TTI Inc. Creates Education Fund at Texas A&M

Electronic News, August 7, 2000 by Heidi Elliott, Marie Eve Demers

Fort Worth, Texas-based distributor TTI Inc. has made a financial donation to Texas A&M University that will be used to recruit and retain faculty. The gift, for an undisclosed amount, was made to the university's Industrial Distribution Program. The money will be used to create a Faculty Excellence Fund, which the school will use to recruit and retain faculty for the Texas A&M Distribution Program. "TTI has had an ongoing relationship with Texas A&M's Industrial Distribution program for more than 15 years. Many of our early recruits from Texas A&M are in key management roles at TTI. We have found the students from this program to have a two-year head start in our business. They are taught the principles of distribution from inventory management, logistics, and supplier relationships, to sales and marketing. It is also part of the College of Engineering with engineering course requirements and is considered a technical degree," said Paul Andrews, TTI's chairman and chief executive officer. "I find that each year many of our top performers are former students coming from this program. I hope our contribution will allow for the program to prosper even further." Dan Jennings, Industrial Distribution Program coordinator at Texas A&M, expressed appreciation for TTI's donation. "TTI's gift to us is more than money," Jennings said. "It's their commitment in every respect to the excellence of our students, the program and the university overall."

Avnet Offers Xilinx Kit

Avnet Design Services, a business unit of Avnet Inc., has joined San Jose-based Xilinx Inc. to announce the availability of a development kit for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp.'s StrongARM microprocessor, created to provide OEM customers with a complete development environment for Intel StrongARM processor-based embedded processor designs. The kit costs $8,995 and includes a development board, the Xilinx PCI core license agreement, the Intel StrongARM PCI interface module, and 16 hours of consulting services to help customers prepare the board for the software development phase of their particular embedded application. "The Intel StrongARM PCI Development Kit provides customers with a ready-made environment that allows them to have hardware up and running quickly so that the software portion of the design can begin right away," said Warren Miller, vice president of marketing for Avnet Design Services. "Avnet's Intel StrongARM PCI Development Kit with the Xilinx Spartan-II FPGA is a welcome addition to the Intel StrongARM development environment and offers a flexible, functional starting point for developing or modifying PCI-based designs," added Tom Yemington, marketing manager for Intel's Handheld Computing Division.

PartMiner Sends New Troops to Europe

PartMiner Inc., New York, recently opened a new office in Stuttgart, Germany, in response to an increased demand for its services in Europe. Hans Scheible, former manager at Burr-Brown Corp., will assume the role of managing director, Central Europe, and will be working from Stuttgart. In his new position, he will be charged with expanding the company's German-speaking sales team and introducing new customers to the Free Trade Zone. Scheible noted that 50 percent of PartMiner's users are based outside the United States, making it vital to build a strong organization in Central Europe.

Avnet Germany to Sell E-Commerce Tool

Avnet CMG, the German subsidiary of Avnet Inc., and Vision Solutions Inc., an Information Availability Management Solutions company, announced a distribution alliance, making the Hall-Mark Computer Products division a distributor of Vision's products in Germany. Avnet and IBM Global Services are the only two approved distributors of Vision's e-business products in that country. In addition, Avnet will have the exclusive distribution rights for the Vision Suite, a product consisting of three modules that delivers disaster recovery, group simulcast, work balancing and horizontal growth. Executives from both companies agree that the deal represents a growth opportunity for the two companies, as products and services that support e-business continue to rise.