More than a year ago, Avnet CEO Roy Vallee offered an open letter to Cisco Systems — asking the networking giant to work with the specialty distributor. Cisco has finally answered that open letter. Here are the details.

Cisco confirmed plans to work with Avnet on Dec. 17, 2009. Making it doubly sweet: Avnet was meeting with Wall Street analysts that day in New York.

As a high-value specialty distributor for Cisco, Avnet will provide its channel partners with the following Cisco data center products:

Although the partnership only covers the U.S. and Canada, it’s still a noteworthy deal. Avnet has plans to introduce Cisco’s products through their vertical solutions like SecurePath, VirtualPath and StoragePath.

The Cisco Data Center Suite  will be led by Avnet executive Chris Swahn, who has over 20 years of experience serving the channel and helping partners.

Separately, our team sat down with Philip Gallagher, global president, Avnet Technology Solutions, during the Dec. 17 Avnet analyst day in New York. We’ll publish  a FastChat video with Gallagher later this week.