Westcon-Comstor has been appointed as the preferred Nokia Enterprise distributor for sub-Saharan Africa.
Rak Parbhoo, MD of Westcon-Comstor, points out that Nokia has a strong focus on industry verticals.
“The technology is all about helping the customer with particular solutions,” he says.
These verticals include smart cities, mining, railways, healthcare, public safety, manufacturing, power utilities and financial services.
Go Allwhere is Nokia’s partnership approach, Parbhoo says. The technology offers an IoT platform for connectivity, device management and data collection.
It also offers SDN solutions for data centre networking and SD-WAN; as well as scalable central and edge cloud compute platforms,
Cloud infrastructure and workload lifecycle management, together with cloud security enhancements work together with solutions enabled by analytics, he adds.
Transport is the key driver for the industry today, says Mark Baptiste, director; IT and optical business for Africa at Nokia.
Whether it’s IT, operational technology or Internet of Things (IoT), the IP platform is where it all comes together, Baptiste explains.
The Nokia strategy is built on a rebalancing for growth, he says.
“We try to lead innovation in the footprint and the base we have today.”
The company aims to expand into new areas as well, but working in select vertical markets with carrier-grade needs.
It also builds new solutions that complement the environment; and creates new opportunities for vertical solutions.
“This is built on operational excellence,” Baptiste says. “We all know the customer is king.”
Nokia has a long history going back more than 150 years, and today has the most complete network portfolio in the market, Baptiste points out.
“We also develop in excess of 1 300 patents every year,” Batiste adds. “We also have nine Nobel prizes and three Turing prizes.”
The different operating areas of the company are mobile networks, fixed networks, IP/optical networks, global services, Nokia Enterprise, Nokia Software, Nokia Technologies and Nokia Bell Labs.
Target markets for Nokia Enterprise include transportation, energy and resources, hyperscale enterprises and the public sector (TEPS).
“We are very excited about this relationship,” says Siseko Ngxola, head of sales: TEPS, South Africa at Nokia Enterprise.
He believes the market will warm to the solutions that Nokia and Westcon-Comstor will be able to offer.
Nokia Enterprise enables the digitalisation of asset-intensive industries with solutions based on high-performance networks and digital automation, he says.
Different industry verticals have different solution requirements, Ngxola points out, and Nokia Enterprises has put together solution suites to match these needs.
“We have a very rich reference list behind us,” Ngxalo adds. In the public sector, Nokia Enterprise has about 240 references; it has more than 100 in transportation, more than 200 in energy; and is implemented in more than 100 Fortune Global 500 and 200 Forbes Global 2000 lists in large enterprise/webscale solutions.
The go-to-market strategy is centred on the preferred distributor, Westcon-Comstor, working with value-added resellers, industrial partners, alliances and communication service providers (CSPs).