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 the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Belgium and Turkey.
“These services will enable us to offer advanced capabilities and expertise in delivering complex IBM software implementation services and are positioned to help our partners grow their businesses in the EMEA region,” commented Ian Belton, business development director, IBM Software, Avnet Technology Solutions, EMEA.
“Following on from the successful uptake in the US and Canada, our IBM partners can now immediately leverage these offerings to expand their own end-to-end services, enhancing their customers' satisfaction while maximising new profit margin opportunities. These opportunities include IBM's Solution Accelerator Incentive, which pays a premium for selling IBM hardware and software together in a single transaction,” he added.
Middleware Infrastructure Automation
End users running robust, high-volume websites based on IBM software need ongoing management and maintenance support for these constantly evolving, complex systems.
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.
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.
Social Business in the Cloud
Social business and collaboration are fundamental initiatives, but companies want to ease into the social world without having to deal with IT issues and bottlenecks.
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.
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.