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Pinnacle appointed Huawei Enterprise distributor

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 26 Nov 2015
Pinnacle will constantly grow and develop the Huawei team to keep up with the pace of the growth of the business, says Pinnacle's David McMurdo.
Pinnacle will constantly grow and develop the Huawei team to keep up with the pace of the growth of the business, says Pinnacle's David McMurdo.

Huawei has appointed ICT distributor Pinnacle Africa as the official distributor of its enterprise solutions.

Both companies hope to improve their play in the enterprise market across Africa through growing the Huawei market share across the data centre suite of products with the key focus being on servers, storage and networking.

In order to drive growth for Huawei within Pinnacle, the ICT distributor has appointed David McMurdo as the general manager for Huawei Enterprise at Pinnacle Africa.

McMurdo arrives from Hewlett Packard with over 20 years' experience in the IT industry and has gained extensive knowledge within the hardware, software and services environments.

Pinnacle's go-to-market strategy is to develop the current Pinnacle Resellers to enable them to now have an enterprise offering, says McMurdo.

The company will further develop existing relationships with the large resellers and system integrators to introduce the advantages of Huawei enterprise solutions to help them bolster their own offerings, he adds.

To achieve this strategy, Pinnacle will constantly grow and develop the Huawei team to keep up with the pace of the growth of the business.

McMurdo says the long-term plan for the Pinnacle Africa-Huawei brand is to develop Huawei into a household name within data centres across Africa by driving new profitable business for the reseller community.

He believes through this the Huawei market share position in SA and across Africa will grow to challenge the existing players and allow Huawei to develop into the dominant player.

"With the Huawei solutions rapidly moving up through the Gartner Magic quadrants and gaining more and more global credibility outside of China, it is now time to challenge the current status quo of the enterprise market share landscape across Africa."

With Huawei currently operating in over 170 countries coupled with the footprint and focus that Pinnacle has across SA and neighbouring African countries, strategically it made sense for both companies to sign the distribution agreement to take the joint offering to the respective African countries, says McMurdo.

According to McMurdo, Pinnacle has already sent a number of engineers to Huawei in China for certification training to bolster its specialist enterprise team within the company.

The partnership with Huawei also completes Pinnacle's offerings in the enterprise space, he adds. "The Huawei enterprise suite provides a very sound platform on which to bolt on the other great enterprise offerings in the Pinnacle stable."

The current threat in the existing data centre market are the pressures that businesses are placing on IT to deliver the required solutions at a faster pace than ever before, but also at a reduced budget, says McMurdo.

The opportunity that Pinnacle and Huawei are currently faced with is that the market needs a solid alternative to the existing vendors, he adds.

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