Tag: Avnet

Avnet sales grew by 0.3 percent

hamadaGlobal distributor Avnet has released its third quarter results and compared to the same third quarter last year, sales are as flat as a pancake.

To March 30, 2013, sales amount to $6,298.7, up only 0.3 percent compared to the same quarter last year.

Gross profit margin of 12 percent was also essentially flat.

Rick Hamada, CEO of Avnet, said the quarter met the company’s expectations and were in line with normal seasonal patters. “We continue to navigate through an ongoing uneven economic recovery,” he said.

Both the company’s operating groups showed year over year “organic revenue declines”.  As a result, Avnet will contnue to cut costs and imprpve its margin.  Cost reductions for its entire financial year will be arund $140 million.

Performance in its Avnet Electronics group fluctuated wildly, with the Americas showing a minus 9.6 percent growth rate, while Asia growthrate amounted to 14.1 percent. The EMEA division showed a growth rate of only 0.8 percent.

Avnet says bye to Magirus man

avnettsAvnet has waved goodbye to Fabian von Kuenheim.

The CEO of Magirus, which was acquired by the distie in October last year, is said to be moving on to pursue “new entrepreneurial challenges”.

Avnet said in a statement that von Kuenheim had played a key role in the initial integration of Magirus into the company. It added that he would continue to provide advisory support to Avnet for a transitional period until September 2013.

Graeme Watt, president of Avnet Technology Solutions, EMEA said the Magirus integration was going to plan and the company was “making good progress” on realising the short- and long-term goals it had set out to bring together the two companies.

He said he was grateful to the work von Kuenheim had done to help with this.

von Kuenheim, who has been with Magirus for 25 years, thanked his staff and said he was proud of what the company had achieved.

Ingram Micro strengthens UC position, Avnet bows out

IMIngram Micro is continuing its investment into the unified communications (UC) market announcing that it has partnered with Sangoma.

The distie has said the new partnership will add Sangoma’s NetBorder Lync Express, which it claims is the only All-In-One Lync Server appliance with built-in Gateway/ SIP Connectivity,  to its growing portfolio of products and services in support of Microsoft LyncTM.

It has now developed a bundle around Lync Express including an on-boarding tool for new resellers wishing to learn about deploying Lync, with training and professional services options.

In addition to Lync Express, Ingram Micro will also bring Sangoma’s VoIP Media Gateway and Session Border Controllers in to the rapidly growing SIP Market.

Jon Bunyard, Director of the Advanced Solutions UK Division at Ingram Micro said the  addition of Sangoma to the company’s lineup, combined with proposition being developed through  partnerships with ShoreTel, Microsoft LyncTM, Cisco, OAISYS and Jabra, leant “significant weight to [the company’s] value proposition in the Unified Communications space.

“We consider UC a growing market and will be showcasing our existing vendor ecosystem at this month’s Convergence Summit North in Manchester where we look forward to talking to resellers about the opportunities these partnerships represent in the voice space,” he added.

The disties further moves into the UC market are a contrast to its rival Avnet, which last month announced that it had decided to shut up shop in the this sector.

At the time it said it would cease taking orders for these products in the UK by the end of March, shunning resellers such as Avaya, Lifesize and Audiocodes who it had worked with to bring these items to market.

Avnet decided to make the moves claiming that UC technology was not core to its overall strategy. However, it promised that it would be working with its partners and suppliers to ensure the transition runs smoothly.

Avnet and Microsoft shine a business light on China

surface-rtCompanies are looking further into China in a bid to boost business.

This week both Avnet and Microsoft have made railroads into the country. The gossip grapevine suggests that Microsoft has decided to extend its selling channels for its Surface RT tablets, which it previously sold through two distributors- its online store and chain store for electronics, Suning.

The giant had not been able to go through further channels as a result of an exclusive distie deal with Suning, but now sources have said that this deal expired in February, paving the way for Microsoft to pick up new channels. It is also claimed that Microsoft was unhappy about the way Suning had dealt with sales, failing to push Surface and get an advertising network around it.

In a bid to boost sales its now, according to the WPDang, turning to four new distribution partners aboard. These include PC Mall, Sundan, One Zero and 360buy.

And its not just Microsoft moving into Chinese circles. Today distie Avnet announced that it was buying Hong Kong’s RTI Holdings, RTI Technology China, Eastele Technology China, and DSP Solutions, value-added distributors of telecom equipment and related components in Hong Kong and China.

The company said that it wanted a piece of RTI as a result of its “focused technical expertise,” as well as its “strong presence” in the Chinese market.

It is hoped that the purchase will help the company break into the Chinese market, which it has so far struggled to do.

Avnet takes HP storage route

avnettsAvnet has made its SolutionsPath methodology available with HP storage products.

The agreement has been signed to offer business partners in EMEA bespoke, customer-based storage services over a 12-month period.

The service, which is based on skills, training and business generation tools is also said to  deliver competitive storage capabilities.

StoragePath is part of the wider SolutionsPath methodology which focuses on making key high growth markets more accessible to partners.

The new deal will now offer customers the ability to be able to utilise Avnet’s common tool sets, local industry knowledge and technology capabilities to identify profitable storage strategies and bring business benefits directly to their customers.

StoragePath is also said to  help with customer profiling and advanced lead generation techniques to help channel partners tailor their offerings and deliver more compelling propositions to their customers.

ARM turns to Avnet to push development tools

avnettsARM is turning to enormous distie Avnet in a bid to push its gear.

The company has teamed up with old school dealer Avnet Electronics Marketing to make available its embedded development tools on the Embedded Software Store (ESS).

Launched in 2011 by Avnet Electronics Marketing and ARM, the online ESS is said to offer services in the embedded software community, providing software that supports ARM architecture.

The portfolio includes ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) tool chain, DSTREAM debug and trace unit, MDK-ARM microcontroller development kit and ULINK family of debug adapters.

In addition, Avnet has also signed on the dotted line to become its new pals authorised distributor for ARM developer tool products meaning it’s reps can now flog ARM products to their clients.

Mutual customers will also be able to access ARM’s embedded tools from ARM online, which the company said would help “accelerate engineers to develop robust and highly optimised embedded software for ARM devices.”

Avnet makes Erin Lewin its chief pleader

Erin LewenAvnet has named Erin Lewin as its new senior vice president and general counsel.

Lewin, who has been praised by the company as “demonstrating her ability to effectively guide a global team,” will report to Avnet Chief Executive Officer Rick Hamada and serve as a member of the Avnet Executive Board and Global Executive Council.

She is responsible for leading Avnet’s global legal team and providing advice and guidance to the company’s business leaders.

Lewin first joined the distie in 2007 and, before her promotion, served as vice president and general counsel, Americas,  where she gave legal advice and the rest to Avnet’s businesses in the Americas.

Before this she was Avnet’s chief ethics and compliance officer for two years, overseeing all aspects of Avnet’s ethics and compliance program globally. Avnet did not give a general description of its ethics at press time.

Lewin said she looked forward to contributing to the success of the comoany’s individual team members and the organisation as a whole.

She succeeds David Birk, who retired after serving as Avnet’s top lawyer since 1989.

What HP really told its dear partners

HP Global Partner ConferenceLet’s face it, us journalists are like a dangerous bacillus for vendors. Although the press are important to HP, we must be kept in isolation, and any HP execs that come anywhere near us must be inoculated beforehand and go through extensive health checks afterwards to ensure they haven’t been contaminated.

So in the ICU unit at this week’s Global Partner Conference, we were kept carefully away from the 2,000 partners invited to the glittering jamboree at the very glittering Venetian hotel in swinging Las Vegas.

We attempted to visit a server briefing but we were ejected by an HP bouncer because he noticed that we were wearing a red badge – red standing for warning, of course.

It was hard to prevent us chatting to sources close to Avnet, Ingram Micro and Tech Data, however, and to sundry HP employees who hadn’t been inoculated. Because these chaps and chapesses haven’t been press trained, we will have to not name them and describe them as “sources close” to the companies. And we can relay the undoubted fact that although folk from the big distributors welcomed Meg Whitman’s pledge to be nicer to the channel, they will believe it when they see it, if you get my meaning.

We hacks didn’t get invited to the Gen8 Petting Zoo, which is a shame. We would have loved to see HP petting the channel. Nor did we learn about the new compact servers (need three pedestals), the future HP Smart Update Manager (SUM), the future HP BladeSystem interconnect and we weren’t briefed on HP’s Smart Storage Futures (power, monitor, internet).

We do know that Synnex is HP’s largest North American distributor, delivering over $3 billion sales every year. It’s HP’s number one distie and has over 45 percent channel share. A Mr Eric Doyle, from the Intel Corporation, delivered the message that Intel, HP and resellers are “better together”.  This Eric Doyle is different from UK hack Eric Doyle, who had a package waiting for him in reception. Confusion arose. The UK’s Eric Doyle was being asked to pay $7 to collect the Intel package. We didn’t see Intel’s Mike Magee there, either.

Dan Forlenza from HP and Aaron Arvizu from Intel impressed on delegates the importance of the enterprise tablet revolution. Those would be HP tablets with Intel chips inside, then. Scott Wiest, from HP, invited the resellers to “ignite new opportunities” with X86 servers and how to migrate IBM and Oracle Sun servers to HP ones, instead.

Ray Carlin from HP told partners that while there have been many predictions of the demise of bricks-and-mortar shops, lots of people still want to go into real shops. As ChannelEye knows only too well, people like to go into shops to eye up the goodies but fewer and fewer are buying there and after they’ve taken a dekko, go online to buy the kit instead.

All in all, the event was a very revealing snapshot of how HP treats its partners.  We were successfully confined to sealed test tubes and shipped out of Vegas with due despatch and without the plague breaking out in a widespread kind of a way.

Avnet and TE Connectivity celebrate silver anniversary

lovebirdsThis Valentine’s, Avnet Electronics Marketing and TE Connectivity are today celebrating their silver anniversary.

The pair have announced they have been going steady for the past 25 years, where they have shown each other “commitment”, while TE described its other half as a “great partner”.

Over the past quarter of a decade, the duo claim to have helped many of their OEM customers, providing them with connectivity products paired with a distribution service

Ed Smith, president, Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas praised its partner, claiming that with its commitment to innovation, TE had “changed the way the world thinks about connectivity”.

He added that the industry had moved on from wanting just a single connector to a  “connectivity solution”, which would change the way they worked and Avnet’s partnership with TE meant that they could provide this.

TE was equally complimentary to its longterm partner, gushing how it couldn’t wait to spend more years together.

To celebrate, the pair have made charitable donation to the FIRST Robotics Competition. FIRST Robotics is a non-profit organisation, led by American innovator Dean Kamen, which seeks to inspire children and young adults to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and maths.

Raise your glasses.

Pivot3 signs EMEA distie deal with Avnet

avnettsPivot3 has signed on the dotted line to make Avnet its distribution partner.

The company, which deals in converged storage and compute appliances, has said under the agreement Avnet will distribute the Pivot3 vSTAC VDIproducts to its partner network across EMEA countries.

The Pivot3 vSTAC VDI appliance family is said to make VMware View deployments easy, affordable and channel friendly for the 100 to 2,500 desktop target market.

They are also claimed to eliminate the need for specialised IT expertise to configure and integrate separate SAN storage, servers and software into a VDI solution.

Ed Bateman, director of software, Wireless and Mobility Business Group EMEA at Avnet said the partnership would give resellers a product that was “simple, scalable and cost-effective” for their clients.

In support of the partnership, Pivot3 has a VDI Channel Ready program which it claims is  designed to maximise lead opportunity and qualification for Avnet resellers and product providers in EMEA.

It provides online tools for VDI self-configuration and ROI analysis. Additionally, prospects can “Test Drive” a live, hosted 300 to 400 desktop scenario complete with workload simulation, login storms, scale-out of desktops and performance reporting. The Channel Ready program is also designed to enhance sell-through with all VMware and Microsoft license revenues flowing to the resellers. In addition, deal registration is available to partners.

The Pivot3 vSTAC VDI is available now and is already said to have caught the eye of several leading enterprises across various industries, including healthcare, education, government and financial services. List pricing starts at $29,999.

Avnet brings FlexPod, Expresspod to EMEA

avnettsEnormous distributor Avnet has teamed up with both Cisco and NetApp to open up integration services based on FlexPod and ExpressPod architecture to resellers in EMEA.

FlexPod and ExpressPod are data centre design architectures built with virtualisation and the cloud in mind. The idea behind Avnet’s programme is to give partners access to these technologies on a basis that will let them roll out as fast as possible. Included is pre-sales support, single order capability, assembly and testing, and ship completion and tracking. Avnet’s Cisco, NetApp and VMware teams will offer additional support.

Avnet says that by partnering with three top market players it has landed itself in an advantageous position for the region.

The programme will be available in every EMEA country where Avnet has distie rights for Cisco and NetApp – which includes the UK & Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark.

In a statement, Cisco’s EMEA director for data centre and virtualisation, Ed Baker, said that the opportunity presents resellers with a “great way to position new services and increase customer relevance”.

NetApp’s VP for partners and pathways EMEA, Thomas Ehrlich, said the potential for the technologies is “immense” because the flexibility of the architecture pays off for resellers and customers.