Auckland, New Zealand - January 15, 2026 - Technology distributor Westcon-Comstor has unveiled a new Centre of Excellence (CoE) in New Zealand, aimed at helping channel partners design, test, and deploy modern data center, cloud, and hybrid IT infrastructure as enterprise demand for more complex digital environments accelerates.
The Centre of Excellence, based in Auckland, is designed as a partner-focused solutions hub rather than a production data center. It brings together technical expertise, multi-vendor architectures, and hands-on validation capabilities to support resellers, system integrators, and service providers working on data center modernization projects across New Zealand and the wider Pacific region.
Westcon-Comstor said the CoE will focus heavily on data center solutions, covering compute, storage, networking, virtualization, backup, and data protection. Partners will be able to access reference architectures, run proofs of concept, and validate multi-vendor designs before deploying them in customer environments, helping reduce deployment risk and shorten project timelines.
The facility integrates technologies from a broad ecosystem of vendors across Westcon-Comstor’s portfolio, including Cisco, HPE and Juniper Networks, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Cohesity, and VMware. By housing these technologies in a single environment, the distributor aims to help partners address growing customer requirements for integrated, AI-ready, and hybrid infrastructure rather than standalone products.
In addition to technical validation, the Centre of Excellence will serve as a training and enablement platform. Westcon-Comstor plans to use the site to deliver advanced partner education, solution workshops, and hands-on demonstrations tailored to real-world data center and cloud use cases. The company has also aligned leadership responsibility for the CoE under its New Zealand partner sales and solutions organization to ensure closer coordination with the channel.
The launch reflects a broader shift in the distribution market, as partners increasingly look for support beyond logistics and procurement. As data center architectures become more complex and workloads such as artificial intelligence and data-intensive applications place new demands on infrastructure, distributors are positioning themselves as solution enablers rather than traditional middlemen.
Westcon-Comstor operates globally as a value-added distributor focused on networking, security, cloud, and data center technologies. The New Zealand Centre of Excellence builds on similar initiatives in other regions and signals the company’s intent to deepen its role in supporting large-scale digital infrastructure projects in the local market.
Industry observers say the move aligns with rising investment in data centers and hybrid IT across New Zealand, as enterprises modernize legacy environments and public-sector organizations pursue more resilient and scalable digital platforms.
