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NAS and SAN disk array specialist Qsan is opening its first office outside of Taiwan – and it will be based in the UK.
The new office is set to open on January 22nd 2016 and is expected to be fully operational by Q2. It will act as the vendor’s EMEA headquarters.
Qsan has been in the UK since 2009, when it started to offer its own-brand Qsan products. Prior to that, it made controllers for tier one and two vendors.
The vendor has largely operated under the radar in the UK, and now hopes to increase its brand awareness and business within this territory.
Qsan’s UK managing director David Kao (pictured right) told PCR: "We want to have local marketing – that’s very important. And we also want to have local RMA and local support. So in the future, customers won’t need to return their proper unit back to Taiwan, they will just need to return it to our UK base.
"So our RMA centre will be responsible for EMEA countries."
So why did Qsan decide to open this office in the UK?
"Because the UK will be easier to get the support engineer," Kao explained. "Some other vendors want to set up RMA support in the Netherlands, but if you want to look for a good RMA engineer or support engineer it’s really difficult. In the UK it’s very easy to hire engineers who understand how to do repairs.
"And of course, English won’t be a problem. In the UK, some British people can speak a second language, so you can find the people who can speak French, German, Dutch and so on."
Stefan Ferrari, technical sales manager at Qsan (and former Synology exec, pictured left) commented: "David and I are opening Qsan’s first office outside of Taiwan, because we know that the European market does require that kind of attention.
"There will be an office and a warehouse. At the moment the warehouse won’t be very big, but it’s enough to cover RMA. It won’t be a sales warehouse – it’s purely a support and RMA warehouse."
Ferrari added: "Our marketing message is ‘Secure, Optimise and Scale’ (SOS). If you think about our strategy, we’ve got our marketing going out with the SOS message, we’re increasing our portfolio, we’re opening our RMA office in the UK and we’re opening a support office in the UK.
"All of those things are designed to grow the awareness of the brand and grow the confidence in the brand."
Qsan’s current distribution partners are CMS Distribution and Origin Storage.
Check out the upcoming February issue of PCR for the full interview with Qsan
