Sweet Carolina: Scenes From Synnex's 2009 National Conference

The theme for this year's Synnex National Conference in Greenville, S.C. -- where Synnex has its East Coast headquarters -- was "Formula for Success."

Synnex welcomed hundreds of vendor and VAR partners to meet its executive team, hear about Synnex's growth drivers for 2010 and what it sees as the best opportunities for solution providers, meet with vendor representatives and showcase a product pavilion.

Here's a pictorial look at the proceedings, which kicked off with an opening night cocktail reception.

OK, so it wasn't digital signage, but HP's ProCurve networking division definitely won points for drink-pouring style.

Bob Stegner, Synnex's senior vice president of marketing for North America, welcomed attendees to the conference by drawing parallels between solution providers grappling with the effects of the recession and the transformation of the city of Greenville itself.





Once a proud hub of textile manufacturing, Greenville saw its local economy depress and then recover, thanks to revitalization of its downtown in the 1970s and 80s and an influx of business from regionally located headquarters of businesses like BMW, Michelin and Synnex itself.

Although Stegner didn't don his customary theme costume, he did add to a collection of conference kick-off videos that in the past have depicted him, among other famous TV and movie characters, as the Terminator (remember 2008's "I am back"?)



This time around, he gave attendees a tour of Synnex's offices and behind the scenes of the conference set-up in a take-off on TV's "The Office," complete with Stegner himself in the role of the baffled, yet self-assured, manager.



"Peter Larocque? Who's that?" ribbed Stegner in the video, passing a sign with the name of Synnex's President of U.S. Distribution.

Synnex President and CEO Kevin Murai said that Synnex's operational structure and key investments were two reasons why the distributor had emerged from the recession, having gained market share and not suffered the double-digit sales declines seen by both Tech Data and Ingram Micro.



Murai also highlighted Synnex's ongoing efforts in health care, digital signage and managed print services as among the most important areas for the distributor going forward.



Murai later sat for an in-depth interview with Channelweb.com.

"We see high growth and high profit in adjacent markets, such as consumer electronics and how they extend home automation, as well as areas like data capture and point-of-sale, and health care," Murai said. "Then we see the ability to provide service offerings up and down the value chain."

"I think people underestimate the willingness of all of us to want to continue to do what we do," said Peter Larocque, Synnex's president of U.S. distribution, following Murai's keynote. "Many of you doubled down on your services years back, and that's saved you."





Larocque identified unified communications, managed print services, utilities, power management tools, virtualization, the federal stimulus, health care, life-cycle management, mobility, security and Software-as-a-Service as key segments and trends for VAR growth in 2010.

Stephen DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard's Personal Systems Group, addressed partners on HP's continued channel growth with the help of Synnex, and laid out opportunities partners would have with HP going forward. HP is Synnex's largest vendor by line card volume and sales to channel customers.





In a later interview from the Carolina First Center's outdoor patio with Channelweb.com, DeWitt detailed how HP's channel management would evolve following the promotion of popular channel chief Adrian Jones to a new role heading up HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers business in Asia-Pacific and Japan. DeWitt also touched on Windows 7, HP's main competitors and the importance of channel leadership.

The health-care vertical is a key focus for Synnex, which has made a number of investments to expand its health-care portfolio and what it can offer VARs. Among those has been a strategic partnership -- finalized this past June -- with AllScripts, which develops applications and other products around electronic medical records that appeal to VARs selling technology into physician practice settings and other smaller health-care sweet spots.





Synnex devoted an entire section of the exhibit hall at the Carolina First Center to its health-care practice and pertinent health-care issues like EMR and the management of paper-to-digital records systems.

Red Hat's vendor breakout included raffling off an HP netbook -- preloaded with Red Hat's Fedora -- to a lucky attendee. The winner was Mustafa Ahmed, a systems analyst at Merkem, a Fair Lawn, N.J.-based solution provider. Ahmed, at right, is joined by Ric Noble, a program manager with Red Hat's North America Channel Marketing team.

Gary Kayye, the founder of rAVe publications, led a session on digital signage and other A/V breakthroughs, arguing that for solution providers, the challenge of the future would be selling to customers who had "less perceived value-add" -- that is, they knew as much about signage and 21st century audio/visual equipment as the solution providers and retailers selling it to them. The value-add, he said, would be in services and technology integration -- A/V as the center of IT systems and an integral part of overall solutions instead of merely peripheral add-ons.

After the day's business had ended, various members of Synnex's management team fanned out across Greenville to take groups of VARs and vendor representatives to dinner. Synnex COO Dennis Polk (right) had one big group ...

...while CEO Kevin Murai (center) and senior vice president of product management TJ Trojan (second from left) had another...

...and Synnex's Director of Commercial Sales Rich Gooding (left) had still another.

Steven S. Little, a business growth consultant, challenged attendees to adapt to changing times and offered "in the trenches" insight on how solution providers should align their businesses to weather economic downturns and other business hurdles.





Little was a last-minute fill-in for Lenovo channel chief Stephen DiFranco, who had been originally scheduled to speak on how Lenovo reworked its channel strategy to sell into North America.

Stegner and Steve Jow, Synnex's senior vice president of sales, used auto-responders to poll the final day's general session attendees about various business issues.

Synnex Director of Government Sales and Education Initiatives David McCarter joins VARs with government on the brain at the conference's closing cocktail reception.

Synnex Director of Channel Development Chris Phillips and Everything Channel Account Director-Events Jennifer Ogle catch the HP Printsolv after a party-down by Greenville's Reedy River.