Arrow ECS Adds Professional Services

Published: March 8, 2010

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As it promised it would last fall, the Enterprise Computing Solutions group of master reseller Arrow Electronics has launched its own professional services business.

Arrow ECS is one of the two big master resellers of servers in the world, the other being Avnet, and both buy from server makers in bulk and sell downstream to thousands of other resellers worldwide. Last October, as The Four Hundred reported, Arrow created a vice president of worldwide services position in the ECS group and tapped Joe Burke, a senior-level executive who has done a lot of different jobs within the company, to create new services that Arrow ECS and its resellers in turn can peddle much as they do iron today. In 2008, services accounted for a little more than $1 billion of the ECS unit's $5.4 billion in revenues, but none of this was for so-called professional services, which includes technical, engineering, and educational support for the server, storage, and software products that Arrow ECS sells in North America. The new professional services unit under Burke will also sell cloud computing and managed services to resellers or their downstream customers. The services also include supplier-authorized training, onsite security assessments, engineering services, and 24x7 tech support for resellers and end users who buy wares from them.

"As the services aggregator and provider, we save resellers from having to select, engage, and manage service providers on their own, thereby protecting them from risk, investment costs, and productivity losses," explained Burke in announcing the new professional services unit. "Services and products are billed on a single invoice, we provide comprehensive presales and post-sales product support, and we serve as the source for solution provisioning."

The way Arrow ECS is pitching its professional services, resellers can use them to augment or replace their own services, depending on their own expertise and workloads. They could resell Arrow ECS services until they get up to speed on a new bit of software or hardware, or outsource customer support if they want to focus more on sales.

For IBM's Power Systems lineup, Arrow ECS is specifically offering consulting and engineering services from the new unit to start.

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