Tony Heywood (Tradewinds)
Newly minted distributor in the trans-Tasman market place, Telarus, has rebranded to Tradewinds in the Australian market.
The name change coincides with the distributor’s official local launch taking place on 21 August with CEO Adam Edwards also in town.
The distributor made the first push into the local market after appointing former Westcon-Comstor executive and AGC Networks country manager, Tony Heywood, as head of channels across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).
The company ran a internal competition to help decide on the new Tradewinds name for Australia.
"It has been a long time in the making," said Edwards, when speaking to ARN. "We’re a 16-year old company and we’re taking the business international, because we believe the model we’re running, really follows the pattern of cloud, which is digital distribution.
"When you don’t have a physical product to distribute, a lot of the logistics go away, but what doesn’t go away, are the relationships.”
The US-based distributor hired Heywood to help ramp up its local business and has been increasing momentum in the market during the past six weeks, with 40 potential partners already earmarked.
Heywood’s responsibilities encompass setting up a local version of the master agent, and pioneering the agency model concept, in which third-party cloud brokers are recruited, trained, and supported to advise clients on which cloud communications and/or infrastructure service is suitable.
“Australia is our first venture out of the US and we explored the market last year, bringing Tony on board in April and he’s speaking with both service providers - IT cloud vendors and telcos - and prospective partners,” Edwards said.
“It’s a great start for us because we think our model will thrive in the Australian market."
The distributor, specifically focuses on cloud, contact centre and unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), with its portfolio including Rackspace, Nice inContact, RingCentral, fuze, OBT Anywhere and 8x8.
Key platinum partners include CenturyLink, Comcast Business, Five9 and Viasat, alongside other partners in the form of Telstra, Verizon Business, NTT Communications and Rackspace.
“Our referral and agency model is totally flexible in the type of partner that we can develop a relationship with and facilitate relationships for vendors,” Heywood added.
“From a partner point of view, we’ll build up Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, first and then we’ll look to expand into New Zealand as well but we have to do justice to the vendors that have put our faith in us in the first place."
A couple of challenges Heywood said he faces was getting partners to believe in its model, which he explained they still maintain control of their customer environment, even though the vendor is providing a bill directly.
“The relationship with the customer is then based on trust and integrity rather than technology alone,” he explained.
“A lot of partners have relationships with their end users based on their technical capability, as opposed to the commercial capability and what I’m seeing is that this model allows the partner to focus on three things: maximising customer revenue; minimising their customer costs and mitigating their risk."
