The Soft Pitch

As VP of PR for Avnet, I often get to hear about great stuff the team is doing around the world before everyone else. Or sometimes I just get a news clip after the fact about something that happened in the UK or India or Malaysia. Either way, almost every day I’m reading something about Avnet activities very far from my personal home base here in Phoenix. It reminds me of just how “flat” our world is and how connected we are these days.  (By the way, we post the highlights of our news coverage daily to the Press Room and you can subscribe to it via RSS.)

So, I’m sharing a couple news clips I got on things Avnet’s doing that never saw a press release or were never promoted beyond a single country’s borders, but I thought worthy of sharing:

This first story comes from the UK where we recently upgraded a facility called

 THE [resource] . THE [resource]  houses a variety of technologies where resellers can come in with a customer and do live demonstrations in an upscale environment.  We’ve had this facility for almost 5 years and it was previously dedicated only to IBM but now we’ve  expanded the technology available for demos.  Interestingly enough, we also opened an IBM-focused center for demos recently in Malaysia and a few years ago one in Poland. We’ve also got similar centers in the US and undoubtedly in many places I don’t know about it. What strikes me most is that we are working to leverage scale and scope and offer the same or similar services in local markets with a twist usually to meet local needs.

The second story comes from India where we recently announced we’ve expanded our global footprint with IBM with several other suppliers soon to follow .  This comes on the heels of our acquisition of Ontrack in India and the team is working quickly to deliver a wide range of value-added solutions and services in that market to resellers. Hardly a week goes by where we’re not announcing a new supplier, a new service, a new technology being offered somewhere.  Expanding by geography, technology and suppliers is a key part of our growth strategy.

I didn’t mean this to be the IBM post, but the truth is we’re one of IBM’s largest value-add distributors in the world – but I could also say the same of HP and Sun. The story of expansion just keeps going – we’re expanding with our other leading suppliers as well – NetApp, EMC, etc. Maybe instead of a global footprint it should be a global boot print. We keep growing. It’s kind of like that movie, “The Never Ending Story.”   Each time you open the page, the story takes a new turn and continues.

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