New Service Offsets Fixed CostsNew Service Offsets Fixed Costs

Several years ago, Avnet was considering outsourcing part of its IT infrastructure. We conducted extensive benchmarking on our resources. A Gartner benchmarking analysis indicated that Avnet's IT infrastructure ranked high for service and low for cost, which meant outsourcing wouldn't be cost-effective for us. Because we were so efficient, we had capacity to spare within our data center.

Since Avnet's business involves developing IT solutions for value-added resellers, we decided to offer hosted data center services for small to midsize businesses through our reseller channel. This initiative let Avnet offset some of the fixed, ongoing costs associated with operating its IT infrastructure and leverage excess data center capacity to help our partners grow their services business.

Avnet gives value-added resellers the opportunity to generate profitable sales growth without needing to invest capital in creating new services. Resellers can sell IT hosting services from Avnet that include 24/7/365 server monitoring and management; operating system patching and imaging; data storage; virus protection; and Web site, database, and application hosting. And the data center environment Avnet provides includes IT resources that smaller businesses wouldn't normally be able to afford such as redundant power sources and generators.

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