Recognising that distribution faces a host of new challenges, Westcon is looking to strengthen its global services business.
In February this year it appointed Chris Ranger as the new vice-president: services for the EMEA region to set up a new services infrastructure.
Ranger explains that the organisation already offers a number of services, but these tend to be disjointed, with each business unit “doing its own thing”. In addition, acquisitions like Sentronics and Comztek have joined the group with their own security offerings.
Ranger is tasked with building a new services organisation that will operate across all of the diverse business units.
“My role is to look at what services we currently offer, and build a strategy for what the new services organisation will look like. This strategy needs to be based on what the market wants and what the sales operation needs to make Westcon’s customer engagements stickier.
“At the moment, there are too many wheels on the bus, when what we need is a bigger, faster bus.”
For the next few months, Ranger will be examining what resellers and end user customers would want from such as services organisation, and will begin crafting a strategy. Following that, he will develop a suite of services that will be available across the whole operation.
“I’ve been given a clean sheet of paper,” he says.
Ranger expects that the services organisation will offer training and education, technical/help desk support; managed and professional services; annuity services; data centre and Microsoft Lync services; and onsite support and maintenance.
“We will develop the services business into a one-stop show offering consolidation, consistency and scalability,” Ranger says.
He stresses that Westcon’s services organisation will complement both vendor and reseller offerings. In addition, resellers would have the opportunity to offer Westcon services as part of their own customer value-add.
Adding a professional services organisation to the business may not be the only intervention that a distributor like Westcon will need to make in order to stay relevant in a changing market, but Ranger believes it is a key strategic move – and he urges resellers to think about services as way to differentiate themselves as well.
“Margins in hardware alone are not going to justify business in the future,” says Ranger. “One of these days, I believe services will be driving hardware sales.”