Cradlepoint has big growth plans in EMEA and the man spearheading its channel expansion campaign is Hubert Da Costa, Vice President of EMEA, whose career path and industry experience dovetails neatly with the US-based company's expanding global ambitions.
Da Costa's IT career began in 1998 at Symbol Technologies, followed by a move to Juniper, then Avaya and Sonus Networks before dovetailing with Cradlepoint. Individually, Da Costa's biggest career achievement is winning his first one million dollar deal at Symbol. "Just as important is the time I spent in major companies under the tutelage of some world class leaders," he added. "This has given me the equivalent of a working MBA. My career experience has enabled me to touch every aspect of the networking mobility world, and I have brought all of this together at Cradlepoint."
He is gunning for Cradlepoint to become a global leader in software defined wireless WAN solutions to the distributed and mobile enterprise. And 15 months into the his EMEA expansion campaign Da Costa remains focused on the company's biggest opportunity - verticalisation of the business through localisation. "We will continue our investment in the channel and our vertical approach in the market," he explained. "Channel expansion has been a challenge that we've worked to address via a two tier route to market. We aim to double our EMEA business within vertical and horizontal markets year-on-year over the next five years."
Cradlepoint is currently investing $4 million in EMEA expansion and plans to grow at 80-plus per cent next year, increasing the team by eight in continental Europe to support the expansion it made into the ME region this summer. Incremental roles will be marketing, sales, channel, technical and business development focused. "We have developed a platform for growth through a 100 per cent channel-led route to market," stated Da Costa. "We will never take a deal direct. This feeds into our personal approach, so that our big accounts have a direct touch from Cradlepoint to enable the channel to grow faster. From here we plan to expand through local execution. We will continue to grow but instead of branching out from the UK into EMEA countries we will have local entities in those countries. We've already started this in the Middle East."
Founded in 2006, Cradlepoint is a privately held company with headquarters in Idaho and has shipped over a 1.4 million routing platforms, offering solutions certified and promoted by major worldwide carriers. These include cloud-based wired and wireless WAN networking solutions for distributed and mobile enterprises, with strong wireless and broadband performance and network system interoperability.
Cradlepoint's family of router platforms are deployed in mission critical applications that require 24x7 connectivity. With both integrated wireless and wired WAN and non-integrated versions, its solutions are designed for distributed and mobile operations and emerging industries that require either remote connectivity or multi-WAN redundancy. Cradlepoint's Enterprise Cloud Manager enables enterprise network administrators to monitor, manage and maintain their distributed network running on different WAN sources from a single location.
"An increasing amount of enterprise network traffic is moving off private IP networks and onto the public Internet and we are starting to see SDN as a solution," noted Da Costa. "This is the market opportunity for Cradlepoint and we are already embracing it through a product called NetCloud, a new brand that represents the combination of all our cloud-based management and software defined routers and EDGE software with the Pertino network as a service. Through this we can not only grow the business, but make a real difference to the customers we already serve."
There was a time when Cradlepoint provided connectivity via boxes. But with a recent technology integration (from the acquisition of Silicon Valley based SDN pioneer Pertino) the company is fast becoming all about cloud-based network solutions for connecting people, places and things over wired and wireless broadband. "We are now taking the core intelligence at ground level and putting it into the cloud, connecting people, places and things," added Da Costa. "Initially, our mantra was 'always connected always protected'. We were able to do this with the advent of LTE for business. LTE was the key driver for us and we hit the market with a high degree of success. Now we're experiencing another big turning point for connectivity in the cloud."
Cradlepoint started out by focusing on retail as it could demonstrate RoI quickly in this vertical. However, its channel operations took it down a different route and the company quickly adapted to support different vertical markets. "Key sectors for us now are transportation, banking and finance, government and healthcare, as well as retail," added Da Costa. "Because of our close relationship with the channel we've been able to develop products specifically for those markets. The channel has been truly instrumental in the evolution of our business as we develop specific products by vertical market. We now have a business growing month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter."
The company grew 56 per cent in the 2014-15 financial year and continues to expand at a double digit rate. "We expect to close the year on a minimum 50 per cent over last year," added Da Costa. "In the last 12 months alone Cradlepoint has seen its EMEA business double. This rapid growth is set to continue as organisations across the region embrace cloud, mobile and IoT technologies to increase their business agility, empower distributed workforces and gain operational insights.
"What everyone is looking for today is something 'as a service'. If resellers evolve over time they will have to embrace the move from a capex to an opex model to better serve today's markets. They will need to take anything, whether voice, mobility or software, and deliver it as a service. This is the future."•