Phil Cameron
Westcon-Comstor Australia is increasing its market share within the competitive distribution landscape through developing strong relationships and delivering on its promise of value among the vendor and partner community.
This is further backed up by its strong leadership team and engaged employees.
“I’ve been in this role now for four and a half years, and we’ve built a really strong leadership team, strong culture and engaged employees,” Westcon-Comstor Australia managing director, Phil Cameron told ARN. “We’ve really built on the promise to our vendors and partners that we deliver value to them and our results are showing that.
“We’ve also increased our market share in all of our leading vendors and had a really strong result last year, with our bookings reaching double-digit growth.”
In Australia, Westcon-Comstor’s top vendor partners include AWS, Check Point, Cisco, F5, Juniper, NetApp, Palo Alto, Tenable and VMware.
Growth in the market - particularly with software and subscription services - was delivered despite supply chain and product supply constraints that many in the industry are facing along with a large backlog of orders.
Cameron said it was navigating these challenges through close working relationships with suppliers, planning ahead and transparency with partners.
“Our go-to-market with partners and vendors is really strong and operationally, we’ve built a great team,” he said. “We’ve mirrored the strong demand in the market and our new financial year started March 1, and we’re continuing to see that growth and it’s buoyant.”
Cameron particularly highlighted its strong leadership team with David Peach, Phil Rettenmaier and John Poulter.
Cameron said it hired about 25 new staff last year and plans for an additional 21 staff across the business this year. Diversity and inclusion was also high on Westcon-Comstor’s agenda with Cameron pointing out 40 percent of its workforce were women.
In the Asia Pacific region, Westcon-Comstor head of APAC and CMO, Patrick Aronson said it was feeling ‘very bullish’ about where it stands as a competitor in the market.
“There’s a couple of aspects to that - how the market looks and how we’re performing relative to the competition - and we’re having success in both areas. This is why 2022 [financial year], was an especially good year for us,” Aronson said. “We’re in the business of hybrid cloud, networking, remote work and cyber security. Those areas were already ‘hot’ and the pandemic was just an accelerator, forcing businesses to accelerate their investment in those areas.”
“In APAC, we were in the right markets, at the right time, with the right technology.
Aronson particularly pointed out within its performance market like Australia where it has been winning RFIs, strengthening vendor partnerships and growing market share across both its Comstor and Westcon business.
“We’ve rebuilt a lot of vendor and partner trust over the years, and as a result, we’ve seen our market share growing, which really drove a great year for us,” he said.
Globally, Westcon-Comstor’s revenue reached US$2.89 billion (up 11.8 per cent) during the 2022 financial year due to demand for its cyber security portfolio, networking solutions, hybrid infrastructure offerings and remote access and cloud collaboration solutions.
“Two years ago, our company demonstrated strong resilience in the face of the pandemic and the FY22 results we announced today illustrate our ability to not just sustain strong momentum but to go beyond and adapt and win in a rapidly changing market," said Westcon-Comstor CEO David Grant.
“Our focus on portfolio expansion with software and subscription-based solutions has helped us to not only record double-digit, organic revenue growth – despite material product supply constraints – but to drive unprecedented EBITDA [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation] improvement as well.
“It’s a true testament to the hard work of our teams across all operations, who have performed exceptionally well this last year.”
Recently, Westcon-Comstor revealed a new flexible payment service called Flex, as demand for financing options for managed services increases.
Flex serves up a range of flexible payment solutions, contracted, and invoiced directly by the distributor without having to go through third-party billing agents or brokers.
