Live Blog: Synnex Varnex Spring 2013 Part II

Business Moves: Synnex recently hired on a new CFO, Marshall Witt, and he started last week. The company expects to complete the Supercom acquisition any day now. 

Heading North: The company continues to nvest in Canada. Forty-four customers are here from Canada, and seven vendors that are dedicated to the Canadian market.

Mixed IT Market: The market has been okay in the past 7 months. While there is some excitement and growth in cloud and mobility, there is a lot of uncertainty out there. Potential bright spot: HP’s formal launch of Moonshot platform is exciting.

From Cloud to Mobile: Synnex has made investments in cloud, IT management, specialization, and mobile. “CloudSolv is moving along well. We just launched our next major version of CloudSolv and we are quickly onboarding new service providers.” CloudSolv is a platform you can adopt to run your entire cloud and practices.

Growth: Synnex has had a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent for the past six years. 

Priorities: Varnex is building upon three pillars: Enablement; becoming an entity, and cohesiveness. “Becoming an entity is the most important to me. We should not be known independent companies, but as one Varnex entity.”

Mobile Bet: “The global mobility business unit is the only unit in our organization that reports directly to me.” Growth opportunity in mobility market is about 60 percent.

“We are rocking in Canada. Lenovo has just become the largest PC manufacturer in Canada.”

“If we weren’t growing at double digit, I wouldn’t be here today speaking to you — somebody else would be.”

Synnex was one of the first partners offering Lenovo’s servers.

Lenovo’s channel community grew 76 percent year-over-year.

“We’ve the fastest growing server company in North America.” (Side note: But that’s coming off a small sales base.)

He claimed the competition wants to sell software and services (HP, Dell). But Lenovo wants to sell servers and storage.

“We’ve had a strong server business in China for the past 20 years.”

He offered Varnex members to call him directly on his cell phone for questions.

Varnex 2012 public sector included education, state local, healthcare, and federal.

Synnex is offering more credit services, more support services, and more opportunities.

Varnex reseller profile includes 65 percent hardware, 23 percent services, and 12 percent software.

“The magic … it’s all of us.”

Microsoft has increased it’s Office 365 deals 120 percent year over year.

40 percent of our SMB customers are running Office 2003 — a prime upgrade opportunity.

New Office conversation involves devices, cloud on customers’ terms, and enterprise capabilities.

Matt Smith, Director, AMS Partner Marketing, HP;

Jeff Turner, Director U.S. SMB Channel Marketing, Microsoft;

Sammy Kinlaw, Executive Director of Channel Sales, U.S., Carribean, and Central America, Lenovo Channels;

Simon Dudley, Video Evangelist, LifeSize;

Brian Burch, Vice President of Americas Marketing for SMB, Symantec; and

Peter Larocque, President of U.S. Distribution, Synnex

Lenovo expects to grow its VAR community 20 percent year-over-year.

If you want to grow double digits, spend time at Varnex.

U.S. commercial business in PC shipments seem fine.

Meet face-to-face before you continue to work on the phone or video.

“The essence of life is relationships.”

Be careful of social media. Too much will kill you. Personal relationships are the key to business, eye-to-eye.

“I have found that greed will kill you.”

“You win by surrounding yourself by good people.”

“Go back and evaluate your team, not just on productivity, but character.”

Never get rid of a hardworking and loyal human being.

“How do people treat the people they don’t need?”