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Corporate Express appoints industry veterans

Three new staff hires part of ongoing efforts to expand its IT solutions offerings

IT reseller, Corporate Express, has made a raft of new appointments to grow business opportunities and drive its high-end customer solutions push.

Former Leading Solutions national sales manager, Garreth Bohanes, has been recruited as the company’s first sales manager of new business to build a strong solutions team across Australia. According to Corporate Express IT solutions director, Ahmed Latif, Bohanes already brought on three business development managers in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney and is looking to hire more.

Ex-Corporate Express software and licensing manager, Trevor Voss, has also rejoined the company as enterprise solutions group manager. In his new role, he is tasked with expanding Corporate Express’ datacentre offering.

The third recent appointment is former Commander sales manager, Chris Ashman, who will oversee commercial products as group manager and has a particular focus on PC systems. Latif said he also expected to grow Corporate Express’ presence in corporate and government markets.

The latest hires tie into Corporate Express’ efforts to broaden out of its office products and SMB heritage into mid-market and enterprise segments. Latif, who was appointed mid-2009 following the departure of veteran, Marcus Heron, said the wealth of experience coming into Corporate Express was just one part of its regeneration plan.

Latif said it had restructured around sales managers overseeing state business, rather than geographic-based general managers. It is also working on building deeper relationships with its core vendors – HP, Lenovo, IBM, Symantec, Microsoft and EMC.

Having been given extra dollars to invest in its IT strategy, Latif hoped to announce additional staff hires and new initiatives in coming months.

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More about: Commander, Corporate Express, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, HP, IBM, IBM Australia, Leading Solutions, Lenovo, Microsoft, Symantec
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Comments

1

mr .i.t.

Mon 15/03/2010 - 14:37

will corp ex sell "exp branded" notebooks,servers,desktops.............no margin in oem hardware!, bad move guys!

2

Curious

Tue 16/03/2010 - 13:35

Hiring ex sales managers from Commander and Leading Solutions equals a recipe for disaster. How do you expect to grow your business when you have hired two sales managers from two failed companies. I wonder how long it will be before CE closes its doors.

3

N

Tue 16/03/2010 - 16:25

Two things "curious":

1. In both the Leading Solutions and Commander cases the cause of the downfall was nothing to do with lack of sales. Quite the opposite in fact.

2. If your theory *is* correct then I think most Tier 1 resellers will be closing the doors shortly given they have just about all hired senior people from both Leading Solutions and Commander.

4

Tiger

Thu 18/03/2010 - 23:31

“N” what on earth are you suggesting? I think readers of this magazine are all quite aware that both organisations didn’t fail because they were “successful”. LOL. They ran out of money from being operated in a non profitable fashion. They sold kit at low margin and over stated the profitability of their services. When they went bust they left customers, disties, and vendors high & dry.

The people being hired at Corporate Express are not the guys who built Leading or Volante years ago. They are the ones that came on board in later years and rode on its back driving it into the ground. Corporate Express has probably become a mates club for failed Commander & Leading freeloaders! Drink up boys!

Vendors need a reliable channel to market so it's little wonder some vendors and large users panic and start revisiting direct models. A few bad eggs sitting in the middle spoil it for the rest of us in the industry.

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