EMC WORLD — Avnet, the tech-distribution giant, is wrapping up a pretty successful week.

The Phoenix-based company took home a pair of major awards at EMC World, the storage behemoth’s annual event for customers and partners in Las Vegas.

Not only that, in conjunction with the conference, Avnet unveiled a new software-defined storage offering featuring EMC’s IsilonSD Edge platform. Available initially in the U.S. and Canada, the new service delivers a scale-out, network-attached storage (NAS) option for edge applications. It aims to solve the needs for demanding file-based replication requirements; Avnet says it’s easily configured to serve the needs of remote offices and back offices for any size of business.

“Software-defined storage solutions are taking the market by storm,” said Eric Barnhart, vice president of Avnet’s EMC solutions business unit in the Americas. “They exponentially increase options available to IT professionals and provide enterprise-grade reliability and performance. These solutions also optimize cost by using industry-standard and commercially available servers. “… EMC software-defined storage solutions are incredibly powerful. When combined with Avnet’s assembly, integration, logistics and financial services expertise, these solutions become truly unique in the marketplace.”

Channel Partners sat down not only with Barnhart, but also a pair of other Avnet leaders – John Tonthat, director of Marketing and Business Development, EMC Converged and Data Solutions; and Doug Sobieski, financial services solution executive; to discuss the awards, the new software-defined storage offering, Dell’s pending acquisition of EMC, and more.{ad}

Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Channel Partners: Avnet was just named EMC’s distributor of the year for both North America and Latin America. That has to be a nice validation for what you’re doing.

Eric Barnhart: We’re incredibly pleased and excited that to get [those awards]. It’s certainly a validation of what we’ve done. We really set our sights at the beginning of 2015 on engagement and alignment with EMC’s go-to-market strategy around converged infrastructure, hyperclouds, and leading the transformation. We’re fortunate that EMC’s direction really mirrors Avnet’s overall vision, let alone our EMC group’s vision. We’ve invested in additional resources and people into the business — particularly fueled technical, fueled resources that align with EMC’s midmarket sales organization. And we’ve developed tremendous relationships that have helped our partners …

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… get closer to their end users in alignment with EMC and VCE sales folks. This was absolutely a validation that that was the right strategy. We’ve come a long way and are really pleased to have been acknowledged by EMC as the best and most effective distributor in 2015, for sure.

CP: How is your relationship with EMC going to be impacted by the Dell acquisition? Any real changes there?

EB: The real change there is very positive. We have a relationship with Dell. We’ve been Dell’s OEM distribution partner of the year for the last three years, which again validates the creative things we do around the supply chain with Dell. I believe Dell helps us fill out that converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, modern data-center story (this year’s EMC World theme) pretty well with EMC. The good news is that we’ve been enabling our partners around this vision and around these capabilities — and with Dell coming in and creating Dell Technologies with EMC, just enhances and really bolsters the opportunity for our partners to drive transformation for their customers.

CP: Talk about your new software-defined storage offering and how your partner base will benefit.

John Tonthat: So what was announced [May 4] is a solution built by Avnet to help the Isilon business unit deploy IsilonSD Edge as an appliance. Essentially, IsilonSD Edge is a software-defined product from EMC that extends the capability of Isilon from the data center to the edge. I think that touches a couple of things: One is the significance of software-defined storage and how software-defined storage is consumed. It’s a piece of software, it needs an Intel CPU to run, and from that perspective, we are able to integrate that solution into a Dell server running VMware. I think it solves a couple of things. From a technical perspective, it makes the consumption of software-defined storage a lot easier, and it … [allows partners] to order it as a SKU. It makes software-defined more tangible and much easier to deploy.

Editor’s note: Avnet will incorporate its consumption-based financial service – CapacityNow – into the solution. It enables organizations, both commercial and government, to acquire technology through a flexible managed service. CapacityNow was developed as an alternative to traditional leasing and financing, where the user can now align their payments with actual usage. Sobieski explains further.

Doug Sobieski: We’re facing the biggest shift the industry has seen in decades in how companies pay for technology. Historically people would pay cash. This is the biggest thing that has caught the industry sort of asleep at the wheel. Those of us in the equipment finance industry, we’ve known this was coming since the 2005-2006 time frame, so we’ve had one eye in the rearview mirror. Every partner is getting more and more calls from people asking about consumption models. They want to pay by the drip. However … there is a change to lease accounting that on Nov. 11 of last year was voted on by the financial accounting standards board that has set the wheels in motion to where for fiscal years starting after Dec. 15, 2018, for public companies, and Dec. 15, 2019, for private companies, all leases – regardless of structure – have to be …

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… on the balance sheet. So for companies that prefer opex, leasing is now off the table. So there is a massive shift in people trying to understand these consumption models.

Fortunately, at Avnet, we knew this was coming years ago and we started and built from the ground up our consumption model, which is called CapacityNow. The most important aspect is the contract itself because people are getting hit from all sides with these consumption models and partners need to know that the contract is critical so that it doesn’t trip some triggers that cause it to be, essentially, an embedded lease. … We fully believe that we’ve constructed something that will solve the opex riddle for companies that are looking to do that and we’ve got the most transparent and friendly approach to how it’s priced. Our partners are able to do it through a trusted distributor.

If you’re aware of how these consumption models work, think of it in terms of your cellphone bill. You go into the cellphone store, you pick out a handset and say, “I want 10 gigs of data per month. If I go beyond that, I’m going to pay “x” cents a gig for any overages,” and that resets on a monthly basis. So that’s essentially how it works.

CP: What’s one key takeaway for our audience as the new Dell Technologies era gets set to begin?

JT: I would say if there’s one takeaway that I’d like the audience to understand is that, in this new world between Dell and EMC, and [now] Dell Technologies, what you really need is a trusted advisor to help bridge the gap between EMC and Dell and [to understand] how the solution portfolio works. So clearly from a validation perspective, EMC recognizes our ability to do that. If there are partners out there who have questions about how to profit from this opportunity, please give us a call.

Follow senior online managing editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.