charles taylor - stock.adobe.com
Westcon-Comstor European unification efforts progressing
Distributor announced at the start of March it was looking to go to market across the region with a more unified approach
It has been a couple of months since Westcon-Comstor made the move to unify its European operations under a single leader in a move designed to make life easier for staff, vendors and partners.
The executive given the task of bringing the distributor’s activities together under one banner was Rene Klein, executive vice-president for Europe, and he has already made progress implementing the strategy.
Although Klein was given the European role at the start of March, he has been working with the distie in various international roles since 2007.
The idea of unifying strategy was not a new concept to Westcon-Comstor. It had been an approach already taken in other geographic regions, and there had been some efforts to overlay a European-wide strategy under the guidance of Simon Thompson. “If you look at the European organisation, it has always been differently, let’s say, managed, than what we already have in the Middle East and Africa and in APAC,” he said. “In APAC, and in the Middle East and Africa, I have two peers, two individuals that are running the region like I’m now running Europe.
“David Grant [CEO of Westcon-Comstor] asked me, ‘Can you come up with an organisational structure that is really aligned to the Middle East and Africa and APAC?’ The majority of those reasons to do this were, first of all, digital automation is so crucial when you are in the industry – but especially for a distributor, and if you want to harmonise your working processes, your flows,” said Klein. “If you want to harmonise your automation and all your tooling, it’s much more efficient if you all work in the same way.
“Then secondly, we have looked at our go-to-market strategy, and if you look at our go-to-market strategy, the world is really evolving into a world where a new sales motion like hyperscalers is involved with AWS [Amazon Web Services], Google and Microsoft,” he added. “They’re definitely a new sales motion that will not go away.”
The final area where unification is expected to make a positive impact is around customer experience, whether that be staff, partner or vendor. “We have looked at the customer experience,” said Klein. “Let’s say our partner experience, our vendor experience and our employee experience. If you have all these overlay functions, what is the partner experience or the vendor experience? Because they are looking for distribution to be their outlet to skill.”
Support and market knowledge
He said that vendors and partners looked to Westcon-Comstor, which was offering something different to the broadliners, and expected high levels of support and market knowledge.
“We have a unique go-to-market strategy, but at the same time, we can scale in Europe into 17 countries – not that many companies that are that special,” said Klein.
“When we talk about Westcon, when we talk about Comstor and all these overlay functions that have definitely value to bring them all together, let’s make sure that if automation is that crucial, intelligent demand at scale … tech communities at scale, then you need to make sure that your whole organisation globally is aligned to one model,” he said. “That makes it much more efficient.”
Klein acknowledges that bringing together a strategy that for years has been often masterminded at a local level is a major project.
“When the company is as successful as we have been in the last five to six years, you just automatically forget to have focus on, ‘Is it really super-efficient?’,” he said, adding that hypersaclers are changing the dynamics of the market, and it was a good moment to pause and consider the future approach.
“You don’t often just pause and say, ‘Hey, but if we organise ourselves in a slightly different way, can we become even more successful?’” said Klein. “Hyperscale is coming into the mix – with margins being under pressure from hardware to software to subscription, you also need to think about what is the most efficient go-to-market.
“It’s a big project and what I’m telling my staff internally is, ‘Can you imagine how fast we grow if we get this right?’, because we are already growing fast,” he said.
