INTERVIEW
For the superstitious out there, Friday the 13th can be a struggle. A special day to avoid black cats, walk around ladders, and, presumably, look out for precarious anvils at the top of skyscrapers; I’m sure it’s exhausting. While he claims not to be superstitious, I could forgive Oliver Harvey-Jones, Cloud Director UK&I at Arrow ECS, for cursing his luck when a call with me popped into his Friday afternoon calendar on this particularly perilous day! Although I doubt many people at Arrow are too worried about luck. The distributor recently announced that Global Q4 and FY2025 sales are up over $8 billion and $30 billion respectively. Arrow’s cloud business, operating under its Global Enterprise Computing Solutions (Global ECS) segment, also demonstrated strong performance, generating $9.35 billion in sales in 2025, a 17.8% increase over the previous year. “Sitting down with the leadership for Arrow UK, a little over a year ago now, the conversation was around the importance of the cloud business to Arrow globally, but obviously more specifically in the UK,” said Harvey-Jones. “The leadership team interviewing me wanted me to come in and bring a new perspective. My background is not distribution, which I think was part of the reason that I was brought in, to offer a fresh perspective, a new pair of eyes to look at how we go to market, but also someone who has lived on the other side of the fence.” Before joining Arrow in January, Harvey-Jones headed up the Strategic Accounts team at Trustmarque, following time at SoftwareOne and Cisco. “Me having a background in knowing what vendors want and what resellers, who both sell products and services, want, made the role a good fit.” Balancing Priorities The position of distribution in an ever-increasing digital world has been a question the tech industry has been grappling with since I started reporting on it in 2016. From the traditional box-shifters, Arrow has managed to grow its EMEA ECS business, which encompasses Cloud, to a point where revenues mirror that of the traditional hardware side. Harvey-Jones is using his experience working for vendors and resellers to help shape the Cloud Strategy from Arrow in the UK. As he put it, “in a Venn diagram with three circles – vendor’s priorities, reseller’s priorities, and our own priorities – we find the most success when those three circles overlap. That’s where I’ve been focusing on over the last 13 months.” A broad definition of those priorities is to grow and succeed as a business, but the balancing act has become a challenge with the size of the product market and the speed at which new solutions are coming to market. “That means our channel partners need more guidance, more expertise, more insight, more access to the vendors than ever before,” said Harvey-Jones. “Vendors also have their own priorities and are changing the way they manage and interact with channel partners. They are starting to look to distribution in
Oliver Harvey Jones
arrow.com
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Vendors also have their own priorities and are changing the way they manage and interact with channel partners. They are starting to look to distribution in terms of that enablement.
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