COMPUTEX: Creating lifelong partnerships through trust

As President of Computex, Worth Davis’ role is to run the business effectively, ensuring that Computex does all it can to keep customers and employees happy, creating a relationship of trust designed to last a lifetime. “We've got a creative, fun and engaging environment for our employees to thrive in, so we are always taking care of our shareholders,” he said.

According to Davis, his job is to surround himself with people that are specialised in what they do: “We call these people our brainware.  If I feel like the smartest person in the meeting, I did something wrong!”

Davis is looking forward to the world settling down a little bit from COVID-19 and getting to interact and build back that human connection: “I'm very passionate about people. In this industry in particular it's a people business.”

Three key strategic areas

Computex looks to make an impact with companies that are growing or in the process of mergers and acquisitions. They look at three areas:

• Enterprise Solutions – When companies are evolving their internal IT and need to evaluate, refresh, or grow their infrastructure (we have the experience, talent, and relationships with world leading manufacturing to help transform their business. 
• Cybersecurity - we find even with those that have a stable presence, their executives are (rightly) concerned about their security footprint.  We offer preventative, awareness, management and remediation solutions for our customers.
• Everything is a service (XaaS) - essentially a pay-for-what-you-need model for services that lets you move your technology operations from cap-ex to op-ex allowing us to focus on day-to-to management of your security, networks, workstations, office365 and others, while you focus on growing your business.  

Customer for life

We focus on having a customer for life, what does that entail? According to Davis, organisations get caught up in a sale or a deal, losing focus on a longer relationship.

On the Computex approach, Davis says that “we only bring in technologies that are vetted, so it brings success for clients. Tried and tested enterprise solutions and cybersecurity solutions. We continuously adapt to new technologies, as the technology landscape changes every 12 to 24 months.”

“Our entire technical team and over a hundred engineers are always looking for the next things that we need to have in the market. It could just be an iteration of something that we already do, or it could be an entirely new branch of the company. We also specialise in disruptive technology, thinking about the vendors of tomorrow and conducting research around them. Thinking of having a customer for life and not just one order tends to develop trust and loyalty,” said Davis. 

Plains All American Pipelines 

A key client for Computex is Plains All American Pipelines. Davis remembers his first engagement with them around a data centre in their office in downtown Houston: “We needed to get it out of that building for technical and disaster liability reasons but it’s location was designed for CEOs and CFOs, not a billion dollar company with massive infrastructure. It was a good project, and we rebuilt a lot of this old site at multiple plant sites, designing their networking, connectivity and backup data centres. 

As proven with Plains, the bigger the project, the more Davis tends to like it: “I like the complexity and the fact that we're going to have a major impact on the client.”

“A company like Plains is there to run their pipelines and have a solid financial model, one that's good for their employees, their board and their shareholders at the end of the day. They're actually not a technology company. So they're looking for technology partners that provide maintenance, with clear licensing programmes and great references within the oil and gas industry”, he said.

Computex put much of their focus on vetting technologies before recommending them to customers like Plains, who tend to want a five year cycle out of a technology, meaning that if they buy it today, they kind of want it to work for at least five years. 

Davis added that: “Mature cloud companies actually want consistency out of their pricing. They don't mind having assets in the cloud. They just want a consistent bill for it. Microtransaction pricing isn't going to work for bigger companies, because they don't actually want the variability in their finances, it messes up their financial planning and projection.” 

Read the full Plains All American Pipeline report HERE