Nuvias Group is the new name for the pan-EMEA distribution business being created by Rigby Private Equity (RPE). The two bid components, Wick Hill and Zycko will now be known as ‘Wick Hill, a Nuvias group company’ and ‘Zycko, a Nuvias group company.’
The organisation now has a regional structure, with key individuals from the two taking positions and a geographical structure of three regions, with offices in thirteen countries. Ian Kilpatrick, David Galton-Fenzi, Lee Driscoll, Zycko’s chief sales officer, and Helge Scherff, managing director of Wick Hill Germany, all join the Nuvias board.
The regions are:
Northern
UK, Nordics and Benelux. This region is headed up by Lee Driscoll.
Central
DACH and Central Europe. This region is headed up by Helge Scherff.
Southern
France, Iberia, Italy and the Mediterranean. This region is headed up by Zycko head David Galton-Fenzi, on an interim basis.
With little vendor overlap, the addition of new vendors is not an issue; one or two customers work with both parts of the new company, but the internal systems can accommodate any preferences for joint or separate billing and relationships, says Paul Eccleston, head of RPE, also now becomes CEO of Nuvias.
“With Nuvias, RPE is building an EMEA-wide, high-value, specialist distribution business, with a common proposition and consistent delivery. The strategy is to redefine value distribution to the channel, enabling the channel and vendor community to deliver exceptional business value to their customers and creating new standards of channel success,” says Paul Eccleston.
The structure is in place to help meet the main aim of creating a distribution business in all the major markets in EMEA, and this will be by both organic growth and acquisition, he confirms.
The brand Nuvias will contain both organisations, which will continue their separate management and status “for the foreseeable future”. Resources will continue to allocated from the central hubs of the two existing distributors, although both will share “best practice” and ideas.
He says: “Zycko and Wick Hill form the foundations of Nuvias, a new type of international distribution company. We’re building a distributor to meet the evolving demands of the channel. As of today, Nuvias is already serving 40 vendors and 5,000 resellers in thirteen countries. Moving forward, we will be covering all major territories in EMEA, offering a common value proposition, consistently executed.”
The new name acknowledges that in future there will be more high value-add, specialist distributor acquisitions, more countries added to the geographical scope, more services provided, as well as new vendor and reseller partner needs.
Today, the Nuvias product portfolio encompasses networking, infrastructure, security, communications, storage, continuity, recovery, access, performance, monitoring and management. Turnover is over $300m. Recently, Nuvias became a pan-EMEA distributor for vendors Unitrends and Malwarebytes while in January 2015, the first joint Wick Hill/Zycko office was opened in Vienna, Austria.