Avnet Wants VARs To Learn By The Book

The goal of the distributor's SolutionsPath Playbooks, which Avnet unveiled at its Compass 2009 conference in Denver, is to give solution providers a resource for developing solutions in specific technology segments, such as virtualization, and specific vertical markets, such as health care.

VARs search the playbooks with criteria as vague or as specific as they want, and the playbooks give VARs access to overviews, backgrounds and descriptions of pain points, a range of marketing resources, Webinars and podcasts developed by Avnet to address particular topics, access to Avnet executives who support particular segments and a catalog of vendors Avnet carries that make products for those segments.

About 75 playbooks will be made available initially, according to Avnet.

"We segmented the markets into domains, and then further into solutions that go into everything from virtualization, security and storage to health care and government," said Colin Blair, director of solutions development for Avnet. "We wanted a resource that gathered empirical data that suggests not only what someone should do in a space but also shows them who are the players in that space."

Blair said the vendor listings take into account products that vendors offer in a particular segment through Avnet.

"We're trying to come at it from an objective perspective -- 'Hey, these are the players and this is what the landscape looks like,' " Blair said. "We want to enable the reseller to think about a particular solution and consider things they haven't really considered and have meaningful conversations around those things. There are supplier-specific plays and multiple brand solution plays. We have some resellers who are one, two, three-supplier types of resellers who don't want to maintain a lot of relationships. Others want to build more comprehensive solution sets."

Blair said vendors did not have a say in how their information appears in the playbooks or how the structure of the playbooks was developed.

"If anything, we have a lot of the suppliers who have seen it coming back to us and saying, 'I don't know if you didn't know this about us, but we do offer this, and we do offer that,' " he said. "We're getting that level of feedback to incorporate into some areas we might have overlooked."

The playbooks are the first initiative from a solutions development team Blair assembled in early 2009. The team is an internal Avnet group made up of veteran Avnet executives looking to re-evaluate how Avnet packages solutions and training to its VARs and, as Blair put it, develop content pools to feed Avnet's various partner resources, including its SolutionsPath universities and seminars.

The Playbooks are available to Avnet partners and accessed through a special portal on Avnet's main site. A lot of the solutions were developed using assistance from Avnet VARs, according to Blair, and the distributor held advisory councils and beta tests with resellers during the development phase.

"We have a lot of resellers that sell multiple lines and are aligned with multiple suppliers," he added. "We don't want to pretend that everybody should be everything to their end customers, so we're trying to come at it with the view of 'What are you interested in doing, and let's build a plan.' We're pretty confident that no one else is doing anything like this in distribution."

Among other announcements, Avnet also used this week's Compass '09 conference -- which caters primarily to Sun Microsystems VARs -- to trumpet gains made by Avnet VARs in growing their government practices.

According to Avnet, VARs who have used Avnet's GovPath resources achieved an average annual growth rate in their government practices of 32 percent year over year.

Avnet launched GovPath, a three-day university-style training course covering public sector opportunities, in April 2008.