Arrow Builds a Stronger Storage Force
By Sonia R. Lelii, VARBusiness
1:52 PM EST Mon., Dec. 03, 2001
Arrow Electronics on Monday announced its plans to build several multiplatform, interoperability enterprise storage labs in various parts of the country where solution providers can test and evaluate technologies.
Two of the storage labs will be open in Atlanta and Minneapolis by early 2002 and two more labs will open in mid-2002 in two undetermined locations.
"It's going to be a true multivendor environment," says Jim Markisohn, vice president of business development for the North American Computer Products group at Englewood, Colo.-based Arrow Electronic.
The idea to construct the interoperability labs coincides with changes within the North American computer products group that will help reduce the conflicts between its Consan unit, which designed and sold storage solutions, and the Enterprise Computing Environment unit, which dealt primarily with enterprise businesses such as MOCA, SBM and Support Net that service resellers.
Previously, Consan served resellers of Unix and NT-based workstations and had no access to vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and IBM because they fell under the jurisdiction of the Enterprise Computing Environment.
Consequently, Consan was competing directly with a sales force within its own group. For instance, IBM reseller Support Net would call on a customer to sell a Enterprise Storage System, also known as a Shark, while Consan would call on the same customer trying to sell an EMC Symmetrix disk array.
"We were cutting our own throats," says Markisohn. "Historically, we may have been fighting among ourselves for a customer that we already had. What we now are saying is, 'We are going to work toward solving the storage problem regardless of the vendor-based product.'"
As of Jan. 1, Consan will be renamed Enterprise Storage Solutions. Arrow is adding up to 40 more people, half will be a dedicated sales force and the other half will be technical engineers. The whole unit will work in concert with the MOCA, SBM and SupportNet sales force.
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