Martine Dodwell-Bennett
Career so far: My early years were spent in cost accounting (engineering and manufacturing), then eight years in credit management (construction and IT industry), two years in IT service delivery, five years in business management and now sales director at Steljes. And I know that makes me look old, but I left school at 16. Honest. If you could be anyone for a week, who would you be and what would you do? I’d be my husband, as I’d love to see if he is as busy as he tells me he is.
What would you have as your last meal? Anything as long as I’m with friends. Alternatively, if it’s all gone horribly wrong and I’m alone in a prison cell, then I’ll have a seafood linguini and a glass of Chablis.
What is the best corporate jolly you have ever been on/taken partners on? France 1998. I went to the England v Tunisia game in Marseille with a minibus of friends. After the match we bumped into some business colleagues and gate-crashed the HP party. We had an awesome time, by far the best party I’ve never been invited to. And since I couldn’t say it at the time, thanks very much HP.
Do you see the cloud as a threat or an opportunity? It’s an opportunity. As services and data move into the cloud, the means of communicating with those elements becomes evermore key in exploiting them. AV should be playing a key role in this. Screens, whiteboards and displays need to give end users a seamless and easy-to-use interface into those services. Steljes will be working with our partners to bring together the elements needed to give our resellers a solid and marketable offering beyond the simple supply of equipment.
Have any of your predictions come true this year? I don’t do predictions. I listen to everybody else’s, select those most likely and then adjust our business to enable us to move should they prove true. I like to operate on what we know today.
What do you see as the channel’s biggest challenge in 2011? The continued convergence of IT, AV and Telco. It’s not easy and without partnerships or in-house skills to adapt, I expect there will be some casualties. Steljes spends a lot of time supporting our channel partners who are challenged in exactly this way.