Avanet.com

Some start‑ups launch with a five‑year plan. We, on the other hand, needed five years to figure out what we actually want the future of Avanet to look like.

Today we’re presenting the first steps that will bring us closer to our vision for the future. The first milestone is a complete rebuild of our shop – not just another update, but the foundation of a platform for the future of Avanet.

Perfecting what already works

If someone asked us about Avanet’s “secret sauce” today, our Sophos shop would certainly be part of the answer. Without the idea we had back in February 2014 – to sell Sophos products online via our website – we probably wouldn’t be as successful with Sophos as we are today. Our journey to becoming a Platinum Partner has everything to do with our web shop.

Over the years we’ve learned a lot about selling Sophos products online. Along the way we came up with many ideas on how we could make it even easier for customers to buy and manage Sophos solutions. Unfortunately, with such specific requirements we quickly hit the limits of our previous shop system (PrestaShop). We would have had to implement many of our ideas ourselves anyway, which is why we decided to build a completely new shop from scratch.

And we took our thinking a step further. Around 90 percent of our revenue comes from Sophos‑related IT security projects, and the shop – alongside the blog – is a core part of our business model. So we decided to bring everything together under one roof: avanet.com.

So here we are, announcing what is probably the biggest change in Avanet’s history since we started.

We began with avanet.ch. With each new idea we added another island around it – Sophos shop, blog, licensing portal and various landing pages. With avanet.com we now want to consolidate everything that has proven itself over the last few years under one strong domain.

Our plan is that in future Avanet will only exist under a single domain: avanet.com.

What about the Sophos Licensing Portal?

Once avanet.com is live, we’ll be taking sophos.avanet.ch offline. When we launched our licensing portal in July 2017, we wanted to offer an alternative to annual licenses with monthly Central subscriptions. However, we stopped selling monthly licenses at the start of this year. The main reason was that Sophos did not provide direct support to customers with monthly licenses – anyone opening a ticket in Sophos Central was always referred back to us. On top of that, we were concerned about planned price changes when Intercept X with machine learning was introduced. Those changes ultimately weren’t implemented, but they would have wrecked our calculations. These two factors were far from ideal, which is why we had to pause the service for new customers.

Existing customers with Sophos Central and XG subscriptions can continue to use the service as normal.

If we find a viable solution, we’ll bring monthly Central licenses back on avanet.com.

What does avanet.com offer me?

Our future company website is built entirely around a shop strategy. Building on the success of our Sophos shop, we want to continue selling services and products online and make management and visibility as simple as possible for you.

Accounts

With our previous shop we initially believed that guest checkout would be enough and that customers wouldn’t want to create an account. Today we have plenty of customers who order from us more than once.

On avanet.com you can now create a customer account and avoid having to re‑enter all your details for every order. While we recommend creating an account, it’s still possible to order as a guest.

Updated products

In recent months we unfortunately haven’t had the time to maintain the shop as well as it deserves. That’s now a thing of the past. On avanet.com you’ll once again find all Sophos products with up‑to‑date product images, comparison tables, descriptions, prices and SKUs.

Blog

After much back and forth, our blog has finally found its permanent home. If you read our news via RSS, you’ll need to update the feed URL once avanet.com is online. Newsletter subscribers don’t need to do anything – the messages will continue to arrive in your inbox.

Services & support

We’ve always been keen to ensure that customers who find us via the internet don’t see us as “just a shop”. We don’t just sell Sophos products; we earn our living with services and projects. We’re one of only seven certified Platinum Partners in Switzerland for a reason. We know the products and help you when problems arise. We’ll happily configure your firewall for you end‑to‑end or support you during deployment in the form of a workshop. One thing we’re carrying over from the “Sophos Licensing Portal” is the knowledge base, which we’ll continue to maintain under avanet.com.

Opening tickets

If the knowledge base doesn’t help and you need our direct assistance, avanet.com will include an official “Open a ticket” form. This is the first step in putting our support workflow on a more structured footing.

Final thoughts

With almost everything we’ll launch on avanet.com next weekend, we’re still at the very beginning. What you’ll see is just the starting point for our vision. In hindsight, especially with the “Sophos Licensing Portal”, we made some wrong calls that we regret today. With avanet.com we’re determined not to repeat those mistakes.

Once the new site has gone live and things have calmed down a little, we’ll of course share our roadmap for avanet.com. That’s where you’ll see which new features and improvements we plan to implement next. And if you have your own ideas or suggestions, we’d be very happy to hear them. 👍