Commenting on England’s appointment, Senior Vice President of Tech Data’s Enterprise business in Europe, Andy Gass said: “We are delighted to welcome Simon to the networking team in Europe. With his extensive experience and reputation, he will be a great asset to Azlan and play a key role in helping us to develop our game plan and move towards our strategic objectives in the networking market.”
England, who held the position of Managing Director Europe and Regional Vice President at Comstor, said that as part of Tech Data, Azlan is uniquely positioned to drive significant opportunities for value-added resellers. “By combining Azlan’s specialization and focus and high levels of service and support with the logistical, finance and information systems backing that Tech Data can provide, we are able to offer a unique value proposition to our VAR customers. The Azlan front-office focus just becomes so much stronger as a result of being able to leverage the Tech Data back-office platform.”
There are significant advantages for vendor partners as well, he noted. "For our networking supplier partners this is a unique opportunity – one that allies tremendous market reach with a highly-focused partner engagement-based approach. The advantages are immense – particularly in the current hot-spots of technology migration and SMB – and if vendors are looking to us to address these key market drivers, that simply multiplies the benefits for our customers.”
Azlan is redefining what it means by the term ‘value add’, placing renewed emphasis on partner engagement and sales support, rather than technology-competency alone. “The new Azlan value proposition is focused on developing new opportunities for partners, both in existing and in new markets, and driving profitability by helping partners utilize their own specializations to best effect, while at the same time relieving administrative office burdens by utilizing TD’s tremendous back-office capability”, says England.
Edzard Overbeek, VP Commercial Europe at Cisco Systems, commented: “This is great news for Tech Data, Azlan and Cisco Systems. Simon has a great track- record of driving value and developing opportunities for partners. The commercial space is the single biggest growth segment for Cisco Systems in Europe, so it is good to see Tech Data investing in management expertise to capitalize on these opportunities.”
England has extensive experience in the networking and telecoms industry, having spent 16 years working in commercial and SMB channels. He had been in charge of European operations at Comstor since February 2002 and previously held senior management positions at Ingram Micro, where he was European Business Development Director for Enterprise Networking, and at Compu-Shack, where he was Managing Director. He will report directly to Gass and be based at Tech Data’s European head offices in Munich.