Avnet’s hunt for local and global growth

CRN: What is a typical local Avnet reseller? What competencies have they got? What have they done previously and what are they doing?

Lawless: Our typical reseller is a tier-two reseller, selling what we loosely term complex solutions into the commercial and low-end of the enterprise space. That is our key reseller space. A lot of these firms are privately held, a lot of them selling into local government, market verticals and they are selling complex solutions. They don’t always have a band of pre-sales engineers or highly technical staff to go and sell the product. That is where our sweet spot is and we help our partners sell their solutions. We tend to focus on solutions which are slightly ahead of the curve in terms of the channel. We will try and be fairly quick to markets, for instance SAN technology being sold into the commercial space. We are also quick to market with blade technology coming into the commercial space, too.

CRN: How does that differ from the types of Avnet resellers in the US?

Hamada: The technology solutions business in the US is a US$4 billion business today. There are resellers with the scope and scale of hundreds of million of revenue. There has been some consolidation among the resellers, with some real large players merging. Larger VARs start building their own resources in those areas, so they tend to be a little bit more selective about the elements we provide that they can use versus what they want to invest in. Our best value is what we can scale behind a network of resellers. We are a bigger fish in a bigger pond in the US.

CRN: What changes do you foresee in your reseller base globally?

Hamada: It’s hard to grab global trends, but I do see a couple of things happening. In the more mature marketplaces I have already talked about consolidation, with VAR consolidation taking place. There is also a fork in the road for many VARs which is, do they want to stay horizontal infrastructure experts or do they want to go more solution or vertical experts? Do they want
to be known for security, or for VoIP? VARs are at a crossroads and I see many more opting for a solution and vertical focus.

CRN: Do you think that distributors across the market are being
more specialised?

Lawless: I don’t think so at all. In Australia there are very few distributors who are tackling technology right now. We have a market which is dominated by a handful of distributors and they tend to be pretty broad.

Hamada: On some scale we have seen niche players and sometimes we add them to the Avnet family.

CRN: Are you going to add new vendor lines in Australia, too?

Lawless: As I say we are going to be aggressive, but being aggressive does not mean we are going to sign up a whole load of new vendors. Our biggest value-add is that we are very focused. We tend to say we have a narrow, but deep approach.

CRN: How much of an indication is the ChannelWorx acquisition of the direction of Avnet? Will you be making further similar acquisitions?

Lawless: Whether it be organic or through acquisition we will get more aggressive in certain business areas, particular networking, security and storage. As our business grows globally we will have a focus on other business units, for instance imaging and printing or document management as they call it. That might take us three, four years to get there, but we will add globally another unit into our business. Our growth in Australia will be as organic as possible, but where it makes sense we will make acquisitions.

CRN: How does the ChannelWorx acquisition fit in globally?

Hamada: We like to offer the opportunity as the Australian teams picks its focus, to see what relationships we have on a global scale that we can offer an Australian connection for.

Lawless: We talk about those niche vendors coming though, those vendors are looking for a global supply chain. There are not a lot of distributors in this region that have that wide a presence. So the value proposition we have for those vendors is very compelling.

and avnets distribution for global growth hunt local strategy