Avnet buys IBM reseller Ascendant Technology

Distributor Avnet Technology Solutions said it will buy Ascendant Technology, a consultancy that builds end-to-end offerings based on IBM middleware through its operations in North America, Europe, Brazil and India.

The acquisition is expected to close in the next 45 days. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Services focus

Ascendant, which works with both smaller businesses and large enterprises, was founded in 2003 and had revenues of about $90m (£56m) in the 2011 calendar year, Avnet said.

Its business model fits in with Avnet’s focus on using services to give a boost to its suppliers and value-added resellers, according to Avnet global president Phil Gallagher.

“Because of Ascendant’s international footprint, Avnet’s ability to identify new services and solution business opportunities for our partners will greatly expand,” Gallagher said.

Avnet Americas president Jeff Bawol said the company plans to use Ascendant’s expertise in services delivery to help focus on high-growth vertical markets.

“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,” Bawol said.

Strategic applications

Ascendant advises in defining and designing strategic applications in areas including e-commerce, enterprise portal and collaboration, web content management, infrastructure automation and cloud computing.

Ascendant employs more than 500 business and technical staff and its offerings are based on a proprietary approach called Insight Driven Engineering Approach (IDEA) Solutions Framework.

Earlier this year Avnet bought Canvas Systems, which specialises in providing new, used and refurbished Sun, Dell, HP, Cisco and IBM servers, storage and networking hardware and support across the US, UK and Netherlands.