Renato (Ato) Garcia (Comstor)
Comstor, the Cisco specialist distribution arm of Westcon, has appointed Renato (Ato) Garcia as new country manager of the Philippines amid plans to build an emerging cloud practice to capitalise on increased customer demand.
Channel Asia can reveal that Garcia joins the business having previously served as country leader of Exclusive Leaders - formerly Transition Systems - for 12 years, helping develop and oversee the creation of a local distribution network focused primarily on cyber security and networking technologies.
Prior to distribution, Garcia spent more than 20 years working in channel and sales management roles at SAP, Cisco, Huawei-3Com and Crescendo Networks, which assets were acquired by F5 in 2011.
“Renato brings a wealth of channel knowledge and experience to our Philippines organisation and is a tried and tested industry veteran who has built trusted relationships with partners throughout the Philippines and beyond,” said Wilson Ho, managing director of Asia at Westcon-Comstor.
As revealed by Channel Asia, the time is now ripe for Philippine-based vendors and partners to team up with hyperscale cloud providers, as the country’s cloud market races towards a major surge in spending.
Enterprise spending on cloud services in the Philippines is expected grow from US$1.8 billion in 2020 to US$2.6 billion in 2024, according to industry analysis firm GlobalData.
New data by the firm suggests that the cloud boom goes well beyond the enterprise segment, with cloud-based service usage soaring in the consumer segment and streaming mobile video users, which are set to grow from 53 million in 2020 to 80 million in 2024.
Moreover, mobile social media users will grow from 75 million to 80 million over the same period. This is in addition to broad industry trends both driving and supporting cloud usage in the country, including digital transformation and growing international connectivity.
International connectivity can be an important factor in building a local cloud-hub, given that it can offer redundant connectivity options to global data centres to ensure resilience of operations. And providers in the Philippines have been making good progress on this front.
“For almost two decades Renato has been fostering the development of young Filippino sales, pre-sales, product specialists and emerging managers in the IT industry, all the while delivering results with high integrity and high value,” added Patrick Aronson, executive vice president of Asia Pacific at Westcon-Comstor. “He’s exactly the type of leader we strive to bring into the Westcon-Comstor family.”
Regionally speaking, Westcon-Comstor recently signed a distribution agreement with network detection and response solutions vendor ExtraHop for key Asian markets, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and China.
The deal works to enhance Westcon-Comstor’s cyber security offering to companies in the region as the business landscape grapples with an ongoing increase in cyber attack activity.
