With the costliest steps in the post-purchase assimilation process behind it, SYNNEX Corp. is ready at last to begin profiting from its Westcon-Comstor acquisition.
So said company leaders at the SYNNEX Inspire partner event, now taking place in Greenville, S.C.
Fremont, Calif.-based SYNNEX bought Westcon-Comstor’s North and Latin American operations in a deal potentially worth over $1 billion last year, and spent the better part of the next 11 months integrating the security, networking, and unified communications specialist’s product catalog with its own. Two months ago, however, that arduous process finally came to a close.
“We exercised the business quite a bit,” said SYNNEX CEO Dennis Polk in a keynote address to Inspire attendees yesterday. “Now it’s really time to really grow the business, and we will in 2019.”
At long last, Polk and other company executives said at Inspire this week, Westcon-Comstor’s rich collection of products is listed in the same ordering systems SYNNEX resellers use to buy everything else. Many of those offerings are from vendors never before available to the distributor’s partners, including Palo Alto Networks Inc., Juniper Networks Inc., and most notably Cisco Systems Inc.
“It really completes our line card,” says John Phillips, SYNNEX’s vice president of U.S. SMB sales. Time will tell what that means financially for SYNNEX and its channel, he continues, but the early signs are encouraging.
“We’re starting to see a rapid pickup in Cisco business this month,” Phillips says.
In August, SYNNEX added three Cisco solutions—the Umbrella internet gateway, Webex Teams collaboration tool, and CMX location-based mobile analytics system—to its CLOUDSolv online solutions marketplace. More offerings will join them soon, according to Rob Moyer, the distributor’s vice president for cloud services, mobility, and IoT.
“We’re very bullish on the pipeline for Cisco’s cloud products coming to market with us,” he says. Moyer declined, however, to specify how many products are on the way through CLOUDSolv or how soon they’ll arrive.
SYNNEX VARs aren’t the only ones who have new offerings to look forward to. Westcon-Comstor partners will soon have a wider selection of online products to sell from familiar names like F5 Networks, FireEye, and Check Point as well, according to Matt Karst, senior director of cloud for North America at Westcon-Comstor Americas.
“We have a lot of legacy vendors that are starting to realize they’ve got to offer a cloud solution,” he says, adding that SYNNEX’s deep relationships with leading cloud providers have made introducing such offerings significantly easier. “We didn’t have Microsoft as a partner that we could bring to the table,” Karst notes.
It didn’t have a distribution platform as flexible as CLOUDSolv either, he adds. Which Westcon-Comstor suppliers leverage that platform first will depend largely on which ones have both the APIs and development expertise needed to put the necessary backend connections in place and solutions that are easily provisioned and fully automated.
“There’s a large queue of vendors right now that have interest in getting into this platform and taking advantage of it, but it’s really going to come down to which ones have the right products,” Karst says. Many of those that do, he predicts, will find themselves reaching into smaller businesses than the mid-market and enterprise buyers Westcon-Comstor partners normally serve.
“The SMB market hasn’t been a spot where Westcon-Comstor traditionally hung their hat,” Karst says. “Now that we’re integrating in and we’re starting to understand and learn from SYNNEX really how do you go after SMBs, it’s absolutely going to be another big win.”
To help that process along, Phillips and his team plan to execute matchmaking campaigns in the months ahead aimed at making introductions between resellers on the one hand and Westcon-Comstor vendors like Palo Alto and Juniper on the other. Simply making SYNNEX partners aware of the fact that products from companies like those and Cisco are available from SYNNEX now, Phillips adds, is an even more fundamental priority for the year to come.
“They just don’t realize it. We’re not the person they think of for those lines,” he says. “Over time they’ll start catching on and figuring out we have it.
