Woods was with Crane for nearly seven years and served as the company’s main trainer. Woods will be drawing up a new training schedule and delivering regular Avaya-accredited training courses for Westcon.
Matt Hathorn, head of training at Westcon Group in the UK, explains Ray’s importance to the company’s overall plan to accelerate cross training amongst its reseller partners: “One of our key challenges today is cross training of engineers to enable them to install and integrate multi-vendor converged solutions. Cisco specialist engineers can benefit from Avaya training just as much as Avaya engineers need to understand how to configure Cisco equipment. In the converged world sales of both will benefit from having engineers skilled to create multi-vendors IP-based voice and data systems. Ray will help enable this training. He is a great asset to our team.”
Westcon Group expects to train at least 20 per cent more resellers this year than last, following an increased investment in this area of the business. It already offers a wide range of IP Telephony, Security and Wireless LAN training courses at its purpose-built training centre in Cirencester and its new additional facility in Slough.
Westcon’s Cirencester training centre has also recently been accepted as a Pearson VUE authorised test centre with onsite mobile testing capabilities. Its offices join the Pearson VUE network of hundreds of convenient test locations across the UK. Pearson VUE offers students secure, distraction-free environments in which to take professional examinations, on behalf of leading companies such as Cisco and Avaya.