Tech Times November/December 2013 by Tech Data

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Executive Address Greetings from Rick Reid

Tech Data Business Builder Tour Building strong connections across Canada

7th Annual HP and Tech Data’s Technical Conference

A fantastic event with southern charm

McAfee SecurityAlliance Partner Summit

Plan for a Better Connected McAfee Partner Community

We catch up with Zycom Technology

TechSelect Member Profile Lights, Camera, Action TechSelect Fall Partner Conference

Selling Commercial PCs in the BYOD Age Commercial PC vendors reacting to this shift

Raleigh Around with IBM and Tech Data

Special edition a great success

Editor Jillian Cahill Art Direction and Design Julie MacAulay Contributing Writers and Editors Mary Bonnici, Irene Buchan, Jillian Cahill, Robert Dutt Project Manager Ralitsa Naydenova Tech Times is published and distributed six times per year to channel resellers across Canada. ©2013 Tech Data Canada Corporation. Prices, promotions, offers & terms and conditions of sale subject to change without notice. Errors and omissions excepted. All manufacturers’ names are registered trademarks of their respective corporations. This publication comes to you free from Tech Data Canada Corporation. We received your mailing address from your Tech Data customer account information. To make changes or to unsubscribe, please contact your Tech Data sales team at 800.668.5588 or notify us at emailcanada@techdata.ca. www.techtimesmagazine.ca

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November/December 2013

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ExecutiveAddress

Giving thanks He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.” – Epictetus

It’s hard to believe that 2013 is already coming to a close. It seems like only yesterday we were heralding in a new year and were excited to experience all that it would bring. While the road was not always smooth in 2013, there are a great many things that I’m thankful for: • I’m thankful for a strong and healthy business that thrived in a difficult economy. It seems to get more difficult each and every year, but the resilience and determination of the channel never ceases to amaze me. I’m humbled to be part of such a powerful eco-system, and am proud of all that we accomplish. • I’m thankful for the talented group of Tech Data employees who come to work every day and do their very best to help our business partners by delivering optimal technology solutions. I firmly believe Tech Data has the very best employees in Canadian distribution and they are what set us apart.

• I’m thankful for our fantastic group of solution provider customers. From small to very large, you are each incredibly important to us, and we never forget that we are working for you. As we look forward to the new year, I want to thank you all for an exciting 2013. I’m confident we’ll do great things together in 2014! Sincerely,

D. R. Reid President, Tech Data Canada

• I’m thankful for our vendor partners whose products and services round out our value offering, and whose support and friendship make it a pleasure to deal with them every day. Our close ties with each vendor confirm to me that we really are a community, and that our many wide and varied relationships are the backbone of the Canadian IT channel.

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The Business Builder Tour wraps up another great year The Business Builder Tour (BBT) made a final stop for 2013 in Vancouver in October. Once again, vendor partners along with Tech Data executives made this event a great success. This year’s BBT gave our reseller partners the opportunity to engage with some of the industry’s premier vendor partners to learn how their innovative technologies can strengthen their business. It provides great networking opportunities for our reseller partners with the participating vendor partners and Tech Data’s executives and sales teams that are necessary to build stronger connections in the channel. Thank you once again to our participating vendor partners and to all of our reseller partners who joined us in each of the six stops we made across Canada this year. Stay tuned for exciting enhancements coming for next year’s BBT that will deliver more opportunities and build stronger connections.

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Thirteen reseller partners joined HP, Intel and Tech Data for the 7th annual Technical Conference in Houston, Texas in October. Attendees enjoyed the perfect blend of business mixed with old fashioned Southern culture! The delegates spent two days at HP’s leading-edge Customer Experience Centre where they received valuable insight from industry experts about HP’s PC, Print, Server, Storage and Networking emerging technologies and Intel’s market strategies. Or course, a trip to Houston would not be complete without some activities that let the group unwind and build stronger relationships. The annual Texas Hold ‘em tournament and Skeet Shooting added some southern charm to this fantastic event. Thank you to this year’s reseller attendees and to our vendor partners. Stay tuned for information on next year’s round up coming in the spring of 2014!

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As the security vendor looks to update its channel enablement approach, McAfee president Mike DeCesare is looking at new – and much larger – rivals By Robert Dutt

At its SecurityAlliance Partner Summit in Las Vegas in early October, McAfee discussed plans to make its partner programs easier and simpler in the long-term, starting with a key challenge around partner enablement. Worldwide channel chief Gavin Struthers told partners that it’s often too hard for them to find the details they need around training and marketing support, particularly for any of the technologies McAfee has acquired in acquisitions over recent years. That’s particularly a problem for the company as it sees its networking security lineup – much of which has been assembled through those acquisitions – becoming as much as 50 percent of its revenues in the next few years. Partner support is growing on the networking side, but many partners still identify more closely with the company’s traditional endpoint security lineup much more than the network portfolio. “We’ve been guilty of random acts of enablement, and it’s been too hard to find enablement components,” Struthers told partners. Lisa Matherly, vice president of worldwide partner programs and marketing at McAfee, said partners will see the results of its new enablement 16

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framework as soon as the next few weeks. The framework will focus on the key areas of learning, planning, and executing with the vendors, and will introduce a structure that will make it easier for McAfee to slide new technologies – whether built internally or acquired – into the enablement structure, rather than “bolting them on,” as the company had largely done in the past. That should allow McAfee to quickly turn up the volume around the products it wants partners most focused on, specifically its SIEM and next-generation firewall offerings, as well as its newlyannounced Advanced Threat Defense offering. Once the full product portfolio is in the enablement framework, the company will shift its attention enabling post-sales services, she said. The new enablement focus will be the first part of a “revamped” SecurityAlliance partner program, one that will begin to take shape in earnest over the next year for full introduction in 2015. Struthers said the primary goal is to make the program simpler and easier to navigate for partners. Details are still in development, but the new program will focus on cross-training partners to get the representation of

the company’s networking portfolio to where it wants it to be, and will also include ways for new acquisitions to more seamlessly be fully introduced into the program, rather than simply tacked on through a new specialization added to the program in isolation. StoneSoft, the firewall company McAfee purchased in July, will likely be the first product – and partner base – fully integrated into SecurityAlliance by default. “Partners should expect a streamlined, simpler-to-navigate program that makes it easier for them to understand the market opportunity,” Matherly said. Rather than simply tacking new competencies onto the existing program, the company is looking to develop “the right competency model for network security” as a whole, with the component pieces flowing from that overall structure. The new framework will also provide an opportunity for the company to clean up the integration of past acquisitions into the partner program. For example, while MX Logic was relatively early on McAfee’s acquisition list, having joined the company more than four years ago, and is partially integrated with SecurityAlliance, its separate Partner Focus program is still running beside the overall McAfee framework.

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More Products, More Success Speaking at the event, Steve Redman, executive vice president of global sales told partners that the company has found that once it gets to three products with any given customer, its wallet share jumps eight times. Eighty percent of the company’s top 1,000 customers have three or more products in their business, Redman said. That number plummets to just one percent in the next 5,000 McAfee customers. “We’re kicking butt when the customers listen to our story of Security Connected, but it’s not getting out enough,” Redman admitted, calling on partners to get up to speed on the company’s complete strategy, and perhaps more importantly, the components underneath it. Since its purchase by Intel three years ago, the company has been focusing on its end-to-end message, Security Connected. But Redman expressed concern that in focusing on that message, partners were missing seeing the trees for the forest, particularly when it comes to hot, high-growth areas. The executive pinned the growth in recent years of Kaspersky Lab in the endpoint market and Palo Alto Networks in the next-generation firewall in large part to the company’s failure to communicate the value or the parts of its solution stack. He said McAfee will work to remedy that deficiency, and outlined plans in various levels of completion to onboard acquisitions in situational awareness, next generation firewall, advanced malware solutions, as well as its simplified lineup for endpoints, as areas of differentiation. He called on partners to get to know what McAfee is doing in some of these higher-growth areas, areas where many partners may have turned to smaller, more specialized vendor partners to address customer pains. “If there’s a hot market out there, we’re doing it internally as well,” Redman told partners. Struthers picked up on the same theme, telling partners, “you have an opportunity here to become less promiscuous.” The security space is a crowded one, to put it mildly, and Struthers made the pitch that partners will be better-suited aligning with McAfee’s broader strategy, and the solutions underneath it, than representing a handful of rivals, each in their own area of expertise. “Customers want to see leaders with vision, and we’ve been talking about this Security Connected strategy for years now,” Struthers told partners. “You have an opportunity to built a more sustainable business with McAfee.”

The gameplan: McAfee channel chief Gavin Struthers shares his plan for a “better connected” McAfee partner community.

New Era, New Rivals McAfee’s competitors in the security space in the long run won’t be its traditional security-focused rivals, company president Mike DeCesare told solution providers. Rather, he anticipates his company’s rivals will be some of the biggest names in the technology sphere. Speaking in a wide-ranging Q&A session, DeCesare said that none of his current competitors make him nervous. Rather, it’s the likes of Cisco, HP, IBM, and Microsoft that give him long-term concern. “This is a huge industry, it’s fast growing, and it’s high, high profile. When you see something like that, it’s natural for the companies that represent massive footprints in IT to want to have a presence there,” DeCesare said. That message went with one that resonated throughout presentations by various McAfee executives over the course of the day: the pitch that the security market is too fragmented, and small players that only cover one or two current hot buttons are, in McAfee’s opinion, getting too much attention and

too much wallet share. “Nobody wants to have 50-plus players in their environments. Clients are looking for security companies to step up and take responsibility for a larger portion of their spend,” he said.

“Partners should expect a streamlined, simplerto-navigate program that makes it easier for them to understand the market opportunity,” Matherly said. He also called on partners to more broadly get involved in McAfee’s newer and high growth opportunities, including next-generation firewall and SIEM. He urged existing partners to build a practice around these areas, and added that if current partners do not do so, the company will remain channel-

centric, but may have little choice but to introduce other specialized partners into incumbent’s customers to represent these new opportunities. “We’d love to keep a single-partner strategy in each of our customers,” DeCesare told partners. Getting partners involved in opportunities, particularly its network security business, is key to enabling the growth McAfee expects to see in that field. While the company’s business currently skews towards the endpoint protection business (70 percent of revenues to networking security’s 30 percent), DeCesare posited that in the next two or three years, those two fields will be deadlocked at 50 percent of its overall revenues. “I need you to understand our networking strategy,” he told partners. He also suggested that as that shift happens, the company may have to expand its channel coverage model, to have true experts on each side of the business calling on and enabling channel partners. The trick, he said, will be figuring out how to maximize that enablement without making McAfee look like two entirely different companies to its customers.

Happy 25th Anniversary Insight - a Milestone Achievement! 1988 - 2013 Insight took a trip down memory lane in September as they celebrated their 25th Anniversary with a “Back to the 80’s” theme. The staff found it easy to get into the 80’s party mood with big hair and outrageous outfits that were sure to impress. The Tech Data team of Tony Mancuso, Tanya Silveira and Belinda Piscioneri were in attendance to personally congratulate Insight and to hand deliver Tech Data’s Circle of Excellence Award recognizing Insight for revenue achievement, continued dedication, commitment and leadership in the channel in partnership with Tech Data. Congratulations on your milestone achievement, Insight! We wish you many more years of continued success and partnership.

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AIS EmployeeSpotlight

Tech Times sat down with Michael Rocha, Avaya Field Sales Specialist at Tech Data Canada to learn how he helps influence business growth. Q: How long have you been with Tech Data? I am currently in my fifth month at Tech Data. Q: What do you like most about Tech Data? I like the variety. Every day at Tech Data is different. I also have quickly established a liking to the local Tech Data community and sales teams.

“I like that I get to be a consultant to small, medium and large enterprises. I influence their business growth by helping them sell technology that I specialize in.”

Q: Describe a typical day for you: Every day is different from the one before it. As a field representative, I enjoy spending as much time as possible meeting face-to-face with my customers. In a typical day, I’ll be out visiting a customer on-site, or chatting with them remotely. Q: What do you like the most about your job? I like that I get to be a consultant to small, medium and large enterprises. I influence their business growth by helping them sell technology that I specialize in. Q: What motivates you in your job? I set goals for myself. I am motivated to reach my goals and the ones that Tech Data has given me. I suppose it’s a testament to my competitive nature; I hate to lose. Q: What has been your most memorable moment or biggest success since joining Tech Data? As the new guy, my biggest success has been being able hit the ground running in a new role. I’ve been able to draw on previous experiences and developed skills to begin taking on new customer projects immediately after introducing myself as their new field rep. Q: Anything else you think we should know about you? I love Movies; I’m a bit of a movie quote savant. Accents too; I do a mean Forrest Gump. I also like chocolate pop tarts.

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APC and Tech Data hosted a group of Tech Data sales representatives and their reseller partners in Orchard Park, NY in November for their 2nd Annual â&#x20AC;&#x153;Score a Touchdown with APC and the Buffalo Billsâ&#x20AC;? promotion. Attendees earned their spot for their purchases of APC products through Tech Data during the promotion period. The atmosphere was exciting despite the Bills losing the game to the undefeated Kansas City Chiefs. It gave the sales representatives and the reseller partners in attendance a great opportunity to further develop their relationships. Stay tuned for more exciting promotions from APC and Tech Data.

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TechSelect Member Profile

– In this issue of Tech Times, we learn how TechSelect membership has helped Zycom Technology close major contracts to strengthen their business across Canada.

Q: Tell us a little about your organization: Zycom Technology is an Eastern Ontario based company that just completed its fifteenth year of operations. We are focused on Enterprise, Commercial and Public Sector organizations to deliver solutions around datacenter infrastructure, networking, security and virtualization/ cloud. We have been transforming our business over the past few years from a product focused to a service centric organization. We have been aggressively hiring high-end consultants to develop and implement solutions for our clients based on VDI and private cloud infrastructure. In fact, it is our corporate vision to become Canada’s most trusted integrator of private cloud solutions. We have a very strong catalog of service we can deliver, from managed services to professional services. Q: What are your thoughts on the industry in general? The industry is going through a seismic shift (again). Cloud computing is going to be a major disruptive force and it will change how our clients think of IT infrastructure. Q: What challenges are you facing and how do you overcome them? The challenges will be to correctly pivot in such a way that we can take advantage of this computing shift. We believe that we need to fundamentally shift how we engage our clients. We cannot be talking about hardware anymore. We need to work with them to realize the benefits that cloud computing will have to offer. If we don’t, someone else will. Q: What would you like to see from vendor partners? Better partner planning so they can better understand our expertise that we can deliver to the market and then help us win together. Far too often, there is reluctance from vendors to work exclusively with a partner in accounts to help close business. Q: What are your organization’s goals for the next five years? • To completely reverse our revenue mix between services and product so that services becomes the major contributor to profitability • Significantly grow our managed services base

Tim Allen, President, Mike Lucas, Vice President - Operations Terry Buchanan, Chief Technology Officer

Q: How has the TechSelect program helped you? Or helped you meet your organization’s goals? TechSelect recently helped us to close a major managed services contract with a pan-Canadian organization. We were able to rely on our TechSelect partners to shore up our ability to deliver on-demand, on-site services for offices from Victoria to St. John’s. The willingness of our TechSelect partners to help us was impressive and greatly appreciated. Q: What is your outlook for 2014? Up! 2013 was a tough year but we are seeing up-ticks that should lead to a very positive year.

• Significantly grow our capacity to deliver cloud based solutions www.techdata.ca

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LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!

The TechSelect community was on the paparazzi’s radar early this November as members took over Tinsel Town for the TechSelect North American Partner Conference. Forty TechSelect members, together with our level one sponsoring vendors and extended Tech Data team rubbed elbows with over 300 channel partners from the U.S. Nestled at the crossroads of the iconic Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, the luxurious grounds of The Beverly Hilton was the backdrop for the 4-day event. The conference included training sessions with Tech Data’s premier vendor partners and Innovation Workshops focused on staying competitive in the IT marketplace and improving bottom line. J.B. Wood, president and CEO, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) and Robert B. Tucker, president and founder of The Innovation Resource, led informative Peer-to-Peer Panel seminars. “The TechSelect conference in Beverly Hills provided all participants with a fantastic mix of industry insight and community networking. The Canadian members in attendance have come to see these conferences as a place to connect with like-minded solution providers from across the country while continually learning about new and innovative products and programs,” said TechSelect Canada’s newly appointed Advisory Council Chair John McLaughlin of NextDigital in Edmonton, Alberta. The conference closed in true Beverly Hills style with an awards gala recognizing members for their achievements. Winners of the 2013 Canadian TechSelect Achievement Awards were: · Most Engaged Member – Graycon Group · Best Year over Year Performance – Information Systems Architects Inc. · Best Newcomer – Oxygen Technical Services Ltd. Tech Data and the TechSelect team would like to thank all those who attended and look forward to hosting the TechSelect community in beautiful Kelowna, British Columbia for our Spring Partner Conference from May 26th – 29th!

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Selling Commercial PCs in the BYOD Age How to get IT and end users to agree on a commercial PC strategy that works for everyone Tour stop in Toronto, Elaine Mah, the chipmaker’s director of marketing for Canada, told me that she believes “It’s never been a better time to be selling devices.” My first reaction was that the statement might be a little hyperbolic. Forget the fact that margins on hardware are tiny and not getting any bigger – that’s the problem of a decade ago. Now, not only are margins slimmer, but unit shipments are down, and there’s no guarantee that machines being used in the business are going to be purchased through business channels, thanks to the growing momentum of “bring your own device.” That said, there are more interesting and exciting form factors, designs and capabilities being introduced in commercial PCs than ever before, as vendors scramble to make the commercial PC as “sexy” as their consumer counterparts. So how can solution providers succeed selling commercial notebooks and desktops in an age of BYOD? Let’s start at looking how major commercial PC vendors are reacting to this shift. Capture the Users, Not Just IT Once upon a time, designing and selling commercial PCs was simple. Not easy, but simple. PC vendors found out what commercial IT managers and business unit leaders expected from a notebook – reliability, security, manageability, the ability to introduce as few distinct configurations as possible. The design of these products was not always the most inspired; IT managers seldom ranked “sexy” among their top criteria. But then something funny happened – a new generation started entering the workforce, a group of “digital natives” used to having access to technology that’s great looking and great performing. These young workers pushed back against being assigned a bland black slab that had neither the looks nor the horsepower of the tools they’ve used throughout their lives. As that generation gained traction in the workforce, they started to ask, request, or even demand to use their preferred tools in the workplace environment. IT hated it, business loved it – while this “bring your own” movement introduced challenges and questions around security and manageability, it had the potential to increase worker satisfaction and to reduce the costs of maintaining a fleet of notebooks. At Intel’s recent Channel Experience Thus, the user got a seat at the table on deciding on corporate notebook policies. And if they didn’t like what the vendors had to offer from their commercial lines, they just picked something else – namely, the device they already loved and used at home or in school. “Traditionally, most of us have done a good job of focusing on the needs of IT and business managers, but the third person in the equation is now the end user,” said Ajay Gupta, director of the commercial notebook product management group at HP. “Our focus is to delight the end user without giving up on the requirements of the other two stakeholders.” The goal, Gupta said, is to produce commercial machines that users “aren’t apologizing for pulling out of their backpacks.” Thinner and lighter is the order of the day for new corporate products from HP and other vendors, and the trend is accelerating as competitors race to outdo each other in making corporate machines that appeal to their users, and not just IT.

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Pick Your Own Device The “Thou shalt take this machine” approach of “old” corporate IT and the “We’ll use whatever we want” IT anarchy of BYOD are at the polar opposites of IT control. And sometimes, perhaps the right answer for any organization is somewhere in the middle. Stefan Bockhop, channel sales director at Lenovo Canada, said he’s seen success with partners delivering a “pick your own device” model, striking a balance between the two extremes by offering users a choice between a number of devices, all of which have been given pre-approval by IT. This can be as broad as “any corporate-grade computer from vendor X or Y,” or as narrow as defining certain products as acceptable. As a bonus for partners with managed service practices, going to such a model can allow an MSP to standardize deployment and support, and maximize their technician-to-user ratio, a key metric for many MSPs. The XP Deadline Looms Windows XP is a much-loved platform. Or at least muchtolerated. More than a decade into its existence, it’s still firmly entrenched in many organizations as “good enough.” But that could all be changing. After April 8, 2014, Microsoft will no longer support the venerable operating system, and the company is pushing customers (and pushing partners to push their customers) hard to get on a modern version of Windows to avoid being without support. Modern, in Microsoft’s parlance, means Windows 7 or 8. Quietly, Microsoft is acknowledging that not every organization is ready to make the jump in user interface to Windows 8, as much as it would like them to. But for organizations that need to pick new machines to meet the system requirements for a “modern” version of Windows anyway, it probably makes sense to look at the latest and greatest – and that probably means machines that are touch-capable. Garrett Dugger, a product ambassador for Lenovo, advises partners and customers that the decisions they make today are “going to impact you for your whole PC lifecycle.” And a time when many organizations are stretching out the lifecycle of the average PC, that’s a bigger factor than ever. “They’re either going to enable you or limit you over the next three- to five-year period,” Dugger told attendees. Get Ready For Touch Combat Attending Lenovo’s recent Product Showcase tour in Toronto could leave solution providers with no other conclusion than the fact that there are a large number of options out there when it comes to personal computing form factors. The newly-minted world’s largest PC vendor put it all out there for partners and customers, showing both the “familiar” – the latest version of its ThinkPad notebooks and Ultrabooks – and the less-familiar, a variety of products that blur the line between the tablet and the notebook. And for those who really want a business-friendly tablet, there were even those too – Windows or

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Android. Your choice. The lineup included the ThinkPad Yoga, bringing the flexible bend-any-which-way screen introduced in last year’s IdeaPad Yoga into the corporate world, the ThinkPad Twist, a more “conventional” take on the convertible notebook/tablet, and the ThinkPad Helix, a detachable notebook/tablet hybrid. Each one has some unique advantages and challenges, and each style is likely to attract a different type of use case. But which one will your end users want? Which one will get them over the hump and into a newer, higher-performance, and touch-enabled machine? Which one will convince them that maybe it’s worth the time to learn how Windows 8 works? Those are all valid questions, and one that Lenovo is taking a unique approach to answering. One solution from the company: Let them try them all and decide for themselves. Lenovo currently offers resellers access to what it calls a Touch Combat Kit, a set of its more innovative products bundled together for customers to take for a spin.

“They’re either going to enable you or limit you over the next three- to fiveyear period,” Dugger told attendees. The current lineup includes a ThinkPad Tablet 2, ThinkPad Helix, ThinkPad Twist, and a ThinkPad Carbon Touch, along with power adapters and a custom Windows 8 image that includes video tutorials for each product, and some productivity apps to test out in a touch environment. Solution providers get access to the Touch Combat Kit through Tech Data Canada, and can then walk customers through the options available to them. Currently, the brand-new ThinkPad Yoga

is missing from the collection of tech toys, but that’s an oversight Lenovo is likely to fix in short order. “What works for me doesn’t necessarily work for you. By having a broad portfolio, and trying new and innovative things, you attract more and different customers,” Bockhop said. Best Time Ever? So is it the best time ever to be selling devices? It all depends on your perspective. But even in the traditional business of the corporate PC, where there are a number of challenges, there are some clear opportunities, and some tools and paths to reach those opportunities. Selling the corporate PC in the BYOD age may not be the easiest task for a solution provider, but with the right arsenal of consumer-friendly commercial PCs, the right approach to the market, and the right tools, it is still a viable and important business, and will be for years to come.

branchingout In this edition of Branching Out, we sat down with Jason Lee, Account Manager with Tech Data Canada to hear more about life in the Vancouver office. Q; How long have you been with Tech Data? I have been with Tech Data for seven years, but the time has passed so fast that it feels like only a couple of years. Time flies.

During the past seven years, I found that Tech Data is not just an ordinary publicly traded company but it is a company that really cares for their customers and employees.

What do you like the most about your job? I enjoy working with my resellers and providing the value that I can bring to the table. I’ve always told each and every one of my resellers that Tech Data Distribution is not your average distribution outlet. It is an everlasting partnership striving to grow your business to the fullest potential. It makes me happy when I see my reseller grow from a small VAR to be a contender in the Western Region of Canada. Describe a typical day for you in our Vancouver office: Every day is not quite the same. Some days, we start off with a vendor training and from there, it leads to managing our set of accounts, making sure all of our emails have been answered and all of the issues have been resolved. The majority of the time is spent calling out to our primary accounts to find any potential deals that are in the works and if they need more in-depth technical assistance that we can help them with. I always tell my customers to use all our vast resources like our Cisco, HP, IBM, or our Software Sales Specialists in Toronto. I also let my customers know the latest and greatest opportunities and programs that Tech Data has to offer that month. It is great communicating with all my customers by phone, but it is even better when I can spend some time visiting them and seeing them face to face to further understand their side of the business and their challenges. What do you like most about Tech Data? During the past seven years, I found that Tech Data is not just an ordinary publicly traded company but it is a company that really cares for their customers and employees. When the Annual Tech Data Business Builder comes to the west, our Directors and President take the time to meet and greet all of our customers, no matter how big or small. I’ve often received calls from my customers the next morning, telling me that the event was fabulous but also that meeting one of our Executives at the event really makes them feel welcome to Tech Data’s culture and that that is what sets us apart from the competition. With the great support that we get from our head office in Toronto, it makes me feel honored to be working here. We continue to challenge ourselves, build on our successes and ask ourselves, what we can do better to make sure Tech Data remains a superior leader in the Industry. What challenges you in your job? In the IT industry, there is always change. A lot of customers can deal with change, but some can’t. That is where the challenge lies. We have to really listen to our customers’ challenges and issues and try to provide a solution. In solving every problem, we must probe and work with our vendor partners and customers in solving the issue on hand. We need to make sure the customer understands the solutions and are confident in presenting it to their end user. Overall, the bigger challenge is to be able to satisfy every account, big or small and ensure customer satisfaction is at its highest level. What has been your most memorable moment since joining Tech Data? There are many memorable moments. For example, I was selected to attend the Tech Select Conference in Vancouver, have won OTT Awards four years in a row and the President’s Club Award, but the best part is when your colleagues and clients that you work with on a day to day basis come to you and sincerely congratulate you on winning the award and hearing in their own words, ”Well Deserved”. Anything else you think we should know about life at Tech Data in Vancouver? There is a family environment in the Vancouver Branch. We are a smaller branch compared to Tech Data Head Office in Mississauga. It is always a friendly and courteous environment, no matter if you work in the Warehouse, Configuration Centre, or Sales Floor. Everybody here is treated like a family member and everybody knows everybody by their first name. A very niche group that really takes a lot of pride in what we do in this branch. If you feel like sharing something funny with us, please do. I’m just a little cog in the big wheel of motion, but it is so gratifying to see my efforts being recognized. It really humbles me. I’m ecstatic to be part of this wonderful team, Tech Data.

www.techdata.ca

November/December 2013

www.techdata.ca

November/December 2013

Raleigh Around with IBM and Tech Data – this year’s “special edition” was a great success! Fourteen reseller partners and their end users join IBM and Tech Data for a special edition of “Raleigh Around with IBM and Tech Data.” Once again, the event was a great success. This year reseller delegates were invited to bring an end user as their guest to take part in two days of training sessions at the IBM Executive Briefing Centre located in Raleigh, North Carolina. While at the Briefing Centre, delegates had the opportunity to participate in informative and interactive IBM Tech Tour training sessions and meet one-on-one with IBM and Tech Data executives. These sessions helped prepare the delegates to further develop their IBM business. A trip to North Carolina would not be complete without a round of golf on one of the state’s most beautiful courses. The group shared some valuable networking time with the IBM and Tech Data hosts where relationships were enriched and strengthened. Thank you to all of this year’s participants for making the conference a great success. Stay tuned for details on how you can be a part of next year’s event in 2014.

November/December 2013

www.techdata.ca

November/December 2013

www.techdata.ca

November/December 2013