Westcon-Comstor will leverage its BlueSky cloud and service management platform and its previous experience as an AWS Value Added Distributor in Asia Pacific to help its resellers build strong practices around AWS.
Siobhan Byron, Westcon Group’s Vice President of Canada and General Manager of Canada
Distributor Westcon-Comstor has become Amazon Web Services’ first designated AWS Value Added Distributor in Canada. The new Canadian relationship comes on the heels of similar successful relationships in multiple countries within the Asia Pacific region.
“I think this is a huge opportunity for Westcon-Comstor, AWS, and our customer base,” said Siobhan Byron, Westcon Group’s Vice President of Canada and General Manager of Canada. “If you look at the Canadian market, we can be a little slower to adopt new technologies like cloud, even when they have been talked about for a long time. Some consultancies with established practices around AWS are doing very well with them. But others are still working on their cloud strategy. They know AWS can play a role there, but aren’t yet sure how they can do that.”
Byron said that Westcon-Comstor’s BlueSky cloud and service management platform provides an important differentiation which will enable their partners to successfully work with AWS.
“This platform is one we acquired a couple years ago from a company in New Zealand with which we were working, and then decided to acquire,” she said. “It will differentiate us to offer value to both AWS and our resellers. It allows the customer to get a consolidated view of cloud usage and cost, and helps them with asset optimization recommendations, analytics and integrated billing. This will significantly enhance the ability of our customer base to bring solutions to bear around AWS.”
Westcon will also support its partners with technical enablement solutions.
“Resellers who are most successful with AWS are those with a strong technical background, and we are a good fit there because most of our customers are quite strong technically,” Byron said. “However we have also made significant investments in AWS-certified technical resources, and we will be using those to ramp up our AWS business.” Westcon will also make its established financing programs available to partners for this initiative.
Byron said that Westcon-Comstor will be able to leverage the best practices learned from working with AWS in Asia-Pacific. They first started there in Australia and New Zealand, and have expanded to others including Indonesia.
“We always leverage lessons learned on a global basis and share those,” she said. “The New Zealand market in particular is somewhat similar to the Canadian one. But when it comes to the Canadian market, we always have to customize and execute locally, and tweak things.”
Avnet, and other distributors, were already AWS Value Added Distributors globally. AWS gave Westcon Comstor the specific designation for Canada because Canada is a developing market for AWS.
