Westcon aims for 100 percent growth

Westcon, a distribution arm of the $5

billion Datatech Group, has notched up global revenue of $3 billion

with the aim of doubling that in the next four years. Closer home,

the company registered $102 million growing at around 50 percent over

last year. “Our revenue from the Indian market grew from Rs 300

crore to around Rs 470 crore. For the coming year, we are aiming at

achieving 100 percent growth in this market,” said Rajiv

Unnikrishnan, Business Head, Westcon India.

Westcon has two other sister concerns

namely, href="http://news.ciol.com/BusinessWire/Business-Science-amp-technology/Comstor-partners-with-Cisco-as-a-National-Distributor-for-India/22567/0/">Comstor,

which primarily handles the Cisco business for the

company, and Inflow, which is another distributor in the Indian IT

supply chain landscape. Currently, the company has around nine

principal vendors on board, including names like Motorola, Zebra for

enterprise mobility; Blue Coat, Sonicwall, F5 and Bigfix for

security; and Extreme and Motorola Wireless for networking.

Unnikrishnan explained the value that Westcon brings as a value-added

distributor, “There is an expectation from the market for the

distributor to be more involved in the go-to-market strategy from a

technical, marketing, customer and channel perspective. Where Westcon

adds real value as a company, is the level of involvement we show

with all the partners we engage with. From a channels point of view,

we enable them with pre-sales and post-sales support and also help

them with implementation and deployment. Besides this, we also

conduct training for our resellers.”

Westcon presently has a reseller base

of around 180 partners of which more than 20 are national SIs; more

than 15 are regional SIs; around five sub-distributors and with the

rest making up local SIs. Westcon has more than 40 employees working

across eight office locations including the four metros, Bengaluru,

Hyderabad, Kochi and Pune.

Sharing briefly about some of the plans

the company has, Unnikrishnan commented, “We plan on increasing our

product portfolio along the existing lines we are already in. We wish

to add other brands, which do not compete with our current base of

principals. We already have products like UTMs and would like to

enhance our security offering with quality anti-virus, firewall and

IPS products. In networking, we would like to add a structured

cabling brand and are looking to sign on three more principals this

year.” Staying with the expansion theme, Unnikrishnan also revealed

the plans for the reseller base and company expansion, “Talking

about our reseller base, we plan to increase this by 20 percent over

the coming year. We also wish to expand our geographic presence to

Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and for the Indian market, set up an office

in Ahmedabad.”

Dwelling on other aspects like the

go-to-market strategy, Unnikrishnan ideated, “We would like to

execute our marketing to our channels and end-customers very well for

the coming year. Until now, we have been managing, but we want to do

better at the way we conduct our events, send out EDMs and also do

our lead generation activities.” The services space is also an area

that Westcon hopes to give its attention. “We recently tied up with

Blue Coat as its technical services partner and our employees were

being evaluated for training others on some high-end devices. After

getting trained, we wish to pass this on to our partners as well.”

Finally, Unnikrishan revealed some of

the challenges in the market, “There are still some issues with

aspects like credit given, working capital and cash flows from our

resellers end and often we have to deal with delayed payments. Also

there has been volatility in the foreign exchange market and being

importers of these IT products, we tend to get negatively affected by

the frequent fluctuations that occur. Although, the year was better

than last year, we are yet to see the 2008 levels return and there is

a lot of fear of another round of recession hitting the economy,”

signed off Unnikrishnan.