Avnet Adds 2 Partner Programs to Cloud Marketplace

**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of recent important channel-program changes you should know.**

Avnet on Wednesday announced the addition of two partner programs for its two-year-old Cloud Marketplace — Avnet AWS CloudFront Reseller Program and Avnet Oracle Reseller Program.

These two new partner programs, geared toward U.S. and Canadian partners, add to the more than one dozen other specialty programs for the Cloud Marketplace.

“We think it’s important to provide specialized focus for accelerating growth for partners based on specific solution capabilities — and in our minds that means unique programs that help them grow in a specific solution area,” Tim FitzGerald, vice president of digital information at Avnet, told us.

Each of the two new programs is based on a unique service.

The Avnet AWS CloudFront Reseller Program provides content delivery for specific workloads for partners’ customers. Partners are able to access Amazon CloudFront, a global content delivery network (CDN)) that accelerates the delivery of websites, APIs video content or other web assets.{ad}

While Avnet has a more general program for AWS, the CloudFront program is unique to CloudFront and CloudFront-focused partners, and offers a unique profit opportunity for specialized partners.

“What the vendor is doing is looking for partners to go deep and understand the technology that’s involved in delivering a workload that specializes in the CDN area,” said FitzGerald.

He also noted that this program is unique to Avnet and not all AWS distributors.

The Avnet Oracle Reseller Program is unique to Oracle and increases the number of Oracle cloud-powered offerings in the Cloud Marketplace – think of areas such as Oracle database, business intelligence, big data, Internet of Things (IoT), and Java – areas that are front and center to Oracle’s cloud strategy.

“This is great for Oracle-focused partners looking to get into the Oracle as-a-service game more efficiently then they could have on their own,” noted FitzGerald.

According to Avnet, the new Oracle program enables partners with an out-of-the-box branded storefront ready to resell the most popular Oracle infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (Saas) solutions.

For partners who do business on the Avnet Cloud Marketplace, the distributor has made several enhancements that improve billing reporting, offer additional customization capabilities and provide new supplier features.

Tech Data’s $2.6 billion acquisition of the Avnet Technology Solutions operating group is expected to close in the first half of next year. Both Tech Data and Avnet have Cloud Marketplaces — at this time it’s unclear how these currently separate and competitive entities will come together once the acquisition closes.