Datatec-owned Westcon AME has "cleaned up", will be profitable this year and has also appointed a "well known" chief technical officer.
The company is also looking to expand through acquisitions in Nigeria and Kenya, says CEO John Hurrell.
Westcon Group CEO Tom Dolan said yesterday that in Europe, Westcon would expand by setting up "thin offices", satellite branches of major offices in other countries.
However, Hurrell says Westcon AME, which reports into JSE-listed Datatec and not Westcon Group, is not taking this approach in Africa.
"We are not going to set up thin offices," he says. "We want to go in there and establish a major presence. And we`d rather do that by acquisition because it`s very difficult to set up a greenfields operation in Africa."
Hurrell says Westcon AME has cleaned up its operations and will be profitable this year. The main thing that has changed is how the company approaches its core business: distribution.
The company comprises three divisions: Westcon, a distributor of, among others, Nortel, 3Com and security products; Comstor, a Cisco distributor; and Scantec, which distributes Symbol scanners, Zebra barcode printers and credit card smart/card readers.
Selling watermelons
Hurrell says that in a grocery, when a customer comes in to look at a watermelon, sales staff are trained to try to interest the customer in other fruit as well.
"That wasn`t happening at Westcon AME two years ago," he says.
"Our focus is security, convergence and mobility. We need to sell these products."
In the past, a Comstor salesman might sell a Cisco Pix firewall appliance, but did not sell authentication products with it, since those were distributed by the Westcon division.
"This doesn`t mean we are going to merge them, but we need to take advantage of those opportunities," Hurrell says.
A newly appointed chief technical officer will spearhead this drive, Hurrell says. Although he cannot name him yet, he is "well known" in the industry.
"It`s being spearheaded by a CTO because he`s not selling a product, but a technology. Behind him will be the product managers and sales people.
"I`ve always believed that the best computer salesman is a techie, because he sells from the heart."
Share