CRN Hall of Fame: Roy Vallee, chairman and CEO at Avnet

CRN: You were recently inducted into CRN’s Hall of Fame, what was your reaction?
Vallee: When I first heard about it, I was honoured and surprised. The real reason I received this recognition is because of the achievements of the men and women of Avnet. I’m privileged to be the team captain, so to speak.

CRN: How do you intend to move Avnet’s business forward — working with more solution providers or doing more business with the solution providers you have now?
Vallee: Both actually. Avnet will continue to expand its geographic footprint and its focus on solutions and vertical markets. Those actions will enable us to develop more relationships with more customers because we’ll be able to offer services in areas where we don’t have a presence today. For example, the recent acquisition of Azure Technologies brings us a group of customers in Singapore and Malaysia that we didn’t serve before. And by offering new solutions we’ll attract new solution providers looking for ways to grow their business, for example by working with Avnet to get into the healthcare market. At the same time, as we continue to expand the solutions we offer, our current customers will be able to expand into new revenue streams. A good example of that is our mobility business where we’re expanding our portfolio of mobility solutions, which in turn helps our resellers offer new technology to end-user customers.

CRN: What will Avnet’s business model look like two years or five years from now? What can we expect to see?
Vallee: We will continue to evolve, but I don’t think it will look radically different from today. What you will see is the continual evolution of our value-added services, an expansion of our offerings and probably a company with greater global scope and scale. The biggest changes will probably come from what our customers want from us in terms of the services we provide. This past year we launched a customer loyalty initiative to help us assess what’s important and then we’ll make the necessary changes to adapt, so it still remains to be seen how we will change as a result. Stay tuned!

CRN: Avnet is a much different company today than it was when you started, how would you say the company has changed in this time?
Vallee: Certainly I would say the biggest difference is that we are now a global company with operations in 70 countries. We’ve built our global presence through more than 40 acquisitions. As a matter of fact, when I first started, Avnet didn’t even have a computer business — that came later — but I had the opportunity to run what was, at the time, Hamilton/Avnet Computer, when it was just getting going. The interesting thing is that when I first started leading Hamilton/Avnet Computer, we had about $300 million in revenue. Today our global computer business is more than $7 billion. The increase in scope and scale has given us the resources to invest in tools for our resellers, such as Channel Connection, that make it easier for them to do business. We’re much more focused today on providing value-added services that enable our customers to grow their businesses whereas in the early days, our value was based more on having the right products available at competitive prices.

CRN:As a business partner, what can Avnet offer resellers and solution providers that other companies can’t?
Vallee: That’s an interesting question because one of the things our customers tell us is that our people really make the difference for them. They count on the Avnet team to understand their business and the industry and then work with them to help them to grow their business. So, what we really have to offer is the Avnet team. They are highly qualified with great technical skills and industry knowledge, but they’re also committed to serving our customers with integrity. And they have a passion to win on behalf of their customers. Avnet offers a great suite of services and tools to benefit our customers as well, and we work with the world’s leading manufacturers,

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