Avnet Technology Solutions bids farewell to von Kuenheim
2013-05-21
Multispecialist Avnet Technology Solutions has unveiled the departure of Fabian von Kuenheim, CEO of Magirus, from its EMEA business. For the past six months von Kuenheim has played a key role in the initial integration of the Magirus Group following its acquisition by Avnet, Inc. on 1 October 2012. von Kuenheim will leave the company to pursue new entrepreneurial challenges but will provide advisory support to Avnet for a transitional period until September 2013.

Avnet collaborates with HP to facilitate high value storage growth for partners
2013-04-24
Multispecialist Avnet Technology Solutions has announced that its SolutionsPath methodology is now available with HP storage products. Based on skills, training and business generation tools the agreement was signed to offer bespoke, customer-based storage solutions to business partners in EMEA over a 12-month period. It also delivers competitive storage capabilities across the EMEA-wide market with StoragePath. StoragePath is part of the wider SolutionsPath methodology which focuses on making key high growth markets more accessible to partners. Business partners will be able to utilise Avnet's common tool sets, local industry knowledge and technology capabilities to identify profitable storage strategies and bring business benefits directly to their customers. StoragePath also leverages in-depth customer profiling and advanced lead generation techniques to help channel partners tailor their offerings and deliver more compelling propositions to their customers.

Avnet Technology Solutions joins NVIDIA Tesla Preferred Partner Program
2013-01-09
Multispecialist Avnet Technology Solutions has joined the NVIDIA Tesla Preferred Partner program to help high-performance computing (HPC) customers drive business growth in expanding industries, including life sciences, finance, oil and gas and manufacturing. The Tesla Preferred Partner program is a sales, marketing and business development program for VARs, OEMs and ODMs that are driving the growth of the HPC market. As a program member, Avnet will provide partners and resellers across EMEA with advanced server and workstation platforms with the new NVIDIA Tesla K20 family of GPU accelerators, which are based on the next-generation NVIDIA Kepler GPU computing architecture. The NVIDIA Tesla Preferred Partner program represents a select group of organisations around the world committed to advancing HPC across a range of scientific and engineering fields. As a new program member, Avnet will receive a number of benefits, including early access to NVIDIA products, sales and marketing tools and support, technical support and training programs.

Avnet unveils its new executive management structure
2012-11-16
Multispecialist Avnet Technology Solutions has unveiled its new EMEA executive management structure, following the completion of the Magirus acquisition, resulting additional presence in Denmark and Italy (from both of which the distributor withdrawed some years ago), Portugal and Spain (where Avnet had few value-added activities). Magirus Executive VP and COO Christian Magirus has been appointed VP of services for Avnet Technology Solutions, EMEA. He will sit on the EMEA Executive Management team. This position underlines the significance being placed by Avnet on the development of services offerings to support growth for its business partners and drive product demand for its suppliers. Christian Magirus will be responsible for Avnet services businesses WBT, Client Solutions, Ascendant, Canvas, Colt cloud services and Mattelli. He will also have dotted line responsibility for all in-country services except vendor resold services.

Magirus Chief Executive Officer Fabian von Kuenheim will step down from involvement in day-to-day operations but will retain his title and serve Avnet in an advisory capacity. Magirus executives Gert Weber, vice president for operations and IT, Martin Lauer, vice president for credit, collection and finance, Petra Speidel, vice president for finance and accounting, and Andreas Bockwinkel, director of controlling, will retain key executive roles with Avnet as well.

Avnet Technology Solutions, EMEA, will operate a four region structure to drive increased coordination and speed execution. Sukh Rayat, senior vice president for Ireland and the United Kingdom, and computer components and integrated solutions businesses, will lead the north region. Roman Rudolf and Judith Ecker, both vice presidents, will lead the central and east regions, respectively. Miriam Murphy, senior vice president for enterprise sales and marketing, will lead the west region in addition to her existing duties.

As part of the new structural changes, former vice president for sales, eastern region at Magirus Jörg Speikamp will leave the organisation.

Beside this, Magirus has not yet been clear about its reorganization and layouts in countries where both Avnet and Magirus were present (that is, Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom).

Avnet Technology Solutions accelerates IBM business partners' success with new service offerings
2012-11-12
Multispecialist Avnet Technology Solutions has unveiled two new service offerings for IBM Partners in the EMEA region, "Middleware Infrastructure Automation" and "Social Business in the Cloud". These services are being made available to the channel following Avnet's acquisition of Ascendant Technology. These solutions are designed to broaden partners' capabilities, lower barriers to market entry and accelerate complete data centre solution sales for Avnet's IBM channel partners. Following the successful roll out of these services in the US and Canada, they are now available in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

With Avnet's new Middleware Infrastructure Automation service, partners can:

• implement a customisable framework that delivers centralised automation of installation and patching, configuration management and application deployments on heterogeneous middleware platforms for their customers;
• work directly with their customers' IT teams to deploy this service; and,
• reduce their customers’ administration costs and help them efficiently expand their infrastructure investments with new hardware and software to support growing systems.

Through automation of the product installation, configuration and application deployment, partners can also help their customers turn time consuming, error prone manual tasks into repeatable, automated processes to increase cost efficiency.

Through Avnet, channel partners can now offer IBM Collaboration and social components via the cloud to:

• help decision makers get started quickly without waiting for internal IT staff to research and implement social media applications; and,
• enable customers to start with a small, cloud-based pilot and scale up to a large production environment, or bring the social software on-premise once the trial period is complete.

In addition, a full IBM Connections environment with features such as blogs, profiles, wikis and communities can be up and running in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months – significantly reducing time to market. Cloud offerings can also be enhanced with social/collaboration design and adoption consulting to drive success for customers.