Belkin follows through on revamped strategy
Belkin is on track with its revamped strategy and the company has been seeing growth as a result of this new direction, according to its international consumer networking product management director, Justin Doucette.
The company recently went through a major reorganisation when Belkin acquired Linksys from Cisco, creating three vertical business units – the Belkin brand encompassing its mobility products, the Linksys business unit, as well as WeMo home automation product line.
“This provides us with different focuses within our business unit but it also allows us to partner as well because there are synergies between the Linksys networking division and the WeMo home automation divisions, for example,” he said.
Doucette said, in the past, the company’s focus within the consumer side of the business was on techy users. That has since evolved to include the connected family as a target market.
“All of our marketing, all of our messaging was around an IT enthusiast. It’s been successful but what we’ve realised now is there’s a much bigger market that we’re not addressing, which is the mass market, especially the connected family.
“So we’re not leaving behind the prosumer; that’s still part of our overall strategy, but we’re also focusing on the connected family. The average family now has two or three connected devices each – it’s desktops, smartphones, media streamers, Xboxes and playstations,” he said.
As for the SMB space, Belkin A/NZ business manager, Greg Morrison, said the company is trying to push businesses into wireless technologies from an infrastructure side of things.
“More businesses are heading towards wireless due to structured costs with not owning billings and having to fit them out. Things like wireless access points are a strong growth area, along with managed switches,” Morrison said.
“The biggest part of penetrating the market now, is through education. We want to work more closely with our resellers and retail partners especially since there is a boom of IoT and connected devices and they can’t work it all off efficiently through a five-year old router.”
The company sells through the channel. Its retail partners are JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, and the Good Guys, and its reseller channel is driven through Ingram Micro, Synnex, and Dicker Data.
Doucette claimed the IoT space is definitely one on the company’s watch list as it plans for the future.
“There’s a lot of investigation around IoT – it is a market that is still evolving and not quite mature from a consumer and technical standpoint. So, we’re trying to let the market evolve and we want to be where the market goes instead of creating the market,” he indicated.
Morrison said for the A/NZ region, the company’s on the way to launching a new online training site where resellers will be able to get enabled and get educated on the company’s latest technologies.
Strategic partnerships are also on the company’s pipeline. Doucette said these new partnerships will be announced around CES 2016.
“There are new areas we’re getting into and there are a handful of different technology partners that provide those components,” he added.
