Dean Douglas travels overseas more often than most Americans. Over the course of several weeks, he had visited Europe, Kenya, Singapore and Sydney, Australia.
“I haven’t been to Brazil in the last six months or so but I expect to go down there sometime before the end of the year," said the 54-year-old Douglas, CEO of Westcon Group, during an interview in September at the company’s LEAP Center in Lafayette, Colo., just east of Boulder and the towering Rocky Mountains.
Circumnavigating the globe goes with the gig when you are the top executive of a global technology distributor that is rapidly expanding. Tarrytown, N.Y.-based Westcon operates in 70 countries with 17 logistics facilities and customers in 70 countries. The company distributes unified communications, infrastructure, security and data center solutions through a vast network of channel partners, including value added resellers, systems integrators and service providers.
Since 1999, revenues have surged from around $200 million to nearly $4 billion based on Westcon’s 2012 internal fiscal year target.
With the global economy in a rut and millions of Americans out of work, Westcon may reflect a silver lining in an otherwise gloomy employment market. “We are hiring across the globe," Douglas said, although he declined to specify the number of workers that would join his company of 2,500 employees.
Westcon’s growth is partly attributable to an aggressive M&A strategy – the distributor acquired seven companies in 2007 alone.
“We are a company that … is very very comfortable in doing acquisitions and garnering some real leverage from them," said Douglas, who has been with Westcon for three years.
Case in point: Over the summer, Westcon announced an agreement to acquire entrada Kummunikations GmbH. Westcon said the company is the second-largest value-added distributor of security products in Germany with 2010 revenues in excess of $90 million. And just this week, Westcon disclosed a deal to acquire Sentronics, a South African value-added distributor of electronic video and security equipment and solutions.
“We’re continuing to look at potential acquisitions," Douglas said. “We’ve got a list of companies that we’re looking at. Some are saying, ‘yeah we are interested,’ some are saying ‘no we’re not’ and so we continue to monitor the marketplace."
