Reseller Middle East

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ISSUE 199 // july 2013 WWW.RESELLERME.COM

Partner Excellence

Awards 2013

Peripherals: the answer to shrinking margins?

Cisco live: taming ‘the internet of everything’

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w© Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

CONTENTS

ISSUE 199 // july 2013

Highlights 6

cover feature

News We help you catch up on all the major news and announcements in the regional channel community.

ANALYSIS 18 Everything and all

Cisco is in the hefty transition between networking giant and total IT company. At Cisco Live 2013 in Floria, it claimed the vehicle to get there will be a new business group and partner ecoysystem revolved around the ‘Internet of Everything’.

opinion 20 Disaster aversion

Data loss is not something you should be losing sleep over—provided you’ve got the right plans in place, says Condo Protego CEO Andrew Calthorpe

Feature 22 Issues and opportunities

Given the record number of attendees at this year’s Reseller Middle East Partner Excellence Conference, it was clear that the region’s channel players wanted to hear how to tackle new challenges.

28 Stars of the channel universe Last month marked the fourth annual Reseller Middle East Partner Excellence Awards, where 30 winners from the channel ecosystem took home the highly sought-after trophies at a glittering awards ceremony.

Feature

Hot products

55 On the fringe

HP Slate 7

Asus Haswell-powered all-in-one PC

With margins for traditional commodity gear at an all-time low, it makes sense that partners are now looking to peripherals to make up on lost revenue.

review 59 Samsung WB250F

Smart Camera

Samsung has kept this little compact camera relevant by packing it full of useful tech while still keeping the price down.

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editorial Publisher Dominic De Sousa Group COO Nadeem Hood

Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409109

Beacon of hope

Contributing Editors Ben Rossi Joe Lipscombe Online Editor Tom Paye

Advertising Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9131 Key Account Manager Merle Carrasco merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9134 Sales Manager Nasir Bazaz nasir.bazaz@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9144

Circulation Database and Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9147 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9146 Designer Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9104 Digital www.resellerme.com DIGITAL SERVICES Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy P Maagma Web Developers Erik Briones Jefferson de Joya Photographer and Social Media Co-ordinator Jay Colina webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

Registered at IMPZ PO Box 13700 Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 440 9100 Fax: +971 4 447 2409

Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor Talk to us: E-mail: jeevan.thankappan@ cpimediagroup.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/ ResellerME Twitter: @ResellerME

In the midst of seemingly endless dark news from the channel, we organised our fourth annual Partner Conference and Awards last month. At the conference, I took the opportunity to anchor a couple of panel discussions featuring key stakeholders from the industry. The first one was focused on the evolving business models of disties, especially in the context of current economic conditions, market opportunities and decreasing margins. This was more pertinent in the wake of news that two major distributors, including a multi-national, have gone out of business in the last six months.

My first question was whether it is going to be all doom and gloom for the channel this year as well. The panel unanimously agreed that the traditional distribution model based on just logistics and finance is fast becoming obsolete and adding value is the name of the game.

The writing on the wall is clear: Scaling up the value chain, and creating profit, holds the key to survival.

Credit was another topic that dominated the discussion. The poor financial health of VARs has significantly hampered the ability of distributors to extend credit. Though distributors are trying to address this issue by new financing and leasing tools, and have enlisted the support of credit insurance firms, all agree that it all boils down to relationships—and knowing your customer.

Not very surprisingly, profitable growth was also discussed at length during the conference. A well-known channel dictum states that volume is vanity, profit is sanity. But the intense competition has made many channel organisations focus too much on top-line growth, and the rising cost of operations coupled with eroding margins has made a considerable dent in the profits of many.

Profitable growth is the mantra for the channel this year. Many vendors have now started to realise that distribution-enabled business costs a lot less than a direct engagement model, and have started taking steps to build their partners’ long-terms profitability. It’s a step in the right direction that most of them are changing their “sell-to” approach to a “sell-with” strategy, jointly investing in skills, market development and managing sales opportunities.

We also turned the magnifying glass on the transformation in the regional IT retail industry. The emergence of power retail has brought the concept of branding to the forefront, and Dubai has emerged as a benchmark for the rest of the region, thanks to the influx of tourists.

Later in the evening, the ballroom at Jumeirah Emirates Towers was thronged with the who’s who of the channel to celebrate the winners of our Partner Excellence Awards. Though many powerhouses fought their way into the finals, not everyone was a winner. Flip the pages to find out who took home the coveted trophies on that memorable night.

Printed by Printwell Printing Press © Copyright 2013 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

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highlights

News

Actifio and Spectrami launch Customer Experience Centre

Copy data management company Actifio, along with its Middle East distribution partner, Spectrami, has launched a Customer Experience Centre in Dubai.

The experience centre replicates a complete data centre, fully installed with Actifio copy data management software, as well as solutions from all major vendors including VMware, Oracle, and HP. The data centre will

be used as a demonstration for Actifio and Spectrami services, eliminating the need for expensive and lengthy on-site POCs. “All the major software servers are active, so basically every client will be able to come in and test the software, regardless of what technology they run on,” said Anand Choudha, Managing Director, Spectrami.

“Actifio has one of these in Boston and it’s

been really successful—we wondered how we could replicate that here.”

The thought process, he claimed, began when feedback on the sales pitches were so strong that Actifio’s ability to follow through on technological promises needed to be demonstrated in real time.

“The feedback from the ideas is, ‘Wow, is this real?’ It’s back-up in minutes, we can restore your solutions in minutes—that’s magic. But we need now to bridge the confidence gap.”

Choudha claimed that customer POCs took planning, shipping demo boxes, and a whole load of activity, so the company decided on a way to cut this process short.

“This lab environment simulates the back-up process and shows the customer in real time, so it offers a hands-on access to our technology. Not only this, but it can also be done virtually—we can log on through the Web and demonstrate as if it were in our office, so people don’t have to travel here if they don’t wish to.”

Spectrami said that a significant investment had been made into the project in order to demonstrate its commitment to the region. And Actifio’s CEO and Founder, Ash Ashutosh, also present, claimed that the services of Actifio are highly important in today’s society, backed up by the company’s impressive growth in quick time.

FVC signs up Swiss fibre optic and copper solution vendor Datwyler

K. S. Parag, Founder and Managing Director, FVC

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FVC has signed a distribution agreement with Datwyler, a Swiss manufacturer specialised in data communications covering fibre optic and copper solutions. The agreement covers its complete range of data networking products across the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Yemen, Iraq and Pakistan, with plans to expand into other countries across the MENA region.

Nasser AlRahhal, Regional Business Development Director, Datwyler said, “Our global distribution strategy is to have a strong representative distributor in each market to ease the sales lifecycle by being point of contact for partners and system integrators. FVC is the right partner for us, fitting our distribution business model since they have a wide market share in terms of partners and geography.”

K. S. Parag, Founder and Managing Director, FVC, said, “We have seen an

increasing demand from our partners and their customers for infrastructure networking and Datwyler is a perfect fit for our portfolio of advanced networking data centre solutions. It has a commitment towards delivering quality products.”

In addition to data communications covering fibre optic and copper solutions for indoor and outdoor applications, Datwyler is known for providing professional services, which is the key differentiator from others in the industry. These professional services support data communications and data centres and cover design, engineering, consultancy, project management, lifecycle management and assessment services.

As part of the agreement, Datwyler will be supporting FVC and its partners with the training and knowledge required to drive the business in the region.

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Redington to distribute Nexans in East Africa

Tarek Helmy, Regional Director for the Gulf, Middle East and Africa, Nexans Nexans has signed a distribution agreement with Redington Gulf that will see the valueadded distributor offering Nexans’ full range of structured cabling solutions through its channel network in East Africa.

Tarek Helmy, Regional Director for the Gulf, Middle East and Africa, Nexans, said that East Africa was an important market for the vendor, and that Redington Gulf would help it to make a big push into the region.

“With so much development taking place, there is big demand for the IT LAN infrastructure,” he said. “We have been looking for a reputed and experienced value-added distributor with a strong local reseller network to help us fuel our growth and increase our market share in the region.

“Redington, with its extensive experience, market knowledge and strong technical expertise, was our partner of choice.”

Helmy added that the partnership also demonstrated Nexans’ commitment to its

existing customer base in East Africa.

For Redington, the partnership means that the distributor will be able to offer solutions that complement an already strong portfolio to its channel base in East Africa.

“We are looking forward to the opportunity for presenting cabling solutions from Nexans to our channel in East Africa,” said Ramkumar B., Senior Vice President, Redington Gulf, Value Division.

“Nexans will complement our existing offerings within networking, servers, storage and convergence in East Africa. Redington Value will run awareness campaigns for Nexans in East Africa and also conduct enablement programmes across East Africa to build the channel for Nexas.”

Prologix forges distribution deal with Agilent The test and measurement vendor Agilent Technologies has appointed Prologix Distribution as the premium distributor for the GCC countries.

Augustin Kodiyan, Sales and Marketing Manager, Agilent Technologies International, said, “The Middle East, and GCC in particular, is a strategic market for Agilent and we are looking to expand our footprint in this region. We needed a partner with a strong distribution network, technical expertise and reputation to help us grow our business and create a strong impact for our brand.

Prologix ticked all these boxes and we are very pleased to partner with them. We look forward to a long and fruitful partnership.”

AccessData named HP AllianceOne Partner of the Year AccessData was recently given the HP AllianceOne Partner of the Year Award in the security category at the HP Discover 2013 conference in Las Vegas.

HP’s AllianceOne Partner of the Year awards recognise HP business partners’ accomplishments in the development and

Working with Prologix, Agilent will continue its commitment to extend its reach and support in GCC with the widest portfolio of basic test and measurement products including oscilloscopes, power supplies, frequency counters, function generators, digital multi-meters, modular products, data acquisition and handheld products.

Sarwan Singh, Managing Director, Prologix, said, “Agilent Technologies invests heavily in research and development to offer the broadest range of innovative measurement solutions in the industry.

With a wide range of application areas for Agilent’s products, we believe that we can tap into the growing need in this region

delivery of innovative HP-based solutions that raise the standards for business excellence and client satisfaction.

Winners are chosen for delivering solutions that drive meaningful business results for shared customers, AccessData said.

AccessData was recognised because, with HP, it helped clients respond to and analyse cyber-security threats, forensics and e-discovery, and provided a powerful end-to-end solution for incident response and

Sarwan Singh, Managing Director, Prologix for high-quality test and measurement equipment. The company’s array of products adds a new dimension and strengthens our existing product portfolio, giving resellers the opportunity of harnessing world-class technology to the benefit of their customers.”

remediation with AccessData’s CIRT solution and HP’s ArcSight SIEM solution.

“It’s an honour to receive such a prestigious award from HP and be named a leader in the field,” said Chad Gailey, Vice President, Worldwide Channel Sales, 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.”

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Fake Xbox games seized in UAE Law enforcement authorities recently seized over 1,000 pirated Xbox 360 games, following three raids in Abu Dhabi, a statement from Microsoft said.

The operation was part of ongoing efforts to combat the spread of pirated Xbox 360 games, Microsoft said. The vendor added that it often works closely with the UAE authorities to combat piracy, which it deems as detrimental to the region’s customers and legitimate games distributors and retailers.

“At Microsoft, we fully support the actions by the law enforcement authorities to support legitimate retailers and ensure that our customers receive the rich experience provided by the Xbox 360 platform,” said Aman Sangar, Interactive Entertainment Business Lead, Microsoft Middle East and Africa.

According to an accompanying statement from Savas Yucedag, Anti-Piracy Lead, Microsoft Gulf, the commercial value of pirated software in the Gulf is worth more than $300 million. But despite the size of the market, Yucedag said that pirated games are dangerous—according to Microsoft, using pirated games can open up users to viruses, spyware and malware.

StorIT signs up Supermicro StorIT has signed a distribution agreement with Supermicro Computer, a server, storage technology and green computing company.

According to the terms of the partnership, StorIT will promote and distribute Supermicro’s complete range of high-performance computing (HPC) solutions across the MENA region.

“StorIT is the first ever distributor to bring HPC solutions to the reseller channel in the Middle East. Supermicro is a great fit to our existing products portfolio—it is in line with our strategy to boost the ability of our reseller channel partners to offer end-to-end, highperformance computing solutions to endcustomers in the region,” said Suren Vedantham, Group Managing Director, StorIT Distribution.

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AT&T Cabling Systems selects Westcon as Middle East distributor Westcon Group has signed a distribution agreement with AT&T Cabling Systems that will see it distribute the vendor’s complete product portfolio in the Middle East.

The deal was announced at AT&T Cabling Systems’ Middle East launch, which took place at Ferrari World Abu Dhabi on May 8. At the launch, the vendor showed off some of its products, including the AT&T CopperLine, FiberLine, CenterLine, RackLine and OutdoorLine.

The distribution agreement with Westcon covers the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, Westcon said.

The vendor said that its channel programme, going through Westcon, provides full channel protection and secures channel profits. It added that all channel installers would receive the AT&T Cabling Systems Certified Installer training through Westcon, with sessions across the region scheduled for June.

“I believe this synergetic agreement combining Westcon Group established exposure and channels with AT&T Cabling Systems quality and brand provides value for both companies across this region,” said Serdar Gorali, EMEA Sales Director, AT&T Cabling Systems.

“Our partnership with Supermicro will enable our reseller partners to successfully address the rapidly evolving opportunities in the areas of Big Data, cloud computing and enterprise IT systems. By leveraging our strong channel network across MENA, we plan to grow Supermicro’s business and market share across this region. We look forward to working closely with their team to ensure that our resellers have the right tools, resources, training and support to sell Supermicro’s solutions effectively,” he added.

As part of the agreement, StorIT will help the vendor identify and onboard resellers, provide value-added services and partner enablement programmes, which include training and certifications, systems design and architecture, implementation support and services, to name some. The distributor will also work closely with Supermicro’s global team to offer pre-sales, marketing, implementation and

James Saldanha, Divisional Director, Infrastructure and Mobility Division, Westcon Middle East AT&T Cabling Systems says it ranks among the world’s most trusted cabling equipment companies—the vendor provides the AT&T Millennium Lifetime Warranty, which is a comprehensive warranty for life.

“We are delighted to be associated with AT&T Cabling Systems. This relationship enables the Middle East enterprise to have access to high-performance cabling systems with the AT&T Millennium Lifetime Warranty through our certified installers,” said James Saldanha, Divisional Director, Infrastructure and Mobility Division, Westcon Middle East.

Suren Vedantham, Group Managing Director, StorIT Distribution post-sales services and support to its channel network. StorIT plans several road shows and training workshops for partners in different cities in the next few months.

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highlights

News

Huawei targets Omani consumers Huawei’s consumer handset devices are now available, for the first time, to the public in Oman, following a distribution agreement with ABT. The vendor’s global range of consumer electronics—including smartphones, tablets and mobile Wi-Fi devices—has been available in the sultanate through telecom operators, but the ABT partnership will allow its products to be sold directly and indirectly to customers, Huawei said.

“Although a young brand, Huawei’s consumer device portfolio has grown rapidly over the past several years in the Middle East, which is in no small part a result of establishing ties with renowned local partners such as ABT,” said Ashraf Fawakherji, Vice President, Huawei Devices Middle East.

As part of Huawei’s push into Oman’s retail sector, the vendor has confirmed the availability of its latest smartphones, the Ascend P2 and the Ascend Mate. The P2, Huawei claims, is the world’s fastest 4G LTE smartphone, while the Ascend Mate is the world’s largest smartphone, sporting a 6.1-inch screen.

The devices will appear on retail shelves immediately, Huawei said.

STME partners with SDG Group

Ayman Al Bayaa, CEO, STME Systems integrator STME has signed a partnership agreement with SDG Group, a global management consulting company.

The agreement will bring all of SDG’s offerings to STME’s portfolio, including Business Process Reengineering, Corporate Performance Management, Collaborative Business Intelligence and ICT Strategy.

The partnership allows STME to cover areas related to business intelligence, STME said. The systems integrator added that the agreement, coupled with its recent contract with Waysecure, makes it one of the most “wellrounded” IT solutions companies in the region.

STME also said that the Middle East is lacking in the services that SDG Group offers.

“Taking the right strategic decision on time with correct data and detailed analysis is the

most critical challenge for all organisations,” said Ayman Al Bayaa, CEO, STME. “That is why we have decided to go for business intelligence and performance management solutions with a real pioneer— SDG, one of the top global firms offering such solutions,” Al Bayaa explained.

For SDG Group, which mainly operates in Europe, the partnership represents an opportunity to push into the MENA region— the firm previously launched in Egypt, but it sees penetration of the wider MENA region as a strategic business goal.

“Signing up with STME brings us a strong opportunity to both work with a MENA region pioneer, and to expand our value proposition and presence to a huge market and opportunities,” said Fabio Bombana, Senior Partner, SDG Group. “[The] MENA region has been growing fast in the past years, and we believe that mature organisations are looking to adopt performance management and business analytics solutions to support faster and effective decision making processes.

“The adoption of these practices needs not only capabilities in implementation but an experienced end-to-end approach that combines consulting skills and industry knowledge to deliver the right analytics and support the organisation in the adoption and change management processes.”

Jumbo Group to distribute newly launched Lenovo smartphones

Lenovo has signed up Jumbo Electronics to distribute its newly launched smartphones across all power retailers in the UAE. Under

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the agreement, Jumbo Electronic will also provide after-sales support on Lenovo products though its network of 21 stores in the UAE. Commenting on the partnership, Vishesh Bhatia, CEO, Jumbo Electronics said, “We, as Jumbo Group, welcome our partner Lenovo and are very excited to represent Lenovo Smartphones in the capacity of KDR (key domestic retail) distribution partner. The smartphone category is growing and this strategic alliance will reinforce Jumbo’s key distribution expertise and diversification across various product categories and channel partners.

Jumbo will continue to leverage its strong

leadership position in retail with an effective marketing strategy, between Lenovo and Jumbo Retail, to promote the Lenovo smartphones in the UAE.” Oliver Ebel, Vice President and General Manager, Lenovo Middle East and Africa, said, “The UAE is a strategic market for Lenovo where we are currently the second PC vendor with 14.5 percent PC market share. In [the] smartphone space, according to research firm Canalys, the UAE smartphone market this year is expected to be 6.75 million units and 10.4 million by 2016. Our goal is to become one of the top three smartphone vendors in the UAE in the coming few years and we believe our innovative devices, as well as our strategic partners, will help us achieve that.”

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ANNIVERSARY 1983 - 2013

highlights

News

Authorities seize over 1m fake HP printing products

Cerebra forays into surveillance security market

Zaher El Ali, Business Head for Security Solutions, Cerebra

Law enforcement authorities in the UAE in April conducted the largest single seizure of counterfeit HP products to date. HP said that its own investigation led to the raids, which resulted in the confiscation of more than 1 million fake printer cartridges and components.

During simultaneous raids on five premises across Ajman and Dubai in April, officials confiscated around 150,000 laser print cartridges, 100,000 fake cartridge boxes, nearly 50,000 security labels and over 750,000 empty print cartridges, HP said.

David Cooper, Director, Global AntiCounterfeiting Programme, HP, said that the raids represented a “significant blow against the production and distribution of illicit printing supplies by criminal organisations in the Middle East”.

“It is encouraging to see that our support led directly to the largest seizure of fake items since

EMC names new MD for Levant and emerging Africa EMC announced recently that it had appointed Nazim Fraijat as managing director for the Levant and emerging Africa region.

In his new role, Fraijat will focus on strategy and business development to extend and accelerate EMC’s growth in the region, EMC said in a statement.

The vendor added that he will do this by delivering and supporting the full range of EMC

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we began the anti-counterfeiting programme in 2006,” Cooper added.

Rami Kamel, a representative for the Ajman Police Unit, said that it was important to quell the rise of counterfeit products, which, he said, often do more harm than good.

“If they work at all, counterfeit cartridges provide poor results and may damage your printer, leading to costly repairs or replacements,” he said.

HP said that these recent raids also provided valuable insight into counterfeiting networks. This will help to further ongoing investigations, which will, HP said, “protect honest traders and their customers”.

Across the EMEA region, HP has over the last four years conducted nearly 1,000 investigations, resulting in over 800 enforcement actions.

Over this period of time, nearly 9 million units of counterfeit products and components have been seized, HP said.

products, services and solutions in established and new markets, and enhancing partner and channel relationships.

Fraijat will report to Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President and Regional Manager for Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East, EMC. With 13 years of experience behind him, Fraijat has previously held a number of leadership positions at EMC. Prior to joining EMC, Fraijat worked for AT&T and NCR, and gained a bachelor’s degree in science and electrical engineering from the University of Columbia, Washington DC.

Cerebra Middle East has launched a new business unit focusing on surveillance security solutions.

This business unit will support the value-added distributor’s channel partners with solutions for CCTV, access control, analytics, PSIM and other best-in-class physical security products.

Apart from storage, the product portfolio would include mega-pixel IP cameras, enclosures, transmission and delivery systems and video management systems, along with complete back-end passive solutions support, providing partners with the capability to execute any enterprise-class project.

Zaher El Ali, Cerebra’s Business Head for Security Solutions, said, “This is a new model for distribution in the surveillance security domain.

Not only are we bringing to our channel partners well-known vendors from the US and European markets, but what is unique in our model is that we will provide consultancy to our partners. To add to this, we would soon be offering level-one and level-two support as well. In order to further enhance our partners’ support capabilities, we will provide highly trained individuals to support SIs around the region and continuous skill upgrades for our partners.”

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highlights

News

Brother inks distribution pact with HCL for Saudi Arabia

Soichi Murakami, Managing Director, Brother International

Cyberoam launches network security academy Cyberoam has announced the launch of Cyberoam Academy, a collaboration between industry and educational institutions to prepare next-generation network security professionals for careers in the real world. Cyberoam Academy aims to offer educational institutions a vendor-neutral network security course that matches industry needs, and makes it possible for students to open up doors from the classroom to the workplace.

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Printing vendor Brother International has signed a strategic distributor partnership agreement with Hoshan Company Limited (HCL), a leading integrated workplace solutions provider in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

Under the terms of the agreement, HCL will distribute Brother’s wide range of printing and solutions products, including colour laser and monochrome laser multi-function centres (MFCs) and printers, as well as A3 Ink jet MFCs and scanners through its 22 sales offices and showrooms, which are spread across the Kingdom.

According to Brother senior executives, the partnership is part of the company’s move to create a strong market presence in the KSA. At the same time, the printing vendor said that it wants to reinforce its leadership in the MENA region’s printing segment.

What’s more, the vendor will hope to capitalise on the growing small and medium business (SME) segment in the Kingdom—analysts see the SME segment as key to channel players at the moment.

“Over the last few months, the Kingdom has marked a demand for more high-quality printing and solutions products that can meet the requirements presented by the country’s corporate

“At Cyberoam, we feel that students lack the preparation needed to leave the world of education and meet the actual network security needs of organisations.

Through Cyberoam Academy, we look forward to empowering educators to more easily train their students to prepare for real-world issues and succeed in the security industry,” said Ajay Nawani, Chief of Cyberoam Academy. “Students that participate in the Cyberoam Academy programme will not only benefit from a comprehensive curriculum, a virtual learning environment and well-trained instructors, but will also have a leg up in the job search process through Cyberoam’s global network of business associates and channel partners.”

Cyberoam Academy’s “Novice to

segment—SMEs and SOHO segments as well. These segments have detailed their need for printing and solutions products that can drive in an increase in productivity, improved efficiency and savings from operational costs,” said Ghassan Odeh, CEO, Hoshan Company Limited.

HCL operates a total of 22 sales offices and showrooms and 30 maintenance centres across the Saudi Arabia. The distributor offers turn-key solutions that effectively address the pressing organisational challenges of its diversified list of clients. HCL’s portfolio includes leading brands like Brother, Sharp, Konica, Minolta and other officerelated products.

“This new distributor partnership with HCL proves to be both very timely and strategic as industry reports have positioned Saudi Arabia as one of the major drivers of growth for the region’s rapidly growing printing industry. We are confident that working closely with our distributors in the Kingdom, which now includes HCL, will play a big role in our move to stir in more market shares and consolidate our industry leadership for the KSA in particular and the Middle East in general,” said Soichi Murakami, Managing Director, Brother International.

Professional” course offers students step-by-step learning tools to help them manage enterprise network security challenges. The course also grants access to Cyberoam eConnect, an online portal for academy, instructors and students that offers a one-stop platform to share learning activities. The eligibility criterion for the programme is only basic computer skills, so the programme benefits students based on their interest, not their capability in network security.

Cyberoam Academy is open to final year students in any graduation discipline and prepares aspiring candidates for a wide range of roles and career opportunities. For more information about the programme, visit: http://academy. cyberoam.com.

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CompuMe founder launches online shopping portal

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CompuMe founder and CEO Dikran Tchabalakian recently announced the launch of LetsTango.com, which he described as a “groundbreaking” e-commerce shopping experience.

Essentially an online store for consumer tech products, LetsTango.com is designed to offer shoppers a secure and user-friendly shopping experience, Tchabalakian said. The

them. We want to be where our consumers are,” Tchabalakian said.

“Digital buyers in the MEA region are growing at a CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of 49 percent. There are about 50 million digital buyers in the region, which will grow to 73 million by 2016. The website aims to meet this surge in demand with the same standards we have always maintained.”

The site also features a “gamified” interface, which rewards visitors for activities, and allows them to collect badges and win awards. There are also features that make the site attractive to mobile users, according to Parag Mehta, Operations Manager, LetsTango.

“Staying abreast with the growing ‘gone mobile’ trend, LetsTango will ensure users receive notifications via SMS all the way from registration and the single-page check-out to the delivery of the order,” he said.

“For seasoned shoppers, the website also provides tailored services including preordering items and gift preparation.”

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Tchabalakian added that LetsTango.com offers next-day delivery across the UAE, an “attentive” after-sales service and a 30-day return policy. Indeed, the site’s e-returns process allows customers to apply for returns completely online.

“Through LetsTango.com, rather than having consumers come to us, we’ll go to

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analysis

Cisco Live

Everything and all Cisco is in the hefty transition between networking giant and total IT company. At Cisco Live 2013 in Florida, it claimed the vehicle to get it there will be a new business group and partner ecosystem revolved around the ‘Internet of Everything’. Ben Rossi reports.

You can’t fault Cisco’s ambition, and you can’t blame it, either.

In an era when many IT companies are floundering, Cisco is bucking the trend. The networking giant has been growing at juggernaut speed in recent years, and shows no signs of stopping.

The reason for such growth? Well, one thing is Metcalfe’s law, which the folk at Cisco just love to quote. And why wouldn’t they—Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the number of connected users within the system.

There are currently about 2.4 billion people and 20 billion things connected to the Internet. For a vendor that rules the networking market, that’s an awful lot of value. What’s more, by 2020, those numbers will grow to more than 5 billion people and 50 billion things. You do the maths.

Another reason is that, whilst it would be easy to stick with its cushy networking market, Cisco is hell-bent on world domination. It has already impressed

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the IT world with its transformation into a top IT solutions provider by growing businesses in cloud computing, collaboration, video and security, as well as building up its software capabilities.

The next step is to develop into a total IT company, and Cisco believes what will get it there is a focus on the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE).

At Cisco Live, the company revealed a major product refresh for its enterprise network portfolio, which it said brings applications and network services software, and hardware networking functions, together to enable its new Enterprise Network Architecture.

This Enterprise Network Architecture, Cisco said, positions its enormous routing and switching franchise, and much of the company’s customer base, for the future of networking, which it believes will evolve around IoE. Research released by Cisco ahead of Cisco Live revealed that the IoE is expected to enable enterprises to generate at least $613 billion in global profits in 2013, and will represent at least a $14.4 trillion market over the next decade.

The IoE is the networked connection of people, process, data and things, and the increased value that occurs as “everything” joins the network.

And Cisco is not just talking about it.

It revealed at Cisco Live that it has formed a business group to specifically address the IoT opportunity, funded with $200 million in R&D resources, hundreds of people in development and 500 people in sales and marketing.

The group is led by Rob Soderbery, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Group, and Wim Elfrink, Executive Vice President, Industry Solutions and Chief Globalisation Officer, whose current duties do not change.

“This is a today business,” Soderbery confirmed. “This is already a multi-hundred million dollar business for us.”

Such a business requires an ecosystem of partners, a task that Cisco embarked upon around six months ago, Elfrink explained.

“I think the first big ones were Rockwell Automation and Honeywell,” Elfrink said.

“Initially, when we started IoE, which was only six months ago, we started to plan what we called a World Forum for IoT. We have had a steering committee and selected in every vertical what we thought were the most important partners.”

The first IoT World Forum will take place in October in Barcelona, and will be attended by around 1,000 partners. Cisco hopes to repeat this event in a different city every year, eventually growing it to a level that could match the scope of events like Mobile World Congress, according to Elfrink.

“It’s growing fast,” he said. “I see IoT and what it enables as an entire new industry. And if you want to create a new industry, you need five things: Thought leadership, global open standards, smart regulation, public-private partnerships, and new world ecosystems.

“The last one is the whole initiative we’re taking to Barcelona now, and then next year somewhere else, to start building a new ecosystem.” //

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Condo Protego

Disaster aversion Data loss is not something you should be losing sleep over— provided you’ve got the right plans in place, says Condo Protego CEO Andrew Calthorpe.

Andrew Calthrope, CEO, Condo Protego

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The notion of “loss” is the stuff of nightmares for anyone involved in business.

There’s nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night from a dream where everything has suddenly gone financially awry.

Unpleasant though the experience may be, I’d like to think that such nerve-rattling nocturnal jolts are the subconscious’ way of giving you a mental nudge to stay sharp and sustainable. Certainly, there’s nothing like the prospect of a bottom-line hit to whip diligent business folk into shape.

Unfortunately, it is the ability to anticipate and deal with another type of loss that is still knocking many in the region for six.

Reseller Middle East

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There’s plenty of concern about losing money, but data? Not so much. Or, at least, not as much as there should be.

Business leaders often dismiss data as a tedious and/or abstract administrative footnote, but I’d argue that it is more critical than ever before.

I won’t bore you with a lengthy discourse about why data is the mojo that keeps businesses ticking over and the inspirational fuel source to unlock new opportunities but, in short, you’re in trouble if you lose it.

Of course, it varies from business to business but, for some, downtime due to data loss can turn into a disaster, be it operational or reputational. Either way, it will harm your ability to turn a profit.

In fairness, the Middle East, packed as it is with relatively young businesses,

is generally pretty good when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

As companies are comparatively early on in their lifespans, they are more likely to be automated and less encumbered by obsolete processes.

Even so, there are many that obliviously forge ahead. Even those who feel they are on top of their game could do with an occasional mental nudge to stay on course.

VARs working in this field should have a big say here. This is not a process a business can tackle alone. A top-notch systems integration team is essential.

For those currently without disaster recovery or business continuity plans, or indeed systems that have seen better days, the overhaul needs to happen as soon as possible.

The more you let your data build up, the more expensive it will become.

Establish a reference architecture early on so you can plan and scale in the most efficient manner possible.

The first step is always to understand what you are dealing with, what are you trying to protect against, and how your business will cope in the event of a disaster.

Only then can you start to focus on the IT side, which is all about data integrity and availability.

Having said that, not all data is equally valuable or at risk, so it is important not to approach the process with a one-size-fits-all mentality. Highlight risk levels and assign appropriate values and actions. It is also worth conducting a cost-and-risk analysis. You need to understand the financial impact of losing data at every juncture.

Optimal disaster recovery and business continuity plans can only ever come as the result of a deep understanding of business objectives and rigorous consultation that spans the entire solution cycle—from design and implementation to comprehensive post-sales support. Healthy data leads to healthy profits. And, one would hope, a better night’s sleep. //

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RME Partner Excellence Conference

Issues and opportunities Given the record number of attendees at this year’s Reseller Middle East Partner Excellence Conference, it was clear that the region’s channel players wanted to hear how to tackle new challenges.

After all of the excitement of the Reseller Middle East Partner Excellence Awards on the evening of June 12, which you can read all about in the following pages, it was easy to forget that there had also been a hugely successful conference during the day.

Yes, the awards ceremony had celebrated the biggest and brightest in the Middle East’s IT channel, but the Partner Excellence Conference was where leading channel players really got down to business. Featuring a packed

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agenda, covering everything from cloud to managing credit, the conference attracted upwards of 100 visitors, filling the Emirates Towers conference room to capacity.

To kick things off, Basil Ayass, Marketing Director, Dell, a wellknown regional speaker, presented the opening keynote on channel transformation.

“Is transformation necessary in the channel?” he asked. He claimed that “aggressive discounts” were stopping the channel from prospering. He also

focused heavily on how the smartphone craze dramatically changed the business landscape, particularly in the consumer segment, where, by his own admission, Dell has struggled.

“I call smartphones converged phones—multiple functions in one device. Convergence changes industries—it turns them upside down,” he said.

“We had channel partners focusing on different things. But then the smartphone came and changed everything—it offered everything.”

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The presentation certainly offered food for thought, particularly as Ayass began to insist that the convergence of technology was happening in the enterprise sphere, too. Naturally, this followed a preview on a new Dell technology, which, Ayass said, would be a nightmare for systems integrators, because it’s simply a plug-and-play device for the enterprise, eliminating the need for systems integrators.

“Who’s a systems integrator here?”

Ayass asked. “What do you think of this?” he said as a few hands went up.

“I like it,” said one, prompting a surprised look on Ayass’ face. “If it’s easy for my customer, then it’s good for me—it’s all about the customer, isn’t it?”

Following Ayass, Ayman Dwidar, Middle East Indirect Sales Manager, HP, began the second keynote speech, in which he covered the cloud’s role in the channel, a key topic in the industry.

Dwidar claimed there are three trends that are currently revolutionising the IT industry, and these were converged infrastructure, cloud, and the software-defined data centre.

“The opportunity in private cloud is going to equal the opportunity in public cloud—the channel must start looking at the skills needed in order to prepare,” he claimed.

“Partners are looking at market opportunities, profit paths, vendor support, channel programmes, and how vendors will showcase their value.”

To tackle cloud, Dwidar said that the channel needs to begin looking at an entirely new business model—the cloud model is completely different to the traditional model, he claimed.

“Channel needs to change,” he said.

“But the most important question is how.

Vendors are not giving solutions on how they can assist change.”

Dwidar suggested that, if a partner was serious about getting involved in cloud services, it could set up an entirely new business, which should be kept separate from the traditional business.

This, of course, poses an element of risk, but Dwidar said that it was a plunge worth taking.

“You can jump early or wait, but those who have the nerve to experience new business models will lead in the future,” he concluded.

Following Dwidar’s presentation, the audience took a short coffee break, during which partners discussed what they’d just heard. Then it was time to hear from someone on the channel side, so Pierre Olivier Descoteaux, General Manager of Cloud Computing, Aptec— an Ingram Micro Company, took to the stage. Like Dwidar, he was covering cloud, though he was advising on which business model is right for the various partners in the audience.

Descoteaux started off bluntly: “I’m here to tell you that you’re relevant and have a place, but, with cloud, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself,” he said. “Cloud allows you to be in one place physically but offer service anywhere as long as you have an e-commerce strategy.”

He then went through the various business models that currently exist in the cloud sphere. A lot of partners, he opined, would probably go for a brokerage model—setting up contracts between end users and cloud service providers—though he also said that

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some partners have already begun to set up their own private clouds for their end-user customers.

“There are two models resellers can choose to be today—broker or cloud solution provider.” Descoteaux said.

“Gartner says that 25 percent of cloud traffic from 2013 to 2016 will go through brokers. Resellers can be consultants, customisers or integrators.

“If you decide to be a cloud solution provider, you can host everything in a colocation facility and offer cloud services yourself. But the advantage to being a broker is to have an offering in 48 hours and to start offering cloud solutions straight away.”

RME Partner Excellence Conference

Certainly, Descoteaux said, the two different models will suit different partners in different ways. That said, some partners could be forgiven for waiting on the fence for the moment when it came to cloud computing—after all, the market is still young.

“The market is early right now. We still need education around security, location of data and the challenges of the cloud,” he concluded.

It would be fair to say that the morning sessions of the conference were pretty cloud-heavy, then, but partners had little time to digest all the information before the agenda moved swiftly on to the next hot topic—

leveraging transaction data to better manage credit. Since the credit crunch, the industry has been on the look-out for guidance on how to manage credit, so the next speaker, Vasudevan K. S., Director, Navo Informatica, had the undivided attention of the room.

“Credit has been a constant nightmare for all of the reseller community,” he said in his opening note.

“We need to focus on what we can control—the main two are operational efficiencies and risk management.”

Vasudevan than gave an in-depth demonstration of how to achieve this.

It may have gotten a little technical for some of the partners, but others, who

The agenda 10:15 to 10:30 Industry keynote: The changing IT landscape—is transformation necessary?

Basil Ayass, Marketing Director, Dell 10:30 to 10:50 Industry keynote: Cloud and the channel Ayman Dwidar, Middle East Indirect Sales Manager, HP 11:10 to 11:30 Cloud business models: Which one is right for you?

Pierre Olivier Descoteaux, General Manager for Cloud Computing, Aptec—an Ingram Micro Company 11:30 to 12:00 Leveraging your transaction data to manage credit better Vasudevan K.S., Director, Navo Informatica 12:00 to 12:30 Panel discussion: Retail—The changing landscape

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Ashish Panjabi, COO, Jacky’s Electronics Neelesh Bhatnagar, CEO, Emax 12:30 to 1:15 Panel discussion: Distribution—new game, new rules Hesham Tantawi, Vice President, Asbis Middle East K S Parag, MD, FVC Meera Kaul, Managing Director, Optimus Technology and Telecommunications Nicholas Argyrides, Managing Director, EMPA Middle East Mohammed Mobasseri, Senior Vice President, Comguard Sukant Mishra, Managing Director,

Octagon International 2:00 to 2:20 Maximising the cloud in the Big Data era Sudheer Subramanian, Senior IT Solution Manager, Huawei Enterprise 2:20 to 2:40 Storage: Today and tomorrow Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Sales Director, Western Digital 2:40 to 3:40 Panel discussion: Partner profitability Ayman Dwidar, Indirect Sales Manager, HP Middle East Djillani Lahiani, MEA Channel Business Partner Development Manager, Lenovo K. U. Shankri, Owner, Luckystar Computers Fady Iskander, Senior Partner Account Manager for the Middle East, Symantec Ramkumar B., Senior Vice President, Redington Gulf – Value Division Taj El-khayat, General Manager, Riverbed Tanya Lobo, Channel and Distribution Director, Avaya

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have been struggling with credit for some time now, kept a watchful eye on every single slide.

The conference then moved on to the retail side of the channel—next up was a panel discussion featuring two of the region’s biggest consumer electronics heavyweights, Ashish Panjabi, COO, Jacky’s Electronics, and Neelesh Bhatnagar, CEO, Emax.

Panjabi kicked things off with his view on the changing landscape of retail. “Things have changed. Retail will continue to evolve and, with that, also is the relationship between vendors and distributors,” he said. “What we need to address is how we are measured— vendors and distributors are measured in different ways.”

Bhatnagar than weighed in, speaking about power retailing and its effect on vendors. He said, “The concept of power retail has really brought the branding of the product into the forefront—it’s here to stay. But vendors don’t understand the concept of power retail very well. Some are shooting us in the foot by squeezing margins.”

Indeed, the great margins debate went on for quite some time—as it would in any discussion about reselling boxed technology, be it in the retail or enterprise sphere. The conversation then moved toward the importance of customer experience.

“The customer experience part has grown,” said Panjabi. “Some stores in the US and Europe look like warehouses— that wouldn’t survive here.”

The last big point came when e-tailing and online shopping was brought up. While Europe and the United States have now got mature e-tail markets, the concept is only just gaining traction in the Middle East, so the two panelists discussed how retailers can get on board.

Following plenty more discussion on the ins and outs of the retail market, it was time to move on to the second panel discussion of the day.

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RME Partner Excellence Conference

This discussion was set to tackle the issues surrounding the new face of distribution, and it was a cracker of a conversation from the get-go. The discussion covered everything from securing good business relationships to how the resellers can create better margins for themselves.

Value-added services came into the mix, too, as did the expectations that vendors now force onto their distributors. Some of the panel members felt that vendors set unrealistic targets, garnering approving nods from their partners in the audience. Indeed, vendors, as a whole, took a little bit of a bashing from the panel. Meanwhile, when the cloud conversation came up, one member said that there is currently no real role for distributors to play in the cloud, but they could eventually fill a provider role.

There was too much to cover in these pages. Suffice it to say that the panel agreed distribution was indeed changing, but the Middle East was reasonably well-placed to deal with any upheaval. Following the discussion, it was time for a technical masterclass from Sudheer Subramanian, Senior IT Solution Manager, Huawei Enterprise.

His job for the session was to advise on how to maximise cloud technologies in the Big Data era.

“Big Data can be defined through the areas of volume, velocity and value,” he said. “When we talk about cloud, all functions need to be 100-percent virtualised for it to be cloud. The functions are not just about the server, storage or network—all aspects must be virtualised up to the application level.

The problems related to Big Data are complex and long-term because most of it is unstructured.”

Subramanian then dove into a highly technical presentation on what can be done to get around these problems.

It may have been a little heavy for an after-lunch session, but certainly the more technologically curious members

To see the day in tweets, simply search #RMEAwards on Twitter

of the audience found the presentation illuminating and educational.

The final standalone speaker of the day was Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Sales Director, Western Digital, who got up to speak about the storage landscape—a topic becoming more pertinent as the demand for storage continues to grow.

“If we break it down, everyone is creating and consuming data, which needs storage to store it in. The amount of data created, replicated and consumed in a single year is growing at an annual rate of 46 percent,” he said.

Following an illuminating presentation on how to address the challenges related to storage, there was time for one last panel discussion, which tackled perhaps one of the most pressing issues in the channel today— partner profitability.

The discussion was heated, with partner and vendor representatives arguing over whose responsibility it was to market products, thereby creating demand. Indeed, that conversation went on for a little too long, though the panel members all agreed that more focus needed to be put on marketing to create demand, which will then lead to greater profits.

Other members said that partners needed to look at the structures of their businesses. Meanwhile, another said it was all about securing good relationships with both customers and vendors. Two of the vendor partners then said that they encourage their partners to specialise, because it means that they can diversify into untapped market segments.

Again, the scope of the discussion could warrant its own article, but it certainly provided a fitting end to the day. And judging by the number of partners who managed to take time out of their schedules to turn up, it was clear that there was a real need for these issues to be aired out in public.

No doubt most walked away with a little more knowledge. //

www.resellerme.com

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Cover feature

Stars of the channel universe Last month marked the fourth annual Reseller Middle East Partner Excellence Awards, where 30 winners from the channel ecosystem took home the highly sought-after trophies at a glittering awards ceremony.

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n the midst of seemingly endless dark news from the industry, the recipients of Reseller Middle East’s high honours are shining examples of how pursuing innovative strategies while keeping their business humming can yield rich dividends. These successful channel organisations have taken steps outside of what is considered the norm to beat the odds, and formulated creative variations in their offerings to differentiate themselves from the competition.

The winners—spread across 30 categories—were chosen from a pool of 250 short-listed entries by a four-member judging panel, based on a variety of factors such as channel leadership, services and support, market development activities and business transformation. While distributors and resellers were honoured for building technology-based solutions that enable customers to run their business more efficiently and

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profitably, vendors were recognised for their efforts to focus on revenue, flexible financing solutions, and resources that help the channel grow.

In line with Reseller Middle East’s commitment to maintain high standards when conducting awards, readers were given an opportunity to voice their preferences for vendors and distributors through online voting, for which we received more than 6,000 votes.

The fourth Partner Excellence Awards was sponsored by Octagon International (Presenting Partner), HP, Fortinet, Optimus Technology & Telecommunications (Strategic Partner), Computerlinks, GBM, BDL Group, Prestigio by Asisbis (Gold Sponsor), D-Link, Despec, Pantum, Mindware, Dell Software, Nanjgel Solutions, Mitsumi, Aptec—an Ingram Micro Company, Emax, WD (Silver Sponsor), Touchmate (Raffle Sponsor), and Huawei (Conference Partner).

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Panel of judges

Ivan Kramer Consultant, Potential

With over 25 years of business experience, Ivan is well known for professionally supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to enhance their performance as a consultant with Potential.

Philip Hughes Managing Director, Greater Middle East, Sims Recycling Solutions

Philip has been working in the Middle East IT Channel since 1993. In 2009, he set up Dubai’s first Green Integrated Solution Providers, Akhdar FZCo, which was acquired in May 2012 by Sims Recycling Solutions (SRS).

Sudhir Nair CEO, SOL Analytics Business Solutions

With a successful professional career in the MEA and Asia region over the last 20 years, Sudhir is the founder of SOL Analytics, a niche organisation focused on business intelligence and business analytics solutions.

Vasudevan K S Director, Navo Informatica

Vasudevan has been associated with the regional technology and consumer durable industry for nearly two decades, and has contributed phenomenally to the region’s growth in the distribution and retail domains.

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Cover feature

Networking Vendor of the Year

Cisco

Software Vendor of the Year

Reseller Middle East

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ymantec continuously enhances its partner programme to give partners the opportunity to expand their business by learning new skills and providing innovative solutions to their clients. In the Middle East, Symantec has focused on partner profitability through the enhanced partner programme that will help partners get the most from their technical staff. This has been through using rebates, teaming agreements, new marketing tools, new sales support resources, and new product deployment solutions.

It total, the vendor has 159 specialist partners across the Middle East and French-speaking Africa, and five Master Specialist partners in the Middle East. In addition, significant investment has been made on a strategic level to ensure that local channel partners across the region are fully supported and are able to garner the same benefits, regardless of which country or city they are based in.

Symantec has also demonstrated its commitment to the channel by investing in education-focused events across the region in the form of roadshows and IT clinics, as well as events like EMEA Partner Engage, the annual Partner Summit and Technology Days, which are designed specifically for partners. These events drive significant benefit to the channel and, in some cases, the end-user directly, depending on the target audience.

In 2012, Symantec announced the formation of an organisation dedicated to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and the partners who serve them.

Symantec 30

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isco has recently restructured its business to focus on five key company priorities: core routing, switching and services, collaboration, data centre virtualisation and cloud, video, and architectures for business transformation.

Cisco’s commitment to partners’ success has been core to the company philosophy since its inception. For nearly two decades now, Cisco has been offering networking certification and specialisation programmes that can enable partners to solve their customers’ most important business issues.

The Cisco Channel Partner Programme focuses on a partner’s ability to deliver intelligent networks and technology architectures built on integrated products, services, and software platforms. The programme offers training on the latest Cisco technologies, provides valuable branding resources, and rewards partners with incentives.

The networking behemoth continues to invest in initiatives and programmes designed to support its partners in the form of marketing resources, incentive schemes and access to Cisco Technical Engineers Network to help accelerate partner growth.

Cisco recently revamped its partner programme to better align its channel partners with the new major areas of focus and shift them beyond technology solutions into architecture-based solutions.

In September 2012, an evolution of the Cloud Partner strategy was introduced to bring data centre infrastructure and cloud into the mainstream with the Cisco Master Cloud Builder Specialisation.

july 2013

www.resellerme.com

Cover feature

Storage Vendor of the Year

Dell

Components Vendor of the Year

Reseller Middle East

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eyond offering the right products, WD also has a sharp focus on helping its partners develop their businesses by offering comprehensive and exhaustive training sessions as part of its channel marketing efforts.

In 2012, the vendor launched its myWD partner programme, an expanded online partner loyalty platform for systems integrators, solution providers and resellers. The programme features pointsbased rewards, more communication and marketing tools, and extra benefits and promotions for members.

WD has demonstrated its commitment to partners by orgainising a number of partner training sessions in countries across the region.

Beyond investing in an office in the UAE and full-time staff who reside in countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, WD’s on-ground team was also expanded in 2012 with the appointment of dedicated retail merchandisers, who carry out training sessions, product demonstrations and other activities aimed at enabling partners to grow their sales.

WD appointed Logicom as its newest distribution partner in the Middle East last year, to further enrich its channel breadth and reach.

WD also signed Mitsumi Distribution as a focus distributor for the Central, East and West African regions last year in an effort to focus on that emerging market’s storage needs. Mitsumi was appointed specifically because of its healthy regional reach and strong incountry presence.

WD 32

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ell has spent more than $2 billion on storage acquisitions over the past two years and the benefits of these are being felt by Middle East enterprise resellers as Dell brings new technology and services to the region.

Dell’s channel strategy centres around four core principles: Simple, enabling, rewarding and consistent. Dell’s PartnerDirect programme offers partners in the Middle East a simple framework with clear, measurable and valuable benefits. Dell believes that simplicity is the key to a good channel programme.

Local training and enablement is a critical component of Dell’s channel activities. In 2012, Dell’s partners in the Middle East completed over 7,000 training courses, and the vendor has established a remote data centre in Dubai to support data centre training across emerging markets. Dell has also established a training lab in Dubai to support better training of Middle East partners.

Dell’s Preferred Partner Programme forms part of its over-arching PartnerDirect structure. It offers incremental value in terms of additional sales support, a richer rebate programme than the other partner categories, a reimbursed training program as well as joint investment on strategic sales.

In 2012, 26 large corporate resellers chose to join the new PartnerDirect Preferred Programme, taking the total number of Preferred Partners to 59. For these, Dell invests in instructor-led, faceto-face training for up to 300 individuals.

july 2013

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ast year, HP combined its PCs and Printers Group into the PPS division, and reiterated its commitment to the channel and partner community by announcing improved partner programmes, including a new PPS Services Specialisation.

HP’s comprehensive PPS Services Specialisaton programme includes more premier partners so that it can better meet their needs for selling and delivering services for printers and personal systems and allow partners to increase their profit potential.

HP also introduced its Ink Advantage printers, which offer print technology that allows home users and micro-business customers to print twice as much for the same cost.

The vendor has invested heavily in anti-counterfeit campaigns and conducted many events to create awareness. In Kuwait, HP hosted an event for its channel partners, IT leaders and media to educate them about the various ways to identify counterfeit products.

Last year, HP hosted its Middle East Value event, which provided an opportunity for the company to collaborate and network with more than 200 of its partners and customers, discussing new growth strategies and identifying ways to expand their businesses. Expanding specialisations in printing with a continued focus on improvement of cost of ownership, energy saving, document management, competitive pricing and ease of use remains a core focus for the company, which helps its partners to effectively anticipate a customer’s business and provide the very best HP solution.

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he Web security vendor has made several enhancements to its Channel Advantage Programme (CAP. The primary objective of CAP is to foster joint success by providing compelling top-line and bottom-line growth opportunities to partners.

Blue Coat believes that a critical step to ensuring a successful channel partnership is with collaborative business planning. Partners at the Elite and Premier levels of CAP are required to develop joint business, marketing, and training plans together with their assigned Blue Coat Channel sales representatives. The plans include key business objectives, a well-developed marketing plan with specific demand generation activities and events that contain measurable ROI goals, and a training plan which identifies the curriculum necessary to maintain certification and build expertise across Blue Coat solutions.

The security vendor also unveiled its new incentive programme, which provides partners with additional margins for new support sales and rewards partners for driving growth by providing a bi-annual rebate based on new product sales. Partners receive an additional margin of 20 percent for the first year of all new support contracts.

Blue Coat is investing to deliver a unified security solution that can deliver the same protection and policy framework to all users and provides aggregate reports of all user behavior regardless of location.

To support this, Blue Coat is making a multi-million-dollar investment in its cloud infrastructure to expand global points of presence to augment its existing presence in 10 locations.

Printing Vendor of the Year

HP Printers and Personal Systems Group

Security Vendor of the Year

Blue Coat Systems july 2013

Reseller Middle East

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Cover feature

Systems and Hardware Vendor of the Year

HP Enterprise Group

Infrastructure Vendor of the Year

Schneider Electric 34

Reseller Middle East

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P Enterprise Group sells servers, storage and networking gear. In 2012, HP consistently topped the charts in terms of server shipments and rose to the number-one spot in the first quarter of 2013 with a with factory revenue share of 26.9 percent.

It is estimated that HP shipped more than four servers per minute to customers during this period, and the company’s x86 revenue share was around 31.6 percent.

HP has continued to revamp its server portfolio and came up with big announcements in terms of product innovations. Some of the new innovations included a new four-socket blade and rack servers for virtualised environments. This provides more processing cores and memory in a tight space so that virtual machines can be deployed more quickly.

However, the most important announcement was the recent launch of Moonshot, a software-defined server infrastructure that aims to help the enterprise meet the demands of the exponential growth of connected devices, while reducing power, space and operational costs.

The new system is made up of HP Moonshot 1500 enclosure and application-optimised HP ProLiant Moonshot servers, which offer processors from multiple HP partners, each targeting a specific workload. HP says social media, cloud, mobility and Big Data are the trends that drive the need for such new infrastructure economies, and it expects Moonshot to play a signification role in the design of nextgeneration data centres in terms of power, space and cooling.

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t Schneider Electric, there is a great emphasis on empowering partners with best-in-class training around its tens of thousands of different solutions. The vendor’s Channel Partner Program (CCP) initiative is designed to align channel partners with key industry trends and business opportunities.

With four different levels to its Channel Partner Programme (Registered, Select, Premier and Elite), Schneider’s channel engagement strategy is based on six critical success factors: Channel profiling, alignment, empowerment, enablement, collaboration and profit.

Each success factor has clearly defined processes that allow partners to gain an in-depth understanding of the company’s solutions and leverage them to be more customer-focused in their approach.

Additionally, Schneider Electric’s Opportunity Registration Programme (ORP) rewards channel partners that generate demand for new business and add value through the services they offer. A standardised process protects partners with pre-sales investment in new opportunities, and that in turn motivates them to generate incremental business.

Recently, the vendor also launched a comprehensive, multiplecomponent offering including a Software Partner Programme, SMB Solutions and Design Tool, Specialised Learning Paths, and hysical infrastructure-focused functions. Channel partners also get access to an online data centre community, featuring energy management education programmes, knowledge forums and solutions advice.

www.resellerme.com

Targus USB 2.0

Docking Station with Video ACP51EUZ

USB 2.0 Docking Station with Video ACP51EUZ

The Targus USB 2.0 Docking station with video provides instant peripheral device attachment via a USB 2.0 single connection, to your Windows based laptop computer. This expansion module enables your laptop computer to gain instant plug and play connections with multiple peripheral devices ensuring you are connected and ready to go. The "One Touch" interface allows users to quickly and easily connect to an external monitor, network, speakers, keyboard, mouse, printer and other USB devices in a matter of seconds. The Universal Docking Station provides greater flexibility to users as it is not laptop platform dependent.

When the laptop is placed on top of the docking station, its angled shape provides a more comfortable typing position and allows for better natural cooling of the laptop. Worker better and smarter with Targus docking solutions.

• Functionality – USB 2.0 single connection to numerous peripherals including, a Monitor (DVI), network, audio and up to four USB devices.

• High performance – Supports monitor resolutions up to 2048 x 1152, including 1600 x 1200.

• Comfortable: Designed for Comfort and Cooling: Raised notebook platform improves airflow and cooling • Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac Compatible. AC adapter required

Authorized Distributors: Al Shadawi Trading DESPEC Tanzania Ltd ITE Distribution Lifestyle by Redington National Trading House Digital World

+971 +255 +971 +971 +973 +968

43552270 seby_vc@alfalak.com 22 2451911 k.anwar@despec.com 048132400 itesales@iteme.com 43734712 namita.gupta@redingtongulf.com 17736363 nattrad@batelco.com.bh 94037160 d.world@omantel.net.om

Further Enquiries:

support.uae@targus.com

www.targus.com/uk

Cover feature

Broadline Distributor of the Year

BDL Group

Components Distributor of the Year

Reseller Middle East

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sbis Middle East, part of a group that operates in 55 countries, is the only distributor of both Intel and AMD in the region, which has catapulted it to the top slot. It also distributes a wide range of memory products, HDDs, SSDs, and video cards from Nvidia and AMD, making it a one-stop-shop for components.

As Intel distributor, Asbis last year achieved a revenue growth of 47 percent in the MEA region, and it has also been the number-one distributor for AMD for four years in a row. Asbis has successfully developed a strategy that looks at each brand, from a training, marketing and demand generation perspective, and assists its vendor partners to conduct regular channel training programmes, which are made available to resellers online.

At a regional level, the company last year continued to grow its business in the GCC region, and made inroads into Egypt and other North African markets. In addition to a broad portfolio and commitment to channel development through training initiatives, Asbis has also demonstrated its leadership by being the only regional distributor that is part of the Dubai Computer Group, a local IT trade association under the umbrella of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Asibs boasts an online sales capability that has made it much easier for all its registered resellers to do business. One of the firm’s noteworthy developments in 2012 was the launch of the Asbis Fusion Club, a long-term loyalty programme for AMD customers in more than 13 countries.

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he success of any broadline distributor hinges on three critical factors—a broad product range, tight logistical operations and excellent customer service. And that’s exactly what the winner of this category, the Saudi-based BDL Group, has been able to leverage on to report a healthy growth rate of 15 percent year on year over the last three years.

To address the economic climate and changing market, BDL restructured and re-energised its business last year by adding smartphones and tablets to its portfolio.

To provide its customers with a significant proportion of products on demand, saving channel partners the need to carry stock themselves, BDL has eight strategically located warehousing facilities, totaling more than 45,000 square feet. In addition, the group has 18 customer service and after-sales centres catering to more than 2,700 resellers across the region.

BDL’s channel-centric business model continues to focus on actively contributing to the growth of its partners with value-added services such as pre-sales support, solution sizing, proof of concept, and training and knowledge transfer.

BDL is also an authorised and certified service centre for warranty and out-of-warranty repairs for major computer manufacturers such as Dell, Asus, HP, Samsung, LG, HCL—among others—and the distributor specialises in repair services for desktops, notebooks, smartphones, tablets and printers.

july 2013

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Breathe easy.

Partner with Redington Value.

For more information, contact sales.value@redingtongulf.com

Redington Value is a value-added distributor for the following brands in parts of Middle East and Africa:

Cover feature

Networking Distributor of the Year

Optimus Technology & Telecommunications

Security Distributor of the Year

Reseller Middle East

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omguard has been the first-choice IT distributor in the region for security vendors such as Acunetix, Kaspersky, GFI, iolo, Infowatch and EC Council. The security distributor leverages its in-house technical strength and availability of 50 engineers to provide technical support to resellers and customers.

Comguard is best known for its strong pre- and post-sales and technical support, which helps it to approach and handle complex security project scenarios for its partners and achieve a faster sales turnaround. This is further bolstered by education support through its dedicated training centre in Dubai. This training facility is staffed with instructors and support engineers, which enables the distributor to provide proof of concepts to its partners and customers.

Comguard is the only authorised training centre for Kaspersky, offering certified diplomas for technicians, and has been recognised with the Best Kaspersky Lab Champion Award for its efforts to deliver high-quality training programmes.

Comguard has also introduced its partner advantage programme to ensure that its partners get maximum compensation for achieving their sales targets, and hosts regional partner conferences to bridge the communication gap and understand real market scenarios.

Comguard plays an active role in the regional security space and co-operates with government bodies such as aeCERT to increase security awareness through various events, road shows, seminars and workshops.

Comguard 38

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or the last five years, Optimus Technology & Telecommunications has been successful in defining its operations as a niche VAD in the region, with brands such as Avaya, Huawei, Netgear and Molex in its roster. Last year was a growth year for Optimus, with the company adding new global vendors, growing its regional presence and investing in qualified human resources in several countries and carrying out successful loyalty and value-add programmes such as WAFA, Optimus Academy, Optimus 360, Primero and Optimus on Cloud to enable and support channel partners to sell and implement Optimus’ products better.

During this period, Optimus has also changed its value model to evolve into an information managed system, where the profitability of its channel is based on better inventory analysis, removal of defunct channel execution points, and greater solution integration expertise rather than just traditional product-based certification.

Optimus has multiple stocking locations across its covered region, locally based sales and pre-sales resources and an extremely responsive service level-based technical support practice. Optimus has invested extensively in the marketing of its portfolio to its channel.

The vision for Optimus is not to be a player in the commoditised technology products market, but to fill into the need of the market, to innovate and deliver value through the creation of a pure value channel that should drive solutions, services, product innovation and long-term business play.

july 2013

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Specialised Distibutor of the Year

torIT Distribution is a specialist VAD focused on enterprise data storage, data protection and data management solutions in the Middle East. With offices in Dubai, Riyadh and Doha, and active operations spanning more than 12 countries across the region, StorIT works with a wide channel network comprising VARs and solution providers in offering turn-key solutions to customers in the SMB, SME and large enterprise segments of the market.

In the past 12 months, StorIT has signed up new distribution deals with leading technology providers such as Mellanox, Supermicro, Aptare and Emulex.

The distributor offers a slew of value-added services, spanning pre-sales consultancy, marketing support, post-sales professional services, project financing options and logistics, to both its vendor and channel partners.

As a distributor, StorIT’s primary value proposition to its vendors continues to be a loyal reseller channel network that can give them the desired market reach across the length and breadth of the region.

StorIT remains committed to significant investments in the areas of value-added services to provide best-of-breed technology solutions that can give its reseller partners a competitive edge. StorIT has also been making consistent investments in intellectual capital, which has enabled the distributor to keep up its competency in providing professional services. This complements and enhances the solutions delivery capabilities of its partners.

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StorIT

Emerging Distributor of the Year

pectrami, a VAD dealing with security and storage, made its debut two years ago and has rapidly ramped up its operations in the region ever since. The distributor has been successful in creating awareness and support structures for key technology around APT, SIEM and copy data management. It has also been instrumental in bringing into the region specialised security vendors such as Actifio, Fidelis, Verdasys and managing their go-to-market strategies.

Spectrami has created a vendor extension model, acting as the extension of the brand it represents, backed by dedicated pre- and postsales support comprising engineers and quality assurance team. The training and enablement of partners is a key focus area, so the distributor has invested in a lab that can be remotely accessed by partners.

Spectrami’s pre-sales team also assists partners in scoping solutions by jointly attending customer meetings and helping them to address market requirements.

Last year, along with Actifio, Spectrami launched a unique lead generation programme, which supported the efforts of partners with cash rewards. The programme was categorised into two—qualified sales lead and qualified pre-sales lead. This offered partners cash rewards ranging between $50 to 100 for every single lead.

Recently, Spectrami launched a customer experience centre replicating a complete data centre in its Dubai office, equipped with Actifio software and servers from all major vendors, including Oracle and HP, to eliminate the need for on-site PoCs.

Spectrami july 2013

Reseller Middle East

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Cover feature

Value-added Distributor of the Year

Westcon Group

Enterprise Reseller of the Year

Reseller Middle East

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ince its inception in 2004, help AG’s focus has been on IT security and, last year, the company expanded its portfolio by adding new brands such as Verdasys and Excitor. It has also signed a deal with HP Enterprise Security for the distribution of its entire portfolio, with a focus on ArcSight, Fortify and TippingPoint. help AG is the only security player who is authorised to provide level-one and level-two support services on behalf of principle vendors like F5, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks and Infoblox. This was achieved by having the highest technical certifications and the biggest number of certified engineers.

One of the strategic initiatives launched by help AG in 2012 was the announcement of the corporate advisor for application security within help AG. This function has the focus of ensuring that application security is baked into every single solution help AG delivers. At the same time, the company also continued to invest heavily in labs and test equipment, now boasting of a full lab infrastructure covering all of its products to allow effective learning for engineers and reproduction of customer issues for the support team.

One of the differentiating factors for help AG has been its technical assistance centre with advanced 24/7 technical support services.

Over the last year, the company fine-tuned this offering and now its customers can not only open service request tickets via phone, email and Web, but also avail of onsite services around the clock that come with a two-hour response time within the UAE.

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estcon Group is a value-added distributor of unified communications, network infrastructure, data centre solutions and security solutions with a global network of specialty resellers. The VAD has made a mark in the regional channel landscape with its product breadth, marketing initiatives, support and services to partners.

A key focus for Westcon is fostering a healthy ecosystem and developing the market for new technologies around data centres, security and collaboration. The distributor has adopted a high-touch model for driving complex technologies into the channel.

Westcon believes that having partners specialised on particular technologies is fundamental to the success of the solutions it brings to the market. It has created focused programmes to enable the partners to support the end-users in large and complex deployments.

As part of its value-added services, Westcon also offers pre- and post-sales support called ServiceVantage, which is designed to help onboard partners and guide them during the initial phases of new technology deployments. SeviceVantage modules include project management, implementation services, solution design and front-line post-sales support.

Recently, Westcon became the first value-added distributor worldwide to achieve Microsoft’s Partner Network Gold Communications competency, based on its standards for revenue, service support and customer satisfaction throughout the EMEA region.

july 2013

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Systems Integrator of the YeaR

Almoayyed Computers

SMB & Consumer Reseller of the Year

Lucky Star Computers

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he Bahrain-based Almoayyed Computers provides bestof-breed solutions through partners such as Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Cisco, Symantec, EMC and VMware. Almoayyed was recognised by its customer community for not only contouring service delivery during the crisis in Bahrain but also enhancing deliverables during the troubled times.

The SI, which has invested heavily in a technology centre to showcase the solutions offered by its partners and a solution staging facility to track deliverables, offers business application solutions to most of the key verticals.

Almoayyed stocks a large pool of IT spare parts in Bahrain to support clients under SLAs with varied levels of support requirements and has invested in a robust help desk system based on IBM Maximo.

Almoayyed has a strong focus on horizontal application needs such as ERP and HRMS, and ensures that post-implementation support resources are maintained in-house.

Over the last 12 months, Almoayyed has executed a number of large projects, including the National Payment Aggregator initiative by the Bahrain eGovernment Authority, which involved setting up a single, unified electronic payment solution across all government entities. Another key project was the full-scaled, IT standards-based implementation at the Ministry of Works. This solution automates the ministry’s incident and service request fulfillment, as well as feedback survey management processes.

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ucky Star Computers started operations in 1998 and has since grown to become an Dh62 million company. This success is based on its customer service and reputation in a highly competitive industry. As part of its expansion plans, the reseller expanded into the commercial SMB sector on the strength of HP workstations and last year entered the Indian market by setting up two showrooms in the IT city of Bangalore. It also forayed into the distribution business by becoming the exclusive distributor of STM, an Australian boutique brand that provides mobility products.

Lucky Star differentiates itself with its personalised services, a factor that is reflected in 700-plus repeat customers. Its customer base spans Europe, Middle East, Africa, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

The reseller has invested heavily in enhancing the technical and sales skills of its resources, and the service professionals of the company have acquired certifications from HP, Microsoft, Apple and Intel. Lucky Star was also on the forefront of organising IT-related activities during the Dubai Shopping Festival and helped to boost sales at Computer Plaza on Dubai’s high street.

Lucky Star has also been recognised as a key partner by major vendors. The company won the leading retailer accolade from Lenovo and Acer, and is a Gold Partner of HP. The reseller, which believes in organic growth, has weathered the storm that swept away some of the players in the UAE’s reseller landscape by providing consistent and personalised service to its customers, partners and vendors.

july 2013

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Cover feature

Super Retailer of the Year

Axiom Telecom

Peripherals & Consumables Distributor of the Year

Despec MERA 42

Reseller Middle East

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xiom Telecom is a leading multi-brand, multi-channel distributor of mobile telecommunications handsets, accessories and telecom services. The company has a presence in the UAE, KSA, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, boasting a portfolio of 575 retail points, and reaches over 3,742 points of sale across the region. It also has stores in India and the UK. The telecom retailer claims that it holds a 71 percent share of the UAE’s handset market, and 30 new stores were opened across the region last year. Much of Axiom’s 2012 performance was down to an ability to debut devices ahead of the competition, with notable highlights including Samsung Galaxy S3, Nokia Lumia 920, iPad Mini, iPad 4, iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy Note 2. In 2012, Axiom Telecom recorded sales of Dh8 billion, compared to Dh7.3 billion in 2011.

To enhance customer support, the retailer has invested in a CRM system and a dedicated call centre. Customer complaints and feedback are processed instantly and acted on without lag-time, while questions for more information are answered on the spot.

Axiom is active in the social media space. This includes the usual communicative channels, in addition to informative, exclusive content such as e-newsletters, games, applications, ringtones and wallpapers.

Environmental impact is also high on the Axiom Telecom CSR agenda, with the company operating an ISO 14001 certified service centre, which helps it recycle huge volumes of mobile devices and electronic waste.

july 2013

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espec, which plays in the aftermarket supplies arena, went through a transition last year with restructuring in Europe and a shift in focus to East African operations. The distributor has partnerships with all the major printing vendors for supplies, including HP, Lexmark, Canon, Samsung, Tally Genicom and Printronix. On the software and storage side, it has brands such as Symantec, Imation, Verbatim, Sony and Fuji in the portfolio.

In line with its focus on the accessories category, Despec has signed up vendors such as ADATA, TDK, XtremeMac, ICIDU, and Trust.

It has also extended its hardware range to include D-Link, Powerocks and TrippLite in select markets. Last year, Despec acquired the master distribution rights for Pantum Printers for the Middle East and Africa.

Catering to both resellers and retailers, Despec claims to be the only distributor with a dedicated supply chain department managing all channel queries in order to provide support and services to resellers.

This department manages all the back-office sales operations for resellers and handles all their queries related to price, products, availability, rebates and incentives.

In the Middle East, Despec works on a model of outsourced logistics, which give it a flexible cost structure and enables it to expand into other countries. To streamline its operational efficiency, the distributor is rolling out an SAP solution, which will involve a complete redesign of its website coupled with a fully functional e-commerce and customer portal with an integrated online ordering function.

www.resellerme.com

Cover feature

Woman Executive of the Year

Sushma Kajaria

Partner Champion of the Year

Reseller Middle East

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akkeer Hussain started his career as a sales associate at Aptec in 1998 before joining D-Link as a channel manager for the GCC in 2008. He was promoted as sales and marketing manager for D-Link in 2010 and has successfully integrated sales and marketing-related tasks with a strong focus on partner training, branding campaigns, online and print marketing activities.

Hussain has a proven track record of delivering bottom-line results in the networking industry and keeping all partners motivated is one of his key strengths. He was instrumental in developing D-Link’s partner programme and has contributed to the company by increasing its partner base by more than 20 percent in 2012 alone.

Hussain’s dedication to position D-Link as a major IT networking vendor has greatly improved customer perception of D-Link products from distributors to channel partners, IT store owners and power retailers. For example, a few years back, D-Link’s representation with power retailers was not a major focus. With the addition of Hussain to the D-Link team, major branding initiatives have now been implemented with a retail focus during 2012.

Hussain is also the initiator of highly successful and important partner rewarding programmes and channel promotions, which have significantly improved D-Link’s sales results in recent years.

Equipped with the necessary IT background and the drive and perseverance to close large-scale deals, he has proven to be a key player and a major asset to D-Link.

Sakkeer Hussain 44

S

ushma Kjaria, Regional Channel Manager of Trend Micro, knows what it’s like to be a woman in a mostly male industry such as the IT channel. But despite the challenges, she has pushed forward to emerge as an accomplished winner. In a career spanning 15 years, she has donned a variety of caps in the whole channel ecosystem of systems integrators, distributors and vendors. Having worked with leading distributors, such as Ingram Micro and Westcon, and leading a security business unit start-up, Kjaria thanks the organisations she has worked for providing a platform on which to hone her skills.

Kjaria, who has a dedication to the mission of the channel, says building relationships is one of the keys to success in a channel role, and this has helped her to implement and execute strategic goals and wield influence in the industry.

In her current role as the channel manager at Trend Micro, Kjaria has taken on additional responsibilities to ensure revenue growth is maintained. In 2012, she was responsible for growing the business she was tasked with by 106 percent. Kjaria has also spearheaded the challenging task of transitioning royal distributors to regular VAD agreements. She has also redefined Trend Micro’s distributor and partner strategy in the Middle East and Africa with a direct impact on business, and set up an ATC in the region to help make training more affordable for the partner community in the region.

july 2013

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S. Parag is the Founder and Managing Director at FVC Inc. During his career in the IT industry, spanning more than 20 years, he has played a vital role in transforming the region’s communications landscape, being the first to implement videoconferencing at ADNOC in the Middle East in 1992. Parag was one of the first in the Middle East channel to recognise the benefits of this technology, especially for distance learning at the Ministry of Education and Higher Colleges of Technology.

Parag recognised the requirement for a value-added distributor that bridges the gap between vendor, reseller and customer, and set up FVC with Bruce Withington. FVC (originally named First Video Communications) predominantly focused on rich media communications, and later evolved into unified communications and diversified into other domains that complemented these technologies.

Parag’s influence in the channel community has been through the widening influence of FVC and its partners across the MENA region. As a champion of emerging technologies, Parag drives a channel-centric initiative, ensuring that FVC invests in regular training programmes for its partners across the region.

Parag ensures that the channel is suitably recognised annually for its contribution to the success of the business and for evangelising his vision of bringing emerging technologies to the region. This support is given in addition to the regular support given through FVC’s dedicated channel programme.

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hahnwaz Sheikh, Regional Director of Dell Software, is a well-known name in the channel community. With 15 years of experience in the regional IT industry, where he played various roles spanning systems integrator, distributor and vendor spectrum, he has won the trust and confidence of the channel through his knowledge of the local market and technology.

Sheikh was instrumental in laying the foundations for Dell SonicWall (now rebranded as Dell Software) in the Middle East almost 10 years ago, when he started as a one-man army for the vendor.

Sheikh’s personal experience in all aspects of the business, including channel and distribution management, pre-sales support, marketing and sales, helped him to build an excellent team for the company. His contribution in picking the right resources for the job and enabling them to be facilitators to the growing business was the first step to success.

With a firm passion and dedication to seeing the growth in the IT security sector, he appointed channel partners for Dell Software within every single market in the Middle East. He adopted a gradual but consistent business growth model by focusing and expanding the channel breadth in countries across the region. Sheikh aims to take the business from its current status to the next level in the next one to two years by leveraging on Dell’s reach and by capitalising on the growing demand for Next Generation Firewalls and Secure Remote Access technology.

Outstanding Executive of the Year-IT Channel

K. S. Parag

Outstanding Executive of the Year-Vendor

Shahnawaz Sheikh july 2013

Reseller Middle East

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Cover feature

Management Excellence Award (Editor’s Choice)

Tamer Ismail

Mobility Vendor of the Year (Editor’s Choice)

Prestigio 46

Reseller Middle East

july 2013

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aving taken note of the major technological trends of the past couple of years, Tamer Ismail, CEO, BDL Group, has taken the Saudi Arabia-based broadline distributor to new heights.

Last year, Ismail noted two revolutions in the information technology market—mobility and the way in which mobile products are designed. He went about taking advantage of these revolutions by creating a new ICT unit within BDL focused on mobility.

Ismail takes a considered approach to doing business. In Saudi Arabia, the company supports hundreds of partners, though Ismail makes it his duty to give each and every one of them the attention they need. He cites the importance of making every product available to BDL’s partners, and backing them up with good support and logistics.

Ismail says that he deals with partners with an open mind, but new partnership decisions are taken by studying them carefully and in-depth. This has led to BDL Group being at the top of one of the most successful IT ecosystems in the region.

Infrastructure is another area that Ismail has managed well to support BDL’s growth. He aims to keep a tight control on inventory through good planning, and keeping tabs on weekly, monthly and quarterly sales.

Ismail has no aversion to new products and emerging technologies. He says that any new technologies will be made available through BDL’s channel, meaning any resellers wanting to expand into new segments can count on BDL for their needs.

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hen you’re up against the likes of Samsung and Apple, you’re in with little chance of making much progress in the smartphone or tablet markets.

However, over the past couple of years, one vendor has, against all odds, managed to make decent in-roads into the mobility market— Prestigio. Having started as a peripherals manufacturer—and done very well—the brand then set its sights on the booming tablet market, and sold close to 500,000 tablets worldwide in 2012.

Not content with stopping at tablets, though, Prestigio recently went truly mobile, unveiling a range of Android-powered smartphones last year. According to the vendor, these smartphones are simply an extension of the trusted Prestigio brand.

The key to the brand’s success, Prestigio says, is that it has hit the right price point while still delivering proper quality. Sitting in between the high-end products of Apple and Samsung, but well above the lower-end vendors such as Simmtronics or TouchMate, the products are ideal for thrifty consumers who still want good performance.

What’s more, Prestigio has worked hard to provide a USP with its mobility products, and so provides regular updates to consumers.

For example, the tablet devices come pre-installed with e-books, Gameworld gaming and the Office Pro suite of office applications.

With an ever-expanding line of products and a shrewd sense for what consumers want, Prestigio is well-placed to continue riding its wave of success in the mobility market.

www.resellerme.com

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arnering around 34 percent of the total votes polled, Avaya emerged as the Reader’s Choice vendor. In 2012, Avaya made a number of strategic acquisitions, grew its midmarket solutions to address the Middle East’s burgeoning small- and mediumsized business sector, and advanced its applications to address the communications challenges facing the region’s private and government sectors.

Avaya has recognised the unprecedented opportunity to address the needs of millions of underserved mid-size enterprise across the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, by launched a region-specific programme called iConnect.

The programme is designed for partners to address and understand the needs and challenges of the mid-market throughout the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, which require simplified solutions that meet changing customer demands for collaboration and mobility while still keeping costs low.

Avaya has also opened a multi-million-dollar training centre for the region in Dubai Silicon Oasis. The centre features Avaya’s latest unified communications and contact centre products, which address the challenges businesses face in delivering superior customer sales and service experiences in a multimedia world. Partners and enterprises from the region will be able to use the facility to increase their knowledge of Avaya video, data and UC technologies, while obtaining industry certifications on new communications solutions.

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edington Gulf fought off strong competition to win this category. The distributor—one of the largest in the region in terms of turnover, channel breadth and product portfolio—has a hybrid business model focused on both volume and value.

The volume arm of Redington distributes over 40 product categories, with multiple variants for each category, from over 20 global IT vendors, and boasts 1,500-plus active partners across the region. It also has 19 stock points across the region with stocks available to fulfil the demands of resellers immediately, and provides door deliveries to resellers in Dubai, Riyadh, Kuwait, Egypt and Qatar.

Redington Value, on the other hand, offers end-to-end solutions from 25-plus vendors to VARs in more than 13 counties across the region. A key part of the company’s go-to-market is enabling sales and technical individuals in the channel.

Redington Value has a dedicated pre-sales team specialised on different technology domains. Around 20 percent of Value team workforce consists of pre-sales based out of regional hubs.

Redington Value has consistently increased it reseller base and in-country presence in different countries across the region, and increased its offerings to resellers through more vendor contracts over the past year. As a VAD, it has grown over 50 percent year on year and the efforts of the company have been recognised by some of its existing vendors such Avaya, Dell Sofware, Red Hat and Trend Micro, who have named it their best distributor in the region.

Reader’s choice Vendor of the Year

Avaya

Reader’s Choice Distributor of the Year

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Cover feature

Best Partner Excellence Programme of the Year (Distributor)

Mindware

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stablished in 1992 and with over 21 years of operations in this industry, Mindware has successfully aligned itself with vendor strategies in the region and adapted to the changing market landscape. The distributor’s channel partner programme enables it to provide end-to-end solutions across a wide array of segments including networking, components, hardware, servers, storage and security.

Mindware has invested in several initiatives to support the channel and ensure a profitable return. In addition to value-added products, the distributor has invested heavily in sales, technical training and incentives, and provided pre- and post-sales support to partners. Last year, the company increased its number of pre-sales consultants, who work with partners to recommend solutions that can optimise IT investments, and customised channel programmes to target market expansion for brands in its portfolio through demand generation activities such as the recruitment of additional channel partners and providing them with intense technical and sales training.

As a market initiative, Mindware has introduced a channel loyalty programme intended to enhance and bring value, and to reward channel partners for selling products under Mindware’s portfolio. The primary goal of this initiative is to improve performance for channel partners and motivate their internal sales teams. The distributor has

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also seen significant success in its demand generation initiatives by organising over 100 channel events with vendors over the past year to help the channel create sales pipelines and focus on opportunities.

Mindware already has an impressive line-up of vendors, which includes Microsoft, Citrix, Juniper, Symantec, and Dell. The distributor also added Emerson Network Power, Motorola Solutions and Lenovo to its portfolio last year to enhance the range and diversity of its products.

It has also expanded its geographical footprint by setting up offices in Qatar and Kuwait, backed by an advanced warehouse management system for better stock and inventory management to provide faster delivery and execution of orders.

Another important development was the improvement of the B2B Platform, which provides a direct line of communication between Mindware’s ERP and those of the major vendors it represents to automate processes involving purchase orders, GRNs (goods received notes) and reporting. The system, based on Microsoft’s BizTalk Server Technology, has resulted in immediate benefits for the company and has now been enhanced with features such as annuity renewals, inventory and partner targets. At present, Mindware has synchronised its systems with Intel, Symantec, McAfee and Microsoft, which account for a signification chunk of the VAD’s business today.

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Best Partner Excellence Programme of the Year (Vendor)

EMC

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MC’s Velocity Solution Provider channel partner programme had a milestone year in 2012. More than 2,500 new partners were recruited globally—with 1,350 selling for the first time—and more than 7,500 accounts that came through the channel were new to EMC. The accomplishments of EMC’s channel programme in 2012 were made possible by the continued focus on what EMC considers most critical to partners—the ease of doing business, opportunities for increased profitability, technology leadership, service delivery, training and support.

Over the past 12 months, EMC has introduced several new channel initiatives to make the partners’ experience simple, predictable and profitable. This included VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, based on best-of-breed components designed in conjunction with Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Intel, Microsoft and VMware.

With VSPEX, channel partners can sell complete, highly flexible solutions to their customers, resulting in a higher attach rate of components and a bigger sale. VSPEX allows partners the option to mix and match server and network components based on customers’ specific infrastructure and application requirements to improve profitability while optimising the value delivered to the customer. In addition, the company has introduced channel-only solutions such

as EMC VNXe3150, which is optimised for organisations building virtualised private cloud environments.

Recently, EMC announced that it is retiring the “Velocity” name that’s connected to many of its partner programmes to introduce one EMC-centric brand, which all partners—Velocity Solution Provider, Service Provider, Global Alliances, Services, IIG and Technology Partners—will use in going to market with their customers. The name is EMC Business Partner.

This announcement aligns with EMC’s goal to help partners leverage the massive brand equity that EMC has created. As an EMC Business Partner, customers recognise that the partner has all of the vision and strength of EMC backing it up.

The enhancement to the programme includes new target product rebates for premier and signature partners, providing them with a predictable income stream through rebates paid on sales of targeted EMC technologies. What’s more, partners no longer need to earn an implementation certification to achieve speciality.

Also, former Isilon partners can now become eligible for Velocity benefits on other EMC products, and existing EMC resellers can become eligible to earn benefits from selling Isilon—all within the integrated partner programme.

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opinion

Brocade

Capex woes: Channel to the rescue Businesses struggle to adopt solutions through Capex, so VARs and SIs need to offer innovative financing solutions to customers if they are to grow their sales, writes Khaled Kamel, Territory Channel Manager, MENA, Brocade. have reached the point when they can’t afford not to invest in IT. However they increasingly can’t afford to make those vital investments, either. To compound the problem, they can’t rely on finance institutions to provide the funding they need, with banks providing fewer loans for smaller amounts. All of this means that customers are increasingly turning to their technology providers for a way out of this problem, and VARs and SIs who can’t come up with a solution are going to find themselves losing out on sales.

The right network isn’t just nice to have; it’s a necessity.

But more than this, being competitive and remaining commercially viable is increasingly coming down to staying ahead in an IT arms race that is putting the network under unsustainable pressure. And this means ongoing demand for innovation is driving ongoing demand for investment into the network.

However, as the cost of just keeping legacy network infrastructures operational keeps rising, businesses

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Khaled Kamel, Territory Channel Manager, MENA, Brocade

More, faster, now, everywhere The speed and scale of technology adoption has created a business environment where more is never enough and business solutions are always a step behind user demand.

In an attempt to catch up, Middle East enterprises are scrambling to rapidly adopt new technologies with the hope of meeting business demands and gaining an edge over the competition.

User-defined demands drive requirement for new resources, new applications, and new ways of accessing information faster. Expectation drives demand, failure to deliver results in plunging profits, and the costs of maintaining the network keep going up.

With profits and revenues being squeezed ever harder, where the money comes from to pay for critical IT investment is becoming an increasingly urgent issue. Already, almost 70 percent of organisations now select vendors based on the availability to offer leasing or financing solutions. So where does this leave VARs and SIs?

Simpler, smarter, flexible financing As with all things related to selling solutions and services, the objective should be to deliver the benefits the customer wants in as simple a way as possible. Process can be a useful tool if applied effectively, but the channel is being asked to take on huge amounts of red tape and administration in order to be able to “sell” technology to customers.

But does it have to be this way?

Rather than developing solutions that help lock in customers even further, and trying to pass on the complexity to the channel, vendors need to recognise a trend that is bigger than they are and which could, eventually, see a significant knock-on effect on their own revenues.

An appropriate response to this would be to provide subscription-based financing, wherein the customer is permitted to increase or decrease the number of network ports they pay for on a pay-as-you-go bundle subscription basis. Vendors may even enable their partners to offer finance on complete end-to-end solutions, including all third-party technology and services, thereby helping customers escape the Capex trap. For the customer, this means simplicity—one contract, one deal and one solution through one partner.

Such a straightforward financing model is going to enable customers to adopt innovation, and for VARs and SIs, it will be an invaluable advantage in winning business and securing a sale.

Anyone who thinks finance is dull, or the province of accountants, needs to wake up to the business realities determining IT investment, and fast.

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MultiPad • MultiPhone • MultiReader • RoadRunner DVR

www.prestigio.com

Peripherals

On the fringe With margins for traditional commodity gear at an all-time low, it makes sense that partners are now looking to the peripherals market to make up on lost revenue.

It’s no secret that margins on traditional commodity gear are shrinking—simply ask any value-added reseller and he’ll tell you that, in some cases, margins have shrunk down to single figures in recent years.

Khalid Wani, Sales Director for Branded Business, Middle East, Africa and India, WD, explains why margins have been steadily declining when it comes to reselling traditional commodity products.

“Towards the end of the 1990s, these products became more common and, now, have become a commodity that almost everyone has in their homes or offices. While these products are indispensable tools, they also started becoming indistinguishable from each other in terms of looks, features and performance,” he says.

“From a buyer’s perspective, choosing one over the other came down to price, and, as manufacturers increasingly focused on offering

feature

products with aggressive pricing, innovation and thus USPs were reduced.

Today, as there are still several vendors who play in the desktop, notebook and server space, decade-long price wars have eroded the margins that can be made on these products.”

Indeed, the channel seems to have resigned itself to the fact that margins on commodity gear are unlikely to suddenly start increasing. The question, however, is how to claw back the revenue lost through declining margins.

There are various answers to the problem—some vendors tout cloud and managed services as great new revenue streams. However, many partners aren’t set up to do this. Luckily, one avenue remains to be explored—in the Middle East, at least—and it’s being hailed as one of the safest bets for partners to ensure good margins.

The avenue lies in the peripherals market, which, in this region, is

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feature

Peripherals

seemingly booming. According to the experts, while commodity gear offers single-digit margins, peripherals— such as keyboards, mice, warranties, KVM switches or print management services—can offer margins of up to 40 or 50 percent.

According to Patrick Hayati, Managing Director, Belkin MEA, this is because peripheral products still offer real differentiation in the marketplace.

Price is less of a factor because customers are simply willing to pay more for something that they really want or need.

“Margins on peripherals tend to be higher as they are not based on quantities. With peripherals, cost is not the key component as they address an intangible need. Customers have different tastes and preferences.

They are willing to pay more for something that matches their personal taste, and peripherals offer them this differentiation,” he says.

Wani agrees, saying, “Buyers actively seek peripherals out to enrich their digital lifestyles and are willing to pay the price of ownership. In contrast, commodity products, like PCs and notebooks are, today, only really purchased when it’s mandatory—when the old machine is too slow or has failed. And if you consider USPs, there’s very little to differentiate one from the other. It’s easier to make healthy

“Customers have different tastes and preferences. They are willing to pay more for something that matches their personal taste and peripherals offer them this differentiation.”

Khalid Wani, Sales Director for Branded Business, Middle East, Africa and India, WD

margins on products that offer one or several USPs and are actively sought out by customers.”

The regional channel is beginning to wake up to the opportunities that the peripherals market can offer. Likewise peripherals manufacturers have set the Middle East in their sights, with lesser-known brands sensing a boom and wanting to cash in. A visit to the recent DISTREE Middle East trade show illuminated just how many vendors are wanting to get in on the region’s peripherals market.

But why is this just happening now? According to Hayati, it all started with the smartphone and tablet boom.

Naturally, as this market picked up— and still sees good growth—the market serving the peripherals associated with smartphones and tablets began going strong, too.

“The catalyst for this boom was the arrival of tablets and smartphones into the market. With sales of these devices exploding, peripherals are riding this wave of success, too, and are some of the most sought-after products.”

Patrick Hayati, Managing Director, Belkin MEA

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“The peripherals market has been booming in the Middle East for the last few years now. The catalyst for this boom was the arrival of tablets and smartphones into the market.

With sales of these devices exploding, peripherals are riding this wave of success, too, and are some of the most sought-after products,” he says.

Ehsan Hashemi, COO, Golden Systems Middle East, agrees with Hayati on the origins of the strong peripherals market: “From the market, we see an increase in demand for mobility products, notebooks and tablets. As the demand for these products increases, the demand for peripherals and accessories will also increase accordingly. Customers are buying compatible peripherals and security solutions for their tablet PCs and smartphones.”

It sounds like a great game to be involved in—so long as the market holds up, which, the experts say, seems likely. However, critics have said that, while the margins on peripherals might be good, the market still won’t provide a noticeable revenue boost—simply because the price points on many peripherals are so low. You’d have to be selling hundreds of products per month to make any real money, seems to be the issue.

Hayati, however, disagrees with the critics, saying, “Peripherals are a great

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source of new revenue. The financial model with peripherals is lower costs with higher profit margins, making it a cost-effective and lucrative investment for partners.”

Likewise, WD’s Wani says that the peripherals market is a good bet for securing an extra stream of revenue. “If you consider that peripherals are more frequently sought out and purchased, owing to a number of reasons, versus commodity products that are now generally purchased only when a user’s existing product is too old or fails, there’s definitely potential for a partner to boost his revenue,” he advises.

That said, partners can’t simply buy up peripheral products and then simply hope for the best—the experts say that partners need to come up with good sales strategies in order to position the products properly. Only then will they see any meaningful profits come from the endeavour.

“Since the peripherals segment is highly competitive with a number of low-price products out in the market, we feel resellers need to gear themselves with the right tools to sell better,” says Hashemi. “Resellers need to work on providing added value to customers by offering them better aftersales service and support. Vendors and distributors, on the other hand, need to offer bundled products on promotion and train their resellers to sell better.”

Hayati advises that partners should both sell peripherals on their own and also bundle them into packages with commodity products.

“Individual sales cater to customers looking to personalise their existing devices while bundling peripherals into packages increases the valueadd of the device being sold. The bundled package would, of course, have a higher margin than when sold separately,” he says.

Wani adds, “In some cases a peripheral is a highly complementary

product and adds immense value to the overall bundle, so in this case it makes good sense. Bundling complementary peripherals is one of the easiest ways to add value and boost customer satisfaction.”

But is hardware the way to go? Others have touted peripheral services as big money-makers, advising resellers to offer, for example, extended warranties or managed print services. Hashemi says that both sides are equally important, while Wani advises that services offer a great opportunity to provide value to the customer. Hayati, however, is less sold

notebooks, would need peripherals and security solutions.”

Hayati agrees that resellers should really be targeting everyone with their peripheral products. He says, “People are drawn to different things in different ways. Individual tastes and preferences are so varied—be that with food, art or even choice of products—and that is a good thing. So, in terms of targeting, everyone is a customer for peripheral products, irrespective of age or gender.”

Wani, however, says that positioning depends entirely on the product: “There are hundreds of products that fall under the peripheral

“Resellers need to work on providing added value to customers by offering them better after-sales service and support. Vendors and distributors, on the other hand, need to offer bundled products on promotion and train their resellers to sell better.”

Ehsan Hashemi, COO, Golden Systems Middle East

on the idea of providing peripheral services to customers.

“The hardware peripherals are extremely profitable and I would advise continued focus on this. Warranties and print services are great add-ons but might not necessarily drive profitability with resellers,” he says.

Whichever peripherals route a reseller takes, though, they’re certain to want to know what kinds of customers to target. However, according to Hashemi, finding out which segment looks best might be more difficult than it sounds. He says that peripherals cover “all segments, as whoever owns a computer device, such as desktop PCs, tablet PCs, smartphones and

category, so the customers that partners should target really depends on the product. If the peripheral in question is an external hard drive, a partner could target a broader range of users who are interested in increasing their overall storage, want to travel with their data or who just want to back up their data to a secondary storage device,” he explains.

However a partner tackles the peripherals market, though, there seems to be no doubting that it is worth tackling.

With consumers looking for more and more differentiation—and with a host of peripherals manufacturers targeting the Middle East—the time has never been better to enter this growing market. //

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Review

Samsung WB250F Smart Camera Samsung has kept this little compact camera relevant by packing it full of useful tech while still keeping the price down.

The compact camera’s role in the consumer technology mix has changed significantly since the smartphone came to prominence.

Given most smartphones have pretty good cameras on them—good enough for most, anyway—and pretty much everyone has a smartphone, the compact camera has largely been forgotten about.

That’s why vendors have to offer something unique with their compact cameras these days. What’s more, they can’t make their compact cameras too expensive, either—the target audience is people who want a little more photography power than their phones offer but who don’t want to pay too much for it.

And with the WB250F Smart Camera, Samsung seems to have hit that nail right on the head. At Dh849, it certainly does well to keep down on price—we’ve seen point-

and-shoot cameras that go for as much as mid-range smartphones, despite offering little more in terms of photographic mettle.

And on the feature front, the WB250F would blow any smartphone camera out of the water—even the Nokia PureView’s mad but fantastic 41-megapixel unit. What’s more, you get Wi-Fi connectivity for easy sharing to your social networks. Indeed, Samsung is way ahead of major competitors like Canon in that aspect, and it’s heartening to see the same sharing features spread out across the entire range.

Anyway, in terms of its capabilities, the WB250F offers a 14-megapixel, backsideilluminated CMOS sensor and an extremely handy 18x zoom lens. You also get a great touchscreen and all manner of creative shooting modes. While those aren’t the best stats, the Wi-Fi capabilities give the WB250F

Hot products

a considerable advantage over rivals from the get-go. And if you’re looking for something with the biggest megapixel count, this isn’t the camera for you, anyway.

Samsung seems to have realised this, and has gone heavy on features instead of focusing—excuse the pun—on photo quality.

It’s pretty good up to ISO 400, but anything above starts to look a little soft, and colours begin to lose their vibrancy above ISO 800. If you’re consistently going above that mark, you need to invest in a more expensive camera or else you might as well be using your phone.

That said, your phone won’t have the very decent flash that the 250F sports. The unit can be angled up, meaning your nighttime portrait shots don’t have to result in ghostly white faces all the time. Again, your pictures won’t look like masterpieces from a photography gallery, but they’ll be a darn sight better than your phone’s efforts. What’s more, if all you want to do is stick the photos up on Facebook, they’ll look great—it’s only when you stretch them that you really begin to see issues.

The same goes for the video quality, which is really very good on this camera. You get a little bit of ghosting if your subjects are moving around quickly, and the anti-shake function isn’t the best, but on the whole, you can shoot some very well-sorted videos with the 250F. What’s particularly impressive is how quickly the camera can adapt to changing lighting conditions.

The other features are all pretty much par for the course—you can have a little fun with the creative shooting modes, and the touchscreen allows you to choose where in the shot you’d like to focus. This means you can create all manner of “artsy” shots—but then again, you can do that with a lot of other cameras, too.

The upshot is that, if you want something that’s more capable than your smartphone camera, and you don’t want to pay too much for it, you won’t go wrong with the WB250F. It’s inexpensive and capable, doing more than it rightly should for the price.

Rating: 8/10 july 2013

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HOT products

R&M upgrades fibre optic cables for data centres R&M recently announced that it has upgraded its entire range of fibre optic cables for data centres to bend-insensitive multimode fibre (BIMMF) standards.

R&M claims that the new systems will deliver “unrivalled” port density, reliability, modularity and ease of installation with the most efficient use of space.

“Organisations striving to be more agile are incorporating new means to offer ondemand services to their employees. This push for greater connectivity is resulting in an increase in the number of ports in data

centres, which are already stretched to their limits,” explained Jean-Pierre Labry, Executive Vice President, R&M Middle East, Turkey and Africa.

R&M’s new range for data centres consists of Type S MTP modules, MTP adapter plates, HD panels, MTP trunk cables and patch cords.

The vendor said that it would deliver the Type S MTP modules pre-terminated to enable simple handling and quick assembly.

The new solutions have also been developed to be easily integrated with the R&M inteliPhy Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) solution, which will soon be launched in the Middle East. This will automate the administration and monitoring of numerous connections in the data centre, simplifying network managers’ tasks.

Imation unveils Nexsan Assureon next-gen object store

Imation recently unveiled its next-generation object store, the Nexsan Assureon secure automated archive solution, which, the vendor said, consolidates storage tiers, secures data and simplifies storage management.

Imation said that the new solution would be of particular interest to government, healthcare and financial organisations, which often have to manage rapid, unpredictable growth in digital content and data while ensuring compliance.

“When we talk to IT leaders, we hear that organisations are challenged to manage exponentially increasing data sets, while complying with strict government and industry

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data retention and security requirements,” said Mike Stolz, Vice President of Marketing, Nexsan Storage Solutions, Imation.

By deploying the Assureon solution, Imation said, organisations can automate storage policies to encrypt, self-authenticate, self-manage and self-configure storage for unstructured files and content.

Imation added that, unlike its competitors’ archiving solutions, the Assureon does not require that applications are customised to use proprietary APIs in order to store their data in the archive.

The Assureon solution has already garnered praise from industry analysts: Deni Connor, Principal Anlayst, Storage Stategies NOW, said, “The Nexsan Assureon solution is a highly advanced archive storage platform, notable for the way it simplifies and automates data ingestion, and assures data integrity in a single hardware-software offering.”

Emerson unveils Avocent Universal Management Gateway 6000 Emerson Network Power has announced the launch of its new Avocent Universal Management Gateway 6000, which it describes as a comprehensive appliance for infrastructure management and control.

The new unit is a multi-purpose appliance that consolidates assets and control to all facilities and IT assets.

Emerson said that it uses proven technology to deliver a single, unified approach for both data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) and remote data centre management.

Emerson also said that the Universal Management Gateway 6000 can maintain data collection capabilities during disaster recovery, with each device storing its own data store. The vendor also claimed that the unit can cut energy costs by up to 30 percent thanks to converging infrastructure purchases into fewer devices.

Emerson added that the device is scalable to support growing operations, with up to 10,000 data points collected per minute, 40,000 KVM sessions and 1,024 service processors managed.

In terms of a user interface, the Universal Management Gateway 6000 offers an embedded Web interface, a single, consolidated Web interface with DSView 4 software integration, and SSH device management command options.

With all of this, Emerson said that the device would enhance data centre efficiency and responsiveness.

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Hot products

Toshiba targets professionals with new Portégé Z10t

Toshiba Gulf recently launched the Portégé Z10t, an Ultrabook-tablet hybrid that the vendor said is designed with the professional environment in mind.

The device targets a specific market of users who need a single, portable device that is both a full-size laptop and a Windowspowered tablet, addressing functions that are needed for work.

Powered by the latest Intel Core processors, Toshiba said that the new device delivers excellent speed and performance, as users may expect from a device built for business. The 11.6-inch, Full HD touchscreen display can be detached from the keyboard instantly to turn it into a tablet. There is also a built-in digitiser for those who want to write and take notes on the screen, providing a technology that effectively mimics the handwriting experience.

“The Portégé Z10t is meant to help professionals boost their productivity at a maximum level. With its detachable 0.49inch, 1.91-pound tablet, it gives users the portability they need when travelling, and the flexibility required to get the work done in no time,” said Santosh Varghese, General Manager, Digital Products and Services, Toshiba Gulf FZE. The Z10t will be available with both Windows 8 and Windows 7, and will be hit the market in July 2013, Toshiba said.

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HP brings Slate 7 Android tablet to the Middle East HP recently launched its first Android tablet, the Slate 7, in the Middle East. With a starting price of Dh599, it’s designed to be an affordable tablet for the Android Jelly Bean fan.

Weighing 368 grams, the Slate 7 features a stainless-steel frame and soft black paint in gray or red on the back. HP says that it also is the industry’s first tablet to offer embedded Beats Audio.

Powered by an ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 1.6 GHz processor, the tablet should be reasonably fast and responsive. It also comes with a High-aperture-ratio Field Fringe Switching (HFFS) panel, which, HP says, offers wide viewing angles that provide easy viewing of documents, games, photos and videos.

The Slate 7 also includes a threemegapixel camera on the back and a VGA camera on the front.

“The HP Slate 7 on Android represents a compelling entry point for consumer tablets, and delivers the service and support people expect from HP,” said Salim Ziade, General Manager, Printing and Personal Systems, HP Middle East.

The Slate 7 joins the recently introduced HP Chromebook as part of HP’s push to offer access to the Google experience.

Seagate unveils new NAS HDD

Seagate has taken the wraps off its new NAS HDD, a drive it says is custom-built for always-on, one-to-five-bay network attached storage (NAS) systems.

The new drives are now available across EMEA in multiple capacity points including a 4TB option—the industry’s

highest capacity NAS hard disk drive (HDD) solution available—with strong industry support from nine NAS system partners.

“Today, about 50 percent of NAS arrays are sold diskless, meaning that customers are challenged with identifying and installing the right storage for their system. By developing a drive like NAS HDD, we’ve taken the guesswork out of it and made it easy for customers to identify the right drive for their system,” said Scott Horn, Vice President of Marketing, Seagate. “By collaborating closely with a variety of partners who specialise in NAS systems, we’re making what was a confusing effort into a plug-and-play one.”

The drive now enables NAS systems such as those utilised in homes and small to mid-size businesses (SMB) to provide up to 20TB of data in a five-bay NAS array. And with over 30 percent capacity improvement over competitive offerings, the NAS HDD 4TB drive delivers the highest capacity available on the market, Seagate says.

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Hot products

Plextor unveils 19nm flash-based SSD Asus launches Haswell-powered all-in-one PC

Asus recently unveiled a complete new line-up of products based on Intel’s new Haswell platform, including the ET2702IGTH all-in-one PC. As well as Intel’s fourth-generation Core processor, the new PC sports AMD Radeon HD 8890A discrete graphics.

The device also supports the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard, meaning speedy wireless data transfer rates. Meanwhile, USB 3.0 and Intel Thunderbolt ports support an ever-expanding range of high-performance wired peripherals and storage devices.

The all-in-one’s impressive display is a 27-inch widescreen unit with an ultra-high 2560 x 1440 WQHD resolution, with almost twice the pixel density of a same-size Full HD display. The screen should even provide good viewing when seen from the side, thanks to 178-degree wide viewing angles.

The ET2702 is optionally available with 10-point multi-touch, and can connect to three external monitors at once for a space-saving professional desktop set-up.

HDMI-in/out ports mean the ET2702 can be used as a WQHD display for Blu-ray players and game consoles, and can connect to an HDTV for big-screen entertainment. A VESA mount and optional TV tuner also allow the ET2702 to be wall-mounted for HDTV use.

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Plextor recently unveiled its next-generation of SSD (solid-state drive), which uses the world’s smallest 64-gigabit NAND memory chip on 19-nanometer (nm) process technology, at Computex 2013.

During the show, Plextor also showcased its consumer SSDs and specialised solutions for industry and enterprise. Consumer products on display included the 100K IOPS-capable M5 Pro Xtreme, the entry-level M5S, and the new M5M mSATA SSD. The industry and enterprise products on display included the tiny eMMC, mSATA SSDs, and NGFF SSDs, and a 2.5-inch, ultra-highendurance SLC SSD. An extreme, temperatureresistant, power-protected MLC SSD was shown as a sample of the customised solutions available from Plextor.

This drive is capable of delivering random maximum read/write speeds of 94,000/81,000 IOPS at temperatures between -40C and

+85C, Plextor said. The SSD utilises tantalum capacitors to prevent data loss in the case of power interruption.

Bill Liu, Regional Manager, Channel Marketing and Sales, Plextor, said, “The strength in R&D, world-class manufacturing facilities, and having one of the world’s largest teams of SSD firmware engineers gives Plextor an edge in the market and allows it to enjoy a market leadership position globally.”

Acer unveils ‘industry’s first’ 8.1-inch Windows 8 tablet Acer has unveiled the Acer Iconia W3, which it says is the industry’s first full-featured 8.1-inch tablet running Windows 8.

The W3 comes pre-installed with Microsoft Office Home & Student 2013. As a result, Acer says that it is ideal for business people, students and families who already use programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for school and work.

“With the Iconia W3, Acer is giving the millions of students, consumers and professionals who create, read, work and play in the Windows environment a single-handed device that does it all,” said Luca Rossi, Vice President, Consumer Business Unit, Acer Europe.

The new tablet is powered by an Intel Atom Z2760 mobileoptimised processor. This should provide plenty of power, though Acer has also looked to offer good battery life, too – it claims that the Iconia W3 can provide up to 8 hours of battery life. It also sports a feature called Connected Standby, which turns off the display while the device remains powered on to handle background tasks.

The 8.1-inch LED-backlit display sports a resolution of 1280 x 800, and the tablet’s front- and rear-facing webcams are both two-megapixel units.

The new tablet is available with either 32GB or 64GB of internal storage, and customers can add an additional 32GB via microSD for extra storage.

www.resellerme.com

column

Refurbished hardware

Reseller Middle East’s online editor offers his thoughts on the Middle Eastern technology channel.

Channel surfing

Where’s the refurbished IT gear?

Walking through the PlayStation 3 section of my local Virgin Megastore recently, I came across something amazing—the chain has started accepting trade-ins as partial payment for new games.

Anyone familiar with local gaming will know that this is a monumental development. The second-hand games market used to simply consist of individuals selling off big collections of games on Dubizzle when they’d finished with them. The retail stores had nothing to do with it, unlike in the UK, where second-hand games make up a huge part of the gaming ecosystem.

But that got me thinking—just as the local second-hand games market is almost non-existent, so, too, is the local second-hand IT hardware market. In Europe and the US, resellers and distributors have entire divisions dedicated to buying up old gear, refurbishing it, and selling it on for a profit. And the gear is cheaper for end-users to buy, so everyone wins.

Who does this in the Middle East? Almost no-one is the answer. Having done some digging, the only company I can see that seriously specialises in refurbished gear is Sims Recycling Solutions (SRS). In May, the firm struck a deal with Microsoft to supply refurbished PCs that have been installed with genuine Microsoft software.

Such a deal makes perfect sense for a company that offers asset management and end-of-life solutions for IT assets. If it can get away with selling on old hardware instead of spending cash on destroying it in an environmentally friendly manner, why wouldn’t it?

But this is just PCs we’re talking about—as far as I know, SRS doesn’t currently sell on refurbished hightech gear. Indeed, hardly anyone does. I’ve heard unconfirmed rumours that Comstor sells refurbished Cisco gear, but that’s all I’ve come across. Having asked around, no-one

seems to know anyone that I can speak to about the matter.

I wonder why this is. The big vendors like Cisco, HP and Dell all have refurbished hardware programmes, either buying back old gear and selling it on direct, or else letting their partners have it. And the gear is never even that “old”—HP says on its website that most of its refurbished equipment comes in about six to 18 months after its initial launch. Sure, 18 months might be getting on a bit for a PC, but if we’re talking servers, there’ll still be a lot of life left in the product.

We’re always hearing about partners looking for additional revenue streams. So why aren’t people jumping at the chance to sell on refurbished hardware? Maybe some end-users don’t like the idea of buying second hand, but if I had my own SMB, I’d definitely shop around for a decent second-hand deal—just like I did when buying video games in the UK. Perhaps I’m missing something here, but I can’t imagine it’d be that difficult for a distributor or reseller to skill up a few technicians to refurbish old gear. Once they’ve done that, they’ve got a new way to offer customers a great deal.

Tom Paye, Online Editor, CPI Technology

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Reseller Middle East

july 2013

www.resellerme.com

2013

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