Azlan has been appointed as a UK Channel Development Partner (CDP) for Tandberg’s complete range of telepresence, HD videoconferencing and mobile video solutions. The Enterprise Division of Tech Data Corporation, Azlan provides pan-European distribution of products for companies including Cisco (which recently acquired Tandberg), IBM, HP, VMware, Oracle and Avaya.
The UK contract extends Azlan’s existing EMEA distribution agreement with Tandberg, which sees Azlan serve as a CDP for Italy, Spain, Portugal and Sweden. The agreement, says Azlan, enables it to “further advance its ambition of becoming the distribution partner of choice for advanced solutions in key growth areas of the market”, and will entail the provision of specialist channel development support and the employment of Tandberg’s enVision partner programme to invest in recruitment, training and business initiatives.
Ian French (pictured), strategic development director for Azlan, commented: “This agreement adds an important dimension to our current portfolio of solutions. Tandberg is the leading player in this exciting market with an excellent range of solutions; from the boardroom right through to desktop solutions within a small business. Fuelled by demands to cut travel costs and improve communication within virtual teams, technologies such as videoconferencing and telepresence are grabbing a lot of attention right now. This type of high-growth product line presents resellers with tremendous potential to grow their revenue streams and their value-added business.”
The combination, he added, of “Cisco’s Telepresence, WebEx, UC [unified communications] systems and Tandberg’s video systems will be very powerful indeed. It will enable reseller partners to offer a complete range of video solutions to customers across the whole spectrum of the market – from single desktop solutions to complete enterprise telepresence infrastructures.”
Reflecting on the underlying market conditions for telepresence in the UK, French told IE: “The telepresence market has grown significantly over the past couple of years; indeed, the term didn’t even exist until relatively recently. Businesses have discovered that there is much value to be gained from connecting physically dispersed executive teams together via dedicated telepresence rooms, rather than flying them to and from meetings. Further to this, those businesses that have deployed executive telepresence suites are now deploying lower cost room-based and desk-based personal visual communications endpoints in order to realise the significant productivity, efficiency and cost savings, which can only be achieved by video, in other parts of their organisation.”
The full range of Tandberg solutions is now available from Azlan, which is investing in a dedicated UC team to provide pre- and post- sales technical support to its partners.