Westcon Group snaps up Kiwi distie

Westcon has expanded its Asia Pacific operations with the acquisition of New Zealand-based distributor Datastor.

Datastor will continue to operate as a standalone business and the existing management team, led by Dave Rosenberg, will remain unchanged. Rosenberg will report to Wendy O'Keeffe, executive vice president Asia for Westcon Group (pictured), who was promoted earlier this year from Australian CEO.

The deal, for an undisclosed sum, gives Westcon access to resellers and vendors in data centre, virtualisation and storage, all strategic technologies for the distributor.

"That was what was attractive to us because the data centre is a very important area for us to focus on," said O'Keeffe.

Datastor's main vendors include VMware, Symantec and EMC. It is the third-largest distributor in New Zealand, it has been operating for 17 years and has a "great customer base" of 900 resellers, said O'Keeffe.

O'Keeffe said there "may have been" other interested parties, but Datastor owner Vic Dickerson chose Westcon because the deal would allow the distributor to operate independently.

"They picked us - it wasn't just us picking them. Vic was keen to pick the right buyer. He didn't want someone coming in and changing everything," said O'Keeffe.

Westcon is rapidly expanding its Asia-Pacific presence to keep up with a customer base that requires an international presence, said O'Keeffe.

Since O'Keeffe's promotion in April, Westcon has registered nine countries and had operations running within four months. More acquisitions are in the pipeline to supplement organic growth, said O'Keeffe.

"There's more. Over the next 12-18 months we will see more activity in joint ventures and acquisitions. We haven't started in North Asia yet. My priority is to bed down New Zealand until the end of this year," said O'Keeffe.

Westcon's goal is "be big but niche", said O'Keeffe.

"With globalisation we are seeing a lot more polarisation where multinational [system integrators] and telcos are doing more business with multinational users and there are more requirements for them to use multinational distributors.

"We need to help those guys move their products to and from any country in the world. Asia is an important part of the world economy, so we need to be bigger."

One reseller used Westcon to manage global logistics for one of its customers, who made 20,000 transactions last year into more than 90 countries.

Smaller resellers also had small business customers expanding offices overseas and requiring IT products and services in other countries.

"We're doing it for the little guys too. I'm going now to one of our local resellers and managing stuff for him in the Philippines. We take the pain away from him and that's a significant value prop," said O'Keeffe.

There were also "huge requirements" for servicing trans-Tasman businesses, said O'Keeffe.

O'Keeffe said that Australian distributors which weren't expanding faced marginalisation.

"You become very good at what you do in your country, but the larger are getting larger. The tier one integrator community is getting more enterprise business but also coming down into the SMB and the commercial," said O'Keeffe.

"You have to provide a solution to companies locally but internationally as well."