Bangkok Post : 3Com to expand into new markets

IT SPENDING

3Com (Thailand) will expand its footprint into the large enterprise market by underscoring its best characteristic in total cost of ownership (TCO).

Sakchai Punyajaray

According to 3Com (Thailand) country manager, Sakchai Punyajaray, the overall IT spending this year will slow down for a while, however, there is the market demand of those organisations who have to change or replace their present infrastructure with the new one.

3Com has recruited a new team, sales and technical, to take care of the large enterprise and state enterprise as this is the new target for the company this year. "This is the segment that has its own IT department and we will work with them with our partners to implement 3Com on their systems," Sakchai said, adding that the targets of 3Com are state enterprises and banking.

He pointed out that under the present economic conditions, organisations will make decisions on IT spending based on their "need to have" rather "nice to have", and thus the first group is the target segment of 3Com.

By doing it more deeply, the company has split engineer resource teams, based on the market segments, SMEs, mid-enterprise and large enterprise, whereas those were pooling resources. In the meantime, the country manager said, 3Com has to seek partners to take care of the large enterprise.

3Com products were recently awarded by the state enterprises, such as the Port Authority of Thailand and Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand. Sakchai noted that those organisations have used the networking products of other vendors, but they have changed to 3Com as they proved that the TCO of 3Com has more advantages than others.

3Com has been also awarded by KBank which recently refreshed its branch network throughout the country.

The company will also encourage the market with new 3Com products including data centre switch, wireless controller and Unified Mobility Network (UMN). Sakchai added that with the increasing use of wireless communication, the cost of network management will grow.