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Huawei Technologies on Monday confirmed a full-fledged U.S. distribution agreement with Synnex, marking an important step in Huawei's building of its U.S. channel capabilities and its overall enterprise presence in North America.
Huawei's switches, routers, storage and videoconferencing products are now offered through Synnex's ConvergeSolv Secure Networking business unit. Synnex is already taking orders for Huawei products and will start to demo Huawei wares in its proof-of-concept labs in Greenville, S.C., and Fremont, Calif.
Peter Larocque, Synnex president for U.S. distribution, said Synnex had had a previous relationship with the Huawei-Symantec joint venture and that signing on Huawei as enterprise supplier was an important move for the distributor.
[Related: Huawei To Challenge Cisco With Bold U.S. Enterprise Channel Push]
"We've been very excited to bring Huawei to the U.S. market and to our partners," he told CRN. "We had the Huawei-Symantec relationship for about 18 months on the security side and that gave us the ability to sell networking products as well, and what we saw from that is that the company had made significant investments in the business, especially in technology. What they've achieved made us feel very comfortable working with Huawei."
Larocque and Synnex also had a relationship with Rob Claus, vice president of Huawei's U.S. enterprise channel business. Claus, who joined Huawei last fall, held various channel and distribution executive positions at HP and ShoreTel over the past three years and had previously spent nine years at Polycom.
"I've known them, and this is a natural fit for us," Claus told CRN. "This is a very busy time for Huawei. We're developing our go-to-market strategy. Among the things we're concentrating on, the first priority was distribution. We entered into some conversations with Peter and his team, and this has made a lot of sense for both of us."
Huawei last fall debuted a U.S. channel program, part of the overall launch of its U.S. Enterprise Group, which is itself part of a global Enterprise Business Group Huawei formed in 2011 during a corporate restructuring.
Huawei executives told CRN at the time that the company's goal is to do 100 percent of its enterprise sales in the U.S. through channel partners. In March, Huawei rolled out both a training and certification program and a global enterprise channel program structure that organizes partners into distributors, VARs, and Silver-, Gold- and Platinum-level Huawei partners.
NEXT: Why Synnex And Huawei Make Sense
