STUTTGART, Germany – Magirus, a leading European IT solutions provider, has announced today that it has been appointed as the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company’s first authorised distributor in EMEA for the Vblock Infrastructure Platform. Resellers across Europe will benefit from Magirus’ existing business and technical expertise in Cisco, VMware and EMC data centre technologies. The Vblock Infrastructure Platform – which integrates technology from all three vendors and accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models - meets the growing demand for easy to deploy, integrated IT offerings, all supported by VCE.

VCE was formed last year by Cisco, VMware and EMC to bring to market Vblock platforms and solutions, the industry’s first completely integrated IT offering to combine virtualisation, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies. These pre-configured, integrated technologies take complexity and risk out of deploying virtualised data centre solutions and future private cloud deployments (see Note to Editors).

Magirus will distribute VCE technology across Europe and the Middle East in line with the new VCE Partner Programme (See release ‘VCE introduces new incentives for growing partner community’). More importantly, they are fully prepared to immediately support VCE partners in line with the new VCE Partner Programme.

“Naturally we are delighted to be onboard as undoubtedly VCE is at the forefront of shaping and simplifying the journey from virtualisation of the data centre to the private cloud,” said Christian Magirus, executive vice-president & COO at Magirus. “We have worked with VMware, Cisco and EMC for many years and have been working closely with VCE for several months. The skills and experience we have developed with these world leading companies and technologies allows us to be uniquely positioned in EMEA. This enables us to bring immediate value to VCE and to help develop profitable new revenue streams for our partners.

“At a stroke, VCE gets a partner with experience and expertise in the European data centre market, a large pan-European channel footprint of more than 6,000 resellers, as well as a strong channel enablement capability. The announcement continues to build on Magirus’ strategy of being the leader in bringing fully virtualised, cloud-ready data centre solutions to our partners and their customers,” he continued.

“We chose to partner with Magirus because of the company’s strong record in data centres and their extensive knowledge of Cisco, EMC and VMware. Magirus shares our vision of building a strong European channel, where resellers remove complexity from the equation for customers wanting to virtualise their data centres and plan for tomorrow’s cloud-based world,” said D Martin, VCE Vice President of Global Channels. “Currently, reliability, robustness, security and lack of control are top of mind concerns for those considering virtualising their data centre or deploying private cloud solutions. Vblock platforms address these concerns head-on and come pre-integrated and validated with a single point of support from VCE,” he continued.

A key element of this new distributorship will be to stimulate and enable the channel. Vblock platforms address the mid- and high-end data centre market. VCE and Magirus will undertake joint marketing and channel development programmes.

In addition, Magirus will provide resellers with increased support, fast and easy ordering, support with order management, single-point ordering, financing and invoicing of the Vblock platforms.