Microsoft technology partner, Altron Karabina, has recently appointed Marc Fletcher as its new Territory Lead for the Western Cape.
He joined the company in 2017 in a business development role and has been focused on growing the Western Cape’s data, planning and analytics, and digital workplace business in the region through sales and account management.
“Marc has a good understanding of Altron Karabina’s technology solutions and I know he really cares and looks after our existing and potential customers. He will represent us well in this important and strategic territory,” said Grant van der Wal, Managing Director of Altron Karabina.
Marc Fletcher, Territory Lead for the Western Cape at Altron Karabina. said: “These are exciting times for the Western Cape region. Cape Town is highly regarded as being the South African epicentre of technology innovation and start-ups. However, there is also a strong, established, and growing commercial and enterprise business segment that still needs to be serviced. For our part, our focus has been with a mix of retail, financial and insurance services, and manufacturing business in the region that we have been aligning our offerings to.
“Prior to joining Altron Karabina, I led a national marketing and business development team from the front line and in the trenches with the sales teams driving market orientation. I still believe in being a hands-on leader and meeting with customers and understanding their business first-hand, which facilitates the necessary and important cycling of market intelligence into the strategy as a continuous improvement process.
“Of course, we have lofty targets in place for the Western Cape, but they are achievable. It is about applying our collective experience and strengthening the existing relationships we have, building new ones, and getting the wealth of support from head office in Johannesburg and our colleagues in the broader Altron businesses where needed.”
It is in this people-centric approach where Fletcher really comes into his own. Fletcher wants to make technology real for Altron Karabina customers. For him, it is about using technology as an enabler to innovate inside a business and unlocking the value of the assets at hand, like a customer’s existing data which can be mined, visualised and interpreted to provide invaluable insights and opportunities.
He says this leads to Altron Karabina taking its customers on a cloud journey. Which rather than being clichéd is an important roadmap that customers should understand, plan for and execute upon – the security, sovereignty and skills concerns of past years are now moot, if customers don’t embrace the cloud in the near future they will be at a competitive disadvantage soon.
“With Microsoft announcing that Office 365 will be available locally in the first quarter of their new financial year (July to September), there will be even more chances to highlight the benefits of a cloud-driven environment for businesses in the Western Cape,” Fletcher said.