MONTREAL – Westcon Canada, a subsidiary of multinational value-added distributor, Westcon Group, Inc., recently expanded its Canadian head office facility by relocating from Lachine, Que. to Dorval, Que.
The new facility measures a total of 24,000 square feet, compared to its prior building in Lachine, which was only 9,000 square feet.
In addition to its new Dorval facility, Westcon Canada also has an office in Oakville, Ont.
Dean Douglas, president and CEO of Tarrytown, N.Y.-based Westcon Group, said the company expects its Canadian business will “lead the economy for the Americas to help keep the business growing.”
CDN had the opportunity to speak with Douglas during the grand opening of the new Montreal facility, where he discussed the company’s past year in business and what’s next for 2010.
CDN Now: How would you sum up Westcon’s overall business this year?
Dean Douglas: Our fiscal year begins March 1, so it’s our fiscal year 2010, so as we look at the year, it’s pretty much three-quarters through the end of calendar year. We started the year looking at the marketplace and wondering what was going to happen next. There really wasn’t any indication as to whether the markets would rebound and if there would be growth, so it was a very interesting time in March of last year. In April and May, we started to see some stabilization. We saw the North American market stabilize and we started to feel a bit more confident about how the market would play out. As you look at the Westcon business, it’s an excellent arbiter of GDP growth and we tend to reflect that very rapidly, so we’re able to now see some bright spots in certain parts of the world, where economies are starting to come back and countries are starting to see a little bit of growth and that’s obviously helped us a lot. On top of that, some of our portfolio continues to grow even in a downturn. We saw that with our security business for example. Network security continues to be a real concern and there are real issues with network security that just don’t seem to go away; downturn, upturn, it really doesn’t matter. Now we’re looking at sequential quarter growth and we’re expecting year-over-year growth as we look to the next fiscal year.
CDN Now: What’s Westcon’s go to market strategy moving forward?
D.D.: As we look at the market place going forward, in addition to our Comstor business around Cisco and our convergence and security business, we think there are a few other “S’s” that will be very interesting opportunities for us going forward. One of those areas is in services. We do a lot in services and when you look at our services portfolio today, we do global deployments. Last year, for example, we did over 20,000 cross-boarder transactions. We know how to do broad-based deployments for large systems integrators, large resellers and large service providers across multiple countries. The second “S” is in security. We have a network security business and I think that business will continue to evolve and manifest itself in very different ways going forward as the market place changes and the climates for security become much more complex. The third “S” is servers. We announced recently we’re bringing on the Cisco UCS platform and we think that will be a nice growth area for us as virtualization takes hold and more IT organizations move to that platform. The final “S” is software. Earlier this year, we announced a relationship with Microsoft in the U.S. and we helped expand that relationship with them both geographically and from a portfolio standpoint. The four “S’s” we think are great complements to the business and portfolio we have today, we’re not going to be a broad-liner, but we’ll remain a specialty distributor. We’ll focus in on each one of our vendors to provide true value to the marketplace. That doesn’t mean we’re going to ignore our Comstor business. We’ll continue to invest in this business and grow this business on a worldwide basis by expanding geographically. We think convergence will provide us with a great deal of opportunity going forward too. Especially here in Canada, the convergence business is one that’s had a great deal of uncertainty around it. With regards to Nortel, we’re very much at the forefront in trying to make that transition as smooth as possible in terms of how things will work, so our partners and customers are comfortable with this transition.
CDN Now: What will Westcon be working on in the New Year?
D.D.: We’ve just opened up our brand new warehouse here (Dorval, Que.), it’s increased our size by multiples and we only occupy a small part of that warehouse. So when we think about 2010 and the kinds of investments we’ll be making in our business going forward, we think this warehouse and the resources and people resources that we’re bringing here to Montreal, will allow us to provide not only better quality of service, but will also allow us to have product available and be able to deliver it. We can also provide reverse logistics capabilities here. As managed services contracts come to a close or as technology refreshes are required, we can go and decommission the product and take the product into our warehouse and either destroy it, refurbish it, or just store it. We don’t take possession and the title of the product, we just do this as a service and that will give many of our Canadian resellers ways to think about how they can continue to refresh products. We also have a very robust team here in Canada, so we’re going to put a lot of resources here in Montreal specifically which we’ve designated as North American resources.
CDN Now: How can your reseller partners best prepare themselves for the end of the recession?
D.D.: There are two things our resellers should focus on. They shouldn’t forget that there’s going to be a real latent demand out there (once the recession’s over). There are a lot of people that deferred decisions and some of those decisions were for whole systems or upgrades. Resellers should think how they can address this and what they need to do to go after the opportunities that are out there. The second thing is that resellers should be focused on the great set of products they have today. There’s a lot of buzz around cloud computing and the like and that’s very real and this is something to be educated on. In the calendar year 2010, our resellers should really be focused on the portfolio and capabilities they have because that’s what their customers will be looking for.
Customers are not going to be in the mood to experiment. Partners will need to address those latent demand issues for products that meet those requirements both now and into the future.
