South Africa based leading ICT solutions company, The Webcom Group recently signed up an reseller agreement with Huawei to sell range of products and solutions like, video ATMs, networking, data centre and telepresence solutions in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
Commenting on the tie-up Pieter le Roux, Technical Director at The Webcom Group, said, “These four mainline product segments broaden our scope of offering, allowing us to deliver a Tier 1 brand to our customers. Huawei’s product offering is competitive and complements our existing offering to customers.”
Webcom expects that the unique Video ATM technology will complement its own offerings and services to the Banking sector with additional functionality of biometrics, video conferencing to banking call centres as well as scanning and print capabilities. Using a 4G backbone, Video ATMs can act as ‘remote’ branches in underserviced or rural areas.
Huawei’s offering will also enable Webcom to deliver mobile data centres to customers in industries such as mining where it is necessary to setup short-term data centres at sites that require access to and saving of large files including images. In addition, its telepresence solutions will provide Webcom with a differentiator as this solution consumes almost 50% less bandwidth than traditional solutions and feature an end-to-end offering including software, hardware, networking and management.
“Huawei’s success in the telecommunications environment is well known but when the Enterprise business was created, it provided us with an opportunity to leverage our products in the greater IT market. Webcom has a good ‘go to market’ strategy in place along with excellent sales and technical resources that can assist us to further penetrate the South African market and Southern African Development Countries (SADC) region.” said Jean-Claude Kabeya, Channel Manager at Huawei South Africa.
Webcom needed to comply to certain criteria in order to fulfil the requirement to become a Huawei reseller. This included sales and technical certification as well as meeting targets.
Kabeya further added, “Huawei is supporting Webcom by providing assistance with marketing, training and first line support. Reseller training is an important focus for us and we encourage our resellers to participate and obtain certification. This is provided from the get go without criteria that needs to be met by the reseller. In addition, we understand the importance of having access to product and provide our resellers with an upfront rebate of demo equipment.”
