SHI Partners With Amazon, Box As Cloud Business Surges In Q3

SHI International is ramping up its cloud focus to meet the growing demand for off-premise products and services.

The Somerset, N.J.-based solution provider Tuesday reported $1.2 billion in revenue for the third quarter of 2013, with its cloud products and services pulling in revenue of $250 million.

While not entirely shifting away from the company's initial focus on hardware and software sales, SHI now offers cloud-based products and services such as Adobe Creative Cloud, HP Cloud, Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Azure.

[Related: Adobe Channel Slowly Catching On To Creative Cloud ]

SHI has also signed on new partnerships with enterprise cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) and online file sharing and cloud management services provider Box, said Ed McNamara, director of marketing and communications at SHI.

According to SHI, the company is now offering Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon CloudWatch.

"SHI is the partner for IT management for traditional hardware/software and helping them manage that from procurement to deployment," McNamara said in an interview. "However, our customers have been saying to us for a long time, 'Help us get our arms around the cloud products that are deployed out there.' It became apparent that if we were going to be the trusted partners we envisioned to be for IT needs, we need respectable products as a part of our portfolio.'"

According to McNamara, the increasing requests for transitions to the cloud won't be stopping anytime soon. SHI's strategic decisions are driven mainly by what the customer necessitates, he said.

"People are still ramping up their cloud usage, and it's increasing very steadily over time and will continue to do so in the future," McNamara told CRN. "At SHI, we don't manufacture a product; we manufacture the experience. It's all about customer demand. Our most popular products are the ones that our customers want, and it's what helps to drive cloud."

SHI also works with smaller solution providers to position cloud infrastructure and security offerings on a local level, said McNamara.

"When necessary, we utilize a partner network to reach out to local solution providers," said McNamara. "Often times, a customer wants to say SHI is involved but would also like to be partnered on a local level, and [SHI] will continue to do that."

Compared to 2012's third-quarter results, SHI has had an 18.8 percent growth and will continue to grow, said McNamara.

"Because we have the ability to act as a consultant on the most popular trend in technology, and marrying up cloud and traditional volume licensing and device services, our mobility and cloud combined with our stability will add to growth as long as we can offer those different solutions seamlessly," said McNamara. "We do expect to grow every quarter and every year."

PUBLISHED OCT. 31, 2013