It’s Friday and—you guessed it—it's time for Distribution Watch! This week we’re serving up the latest news from top distributors including Tech Data (TECD), Ingram Micro (IM) and Arrow Electronics (ARW).

Tech Data: Tech Data announced the winners of its Vendor Partner of the Year awards during the company’s 10th annual U.S. Vendor Partner Summit in Tampa. The list of this year’s big winners included:

"We are pleased to recognize the commitment and achievements of our outstanding vendor partners," said Brian Davis, senior vice president, U.S. Marketing at Tech Data, in a statement. "From winning strategies to exceptional business performance, our Vendor Partners of the Year have best exemplified a commitment to the success of their channel partners. Our vendor partners are key to the success of both Tech Data and our customers, and we look forward to continued growth in the coming year and beyond."

Ingram Micro: Ingram Micro and Cisco Systems (CSCO) have expanded the “Fly Higher” partner enablement program with three new partner enablement offerings, including a Config to Order Portal, customized enablement services and an on course program to help partners manage their Cisco certifications and specializations.

The additions to the program were announced during the Elite 2014 Ingram Micro and Cisco Partner Exchange in Arizona last month. 

This week, Ingram also announced a new strategic reseller agreement with technology solution provider Netelligent Corp., which will allow the distributor to deliver Netelligents’ Cisco-Powered UCaaS solutions to its reseller network.

“Leveraging Ingram Micro and its Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace accelerates our hosted collaboration penetration to the market, allowing channel partners to empower their customers to focus on their business, not their technology,” said Aaron Stone, president and CEO of Netelligent. “This alliance with Ingram Micro exemplifies our shared commitment to delivering reliable and secure cloud services to channel partners.”

Arrow Electronics: Cloud services provider SherWeb has finalized a new distribution agreement with Arrow Electronics, which will allow the distributor to sell SherWeb’s portfolio of cloud services to its United States and Canada-based solution providers.

“Our resellers are hungry for high-performance, flexible cloud solutions,” said Dee Dee Lear, vice president of Cloud and Business Development for Arrow’s North American Enterprise Computing Solutions business. “Not only does SherWeb fit these requirements but they are also highly regarded in the industry for their personalized partner enablement and support.”

Sherweb’s cloud solutions will be available through the ArrowSphere online marketplace, according to the announcement. Available solutions will include SaaS bundles including Hosted Exchange, Hosted Lync, Hosted SharePoint and Online backup. Sherweb’s new Performance Cloud Server IaaS solution is also available via the ArrowSphere marketplace.

“We are thrilled to be working with Arrow,” said Mathieu Leblanc, Director of Sales and Strategic Partners at SherWeb. “SherWeb has a strong value proposition to offer Arrow’s reseller channel and we are confident that together, we’ll all be highly successful in driving additional revenues around hosted cloud solutions.”

We hope you all have a great weekend, and stay tuned to The VAR Guy for more distributor news!