Westcon International outlines changes following Americas disposal

COO David Grant talked Tom Wright through the changes at the distributor after its Americas business was sold to Synnex

Datatec finally completed the sale of Westcon-Comstor's Americas business on 1 September, bringing the curtain down on a lengthy and initially mysterious transaction.

In a somewhat unorthodox deal, US distributor Synnex acquired the Americas arm of Datatec's Westcon business, as well as a 10 per cent share in the EMEA and APAC business - now dubbed Westcon International - with the option of doubling its stake at a later date.

A sale of some kind was first announced in January when Datatec said it had entered into negotiations regarding a transaction, before drip-feeding information over the coming months.

Announcing the sale in June, Datatec CEO Jens Montanana said hem would have ideally liked to offload the whole Westcon business, but has instead been left with a significant chunk of a business that has struggled over recent times.

In fiscal 2017, revenue for Westcon-Comstor (before the sale) fell seven per cent year on year to $4.9bn (£3.7bn), while operating profit dropped 67 per cent to £20.3m.

Speaking to CRN just after the transaction closed, David Grant (pictured), COO of Westcon International (which encompasses Westcon-Comstor's EMEA and APAC business), said that the new, leaner Westcon is better placed to serve partners and vendors than when it still had its American business, and revealed changes that have already been made internally.

"We can now move forward because these investments and acquisitions are always time consuming," Grant said.

"We now have a leadership team that is centred in EMEA. We have people in region responsible for driving the business and I think that understanding of the market, speed of response and ability to make local decisions are the areas that our customers are going to benefit from.

"Having a representative of Synnex on our executive team means we can get an insight and develop our business through an additional lens, but it also allows us to spend all our time focused on growing our business, serving our customers (partners) and supporting our vendors."

Westcon has also merged its unified comms and security units into one team. As a result, the distributor has shuffled its executive pack, with Rene Klein now SVP of Westcon Europe - which encompasses the UCC and security business - and Willem de Haan SVP of Comstor Europe, which houses the Cisco side of the business.

Despite Synnex taking control of the Americas business, a relationship will remain between the separated pair in the form of a joint venture (JV) that can be leveraged by global partners, dubbed Westcon-Comstor Global Deployment Solutions.

"Our global transactions fall into three categories," Grant said. "Firstly our 19 global customers which are the likes of BT, Verizon, AT&T who we transact with locally and on a global basis; we have some vendors that don't have a global coverage model which we support; and there are also a number of regional resellers which from time to time have an international project.

"One of the questions I was asked by our largest customers and our global vendors was 'how are you going to continue to service those clients' global requirements?'

"We have established with Synnex a JV organisation which will allow us to continue to offer that seamless global go-to-market. It will be driven and supported by all the people who used to undertake that business for Westcon-Comstor when we were a single organisation, but the governance will be shared between Synnex and Westcon International.

"We're not going to be burying it somewhere deep internally, we're going to market it and both Synnex and Westcon believe that there is more opportunity now to work with vendors and with partners on global deployments."

Increased vendor focus

Along with the sale of the Americas business, Westcon has been dealing with a troublesome SAP rollout that had a significant impact on its fiscal 2017 results.

With the worst of this now behind it, Grant said that Westcon will be putting more of an emphasis on aligning itself with its vendors.

"We've been spending a lot of time investing in establishing a unified business foundation with SAP," he said. "It means that we can now really leverage that time and investment getting back to being exclusively focused on vendors, customers and growing the business.

"As we move forward we're looking to adapt the business to not only give us customer focus, but really bring additional focus on our vendors' objectives.

"In distribution our channel customers are absolutely critical, but being aligned to our vendors' objectives and working seamlessly with them is just as important."