Happy Friday, and welcome back to another hard-hitting edition of Distribution Watch. This week’s feature includes the latest news from the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC), Arrow Electronics (ARW) and D&H Distributing.

GTDC: The Global Technology Distribution Council named the recipients of its 9th annual U.S. Rising Star Awards this week, which recognize technology companies with exceptional sales growth through U.S. distributors over the past year. This year’s big winners included Samsung for having a hardware revenue of more than $500 million, AMD for having a hardware revenue of $100-$500 million and Palo Alto Networks for hardware revenue between $25-$100 million. Veeam took the top honor for software revenue in excess of $20 million.

The winners of this year’s awards were based on the actual U.S. revenue of each company over the past year as reported by the NPD Group, according to the company. Last year’s winners included Samsung, Sharp, Isilon Systems and RSA Security.

Arrow Electronics: Arrow signed an agreement with cellular modem provider NimbeLink, allowing Arrow to distribute the NimbeLink Skywire family of plug-in cellular modems across North America. NimbeLink’s devices are designed to help companies simplify their machine-to-machine communication processes and provide product developers with solutions to help speed innovative products to market, according to the company.

“Since its introduction in 2013, Skywire has gained quick acceptance among product developers,” said Kurt Larson, chief technology officer at NimbeLink, in a statement. “We recognized the need for expanded distribution and chose Arrow for its worldwide coverage and experience in bringing leading-edge technologies to the marketplace. Working with Arrow will allow us to focus our own resources on developing our products and working with customers to tailor solutions to their specific applications in the Internet of Things.”

D&H: D&H Distributing will help resellers take advantage of the upcoming end of service upgrade cycles for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP by offering training and marketing resources to its partners, according to the company. D&H will continue to host educational seminars on server opportunities and in-person sessions throughout the fall, as well as offering several customizable marketing brochure templates that emphasize XP and server migration strategies.

“Although many enterprise-level organizations have already addressed migration issues, there is still a vital opportunity to help SMB companies upgrade to the new server and OS environments, including Server 2012, Windows 7 and Windows 8,” said Dan Schwab, co-president at D&H Distributing. “The Server 2003 End-of-Service deadline will be the next boon to the SMB reseller, creating opportunities that extend well beyond a basic wireless network installation.  We hope to lead the way in driving both education and market demand on behalf of our customers.”

Thanks for reading and for being here each and every week to catch up on the latest distribution news. Have a great weekend, and keep on distributing.