Why COVID-19 is "a blessing in disguise" for this Dell Platinum partner

Dell partner Constor Solutions believes its new office in India strengthens its position to withstand the financial impact of COVID-19, according to its sales director Foiz Ahmed.

The new office in Hyderabad marks the reseller's expansion outside of its London base and Ahmed explained that it was chosen to take advantage of the technical expertise in the area as a result of the large Dell office nearby.

The eight recruits to the new office have all worked for Dell in the past, including MD Samuel Veerasingh who spent 16 years with the vendor, leading the pre-sales team in his most recent role before departing.

Constor MD Suman Ramesh Babu last year outlined his plans to CRN to double Constor's revenues to £9m in its most recent fiscal year, but Ahmed admitted that revenue had "plateaued" for the year which ended 31 March 2020. He attributed this missed target to challenges around Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis at the end of the fiscal year.

"Towards the end of this year we had a £3m opportunity which slipped because of COVID-19, so our revenues stayed the same," Ahmed said.

"We didn't grow our numbers as we forecast, but we did grow our headcount from 10 to 21 and now that we've got an office in India, hopefully, this year we can grow our revenue."

Indian office boss Veerasingh added that in a way the pandemic is a "blessing in disguise" for Constor's Indian operation, as customers will be warier of having outsiders enter their offices and buildings.

"People will behave very differently post-pandemic, they won't want as many physical contacts as they would have had, such as IT guys coming into the office space to deploy or install stuff," he elaborated.

"What the India office is going to bring to the table is extremely valuable and something not many partners in the UK could boast about. We will be able to manage almost 90 per cent of deployment and project delivery remotely from the India office.

"I think this is something that customers are going to appreciate in the future, or at least in the near future; they don't want outsiders walking into their office and spending a lot of the day there. That fear is going to remain for a while and, in a way, it's a blessing in disguise for us."

Constor recently upgraded to a Dell Platinum partner, despite MD  Babu last year telling CRN it preferred to remain a top-level Gold partner than move up.

Sales director Ahmed said that a number of reasons played into the decision to move up, not least that its resources have expanded in the last year, making it confident it could maintain Premium-tier status, as well as a push from Dell to make the move.

"There were a number of factors [in the decision reversal]; there was a lot of changes in Dell at that time, but also we felt we didn't have the resources," he explained.

"Being a Platinum partner is all about making sure that we can not only maintain that level, but we can also go to the next level of becoming a Titanium partner. We also wanted to show that we were growing as an organisation to serve the world as well."

Constor counts Microsoft, Cisco and AWS among its other partners and sales director Ahmed said it was planning to invest further in its vendor portfolio as part of its plans to change its business model, as well as branch out into workplace and mobile device management offerings.

"We've now invested in some different tools, we've invested in a new CRM solution and we're about to launch a brand new website, which is going to be different and focus on what we're really good at," he stated.

"We don't want to be restricting ourselves and just talking about one vendor and one type of solution. We want to go with a portfolio solution that matches our skills and our technical expertise.

"There's an investment happening within the business to ensure that when this dreaded situation that we're all in does finish, we'll be in a position to really benefit from the investment that we've made."

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• Topics
• Reseller
• Constor Solutions
• Coronavirus
• coronavirus hub
• Expansion