Arrow ECS, IBM open up on exclusive distribution deal for Ireland
Arrow ECS was appointed sole distributor for IBM in Ireland last month. Niall Kitson sat down with Nick Bannister, vice president UK &I Arrow ECS and Alison Say, vice president of ecosystem UK & I, IBM to talk about where the partnership will lead and the state of play with AI and cloud.
Niall Kitson (NK) The combination of Arrow ECS and IBM isn’t new but it is new to Ireland.
Nick Bannister (NB) The relationship in Ireland is new, our relationship with IBM, not only in the UK but wider in Arrow and EMEA, goes back from many, many years.
We committed to the RFI [request for information] very seriously for a lot of resource commitment into this and it was never a guaranteed win for us. We were up against other competition and we really gave it our all and you know we are heavily, heavily committed to IBM.
This is very good opportunity for us in Ireland. It’s what you would probably call a game changer.
Alison Say (AS) We have a very clear distribution strategy, which has evolved over the years. We’re always looking at and evaluating the needs not only of our business, but that of our downstream partners, making sure that we’ve got the right setup on both sides of our partnerships.
We obviously needed to make some changes with the Irish market and we ran a very deliberate and focused RFI process.
It was very clear that Arrow was heavily invested in both making it work in the Irish market, but also the extension of the relationship and the skills and investment we have in the UK. We run a global company, we have a global relationship with Arrow ECS and a strong EMEA relationship.
The RFI for Ireland was taken on its own independent merits, but obviously it’s great that now we can extend the relationship and the skills and the partner relationships.
(NK) Have you found any particular challenges in certification and maintaining standards when it comes to IBM?
(NB) Every vendor comes with accreditations that any distributor needs to uphold. With IBM, we have many accredited engineers. This is where it’s nice from the UK point of view because Irish engineers can feed off the UK who are fully accredited. But you know, there is nothing different really about IBM than there is about any other vendor, and rightly so. They have the right to expect their distributors to uphold high standards.
(AS) Our route to market in Ireland is entirely through the partner ecosystem. It’s a huge opportunity for Arrow and IBM and our partners. On the skills point, we announced our Partner Plus programme in January, which is focused on rewarding partners for expertise. It’s a core part of our incentive stack and a core part of how we build out our benefits to partners.
What’s really interesting is, not only have we done a lot of work to simplify that process, we made an announcement ahead of Partner Plus last October that all of our IBM training – both technical and sales across the board – everything that’s available to all of the engineers, the architects, the pre sales teams, the sales teams, is available free of charge to the partner community.
I think it’s really important that not only do we reward them for keeping skills current, but we also make it very easy for our partners to pick up those skills and take them into the market. It’s what differentiates us.
(NK) Are you finding it particularly difficult to support people or to find the appropriate expertise or are you finding people are generally very open minded and want to find out how to make use of AI?
(NB) We invested in virtualisation way before anybody else did, we invested in cloud way before most people did, so we’re pretty good at spotting market trends and knowing where to invest.
But whenever you invest in a new technology area it’s really, really important to prepare. We have a European demonstration centre in Sweden for AI that we’re going to expand across Europe. We’ve got a dedicated team around AI in the UK.
I think you’ll see that technology start to really accelerate. I’m not sure if you’ll see it this year, but I do think you’ll see good growth going into next year. I think you’ll start seeing it accelerate even further. Given the financial situation a lot countries are in, you will see cloud grow even more this year.
(AS) One of the things to that point about what exponentially growing companies. Some are dealing with ‘cloud sprawl’. We’re about ensuring that you’ve got the right workload in the right place that entire hybrid platform.
Portfolio pieces play a really important role in terms of optimising performance and resource management and using automation to ensure you’re being as sustainable or driving down costs as across your estate.
(NK) We’ve seen pushback over the recurring high costs of cloud services, and even companies like Ahrefs and 37Signals going back on-prem. Are these outliers or the start of a trend?
(AS) That’s why hybrid is important. It’s about making you know that customers are at different stages of their journey and ensuring you can go back to the right workloads in the right place. And that optimisation piece again, I know it’s repetitive, but it’s really important that we also help advise them.
With our downstream partners, it’s about where’s the best place to run all of those different applications in spite where we are in 10/12/15 years. Many clients are still very early on in their cloud journey so there’s an ongoing balance and we’re getting smarter with the tools that we can layer on top to help manage those hybrid environments.
(NB) Cloud is not going to be for every single person. You will have the cloud people who want to take their business fully cloud. You’ll have those that that want to stay on-prem. You’ll have that hybrid mix for certain areas. But I certainly don’t have any nervousness that we will not see cloud grow exponentially again this year.
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