Credit: Avnet
Avnet has strengthened its global distribution deal with Lenovo through a new education partnership which will see the distributor provide training to partners on the specific servers and 2-in-1 devices.
As a result, Avnet Academy - the distributor's training division - has expanded its education portfolio to include training courses for Lenovo’s System x server and Flex 2-in-1 products.
Locally, the distributor said these will be available to partners and customers in all the countries where Avnet operates, including Australia and New Zealand.
"The launch of this program makes it simpler for partners and their customers to build up knowledge and become more highly qualified," Lenovo director data centre group services training, Alex Badia, said.
In support of the agreement, Avnet in the UK and Germany are running pilot partner programmes to encourage promotion of training.
In addition, the company said it will offer rewards for positioning training effectively, with the aim of driving accelerated growth in education services across EMEA - it's unknown at this stage whether a similar program will be run in Asia Pacific, Australia or New Zealand.
"Education is key in ensuring that Avnet and our channel partners can take the most innovative technologies to market first," Avnet vice president, marketing, education and supplier management, Michael Costigan, said.
"With this latest edition to our global training offering, we can help our partners to enhance their own skills, but also to and expand their channel ecosystem to include new technologies and customers."
Avnet signed its latest global distribution deal with Lenovo in October 2014, which saw the company take over the distribution of the vendor's enterprise products, including Lenovo's x86 server after the PC manufacturer bought IBM's System X server business.
Prior to this, Avnet was IBM’s largest x86 distributor worldwide - the $US2.1 billion takeover of IBM's x86 server business made Lenovo the third largest player in the $US42.1 billion x86 server market.
