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.

Spain gets its cloud distributor
2012-01-20
Spain : the small family of cloud distributors in the EMEA region has a new member : AvantaaS has recently opened its doors in Madrid. The company offers several cloud services including virtual desktop and applications as a service, IaaS, virtual datacenters or collaboration tools. Among the shareholders of AvantaaS, we can find Pedro Galatas, who is better known as the president of network and security VAD Afina Sistemas, and Pedro Tortosa, the CEO of system integrator Ermestel. Currently, the only identified partner is VirtualSharp, a cloud disaster recovery provider. VirtualSharp is currently making a strong push in the EMEA region, with several partnerships signed in multiple countries : Aptec in the Middle East, Systematika in Italy and Altimate in Belgium and Luxembourg.

Altimate optimizes its customer service and launches its reseller portal MyAltimate
2011-11-16
In order to optimize the quality of its customer service, storage and security VAD Altimate has centralized all the orders of its resellers to a single access mail address, orderscustomerservice@altimate-group.com, and launched its web portal MyAltimate. Initially launched in Belgium, France and Luxembourg, MyAltimate will be extended to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom early 2012, and later in Portugal and Spain. Through MyAltimate, Altimate's resellers will be able to :

• track the processing of their orders by Altimate,
• be informed by mail of any change in the status of their orders
• visualize and edit copies of their invoices

Both these new tools are part of the new commercial strategy of the Altimate, which started in 2010 by its new name, then the implementation of a unified ERP and then the launch of a unified website for the whole group. All the new services can be used by any reseller who order more often than every 45 days. New functionalities will be added in 2012, which will allow resellers to have an access to targeted marketing and sales informations.

Altimate stores on Netapp
2011-11-03
Spain : storage and security VAD Altimate has been appointed official distributor by storage infrastructure vendor Netapp. Both companies are already working together in Belgium and the Netherlands since some years.

Stonesoft gets into the cloud
2011-08-29
Finnish security vendor Stonesoft offers its resellers to become security operators thanks to its new MSSP. This bundled managed security offer includes a cloud-based management platform. Licenses related to this platform is free : VARs and system integrators simply pay an annual fee based on its use. This fee is calculated on the number of managed sites (whatever the number of installed UTM), with a flat rate of around €60 and no exit penalties. This simple pricing has been decided to make the MSSP offer as attractive as possible. Stonesoft French office acts as a pioneer, as it has developed MSSP bundle for about one year. The other countries should follow before the end of the year.

According to Léonard Dahan, France and Benelux country manager, "with MSSP, resellers can become an interesting alternative to classic operators, thanks to a greater proximity and reactivity". MSSP will also allow Stonesoft to enter more agressively the SMB market, as it is usually stronger on major accounts. Thus, some of its distributors, like Afina or Itway, will play a major role in the success of this offer, although the others (Amosdec and Computerlinks, which are more dedicated to major account market) may also distribute it through their channel network. Léonard Dahan hopes to sign 2-3 VARs for each main French city, that is about 30 partners by the end of the year. This is enough to give an idea of ​​the potential in other countries…