Looking to sharpen its focus for Cisco products and customers,
specialty networking distributor Westcon Group says that Cisco products
will now be sold worldwide through the Comstor brand widely known for
Cisco sales – creating a Comstor Worldwide organization.
The change is expected to enable partners to leverage more resources,
says longtime Comstor executive Bill Corbin, who will continue to lead
the group in its new incarnation.
“The partner experience will remain consistent,” he tells Channel
Insider. “The upside for the partner base is the ability to leverage a
deeper set of resources than they’ve had the ability to do before our
reorganization. Before, we made our realignment too hard and
cumbersome. Now a global alignment will help partners with a broader
set of resources to bring to their end users.”
Cisco sales make up more than half of Westcon Group’s business around
the world, and the company believes it can augment its growth by moving
all Cisco sales into a specialty business group.
“The Comstor brand, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, is associated
with quality Cisco distribution and service,” says Corbin. “We are just
going to continue to focus and build on that.”
Corbin adds that Westcon is talking to other vendors who may have
add-on products to the Cisco solutions that could be bolted onto the
new Comstor Worldwide organization. But in the meantime Westcon
executives were confident in the potential of the new organization as
it stands.
“The creation of Comstor Worldwide is truly a milestone in our
company and will enable us to better manage growth and investments in
our Cisco-oriented business, in which we see tremendous untapped growth
potential,” says Dean Douglas, president and CEO of Westcon Group, in a
prepared statement. “Having our Cisco-oriented offerings aligned in a
single, global business unit will amount to an unprecedented
opportunity for our resellers around the globe.”
Westcon Group notes that it was the first distributor to sign a global
distribution agreement with Cisco in April 2008. Tarrytown, N.Y.-based
Westcon specializes in distribution of networking, convergence,
security and mobility solutions.
