Lakeview Inks Exclusive Distribution Deal with Avnet

High availability software vendor Lakeview Technology will today announce that it has inked a mutually exclusive deal with Avnet Partner Solutions Americas that will designate Avnet as the sole System i reseller channel through which Lakeview will peddle its MIMIX product line.

Exclusive deals are a rarity in the computer business these days, but they still do happen because sometimes a tighter link between a vendor and a distributor can make for more revenues and profits. This is clearly what both Avnet and Lakeview are hoping for in this case. “This is a really big change for us,” explains Ed Vesely, vice president of marketing at Lakeview. “This will significantly expand our opportunities.” Right now, the deal covers the Avnet channel in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and Vesely says that Lakeview will now be able to push through a couple of hundreds resellers, who are all working in concert with Avnet.

While the deal is mutually exclusive to Avnet and Lakeview–Lakeview will not sell MIMIX products through Arrow Electronics or Agilysys, and Avnet will not sell any i5/OS-based HA products from Lakeview’s half dozen competitors–Vesely says that some of Avnet’s tier two resellers have non-exclusive agreements with Avnet, and therefore can often sell other solutions. In these cases, Lakeview will still have to work to get its share of the HA software business among downstream OS/400 shops, he says.

The goal of the deal is for Lakeview to be able to fully leverage the Avnet channel. Avnet will take the lead in marketing the MIMIX products, and is even branding the MIMIX Vault backup product as Avnet MIMIX Vault. Lakeview will provide collateral and content for marketing and sales as well as do joint events to promote the software. Avnet will be responsible for demand generation in its channel, which frees up Lakeview to do more of its own demand generation outside the Americas region and through its own reseller channel, and allows it to focus on more brand-level marketing for its products in the Americas and around the world.

Avnet Partner Solutions will sell the MIMIX ha1, MIMIX ha Lite, and Mimix dr1 products as well as the MIMIX Vault, which is a service-based method of delivering HA to customers where Lakeview and its partners create services for HA backup and recovery, which companies subscribe to, rather than a licensed product that customers install and maintain. Avnet signed up to be a distributor of the MIMIX Vault service back in February. That deal allowed Avnet’s partners to brand the MIMIX Vault service under their own names as they resold it.