Line of Business
Q&A: Avnet Technology Solutions goes vertical
The distie's global president, John Paget, wants to grow Avnet's business through verticals such as healthcare, virtualization and government8/20/2008 10:51:00 AM By: Maxine Cheung
Colorado Springs – During this year's annual Avnet New Frontiers conference, held here for the specialty distributor's Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) partners, Avnet Technology Solutions Americas (NYSE: AVT) executives said that solutions in the virtualization, unified communications (UC), network security and storage spaces are all key to the distributor's distribution strategy moving forward.
To help keep pace with specific solutions and market segments, Avnet Technology Solutions, an operating group of Avnet Inc., last month launched VirtualPath University for its VARs. In addition to VirtualPath, Avnet also has offers its partners HealthPath University and GovPath University, which are each three-day training sessions that focus on the healthcare and government industries. While GovPath is only available in the U.S., both VirtualPath and HealthPath are available in the U.S. and Canada. The training schools fall under what Avnet calls its SolutionsPath methodology, which enable partners to target one of three markets.
CDN recently had a chance to speak with John Paget, president of Avnet Technology Solutions, Global, about the new Avnet training, specific areas of growth, rising fuel costs and company plans for 2009 and beyond.
CDN: Throughout your career, what's the most important lesson you've learned about working in the distribution business and working with partners?
John Paget: I've learned two things. The first is that this business is a high relationship business and people do business with you because they trust you. The second thing I've learned is that you also have to be a student of the industry to understand the changes and the things that are going on in the economic environment; because as the distribution partner, we're the trusted advisor to our partners.
CDN: What would you say has been your biggest accomplishment at Avnet Technology Solutions to date, and why?
J.P.: I think that we've moved from being a VAR distributor to a solutions distributor. It's the way we go to market, by selling solutions. It's also about the tools, commitment and the engineering talent that we have. This last year we grew in the mobility practice by about 38 per cent. Unified communications is also growing at about the same speed as market is growing.
CDN: What's Avnet's commitment to the Canadian market and your partner community?
J.P.: In Canada, our Sun business is big and the year over year growth is actually exceeding the growth in North America with all of the practice sets. I would say we just had the best year in Canada in about the last four to five years. HealthPath and GovPath and VirtualPath University are three mechanisms we are using to bring our VARs up to speed for that market segment and practice. A lot of people believe the job of a distributor is to just provide the time and place. The real job for us though, is to understand the marketplace and to enable the reseller and the vendor.
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