The Soft Pitch

Saturday was a beautiful day here in AZ and I decided to take up the invitation to see # 50 Ian Fanning play Pop Warner football. I was really shocked…the place was packed with parents and family. (good ones, not complaining or yelling etc like some stupid parents) Cheerleaders, tents were setup, at least 6-8 coaches dressed uniformly, excellent equipment, cool uniforms with their names, snacks, Gatorade bottles and big drums (to pour over the coach?)…parents dressed in their team shirts some with the roster printed on the back . The only things missing, were a scoreboard with advertising (let’s get on that Sean), a logo on the field and walky talkies…if Bill Beliceck was there they he would have stolen some of the hand signals.

Ian was awesome…he is old school, he played every down at guard and defensive nose guard and special teams. Unfortunately his Fighting Squirrels were out gunned about 32 -7…the Firebirds had a QB who could actually throw passes…better than the Bears Orton and Grossman.

Not bad for 8-9 year olds.

Geez when I was playing then, half of us had one bar face masks, no uni’s and we played on gravel at Farnsworth school in Chicago. No coaches or parents saw those epic struggles…how did we ever grow up?

All I could say was wow things sure have changed…same goes for distribution. Sean (Ian’s proud Dad and SR VP here) and I even discussed this at half time. In the old days parts were parts and we shipped them when we requested. Today Avnet is not your father’s old distributor…Sure we still ship out a lot of boxes…but we have so much invested in services and solutions, integration centers, logistics and training of our talented folks to accelerate the success of our customers as consultants. We are not just order takers. We are also not just in doing biz in USA but a global supply chain expert.

The value of Avnet and distribution to customers today is on such a higher level, some times we are not given the props for the support by suppliers, customers or rarely by Wall Street. Remember when the tech bubble burst in 2002 and online companies were going to eliminate distributors? We all found out they needed some brick and mortar, some actual products and yep real people to help the customers. Virtual is cool but not reality with orders that have any complexity and volume.

But that’s ok we will keep putting up the effort like the Fighting Squirrels did, they never gave up and we have been doing that too since 1921…want to learn more about the value we provide? Just send me a note and I will get you the right person…starting with our executive board.

Last week we learned that Avnet has been named as a finalist in Computerworld’s Green IT awards for “Green IT in the Data Center.”  “Green IT in the Data Center.”

We’re in with some pretty big company (IBM and Unisys were also named finalists in our category). But just being named a finalist I think shows a recognition of some things we take very seriously in running our business.

It’s become very cool these days to tout everything “green,” and sometimes we all get ahead of ourselves. So, I’m realistic. Avnet is on a journey to become more of a green company, we’re not perfect, but we’re looking at everything from coffee cups in our break rooms (we switched from Styrofoam to paper and regular old mugs) to use of plastic water bottles (we recently stopped using them at our large corporate functions) to big things like energy conservation.

Our journey in the data center began in 2005, when we needed to expand. The IT team worked closely with our facilities management team. Some things we did to get ahead of the power consumption curve:

ü     Using virtualization we consolidated our servers and decreased power consumption per image by 44 percent.

ü     We replaced “down flow” air conditioners with new ones which were 20 percent more efficient.

ü     We added more insulation. For a data center located in Arizona, where temperatures can reach more than 115 degrees, this investment resulted in a more efficient building, lowered cooling costs by $7500 per year, and increased the longevity of cooling systems and the roof.

ü     We replaced 250 T12 lighting ballasts with more efficient T08 ballasts.  This reduced Avnet’s lighting costs by 30 percent.

Winners will be announced September 18^th at Computerworld’s Green IT Symposium.  I have my fingers crossed.