Arrow Extends Cloud Enablement Offerings to North American Partners

Arrow Electronics has broadened the reach of its ArrowSphere cloud service brokerage and cloud aggregation platform, and has extended its services to partners in the U.S. and Canada. This follows last year’s rollout among five countries in Europe. Included in the same initiative, the Englewood, Colorado-based value added distributor is also making a number of enablement services available. These will work with support channel partners to better manage their transitions to the cloud. 

The vice president of services for Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business in North America, Jim Livingston, said: “I haven't met a single solution provider over the last several months who doesn't have a major interest in this space and hasn't begun to place bets. Whether you are selling based on speeds and feeds or service-level agreements, there is a lot of discussion around the selling motions, and how best to meet the needs of the end customers. So we are providing a platform to augment their efforts, and also helping them to deal with a variety of the business aspects of the move, including things like compensation, training and how to work with their customers.”

The migration towards the cloud and managed services, according to Livingston, appears to have gathered greater momentum in Europe. Centralized billing and provisioning of a variety of cloud services, including storage, servers on demand, security and unified communications are offered by the platform. There is also the opportunity for partners to white label the brand.

Livingston added: “The platform leverages Jamcracker technology for the aggregation, provisioning and billing engine, and we've driven the build out of a lot of our integration with a number of different service providers, leveraging IBM Cast Iron. In addition to the platform, we've focused on some of the lessons-learned in order to create an overall ecosystem that extends what we do as a value-added distributor. This allows us to bring a catalog of cloud offerings to market, and allows the partner to brand it themselves. And we can aggregate contracts and pricing, and aggregate the billing function in order to help simplify the back office for them.”

A number of mechanisms deploy enablement, and these include online training modules, workshops and discussions among teams. Assistance with assessing the impact of recurring revenue on cash flow, as well as sales compensation, on-boarding, branding, and catalog creation are offered by key areas of business model focus.

The president of ThinkASG, Inc., David Browning, said: “Obviously, the platform is important table stakes, but at the end of the day, I think the main proposition is the enablement aspect that provides a rapid start into cloud offerings. This allows us to go to our customers who currently buy from us in a product context and offer cloud-based alternatives. That quickly endorses us as a broader spectrum consultant.” According to Browning, Irvine, California-based ThinkASG is a “consultative integrator,” which is preparing to adopt a cloud model.

Browning added: “Arrow's done a good job of developing the ability for us to syndicate their efforts. They've got everything ranging from help with negotiating the cloud provider contracts, marketing capabilities, relabeling, etc. All this helps us to take our first step into that [cloud] space.” Earlier in the year, a beta test of the initiative was introduced to North America. (CY) Link