IT Strategy

Further assisting resellers with increasing sales opportunities in the government space, Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions, a business segment of Arrow Electronics Inc., is expanding its General Services Administration Schedule 70 across its North American operations and adding enterprise technology to its program.

A GSA Schedule 70 includes prenegotiated contracts to public-sector agencies for information technology solutions that are available at a set price and have been approved by the GSA to be compliant with specific laws and regulations. The Arrow ECS GSA schedule (previously managed by Arrow ECS’ Alternative Technology Group) is in the top 4 percent of Schedule 70 contractors.

“Expanding the GSA program that the Alternative Technology Group established in 2005 across Arrow ECS’ entire North American operations enables us to make the program available to all our resellers and suppliers who want to participate,” said Rich Severa, president, Arrow ECS North America.

Now open to all North American Arrow ECS resellers, the program also is being expanded to include enterprise solutions, beginning with the addition of HP. Also, the full suite of SysTrack products from Lakeside Software solutions was added to the program recently.

“The addition of enterprise solutions better enables our resellers to meet increasing demand for GSA Schedule contracts. According to Federal Computer Week, the GSA processes more than 11 million transactions each year under Schedule 70, which amounts to approximately $17 billion in annual sales. Certainly, enterprise needs comprise a large segment of this opportunity,” said Severa. “We are pleased to add HP to the program and hope to add other enterprise lines from our portfolio soon.”

The HP solutions in Arrow ECS’ GSA Schedule program include BladeSystems, Integrity servers, iSCSI arrays, Enterprise Virtual Arrays, XP, technology services, networking, and BTO Software. Arrow can now support their reseller network with a GSA Schedule contract that has HP solutions for their customers.

In addition to offering a GSA Schedule, Arrow ECS supports resellers in the government space through activities such as:

• Education about stimulus opportunities and how to capture that business, which Arrow ECS believes to be around IT modernization, energy efficiency, broadband and IT security
• Integrated marketing campaigns targeting federal and state users of specific technology
• Webcasts and podcasts led in partnership with INPUT, a government business consultancy
• Business intelligence services to mine historical data for resellers and identify buying patterns of agencies
• Financial-selling education and financing programs

“Arrow ECS has a proven record of success with supporting government business,” said Mike Humke, vice president, public sector sales, Solution Partner Organization, for HP. “We are pleased to be working closely with them to help drive new growth in the government market and continue to look for new ways to provide solutions and support for the partner community.”

“Lakeside Software solutions are ideally suited for the government market. Desktop-power management helps deliver a greener information technology department and reduce energy use, while our desktop-virtualization planning tools help agencies reduce cost-of-ownership and improve quality of service,” said Mike Schumacher, chief executive officer for Lakeside. “We are pleased to work with Arrow ECS to connect government resellers with our products.”

Other suppliers in the program besides HP and Lakeside include AEP Networks, Blue Coat, DataCore Software, Fortinet, Gemalto, Novell, SonicWall, ThinPrint and WYSE. Various other service and support offerings are included in the program as well.