Avnet Technology Solutions has announced three new services offerings for the U.S. and Canada: Healthcare Provider Portal, Middleware Infrastructure Automation, and Social Business in the Cloud. These services, the first made available through Avnet’s recent acquisition of Ascendant Technology, are designed to broaden partners’ capabilities, lower barriers to entry, and accelerate complete data center solution sales for Avnet’s IBM channel partners.
"Avnet acquired Ascendant Technology for their advanced capabilities and expertise in delivering IBM software implementation services that are well positioned to help our partners profitably grow their businesses," said Fred Cuen, senior vice president and general manager, IBM Solutions, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. "Our IBM partners can now immediately leverage this new alignment to expand their own end-to-end services, enhancing their customers’ satisfaction while maximizing new margin opportunities. Those opportunities include IBM’s Solution Accelerator Incentive, which pays a premium for selling IBM hardware and software together in a single transaction."
"These additional services offerings from Avnet fit well with our solutions strategy, allowing us to focus on our core customer value and still broaden our offerings," stated Kirsten Craft, executive vice president for SIS, an Avnet partner. "SIS had very positive customer engagements with Ascendant, and we look forward to continuing that healthy and balanced partner relationship with Avnet. Leveraging these types of services as a part of our solutions enable our growth strategy in a cost effective way."
Healthcare Provider Portal
Healthcare providers are faced with competing demands ranging from meeting regulatory mandates such as Meaningful Use and ICD-10 to significantly improving patient engagement, online self-service capabilities and access to care. They must meet these demands while facing intense competition in the marketplace and attempting to reduce operating expenses and increase revenue. To do all of this effectively, healthcare providers look to their channel partners for solutions that provide easy access to a diverse set of systems that connect patients, families and caregivers throughout the continuum of care in a single environment accessible via the Web, mobile devices and tablet devices.
Built on open standards-based IBM software solutions, Avnet’s Healthcare Provider Portal allows providers to serve all of a constituent’s varying, yet integrated needs through a single interface that delivers a highly personalized experience on an integrated platform. This solution is complementary to traditional Healthcare Information Management Systems.
Avnet’s IBM partners can leverage this new Healthcare Provider Portal offering to engage in discussions with line-of-business decision makers to identify business goals and priorities that result in greater demand for supporting infrastructure and software. Partners can provide a two- to four-week assessment to help customers identify short-term and long-term opportunities for improvement based on business priorities, return on investment targets, and leading technical design and usability practices.
Middleware Infrastructure Automation
End users running robust, high-volume websites based on IBM software need ongoing management and maintenance support for these complex, constantly evolving systems. With Avnet’s new Middleware Infrastructure Automation service, partners have a customizable framework that delivers centralized automation of installation and patching, configuration management, and application deployments on heterogeneous middleware platforms for their customers. Partners can work directly with their customers’ IT teams to deploy this service. In addition, reduced administration costs mean partners can also help customers efficiently expand their infrastructure investments with new hardware and software to support growing systems.
Through this automation of the product installation, configuration and application deployment, partners help end users reduce their cost of administration and turn time-consuming, error-prone manual tasks into repeatable, automated processes.
Social Business in the Cloud
Social business and collaboration are typically line-of-business initiatives. Companies want to ease into the social network without having to deal with IT hurdles and bottlenecks. Through Avnet, channel partners can now offer IBM Collaboration and Social components via the Cloud so they can help line-of-business decision makers get started quickly without waiting on their internal IT staff to research and implement social media applications. Customers can start with a small, cloud-based pilot and scale up to a large production environment, or bring the social software on-premise once the pilot is complete. A full IBM Connections environment with features such as blogs, profiles, wikis and communities can be up and running in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. Cloud offerings can be augmented with social/collaboration design and adoption consulting to drive success for customers.
For more information about any of these three new services offerings, email Avnet at
Avnet’s acquisition of Ascendant Technology LLC, a leading international IT consulting firm that specializes in developing end-to-end IBM solutions, was completed on Monday, April 2, 2012. Ascendant generated revenue of approximately US$90 million in the 2011 calendar year and will be integrated into the operations of Avnet Technology Solutions. Sam Fatigato, former CEO of Ascendant Technology, is now vice president and general manager, Software Services, for Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas.
About Avnet Technology Solutions
As a global IT solutions distributor, Avnet Technology Solutions collaborates with its customers and suppliers to create and deliver services, software and hardware solutions that address the business needs of their end-user customers locally and around the world. For fiscal year 2011, the group served customers in more than 70 countries and generated US $11.5 billion in annual revenue. Avnet Technology Solutions (www.ats.avnet.com) is an operating group of Avnet, Inc.
About Avnet
Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT), a Fortune 500 company, is one of the largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology serving customers in more than 70 countries worldwide. Avnet accelerates its partners' success by connecting the world's leading technology suppliers with a broad base of more than 100,000 customers by providing cost-effective, value-added services and solutions. For the fiscal year ended July 2, 2011, Avnet generated revenue of $26.5 billion. For more information, visit www.avnet.com. (AVT_IR)
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