Reseller Middle East September 2013 Issue by Reseller Middle East

ISSUE 201 // september 2013 WWW.RESELLERME.COM

the next big thing: Why the channel needs to suit up for the sDN wave The $5bn plan: Can Tech Mahindra really become a $5bn company by 2015?

Link up, look sharp The personal approach to distribution

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CONTENTS

ISSUE 201 // september 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 Cracking the market

Sony has had no end of trouble in the smartphone market. However, with its new crop of smartphones, sales figures have been encouraging, and the business unit is finally beginning to see some success.

feature 30 SDN: The next big thing

Software-defined networks are poised to replace legacy network infrastructure, with the promise of automating the entire network fabric. Should the channel prepare now for this emerging tech?

partner watch 42 The power of differentiation

Forging long-term relationships with customers and partners, Lucky Star Computers is continuing to thrive even in turbulent market conditions.

44 The $5bn plan

With the much-delayed amalgamation of Indian systems integrators Tech Mahindra and Satyam Mahindra finally formalised, the merged entity has now set its sights on becoming a $5 billion company by 2015. To help achieve that target, the head of its MEA and Turkey business has set out his strategy to double Middle Eastern revenue.

Linking together The security industry may be in growth mode, but Computerlinksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Lee Reynolds believes that a personal approach to distribution has been the key to his success.

Hot products Sony Xperia Z Ultra reviewed

AOC expands myDisplay line up

Interview 56 Charting a different course

Dean Douglas, President and CEO of Westcon Group, was in Dubai recently and spoke to Reseller Middle East about a range of topics, and his companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plans for the future.

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T C E EXP

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Y T I R U C OF SE

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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

The cloud conundrum

Contributing Editor Ben Rossi 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

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There is still lot of uncertainty and fear about cloud computing in the channel. Whether you like it or not, cloud is gaining steam and it’s bound to redefine the channel landscape as we know it today. Now the question everyone seems to be asking is whether distributors and resellers have a role to play in the cloud marketplace. Will it kill distribution? Cloud is often thought of as a direct engagement model and we have already seen a major VAD pull out of cloud services citing this as a reason. Most of the major cloud vendors deal directly with end-users and solution providers, fanning fears that distribution is on its way to redundancy. No doubt, the move to off-premise IT will have an impact on the sales of traditional disties who are focused on hardware and software. But cloud is also a big opportunity for distributors to aggregate services for resellers to take it forward to the market. Some of the major distributors in the world such as Ingram Micro and Tech Data already have a play in this space. Aptec, Ingram’s local arm, is all set to launch its cloud services officially at this year’s Gitex. And Westcon Global is currently piloting its cloud platform in some of the developed markets. However, getting on the cloud bandwagon requires a complete re-think of the business model for distributors. They will have to invest in skills and new competencies, such as automated provisioning, aggregated billing and security to make the most of cloud. Where does it leave resellers? This is also a golden opportunity for solution providers to forge direct relationships with vendors and take their offerings to the market. They can play the role of a consultant because most of the SMBs would need trusted advisers when it comes to cloud. They can also help to customise because most of the cloud solutions would need some amount of tweaking to run at full capacity. Then comes the opportunity to integrate these cloud services with the existing infrastructure of their customers. The industry is still debating whether it’s a good idea for solutions providers to work directly with vendors, bypassing the distribution channel. Most of the disties we spoke to for this month’s feature on cloud opine that they are in a better position to negotiate better contracts with vendors and ensure that resellers have more margins going through them. While the jury is still out on that, what is for sure is that cloud is an exciting opportunity for the channel if players can learn and evolve fast.

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

september 2013

Reseller Middle East

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Redington Gulf becomes Eaton distributor

Ramkumar B., Senior Vice-President, Redington Gulf Industrial manufacturer Eaton has signed an agreement with Redington Gulf that will see the distributor become the newest authorised Eaton distributor for critical power solutions under Eaton’s Power Quality Systems and Solutions division. Redington Gulf, a major supporter of global IT and telecommunications brands in the Middle East, will work together with Eaton to provide end-users with valueadded solutions across a variety of IT, infrastructure and commercial projects, an announcement said. Commenting on the agreement, Ramkumar B., Senior Vice-President of Redington Gulf, said, “Eaton is the perfect vendor-partner for an organisation like ours. We always seek to partner with like-minded companies whose end-goal is to better serve our customers through employing a solutionsbased, value-added approach. “I’m certain that with Eaton’s high-quality products, coupled with the company’s technical expertise, this venture between their company and ours will be an on-going success”. Meanwhile, Rahul Sikka, Sales Director GCC- Eaton said, “Redington is a distributor with not only a tremendous reach across the Middle East market but also a robust and responsive reseller base. Eaton is extremely pleased to be working with Redington as we believe this mutually-beneficial partnership with a reputable and trusted company will help us to increase our visibility and brand recognition in the region, making it easier for our customers to benefit from Eaton solutions and Partner programmes.”

Reseller Middle East

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FVC adds Watchful Software to portfolio Dubai-based FVC has signed a distribution agreement with Watchful Software, a provider of data-centric information security solutions. This partnership allows FVC to offer Watchful Software’s information security technology products throughout the MENA region through its partner network. The agreement covers sales and support capabilities for Watchful Software’s line of security products, including RightsWatch and TypeWatch. “This agreement signals the increased demand that customers are placing on VARs for information security technology offering in light of today’s constant information threats, and the strong market response to RightsWATCH to address these demands,” said João Beato Esteves, EMEA Sales Manager for Watchful Software. “In addition, the value-add that FVC brings to the VAR and reseller channel means faster delivery, deeper technical support, and streamlined operations through online ordering, configuration tools, and customer financing resources for a total business and technical solution.” “We are pleased to be taking the lead in delivering powerful and innovative security solutions to the Middle East market,” said K.S. Parag, Managing Director at FVC. “Our partners and their customers look to us

K.S. Parag, Managing Director, FVC to provide access to the industry’s best technology and to marry that with support and services that leads to highly successful projects with a rapid ROI, and we feel that the Watchful’s portfolio will deliver just that.” Watchful Software’s product portfolio features RightsWATCH, an award-winning information protection solution to keep data safe and secure regardless of whether it is at rest, in motion, or in use even when it’s totally outside your network perimeter. In addition, the portfolio includes TypeWATCH, which leverages state-of-the-art e-Biometrics technology to constantly ensure that the people using your systems are who they claimed to be when signing in.

Lexmark to acquire Saperion

Paul Rooke, Chairman and CEO, Lexmark Lexmark International has signed an agreement to acquire Germany-based Saperion AG, a developer and provider of enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software in Europe, for a cash purchase price of approximately $72 million. Upon the closing of the transaction, Saperion will

merge into Perceptive Software. Saperion’s ECM/BPM products feature a platform-independent, multilingual architecture, making the products highly scalable and easy to integrate with all major ERP, email and document management systems. Saperion has also developed leading cloud-based and mobile ECM solutions to provide workers easy and intuitive access to important content, even when they are away from the office. The offering empowers businesses to efficiently manage an increasing volume of information, to automate and streamline business processes, and to realize productivity gains. Saperion has a large installed base of customers consisting of medium-sized companies as well as global accounts such as Schindler, E.ON, Fleurop, Henkel, Lufthansa, Vodafone, Daimler and Siemens with corporate-wide rollouts.

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EiQ Networks signs up Bulwark Technologies EiQ Networks, which provides security, risk and compliance solutions, has announced a distribution partnership with Bulwark Technologies, one of the leading value-added distributors for IT Security and IT Solutions in the Middle East. Through this partnership, SecureVue NGS will be offered to customers across the Middle East including United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and neighboring countries, to help combat the industrywide challenges associated with traditional SIEM and log management. “We have had many organisations come to us expressing their growing frustrations over the complexities and costs associated with traditional SIEM solutions,” said Jose Thomas, Managing Director, Bulwark

Jose Thomas, Managing Director, Bulwark Technologies

Technologies. “Our partnership with EiQ Networks is both refreshing and rewarding as we can now drive demand within the end-user space and through the education of our solid partner base. SecureVue NGS is a simple solution that provides immediate value for security and compliance to organisations of any size.” SecureVue NGS is the industry’s only next-generation SIEM solution that can be fully deployed in one hour and provides log management, event management, network behavioral analysis and intelligent security search, all in a simple, easy-toinstall, cost-effective solution. The solution delivers unified situational awareness by combining next-gen SIEM, secure configuration audit, compliance automation and contextual forensic analysis, through a single console yielding a unified view, operational efficiency and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). “Building solid partnerships across the globe is incredibly important to us as our go-to-market strategy is 100 percent channel driven for SecureVue NGS,” said Phil Demeo, Director of Alliances, EiQ Networks. “Our partnership with Bulwark Technologies will enable us to provide unparalleled security intelligence and unified situational awareness to customers across the Middle East.”

Metra to distribute Vision Solutions Vision Solutions has announced a broad partnership agreement with Metra, a Middle East-based IT distributor, which will help to enhance Vision Solutions’ position in industry. Vision Solutions specialises in replication, high availability and disaster recovery. Under the terms of the agreement, Metra will distribute and provide technical support to Vision Solutions’ Double-Take products in the Middle East. Through the partnership, two companies are hoping to maximise the product development talents and resources on both sides, driving scale and efficiency in the partners’ respective

supply markets. Metra was chosen because of its strength and reach to different channel segments, whether it is system integrators, resellers or corporate resellers, Vision Solutions said. Metra offers full implementation on pre-sales and post-sales, proof of concepts, technical enablement, demand and lead generation engines, alliance management, consultancy and implementation services. The distributor has a network of over 20 vendors serving more than 5,000 resellers fully operating throughout 11 countries.

StarLink extends Dell Software partnership

Shahnawaz Sheikh, Regional Director, Dell SonicWall Middle East and Turkey StarLink has announced that its distribution relationship with Dell Software Group has been extended to include SonicWall covering Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Dell SonicWall solutions feature high-performance, solid-state firewalls, Next-Generation Firewall and VPN appliances with application intelligence, control and visualisation plus security subscriptions such as anti-virus, intrusion prevention and anti-spyware, for wired and wireless networks. Shahnawaz Sheikh, Regional Director, Dell SonicWall Middle East and Turkey, said, “With the advent of our carrier-class product category, we felt that it was the right time to partner with a VAD in the region that has an extensive reach into the enterprise, telco and government market segments. The partnership reinforces our objective to expand our product reach in the Middle East. Avinash Advani, Director of Business Strategy, StarLink, added, “StarLink has traditionally been a niche IT security-focused distributor, but given the constantly developing relationship with Dell Software Group, and their visionary acquisition strategy to become an IT Security powerhouse, it became clear to us that with the acquisition of SonicWALL, they would be able continuously deliver bestof-breed and bleeding-edge nextgeneration firewall technology.”

september 2013

Reseller Middle East

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Belkin enters retail partnership with Axiom Telecom

Huawei signs Telematics as authorised partner

Faisal Al Bannai, CEO, Axiom In an effort to broaden the reach of its smartphone and tablet accessories, Belkin has entered into a retail partnership with Axiom Telecom. The partnership will mean that Belkin accessories will be available in Axiom stores throughout the UAE. The partnership is effectively immediately, according to a statement from Belkin. The vendor added that its products would also be made available through Axiom’s independent retailer network channel, which includes both resellers and dealers. Andrew Pepperell, Sales Manager, Belkin MEA, said that the partnership was signed in the midst of attempts to diversify the vendor’s go-to-market strategy. “The sheer number of stores, their customer profile, the product mix and breadth of value-added services means that Axiom Telecom is a great fit with the Belkin portfolio,” he said. “With regards to the overall distribution strategy for Belkin in the UAE, the company has looked to diversify its go-tomarket strategy and develop relationships with partners who we see as integral to future Belkin business within the region.” Belkin’s statement added that the vendor was currently working with Axiom to develop a number of joint initiatives, which it hopes will Demetris Demetriou & Richard Lee, Chairman of Qnap add more clout to the partnership. According to Axiom’s CEO, Faisal Al Bannai, the partnership should help Belkin realise its large-scale regional ambitions. “Belkin has significant ambitions across the Middle East, and Axiom Telecom is proud to play a part in their ongoing success,” he said. “By providing a world-class retail experience – from product demonstration and display to post-sales support – we are confident that Belkin will be able to connect with its largest audience yet in the UAE.

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

Huawei Enterprise has signed a partnership agreement with UAE-based systems integrator Telematics, which is now an authorised partner in the Middle East. Huawei said that the partnership underlines its commitment to the Middle East and the expected growth in the region’s unified communication (UC) market. According to a recent report from Frost & Sullivan, the Middle East UC market is expected to reach $235 million by 2014. As the workforce becomes more mobile, UC becomes increasingly important, allowing users to experience seamless communication through multiple devices while on the move.

The tangible business benefits of UC adoption are cost savings resulting from reduced power consumption, space and hardware requirements as well as increased employee efficiency, Huawei said. Dong Wu, Vice President of Huawei Enterprise Middle East said, “Huawei’s channel partner programme plays a vital role in our overall Middle East business strategy where Qatar and the UAE are some of our fastest growing markets. “Telematic, part of the BMTC group, brings valuable insights into key vertical industries such as finance, hospitality, and government. Together, we look forward to bringing the latest in unified communications technologies to customers throughout the region.

EMC acquires Aveska EMC has acquired privately held Aveksa, which provides business-driven Identity and Access Management solutions. Effective immediately, Aveksa will operate within the RSA security division as part of RSA’s Identity Trust Management product group, bringing leading technology and expertise that will help RSA bring innovative new solutions to identity and access management challenges across enterprise, cloud and mobile access use cases. RSA and Aveksa together will help give organisations the ability to automate the complete identity lifecycle of users from a business-driven perspective, helping turn traditional IAM systems into more

agile, intelligent and scalable “situational perimeters”. With Aveksa, customers have a unified dashboard to manage, control, and deliver access, while consistently enforcing identity and access policies across the enterprise and cloud, at a granular level. Aveksa solutions help define rich user profiles and increase the convenience of managing user identities, allowing customers to continue building situational perimeters that can flexibly enforce security. The line of business is given easy and secure access to applications, while enabling them to take accountability and responsibility for making access decisions, within the controls, processes, and policies defined by the information security organisation.

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Visionaire reaps accolades from HP and Microsoft Visionaire has been chosen by HP and Microsoft as an Outstanding Partner for the Year 2013 for the HP and Microsoft Frontline Partnership for Unified Communications and Collaboration. Visionaire is a Microsoft Gold OEM and Gold Application Development partner, and also holds Professional Networking Gold Specialist partnership with HP to provide Unified Communications and Collaborative solutions to its customers. The company has been working closely with both Microsoft and HP for many years now and has led several successful implementations using HP and Microsoft platforms. The worldwide HP and Microsoft Frontline Partnership (FLP) is a 20-yearold alliance that is unique in the industry. It ensures that Microsoft and HP products have been designed and engineered to work together and are supported by both companies. The FLP benefits small and medium-sized businesses through worldwide joint HP and Microsoft partner programmes,

also supported by both companies. The award ceremonies were held at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last month in Texas, USA. Visionaire, as a joint partner, gain from the industry leadership and combined strength of both companies who have chosen each other’s technology for long-term strategic investment. “The HP and Microsoft FLP Partner Celebration that took place in Houston, Texas during Microsoft’s WPC conference in July was our way of recognising Visionaire for the work they have done with their customers over the past year” stated Andrew Morlidge, Senior Director, Frontline Channel Partners, Microsoft. Visionaire provides state-of-the-art audio-video solutions based on its proven “technomics” best-of-breed systems integration model to a multiple customer base spanning different industry segments in education, government, hospitality and corporate institutions.

Aneeta Gupta, CEO, Visionaire Expressing her happiness on being awarded Outstanding Frontline Partner of the Year, Aneeta Gupta, CEO, Visionaire, stated, “We are extremely glad to be recognised for our efforts and contribution to the industry. The Microsoft and HP Frontline Partnership allows us to consistently deliver unparalleled ROI and best in class TCO that works for customers today and tomorrow.”

Spectrami, Actifio organise partner workshop in Bahrain

Anand Choudha, MD, Spectrami Spectrami, in association with Actifio, recently organised a training workshop for its channel partners on Copy Data Storage Management in Bahrain. Spectrami is the value-added distributor for Actifio in the Middle East. Actifio pioneers the industry’s first storage system optimised for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

applications. Actifio is part of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Backup/Recovery Software for the year 2013 and is also one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world. Channel partners from all over Bahrain attended the TechWorkshop that was held recently at Hotel K in Bahrain City. The workshop was attended by leading players in channel business and was given a run down on the latest activities about Actifio in the region. During the course of event, Sarfaraz Kazi, Director Technical at Spectrami made presentation on the dynamics of copy data storage management and how Actifio works to solve the problem of data explosion that is being confronted by enterprises. He also discussed the competitive landscape and the technical edge that Actifio solutions offer to the enterprises in the country. Spectrami also highlighted the opening of Customer Experience Center (CEC) facility for Actifio’s Copy Data Storage platform in Dubai. CEC is fully equipped with

an experienced professional team that has the right skills, experience and expertise to service the requirements of channel partners and their customers on Actifio Copy Data Storage platforms. Anand Choudha, Managing Director, Spectrami, said, “TechWorkshop’ provides an excellent platform for channel partners to update and upgrade their skills about a particular technology. The workshop at Bahrain helped channel partners to understand key aspects of both technology and sales cycle for Actifio, which helps them in offering the right solution to their customers. We are happy with the response and plan to conduct more TechWorkshops in the region on various technologies that we have in our portfolio.” Actifio is represented in Middle East by Spectrami as their authorised distributor with rights to sell and market the Actifio products across the region including countries like UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and among others.

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Demand more! The Z-Generation

Production level functionality in a compact desktop scanner is available today with the new Z-Generation of Fujitsu Desktop scanners. IT-Managers appreciate the new Centralized Administration module – operators love the ScanSnap Productivity mode for ad-hoc one-button-scanning. Demand more! Demand the Z-Generation scanners from Fujitsu. ScandAll PRO V2 software included

Have a look at http://emea.fujitsu.com/Z-generation

All names, manufacturer names, brand and product designations are subject to special trademark rights and are manufacturer‘s trademarks and/or registered brands of their respective owners. All indications are non-binding. Technical data is subject to change without prior notication.

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SAP partners to earn $220bn through Big Data and analytics, says IDC IDC recently estimated that SAP partners around the world are likely to earn $220 billion in revenue from the vendor’s Big Data and analytics solutions over the next five years. The research firm was commissioned by SAP to draw up an infographic detailing the opportunities in Big Data and analytics for its partners. IDC’s research showed that $48 billion revenue is expected to be seen in the Asia-Pacific-Japan region, while $70 billion revenue is expected from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. According to IDC, the projected earnings for SAP’s partners are in line with a sharp increase in customer demand for skills in advanced and predictive analytics over the next 12 months. From 2005 to 2020, the digital universe will grow from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes, IDC said. By helping customers to master this massive growth of data to make informed business decisions, SAP hopes to play a major role in optimising customers’ businesses. The multi-billion-dollar partner opportunity related to SAP products includes reselling, professional services, hardware and additional solutions developed on top of SAP’s analytics products, IDC said. “SAP and its partners make a significant impact on the global economy,” said Darren Bibby, Vice President, Channels and Alliances Research, IDC. “SAP does an excellent job delivering great products for partners to work with, as well as effective sales, marketing and training resources. The result is that the SAP ecosystem is wellpositioned for the future, and customers will benefit from these additional skills and resources.”

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

SRS nominated for waste management award Sims Recycling Solutions has been nominated in the Waste Management category for the 2013 Global Cleantech Cluster Association (GCCA) 2013 Later Stage Award. The nomination is for SRS’s focus on providing compliant solutions to manage the end of life of electronic products in the Middle East. SRS is a part of a pool of over 160 nominees worldwide at the award. The annual awards recognise innovative mid- to late-stage cleantech companies around the world who are thriving in the new green economy and show great potential for growth. Winning companies will be announced at the Corporate Cleantech Venture Day on November 20, 2013 in Lahti, Finland. Philip Hughes, Managing Director, SRS, said, “We are very proud to have been recognised and nominated for this award. Over the past year, we have worked hard to help educate the technology sector and the enterprises that use it to responsibly build and manage end-of-life systems that ensure that all electronic and electrical equipment is disposed [of ] in an environmentally-friendly manner.” Shawn Lesser, Co-Founder of Watershed Capital Group and the GCCA, noted, “What differentiates the annual Later Stage Awards is the platform

Philip Hughes, Managing Director, SRS it provides for new technologies to grow. Through these awards we help support innovators in the cleantech industry, who are developing their local green economies, by putting them in front of a global audience.” The Top 30 companies will be evaluated by over 30 venture capital and cleantech judges, who select the winners for the Later Stage Award. With more than $3.5 billion invested in clean technology, the GCCA Judges are devoted to later stage companies who have a proven track record in their home market and have the potential for international growth.

GFI launches summer promotion offer for partners Comguard in association with GFI Software, has announced a summer promotion offer for channel partners in the Middle East region. The offer runs for a limited period. The offers from GFI cover multiple products and are aimed at giving maximum benefits to channel partners. As the exclusive distributor for GFI Software in the Middle East region, Comguard will run this promotion offer across the region covering countries like UAE, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,

Bahrain, Iraq, Pakistan, and Lebanon. Scott Hagenus, Director of Channel, at GFI, said, “GFI is committed towards the channel and the main aim for this promotional offer is to keep business moving for our channel partners during the lean months of summer in the region. We are confident that this limited promotional offer will give a boost to the market and enable our channel partners to maintain their revenue stream and make good margins.”

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P.O Box: 18673, South Zone Phase 8, Blue Sheds,Warehouse # AG01, Jebel Ali,Dubai. UAE Tel: + 9714 8862237 /8 Email:itdsales@unatrac.com

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BRAMS appoints a new regional sales director as part of ambitious MEA expansion plan

Prramhod Shetty, Regional Sales Director. BRAMS Cloud technology expert BRAMS has announced that it has found a regional sales director in Prramhod Shetty, who will now be responsible for sales and marketing across the Middle East and English-speaking Africa region. The announcement was made by Brahim BenLahmr, CEO, BRAMS, at a special presentation hosted by the company for select CIOs in the UAE at the Address Hotel, Downtown Dubai. Speaking on the occasion, BenLahmr said, “We have only just expanded our operations to the Middle East and set up offices in Dubai. As such, we are looking for experts in cloud computing in the Middle East to join the team. Prramhod fits the bill.” Shetty will work with the BRAMS management to help define the cloud technology and enterprise search sales strategy for the vendor’s expanded operations in the Middle East. He will also work to increase the BRAMS footprint across the region, which includes forming channel partnerships in key countries around the region.

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

AccessData inks distribution pact with ARM AccessData has signed a distribution agreement with ARM, which specialises in cyber-security and other consumerrelated IT software products in region. AccessData said it hopes that the agreement will enlarge its footprint in the region. The vendor added that it wanted to tap into the growing demand for cyber-security and incident response solutions. Under the agreement, ARM will be responsible for business development and market expansion. The distributor has also been contracted to build the channel partner community for AccessData, which includes recruitment, partner training, marketing support and first- and second-level technical support. “Traditionally, we invested in a very small number of technology partners because our heritage business in the forensics space was very niche and focused almost entirely on the law enforcement vertical. However, our operations in the Middle East now need to be driven by a larger channel,” said Simon Whitburn, Senior Vice President and General Manager, AccessData. “This is because the corporate sector in this region demands the capability to conduct their own inhouse digital investigations, as well as in-house rapid detection and response to defend against hackers, malware and advanced persistent threats. They want the option to control their own information assurance and cyber-security programmes without having to resort to a third-party or divulge information to law enforcement, as the threat of cyber terrorism and breach attacks continues to grow.” Whitburn added that AccessData already has an existing channel engagement with DRS, ARM’s sister company in South Africa, meaning that it was logical to extend the partnership to the Middle East. ARM said that it will be looking to recruit partners that are serious on

Simon Whitburn, Senior Vice President and General Manager, AccessData developing their security portfolios, who understand networks and have experience in verticals that are important to national infrastructure, such as government, telecommunications, energy, utilities, and banking and finance. The likes of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar represent key growth markets for AccessData, ARM added. Robert Brown, Executive Director, ARM said, “AccessData’s forensics and cyber-security solution portfolio is very unique. There are companies that compete with AccessData in the different segments, but there is no one company that goes from detection all the way to remediation and allows you to effectively use one interface to manage everything. We will focus exclusively on AccessData for at least the first year. “Forensic techniques for digital investigations and incident root cause analysis are relatively new concepts in this region and hence require time and effort to educate channel and end-users and get them to start looking into these advanced capabilities. Due to the recent surge in cyber-crime attacks in the region, the potential for uptake of the solution portfolio is huge and our efforts are sure to pay off in the long run.”

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highlights

News

Prologix partners with Fluke Networks Prologix Distribution has signed a partnership agreement with Fluke Networks to deliver the vendor’s range of network monitoring, analysis, troubleshooting and security solutions to enterprise customers and SMBs in the UAE. Prologix will leverage Fluke Networks’ OptiView, TruView and AirMagnet solutions to build high-performance networks that will see deployment in the telecom, banking, finance, contact centres, oil and gas, healthcare, hospitality and education sectors, a Prologix statement said. “The broad range of industries that these solutions can be deployed in gives us a wider customer base to target,” said Sarwan Singh, Director Sales and Operation, Prologix. “The ability to identify, analyse and troubleshoot network disruptions on the go is essential to ensuring service delivery that meets QoS expectations. Our partnership with Fluke Networks further strengthens Prologix’s networking capabilities, allowing us to add yet another facet to our solutions portfolio.” Prologix expects the partnership to generate in excess of $1.5 million in the

first year and has established a team of five network professionals dedicated to the new product range. These engineers have all received training directly from Fluke Networks on the company’s OptiView, TruView and AirMagnet solutions and are capable of rapidly deploying convincing POCs in highly complex customer network environment, Prologix said. As per the agreement, Fluke Networks will further extend sales and pre-sales support to the Prologix team and assist in identifying solutions and deployment scenarios that will best meet customer requirements. Fluke Networks’ OptiView is a handheld tablet device that allows network managers to analyse and troubleshoot anything, anywhere in the network, at any time. It automates root cause analysis of network and application problems to reduce the time required for troubleshooting. This ease of use is also seen in Fluke Networks’ TruView unified network and application performance troubleshooting appliance, which correlates data into guided workflows to

Sarwan Singh, Managing Director, Prologix provide root cause visibility in three clicks or less. Prologix will also offer AirMagnet, a tool set for wireless planning, deployment, verification, troubleshooting, interference, security and 24×7 performance monitoring. The solution spans the entire WLAN lifecycle, from planning and deployment to ongoing troubleshooting and dedicated security monitoring, combatting all wireless issues.

Head of HP’s Middle East PC division leaves

Salim Ziade, the head of HP’s PC division Salim Ziade, the head of HP’s PC division in the Middle East, has left HP after 17 years with the company. Ziade, whose official title was General Manager, Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) Group, HP Middle East, said he made

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

the decision to leave HP for personal reasons and doesn’t have immediate plans to join another company. “I’m not moving somewhere else,” he told Reseller ME. “Actually, very simply, I’m taking some time off. “I’m taking a break from work for a few months, taking care of the family, and just taking some time for myself. 17 years wears you off, so I needed a break.” Based in Dubai, Ziade did reveal that he and his family do not intend to leave the city, and that he plans to remain in the regional market when he does resume work. “Besides that, I’ll start thinking about [my career] in a few months. Now I just want to enjoy my time off. I don’t know what I’ve got coming.” Ziade was previously Channel Sales Director for Consumer and Commercial Products at HP Middle East, Mediterranean

and Africa, as well as the former manager of HP’s now-defunct Solutions Partner Organisation (SPO). He took the PPS Group General Manager position after Anil Kumar resigned from the role and company in January 2010. “It was a fantastic ride,” Ziade said of his time at HP. “It was an amazing 17 years — intense, exciting, challenging and very tiring.” HP confirmed the departure, and announced an interim replacement in the form of the current Channel Sales Director for the Middle East, Mathew Thomas. “Salim Ziade has decided to leave HP after 17 years with the business. We wish him well with his new career,” HP said in a statement. “Mathew Thomas has been appointed acting General Manager, Printing and Personal Systems, for the Middle East, until a permanent replacement is announced.”

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analysis

Sony

Cracking the market Following the split with Ericsson and the decision to take on the smartphone market alone, Sony has seen no end of trouble. However, with its new crop of smartphones, sales figures have been encouraging, and the business unit is finally beginning to see some well-earned success. It might be a little early to draw conclusions, but it looks like Sony might just have finally cracked the smartphone market. According to its latest earnings report, the company sold 9.6 million smartphones during the last quarter—a significant improvement over the 7.4 million it sold in the same quarter last year. What’s more, Sony Mobile has managed to streamline its business significantly. During the last quarter, the division turned a $60 million profit, which is much more encouraging than the $28.1 million loss it posted in the same quarter last year. And given the dominance that

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september 2013

Apple and Samsung currently enjoy in the smartphone market, this is certainly an achievement. To be honest, though, it’s difficult to see why Sony Mobile struggled so much in the first place. According to Gita Ghaemmaghami, Marketing Communications Manager, Customer Unit, Middle East and Africa, Sony, the brand wants to be seen as “the premium alternative to Samsung and Apple”. And that’s pretty much what Sony Mobile has achieved. Upping the game However, whereas Apple hasn’t dared to explore the niche mobility segment of the phablet, Sony certainly has.

Earlier in the summer, the brand launched the Xperia Z Ultra, a monster of a device with a 6.4-inch display. Is the brand trying its luck a little with this device—as our review later on in the magazine states, it really is huge—or will consumers welcome it? According to Mansoor Ahmed, Product Marketing Manager for the Middle East and Africa, Sony Mobile, there really is a desire for such a large mobile phone, and that current trends are seeing mobile screen sizes getting bigger and bigger. “Screen real estate has become a big thing. And you can see that almost every manufacturer is making

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analysis

Sony

at least one large-display phone, because people want, first of all, something that is universal and simplified. And the second reason is that more and more tech people are finding that they were once using a 4.3-inch screen, then a five-inch one, and now a 6.4 isn’t too big. They migrate,” he says. Ahmed acknowledges that some people might be turned off by the idea of a large phone. However, he sees that some buyers do want a bigger screen on which to consume content on the move. The Z Ultra might not be for everyone, but Sony wants to be there for anyone who does want such a large smartphone. “For many people, it’s weird to see people holding these big phones next to their ears. It’s too big, it’s a phablet, they’ll say. It’s a niche market for now, but until recently, five inches was a big thing. And now suddenly it’s the norm. Next year, we will see a lot of 5.9-inch and 6.1-inch screens. And today, we actually have content on the Internet that uses big screens,” he explains. Sony isn’t the only mobile phone manufacturer betting on the bigscreen market. Samsung recently made headlines with its Galaxy Mega smartphone, and one of Huawei’s devices once held the record for the biggest smartphone display. And if there wasn’t a market for large-screen phones, no-one would bother making them, Ahmed contests.

“We are seeing that a lot of people actually do carry other largescreen display phones in the market— for example, Samsung, Huawei, and even HTC. Everyone’s bringing a large one in because we’re all seeing that there’s a market for it,” he says. More than one kind of buyer This market could expand extremely quickly if Sony can convince people to invest in its Z Ultra rather than a new tablet. The Z Ultra’s buyers could easily include those who want to have a good smartphone and a small tablet, but don’t want to have to shell out for two devices. “Many people who are upgrading their smartphones would move into a product like this simply because they want something between a tablet and a five-inch smartphone. And they prefer that because it’s one cost and you can do everything on it. They’ll go for that,” Ahmed says. Females could also make up a large part of the Z Ultra’s userbase, according to Ghaemmaghami, who explains that Sony expected more females to show interest in the phone than males. The reason behind this is simple—most women will have a handbag in which to carry the Z Ultra. That said, she explains that male buyers have shown considerable interest in the device, too. “With the Z Ultra, we were assuming that, maybe, female buyers

Gita Ghaemmaghami, Marketing Communications Manager, Customer Unit, Middle East and Africa, Sony

“Screen real estate has become a big thing. And you can see that almost every manufacturer is making at least one large-display phone, because people want, first of all, something that is universal and simplified.” Mansoor Ahmed, Product Marketing Manager for the Middle East and Africa, Sony Mobile

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

are more happy to have the phone, because they all have a purse. So it’s easier for ladies just to put it in there. But for males, it might not be so comfortable to carry or to put it in your pocket. But the people I have seen are excited—specifically males went and bought it, and even they are happy with the size,” she says. Indeed, technophiles of both sexes have showed encouraging interest in Sony’s new device. The vendor recently held an event for regional technology bloggers— who are infamously harsh in their judgements—and the response was better than expected. “What was surprising to us was that, when we introduced the phone to them, they loved it. Why it was surprising for us was because generally they are very techy people. Bloggers are kind of harsh critics. But they loved it. They loved the quad-core processor, and they loved the details. We were very pleasantly surprised that it’s been well-received,” Ahmed says. Whether the rest of the buying public will show the same sort of interest remains to be seen. Without providing numbers, Ghaemmaghami says that early sales figures have been encouraging. It’s far too early to tell if the Z Ultra will be a flop, but it certainly seems like Sony really has cracked the smartphone market. //

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feature

Cloud

Simran Bagga, Gulf Distribution Manager, Microsoft Meera Kaul, MD, Optimus Technology & Telecom

A cloudy forecast Cloud is changing the distribution landscape, and though the channel is a critical enabler of cloud adoption, distributors have to rethink their business models to adapt to this new reality.

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

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It’s time to build your network around your business. Stay ahead of changing needs with software-defined networking. In today’s business world, only the agile thrive. Now you can build the open, flexible network you need to meet your rapidly changing needs with HP Software-Defined Networking solutions running the OpenFlow protocol. To learn more read the Gartner report Ending the Confusion about SDN and discover how you can transform your network into a powerful tool for business innovation. The power of HP Converged Infrastructure is here. Go to hp.com/go/SDN and download the Gartner report.

For more information, please contact Prologix. Prologix L.L.C Dubai, UAE | P.O Box: 71790 Mobile: +971 55 2243 614 or +971 55 1070 313 Tel : +971 4 3626218 | Fax: +971 4 3683039 Email: live@prologixme.com Website: www.prologixme.com

© Copyright 2013 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.

september 2013

Reseller Middle East

feature

Cloud

Cloud services have reached a point of maturity, with most major technology suppliers coming up with cloud offerings. This is turning out to be a lucrative option for distributors reeling under shrinking revenue streams. However, they have to chart a course as to how they play and participate in the cloud market—whether to partner with a cloud provider and resell an offering or actually invest in their own cloud offering. The cloud offers everything from alternative streams of revenue to logistics and finance for distributors but they need to consider how they are adopting the technology changes in the market—and have the right infrastructure to support it. “Over the last couple of years, cloud services has been a muchtalked-about, but rarely delivered technology trend. It is now moving from hype to reality and the impact that cloud has on the channel will be interesting to see play out. The critical element that will make distributors or resellers successful is how they offer what customers need, but also how they educate customers on what can be gained from implementing cloud technologies and services,” says James Coulston,

Director, Global Commercial Channel, Dell Emerging Markets. As distributors and resellers transition to the cloud strategy, it’s also slated to have an impact on the whole channel structure. “The classic IT channel in most countries around the world is a two-tiered model, with a distributor and a reseller. The channel landscape is going through an evolution, with the cloud gaining momentum and impetus across vendors with multiple product offerings. The cloud as a concept is a very customer-centric model that gives the customer a choice to host their data both on premise as well as in the cloud. This flexibility supports the existing channel, as this journey is a subtle transformation rather than an abrupt change. Some complications will surely arise concerning the way the channel delivery is evolving. However, these changes are leading to a win-win environment for the channel as well as the end-user,” says Simran Bagga, Gulf Distribution Manager, Microsoft. Peter D’Souza, Regional Product Manager, Logicom, offers a different perspective: “Cloud adoption is making a significant change in the way vendors, distributors and channel partners operate. Very few VADs in the region have captured

“Cloud adoption is making a significant change in the way vendors, distributors and channel partners operate. Very few VADs in the region have captured these transtions in advance, and they are capitalising on the ‘early bird’ advantage.” Peter D’Souza, Regional Product Manager, Logicom

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

these transitions in advance and they are capitalising on the ‘early bird’ advantage. Other distributors, selling point products, should definitely see revenue dropping in the future.” Meera Kaul, Managing Director, Optimus Technology & Telecommunications, echoes a similar opinion. She adds that the sales of on-premise hardware and software are bound to fall as solutions providers may now be forging relationships directly with cloud providers and vendors, and the need for channel fulfillment reduces. “However, this opens up huge opportunity for the existing channels to add value to the process through sales and services support or demand generation activities,” she says. As the battle for the cloud services market intensifies, it is imperative for distributors to develop new competencies in order to maximise the cloud opportunity. “Skill set availability in cloud reselling is going to be one of the immediate challenges with the availability of various applications that will need to interact with various systems, and this will take time to totally change. Hence, integration services of cloud and premise will gather momentum with product selling of simplifying of that process,” says Boby Joseph, CEO, StorIT Distribution. “Distributors will have to make some quick investments in resources which are not typical integrating resources or migrating resources. They will also need functional expertise in that area. In fact, a new business division has to be churned out from the existing one while the rest of the resource is in transition— including sales.” According to Shane Mahney, General Manager, EMT Distribution,

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feature

Cloud

this depends on what kind of cloud offering the distributor wants to supply. “But, generally speaking, VADs should do a business model restructuring to be able to offer and support cloud offerings. This can happen with more training, implementing cloud-enabled infrastructure as well as designing reasonable SLAs,” he says. Distributors looking to get into cloud and provide services will have to walk a tightrope and ensure that the cloud business doesn’t impact pricing and take a piece out of resellers’ margins. “Following a reseller-centric model rather than an end-user model, the distributors conventionally sell products and services through the resellers. The distribution partners should therefore facilitate, coach and work as trusted advisors for their resellers to help them build and transform business into the cloud,” says Bagga. Kaul from Optimus allays fears. “Distributors have always been in the business of aggregating product, logistics, pricing and product supply chain management. This is no different. The margin made by a distributor in these services is also a function of the same factors of products, services, the logistics of delivery and availability. Margins only gets impacted when there are inefficiencies in the supply chain to cater to the demand.”

“VADs should do a business model restructuring to be able to offer and support cloud offerings. This can happen with more training and implementing cloud-enabled infrastructures.” Shane Mahney, General Manager at EMT Distribution

Distributors should also pick the most lucrative option when it comes to cloud, depending on its size, and evaluate what their partners are looking for. Industry experts suggest the aggregation model is the most ideal one distributors. “Distributors will always have the channel, which the vendors will utilise to sell their services and products. However, the delivery and charge-back models may see a change. Most of this is too early to infer but it is a guarantee that it will disrupt certain operational functions of the organisation,” says Joseph. Coulston says there are multiple roles a distributor can play when it comes to offering cloud services— they can provide a ‘template’ to resellers on how to design cloud offerings for customers, or they can offer a hosted cloud environment for their resellers to sell on, either as a public cloud offering, or more likely in the short term, a small private cloud offering as a hosted service.

“Distributors will have to make some quick investments in resources which are not typical integrating resources or migrating resources. They will also need functional expertise in that area.” Mr. Boby Joseph, CEO of StorIT Distribution

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september 2013

With the cloud model, solutions providers have the option to work directly with suppliers, giving rise to fears that the traditional model might erode. But distributors shouldn’t worry just yet, says D’Souza: “In fact, at present, we see almost all of the larger vendors moving their direct partners to distribution and most vendors are changing their go-tomarket strategy to a distribution-lead model.” Joseph agrees: “In all cases, the traditional business model in sales and education will remain. However, the service delivery model will shift towards integrating and customising deliveries of various products and will grow substantially. Vendors will make products for the cloud service providers. Service providers may provide the platform or the raw cloud itself with various connectivity mechanisms (typically the telecom providers or big hosting providers). Distributors will bulk sell these products and the VARs or integrators will then integrate these products into the customer’s premises. VARs will mostly manage the customer relationship through the distributors.” As regional businesses become more confident in cloud offerings and those pushing it out into the market proliferating, it’s an option distributors can no longer ignore. It’s all about offering a point of difference and taking advantage of new opportunities in the market. //

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Interview

Aptec—an Ingram Micro company

Tips for tapping the cloud Pierre-Olivier Descoteaux, General Manager of Cloud Solutions, Aptec—an Ingram Micro Company, talks about cloud and the role that distributors can play in the technology. What we are trying to do now is to push this portfolio to bigger numbers. Right now, we have around six to seven vendors and, by the end of next year, we will have 20 to 25 with a healthy portfolio of 30 to 40 solutions. In the US, we have around 45 vendors in the cloud portfolio, accounting for around 150 solutions. Ingram is by far the market leader when it comes to cloud distribution. You can buy it from us today, we are adding more vendors and the strategy for MEA is to focus on existing vendors. There is a big gap between the US and the Middle East in terms of cloud market maturity and resellers need to understand the technology itself. We are focused on educating the market and support our reseller partners with training and building a healthy pipeline of leads.

Do you think distributors and resellers have a role to play in the cloud markets? There is a huge opportunity for traditional hardware and software distributors if they evolve, hire the right people and switch to a recurring stream of revenue model. What does Ingram offer in the cloud space? Ingram Micro is the first distributor in the world to have launched managed services and cloud computing six or seven years ago. We have 300 personnel dedicated to cloud within the company, including a Midde East team. Aptec, in particular, has been selling cloud solutions for the past two years with VMware, Microsoft and Symantec.

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september 2013

Pierre-Olivier Descoteaux, General Manager of Cloud Solutions, Aptec—an Ingram Micro company

What is your cloud strategy? Our cloud strategy is multi-pronged. We are looking to grow the business with existing vendors, and acquire new vendors who are either local or get the best of breed type vendors from across the world. The strength of Ingram Micro is that we can leverage what we have in the US and relationships we have with the likes of IBM, Citrix, Amazon, and make sure the Middle Eastern resellers have access to these world-class companies. Going forward, our strategy is to onboard all these vendors onto a market storefront, similar to iTunes, so our resellers from anywhere in the world have access to the whole portfolio. Our goal is to have to a portal for resellers with a single sign-on, where they have access to everything cloud, including the whole portfolio, educational and marketing materials

and price list. New resellers will also be quickly sign up and become an Ingram partner and get access to solutions that can be deployed within 24 to 48 hours. Is Ingram building its own cloud infrastructure? Though Ingram has three internal data centres, we are not looking to become a cloud service provider. However, when it makes sense, we will deploy solutions ourselves. For example, we have deployed Cisco HCS, hosted on our data centre. This is because we have a very tight partnership with Cisco, which accounts for 10 percent of our revenues. There is a growing fear that vendors are forging direct relationships with solution providers and we have seen that with the likes of Microsoft, Google and Salesforce. According to Gartner, last year 90 percent of cloud computing solutions were sold directly to SMBs. But, there is a problem with this. It’s fine when you have just one or two solutions. But when you start adding security, backup and IaaS, you have to deal with three or four types of control panels, different billing and it becomes cumbersome. If you go by what Gartner says, this year around 20 to 30 percent of that business will go through a broker. So resellers will have to evolve to grab those opportunities and distributors themselves as well. Last year, we organised a cloud summit to dispel fears that resellers might lose their relevance or credibility to the SMB market with the advent of the cloud. We are organising our global cloud summit again from 4 to 7 April, 2014, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the US, which is open to all our resellers across the world. //

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feature

SDN

The next

thing Software-defined networks are poised to replace legacy network infrastructures, with the promise of automating the entire network fabric. Should the channel prepare now for this emerging tech?

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

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Software defined networking (SDN) is a very hot topic in the networking industry today. SDN has the potential to make networks more flexible, reduce the time to provision the network, improve quality of service, reduce operational costs and make networks more secure. Vendors, both large and small, have made a range of SDN announcements, and have started recruiting channel allies to spur adoption. SDN is an emerging field and it’s important for channel partners to develop deep understanding of the technology and how it differs from traditional networking so they can be in a position to assist customers. “SDN is a powerful new network paradigm designed to address the shortcomings of traditional networking. It proposes to dis-aggregate traditional vertically integrated networking stacks to improve network feature velocity or customize network operation for specialised environments. This initiative has broad implications across the data, control, and management planes of the network,” says Khaled Kamel, Territory Channel Manager, MENA, Brocade Communications. SDN comprises multiple technologies that open the planes of the network, enabling them to participate in broader orchestration frameworks to solve cloud-related challenges. The OpenFlow protocol is one of the leading SDNenabling technologies and is gaining increased support from the world’s most demanding network operators. OpenFlow enables programmatic control of network infrastructures and rapid network service development and deployment. This allows SDN to centrally manage and monitor the network across not just routers and switches from a single vendor but across any networking hardware. “One of the critical challenges facing the industry today is the difficulty in orchestrating, managing, visualising, and taking inventory of multi-vendor networks. SDN, for the first time, brings

the network closer to the application. What happened to the computing world with data centre virtualisation is expected to happen in the networking world with SDN,” says Dharmendra Parmar, GM of Marketing, FVC. SDN is very much an early-adopter exercise at the moment and vendors expect cloud service providers and academic institutions to be the first adopters. “SDN adoption is currently slow, mainly because it is a disruptively new technology that will require organisations to overhaul their own operational models and network architectures. However, there are migration paths available that will give an immediate ROI along the way,” says Ahmed Youssef, MEA Business Development Manager for Enterprise Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent. A recent survey commissioned by Brocade in Europe and North America shows that one in five enterprises are using software-defined networks— though there are discrepancies in what respondents “had in mind” when they said they are using SDN technology. “Early adopters of SDN are currently investigating a wide range of applications and use cases. These include network virtualisation, largescale data centre infrastructure management, traffic engineering, and Wide Area Network (WAN) flow management,” says Kamel. “Do I believe SDN will see widespread adoption in the region? Yes! Traditional networks and data centres are being stretched to their limits as they were never designed for today’s astronomical growth in bandwidth-intensive applications— and the growing demand for speed, scalability, and resilience.” Industry experts say the channel will be a key conduit for SDN in the enterprise as adopters will seek the help of SDN advisors and implementers. “If you look at what the role of the channel is for a company such as Cisco, it’s obviously about creating scale for us to reach out and touch the customers. Obviously we do that through the

“SDN adoption is currently slow, mainly because it is a disruptively new technology that will require organisations to overhaul their own operational models and network architectures.” channel. When it comes to SDN, I don’t really see that role differing too greatly, if I’m honest. In regards to all technology transitions that have happened over the years—whether they be in data centre, networking space or compute space— there is absolutely a definitive role for the channel to play in that technology transition,” says Den Sullivan, Head of Architectures in Emerging Markets, Cisco UAE. Parmar agrees that channel support is important because it gives the end customer the peace of mind to have someone drive to their offices to resolve their problems: “Customers need to trust someone they can relate to. Having someone answer their calls from hundreds of miles away will not help. They need to show their issues to someone who is less than 30 minutes away. That is why FVC has signed up with Cyan to provide these solutions through its partners throughout Middle East and Africa.” Should the channel prepare now to support SDN? “Partners should be ready to embrace SDN since it presents them with a fantastic opportunity to increase their revenues and margins. Unlike technology manufacturers, channel partners do not manufacture the hardware boxes that will be displaced by SDN, rather they only sell them,” explains Kamel. With the shift to a software-defined model, partners can not only make better margins than on hardware, but it also costs them less in terms of inventory and so on. SDN will be a boon for the financial model of our partners, he sums up. //

september 2013

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SDN

What you need to know about SDN

Opinion

hosting or non-critical storage backup to cloud data centres, which are accessed over low -speed IP networks that statistically multiplex data as the network permits. Over the next few years, enterprise will leverage the cloud for distributed database access of increasing amounts of data and for both platform and infrastructure services. As the use of the cloud becomes more prominent, IT will need a more flexible and intelligent network to capitalise on the potential that the cloud represents. A cloud-ready network must be able to dynamically respond when IT needs to move large amounts of data, without bottlenecks, security holes or data loss. SDN makes this happen. SDNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shift to automation streamlines labour costs. SDN enables network automation, which significantly reduces provisioning times and configuration errors, as well as decreasing operations costs. Automating the network is essential towards virtualising the networkâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; expanding network capacity and efficiency while improving revenue potential and service innovation. SDN will help IT managers improve and simplify network operations and allow them to tailor their network to specific applications and IT requirements. According to a 2011 CIO Insight survey, automation could eliminate up to 25 percent of IT labour hours.

Mervyn Kelly, EMEA Marketing Director, Ciena, lists out the top 10 things to know about SDN. SDN is not just todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fad or buzzword. SDN is a new, dynamic network architecture that transforms traditional network backbones into more intelligent service-delivery platforms. IT leaders can use SDN as a tool to change the way they do business. For example, enterprises can foster closer relationships with their customers by offering greater online access to select data over the enterprise network. A financial services firm can give large corporate customers the opportunity for third-party reporting, governance, or even allow analytics firms to directly access enterprise credit card transactions, obviating the need for intermediate sites and cumbersome manual process steps that are needed to provide sufficient multi-level security. An SDN would create virtual network

SDN offers a way to build simpler and more customisable networks. In an SDN architecture, network intelligence is logically centralised to offer unprecedented control of forwarding behavior in the underlying network elements through open, programmatic interfaces. By maintaining a global view of network topology and configuration, granular, flow-based network control may be achieved that is abstracted from

partitions governed by stringent and limited access policies, and security to decrease unauthorised access. SDN enables the cloud and aids the large enterprise transitioning to IT-as-a-Service. Today, large enterprises typically use cloud services for email, application

september 2013

Reseller Middle East

Opinion

SDN

the hardware through OpenFlow. In addition, configuration changes may be made without directly accessing individual network elements, significantly streamlining operations. With the unprecedented programmability, automation, and network control that SDN offers, enterprises and service providers will be able to build highly scalable and flexible networks that readily adapt to changing business and end user needs. SDN paves the way for a more 5 flexible security architecture, lowering overall costs. Traditional approaches to network security are predicated upon providing physical protection for a static perimeter. SDN offers the potential to reshape the

compute and/or storage resources throughout the enterprise. An SDN architecture allows networks to be flattened, consolidated and automated, all of which help simplify operations. Capacity can be increased by simply adding (or upgrading) network elements. SDN helps to streamline network provisioning and configuration, which translates to faster deployment of services and applications. Infrastructure management is also facilitated through coordinated, in-service software upgrades as well patch and version management. The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is working aggressively to push Open (vs. proprietary) SDN. The ONF—a who’s who from the

“SDN leverages the flow-based paradigm, allowing for user-level policies to be enforced no matter where users physically access the network.” network security landscape by providing a more granular, and service-oriented means of managing increasing threats brought on by mobility and BYOD, and the rapid expansion of cloud and virtualisation services. SDN leverages the flow-based paradigm, allowing for user-level policies to be enforced no matter where users physically access the network. Suspicious flows can be rapidly redirected for further security processing, while these processing demands can be relaxed by alleviating the need for all flows in the network to be examined. SDN’s “centralised control” model enables network virtualisation. Network virtualisation involves dividing available bandwidth into multiple slices that can then interconnect virtualised

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

industry—are working to develop and standardize SDN architecture and best practices. OpenFlow is the first ONF SDN standard that provides an open interface between the Control and Data planes. By abstracting the software providing control from the hardware providing the forwarding, a common control layer can control multiple vendors’ equipment simultaneously, and concurrently with existing equipment running today’s Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols. New working groups and vendor solutions are emerging every day to tackle SDN. One of the newest working groups within ONF, the Optical Transport Working Group, is chartered with extending the benefits of SDN and OpenFlow to the optical network

domain. Another working group, the Migration working group, will produce methods to migrate from a traditional network, like a data center or a wide area network, to SDN. Primarily driven by end users, the Migration working group members are considering various deployment scenarios, obstacles to overcome, and requirements to realise the benefits of SDN while protecting the huge investment in the installed base. SDN enables change beyond the data centre. To date, the focus for SDN has arguably been in the data centre, motivated by rapid growth and adoption of cloud services. Over the past year, SDN has gained momentum in the WAN, with major carriers and customers alike actively evaluating the benefits and use cases for SDN throughout their networks. With applications like data centre interconnection, hybrid cloud (i.e. public to private cloud) networking, and Big Data applications spanning the globe, SDN enables an end-toend, highly flexible solution offering agility, differentiation, and overall cost reduction.

Software growth will be steady, not spikey. The SDN market is expected to surpass $35 billion in the next five years, far higher than previously reported, according to new research by Plexxi, SDNCentral and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Despite the shift to SDN, hardware will continue to play a significant role in the network infrastructure. It is estimated that by 2018, 46 percent of overall datacenter network spending will be on SDNenabled optical, switching and routing hardware while a slightly higher number—49 percent—will be spent on non-SDN-enabled data centre optical switching and routing. This is not surprising, and hardware and software will continue to co-exist in SDN. //

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cover story

Computerlinks

Linking together

Lee Reynolds, Managing Director for the Middle East and APAC, Computerlinks

With the security segment booming, it’s no wonder that Computerlinks has posted an impressive year-on-year growth of 20 percent for the past seven years. However, according to its Managing Director for the Middle East and APAC, Lee Reynolds, Computerlinks’ success has got much more to do with its qualitative, personal approach to distribution. How many partners do you meet every month? I typically try to see two or three partners every week. The two largest markets in this part of the world are the UAE and Saudi. The UAE has slowed down in the last few years, but it’s starting to really

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

come up again with Abu Dhabi and everything. But Saudi is still the main focus of the business. Very occasionally, I go to Saudi but often the Saudis like to come here— usually for long weekends. I entertain a lot of partners in lunch or dinner scenarios. I know all their first names, I

know their children’s names, so that’s how close we are to the business. I’m not an ivory tower kind of guy—I’m on the ground. My office door is open all of the time for whatever issue. This morning, we were talking about F5 and two partners in Saudi, and how to incentivise. I’m still doing it, and I’m still at that level.

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Computerlinks

It’s really important to me that we keep our feet on the ground, and really know our customers. We are an international company, but we’re really local and we know our partners. That’s the most important thing. Do you do a lot of talking to end users on behalf of your partners? All of the time. In this world today, usually you talk to a partner that has half the story, you talk to the end user that has half the story, and then you have to stitch it together. If you don’t stitch this together then you won’t get the true story and the product won’t be delivered and supported the way it should be. Are the problems of shrinking margins and credit risk still affecting the channel? You have certain different distributors. You can’t really put a blanket over everybody and talk about the risks. There’s a lot of risk in CPUs and hard disks—that’s inevitable. But is there risk in security, especially when you’re in an operation with support, an ATC centre and training? Not really. So you see security as good business to be involved in? It’s very good. We keep the customers close, and the partners even closer. We know our customers. We don’t have 10,000 resellers. We may have close to 150 partners. We have a lot of SMB players that go into the thousands, but if they’re in the enterprise space, then we really get to know them. So you’re not trying to sign up as many partners as possible? How can you go and see 2,000 partners? It’s impossible. All of our guys are always targeted at the amount of people that they touch— each week, each month. I get reports on how many partners they’ve seen, and where the deals are. There’s a lot of pressure in the box-moving space on revenues

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

because there are a lot of competitors. You’ve got Dell, HP, IBM, whoever, and they’re all in the same space. And you’ve got 12 distributors all battling for the same end-user customers. It’s going to be a lot more competitive than our market. We do less deals but the deals are more sizeable and there’s more value to be offered. Would you say that your approach to distribution is qualitative rather than quantitative? Absolutely—1,000 percent. One issue that we have sometimes is with those SMB players going into the enterprise space and trusting us with their customers. A lot of enterprise players understand our position—where we are and how we do it—and they’re sharing with us those customers because we work with them to get the job done at the end of the deal. Sometimes, these small players won’t give up their customer name, and that’s because they’re selling what the customer is asking for. In the cycle of technology to customer, you’ll go to a customer now and they’ve already 50 percent made their mind up about what they want. But the necessity in security, where we are, really is a necessity. There’s an importance around that necessity. It’s a case of which vendor they actually go for, so that’s the battle. The battleground is not the technology area; it’s actually the vendors. And we take the fight to the end-user. How have you seen the distribution landscape change over the past few years? To be honest, the UAE was slowing down dramatically after all the government de-centralisation happened. Now they have the right to purchase individually, not centrally. It all kind of started at the point of the property crash. But has it slowed down IT, and has it slowed down security? Absolutely not. We’ve grown 20 percent year-on-year for the last seven years.

Is that an indication of how strong the security market is? I think it shows the importance of security in the overall strategy of an enterprise or a small to medium-sized business. But it also shows the value that we can offer to our customers. And the brands that we do around this are all the best in the market—they’re best of breed. What about new brands and products? I do like to play with up-and-coming products. There’s more margin in new products, but more interestingly, I need to feed my partners with new technologies. Over an amount of time, they’ve given us the carte blanche to introduce new technology areas to them, so it’s my job to make sure I bring the right technologies into our partner network. And it only takes a few products for them to understand that it makes sense and it’s the right one. It’s things like Skybox and Gigamon—these technology areas are really important and they’re interesting. You’ve got to fuel your partner network. And that’s another value that we’re offering to our partners. A lot of distributors are talking about making inroads into Africa. How do you see that market? There’s always a lot of talk. I use an analogy that it’s like blowing a balloon up with air but it’s not actually going up. There is business there, like in any region, but it’s certainly divided. We deal with North Africa—Morocco, Algeria and Egypt—from here. In South Africa, it’s okay—it’s an area that grows at maybe five or 10 percent a year, but it’s not like we need to open an office there. What’s your growth outlook for the next year? I’d like to exceed more than 30 percent this year, to be honest. With the things we have coming along, I think we’ll be very happy. //

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opinion

Condo Protego

Partn ers fo r

life?

Hooking up with your technology soulmate should not be an opportunistic affair, says Condo Protego CEO Andrew Calthorpe. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes delivers a memorable speech about the nature of love and why people feel “whole” when they have found their true partner. To cut a long(ish) story short, Aristophanes spoke of how in primal times people had doubled, spherical bodies with faces and limbs turned away from one another. Happy as can be, they rolled around with much hilarity. Yet they were extremely powerful and Zeus, fearing an uprising of sorts but not wanting to deprive himself of their devotions, crippled them by cleaving their bodies in two. Apollo was then enlisted to turn their faces around, pull their skin tight and stich it up from the navel as an eternal reminder to not get any overly lofty ideas. Ever since, people have wandered around saying they are looking for their other half. When they find it, they never want to be separated. It’s a nice story and one that is at least tenuously evocative of the tricky rigmarole of choosing a technology partner. Unfortunately, the notion of an ideal, mutually satisfactory partnership of this nature is often as Greek to the local IT industry as one of Plato’s yarns. The main problem is a lack of strategic thinking. Teaming up with a vendor is all too often an opportunistic affair—usually driven

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

by a knee-jerk reaction to the prices on offer—and the subsequent results almost inevitably suffer. Opting for the flavour of the month and chopping and changing at a whim, all has the potential to seriously hamstring business goals. And that really is the key here. Technology partnerships should be exhaustively structured and entirely goal-oriented. A solution that works is not just tangible nuts and bolts. It is consultation-driven, it is tactical decisions and it is people powered. A workable long-term solution is always derived from a reference architecture that considers all variables of software and hardware interaction. Lobbing a cutting-edge piece of kit at the problem without understanding its shifting nuances is asking for trouble. Project implementation is invariably complex and cannot truly succeed without the right team in the right place, at the right time, to deliver exactly what is needed. VARs have a big responsibility here to make all the connections from the outset and maintain them with rigorous after-care and continual strategic updates. The more projects are delivered right in the region, the more it becomes the desired norm to everyone’s benefit. It should be an immediate red flag if you are thinking of ditching a technology

Andrew Calthrope, CEO, Condo Protego

partner within two years. A relationship should be stable and scalable to enable fine-tuning to suit business requirements. Disruption should be kept to an absolute minimum. When businesses find their technological “other half”, it will make them more confident, more flexible and more inspired to unlock new avenues of innovation. Issues from security to storage and beyond are no longer niggling, nagging problems but opportunities to run better. As in life, ask all the right questions before you commit to a relationship. Go in with your eyes open, and be honest about what you want out of the union. Don’t accept any compromises or lack of substance, or you risk messy break ups and ending back at square one. //

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Partner watch

Lucky Star Computers

The power of differentiation Forging long-term relationships with customers and partners, Lucky Star Computers is continuing to thrive even in turbulent market conditions.

The rapid evolution in the ICT industry is forcing resellers to rethink their roles and functions. In this new age, resellers have to evolve and differentiate to stay in the business in a diversifying market. The bottom line to this evolution is to become trust advisers and technology consultants to their customers. A case in point is the Dubai-based Lucky Star Computers, which has grown into an Dh62 million company from its humble origins. The company was founded in 1998 by K.U. Shankari, who moved to Dubai in the early 1990s after a brief stint at an Epson Manufacturing unit in India. Today, Lucky Star boasts of four outlets in Dubai’s busy Computer Plaza along with two showrooms in the IT city of Bangalore, India. It represents almost all major PC brands and workstations from HP, and registers 10-13 percent

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

K.U. Shankari, Founder, Lucky Star Computers

year on year growth in business, even in these tough times. The plummeting hardware margins coupled with credit crunch has eaten into the bottom line of many resellers in the market. However, Shankari says the biggest challenge for her has been the support from vendor community. “The vendors are focused on power retail and they tend to neglect traditional resellers. They can create bundled offers and help us with marketing promotions and branding activities.” She says resellers such as Lucky Star have an edge over the power retailers on the basis of personalized services. “If you look at power retail, the people on the floor promoting products are not their staff. Meanwhile, we have invested heavily in our staff and training to offer that personal touch. For example, I have six engineers in the company, out of which four are in sales. The professionals will always come to us.” While the ongoing slump in the

PC market has made the going tough for many, Shankari says the local consumption is still healthy. “Yes gone are those days when we used to move 4000 laptops in a month. But the demand from the commercial sector is very healthy and the margins are still healthy. The decline in PC market has had an impact on those who are focused on the consumer sector but 60 percent of my business comes from the SMB sector and 20 from the commercial, which helped me insulate from the volatile market.” The plans going forward? Having tasted success in the mobility business in India, Shankari is now looking out for opportunities to get into the mobility business, possibly by acquiring companies. “We believe in consistent and organic growth, and providing trustworthy and personalized services to our customers, partners and vendors.” It’s a model many new-age resellers can indeed emulate to stay afloat. //

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partner watch

Tech Mahindra

GB Kumar, Vice President and Geo Head for the MEA and Turkey, Tech Mahindra

The $5bn plan With the much-delayed amalgamation of Indian systems integrators Tech Mahindra and Satyam Mahindra finally formalised, the merged entity has now set its sights on becoming a $5 billion company by 2015. To help achieve that target, the head of its MEA and Turkey business has set out his strategy to double Middle East revenue.

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

When Ramalinga Raju, the former Chairman of Satyam Computer Services, revealed in January 2009 that he had manipulated his company’s accounts by $1.47 billion, it shocked the corporate world. It was the biggest corporate fraud in India’s history. Had you predicted that the company would go on to be part of a $5 billion company by 2015, you would have been branded as crazy as Mr Raju himself. But such is business. Three months after the revelation, Satyam was acquired by Tech Mahindra, another systems integrator of similar size to Satyam. It wasn’t to be quite as easy as that, however. Tax and legal issues led to much toing and froing in the India courts, before the merger was approved and announced by the board of the companies in March 2012. It would then be another 14 months before they were legally merged. Both companies how have cause for much cheer. The merged entity forge a quite a formidable force in

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partner watch

Tech Mahindra

technology services, with revenue of $2.7 billion and a team of 84,000 professionals across 46 countries. What’s more, the company has now set its sights on a target of achieving revenue of $5 billion by 2015. Over in the Middle East, Africa and Turkey region, GB Kumar has been tasked with helping this region play a part in that target. To date, ongoing projects in the region are worth in excess $150 million, which Kumar aims to double in the next two years. “I think it’s an exciting goal,” Kumar says. “In a nutshell, the objective for the Middle East is to double our revenues in the next two years from where we are now. “Right now, we collectively support close to 1,000 engineers in terms of actual projects, between onsite and offshore for the Middle East, and the typical way we work is 60% offshore and 40% onsite in this region.” To achieve that growth, Kumar is looking at the inorganic and transformational initiatives which will allow the company to move faster than the market. Among the keys to that is the market Tech Mahindra is targeting. “On the enterprise side, we have typically played in deals which are less than $5 million in terms of size,” he says. “The way I see it, there is an invisible glass ceiling.” Last year, Kumar and his team scored some big managed services wins with Majid Al Futtaim Properties, Mubadala and Aspire, which did break through that ceiling. He believes deals like these are integral to achieving the ambitious targets, and speaks of his “frustration” with Mahindra’s position in the market. “My frustration has been that we play in less than $10 million ticket size deals, but 90% of the share of the wallet in this region go into greater than $10 million deals, so I’m not even present. “I’m trying to play in 10% of the market and trying to gain market share. First of all, I need to break through that part of the barrier. Then the playing field is much bigger than where we are sitting today. I think that time is now.”

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

However, with the amalgamation now formalised, Kumar believes Mahindra can now target a much bigger market. “The advantage I have with the merger of the two companies,” he says, “is there is no stigma attached to the name anymore. The size of the company justifies customers to invite us to the bigger parties.” On top of this, Kumar is keen to expand Mahindra into the large markets of Turkey and Saudi through partnerships, joint ventures and acquisitions. Match made in heaven But new geographies and larger project sizes are not the only areas where Tech Mahindra is looking to expand. Indeed, the acquisition of Satyam was motivated by the very different markets each company played in. Whilst Tech Mahindra made its name as a successful telecom services company, seeing growth through big customers like BT (British Telecom) and AT&T, Satyam excelled in the enterprise space. “There was an opportunity for Tech Mahindra to really proliferate to the enterprise side, which was not its core competency,” Kumar says. “That is where the Satyam acquisition came into play; Tech Mahindra comes from the telecom depth of experience, and Satyam has always been known for its expertise from the enterprise perspective.” With that in mind, Kumar sees the amalgamation as a “beautiful complement of skill sets” in terms of creating a holistic organisation which can offer solutions to organisations no matter what their vertical. He adds that a further benefit which not was before realised is the evolution of the cloud. “Three years ago, we were not thinking that cloud technologies, bring your own device, and mobility would become so big,” he says. “So the merger has actually given rise to a very unique differentiator with customers when they’re talking these new technologies. “That is the unique intersection synergy that we have seen, which is really helping us in terms of driving the business to the next level.”

And whilst legal issues got in the way of the acquisition running smoothly, Kumar says internally the merger was very successful because of the differing skill sets. “Typically, a merger tends to be very painful between two large organisations when there is so much overlap that it’s chaos,” he says. “But here, whilst there were some overlaps relating to some administrative issues — like why would you have three admin supporting one region — when it came to technology competencies it was very clear that I they could leverage off each other.” The transition was helped, he adds, by the largely contrasting cultures and work philosophies of the companies. “The culture of Tech Mahindra was aggressive, results orientated and constructive confrontation,” he says. “The Satyam culture was very technically orientated, polite and relationship focused in the way they approached customers and built the business. “In my opinion, the way these two cultures complemented each other was unprecedented.” Keen to put a positive spin on the merger delays faced by the courts, Kumar refers to this as a “blessing in disguise”. “Those years actually gave us a very good runway for the organisations to work out of the same office and understand each other from a cultural perspective,” he says. “So when the whole thing was officialised in July, nothing really changed. “Tech Mahindra folks are sitting here, Satyam folks are sitting here — it’s the same office, and I was leading the entire region as a merged entity whilst the court cases were still going on. “So from a work and business-asusual perspective, the integration had already taken place. For us, the official amalgamation was more of an event that happened and didn’t have any material implementation.” So the stage is set, and this time the spotlight is bright for a different reason. Not global shock or embarrassment, but excitement amongst a rapidly growing company. //

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PARTNER WATCH

Tejuri

A lesson in logistics Billing itself as the Middle East’s first online mall, Tejuri. com offers a fully managed service to retailers looking for an online presence. And perhaps most impressively, it takes a simple, common-sense approach to getting products from retailer to customer.

When Tejuri.com launched earlier this year, it wasn’t entirely clear how its business model would work, or why retailers should use it to get onto the e-commerce scene. However, with the online “mall” now playing host to over 150 online “shops”, it’s clear that Tejuri must be on to something. It’s actually little wonder that the concept is beginning to take off. The website was built on the success of Tejari.com, a B2B e-commerce site that was launched in 2000. Using many of the same ideas, the people behind Tejuri thought it time that the B2C retail market began taking advantage of the region’s e-commerce potential. Unfortunately, this isn’t a completely straightforward task, as Ayaz Maqbool, Managing Director, Tejuri, explains. “When someone wants to buy a shirt or a pair of jeans, they actually just go to the store. We wear it, we touch and feel, and then we buy it. But in the online space, you’ve got to

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

have the equivalent of that from very enriched content, excellent images of the product, and a multi-angular view, so you get to know the fit and the form of the product,” he explains. “And we realised that none of the retailers are actually geared up to have all of that operational capability in place. Today, they sell jeans from a shop on a hanger. There’s never been a need to do photographs. They’ve never needed to write rich content because you go to a store, you look at the price tag, and you decide if you want it.” To get retailers on board, then, Tejuri set about helping them with building strong online content. Indeed, according to Maqbool, the company set up every single piece of the infrastructure, from building rich online content, through allowing online credit card payments, to taking care of everything to do with shipping and logistics. Tejuri had suddenly become a fully managed service for retailers looking to get into the e-commerce market. In terms of the logistics side, the solution is beautiful in its simplicity.

Retailers pay the website “rent” for “floor space”, just like in any normal mall, and also share a small chunk of the profits with the site. Aside from that, there is no added expense to being with Tejuri, and everything else is taken care of. So, at the moment an order is placed on the site, the shop the user bought it from is notified through the back-office system called Merchant Centre, which Tejuri provides to all of its retailers. The retailer tags the product, sets a box aside, and then waits for a delivery company to come and pick it up. Either one of the two delivery companies that Tejuri uses is paid for by Tejuri as part of the managed e-commerce service. And according to Maqbool, choosing the right one was hugely important in creating the site. “The shipping companies we selected very carefully. You know, the biggest drawback in the Middle East is that we don’t have a very advanced address management system. Dubai, as usual, has taken the lead in coming up with the names of streets, tagging

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Ayaz Maqbool, Managing Director, Tejuri

Of course, with online shopping, customers returning items comes with the territory, but Tejuri has this covered, too. For one thing, every item that is shipped is underwritten by an insurance provider. This means that, in the event of breakages during delivery, the consumer – and retailer – is covered. Meanwhile, Tejuri also handles returns on behalf of the retailers. For a retailer, this might seem like a lot in return for a simple monthly fee, but the website is anticipating plenty of success. And with such support so readily and easily available, there isn’t a retailer in the region that has an excuse to avoid e-commerce. //

the districts and zones. We said that we needed to build the shipping logistics infrastructure in a way that our partners fully understand. Every street is fully mapped – all the addresses are wellknown,” he says. “We went and selected two shipping companies who were actually spun out from the region. They were very familiar with the streets and districts of the UAE, as well as the Kingdom of Suadi Arabia. The two agencies are Aramex and Sky Net, who we partnered with, and they’re both providing a choice to the consumer. If you’d like to choose one over the other, you have that facility. We’re not only giving one option.”

Tejuri

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VENDOR FOCUS

Cyberoam

Out of the box UTM appliances vendor Cyberoam Technologies is keeping pace with the changes in the security industry. Surender Bishnoi, GM, Middle East, Cyberoam, tells us why he is upbeat about the business opportunities in the region.

why we have come out with our nextgeneration series of UTM appliances. Even the smallest device in this portfolio has 2 to 4Gb throughput, moving up to 40Gb. We are using multi-core parallel processing technology, offering faster performance to even SoHo/SMB customers. Our NG series appliances come pre-loaded with CyberoamOS, our most powerful firmware to date and integrates tightly with hardware for network and crypto acceleration to deliver high performance. Can you tell us a bit about your regional operations? We have been in the Middle East since 2007, and growing year on year. We have in-country penetration in the whole of Middle East and Africa, with offices in Dubai and UAE. Within Cyberoam, we have a separate SBU called NetGenie, which is focused more on retail business. What is driving the changes in the UTM market? The UTM market is in the middle of transition, driven by connectivity and bandwidth. The network infrastructure is gigabit now and corporates have high speed internet connections. However, the security devices in your network do not have that kind of throughput or gigabit ports required to support these speeds. Now the focus is removing that bottleneck and give performance that catch match these networks. Which is

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

Surender Bishnoi, GM, Middle East, Cyberoam

UTM has been a SMB darling. Are you finding acceptance among enterprises? Previously, there have been concerns about performance, scalability and single point of failure. We have addressed all these concerns and there has been a huge growth in the enterprise business. We have ISPs in our client roster and educational institutions with more than 2000 users. The advantage of UTM for the enterprise is that you get performance and the cost of operation is very low. Do you see enterprises budgeting separately for security now? Even consumers are taking security seriously these days. The security perimeters dissolving fast and data protection is now more important than ever. The industry sectors such as construction, which historically shied away from network security now investing heavily in it.

What is your go-to-market strategy? We are a 100-percent channel-driven company globally. We believe in a layered approach and we don’t sell directly. We prefer an in-country distribution model as it gives us more control, ease of operation and visibility. We have Bulwark Technologies covering the GCC, Sariya in Saudi and Seven Gate in Jordan. Is UTM getting commoditized? Are there still healthy margins for partners? We ensure that there is no cut-throat competition within our channel ecosystem, and we manage the leads and deal registrations. We ensure that there are double digit margins for our partners. Do you have a dedicated channel organisaton? Yes we do have channel managers, presales managers who directly interact with the technical respirces of partners and BDMs who deal with the sales resources. We have three different levels of partnership—authorised, gold and platinum—and certification is a prerequisite to become a partner. Are you looking at the next-gen firewall market opportunities? It is more of a marketing buzzword, rather than being a different technology. For us, next-gen is all about throughputs and meeting the performance requirements. Our core domain is UTM, which is our focus from day one. //

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Office No. 607, The Atrium Centre, Khalid Bin Walid Road Bur Dubai, PO Box 17266, Dubai, UAE Tel : +971 4 373 4600 | Fax : +971 4 355 6336 www.redingtonmea.com

INTERVIEW

StorIT

Moving upstream Suren Vedantham, Group Managing Director, StorIT Distribution, talks about what it takes be a VAD in the true sense of the word.

How do you define yourself as a value-added distributor? Our business is based on a service delivery model, which can offer our resellers a partner in us, who can reinforce and enhance their business development competency by supporting, and if required guiding, them in their endeavour to sustain their growth and climb up the value chain. Without compromising the high standards of traditional distribution facilities, StorIT offers comprehensive support services to its channel partners in almost every aspect of business right from product training and solutions design & architecture through consultancy, sales, post sales, marketing, and even business finance facilitation. As for our vendor partners, we act as their extended sales arm who not only shares their vision for the region but also provides them with a broad reseller channel network which can introduce their technology to the market at the shortest time span and help them achieve their growth objectives. Our superior domain expertise, in-depth market knowledge, over a decade long regional experience, and a team of highly qualified & certified technical/sales professionals aids our vendor partners

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in building a qualified channel partners who can successfully market, sell and support their products. In a nutshell, StorIT brings the expertise to reinforce the competitive edge of its reseller and vendor partners. Out of the three categories - pre-sales, support in sale, post-sales - which is seen as the most sought after and the most critical in today’s business model? For StorIT, compromising on any one of these aspects is NOT an option. While pre-sales and sales-support helps us win business, post-sales helps us sustain our success rate. Does a distributor have to offer value addition in today’s market to be competitive? If so, why is this? The very premise of StorIT’s business, since inception 12 years ago, was based on the idea of providing our resellers and vendors with the choice of having a partner who shares their vision, carries high-calibre domain expertise, and acts as a catalyst in consistently succeeding in the regional market over the longer-term, rather than just providing conventional distribution and logistical support services. Going beyond the ordinary is a choice that is upto each organization to make.

Suren Vedantham, Group Managing Director, StorIT Distribution

Are VADs now having to align with vendor business models more? We act as an extension of our vendors in the region and hence it is important for us to align with the vendors’ business models. We try to identify and invest in areas, which could compliment vendors’ commitment to the region while adding to the strength of reseller channel partners. What are the major market challenges currently facing VADs? The rapidly changing industry landscape and the fast evolving technological developments may seem to throw new challenges but they can be a source of new opportunities if we can develop the agility to adapt. //

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the

To see a product demonstration and learn more about Fidelis XPS, please contact Spectrami

INTERVIEW

Westcon Group

Dean Douglas, President and CEO, Westcon Group

Charting a different course Dean Douglas, President and CEO of Westcon Group, was in Dubai recently and spoke to Reseller Middle East about a range of topics, and his company’s plans for the region.

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september 2013

What brings you to town? I am here for two things. Number one is to meet our customers and the companies we represent in the region to talk to them about how the business is going and to make sure that we are properly aligned. We ensure that they understand what our strategy is and that they’re comfortable with the investments we’re making as we go forward. So the other piece of it is that we are getting together as a team across the entire region to talk about our business and how we plan to

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INTERVIEW

Westcon Group

address the market opportunities over the next 12 months. What kind of opportunities do you see in the region? I see there are a lot of opportunities in the region for us to grow. Our business has transitioned over the last few years from a company that was primarily North America based—in fact, just a few years ago, we derived 80 percent of our profits from North America. But today if you look at our business, we get about a third of our revenues and profits from the emerging markets and obviously the Middle East and Africa fall into that category of emerging markets. Overall two-third of our business is from outside North America and pretty evenly balanced with our profits as well. So we don’t think ourselves as a US company anymore, we think ourselves as being international. Is the Middle East is a strategic market for Westcon? The Middle East is an absolutely strategic market. It is very, very significant for us. If you think about it, just the Middle East is 5 percent of the global GDP, and when you add Africa to that, it becomes a very nice market. We’ve been here for a while and we’re not a brand new player. We know the market place. We know the resellers and systems integrators here. Is adding value the name of the game? The industry has gone through two

major transitions over the last decade. If you looked at the industry 10 years ago, it was really about driving values through logistics capabilities and credit. In the early part of 2000s, because of what was going on in the market place, the market sort of bifurcated into broadline and value-added distribution, which was focused on driving value beyond just those elements. What we are seeing today is a totally different transition, which is really about integrated offerings, either from a software-hardware side or integrated in terms of aggregated cloud offerings, and most importantly the integration that occurs between private and public cloud infrastructure. This hybrid model is really where the market is going to go. So when you think about cloud and how enterprises are making decisions, it is consistent across the world. It used to be that enterprises allowed each business units to operate independently and develop their own infrastructure. But because the requirement of securing and managing the networks and devices on it has created such complexity enterprise are looking for consistent play across the globe. And that’s such the private cloud infrastructure and it becomes even more important when you start to talk about the public cloud. So we saw that trend five years ago and embarked upon a pretty aggressive move to drive in our business a true global presence. Because we think that global presence is essential for

“The Middle East is an absolutely strategic market. It is very, very significant for us. If you think about it, just the Middle East is 5 percent of the Global GDP, and when you add Africa to that, it becomes a very nice market. We’ve been here for a while and we’re not a brand new player. We know the market place.” 58

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the enterprises, resellers, SIs and vendors we are representing. They want consistency in the way we go to market, the way we market ourselves and their products, and consistency in the ability to deliver the product in a way that the enterprise can trust that our products are going to look the same, feel the same, react the same no matter where is the place. We’ve done deployments in as many as 170 different countries for a single entity. The cloud vendors look for the exact same thing because that’s a business which has opportunities for very big gross margins, just like the software business which has very strong gross margins; the last thing they want to do is to build up teams of people to take these products to market geographically based, because that erodes significantly the value of that gross margin. And we think using the channel community as the vehicle gives them with the best opportunity to take their products beyond their home geographies across the globe. Frankly for cloud offerings, we want to take it across the globe. It’s a natural opportunity now. Do you have a play in the cloud services market? As a distributor, we are not going to host the cloud services; that’s for the resellers and systems integrators. The issue with cloud service is that is a point solution. So if you want to get a security service then you go to one player or maybe couple of players. Or you want infrastructure you go to different set of players, and if you want applications to run on the infrastructure, then you go to different players. An enterprise, whether it’s SMB or a large enterprise, can end up dealing with a great number of different companies. So what distribution can do and what we are doing is creating an aggregation platform, bringing together all these offerings in a single pane of glass. //

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Sony Xperia Z Ultra Sony has brought out the big guns with its Xperia Z Ultra. But given the device’s 6.4inch display, is it simply too big for everyday use?

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is like a big, dumb dog – it’s great to play around with, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to live with it every day. An extension to Sony Mobile’s flagship line, the Z Ultra is essentially a standard Xperia Z with a couple of extra features and a gargantuan 6.4-inch, Full-HD display. Indeed, Sony claims that the phone features the world’s largest Full HD smartphone display, and that’s an important point. Sony isn’t selling this device as a small tablet that can make calls—the Z Ultra is just a really, really big phone. We hate the word “phablet” but if you were going to assign it to anything, this would be it. The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 appears puny in comparison. But then again, this phone’s natural rival would be the Galaxy Mega 6.3, so we’ll use that as a benchmark. The display On the face of it, the TFT display is hugely impressive. It was developed by Sony’s Bravia TV engineers, and features what the brand

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september 2013

calls a Triluminos Display, which Sony says delivers a wider colour gamut and a wider sense of depth. Compared to your average LCD screen, it looks fantastic, with rich reds, blues and greens set against dark blacks. The display is also surprisingly sharp, given how large it is. Sony claims 342 pixels per inch—which is way better than the Galaxy Mega’s 233 ppi. Indeed, the Galaxy Mega doesn’t even offer Full HD. There’s no denying that the Z Ultra makes content look brilliant. In fact, you don’t even have to be watching HD content to appreciate this brilliance. Sony claims that its new X-Reality engine can process and upscale process low-resolution Web videos so that they appear much cleaner on the screen. In real life, the improvements are noticeable, and it means you don’t have to stream HD content all the time. Usability It might be great having a big screen to watch HD videos on, but you have to sacrifice an awful lot for the privilege. For one thing, in the

hot, humid months of summer, it’s all too easy to get a lot of condensation on the screen. Okay, you can live with that. But what becomes really frustrating to live with is the cumbersome nature of the phone in general. The display itself might be 6.4 inches, but from top to bottom, the phone measures 179 millimetres. It’s also 92 milliemetres wide, making it difficult to hold even with two hands. You can forget about typing out messages quickly, because it’s all too easy for your grip to slip, causing you to press keys unintentionally. You can also forget about fitting the device into your trouser pocket—only the baggiest trousers will house this phone. The size issues we have with the Z Ultra aren’t limited to this device, however. The Galaxy Mega 6.3 suffers from the same problems, so perhaps we’re just not people who wants a really big phone. What’s more, if the focus of the Z Ultra is entertainment—viewing content on such a large screen—then we would have thought more heed be paid to the on-board speakers.

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A service-centric design for datacentre infrastructure

Ahmed Youssef, Business Development Manager: Network Infrastructure, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise MEA

or as long as data networks have been supporting organisations, IT has been driving the decision-making in the business. But over the past few years, there’s been a fundamental shift, with the demands of users and consumers fuelling a change from an infrastructure-centric to a service-centric model. This is due to the rise of mobility and the increasing adoption of bring your own device (BYOD) policies. According to Ahmed Youssef, Business Development manager for Network Infrastructure, ME and Africa at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, this has significantly changed the approach to network development. He says this new paradigm where the users effectively call the shots means mere power and speed are no longer enough.

“Throwing additional bandwidth at the problem will not make it go away. What is now required is intelligence in the network. Today, networks need to be designed in a way that makes them capable of effectively handling mobility. People want freedom of movement and of the device, but this creates security headaches for IT. So your datacentre needs to be context-aware – it must be able to answer the ‘who, what, why, where and when’ conundrum,” he says.

enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com

“Because there are multiple factors to take into account, including device, point of access, what applications are running, etc., the network today needs to be intelligent. Alcatel-Lucent focusses on crafting the appropriate design to enable this. We create context awareness via what we refer to as the application-fluent network, which takes into account factors such as the user, the device and the application, thereby providing a more appropriate user experience.”

Streamlined and self-healing Youssef says Alcatel-Lucent has developed a network that is more streamlined and is selfhealing. This means it’s far less susceptible to failure and its reliability means administrators need not be as hands-on as they have to be with older technologies. “Our goal is to be able to handle the convergence of connecting everything via one network, which is why our networks are streamlined and efficient. For example, instead of utilising multiple layers of physical switches, we’re collapsing this down to single layer. This reduces complexity and capital expenditure. “Furthermore, Alcatel-Lucent has always had a reputation for being green, so our switches are extremely energy-efficient. And since a single layer of switches requires far less rack space, we’re also playing our part in reducing the energy consumption and the heating and cooling costs of the datacentre.”

automated, self-healing network that reduces the need for management and administration. This, in turn, means that manpower traditionally used for this can be redeployed within the business, improving its efficiency. Asked about the future of the datacentre, Youssef says that for the foreseeable future, the foundation of a successful operation will be built on switch performance, design of the network and its intelligence. “The other crucial factor is to ensure the design is based on open standards; going the proprietary route will likely lead to vendor lock-in. I believe this revolution in datacentre design is all about supporting new demands and tackling new challenges. To do so effectively, the customer must be flexible enough to change with market demands. “By ensuring your platform is interoperable, you’re able to shift as the market shifts, without having to rip and replace your entire infrastructure. The key to staying ahead of the pack is to be able to adapt and change swiftly as new technologies or ideas come along. To successfully pull this off, you need an infrastructure that’s intelligent, self-healing and flexible,” he concludes.

However, the biggest value proposition the company’s next generation networks offer, he believes, is in the total cost of ownership. This is achieved by reducing both capex – through the reduction in the number of switch layers – and opex. This is done not only by reducing the costs of heating and cooling, but also by having a fully

september 2013

www.fvc.com 61 Reseller Middle East

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On full volume, they’re nowhere near loud enough. In credit to Sony, though, the stock earphones are very good—much better than what some manufacturers will give you. Despite our complaints, however, the Z Ultra as a whole isn’t entirely horrible to use. The 2.2 GHz Qualcomm quad-core processor runs like a dream. And because you get 2 GB of RAM, you can have a dozen apps open and the device won’t even flinch. This, coupled with that large screen, makes gaming great fun. And the Galaxy Mega certainly can’t match the experience. Productivity Given the Z Ultra was built with entertainment in mind, it comes as no surprise that it’s not the most productive device out there. That said, we wouldn’t have minded a little more than what the phone provides. The email client, for example, is extremely difficult to set up, and isn’t great once you’ve got there—buttons aren’t where you’d expect to find them, and attachments aren’t all that easy to access. We found another gripe with the phone’s Notes application. There’s no separate voice note app, but you can take voice recordings in here. Unfortunately, the audio file doesn’t show up when you’re browsing through the device’s folders on your computer. Your only option is to export the note to Evernote, which is itself a big faff. You’re better off just using Evernote from the beginning, making the Notes app completely pointless.

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Review

september 2013

That said, the so-called STAMINA mode is great if you want to go for long periods without charging. Of course the nonremovable 3,050 mAh battery helps, but the way this phone can manage its power is really something. You can set which apps are able to access either Wi-Fi or cellular data when the device is in sleep mode, meaning you’re only using the bare essentials. The quality We’ve always associated Sony’s smartphones with iPhone levels of quality, but we’re not sure that’s true anymore. There’s no metal on the outside, and the physical buttons on the side don’t feel quite meaty enough. The flipside of that, of course, is that the Z Ultra is water-proof and shock-proof. You can chuck the device across the room and it won’t blink an eye, and accidental spillages are literally like water off a duck’s back. Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. For whatever reason, the device lost its ability to vibrate during our third day of use, and because the speakers aren’t all that good, that meant we were consistently missing calls. Maybe our test device was a little dodgy, but it hardly speaks of quality, does it?

The verdict Personally, we’d buy the standard Xperia Z over the Z Ultra in a heartbeat, because we’re not interested in the gigantic screen—indeed we think it’s more of a bane than a blessing. But we’re not the target market, so it’d be unfair for us to simply disregard the device entirely. If you are, for whatever reason, in the market for gigantic phone, we can’t see why you’d choose anything else over this. It’s good-looking, it’s damage-resistant and the display is beautiful. Compared to similar-sized phones from other vendors—productivity gripes aside—the Z Ultra offers a much more compelling package. //

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HOT products

AOC expands myDisplay line up Under the family name “myDisplay”, monitor specialist AOC has recently launched a number of display products. Now, the company has introduced the two latest Style Line members of its showpiece product range. The myUltraSpeed, a 24” (61 cm) Full HD model working at the stunning picture refresh rate of 144 Hz mainly targeted at gamers. The new 15.6” (39.6 cm) ultra-mobile myConnect on the other hand sets out to make notebook users’ lives easier with its plug-and-play USB connectivity by instantly extending desktop real estate. The myUltraSpeed has been developed by AOC in cooperation with professional gamers. Equipped with a state-of-the-art LED-backlit TN panel, the myUltraSpeed (the model is also listed as g2460Pqu) delivers crisp images without compromises. Its 144 Hz refresh rate more than doubles the frames per second rate of conventional LCDs.

DVR with GPS tracking and speed camera locator

Mio Technology, a subsidiary of MiTAC International, has launched its most advanced Full HD 1080p G-Sensor Combined Driving Video Recorder & Speed Camera Locator, Mio MiVue 388 in the Middle East region. Mio MiVue 388 is equipped with 1080P Full HD quality, H.264 technology for capturing details and 360° rotated camera allow the driver to record a high-quality video in any direction. MiVue 388 also install speed camera ensure a better drive environment for drivers. MiVue 388 set a new standard for digital video recorder (DVR) user experience.

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Mio MiVue 388 is equipped with Full HD, H.264 Compression Technology to record videos at highest possible quality. It is fitted with a revolving mounting cradle that allows the driver to rotate the video camera at 360° to adjust the focus in any direction. Powered by Built-in 3-axis G-shock sensor, the wide-angle camera with 120˚ view angle captures the images without blind spot. The Full HD 1080p, with the latest H.264 technology for capturing details at a smaller file size while it requires at the lowest possible.

Linksys launches Powerline networking kit Linksys has launched Powerline HomePlug AV2 Kit (PLEK500). The new HomePlug AV2 technology allows consumers to create a high speed network connection between two locations that is ready for highbandwidth applications including HD/3D video streaming and gaming by simply leveraging their existing power outlets. The new solution connects devices with speeds of up to 500 Mbps when using computers, tablets, consoles and televisions throughout their home. The Linksys Powerline HomePlug AV2 Kit uses the latest HomePlug AV2 industry-standard technology to turn any home wall outlet into a powerful network connection. The white, compact, space-saving design of the PLEK500 Powerline HomePlug AV2 Kit blends in nicely with the wall and leaves room for other appliances to be plugged into the same outlet or power strip.

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ORGANISED BY

A NEW DAWN OF SECURITY? 18TH SEPTEMBER 2013 EMPIRE ROOM, H HOTEL, DUBAI, UAE

For general and agenda-related enquiries Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor-CPI Technology Division jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 55 1053774

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Second-quarter results

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

Channel surfing

column

Quality over quantity Have you heard what a lot of the big distributors come out with sometimes? Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of them bragging about serving thousands of partners across the region, about their monumental reach and their massiveness as a company. It’s all well and good flaunting your numbers, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s something worth bragging about. Firstly, the big distributors might say that they work with thousands of partners, but I’m convinced that the reality is a little different. The numbers they provide include one-off deals with small, niche resellers who would otherwise have nothing to do with them. It hardly constitutes a meaningful relationship, does it? All it says is that the distributor happened to have something that the reseller wanted at the time. I’m sure some local distributors would contest this. “We place the utmost importance on our partners’ wellbeing,” they’d tell me. But here’s the other thing—if you’ve actually got thousands of regional partners at your disposal, how are you meant to have meaningful relationships with any of them? Let’s say you serve 5,000 partners across the region, and you want to make sure that every single one of them feels valued. To do this, you’d need a team of 500 relationship managers serving six accounts each. And when you start talking about those kinds of numbers, you’d need guidelines,

rules and a system that means the upper management are ultimately accountable. The problem with this is that it creates an impersonal system. You might have an account manager, but because of the size of the operation, there’d be too much red tape for your manager to offer any real compromises. The alternative is to give each account manager the power to make well-informed decisions on deals, and to let them use common sense. But how likely is any company to do that? As a distributor, it would be better to spend time looking at the regional channel landscape, picking out the best partners for the products that you carry. With this model, there’s room for large-scale resellers and SMBs alike. This would make it much easier to support vendors that specialise in enterprise-class tech, but have also come out with solutions for smaller businesses. It would also keep your partners happy, because it’d be blindingly obvious that you value them. Some distributors have already adopted such an outlook, and because they do, they’re able to put a lot more effort into providing real support for their partners. And don’t think that opting for a more consolidated partner base will equal lower revenues; one distributor I spoke to this month posts revenues of more than $150 million every year. In all too many cases, this qualitative approach to distribution is overlooked in order to satisfy accountants and shareholders. But in my opinion, numberchasing doesn’t get anyone anywhere these days—ultimately, people will always value quality over quantity.

Tom Paye, Online Editor, CPI Technology

Reseller Middle East

september 2013

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As enterprises adopt new trends like BYOD, applications and device explosion, cloud computing and virtualization, they need to prepare for emerging security risks in their networks. Cyberoam helps secure the corporate office, data center and branch offices of enterprises against the constantly evolving threat landscape by offering them future-ready security with NG Series UTM appliances, virtual UTMs, and Cyberoam's nextgeneration feature set. Become a Cyberoam Partner today! ! Efficient & Easy Partner Program ! Profitable Swap-out promotions ! Free Cloud-based Central Management Console for partner ! 24x4 technical support available for partners ! Points-based incentive Rewards program for partners ! Award winning identity-based technology ! Available in wifi - network - virtual

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For Partnership Enquiries and Demo Requests, please contact: Surender Bishnoi (General Manager- Cyberoam ME) Tel:+971-4-214 9860 Mobile: +971-55-9745182 Email: surender.bishnoi@cyberoam.com ÂŠ Copyright 2013 Cyberoam Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.