The new president and CEO of specialty distributor Westcon Group says he has ample credit facilities available to help resellers and solution providers get deals done. It’s just a matter of getting the word out to the channel that the programs are there.
Dean Douglas will officially take the helm of Westcon on April 1st, having served as COO since last June under Westcon co-founder Tom Dolan. Dolan will become chair of Westcon’s board of directors. Prior to joining Westcon, Douglas held senior executive roles, primarily focused on services, with IBM and Motorola, and also led Motorola’s joint venture with Cisco Systems.
Douglas said Westcon has grown pretty solidly over the last several years, and has done a lot of the right things around vendor management, reseller engagement, and building processes that drive reseller and vendor value and profit. Those are areas Douglas doesn’t want to change, but he said he doesn’t have three key priorities for Westcon going forward.
The first is driving liquidity to the channel. Douglas said Westcon recognized last year liquidity is the biggest challenge resellers are facing, and has created several programs designed to help credit-challenged resellers and ensure they have sufficient credit to do large transactions.
They have the credit program in place, said Douglas. The challenge has been getting the word out.
“We have very robust lines of credit and we’re nowhere near capped-out. It’s fractions of our lines of credit (that have been used) so we have a lot of headroom and capability,” said Douglas. “I think there’s a lot we can do to help resellers (around credit).”
The second priority for Douglas is broadening Westcon’s global reach, particularly leveraging the distie’s logistical and market expertise in different geographies to help large international resellers and global systems integrators build their international business and do engagements cross-border.
“We can help companies figure-out how to deploy all this equipment to their offices around the globe in a tax efficient and duty-mitigated way that conforms to government regulations,” said Douglas. “Last year we did 20,000 cross-border transactions. The market is really demanding this.”
Third, Douglas will continue to have Westcon invest in services, and particularly process-driven services, helping VARs improve their services by outsourcing particular process, perhaps around procurement. Finally, Douglas also sees growing opportunity around reverse logistics, assisting with electronics recycling and refurbishment.
Douglas said he has travelled to Canada a number of times since joining Westcon and it’s a great market for the distie and one they’ve been investing heavily in, with a warehouse and office in Montreal, another office in Toronto, and field staff across the country. And he said that investment will continue.
“We recently took on a number of vendors in Canada, and today we have a portfolio of vendors there that’s unrivaled,” said Douglas, mentioning Avaya, Juniper, Cisco and Checkpoint. “I don’t think there’s another distributor that has that breadth of capability (in Canada). We see a tremendous amount of opportunity, and we want to continue to invest and grow.”
From his view, Douglas said the state of the economy is about the same in Canada as in the U.S., although Canada did enter the downturn a little later. The market is down and spending is down, but it hasn’t ended and it will recover, he said.
“I think our investments in Canada are paying off and we’ll continue to see a pretty robust business in Canada going forward,” said Douglas. “As the economy recovers we’ll be very well positioned to take advantage of it. We have local management that understands how to do business, people from Canada, and that has helped a great deal as well.”
