GEC NEWS WIREAs the Middle East and Africa market is moving on a high growth trajectory, it is obvious that there has to have sustainable resources of infrastructure at the back to support the growth. And the government is talking about creating smart cities, which means every infrastructure at the back end has to be well connected and communicated to enable the services to be successfully delivered to the citizens. In this opportune moment, Datwyler, the Swiss Datacentre solutions provider, has made an entry into the market by tying up with Global Distribution.
Jon Bamford, Managing Director, Datwyler Middle East & Africa and Mario M. Veljovic, VP Solutions MENA, standing MoizNurein, Regional Sales Manager, Middle East, Datwyler and Imran Batoaq, Business Unit Manager “IT Infrastructure & Physical Security” Global Distribution
“Mario M. Veljovic, VP- Solutions MENA, Global Distribution, said, For us it is very important to find a partner on whom we can really rely on”
Some say it is good time to start a business in UAE, others say Nay! It is too late. But to me no time is a bad time for starting any business in any region – only thing one needs to take care of is to have right partnership in place. I am not sure whether Datwyler had any presence through any distributor or resellers in the UAE or GCC region in the past but now that they have associated with Global Distribution, which shows a lot of promise in the market, is really a game changer for Datwyler.
Asked about why tied up with, Global Distribution, Managing Director of Datwyler Middle East & Africa, Jon Bamford, said, “Global Distribution is a very interesting partner for us in the region. Although Datwyler is a well-established global organization and a 1.5 billion dollar entity with businesses in more than 100 countries, but in the Middle East, we are relatively start up. We have strong products with good reputation of being Swiss brand for 100 years but what we need is to penetrate this market with the support of a right partner. Global Distribution for us has strong footprint across a number of countries. And we believe that they have the passion and ability to touch a lot of customers quickly through their partners and demonstrate the value proposition that we can offer.”
Mario M. Veljovic, VP- Solutions MENA, Global Distribution, said, ”For us it is very important to find a partner on whom we can really rely on. Obviously when you set up a new business unit, it is important that the vendor you choose, you evaluate that very carefully and make sure that there is no bad impression from your reseller community and from the end customers from the stand point of reliability and quality of the products. There are so many cabling companies but we could not see any one really matching the way we see the market and, how we value our relationship, commitment and compliance within the market place. We found Datwyler emanates same kind of passion and commitment that we have. Plus, Datwyler is a global company with significant market share in many other markets.”
Datwyler has adopted a strong on boarding process with 30, 60, 90 days plan. The Think tank has done the ground work in terms of analysing the customers that the company would like to work where they see immediate opportunities. At a time when the company is planning a 30-90 days schedule to recruit, enable and develop resources, the management is also ensuring that they have to stock up products in order to showcase and even fulfil smaller projects immediately. Obviously a lot of marketing activities will go along with that and there will be co-investments from both the sides.
John added, “We have a financial commitment which is confidential between us at the moment but we have a very strong ambition. It is marriage we have to work through the good days and bad days. We will have good people to have the initial things rolling.”
Mario added, “It is going to be a flagship product within our portfolio for IT infrastructure and physical security market. We do not want to bring in competing brand. We have gone out and done a solid research in last couple of months and made the decision now. For us it is very important to remain focussed.”
When Global Distribution has already taken the business unit manager to lead this business,the company is in the process of investing in creating resources on the sales and pre-sales side for the GCC region. Plus, Global’s existing infrastructure will surely support the newly built up BU from marketing, technical support and supply chain perspective.
It is certainly a growing market. The proliferation of data communications is surely happening in this region but the explosion of data communication is yet to be seen. Therefore the opportunity for the physical data cabling market is in abundance. So when we look at the market we could see it as good as 10 billion dollar marker per year. Now, what share Datwyler should notch up! Well it all depends on how both the companies perform the tango with each other in the market place. However, John expects to garner at least 10 million dollar worth of business in next three years.
However Mario puts it modestly: “It is not that we are putting on a target but we want to have a healthy business for us to have a decent return on our investment. But the fundamentally we want to have a lot of happy customers. Because the more happy customers we have the more business we will have.”
Finally…
With the new super massive data centres coming up in the region and surveillance projects are taken up seriously along with other data intensive projects, the opportunity for cabling market is really large and Datwyler will try to do all things right in the market to have a leadership position.
