Westcon Group is bringing its Comstor brand to Canada – part of a global strategy to up its game around Cisco. This is good news for resellers, but perhaps not such good news for the broadliners it will compete against.
Cisco represents 54 per cent of Westcon’s business – after all, the specialty distie is focused on networking, convergence, security and mobility, and Cisco is a major player in these markets. In the U.S. and Europe, Comstor is already a well-established and recognized brand, but not here in Canada or other regions, such as Brazil.
And that means resellers here don’t always get the same resources as their counterparts south of the border or across the pond. This will change, however, now that Westcon is bringing Comstor to Canada. Here in Canada, Comstor will operate as an internal division of Westcon Canada, led by Dan Forbes.
It also means there will be more direct competition for Ingram Micro and Tech Data, which already have established Cisco practices, especially since Comstor is looking to develop solutions based on the Cisco platform in areas such as virtualization, storage, security and unified communications. Comstor won’t be pushing boxes – it will be selling solutions.
For Westcon, this is part of a larger move to sell Cisco products worldwide through Comstor Worldwide, allowing local Comstor operations to take advantage of shared services and operational capabilities.
Westcon is also in talks with other vendors to bring add-on products into the Cisco mix.
Comstor Worldwide will first expand to Canada, followed by Brazil, allowing Canadian and Brazilian resellers to take advantage of its OneX series of channel programs, which provide tools to help Cisco partners be more competitive. These two countries were likely chosen first because they already have a strong presence with the Westcon Convergence and Westcon Security business practices.
This also means Cisco will now have a distributor in Canada focused solely on its own products. Good news, of course, for Cisco – but it will also provide Cisco partners with another avenue for developing customizable solutions around the Cisco platform and, in theory, see a faster time-to-market.
Westcon was the first distributor to sign a global distribution agreement with Cisco back in April 2008, and the distie says the alignment of Comstor into a single global business unit will allow it to better manage growth and investments in its Cisco-oriented business.
What will be interesting to see is whether Ingram and Tech Data now up their game in their Cisco practices, and what will differentiate the broadliners from a specialty player honing in on the Cisco business in Canada.