Tech Data: Our No. 1 Duty Is To Make Partners Successful

Close to celebrating its 40-year company anniversary of working in the channel, Tech Data executives addressed a crowd of resellers, customers and vendors, thanking them for their support and projecting even more success going forward at its Channel Link event at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn.

Joe Quaglia, Tech Data Americas president, outlined the company's successful history, starting when the company was founded in 1974, through when it hit its first billion dollars in revenue in 1993, the launch of many key services and technology groups as the company continued to expand globally, and finishing with how the company's earnings, announced Wednesday, placed the company at $26.8 billion in fiscal year 2014.

"We're very humbled and very proud of being in business for 40 years. We certainly could not have done this without the loyalty and support of our vendor and reseller customers," Quaglia said in his speech.

[Related: Tech Data Partners With Mobile Security Solutions Firm Good Technology ]

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The partnership that Tech Data works to have with its partners is one of innovation and opportunity, said Tech Data Senior Vice President of Marketing Brian Davis, who also spoke in the keynote. He said that it's about finding the intersection and the "special spark" when opportunity is recognized, and enabling partners to take advantage of those opportunities.

"Being a reseller is a tough job," Davis said. "My No. 1 duty here is to make that job a little easier for you and make you more successful," he said to the resellers in the audience.

That enablement becomes especially important, he said, as the pace of change is accelerating in the marketplace, centered primarily around what Gartner calls the "Nexus of Forces:" social, mobile, information and cloud. To that list, Davis added security as well.

"I look at it as it's our duty here at Tech Data. We need to help describe what that opportunity is, we need to be able to inspire you to want to be part of it, and we have to enable that success. It's all about that empowerment," Davis said.

"I think our responsibility here at Tech Data is really about empowerment, and it's about empowering the connection between our great vendor partners and the reseller partners as well," he continued.

John Futter, proprietor of Whately Integrated Networks, a Whately, Mass.-based Tech Data partner in the audience, said that the speeches by Tech Data executives, as well as those that followed from Good Technology, the mobile security firm with which Tech data recently partnered, and Cisco, is causing him to start reevaluating his portfolio and figure out ways to add more technologies to help his customers. He said he is looking to possibly do more business with Tech Data in the future after the keynote.

"I'm trying to tie together some of the things I'm seeing with what I do in my business," Futter said.

PUBLISHED ON APRIL 9, 2014