The team is being led by Kevin Markwick, who was appointed Azlan IBM and Services Business Unit Director at the end of last year and has since been working on building the team and the Azlan Services proposition.
Markwick stated: “We see services as a massive opportunity and while we have encouraged resellers to build particular vendor services – and had some real success in doing that – we knew that we needed to put more concentrated and sustained effort on the wider services opportunity. We now have that focus and the team and partnerships in place to help resellers develop their value-added services business. We see this as a major opportunity and one that will be increasingly important in the future, as business models shift further towards annuity-based revenue streams and away from reliance on product sales.”
As well as working with core vendors, Azlan has formed a partnership with professional services company ITEC Intelligent Services PLC to provide configuration, installation, project management and other core services resources to partners. Further collaborations and partnerships are being discussed.
The Azlan Services team will work with resellers to help them develop a services proposition that suits their business. It will help resellers to meet customer needs by calling on its own in-house expertise or partnerships with specialist third parties, or to enhance or create their own services capabilities.