When I interviewed Rick Hamada, the soon to be new CEO of Avnet Inc., he said that the future is not in North America but in Europe.
A few months later, Avnet (NYSE: AVT) signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Paris-based Amosdec SAS, a value-added distributor established in 1990 who has established a foothold in the virtualization space in France.
Europe has its challenges for all the IT smarts of a Germany, U.K., Ireland and France there are also some duds such as Romania, Italy and Bulgaria. Having said that Europe does have some emerging markets such as Poland, which might make these ventures worthwhile.
Avnet also has a great base of experience handling European pitfalls because they acquired Bell Microproducts last year. Bell Micro was saddled with on-going European market headaches but in the end managed to solve many of them.Amosdec is not necessarily a huge operation. The company did $90 million in revenue last year. Graeme Watt, president of Avnet EMEA said Amosdec acquisition will significantly strengthen Avnet’s position in France, the third largest IT market in Europe.
Amosdec’s excellent leadership team and talented employees along with its strong market position with VMware and NetApp provides us with the opportunity to further develop our software, storage, and services portfolio throughout EMEA.Speaking of NetApp, Avnet also introduced a service called FlexPod that offers Cisco and NetApp solution providers a single source for all data centre products.
What Avnet is trying to accomplish here is help resellers bring solutions to market faster. Many solution providers have told me that the quicker they can get to market the more cost effective they’ll be. FlexPod solutions will also be validated by Avnet so they will be ready for market.
Scott Look, vice president and general manager, Avnet, said data centres are transforming toward shared infrastructures to increase agility and reduce costs, and FlexPod is designed to simplify this evolution. Working jointly with Cisco and NetApp, Avnet focused on creating a suite of services to shorten and simplify the sales cycle, making it easier for our channel partners to go to market with FlexPod solutions. Avnet’s FlexPod Services and our single-resource capabilities mean that our resellers and their customers are ensured a consistent and positive experience.
Ingram gets physical
Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE: IM) announced an exclusive broadline distribution relationship with Paxton Access, Inc.
Under the new North American agreement, the Ingram Micro Physical Security Business Unit will market, sell and support Paxton Access’ complete lineup of access control systems including IP and wireless controllers; server- and browser-based software solutions; and a full line of keypad, proximity and specialty readers.
Solution providers use Paxton Access systems to securely control, monitor and manage the entrances and exits of buildings, apartments and homes at any given time — locally or remotely.
Arrow hosts a U.S. only event
Arrow Electronics Inc. is hosting a series of seminars throughout the U.S. called “Make or Buy Decisions.” The series is designed to assist OEMs with evaluating new products and best practices for customized industrial and embedded computing solutions they plan to build or contract out for assembly. However, Arrow will not be running this series in Canada. Executives from other distributors and vendors in the U.S. have told me that sometimes the costs involved to run shows in Canada does not provide a high enough return on investment. My point is then why set up shop in Canada. I’m not saying this is only an Arrow problem, but it seems to be