IT management solutions provider CA Technologies has beefed up its regional presence, including a new channel account director to look after New Zealand.
The company on September 11 announced the appointment of Lourens Strydom, who will be responsible for developing business for the company’s partners here.
Strydom comes to CA from Transpower where he worked as an infrastructure architect. CA says Strydom’s hiring reflects the company's plans for ANZ in the coming year, which emphasise solutions over product offerings.
“What we realised is that we would have more success in delivering outcomes and helping partners to deliver the outcomes to customers,” says Klasie Holtzhausen, senior director for CA Technologies in ANZ. “Those outcomes are around how they can be more innovative to support the business and help customers thrive on a day to day basis, to transform business by finding more innovative and cost effecitve ways in those environments, at the speed of business, and helping to manage the associated risk.”
Holtzhausen says the company has been making investments in new technologies over the last 24 months that bring its solutions into cloud environments. This has pointed the vendor in the direction of finding new business in what Holtzhausen calls “growth markets”, which seem to include smaller enterprises that haven’t been tapped by the vendor before.
“Now we have a focus to extend our reach in the market place with our traditional offerings and our most recent release and capabilities and solutions,” he says.
“We’ve made a number of investments in solution sets that help us extend our end customer base,” he adds. “We’ve been strong in the enterprise space. With a number of acquisitions we’ve been able to target the growth market. Which means we had to change the way we go to market. Because of that we made investments in developing marketable routes to market, and in the channel.”
Strydom’s job includes fostering growth in the traditional enterprise space as well as tapping the growth in the broader market.
“I wouldn’t say it’s SMEs,” says Holtzhausen. “Everyone has a different definition of what an SME is. That's why I call it growth market. This is really outside of the top accounts. It’s the next tier down that we've not penetrated really very much in the past.”
The company works with some of the larger resellers in New Zealand, including Fujitsu, Gen-i and Datacom. It also distributes exclusively through Westcon. Holtzhausen says CA Technologies has “reinvigorated” its relationship with Westcon and has plans in place to accelerate growth through Westcon to tap the broader reseller market. The company also intends to leverage its relationship with other vendors, including Cisco, NetApp and SAP, which OEM’s CA services.
The relationships reflect how the company has sold in the past and how it sells today, says Holtzhausen.
“We’ve got four routes to market. First, is where we sell with our global system integrator partners, second is MSPs, and third is solution providers that are more the traditional reseller,” he says. “That last one is where the customer wants to own the software and wants a partner to support the software from time to time and that is the area that we’ve recently identified and wish to accelerate.”
Holtzhausen says the ANZ market is key to CA’s growth in the entire region, and that the company’s relationships and recent technology acquisitions reflect the changing market for IT management solutions, and for aggregating CA’s solutions with other products.
“It’s about having the flexibility and ability to work at the speed that is required to deliver solutions,” he says. “These can be in a way those smaller customers can leverage in the cloud. For resellers, this allows them to aggregate those things in the cloud as they source solutions from various providers. It just opens a lot more opportunity for enterprise providers.”
