Hot on the heels of Peter Diniz’s departure from Avnet, (NYSE: AVT) the distributor has shuffled the deck chairs on the executive floor level.
The most important move for the Canadian operation is that of Fred Cuen. Cuen will now be responsible for the Canadian team. That job was previously held by Rick Alvarez. Canadian GM Brian Aebig will now report to Cuen. Cuen will continue to lead the IBM Solutions group.
As for Alvarez, he will lead a newly created team called Sales Acceleration. This group consists of teams that are key to accelerating Avnet Technology Solutions’ services offerings, recruitment and sales efforts, as well as driving supplier growth.
Also getting a promotion is Scott Look. Look is going to be the new vice president and general manager of Avnet Technology Solutions’ Technology Infrastructure Solutions business. Look will leave his post as vice president of sales for the Technology Infrastructure Solutions group.
Gavin Miller was not left out of the moves. He will now lead the Solutions Marketing and Development team, which includes Avnet Technology Solutions’ SolutionsPath practices, financial services and partner enablement. Miller may have the toughest assignment as he has been mandated to strengthen the linkages and execution between the Avnet team and the brand solutions teams for Cisco, HP, IBM and Oracle.
On the HP front, Tony Vottima will now be in charge of the HP Solutions team.
Filling out the new executive team is Nicole Enright. She will handle strategy development and execution, while continuing to run Avnet Americas operation.
The only reason given by Avnet for the multiple moves in leadership is that the distributor desire to drive long-term strategies and to support succession planning by enabling leaders to share experiences and acquire new knowledge in key areas.
You definitely see a lot of this knowledge transfer strategy with executives in companies such as Microsoft and Cisco, but not on such a mass scale.
Meanwhile, Avnet reported positive results this week. It achieved its fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year revenue growth. The distributor increased sales by 40 per cent and about 14 per cent of that was organic.
According to Avnet, demand for IT continues to be firm, with hardware sales growing faster than software and services, indicating that enterprise investments are being made in hardware refreshes. Industry standard server, storage and networking sales continue to be strong, and Avnet is seeing signs of cloud infrastructure build-outs.
