Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions has created a new business unit for its professional services business, and is looking to expand its services offerings for solution providers.
The new professional services business unit covers North America, and includes four areas of services: education, support, consulting and the newest member of the family, managed services and cloud computing.
“The formalization of our business and our structure is in direct response to our resellers,” said Joe Burke, vice president of worldwide services for Arrow ECS, who heads up the new business unit.
Previously, most of the services for Arrow ECS had been run through the Alternative Technologies unit, and Burke said that building the business unit will allow Arrow to better market its services.
The biggest addition is the new cloud computing and managed services program, which Burke said represents a large opportunity for solutions providers. The group currently offers managed services from Web hosting giant Verio and e-mail and Web defense services from McAfee acquisition MXLogic, and Burke said the company would look to expand into other fields, including monitoring and management, disaster recovery, business continuity, cloud computing, SaaS and BI.
“Our intent is to build a suite of MSP offerings that we can offer to our resellers, and put solutions in place that resellers can offer to end users,” he said. “With the growth rates we see around [managed services,] we really want to help our resellers grow in this space.”
He envisions the services group working with both existing managed service providers and with resellers who have yet to make the managed services plunge, but does envision solution providers using Arrow as an “easy on-ramp for our resellers to get into this area with limited cost and investment up front.” “They can use us and decide how much they want to get involved in it,” he said.
