Old hand takes new post at CA

After more than 30 years in management and sales, 17 of which have been at CA, Allan Smith has moved into the role of vice president, channel sales, Pacific at CA.

Reporting to Nick Ellis, regional channel sales vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan, Allan will be responsible for driving partner-led sales throughout CA’s commercial accounts and for developing managed service provider relationships.

Before joining CA, Smith was Ariba’s CEO for Australia and New Zealand, and technical support operations manager for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

CRN caught up with Allan to discuss his career, his new challenge and CA’s channel set-up.

CRN: Including your 17 years at CA, how has your career progressed
to date?

Smith: I have been at CA in two stints.
I had four years off in the middle.
Most of my roles at CA have been in sales management of one sort of another, starting with Australian sales management roles in Melbourne and Sydney.

There have been a number of enablement roles.
In one of the roles in Australia I had a project to design an internal sales methodology.

I did two years as country manager in Hong Kong, nine months in Korea, and I had a stint in the US as senior vice-president of California.

I have managed the Australian operation previously as managing director for both Australia and New Zealand.

In the past three or four years I have had some interesting jobs. The Korean one is included in that, as is the Hong Kong job, but I also spent a couple of years in the chief learning organisation and I was responsible for rolling out the programs for all employees in both EMEA and APJ.

That included channel programs as well as direct programs. That was based in Hong Kong and I returned to Australia and took up a role around the direct sales operation. Now I’ve moved into the channel role.

CRN: How will the experience you have gained over the years enable you to succeed in your new role?

Smith: In three specific areas.
The first, which may sound a little odd, but my Korean experience.
In Korea, it is around a 99 percent channel operation [for CA] in terms of both value and volume.

It is all to do with partners and I think that experience, with the added language difficulty, got my head into that space pretty quickly.

The second one is in Hong Kong where I got a lot of experience in the volume business, because at that time we were pumping quite a lot of volume products out of Hong Kong.

The third part is when I mentioned earlier about the processes.

I think one of the things I do well is looking at the processes of the company and what CA is doing, and how we are offering any value in those processes to people we interact with.

Whether that is the clients through our direct sales organisation or whether it is with partners in our indirect sales organisation, I think I will bring a little more planning and discipline to the role.

CRN: What are the main changes and trends you have seen at CA over the years?

Smith: CA is now more solution-focused, so rather than acquiring a load of products and talking feature/function, there is now a very conscious drive to say ‘what are our clients looking for in terms of solutions and how do we make that solution better’.

That may sometimes lead to acquiring or building our own new technology, but in a lot of cases it also leads to specialist partners with the knowledge.

Another trend which has spun off from that is a drive towards better partnering and we have seen that in what has happened in both Asia Pacific and Europe in the past nine months, where we have made a conscious move to work with partners and not have a direct organisation at all.

CRN: What will your new role involve and what do you hope to achieve?

Smith: The role covers management of our three types of partners.

The types are the sale of solutions through resellers, who does the sale and implementation. We have volume products which are mainly PC-based products through the two-tier distribution model.

And a side we have been shouting about for the past couple of months is the managed service provider (MSP) business.

This side of our business is quite different from the other two parts.

That is what I will manage and hopefully be able to put in place plans to make those partners successful, which will then make us successful.

CRN: What is your approach to dealing with channel partners?

Smith: My approach is based on planning. We have done a lot of training in the past three to four months and we have driven a lot of planning programs.

This involves indentifying what the partners want, rather than us hoisting stuff on them, then agreeing on what they want to do and looking at what we can do to enable them.

That is in both a program sense with how we get the products and services to partners, as well as the enablement plan in terms of what training and assistance we can provide.

That degree of planning, without being completely admin intensive, is something which we are driving quite hard.

CRN: Can you provide an overview of how the current CA channel is set up in Australia?

Smith: Our channel is in the three areas I mentioned before: the volume products with the two-tier distribution model, the value-add resellers and the managed services provider business.

We have now got groups of people dedicated to each of those.
We have a group of people dedicated to the MSP.

They are a bit different as they focus on the CA infrastructure solutions. They are what the MSP use to enhance their offering to clients.

The volume business we manage through the distributors and resellers, and the rebate programs.

With the value resellers we are taking a slightly new approach with them – as the people at CA who look after our value resellers we are now aligning to CA solution areas. The reason for doing that is we want them to be able to add value to what our value resellers are doing.

They can only do that if they have knowledge or expertise around what our value resellers are actually selling. It also gives them much better ability to say ‘that is a good reseller for this particular solution area’.

CRN: Have you got any plans to swell your channel base?
Are there any areas where you need to get more resellers onboard?

Smith: We are looking at that in two senses.

One is geographic – we want to make sure in places such as Western Australia or Queensland that we have the right level of representation.

The other, which has just started to take off, is in terms of our resellers’ target markets.

For example, a company called Klikon Solutions, which is a 40-person company – relatively small by most standards – but has more than 100 clients that have 50 to 500 people, and provides managed services.

We have made the MSP presence at the big end of town with the big SIs in the enterprise space, but Klikon is a great example of where someone has gone out and said ‘here is a smaller company which is in its chosen place in the market and we have been successful in providing our enterprise tools’.
We have been able to scale down and help Kilkon.

CRN: Are there any areas in particular where CA resellers are finding the most success?

Smith: One obvious one is project and portfolio management.

We have got the leading product there, according to the Gartner magic quadrant. It is a solution which needs domain expertise, so people have to know what they are doing to implement that properly.

It is a mixture of having a great product and great implementation services, and project management. It is also a high value item.

CRN: What message would you leave with your resellers in terms of what they should look to achieve in the next 12 months?

Smith: I want to drive the value we have with partners.

We want to set reasonable expectations that both the resellers and CA can meet.

We want partners to know what support they can get from us and when they can get that support.

From being in a training organisation, all the training we give to our direct people is also available to our partners.

A lot of that is electronic learning, which is great as partners can access it at a time suitable for them. I want to make sure all our partners know about that, have got access to it and understand where they can get it.