LAS VEGAS – Synnex President of North America Peter Larocque told a crowd of approximately 700 attendees at the VARnex conference that the distributor plans to implement more of a services culture throughout the organization.
This culture shift is also coming to the Canadian operation, according to subsidiary president Mitchell Martin.
Martin told CDN the services culture initiative is a North American wide strategy centered around ServiceSolv. The new services push will have solutions development managers handle all aspects of a channel partner solution such as implementation, special delivery and deployment services in the field. “We are closing about 1,000 to 1,500 tickets a month through ServiceSolv and our goal is to expand that dramatically,” Martin said.
Beyond ServiceSolv, Synnex Canada offers MobilitySolv, which includes Internet of Things, CloudSolv, VisualSolv, ConvergSolv, GovSolv, and PrintSolv where Synnex Canada was recently named distributor of the year for HP Inc. Canada.
The distributor is working on making the culture shift consistent with solutions and services. Martin also said the company is investing in people resources for ServiceSolv, MobilitySolv and GovSolv. There are people now in place for activation services in MobilitySolv with Rogers and Bell, but Martin said that area will focus on commercial activations. In the U.S., MobilitySolv has managed to do 150,000 commercial activations in 2015. “It’s a matter of time before this catches on in Canada,” Martin said.
In GovSolv a Canadian executive named Ed Franklin has North American responsibility and Rock Marriott has been hired to manage GovSolv for Canada. Marriott is a former LG Canada and Bell Microproducts executive.
Education and Public Safety are two other growth targets for Synnex Canada. Martin said the company will be focused on providing Windows and Chrome-based solutions for these two areas. In the Public Safety area expect to see more Body Cam type solutions. One of the issues Martin will be working on along with channel partners is convincing law enforcement that all the data captured on body-worn cameras should be stored in the cloud. Synnex has a partnership with Microsoft Azure for those cloud services. Martin said that the cloud for a police force such as Toronto’s is safe and much more secure than a local solution.
The company is also working in the CloudSolv program to make it easier for the channel to offer multi-vendor, multi-solution billing. There will also be new multi-financing options on the hardware side through the Macquarie Group, a global investment bank with expertise in financing.
Martin added that Synnex Canada is exploring from a North American basis the transportation sector and utilities.
