The unfurling of the Westcon brand is a step to consolidating and leveraging a larger unifying identity for its business in the emerging markets, which forms a growing focus for the group. Besides the Westcon brand, the group also manages Comstor which is now the largest Cisco distributor worldwide and in the region.

Steve Lockie who oversees the regional operations of these two separate entities in the region at a strategic level, is a veteran of channel operations. Lockie was earlier the MD of Tech Data’s Middle East operations and later worked on a different assignment in the UK. In his new role, he has his hands full with the challenging economic scenario. He is however cautiously optimistic and believes that they will be able to show a fair growth this year.

Lockie says, “Online Distribution has done great work here but to leverage the brand across the region, it was logical to rebrand as Westcon. We are directly owned by Datatec, although we are part of the Westcon family. As Datatec, we have a distribution business worldwide. There are two sides to the business. The Comstor side of it which is exclusively Cisco business and the Westcon part which includes all the other vendors put together.”

The group itself is in a phase of expanding presence in emerging markets including Africa and India through takeovers that have already been executed. Now the next step is to leverage sysnergies across the board. The trick is also to keep the Comstor operations independent and separately focused on Cisco because that is a significant business for the group.

Datatec made a couple of acquisitions under the Westcon umbrella in the past couple of years and at the same time outside the umbrella. Two notable ones were Weston South Africa and the other was Online Distribution.

Lockie says, “When a couple of years ago, we wanted to grow the footprint of the business, we looked to emerging markets and to introduce the Comstor brand and really start consolidating. Just a few months ago, we announced the formation of Westcon emerging markets and that is the culmination of some of those efforts. As a result, we have Westcon South Africa and Westcon Africa which is a combination of Jet Distribution and the Sparnoon-Dynatech Group. We also entered India making a great acquisition of Inflow Technologies, a VAD.”

The group decided to keep Westcon Emerging markets reporting directly into Datatec Europe.

Online Distribution has done great work here but to leverage the brand across the region, it was logical to rebrand as Westcon. We are directly owned by Datatec, although we are part of the Westcon family. As Datatec, we have a distribution business worldwide. There are two sides to the business. The Comstor side of it which is exclusively Cisco business and the Westcon part which includes all the other vendors put together.

Lockie adds, “Westcon has a huge presence worldwide, in the Americas and even Europe. The efforts to establish the business in the emerging markets is quite significant. Besides, the business practises, days of the week, compliance regulations here are much different to Europe. We are reporting in directly to Datatec so that we get the required attention as well as funding. This allows Westcon Emerged to continue to grow their businesses through acquisitions or merger in Eastern Europe etc while here, we follow this reporting structure.”

There are some good synergies between the businesses in Emerging markets.

The Comstor business is based out of Dubai Airport Free Zone as a separate entity with separate resources. That business has grown for the group.

Adds Lockie, “ We are number 1 Cisco distribution partner in the region. From Cisco’s viewpoint, we have been able to work in harmony with other distributors and up the ante. This has meant a lot of in-country investments and our own growth has been through acquisition of new partners. We have introduced the new VARs to our programs where we can assist these resources to become voice specialists in terms of convergence or security specialists or simply Africa specialists. We also maintain a common back-office and that helps us scale easily.”

Westcon buying out Online Distibution was also helped by the fact that the company had a similar line of business. Online had a portfolio that included security solutions, convergence solutions, wireless and enterprise mobility business. Some of the notable milestones for the group this year include entering into the convergence market, growing and extending Nortel’s business into Saudi Arabia. It also tied up with vendors including Avaya for the voice solutions, Legrand on the structured cabling front, and Sonicwall for security products. With such a broad kitty of complementary solutions, the distributor has been cleverly positioning various options to its VARs.

Lockie says, “We have multiple products from different vendors and can introduce resellers to new solutions.We have started to cross market into the reseller base more strongly since the Westcon rebranding. We have got cabling and are specialised into data centre solutions. Data centre has become a marketing theme and similarly security.”

The next element of the distributor’s activities this year is to create some more demand in end user environments. Seminars will be one of the line of activities that it will be looking at.

Lockie adds, “Customers are not interested in technology per se. Everyone has the same challenges. Cost savings are a big concern. They are also interested to look at how to enable mobile workforce and to increase productivity. We will look to our vendors to help us take that story to the end users.”

The distributor is aware that there are other technologies that they don’t presently carry on the software side especially. However, it looks like the group is quite convinced that it needs to be a specialist VAD.

It is always quite difficult because there are so many good technologies. We are open to doing roadshows with them. We don’t necessarily have to hold the franchise to have an attractive proposition for that market. For instance, we have interesting options for VMWare VARs who are into providing datacentre consolidation. While w don’t need to carry the vendor necessarily for that, co-marketing is an option.”

He adds, “In the words of our CEO, we are not everything to everyone. What we aim is to be the specialists. For instance, if someone is setting up a datacentre, it involves working with electronmechanical suppliers. We don’t provide all that stuff and we don’t intend to. What we try and provide are the best cabinets, best networking equipment etc. If we intend to provide all of it, we lose our specialism and become more of a broadline distribution house. VARs can pick up what we provide and source other elements of the required gear from other distributors.”

Lockie claims that they haven’t yet been affected yet by the economic slowdown. The group is also betting on areas which are likely to see healthy growth this year.

He says, “Our pipeline for the next 3 months is quite strong but beyond that is a bit cloudy. We still see good business coming from Qatar, Kuwait, KSA and UAE. The government budgets are still strong while the private sector has pulled down a little. We see good growth opportunities for the short term. Commercial real estate is still going up and that is really where we sell. The last thing businesses want to compromise is security and we have seen this part of the business doing well. Our mobility business should hold up. Data centre business which brings consolidation should also grow. So there are enough reasons to believe that the businesses we play in should do well.”

However in the present scenario, he doesn’t rule out extraneous factors like a credit crunch in the market, or the time to recovery of the private sector and beside the fiscal health of the vendors themselves playing a significant role in the months ahead. While all that involves a bit of crystal ball gazing, Lockie and his team believe that they should still see a reasonable growth in this year.

Lockie comments, “Our Comstor business has always been strong and has grown quarter to quarter. Last quarter was the best so far and we became the largest Cisco distributor in the region. The Westcon business has also grown aided by a couple of large deals. But the best is yet to come, I believe. We want to be the number one distributor for Avaya in the region. We are modifying our view on Juniper and taking it to market as an end to end vendor rather than as a security vendor. We are able to provide regional leverages in terms of training and support across the Middle East, Africa and India; there is no other distributor who is able to provide such a compelling proposition to vendors.”

And with tools like ‘MailVision’ its reseller awareness tool, innovative and cost effective ways of providing training over the web to its select VAR channel, the distributor is signalling that it is here to walk the talk.