Tech Data Creates Solutions Groups Around HP, IBM, Storage, Software

Infrastructure

The groups, focused on Hewlett-Packard, IBM, software and storage, join the Cisco solutions group that was formed last year, according to Pete Peterson, senior vice president and general manager of Advanced Infrastructure Solutions at Tech Data.

"Partly due to the success of the Cisco group and the opportunity we see overall in the data center space, we have formed these solutions groups," Peterson said.

Each solutions group has dedicated technical, sales, marketing and business development resources to help solution providers build their practices in these areas, Peterson said.

"For HP, it's all of the Enterprise Servers and Storage [ESS] piece of the business. IBM is very similar; it's all the xSeries server products, storage and service components, too," Peterson said.

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Dramatic changes to data center infrastructure led to the creation of these groups, Peterson said.

"We think the new data center is going to be a more integrated network of solutions that includes not only servers and storage, but virtualization, the network and the power and cooling component to make those data centers run more efficiently," he said.

The software solutions group is dominated by Tech Data's virtualization portfolio, especially VMware, Peterson said.

"It's also the other virtualization ecosystem software lines that make virtualization more effective. We also have some of the backup and recovery type offerings," he said. "Virtualization is a huge focus for Tech Data and we're just scratching the surface, with desktop and storage virtualization coming in the foreseeable future."

The storage solutions group complements the HP and IBM storage offerings with EMC, Brocade and other vendor partners, Peterson said.

"Whether it's from a compliance perspective or your own personal videos and files, there's a huge opportunity on the high-end, enterprise [storage], but also from an SMB perspective, there will be growth for the foreseeable future," he said.

The formation of solutions groups around big-name vendors and storage and software gives Tech Data a similar alignment to other distributors focused on enterprise solutions, such as Arrow Electronics and Avnet.

"We're competing more today, particularly in the open distribution element of the market, with the traditional value distributors. At the end of the day, it's about skills to develop and enable existing partners and new partners. We think we've done that," Peterson said. "We just came out of a really challenging year, but we saw a chance to grow areas that we saw significant growth opportunities in."