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What's the future of S3? Are you looking to acquire more Avaya partners?
We picked up two major solution providers. Absolutely they will continue to focus on their Fortune 500 base. We're now one of leaders in call center infrastructure and that's a pure telephony voice play. We're one of leaders in the health-care vertical in the telephony space.
We want to build upon that business where it makes sense and grow it with Avaya. The [partnering] part with the VAR base is a long term objective. We have to evolve to that. We're going to leverage it and white label it. That'll be a separate effort under Sean Kerins to grow that with the VAR base.
Why did you pick Avaya partners to buy and not partners of another vendor like Cisco?
We saw Avaya as more compatible with our go-to-market strategy. We believe it's something we can build over time. Clearly there are other players in the market, but Avaya is a very supportive vendor to the channel. It's a good relationship we're building where we want to build one of the biggest relationship. Clearly Avaya has some services they want to deliver and services they want channel to deliver. We want to participate in that stack and do that service in a way better than Avaya can do it.
Can you update us on your relationship with Oracle? Is that progressing to where you'd like or are there more things you'd like to see from them?
Obviously, there's still some work to do there. But they are being very aggressive in the channel. They're coming out with new products that play to the midmarket, some new appliances coming out are very exciting. We're still in the mode where you want to build a little more traction but we do see it building. There's a lot of competition in the Unix space right now, but we see it moving along and we intend to work hard on Oracle.
How about HP? Has Meg Whitman reached out to you guys yet? Arrow doesn't have a PC business, but does the company keeping its Personal Systems Group have an impact on you or your VARs?
We haven't chatted with her yet. They have a major partner conference for the Americas in Las Vegas in November. I've spoken with Dave Donatelli [HP's executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and Technology Services] and other executives. Things are steady as she goes. The announcement that they would not spin off the PC business is good for the channel, regardless of whether you have a data center or desktop PC focus. It sent the message that they intended to stay in the technology hardware space, which is important to their supply chain. That was good news from my perspective.
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