D-Link targets education

D-Link has traditionally been associated with the consumer market, however the recent appointment of Jamie Carter in a management role focused on corporate business indicates a play for meaty government and corporate projects. Maurice Famularo, marketing director, D-Link told CRN the move should not be interpreted as an abandonment of its consumer-centric offerings.

“We’re not moving out of consumer space, we’re still going to maintain and grow our consumer market. What we want to do is grow the corporate side of things, which includes government and education,” he explained.

The vendor’s commercial sales team, consisting of pre-sale engineers and business development managers including Jamie Carter, has expanded. Carter’s responsibilities are based on developing D-Link’s education offerings from a national point of view, explained Famularo.

“There are others who look after education and focus on education under his guidance in various states,” he said.

According to Famularo, the Rudd government’s so-called Education Revolution was not the motivation behind the move. Rather, he claimed D-Link has been engaged in developing its commercial sector for some time.

“Education has been one of our target markets for a while now, we’ve just been fine tuning our structure internally from a sales point of view to ensure that we have the right people focusing on those areas,” he said. “We’re still expanding on that structure and are likely to grow the team.”

D-Link is currently participating in several projects and collaborating with a number of resellers in the education sector, stated Famularo, however he could not disclose specific details. He added the vendor is maintaining the existing channel structure of its go-to-market strategy.

“We’ve partnered with key resellers with good market awareness in education,” he said. “We want to work with the integrator and develop a relationship with their customer as well. Either we bring the opportunity to the integrator or they bring the opportunity to us ... it’s an ongoing relationship.”

There is a temptation among resellers to approach a customer with a sales pitch rather than identifying their specific requirements and focusing only on those needs, claimed Famularo.

“One of the issues resellers face is they baffle the customer with speeds and feeds and don’t listen enough to what the customer’s real urgent requirements are,” he said.

Famularo commented that the issue is particularly critical in education where adhering to budgets is important.

“Budget is definitely an issue in education, some schools have a lot of money to spend and others don’t,” he explained. “We have a good portfolio of products that we believe will address the problems schools have … we’re looking at relative lifespan in a school and being able to be integrate it with existing products as well as expanding as need be in the future.”

collaboration dlink education networking