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Els Demeester commutes between Ternat and Munich. For Tech Data she is CEO in the Benelux region and Managing Director in Germany and Austria. The experience of working in other countries has taught her much about markets and cultural differences. And also about the future of Unified Communications.

Els Demeester is an industrial engineer. “But that wasn’t originally my plan. Actually, I wanted to study architecture, but I made a realistic choice about what to study. In the middle of the 1980s, there was scarcely any work for architects,” she began. During a supplementary year of management studies, she did an internship at an IT distributor. “Obviously we had worked with computers at school but, during the internship, it was the first time I really encountered information technology products. More than the products themselves, the world surrounding them appealed to me at once. Distributors are very centrally placed in the sector, between the suppliers and the users. As a distributor you have to instantly understand what direction the market is going and what the latest trends are. And it seemed that everything changed very rapidly. That suited me from the start.”

Cultural differences

In 1989 Els Demeester helped launch the Belgian branch of the German IT distributor, Computer 2000. The company later merged with the US-based Tech Data. Els Demeester took command of the Benelux division in 2001 – when she was 36. Since 2007 she has also been Managing Director for Germany and Austria. The international facet of her job has had a greater impact than she expected. “It changes you as a person because you discover the cultural differences up close. The extreme precision of the Germans for example; I really had to make a big adjustment to that.” At the same time, she brought with her a little piece of Belgian pragmatism. In Germany and Austria, there is a tendency towards over-engineering, and to following standard procedures without deviation. “Sometimes you have to be able to break free of that. That is something I definitely had to introduce.”

Dissimilar markets

What’s more, it turned out that the market in Germany was completely different from the one in the Benelux. “That was a surprise to me. In the German top 10 of suppliers, you often find completely different names than here at home. What I learned from this is that the history of a brand and the market can be very important, but also that marketing and support can make the difference.” The differences in the top 10 also say a lot about the products themselves, according to Demeester. “It’s an indication that there actually aren’t any bad IT products anymore. The technology is often very comparable. So the differences are found elsewhere. Once in a while, a company still makes a choice for a specific product for reasons of functionality. But usually it is the dealer who has a decisive effect because of the service, the brand, the support…” The latter two aspects are truly important in Belgium because here – certainly in comparison with the Netherlands – there is a fairly conservative time-to-market. You won’t find really serious early adopters here.”

Smartphone indispensable

Because of her international role, Demeester is often on the road. From Belgium, she keeps in touch constantly with the sites in the other countries. “We use videoconferencing a lot. That doesn’t prevent me from traveling regularly to Germany and Austria though.” On those trips, the smartphone has become indispensable. “I consider Unified Communications to be extremely important. For me personally, I would say it saves me at least 30% in work time.” Demeester jokes that she could find her way around the Munich airport with her eyes shut by now and is glad that the facilities are offered to work with a laptop there. “In fact, we are evolving back again to the world of the client-server, only now everything is wireless. I want to have fast and easy access to the applications and data from the company, any time and with any device: from my own PC at home, my laptop in the airport, my smartphone at a meeting…”

Next generation

Els Demeester: “In this context, the central storage of data is important, just like security. And of course, the bandwidth has to keep pace.” She considers that to be THE condition for the further success of mobile applications. “We have to be able to do more than just read little email messages. It has to be possible for heavier applications to be run on smartphones. Maybe that suggests that the trend in making smaller and smaller smartphones is going to be reversed. If you want to view a PowerPoint presentation, you need a bigger screen. The users are driving the demand in any case. A new generation of employees is on its way who have grown up with the PC and the smartphone. They are going to give the use of Unified Communications an extra boost. Today, technology supports and optimizes the existing processes (enabler). Soon, these processes will be fundamentally changed (driver). It won’t take long for us to reach that point now.”

I never stopped to think about it

In lists of influential Belgian women in IT, Els Demeester invariably appears somewhere near the top. Although there are other examples of women who have advanced into strategically important functions in Belgium, they often still remain exceptions to the rule. Els Demeester: “It’s always been that way. When I graduated, there were three of us girls.” According to the CEO of Tech Data, few young people choose to study information technology because they have an incorrect image of what the studies entail and the opportunities they can create. “Young people often think that it is a strictly technical program of study. They don’t realize that there are many jobs in IT that have to do with project management: that takes social skills, language skills, etc.” This incorrect image unnecessarily scares off young people – and particularly girls. But the educational system is not completely without blame. “When I was at school myself, I was missing a clear link between the program of study and the business world. I don’t have the impression that much has improved since then. In information technology education, more attention should be paid to the world behind the technology. Communication is of the utmost importance in our sector, and that is something that is scarcely covered in the studies.” The fact that Demeester was one of the few women in the program when she was at school never struck her as a problem. Nor when she later began working in the IT sector – largely a man’s world, after all. “Sometimes it can be an advantage. As a woman, you have just a little bit more visibility in that man’s world. But really, I’ve never stopped to think about it, I wouldn’t see any reason to.”

Profile

Els Demeester studied industrial engineering in Ostend. She supplemented her diploma with an additional year of management studies. During this program, she was granted an internship with a distributor of IT equipment. And, after that move, she never left the sector. In 1989 she helped launch the Belgian branch of Computer 2000, the German IT distributor that would later merge with the US-based Tech Data. Since 2001, Demeester has been CEO of Tech Data Benelux. She is also Managing Director of the branches in Germany and Austria. In the Benelux region, Tech Data has a turnover of approximately €1 billion and employs 430 people.