Arrow, IBM Combine For Cloud Retailing Solution, More

The two companies have also teamed with VisionMax on a cloud-based solution for the retail market. The announcements were made Monday at Arrow's IBM May Days conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

The Arrow Fusion Retail-in-the-Cloud solution includes pre-developed IBM software modules to support a variety of retail business functions including point-of-sale, administration, accounting/financial, billing, inventory management, infrastructure, customer relationship management and marketing, support/training, sales and reporting, according to Lee Fawcett, vice president of Arrow's Fusion program.

"It's everything that a small to medium-sized retail company would need. It runs on IBM infrastructure and is hosted in the IBM cloud," Fawcett said. "We have a strong presence in retail with good partners in that area."

The Retail-in-the-Cloud solution is the first of several vertically-focused cloud-based solutions that Arrow has planned, Fawcett said.

Arrow and VisionMax have been planning a partnership for three years, said David McDougall, president of VisionMax. "We met [president of Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions] Andy Bryant three years ago to talk about the future of the cloud and software being delivered in a browser," McDougall said. "He was excited but that's not where Arrow was at the time. Since then they've started their Fusio division and IaaS offerings and we really saw this as the right time."

The Retail-in-the-Cloud solution is targeted at SMB customers with less than1,000 stores, McDougall said. "The SaaS nature of this gives the VAR the ability to get it quickly into customers' hands," he said.

Arrow also plans to team with VisionMax to release to retail VARs later this summer VisionMax's Virtual Personal Stylist solution, a tool that lets shoppers see what they — or at least an avatar of themselves — would look like in different clothes, beauty products and other items.

Meanwhile, the IBM Power services available through Arrow Fusion include assessments for the front-end of a legacy platform migration project, such as database, document and infrastructure analyses. It also provides data- and application-migration support, assessment services for customers considering replacements of existing IBM servers as well as non-IBM hardware, said Fawcett.

"We're helping a VAR help end user determine how they could replace existing servers with Power products. We come in an assess their application suites, documents, database, everything around their current deployment," Fawcett said.

Using the service, VARs also receive a detailed assessment and roadmap of a move to Power-based infrastructure, Fawcett added.

"We do full planning and migration, looking for potential migration issues and how to resolve those, what's the recommended migration approach, the estimated cost," he said. They go away and determine whether the solution makes sense for them."

Both the retail solution and the Power assessment tools will be available for VARs attending the 15th annual May Days conference, said Brad DeBartolo, director of IBM Power Systems for Arrow ECS North America.

More than 700 VAR attendees are expect at May Days, representing more than 100 different companies, and Arrow expects to help hundreds of VARs complete their recertification process on IBM storage products (which have a May 31 deadline) and Power (July 31 deadline products.

The key of the event is around education, that's its heritage and roots. We allow every attendee to get up to six certifications as part of the entry fee to the event," DeBartolo said. "It's a good cost justification to attend."