Channel Champion: Phil Cameron, Lenovo

Many people would be lost for words when presented with an award in recognition of their contribution to the industry; Phil Cameron certainly isn’t one of them.

When he took to the stage recently at the ARN IT Industry Awards after being inducted into the Hall of Fame, Cameron immediately started poking fun at former employers and colleagues including Toshiba and EMC’s David Henderson, who was once his boss many years ago. There’s a fine line between cheeky charm and arrogance but Cameron knows where it is and you can’t help but suspect that this has played a major role in furthering his career.

He has had several mentors in the industry but it’s his father he remembers first when asked who gave him the most important advice about business.

“My father always told me to treat everybody the same, whether it’s somebody on a shop floor or the managing director of an organisation, because they all have the same emotions,” Cameron said. “That has helped me to talk to senior people without getting too flustered about it and relate well to everybody else within the organisation. He also told me learning to read upside down and writing so that nobody knows what it says would be valuable skills!

“I’ve learned over the years that you need to be able to celebrate your successes – I’ve tried to have that style throughout my career and I think it’s worked out. I try to be humble and treat people how I like to be treated.”

Anybody want to buy a toaster?

Cameron started his IT career in 1980 after 18 months working for an advertising and marketing organisation in Melbourne. His father, who was sales director of Philips Electronics Australia, was relocated back to Sydney and, on returning to the city of his birth, a young Cameron saw a sales clerk job advertised at Toshiba.

“I asked my father what Toshiba did and he said ‘I think they sell toasters and TVs’. I applied for the job and got it,” Cameron said.

After a year as a sales clerk, he was promoted into a rep’s role selling TVs, videos, microwaves and toasters to retailers that have since disappeared from the landscape including Waltons, Homecrafts and Norman Ross. Toshiba’s Information Systems Division (ISD) didn’t even exist at the time and Cameron spent his first few years with the company selling consumer products. In 1985 the company released its first notebooks, or portable computers as they were known at the time, and Cameron joined ISD as a sales rep.

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“We were just told to go out there and sell this stuff. There were no processes but we won some good business with early notebook adopters like Deloitte,” he said.

After a year with ISD, Cameron applied to run Toshiba’s newly opening Queensland and Northern Territory office in Brisbane. He spent four years north of the border and grew that business from a one-man operation to one that employed five staff. “That strategy was really about getting on the government contracts because they were starting to buy portable computing,” Cameron said. “But eventually I wanted to come back to the big smoke because I was a Sydney boy.”

When he returned to Sydney in 1990, Toshiba put Cameron into a channel manager’s job before making him state manager for NSW. He spent a couple of years in public sector running major accounts with the likes of the Department of Defence and Telstra before getting the job he really wanted – national sales manager for the notebook division. He spent five years in that job.

“It was a lot of fun because we only sold through the channel and had great relationships with the distributors. Those were the good old days where our goal was to have twice as much marketshare as our nearest competitor. You can’t even dream of that now because other organisations saw growth in the notebook business and started to invest in it,” he said.

“We had LCD products with a grey screen and plasmas with an orange screen. Then the first colour notebooks came out and there was a major focus on battery life because it was probably two hours at the most.”

Time for a new challenge

After more than two decades with Toshiba in at least eight different roles, Cameron decided it was time for a new challenge. He left at the end of 2001 because “he was keen to work for a global company and get an understanding of how these huge organisations work”. It would be hard to think of a better example than IBM, which he joined as head of channels for its PC and xSeries Wintel server products.

“I went into that organisation at a time when IBM had really been driving its direct strategy for the past couple of years so the channel business needed some work,” he recalled. “I put together some programs and rules of engagement to clarify where IBM would sell direct and where we would partner. That gave clarity back to the partners and took out a lot of the conflict.”

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After three years at Big Blue, in which time Cameron’s role had expanded to include large enterprise and public sector sales as well, Lenovo purchased IBM’s PC business. He wasn’t surprised IBM sold the business, because rumours had been flying around for a while, but remembers everybody in the office turning to Google when the official announcement broke because they had never heard of Lenovo.

Cameron was now sales director for Lenovo’s relationship business above 400 seats, which meant mid-market, large enterprise and public sector; with David Nicol overseeing transactional SMB business through distribution. Although Lenovo, which was formerly known as Legend PC, had a 30 per cent share of its home market in China, it was an unknown brand in Australia so the strategy was to grow its reseller base and market share. Cameron claims it has grown quarter on quarter since entering the local market, with its most notable successes coming in large enterprise and public sector, which have doubled during the past 18 months.

Learning from others

Although the three IT vendors Cameron has worked for in his career are all large companies, he said they have very different cultures. One constant, however, has been the key to successful channel engagement. Over the years, the most important things he has learned are the need for transparency and to demonstrate the intent to help partners grow their business.

“It’s all about winning in front of the client so you have to be prepared to compromise and find a solution,” he said. “You need to be honest and have credibility if you’re going to build trusting relationships. Partners are looking for vendors where they can pick up the phone if they have an issue.

“I’ve been able to build those relationships over the years because I’m prepared to tell it how it is. The emails and phone calls I’ve received since being added to the ARN Hall of Fame have confirmed to me that what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years is OK.”

From a channel perspective, Cameron has had a few mentors over the years including the owner of Brisbane-based Sunrise Computer Systems, Phil Howson, who eventually sold his business to Datacom, and Melbourne-based Southern Cross Computer Systems founder, Andy Hegadus.

“I learned a lot from those two guys. They were very good at giving me feedback on how you should think about your people, how you should think about your customers and how you look after the business,” he said. “They were pretty direct when it came to letting me know what worked and what didn’t work. I’ve had a lot of feedback from business partners over the years!”

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Cameron also acknowledged CHA’s Roger Bushell and former Ingram Micro chief, Steve Rust (who was another previous boss from his Toshiba days) as distributors that had given him good advice over the years. In vendor land, he tipped his hat to David Henderson, Bruce Lakin and Mark Whittard.

“David and Mark are among the best marketers I’ve ever seen and Bruce was a real driver of the business who was very good in front of clients,” he said. “You learn different things from different people along the way.”

Taking the reins

Cameron got the top Lenovo job locally in April this year when previous managing director, Alan Munro, was promoted overseas to run its UK business. One of the key ongoing challenges is to make the Lenovo brand more relevant to a broader user base without diluting the prestigious reputation of the ThinkPad notebook and ThinkCentre desktop monikers it inherited from IBM.

“The strategy globally has been our sponsorship of the Olympics and Formula One. The Olympics showed how we could essentially turn on what was essentially a Fortune 500 company within a two-week period. There was obviously months of work that went into that but we installed 30,000 pieces of equipment and had 700 engineers; the message was that if we can do it for the Olympics, we can do it for your company.

“At the same time, TV advertising around the Olympics has tripled our brand awareness in Australia during the past three or four months. It has been fantastic.”

Looking ahead, Lenovo is also about to mount a challenge in the ultra-competitive x86 server market and Cameron has no fear of competition.

“It’s a highly competitive space but we’re used to that in the PC business,” he said. “We’re moving up the pyramid and that will help us become more important to our customers and partners. We entered the workstation market a couple of quarters ago and there are other moves we’ll be announcing.”

Out to pasture

Away from work, Cameron is a family man with a wife who is studying law and a couple of boys that are sports mad, which isn’t very surprising given their father’s history. He competed in triathlons for more than a decade and represented Australia in the World Championships for his age group in Manchester during 1993 as well as the World Durathlon Championships in Hobart the following year.

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Cameron has also completed a couple of ironman events – each of which involved swimming 3.8km, cycling 180km and running a marathon (42km) – with an impressive best time of 9hr 53min. He still runs now, loves to get out on his mountain bike and competes in events with other members of the Lenovo team.

“About 30 of us did City to Surf this year, we had a race recently that involved orienteering, mountain biking and running, and we had four teams in the Oxfam 100km walk last year,” he said. “It was billed as ‘Beat the Bosses’ but the bosses won. I lost a couple of toenails along the way but we like reminding the young people in here who won.”

Cameron also has a 75-acre farm in rural NSW just outside Mudgee that the family visits as often as possible, but he hasn’t started planning for a country retirement.

“In this industry you need a lot of energy because it’s fast moving and highly competitive,” he said. “I look forward to continuing my career and don’t want to move to Mudgee just yet.”