Global enterprise contracts were being signed centrally, but the customer experience depended on local partners across multiple countries and time zones.

At ACSL, the commercial model looked simple from the centre.

Large enterprise customers such as Manpower, A.P. Moller Maersk and others signed global agreements with IBM. Those contracts defined the commercial terms, standards and expectations centrally.

But the actual delivery happened locally.

Each country relied on a reseller partner to interpret the agreement, configure the right products, manage local requirements, coordinate delivery and keep the customer experience consistent with what had been promised globally.

That meant the commercial risk did not sit in the contract itself.

It sat in the handover between global agreement and local execution.

And those handovers multiplied quickly.

What started with one account and a limited number of countries expanded into multiple enterprise customers across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Oceania. Different time zones, different partners, different local realities, but one customer expectation.

The challenge was not simply to move hardware from A to B.

It was to make a distributed network behave like one coordinated delivery system.

That required clarity on ownership, fast interpretation of global agreements, strong partner relationships and constant follow-up across regions.

My previous experience at AXI helped enormously. I already understood how local resellers worked, how IBM product codes and configurations behaved, what information partners actually needed and where execution could get stuck.

So instead of managing the relationship only from the centre, I could anticipate the friction points at the local level.

That became increasingly important as the scope expanded.

A delivery issue in one country could quickly become a global account problem. A misunderstanding around configuration, timing or responsibility could damage trust far beyond the local partner involved.

And because the network stretched across time zones, the operating rhythm had to stretch with it. Asia early in the morning, Europe during the day, the Americas later, and occasionally New Zealand in the middle of the night.

The commercial challenge was therefore not one of ambition or contract value.

It was coordination.

The customer had bought a global promise. Our job was to make sure that promise survived contact with dozens of local execution points.

That is where the real work sat.

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