In today’s global economy, we live in a connected world where companies are expanding internationally and optimizing best practices across regions. At TD SYNNEX, we serve vendors and customers in more than 100 countries around the world, operating in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), giving us full global visibility to the IT ecosystem.

To expand our readers’ understanding of our global operations and how we serve customers around the world, we sat down for a conversation with industry veteran Patrick Zammit, president of Europe and APJ at TD SYNNEX. Patrick currently resides in Brussels, Belgium and has been with TD SYNNEX (including legacy Tech Data and legacy Avnet Technology Solutions) for more than 20 years.

This article is a transcript of an interview conversation. The content has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Tell us about your role and top priorities as the president of Europe and APJ for TD SYNNEX:

In this role, I have three goals:

1. Deliver results on our commitments
2. Ensure we remain a great place to work
3. Continue to stay relevant in the market for vendors and for partners

For the new [fiscal] year, I have prioritized a couple really key initiatives which are really close to my heart:

1. Customer-first culture — Our DNA is built on excellence and it’s critical to put our customers at the heart of all of our decisions.
2. Accelerate on digitization — We’ve made great progress developing platforms that embrace market trends and technologies like cloud and consumption models, but we also need to invest in e-commerce tools and become the leader in utilizing data to improve customer experience and identify new growth opportunities.

Describe your leadership style:

I would describe myself as a servant leader; a significant portion of my time is spent building my teams or selecting the right individuals for all the critical jobs. Indeed, as leaders, the quality of our team defines our performance. I then want to make sure those leaders develop and find success in their job. My role is not to do their job on their behalf, but agree targets and priorities and empower them and help them achieve their personal and professional goals and development. Last, I make sure that my direct reports work as a team. Like in a sport team, having great individuals is a condition but isn’t sufficient to drive success. They need to play together.

Why it’s an exciting time to connect with TD SYNNEX:

Having global scale and scope absolutely matters in our industry. The investments that we need to make going forward to stay ahead of the market is significant. We are the only distributor that is truly end-to-end in the market; we cover all of the technologies that our customers are looking at. We have the expertise to support transactional business or, more importantly, support project-based initiatives, opportunities, delivering business outcomes, which is unique in the market.

Why Europe and APJ are critical to the overall business:

I think there are two reasons. First — the growth opportunity. Right now, we have significantly more market share in the Americas than in Europe or APJ, presenting a growth opportunity. Second — the fact that we are global is a key differentiator for both our vendors and our customers. Vendors are able to agree on our strategy and have confidence the strategy will be rolled out globally. Customers, our large partners in particular, are getting more requests from their end users to engage on a global scale. We are well-positioned to support those requirements.

To learn more about Patrick’s areas of responsibility, visit our Tech Data Europe Medium publication and our TD SYNNEX APJ website.