Well it’s been a quiet week in distribution. Almost too quiet; looks as if some broadliners will be announcing results soon.
The most significant announcement came from Avnet who launched NetworkPath, one of the distributors SolutionPath areas of focus. Avnet for many years now has been trying to differentiate itself by adding more value to the products it ships for vendors and resellers. Similar to its other SolutionPath programs, NetworkPath will provide channel partners with services, tools, training and much needed expertise in build and profitable networking practice.
There are three parts to NetworkPath. NetworkPath University is a curriculum-based training program that has real-world experiences along with new knowledge for growing networking market opportunities.
NetworkPath Assessment Services enables channel partners to identify new sales opportunities by offering customers network analysis in optimization, readiness, converged or consolidated networks, security and wireless LANs.
Finally, SolutionsPath Playbooks, Avnet’s online sales toolkits, will be part of the NetworkPath program.
Besides NetworkPath, the distributor will be hosting its third annual Avnet Tech Games. This virtual competition attracts some of the best minds from U.S. colleges across America. At stake is scholarship money. The virtual games let students test their knowledge, creativity, decision-making, problem-solving and technical skills and help prepare them for real-world experiences, potential internships and job opportunities. Like I said this is only in the U.S. This looks like a fun program that will get young people involved in high tech. I wish something like this was going on in Canada because we sure need it with the incredible short supply of IT talent in this country.
Distie news in brief: Eduardo Araujo has been named president of Ingram Micro Latin America region. This used to be a job held by Asger Falstrap, the former Ingram Micro Canada president.
Westcon will be launching Avaya new partner bootcamps Canada that will include Nortel solution providers who want to transition to Avaya. This will include in person training and on-boarding techniques for Nortel’s channel base especially for SMB and enterprise focus partners.
D&H is going to make a big splash for the 2010 Earth Day celebration with a promotion featuring a Toyota Prius as the grand prize. The distributor really wants to provide environmentally-friendly products and is pushing its reseller-partners to adopt more green IT solutions. This year’s Earth Day will be the 40th anniversary of the celebration; it’s been going on for 20 years in Canada.
Back to Ingram, they launched more V7 products. V7 is the distributor’s house brand and Ingram will be making available laptop security locks for $24.99 under the V7 line.
Finally at Synnex, they announced a new distribution agreement with EMC. Synnex resellers will be able to source products such as CLARiiON for networked storage, the Celerra for unified storage and EMC’s backup and recovery software.