Dominic O'Hanlon (Rhipe)
Rhipe is stepping up its hunt for vendor prospects in the North American market with the new appointment of an old ally, Boughty (Anthony) Canton, who has come back into the fold as the distributor’s new group executive of new alliances.
Canton was one of Rhipe’s earliest hires, according to CEO Dominic O’Hanlon, and held the role of vice president, products and programs from late 2004 to late 2016. Since then, he has held a number of various roles from his home base in the US state of Portland.
Now, Canton has been handed the brief of focusing on new vendor on-boarding for Rhipe. His appointment is part of a broader plan to focus on new vendors to bring on board.
According to O’Hanlon, part of the decision to bring Canton back into the fold was his location. Canton’s Oregon base puts him within easy reach of Silicon Valley, where many of the prospective vendors on Rhipe’s radar are based.
“I was over in Silicon Valley recently,” O’Hanlon told ARN. “And we got a lot of interest from a lot of vendors who've done their homework and are saying [that they] want to partner with Rhipe. And I'm saying: ‘Who's going to talk to them, because I'm busy?’ So, then we realised we've just got to bring somebody on.”
To some extent, Rhipe is always keeping tabs on dedicated software-as-a-service vendors from North America that are looking to break into the broader Asia Pacific (APAC) market.
However, Canton’s appointment could see the Australian-listed cloud software distributor ramp up its efforts to onboard new software-as-a-service providers -- but only if they fit the bill.
According to O’Hanlon, Rhipe’s particular recipe for distribution, which focuses primarily on cloud-based SaaS offerings means that the company typically only onboards vendors with the right combination of maturity and product offering.
“We've got quite a quite defined roadmap, actually,” O’Hanlon said. “We're looking for multinational vendors that are struggling to launch their subscription offerings in the APAC region.”
Indeed, the company’s footprint in Asia is growing, with the distributor revealing earlier this yearthat, while roughly 60 per cent of this growth during the financial year ending June 2019 came from the Australian market, the remaining 40 per cent came from Asia.
In 2015, Rhipe was appointed to the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Program across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. Since then, the company has only increased its presence in the Asian market -- a factor that positions Rhipe well to introduce new vendors to the region.
According to O’Hanlon, a lot of traditionally US-centric software vendors have struggled to break into the APAC market. From O’Hanlon’s perspective, this is an area where Rhipe, with its presence in Japan and Korea, among other Asian countries, can step in and help.
