Monday Morning Impact – March 29

Synnex and Tech Data Announce Merger

Synnex and Tech Data have entered into a definitive merger agreement valued at approximately $7.2 billion. The combined company, with approximately $57 billion in estimated annual revenues and a team of over 22,000 people, is expected to enjoy economies of scale necessary in the hyper-competitive distribution environment.

“Together, we will be able to offer our customers and vendors exceptional reach, efficiency, and expertise, redefining the experience and value they receive,” said Rich Hume, Tech Data CEO. “The combined company will also benefit from significant financial strength to invest in its core growth platform as well as next generation cybersecurity, cloud, data, and IoT technologies, which are experiencing explosive growth due to work from home and return to office trends.”

The combined company will have a global footprint that serves more than 100 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions, and a broad, diversified portfolio of more than 200,000 product and solutions offerings. Such scale is expected to provide increased value and purchasing efficiencies to the combined company’s 150,000 customers and more than 1,500 vendors. Technology product segments include cloud, data centers, security, Internet of Things (IoT), services, 5G, and intelligent edge.

“This transaction allows for accelerated revenue and earnings growth, an expanded global footprint, and the ability to drive significant operating improvements while continuing to create shareholder value,” said Synnex president and CEO Dennis Polk. “We look forward to working with the talented colleagues at Tech Data and expect our combined business will create the opportunity for team members to produce the highest levels of service to our partners.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Tech Data owner, Apollo Funds, a New York private equity firm, will receive an aggregate of 44 million shares of SYNNEX common stock plus the refinancing of existing Tech Data net debt and redeemable preferred shares of approximately $2.7 billion. Upon closing of the transaction, SYNNEX shareholders will own approximately 55% of the combined entity, with Apollo Funds owning approximately 45%.

Rich Hume will lead the combined company as CEO. Dennis Polk will be Executive Chair of the Board of Directors and will take an active role in the ongoing strategy and integration of the business, among other responsibilities.

Channel Impact^®
The agreement creates a global solutions aggregator with significant breadth and depth of capabilities.

Gartner Identifies Top Data and Analytics Trends for 2021

Gartner has identified the top data and analytics (D&A) technology trends for 2021 that can help organizations respond to change, uncertainty and the opportunities they bring in the next year.

“The speed at which the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted organizations has forced D&A leaders to have tools and processes in place to identify key technology trends and prioritize those with the biggest potential impact on their competitive advantage,” said Rita Sallam, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

Among the top trends, the greater impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) requires businesses to apply new techniques for smarter, less data-hungry, ethically responsible and more resilient AI solutions. By deploying smarter, more responsible, scalable AI, organizations will leverage learning algorithms and interpretable systems into shorter time to value and higher business impact.

The second trend suggests that open, containerized analytics architectures make analytics capabilities more composable. Composable data and analytics leverages components from multiple data, analytics and AI solutions to rapidly build flexible and user-friendly intelligent applications that help D&A leaders connect insights to actions.

According to the next trend, increased digitization and more emancipated consumers are causing D&A leaders to increasingly use data fabric to help address higher levels of diversity, distribution, scale and complexity in their organizations’ data assets. Fabric uses analytics to constantly monitor data pipelines. A data fabric utilizes continuous analytics of data assets to support the design, deployment and utilization of diverse data to reduce time for integration by 30%, deployment by 30% and maintenance by 70%.

Gartner also says that the extreme business changes from the COVID-19 pandemic caused ML and AI models based on large amounts of historical data to become less relevant. At the same time, decision making by humans and AI are more complex and demanding, requiring D&A leaders to have a greater variety of data for better situational awareness. As a result, D&A leaders should choose analytical techniques that can use available data more effectively. D&A leaders rely on wide data that enables the analysis and synergy of a variety of small and large, unstructured, and structured data sources, as well as small data which is the application of analytical techniques that require less data but still offer useful insights.

Channel Impact^®
The trends can help companies respond to change, uncertainty, and opportunities when properly leveraged.

HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Adds New Features

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced a series of updates to its GreenLake cloud services portfolio designed to simplify billing and expand the company’s cloud services business.

New cloud services for virtual machines, containers and bare metal management will feature scalable, modular entry points specifically tailored for mid-market businesses, starting at 100 VMs, and increasing to 600 VMs.

Enhanced features for the Aruba offering are tailored to partners seeking to shift to an as-a-service selling model.

“As the market leader in hybrid and on-premises cloud services, HPE continues to innovate to bring HPE GreenLake and the cloud experience to a broader set of customers for their digital transformation and modernization efforts – at the edge, colocation facility, or datacenter,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. “The HPE partner ecosystem plays a central role in our success, and partners of all types are embedding HPE GreenLake into their business models and offerings to deliver an agile as-a-service experience to their clients.”

The expanded cloud services include services for bare metal which allows customers to discover, provision and manage compute and storage resources in HPE GreenLake Central, to run workloads directly on the server, or use VMs or containers in the mix that best fits their business.

Cloud services for virtual machines (VMs) enables customers to more easily choose from various deployments, as well as compute and storage instance types sized for 100 VMs and up, in standardized blocks with 4, 8, 12, and 16 compute nodes.

Cloud services for containers uses the same building blocks as bare metal and virtual machines, and offers solutions based on small, medium, large and extra-large capacity sizes for the HPE Ezmeral Container platform.

Meanwhile, a number of distributors will add the offerings to their respective online marketplaces. 

Channel Impact^®
The enhancements are intended to provide customers with lower-cost, smaller entry points through which customers can start small and have the flexibility to scale out to meet future requirements.