Global IT solution provider Zones Inc. has arrived in Canada. Zameer Hussain has been hired to be Zones’ first ever country manager for the Canadian operation.
Hussain was formerly with two CDN Top 5 Solution Providers Compugen and CDW Canada. At CDW Canada, Hussain was one of Mary Ann Yule’s top direct reports. Before that Hussain worked at two other CDN Top 100 Solution Providers in Xwave and Metafore. He got his start in the channel at Ingram Micro Canada.
It was long rumoured that Zones was entering the Canadian space ever since Canadian executive Murray Wright took over Zones as CEO back in 2013. But that never occurred under his leadership. Wright left Zones in late 2015 and now works at wireless solution provider Tessco Technologies Inc. as president and CEO.
Wright was replaced by the co-founder of Zones Firoz Lalji, who is also chairman along with holding the titles of president and CEO.
One source close to the situation told CDN that Hussain’s growth strategy for the Canadian market is to go after the Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. companies that are already Zones customers. This is a similar strategy that was used by other large, foreign-owned solution providers such as Dimension Data and CDW when they entered the Canadian market.
The source also said Hussain is currently building up his team for the Canadian market push.
Also CDN has learned that Zones will be offering customized IT solutions and professional services in Canada. The company based in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, Wash., will be providing Zones Canada with a deep bench of people resources called the Zones Global Team.
One of the more interesting aspects of Zones is they have an OEM partnership with Apple, which historically has not been a strong alliance vendor to many other solution providers in the country. Zones also has vendor partnerships with Dell EMC, HP, IBM, Lenovo and NetApp.
Also part of the plan is to have coast-to-coast distribution facilities along with configuration services for servers, storage, networking, desktops, mobile and even digital signage.
Another source told CDN that Zones might be setting up a reseller network across Canada. This source added that with the hiring of Hussain expect Zones Canada to be aggressively going after new business in Canada.
Zones is also a cloud provider able to develop public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
The company recently unveiled a Cloud Marketplace that offers customers cloud solutions that comes with administration, management and around the clock post-sales support. According to Zones, the Cloud Marketplace portal enables customers to provision workloads in real time in a self-service manner.
Zones entering the Canadian market comes at a time when the global solution provider has acquired New York-based nfrastructure Technologies LLC, a provider of core-to-edge technical and managed services. The terms of this deal were not disclosed, but Zones did say by acquiring nfrastructure it would be able to extend its solutions and services capabilities along with enhancing product fulfillment and technical expertise. Zones will be make infrastructure a wholly-owned subsidiary of Zones.
