Arrow And DinCloud Sign Pact To Offer First VDI Deployment

The Englewood, Colo.-based distributor will be adding DinCloud's portfolio of hosted virtual desktop offering, hosted virtual servers and cloud storage services, said Jim Livingston, vice president of Arrow ECS services.

"DinCloud's strong offering gives our reseller community out there selling cloud services a differentiated service to offer their customers," said Livingston. "This distribution agreement allows us to make it available for our cloud customers in our web store, ArrowSphere e-commerce for cloud," he said.

[Related: VMware Virtual Desktops Are Expensive But We're Working To Change That ]

As people require more instant access to their information, virtual desktop deployment is currently an emerging category, Livingston said.

"Many of our customers have been asking for it, and we're excited to add it to our catalog and make it available," said Livingston. "Technology has advanced to a point where it's viable to the scalability and performance, where it’s a capability on the cusp of having more significant adoption."

As the distributor, Arrow is here to provide the value of aggregation in simplifying and automating the procurement activities, including billing for the reseller community, said Livingston.

"The broader the portfolio we can build out, the more for channel partners to take advantage in our role of aggregation where they can position themselves with virtual machines and desktop services," said Livingston. "It is significantly easier to take these offerings to their customers and make it a part of their portfolio."

With the distribution agreement between Arrow and DinCloud, Doug Potter, of Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider Insight, said he remains hopeful.

"DinCloud had a very major problem. It was purely logistical in their ability to package up and make their product easy to sell," said Potter. "I would say having them partner up with Arrow is a very good move."

As long as Arrow streamlines the process and packages the virtual desktop infrastructure offering to sell, Insight will sell the product to its customers, said Potter.

"As Netapp resellers, [we] use Arrow as our distributor, and it’s a smart move as long as Arrow will package this up for us, and make it easier to sell."

In the next two to four months, Arrow will be adding other virtual desktop service offerings to their portfolio, said Livingston.

"This is the first offering and this is one of the hot ones in the market as the technology has matured and is far more viable," said Livingston. "Core infrastructure, backup and replication offerings are great categories where we will be expanding on."

PUBLISHED DEC. 11, 2013