Avnet To Offer Azaleos E-mail Managed Service
The Tempe, Ariz.-based distributor's partners will be able to resell Azaleos's OneServer, BladeMail and OneStop Managed Services offerings, which integrate remote monitoring, management, archiving, reporting, backup and disaster recovery services with Microsoft Exchange and IBM hardware.
The distributor unveiled the new offering Monday at IBM PartnerWorld in St. Louis.
Azaleos's OneServer and BladeMail e-mail appliances support up to 6,000 and 24,000 end-users respectively, and several can be networked to support larger organizations. The OneStop managed service provides continuous monitoring, patch management, backup and optional disaster recovery capabilities.
"I think the product set is really top notch," said David Stone, vice president, business development, at Solutions-II, a Littleton, Col.-based solution provider.
"We're excited to have Avnet bring these kinds of solutions packages together and bring their strength together with companies like Azaleos, and bring it to the partner channel-ready so it has significant value to us. This particular product is very strong because it takes a lot of complexity out of upgrades and migrations to Exchange 2007," he said.
"I think it's going to enable channel partners to really expand their purpose and help their customer bases. The migration from Exchange 2003 to 2007 isn't that complex, but people's mail environments are getting much more critical, and to have this whole turnkey set is going to be very valuable for the channel. They've put this together in a nice way with really robust hardware and good configuration options," Stone said.
For Avnet, the partnership helps it in its mission to offer customers products in a more solutions-driven way, said Tony Madden, senior vice president and general manager of Avnet Technology Solutions' IBM business unit. "[Azaleos'] expertise in this marketplace combined with the scope and scale of Avnet's partner community are a perfect combination and very consistent with our focus on bringing solutions to the market for our partners," he said.
"This is an ideal solution because every end-user customers is having this challenge right now," Madden said. "It's an absolute perfect marriage of leading-edge technology with great relationships that our partners have with their end-users." For Azaleos, the partnership with Avnet will help the company expand its reach beyond what its direct sales force and small network of resellers are capable of providing.
"The challenge with any growing company is actually being able to reach out to a large number of resellers and to be able to educate those resellers and provide them with support. In this case Avnet has all of those capabilities, which is really attractive to an ISV or any company building a solution like what Azaleos is doing," said Keith McCall, CTO and founder of Azaleos, Redmond, Wash.
He said he expects Azaleos to transition from being about 80 percent direct to 80 percent channel in the next two years. "Our goal as a company is to shift to a channel-based sales model and with Avnet we believe we'll get significant support in that transition," said McCall.
The company has been growing by leaps and bounds, McCall said. The number of e-mail boxes it manages roughly doubles every quarter. Azaleos now manages about 20,000 e-mail boxes and expects to have 100,000 under its watch by the end of 2007.