Elaine Wang is an all-round tech enthusiast with a passion for the transformative power of the cloud for SMEs. She is the Cloud and Software Solutions Director of Rectron. She inspires and embodies tech leadership and is constantly finding innovative ways to solve problems.
You have a passion for helping SMEs figure out how technology can help their businesses, what’s your approach to engaging local enterprises?
Rectron works indirectly through the various channels to help SMEs - we partner with our resellers to deliver technology solutions that help local enterprises run better. We are more familiar with the tech and how it can grow a business’s bottom line, so when we engage in our sales process, we aim to empower our resellers to communicate this value to the end customer. Through the cloud solutions that we offer, we assist SMEs in collaborating better and being more productive, all while ensuring that their software is secure. Rectron’s SaaS solutions bring big business functionality at SME price points.
What are the trends you’ve noticed within African marketplaces in terms of uptake of enterprise cloud solutions?
It is a reality that infrastructure problems are holding back cloud usage in many African markets, but senior technology executives are accepting that cloud technology is a necessary ingredient for business growth. African marketplaces are in the early stages of development in terms of the uptake of enterprise cloud solutions but the impact of cloud services is already far-reaching. For the African marketplace, cloud, virtualisation and the broader evolution towards serverless computing are the most disruptive technology developments since the advent of the mobile payment revolution. Infrastructure issues remain, but tech executives are realising that cloud technology is the way to optimise their IT costs, speed time to market and grow their businesses.
Your operations extend into countries such as Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Zambia. Any future plans to expand Rectron further into Africa?
Rectron is well known to vendors and is recognised as being a distributor of choice for the South African and southern African ICT market. We will continue to forge close working relationships with vendors and facilitate joint business development by opening doors to our broad reseller network further into Africa. Our vendors work closely with our executive team to tap into new opportunities within our reseller partner base on African continent, leveraging Rectron’s core strength of being able to reach the breadth audience as a platform to mutual success.
What will drive your sector in SA in the near-to-mid future?
Cloud continues to drive growth in the technology sector. According to Gartner, the IT sector will grow at 1% in 2020, in spite of an anticipated decline in sales of devices this year, as well as a general slowdown of our economy. As businesses start to move workloads into the cloud, their appetite for cloud services increases and this brings about great opportunities for the reseller channel to make money through their service offerings. We will continue to see growth in SaaS and IaaS workloads. On top of this, Microsoft’s launch of their local data centre last year and AWS’s launch this year are all positive signs for our region’s ability to grow cloud consumption.
Are we seeing enough innovation in the ICT/tech space in SA? What challenges do you face under the current economic climate?
The ICT/tech space is critical to drive sustainable growth in South Africa and has shown strong output and investment in the past decade. The ICT sector continues to face challenges on a national level: education and skills shortages; job creation and empowerment; policy conflicts and regulatory failure have led to poor outcomes and slower development. A shortage of technical skills is the major challenge on company level and as technology continues to evolve rapidly we cannot always build on what has gone before, we must find new and novel solutions to the country’s unique challenges.
What are you most excited about for the next 12 months? Are there any immediate areas of growth you are targeting?
In addition to technology, we also offer power solutions under our RCT brand. We’ve seen positive uptake in inverter and solar power solutions in recent months arising from Eskom’s load shedding. With no clear end in sight, we believe that we will continue to see growth in this area. We have also seen immense growth in our enterprise hardware lineup. Recently we partnered with our resellers to deliver on some major projects utilising these solutions. Key areas for growth in enterprise hardware include networking, retail and warehousing solutions.
How does Rectron choose reseller partners to work with in architecting solutions that provide productivity and disaster recovery solutions?
Rectron has a vast network of over 7000 active resellers and retailers. We work closely with our partners to bring technology solutions to end customers. Our resellers have access to Rectron’s entire spectrum of hardware, software and cloud solutions. As a value-added service, we engage in a co-selling process with the reseller channel to help to articulate the benefits of the solutions that we sell. In addition to this, we regularly provide both sales and technical training for the reseller channel to ensure that our resellers are also up to speed on the latest technology. In cases where resellers are not able to deliver on projects, we also offer project delivery and support services to help resellers to plug the gap. We only supply to businesses that resell IT equipment, software and solutions through to end users.
How do you develop consultation programs and training services to help drive adoption of technology and to ensure that businesses in Africa derive the maximum value from their technology investments?
With a national footprint in the Southern African region, Rectron aims to provide excellent support to our customers with the purpose of assisting to drive the adoption of technology and ensure that businesses in Africa derive maximum value from their tech investment. To make the process as simple and as convenient as possible, Rectron offers online support services as well as walk-in face-to-face support in all major South African cities. We have service centres located across the country staffed by skilled individuals who provide customers and end-users with service information, advice, returns, swap-out options and financing solutions. Our support staff can assist with assembly problems, preparing products for use, testing, configuration. They are readily available to provide support, advice and information.
What technology areas are retailers investing in?
Today’s consumers want experiences that include personalisation and information to help them make decisions. The Internet of Things technology and smart equipment helps retailers deliver these experiences to these customers. Virtual and augmented reality offer retailers several ways to enhance the customer experience. Predictive analytics of big data helps retailers be smarter, more efficient, and reduce costs.
Are there differences when providing cloud services to a retailer, who can have multiple locations and inventory in transit across a wide geography, compared with serving other types of enterprises?
Projects where there are multiple sites are often more complex, but the fundamentals in delivering cloud services remain the same. As a first step, any organisation needs to have an understanding of their business challenges that might be helped along with a technology solution. Once this is established, an IT audit needs to establish what is available in the existing environment. Thereafter can we offer a technology solution to help to solve some of the business challenges in the context of the existing environment. Only once this is done can project delivery start to take place. With a geographically diverse organisation, some elements of the project might be able to be delivered remotely. For those elements which cannot be delivered remotely, it is important for those organisations to partner with a service partner that has a nationwide footprint.
What future types of cloud-based, enterprise services could be developed for the retail industry? Who are some of the third-parties building services on Google Cloud for retailers?
There are several core cloud-based enterprise services that can be further developed for use in the retail industry. Retail as a Service (RaaS) can integrate the different verticals like inventory and order processing thus improving restocking capabilities. With cloud computing, retailers can have an enterprise-wide supply chain visibility, capture real-time status of consignments, digitised documents from suppliers, logistics providers etc. Better merchandising decisions, personalised customer service and better insights into business performance are all derived from cloud computing and big data analysis. SAP, Trax and Capgemini build retail solutions on Google Cloud. Depending on their needs, Google has tech partners who build complete solutions and packet solutions for the retail market as well as service integrators who build more bespoke solutions for retailers.
Rectron’s new cloud platform, RCT, houses your cloud and software solutions, including Microsoft, Palladium, Acronis and Bitdefender. How does RCT help simplify the way that companies run their cloud businesses?
Rectron has recently re-launched RCT-Cloud, our cloud platform. Our reseller channel can simply log on and provision the cloud services required for their customers, to be billed either monthly or annually. The ability to do all of this on a single platform simplifies business operations for our reseller partners. The cloud and software solutions Rectron offers a wide variety of services that will be needed in retail businesses.
What sets Rectron apart from the competition?
Rectron is intent on being recognised as a leading player in the South African and southern African ICT industry. Being so close to technology and having to be one step ahead in a digital universe means that we need to be highly innovative if we want to get ahead and remain a leading player. We employ technically-skilled specialists as well as creative and strategic thinkers, to foster a culture of innovation and excellence. A strong national presence and close ties with leading global ICT companies enables us to respond quickly to market changes and to identify trends that are likely to impact our market and business channels. Our objective is to keep an ear to the ground and to be first to respond to changes, seizing opportunities that come our way and always seeking new and better ways to empower our customers.
You’ve been vocal on the topic of how organisations can maximise their cloud investments. What are some of the ways businesses can achieve this?
At Rectron, we begin with understanding organisational objectives to measure the success of any strategic cloud engagement at a later stage. Any cloud investment needs to ultimately help a business to operate better, whether this is helping the CFO to restructure costs, or helping the Sales Director to build the business.
Tactically, there are several ways organisations can maximise their cloud investments. These range from workload optimisation through rightsizing to bringing about organisational productivity through SaaS solutions. Once in the cloud, organisations can reduce costs auditing their cloud environments. These tactical activities can be managed through cloud monitoring software.
Organisations must consider what to do with existing and legacy applications. They have the option of re-building the application from the ground up or refactoring them for the cloud.
Regardless of what a business is doing to get to the cloud, it’s imperative to keep the user and customer journey top of mind, as the success of any cloud project is determined by the users. Organisations must ensure that they have consulted adequately with all key stakeholders to drive adoption of the technology and to ensure that the new processes and applications are built with the user experience in mind.
What do you think is the best part of being a female leader in the tech industry and what advice would you give to women looking to break into the tech field?
Being a female leader in tech, we really stand out! Women bring different views to the boardroom, which helps to generate tangible business value. My advice to all women looking to succeed in the tech industry is to put up your hand to get involved, even when you are not sure if you should. Be brave and don’t back away from a new challenge, especially in a traditionally male-dominated environment.
Rectron’s own programme, Basadi, was launched last year with the aim to empower the women at our company and to encourage each one to stand up and get involved. It’s really important that women support each other, and only by doing so, we will succeed in our goal of increasing female representation at all management layers within the company.
What is your biggest piece of advice for IT companies getting started with diversity and inclusion?
Diversity and inclusion must be regularly discussed around the boardroom table; it requires buy-in from top management. Metrics should be put in place to evaluate the success of any such initiative. Organisations do well to involve their staff in Diversity and inclusion campaigns because diversity is meaningless without inclusion.
Your customers are wide-ranging from ICT resellers, system integrators, value-added resellers, mass retail groups, independent store-owners, e-commerce stores, telcos and ISPs. The end-users of your products include consumers, SMEs, corporate organisations, the hospitality industry, government, educational institutions and mining houses. Does Rectron’s company culture help when it comes to creating consistency of service delivery across these different verticals?
Rectron aims to create a uniform customer experience that delivers service excellence regardless of who our customers are. Our staff are all customer advocates, who work together towards a common purpose.
In your leadership role, how do you maintain a business focus while ensuring that innovation within the company stays on trend?
Innovation is crucial to a business being able to improve its processes, bring new and improved products and services to market, increase its efficiency and, most importantly, improve its profitability. Whatever form it takes, innovation is a creative process. The ideas may come from inside the business, e.g. from employees, managers or in-house research and development work or outside the business, e.g. suppliers, customers, media reports, market research published by another organisation, or universities and other sources of new technologies. Successful leadership requires that innovation becomes part of our thinking on every level. Business focus comes from filtering those ideas, identifying those that the business will take forward on and applying resources to achieve them.
How do you approach gaining the depth of knowledge around Rectron’s core business to identify opportunities for innovative technology to enable your primary customer’s objectives?
We meet regularly as a leadership team to strategise around our core business. We are fortunate that our leadership team has a deep understanding of our business as well as that of our customers. We also work very closely with our strategic vendors to ensure that we keep abreast of the latest trends that we can bring to our customers.
How do you align your IT projects to fit the overall business strategy of your organization?
In my talk at the Women in Tech conference, one of the key takeaways is that business strategy lies at the heart of any IT project. One needs to get a sound understanding of what the business needs to achieve, before looking for the tech tools that will help the business to achieve these goals. This requires consultation between all stakeholders, from IT, to management, users and customer champions.
How do you maintain work-life balance and what are your views on goals, timelines, and measuring success?
I am goal driven by nature, and that has been key to the success that I’ve seen in my career. I believe that smaller goals are extremely important to one’s career as they represent milestones to reach – as they say, you eat an elephant one bite at a time.
However, while I’m always looking forward to the next goal, I understand the importance of looking back and reflecting on my achievements. I’m fortunate that I work for a company that values family and work life balance. However, one trick that I have learned to be able to switch off from work is to remove email notifications on my phone.
How do you collaborate with IT, sales and product teams? What technical and soft skills are integral to your role?
Collaboration between teams is always tricky. However, the key to doing this is over-communicating. I believe strongly in face time with people, as even with all the technology at our fingertips, you can’t replace that human interaction. So often, things get misinterpreted over email and instant message – you need to actually speak to each other to get your point across. Internally, we are using Microsoft Teams as our collaboration tool and it is working very well. It allows us to stay connected with our teams during and after meetings to ensure that nothing gets lost. In my role and in delivering on some of the projects for the company, basic project management skills are also required to ensure that we deliver on time. Lastly, listening is an important skill to ensure success in a team environment.
How important is it to be exposed to all areas of the business in order to be an effective leader within your business?
It is always important to have a good idea of what is happening in other departments in order to be effective in one’s own role, since the overall success of a business is never dependent on one department alone. At Rectron, we implement a policy of job rotation when you first join the company so that you get a good idea of how each department operates. It also gives you an appreciation of the challenges that each department faces in their day to day, ensuring less finger-pointing within our business. At a leadership level, it is important to communicate with other department heads and understand the challenges in each area to see if my own department is able to help out.
What influences your leadership style and what values are important to you? How do you balance cooperation with others and independent thinking?
I have been fortunate to have had some incredible managers in my career and I would say that they have heavily influenced my leadership style. Day to day, I strongly believe that one’s ability and willingness to learn is key to achieving success. While I believe it is important to have an opinion, any effective leader needs to be able to listen and mold their opinions, updating them with new information.
What's your view on the most important technical skills to have in the IT department in three to five years (or 5-10 years)? How do you go about determining future skills needs?
Effectively coordinating people, budgets and resources will become an indispensable technical skill. Resource savings, prompt resolution of problems and the anticipation of future issues require project management. I believe that project management will become imperative In every area of a business: the ability to deliver projects more efficiently, use resources cost-effectively and deploy the right staff to complete the right tasks.
Business intelligence is a crucial skill in the age of information because it can give businesses vital information they can use to retain market share or define their competitive advantage. Big data analysis also will continue to play a vital role in the overall business process, resulting in more effective marketing and sales operations, increased opportunities to generate revenue and greater operational efficiency.
In an increasingly digital world, information security is a technical skill in high demand. IT Specialists who are able to identify loopholes in systems, pinpoint any vulnerabilities and tailor practices to strengthen the way in which information is managed will enjoy greater demand in the quest for business success. The biggest challenge facing the IT industry is the specialised skill shortage required to unlock new routes to innovation. To determine future skill needs, companies must ensure that they are purposefully attracting a more diverse, curious and youthful workforce.
Originally published in Business Africa Online.
https://businessafricaonline.com/elaine-wang-2/
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