaaS offerings include multiple levels of off-site server hosting, ranging from colocation to fully managed hosting to public cloud solutions. These solutions, powered by Terremark, enable companies to provision and manage their computing resources through self-service applications that are supported by 12 data-centre facilities on multiple continents, providing connectivity from 160 global network carriers and round-the-clock support.
Meanwhile at Tech Data, they too strengthened its Cisco business by hiring Angela Beltz-Norrie to the post of vice president, Cisco Solutions Group. Beltz-Norrie will be responsible for leading the company’s team of sales, marketing and technical professionals supporting all Cisco solutions available through Tech Data, including the Cisco Unified Computing System or UCS and System B and C Series servers.
