Mark Corrigan, recently appointed Head of Azlan’s Enterprise and Access Networking business unit, talks about his plans to encourage closer working partnerships between Azlan and its vendor and reseller partners

Mark Corrigan has been around in the channel for more than two decades (so many of you reading this probably already know him). He has worked in various business development roles covering networking, security and latterly virtualisation solutions and helping distribution businesses to create high performing teams that get results and when the opportunity to join Azlan came up, he had no hesitation in accepting.

‘I started in the industry more than 20 years ago now and even then, Azlan were the organisation you looked up to and I have always had that perspective ever since. To me, Azlan sets the standard for what value-added distribution should deliver. The other reason I came here is the scale of the opportunity. Azlan has established Cisco, IBM and HP business in enterprise networking and there is a great opportunity to enhance and develop that core business by working with complementary vendors such as Juniper, Brocade, APC and ZyXEL to build a complete, solutions-based approach. Looking to the future we will add additional vendors that enhance our portfolio.’

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The Secret to Effortless Networking Revealed – March 7th 2012

Trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), mobility, virtualized desktops and unified communications are now being realized.  However, years of adding layers of complexity with every new feature, combined with rising demand for more virtualized environments that enable cloud and support increasing mobility, has impacted the financial and technical performance of the campus LAN.

The campus network has long been the poor relation to where the major innovation and investment has been made within the data centre.  But changes in how users connect, and the kinds of data they are driving back and forth over the network, means the campus network has become critical. Demanding the kind of intelligence already found in data centre networks, solutions that offer effortless deployment and management, scalability, bandwidth, and resilience are required.

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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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Hot technologies and markets for the channel in 2012 Part 1

For a channel partner looking to carve out a niche, going with an established vendor in a saturated market is actually rather tricky. You need to be either technically better than your rivals or significantly cheaper. Both are not easy to achieve. The other option is to pick an emerging technology area that is likely to bear fruit in the next 12 months and commit early. But there are lots of areas and tech companies to choose from and investing in a vendor that goes under or a market that never truly hits the big time is a big risk.

In the day-to-day trawl of the IT industry that is our remit on Channel Pro, we come across emerging technologies and vendors that standout as a “bloody good idea!” but for a number of reasons, haven’t yet carved out a sizeable channel. These are our top four for the next year.

Mobile Device Management

Look around you; everybody seems to have a smartphone these days. Online app stores are flourishing and all the social media sites are going mobile. More and more people are actually using them
for work. For the average IT department, setting up, patching, securing and ultimately recovering these smart devices is a time consuming and expensive business. Wouldn’t it be nice if the desktop provisioning, patch management, application deployment and security tools from the likes of Shavlik, HP and Microsoft could apply to mobile devices? Well mobile device management as
exactly that and it is hot!

The vendors and the technology

There are a number of players in the space that are recruiting and according to Gartner’s influential Magic Quadrant, the ones to watch are AirWatch, MobileIron and Sybase. The technology each vendor uses is comparable, but taking MobileIron as an example, it uses a platform charged at roughly a £4 per user per month that extends all the traditional desktop management stuff to almost every “smart” mobile device under the sun. It also adds a few bells and whistles around managing roaming charges and data loss prevention.

The potential versus the pitfalls
According to the few partners that have dabbled with Mobile Device Management, the technology is pretty good and it supports lots of devices. The “perseat” cost model also sits well with customers and, so far, the startups like MobileIron have added more features without jacking up the price. There are also only a handful of partners in the UK and the market is definitely growing. The problem is that there are a lot of entrants in the space. Gartner counts around 20, and the competition in this space could get fierce. McAfee bought a key rival in the space just before they were gobbled up by Intel so expect to see some serious competition from a big player soon. Also, the technology is ripe for deployment at a mobile operator level which could cut the channel out of the loop.

Summary

Mobile device management will be a major industry, Gartner agrees, so it must be true. Whether early pioneers like MobileIron or McAfee (Intel) will be there when it hits is debatable, especially with the buying frenzy that is happening at the moment. As new hybrid devices that start to blur the distinction between phone, laptop and pad enter the market, the opportunity will grow further. Either way, the sector is pretty exciting.

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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