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PA G E S 3 2 VOLUME 01 | ISSUE 01 AUGUST 2013 WWW.ENTERPRISECHANNELS.COM

TIME FOR AN INTEGRATED SOLUTION-BASED APPROACH

“LONG-TE R M STRATEG I ES PAY R ICH DIVI DE N DS”

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With the rapid growth of Middle East and Africa market, IT vendors are focusing more on channel enablement in order to make them solution partners and thus creating opportunity for a deeper engagement with the customers /14

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EDITORIAL

Bringing Great Value…

S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A EDITOR@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

After establishing its strong position in Indian IT Media market, now Access Info Media has expanded to Dubai and introduced Enterprise Channels MEA magazine in the region. The objective of the magazine is to create a meaningful bridge between the principals and their partnerss in the entire Middle East and Africa region.

Accent Info Media understands that there is a huge potential in the region from the enterprise IT perspective. When there is slowdown in the global market, and the recovery of many countries is either negative or very negligible, the economy in the Middle East countries is bouncing back quite sharply. If one goes by the data published by Gartner Says Middle East IT Spending to Reach $192.9 Billion In 2013. The company says that Cloud Services Market In the Middle East and Northern Africa Region To Reach $462.3 Million in 2013. Similarly, IT Infrastructure Spending To Reach US$ 4 Billion in 2013 Another report says that there are many large projects happening in the region. Already $13.5bn worth of contracts have been awarded in the GCC region.

In line with these estimates, if Dubai hosts 2020 world export, it will definitely swell the market growth by many standards.

As per Gartner, GCC countries including UAE, Qatar and Bahrain are adopting eGovernment programs aggressively. They are planning to electronically link up departments and offer a single interface point for citizens to connect with government agencies.

On the other side, the consumers’ buying behaviour in the region is different. Whether it is IT or non -IT products, they see quality and never hesitate to buy the best-of-breed technologies. Convergence of technologies is at the highest order in the region.

Enterprise telephony and mobility is going to grow multiple times in next five years. Cloud computing and virtualization are going to influence the market majorly. All the next-gen complex technologies will have to be simplified. Therefore there will be a need of quality content for the market.

Accent Info Media, with its deep understanding of market and technology, can deliver quality content through its print (Enterprise Channels MEA) and digital publications (www.enterprisechannelsmea.com) but also through various trade events. Both the print and online properties will carry current news, views, case studies, white papers, stories, interviews, etc. In fact, we have already started the website and daily newsletter to carry updated news and views of the industry. With time passing by, we will strengthen our content and play a strong role in the entire region. But I strongly believe that without the cooperation and support of industry it is difficult the achieve the goal. Pls. send me your content and comments. ë

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CONTENTS VOLUME 01 ISSUE 01 AUGUST 2013 W W W. E N T E R P R I S E C H A N N E L S M E A . C O M

2013

COVER STORY

TIME FOR AN INTEGRATED SOLUTION-BASED APPROACH

With the rapid growth of Middle East and Africa market, IT vendors are focusing more on channel enablement in order to make them solution partners and thus creating opportunity for a deeper engagement with the customers /14 GUEST TALK /28

LEADING THE PUBLIC WEB INTO A BIG DATA ENVIRONMENT MARK LITTLE & TOM LLEWELLYN OF RED HAT MY VIEWS /26

“Long-term strategies pay rich dividends”

INDUSTRY WATCH /13

WORLDWIDE PC MARKET GOES DOWN BUT TABLET MARKET SURGES

IMPORTANT UPDATES From the Event /24 Cisco: Going Strong in MEA &APAC

Fifth Consecutive Quarter, longest duration of decline in the PC Market history

KHAWAJA SAIFUDDIN, SENIOR SALES DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, AND SOUTH ASIA, WESTERN DIGITAL MY VIEWS /12

“Huge Opportunity Through VAD business” AHMAD QASEM, CHANNEL SALES MANAGER, EPSON

EDITORIAL::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 03 CHANNELSTREET::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 06 CORPORATE STORY::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 22 INNOVATIONS:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 30

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“SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT” IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR USERS

The Fedora Project is now available with functional Linux operating system - Fedora 19, code-named “Schrödinger’s Cat.” Developed by a worldwide community, the Fedora Project continues to enable users to experience the latest in free and open source technology, integrated into a Linux distribution and ready for free download, use, modification and redistribution.

With a variety of developer tools, ranging from popular languages and packaging tools to testing and instrumentation features, Fedora 19 enables developers of all skill levels to create and deploy code in many environments.

NETWORKS WILL REDUCE TO HALF IN NEAR FUTURE According to Network Barometer Report 2013 published by Dimension Data, future networks will cost about half of what traditional networks cost today. They will require a smaller capital investment, will be cheaper to operate and easy to manage, provide unified access, and require less power and cooling.

There are a growing number of users across the globe pushing organisations to create BYOD ready environments.

This will usher in the enterprise mobility era that will inevitably change the structure of networks. Today, most campus networks comprise around 80% wired ports serving individual users, and 20% WLAN ports supporting multiple users.

MANOJ PANCHAL DIVISIONAL MANAGER WESTCON CONVERGENCE

Westcon Advances Channel Enablement of Avaya Partners Westcon Group has advanced the enablement of its channel though the successful delivery of Avaya Professional Sales Specialist trainings and certifications to 18 of its reseller and system integrator (SI) partners. These trainings which have bolstered participating partners’ knowledge and capabilities in Avaya SME-IP office and enterprise unified communications (UC) technologies were provided free of charge as a value-add by Westcon.

Commenting on Westcon’s abilities that extend beyond the scope of traditional distribution, Tanya Lobo, Channel Director, MEA & Turkey at Avaya said, “Having a partner with capabilities and dedication that Westcon repeatedly demonstrates greatly enhances the value through the entire distribution chain. The trainings they have provided will enable their partners to approach customers with a watertight business case for the implementation of Avaya’s technologies. This in turn will result in customer wins and benefits for every party involved.”

Manoj Panchal, Divisional Manager, Westcon Convergence, said, “Our distribution model and award winning ‘Westcon Way’ - recruit, enable & grow- methodology goes well beyond simply providing IT products to the channel. Having highly skilled reseller and SI partners is an invaluable and fundamental asset to our organization as it helps us deliver the best solutions and the greatest value right down to the end customer.

This is why we lay a great deal of emphasis on our value add services.”

Westcon conducted the trainings - Avaya Professional Sales Specialist, UC Fast Track and Avaya Professional Sales Specialist, SME Fast Track which were attended by 25 and 20 executives from partner organizations respectively. The training credentials validate that the candidate has basic-tointermediary knowledge in selling Avaya products and customer focused solutions using best practices in selling and competitive sales techniques.

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Red Hat EMEA Partner Conference to be Held in Madrid Red Hat announces that its fifth an ideal forum for Red Hat annual Red Hat Europe, Middle distributors, system integraEast and Africa (EMEA) Partner tors, ISVs, OEMs and solution Conference scheduled to take providers to collaborate and place in Madrid, from Sept. 29 – innovate with Red Hat and one Oct. 2, 2013. another. From discussions with The event will open with Red Hat’s executive team to keynote presentations by Arun developing a winning business Oberoi, Red Hat’s executive vice strategy with Red Hat solutions, president of global sales and the Red Hat EMEA Partner services and Brian Stevens, Red Conference offers a broad Hat’s CTO and vice president spectrum of opportunities for of worldwide engineering. the Red Hat partner ecosystem.

PETRA HEINRICH, VICE Petra Heinrich, vice president Attendees will discover PRESIDENT OF PARTNERS & ALLIANCES FOR RED HAT of partners & alliances for Red how Red Hat customers are EMEA Hat EMEA, will provide insight implementing current solutions into the partner landscape and to increase productivity while strategy. Also featured on stage will be panel reducing costs. Attendees will also have a chance discussions examining trends on open hybrid to meet with platinum sponsor IBM and gold cloud, middleware and platform offerings and plus sponsor HP, plus network with alliance and product strategies. ecosystem partners at social events throughout The three-day event will feature breakout the week. sessions focused on strategies and best practices The Red Hat EMEA Partner Conference will for transforming enterprise IT architecture using be comprised of three pillars. Pillar one is built open source technology and migrating from on datacentre integration with the key themes of physical to virtual and cloud solutions. partner enablement and IT modernization.

The Red Hat EMEA Partner Conference is

PROLOGIX INITIATES ‘PROLOGIX COMSERVE’ Swift revolution in technology & growing regional demand for high-speed internet connectivity for smart devices delivered though wireless networks has encouraged Prologix Distribution to penetrate the telecommunications domain and formulate new strategies for serving wireless service providers in the MENA region - A new division, ADITYA SAHAYA, Prologix Comserve,.

DIRECTORSALES, Aditya Sahaya, PROLOGIX LLC Director-Sales, Prologix LLC, said “Prologix Comserve has already started building up a healthy pipeline of projects & also been selected

by ZTE to install the solar panels in a project for a UAE telecom operator.

We have also been chosen by a reputed systems integrator to conduct in-building design and validation for a regional telco.

We are very happy with the response and results that we have seen in such a short time frame and can only expect that the booming telecom market will rapidly drive our business growth.”

CommVault Tops in Enterprise Backup Forrester Research has named CommVault a leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Backup Software, Q2 2013. The Forrester Wave is an objective methodology that evaluates vendors on current offering, strategy and market presence, against pre-defined evaluation criteria. CommVault is top ranked in the current offering category for Simpana 10 software, scoring 4.45 points out of a possible five.

According to Forrester, “CommVault excels with an integrated platform. CommVault’s primary strategy centers on providing a single platform for backup, recov-

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N. ROBERT HAMMER, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, COMMVAULT

ery, continuity, archive and other data management and protection strategies. .”

The Forrester Wave report also

stated, “CommVault touts its simplicity and unified platform...

Areas of strength for CommVault include its deduplication capabilities and cloudtarget integrations, as well as hypervisor and application capabilities. The company also received high marks in the professional services and consulting area, which is a newly expanded offering for CommVault.”

“CommVault’s singular platform

enables our customers to do more with less, by automating operations, reducing hardware costs and managing large data center and cloud environments,” said N. Robert Hammer, Chairman, President and CEO, CommVault. “We believe that Forrester’s recognition of CommVault as a leader in enterprise backup and recovery software underscores our commitment to deliver data and information management innovations that improve efficiency and provide access and insight to data.”

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Juniper Honored AT INTEROP Tokyo 2013 Juniper Networksreceives top awards at Interop Tokyo 2013. PTX3000 Packet Transport Router received the Best of Show Award Special Prize in the Carrier/ Service Provider Networking category while the EX9208 Ethernet Switch has won the Best of Show Award Grand Prix in the ShowNet Product category.

Juniper Networks PTX3000 Packet Transport Router is a ground breaking Converged Supercore that sets the benchmark for size, performance and efficiency, addressing the infrastructure and energy barriers that service providers face in today’s networks.

The programmable, flexible and scalable design

NEC LAUNCHES MD211G5 DISPLAY SOLUTION

of the EX9200 Ethernet Switches simplifies the deployment of cloud applications, server virtualization and rich media collaboration tools in campus and data center core and aggregation environments.

“We are honored to have won such prestigious awards which reinforce Juniper’s leadership in driving network innovation in both service provider and enterprise markets. Whether you’re a global telecom provider or a leading enterprise, Juniper’s networking solutions deliver reliable performance at scale to power your business,” said Mike Marcellin, SVP, product marketing and strategy, Platform Systems Division, Juniper.

JORDAN ISLAMIC BANK CHOOSES AASTRA Aastra was chosen to supply Jordan Islamic Bank with a state-of-the-art contact centre solution.

Jordan Islamic Bank (JIB) is Jordan’s first modern Islamic bank and promises each of its customers innovative banking solutions that are both Sharia compliant and in line with their specific banking needs. JIB has around 2000 employees, 64 branches, 16 cash offices and 131 ATMs throughout the kingdom.

As a fully-fledged Islamic bank, JIB has combined the best of traditional Islamic values with the technology and innovation that characterize the best of modern banking. JIB is a customercentred organization with close personal service and understanding, forming the basis of clients relationships. And in order to fulfil its vision, JIB was looking for the state-of-the-art customer service communication solution offering access to live agents via telephones, email, SMS and chat as well as telebanking self services around the clock. Aastra had the optimal solution to JIB needs with the Solidus eCare Multimedia Contact Center solution.

NEC Display Solutions Europe is supporting breast cancer prevention with the addition of a new LED backlit, high-brightness greyscale display for digital mammography.

The NEC MD211G5 brings LED backlight to a greyscale medical display, delivering lower power consumption and a longer lifetime compared to traditional LCD displays. This, combined with a high maximum brightness of 1200cd/ m2, 5MP resolution and IPS panel technology, ensures superior image quality and stability for reliable diagnosis “Accurate diagnosis is physician’s key weapons to fight against breast cancer. The developments made with this new display means that more detail can be seen by the doctor, ensuring better diagnostic reliability,” said Ian Gobey, General Manager for Middle East & Africa at NEC Display Solutions. “For instance, micro calcifications – which are only visible as extremely fine white specks on a mammogram - are possible indicators of pre-cancerous condition. It requires the best image possible if these sorts of indicators are going to be identified and acted upon.”

SPECTRUM GROUP HOSTS CHANNEL PARTNER CONFERENCE Spectrum group, the holding company for Comguard, Spectrum Network Solutions, Spectrum Training, ComGuard Infosol (India) and Psilog International, felicitated its channel partners for their contribution towards its success in the Middle East and India at a recently held Annual Partner Conference in Dubai.

The Conference was supported

by Kaspersky, EnGenius, TripWire, gateProtect, WinMagic, Accutnix and GFI. The partner conference was

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AJAY SINGH CHUAHAN, CEO, SPECTRUM GROUP

attended by over 200channel partners from the Middle East, North Africa and India. Spectrum group awarded partners in various

categories on behalf of its different companies.

“We are extremely happy to host our channel partners and share our thoughts with them. The conference provided us a perfect opportunity to express our gratitude by awarding our champion channel partners for their efforts and support that has brought us to

the forefront of IT distribution in the region and in India,” said Ajay Singh Chuahan, CEO, Spectrum group.

Spectrum group consists of leading distribution companies that distribute world class brands like Kaspersky, GFI, HP ArcSight, WinMagic, WatchGuard, Clavister, gateprotect and others. The group operates across Middle East including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, and India among others.

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CHANNEL STREET IN PUBLIC

“But in sharp contrast, the UAEmarket experienced a severe decline of 21.5% over the same period, with no sizeable projects taking place in the country.”

ZEESHAN GAYA, RESEARCH MANAGER FOR SERVERS AND SYSTEMS AT IDC MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, AND TURKEY

FVC Adds Barco’s ClickShare System to its Portfolio FVC has signed a distribution agreement with Barco for its ClickShare wireless meeting room presentation and collaboration system.

With the addition of Barco’s presentation solution, FVC can now present its clients with an all-in-one package for a state-of-the-art meeting room and enhance video conferencing experience at enterprise level.

ClickShare allows meeting participants to show their presentations on meeting room screens by connecting the USB device to the laptops. Connecting a ClickShare button to a laptop will not change

the screen resolution, so users can be confident that the presentation will be in proportion and displayed to the highest possible resolution.

ClickShare can be used directly with a projector/ screen or integrated with an AV system.

K.S. Parag, Managing Director at FVC, said, “As one of the leading VADs that has championed the cause of unified communications in the region, our partners and customers rely on us to continuously add value-added accessories that enable them to provide creative solutions to the business needs of this region.”

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DISTREE EVENTS COMES TO ASIA PACIFIC DISTREE Events is expanding into the Asia Pacific market in 2013. DISTREE Asia Pacific (www.distree-apac.com) will offer vendors easy access to major channel buyers from across this vast region in one place at one time. The first DISTREE Asia Pacific will take place in Singapore from November 12th to 14th 2013.

DISTREE Asia Pacific 2013 will be covering major markets in SAARC, South East Asia and Oceania, with top distributors, retailers and e-tailers invited to attend the three-day event.

This includes representatives from more than 20 countries, including strategically important emerging markets such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines.

BELKIN UNVEILS GREAT ACCESSORIES Looking at long summer vacations, Belkin unveils some swanky iPad and Galaxy Tab accessories for the outdoor activities.

The first one is Folio + Keyboard for the new iPad2/3/4.This versatile and protective folio features a removable keyboard that lets you switch between work and play with ease—anywhere

NVIDIA’S UPGRADES GEFORCE GPU NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 760 GPU new offering amazing PC gaming performance, smooth frame rates and exclusive GeForce GTX features, which over- rides the prior GeForce GPUs. Designed to deliver extreme frame rates for all of this year’s hottest PC games, the GeForce GTX 760 GPU is the new weapon of choice for experiencing high-definition gaming. Powered by an NVIDIA Kepler architecture-based GPU with an incredible 2.3 gigaflops of processing horsepower it is dramatically more powerful than the next-generation game consoles expected by the year end.

GeForce GTX 760 is a powerful, feature-rich graphics card stacked with advanced gaming technologies like NVIDIA GeForce Experience, GPU Boost 2.0, PhysX, TXAA anti-aliasing and much more.

you use your iPad. The premium, stitched case is custom fit to your iPad with a smooth inner lining that’s soft against your device. Lightweight and form-fitting, it slips easily into another bag without adding bulk. Priced at AED 599, the products are available at leading stores in UAE region.

Similarly, Belkin Tri-Fold Cover with Stand for Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0, is ideal for watching movies to sending emails in one simple motion.

BUFFALO LAUNCHES FASTEST DRIVESTATION Buffalo Technology has launched a new ultra-thin storage unit that it claims is the thinnest on the market, measuring in at just 8.8mm thick.The device, called the MiniStation Slim, offers storage

OPTIMUS WINS ACCOLADES Optimus Technology and Telecommunications has won two major industry awards i.e. ‘Best Networking VAD’ award and the ‘Networking Distributor of the year’ award from leading publications recently taking the total number of awards it has won in 2013 to three.

“We are proud and very happy with what we have achieved in just five years. Winning the ‘Best Networking VAD’ from Network Middle East magazine and the ‘Networking Distributor’ from Reseller Middle East is an endorsement of our company’s innovative initiatives and commitment to providing the latest and best networking solutions including 24x7 support to our customers and partners in the region,” said Meera Kaul, Managing Director of Optimus Technology and Telecommunications.

of 500GB and has data transfer speeds of 5Gbit/s via a USB 3.0 port. It can also double as a hard disk drive recorder for audio and video content. The full dimensions of the device are 8.8mm thick, 11.5cm long and 7.9cm wide and it weighs 140g. It’s compatible with the new Microsoft operating system Windows 8, as well as Windows 7, Vista and XP, and Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

Buffalo has been the first to market 8.8mm thick portable storage in the Middle East, and many of Buffalo’s partners started carrying the MiniStation Slim. The product is available in MSRP AED299.

MEERA KAUL, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF OPTIMUS TECHNOLOGY AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

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StorIT Bags ‘Specialized Disty of the Year’ Award StorIT won the ‘Specialized Distributor of the year’ award at the fourth annual Reseller Middle East Partner Excellence Awards held at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers Hotel recently. The company was recognized for setting superior standards in its domain expertise, value services, channel initiatives and programs, and its solid commitment to vendor and reseller partners.

Suren Vedantham, Group MD, StorIT Distribution fzco, said, “We are delighted to win the ‘Specialized Distributor of the Year’ award from Reseller Middle East. It has added a lot of impetus to our constant strife to set new standards in refining value distribution services that not only help us innovate, adapt and succeed in a rapidly

changing technology landscape but also provide consistent opportunities of growth and value for our vendors and channel.”

StorIT is the only specialist value added distributor of enterprise data storage, data protection and data management solutions in the Middle East. The company has a proven track record of successfully introducing the very best-of-breed global technology providers to the Middle East market. By establishing and enabling a robust reseller channel that has been a key factor in its rapid growth in the region, StorIT has sealed its credentials as one of the most reliable, resilient and far-sighted value distribution organizations in the region.

POLYCOM ENHANCES CX SERIES OF LYNCOPTIMIZED SOLUTIONS Polycom has unveiled the 360-degree, panoramic 1080p HD video collaboration solutions custom-built for Microsoft Lync 2013.

The new Polycom CX5500 and CX5100 Unified Conference Stations are designed to deliver a groundbreaking around-the-table experience for all participants, whether they’re in the room or thousands of miles away announced the press release.

At the Microsoft 2013 Worldwide Partner Conference, Polycom also announced that it has received Lync 2013 qualification for its full portfolio of Polycom VVX Business Media Phones.

These announcements further the extensive partnership between the two companies, building on Polycom’s industry-leading portfolio of 40 video, voice and content sharing solutions that are interoperable or optimized to work with Lync today.

REVOLABS NAMES FVC AS DISTRIBUTOR Revolabs has named FVC as a distributor of the company’s wireless audio systems for unified communications in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Under the agreement, FVC now offers Revolabs’ plug-and-play, desktop, and wireless unified communications products to its network of partners in a wide range of MENA markets, including education, oil and gas, government and defense, finance, and healthcare.

FVC is a leading value-added distributor in the MENA region. With dedicated offices in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Kenya, Nigeria, and others.

“There is a high demand for unified communications solutions in the MENA region, but it has been challenging to provide high audio quality under certain situations,” said K. S. Parag, managing director of FVC. “We are very excited to address this need by bolstering our product lineup with Revolabs’ plug-and-play, desktop, and wireless UC products range. The company’s products enrich our portfolio while providing the MENA market with greater access to the benefits of advanced wireless audio technology. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial partnership with Revolabs.”

OPTIMUS APPOINTED MASTER TRAINING PARTNER FOR CSA Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has named Optimus Technology as a new Master Training Partner (MTP) for the Middle East region.

Optimus will develop and train partners across the region and help promote the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK) program. Additionally, with this new partnership agreement, Optimus further strengthens its partnership with CSA, becoming one of the first two MTPs for CSA globally.

The new CSA MTP program

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will help accelerate worldwide access and adoption of the CCSK certification.

As an ATP of CSA, Optimus Academy has conducted several training programs for the CCSK examination, where they have enabled many IT professionals to build a strong foundation and understanding of key information security concepts and help them apply these concepts towards cloud computing security.

Meera Kaul, Managing Director

of Optimus Technology & Telecommunications, added, “In the recent past we have run industry surveys in the region with respect to Cloud deployment readiness and over 60 percent of CIOs have stated security as the major impediment to the deployment decision. The CCSK program, the industry’s most trusted user certification program for the advancement of secure cloud computing, helps security professionals understand cloud security and its challenges and

best practices. The new CSA MTP program is designed to accelerate worldwide access and adoption of the CSA’s CCSK certification, where companies will receive the training they need to develop a program that fits the unique security needs of their organization. Optimus will have no restrictions on where it can hold courses and will work with interested existing training partners to outsource classes and use our instructors in mutually beneficial agreements.”

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2013 to be a Watershed Year for Secure Identity Industry According to a study done by HID Global on Top security identity trends of 2013 and its projections, 2013 will be a watershed year for the secure identity industry due to important advances in technology that will drive increased security and unprecedented user experience across both existing and new markets.

HID Global, a worldwide leader in secure identity

solutions, conducted a research on Top Secure Identity Trends Of 2013 and released its projections. The predictions span a broad range of market segments including physical access control, logical access control, and mobile access control using NFC-enabled smartphones. Other market segments covered in the company’s projections include visitor management, secure

credential issuance, and RFID tagging for traditional asset tracking applications as well as new uses, such as product and document certification and authentication.

HID Global anticipates that thetrends in IP-based access control will drive new capabilities in 2013 while shaping the market in the years to come.

WEB CLIPS SOPHOS HOLDS GLOBAL PARTNER CONFERENCES Sophos recently concluded its annual global partner conferences, held across the Americas, Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions.

In all, the company welcomed 800 partners to hear about the latest in complete security innovations. Additionally, the company recognized select partners worldwide for their growth, commitment and success with Sophos solutions over the recent fiscal year announced the official statement.

FOCUS SOFTNET LAUNCHED MPOS Focus Softnet announced the launch of Focus Mobile Point of Sale (MPOS), which is software solution that incorporates the power and

SAP MAINTAINS ITS DOUBLE-DIGIT GROWTH SAP AG announced its financial results for the second quarter and first half ended June 30, 2013. SAP is continuing a double-digit Growth from three years. The report highlighted that with approximately 30 million cloud users, SAP has the largest subscriber base in the cloud market.

SAP’s double-digit growth momentum continued in the second quarter with Non-IFRS software and software-related service revenue increasing 10% at constant currencies (7% at actual currencies to €3.35 billion). Non-IFRS software and cloud subscription revenue in the quarter increased 7% at constant currencies (3% at actual currencies to €1.17 billion). Non-IFRS operating profit reached €1.22 billion in quarter, a 10% increase at constant currencies (4% at actual currencies), resulting in a 60 basis points expansion of the non-IFRS operating margin at constant currencies despite a negative effect from the Ariba acquisition of 40 basis points.

functionality of a traditional POS work station into a mobile device and allows businesses to serve customers from anywhere and at any time.

Focus MPOS is a customer centric mobile POS application with complete POS functionality. It integrates with any POS, tracks customer history; manage favorites and promos, cross sell with bill optimization and do checklist tracking.

ACCESSDATA NAMED HP ALLIANCEONE SECURITY PARTNER 2013 AccessData announced that it has been recognized with the HP AllianceOne Partner of the Year Award in the category of security at HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas.

“It’s an honor to receive such a prestigious

MOVEMENTS Red Hat has named a new vice president of Global Strategic Alliances. SCOTT MUSSON, previously of VMware, will be responsible for Red Hat’s global alliance, system integrator and independent software vendor (ISV) relationships, and will manage Red Hat’s strategic relationships with HP, IBM, Dell and Cisco.

Westcon Group has appointed CHRISTOPHER GREEN as the Divisional Head for its Security Business Unit. In this role, Green will manage the sales and pre-sales teams for Westcon’s portfolio of Juniper, Blue Coat, Dell SonicWall and Kaspersky solutions.

5.9 NUMBER GAME

percent

The overall MEA x86 server market suffered a 5.9% year-on-year decline in unit terms in Q1 2013.

award from HP and be named a leader in the field,” said Chad Gailey, VP, Worldwide Channel Sales at AccessData. “Together with HP, we are working to raise the bar in cyber security innovation and fight the war on cyber-attacks by offering solutions that streamline the incident response process and allow for much faster responses by forensics and investigative teams.”

R&M UNVEILS HD MTP SYSTEM Reichle & De-Massari (R&M) announced a complete upgrade across its entire range of fiber optic cables for data centers to bend-insensitive multimode fiber (BIMMF) standards. The new systems will deliver unrivaled port density, reliability, modularity and ease of installation with the most efficient utilization of space.

The company’s newly unveiled solution for data centers consists of Type S MTP modules, MTP adapter plates, HD panels, MTP trunk cables and patch cords.

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MY VIEWS

There is a good upsurge in the solution selling and VAD business in the region, what kind of trend and opportunity do you see in this space?

Epson believes that there is a huge opportunity through the VAD because there is a huge link between the software and hardware, such as archiving solutions.

AHMAD QASEM

CHANNEL SALES MANAGER, EPSON

“Huge Opportunity Through VAD business” AS CHANNEL PARTNERS ARE CONSIDERED AS THE TRUSTED ADVISORS TO THE VENDOR COMPANIES, THEY NEED TO BE CONSTANT TRAINED AND ENABLED TO ENSURE HIGH LEVEL OF UNDERSTANDING OF CUSTOMERS’

There are huge projects coming up in Middle East till 2020, there will be huge momentum of products and solutions, how are you marshalling your resources to address the requirements?

Epson has been monitoring the opportunities and growth in the region for a long time and based on our observations, we foresee execution of some of the projects soon. We are constantly communicating with the end users directly for better understanding of the customers’ requirements and we got our partner on the second stage of communication to ensure high level of understanding of the customer’s requirements.

Any suggestion to the channel market to cope with the growth?

We suggest that channel partners should start to think more about revenue generating products than volume products. They might also need to replace non profitable brands with better profitability brands as well as migrate portions of the business from mainstream to higher levels.

REQUIREMENTS. ENTERPRISE CHANNELS SPOKE TO AHMAD QASEM, CHANNEL SALES MANAGER, EPSON TO GET HIS PERSPECTIVE ON CHANNEL BUSINESS IN THE MEA REGION. EXCERPTS

What is the channel partner opportunity in the entire MEA region from value perspective?

From a value perspective, it can be said that channel partnerships help partners build volume for better benefits. Also, the exposure they get in the market place provides additional channel benefits by placing them in a better position to compete.

What is the present trend now in terms of partners business?

The current trend with regard to partners business is to build volume for better channel benefits.

In the partners’ business, there is direct vertical market growth, as far as front line is concerned.

But there is also horizontal growth into the SMB reseller segment when you take into consideration the resell volume and market exposure.

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How the new concepts like cloud computing, enterprise mobility, datacentre services, BYoD are influencing their business?

The new concepts like cloud computing, enterprise mobility, data centre, services, BYoD are not only limited to channel. These are widely used by almost everyone and that will help ease the business requirements.

There are a lot of news around e-Governance, e-tailing, m-commerce, etc. What kind of impact these concepts will have on channel business?

Regardless of the technology mode adopted, be it e-Governance, m-governance, etc. channel business remains the main supply chain as the product has to be supplied through channel itself.

What kind of channel programme you are running?

We have a generic program for typical channel business in place and additionally, we also have tailor made programs for every specialized business category, where we almost double the rewards of specialized channel partners. We expect 20 per cent growth in the business generated by specialized channel partners.

How these programmes are different from the competition?

The programs are different in terms of recognizing specialist resellers, where the value of business cannot be as much as the normal channel. The programme has been developed to be flexible enough to recognise and reward all types of specialist business.

What kind of growth are you envisaging for the channel partners?

We see a business growth of 20 percent across different business categories. ë

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INDUSTRY WATCH

PRELIMINARY WORLDWIDE PC VENDOR GROWTH FOR 2Q13

-0.6% -3.9%

Note: Data includes desk-based PCs and mobile PCs, including mini-notebooks but not media tablets such as the iPad. Source: Gartner (July 2013)

-4.8% -20.5%

-35.3%

GARTNER

Worldwide PC Market goes down but Tablet Market Surges Fifth Consecutive Quarter, longest duration of decline in the PC Market history n WORDS: MANALI MISRA <MANALI@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

T

he PC market continues to fall spectacularly, this time setting a record for the longest duration of decline in its history after five consecutive quarters of falling

shipments.

Worldwide PC shipments dropped to 76 million units in the second quarter of 2013, a 10.9 percent decrease from the same period last year, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. All regions showed a decline compared to a year ago. The fall in the Asia/Pacific PC market continued, showing five consecutive quarters of the shipment decline, while the EMEA PC market registered two consecutive quarters of double-digit decline.

“We are seeing the PC market reduction directly tied to the shrinking installed base of

PCs, as inexpensive tablets displace the lowend machines used primarily for consumption in mature and developed markets,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.

“In emerging markets, inexpensive tablets have become the first computing device for many people, who at best are deferring the purchase of a PC. This is also accounting for the collapse of the mini notebook market.”

HP and Lenovo’s neck-and-neck competition continued. This time, Lenovo was back in the top position by only a small difference in share (see Table 1). Lenovo showed mixed regional results, as it experienced strong growth in the Americas and EMEA, while showing a major decline in Asia/Pacific.

Weakness in China was most likely the contributor of Lenovo’s shipment decline in the region as the majority of Lenovo’s volume

OTHERS -10.5%

TOTAL -10.9%

came from China.

While HP was slightly behind Lenovo, HP is a market leader in key regions including the U.S., EMEA and Latin America. Asia/Pacific has been a weakness the last three years for HP, but preliminary second quarter results suggest an improvement of their performance in the region.

Dell’s shipments declined compared to a year ago, but its 2Q13 results showed a smaller decline than the past several quarters. Dell showed good growth in the U.S. and Japan, but struggled to increase shipments in Asia/Pacific and EMEA. Both Acer and ASUS showed steep declines compared to the second quarter last year. The decline was partly affected by their strategies to exit the mini-notebook market.

PC shipments in EMEA totaled 21.3 million units in the second quarter of 2013, a 16.8 percent decline from the same period last year. The challenging economic environment continues to mute general spending in the consumer markets. Shipments in Eastern Europe also remained low as consumers are looking mainly for Android-based tablets. The second quarter is also typically a quiet quarter for business buyers in the region.

In Asia/Pacific, PC shipments surpassed 26.8 million units in the second quarter of 2013, an 11.5 percent decline from the second quarter of 2012. All country markets across the region showed weakness, but India performed slightly better due to a state PC tender fulfillment. China’s PC shipment remained weak as the consumer market was hampered with lack of new demand generation programs, such as subsidized PC program in the rural cities.

These results are preliminary. Final statistics will be available soon to clients of Gartner’s PC Quarterly Statistics Worldwide by Region program. ë

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COVER STORY

Time for an integrated solution-based approach With the rapid growth of Middle East and Africa market, IT vendors are focusing more on channel enablement in order to make them solution partners and thus creating opportunity for a deeper engagement with the customers n WORDS: NIVEDAN PRAKASH <NIVEDAN@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>â&#x20AC;&#x192; n PHOTOS: SHUTTERSTOCK

M

iddle East and Africa (MEA) region is a combination of emerging markets and established markets with varying degree of IT maturity.

From a demand perspective, customers in Central and North Africa as well as smaller countries in Gulf and Levant are continuing to invest in

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basic infrastructure and products. On the other hand, in more mature markets like South Africa, UAE and Saudi Arabia, there is greater appetite for integrated software, hardware and services solutions.

According to a Gartner report, the Middle East and African IT infrastructure spending is forecasted to reach $3.9 billion in 2013, a 4

percent increase from 2012. IT infrastructure growth in Middle East will be driven by data centre consolidation coupled with new data centre build outs. Servers are the largest segment of the IT infrastructure market with revenue reaching $1.54 billion in 2013, and it will grow to $1.69 billion in 2016.

The report also suggests that IT demand is

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“According to Gartner, the Middle East and African IT infrastructure spending is forecasted to reach $3.9 billion in 2013, a 4 percent increase from 2012”

quite selective in large ME organizations. A strong IT demand is expected from vertical industries like banking and government in 2013. As the Gulf economies continues to develop the non-oil GDP part of the economies, increased reliance on information technology will happen to spur this growth. A detailed understanding of vendor offerings and user needs are critical to fulfilling

business needs.

These market estimates clearly indicate that there is a window of opportunities not only for the vendor companies but also for the channel partners of the MEA region. A proactive service approach coupled with forging a strong customer relationship is the need of the hour.

TRENDS PREVAILING IN THE MARKET Industry analysts have forecasted a slow growth in the information technology market, which is driven by the modest increase of customers’ budgets that are growing 6-7 percent year-on-year.

The overall economic situation in the region is the major contributor to this fairly small growth.

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However, at the same time, there are quite a few partners who have grown their business 10 folds over the past year as they have updated their strategy to move away from traditional product selling to more of solution/ value-based selling.

Preeti Oberoi, Director – Channel Development, Middle East and Africa, IBM, asserted, “From a channel perspective there is a pressing need to invest in skills and achieve greater product specialization. Customers are looking up to Channel partners as key enablers to support their business vision. At IBM we are working closely with our channel community to equip them with the right skills and resources to help them meet the expectations from clients and deliver enhanced business value.”

“In today’s dynamic and fast changing cyber security environment, channel partners and resellers need to be certain they are partnered with vendors that have a solid understanding and extensive expertise in security. Symantec’s security product portfolio is continuously enhanced to adapt to market trends and industry trends that are impacting the security landscape – like cloud computing and mobility,” added Fady Iskander, Regional Commercial Manager (Middle East, Africa & Turkey), Symantec.

As the MEA market has witnessed a huge transformation in the recent times, there is a pressing need for an increased consolidation. The big daddies of channel are acquiring the smaller players in order to secure their position in the relevant markets. Besides, due to huge investment by the regional governments in infrastructureand hospitality-related projects, the regional economy is growing at a significant rate and this in turn is providing partner businesses with new opportunities for growth.

Harsh Vardhan G, Executive Vice President -Global Marketing and Channels, Ramco Systems, said, “Earlier, the focus of a channel partner was more towards specific solution-based and transactional relationship. Whereas now, we are witnessing a shift in the trend as most of the channel partners are now focusing on an integrated solution based approach, considering the long-term perspective. The channel market is much more mature with the partner’s involvement in the customer’s business and understanding the customer’s requirements and strategies.

Ramco has been spearheading toward the same.”

Apparently, businesses are now supporting channel partners more than ever before. The importance of their services has become more evident as global economies are slowly coming out of the recession. The MEA region is also seeing partners becoming more specific on what types of services they specialize in. And once they

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PREETI OBEROI, DIRECTOR – CHANNEL DEVELOPMENT, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, IBM

“Customers are looking up to Channel partners as key enablers to support their business vision.

At IBM we are working closely with our channel community to equip them with the right skills and resources to help them meet the expectations from clients and deliver enhanced business value.”

define which market they want to focus on, they have the ability to choose the specific services or products they are interested in.

CHANNEL OPPORTUNITIES FROM VALUE PERSPECTIVE The opportunity for channel partners are from a value perspective is for more emerging and innovative technologies. The key requirement for a partner is being able to understand these new technologies and how this would help their enterprise customers operate more efficiently; build expertise both from a pre- and post-sales perspective to be able to do a solution design and support the end customer; and finally, understanding the customer’s business for proper IT solution integration.

Vardhan further added, “With regards to the

FADY ISKANDER, REGIONAL COMMERCIAL MANAGER (MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA & TURKEY), SYMANTEC

“In today’s dynamic and fast changing cyber security environment, channel partners and resellers need to be certain they are partnered with vendors that have a solid understanding and extensive expertise in security.”

value perspective, the channel partner helps in creating local awareness. Most of our partners are solution partners and this creates an opportunity for a deep engagement with the customers, as businesses are often comfortable dealing with local entities. Hence, this would add value in maintaining customer relations and growing our partner ecosystem.”

“It is observed that the general approach adopted by channel partners is product selling.

We have an approach of solution selling, understanding the customers pain areas, their network infrastructure and accordingly we suggest them to design security policy for their network, implement these security policies for different users/ employees or groups/departments and have a strong monitoring and reporting system. Hence, we add value to our channel partners in terms of education on cyber security and extensive prod-

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HARSH VARDHAN G, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT -GLOBAL MARKETING AND CHANNELS, RAMCO SYSTEMS

“The channel market is much more mature with the partner’s involvement in the customer’s business and understanding the customer’s requirements and strategies. Ramco has been spearheading toward the same.”

uct training that helps them to understand the IT security needs of their customers and according offer security solutions to them,” pointed out Nazir Kazi, AVP – ME and Africa, eScan.

Anish Kanaran, Director Channel – Middle East, Africa, India, Epicor Software, opined, “As the region has witnessed steady growth during the last two years, MEA channel partners can position themselves to take advantage of the range of opportunities vendors are bringing to the region. Comprehensive partner programmes mean they can gain value from a faster return on their investment, increasing their bottom line revenues and ensuring business growth.”

NEW CONCEPTS INFLUENCING BUSINESSES The arrival of new concepts like cloud computing, enterprise mobility, datacenter services, and BYOD amongst others is certainly influencing businesses in the MEA region. In fact, these are cross-industry industry trends that represent a

NAZIR KAZI, AVP – ME AND AFRICA, ESCAN

“We add value to our channel partners in terms of education on cyber security and extensive product training that helps them to understand the IT security needs of their customers and according offer security solutions to them.”

paradigm shift for channel driven solutions that opens up new revenue streams. And it is clearly seen that the partners are gearing up to meet the demands caused by these emerging technologies.

A recent Gartner study points out that IT leaders in the Middle East will extend their virtualization investments to create private clouds, especially banks, government and telecom organizations. Security is one the biggest barriers for the adoption of public cloud. However, this market has a huge universe of small and midsize enterprises who are experimenting with some of the public cloud offerings. Besides, the data centre market in the Middle East is fuelled by increased construction of tier 3 and 4 data centres, especially in Saudi Arbia and UAE, primarily driven by Multi National Corporations as well as regional collocation and hosting service providers.

“These developments mean different things depending on which industry. In terms of security and WatchGuard, we support all of their busi-

ness functionalities as they call for security. These new concepts come with the creation of new security services and products to protect them, of which WatchGuard shares with their partners.

We support them by giving them training, and this allows them to expand the services that they can provide their customers. It also means there is an opportunity to expand their client base, as they can service more technical needs,” said John Spoor, Regional Manager – Middle East and Africa, WatchGuard.

The implementation of these technologies will definitely affect channel partners as the traditional products, solutions and services offered by them will be redundant. This will, however, open up new opportunities for partners to offer security solutions for enterprise mobility and BYOD because mobile devices are easily stolen or lost. And having data and applications on the mobile devices which gives access to corporate data can be very vulnerable. Channel partners need to upgrade themselves with new technologies and solutions around these areas in order to cater to the IT security needs of their customers.

“Cloud computing and managed services are key growth plays for and our business partners globally. IBM is committed to enabling our business partner community to adapt and flourish in response to these industry shifts. We are actively engaging and committed to our channel partners to help them transform their business models to enable them to be successful in this new era of computing. This includes helping business partners build skills to ensure readiness to drive our cloud portfolio to the market, as well as enabling our channel partners deliver cloud based services and solutions underpinned by IBM’s industry leading solution stack,” added Oberoi.

On the other hand, there is a lot of news around e-Governance, m-governance, e-tailing, m-tailing, e-commerce, m-commerce, etc., which has thrown both opportunities and challenges for the channel business. “e-Governance and e-commerce has been around for some time. But a sudden swing into m-governance and m-commerce has seen a shift with new mobility devices in the marketplace.

The ability for the channel to understand these solutions and build a core value around professional services will be the most important part of the next evolution in business,” asserted K S Parag, Managing Director, FVC. The consumerization of IT, coupled with the uptake of Big Data & Analytics, mobile, social business and cloud computing are key trends that are reshaping business dynamics in MEA today.

In turn, government and corporate entities in MEA are increasingly leveraging online mediums

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to engage and empower their customers.

According to Gartner estimates, UAE, Qatar and Bahrain lead the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) adoption of e-Government programs and will now focus efforts to electronically link up departments and offer a single interface point for citizens to connect with government agencies.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is the largest GCC member, and its second e-Government action plan will leverage public private partnership contracts and framework agreements. However, the availability of skilled and trained resources will be critical to drive success of various e-Government initiatives. The South African government’s planned expansion of the recently piloted Smart ID card initiative in 2013 and Turkish government plans to provide all government services electronically by the year 2019 will create new opportunities for technology and service providers in the fast growing Middle East and Africa region.

Phil Hughes, Managing Director – Middle East, Simms Recycling, explained, “If you look at EU markets, the small independent reseller no longer exists. Even the major superstore chains or e-tailers have found it incredibly difficult to compete. The regional channel business here is still diverse, from the box shifting traders through to the mall mentality all the way up to world class system integrators. That diverse channel has been developing over 20 years now, and will continue to develop and evolve. Just as they did during the economic downturn, the market will adapt.

They will see new opportunities and respond to them. For example, online selling will still need service partners. Compliance and Governance programmes will open new opportunities within the SIEM sector. The channel here has proven that it can react and change and benefit.” “e-tailing, m-tailing, e-commerce and m-commerce are all B2C concepts which will definitely have great impact on Channel business. .These concepts will also impact channel business catering to business customers and that is why our strategy of solution selling approach will work well as these channel partners can add value to their products and services. e-Governance and m-governance will definitely add great convenience to citizens, employees and businesses in general. However, the opportunities for the corporate/enterprise channel partners servicing to government clients will be more lucrative, whereas channel partners servicing to SMB/ midsize corporate will not have any advantage, they still need to gear up with new technologies and solutions to grow up the ladder,” highlighted Kazi.

SOLUTION SELLING &

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ANISH KANARAN, DIRECTOR CHANNEL – MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, INDIA, EPICOR SOFTWARE

“As the region has witnessed steady growth during the last two years, MEA channel partners can position themselves to take advantage of the range of opportunities.”

VAD BUSINESS GAINING MOMENTUM Earlier, channel partners were primarily involved in the sales of the product but they have now started engaging in product implementation as well. Having evolved over the years, they are now geared up, as a comprehensive solution partner, to meet growing customer’s demands involving sales and implementation.

Meanwhile, Middle East and African countries are in different stages of development. The emerging markets in Central and North Africa as well as smaller countries in Gulf and Levant are still focused on products and investing in IT infrastructure, hence there is a lot of reliance on solution providers and system integrators.

However, in mature markets like Saudi, UAE, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco the trends is rapidly shifting towards deploying complex solutions and there are additional expectations on channels and suppliers to package solutions and sell the value proposition. This creates an additional demand and expectation on channel partners to have different conversations with their clients and develop higher value IT solutions to address specific business challenges.

JOHN SPOOR, REGIONAL MANAGER – MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, WATCHGUARD

“We will also be looking for specific partners that can support key industry verticals such as banking, finance, telecom and the public sector.”

Iskander stated, “Symantec’s focus with distribution is to develop the VAD play to address the thousands of channel areas that Symantec does not touch directly, bringing incremental revenue that we would not have otherwise. Symantec’s distribution team, with our value-added distribution channel, has developed sales, marketing and technical bundles that make it easy for the SME channel to position Symantec solutions to address customers’ need that could not have been fulfilled on their own.”

“We are seeing more VADs setting up operations in the region as well as seeing a lot of regional and international distributors setting up a VAD division to tap into the growing demand for value added services. The channel requires support from these VADs from an enablement perspective, along with suitable training for sales & POCs (proof of concept). The VAD can engage with the channel towards achieving these mutually beneficial objectives leading to increased sales opportunities,” opined Parag.

Kanaran further added, “Today, VADs play a crucial role in IT distribution as they significantly enhance the vendor’s offerings to the channel by accentuating the various programmes launched

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K S PARAG, MANAGING DIRECTOR, FVC

“We are seeing more VADs setting up operations in the region as well as seeing a lot of regional and international distributors setting up a VAD division to tap into the growing demand for value added services.”

by IT manufacturers to the channel community.

VADs are now increasingly providing an edge to a product by investing in technical expertise that can deliver pre-and post-sales services, or investing in technology development capabilities that can boost the products being offered. We are seeing notable VAD changes happening in software, particularly in cloud-based software.”

In a way, it can be comprehended here that VAD is evolving to match the demand and the opportunity size in the region. The increase in solution selling is very encouraging as it means that the vendor companies are digging deeper into their customers’ areas of concern and providing them with not only the answer to one problem but a complete solution to solve many problems.

Also, the MEA market is seeing an increase in traditional broad line distributors’ move into the VAD space as the margins on traditional box moving activities are becoming tighter. And within the distribution space, these VADs are able to provide a more complete end to end service to their existing channel partners allowing them to

PHIL HUGHES, MANAGING DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST, SIMMS RECYCLING

“Education is my single suggestion to the channel market. Train your staff to manage better and maximize efficiency; train them to recognize an incremental revenue opportunity.”

strengthen their relationship and increase their revenues. As a result they are able to cater to larger projects and multiple product deals with a stronger grip on the delivery schedules, as the end user is coordinating with only one supplier.

MISSION 2020 As there are huge projects coming up in Middle East till the year 2020, the market will certainly witness a huge momentum of products and solutions. Even the vendors operating out of this region are gearing themselves to cater to the increasing requirement from different sectors.

For WatchGuard, which has recently opened a new office in Dubai to expand their presence in the region, Middle East is a key growth area and it’s an important time for the company to cement relationships and at the same time, expand partnerships.

“As for the role that partners will play in the region, they will work directly with the customers. They are our connection to clients and the ones that implement our products. We need to invest the time into new partnerships to insure

that they are offering the best advice and service to customers. We will also be looking for specific partners that can support key industry verticals such as banking, finance, telecom and the public sector,” pointed out Spoor.

In order to embark on this growing opportunity, IBM is also actively engaging with a range of traditional and non-traditional channel partners ranging from Real Estate Developers, MEP’s (Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing) , BMS providers, niche technology specialists resellers and system integrators in the region.

Similarly, eScan foresees a great opportunity not only in UAE, but across the region and hence have opened up local office, eScan Middle East in Dubai, UAE with sales and technical resources made available to its channel partners in order to cater the increasing demand ofIT security solutions. The company’s primary objective will be training, educating and ensuring that its channel partners are more capable to offer security solutions across all platforms with prompt after-sales support.

Ditto is the case with Symantec that has made significant investment on a strategic level to ensure that the channel base in local markets across the Middle East region are fully supported and are able to garner the same benefit regardless of which country or city they are based in. The company has put teams together based on a geographical focus by aligning sales, presales and channels on specific regions that span across the Middle East.

As the MEA momentum is building up, the other biggies like Ramco, Epicor, FVC, and Simms Recycling along with their partner ecosystem are all set to capture the global market and ready to capitalize over the huge, upcoming projects. They are working towards bringing themselves up to speed by investing in new technology and resources.

CHALLENGES WITH CHANNEL BUSINESS While all the vendors are on a growth path and writing success stories in the MEA region, they have to also cope up with the some of the impending issues prevailing in the channel business. The dearth of qualified talent pool locally is a significant impediment for channel partners. Sourcing professionals with the right skills remains a challenge compounded by high attrition rates witnessed in the region. Partners are sometimes too busy to register opportunities as they are created, which at times causes them to lose rebates.

Also, some new market trends require a completely new channel program to be developed and

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RAKESH CHITRODA,

INTERNATIONAL SALES MANAGER, MATRIX COMSEC PVT. LTD.

As far as Middle East is concerned, we are expanding our partner base in this region.

Currently, we have partners’ presence in Dubai, Qatar, and Oman. There are other potential markets like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait where we will appoint partners as well.

We normally look for system integration companies who are not only the champions of the distribution but also involved in solution selling along with extending technical support to the end customer.

As Middle East market potential is phenomenal, so is the opportunity for channel partners.

There are a lot of good system integrators operating out of these countries who are involved in promoting enterprise telephony

localized, which takes time to create, launch, and educate resellers on. Additionally, the political instability in many parts of Africa constraints the access to finance for channel partners, thus hampering their growth and expansion ambitions.

The political instability also holds repercussions for attracting and retaining talent in the region.

Vardhan stated, “The only issue that the parent company can face with the partner perspective is the start-up norms, as organizations need to be aligned to the business strategy and goals. Hence, getting aligned and to get the partnership kick started is a major issue of concern.”

“Some of the major issues are high competition resulting in wafer thin margins, insecurity on losing existing customers and opportunities.

Moreover, new customer acquisition has always been a challenge. Also, there are issues pertaining to lack of time, resources and manpower to upgrade/ update their skills on new technologies and solutions,” asserted Kazi.

SUGGESTIONS FOR PARTNERS With the MEA region being the key growth market for all the vendors, they want their channel ecosystem to be equally strong and efficient.

They just not want partners to be extended arms but face to the customers. All the vendor companies have certain expectations from the channel

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partners and they are leaving no stone unturned in making them a proficient expert.

For IBM, their business partners need to further invest in key solutions areas that are both relevant for their markets today and will be in demanded by clients tomorrow. This includes embracing new technology and delivery models, innovating offerings to transition to higher value services and broadening their scope of offerings (horizontally and regionally). With many customers in MEA looking up to the channel as trusted advisors, the channel also has the responsibility to evangelize and educate the customers about key technology developments and the impact these hold for their business.

With increasing customer demands, Ramco Systems wants its partners to understand the challenges and complexities of the customer’s business and accordingly, provide solutions. Secondly, it is important for partners to have an engagement model from a long-term perspective to manage customers and their relationships with them.

One key suggestion from FVC to the channel market would be to build pre-sales and technical competency to ensure they are abreast with the fast growing changes in IT. This would lead to building proper professional services to be able to deploy the solution to the customer’s requirements and needs as well as provide the opportunity for additional revenue opportunities.

Hughes pointed out, “Education is my single suggestion to the channel market. Train your staff to manage better and maximize efficiency; train them to recognize an incremental revenue opportunity; but most of all in this current environment, expect rapid changes.” eScan believes that channel partners need to have a multi-dimensional approach towards their

products.

Africa too has a good potential but we are approaching this market in a different way because the import and government regulations in a few African countries are stopping us from entering those markets. However, we are leveraging international treaties wherein we are pushing in a lot of products through Dubai. For example, India has direct treaties with Kenya, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Zambia where import duty is very high but we are still doing business with these countries as we route our products through Dubai (being a free trade zone).

Our prime focus in this region is to create more reach and have partners in as many countries.

business and identify solutions which will add value to their offerings. They need to re-organize their resources and identify their strengths and weakness to conclude a growth strategy. They also need to identify and take up products/solutions with vendors/manufacturers who are interested in growing with them and assist them in growing their business.

Epicor recommends that any channel partner that is serious about growing their business in the Middle East must not only invest in technology, training and development but also provide a high standard of customer service and added value around their offerings in order to gain competitive edge.

The best advice WatchGuard wants to give to its channel partners is to do as much as you can to train and retain your best employees. End users like to see continuity, consistency and build up relationships with individuals within their suppliers. Additionally hiring and retraining not only costs money and takes time but also has a negative impact on the ability to maximize the growth potential.

FINALLY The remarkable growth of the Middle East and Africa market is driving the humungous sales of IT products and solutions. As the vendors’ volumes are expected to grow at a much faster pace, so is the channel business. Partners need to leap frog from box-pushing mode to comprehensive solution selling. The technology vendors are scouting for VADs who could play the dual role of both a distributor and system integrator. If the channel partners of this region align themselves with these changing market dynamics, they would certainly reap benefits in the long run. ë

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CORPORATE STORY

CYBEROAM

“Empowerment of Channel to Redefine Success” In order to stay competitive and capitalize on the market opportunities, vendors need to focus on equipping their partners with the latest advancements in technology. This can be only achieved through regular training and certifications. n WORDS: NIVEDAN PRAKASH <NIVEDAN@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

Businesses in MEA region are increasingly making use of IT to optimize production and quicken decision making processes. In other words, the organizations in this region are using IT to fuel their growth. Therefore, businesses choose to invest wisely. In fact, the investment in IT Security is driven by dynamic cyber threat landscape and regulatory compliance. The need of the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of their networks for their continued success is one of their top priorities.

According to IDC, the security appliances market in MEA will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 9.6% over the next four years, taking the total to approximately $350 million in customer revenues. Unified threat management (UTM), in particular, will lead the demand curve, accounting for a combined share of about 80% of the total security appliance market by 2016. The reason being that IT heads prefer complete solution to fight the threats and ensure compliance comprehensively.

Surender Kumar Bishnoi, General Manager – Middle East, Cyberoam Technologies , says, “Cyberoam always strives to stay a step ahead of the complex threats that plague businesses while taking care of their emerging business and pro-

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ductivity needs. The Cyberoam NG series offers future-ready security to through its enterprise grade security features, gigabit ports and up to 5 times the average industry throughputs at affordable price points.”

He further adds, “At the base of Cyberoam security is its identity based security that incorporates end user’s identity as the main security parameter across all its security features. This allows IT managers to gain complete visibility and control over online activities in the network.

This technology makes Cyberoam security highly granular enabling watertight policy configurations. It also adds to the security quotient many times over by identifying the actual user because most cyber threats in today’s times leverage users and user information to launch attacks. This technology not only prevents attacks but helps businesses apprehend threats much in advance based on user activities and thus maintain a highly effective security posture.”

Hence, the company’s partners in the market are equipped from the very beginning with a competitive advantage and proven efficacy of Cyberoam that makes it so much easier for them to pitch Cyberoam products. The company designs regular and updated training to give part-

ners confidence and improves their performance by helping them acquire expertise required for the installation and configuration of all Cyberoam features and functionality. The partners also bundle services such as technical support and customized reports. In face of ever evolving threat landscape and emerging business needs, training becomes the mainstay of Cyberoam’s strategy to keep partners updated and in sync with market needs. The end result of the regular training is that the partners are empowered to strengthen and deepen their market presence.

Cyberoam is doing well across the region covering most countries. The reason is that it is a 100% a channel centric company with dedicated focus and support in the region and works hard for creating a momentum to grow along with market opportunities. For example, the Cyberoam Program is suited to help partners develop revenue opportunities and grow profits, providing expertise and resources that customers require. Also, the company’s partners gain access to a recurring revenue stream with the help of Cyberoam subscription services, service renewal tracking and automation through its 24x7 partner portal.

He asserts, “The Cyberoam Partner Program

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is geared towards nurturing our partnerships through rewards and training to help partners’ business succeed. With attractive incentives, rebates, co-marketing tools and other services to support business, channel partners have total control over the growth of their business. Our channel programme is an ongoing process of enhancement providing in-depth training and support to the channel members at each stage of sales cycle.”

Meanwhile, Cyberoam is directly present in the Middle East and leverages the extensive partner network in the neighbouring Africa. Its distributors have proven capacities and expertise in catering to market demand efficiently. Also, the distributors recruit and manage resellers and extend Cyberoam marketing training and technical support to them. The company collaborates with the distributors to develop strategies in order to enlist and expand its partner network.

The company’s marketing campaigns are aggressive and geared to capture and retain markets in the long run. The collaboration is reflected in vigorous training, support and education that enable its partners to tap and capture emerging markets, promote Cyberoam products and services and win enough market to meet the sales objective as well as long term growth goals.

A broad range of product portfolio that caters to needs of different business segments, creating and steadily sustaining value added partners in the channel and a unique proposition with highest

SURENDER KUMAR BISHNOI

GENERAL MANAGER – MIDDLE EAST, CYBEROAM TECHNOLOGIES

“Along with our channel ecosystem, we lead the market by providing more value to our customers vis-àvis competition products in the market”

value at most competitive price points are some of the most important elements of Cyberoam’s business strategy. And at the core of this strategy, lies fundamentals of innovation and continuous development.

Bishnoi points out, “Along with our channel ecosystem, we lead the market by providing more value to our customers vis-à-vis competition products in the market. Another very important aspect of our strategy is nurturing the channel’s capabilities to quickly respond to changes matching the evolution of our product line. The speed with which the channel adapts to emerging market and also the buying behaviour is rather crucial to channel strategy.”

As a partner-centric company, Cyberoam invests highly and effectively on all partner parameters including technology, marketing assistance, training and certification, brand pull and marketing, price-performance of products, customer support, etc. Cyberoam’s offers regular program for unique and innovative marketing and sales support based on research, collaboration and a strategy that sees partners as central to its growth dreams.

Bishnoi highlights that with this empowerment, it becomes so much easier for the channel partners in implementing and supporting the security postures of clients to significantly improve their network performance and protection. In fact, their partners are redefining the benchmark of excellence. Today, most of the partners are leading players in security arena and play most important role in the company’s success by bringing in their expertise in serving clients’ specific requirements. By comprehensively addressing security vulnerabilities, Cyberoam’s distributors help customers to enable collaboration inside and outside of their organizations and create a growth strategy looking at the changing threat landscape. All this clearly shows how the company’s empowerment strategy works out to play a strategic role in the partners’ success and ultimately giving a push to their bottomlines.

FINALLY...

While Cyberoam is registering more than 100 percent growth in the region, it is also looking and analyzing the market pulse. As the customers in this region prefer next generation firewall, the company is all geared to tap this opportunity with its product range that can meet the needs of businesses in enhanced networking requirements owing to newer trends in technology including virtualization, converged networks, need for faster access, new breed of network-intensive applications, and more. ë

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LEADERS CORNER

FROM THE EVENT

Cisco: Going Strong in MEA &APAC From Customer Led to Partner Led, it is a strong transition that Cisco is making within. In fiscal year 2014, Partner Led is going to get US$150 million investment, double of last year, to tap a US $55 billion market. n W O R D S : S A N J AY M A H A PAT R A < S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M > n P H O T O S : C I S C O

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t the recently concluded 17th annual Partner Summit 2013 in Boston, Cisco’s chairman and CEO John Chambers laid out his strategy and vision to make Cisco the No.1 IT company in the near future.

Addressing the channel partners he stressed on three market opportunities: Midmarket opportunity, Cloud as a differentiator and Hybrid IT. Talking strongly about the competition, he said, “The message that we must give together to our competitors is, ‘If you are going to compete against Cisco and its ecosystem, you are going to lose.”

With “Today, Tomorrow, Together” as the theme of the summit, it was attended by nearly 2,000 partners from 1,121 companies from 93 countries along with 6,000 virtual partners.

On the occasion, Bruce Klein, Senior VP (Worldwide Partner Organization), Cisco, explained, “Everything is happening today, and we are hearing a lot about Internet of Everything for tomorrow and we can do it together with our partners. Our partner centric model is the differentiator for us, and I thank them for that.”

He further added that cloud, software and services, solutions are going to play a big role for the channel partners. The deal size is going to become anywhere from 2.5x to 7x and reduce time to close deal by half.

To make Cisco No.1 IT company, Chambers informed, “Cisco has been enhancing its strength

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through many acquisitions – to be precise 15 companies in last 12 months. And more such acquisitions might be in the future.”

He emphasized the importance of SMB market for them, which Cisco addresses as commercial market. With services and security going to play a major game changer in the market he stressed on the need for channel partners to adopt these businesses aggressively. As per the presentation of the company- Internet of Everything represents a $14.4 trillion worldwide revenue.

As per Chambers the mid-market opportunity is top of mind for Cisco, with the company promising to double its investment in “Partner Led” resources, from $75 million last year to $150 million in fiscal year 2014. The goal of the investment is to help partners capture a $55 billion market: $25 billion in product and $30 billion in services revenue by 2016. It is to remember that Cisco is delivering industry- leading partner support through its Partner Led initiative – its selling model that rewards and empowers channel partners to lead the sale with mid-size (along with small and large) customers.

Last year, Cisco introduced the cornerstone of its support framework, Partner Plus- designed to help partners grow their mid-size business practices. Under this 2000+ partners enrolled globally in the Partner Led programme. Out of them more than 40% have alredy met their targets and receiving reinvestment checks. Partners that leveraged virtual engineering resources grew two

times more quickly. There has been 11,000 leads and 39,000 prospects routed to partners through the sales collaboration platform.

Taking this opportunity, Cisco also announced some mid-market solutions including Catalyst Switch 2960-X Series and Virtualised Foundation Smart Solution. The company also highlighted on the Meraki Managed Services Dashboard, Cloud Services reseller and Business Transformation Playbook.

When the Managed Services Dashboard brings together a number of features for managed service providers (MSP) to offer cloud-managed networking as a service to their customers, the MSP dashboard features specific tools, analytics and monitoring capabilities and is built to allow service providers to manage end-customer networks easily from a central location while still maintaining separation and security of each customer network.

Cisco is also making significant new enhancements to its Cloud Services Resale Model to accelerate the cloud services reseller’s ability to capture new revenues from the cloud opportunity and provide a variety of new benefits to help them become successful. The enhanced benefits, available in August 2013 on a global basis, are designed to accelerate the current cloud services resellers’ business and entice new product resellers to join the programme.

Cisco Business Transformation Playbook is to provide a blueprint for partners transitioning

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LEADERS CORNER

“The message that we must give together to our competitors is, ‘If you are going to compete against Cisco and its ecosystem, you are going to lose.”

JOHN CHAMBERS

CHAIRMAN AND CEO, CISCO SYSTEMS

their business from a product reseller model to include annuity-based cloud revenue.

The company strongly believes that with right sized products, solutions and services could make them successful in the market. Hence the company has pledged to continue to build on the industry’s broadest “made for mid-market” portfolio of products, solutions and services.

About transition in the market and transition of the channel partners, which will be effected because of cloud, Edison Peres, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Channels, Cisco, said, “Cisco is offering new resources and incentives to its Cloud Services Reseller partners, or partners who don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to stand up their own cloud practices, but want to resell Cisco Powered Services from other cloud providers.

Cloud Services Reseller partners will have access to Cisco’s Value Incentive Program (VIP) rebates on sales of Cisco-Powered Services.”

He added, “Cloud Services Resellers can now tap into a Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) Resource

Center, a Web-based and self-service portal providing access to all of Cisco’s go-to-market tools.”

Coaxing the partners to take cloud and service business seriously, he said, “To be honest, there are still many of you sitting on the sidelines, wondering, ‘Is cloud really here? Is as-a-Service really important?’ Don’t sit on the sidelines, get in the game.”

He also announced that Cisco will roll out two new partner certifications that focus on businessmodel transformations and next-generation sales models. To nudge partners toward these certifications, Cisco will help offset the training and exam costs for the first 800 partners who sign up for the certifications.

Speaking about the APJC market, Jaime Vallés, President (Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China), said, “In the emerging markets including India, China, Indonesia, we are seeing a lot of transition. These are very important for Cisco because 100s of cities in these geographies are

transforming. Millions of middle-class people are becoming empowered. Increasing number of people are now preferring to work from homes.

Companies from emerging countries are buying global companies. So we are getting all the global practices and localising for them.”

Emphasizing on the services business, Edzard J. C. Overbeek, Senior VP (Cisco Services), Cisco, said, “The opportunity of the partners is really around smart services, which will help you create new solution for the customers. The maintenance, break-fix and professional services are the things which we need to keep on doing together, because those are very profitable for you.”

FINALLY… It is good see Cisco’s ambition and the blue print of its execution. The biggest realization is that the channel partners are safe in the hands of Cisco.

Today, if any channel partner is unhappy about his business bottom line, I would advise him to get associated with Cisco. ë

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MY VIEWS

KHAWAJA SAIFUDDIN

SENIOR SALES DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, AND SOUTH ASIA, WESTERN DIGITAL

“Long-term strategies pay rich dividends” AS THE MEA REGION HAS SEEN EXPONENTIAL GROWTH IN THE RECENT

(NAS) devices, most of which are sold without hard drives. WD is addressing this segment with the Red line of drives, which are designed specifically for SOHO NAS enclosures that offer between 1-to-5 drive bays. Increased awareness about the need to backup vital data is also driving the adoption of direct attached storage (DAS) devices such as our My Passport and My Book products. As the African market has traditionally been underserved, WD is focusing on expanding its reach within the continent to address this demand.

TIMES, THE TECHNOLOGY VENDORS ARE LEAVING NO STONE UNTURNED IN TAPPING THE UNDERLYING OPPORTUNITIES.

From the HDD perspective, what is the opportunity in MEA region?

Countries in the Middle East and Africa present healthy prospects for internal hard drives, as well as external storage products and solutions.

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The explosion in the growth of digital content and the need to have access to this data locally, as well as remotely across multiple platforms (desktops, notebooks, tablets, smartphones) is driving the adoption of network attached storage

What kind of performance growth WD is seeing in the region?

While we’ve been enjoying healthy year-on-year growth, it’s a challenge to accurately put a figure to growth because of external pressures that affect some of the key markets in the Middle East and Africa from time-to-time. Political strive in large markets such as Egypt, for example, have had a knock on impact on people’s lives and thus their

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MY VIEWS

purchasing decisions. Other countries within the region on the other hand are saddled with customs issues, among other things. Having said that, we see healthy opportunities within the countries in these regions, hence we will continue to invest in them.

What is the breakup of your business from desktop storage, external storage and enterprise storage?

While our desktop and external storage business still make up a sizeable chunk of our business in these regions, in recent times we’ve enjoyed a spike within the enterprise segment as well. Large scale projects within the region have allowed us to shift higher margin enterprise class products such as our 7,200rpm RE drives. At the same time a move towards digitizing surveillance systems in the region has also led to increased demand for our video storage optimized AV-GP and AV-25 drives. With the diverse and ever expanding portfolio of products under our belt, we expect these segments will all make important contributions to our overall performance in the region in the coming months and years.

Where do you think growth is coming? And where are your sales and marketing engines are focusing on mostly?

Several factors are driving growth across the consumer, SMB and enterprise segments as discussed earlier. As WD has products that address each of these markets, our sales and marketing teams are focusing on each segment equally, with perhaps a slight edge towards the enterprise segment, owing to the need for high performance, high reliability storage solutions and the launch of our new WD SE drives. These 3.5-inch drives are purpose built for SMB NAS enclosures with between 6-to-12 bays and for scale out computing architectures (such as datacenters). The launch of our SE drives give us the ability to offer buyers the power of choice when it comes to selecting a NAS drive, as the Red targets SOHO 1-to-5 bay boxes, the SE SMB 6-to-12 bay enclosures, while the RE sits at the top for 12+ bays NAS systems.

Which are the countries giving good growth for you?

Our Middle East operations have been up and running for nearly 15 years and the dividends are coming from countries like the U.A.E, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. As we’ve now expanded our focus on countries within Central, East and Western Africa, we expect the business coming from those countries will supplement that

coming from Middle Eastern countries in the coming years.

What is your country specific strategy?

While the countries in the region have a healthy appetite for storage, each has its own unique do’s and don’ts when it comes to doing business. As we’ve long been a player in the market, we’ve had the chance to watch, deploy, learn and adapt our strategy to take these unique requirements into account. It’s impossible to apply a one size fits all strategy given the diverse nature of these markets.

What is your overall marketing and channel strategy?

Since our product portfolio covers the consumer, SMB and enterprise segments of the market, it goes without saying that our channel strategy has to be bulletproof and takes us to the right partners that can take our products to market.

For our component products our sales and marketing teams work closely with our distribution partners and resellers, so that they understand our products and have the necessary collaterals and any other support they require to help drive sales. Moving to our branded products, the sales

which provides benefits such as web-based product training, access to marketing collaterals, cash incentives and much more. Along with this, we also conduct face-to-face training sessions on products from time to time and encourage partners to liaise with our staff face-to-face or via phone or e-mail whenever a question or issue arises.

What different are you doing in the market?

We take a very local approach to doing business in each market we are in. As I said before, a one size fits all strategy just doesn’t work, so we make it a point to work very closely with other elements within the market and employ on-ground staff to manage relationships and the market. We’ve had our on-ground operations in place in the UAE for nearly 15 years and that investment has been giving us healthy returns over the years.

As the market nature is shifting to cloud and virtualization, how WD is changing its approach?

For the foreseeable future, the majority of data will be stored on mechanical hard drives, as SSDs are still at a major price and capacity disadvantage. Datacenters that are designed to

“WE DEVELOP CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH EACH OF OUR PARTNERS AND HIGHLY VALUE TWO-WAY DIALOGUE, AS IT HELPS US FINE TUNE OUR OWN STRATEGY AND MAKE CHANGES WHEN NECESSARY.”

and marketing teams work closely with the earlier mentioned partners but also reach out to the retail sector by focusing on hyper retailers, power retailers and high street retailers. It’s vital to take the right products to the right partners, so they can in turn take them to the right customers.

What is your empowerment and growth strategy for the partners?

At WD, we highly value our partners as they are the ones who ultimately help us address the market and they are the ones whom we look to for on-the-ground intelligence. We develop close relationships with each of our partners and highly value two-way dialogue, as it helps us fine tune our own strategy and make changes when necessary. As our success is linked to their success, we provide as much support as possible to ensure their business objectives are met. We have rolled out and enrolled these partners into programs such as myWD,

provide cloud and virtualization services will use high capacity mechanical hard drives to store the majority of data, whereas SSDs will be used to store smaller data that is more frequently required (database records for example). To address this segment of the market, WD has the XE, RE and recently launched SE family. With our current range of products, WD is able to address almost every storage requirement, whether it is personal cloud storage at home, NAS storage for SMBs or large data center environments.

What is your growth expectation for this year?

As we continue to launch new and innovative products that take us into new segments of the market, the potential for growth is tremendous.

In short, WD is looking to build on its ongoing success and surpass what we achieved in terms of numbers last year. ë

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GUEST TALK

RED HAT

Leading the Public Web into a Big Data environment Mark Little, vice president, Middleware Engineering, Red Hat and Tom Llewellyn, Business Development Manager, Red Hat Storage explain how Large-scale Elastic Architecture for Data-as-a-Service (LEADS) will enable enterprises to leverage all of the public data on the web against privately held data.

D

ata, both public and private, is growing at an unfathomably rapid rate. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, the volume of data in existence worldwide will have grown by more than the volume of data contained in all of the books ever written. For instance, on YouTube alone, 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute, furthermore unstructured data is growing at a rate of 80 percent year-on-year. As more of us live our lives online, as companies large and small capture massive volumes of customer information, as the regulatory framework around data retention tightens, data storage has evolved from a routine IT process to a major business issue.

In some industries, such as meteorology, seismology, power distribution and financial services, gathering and curating huge volumes of data are integral features of the business. These businesses have grown into Big Data and they have pockets deep enough to cover the cost of the necessary IT infrastructure. But businesses across all sectors are now engaging with their customers across multiple channels: on the web, across mobile devices, through social media and face to face. They are increasingly looking to unify all these different sources of data to analyse the ‘customer journey’ and target individuals proactively with tailored messaging.

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The benefits of capturing and securely analysing data should be obvious to all, yet according to a recent IDC report less than one percent of data is analysed and more than 80 percent of it remains unprotected.

Why then is so little analysed and why does so much go unprotected? Put simply, Big Data is too big for most for all but the largest companies. Traditional storage models are not scalable enough, while the processing power required to quickly make sense of an almost limitless long tail of potentially useful information is beyond all but those with the deepest pockets.

Much has been written on the subject of Big Data, in fact, if you search the term using Google, it returns nearly 19 million results. Assuming it takes your browser about five seconds to open each link, that’s over 26,000 man hours to briefly glimpse each page, never mind take in, analyse and act upon the contents in an intelligent way that benefits your business. This should put into some sort of context the scale of the task of applying Big Data logic to both public and private sources, to create a Large-scale Elastic Architecture for Data-asa-Service (LEADS) that businesses can use to mine and analyze data published on the entire public web.

The objective of LEADS is to build a decentralized DaaS framework that runs on an elastic collection of micro-clouds.

LEADS will provide a means to gather,

MARK LITTLE

VICE PRESIDENT, MIDDLEWARE ENGINEERING, RED HAT

“The monetary cost of the infrastructure is among the critical factors determining how to store Big Data.”

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GUEST TALK

store, and query publicly available data, as well as process this data in real-time. In addition, the public data can be enriched with private data maintained on behalf of a client, and the processing of the real-time data can be augmented with historical versions of the public and private data.

Cloud-based or DaaS models look most likely to provide the answer to our Big Data challenges.

Rather than maintaining data in-house in dedicated data centres, it is both economically and ecologically smarter to store it in a shared, open source, infrastructure.

The LEADS consortium is composed of universities and research centres (UniNE, TUD, and TSI), whose members proved to be able to push new ideas rapidly and effectively to the scientific community and large companies (Red Hat, BM-Yahoo! and Adidas) which have the power and legitimacy to effectively propose new technologies and methods both for their own use, for their clients and as new standards of opera-

TOM LLEWELLYN

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER, RED HAT STORAGE

“The benefits of capturing and securely analysing data should be obvious to all, yet according to a recent IDC report less than one per cent of data is analysed and more than 80 per cent of it remains unprotected.”

tion. Most importantly, Yahoo! and Red Hat are leaders in the development and distribution of open-source solution and the expected impact of providing the LEADS infrastructure to the community is enormous.

Clearly, the financial investment needed for crawling, storing, and processing even a small portion of the internet is very high, making such a task prohibitively expensive for small to medium and start-up companies. Currently, only the biggest IT players have access to the infrastructure for storing huge amounts of data and the computing facilities needed to process it. Small and medium companies often have no other choice than relying on larger companies with dedicated data centres to provide them with the data and processing resources.

The monetary cost of the infrastructure is among the critical factors determining how to store Big Data. As noted, this problem is especially acute for small and medium-sized companies that have limited resources. Therefore, any new solution should offer pricing competitive with, or lower than, conventional data centres to be attractive.

In unpredictable markets, data warehousing will no longer suffice. Here, organisations process large volumes of data into certain forms so that predefined types of analyses can be performed. This is too restrictive: who can foresee what analysis might be needed next month, let alone next year?

Businesses must have the freedom to keep their options open. This is where the model of Big Data comes into its own. It allows unstructured data such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents to be interrogated in new ways to extract fresh insight, thereby maximising its value to the business over the longer term.

Using data this way helps companies to make better informed forecasts and decisions. Companies taking advantage of Big Data are equipped to understand their business at a deeper level. They can respond nimbly to changing conditions, take innovative products and services to market more quickly and steal a march on the competition.

The LEADS platform will be designed from the ground up to account for privacy, security,

energy-efficiency, availability, elastic scalability, and performance considerations. The project will be validated on use-cases involving the crawling of web data and its exploitation in different application domains.

In selecting technology partners the European Union, which is behind this initiative, needed to avoid proprietary providers from the outset. Choosing between products that purportedly offer a Big Data solution can be a large enough hurdle to scare even the most robust IT managers. All of the main proprietary storage vendors have a solution in the Big Data space, typically a package comprising their own hardware with preconfigured software.

However, open source software offers an alternative way of creating a cost-effective storage solution. Software built using standard software components based on standard protocols is layered on top of commodity hardware. This opens up a vendor-neutral route, whereby user organisations have a wide choice of affordable hardware and portable open source software available to them.

Using open source for LEADS avoided the project becoming locked into a particular hardware vendor or the high software licensing costs associated with proprietary operating systems, middleware and applications. It also has all the advantages of continuous testing, refinement and innovation. Furthermore, open source technology can work alongside existing storage infrastructure.

An open source scale-out solution for unstructured data is used that can grow as required, creating an infinitely large pool of data. It’s a solution that spans seamlessly into the cloud. By accessing cloud-based storage resources, capacity can then be turned on or off according to demand. This is particularly useful where customer demand is challenging to predict.

Of course, predicting demand, particularly in recent years, is a major headache. Make no mistake, data growth is becoming the biggest challenge for enterprises to manage their own data centre hardware infrastructure. The economic downtown forced many IT managers to defer infrastructure and technology upgrade cycles. LEADS provide an economical approach to processing large amounts of data by sharing the collection, storage and querying of public and private data. Combining privately held data with publicly available ‘free’ data is a logical next step for Big Data. Google managed to evolve the simple action of searching publicly available information into a $50 billion business. LEADS could be similarly beneficial to just about any other business. ë

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INNOVATIONS

Fedora 19 Fully functional Linux operating system, Fedora 19, code-named “Schrödinger’s Cat”, continues to enable users to experience the latest in free and open source technology, integrated into

a Linux distribution and ready for free download, use, modification and redistribution.

From high-level features for enabling cloud and virtualization infrastructure,

scalability, resilience, and flexibility that are vital in a technology world increasingly focused on rapid delivery of solutions, services, and information.

With a variety of developer tools, ranging from popular languages and packaging tools to testing and instrumentation features, Fedora 19 enables developers of all skill levels to create and deploy code in many environments.

Fedora 19 also provides a variety of improvements to the management of the operating system, including the boot process, recovery from failures, migration of systems, and more. all the way down to process- Fedora 19 includes tools for level and virtual-machine diagnosis, monitoring, and level portability, combined logging that enable users to with the newest developer be proactive, not reactive, toolchains, Fedora 19 leaving them with more time contains cutting-edge to spend doing the things. technologies that enable

KEY CAPABILITIES n Developer’s Assistant, a tool suitable for beginners; n 3D printing capabilities, ranging from software for creation of 3D models, to tools for generating and sending code to 3D printers; n Virtual machine storage migration, enabling the migration of virtual machines and associated, in-use storage n Systemd resource control, for modifying service settings without reboot; n Checkpoint and restore capabilities for processes n OpenLMI, a common infrastructure for remote management of systems and storage; n The latest release of OpenStack, known as “Grizzly,” including the incubated Heat and Ceilometer projects.

PLEASE SEND YOUR FEEDBACK AT EDITOR@ ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

POLYCOM CX5500 The new Polycom CX5500 Unified Conference Station is designed to deliver 360-degree, panoramic 1080p HD video collaboration solutions custom-built for Microsoft Lync 2013.

The new Polycom CX5500 delivers enterprise-grade video and audio collaboration capabilities in an easy-to-use system that can be plugged into a USB port on a laptop, and it also doubles as a SIP audio conference phone providing the industry’s best audio quality.

The new additions to Polycom’s CX series of Lync-optimized solutions are successors to the Polycom CX5000 HD Unified Conference Station. The solution retains the unique around-the-table, 360-degree, panoramic experience and delivers more than twice the HD video image quality, double the frame rate for life-like motion handling, and Polycom’s HD Voice for the highest quality audio while adding a new interface and design and a privacy cap.

For organizations with Microsoft Lync- environments, the new Polycom CX5500 enhances communications and collaboration by providing more productive and efficient meetings.

Since the Polycom CX5500 is placed in the center of a meeting room table, it enables a natural conversation that addresses the need to collaborate and engage simultaneously with those in the room (around the table) and other participants who are remote. Both systems deliver 1080p active speaker video that automatically tracks the flow of conversations at a fluid 30 frames per second, while offering a 360-degree panoramic view of the room. Conversations remain crystal clear with high-fidelity Polycom HD Voice.

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Innovations.indd 30

KEY CAPABILITIES n All-new user interface and system design n Simply connect via USB to a computer that is running Lync n Can also be used in combination with the Lync Room System n Bringing together center-of-table 360-degree cameras with a built-for-Lync video room system that includes touchscreen monitors and a tabletop touch controller. n Functions as both an HD video collaboration environment and a fully featured SIP conference phone, n Easy to use, provision and configure, companies can save on training and IT costs.

A U G U ST 2013

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26/07/13 11:31 PM

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In today’s business climate, confidence is directly proportional to how well an organisation connects their information security practices to the highest levels of their business. With the right strategy, a company can move forward on their goals with certainty. Without one, even the smallest breach can paralyze progress. Tripwire takes the guesswork out of security by making it visible, measurable and actionable. This dynamic, system-wide approach allows business to stay focused on the gameplan that’s right for their customers. It gives management the information it needs to intelligently visualize weaknesses and effectively hold people accountable. And most critically, it also gives leadership the ability to clearly identify threats and communicate their impact on the business. To learn how Tripwire can deliver this confidence to your company, visit www.tripwire.com/confidence

www.tripwire.com/confidence

Dubai Launch advt02.indd 10

26/07/13 9:12 AM