Dimension Data Americas Ends 2015 With 26 Percent Organic Growth

With robust growth in security, networking and data center, Dimension Data Americas posted a whopping 26 percent growth in organic sales in 2015.

The robust organic sales growth, which does not include the 2014 acquisition of $471 million solution provider Nexus, puts the Americas business on track to meet its goal of hitting $3 billion in sales by 2018.

"We are on track to triple the business," said Dimension Data Americas CEO Mark Slaga, who has led the fast-growing Americas business for the past two and a half years, in an interview with CRN. "I feel really pleased and proud."

[Related: CRN Interview: Dimension Data Americas CEO Mark Slaga]

The 2015 sales growth includes 29 percent growth in the security business; 22 percent growth in the networking business; and 19 percent growth in the data center business.

Looking to 2016, Slaga said New York-based Dimension Data, No. 10 on the CRN 2015 Solution Provider 500, will continue to focus on driving sales growth above market rates. "Our philosophy has always been to grow above market rates, whether you measure it by the IT industry or our partners' growth rates -- we want to be capturing market share with our strategic partners," he said. "We are going to continue to focus on growing faster than the market."

The organic growth in 2015 is on top of the sales kick from Nexus, which expanded Dimension Data Americas' footprint in the U.S. by 40 percent in 2014 with the addition of 19 offices. That acquisition significantly increased Dimension Data's presence in the West, Southwest and Southeast.

Key to Dimension Data Americas' success has been the successful integration of Nexus, said Slaga. "We have been able to get the team really firing on all cylinders," he said. "We have selected leaders from both parts of the business to lead us going forward. We have the right go-to-market approach."

Deron Pearson, the founder of Nexus, who continues to run that business, said the integration has gone off without a hitch, with an even lower attrition rate than Nexus had on its own. "We have had a lower attrition rate even when we were growing our company," he said. "That says a lot about the success of this acquisition."

Dimension Data Americas has carved out a strong position in the mission-critical enterprise cloud services market with strategic cloud relationships with SAP (it is one of only five partners that can deliver SAP as a service) and Oracle (it's the only partner to provide Oracle Cloud on a supercluster).

"We have clients that are putting their Oracle platform on our cloud," said Slaga. "That is mission-critical applications on our cloud. That is something I am really proud of."

Dimension Data is also one of a handful of customers that is teaming with Cisco on Application Centric Infrastructure -- the basic building block of the Cisco cloud architecture.

In September, Dimension Data also inked a deal to provide hybrid cloud solutions with EMC under what it calls the Catalyst Alliance. "That is all about taking what EMC does really well and providing it as a service to our clients, as well as connecting it into the Dimension Data global platform," said Slaga. "This allows the client to buy it in a consumption-based model, where it is actually a Dimension Data asset. We also provide a connection from EMC's great products into our cloud.

PUBLISHED NOV. 20, 2015