Novell South Africa has announced the appointment of five-year veteran, Desan Naidoo as national sales manager, with aspirations of increasing revenues by 30% during the course of 2005.
Stafford Masie, managing director of Novell South Africa, says: "Desan was a natural choice for this position. He has a thorough understanding of Novell`s sales processes and the manner in which Novell take their solutions to market. Desan also has a good understanding on how to penetrate new business, grow the existing business and develop a strong sales team internally. I am very excited about Desan accepting this position."
Naidoo, who hails from a technical and account management background within the company, says the team and channel the company has built over the past two years places it in a strong position to meet and possibly even exceed these targets.
"It has taken us two years to build a strong national sales team with diverse backgrounds in line with the company`s BEE regulations," Naidoo says. "Consisting of dynamic young individuals who cover the whole spectrum of the South African market, we believe we are going to achieve good success with both our open source and proprietary solutions going forward."
In terms of what Novell aims to bring to its customers during the course of this year, Naidoo says solutions will centre on the company`s Linux and open source portfolio, as well as identity management where it sees itself as a leader in the market.
"Linux and open source, apart from reducing costs for customers, form an excellent basis for our proprietary, yet industry-leading solutions in the identity management, GroupWare and IT management space," he says.
"One of the key focus areas for us over the coming year will be to build a handful of key reference sites, giving impetus to the benefits Linux and open source can bring to the foray."
Naidoo says the company will focus on building references in the government vertical, since currently 65% to 70% of Novell`s revenue and revenue potential comes from the public sector.
"There is already a strong interest in open source and Linux within government and strong potential exists for replacing legacy solutions with cost-effective options. Identity management will also be a key focus area for government over the coming years and our leadership position in the market means we are well-poised for success in this space," he says.
From a channel perspective, Naidoo says Novell will focus on building new relationships and strengthening existing relationships with its channel over the coming year. "Selling through the channel is key to Novell`s business model and having appointed numerous new BEE business partners over the past year, we will work hard at enhancing relationships and building sound go-to-market strategies."
Naidoo says a key part of this will be in ensuring healthy margins exist for all channel players. "A key part of sales execution strategy in 2005 is to ensure channel partners understand the enormous revenue opportunities surrounding our open source technologies. Although the technologies are priced extremely competitively, living up to the obvious licensing elimination values of OSS, the volumes of Linux and open source solutions we will put into place over the coming year will make up for this. Good revenue potential also exists for channel players focusing in the services space, or reselling Novell services," he says. "After all when it comes to open source and Linux, the most honest and viable revenue model exists around value adds, services and support, areas our key partners are profiting from already," he adds.
"Desan and I are very bullish about the country, the people and the economic opportunities. Our success lies in our ability to execute on a sound strategy very much aligned with the OSS direction of our country and government. We`re spearheading a revolution in the software market and ultimately our aim is to transform SA into innovators versus simply adopters of enterprise software," Masie concludes.
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