Happy Birthday - Avanet turns 5 years old today
Every year on 12 December we celebrate the birth of Avanet. Today it’s that time again - and this year marks our 5‑year anniversary! 🎉
In this article I’ll first introduce our new logo, which we commissioned specifically for our 5th anniversary. After that I’ll take a brief look back at 2017 and highlight a few key developments.
For our birthday: Avanet gets a new logo
You’re probably wondering: “Why do you need a new logo after 5 years?” And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. As you’ll see in the annual review below, after 5 years of Avanet we’ve more or less “grown up”. The start‑up mindset of spending as little money as possible on things we could somehow cobble together ourselves is increasingly receding into the background. Over the years we have refined our business model around IT security with Sophos, and we now want this to mark the start of a new era.
There were also a few aspects of the current logo that bothered us. For instance, we frequently received feedback that it looked very similar to the “AngularJS” logo. Since we actually use this JavaScript framework from Google ourselves for mobile and web projects, that was all the more irritating. Another impractical element was the shield with the “A”, which we also used as the initial letter of “Avanet”.
For these reasons, in October we decided to invest in a logo redesign and entrust the work to a professional. That decision has now been fully implemented, and there is no going back. We have retained the shield as the logo, as it is still an excellent fit for a company whose core focus is IT security.
A brief look back at 2017
Business model further focused on IT security with Sophos
When we founded Avanet on 12/12/2012, our first priority was to put as many offerings on our website as possible that could generate some revenue. Since nobody knew us at the time, we wanted to appeal to as broad an audience as possible in order to maximise our chances of landing projects.
Even though I’m still convinced today that we would hardly have survived 5 years without this approach, it also clearly shows that we embarked on self‑employment without a concrete business plan. We simply plunged into the adventure.
Each additional year in Avanet has shown us that we need to sharpen our focus if we want long‑term success. Anyone who knows us a little is aware that this focus has been “Sophos” for roughly the last three years.
This year we spent around 85% of our time selling, supporting and of course deploying Sophos products. We also continue to invest a great deal of time in our online presence to make purchasing Sophos products as straightforward as possible.
Avanet GmbH became an AG
Our ongoing success with Sophos also prompted us this year to convert our GmbH into an AG. We wanted this to signal that we’re serious about Avanet and that we stand 100% behind our company. As we will continue to rely on IT security as the main pillar of our services, this step seemed very sensible to us from a trust perspective.
Sophos Discover Conference
A definite highlight this year was the Sophos Discover Conference in Lisbon! As the word “holiday” has more or less become a foreign concept for us in recent years, at least Sophos gives us the opportunity once a year to leave the office, board a plane and discover a new place somewhere in the world. We’re already looking forward to the Discover Conference 2018 - assuming we have the privilege of attending again!
Avanet became Sophos Platinum Partner
This has always been one of our goals, and this year we finally achieved it. With Sophos we’ve moved up from Gold to Platinum Partner. In light of everything we still intend to accomplish with Sophos, this status is obviously a huge advantage. On the one hand, it confirms that we’re on the right track, and on the other, it helps us continue to offer attractive deals to our customers.
Launch of our Sophos Licensing Portal
The last item in this review is the “Sophos Licensing Portal”. On 12 June 2017 we officially launched our new website at sophos.avanet.ch and since then we’ve been steadily working through further items on our to‑do list. Our Knowledge Base is growing continuously, and our new News page is also seeing regular new articles. On 22 November we fulfilled another promise and, in addition to our Sophos Central subscription, we also launched the Sophos XG subscription, which means you can now obtain your XG licences on a monthly basis as well.
You can look forward to 2018 - there is still a great deal planned for sophos.avanet.ch!
