The new boss of TD Synnex’s Advanced Solutions UK has pinpointed building closer links between its cloud and traditional infrastructure businesses as his short-term priority.
Simon Bennett took the helm of the business – which generates around 55% of TD Synnex’s UK revenues – on Monday as part of a wider reshuffle.
He spent the previous five years running TD Synnex’s Enterprise Software and Public Cloud UK business, and the three years before that as Business Unit Director of Datacenter and Infrastructure.
“I ran all the infrastructure business, and have spent the last five years building a cloud practice. It’s perfect timing for me to run that Hybrid Cloud practice,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
Hybrid Cloud is one of four practices within Advanced Solutions, alongside Data and Applications, Networking and Communications, and Security.
The latter three are “well established practices”, Bennett said.
“But if I think about 70% of what’s driving the industry and the traditional channel, it’s the hybrid cloud piece and getting that business unit working together. Previously maybe they haven’t worked together in as much alignment as they should, so the short-term priority is for me to get that right.”
Bennett added: “When you think about Dell, Cisco, HPE and all the ‘Titan’ vendors, we’ve got probably the largest datacentre practice in distribution. But then we’ve also got the full public cloud hyperscaler line card in Microsoft, Google, AWS, IBM and Oracle.
“My immediate challenge is bringing those collections of vendors and those specialist business units together.
“We’re not going to go down that road of creating a cloud-only division. When we look at our resellers’ businesses, they’re working in that [hybrid] motion. So why would we not want to build our go to market to support our customers?”
Targeting ‘untapped revenue’
Bennett’s promotion came as part of a wider reshuffle that saw predecessor Matt Child move to SVP Digital, Europe, following the retirement of Andy Gass.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen in August, TD Synnex Senior VP for UK&I Dave Watts (pictured below) characterised the market as “tough”, with TD Synnex’s global revenues falling 9.1% year-on-year to $14bn in its most recent quarter.
Bennett said another of his priorities is to highlight the “untapped revenue opportunities” for partners against this backdrop.
“I’ll give you one example: hyperscaler marketplaces,” he said.
“Apart from the top-tier resellers in the UK, most resellers I speak to are struggling to understand how to monetise them or make them profitable.
“When the vendors say they’re growing triple digits in that hyperscaler marketplace landscape, we know that means enterprise customers and it’s not necessarily driven by the channel. So I really want to open up that opportunity.”
TD Synnex will also step up efforts to automate and digitize some of the “more boring” tasks for reseller customers, Bennett added.
“That’s where we will use AI. We will find projects to use Copilot and other AI tools to drive automation in our business, which we will then be able to help downstream partners with,” he explained.
Bennett said he felt “super privileged” to work in the IT industry.
“It’s one of the most privileged jobs you can have in my opinion, and one of the things I want to do in 2024 is to change people’s mentality in our organisation, and within the reseller community, that there is an opportunity to grow,” he concluded.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
