
Distie roundup: Activity at Arrow, CMS, Exclusive, e92plus and Westcon-Comstor
Channel players are extending vendor relationships to add more services and routes to market
There have been moves by a number of distributors in the past few days to bolster their security portfolios, as well as enhance their abilities to reach a wide channel audience.
Security has remained one of the growth areas in the market, and those that have a reputation for supporting that side of the industry have been actively extending their options to provide more choices for resellers and MSPs.
Westcon-Comstor is among those that have formed partnerships to deepen their security credentials, with the firm’s Comstor arm landing EMEA rights to handle Splunk.
The addition of the security and observability specialist, which has been working with the channel partner in Asia-Pacific, builds on the distie’s three decade-long relationship with Cisco, which acquired Splunk last March.
Comstor will be leaning on its market knowledge to support cross-selling across Cisco’s partner community, as well as getting Splunk in front of a wider reseller audience.
“Comstor is ideally equipped to enable partners to take advantage of the opportunities presented by this agreement, as reflected by the fact that around 90% of our teams are accredited with Splunk sales or engineer certifications,” said Willem de Haan, executive vice-president of Comstor Europe and Comstor International at Westcon-Comstor.
Alexandra Turbitt, general vice-president for EMEA partner organisation at Splunk, said the distributor would help it strengthen links with Cisco’s business and widen its reach. “Comstor’s investment and ambition are truly inspiring, and we look forward to their contributions, particularly in attracting net new customers.”
Adding depth
CMS Distribution has also been active on the security front, adding more depth to the portfolio with Malwarebytes.
The distributor will be handling Malwarebytes’ ThreatDown family of products to resellers. “Through this new partnership, our resellers will gain real-time and comprehensive threat detection that is scalable to businesses of all sizes,” said Liam Mugford, head of partner development at CMS Distribution.
In response, Jason Coville, chief revenue officer of the corporate unit at Malwarebytes, said it was keen to work with an established channel player. “With this partnership, our cyber security solutions can reach a broader reseller community and support the businesses they serve,” he said.
Adding more depth to the portfolio was also the motivation for e92plus expanding its partnership with Proofpoint.
As a result, the distie will now be offering partners in the UK access to Proofpoint’s complete human-centric security platform and portfolio.
Mukesh Gupta, CEO of e92plus, said expanding the relationship with the vendor meant it could offer partners more choice. “Proofpoint has demonstrated clear leadership in the data, email and identity security markets, and our expanded partnership will provide an outstanding opportunity for our partners to help their customers transform their cyber security strategy and address the most complex threats,” he said.
Jerome Jullien, vice-president of channels and alliances for EMEA at Proofpoint, said the number of threats that looked to exploit human behaviours were continuing to increase. “By extending our partnership with e92plus, we aim to provide more organisations in the UK with the human-centric tools they need to navigate today’s complex threat landscape successfully, protecting their people and defending their critical and sensitive data,” he said.
AWS agreements
Elsewhere, Exclusive Networks has been looking to ensure it can get its security vendor out to as wide an audience as possible by sealing a couple of agreements with with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The distributor has become an Authorized AWS Distributor for the European Economic Area (and Switzerland), and joined the Designated Seller of Record programme.
Jesper Trolle, Exclusive Networks CEO, said the agreements would give the channel player the opportunity to sell security products via various routes to market.
“These agreements with AWS are a major step forward in Exclusive Networks’ digital roadmap, enabling us to continue innovating, and offering the best solutions and services through premier channels,” he said. “We are determined to pursue our mission to expand growth opportunities for both our vendors and channel partners.”
Customer success
Arrow Electronics has also been expanding its hyperscaler relationships, picking up the infrastructure and database migration to Microsoft Azure Specialisation.
The distie gained the status as a result of its expertise around planning and migrating infrastructure and database workloads, and had to meet stringent criteria around customer success and staff skill levels.
Brendan Murphy, global director of public cloud for Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business, said the specialisation helped the firm differentiate in the market.
“It highlights our ability to support our channel partners in accelerating their end customers’ migration journeys to Azure, especially with the additional significant benefits that come with this recognition,” he said. “We are committed to providing our channel partners with the best tools and support to ensure their success in the cloud.”
In response, Andrew Smith, general manager of partner program management at Microsoft, said the specialisation was only awarded to the most capable partners.
“Arrow clearly demonstrated that they have both the skills and the experience to offer clients a path to successful migration so that they can start enjoying the multiple benefits of being in the cloud,” he said.