Avnet Technology Solutions A/NZ vice-president and general manager, Darren Adams and Avnet chief financial officer, Kevin Moriarty
In a world of macro-trends like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud, businesses need to evolve and adopt new technology, according to Avnet chief financial officer, Kevin Moriarty.
He says reinvention and innovation is a core tenant of how the company positions itself and the future is just another opportunity for it to continue to provide that value to the marketplace.
“The industrial side, particularly where we play – data analytics and storage – is a result of a lot of the macro-trends. Avnet is investing resources and skills to position ourselves to continue to take advantage of it,” Moriarty said.
Avnet Technology Solutions A/NZ vice-president and general manager, Darren Adams, said locally the company has been working on a project where it’s looking into the IoT leveraging its semiconductor business, Avnet Electronics Marketing, and its Technology Solutions business.
“Through this project, we’re already a player in this space; it’s nothing new to us. A lot of companies are talking about what they might do with new technologies but we’re already here. The opportunity is how we scale and do it more profitably and efficiently in future,” he mentioned.
Adams added that in the local market, storage and services is one of the main focus areas for the company.
“We are very much focused on some of the emerging areas of storage like flash technology, we’re seeing a lot of demand for solid state flash and storage virtualisation, which is virtualisation extending beyond the server into the storage and network.
“Our line card today, versus 18 months ago, is weighted towards some of those areas,” he said. In addition, Moriarty said the company had made a number of investments in integration, and would continue to focus on this going forward.
“If you think about hyper-converged infrastructure solutions capabilities, we’ve made a number of investments in integration centres to position us to take advantage of that market opportunity. As a value-added distributor. That’s an important service to provide,” he claimed.
According to Adams, the changes in technology are also altering the way the Australian channel operates. He said the traditional buy-sell relationship between an OEM, a distributor, and reseller is not what it used to be.
“It is changing and for the long-term that is a good thing, but for the short-term, change creates some level of upheaval and nervousness and so forth. Things that were traditionally done by the supplier, the distributor and the reseller now are being done by all three at different times based on the client requirement. Businesses should be ready for this,” he said.
In the coming months, the company will be looking to increase its investments into partner training and education, new solutions and services, and inking more partnerships in the channel.
“We’re always on the lookout for new partnerships and our history over the past 12 months would indicate that we’ve been active with that. So I’d be surprised if the next 12 months doesn’t see any new partnerships.
“I’m confident that these new partnerships will be very strategic. We’ve had a good track record ion storage, flash, and solid state so I can see that continuing. Security and networking has got some traction so we might expand on that. The software area is also one we’re looking at,” Moriarty said.
