Executive Briefing: A Chat with Avnet's Incoming CEO
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Rick Hamada, Avnet's current president and COO, will take over the CEO job on July 4, 2011 from the current chief Roy Vallee. Should Avnet partners and vendors expect big changes ahead? Not likely. Hamada, speaking with Channel Insider, points out that he's worked for Avnet for 27 years and has shaped and influenced many of the company's directions and strategies already.
Nevertheless, a new CEO at the helm will likely mean some kind of change. Channel Insider spoke with Hamada about his vision, goals and strategy as Avnet's new CEO. Here are excerpts of that conversation.
Channel Insider: What are Avnet's key issues going forward?
Hamada : Growth, globalization and great people. Theses are the major topics on my mind and I have a feeling that my vision and agenda will include a lot of attention to those three. But I’m keeping an open mind and using this transition time to reconnect and make sure I know what’s on the minds of key constituencies.
Channel Insider: Tell us about the progress of Avnet's Solution Paths. Are you seeing more success from any one more than the others? Is the Solution Path strategy performing the way you'd hoped it would?
Hamada : We are still very firmly convinced that the move towards solutions enablement for our partners – building full ecosystems around verticals or technology practices, is absolutely the right strategy. The most mature ones are Health Path, Gov Path, Storage, Security and Virtualization… We feel so good about it, we announced additional Solutions Paths in the areas of Retail, Finance and Energy.
We still believe that preparing a channel to be more specifically trained, knowledgeable, have deeper subject matter expertise in some of these key vertical and technology areas is the way that value-added distribution is defining itself for the future. Value propositions have lifecycles, too. People working in technology are very familiar with technology product lifecycle. Value propositions have lifecycles, too, and Solutions Path I believe is the result of the evolution of value-added distribution.
Distribution 
