CREATING VALUE

emt Distribution is committed to selling through its channel partners, enabling its large reseller base. Mo Mobasseri, CEO, emt Distribution, discusses how they are empowering its regional channel partners on path of self-sufficiency.

you have something emerging and new to the market, you must spend a lot of time and resources to make these technologies palatable. You need to educate the market and create awareness. Then, after the customers start showing interest is when you can start selling. Last year, we looked mainly into emerging technologies and signed up with multiple vendors. And some of the new technologies we have signed up for are backed by a VC like Insight Partners, which owns most high-tech companies globally.

We were also lucky that acquisitions were in our favour. Most of the time, when an acquisition happens, it causes fundamental changes in the distribution landscape, and you might lose the distribution to a different partnership based on the strategy. Last year, Progress, one of our key vendors, acquired two more companies. One is Kemp, which is into load balancing and application performance management. We were happy to add that to our portfolio, and we already have some fantastic projects in the region. And they acquired another company called Fkowmon, which is focused on network detection and response. So, this is another technology that we have onboarded

Last year, emt Distribution forged many new partnerships. Please elaborate on these. emt stands for emerging market technologies. So when we started 34 years ago in Australia, the idea was to go to developing markets and bring-in emerging technologies. Many companies sell established technologies. We don’t want to get in there because it is already crowded. So, our focus has always been on emerging technologies. But, when

Some of the other new vendors we have partnered with include DNSFilter. This is one of the companies backed by Insight Partners and they are making a lot of investment in DNS security and content filtering.

We have also signed up Storvix. In emt globally, we never had any hardware products because we always focused on cybersecurity and software. Storvix is an interesting one for us because they have so many patented storage and data management technologies. Though this is a new domain, we are leveraging our experience and collaboration with other vendors to make this work. We focus a lot on integration and value addition. Another partnership that I must mention is with OPSWAT, which is focused on protecting critical infrastructure. There is a lot of demand for OT and ICS security in this region, and we are one of the first disties to enter this space.

Are any new partnerships in the pipeline?

As you know, the emt group was acquired by rhipe last year, an Australian publicly listed company. This acquisition strengthens rhipe’s presence in security software distribution, and we are evaluating many new solutions. We will soon announce new collaborations.

What are the latest cybersecurity and IT management trends to watch out for in 2023?

Currently, one of the major challenges is the lack of awareness among employees. There are many organisations in the region where the workforce needs to be made aware of the new attack modes. So security awareness, especially among non-IT staff, is important. Unfortunately, many regional organizations do not provide awareness training to their employees. This is why you see there is a demand now for phishing and spam simulations in the market today to keep employees aware of how threats can jeopardise their organizational security.

Another major shift is organisations moving their data to the cloud, thanks to the presence of hyperscalers in the region. Cloud migration started last year and is a great opportunity for our partners. This includes understanding the customer’s environment, assisting them in their migration journey, and optimising the cost. Cloud migration is an endless process that includes constant investment at various levels. There should be some control over the cost. Otherwise, cybersecurity would become the most expensive cost for the organization. Hence, cost optimisation as a service is another major trend this year.

Another trend is around CDR (content disarm and reconstruction). We always suggest to resellers, IT companies, and even customers that they should plan to have CDR implemented at different levels of their organizations.

What are the latest value-added services that emt Distribution is offering?

We focus mainly on services, as 25 percent of the revenue is from this domain. We are planning to launch our vendor neutral services soon. Many IT companies, especially the large ones, cannot convince customers to invest in a particular solution, or the sales cycle is taking long.

So we are launching a couple of vendor-neutral services like VAPT, and many others, that we’re selling to our resellers, so they can actually white label our engineers, and we can jointly go to market. This will help them generate more revenues and cash in on cross-selling opportunities as well. Also, we are the only distributor focusing on vendor-neutral training. Many organisations offer product training, but our focus is on emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, cybersecurity and data science.

How is emt Distribution leveraging the power of AI in its solutions?

We have solutions that are based on AI, especially around IT Service Management (ITSM) domain. This domain involves a huge number of resources, so our effort is to minimize the required resources to respond to service requests and maximise the speed. With AI, we are focusing a lot on increasing productivity and enhancing the quality of services. We are also using AI to automate parts of cybersecurity.

How emt Distribution is empowering its regional channel partners on the path of selfsufficiency?

We have been working with the channel closely, and last year we’ve appointed a regional channel manager to focus specifically on the META region.

At first, we go through the entire new enablement session for the emerging technologies with all of our partners, irrespective of whether they are existing or new. We then conduct thorough technical training specific to the technology they’re interested in. We also do certain events like MMTS - Market Magnitude Technology Seminars, where being vendor neutral, we focus on salespeople of resellers to understand their perspective. We also do brainstorming sessions with them to understand how they can upsell and cross-sell solutions other than what they are comfortable with. These are the approaches we follow to strengthen this relationship.

And then, when it comes to technical presales, we conduct training sessions on regular basis to enable them to become self-sufficient. Honestly, there are many projects in the region where emt is white labeling its service. So we approach the customer, do an entire implementation, and support as the partner so that they understand the value and plan to invest in more resources and do it themselves.

What are your plans in terms of business strategy and innovation for 2023?

Our business strategy has always been to expand in different regions. This year we are focusing on our expansion in Saudi Arabia. Having our headquarters here in UAE, our business is growing phenomenally in this region. So we are making a lot of investment in Saudi. We have a local team that we plan to expand in the coming years. We’ve already done a lot of activities in a couple of African countries, so now, in 2023, we’re going to focus a lot on the African market as well.

We have launched Center of Excellence in regions like Europe, Asia, and here. We will continue doing such services and simultaneously scale up offerings to the MSPs because we have some really good solutions targeted at this market. We are also setting up a portal for our resellers, enabling them to onboard their customers and simplify the process.