Nick Verykios: HPE will "add $200m to our revenue"

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has overhauled its distribution roster, trimming nine disties down to six, with Sydney-headquartered Distribution Central perhaps the biggest winner out of the review.

DC, which already had the Aruba account, now adds the full HPE suite of server, storage and networking technology.

Managing director Nick Verykios said the win could transform the company. "What we are getting told is that it will add another $200 million onto our books. It'll take us from $400 million to $600 million."

Verykios said he was less interested in a market share battle over the business left by Synnex and Avnet, and more interested in fresh opportunities around hyper-converged systems – an HPE market opportunity that he said was currently underserviced.

He revealed that "my competitors are ringing and congratulating me and saying, 'You have $200 million of revenue there'. There will be some share grab, of course, but everyone will be going for the Avnet and Synnex share. Let them do that, I am focusing on a bunch of resellers who have been underserviced."

Verykioswas added he was excited about some of HPE's lesser-known solutions, especially "some real gems" in the server range.

"Our reverse due diligence on this is that the partner base doesn't know about [all of] HPE's technologies but they should because they are unbelievable," he said.

"We have a bunch of other vendors' technology that is associated with HPE – a whole bunch of reference architectures identified with about seven of our vendors, and that is not even including Aruba."

Distribution Central is a major NetApp distributor, and Verykios expected the distie's ability to combine HPE and NetApp would offer an alternative to the leading FlexPod converged stack, which integrates NetApp with Cisco.

"You have storage vendors like NetApp and EMC that have a partnership with Cisco, but what if you don't want that? What if you are a HP reseller?

"The point is we will have a great time looking at an [HPE] installed base that is already there," said Verykios.

Some of HPE's most highly credentialed partners gave their judgement on Distribution Central's win.

Craig Somerville, managing director of Sydney-headquartered Somerville Group, said there were "no real surprises" at the outcome of the review, "with the only comment being that Distribution Central is better known for challenger brands than it is for the mainstream vendors, but as a very successful distie, it's not surprising HPE saw value in that".

David Abouhaidar, director strategic alliances and commercial sales at AC3, formerly Klikon, was happy for Distribution Central – "a fantastic value-added distie" – but cautioned, "they must understand that they are playing in the big league".

"Dicker and Ingram have been doing this for a very long time and I believe they have 70-80 percent share of HPE between them," said Abouhaidar.