FD Insights Issue 11 | Page 4

Looking Backwards… and Forwards Welcome to the latest issue of FD Insights. As seems to happen with every year, 2015 has flown by and we find ourselves at the tail-end of the year once again, with all its accompanying festive madness. It has been a productive year for First Distribution. We kicked it off by winning the 2015 IBM Choice Award for Growth and Transformation for MEA at the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, in February, an award which I believe was fully deserved and serves to further cement our status as SA’s premier IBM distributor. We also launched our very own FD Academy, aimed at offering training and skills development to the IT channel community, and hosted in partnership with Ingram Micro. It is something which I hope will grow to provide a real benefit and service to the greater channel community. Tintri was added to our vendor portfolio in June, adding an application-aware storage offering to complement our existing virtualisation and cloud-based portfolio. And lastly our cloud services brokerage, First for Cloud, continues to gain traction and go from strength to strength as it rolls out its webstore offering to various customers. You can find out more on all these developments within the pages of this magazine. I wish everyone a safe and prosperous festive seaso