Kathea has become a specialised distributor of Huawei video conferencing (VC) and unified communications (UC) products.
As an established visual collaboration specialist whose channel partners service more than 90% of South Africa’s top 40 listed companies, Kathea is adopting a multi-channel VC strategy for the first time.
“We believe this partnership will prove to be a game changer and we are really excited about it,” says Richard Henn, CEO of Kathea. “Kathea is looking to diversify its offerings in the ever expanding communications industry.
“With a solid track record of more than 20 years in the communications field, Huawei has developed multiple industry-leading converged voices, data, video and service flow technologies.
“Kathea’s experience in the communications space, supported by Huawei’s technology, has all the ingredients to service the VC and UC market in a way that will prove beneficial to both parties but most importantly to the channel community.
“We have a team of engineers who have been trained by Huawei to assist any of our partners in the channel and we will be able to give ongoing training to our partners around product awareness in our Johannesburg, Cape Town Durban and PE branches. We are looking to aggressively grow the market with Huawei. We will be supporting the channel 100% with pre sales, sales and support.”
From October 2016 onwards, Kathea will begin distributing Huawei’s industry-leading UC and VC solutions which feature mobility, converged video and cloud collaboration with an aim to help enterprises achieve more convenient communication, higher productivity, and more powerful sales and service delivery.
“The agreement is likely to disrupt the landscape of enterprise video conferencing in Southern Africa,” says Rodger van den Berg, unified communications and collaboration solutions manager of the Huawei Enterprise Business Group. “With Kathea being the largest dedicated team in Sub-Saharan Africa for video and related-services, we look forward to providing more flexibility to their existing 200 VC resellers by including cutting-edge Huawei products.”
“Huawei is making huge leaps and bounds in the ICT market, gaining recognition from industry customers across government, transportation, energy, electric power, finance, and large enterprise sectors. In 2016, Huawei Technologies rose to position 129 on the Global Fortune 500 from position 228 in 2015. According to IDC, Huawei is ranked number three globally in the enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment market,” continues van den Berg.
Going forward, Kathea and Huawei plan to hold joint multi-year training and certification programs to up-skill channel partners and enhance their strategic alliance.