Storage solutions giant EMC has appointed Nkuli Mbundu as regional leader of its Information Intelligence Group (IIG) in southern Africa.
IIG is responsible for helping EMC customers transform their businesses with enterprise software and cloud solutions through consulting, education, support and managed services expertise.
Mbundu joined EMC in January 2011 as an account executive focusing on the public sector. In that role, EMC said, he led a number of successful sales initiatives, significantly expanding EMC's footprint in strategic government clusters. He was recruited into IIG in 2013.
With 15 years in IT and telco sales and management, Mbundu has gained experience with companies such as Cisco Systems, Ericsson and Sun Microsystems.
In an exclusive interview with ITWeb, Mbundu said among others, channel development is his immediate goal as the regional leader. He revealed the company aims to recruit, develop, certify or re-align partners within its vertical focus - healthcare, public sector, financial services, life sciences as well as energy and engineering.
He added he will use his new position to improve alignment with EMC's core go-to-market strategy, leveraging the strength of the vendor's established core channel. Another short-term goal is to establish a strategic partnership with government.
Describing his long-term goals, Mbundu said EMC intends to drive government's initiatives for crime reduction, job creation, improved service delivery and efficient citizen engagement. "A number of large government organisations have invested in EMC IIG technology. Our goal is to help them exploit the full capabilities and realise the return on their investment."
He also prioritises increasing EMC's market share in the financial services enterprise space. "These customers love our innovative technology, but are too heavily invested in old and lethargic technology, and sometimes opt to stay locked in to that for fear of change."
Mbundu is expecting some challenges in his new designation. He pointed out software sales cycles are quite long, particularly for solutions that address business efficiency, productivity and innovation.
"It's surprising how transformation typically ranks lower on the business priority list until a crisis happens, at which point the business becomes reactive and acquisition costs escalate."
According to Mbundu, a lot of focus and priority is still on tangible assets like hardware and front-end software applications. In government, for example, he said very few departments have dedicated functions to look at productivity and innovation to address long-term efficiency and cost savings.
"One of our biggest challenges is how to elevate our productivity solutions agenda to the core business decision-making platform," Mbundu revealed.
EMC in SA is also known as an information storage company, he noted, adding few people know that since 2003, EMC has invested over $33 billion in acquisitions and research and development, and has integrated more than 70 technology companies in the same period, with Documetum being one of the most successful.
"This gives you a perspective of the value that lies beneath the iceberg. Our challenge is to expose this inherent value and reshape the market's perspective of EMC. For this, there's no better place to start than with our innovative software solutions."
Concluding, he said EMC is a partner-centric business and its success to date has been largely due to the relationships with its partners. "We aim to use this successful model and expand our partners' knowledge and skills in Information Intelligence solutions. From 2015, we will be recruiting new select partners to help us get in front of business decision-makers."
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