Paul Marnane on Arrow ECS ANZ "transition"

Like other distributors, Arrow ECS ANZ is moving to evolve its offering. Its leaders have flagged their intention to modernise the business in line with Arrow globally, to act “as a global value-added distributor in the modern data centre, virtualisation, analytics, networking and cyber security areas”.

This year, Arrow ECS ANZ brought in a new general manager of its enterprise computing solutions business in Australia and New Zealand, Paul Marnane, following the departure of Karl Sice. That’s in addition to announcing a new sales director, Ingram Micro veteran Kelly Johnson, in March.

Formerly the Arrow ECS country manager in Ireland from 2019 to 2023, Marnane will no doubt have plenty of eyes on him as he charts a course for Arrow’s business.

We asked Marnane to comment on the positioning of Arrow ECS ANZ in Australia and the road ahead for the business.

CRN Australia: What can partners and vendors expect from Arrow’s transition in ANZ to becoming a value-added distributor in modern data center, virtualisation, analytics, networking and cyber security? What’s your vision for Arrow ECS Australia?

Paul Marnane, Arrow ECS ANZ: Arrow helps channel partners and suppliers​ to succeed in their journey to the cloud and XaaS​. This is a journey we are undertaking in Australia and we are looking to accelerate our presence both in the market and pivoting more of our business to monthly subscription and software transacting business. In ANZ, we are making significant investments to bolster our cloud team and drive cloud solutions in the ANZ market. We’re also constantly reviewing our vendor offerings to help ensure we have the most relevant mix of solutions and continue to be actively searching for emerging technology, vendors and channel partners to add to our ecosystem.

CRN Australia: Will there be significant hiring in ANZ required? What sort of skills or other resources will you be looking for? What changes to the local Arrow ECS ANZ business model or way of working will this transition require?

Paul Marnane, Arrow ECS ANZ: There is significant investment being made into building a digital sales team that will be actively profiling, managing and building the mid-market segment, where we see the biggest opportunity. We have recently announced Kelly Johnson as the ANZ sales director to accelerate our presence in this segment and we have several roles we are actively recruiting in her team and the alliances team. Additionally, we have also restructured our vendor and sales engineering teams, who now sit under our new vendor alliances director, Scott Hayman. We believe that bringing product and technical teams together brings greater alignment for our vendor resources and will deliver greater value in terms of technical enablement and support for our channel partners. This is a key value to our vendors and new and emerging channel partners looking for help with these skills.

CRN Australia: I assume this transition will put Arrow ECS ANZ in more direct competition with other value-added distributors in ANZ. Where do you see Arrow fitting into the Australian distribution landscape now and after the transition? What do you see as its selling point or differentiator?

Paul Marnane, Arrow ECS ANZ: Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business in ANZ is part of a global enterprise with $37 billion in annual revenue. We are in a unique position to harness the strength that comes from that. We are making strategic and intentional plans to set ourselves up for growth opportunities by harnessing platforms and using the intelligence inherent in the business. Further, as we expand our sales capability to address the enormous opportunity across the IT market not just the mid-market, we recognise our existing strength in the enterprise market - that's where our customers are, that's where our best solutions are, that's where our expertise lies. We’re also uniquely positioned to offer our partners a raft of value-added services, like education and training, business development, marketing support, pre-sales and engineering support, professional services, business intelligence, finance solutions and global delivery services.

CRN Australia: What are your main goals for the Arrow ECS ANZ business in the coming year? What will be the overarching focus when it comes to your ANZ partner ecosystem?

Paul Marnane, Arrow ECS ANZ: Arrow is focused on future growth. We are undertaking a period of active and intentional change, as we transition to a solutions aggregator. We are committed to growing our existing vendor portfolio by tapping into the mid-market opportunity. We are also actively searching to recruit new vendors and new channel partners who embrace consumption as a growth model and that they also align to our future vision of XaaS.

CRN Australia: Have you learnt any lessons about dealing with technology supply and demand during the pandemic that you will bring to Arrow in ANZ?

Paul Marnane, Arrow ECS ANZ: Managing supply over the past three years has been challenging for all. We have learned to educate channel partners and customers to order earlier in the buying cycle and manage the forecasting process by building in these long lead times into our process. We have also increased the amount of stock we hold locally in Sydney and help channel partners manage project cycles better by using our logistics capabilities for staging and scheduled rollouts.

CRN Australia: While IT spending hasn’t crashed, it’s said that businesses have shifted focus from top line growth to bottom line margins, which is driving a push for operational excellence. Are you seeing that play out in terms of IT spending and how? Is Arrow is helping its partners adapt to this, and if so how?

Paul Marnane, Arrow ECS ANZ: What we have seen is that end customers are sweating their assets for longer periods eg. three to four or five year cycles, and as a result they rely on channel partners services even more to manage these longer cycles. This allows the channel partner to get deeper with customers and to provide them a more comprehensive and fuller end to end solution to cover them for every eventuality, especially the threat of cyber security attack. As a result of more services, channel partners have had higher growth and a higher mix of more profitable business. However, with this comes higher costs with pay rises, interest rates increase, etc so in the end it is a balance between these two things for most channel partners and staying profitable.

CRN Australia: Is there anything else important or newsworthy on your agenda for Arrow in ANZ that we should know about?

Paul Marnane, Arrow ECS ANZ: Arrow recently ran a business resilience event, “The Power of Resilience” in Sydney, which was very well received and provided thought leadership around cyber security. We plan to do similar events across the nation, with events planned in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Auckland in the coming months to tell customers about the new and better Arrow. We are positive and bullish about the state of the ANZ market and as such we are actively recruiting and looking to hire in Sydney. We are keen to invest and looking for young, diverse and talented individuals to come and join the journey.