Issue 05 | March 2014
Tasting success How to develop a successful channel marketing strategy
Published by
THE
LINK from the MANAGEMENT
“Marketing drives the success of our business and that of our partners and vendors. This year, we are building a new marketing strategy with some internal changes to support our partners and vendors through new programmes, incentives and campaigns.” Lee Reynolds, Managing Director, Computerlinks Middle East, India and APAC
“If solutions and services are adapted to meet the demands of the customers there wouldn’t be a need to convince them. Marketing is the medium to let customers know that you have taken their demands and expectations seriously.” Gareth Morgan, Director of Sales, Computerlinks Middle East, India and APAC
Marketing matters Welcome to the latest edition of The Link, which focuses on a subject that’s close to the heart of all channel stakeholders—marketing. The technology revolution has made today’s customers selfsufficient; no longer do buyers depend on vendors to seal the purchasing decision. Often, they are in-store armed with research and extensive knowledge about the product they want to buy. In this scenario, marketers need to strive to stand out from the crowd and make an impact on their empowered buyers. But this is easier said than done. Computerlinks turns the spotlight on marketing managers of our vendor-partners and discusses their challenges and how they go about rolling out a marketing strategy in today’s challenging business environment. Many vendors are keen to work with their partners to implement effective marketing strategies. They believe partners should adopt a more active role in marketing initiatives, especially since they are on the customer-facing end and are privy to a mine of information. Partners not having access to resources could be an issue, which vendors are ready to solve by offering their support and expertise. Creativity and co-branding will pave the road for the future. Marketers are also now optimising social media platforms and leveraging innovations in smartphones, and a WebDAM infographic report indicated that social media budgets will double over the next five years. Likewise, Big Data predictive analytics can be a powerful tool for marketers, if used correctly. Trevor
Dearing, EMEA Marketing Director, Gigamon explains its opportunities in his opinion piece, ‘Why Big Data requires big visibility’ in this edition. With massive amounts of data generated on a daily basis, it is surely up to the marketer to customise intelligent campaigns, which can derive better-focused results. In a fiercely competitive environment, how can vendors ensure that their marketing efforts are not wasted in the ocean of existing tactics? How can each activity be an example in innovation in getting closer to the consumers? It is not always about the number of marketing campaigns, but what can make the difference is if one of those campaigns is effective and precise. In essence, quality will triumph over quantity. While budgets continue to be a challenge for many marketing managers, they have steadily increased since the financial crash of 2008. With better technology and systems in place, marketers are able to anticipate the ROI and the effectiveness of the campaigns. Although measuring ROI can be a time-consuming process, it is critical to identify what works and what doesn’t in the market. At Computerlinks, marketing is intrinsic in everything we do. It is the core of our value add. 2014 will see new strategies and initiatives to further enhance our efforts in supporting our vendors and partners, with a focus on incentives and lead generation, all of which will produce accurate ROI. We look forward to sharing our plans with you in the coming weeks. The management.
www.computerlinks.com
March 2014 | The Link
3
contents Internet advertising will make up nearly
Nearly
25% 50%
of the entire ad market by 2015.
06
In 2013,
12 08 06 Interview: F5’s Mohamed Maher shares challenges in the dynamic business environment and strategies for an effective marketing plan. 08 Insight: Louise Matthews from VCE explains the company’s marketing strategies for the year and how it leverages social media. 12 Interview: Ruben Espinosa from RSA discusses how the channel partners play a role in the company’s marketing strategies. 14 Opinion: Trevor Dearing from Gigamon says mobile service providers should optimise the opportunities present from growing data. 18 Interview: Gigamon’s Caroline Ward says resellers could be more proactive and creative when it comes to marketing. 22 Updates: The latest news from Computerlinks and its vendor partners
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The Link | March 2014
www.computerlinks.com
55%
of companies have content marketing strategies
Social media marketing budgets will double over the next
5
of marketers worldwide increased digital marketing budgets.
years
Customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing at
Emails with social sharing buttons increase click through rates by
89% 158% 65% 67% 67% 86% B2B companies that blog generate
of your audience are visual learners
of B2B marketers think Event Marketing is the most effective strategy. Stats source: webDam
more leads than those that don’t Videos on landing pages increase conversions by
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insight| F5
Scaling growth F5’s Regional Marketing Manager, Mohamed Maher shares challenges in the dynamic business environment and strategies for an effective marketing plan. 6
The Link | March 2014
www.computerlinks.com
In the channel business, marketing plays a critical role in enabling partners and reaching out to end users. But over the years, the market has become saturated with many marketing activities and today it is a challenge for vendors to stand out from the crowd. Mohamed Maher, Regional Marketing Manager, Middle East, F5 says, “The challenge is in trying to reach end users in an effective way with a short and concise message that will raise interest.” What tends to happen is that the same CEO receives a number of invites, emails and calls and the challenge is making sure your message stands out from the rest. Another setback is keeping the channel focused and loyal. “This can only be done by working closely and supporting them and ensuring that it is a true partnership,” he adds. F5 aims to do this by strengthening and growing its channel reach into the market. Its VADs and partners will be enabled through training, resource support such as content for e-marketing, ready webinars, white papers and case studies that can be taken to customers and used as references, and by driving a joint marketing strategy that is focused
on being channel-led. Moreover, Maher adds, “We support them with training, run joint end user events and also provide PR to share joint successes with our partners. There is also joint managed channel funds that we support partners with to drive demand generation.” Sponsoring key third party events is also a priority for the company as well as driving success stories into the market through targeted PR. In terms of marketing strategies, Maher says the key play areas are, “Synthesis, which is our new vision for a softwaredefined data centre, our reference architectures, which are customer blueprints to solve common application delivery scenarios, with a concentration on security, which is becoming a key focus in the IT market as a whole.” Security is definitely the main focus in the market today, both from customers’ and partners’ point of view, which helps the company drive its solutions. And when the company diversifies its channel, “we ensure that we select the right partners that can deliver our solutions and grow our reach into the market. Our VADs play a key role supporting us to ensure all partners are trained and enabled.”
“We ensure that we select the right partners that can deliver our solutions and grow our reach into the market. Our VADs play a key role supporting us to ensure all partners are trained and enabled.”
When it comes to most strategies, it is crucial to measure and review the impact on the market. Maher reviews their plans quarterly, to guarantee that the company is getting clear return on investment from its campaigns. “This is in the form of leads coming out of campaigns but we also measure pipeline acceleration of existing opportunities. We also look at database growth as this reflects our reach into the market. From a PR perspective, we measure our visibility in the market and also interpret our market perception. Finally, we use analyst data to measure our growth in the market and this is a key indicator of our success,” he adds. For an effective marketing plan you need to ensure that you allow enough time to run a full campaign end to end starting from awareness, to consideration and eventually to a closed deal, Maher says. Along the marketing funnel and its several stages, the company needs to ensure that it has the right tactics in place and the correct messaging. What is imperative to keep in mind is that the market doesn’t get unfocused by driving too many products or messages simultaneously. “You also need to ensure that when addressing end users you understand whether these are new, white space customers or customers that may have bought something from you before and are curious to know what else they can buy from you or, finally, existing, loyal customers.” As each of these are addressed differently, one needs to make certain that the messaging is correct. Also
Mohamed Maher, Regional Marketing Manager, Middle East, F5
sharing success stories has a direct bearing as the voice of one customer’s satisfaction over your products means a lot more than any other marketing activities. “And lastly, you need to ensure that your channel is trained and enabled to deliver and sell what you as a vendor is driving into the market. Be100 percent direct, it is key that the channel understands the vendor strategy and is the extended arm into the market,” Maher says. He further believes that marketing is a joint responsibility and it needs to be proactive from both ends, for it to be successful. Vendors and distributors have the responsibility of supporting and enabling resellers and ensuring that resellers are trained and capable and able to drive key messages into the market. “Resellers are the voice of the market and the closest to the end user and therefore, should be able to share their knowledge and give proactive feedback on what vendors and distributors can do to improve their reach into the market,” Maher concludes.
www.computerlinks.com
March 2014 | The Link
7
Interview | VCE
Ad-Partner-8.5x11-Proof.pdf
Creating opportunities Louise Matthews, Marketing Manager, VCE explains the company’s marketing strategies for the year and how it leverages social media.
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The Link | March 2014
www.computerlinks.com
1
Could you discuss your marketing strategies that you have in place for 2014? As VCE embarks on its fourth year, we have a number of strategies and priorities for investment in 2014. They include continuing to align with our global sales strategy both within VCE and through channel alignment, further building our marketing campaigns, which are always partner-ready, strengthening the automated tools to drive the nurturing
9/18/13
9:23 AM
Interview | VCE
process, and focused marketing to and with our partners. How are the trends in the channel defining it? From a marketing point of view, I’m encouraged by the trend of our channel partners massively maturing their efforts—driven a lot by a solutions sales approach. We are obviously closely aligned with EMC, Cisco and VMware and our partners really are thinking very cleverly about how to build campaigns that showcase their certifications and demonstrate their ability to provide their customers with a solution rather than individual product sets. Could you discuss how VCE’s channel partners play a critical role? Since the launch of our channel programme in September, we have underlined our commitment to being a channel-centric company. VCE has grown to over $1 billion in three years and we have a huge trajectory given the growth anticipated in the Converged Infrastructure market. Our partners, especially in high-growth markets such as the Middle East, are critical to the company’s success. By
consistently aligning our efforts, as marketers we can genuinely drive awareness, opportunity and engagement. VCE wants to sit side-by-side with our partners to shape the marketing strategies and campaigns, which will allow us all to capitalise on the opportunity in our market—no one else is growing quite like us. What marketing resources do you provide to your partners? First and foremost, we have an MDF budget available for our partners. This is available for partners to either modify the campaign materials we produce or support their own activities. We have a core value proposition campaign entitled ‘Numbers Add Up’ and another for SAP entitled App Ready Infrastructure. We are also developing campaigns around Oracle, VDI and Microsoft collaboration tools. The campaign kits include online and print ads, social media kits, landing pages, videos, registration pages, invitations, presentations. Survey materials, assets for CTA such as analyst papers and email nurturing templates. In addition, we have our own direct marketing efforts, which are intended to
“VCE wants to sit side-by-side with our partners to shape the marketing strategies and campaigns, which will allow us all to capitalise on the opportunity in our market—no one else is growing quite like us.”
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The Link | March 2014
www.computerlinks.com
drive awareness and demand for VCE. I love nothing more than partners who involve me in the planning and execution of a genuinely integrated marketing campaign. Do you believe the responsibility for marketing lies with vendors and distributors, or should resellers start to take a more proactive approach? I believe resellers have to absolutely take responsibility to drive proactive, integrated marketing campaigns and it’s something we are driving with select partners across the region. It is an obvious statement but customers not only have the choice of which solution to go with but who their partner is. Partners that do not embrace marketing, as a way of differentiating their value-add, will struggle. I’ll caveat that with empathy for the lack of resource some of our partners have and that’s where we look to help alongside Computerlinks. We work closely to develop the ideas, tactics and messaging so that partners can have a voice in the market without too much burden. How often do you review the success of the marketing strategy and what kind of metrics do you have in place? In terms of reviewing, ideally, the answer is continually so that tweaks can be made as we go along. The realistic answer is quarterly with a mid-point analysis to ensure we are on the right track. The metrics used vary depending on the campaign but norms include the number of interactions, leads,
how many times a prospect customer repeatedly interacts, engagement and attention, anecdotal feedback (and often overlooked or forgotten gem) and needless to say, pipeline and revenue. How are you leveraging social media? Which of the platforms have you found most effective? Social media engagement varies from country to country but personally, I find Twitter and LinkedIn most beneficial. However, for both, I do prefer the personal touch. For example, I only connect with people on LinkedIn that I have actually met—it feels too false for me otherwise. With Twitter, I am an avid follower of the @ VCE account as well as use it as a chance to chat to our partners. I find people who just push content rather than engage very frustrating, much like socialising in person, it’s about the conversation. Ad-Partner-8.5x11-Proof.pdf
1
9/18/13
Today, as a marketing manager in a dynamic business environment, what are some of the challenges you face? Quite simply, cutting through the noise. Our customers, prospects, partners and sales colleagues are inundated with information while constantly juggling priorities and balancing time, budget and resource. As a marketing manager, you have to be able to communicate with each, back and forth, to suit their needs while delivering against your own objectives. It’s tough but it’s what gets me out of bed every day so I wouldn’t change it for the world.
9:23 AM
interview | RSA
Empowering partners Ruben Espinosa, Marketing Manager, RSA discusses how the channel partners play a role in the company’s marketing strategies.
Could you discuss your marketing strategies that you have in place for 2014? We see that the increase of advanced persistent threats in the marketplace is bringing more attention from customers about their need to defend against these and are looking to vendors who can help them in a multi-
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The Link | March 2014
layered approach. RSA’s strategy of intelligence driven security enables customers to use big-data analytics to help them identify, analyse and mitigate against these threats from a security analytics, IAM and GRC perspective. Our strategy is to bring this message to the marketplace as the Trusted Advisor in this space.
www.computerlinks.com
How do you plan to do that? We believe that the buying cycle is changing and we, as marketers must evolve and rethink the way we do marketing. It´s what we call internally ‘Next Marketing’. We already know that traditional marketing models are getting lost in the noise and are rapidly decreasing in effectiveness. We
also know that the nature of the sales cycle is changing and that greater proportions than ever of our prospects’ research and solution-selection process are well formed before the first point of interaction with Sales. The impact of this alone is significant, and places new imperatives on the marketing departments to
level, we need to rely heavily on our business partners. In this manner, we are developing joint marketing plans with our partners to ensure we accomplish common objectives. Channel partners are key to helping advice and support customers in today’s threat landscape. RSA is investing in enabling, educating and building demand with our channel partners to better work with their customers. What marketing resources do you provide to your partners? We provide partners with a variety of best-in-class tools and resources to include in the joint marketing plan. For example, self-demand documentation portal, marketing campaigns to match their go-to-market, lead generation activities, resources (budget and people), etc. Two of the latest resources we have provided to our partners are the new partner portal – which has features such as deal registrations, RSA in the news, thought leadership blogs, partner on boarding section, training, product information, how-to videos, event calendar, marketing campaigns materials and more. We have also just run the 2014 Virtual partner kick off to share strategy with partners.
ramp up our customer insight, our mobile presence, and our integrated and digital marketing execution. How are channel partners playing an important role in these plans? To escalate the RSA business and raise the bar to the next
Do you believe the responsibility for marketing lies with vendors and distributors, or should resellers start to take a more proactive approach? If we want to be close to the customer and increase customer satisfaction, we need the resellers to be proactive about marketing campaigns. It should be a joint effort from all parties,
reseller, distributor and vendor. The problem we face is the lack of marketing knowledge and resources from the reseller. In this case, the support from the distributor and vendor is key. How are you leveraging social media? Which of the platforms have you found most effective? RSA is investing and transforming our social media profile. The customer buying cycle is changing and they usually arrive at the supplier with the decision already taken or with a good idea about what exactly do they want. How do we engage with the customer in the early stages of his decision or even before he hasn´t made any decision to buy? One of the answers right now is the social media tools. We are investing heavily in content, which is the key value of social media. If there is interesting and appealing content available to the customer, he will be able to find it and surf it through the blogs, tweets, LinkedIn communities, Facebook chats, Instagram pictures, etc. Do you believe marketing budgets might increase over the next few years? Marketing budgets are tied to the business. As we expect the business to grow in the region, so will the marketing budget. However, as a percentage of revenue, budgets will stay the same. But the real question here should be: where these marketing budgets will be allocated compared to previous years? We will see a shift of the budget expend from the traditional marketing (direct marketing, events, sponsorships and traditional advertising) to the Next
Ruben Espinosa, Marketing Manager, RSA
Marketing (content development, thought leadership, sales enablement, digital marketing, brand communications, private events, marketing technology and performance management). Today, as a marketing manager in a dynamic business environment, what are some of the challenges you face? I have been in the IT sector for more than 15 years now, and the challenges that I face everyday have been, in essence, the same through all these years ―managing scarce resources (people and budget) to meet the business objectives. Despite an improving economic picture, the era of doing more with less is not yet over. Nowadays, there are few other challenges that we must add to the list such as rapid growth economy, big region to manage, changing buyer behaviour, education of the buyer (information anywhere-anytime) or the move to the IT 3rd platform.
www.computerlinks.com
March 2014 | The Link
13
opinion| Gigamon
WHY BIG DATA REQUIRES BIG VISIBILITY Mobile service providers should optimise the opportunities present from rapidly growing data volume, says Trevor Dearing, EMEA Marketing Director, Gigamon.
Big Data represents significant operational challenges for any service provider, but it can also bring great opportunities. With the right analytical tools in place, service providers can get closer to the subscriber experience across their networks by turning this flood of data into workable intelligence – leading to a truer understanding of their network and customers. Ultimately, with these insights, mobile service providers can find ways to increase average revenue per user (ARPU), boost operational efficiency, effectively manage capacity – as well as performance – while subsequently reducing churn. Optimising ARPU by enhancing operational efficiency Rapidly growing data volumes,
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The Link | March 2014
www.computerlinks.com
Visibility in the data centre “Traffic Visibility Solutions are a critical and fundamental component in next-generation infrastructures.� - Forrester Consulting Gigamon Visibility Fabric TM is a simple solution to help you better monitor, manage and secure your network Discover the benefits of Visibility in just 2 minutes! - visibilityfabric.eu/Videos visibilityfabric.eu
Traffic Visibility Solutions Are A Critical And Fundamental Component In Next-Generation Infrastructures, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Gigamon, October 2011.
opinion| gigamon
driven by the ever-increasing number of smart devices connecting to networks and the availability of thousands of new applications is creating a new and challenging environment for the mobile service provider. Even as increased services use pushes networks to the limit, subscribers continue to demand high-quality, high-speed data 24X7, 365 days a year. Unfortunately, there is little carriers can do to slow down the deluge of information traversing the networks and, as demand for data rises, it does not immediately lead to revenue generation. Rather, the problem for carriers is that incoming revenue is decreasing as they are forced to offer larger pipes, while taking measures to avoid passing the cost on to customers. This, combined with the rising cost of additional tools to analyse the vast amounts of data, causes existing carrier business models to break down. Carriers therefore need a new way to keep their business costs in line and, more importantly, retain existing expense structures while providing subscribers with the quality, uptime, and reliability they expect. What’s more, as LTE continues to roll-out across the globe, new all-IP based mobile networks will initially exist as hot spots during the early deployment phases. GSMA Intelligence has predicted that there will be more than 200 live LTE networks in more than 70 countries by 2015, meaning there will likely be frequent inter-technology handovers between 3G and LTE, which could create further problems from an interoperability point of view. An operator’s ability to detect, isolate and resolve these issues ultimately depends on its approach to network visibility. It is imperative that carriers can economically gather the entire set
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The Link | March 2014
of relevant network data needed to make better business decisions. To clarify, it is the individual, subscriberlevel insight and detail that provides this much needed view into service and network issues, particularly those linked to specific groups of affected customers. Real-time analytics enhanced by deep visibility into data traffic enables MSP’s to respond more quickly to service-impacting network issues – particularly those upon which SLA’s are based – so that they can continue delivering the highest value to premium customers. What can carriers do? As the saying goes, fail to prepare and prepare to fail. The same is true for service providers when it comes to capacity management – struggling to find a balance between today’s need and tomorrow’s (often unexpected) demand. Intense competitive challenges, technology evolution, and service convergence have resulted in rapid network growth. Building out excess capacity when it is not needed can put immense pressure on the operator’s CAPEX budget, so they must build in solutions that enhance their ability to plan, predict, and optimise their investment in any network rollout, while identifying potential stress points. Essentially, this cannot be possible without first understanding the drivers of network traffic. GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) is the most common method of carrying mobile data across a network – so to gain visibility into subscriber activity for business and pricing decisions, there must be the ability to understand the stateful nature of GTP and to correlate subscriber-specific sessions. Solutions are available to facilitate this, such as Gigamon’s GTP correlation application, which helps carriers to access data in GTP
www.computerlinks.com
tunnels by correlating and passing all of the control and data sessions to the network probes and billing subsystem to ensure an accurate view of the session. From there, subscriber sessions can be intelligently filtered, replicated and forwarded to specific tools by correlating the subscriber IDs to the corresponding tunnel ID or tunnel endpoint ID (TEID). In doing so, current tool infrastructure investments can be optimised, while increased visibility into subscriber traffic can help improve quality of service, lead to better business decisions and improve overall performance. Active aware subscriber sampling is another method of gaining the visibility needed to turn Big Data into manageable data. Contrary to traditional methods, which simply sample random packets of data with no correlation to the flows, this approach delivers a representative view of all traffic for diagnostic coverage – in other words, preserving the integrity of subscriber flows. Only then will carriers be able to see specific behaviours and the experience of individual or groups of subscribers. Visibility reduces churn With so much competition in this market, service providers must take steps to adequately differentiate themselves from their competitors and protect the customer experience. By moving away from flat pricing structures and ‘one size fits all’ tariffs toward a more tailored model that sees price plans based on actual usage, carriers can develop deeper relationships with their subscribers. To achieve this, it is absolutely essential to attribute network traffic to specific users across voice, video and data – which is no mean feat without a suitable visibility solution in place. Unfortunately the lack of a
Trevor Dearing, EMEA Marketing Director, Gigamon
representative view of the overall traffic distribution has stifled the development of such flexible, tailored usage policies, prolonging the poor quality of service for the majority of subscribers and impacting loyalty in the process. Carriers therefore need a visibility layer that can access and deliver this Big Data to the monitoring tools in order to benefit from meaningful and actionable analytics. If managed correctly and if supported by the right applications, Big Data analytics can help service providers drive down costs, reduce customer churn and generate new revenue streams. If handled improperly, it can unfortunately become a significant drain on resources and a very real headache for both the IT and management teams alike. Gaining a complete activity view of premium subscribers with solutions such as Gigamon’s GTP correlation application will help carriers to optimise ARPU, identify roaming users across peered networks and find new ways to generate income.
STAGE ONE: RECON
STOP THREATS STAGE TWO: LURE
ACROSS
STAGE FIVE: DROPPER FILE
STAGE THREE: REDIRECT
THE
OUTLOOK-Alvina-APTRiskAssessment-260214-bw
KILL CHAIN STAGE SIX: CALL HOME STAGE SEVEN: DATA THEFT
STAGE FOUR: EXPLOIT KIT
insight | gigamon
Going the extra mile Caroline Ward, Senior Manager, Channel Marketing EMEA, Gigamon says resellers could be more proactive and creative when it comes to marketing.
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The Link | March 2014
www.computerlinks.com
Vendors and distributors usually bear the expense of marketing in the channel. This is because the costs are huge and partners generally don’t have the bandwidth to implement the strategies. However, at the end of the day, it is a combined effort from all stakeholders—vendors, distributors and resellers. Agreeing wholeheartedly, Caroline Ward, Senior Manager, Channel Marketing EMEA, Gigamon says, “But I certainly champion resellers taking a more proactive and innovative approach. Resellers have more opportunities to be creative; they are in the perfect position to use feedback from their end user community to drive bespoke, specific campaigns to drive cross-sell, upsell and migrate opportunities or to attack their installed base.” As a company, Gigamon provides its partners a number of resources, from training and certification to collaterals and offers one of its four global
marketing campaigns for partners to leverage. “We also work with partners on joint campaigns, to develop joint case and user studies and to run joint PR activities,” she adds. All these activities are accessed through its partner portal once a partner is signed up to sell the company’s products and solutions. Marketing budgets have been a cause for concern over the last few years since the economic meltdown. But Ward sees potential of budgets increasing, provided “We show ROI back to the business and demonstrate added value. Equally with social media, CRM including lead nurture and lead tracking, all moving at such a rate of change, incremental budget should be made available to maximise their reach,” she says. For Gigamon, 2014 is the year of the channel and its marketing strategies revolve around its partner community. “I am focused
“Resellers have more opportunities to be creative; they are in the perfect position to use feedback from their end user community to drive bespoke, specific campaigns to drive cross-sell, upsell and migrate opportunities or to attack their installed base.”
on three key areas for the business – partner enablement, partner development and revenue growth, supported by campaigns and metrics to ensure we deliver on our goals,” Ward says. As a company working in a vibrant growing market, Gigamon is focusing on areas that allow its partners to maximise the opportunity together with the company. “For partners who focus on markets such as the data centre, service providers and security the chance to find new revenue streams is substantial and the majority of our marketing efforts will drive into these areas, so it is a great opportunity for our partners,” she adds. It is clear that channel partners are critical to the company’s success. They are its extended salesforce and marketing team getting the message out to a broader audience on the company’s behalf. Explaining further, she says, “Partners need to be Gigamon evangelists pushing the performance monitoring message, creating the need and then delivering a Gigamon solution. Certain areas such as the Middle East region, where we really value the relationship that has been built here to-date, is critical to our success.” Talking about the trends defining the channel, Ward says that it is interesting to see the continuing consolidation
Caroline Ward, Senior Manager, Channel Marketing EMEA, Gigamon
within the channel and what that means to both vendors and distribution. “It is important to be flexible in the way work is done to ensure that the most relevant and proactive partners in our space are working with us and who have the appetite to drive business,” she explains. “We all know it is getting tougher to reach our end user target audience with up to 13 touches before you get a response and that end users are doing their own homework long before they even consider a vendor so working with our channel partners needs to be even more of a partnership than previously, leveraging skillsets and competencies.”
www.computerlinks.com
March 2014 | The Link
19
NEWS updates
RSA hosts Dubai Security Summit
RSA, the security division of EMC, hosted its Dubai Security Summit recently, which was aimed at helping organisations address evolving, complex and sensitive security challenges. The Summit brought together an audience of senior security professionals from the IT industry, including Chief Security Officers, Compliance and Risk Managers, CIOs, and IT Directors to highlight the emerging trends in the space of cyber security. RSA hoped to frame how organisations could help build an element of ‘trust’ in their IT organisations and highlight the
need to ramp up their team’s ability to face the unknown threats and ensure data protection and mitigation of the risk of an attack. The adoption of third platform technologies such as cloud computing, Big Data, social networking and mobile devices to help enterprises achieve their IT and business transformation goals depends on a foundation of trust, and the organisation’s ability to secure their cloud environment, RSA said. Alaa Abdulnabi, Regional PreSales Manager, Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East, RSA, said,
“Security issues in this day and age have to be framed in a proactive versus reactive context. Nowadays we are seeing an average of 60-70 percent being spent by organisations on preventative security, and only 10 percent on detection methods. This is indicative of the age we live in, where breaches are inevitable.” The summit featured presentations from senior RSA executives and security experts which highlighted the need to harness Big Data Analytics to leverage the benefits of a transformational security monitoring and investigative solution. The subject follows from a recent survey conducted by EMC found that 67% of respondents in the UAE agree that Big Data technology will prove vital in identifying and protecting against cyber-attacks while only 66% of respondents in the UAE were confident of their ability to fully recover all their data should they have need to.
F5 delivers on its Synthesis vision to accelerate the expansion of mobile broadband F5 Networks has announced recently offerings and reference architectures that extend its F5 Synthesis framework and bring new benefits to service providers. F5 showcased these reference architectures and demonstrated the benefits of its service provider offerings at Mobile World Congress, which took place in Barcelona recently. F5 Synthesis provides an elastic services platform to help service providers effectively scale their networks and realize the benefits of emerging technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) by delivering Software Defined Application Services (SDAS). SDAS leverage F5’s fabric-
based approach by efficiently and intelligently combining virtualization, scalability, programmability, orchestration, and other capabilities. “Changes in the service provider market are being driven by the desire for services that better address new economic models and customers’ evolving interests. The F5 Synthesis framework provides a unified technology fabric and intelligent services orchestration, enabling service providers to accelerate the transition from just providing connectivity to delivering enhanced, differentiated mobile experiences for subscribers,” said Dr. Mallik Tatipamula, VP of Service Provider and Cloud Solutions, F5
The F5 Synthesis vision leverages core F5 technologies and enhances service provider solutions focused on the data, signaling, and application planes to further enable the secure, optimized, and orchestrated delivery of application services. The company helps service providers adopt service-driven business practices, empowered by policy, subscriber identity, Diameter signaling, and other context- and application-aware solutions. Moreover, by delivering services in an efficient, unified manner, innovative service provider products aid organizations in managing and monetizing the way services are introduced to the market.
Virtual Instruments releases VirtualWisdom SolutionPack for EMC SRM suite Virtual Instruments has announced the release of VirtualWisdom SolutionPack for the EMC Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite. The VirtualWisdom SolutionPack complements the capabilities of the EMC SRM Suite with subsecond performance analysis and SCSI-level protocol visibility, Virtual Instruments said. “IT infrastructures are increasingly complex and IT leaders are faced with the challenge of managing highly virtualised environments while also dealing with tremendous data growth,” said Sean Maxwell, President, Virtual Instruments. “Organisations are turning to software defined solutions, enabling IT to dynamically configure the infrastructure based on changing user and application demands. As a result, organisations require a sophisticated set of monitoring capabilities to ensure their IT infrastructure is operating at peak performance.” The VirtualWisdom SolutionPack, which was developed through a collaborative engineering effort with EMC, extends the capability of the EMC SRM Suite with the ability to detect and troubleshoot performance spikes in one second intervals, and features SCSI protocol level visibility. It also features performancebased SLA management, and accelerated migration of performance-sensitive applications to software defined storage. “EMC is committed to offering open and extensible storage management solutions tailored to our customers’ needs,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, Vice President, Marketing, Advanced Software Division, EMC.
www.computerlinks.com
March 2014 | The Link
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NEWS updates
Sophos Mobile Control—most deployed MDM solution Sophos recently announced growing momentum for its Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions and demonstrated its best-inclass solutions, most notably, Sophos Mobile Control at Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona recently. Protecting millions of mobile devices across tens of thousands of customer accounts, the latest release of Sophos Mobile Control (SMC) features an easy-to-use webbased console—deployed either on-premise or as a Service—to manage, protect and secure data. It delivers effective mobile device management to control the devices that access corporate systems. Using Sophos Mobile Control, IT teams
can equally enforce regulatory compliance as well as corporatemandated policies for complete data and device security without complexity. SMC supports Windows Phone 8, Android, and iOS 7, Apple’s latest mobile operating system. In a recent research note by IDC, 24 percent of SMB organizations currently utilize an MDM solution to govern and manage their mobile devices. The study identified Sophos Mobile Control as the most-deployed MDM product among all survey respondents at 25 percent. “We’re thrilled by the continued adoption of our MDM solutions. As the IDC report confirms, the market opportunity is huge, and Sophos Mobile
Websense reports record surge in demand for Triton cybersecurity
Control is already at the head of the pack,” said Dan Schiappa, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enduser Protection Group, Sophos. “As organizations look to define and refine BYOD policies and comply with regulations and compliance issues, Sophos continues to be a trusted provider for endpoint, network and server protection solutions.”
Symantec rolls out new solutions to secure mobile devices Symantec showcased new mobile solutions for both businesses and consumers at two industry conferences, Mobile World Congress and RSA Conference 2014, held in February. On display at both conferences, Symantec’s mobile experts demonstrated several solutions that enable safe and secure management of information across iOS and Android platforms, including File Sync and Share That’s Truly Private – Norton Zone integrates with the Symantec Encryption Management Server (SEMS), which enables customers to manage encryption keys themselves and incorporates the patented Symantec Multiblind Key Encryption (MBKE) technology, adding another level of security to protect sensitive data. Norton Zone also includes support for Security
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The Link | March 2014
Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to provide single signon (SSO) via identity providers, two-factor authentication, and virus and malware scanning. Another solution the company demonstrated was Making Secure Logins Simpler for the End User, through which Symantec’s new Push Authentication technology for Symantec Validation and ID Protection (VIP) Service removes the need to manually enter a PIN every time someone logs into a VPN connection. The user simply clicks “allow” on their mobile device and the VPN client will automatically login without requiring a PIN. Expanding Mobile Partner Ecosystem is a solution, which delivers enterprise-class security for both internal and third-party applications on both iOS and Android operating systems. The program currently has 60 partners and more
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than 125 applications. It allows customers to easily manage a secure ecosystem of third-party licensed applications and organic applications in a single, secure workspace for their corporate end users. “In a world where mobility plays an integral part of both our personal and professional lives, Symantec’s mission is to help reduce security and privacy risks that prevent people from getting the most out of their devices,” said Chandra J. Rangan, Vice President, Enterprise Segment Marketing, Symantec Corporation. “We are thrilled to build out our partner ecosystem and share our expertise in mobile security management and technologies this week to further help our customers learn firsthand how easy it is to be productive and protected – wherever they may be.”
Websense, a global leader in protecting organizations from the latest cyberattacks and data theft, recently announced record sales and revenue for 2013. This success is due to demand for its Websense Triton security system, which is the only solution that proactively defends all channels by identifying, stopping, containing and disarming advanced persistent threats, targeted attacks and data theft, according to the company. In 2013, total Websense billings topped $380 million with Websense Triton solutions accounting for 70 percent. In the same year, Websense increased its Fortune 100 sales by 45 percent over 2012. Websense Triton solution billings increased 13 percent to more than a quarter of a billion dollars and Triton revenue grew 18 percent. In fact, nearly 50 percent of Websense customers have purchased Websense Triton. Following the acquisition of the company by Vista Equity Group in June 2013, Websense new customer acquisition surged by more than 30 percent worldwide in the second half of the year. Momentum was evident when the company secured six Q4 deals that exceeded $1 million with three topping approximately $3 million each. In the US, Triton continued to be the go-to choice in cybersecurity with an 81 percent increase in new enterprise business. “Our extraordinary growth is a clear indicator that tens of thousands of organizations clearly see the value and the security results our Websense Triton technology delivers,” said John McCormack, Websense CEO. “Security systems are an increasingly crucial business necessity. We protect the infrastructure and critical assets of many of the largest global organizations and government functions from cybercriminals. Success in the security industry hinges on continued innovation and an investment in talent. Our Triton security system is the result of ten years of focused security investment—our customers rely on that innovation every day.”