Avnet Technology Solutions Brings SAP's HANA On Board

The new agreement around SAP HANA expands Avnet's existing partnership with SAP to North America. Avent recently had signed distribution pacts with SAP in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, said Jeff Bawol, president of Avnet Technology Solutions Americas, Tempe, Ariz.

"Our new relationship allows us to help SAP grow and expand their current partner base, and we get the ability to help enable those partners to be better qualified to position SAP HANA," said Bawol. "The addition of SAP to Avnet's portfolio will help partners capture new opportunities related to analytics, big data, converged infrastructure and enterprise mobility."

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"We focus on vertical markets in the health-care, government, finance and retail industry," Bawol said. "Partners are very interested because SAP is a quality product that allows the partner to go into that end user and talk about solving business problems regardless of what industry they are focused on."

SAP, with U.S. headquarters in Newtown Square, Pa., has made a major push around the HANA platform this year, with CEO Bill McDermott calling HANA "the platform for every single thing the company will do going forward."

Scott Look, vice president and general manager for connected and secured solutions at Avnet, said, "If you are looking specifically at SAP HANA, the business problems that it will help partners address with their customers include profitability reporting and forecasting, retail merchandising and supply chain optimization, security and fraud detection, energy use monitoring and optimization, and telecommunications network monitoring and optimization."

In addition to SAP's enterprise applications and platform offerings, Avnet channel partners in the U.S. and Canada will gain access to a variety of resources and services, including sales and technical training, customized demand generation programs in vertical markets, and SAP- targeted analytics, according to the distributor.

Vince Deluca, CEO of New York-based Logicalis, believes Avnet's new distribution agreement with SAP will open up opportunities. "Our customers will benefit in terms of the knowledge we'll bring to the table with use cases and references that we can bring collectively in a very robust capability around SAP," said Deluca. "While we certainly have our customer base, from a white space perspective [of markets Logicalis hasn't touched yet], Avnet is committed to working with us and providing analytics that are targeted to our geographies and markets we are serving."

For the future, expanding and extending into the software space will benefit Avnet and Logicalis in reaching the both the enterprise and SMB marketplaces, Deluca said.

"Our heritages are in hardware distribution or hardware value-added resell, and we both recognize the need to extend into areas of software," Deluca said. "Software is really where our industry will have the most impact and have the most impact into our customer base."

PUBLISHED OCT. 15, 2013