Westcon-Comstor has been appointed as a distributor for VMware’s portfolio of cloud infrastructure and business mobility solutions in South Africa.
The expanded agreement supports partners with pre- and post-sales support, technical support, as well as logistics services from 60 offices across six continents. Partners also gain access to Westcon Academy’s range of technical programmes, both certified and non-certified, designed to educate their staff, expand capabilities and keep them ahead of their competition.
“Through this extended SADC agreement with VMware (which now covers South Africa) our partners are better positioned to help businesses more efficiently transition to the cloud and leverage workload mobility more securely across multiple data centre sites,” says Louise Taute, Comstor director, southern Africa. “VMware’s unique approach to the data centre gives their customers a ‘one-cloud, any-application, any-device’ architecture that unifies private, managed and public clouds into one hybrid solution.”
Paul Conradie, CEO of Westcon Group, points out that Westcon already distributes enterprise brands, and VMware fits well as the glue that sticks many data centre technologies together.
“Westcon is not a broad-based or volume distributor,” he says. “We are entirely a value-add company. We offer professional services to assist customers who don’t have the skills to install products. At our staging facilities, we built to order for our customers.”
In addition, the Westcon-Comstor data centre practice makes available a selection of enablement and training courses along with business development activities that empower solution providers in advancing information management.
Alongside its Data Centre Practice, Westcon-Comstor offers worldwide capabilities in cloud, global deployment and services, and category-leading security, unified communications and collaboration, and networking technology practices.
Mark Reynolds, head of the partner and general business operation at VMware Southern Africa, says the process of appointing Westcon-Comstor as a distributor was a stringent process, and covers the whole SADC region.
In other partner news, VMware has moved its VMware Partner Network (VPN), to make it transferable. “SADC is being treated as one region. So if a partner has a licence with us in one country, they will be able to sell in other countries in the region. The region is that customers tend to be mobile across the region,” Reynolds explains.
He adds that First Distribution won’t be a distributor of VMware’s perpetual licencing from 1 March 2016, but will still represent VMware’s vCAN offerings.
Along with the range of VMware products and services that Westcon-Comstor will bring to market is the vCAN (vCloud Air Network) offering.
“No-one cares where the infrastructure is or what it is,” says David Funnell, manager: cloud provider programme at VMware Southern Africa. “All that matters is that it delivers solutions.”
Key to VMware’s SDDC offering is that customers can build solutions on their own data centre stack, then move those workload across a variety of platforms.
This is where the vCAN partners come in: they can help partners to structure and consume their IT across various platform.
The vCAN programme is essentially a combination of the vCloud air programme and the partner ecosystem
The solutions we develop for our customers in vCloud Air, we are offering to our partners through vCAN,” says Funnell.
“This supports partners by accelerating their ability to go to market quickly with solutions.”
With vCAN, partners can help customers to build true hybrid cloud solutions that are 100% compatible between their own data centre and the cloud, offering both choice and control, investment protection, reliability and security, data sovereignty, and global reach.
