Avnet Takes Storage Best Practices Nationwide

The solution provider this week unveiled the Avnet Design and Implementation Methodology (ADIM) program, aimed at making sure storage skills and experience gained from SAN deployments become part of the company's best practices, said Jeff Beall, senior vice president of professional services at Avnet Enterprise Solutions.

Until now, Avnet did an ad hoc job of managing its best practices, Beall said. "Vendors offer set implementations," he said. "We, like other partners, add value to those implementations. ... ADIM gives us a methodology to repeat the best practices that we've learned. In the past, we took what a vendor offered for a particular installation but didn't reuse the skills."

An Avnet customer in California, for example, might also have an office in Florida, Beall said. "Now we can repeat the work done there in their Florida office," he said. "Or we can use our national overlay team to use the best practices of that job on subsequent engagements with that client or other clients."

Services covered under the ADIM program include needs assessment, solution design, implementation and after-sales services such as remote monitoring and technology updates, Beall said. The majority of those services will be done in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, Avnet's biggest storage vendor, he said.