Westcon to broaden Intact skills in major services play

Distributor's UK and EMEA leadership talk services, cloud and margin challenges

Westcon plans to use recent addition Intact Integrated Services as a power base to ramp up its services offering.

Intact, which Westcon acquired from parent company Datatec earlier this year, specialises in providing third-party services to the Cisco channel. Jeremy Butt, EMEA vice president of Westcon, claimed the distributor is seeing early opportunities around its Cisco-dedicated Comstor business, but claimed Intact's 200 employees will gradually be skilled up across the rest of Westcon's portfolio of comms and security vendors.

"Intact had a great business but did not have a great route to market; through Comstor, we give them access to a fantastic route to market for Cisco resellers - not just in [its existing locations] Germany and the UK, but also going into other countries."

Tony Nevill, Westcon's UK and Ireland managing director, claimed that "we are already at 65 per cent utilisation of the increased technical resource". He said early additions to the Intact kitbag were likely to be services around F5 and Check Point technology, and thereafter "the challenge will be deciding in which order we tick off" other vendor partners.

"We are already beginning to see the opportunities in the UK," said Nevill. "The rest of the year and next year we will be scaling up the technical resources."

Cloudy outlook
Westcon has been on something of a shopping spree of late, with cloud aggregation specialist Verecloud another recent acquisition. Scott Tolley has been brought in to head the distributor's cloud business across EMEA. Nevill explained that Westcon had decided that aggregation was the most channel-friendly approach to cloud.

"One thing we are crystal clear on is that we do not want to compete with our partners," he said. "Therefore a decision was taken that we did not want to stand up our own datacentre and our own cloud services. Our role, at least for the short- to medium-term future, is to identify best-of-breed cloud-based solutions and provide those to the market. The beauty of being an aggregation partner is that a reseller gets a single point of contact."

In its 2014 fiscal year the distributor saw its margins decline, which was in part chalked up to a reduction in Cisco discount levels. Nevill claimed that Westcon's performance so far in FY15 indicates that it is back on track.

"We have just concluded our first half at the end of August and, across all our solution practices, we were ahead of our goal from both a revenue and a gross margin perspective," he explained. "We are predicting to be ahead of goal for the second half of the year, so I think we have managed to address any issues."