Richard Tilley

Biography

As country manager for Africa, Eurasia and Middle East (AEME), Dick Tilley has one of the most complex and demanding tasks within the UKMEA management team. The region is geographically huge and extremely diverse, covering nations across Southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and as far east as Pakistan.   Dick has complete general management responsibility for delivering profitable growth in no less than 29 countries in this territory, with a major focus on Greece, Turkey, Ireland, Pakistan, Israel and Croatia/Slovenia.

Few people could be as well qualified for this challenging role. British by birth, following 3 years commercial experience he emigrated to South Africa, where he joined Burroughs South Africa as a Sales Trainee. Various assignments followed, with Dick becoming a member of the management team in the mid 80’s. The creation of Unisys gave Dick the opportunity to take an Account Management role – Financial Line of Business in the South African operation for the new company.

Following this period, now as part of Unidata, the South African owned Unisys distributor, Dick spent five years in the PC and networking business, building sales volumes for the company. 1994 saw Dick join Unisys UK Region as Area Sales Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, which enabled him to develop the kind of intimate knowledge of the marketplace, the culture and the business conditions required to help maintain Unisys as a leading player in these key markets. 

As Dick comments: “Eight years ago in AEME we recognised that our success would be driven by not only focusing on delivering through distributor channels, important though these key local operations remain. In AEME, we consider the end customer as a “Unisys client”, with the AEME sales team acting as account director for the total Geography, key clients and the distributor companies.”