The Insider by Logicom Oct 2013

THE

INSIDER Logicom expands portfolio and SERVICES to lead the pack Published by

from the director:

contents 05 Creative Cloud

Dear Partners,

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elcome to The Insider. We’re very excited to be exhibiting this year at one of the most influential ICT events in the world, GITEX Technology Week 2013. We’re geared up for a productive week and look forward to seeing you all there.

This has been an exciting and busy year for all of us. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all our partners, our vendors and of course, the Logicom team for their hard work, cooperation and passion for achievement.

Logicom continues to expand its reach, creatively managing any challenge that comes our way and turning it into an opportunity. This year, we are proud to have had our leadership and innovation recognized with two regional awards ‘Distributor of the Year for MEA’ Award from APC by Schneider Electric and Cisco’s Outstanding Achievement in SMB Velocity EMEA Award.

Logicom’s strength in distribution is built on sound, long-term relationships with the world’s leading technology vendors and the delivery of the highest quality of Technology Solutions to a diverse geographical region and a wide spectrum of partners. In 2013, we have enhanced our investments and partnerships in the Middle East and the Gulf regions with the addition of new lines of businesses with HP in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, a new Nokia partnership in Lebanon, as well as regional cooperation with new vendors such as Lenovo, Citrix, NetApp, Jabra and ZTE. Beyond the movement of products to where and when customers need them, we offer exceptional value-added services in support and development of our distribution channel. We continue to deliver exceptional service and go the extra mile to celebrate our partners’ success.

We also continue to invest in growing our presence with new offices and have now established resources on the ground in Iraq and Algeria. In addition, we have recently unveiled our new purpose-built facility for our Dubai headquarters, in South Jebel Ali. This new facility, designed specifically for Logicom operations and integrating both office and warehouse space, is set to double our company’s capacity in the region. Logicom now hosts operations in 18 countries, has a highly-trained workforce of more than 600 professionals and serves more than 30 countries in Europe, Middle East, the Gulf, North Africa and Asia.

07 The services-led approach

08 FlexPod Express: The Perfect Infrastructure Solution for Small and Midsize Businesses

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09 Meet the team .

11 QNAP’s storage systems

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14 Watch out for Watchguard

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15 Logicom rebrand

The key to our success is the strong relationship with our partners. Our mission is to continue developing and extending the value we deliver to an involved and loyal network of partners and remain an indispensable link in the technology supply chain. We strive to deliver our mission every day, guided by our core values: uncompromising integrity, commercial agility, maximum operational efficiency and the highest of service quality standards.

We aim to be the partner you count on to succeed.

I wish you a successful end to 2013 and I hope to see you at Gitex, Michael Papaeracleous Logicom - Director of Distribution 3

Everything you need to create anything.

Adobe® Creative Cloud™ gives you all-new versions of your favorite apps like Photoshop® and Premiere® Pro and ongoing access to new features and products as soon as they’re released.

Store and sync your files, share folders, and plug in to the world’s leading creative community.

It’s your entire creative world. All in one place.

Adobe Creative Cloud Learn more at adobe.com/go/creativecloud

Save 40% when you upgrade from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud. Just $29.99/month.

Visit

© 2013 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe, the Adobe logo, Creative Cloud, the Creative Cloud logo, Creative Suite, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

ADOBE | CREATIVE CLOUD

Creative Cloud Adobe swings to the cloud but reassures it won’t impact its channel or retail relationships.

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dobe’s Creative Cloud brings together everything you need to create your greatest work. One simple membership gives you and your team access to the very latest versions of all the Adobe professional creative desktop applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and more — plus new features and upgrades as soon as they’re available.

Cloud storage and file syncing capabilities allow you to reliably access your files wherever you are, even on your mobile device, and you can share concepts with clients or colleagues more easily than ever. Cloud-based

services let you build and publish websites, mobile apps, iPad publications, and content for any medium or device.

And with Behance integration, you can publish your customized portfolio on your own URL and plug into the world’s largest creative community to get inspired, get feedback, and find new opportunities. With Creative Cloud, your entire creative world gets its own central dashboard to keep your ideas, files, fonts, settings, notifications, desktop applications, and team members in sync.

At present, Creative Cloud has over 15 major creative

applications plus several services along with a few smaller additional applications.

According to the last Q3 results, it has more than one million members globally.

Some of the applications available through Creative Cloud include Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, Adobe Audition, Adobe Muse, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Edge Animate, Adobe Edge Code, Adobe Edge Inspect, Adobe Edge Reflow, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InCopy, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Kuler, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Prelude, Adobe SpeedGrade, Adobe

Dreamweaver, Adobe Flash Professional and Adobe Scout The Creative Cloud comes in several flavours aimed at individuals, teams (which includes more storage, expert support, virtual workgroups, centralised admin and billing), and enterprises. Packages such as CS6 Design Standard comes with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Bridge, Acrobat, and Media Encoder, and other packages comes with a different mix of products aimed at different types of users.

Adobe spent the last year constructing a detailed road map of its transition from a traditional software company to a collaborative, cloudbased software behemoth serving individual designers, small shops, and enterprise businesses.

“Most of the solutions in our Adobe Marketing Cloud have always been offered as a SaaS-license (Software as a Service) and with the introduction of Creative Cloud we have started this in our Digital Media segment too. Creative Cloud for Teams is offered by our channel partners and they are very successfully offering the product to their customers,” says the company spokesperson. And in other initiatives, it is looking at making volume licensing available through partners as well. The company also plans to continue to offer Creative Suite 6 for the time being.

To access Creative Cloud, one needn’t have an ongoing internet connection as the applications are stored on the desktop. And the files can be shared with even those who doesn’t have the membership, making it a convenient way to share and access data.

(Adobe Creative Cloud available from Logicom)

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cisco | SMART SERVICES

The services-led approach By offering Cisco Smart Services, Logicom hopes to not only provide partners with a valuable service, but to also encourage them to adopt a services-led approach to business.

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ey mega-trends in the ICT market, such as mobility, cloud virtualisation and video, are forcing partners to change their business strategies. As margins on boxed products fall lower every year, partners are now looking to services to make up on lost business.

The reasons behind the shift to services is simple. For one thing, services offer margins with a significantly greater profit potential than products do – Logicom estimates that services can offer margins as high as 25 percent. What’s more, margins can grow rapidly as partners increase attach-and-renewal rates and extend contract lengths.

Services also provide a platform for a recurring revenue model – whereby partners can be sure that

revenue will always be coming in. What’s more, partners are finding that providing services can lead to greater customer loyalty and an increased ability to sell total solutions in the first place.

Logicom encourages its partners to adopt a servicesled approach, and has lead by example by selling “onepackage” solutions, where it attaches a service on every product sold. Indeed, the distributor saw a 151-percent year-on-year growth in services in 2013.

Such is Logicom’s commitment to its services business, when it gained Cisco Distributor Accreditation earlier in 2013, it highlighted the fact that all of its Cisco sales managers have achieved CSE certifications.

This means that it is able to provide the highest level of customer service to its partners.

But Logicom also wants to see its partners walk down the services road when it comes to Cisco. The distributor believes that partners need to aggressively change their business models, adopting a services-lead approach to accommodate the emerging ICT mega-trends. Businesses are operating in more demanding environments, and downtime is becoming less and less tolerable, meaning partners must be onhand to help with customer issues.

For these reasons, Logicom makes Cisco Smart Services available to its partners. With services such as Smart Care, Logicom’s partners can provide a collaborative and proactive support approach, which combines their business and technical expertise with Cisco’s intellectual capital and smart service innovation

to offer unique services with premium network support.

Through “smart portals”, partners can monitor the whole network of clients and receive notifications for potential faults. This means that partners can engage with the potential fault before it turns into an issue that may lead to downtime. The portal also alerts partners to customers that are becoming EOL, providing new revenue opportunities for hardware.

Logicom is committed to selling these smart services. In 2012, the distributor started a campaign in order to help its partners adopt a more services-lead business model.

With 2014 around the corner, Logicom’s strategy is to push this initiative even further, with more training, workshops and probe installation support all on the cards.

Logicom believes that taking this services-led approach that it makes available through Cisco will open many more opportunities for partners. The distributor sees opportunities in the areas of planning, design, implementation, integration, maintenance and optimisation. It advises partners to shift to a consultative approach in order to capitalise on the potential offered by services.

From vast vaults of online training sessions and workshops, with the support of Logicom’s services team, partners can be nourished from start to finish with any of their services engagements.

Logicom wants to help partners make the shift to a services-led approach.

Get Started Today!

Schedule a meeting with your Logicom Distributor Account Manager to learn more about building and growing your business by incorporating Cisco Services into your practice.

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interview | netapp

FlexPod Express: The Perfect Infrastructure Solution for Small and Midsize Businesses Small or medium-size businesses need cost-effective, easy-todeploy solutions that consolidate application and data requirements. NetApp and Cisco have teamed up to deliver FlexPod Express—a single, convenient, converged platform to manage the entire SMB data infrastructure. Husam Abdul Hamid, Manager Channel Sales at NetApp Gulf, North Africa & Pakistan, tells us more about this affordable solution.

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hat is the value proposition of pre-packaged and tested architecture for SMBs? For growing small and midsize organizations beginning to virtualize their networking, storage, and computing environments, pre-tested, low cost solutions are a great way to save money and resources by using virtualization to consolidate workloads and streamline management.

FlexPod Express, for example, reduces the number of servers and storage capacity required for applications, simplifies overall infrastructure, optimizes

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architecture and accelerates deployment times, hence letting SMBs streamline their servers and storage to build a cost-effective IT infrastructure.

Organizations can leverage FlexPod Express to reduce the number of servers in their environment and consolidate common applications such as e-mail, database, collaboration, or content management, which previously resided on their own servers, into one infrastructure set.

With its streamlined architecture and processes, FlexPod Express allows companies to easily manage IT resources and take advantage of the benefits of virtualization.

Is converged infrastructure the future of the data centre?

Businesses—especially SMBs— continue to exert pressure on IT to be faster and reduce costs.

However, the majority of IT budgets and time are spent on maintaining equipment, leaving only a small amount for new projects and innovation. To reduce the time and cost of deploying

infrastructure and applications, companies are increasingly adopting a converged infrastructure approach.

Looking at industry trends, it is safe to say that people will move away from buying parts and look at solutions that are designed and tested to work together. By deploying these converged solutions that leverage shared resources, IT teams at SMBs will be able to slash design, planning and testing phases by months.

Is FlexPod Express available in different configurations?

FlexPod Express, which uses fully validated NetApp and Cisco components, comes in two standard configurations based on Cisco Nexus 3048 switches, Cisco UCS C220 M3 rack-mounted servers, and either a NetApp FAS2220 or NetApp FAS2240 storage system.

The NetApp FAS2220 is used in the small configuration and supports 12 drives internally and up to 2 additional disk shelves, for a total of 60 drives. The NetApp FAS2240 is supplied

with the medium configuration and supports up to 24 drives internally and up to 144 total disk drives using external shelves.

Does FlexPod Express support an open ecosystem of management and hypervisors?

Yes, FlexPod Express supports an open ecosystem of management software for SMBs to pick from. For example, the Cisco UCS Director allows you to manage all resources from a single interface to provide precise control over both physical and virtual infrastructure with full management and monitoring from a unified dashboard.

FlexPod Express also supports the leading hypervisors, applications, and management platforms. It was tested with Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller, a management solution that provides physical and virtual infrastructure control, management, and monitoring from a unified dashboard.

FlexPod Express was also tested and documented with VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualization platforms.

What are the additional market opportunities offered

by FlexPod Express for partners and who can sell it?

NetApp, Cisco, our strategic partners, and authorized resellers can help SMBs successfully make the move to FlexPod Express and assist with the consolidation, optimization and virtualization of IT environments. There is no need for specialized certification to sell FlexPod Express, but you must be an authorized Cisco and NetApp reseller.

(FlexPod Express is availabble from Logicom

meet the team

Meet the team F

lexPod Express is a new converged infrastructure for small and medium-sized organizations based on its predecessor, ExpressPod. FlexPod Express integrates Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) C-Series servers, Netapp FAS2220 or FAS2240 (Fabric Attached Storage) arrays, and Cisco Nexus 3048 switches with infrastructure management. FlexPod Express supports an open ecosystem of management and hypervisors, say the core team behind the product at Logicom.

“FlexPod Express is primarily targeted at the SMB and commercial customers. It is a prepackaged and tested architecture for SMB and commercial customers. The objective behind this is to give a best-in-class solution in a pre-tested and validated design package that can simplify deployment, administration and support.”

Peter D’Souza, Regional Product Manager, NetApp & Data Centre Lead, Logicom Dubai

“FlexPod Express comes in two configurations and the benefit for the user is the reduced turn-around time. It is basically plug and play.”

Neeraj Sharma, Pre-Sales Account Manager, NetApp, Logicom Dubai

As this is a simplified architecture, tier II resellers don’t have to invest in skill sets. All they need is a minimum level of certification from both Cisco and NetApp. It is a complete solution to manage the infrastructure of the client, which offers good margins to partners.

Niket Raje, Account Manager, NetApp, Logicom Dubai

100% CISCO COMPLIANT

Jabra offers full call control on Cisco Jabber and Cisco VXI.

JABRA.COM

QNAP | PRODUCT REVIEW

QNAP’s B storage systems

usinesses are constantly on the lookout for large and efficient storage systems in order to accommodate the growing demand of current IT environments.

QNAP Systems recently released its business-class TSx70 series Turbo NAS - an answer to this quandary. It comprises of TS-870, TS-670 and TS-470 and is available in 4, 6 and 8 bay tower models, instilled with a scale-up support.

This enables businesses to expand their storage to over 150TB raw capacity.

Offering corporate users high-performance NAS solution for daily operations, the series are powered by

a dual–core Intel 2.6 GHz processor and 2GB DDR3 RAM. QNAP’s QTS 4.0 operating system makes it effortless to use and run multiple tasks efficiently and it is compatible with a wide range of solutions. The company’s vSphere Client plug-in further improves its efficiency of operations and it also provides users with flexible backup solutions. What’s more, users can also enhance the series’ functionality with QNAP’s built-in App Center.

QNAP’s development platform also allows developers to create various applications, adding even more value to the TS-x70 series.

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interview | watchguard

Watch out for WatchGuard The UTM market has stabilised in the last few years with businesses realising the importance of data protection and partnering with the right companies to achieve the secure environment. WatchGuard has managed to be at the forefront of these changes by focusing on developing differentiated products and by not missing a step. John Spoor, Regional Manager, Middle East and Africa explains further how the company plans to stay tuned to the market conditions.

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nified Threat Management (UTM) market is now mature with a focus on performance and throughput.

What is WatchGuard doing to keep pace with these changes?

At WatchGuard, we believe that we differentiate ourselves from the rest by the products and solutions we offer— • Top performance at every price point in the UTM product line We proudly advertise what we call our UTM throughput number. The number indicates our performance with all our security services turned on, as opposed to every competitor’s arguments and sheets that show how well they perform focusing on single aspects of security.

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• Best-of-Breed technology combined in one single platform Our UTM appliances combine many diverse technologies such as antivirus, intrusion prevention, application identification, URL classification, and the list goes on. Each of those layers is a specialty in itself. Most of our competitors have chosen to try and do all of those different things themselves. However, we take a different stance.

Rather than try to re-create the wheel, we partner with best-in-class industry specialists for our different security services. This best in class strategy truly allows us to offer better security than other UTM competitors.

• Strong focus on manageability According to Gartner, 95 percent of firewall breaches come down to misconfiguration. We believe that intuitive, well-designed and easy to use management interfaces can increase one’s security by cutting down on configuration mistakes. Our own engineers can focus most of their time on creating delightful management interfaces and seamlessly integrate all these services and making them easier to use, we’re able to do this by partnering with security services.

WatchGuard has been pretty dominant in the SMB space.

How do you plan to tap the mid-market?

In the immediate future we will be focusing on partner recruitment in certain countries where we need to increase our presence. And in countries where we have a strong foothold, we will be focusing on partner enablement. This includes sales and technical training, assistance with lead generation and marketing activities as well as constant guidance and communication to allow them to provide the best possible service to our customers.

Our partner program offers excellent initiatives and incentives to partners who are committed to working with our solutions.

Do you offer Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and authentication solutions?

Yes, certainly. We will be introducing our DLP solution for UTM. This new solution will enable businesses to instantly protect data and prevent costly regulatory attacks within their networks.

How do you think your enterprise channel partners should pitch WatchGuard to execute profitable business deals?

At WatchGuard, we believe that our relationship with channel partners differs from

many other companies. We are 100 percent channel, 100 percent of the time. We work with our partners and trust them to sell and support WatchGuard, while managing sales and implementing software and products. We have never dealt with the service side of client relations and allow partners to develop this area of business.

Also, we look for partners that are skilled and have experience in delivering services to clients. We also support partners that are trained in specific areas such as UTM software and products, rather than the whole range of solutions that we offer. We also encourage development in the form of certification and training.

Finally, we give our channel partners as much support as we possibly can. We give them the tools to represent WatchGuard products with detailed knowledge of products, implementation and benefits.

Working together allows us to share possible opportunities with partners, while encouraging development with our tiered partner model.

We invest for the long run and we believe that strengthening bonds and working on relationships benefits everyone, including end users.

(WatchGuard is available from Logicom)

The new Logicom Brand

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his year, we are very proud to reveal our new rebranding plans which are set to upgrade and renew the way Logicom communicates with the public.

Logicom’s rebranding project will be unveiled at GITEX 2013. The project itself includes the adoption of a revamped logo, an updated social networking presence, and a brand new website complete with graphical language.

This new image aims to highlight the key pillars upon which the success and development of the Logicom brand are based.

Logicom’s pillars of success include its close links with all its stakeholders, from customers, partners and vendors, to staff, bankers, and shareholders, within a globalized environment; a strong network of partners that is based on the principles of mutual trust and support; attention to detail; and a strong presence in a significant number of countries in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.

With a fresh new image, Logicom will continue to reinforce and foster its values of loyalty and professionalism, strengthened with the adoption of a new tagline that epitomises the foundation of our company, ‘Partners in your success.’

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Success comes from close partnerships in a global environment. At Logicom, our business is built on strong relationships with our partners. We are proud to deliver exceptional service, and go the extra mile so that we can celebrate in your success.

We believe GITEX is the perfect opportunity for us to get to know each other better. Our team, along with key members of senior management are looking forward to you visiting us at GITEX Technology Week.

Visit us in Hall 4.

We are looking forward to meeting you!

Our partners:

Logicom Dubai Plot S60608 South Zone, Jebel Ali, PO BOX 54328 Dubai T: +971 4 8055399 | F: +971 4 8894950 | info@logicom.ae

www.logicomdistribution.com