Ipanema's new president eyes North American expansion

Ipanema Technologies last month announced $7 million in new financing, earmarked for global expansion and to grow its research and development operations. One of the people spearheading that expansion is Ipanema newcomer Reza Mahdavi.

Mahdavi is Ipanema’s new president, in charge of worldwide operations for the French company, which first established a U.S. office in 2006. Prior to joining Ipanema, Mahdavi spent 14 years at Cisco, initially as head of global and strategic partners, and later as president of emerging and developing countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

I mentioned in the last newsletter that Ipanema’s strength has been selling its WAN optimization technology to service providers like BT, Orange Business Services and Swisscom, which then use the technology to offer managed application services to enterprises. It’s a strategy Ipanema plans to continue as it looks to build up its business in North America, Mahdavi says.

“We will definitely not deviate from our overall go-to-mark strategy, which for us has been to partner with telcos and telecom providers in different parts of Europe and Asia-Pacific,” says Mahdavi, who is based in Ipanema’s U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Mass. As managed services take off in the U.S., Ipanema estimates that about half of its revenue within three years will be derived from the North American market.

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Ipanema Technologies last month announced $7 million in new financing, earmarked for global expansion and to grow its research and development operations. One of the people spearheading that expansion is Ipanema newcomer Reza Mahdavi.

Mahdavi is Ipanema’s new president, in charge of worldwide operations for the French company, which first established a U.S. office in 2006. Prior to joining Ipanema, Mahdavi spent 14 years at Cisco, initially as head of global and strategic partners, and later as president of emerging and developing countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

I mentioned in the last newsletter that Ipanema’s strength has been selling its WAN optimization technology to service providers like BT, Orange Business Services and Swisscom, which then use the technology to offer managed application services to enterprises. It’s a strategy Ipanema plans to continue as it looks to build up its business in North America, Mahdavi says.

“We will definitely not deviate from our overall go-to-mark strategy, which for us has been to partner with telcos and telecom providers in different parts of Europe and Asia-Pacific,” says Mahdavi, who is based in Ipanema’s U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Mass. As managed services take off in the U.S., Ipanema estimates that about half of its revenue within three years will be derived from the North American market.

Mahdavi says Ipanema’s technology is in line with its long-term, strategic approach to solving application delivery issues:

“Ipanema’s solution and approach to things is slightly different than how things are done in the U.S. We don’t have just a pure product or point-product solution, we take a global approach to things. It’s kind of a typical European mindset: strategic, long-term thinking to solve a problem that is going to become bigger as more and more different types of traffic are running over the Internet, over private networks and over very large networks of global companies.”

But he acknowledges selling the value of that approach isn’t easy.

“In the States, the biggest challenge that I see is educating the customer to look at things more holistically and strategically as opposed to tactically. [U.S. companies] have been conditioned extremely well, and socialized by certain companies, to use point products that solve an immediate problem,” Mahdavi says.

When there’s an immediate problem sending data between a company’s New York and Beijing offices, for example, the tendency is to solve that issue, not reconsider how best to ensure optimal application delivery going forward. “You need to have a type of customer that can understand and has the luxury of time to think beyond this week,” Mahdavi says.

Mahdavi says he’s excited about his new role, and the opportunity to help grow Ipanema’s global business. “I always like a challenge, and to take a great European company and make it known in the U.S. is something I have never done,” he says. “I have always helped American companies to succeed anywhere else in the world, so this for me, is kind of taking a reverse path.”

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