Cisco names Magirus first speciality datacentre distributor
Distributor Magirus and Cisco have signed a Pan European distribution agreement aimed delivering the networking vendor’s end-to-end datacentre strategy to a new channel of around 6000 partners across the region.
Through its existing top tier agreements with VMware and EMC, virtualisation and storage specialist Magirus will gain access to the entire portfolio with a focus on datacentre products including Cisco’s Nexus range of switches, Unified Computing System (UCS) blade and rack-mounted servers, Application Networking Services (ANS) and Multilayer Director Switches (MDS).
Denise Bryant, UK managing director at Magirus explains: “Magirus owns a European assembly facility in Strasbourg allowing us to customise configurations to meet what partners have sold to end users – quicker than ordering directly from Cisco.” The new facility is currently retro-fitting for Cisco business and was previously used for the firm’s old HP and IBM business, which to it sold to Avnet in 2007.
Recruitment
Magirus has also announced the creation of a Data Centre Division which will focus on developing and recruiting more resellers which it hopes will boost revenues by an additional 20 percent within the next two years.
The distributor has been conducting profiling in Magirus for six months with Cisco, “[We will also be] recruiting new partners that may already be selling VMware and EMC successfully but have not considered selling Cisco into datacentre,” Bryant explains.
Magirus is the first major distributor signed by Cisco in Europe for six years, excluding a number of smaller sub distributor agreements. Thierry Drilhon, vice-president for worldwide channels, European markets at Cisco, says, “We selected Magirus due to its strengths in virtualisation and storage, its European reach, and its proven track record in data centre and highly secure networking.”
Overlap
With no competing server or networking vendors at Magirus, the Cisco partnership looks like a logical choice in the view of Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at euroLAN and network industry watcher. “Magirus is hanging its hat early on the cloud computing model and that’s a brave move – and probably right,” comments Humphreys. “And for the smaller UCS focused partners, they can potentially offer a good service but the big datacentre integrators don’t really need them.”
Humphreys points to the existing big Cisco distributors like Westcon, Azlan and Tech Data who already have many elements of the datacentre story from Cisco as potential overlap.
“The only thing Magirus is missing is a Microsoft element,” comments Humphreys, adding that he would not be surprised if that was something they added later.
Although Magirus is the first specialist datacentre partner, other distributors are also ramping up to sell the Cisco datacentre strategy. Rival Avnet has signed a US agreement to add Cisco Data Center Products. Comstor has invested in substantial datacentre training while Ingram Micro has also picked up agreements to sell UCS, although mainly at the lower-end channel.
