Avnet Delivers 4 Cloud Solutions on Amazon Web Services

By Khali Henderson

IT distributor Avnet Technology Solutions unveiled four cloud solutions using the Amazon Web Services platforms, delivering on the integrated and packaged offerings it promised its partners when it launched the Avnet Cloud Solutions group in May.

Avnet’s solutions incorporate AWS with technologies from Microsoft, Oracle, Riverbed Technology and Symantec, to provide cloud solutions for productivity and collaboration, backup and disaster recovery, and application hosting and management  three of seven workload areas identified by the Avnet Cloud Solutions team as high demand for moving to the cloud. The other four areas include test and development security, remote management and monitoring, and data center as a service.

Specifically, the solutions include:

The services are debuting at AWS re: Invent, held Nov. 27-29, in Las Vegas, and will be available immediately through Avnets partners in the U.S. and Canada.

Tim FitzGerald, vice president of Avnet Cloud Solutions, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas, told Channel Partners the packaged offers are designed to “take the cost and time our of the partner responsibility” for delivering services to their customers.

Avnet partner Jennifer Connolly, president of The Metropolitan Technology Services Group, said the solutions will significantly reduce its solutions development time and costs.

“Most importantly, Avnets solutions built on AWS have given us a very specific set of offerings that we can start discussing with our customers today, which will help us quickly profit from the growth opportunities in off-premise cloud computing,” Connolly said in a press statement.

FitzGerald said he expects these first Avnet packaged solutions to have broad appeal for partners’ customers.  He noted that backup and recovery already enjoys a comfort level for outsourcing among businesses and the other two  collaboration and hosting  can benefit from the elasticity provided by the Amazon cloud computing platforms.

Avnets solution-driven strategy coupled with Amazon Web Services highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud gives Avnets channel partners enterprise-class packaged solutions that they can easily consume and deliver faster and at a lower cost to their customers,” said Terry Wise, head of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, AWS.

FitzGerald said partners maintain the contractual and billing relationships with their customers. Avnet bills the partner at a discounted rate for the customers’ usage and the partner bills the customer at retail.