Huawei goes after enterprise network and UC markets

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 16 August 2011 14:39

IT Industry - Strategy

First it was the carrier networking market, then mobile devices and now Huawei is making a big play for the enterprise market in Australia with the launch of a channel partner program and the appointment of Simms International as its exclusive distributor.

 

It has named the channel program Huawei Enterprise Advantage Partner (HEAP) saying it has been created to "target value-added resellers, system integrators and technology suppliers to join Huawei as it seeks to rapidly build its enterprise business in Australia." Products to be offered will include routing and LAN switching, storage, unified communications and conferencing including Huawei's telepresence offering.

The managing director of Simms International, Danny Moore, said that the company's appointment by Huawei represented its entré into the enterprise communications market. "Each of the major vendors we represent is at the forefront of their market. We started with Kingston [memory]. We started our relationship with Apple in 2006 and we see exactly the same opportunity today with Huawei'¦We focus on a select number of vendors and the enterprise networking space has been vacant for Simms for some time because there was not an appropriate partner that provided the right opportunities."

Jeff Hwong, Huawei's regional sales director South Pacific, said: "One of the reasons we chose Simms was that they have helped a lot of vendors achieve success in Australia, but it was by no means a two minute discussion. It was a very long discussion over four months."

Gavin Milton-White, general manager enterprise for Huawei Australia, said the company would be going after every segment of the market: SMBs, mid sized and large enterprises. "We will have a 100 percent indirect high touch model'¦We will have a channels team, a team of solutions engineers and an in country support team."

He told iTWire: "This is a new business in a new market for Huawei, but we have been selling some of these products to carriers'¦We have not announced any partners yet but we have progressed a long way with some quite specific resellers.

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