The growing flash businesses, strong partner services opportunities, and better leveraging of Arrow and Avnet have helped drive NetApp’s Canadian business in 2016.
The TSANet has facilitated inter-vendor collaboration for post-sales technical support for over 20 years. A year ago, its ranks were opened to the channel, and TSANet was at ChannelCon last week, to make its case why the channel should join.
The turnkey solutions are expected to build up Equinix’s base of MSP and VAR partners, something that has been a focus for the company this year. Equinix is especially interested in partners with strong Microsoft practices.
New, preconfigured NetApp bundles for enterprise Splunk deployments will now also be available through Arrow, which is expected to significantly increase the amount of EF-series all-flash arrays sold in particular, as well as E-series arrays.
The bundle enhances interoperability between Fortinet’s FortiGate Network Security Platform and the HPE Security Logger products, and will initially be piloted exclusively through Arrow to a limited number of partners, before being opened up later this year.
Dell believes its configure-to-order embedded PCs will do well in a market dominated by smaller manufacturers doing custom orders, and whose machines lack the software, manageability and support options Dell can offer.
Atlantis also announced a new relationship with Dell, the only major OEM for whom its software was not customized when the first Atlantis hyperconverged products were announced last year.
ForeScout has shown strong recent growth that has begun to strain its old policy of dealing directly with its partners, so it has signed North American deals with the two VADs which best complement their product set. The company is already fairly strong in Canada, and is looking to distribution to strengthen Canadian presence further.
The Arrow deal broadens the Nexsan distribution network, and is also intended to transition more Nexsan resellers to Tier Two distribution, away from the direct Tier One model Nexsan used before it was acquired.
Lenovo announces its second hyperconverged partnership this week, which like the first is focused primarily on the SMB space, where Lenovo is initially focusing with its hyperconverged strategy.
Lenovo teams up with software-defined storage vendor StorMagic to offer three new hyperconverged offerings. They are unlikely to be their last.
The new CS 250 is a much-enhanced followup to the appliance HP first announced in December at HP Discover, and which came to market earlier this year.
The Toronto startup is going to market through the channel out of the gate, and unusually for a startup, has been picked up by a major distributor. Arrow is handling their North American distribution.
Violin has never been a serious North American channel player before, but having remade the company with a channel-friendly product and channel-centric go-to-market platform, it has selected Arrow as its first North American distributor
StorMagic is looking to re-engage with the channel and build up a strong channel business for its sophisticated solution aimed and priced for SMBs and ROBO environments, which will include more strong Canadian partners.
Synnex joins Ingram Micro and Tech Data among Dell’s broadline distribution partners. While the deal is U.S. only, its expansion to Canada is under consideration.
While both Lenovo and IBM used some different distributors, under Lenovo all distributors formerly used by both companies will remain, and each distributor will be able to sell any server Lenovo sells. All partners will also be able to sell all Lenovo servers.
Dell is seeing significant growth through distribution as it ramps up its activity with disties, including a return to working with Ingram Micro Canada.
IBM has introduced Ingram Micro as its fifth global training partner as it continues its quest to hand over education to partners.
Stratus Technologies’ partnership with Arrow to bring fault-tolerant software to x86 servers.
