News

Arrow acquires Altimate
2012-04-19
American giant distributor Arrow Electronics has signed a definitive agreement to acquire 100% of the shares of VAD Altimate, a subsidiary of Irish group DCC, for €41m in cash and €7.1m related to "deferred acquisition considerations" of Altimate that Arrow will take on. Specialized in storage and security, Altimate operates in eight countries including Belgium, France (its country of origin), Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. It has a network of approximately 2,500 value-added resellers and system integrators. This acquisition will allow Arrow's VAD division Arrow ECS to globally strengthen its positions in all these countries (despite some local overlaps in terms of vendors), providing the acquisition is closed (in the next 90 days) and cleared by regulatory approval.

Arrow ECS joins Pano Logic's EMEA Channel Network
2012-04-03
Pano Logic, a specialist in zero client desktop virtualization (VDI), has unveiled that infrastructure VAD Arrow ECS has become an authorized Pano Logic value-added distributor for 26 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Pano Logic will draw from Arrow ECS' expertise and resources to Pano Logic resellers that are assisting organizations with radically centralizing desktop computing with the Pano System and slashing their total cost of ownership (TCO). Pano Logic products should be available in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom as soon as local teams are trained.

Microsoft signs with Arrow ECS
2011-09-15
Poland : Microsoft continues to expand its VAD network across Europe, and has appointed network, security and infrastructure VAD Arrow ECS as official distributor for its security and virtualization products.

Distributors lose industry share in 2011
2011-08-31
According to the last Canalys report, the growth of the distributors does not match those of the rest of the industry. The Canalys IT Industry major vendor (Apple, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Lexmark, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP) grew revenue 18% worldwide on average in the first quarter of 2011. In comparison, the big four distributors (Arrow ECS, Avnet TS, Ingram Micro and Tech Data) managed 11%, with many smaller distributors faring worse than this. Distributors have blamed recent disappointing results on excess inventory, poor retail demand, sluggish sell-out and weakening economies. They have comforted themselves by making peer group comparisons where sales-out data shows "we are performing as well as the others, so please blame the market for our results, not us!" And while these reasons are valid justifications, Canalys argues that distributors need to see the bigger picture and realize that for the first time in a decade industry trends are conspiring against them.

According to the report, distribution thrived for the last 10 years thanks to rapid notebook and netbook adoption and the virtualization of the server room, with two-tier distribution at the heart of the routes-to-market for both B2B and B2C vendors. But the growth drivers of the industry have now changed. Mobility is still booming, but now on the back of smaller devices, notably smart phones and pads, which are more and more sold either directly or through service providers. The server and storage markets are healthy, driven by data center activity and cloud applications. On top of these industry changes, the world economic growth is mainly coming from economies beyond Western Europe and the US, where the top 4 distributors are at best weak, at worse absent (MEA, Russia, Japan, etc.) : in these countries, local distributors will outgrow them, with already some local giants like Merlion in Russia for example. All of these factors combined are set to cause headaches for distributor executives for at least the next two years. The report concludes with a list of recommandations for the distributors to follow, if they wish their growth to match the industry, one of which is to go East as soon as possible…

Arrow ECS gets a Cloud-service director for EMEA
2011-06-02
Network, security and infrastructure VAD Arrow ECS has hired Frédéric Braut from Websense to become its new Cloud Service Director for the EMEA region. Operationally, Frédéric is also in charge of the Cloud business of Arrow ECS in France, ASPlenium, a business which may very well be duplicated in the other countries where Arrow ECS is present.