Nicholas Lambrou (Thinxtra)
Internet of things (IoT) network specialist Thinxtra has made new hires in the market, with Roger Smith joining as its new sales director and Jason Ward as its partner business manager.
Ward will be responsible for identifying, recruiting, onboarding, enabling and collaborating with channel partners. Prior to joining Thinxtra, he was at TeamViewer, as well as Ingram Micro, Dicker Data and Avnet.
Smith, meanwhile, joins from Sensitech where he was a strategic account manager for almost three years. Previously he was in the logistics industry working for Toll.
The new appointments come at a time when Thinxtra is developing its market and product strategy and focused on recruiting more partners into its ecosystem.
Thinxtra CEO Nicholas Lambrou said he had three main objectives – growing the Thinxtra team and evolving from its technology evangelist approach to adopting more sales and marketing expertise; simplifying massive IoT; and recruiting partners.
“We’re a partner-first organisation,” he said. “There's been a lot of hype around IoT and talk about its potential but there’s a substantial amount of complexity and we need to help customers understand how it’s going to deliver value.
“Realistically, a lot of the solutions that we bring to market are either about how we drive operational efficiencies, how we can increase the user experience and the environmental impact.”
An example Lambrou pointed out was a solution that monitors indoor air quality through sensors, connectivity and a platform that measures the quality of the air based on the levels of carbon dioxide, temperature and particulate matter or humidity.
On the partner front, Lambrou said the specialist was looking to recruit traditional IT partners and what he describes as ‘innovative disruptors’.
“These are organisations who are looking to implement a layer of IoT to disrupt a traditional business model,” he explained.
“We have a suite of professional services that we offer and we help them go from that ‘dream to reality’ and provide that connectivity via the network that we've built.”
Lambrou said Thinxtra was looking to enable ‘traditional partners’ to understand what IoT can deliver and was looking at potentially tapping into IT players in the education sector that want to extend beyond managed services and potentially bringing on a distribution partner.
“Whether it's indoor air quality or asset tracking, we’re creating opportunities for a distributor to get into markets that traditionally they may not have been in, for example, facilities management,” Lambrou added.
“One of the biggest issues at the moment is supply chain logistics, so being able to track those assets for the purpose of asset utilisation and in particular minimise wastage and the impact on the environment.
“We have an ability for distributors to be able to develop a subscription based kind of revenue stream because the beauty of what we're doing is tracking the life of the asset means that annuity or subscription based revenue lasts for a very long period of time.
“Extending our product solutions roadmap is a key focus for us and probably over the next six months, we’ll hopefully bed down a distributor.”
