INTERVIEW David Grant - Westcon International
“Resellers like the technical shifts in the market but buyer behaviour is much more conservative than the
messaging coming from the vendors.“ David Grant, President & COO, Westcon International
Optimising Business
Comms Business Magazine met up with David Grant, recently promoted to President and COO of Westcon
following his reshaping of the business over the last two years. A position from which Grant can consolidate
the organisation for the next phase of growth and evolution
“We’re in good shape,”
says David Grant before
going on to say that good
indicators of that position
can be seen in how well they
are doing for vendor partners
which in turn is re ected in
new country appointments,
industry awards and the
increasing number of customers
they are dealing with.
Europe is a particularly
important territory for
Westcon, generating 60% of
their revenues.
Grant says that there are two
distinct routes to market for
the distributor, Cyber Security
and Uni ed Communications,
Collaboration and Networking.
“Cyber security is shifting
focus to the cloud, which
is re ected in our recent
acquisition of Netskope, a
Magic Quadrant leader in
cloud security. is strengthens
our Next Generation Solutions
(NGS) o ering in cloud and
data security by adding a pure
play cloud security vendor and
o ering adapted security to
customers that are making the
transition into the cloud.
Likewise, Uni ed
Communications and
Collaboration applications
have also shifted and become
mainstream in the form of
UCaaS. Our expertise at
Westcon is now to focus on
customer engagement and
target the growth opportunities
in both routes.”
According to Grant the
term Digital Transformation is
overused.
“We focus on helping
partners by providing
opportunities to develop
business the way the user
wants. Resellers like the
technical shifts in the market
but buyer behaviour is much
more conservative than the
messaging coming from the
vendors.
Whilst there is still a
group of what we might call
traditional or legacy partners
with pragmatic business
models, users are becoming
more attracted to the more
agile, cloud-based reseller.”
According to Grant some
vendors are still nding the
shift to a cloud model a
challenge.
“One area that Westcon
is looking to invest in is
Technology Refresh and
generating a sales motion that
is fully engaged in subscriptionbased
apps where renewal
can often be a challenge and
upselling di cult. e security
market has been a typical
subscription model market
where users subscribe to
product for say 12-36 months
contracts whereas the cloud
model is more like one-month
contracts.
e core of our business
is software supplied on
subscription and here resellers
can use our single instance
SAP platform to see all their
customer subscriptions and
revenues online. For our
resellers this drives revenue by
automation and reduces their
time spent on administration.
As a result, resellers have more
time to focus on selling and
adding value through customer
support.
My job has been to stabilise
and grow our business and now
is the time to optimise that
position. We need to localise
more services for the customer,
become less centralised and
become more agile and
responsive.”
Grants says the Avaya deal
with RingCentral is still very
much in its early days.
“Core products that
provide APIs are very
useful but for a distributor
the choice has always been
about which third party
applications to support –
you can’t support them all
as the volume will never be
there. So, we have to decide
which are the most relevant
apps. ese
are di cult
decisions to
make at
times and
we must
never lose sight of our core
business products.”
David Grant, President and COO
of Westcon International
ED SAYS…
Westcon has some 1600 employees in Europe
and has prepared well for multiple Brexit
eventualities and outcomes. The company
has always had a strong presence in both the
UK and in the Netherlands so is well insulated
in terms of movement of hardware and is
comfortable that the new UK government,
whether through leadership or sheer weight
of numbers, will provide the clarity business
need for the future.
54 | Comms Business Magazine | March 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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