It’s talking about people that excites Patrick Aronson, a rather surprising insight considering his world is all about technology. But while he can wax lyrical about unified communications, network infrastructures, data centre technologies, and cyber security solutions, this 25-year veteran in technology distribution, and newly appointed Executive Vice President of Westcon-Comstor Asia Pacific, is very much a people’s man.
He firmly believes that in a world of automation where technology has replaced countless workers worldwide, people are still the most important resource in business. “The irony is that as more and more people are replaced by technology, people become even more important,” he says. “Let’s take two companies in the same industry. Both have replaced half of their employees with technology. This means that 50% of their processes
are identical, completed with more or less the same technology. It’s the people who now remain that are the point of difference: they are even more critical to defining the business, creating the culture, creating the value, and driving the final performance.
“Westcon-Comstor’s only true asset is people. We are not a company that keeps huge warehouses of inventories; we don’t own property; we don’t own aeroplanes or fleets of ships, machinery or factories. We have no other assets other than our people and that’s the key thing that makes this business run.”
Westcon-Comstor’s people are spread all over the world with teams manning offices in more than 70 countries spanning 6 continents, with its headquarters in Tarrytown, New York.
“Being a leader is not necessarily knowing exactly how things work, but about offering new thoughts.”
The US$6-billion-plus company was launched in a garage in 1985 by Tom Dolan, Phil Raffiani and Roman Michalowski to enable PC networking in and around New York City. Westcon became 1 of the first companies to sign a distribution agreement with a technology manufacturer, changing the way technology products were sold. It has evolved into a global powerhouse, with Comstor joining in 1999 and its competitive edge honed by offering technical support, training, marketing and financing to help small businesses upgrade their technology infrastructures.
The company expanded into Asia in 2001 and has become Asia’s leading speciality distributor of advanced network technology solutions, boasting a portfolio of market-leading vendors with Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, F5, Checkpoint Software, AWS, and a number of other industry-leading manufacturers.
Born in Chicago, Patrick has spent much of his adult life in Asia. Fluent in Vietnamese and Thai, he spent 15 years at Motorola where he led the mobile device business in South East Asia through the boom periods of the late 90s and early 2000s. He later moved to distribution and advanced supply-chain services as managing director of Brightstar in Singapore. Patrick joined Weston-Comstor as vice president Asia in early 2015, and was elevated to executive vice president, Asia Pacific, at the end of last year. “Yes, I came from a very different background and was a newcomer to the IT industry when I joined Westcon 2 years ago, but in many ways it is an industry that is heading in a similar direction to the mobile industry, just not quite at the same breakneck speed.
“In the old days, the mobile device channel was all about making margin on the mobile phone,” he explains. “But now the channel needs to understand and profit from the entire service offering — the device, the subscription, the apps, the trade-in value. In essence, this is what is happening now in IT. “The role of the service provider is growing significantly, and our role as a distributor means that we have to adjust our business.
“A major area of investment for us is in cloud distribution. Companies don’t go out and lay huge capital on a piece of hardware; instead, they rent on a monthly basis. The more they use it, the more they pay; the less they use, the less they pay. This is what the cloud is all about, and it is much more economical. It is basically transforming the IT industry today.”
Westcon-Comstor is already revolutionising cloud business intelligence with its BlueSky platform, which radically simplifies the ordering, delivery and management of cloud services. “These changes reflect how important it is to get the right skillsets,” Patrick says. “We want to build an innovation business with creative thinkers, people who are solving customers’ problems, who are bright, bold and experimental. And to be innovators, you have to recognise there are no bad ideas out there.”
