Avnet Demo Tool Spurs VAR Sales

The distributor's ITDemoCentral online tool allows VARs to showcase solutions from a variety of vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Symantec. Avnet would not say how much business has been generated from the tool, but resellers have used it to demo solutions to more than 550 customers in the past three months, and new vendors, including Citrix and Sun Microsystems, are expected to be added soon, according to the distributor.

The most popular products recently demonstrated on ITDemoCentral include Network Appliance's SnapManager for Exchange and SnapManager for SQL, EMC-CX3 Clariion Navisphere, Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Web Client and HP Enterprise Virtual Array 3000. VARs can sign up for time via the Internet to demonstrate different products to customers, and Avnet has the software and hardware ready when VARs sign on for their scheduled appointments.

The tool is especially helpful as customers themselves grow from small businesses into midmarket companies that require more advanced technologies, solution providers said.

Mark Darlington, COO of Trilogy Solutions, a Cranbury, N.J.-based solution provider, has used ITDemoCentral to show customers the HP EVA 3000 virtual storage array, and the demo even helped him make a sale to a midmarket customer that had been reluctant to make a purchasing decision.

For more than three years, Darlington pursued the customer—document management software company Mobius Management Systems, Rye, N.Y.—to help the company create a virtual storage array that would let it conduct multiple demos of its own software for its customers. "The opportunity would revive itself and then die, so it took a lot of persistence and patience," he said. "They didn't want to invest in a storage solution that they couldn't prove was going to work in their particular environment."

At Mobius, finding the right fit was important, as was working with solution providers to answer questions on systems from both EMC and HP.

"I was working through other integrators, too, and the ones that were geared toward pushing EMC, I couldn't get an answer on [whether the system had a read-only feature]," said Dan Feeley, director of network services at Mobius.

Darlington and Trilogy, he said, were quick with answers and had the ability to show Feeley how the system would actually function in his environment. Once Darlington demonstrated how the HP EVA 3000 array worked using Avnet's IT Demo Central, Mobius executives decided to spend almost $200,000 on the system in two weeks.

"It's always nice to be able to show a customer an EVA [array] physically, but really all you'd be looking at is a bunch of flashing lights. What they really want to see is the functionality delivered by a storage array like this," Darlington said.

ITDemoCentral has helped Avnet create better relationships with its resellers trying to reach midmarket accounts, said Ray Fischer, senior vice president of professional services at Avnet Americas. "You couldn't ask for something to hit more of the key ROIs out there," he said. "For example, if you've ever tried to orchestrate a demonstration with a customer, first of all just getting the time is a monumental effort."

With ITDemoCentral, if a customer wanted to see a solution, resellers can go online, check the system's availability and potentially be online demonstrating the applications within minutes, Fischer said. "It really empowers people to be a lot more flexible."