IGEL Technology hires Dell’s Ward Nash as A/NZ vice-president
Thin client software and hardware company, IGEL Technologies, has named Ward Nash as its new A/NZ vice-president. Nash joins the company from Dell, where he was formerly its Cloud client computing managing director and Asia-Pacific and Japan general manager.
Nash held on to this post for two years.
Nash was the managing director and Asia-Pacific and Japan general manager for Wyse Technology for four years before he assumed the position at Dell when the company acquired Wyse Technology. Prior to that, he held a number of positions with the company that included the managing director and A/NZ general manager role, as well as A/NZ (northern region) regional sales manager role.
IGEL Technology managing director, Erhard Behnke, said Nash’s appointment is part of the company’s move to be more active in the Asia-Pacific region. And in doing so, the company has also relocated its Asia-Pacific headquarters to Bondi, Sydney from Singapore.
Nash will be based in this Asia-Pacific headquarters.
Behnke claimed it has consolidated the company’s sales, support, and services functions to be closer to customers and partners in major markets in ASEAN and A/NZ. He added that the move recognises the mature market for virtualised environments in A/NZ, as well as strong growth in this region.
“A/NZ has the highest penetration of VDI in the thin client market in Asia-Pacific and Japan. It’s the most mature market and there are plenty of early VDI and Cloud adopters in this region. Geography also plays a part in this.”
No staff from the company’s Singapore operations were let go. The office gets shut down but the staff were relocated to either the operations in Australia or integrated into other parts of the company. It has also appointed sales managers for the northern (Queensland, New South Wales, and New Zealand) and southern regions (everywhere else including Canberra) of A/NZ, that Nash will oversee.
Nash said IGEL Technologies has a strong strategy for market penetration in this region and is looking to the channel to support that advancement.
“Citrix, VM ware and Microsoft are the main partners for IGEL, so we’ll be linked to the hip with these companies. We’re also looking to partner with other SIs to go to market, which will be competitive to HP and Dell,” he said.
“We do not do consulting services so the channel doesn’t see us as a threat. We’re not going to take away their professional services business. So we will partner with all the high-level consulting services firms and go into verticals such as banks, healthcare, schools, and government.”
According to Nash, its distribution channel is also a key part of its go-to-market strategy.
“We don’t view them as warehouses. They bring the channel together. They can do multi-pronged sales bundles, etc. We want to work closely with the channel and will be, in the coming weeks and months, do a lot of training and enablement with them,” he said.
He mentioned that the days of the channel being a reseller of PCs is long gone. He claimed with IGEL Technology’s solutions, the channel will be able to provide an eco-system which encompasses consulting services in the move from fat client (taking it off PCs and into the datacentre) to thin client.
“The margins of selling PCs are low so if you’re going to run a business doing just that today, it’s going to be hard to be profitable. With this, you’re able to own the customer and there’s a lot of value you can sell to them,” he added.
Including Nash, IGEL Technology has four staff in its Asia-Pacific team and Nash claimed the company will be growing that number to reflect its expansion in the local market.
“We’ll be looking to ramp that up as we grow with the channel and revenue. We’ll be speaking to our distributors (Exclusive Networks and Connector Systems), resellers, and vendor partners in deciding where to put our resources,” he concluded.
