Partner Content: How one Brazilian Channel Partner is helping with digital transformation

[April 21, 2020]With more than 20 years of experience, Compwire is one of the respected technology consulting firms in Brazil, a country that has been embracing digital transformation. The proactive mentality of the governments in various level prompted changes in the market trends and sent Compwire through some ups and downs. But with the partnership with Huawei, it turned around and regained its leading role in the industry.

Digital Transformation Prompts Changes in Market Trends

Brazil is a country with continental dimensions, spanning across an area of 8.5 million square-kilometer and has more than 210 million in population. Given is a vast dispersion in development parameters across regions, the Brazilian administration looked into different options for better governance. Indeed, Brazil has been gradually "mobilized" and is expected to be among the five major smartphone markets by 2025 with 200 million mobile connections. The government identified digital transformation as a powerful tool for the state to effectively reach its citizens, delivering efficient, quality services, and eliminating the time and money citizens must spend to travel across such a vast territory to reach their government.

Since early 2010s, the rapidly deepening internet penetration and fast-growing mobile population have represented tremendous business opportunities of technology companies. The explosion of data demand was a driving force for modern storage technology. But all these also led to a fierce competition among vendors, including Huawei and Compwire. Between 2015 and 2016, social instability and a sluggish economy complicated the market development, where Compwire saw its business declining in traditional market as the uncertain direction of governments resulted in decreasing orders.

The government finally brought themselves together after the turmoil and decided to launch a series of technological initiatives to construct Digital Cities and Safe Cities across the country, where the Public Safety Department was set up to oversee these plans. It has become a major shift of market trend from traditional ICT to emerging techs with high connectivity. This is when Compwire decided to transform itself to catch the market trend.

From Competitors to Partners

Riding on the wave of digital transformation, Huawei Enterprise Business witnessed robust growth in Brazil between 2017 and 2018, particularly in the storage market in which Compwire had a share. The two firms competed for various projects in the public and finance sectors, and they developed rather good knowledge of each other.

Planning for further expansion, Huawei was looking for partners with strong presence in the country. Competitors then quickly became partners, where Compwire was one of Huawei's Certified Service Partners (CSPs). The partnership kept growing.

In 2018, the two companies decided to further cooperate by sharing valuable customers, expanding their business, and making breakthroughs in domains such as storage, servers, and private cloud platforms.

Compwire's decision to partner with Huawei makes perfect sense to the Brazilian firm because Huawei has a wide range of quality products to offer. "In this scenario of digital transformation, many new opportunities have arisen such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Smart Cities, which have already become a reality for our business," said Marcos Choinski, CEO of Compwire. "Huawei is huge in terms of space and immense in terms of developing new technologies. And this is of utmost importance to us."

Down to the country's technology initiatives, Huawei offered comprehensive Safe City solutions, and had deployed the first CloudIVS project in Brazil. Huawei's advantages in the Safe City market perfectly matched Compwire's transformation requirements. With the Huawei Dorado all-flash storage's outstanding performance and low latency, Compwire gained important customers as such the State Labor Court and the State Secretariat of Finance.

For Huawei, Compwire is also the best choice for its marketing strategy. Huawei always looks to localize products and solutions in different markets. It has already seen rapid growth in sales and particularly topped the Brazil's storage market in recent years. The portfolio has then continued to extend to IP, IT, VC, and wireless products, giving a huge potential for Compwire to expand business scope.

"Huawei had adhered to a strategy of providing products for integration in Brazil, which meant that it sold its Huawei products through local partners," Choinski noted. "From a long-term perspective, this strategy guaranteed that Compwire would benefit from the cooperation."

In early 2019, Compwire joined Huawei's global Partner Advisory Board and later named Huawei's "Best IT Partner of the Year". The business plans jointly compiled by Huawei and Compwire have been used to win named accounts in government, banking, oil and gas, power, and other sectors.

Yao Wei, General Manager of the Brazil Rep Office,
presented the VAP certificate to Marcos Choinski, CEO of Compwire.

Collaborations proven to drive success

Building on this robust foundation, Compwire looks forward to further collaboration with Huawei, leveraging its product portfolios and ICT solution integration capabilities. The future focus will fall on the data center, big data analytics, the IoT, and Safe City domains, striving to become an important partner of enterprise and government customers on their digital transformation journeys. Huawei has decided to certify Compwire as a solution partner. Following the establishment of the OpenLab in Brazil in June 2019, Huawei and Compwire will collaboratively test and develop solutions in Brazil, reflecting the rapid maturing of channel partnership.

The journey of digital transformation does not just end there. According to fintech form PagBrazil, the country is now highly digitalized, with 150.4 million internet users and 71% internet penetration as of January 2020. The number of internet users increased by 8.5 million, or 6% just between 2019 and 2020. The collaboration not only opened up more business opportunities for Compwire and Huawei, but also helped drive the digital transformation in Brazil. This further confirms the shared success of Huawei's strategy with its channel partners.