Avnet secures top Tandberg UC accreditation

The UK’s Avnet Technology Solutions has become the first distributor to achieve Tandberg’s Accredited Service Partner (ASP), an honour normally reserved for highly technical system integrators. Avnet Technology Solutions, part of Avnet Inc, is now accredited to deliver a complete end-to-end service to assist business partners with defining, building and implementing Tandberg Unified Communications technologies.

ASP status, which is held by only seven Tandberg partners, signifies that the recipient has the ability to deliver the most challenging UC solution across every phase of the project and through all tiers of non-manufacturer support.

However, Joel Chimoindes, Avnet Technology Solutions, UK, Unified Communications director stresses that the firm “will never go direct to end customers,” although the ASP status means that Avnet channel partners can use its in-house expertise at to jointly deliver projects that require complex project management and logistical support.

Avnet is the UK’s only Tandberg distributor and looks after 24 of the vendors 31 partners. In the UC space, the Avnet has a broad set of partners but no relationship with Cisco, a vendor it has actively courted over the last few years. In the US last December, Avnet Inc finally secured specialty distributor status with the networking giant to Nexus, MDS Fiber Channel SAN and Catalyst E-Blade Switches. Avnet US will also carry Cisco’s new Blade and Rack Servers, Application Control Engine (ACE) and WAN Optimization (WAAS) product lines.

With Cisco reputedly now in the last stages of finalising its purchase of Tandberg, and with Avnet the most qualified Tandberg distributor in Western Europe, the potential for Avnet to extend it recent US agreement to the UK is likely to increase.

Chimoindes would not speculate about the likelihood of a future relationship between Avnet in the UK and Cisco through the imminent acquisition of Tandberg. “No one vendor has a complete UC solution yet,” he comments, although he agrees that the addition of Tandberg to the Cisco portfolio would make a very compelling UC proposition, and could potentially make both selling and implementing UC easier for the industry as a whole.