(Pictured above: Tech Data’s Joe Quaglia on stage at Tech Data TechSelect in Orlando, Oct. 1.)

TECH DATA TECHSELECT — Tech Data‘s SMB segment offers partners a ripe opportunity.

Tech Data’s Joe Quaglia

That’s according to Joe Quaglia, Tech Data‘s President of the Americas, who spoke at Tech Data’s fall TechSelect event. Quaglia said the SMB and midmarket customer base, which the TechSelect reseller community targets, has grown “substantially” over the last four years. Tech Data CEO Rich Hume told the partner audience that 2018 featured one of the top five hottest markets he has experienced in his career. While the growth is more nuanced this year, Hume said the SMB/midmarket remains hot.

“The cornerstone of that growth starts and ends with TechSelect, and your growth and your support has been outstanding,” Quaglia said.

The TechSelect community includes more than 400 solution providers.

The distributor last year embarked on a new initiative called EOS, also known as “The Dawn of a New Day.” The initiative, which Quaglia said represents the largest investment in Tech Data’s history, began a year and a half after the company finished integrating part of Avnet into the fold. Tech Data bought the Avnet technology solutions business unit for $2.4 billion about two years ago.

“We realized that after we put the companies together, we had to quickly transition to transformation,” he said.

EOS runs on four pillars: reducing complexity, which means adding more automation to to save partners hours of manual labor; optimizing advanced and next-generation solutions, such as data center, security and IoT; delivering “the ultimate coverage model” for various customer types and market regions; and the TD Operating System (TDOS), which will provide a “single door” for partners to select and build solutions.

“We believe that as we come out of this transformation, we’re going to be bigger, better, stronger, faster, and deliver a better quality of service to our partner community,” Quaglia said.

The company this year has rolled out an analytics and IoT catalog and factory, and a program to help partners build cloud practices.

Tech Data is hosting the TechSelect event in Orlando, Florida.

Hume expressed bullishness for the SMB segment in an interview on CNBC’s Mad Money.

Carbon Black

The distributor on Wednesday announced a partnership with endpoint protection provider Carbon Black. The agreement gives Tech Data resellers access to endpoint detection and response and “next-generation” antivirus solutions.

Tech Data’s Alex Ryals

Alex Ryals, Tech Data’s vice president of security solutions for North America, said the increasing number of cloud and mobile-focused solutions has turned the endpoint into “the new perimeter.”

“New and emerging attacks are defeating traditional cyberdefenses, and security teams need …

… sophisticated tools to address these threats,” Ryals said. “Through the combination of Carbon Black products and others from our expansive security portfolio, Tech Data customers can now offer their clients solutions that can protect them from the core to the edge of their network.”

Other Carbon Black solutions include managed alert monitoring and triage and virtualized data center security.

“We are constantly seeing the landscape change as new threats are deployed to maliciously catch organizations off guard. It has created a challenging dynamic for security teams as they grapple with addressing unknown threats. Our technology is developed with this challenge in mind,” said Victor Baez, Carbon Black’s vice president of worldwide channels. “Between our innovative solution set and Tech Data’s expertise and portfolio available to its customers in security, we believe that our combined efforts can help organizations better secure their infrastructure at all levels.”

VMware announced last month that it was buying Carbon Black for about $2.1 billion. The deal will close later this year.