Change is the focus for APC regional event

The event theme, 'Field of Dreams', was built around the opportunity to witness the biggest Soccer match of the Spanish League season with Barcelona playing host to Real Madrid on the official field of dreams. In addition, the partners were able to experience the surreal and dreamlike art and architecture Barcelona has to offer.

62 regional distributors from the Middle East & Africa, earned the opportunity to travel to Spain and were hosted by 30 APC employees. The 2007 was the debut for joining the Middle East and African partners together, enabling the introduction of diverse products, processes and solutions APC to a wide audience of "Emerging Market" partners.

APC's main objective was to prepare the partners for change, so that they would be well positioned to understand and take advantage of the major business opportunity that now exists for critical power & cooling services across the region following the merger between APC and MGE.

The new entity will be providing integrated solutions for all market sectors, from Retail through to Data Center in the fields of Power, Management, Security, Cabling and Cooling for both corporate and home environments.

The style of the event was designed to be both entertaining and educational. Not only were APC's product managers and technical experts present, but the event also attracted the first visit to European Customers and Employees of APC-MGE's new CEO Laurent Vernerey and other senior managers from the Sales, Marketing, Operations and Logistics functions to support and enhance the event's secondary objective of education and motivation.

This enabled a mixture of presentations which included channel strategies, business development strategies and product updates and a fascinating insight into the high level world of Mergers and Acquisitions with the new CEO.

Philip Hughes, newly appointed Director, Middle East Zone, APC-MGE, commented, 'For our new Leadership, this was a fantastic opportunity to meet with our widely diverse range of partners, to discover the real difficulties of driving growth and help identify solutions to those problems in an emerging market and more importantly to help us to reinforce a coherent strategy, leadership and direction to drive long term sustainable business development.'

"Middle East and Africa has a fantastic team of partners and employees spread across three continents who often only get the chance to interface directly with Management or Product Specialists once a year. These events also allow us to Empower our partners, to give them the tools they need to offer comprehensive solutions to their market, but also to show them how they can interface with the organization to bring additional skills on line to help them develop their own businesses."

At the Barcelona event, presentations were given by the new CEO of APC-MGE, Laurent Vernerey, and Global Chief Marketing Officer, Aaron Davis, speaking of the benefits partners and the customers will experience as a result of the merger between APC and MGE.

Part of the regional event was to celebrate the official launch of a new, improved call center facility, based in Dubai, as Hughes described,

"The launch of our regional 'Shared Services Center' (SSC) provides partners, resellers and end users the ability to experience the technical and sales support functions of Europe here in their own region".

The SSC will manage pre and post sales support, order management, logistics and is seen as a major investment of resources in the region.

APC's Barcelona event ended with an 'Oscar style' Gala awards ceremony, rewarding partners of their achievements during 2006 and setting the competitive standard for business in 2007, and a highly entertaining and thought provoking show designed to emphasize the ability of people to change their view of the world.

Hughes 'There is no doubt in our minds that this annual event has been a key driver of our continued success in Middle East and this year by adding the Africans and by becoming a new entity, we can push forward faster on the integration of APC & MGE in our region and address many of the key business opportunities in this region.'