Sun Microsystems spent six months looking for a new MD for its local office. In Stefano Mattiello, they found a "strong, credible, strategic thinker".
"We are delighted to have Matt, who can take Sun SA to its right place in this region," says Alan Townsend, MD of Sun's Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. Sun plans to invest heavily in the region and feels that Mattiello is the ideal person to spearhead this drive.
For Mattiello, who spent years at SAP Africa and then had a short stint at Spicer, Sun is "one of the very few companies left in the IT space that has a clear focus and direction".
But this focus might not be immediately obvious, as Sun operates in the high-end server and storage space, in the dot-com space and in software with Java.
A passionate Townsend explains that the focus is indeed "crisp, clear and concise": the Internet. "We believe that our role is to drive the systems that drive the Internet. There are three pieces to it - devices, wires and systems that drive the Net from the back-end - and we want to own the latter role. We believe that's going to be - if not already - the biggest industry in the world. Period."
Mattiello points to the three things that Sun is betting its future on: "The first is multidimensional scalability. As the Net explodes you're going to need some serious computing power.
"The second is integrated space. And the third, continuous, real-time Web availability of online applications."
Popping the cork
Mattiello quotes Sun's CEO Scott McNealy as saying that everything on this planet that has a pulse will be connected to the Web. But how does a connectivity-challenged MEA region fit into this vision?
"We are quite clearly behind Europe and other areas in size, scale and volume," says Townsend. "The benefit the West has is that it's wired as it is - there's so much fibre wire around. But the thing that's really going to pop the cork in this market is WAP [Wireless Application Protocol], because wireless is everywhere now. There are three wireless service providers in Egypt. There are 60 million people in Egypt alone, 45 million in SA, 25 million in Pakistan - these are major population centres."
He believes wireless is the only cost-effective way for developing economies to network. "As mobile phones become more cost-effective devices to communicate with, we are going to see information delivered over wireless, making the PC a rich man's toy at best, and kind of redundant."
If one considers the number of wireless consumers the MEA region could have, and convert that to Web usage, this will be the single biggest Web market in the world, explains Townsend. And that's where Sun sees its opportunity and plans to invest strongly in the region.
Townsend says Mattiello will, with his credibility in the marketplace, blue chip experience and the investment from the parent company, take the region to a new level of performance, which he describes as "needle-sharp expertise". "We believe that over the next year to two years SA represents a massive growth opportunity for us," he says.
No geographic boundaries
Townsend notes that Sun is getting away from regional or country thinking. "We are part of the global community and we will leverage resources wherever they are.
"We'll become advisers to the people that are breaking ground, and those advisers can be global. And whether we apply SA resources in Morocco, or Swiss resources here, is academic - we'll just get the right man for the right job.
"We will, over the next two to three years, wire everything we can, we'll dot-com ourselves, wire every kind of information delivery system we can."
But before that happens, Townsend and Mattiello are responsible for the company's revenue and growth in Sun's 18-month-old MEA region. "We have seen a 27% growth in the first year, which is OK, but our ambitions are much higher than that," says Townsend. "Matt's going to be a major springboard for that because SA probably represents about 40% to 50% of the region."
He says Sun is the fastest growing technology company alive, with a global average of 35%. SA is expected to show a growth "well over that average". Mattiello says he wants to grow the local organisation to the worldwide watermark as "right now we are trailing behind".
But the MEA is the fourth highest contributing region in the world for Sun, after US, UK and Germany. This quarter alone it sold 22 Starfire systems, 19 of which were sold in SA.
Townsend predicts that people will move away from buying computers and are going to outsource. "Computer systems will become like a cellphone service. People will outsource to network service providers, or integrators. And we are providing technology to integrators - people who will foster small businesses using data centres."
In future, Sun wants to move away from selling small systems to small businesses. "Yes, we do now [sell small systems to small businesses], but we believe that's the wrong solution. Small business should be going to the service provider, and we'll provide the service provider."
SA partners going global
Sun last month added Dimension Data to its list of long-standing local partners, which includes PQ Africa, CCH, Ariel Technologies and ICL.
"We are not looking for a channel, we are not in the commodity space," comments Mattiello. "The nature of our partners will be different - they will be ASPs [application service providers] and service providers, the organisations that are changing the nature of IT."
Reiterating that "needlepoint expertise is the name of the game," Townsend continues: "What we need now is to develop needlepoint specialists here that can go and sell anywhere. Our major drive will be to globalise our SA partnerships as they could become global players - and some of them already are."
For Mattiello, it will mean, in Townsend's words, "putting an accelerator of mind-boggling proportions" to Sun's local partner businesses.
"The first goal is internal - increasing the level of excellence in the company," says Mattiello. "Then we'll look at our partners and our customer interface. We need to get out of the commodity space and start looking at how to engage our customers."
This will mean expanding their views quite considerably and often changing their mindset. Says Townsend: "We've got to stop thinking South Africa. Geographies are gone; anything is either six seconds away or eight hours away. There are no borders."
Share