Marching into the New Year with an enviable army of vendors and a clear-cut execution strategy, Westcon New Zealand has big plans for 2015, both at home and overseas.
Following a year of significant change at the distributor, triggered by an executive level reshuffle and a high-profile cloud acquisition, the Kiwi division continues to breathe fresh life into the channel market, executing a business approach built on quality, cloud and a healthy solutions portfolio.
“We have a very positive outlook for the year ahead, and unsurprisingly security will be high on the agenda for many companies,” says Mark Baker, Sales and Marketing Director, Westcon New Zealand.
“We’re continuing our transition to hosted applications and the ability for the channel to continue to support and add value to businesses.”
Speaking exclusively to Reseller News, Baker, who replaced Dave Rosenberg as the head of the company’s Kiwi division in September 2014, also expects service provider development to continue to blossom in the local market, alongside application developers which “continues to gain relevance” in the industry.
“It’s good to settle down and look ahead to 2015,” adds Baker, who has successfully negotiated an era of significant change for the New Zealand company. “We’ve had a good solid vendor list for a long period of time which we have optimised a little over the past few years.
“We’ve moved out a few things that were not conducive to the business, profitability wise. We had quite a legacy of older stuff so it was prudent to do some trimming and we’ve done that - we’re always looking for quality not quantity.
“The business is not wasting time on things taking a lot of effort but not returning much revenue.”
Operating as a value-added distributor of category-leading unified communications, network infrastructure, data centre and security solutions, in New Zealand, Westcon boasts a large portfolio of services, even compared to its sister company across the Tasman.
Ranging from Actifio to X-IO, the Kiwi branch has well-known experience in designing, deploying, and supporting some of the largest and most complex solutions across the country, leading to a greater alignment with the company’s global strategy.
“Global agreements have given us some good quality vendors as part of global deals which we’re executing now,” adds Baker, who first joined the company in May 1997, nearly 18 years ago.
“The global business now has got a solid process around evaluating a new vendor and putting some rigger around how we’re going to onboard vendors.”
Of the company’s expanding portfolio, which includes a greater focus on cloud solutions, Baker believes the infrastructure into hosting / service provider community has displayed strong signs of growth during the past twelve months especially, from virtualisation technologies, security and the management of complex environments.
Other noticeable areas of growth for the company have been around Security Treat prevention and proactive management, as well as secure connectivity and a growing interest in big data analytics and Security Audit Reports identifying vulnerabilities.
“I think our Data Centre Solutions and Security Technologies are the strongest,” adds Baker, acknowledging that from a business perspective, 2014 was a “solid” year for the company.
