Way back February 2011, we reported Avnet planned to make COO Rick Hamada CEO of Avnet come July 4, replacing Roy Vallee, who moved into the position of  executive chairman. With the Independence Day celebrations come and gone, Hamada is now in his new position. So can we expect changes at Avnet, especially considering its recent moves in the cloud space? Read on for some perspective.

First, let’s look at what Avnet has been doing in the marketplace, since it’s hard to ignore its momentum into the cloud and the data center. We’ve covered Avnet’s moves in offering Storage as a Service for VARs (initially only for HP VARs), Rorke Data’s beefy SMB storage offerings, Avnet’s cloud sales and technical training program, and Avnet’s most recent partnership with HP for the Cloud Center of Excellence. Is there a trend emerging?

With all the buzz around the cloud, Avnet may very well be jockeying to become the distributor of choice when it comes to VARs looking to deploy cloud services. Right now rival distributors have made their own strong moves, such as Tech Data’s TDCloud program and Ingram Micro’s Cloud Marketplace. But with things heating up in the cloudy atmosphere, Avnet is positioning itself to strike with an arsenal of coupled and complete data and cloud solutions. This is especially interesting, since as late as December 2010 Avnet was somewhat gun-shy on approaching the cloud.

Now that the official CEO baton has been passed to Hamada, can we expect even more cloud focus? With 28 years at Avnet — four years of which (2002-2006) as president of Avnet Technology Solutions Group — Hamada may be better suited to understand and drive Avnet into the cloud than CEOs of past. We’ve reached out to Avnet for a comment from Hamada the future of Avnet, and also prodded about Avnet’s affinity for HP. Be sure to check back in for an update right here.

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