Distribution Watch: Carousel Industries, Arrow, Avnet

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Carousel Industries: It’s always a good thing when a distributor integrator gets a high-five from one of its vendor partners, and Carousel Industries is touting its recognition from Aruba Networks (NASDAQ: ARUN) as Americas Partner of the Year. The award was presented during the vendor’s second annual Americas Partner Summit in Las Vegas, March 19-21, 2012.

“Aruba Networks has recognized Carousel Industries with the Americas Partner of the Year Award for building a solid strategy for mobility and BYOD, and then executing successfully on it,” said Robert Bruce, vice president of worldwide channel sales at Aruba, in a prepared statement. “Carousel has become an invaluable partner in developing effective customer-oriented solutions around Aruba’s offerings.”

This is the second year Carousel has earned accolades from Aruba; in 2011, the distributor integrator earned the Growth Partner of the Year Award to recognize its strong revenue and business acceleration with Aruba.

Arrow Electronics: Arrow (NASDAQ: ARW) is making news across the pond, announcing its purchase of U.K.-based distributor Altimate Group for $63.98 million to expand in Europe.

Altimate is a unit of Dublin-based business services group DCC Plc and sells data management, security and virtualization software, servers and storage products for enterprise customers. The deal is the third Arrow acquisition so far in 2012 — in February it acquired St.Paul, Minn.-based Asset Recovery Corp. and Austin, Texas-based TechTurn Ltd., both technology recycling/refurbishing companies.

Avnet Technology Solutions: Also news from distant shores, Avnet Technology Solutions, a division of Avnet Inc. (NYSE: AVT), is now offering a 24-hour help desk management service for its U.K. business partners, which will enable them to expand existing support offerings for their customers.

“As IT budgets everywhere are squeezed to the limit, organizations are looking for smarter ways to run their help desk operations. By outsourcing all or part of their help desk to Avnet, business partners can trust us to deliver a highly knowledgeable, personalized service to their customers without having to invest in new software or additional headcount themselves,” said Anthony Rowan, services director at Avnet Technology Solutions, in a prepared statement.

And that’s this week’s Distributor Watch. Check in next week as we look through our spyglass and report on the latest goings-on. Until then, carry on.