This article first appeared in Cloud Reseller News issue #1
After a year in the job, Oliver Harvey-Jones, Cloud Director UK&I at Arrow ECS, sat down with Elliot Mulley-Goodbarne to discuss Arrow strategy, Artificial Intelligence, and distributing enablement.
Arrow’s cloud business is experiencing strong growth, generating $9.35 billion in sales last year. Oliver Harvey-Jones, Cloud Director UK&I, is drawing on his background to align the priorities of vendors, resellers, and Arrow. A key part of this strategy involves shifting from merely distributing products to distributing enablement, actively guiding partners’ AI strategies and utilising its AI-powered platform as a sales enablement tool to help resellers adopt and confidently sell AI solutions to the market.
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 terms of that enablement.
“When vendors look at Arrow, they no longer want to see an organisation that distributes products; they want to see an organisation that distributes enablement. The challenge that we have is keeping up with the demand of our channel partners, who, rightly, expect more from distribution than they may have done in the past.”
Offering Guidance
Artificial Intelligence is one of those areas where partners are looking to Arrow for some guidance.
With so much noise around the technology, everyone seems to be at a different stage along the path to AI enlightenment, a theme not lost on Harvey-Jones.
“If we ask our channel partners to be truly honest with themselves about whether they have an AI strategy fully mapped out, I think you’d be surprised at how few of them would be able to say yes.
“In fact, towards the back end of 2025, we had 400 channel partners in a room, and we asked that same question. Twenty or 30 people stuck their hands up and said they were confident that they had an AI strategy fully mapped out.”
But while we may be tempted to put every business into yay-or-nay boxes, Harvey-Jones said, “if we went into real nuance, there’s probably more than two camps, and you could probably split some of those camps into further subsections.
“Some partners use it, some see the value in it, some are using it for prompting and as a digital assistant, then there are people who are starting to embrace agentic AI.
“Ultimately, there are going to be different levels of adoption, different levels of maturity around AI strategy, and I think it is absolutely the place for companies like Arrow to help guide that strategy, and guide that direction moving forward.”
Trusting the Processor
Although distributors like Arrow should be on hand to guide that AI strategy, resellers need to trust that that guidance is right for them.
“There needs to be trust,” said Harvey-Jones, “not just that you’ll do the job, but trust that they’re helping you to head towards your own strategic direction and your own imperative.
“Ultimately we are a people business, so we will go and talk about AI, but what it comes down to at Arrow is we are people first and we build trust through thought leadership, through the support that we give, around sales, marketing, technical resource, the services that we can offer, our expertise on our platform, and how we act as a conduit into the vendors.”
On top of building relationships, Arrow has also demonstrated its expertise through its portal, ArrowSphere, which not only utilises AI to give users a convenient way to see and manage their business but also helps with day-to-day tasks.
Sale EnAIblement
“This isn’t just putting AI in the ArrowShere because we’re jumping on the bandwagon,” said Harvey-Jones. “This is actually turning what has traditionally been viewed as a platform or an operational tool into a genuine sales enabler.
“From an operational standpoint, you can open the ArrowSphere assistant and ask it to bring you the information that exists within your platform using human language. That’s good. It’s useful. It can save some clicks.
“But where it gets exciting is when it’s a sales enablement tool. You can ask it to help you write responses to proposals, create marketing assets, bring up details of renewals, look at propensity data, help you craft emails and outreach programmes to customers about their renewals that are upcoming and the upsell opportunity that exists.”
“So there are fantastic applications for the AI that we’ve built into ArrowSphere. We were first to market with that, we know we are market leading, and Microsoft agree.
“Nicole Dezen (Chief Partner Officer and CVP, Global Channel Partner Sales, Microsoft) has publicly spoken about ArrowSphere, not just about the capability, but enabling our channel partners to be ‘customer zero’ by utilising AI in their daily life.
“What we know for a fact is that when an organisation has already adopted AI themselves, they are far better equipped to go and sell and position AI into the market as well. That’s what we’re doing with ArrowSphere.”
