Synnex CEO: Cloud, Green Technology Will Be More Important

Synnex held its Varnex Fall Conference in Las Vegas this week, where CEO Kevin Murai espoused the power of partnerships to the 200-plus so solution providers on hand.

Murai talked with CRN's Scott Campbell about where Synnex is making investments to improve those partnerships with VARs and vendors and what solution providers can do as well. The following are excerpts from the conversation.

What is your message to VARs attending this conference?

Start off with the power of partnership; the partnership between Synnex, OEM partners and VARs is a key message. Together, we're better. With Varnex, it's about creating a brand in the marketplace that is nationwide and more capable than any brand that a specific VAR could take to market on their own.

Another [message] is thank you for the business support. Another piece is about Synnex presenting its point of view and vendors presenting their point of view of where they see technology going, where they see the opportunities are going to be and where we need to jointly focus and invest.

Has there been a disconnect in the chain between vendor, Synnex and solution provider that needs to be improved?

No. If anything the links have been getting stronger. Now as we get into the next layer, what I spoke about [in a keynote address] here are what some industry pundits are saying in terms of technology trends, and here's where Synnex is focusing its resources on these specific tech areas or markets.

What are some of those areas of focus?

There are a number. Some we highlighted were in areas like cloud, and cloud is broken down into SaaS, HaaS, mobility, the need to capture the anywhere, anytime computing. Where we believe opportunity in the commercial space is integrating into business workflow, having a discussion around green IT, having a discussion around convergence, around management of IT or RMM-type solutions that would on a macro level include things like managed print services

Synnex took a poll of attendees here that show many are not selling green IT now. Is that disconcerting?

I don't think the results said they think green IT is not important. What I hear and what I believe is that throughout the recession the priority has been business at the end user level in survival mode. Some factors of that are cost reduction and driving higher productivity, and the green IT and the carbon footprint have taken a backseat. However, green IT plays across both of those. Power savings plays heavily into cost benefit analysis. Then you can say green IT is important today, but those other factors, carbon footprint and environmental consciousness, become a more important thing.

Next: Green IT in the government space

So VARs are selling "green IT" today but they're just not marketing it that way?

Yes. And green IT is still very important in the government space. Even through the recession, RFPs include more and more requirements not just for the Energy Star rating but now looking at the supply chain itself.

One of the other poll questions here found that a third of the attendees do no business in managed services or cloud. Do you need to give them a kick in the butt to get going in those areas?

The results did not surprise me. The question was how much of your business is around cloud. That's a very different business model. Take one extreme -- guys predominantly selling hardware -- to the other extreme, guys selling just services. The top line revenue number for hardware is big, even though profit is small. I could have a business that is 50-50 but still manage less than 10 percent services because of the way the P&L works. I'm not surprised by that. They're not doing cloud services today but the one question we didn't ask is are you planning on doing it in the next two years. If we ask that question, I guess we'd see a very high percentage saying yes we are. [Also,] the way cloud described today is pretty complicated. That's where I think we have an opportunity to put the right solutions together to make it easier to sell and manage cloud solutions.