Showdown!: Synnex, Telarus Face Off with Avaya Cloud Office in Canada
… master agent credentials, thanks to its $600 million acquisition of Westcom-Comstor’s North American business, Ardiel said.
“Synnex legacy prior to purchasing Westcom-Comstor would have been much more of your traditional IT distributor,” Ardiel told Channel Partners. “But when we bought Westcom-Comstor, it was an incredibly accretive business; that actually catapulted us because we retained all those employee and vendor assets.”
The acquisition of Westcom-Comstor helped Synnex expand into telephony and communications, Ardiel added.
“Westcom has had many years in the networking, telephony, unified communications network and security space,” he said. “We’ve been very strong partners of Avaya for many, many years. This isn’t new to us.”
Industry analyst Janet Schijns, CEO of JS Group, believes Telarus is a better choice.
“For Avaya Cloud Office, I would choose Telarus — they have much deeper experience in that space,” Schjins said. “They have stronger customer quoting tools, strong marketing and demand support, and superior partner support for these types of solutions.”
Neither distributor said how many partners have aligned with them. Ardiel said 75% of those who signed on with Synnex as its master agent in Canada were existing Avaya partners.
As an early Microsoft Office 365 partner, Ardiel said Synnex has more experience driving partners through convergence than do traditional master agents.
“This isn’t our first dance into a cloud offering from a vendor,” he said. “We have become a very cloud-first sales organization and our understanding of cloud is now in a much more mature phase than others.”
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