He's back: Westcoast re-hires Alex Tatham as exec director after one-year break

Following one year at NSC Global, Tatham is heading back to Westcoast where he started 15 years ago

Following a year at NSC Global Alex Tatham is back at Westcoast, this time with the title of executive director.

Tatham announced last April he was leaving his position as head of global clients and marketing at NSC Global after only joining in September 2022.

"When you come through the ranks like I did and get promoted through a business up to the MD position, what I found was that I felt like I needed a refresh," Tatham said about leaving Westcoast in the first place.

"And I felt like as though I needed to be able to go and do something different. I felt that I could go and do that.

"Then I decided to come back and with this very much a refreshing type of role. There are some really exciting new things I think that Westcoast are getting stuck into and Joe Hemani [founder and chairman of Westcoast] has given me that remit to get stuck into."

Tatham explained he found his time at global service provider NSC as a "fascinating experience" to learn about what goes on the other side of the fence.

"I think the two are very, very different businesses, but I'll be bringing back to Westcoast a service culture, how we can manage services and do services on behalf of customers better, how do we manage a partner organisation and I can see us doing lots of that.

"How do we focus on large project-based customers? So how do we help Capgemini repeal rollout or how do we help Verizon with some of their businesses as an example, so there's a really a different customer base as well.

"Understanding the services-based culture, I think is one of the great learnings that I've gotten from my time at NSC."

Hopes, goals and opportunities

Having had his "refreshing break", Tatham seems excited and more determined than ever to expand Westcoast's horizons.

"Really, the key goal is to make sure that we look at new products, new customers and new vendors."

Integrating with Germany and Poland, following a merger with German distributor KOMSA will also be one of his focuses, as well as taking charge of other areas that "have slipped" in his time away.

"One of the things that Joe would have said to me before I joined was 'Alex, we've lost our voice a bit'.

"So therefore, I'm going to make sure that the voice of Westcoast is loud and clear."

Tatham identified some other key opportunities and challenges ahead, such as in unified comms.

"Particularly with HP buying Poly. We need to make sure that we're ready for that. How do we create better experiences for a voice market? It's going to come into mainstream distribution, and it's very much more so driven by Microsoft, by Zoom, by Google Meets, as an example.

"And they all need help with hardware, better opportunities around meeting rooms, better opportunities around how to manage some of these things. And the simplification of a lot of that voice.

"So, there's a big focus on voice I think within the business and collaboration meetings."

MSPs is also another interesting area, according to Tatham.

"What's going to happen with the MSP market? Generally resellers setting up in business today are forming themselves as MSPs.

"And they are incredibly influential.

"So how do you actually target the MSP market? How do we help them with some of the deployments because every now and again, there will be a big deployment that they get themselves involved.

"Our job is to be able to help with that and therefore help with the deployment services and the redeployment services as well as some of the lifecycle management of devices of networking products out there that that needs to be done."

Tatham adds that digging further in the networking business will be very important and he hopes to be able to strengthen relationships with Aruba and Juniper, but also start working with Cisco.

"I'm looking forward to getting onto that as well as other networking vendors."

To the wider channel, he said: "If you've missed Westcoast, I hope that's because I've not been there. I'm back now, and my job is to make sure you really feel you can engage with Westcoast again."