Westcon-Comstor confident of positive growth in APAC

The tech distributor is confident that it can continue to bridge the relationship between vendors and partners to be successful in 2025.

As one of the leading tech distributors globally, Westcon-Comstor continues to bridge the relationship between vendors and its customers to ensure the best outcome. Over the years, the distributor has grown its presence in the Asia Pacific region as well, offering customers the opportunity to embrace emerging technologies seamlessly.

“As a company, one of the things that differentiates us is that we're very specialized. We drive the majority of our business through our top 10 strategic vendors. They account for a very large percentage of our revenue,” said Patrick Aronson, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President for APAC at Westcon-Comstor.

The top ten vendors include Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, F5, Juniper Networks, Checkpoint, Extreme Networks, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, AWS and Broadcom. Aronson mentioned that Westcon-Comstor also works with emerging vendors in the industry.

In Southeast Asia, Westcon-Comstor became the first distributor to bring Zscaler professional services to the region. In October 2024, Westcon-Comstor entered into an agreement with Cloudflare to distribute the company's security and connectivity solutions in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Earlier this year, the global tech distributor signed an agreement with CrowdStrike to drive accelerated adoption of the cybersecurity vendor’s market-leading products and solutions in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, including next-gen SIEM.

On the partnership with Broadcom for the Asia Pacific region, Aronson pointed out that the relationship was built on their relationship with Symantec and Carbon Black. Symantec was acquired by Broadcom in 2019, while Carbon Black was acquired by VMware, which was eventually also acquired by Broadcom.

Westcon-Comstor was made the exclusive aggregator for Broadcom’s Symantec cybersecurity portfolio, from North Asia into Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The distributor also announced a collaboration with Broadcom to leverage the Symantec and Carbon Black portfolio to drive accelerated growth, significant profitability, and grow recurring revenues for channel partners across India.

“Broadcom has taken a very different business model. As a company, they're quite focused on their top accounts and global customers. While they have had some sort of renewals business, they've asked partners around the world to step up and pick that up. We're the partner that they've chosen to do that with,” explained Aronson.

On their partnership with Cisco, Aronson said the changes to Cisco’s partner program made sense as the network and security company needed to reinvent itself to be a leader and a winner in tomorrow’s technology world.

“With Cisco, it's no longer just about the network. For the longest time, it was always about selling networking and then pulling security along. Now it's more like bringing in security and pulling the networking along. It’s a very different mindset for Cisco. The acquisition of Splunk, for example, shows how security aligned the company is,” he said.

Aronson also highlighted that Westcon-Comstor is already a Splunk distributor in the region and the acquisition by Cisco will only align them together more. This is why he feels excited about the future with Cisco.

“Cisco has got a ton of data that they can bring in. And now with Splunk, they can ingest that and provide visibility. The data also provides the framework and foundation for a strong AI play,” said Aronson.

The world of AI

For Aronson, their customers are primarily the channels. As such, when Westcon-Comstor thinks about AI in the channel, it exists in two distinct fields.

First, it’s the way traditional vendors are building AI into their solutions at speed. Cybersecurity vendors are building AI in order to solve the new threat landscape. For example, Cisco is building AI to ingest data from the network to give more insights and observability about what's happening. Microsoft is building AI into their tools like Copilot to make their software more efficient and to make their workers more effective. Adobe is building AI into all of their various tools so that their tools run more effectively. Aronson pointed out that it's happening everywhere and it’s a software-driven approach.

“The AI sits in the cloud, but its features are being built in, and that's going to proliferate and continue. Now, comes the question of helping the partners understand the changes that are happening in the features and functionality of the solutions and being prepared to support those. Thankfully, it doesn't require a ton of transformational change,” explained Aronson.

The second big AI story Aronson pointed out is businesses are wanting to invest in building their own AI infrastructure. This means they would need to build learning servers or inference servers. For Aronson, this is a return to the private on-premises data centre, which is a really big server investment.

“It's new vendors that are emerging, which are built around NVIDIA. It's new software stacks that drive it and enable it. It's quite hybrid sometimes with the cloud,” said Aronson.

At the same time, Aronson stated that AI PCs are going to play a big role especially when it comes to connecting back to the public cloud or private data center. There’s a distributed AI model where stuff that's happening on the PC gives contextual intelligent information, sharing it in the cloud and maybe making it faster or less power demands.

“It's coming fast and hard and it's going to change our productivity and it's going to really make it interesting. One of the best quotes I've heard is that AI is, in fact, not going to replace anybody's job except for those who don't use AI. So, better get on top of it and know what's going on,” added Aronson.

For Westcon-Comstor, Aronson said while there is some exploration in AI, the focus remains on their technology portfolio on what they bring out to partners. This includes working with new AI vendors too that are building out AI infrastructure in the data center where Westcon-Comstor feels it can bring potentially new software solutions or elements to help complete their offering to channel partners. This enables channel partners to sit with their customers and offer a complete solution set and get it from one source.

On the relationship with vendors, Aronson said that they want to make sure that there's adequate margin that allows them to continue to invest with the vendors to grow out for the future needs of the business.

“We're not just sitting here taking whatever the margin is and pocketing it and just doing a transaction. This is a long-term relationship between us and the vendor. Just like it's a long-term relationship between us and the channel partners. We're not enabling them today to do one deal. We're enabling them to do deal after deal for the next 10 years and being their distribution of choice,” explained Aronson.

On plans for 2025, Aronson stated that the distributor has been operating in the Asia Pacific region for the past 25 years, having started in Singapore and Australia. While Westcon-Comstor has had a presence in India before, they are expected to renew their focus on the Indian market in 2025.

“We had a period where we agreed not to come back to India, but that period has since passed. Now, we've got an opportunity to go back, and so we're re-entering the Indian market. While India is certainly an area of opportunity and growth and investment, I wouldn't say it's any more focused than our growth in the markets that we're in. Because the reality is that in Asia, there's so much growth happening in all across the region,” concluded Aronson.