Switch and router sales see continued growth

IDC recorded growth of almost 11% sequential in the worldwide market for Ethernet switches in Q3, with year-on-year growth at just over 6%. Revenues reached of $5.9 billion. The worldwide market for routers grew by 2.9% year-over-year. Most of the growth came in the Asia/Pacific region, where switch sales increased by almost 28% and now account for a quarter of worldwide revenue. China experienced a remarkable 44.1% year-over-year growth. Revenues generated by 10GbE switches increased by almost 30% and almost doubled in terms of port shipments, due to continued adoption in data centres and campus core deployments. A record total of 2.09 million 10GbE ports were shipped in the quarter.

Azlan appoints Nigel Dunn to head HP Business Unit

Azlan, the enterprise division of Computer 2000, has appointed Nigel Dunn as Director of its HP Business Unit. Dunn, who has previously worked as General Manager of Azlan’s HP Value Storage Business and has a strong history with the company having worked at Frontline and Datech.  More recently, Nigel has worked with Tech Data in a consultative role on strategic initiatives in Europe.
 
Dunn will take full responsibility for all for day-to-day business on HP ESSN (servers, networking and storage) solutions, working with the existing Azlan HP team to drive business development initiatives and growth programmes for HP and its partner network.

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The Long Term View

When was the last time you sold a product knowing what it was going to be used for? Certainly at a Distribution level until recently the answer would have been not often.  At a Reseller level you most likely had visibility of the immediate opportunity to bolster your quarterly revenue but little more than this if the skill sets for the entire opportunity required were out of your scope. 

Distribution is traditionally a Near Term Revenue (NTR) business; put simply it moves a box from point A to point B, and by doing this successfully it gains repeat business. 

Solution provisioning traditionally struggles to deliver against NTR and are often project based which places them into the Long Term Revenue (LTR) category.  This is one of the defining differences about Azlan; by recognising the long term view and enabling solution delivery for our Resellers we are witnessing growth at an unprecedented rate.

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Cisco channel strongly embraces video

Interest in TelePresence solutions has been growing strongly since the acquisition of Tandberg by Cisco with many partners signing up to the new Cisco TelePresence Advanced Technology Programme (ATP).

Joel Chimoindes, Azlan Director of Unified Communications, commented: ‘We have been really encouraged not only by the keenness of Cisco partners to adopt TelePresence as a new offering to their customers, but also by their willingness to invest in training and accreditation in order to have the requisite skills to successfully implement a video solution as part of a wider collaboration deployment. Cisco has a philosophy of recruit, enable and grow, and that’s exactly what we are doing at Azlan by enabling partners with the skills and supporting services they need in order to create an environment in which they can grow.’

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Colin McGregor to lead from the front for Azlan

The new head of Azlan is Colin McGregor, who brings over ten years of hands-on experience of enterprise distribution to the business. He will continue development of the enterprise business and build on the existing range of propositions to deliver consistent levels of service to resellers, and maximise partner relationships.

With a wider range of market leading vendors, such as; HP, IBM, Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Pillar Data, Avaya, Emulex, QLogic and AudioCodes, now allies to the Azlan business, McGregor has joined at an exciting time. ‘We are delighted that Colin is joining us and welcome the breadth of knowledge he brings to underpin the foundations of the Azlan business’, said Andy Gass, Managing Director Computer 2000.

McGregor, who joined Azlan at the start of the month, said: ‘I’m really looking forward to working with this high performing team and building on Azlan’s portfolio of enterprise solutions.’ He has moved to Azlan after running a consultancy business and prior to that was director of enterprise EMEA for Bell Micro.

Azlan wins Brocade SAN contract – complete Brocade portfolio now available

Azlan was recently awarded the distribution contract for Brocade SAN solutions, which means we can now provide the complete portfolio of the vendor’s advanced storage and networking products. That’s great news if you are a Brocade partner and want to take full advantage not only of the high standard of technical and sales assistance we can provide on Brocade through our dedicated Solutions Architect, but also the unrivalled logistics, shipment and financial resources we have at our disposal. Our relationship with Brocade is developing all the time and we are pleased with the response and feedback we’ve been getting from partners.

Eco System Specialism

How much thought do you give to the Eco system of your specialism?

Fear not this isn’t a twist on the Darwinist argument; more the opportunity to raise awareness on just how broad your speciality probably is.

Let’s run with an obvious one first which is the Microsoft Voice product range.  This is typically the hardest item to deliver to any reseller who’s first question is; “How do we make money out of it?”  The answer in all likelihood is that you don’t.  Obviously this is a fantastic business proposition then…(!)  What you do make money from is the Eco-system and the services in providing it.

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Unified Comms; information overload or organised chaos?

Last week I went on a time management course; ignoring the irony that I had to cancel two appointments to make it and subsequently worked until 2am Friday morning to catch up, it was a worthwhile experience.

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Avaya IP Office 7.0 opens up massive SME upgrade potential

Avaya has announced that all legacy Nortel phones will now function on the new version of Avaya IP Office and all existing data – including customer records, voicemail and system configurations – can be migrated to the new platform easily using a migration wizard. This opens up massive potential in the SME market, as it provides a clear and affordable migration path to Avaya IP Office from legacy systems such as Meridian and Norstar, as well as the more recent BCM offerings. There is a large installed base of these systems in the UK.

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Azlan invests in additional expertise to provide higher level support for HP ESSN partners

Azlan has made a further investment in building its expertise in HP technologies appointing John Ward as Business Manager HP ESSN (Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking). Ward brings more than 25 years experience working in technical, sales, marketing, and management roles for both end-user and channel companies. He has spent the last nine years working as a senior HP Business Manager with another channel distribution company.

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