Avnet Acquires VAR Ascendant Technology

CRN's Fast Growth 100 recognition

Ascendant was founded in 2003 and reported about $90 million in sales in 2011 and specializes in IBM solutions to customers in North America, Europe, Brazil and India.

The acquisition will enhance Avnet's SolutionsPath practices around the financial, healthcare and retail vertical markets and will help VARs achieve deeper market penetration in those areas, according to Avnet.

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"It supports our strategic focus on enhancing our services and software capabilities to drive growth for our suppliers and value-added resellers. Because of Ascendant's international footprint, Avnet's ability to identify new services and solution business opportunities for our partners will greatly expand," said Phil Gallagher, global president of Avnet Technology Solutions, in a statement.

Ascendant is also a strong player in the definition and design of strategic software applications, the development and deployment of e-commerce, enterprise portal and collaboration, Web content management, infrastructure automation and cloud computing solutions, according to Avnet.

The VAR developed a proprietary Insight Driven Engineering Approach (IDEA) Solutions Framework that Avnet believes can now help other VARs deliver IT solutions in less time with reduce risk and expense, according to Jeff Bawol, president of Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas.

"Ascendant Technology's expertise in services delivery, complemented by their software offerings, aligns with Avnet's strategy to provide our business partners with the support they need to succeed in high growth vertical markets," Bawol said in a statement. "Avnet partners primarily focused on providing infrastructure solutions will now be able to leverage their distributor relationship to expand the overall business value they can offer to their customers. Our unique SolutionsPath value proposition, which prepares and enables our business partners to deliver complete hardware, software and service solutions to their customers using a vertical market focus, will be further supported by Ascendant's expertise in software application integration and services support."

The acquisition marks Avnet's second purchase of a VAR organization this year. The distributor previously acquired Canvas Systems, an asset disposal specialist in January.