CRN Interview: Avnet COO Hamada Talks Access Integration

CRN: As Avnet moves forward with the integration of Access Distribution, do you expect any impact on your company's solution provider partners?

HAMADA: We certainly expect that we are engaging with a broad, new segment. All of these customers are not net-new. Some are broadline themselves and have multiple relationships, and we've been servicing part of their business. Perhaps we can entertain being a more full-service, full-range partner. There is a segment of customers that we maybe have never done business with before. Now can we leverage and get sales synergies from selling more of the Access solution portfolio to our old, traditional base or perhaps take some of the traditional [Avnet Technology Solutions] technologies and leverage them into this new partner base. There are some great opportunities there. We did not quantify that, nor did we build that into the equation regarding our valuation. It is certainly there, and the team will be all over it.

CRN: Are there any particular technologies you expect to have a high crossover potential as you combine the two companies' customer bases?

HAMADA: Interesting question. We're making sure that we learn carefully what Access had going in terms of its solutions and practice approach to the market in security, voice-over-IP, etc. The Avaya relationship, as an example, is brand new to us. F5 is brand new to us. We have a Symantec relationship already. That's more complementary. Hitachi Data Systems, we did not have a relationship with Hitachi for storage solutions. We'll evaluate each one, but I guess I would default to where the hot spots are.

The industry-standard server space and the storage solutions space, those will probably be two key areas to start to evaluate. Are there opportunities for enterprise VARs looking for solutions that may include or may necessitate the inclusion of some of these complementary lines? How can we service that without confusing the customers or having them call too many different salespeople? It's not only strategy but it's also execution when it comes to making it easy for them to do business with us and helping accelerate their success with a total package of offerings, not just giving them another silo to confuse them.