Reseller Middle East October 2018 by Reseller Middle East

ISSUE 261 | OCTOBER 2018 www.tahawultech.com

IMPORTANCE OF PARTNER TRAINING | GITEX 2018 UPDATES | CHANNEL SPEAK SURVEY RESULTS

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CONTENTS

ISSUE 261 // OCTOBER 2018

COVER FEATURE

DATA AVAILABILITY CHAMPIONS

How Veeam Software is ushering enterprise customers to the intelligent data era.

14 PROFITABLE CONNECTIONS

HIGHLIGHTS

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

HPE Aruba’s Osama AlHaj-Issa on how small businesses in the Middle East can harness big benefits from wireless networks.

FEATURES

OPINION

12 RIDING ON THE TECHNOLOGY WAVE

Kushal Nahata from FarEye, on how logistics must adapt to new age digital technologies.

Regional partners voice their true challenges of everyday business.

50 LEARNING THE ROPES

20 GITEX 2018

36 CHANNEL SPEAK

Reseller ME speaks to industry players to understand how trainings can be made an intrinsic part and parcel of everyday channel business.

Leading technology players to watch out for at the 2018 edition of the show.

INTERVIEW REVIEW

56 THE VALUE OF DATA

HOT PRODUCTS

NEFFOS C7

“WORLD’S THINNEST LAPTOP” SET FOR 2019 ROLLOUT: ACER

Redington Value executives share details of the firm’s new data science and analytics practice launched regionally and how partners can cash in on market prospects.

EVENTS

70 ESET SECURITY DAYS FORUM

ESET Middle East’s Security Days forum in Dubai had experts discuss the evolving threat landscape.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

EDITORIAL Embracing metered services

Janees Reghelini Editor

E-mail: janees.reghelini@ cpimediagroup.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/ TahawulTech Twitter: @TahawulTech

FOUNDER, CPI MEDIA GROUP Dominic De Sousa (1959-2015) Publishing Director Natasha Pendleton natasha.pendleton@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9139 Published by

Registered at Dubai Production City, DCCA PO Box 13700 Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 440 9100 Fax: +971 4 447 2409 ÂŠ Copyright 2018 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.

s customers are looking to streamline costs and design predictable spending structures, consumption-based models are increasingly becoming popular. Flexible payment models allow customers to pay for the solution or infrastructure that they actually use, with an option to purchase more only when they scale their operations. Pay-per-use pricing models are not really a novel concept, telecom firms have been leveraging this framework for many years now. Today, we are seeing this being extended to other verticals. Increasingly, customers prefer the option of using metered services especially when it comes to technology. It is great to have the assurance of knowing that what they might need is easily accessible but only have to pay for it when they actually need it. It has advantages for both customers and vendors. Customers can enjoy the benefits of flexibility, convenience and affordability. While vendors have not only

EDITORIAL Managing Editor Michael Jabri-Pickett mjp@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9158 Editor Janees Reghelini janees.reghelini@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9167 Online Editor Adelle Geronimo adelle.geronimo@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9135 DESIGN Head of Design Froilan Cosgafa IV froilan.cosgafa@cpimediagroup.com Senior Designer Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com

financial predictability but also reduced unit costs from aggregation and superior customer relationships. This transition from CAPEX to OPEX also presents regional partners with opportunities. With growing number of technology providers creating pay-peruse pricing models for their offerings, partners can now close deals in a more agile and faster manner. It also enables partners to acquire more business with the potential of cross-selling. Also, if vendors have programmes that incentivise partners to use subscription-based payment models, they will have added benefits. Partners must optimise such schemes to be able to reap the benefits. It is clear that those who pay no heed to the value flexible payments can bring to their business, will miss out on market opportunities. On a separate note, we are in the midst of our preparations for yet another edition of GITEX and look forward to having exciting conversations with technology leaders.

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www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

HIGHLIGHTS

Talend appoints Redington Value as Middle East and Africa VAD

SA-based cloud and big data integration solutions company Talend has appointed Redington Value as the value-added distributor for the Middle East and Africa region. Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, USA ,Talend provides big data and cloud integration solutions that helps companies become data driven by making data more accessible, improving its quality and quickly moving data where it’s needed for real-time decision making. By simplifying big data through these steps, the vendor enables companies to act with insight based on accurate, real-time information about their business, customers, and industry. The Talend VAD programme is part of the firm’s growing alliances and technology network programme that is designed to accelerate the technical and sales development of specialist VARs, SIs and general resellers wishing to enter the rapidly growing market for data management and big data solutions.

Sayantan Dev, Redington Value

Brian Perrins, manager, Talend Emerging Markets, said, “The VAD programme was developed to enable local and regional VARs to extend their technical and sales skills on new and emerging technologies that the big data and cloud ecosystems demand, to areas and regions where such skills are limited or not yet available. The skills of the VAD are offered in addition to those of Talend and the VAR to deliver local knowledge and experience to VARs who do not have such skill.” Sayantan Dev, VP, Redington Value, said, “We have seen the huge demand for big data, cloud and associated analytics for a while now and have been building our competences and delivering solutions to our channel partners across MEA. Talend is a strategic partner and technology. We are delighted to now have the opportunity to share the skills and experience with our VARs across the region that do not or cannot reach the levels required or are demand by the end users adopting this leading-edge technology.”

StarLink brings Napatech’s cloud expertise to the Middle East

alue added distributor StarLink has been appointed as Napatech’s VAD for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region. Napatech’s reconfigurable computing platform improves the performance of leading IT applications for networking, security, Big Data, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Mahmoud Nimer, general manager, StarLink, said, “In a world of software defined networking, the way networks are being designed and secured is changing. A wide range of cybersecurity applications are being deployed as software-only solutions on standard server platforms. We are excited to add the Napatech solutions to our security framework using their FPGA-based SmartNICs to help our customers and partners fulfill this vision. The agreement enables StarLink

to add Napatech’s reconfigurable computing platform to its portfolio of IT security offerings. StarLink will be fully authorised to sell, market and distribute Napatech’s FPGA-based SmartNIC hardware and software to networking and cybersecurity teams who are deploying applications and services as software solutions on standard server platforms. This partnership marks the latest move by Napatech to strengthen its sales, marketing and distribution channels around the world and follows recent partnerships with VARs and distributors in North America and EMEA. Joe Seiferth, vice president, worldwide channel Sales at Napatech, said, “An increasing number of networking and cybersecurity professionals are deploying software-based solutions to meet their performance and cost objectives, while maintaining the highest

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Mahmoud Nimer, StarLink

levels of agility. The demand for these new solutions includes enterprise, government, service providers and cloud data centre networks. StarLink has the reputation and relationships to bring Napatech’s solutions to their customers and partners around the world.”

HIGHLIGHTS

TP-Link appoints FDC International as a regional distributor

P-Link has signed FDC International as its regional distributor to increase the firm’s market horizon and brand visibility even further. As per the agreement, FDC International will involve SI and channel partners who will offer TP-Link SMB products and solutions to their clients or end users in the UAE region. Lucas Jiang, general manager, TPLink MEA, said, “What helped turn the decision in favour of FDC International was how well-equipped they are in taking care of their clients’ requirement. And we trust them to offer reliable services that will strengthen our SMB networking business in the channel community and end-consumers.” The SMB business by TP-Link ensures

ease of management, high performance and professional support to customers, said the firm. At the alliance meet, USPs and insights on SMB product range and uniquely advanced solutions like Jetstream, Omada Ecosystem, Auranet Wi-Fi, Pharos Wireless, Managed Switches and Safestream Routers were discussed. List of challenges and solutions were spoken about that helped SIs and channel partners to understand every brand element. TP-Link also encouraged partners to enroll for the online Training & Certification programme, which is a dedicated partner portal that caters to pre-sales, sales and technical knowledge. This programme offers support to the SIs to grow their share of business with TP-Link’s solutions in the SMB segment.

AOC and Philips monitors unveil new channel loyalty programme

brands in the market.” MD, the Dias further added, brand license “Channel partners with partner for as little as $15,000 Philips business between the displays and AOC & Philips brand of AOC monitors has created monitors spread over four a loyalty programme, months period stands which will reward channel to gain by being part of partners over next four this programme. We are months. The company confident that majority of launched the channel our partners in UAE will loyalty programme from at participate in this initiative the beginning of this and gain extra rebates month and it will run as well as exciting gifts through 31st December Carol Anne Dias, AOC and such Apple MacBook or 2018. Philips monitor iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Carol Anne Dias, Microsoft Surface tablet, regional sales director, AOC or Philips Smart TVs. Travel to Middle East and Africa, AOC and Istanbul, Beirut, Paris, Prague, or South Philips monitor, said, “Channel is the Africa. And, even stand to gain AED most important component and it is 15,000 worth of travel vouchers. We will always our endeavour to work closely also honour Best Salesman among all with our channel partners. We have our partners in UAE with special award.” carefully crafted the programme to drive AOC & Philips channel loyalty maximum mileage. To make it easier for programme is applicable on all the partners, we have included both our key monitors in stock and is open to all the brands AOC and Philips to be part of channel partners in UAE. this programme that will enable partners to gain from by selling either or both

Fidelis Cybersecurity signs up StarLink to deliver solutions across META

S tarLink, a value-added distributor in the Middle East, Nidal Othman, StarLink Turkey and Africa (META) region has signed a distribution partnership with Fidelis Cybersecurity to become the main distributor for the vendor’s deception solutions across META. Fidelis joins StarLink’s channel network of IT security and specialised partners to offer intelligent deception solutions to enterprises, said the company. This platform dramatically improves the effectiveness and efficiency of security operations by delivering comprehensive visibility, intelligent deception, automatic alert validation, and increased response across network and endpoints. StarLink’s channel network has a dedicated team to support its resellers, and the partnership will help extend Fidelis’ channel base in the region. Based on customer demand and market needs, StarLink will offer Fidelis Cybersecurity product portfolio mainly focusing on deception solutions. “With Fidelis deception technology, we are very excited to help enterprises in this region change the rules of the game. They can stay ahead by detecting zero day attacks, gain critical insights about potential attacks and have visibility of their network assets and communication channels,” said Nidal Othman, MD, StarLink. “This partnership will meet the market demand for enterprises looking for a single, unified platform that automates the detection and response of both attacks on the enterprise as well as data leakage, creating an opportunity for active defence. With its channel network, StarLink is uniquely positioned to meet this demand by introducing our solutions to key markets, as well as helping to create additional revenue and growth opportunities for our partners,” said Ivan Dolensky, VP, International Sales, Fidelis Cybersecurity.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

HIGHLIGHTS

hosts leadership conclave to TYAN signs up DCG help businesses address challenges ASBIS as official distributor

SBIS has been appointed as the official distributor of TYAN in EMEA emerging markets: Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, the Former Soviet Union, the Middle East and Africa. “We are excited about partnering with ASBIS and bringing TYAN server solutions to the EMEA markets. This partnership will strengthen our sales network and improve our customer service across the EMEA markets,” said Robby Lin, senior director, MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation’s TYAN Business Unit. Lin added that the company’s portfolio of HPC, storage, and cloud server platforms are based on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and AMD EPYC processor and are designed to address HPC, data centre, server storage and security appliance markets. He said, “We look forward to providing scalable, highly-integrated, and reliable products and gaining new business opportunities through ASBIS’s distribution channels.” Georgii Saprykin, product marketing manager, ASBIS Enterprises said, “Partnership with TYAN expands the line of server offerings of ASBIS and provides our customers with reliable platforms for creating scalable and easily managed solutions for cloud infrastructures, Big Data and Deep Learning. With TYAN’s server platforms and storage solutions, our customers can focus on the expansion of their operations and the range of services provided, minimising the time and cost of infrastructure deployment.”

ontinuing its aim of building capability within the IT industry, Dubai Computer Group (DCG) had organised a two-day workshop called Business Leadership Conclave with a theme of ‘Make it happen, make it matter’. While Toshiba was the Platinum sponsor; AOC, ASBIS, Supermicro and XFX were Gold sponsors for the event. The event’s primary objective was to assist business owners and their frontline staff overcome the challenges facing the industry by renewing their organisational outlook and approach with the help and training of guest experts Simerjeet Singh and Reg Athwal. Singh is a professional speaker with expertise in sales motivation techniques, leadership excellence, adaptability, achieving one’s highest potential and ways to bounce back after setbacks. On 29th Sep 2018, Singh conducted an interactive workshop for 300 customer facing employees of DCG member companies to help them boost their sales techniques, improve skills and communication as well as build confidence. On 30th Sep 2018,

Athwal conducted a full day workshop for a select group of 60 DCG member company owners and CEOs. Athwal is a strategic advisor to some of the world’s most influential CEOs and a worldrenowned professional speaker. He has a track record of building several high growth companies. He has conducted a management workshop schedule to impart skills of building alliances and networks, expanding boundaries in business, fine-tuning entrepreneurial legacy and next generation development. “This is one of our biggest training events organised to date with world class speakers and is hopefully the first of many more to follow,” said Dharmendra Sawlani, president, DCG. “Workshops like these will help the local businesses begin to change their business paradigms and hopefully help the industry thrive in an era of several macroeconomic and industry shifts.”

Exclusive Networks announces new formula for data centre transformation

xclusive Networks, as part of its partnership with Mellanox, is offering NuMeRu, a complete data centre transformation bundle of solutions, services and go-to-market support for BigTec channel partners. NuMeRu is a turnkey solution that combines offerings from Nutanix, Mellanox and Rubrik. It is an integrated data centre stack designed to make it simple to migrate from complex legacy data centres, aimed at creating new opportunities for partners to convert customers to enterprise hybrid cloud with fast ROI and affordable financing. The constituent parts of NuMeRu are each market-leading solutions in their own right. As a unified whole, they

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

provide the complete foundation for data centre transformation; a flexible and scalable basis for enterprise hybrid cloud supported. NuMeRu aims to help organisations attain a software-defined technology stack that is no longer locked down to proprietary infrastructure or legacy complexity; enabling you to create fast, secure data and application services. The service wrap for NuMeRu is delivered by Exclusive Group’s PASSport Global Services division, with tiered support levels and other technical and professional services providing extra revenue and margin opportunities for partners. Flexible financing and leasing plans to help spread purchasing costs and overcome buying constraints are executed by Exclusive Capital.

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HIGHLIGHTS

Raqmiyat inks partnership with Jedox for Middle East

edox AG, an Enterprise Planning and Business Intelligence software vendor has announced a Middle East partnership with Dubai-based global IT solutions and services company Raqmiyat. “We are delighted to partner with Raqmiyat as the company has excellent access to the Middle East market, with strong connections across the region. This makes them an ideal partner to provide Jedox solutions to clients in the Middle East. The Raqmiyat team has years of experience in the technology sector with a proven track record of successful solution implementations. We are confident that, with Raqmiyat, we will be able to further strengthen our market dominance in budgeting, planning, reporting and analytics, and to expand our customer base across the region,” said Jedox’s CSO, Bernd

in the most Eisenblaetter. comprehensive The Raqmiyat and economical and Jedox manner.” Jedox strategic alliance is focused on will initially focus simplifying on UAE, as planning, analysis well as mutual and reporting customers in with one unified Saudi Arabia software solution. and other GCC It empowers countries, across decision the banking, Bernd Eisenblaetter, Jedox and Amer Khreino, Raqmiyat makers and financial services, business users telecoms and across all departments to help them government sectors. work smarter, streamline business Amer Khreino, CEO, Raqmiyat, said, collaboration and make insight-based “We are extremely excited to forge this decisions with confidence to drive true partnership with Jedox; as we see great competitive advantage. In addition, potential and value to our customers. the company recognises a flexible Jedox will provide a unified solution approach to deployment and, therefore, to our customers for their corporate offers a choice of cloud, subscription or performance management (CPM), on premise. reporting and business intelligence;

Veeam’s data management solutions now available via Lenovo resellers

xtended partnership now allows customers to purchase Veeam’s Hyper-Availability solutions directly from Lenovo and

its resellers. Veeam Software has announced a new global partnership with Lenovo to enable customers to purchase Veeam Intelligent Data Management solutions with Lenovo Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) and Storage Area Network (SAN) offerings directly from Lenovo and its resellers in a single transaction. Veeam’s integration with Lenovo solutions provides organisations with a broad range of choice and flexibility to deliver availability, IT simplicity, scalable performance, operational efficiency and accelerated innovation for the HyperAvailable Enterprise, said the company. “Lenovo’s decision to resell Veeam Intelligent Data Management and Availability solutions with their offerings

Peter McKay, Veeam

reflects Veeam’s market momentum and leadership,” said Peter McKay, president and co-CEO, Veeam. “It’s a prime example of two technology leaders collaborating to provide the most seamless and efficient sales and deployment process for its partners and

customers. Lenovo’s global reach and extensive partner ecosystem, combined with the strong growth of its Data Center Infrastructure (DCI) and Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) business units, provides Veeam customers with the best purchasing experience.” “Veeam’s strong track record of innovation combined with their focus on creating a great user experience aligns with our customer-first approach. This alliance further enables us to provide an effortless customer experience and relevant solutions to our customers,” said John Majeski, who leads the Software and Solutions business at Lenovo Data Center Group. With Veeam, Lenovo customers attain IT simplicity and hyperavailability by leveraging Veeam’s easy to deploy and easy to manage architecture, to enhance availability service levels for all applications and data across virtual, physical and cloud workloads, said the firm.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

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APPOINTMENTS

INDUSTRY APPOINTMENTS

An overview of the latest people movement within the IT channel business.

Infoblox appoints Middle East and Africa channel head Secure cloud-managed going forward. network services provider Channel recruitment Infoblox has announced and enablement and that Feras Masoud has acceleration of channel been appointed as its new sales will be his main focus regional channel manager areas to help ensure that for Middle East and Africa partners are well equipped (MEA). to be able to fully utilise all An IT industry veteran the advantages that the with more than 21 years’ Infoblox’ technology and experience under his belt partner programme offer. in channel sales, pre-sales, In his new role, Masoud operations, and leadership Feras Masoud, Infoblox will focus on investing in roles, Masoud was the Infoblox channel partners regional channel manager for Middle by providing dedicated channel East for Ixia, prior to joining Infoblox. resources, sales and technical trainings Masoud has held regional channel and joint marketing activities that will manager roles at Limelight Networks positively impact Infoblox business across and Polycom and also worked in senior the region. He will also work closely sales positions at companies like Hewlett with Infoblox partners to enable them Packard and Nortel. to become the main trusted advisors Masoud will be responsible for for customers across the region. His Infoblox’ regional channel strategy responsibility also includes increasing

Infoblox’ indirect business through partner initiated leads and deals. Masoud said, “Our channel strategy is to invest in our channels by providing dedicated enablement sessions from business and technical perspectives. This year there will be more focus on Managed Services Providers (MSPs) as another indirect route to businesses across major countries. We are investing more in our BuildingBlox partner programme to make it more attractive to the partners and to simplify the way we work together. From a training and certifications perspective, we have developed a new partner training portal that includes online sales, presales and technical trainings that will help partners in achieving their bookings and accreditation targets and drive more value for our customers.”

GBM names new GM for Oman operations Gulf Business Machines (GBM) has appointed Eddy Abboud as general manager of the company’s Oman business. In his new role, Abboud will be responsible for spearheading GBM Oman’s efforts in support of the Sultanate’s Digital Oman Strategy, which strives to transform Oman into a modern digital society. He will also oversee client relationships in the Sultanate, supporting public and private sector organisations as they embark on their digital transformation journeys. “Abboud has been part of the GBM community for over 10 years and we are thrilled to welcome him on-board our leadership team in Oman,” said Martin Tarr, CEO of

GBM Dubai office as a GBM. “We are witnessing Project Manager. His the Omani government most recent role was increasingly prioritise based out of the GBM technology development Abu Dhabi office, where across the Sultanate he was the Director of as they recognise the Corporate Transformation instrumental role it plays and Shared Services. in their efforts to transition “With the Omani into a knowledge-based government continuing to economy, as outlined in highlight the importance their Vision 2020 plan. of private and public GBM will continue to Eddy Abboud, GBM sector ICT investment develop expertise that as crucial drivers of could contribute to the their long-term visions and priorities, growth of sultanate’s tech industry.” I cannot think of a more exciting time An industry veteran, Abboud’s to be in the Sultanate,” said Abboud. career spans over two decades across “I am very excited to be working with several Middle Eastern countries. our clients in Oman and am looking Having worked with GBM for over 10 forward to making my mark.” years, Eddy began his career in the

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

OPINION // FAREYE

Riding on the technology wave Kushal Nahata, co-founder and CEO, FarEye, believes logistics must adapt to new age digital technologies to transform the ‘digitally-empowered’ customer experience

oday’s customers are digitally connected, engaged and influenced. The phenomenon of the e-commerce industry has grown beyond comprehension in terms of volume, scale, markets and countries. With shopping online and at retail stores at the same time becoming a reality coupled with devices connecting every aspect of consumers’ lives, the shift is making way for the tidal wave of industry transition in the Middle East. This has given a push to the e-commerce markets, a 246.15 percent increase in worldwide e-commerce sales, from $1.3 trillion in 2014 to $4.5 trillion in 2021. That’s a nearly threefold lift in online revenue. To embrace the customer and provide a seamless delivery experience, on-demand, e-commerce and logistics players are ‘going mobile’ to ride high on the technology wave.

“To reduce the delivery time and in order to enhance the customer experience, enterprises must focus on adopting the right mobility solution that aids in running their field operations seamlessly.” In a quest to provide superior customer experience, the companies are incurring huge operational cost. The cost of ‘last-mile’ constitutes 28 percent to 32 percent of the total logistics costs and these are usually borne by the customer when he places the order or at the time of delivery. The growing popularity of e-commerce has given

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

rise to accommodate a new business model which is ‘tech-driven logistics.’ Logistics players today are adopting unconventional solutions, smarter analytics and advanced processes to serve the ‘digitally-empowered’ customer. With an eye on the growing base of ever- demanding customers, enterprises today are adapting to tailor-made solutions to suit their expectations. To reduce the delivery time and in order to enhance the customer experience, enterprises must focus on adopting the right mobility solution that aids in running their field operations seamlessly. For example, Last -mile deliveries in the region are timeconsuming with the delivery cycle easily lasting for 6 to 7 days or more. The longer delivery window poses a challenge for the delivery personnel to carry the details of each and every parcel delivery. With the help of mobility

solution, that functions in 2G networks or even offline mode, the delivery personnel can save the information and update his manager ‘real-time.’ Adopting a flexible and future-oriented solution helps in generating automated reports on cash reconciliation, updating the task lists and the progress of the jobs allotted after the run-sheet is generated. While aligning with new mobility partners, logistics companies have to keep a check if the solution is able to blend the operational and customer requirements, according to the region. Customer preferences in the Middle East region mostly revolve around, a mandatory call before the courier guy reaches the customer location and informing the customer regarding the status of shipment in regular intervals. Preferably, to reduce the delivery cycles and to cut down on the operational expenses, companies have to give customers the feasibility to

“By using multiple payment options like cash-ondelivery and card-ondelivery, companies can reduce the cancellation at the time of delivery.” tag themselves. Based on the geocoordinates, the routing can be done by optimising all the nodal points where the delivery personnel should attend during the day. Integration with multiple payment modules will give the flexibility to the customer to pay and finish the purchase. By using multiple payment options like cash-on-delivery and cardon-delivery, companies can reduce

the cancellation at the time of delivery. According to a recent report released by PayPal, cash-on-delivery in the Middle East is around 60 percent, while card payments and online payments occupy 25 percent and 15 percent respectively. These numbers have gone up from 15 percent and 5 percent in 2012. Customers expect convenience and speed which entices logistics firms to venture the possibilities of the virtual world. Innovative last-leg solutions, help in improving connectivity to ensure, speedy and affordable delivery. In order to ensure customer loyalty, logistics companies must adopt track-and-trace systems, efficient last-mile delivery methods, integrated technology and smarter delivery management systems. With e-commerce being the driver of future growth, the journey ahead promises to be truly exciting for the logistics industry, as it shifts gears to take on a different mindset of riding high with mobility.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

OPINION // HPE ARUBA

Profitable connections Osama AlHaj-Issa, regional channel director, Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, discusses how small businesses in the Middle East can harness big benefits from wireless networks and how channel partners can help.

ery few SMB owners have a fully functioning IT department. But they are still expected to provide modern and engaging experiences for their customers, using the latest technology. And the network is where it all begins. But how many non-IT people know the first thing about how to set up and secure a network? It’s time we addressed the demands of the smaller business, and made network management simple. Recent studies suggest that 66 percent of small to medium businesses (SMB) consider the use of the cloud, applications and mobile devices to be a strategic priority. They recognise that they stand a good chance of improving their customer experience by making such investments. But it’s down to us, the technology providers, to make that

“From a reseller point of view, there is increased opportunity to work closer with the small business market and offer a highvalue solution, while at the same time improving their own offerings.” investment as easy as possible. A truly robust network requires you to manage filtering for a million websites, create individual user profiles and set security protocols for different

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

applications. That’s too much for many business owners - so they need management tools and software that does the hard work for them. From a retailing perspective, consumers are constantly using their smartphones in store, creating the obvious need for network speed, security, and availability. From here businesses can not only be sending push notifications, but analysing the data provided by consumer devices, helping shape in store layout for example. In a larger business, you will find a network that has a solid infrastructure, with the ability to keep incorporating new applications as the business grows. Why shouldn’t smaller businesses have the same features as well? Your wireless solution, as an SMB, should be able to handle any business application easily. It has to accommodate a growing number of

“In a larger business, you will find a network that has a solid infrastructure, with the ability to keep incorporating new applications as the business grows. Why shouldn’t smaller businesses have the same features as well?”

mobile users and have built-in security as a given. And quite simply, it should just work. This is why straightforward set up and quick, precise remote monitoring and troubleshooting should be a feature for all new technology made available to the SMB. Opportunities for small businesses Smaller businesses, by nature, employ fewer people. But there are still opportunities for these smaller teams to reap the same benefits from technology. With a network that is securely and simply managed, SMBs can benefit from: • Ease of management – customers now expect to use apps to get a simpler and quicker technology experience, so why should managing the network be different? Through using automated management software, the business owner will now be able to easily set network controls through a mobile app, and even sign in using social media profiles. Easy.

•

Super-fast, reliable Wi-Fi to keep employees connected and productive, have critical applications running at top speed, creating mobile experiences that customers can rely on. An automated and intelligent network that can act as an instant security barrier by detecting and isolating, any device that displays a potential risk.

The future of SMBs With the technology back-end taken care of, businesses are left free to innovate. With the rapid shift to create new customer experiences, for example using location-based services via mobile apps, it’s important that tech admin does not get in the way. Your network must work at the pace of your ideas. To enable this, the support you receive from a technology provider is as important as the solution. For example, any business owner that doesn’t want to manage their own cloud can have a partner do this as a managed service. From a reseller point of view, there is increased opportunity to work closer with the small business market and offer a high-value solution, while at the same time improving their own offerings. And for the time-strapped, costconscious businesses who are looking for wireless solutions they can count on, it’s important to have access to technology providers that can deliver. Just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a network than can deliver everything your customers need.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

OPINION // PEARSON PROFESSIONAL

Learning curve Roy Strik, head, Business Development, Pearson Professional, elaborates on the lack of skillsets for advance technologies in the region and urges partners to offer customised solutions.

he regional education sector is fast changing. As the Middle East economy looks to diversify, improve public sector efficiency and up-level private sector workforce, there is a need for working professionals to update their skills and progress in their careers while making material improvements in the organisations that they work for. In today’s working environment, continuous learning and professional development are much sought-after in a competitive environment, which is based on technology and innovation. With the dynamic nature of the current workplace, self-development and continuous education and up-skilling have become crucial, not only for career progression and advancement but also for career survival. For example, 90 percent of marketers already report suffering from a shortage of digital skills, and only 8 percent of surveyed companies feel strong in the area of digital marketing (whitepaper by Grovo). As a result, we are seeing an increased demand in the Middle East for professional development programmes as well as for short-term courses that equip managers with futuristic skills. UAE is aiming to be the hub for many future jobs, and government initiatives – from smart government to hyperloop, Dubai 10X and AI projects – are very encouraging in that respect. The need to upskill workers to be able to handle new jobs and the increasing demand within the job market means pressure on the learning apparatus that traditional learning supply is not able to cope with. E-learning is slowly being acknowledged as the most viable and convenient solution to correct the imbalance between supply and demand. While the assembly lines of the industrial age relied more on the machines than on the humans operating them, the new jobs of the future are

“Vendors and distributors with strong sales, communication and organisational skills are always an asset to any partner. They should be able to convince clients to purchase the partner’s offerings.” increasingly talent focused. Even with robotics’ advancement, it is argued that the emphasis is more on the kind of talent around the machine than the machine itself. The good thing about the post graduate and the adult learning landscape is that it is reasonably flexible. Also, in adult education, the private sector plays a much more substantial role which makes adapting to new ways of learning (including eLearning and blended learning) much faster.

UAE has one of the best technology and telecom infrastructures in the region. Application of AI and immersive technology in education is slowly taking shape and regulations around eLearning are being introduced. Private companies, especially those related to education and Edtech, are also starting to play their fair share of the game and are making more investments and taking concrete and courageous steps in the right direction. There is scope for much more, and we look forward to changes for the better. Additionally, it’s not only technologies that are changing but as well as new things are learnt differently now too. Blended education, which combines online learning with traditional faceto-face interaction, is gaining more popularity and brings new opportunities to the private and public sectors as well as overall employee development. Such way of learning brings in the best of all worlds, presenting learners with a chance to upskill themselves professionally while still holding a fulltime job. Vendors and distributors with strong sales, communication and organisational skills are always an asset to any partner. They should be able to convince clients to purchase the partner’s offerings. They should be good listeners, actively listening to customers’ needs, be able to offer solutions and speak to a wide variety of people. Most importantly, they should possess a positive attitude, which will carry them through even under pressure. Channel firms looking to enter in the private sector workforce education space should thoroughly review their offerings before approaching customers. They need to understand the challenges that regional firms face today amidst the technological revolution and create customised solutions to address them.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

OPINION // CRITEO

Win by collaborating Alexander Gösswein, regional managing director DACH, MEA and Russia, Criteo, on how e-commerce players can boost their marketing through collaboration.

he world of commerce is changing dramatically. Today’s consumers have become real “omnishoppers”, who switch from one device or platform to the next, and from online to physical stores and back expecting a seamless and consistent user experience. For retailers, this consumer behaviour means a huge challenge, in which large-scale customer data has become a core asset to successfully understand and connect with today’s omnichannel shoppers. E-commerce players in the Middle East and globally are generally successful when it comes to capturing the activity of their website users. For example, they know how a user came to the website, which products this user has viewed and placed in the shopping cart, or where the user stopped shopping. This data is an important basis for being able to build

the initial audience data base on a user level, which is the first step towards a personalised and targeted user approach. However, the website is not the only relevant data source for merchants; it only represents a small portion of the overall picture. Data from CRM systems, user journey data and others assume higher priority on the list. However, bringing all of this together consumes enormous amounts of data, time and money. This is why Data Management Platforms (DMPs) are experiencing a boom; these platforms can be used to merge data from a wide range of systems so that the data manager can bundle these into audiences which is helpful to conduct targeted marketing campaigns. However, even if retailers concentrate on their own first party data – generally considered to be the most valuable asset for marketing purposes – setting up targeted campaigns can become

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

very complex. This is one reason why retailers do not fully leverage their firstparty data despite the benefits of higher additional value that can be gained. I know of significant performance uplifts of retailers who leverage firstparty data for website personalisation, even if all they adopt is an audiencebased approach and not entirely a personalised one. Collecting data is not enough When it comes to cross-device and personalised performance campaigns, retailers quickly reach their limits, as getting a unique view of the users across different channels is a difficult process, perhaps far more than relying on one’s own data. It is possible to restore shopping carts on various devices, but it isn’t always possible for one retailer to use a cross-device approach across all platforms. In particular, app data or possibly even offline data are difficult to integrate.

Retailers securely contribute their data to the ecosystem and benefit from the aggregated information of other participants in their campaigns.

knows a specific user on the desktop and retailer B on a smartphone, this information can be bundled and played back to both retailers for their marketing campaigns. The added value for both is clear and the technical effort both have to take is minimal. This collaborative approach is the basis for even more targeted performance campaigns, including new customer approaches. By bundling interest data from users of various web shops across a large number of advertisers, a retailer can detect potential new users that are likely to convert.

Acquiring new customers is again another matter. Attracting potential new customers without huge wastage is unlikely with first-party data alone. So what can be done? Acquiring third-party data is one option with DMPs offering this data. Retailers must consider the below before choosing this option: • The older the data the less is its worth. Therefore, is it possible to assess how up-to-date is this data? Further, is it possible to estimate the intersection with data that is already available? And from this point of view, is the ratio between price and expected performance increase ultimately correct? • Second, are you willing to take the extra effort involved in processing additional data? • Third, and most importantly, what are the alternatives available to buying third-party data?

Achieve more by collaborating with others The alternative to acquiring data is collaboration. The idea behind this approach is as simple as it is efficient. It is based on the fact that one retailer’s data in combination with the data of others offers more advantages for each partner than it would on its own. Retailers securely contribute their data to the ecosystem and benefit from the aggregated information of other participants in their campaigns. The aggregated data pools are much more advantageous for each participant than the potentially perceived disadvantage of “giving away” a little bit of their own data. Aggregated data in this context means that the information can no longer be associated with a specific retailer. Let’s take the example of the cross-device user approach. Retailer A provides log-in information of their users in a hashed form and retailer B proceeds identically. Now, if retailer A

Retailers increasingly see the added value of aggregated data Collaborations and data pools are not only a consideration for a few pioneers in the industry. A largescale Criteo survey of 504 marketing executives from six countries employed in companies with over $50 million in sales determined how brands and retailers assess the pros and cons of collaboration and pooled data assets so as to meet customer needs. It was found that 71% of surveyed retailers are willing to contribute online search data to a shared pool. Around 60% are already part of data collaboration and 70% of them are satisfied with both the cooperation and the data received. In addition, 72% of marketing executives cite rising sales as the biggest benefit of pooled data. The time of the lone fighters is over. If retailers want to reach increasingly demanding consumers in a targeted manner, they should develop the willingness to join open and transparent networks. The breaking up of old habits and existing silos may not be easy at first but is imperative.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

GITEX 2018

GITEX 2018: PLAYERS TO WATCH OUT FOR

GITEX Technology Week in its 38th year aims to be a melting pot of conversations around AI, blockchain, robotics, cloud and other market trends that drive its theme of “Experience Future Urbanism”; while also being the impetus behind digital transformation strategies. We profile the who’s who of the technology world to learn what the market can expect from them at this year’s tradeshow.

A10 NETWORKS At Ingram Micro’s stand 11 in Hall 4

Mohammed Al-Moneer

A10 Networks will showcase its entire portfolio of solutions at the GITEX Technology Week. The company will highlight its service provider network security to support IoT in the age of 5G, multi-cloud management, DDoS protection and application visibility and analytics, said a statement from the company. A10 is keen to demonstrate GI/SGI firewall protection for mobile networks, Application Environment Management and Analytics, DDoS Mitigation and Office 365 Scaling & Security. Mohammed Al-Moneer, regional director, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), A10 Networks, said, “GITEX offers a great platform for our company to expose our brand and showcase our products and capabilities to decision makers from various segments of the market that attend the event.” “As a market leader in service providers in CGN/DDoS, and with over

7,000 customers world-wide, we are always looking to share best practices and rich technology insights with the community,” he said. “At the same time, we are eager to gain a greater understanding of how A10 can help current and future customers in the Middle East based on a customized approach to the region’s specific needs,” he added. A10 Networks will be exhibiting from its partner Ingram Micro’s stand number 11 in Hall No. 4.

CENTRA HUB Stand C8-05

Rohan Tejura

Over the course of this year, Centra has enhanced and strengthened its vertical specific offerings for the real estate, automotive, retail and trade, van sales, project management, and courier and logistics management sectors along with smart mobility and app-based solutions as well. The company has further revamped and re-engineered the UI/UX

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

experiences of its product portfolio to further make using the system simple, easy and extremely powerful. Centra will be focusing on showing off its new revamped UI/UX as well as deeply automated vertical-specific capabilities at GITEX 2018. Rohan Tejura, AVP, Centra Hub, said, “Centra plans to launch its new and improved mobility solutions as well as unveil the new “Express” line of QuickStart solutions across its product portfolio. The Express line aims to take customers live within 10 days with industry-specific standardised best practice templates. This standardised system is further customisable should end customers require further tailoring of the solutions as well. This revolutionary approach is poised to bring a paradigm shift within industry tech adoption for operations digital transformation. For 2019, Centra said it already has designed an aggressive plan under its Centra Alliance & Partner Program (CAPP) to engage with its partner network in the region, and boost partner toplines and bottom lines through agile, quick-to-implement and robust vertical specific solutions as well as industryagnostic solutions thereby increasing bandwidth of deliverables for the partners, and quicker go-lives and faster ROI realisation for end customers.

GITEX 2018

EQUINIX MENA

F5 NETWORKS

FOCUS SOFTNET

Hall 6, Stand 603

C6-10

Hall 8, Stand C-05

Jeroen Schlosser

Equinix is looking forward to meeting and collaborating with stakeholders at GITEX this year. Jeroen Schlosser, managing director, Equinix MENA, said, “We will be sharing our experiences and insights we have gained in helping our customers transform into digital businesses.” At this year’s GITEX Technology Week, the company will demonstrate how its enterprise customers around the world are successfully navigating their own digital business transformations. “We’ll share how they have overcome the barriers of increasing IT fragmentation, complexity and cost in their digital deployments. This includes insights into how to utilise an Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA) strategy to deploy decentralised points of integration and control at the edge of your digital business. We’ll show you how to leverage blueprints designed from our customers’ real-world implementations to best position your company for digital business.” The vendor is expecting to have conversations with enterprises about the transformative power of interconnection, and the key benefits to co-locate in Equinix Data Centers, in Dubai or any of its other 200 co-location facilities on five continents. Equinix said its team will be sharing insights from the New Global Interconnection Index (the ‘GXI’), and how interconnection helps businesses make the leap to digital, and also showcasing Interconnection Oriented Architecture, which is a proven and repeatable architectural framework and “how-to” guide to digitally transform customers’ strategy.

Tabrez Surve

Ali Hyder

F5 Networks will highlight the Middle East’s potential for multi-cloud-driven digital transformation at GITEX 2018. The cloud and application security expert will showcase a raft of news services, as well as present original research on how multi-cloud business and consumer realities will evolve over the next five years. Tabrez Surve, regional director, Gulf & Turkey, F5 Networks, said, “At GITEX 2018, we expect to showcase our most compelling vision yet on how new digital realities will unfold in the region and, against this transformational backdrop, how to best deploy, secure and optimise applications in a multi-cloud context.” New F5 products in the GITEX 2018 spotlight will include F5 Advanced WAF, BIG-IP Cloud Edition and F5 SSL Orchestrator. “We are continually enhancing our go-to-market strategy in concert with our ever-growing partnership base. This includes broadening our application service consumption models, strengthening existing partnership capabilities and enhancing support for multi-cloud, hybrid, and security initiatives,” said Surve. “An emergent threat landscape requires a multi-faceted approach to successfully secure the journey to a multi-cloud or a multipremises world. We will continue to develop our already strong partner network to help customers solve complex problems and ensure their applications go faster, smarter, and safer.”

IT solutions provider Focus Softnet offers a broad portfolio of ERP and vertical market solutions catering to enterprise and SMEs across industries. The firm will be showcasing its complete product portfolio including its flagship ERP - Focus 8, which has been upgraded with multilingual capability and is now GCC VAT compliant. “We will also be highlighting the features and benefits of our verticalfocused solutions, mobile apps and cloud-ready business software solutions,” said, Ali Hyder, group CEO, Focus Softnet. Additional solutions on display will include Focus i, a middle-tier ERP solution with business intelligence tools, and other range of ERP solutions. “We will also demonstrate our vertical market capabilities including Focus RMS (Retail Management Suite), Focus e-RMS (Restaurant Management System), Focus MRP (Material Requirement Planning), Focus POS (Point of Sales) and Focus WMS (Warehouse Management System) amongst a few others.” He added that the firm will have announcements around new product launches and partnerships during GITEX 2018. Hyder said, “We will continue to expand both in terms of solutions as well as geographically in 2019.”

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

GITEX 2018

FORTINET

FRENCH TECH PAVILION

HPE ARUBA

Sheikh Rashid Hall, Stand SR- C4

Hall 4

Hall 7, Stand A7-01

Alain Penel

Fortinet’s focus at GITEX this year is to encourage organisations to adopt a Security Transformation (SX) approach to complement their Digital Transformation (DX) initiative. Alain Penel, regional VP, Fortinet, said, “We will showcase our vision of security transformation and hold customised demonstrations highlighting the key capabilities of the Fortinet Security Fabric.” The company will be introducing new capabilities across the key solution areas within the Fortinet Security Fabric architecture, including management and analytics, multi-cloud, network, advanced threat protection, unified access, web applications, email, IoT and endpoint security. “We will also focus on our industryleading secure SD-WAN functionality, threat detection services, and expanded visibility from IoT to multi-cloud networks protecting the vast attack surface resulting from DX strategies.” The vendor’s aim is to continue its leadership in the network security market while strengthening its channel network and outreach. “We also want to focus on getting as many partners trained and certified to provide customers with the support they need to deal with an evolving and complex threat landscape,” he added.

Business France, the national agency supporting the international development of the French economy, is once again hosting the French Tech Pavilion at the 38th annual edition of GITEX. This year, tourism and ticketing platform Amadeus will be the official partner of the French pavilion. It will reward the most innovative French exhibitor. In the top 5 of the most innovative country in the world, France is reinforcing its commitment to support regional initiatives such as the “Smart City” projects by bringing leaders in French technology to the exhibition. Business France will also introduce several French tech startups who will be present for the first time and looking to connect with other GCC techies. French tech companies exhibiting at GITEX will be presenting their latest designs and inventions in relation to the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, LIFI, and Fintech. There will also be a section dedicated to Blockchain and open source, such as Linagora and its Open Source Personal Assistant, Two-i and its emotion analysis and behavior prediction tools, Dejamobile and its contactless payment management software, Sowhen and its digital production and creation studio, and Foxynerds Studio for the analysis of emotions. “GITEX is one of the key events that we encourage French Tech companies to take a part in annually as it is a great way to strengthen their presence in the region. Several instrumental meetings have been organised on this occasion with potential partners from the UAE, KSA and Egypt,” said Christelle Peyran, regional head, Tech Division at Business France Middle East.

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Osama AlHaj-Issa

In its 9th appearance at GITEX, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, will be exhibiting under the theme ‘Delivering better experiences through digital transformation’ and demonstrating its Mobile First Architecture - a next generation networking architecture for the software defined enterprise, designed to be mobile first and deliver a network that is open, secure, and autonomous. The Mobile First Architecture is purpose-built for the digital era and enables enterprises to rapidly innovate and transform their network so that they can enhance experiences and simplify IT. Osama AlHaj-Issa, regional channel director, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, HPE Aruba, said, “We are keen to demonstrate our recently launched Software-Defined Branch (SD-Branch) solution, a new approach designed to help customers modernise branch networks for evolving cloud, IoT and mobility requirements.” The firm will also unveil Aruba NetInsight, a solution that advances its Mobile First Architecture to enable autonomous networking and the Smart Digital Workplace, at GITEX. AlHaj-Issa added, “We have introduced important advanced switching, location based and cloud platforms that serve top enterprises and telcos who sell to SMB and others. These platforms are now being positioned with these various customers through Aruba channels and this will remain a focus for us for the next year as well. Also, we will see new IoT innovation to meet the growing market and challenges in this solution area. This year and next we will work to provide our channel with a bet-

GITEX 2018

ter services model to be more prepared to support their customers.”

HUAWEI ME Za’abeel Hall, Stand Z-D10

Located at Dubai Internet City, the facility will be a platform for Huawei and our regional partners to create innovative solutions. We will be adding great focus on several new technologies in AI to create additional value for governments and businesses.”

INFINET WIRELESS Zabeel Hall, Stand Z2-C8

LENOVO

Alaa ElShimy

Huawei will be focusing on new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud, IoT, Safe City, Smart City catering to governments, businesses and consumers, at GITEX 2018. One of company’s biggest highlights will be the third edition of the annual ‘Innovation Day’, which will be held under the theme “Innovative for a digital Middle East”. Innovation Day is a platform for luminaries and industry experts to gather and embrace digital transformation. Taking place on the second day of GITEX, the event will commence with a 5G Ecosystem conference, followed by the second part of the event aiming on AI and Smart Cities, under the theme “Activate Intelligence”. The events will include discussions, opinions and sharing experiences on how AI and Smart Cities are transforming and reforming the world we live in. Alaa ElShimy, MD and VP EBG, Huawei ME, said, “Some of the new technologies that we will be revealing at Gitex are: Huawei’s Full-stack, allscenario AI solutions, the FushionCloud 6.5, The FushionAtlas, the EC3000 to facilitate enterprise video conference and cloud communication and in the field of wireless technology, the latest eLTE-DSA solutions.” He adds that 2019 is expected to be packed and eventful year at Huawei. “One of the key milestones we’re looking forward to this year is the launch of our new OpenLab facility in Dubai.

consolidate our position in the region by developing new wireless solutions, tailored to meet the exact requirements of our partners and end users in the Middle East,” he added. “For example, we will be shortly launching a number of new wireless platforms which will deliver significantly higher throughputs and reduce latency to its lowest level possible, paving the way for the myriad of applications that will be deployed as part of the IoT and 5G roll-outs.”

Hall 7, Stand A7-25

Kamal Mokrani

At GITEX 2018, InfiNet Wireless will display the Quanta 5, its brand new 5 GHz Point-to-Point (PTP) solution, designed on InfiNet’s latest Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology. Providing the highest spectral efficiency available in today’s wireless marketplace—even when operating in high interference environments, often experienced in many parts of the Middle East —the new Quanta 5 solution is ideal for a diverse range of applications, and more specifically back-hauling for WiFi, LTE and 4G base stations, transmission of high resolution CCTV and video streams, as well as providing internet access to remote locations, according to Kamal Mokrani, global vice president, InfiNet Wireless. Mokrani said, “Other solutions on display alongside the Quanta 5 will include the latest generation of the successful InfiLINK XG product family.” Available in new frequency bands, the InfiLINK XG is the ideal solution for unlicensed backhauling in multiple bands such as 2 GHz and 3 GHz for legacy WiMAX and microwave replacements, or 4 GHz and 6 GHz which are specific frequency allocations depending on specific countries, said the company. “Our plan for 2019 and beyond is to

Richard Wilcox

Lenovo Data Center Group’s third participation in the region’s annual technology event comes with a larger presence this year. At GITEX, Lenovo aims to demonstrate how it is leading Intelligent Transformation to drive its customers’ businesses. Customers will get an immersive experience with the firm’s latest products, services and solutions through the dedicated zones for AI and HPC, IoT and Telco NFV, data analytics and the cloud. Richard Wilcox, Data Centre Group (DCG) regional director, Lenovo Middle East, said, “When new technologies come to life, there is a connection between people and technology – something we are calling Intelligent Transformation. Data lives and flows through data centres, powered by Lenovo. Workers feel the power of that transformation on Lenovo personal computers and smart devices at their desks or in the palm of their hands. Or when whole new worlds become real through the view of our VR/AR headsets. We are

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

GITEX 2018

partners in shaping how intelligence fuels our future and how it not only transforms business models, but entire industries and their value chains.” He added, “Our mission to help solve humanity’s greatest challenges is the driving force behind the collaborations and innovative High-Performance Computing and Augmented Intelligence solutions that we deliver. At GITEX, we’ll take you on a journey to see how customers across industries get started in AI and how our AI Innovation Centres enable university research collaborations, enterprise PoCs and partnership engagements to tackle real business problems and humanity’s greatest challenges.”

LINKSYS Hall 1, Stand Z2-C6

The firm will also be showcasing Phyn a smart water management and leak detection system for home and business. Amanulla Khan, MD, Linksys, said, “With the recent exciting launches in our SMB portfolio, Linksys Middle East is focused on taking over the SMB market focusing on key verticals like hospitality, and retail. We will continue to invest in enhancing our consumer and SMB product portfolio, bringing technology innovation to the marketplace, making it easier for businesses to deploy and manage the network and thereby helping them to improve efficiency and for consumers to experience awesome Wi-Fi throughout the home. Linksys strongly believes in their channel partners and focuses efforts to enhance our relationships across the partner spectrum to enable digital transformation and growth of the channel market.”

NETAPP Cloud Hall, Stand C6-20

nected flash systems and software. In the case of NetApp AFF, we will show how it provides the power and functionality to deliver data to the NVIDIA solution at speed and scale. Fadi Kanafani, senior director, Middle East and Africa, NetApp, said, “Our team of experts will be on hand to explain the powerful features of NetApp HCI, the world’s first enterprise-scale hyper converged infrastructure solution, and NetApp Cloud Volumes, which provides customers a fully-managed, cloud-native file storage service that is integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).” For 2019, Kanafani said that NetApp is planning to secure a bigger market share in the regional industry by solidifying its leading position in all-flash solutions and continuously developing game-changing innovations to help businesses exploring the benefits of their digital transition. “We are also looking at building new strategic partnerships; and enhancing customer experience by consistently delivering world-class solutions.”

Amanulla Khan

Visitors to Linksys’ stand at GITEX will be able to experience a smart home with Intelligent Mesh technology brought to reality by Velop Whole Home Wi-Fi system with entry-level Dual-Band offerings. Linksys will also showcase a range of disruptive intelligent business solutions for SMBs. Linksys, celebrating thirty years of networking and WiFi innovation for the home and business, will be announcing Linksys Cloud Manager, a cloud-hosted WiFi Management Platform purposebuilt for small business environments that reduces costs and increases operational efficiencies. The solution offers centralised visibility, management and control of a wireless network without the cost and complexity of traditional hardware controllers, overlay software, or annual hosting costs.

NEXANS CABLING SOLUTIONS Fadi Kanafani

At this year’s GITEX, NetApp will showcase its portfolio of next-generation solutions: the artificial intelligence (AI) solution NetApp ONTAP AI powered by NVIDIA DGX supercomputers; NetApp AFF A800 cloud-connected all-flash storage; NetApp HCI and its cloud-like simplicity and automation; and NetApp Cloud Volumes, a fully-managed, cloudnative file storage service that integrates with the world’s largest public clouds. For ONTAP AI, a joint NetApp and NVIDIA proven architecture offering, the firm will highlight the benefits of combining the most powerful GPU solutions with the fastest and most cloud-con-

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Hall 3, Stand D3-1 and Sheikh Rashid Hall, Stand SR-G2

Tarek Helmy

Over the last 26 years, Nexans Cabling Solutions has been successfully enabling thousands of customers to invest in future-proof, high-bandwidth networks, lower their operational costs and look to the future with confidence. The company has been positioned

GITEX 2018

as a high-end LAN infrastructure vendor that provides complete end-to-end solutions to major customers in the enterprise market. With a complete range of solutions in both, copper and fibre, the firm offers solutions for customers’ LAN infrastructure and data centre needs that meet their today’s and tomorrow’s requirements. Tarek Helmy, regional director Gulf and Middle East, South & East Africa of Nexans Cabling Solutions, said, “We will be exhibiting with our distributors at the show. We would like to show our commitment to our customers and partners in terms of our leadership in offering latest and best technologies and our longterm plan to firmly support them in the region.” The firm’s focus this year is on our Data Centre Innovations (New Cat7A that supports 25G over copper, & OM5 FO) and Fibre-to-theOffice (FTTO) latest V5 micro switch solutions in addition to showcasing its comprehensive range of LAN passive solutions. “We will be demonstrating our ‘Smart Choices for Digital Infrastructure’ includes different data centre infrastructure technologies that are flexible and scalable to adapt to future requirements and support several consecutive generations of active equipment. We will also promote our LANactive solution, which is based on Fiberto-the-Office (FTTO) latest V5 micro switch in office and the latest harsh environment switch that operates outdoor temperature range of -40 to +65 degrees.”

NUTANIX MIDDLE EAST

PIKCIO

Hall 7, Stand A7-20

Hall 4, Stand D4-15

Bassam Al Masri

Nutanix will be participating at GITEX under the theme ‘Freedom to Build’ – with the company giving enterprises the freedom to build modern data centres with unlimited choice of best-of-breed technology, simplicity and flexibility. GITEX trade show attendees will be given a demonstration of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software that makes data centre infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that power their business. CIOs and IT managers visiting the Nutanix stand at GITEX will have the opportunity to hear about the latest trends, strategies and innovations in the field of scalability, management and design of the Enterprise Cloud. Executives from Nutanix will be conducting hourly technical seminars at the stand. The company has also confirmed its participation at a CXO Workshop organised by Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) on Day 3 of GITEX. Bassam Al Masri, senior manager, Channel, Nutanix Middle East, said, “Our company has set for itself an ambitious but attainable goal of hitting $3 billion in billings from software and support in FY’2021. In line with the global vision, on a regional level we will continue to position Nutanix as the next generation operating system for the enterprise cloud. We have Gartner’s validation of being a leader in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) space. We want to be the first vendor that comes to mind as a trusted partner when enterprises in the region are ready to transform their data centres, their IT operations, and their businesses.”

Pikcio has developed a customer data exchange platform on its own custom built, fully GDPR compliant blockchain, that seamlessly solve data related issues. For companies, collecting, authenticating and protecting their customers data is an effort amounting to billions of dollars each year. Traditional data handling solutions are not built with newly implemented, data protection legislation like GDPR in mind, resulting in an increase of processing costs and time as well as poor customer satisfaction and ROI. Pikcio is able to offer 100 percent digital native solutions for every organisation facing complex processes to collect, verify and classify customer data. For businesses, our fully GDPR compliant, customer data exchange has many benefits: It is customisable, it permits companies to benefit from a non-invasive infrastructure, a reduced third-party dependence and a stronger, faster and cheaper user identification. It eliminates redundancies and enhances data collaboration across departments and business lines. Pikciochain is a data agnostic platform, in order to manage and handle a wide range of use cases and products. It handles both corporate and personal data. The first solutions have been developed in the banking, insurance and health care sectors. However, Pikciochain is an open platform where every corporation can create its own solution. As an example, for the banking and insurance sectors, our shared ledger platform benefits all stakeholders by

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

GITEX 2018

enabling greater transparency, reducing operational inefficiencies and ensuring up-to-date customer data. Attendees at GITEX can meet the firm’s customer experience manager for the Middle East Cyril Ghanem to know more about its solutions and offerings.

PURE STORAGE Hall 6, Stand A7-10

recently announced our vision to modernise storage architecture for unstructured, data-intensive workloads. Our data hub architecture is designed to be truly data centric and enable organisations to effectively utilise today’s most critical currency, which is data. “So, in line with this vision, as we head in to 2019, our goal is to work closely with our regional partner network to expand our client base by targeting cloud and SaaS providers, enterprises in the Global 2000 and businesses with next generation use cases like AI.”

RED HAT Hall 6, D6-20 Christian Putz

Pure Storage’s data solutions enable SaaS companies, cloud service providers, and enterprise and public-sector customers to deliver real-time, secure data to power their mission-critical production, DevOps, and modern analytics environments in a multi-cloud environment. The firm enables customers to quickly adopt next-generation technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help maximise the value of their data for competitive advantage. At GITEX 2018, Pure will demonstrate a host of new data-centric solutions for enterprises at every stage of their lifecycle including the new FlashArray//X product linel; FlashBlade, an advanced scale-out storage, architected to accelerate modern workloads and simplify infrastructure; AIRI (Artificial Intelligence Ready Infrastructure) and AIRI Mini, architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, is the industry’s first integrated AI-ready infrastructures for deploying deep learning at scale and FlashStack, the firm’s converged infrastructure (CI) solution developed jointly with Cisco. Christian Putz, director, Emerging, EMEA, Pure Storage, said, “We have

include Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud - an integrated solution for customers seeking to colocate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments; Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 - the latest version of Red Hat’s massively scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-asa-Service (IaaS) solution and Red Hat Virtualisation 4.2 - the newest release of the company’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered virtualisation platform that enhances the foundation for digital transformation. Red Hat executives are also eager to spread awareness about Red Hat Academy, an open source education programme that provides “turnkey curriculum materials for educational programs in high schools and institutions of higher education worldwide.”

RIVERBED Stands: Riverbed CC2-11; Distributor partners:Mindware stand D3-1, Hall 3 and StarLink stand SR-J2 Mustapha Hlil

At GITEX, Red Hat will showcase the company’s entire solution portfolio spanning Linux, middleware, virtualisation, cloud and cloud management, storage, containers, OpenStack and automation tools. As in previous years, Red Hat will continue to focus on educating trade show attendees about how adopting an ‘Open Hybrid Cloud’ strategy is fundamental to their digital transformation aspirations. This cloud strategy enables enterprises to migrate workloads across cloud boundaries, and more advantageously, set up some degree of workload portability, integration, orchestration, and unified management. Mustapha Hlil, regional manager, Partners and Alliances, CEMEA, Red Hat, said, “Red Hat has launched several innovations during the course of this year and we are keen to demonstrate these solutions at GITEX.” Some of these recent launches

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Elie Dib

Under the theme ‘Maximise Digital Performance: #RETHINKPOSSIBLE’, Riverbed will showcase platforms for Digital Experience Management and Next-Generation Infrastructure at GITEX 2018. This will include demonstrating the power of Riverbed SteelCentral, the digital experience visibility solution for end-to-end network, application and end-user experience monitoring. “The aim of this is to help organisations maximise digital performance, enabling them to fully measure and monitor the digital experience and address the most critical network infrastructure requirements of the govern-

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GITEX 2018

ment, oil and gas, financial services, and retail sectors,” said Elie Dib, regional vice president, METNA, Riverbed. “This year, we reimagined our brand identity to become ‘The Digital Performance Company’, which reflects our significant market momentum, technology and goto-market investments, and relevance in today’s digital world. It also encapsulates the evolution of our entire portfolio, putting the digital experience and digital performance at the centre.” Riverbed has been executing on a multi-year strategy to lead in digital performance, which includes several strategic acquisitions, organic development of digital performance and cloud-based features and functionality, integration across multiple solutions, and evolving key partnerships. “This is what we intend to highlight at GITEX- not just the launch of a product or solution but the continuous evolution of our portfolio, driven by the desire to empower our businesses and enable them to measure and manage the digital experience, and a next-generation network for digital performance,” he added.

and managing director, SAP Middle East North, said, “Our MENA business is channel-led, with our SAP PartnerEdge channel partner training programme fast-evolving and one of the fastestgrowing in the EMEA South region.” He added, “As the first multi-national enterprise application software company to go live on cloud data centres in the UAE and KSA, we will showcase cloud journey across aviation, banking and finance, public sector, retail, and telco. We will launch research, host senior executives, network and grow our channel partners, and exchange best practices to enable digital transformation and Smart Cities.” Al-Faifi said that the firm is seeing strong progress on its AED/SAR 1 billion investment plans previously announced across the region. “With both our UAE and Saudi Arabia cloud data centres fully operational, we will continue to enhance our offerings with the latest products and solutions aligned with our global roadmap. We will also continue to invest in our ecosystems through enablement programmes and localisation of our SAP solutions to meet in country needs.”

SAP MIDDLE EAST NORTH Hall 6

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC Hall Trade Plaza, Stand PL-2

Hanan Darwish, cluster president, Gulf and Pakistan, Schneider Electric, said, “At GITEX, we will showcase Internet of Things innovations running on our open and interoperable EcoStruxure architecture via our Innovation Hub on Wheels.” Visitors can experience 17 use cases for EcoStruxure, across three layers: connected products, real-time edge control, and applications, analytics, and services. “We will also showcase our prefabricated data centre with real-time solutions, in order to simplify planning, construction, and implementation. Edge computing will be another area of focus, especially in the high-potential connected retail sector.” Aligned with the GITEX theme of “Experience Future Urbanism,” the firm will exchange best practices from its leading Smart Cities such as Naya Raipur, India, the first greenfield integrated Smart City in India, and Istanbul, Turkey. Darwish said, “We are seeing strong growth in the Gulf and Pakistan for 2019 – especially in six key fields: data centre, buildings, transportation, water and waste water management, oil and gas, and utilities. “At GITEX, we will exchange best practices from regional innovators such as ADNOC, Ajman Bank, Dr Sulaiman Al Habib Hospital, Hilton Garden Inn MoE, and the Kuwait Oil Company. Our Go Green in the City initiative will also support young entrepreneurs in developing Smart City innovations.”

Ahmed Al-Faifi

Aligned with the GITEX theme of “Experience Future Urbanism,” SAP will support Smart Cities innovation under the theme “The Intelligent Enterprise.” The firm’s central showcase “Life in the City Reimagined for the Digital Age will feature six customer journeys across cloud, AI, machine learning, blockchain, and Big Data. Ahmed Al-Faifi, senior vice president

Hanan Darwish

Schneider Electric is the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation. It provides integrated energy efficiency solutions that combine energy, automation, and software. The firm’s System Integrator Alliance has trained over 20,000 SIs, which have connected over 1.5 million assets.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

GITEX 2018

VMWARE Hall 6, Stand A7-14

regional customers implement a more secure, end-to-end software-based network architecture – a Virtual Cloud Network – that supports their multicloud enterprises and advances security in new and compelling ways.

ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES Stand: A5-15

WINSOFT Hall 4, Stand E4-20 Ossama Eldeeb

VMware will be showcasing its latest innovations in cloud, networking and security and digital workspace technologies that are seen as critical to the successful digital transformation of Middle Eastern organisations, at GITEX 2018. VMware will also be displaying its latest achievements across its VMware NSX networking and security portfolio, to help regional customers implement a more secure, end-to-end softwarebased network architecture through a Virtual Cloud Network. Ossama Eldeeb, regional channel director, Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, VMware, said, “In line with GITEX’s theme of ‘Experience Future Urbanism’, VMware will be helping customers and partners understand how its compute, networking, storage, and management capabilities can help optimise workload performance and capacity across hybrid cloud environments. This applies to all sectors, with a particular focus on public and private-sector organisations that are looking for ways to manage monitor, and secure their IoT infrastructures, in response to the continued investment in smart cities projects by the Middle East.” To address the challenges of multi-cloud environments, VMware will showcase new and enhanced VMware Cloud Services that will enable cloud operations, DevOps, and security and compliance teams to better manage cloud costs, operations, security, and compliance across clouds. VMware is also set to highlight new innovations across VMware NSX networking and security portfolio to help

Global software publisher WinSoft International will showcase FileMaker, a workplace innovation platform at the upcoming GITEX Technology Week, which will run from 14th to 18th October 2018 in Dubai. WinSoft offers a localised software for the MENA market that supports the special characteristics of Arabic and right to left languages. It has partnered with FileMaker, an Apple subsidiary, to make publishing technologies accessible to Middle Eastern countries. FileMaker provides solutions that streamline workflows and solve faster your ever-changing challenges. You can design and create custom apps for your business, share them so your teams can work anywhere, and integrate your apps with software services and iOS devices. Hundreds of companies in all fields of activity and educational and governmental institutions have developed and deployed a custom FileMaker app to run their activity in the Middle-Eastern countries. Mihaela Vignon, sales manager, WinSoft, said, “Our attendance at GITEX 2018 will be a great opportunity for WinSoft to increase the brand awareness of FileMaker in the UAE and the Gulf Countries, to introduce the workplace innovation platform for SMEs and Global companies and to expand our network by recruiting new partners in the MENA region.”

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Hozefa Saylawala

Zebra empowers the front line of business in retail and e-commerce, manufacturing, transportation and logistics, healthcare and other industries to achieve a performance edge. With more than 10,000 partners across 100 countries, the firm delivers industry-tailored, end-to-end solutions that intelligently connect people, assets and data to help our customers make business-critical decisions. Hozefa Saylawala, director of sales, Middle East, Zebra Technologies, said, “Our market-leading solutions elevate the shopping experience, track and manage inventory as well as improve supply chain efficiency and patient care.” Among the solutions that will be on display at GITEX are Zebra SmartPack Trailer, a load planning solution providing transportation and logistics customers with real-time operational visibility into their loading operations and Zebra MotionWorks, the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of business-class location solutions to track and manage assets in real time. Zebra’s latest addition to its Android portfolio, the TC25, a new rugged smartphone specifically designed for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) empowering field mobility workers will be featured, as well as the ET55 tablet and the latest ZQ600 mobile printers designed for high-volume label and receipt printing applications used in the retail, transportation and logistics, and manufacturing industries.

THE FRENCH TECH PAVILION @ GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK 14-18 OCTOBER 2018

Come and meet the most promising software & hardware French companies in Hall 4 For more information, contact : Caroline GINOUX Project Manager caroline.ginoux@businessfrance.fr Christelle PEYRAN Trade advisor christelle.peyran@businessfrance.fr Miryem OUKAS-MESSIDI Communication Manager miryem.oukasmessidi@businessfrance.fr

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MANY THANKS TO OUR PARTNERS

VIDEO CONTENT ANALYTICS

COVER FEATURE // VEEAM SOFTWARE

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

eeam Software, global provider of solutions in backup, disaster recovery and intelligent data management software for virtual, physical and multi-cloud infrastructures, has had an impressive journey in the region. The Middle East operations will play a significant part in the company’s global revenue goals, which is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2022. The software vendor has had a string of milestones over the last year. Boasting over 4500 regional enterprise customers, the company has invested in 55 people in the Middle East alone and inaugurated its new office based in Dubai, almost a year ago. Veeam’s recently appointed regional manager for Middle East and Central Africa Claude Schuck, says, “As a company, we recognise the importance of investing in people and growing the organisation.” He adds, “Our big focus continues to be on enterprises, but we continue to cater for organisations of all sizes. Our basket of offerings has expanded, giving us better functionality and comprehensive capability to cover customers end-to-end.” Founded in 2006, the company has seen a noteworthy growth trajectory and ensured it is keeping up with the dynamic IT landscape. Over the last decade, the firm has led the conversation from basic backup and recovery schemes, availability and now to hyper-availability and a higher

level of intelligence. In line with this, the company has introduced a suite of Intelligent Data Management solutions. Gregg Petersen, regional sales vice president, MEA, Veeam, says, “Our communication to the market now revolves around Intelligent Data Management. We want customers to be proactive with their data management solutions and use the data they’ve been backing up to innovate with.” According to Petersen, there are five steps on the journey to intelligent data management in the hyper-available enterprise. The first stage is backup where all workloads are backed up and are easily recoverable in the event of any

security-related incidents. This is the basic foundation that cannot be skipped. The second stage is aggregation, which is where the business needs to ensure protection and access to data across multiple clouds, to drive digital services and ensure continuous business operations. This is where I’m seeing most businesses I speak with. “Visibility is the third stage where customers have a complete view across their aggregated workloads of their backedup infrastructure and the ability to manage data anywhere. At this step, customers will have a clear and unified view of usage and performance issues, and the potential to be proactive rather than reactive.”

“Our basket of offerings has expanded, giving us better functionality and comprehensive capability to cover customers end-to-end.” Claude Schuck, Veeam

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

COVER FEATURE // VEEAM SOFTWARE

During the fourth stage of orchestration, customers have the capability to move workloads to the best location for their needs across multicloud environments. This allows customers to ensure business continuity and make the optimal use of business resources on hand, overcoming outages, power failure to prepare and plan for most security-related circumstances. “Many of our customers are bringing in risk, compliance and governance into the discussion. They need to evaluate if they have all the necessary technologies to orchestrate and stimulate these risks,” explains Petersen.

Gregg Petersen, Veeam

“The fifth and final stage is automation. However, not many customers have reached this stage yet. As a company, we will soon be empowering customers to achieve this level. When we get to automation, data will be able to back itself up, predict issues before they arise, and recover instantly with zero loss of availability if

the worst should happen.” Petersen says that once customers reach this stage, they will be able to truly leverage the advantages of automated intelligent data management; getting business value out of the data. “This is the journey we are focusing on and want to engage our customers with. This will also be the highlight during

“Our communication to the market now revolves around Intelligent Data Management. We want customers to be proactive with their data management solutions and use the data they’ve been backing up to innovate with.”

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

our discussions at GITEX 2018.” Following a 100-percent twotier channel-led business model in the region, Veeam has had further noteworthy accomplishments over the last year. Graham Porter, head of channels, Middle East, Veeam, says, “We are driving customer conversations from backup to availability and now to hyperavailability. This is also momentous for our partner community. Over the course of the past year, we have signed reseller agreements with global leaders HPE, Cisco, NetApp and most recently Lenovo. This opens new revenue avenues for our channel.” The company has been enabling partners through joint sessions, inclusive training and relationship building sessions. “We have 10 out of 55 Veeam executives in the region covering the channel business. This is how serious we are about our partners’ business,” says Porter. “On the distribution side, we have been looking at elements such as activation of partners, average deal size and frequency of purchase. We have also designed incentive schemes to motivate partners and distributors.” He adds that the company has been incentivising partners to carry out PoCs, especially as a large portion of these installations turns into revenues. Globally, the cloud backup software provider believes it is well-poised to cross a billion dollars by the end of this year, clocking $827 million as total bookings revenue for 2017. Porter says, “The fact that we are getting into more enterprise deals,

Graham Porter, Veeam

working closely with our global alliance partners, as well as becoming part of larger solutions with bigger partners, gives us the confidence to achieve this huge objective.” Schuck says the expected investments from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, where these firms are launching data centres in the Middle East, will further boost the market opportunities. He says, “Veeam is wellpositioned to take advantage of this. I believe the shape of our business will change. What we have to offer in terms of how customers procure and how they use Veeam services will change for the better, in terms of leveraging off the hosted services. That’s going to be a massive change for the region.” Customers and partners can look forward to details of the company’s new releases and updates at its annual VeeamOn Forum Middle East event on 14th November in Dubai. “The Middle East market will see a lot of innovation around the cloud space going forward. As big global cloud providers are setting up regional data centres, it will transform the way customers operate and lower entry costs for businesses. Looking ahead to 2019, our roadmap is strong and the market can expect innovations from us around our channel partners, process and our technologies,” says Petersen. “Our biggest goal in 2019 is to grow to be the number one player in the Middle East in the cloud and intelligent data management space.”

FIVE STAGES OF INTELLIGENT DATA MANAGEMENT Backup: Back up all workloads and ensure they are always recoverable in the event of outages, attack, loss, or theft. Aggregation: Ensure protection and Availability of data across multicloud environments to drive digital services and ensure the aggregated view of service level compliance. Visibility: Improve management of data across multi-cloud environments with clear, unified visibility and control into usage, performance issues and operations. Orchestration: Seamlessly move data to the best location across multi-cloud environments to ensure business continuity, compliance, security and optimal use of resources for business operations. Automation: Data becomes self-managing by learning to back itself up, migrate to ideal locations based on business needs, secure itself during anomalous activity and recover instantaneously.

“The fact that we are getting into more enterprise deals, working closely with our global alliance partners, as well as becoming part of larger solutions with bigger partners, gives us the confidence to achieve this huge objective.”

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

FEATURE // CHANNEL SPEAK RESULTS

CHANNEL SPEAK

Supported by Reseller Middle East, Enabler One has released the results of the first-ever vendor agnostic survey in the Middle East and North Africa region â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Channel Speak. With inputs from an extensive database of partners, the survey explores key issues and paints a true picture of the regional channel business. Find excerpts of the results in the following pages. 36

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Rishikesh Trivedi, co-founder and principal enabler, Enabler ONE

It was great to see insights from vast number of channel partner organisations, helping us make the 2018 Channel Speak survey not only a resounding success but a platform of choice for clearly articulating their feedback to their peers on what they believe is still selling in spite of the various new-age technology buzz words and reflecting the kind of support they expect from their supporting ecosystem of distributors and vendors. It undoubtedly validates the need for a platform wherein the channel ecosystem can voice their opinions freely.

hannel partners act as the extended sales arm of the distributors and vendors. However, they are often perceived as mere fulfillment routes within the IT ecosystem. Both distributors and vendors often conduct channel satisfaction surveys, which certainly provide a good view of the satisfaction levels of partners on variety of areas with their distributors and vendors. However, there is a clear market need to deeply analyse the actual challenges faced by partners and

then work towards building a strategy to address those issues. Most distributors and vendors rely on a small set of partners for over 80 percent of their business; this isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t because of the incapability of the remaining partners, but it is rather due to the lack of the support from distributors and vendors to the remaining partners. If distributors and vendors desire to develop a much stronger partner ecosystem, then it is pivotal to expand their vision beyond their top partners. In order to capture the ground reality

of the market; and understand the true challenges and expectations of channel partners; Enabler ONE conducted the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first vendor and technology agnostic channel ecosystem survey, Channel Speak. Methodology Channel Speak surveyed large and medium sized channel partners in the GCC. The overall questionnaire was broken down into four key sections, i.e. portfolio of solutions offered and sold, partnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s views on the buying

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

Barracuda Essentials

FEATURE // CHANNEL SPEAK RESULTS

THE MARKET IS READY TO ADOPT NEW TECHNOLOGIES, BUT THE PARTNERS AREN’T; AND THE CURRENT STATE OF THE SUPPORT EXTENDED BY THE DISTRIBUTORS AND VENDORS TO THE CHANNEL PARTNERS IS ONE OF THE KEY CONSTRAINTS AROUND THAT.

WHAT CHANNEL PARTNERS OFFER V/S WHAT THEY ACTUALLY SELL: 50%+ partners offer cloud, consulting, professional services (PS) and managed services (MS); but majority confirmed server, storage, and network infrastructure as their top sale in the last one year.

Over 30% of the respondents from top management believe they will sell consulting, SaaS, and IoT, while over the same percentage of respondents from the rest of the team of partners believe they will sell infrastructure products, cloud, applications, PS and MS in the next one year.

Market readiness

Are they selling OPEX deals?

81% of partners confirmed that enterprises are open to take the risk of adopting new and disruptive technologies (even if they aren’t proven yet) as long as there is a clear business value.

56% of the partners confirmed to have sold deals in OPEX model in the past one year. Breaking this down further, only 32% of the respondents from the core sales team confirmed this, in comparison to the 68% of the top management stating the same.

Lack of credit: Really?

Countering Challenges

Over 38% of the partners cited lack of credit as one of their top business challenges; yet over 60% of the OPEX deals were internally financed.

44% partners cited new vendor partnerships, 30% confirmed geo expansion, and 42% stated services portfolio expansion as their key strategic initiative to improve business and margins. However, only 15% mentioned downsizing to improve margins.

behaviour of enterprises, market challenges and counter strategies adopted by partners, and the overall engagement between the IT ecosystem. This article presents the key findings of the survey, which not only are eye opening, but also thought-provoking. Despite the hype of the disruptive technologies like IoT, Blockchain, cloud, big data analytics and the like, it is quite clear that a significantly large number of channel partners at present, and in future, envision to have traditional infrastructure solutions as their top sale. Another critical area that got reflected, through Channel Speak, was the disconnect and opaqueness between the top management of partners and the actual sales teams when it came to the future vision and the existing ground reality of the market. Channel Speak also attempted to gauge partners’ opinion on the market readiness to adopt new technologies, and the

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

FEATURE // CHANNEL SPEAK RESULTS

Nehul Goradia, co-founder and principal enabler, Enabler ONE

results indicate that 81% of the partners confirm the market is ready in taking the risk to adopt new technologies, the obvious question to then ask is: why aren’t they selling it? This could possibly be attributed to the lack of skills and readiness, as well as the desire to capture low hanging fruits (i.e. selling what always sells – infrastructure!) of the partners itself. If vendors and distributors need a better ecosystem where partners are prepared and capable enough to drive a sophisticated conversation around the new technologies with the CIOs, then they will have to rethink their partner programmes all over again. If we connect the dots, we will realise that the market is ready

For the first time in the region, Channel Speak has provided an unbiased and anonymous platform for the entire channel ecosystem to convey the ground realities and the exact support they need from their ecosystem stakeholders. While reaffirming some of the known aspects of channel engagements, it has also thrown up some unique insights into the disparity of market viewpoints across different levels within a channel partner organisation as well as the technology demands of enterprises within the region. It is our belief that the insights received through Channel Speak will help the distributors and vendors tweak their partner engagement programmes and better synergise with their channel ecosystem.

to adopt new technologies, but the partners aren’t; and the current state of the support extended by the distributors and vendors to the channel partners is one of the key constraints around that. If one is to take a deeper look at why only 32% of the respondents from the core sales team have sold OPEX deals, as compared to the 68% of the top management – the point of the lack of readiness of the sales teams in terms of their ability to drive complex OPEX deals gets reinforced. Almost all the partners expect distributors and vendors to provide them with presales support, lead generation, marketing support, and product trainings. The easy way is to keep supporting the partners with sales and presales support; however, the difficult and long-term solution to

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

address this challenge is to reduce this dependency and make the partners more independent. Distributors and vendors clearly need to develop partner programmes that are more focused on upskilling their partners; otherwise, partners will continue to have a short-term vision, and won’t evolve from a box mover to a true IT services provider, which is what most of them are aspiring for. To gather more insight on some of the above points as well as to know more on what the channel ecosystem is really saying, download a FREE copy of the inaugural 2018 Channel Speak Report from the Enabler ONE website: www.enabler.one/ channelspeak2018

Industry

FEATURE // CHANNEL SPEAK RESULTS

THOUGHTS

NARENDRA TALREJA, COUNTRY HEAD, SOFTWAREONE UAE

I am optimistic that Channel Speak will be a strong link between stakeholders to help understand each other’s business objectives. This is especially more relevant in current scenarios where almost all vendors have transformed their legacy products and services to map with the disruptive technologies.

vital for vendors and distributors to truly understand the challenges partners face and support them to address these issues effectively. Initiatives such as Channel Speak helps us to gain a clearer picture on market circumstances and the bottlenecks partners grapple with. We also commend the survey as it is the first time there has been an initiative of this scale at a regional level.

STEVE LOCKIE, GROUP MD, WESTCON-COMSTOR

ALIASGAR DOHADWALA, CEO, VISIONTECH SYSTEMS

The survey is ideal for getting conversations around major issues started. This will lead to more open and direct dialogues, resulting in success stories and secured business processes among channel partners and their stakeholders.

RAMKUMAR BALAKRISHNAN, PRESIDENT, REDINGTON VALUE Almost all global vendors rely on the strength and expertise of regional channel partners to ensure their offerings reach their targeted customers. It is

It is great to see an initiative like Channel Speak being launched by Enabler One and Reseller ME as it aims to provide a platform to get unbiased feedback from the channel. The survey can surely help provide useful data to enable partners, distributors and vendors to fine tune their current offerings and make everyone work towards the creation of a more aligned channel ecosystem. We look forward to using the insights from this survey to plan our channel strategy and service offerings for the coming year.

SHAHNAWAZ SHEIKH, SALES DIRECTOR, MIDDLE EAST & TURKEY, SONICWALL A perfectly aligned channel partner/distributor and vendor can deliver an optimal and the best solution to its endcustomers. Having said that, a survey, such as Channel

Speak, aimed at knowing endcustomer’s perspective through the lens of channel partner is very useful and can provide well-informed business data to enable partner/distributor and vendor’s collaboration for achieving a healthy channel ecosystem. Availing up-to-date insights, directly from the partners through this medium, into the changing market dynamics that is driving comparison between OPEX and CAPEX model, skills availability, training demands, growth and sustainability and risk criteria, financial behaviour, integrated or multi point solution and inputs on customer experience are some of the key business indicators that can help SonicWall engage better with channel ecosystem to achieve best productivity, channel loyalty and customer satisfaction and customer retainment.

SAURABH VERMA, HEAD ICT AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, MENA, FROST & SULLIVAN Most vendors and distributors boast a strong and closely integrated channel partner programme. However, in reality, most partner programmes are still disintegrated with the ground realities and pain areas of partners. Both distributors and partners need to rethink their partner programmes, and make sure that they are more aligned to address the needs and expectations of their partners. In order to do that, they need access to solid, and more importantly unbiased feedback from partners; which is what Enabler ONE has attempted through Channel Speak.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

FEATURE // GITEX 2018

TOP DISTIES TO MEET AT GITEX 2018

GITEX Technology Week 2018 will showcase the innovation that is happening within the regional IT industry by showcasing use-cases of advanced technologies such as AI, blockchain, robotics, IoT, analytics and cloud. We feature leading distributors to rub shoulders with at the 38th edition of the annual trade show.

AlJammaz Distribution

Bulwark Technologies

Meet them at: Hall 3, C3-1

Meet them at: Sheikh Rasheed Hall, SR-D6

Value-added technology distributor in the GCC, AlJammaz Distribution delivers advanced technology products, solutions and services in the areas of data centres, infrastructure, cloud, IoT, networking, collaboration, cyber security, servers, storage, wireless mobility, broadband and Internet access as well as consumer gadgets and life style.

Headquartered in Dubai, Bulwark Technologies serves the entire region with solutions from more than 20 technology vendors and works with more than 400 partners, with the aim of bringing the best in technology to the Middle East. Gearing up for GITEX 2018, the company has reiterated the importance of building a strong, integrated security infrastructure in the region. Bulwark will highlight its end-to-end security solutions and customer-centric distribution strategies during the show.

Asim Saud AlJammaz, vice president, AlJammaz, said, “Our primary objective at GITEX 2018 is to meet our partners around the region, share with them the latest trends in technologies in hyperconverged and data centres, inspire channel partners about the cloud opportunities and how can they use it to address and solve end user problems, show the end users the latest technologies in surveillance systems and face recognitions, demonstrate different IoT solutions that channel partners can use to solve customers issues, solutions around cybersecurity, collaboration and wireless that can help enterprises to secure and do their business better.” He believes partners need to plan the visit ahead of time, decide in what technologies they need to know more about and search who is demonstrating these technologies. “They must plan important meetings in advance and dedicate time to network with other peers, friends and customers.” Heads up: The distributor will be making several announcements on new partnerships, especially for cloud solutions, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Jose Thomas Menacherry, managing director, Bulwark Technologies, said, “Bulwark will be showcasing its complete product portfolio with focused product demos and presentation sessions at GITEX 2018. We would also engage in prescheduled meetings with our potential customers to firm up their initial engagement along with our vendors.” Heads up: The distributor will be emphasising on its recent partnerships with 42Gears Mobility Systems addressing Enterprise Mobile Management along with best-in-class products and solutions in its current portfolio from global leaders such as iStorage, Mimecast, MailStore, SendQuick and EnGenius.

Enterprise Systems

Exclusive Networks ME

Meet them at: Z1-D10

Meet them at: Sheikh Rashid Hall, SR-B4

Enterprise Systems is a value-added distributor that has been in the market for over six years, delivering enterprise products in the market. With an experienced team, Enterprise Systems offers a complete spectrum of services – marketing to sales, technical to training, logistics to finance.

Headquartered in Europe, Exclusive Networks ME aims to accelerate market entry and growth for innovative cybersecurity and cloud technologies in the Middle East region. As the regional channel business strives to keep up with the evolving trends in the market, Exclusive Networks has been able to maintain a sustainable growth. According to the distributor, this growth has been driven by existing vendors and the addition of new vendors and services.

Pouya Parsafar, CEO, Enterprise Systems, said, “GITEX is a way to showcase what we are capable of and the primary objective is get more partners to work with the company. New partners can bring in new opportunities and customers. Enterprise Systems seeks to strengthen existing relationships and gather new ones, along with our venders.” According to the CEO, GITEX is still a relevant platform for showcasing the latest in solutions and technology development, right from artificial intelligence to blockchain, robotics to cloud and other future trends that give access to emerging markets. “Attendees can gain experiences that will expand their business reach to new territories and buyers from all over MENA and the conferences will help to gain new perceptions on game changing ideas.”

Nathan Clements, MD, Exclusive Networks, said, “However, in parallel to this, we also have a strong and highly motivated team, which has allowed us to consistently deliver good growth. There are around 15 vendors we are actively working with as of today. Some of our new relationships with vendors will be formally launched at GITEX 2018.” Currently, Exclusive Networks boasts vendors such as Nutanix, Rubrik, Fortinet, F5, SentinelOne, Gigamon, Gemalto, Infoblox, Skybox, Ivanti, FireEye, Exabeam, Cloudian, Pure Storage and Mellanox in its portfolio.

Heads up: The distributor’s aim is to obtain new businesses by networking and reinforce existing vendor, customer and partner relationships effectively.

Heads up: This year the distributor will be officially launching Exclusive Group’s first Cyber and Cloud super centre. Stay tuned to learn more.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

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FEATURE // GITEX 2018

FVC

Gulf Software Distribution

Meet them at: Sheikh Rashid Hall, SR-B2 Meet them at: Dedicated meetings during the show FVC is a regional value-added distributor (VAD) that provides tangible solutions across vital areas of enterprise – unified communications, unified collaboration, audio-visuals and information security and advanced networking.

Over the course of this year, regional value-added distributor Gulf Software Distribution (GSD) has successfully grown its top priorities – people, partners and products.

KS Parag, managing director, FVC, said, “At GITEX, we will be focusing on expanding our overall solutions portfolio, with a particular focus on strengthening its reach towards key verticals like hospitality, healthcare and education, among others. We will also showcase our FVC services offering that is

tailor-made specifically for partners to be able to offer the same high levels of services to their customers.” He added, “In keeping with the current business needs for solutions that support DX, AI and IoT environments, we believe a stronger channel community specialised in these areas will help FVC stay true to its commitment of being a trusted partner and an enabler of digital transformation initiatives within organisations.”

Heads up: FVC will be highlighting a number of key solutions from its UC and AV portfolio, namely PRYSM’s LPD 6K Series of interactive displays, SMART Technologies’ interactive displays, whiteboards and collaboration software for businesses and educational institutions, Sony’s TEOS Manage software, which offers a complete display, device, and room management solution for corporate environments and Sony’ BRAVIA professional display screens.

The company has doubled the size of its team and substantially developed its partner network over the past six months. During the 2018 edition of GITEX Technology Week, the distributor will be highlighting new vendor partnerships and milestones achieved during this year. From day one of its regional operations, set up in 2016, the distributor has focused on developing a niche around IBM Software in the GCC. While that continues to be a focus, it is now looking at creating a strong security and analytics offerings. Gareth Hansford, general manager, Gulf Software Distribution (GSD), said, “We have significantly grown the number of value-added resellers and systems integrators we are working with.” He added, “We have also signed up two new vendors – Cloudflare and STEALTHbits, which are complementary to our existing IBM portfolio.” Heads up: Instead of a standalone stand, this year the distributor will be showcasing its complete portfolio and emphasising on new vendor partnerships to partners and customers through dedicated meetings, enablement sessions and demonstrations.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

FEATURE // GITEX 2018

StarLink

Synergix International

Meet them at: Sheikh Rashid Hall, SR- J2

Meet them at: Sheikh Rashid Hall, SR-3D

Regional value-added distributor StarLink said that it intends to address the cybersecurity challenges and bring to its customers an array of next-generation technologies with focus on Software Defined Data Centre, Identity Access Management, Risk and Compliance, Infrastructure Security, Data Protection and Security Intelligence Centre that can help bolster cyber resilience, at GITEX 2018.

Established in 2000, Synergix International along with its associated group of companies, works towards the objective of driving computer network technology advancement in the Middle East and North Africa region. As a value-added IT distributor, Synergix International offers cost effective and leading-edge technology requirements from leading vendors such as AiRISTA, Ekahau, Fluke, Fluke Networks, Infilink, INNO, NetScout, STR, Viavi Solutions. Alan Pourmirza, managing director, Synergix International, said, “We will be showcasing our latest products and services during GITEX 2018. We are looking forward to meeting and greeting our customers as well as discovering new ones. We will also be demonstrating the advantages of some of our solutions for the customers.”

Nidal Othman, MD, StarLink, said, “Year-on-year, we have seen GITEX innovate and evolve to cater to the prevalent IT security trends and challenges. Thereby, setting the stage for exhibitors and visitors to capitalise on the vast business opportunities, build partnerships and alliances as well as keep up with the changing IT security landscape.” Deriving ROI from such an event can be “tricky as it is majorly about networking and engagement,” he added. This is why it is important for partners to plan well in advance. He said, “Partners need to also deploy the right resources, especially the business development and technical teams, to cater to all the queries, have a targeted list of potential customers and preschedule meetings with the right audience. It goes without saying that the marketing teams support in ensuring maximum visibility and exposure leading up to the event to push traffic is equally important.” Heads up: We can expect several announcements from the distributor around new partnerships at GITEX.

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

He also encouraged partners to schedule meetings with Synergix team prior to the show and dedicate time to learn about new product services. “Experts from our team will be available to help and assist partners with any queries or challenges they face with our solutions.” Heads up: The company will be making announcements around Infilink Cat 8 solution, anti-vibration and anti-seismic solution for data centre and data centre technical cleaning with ISO 14644-1 Class 8

VAD Technologies

Westcon-Comstor

Meet them at: The distributor will be present across its vendor stands

Meet them at: CONNECT lounge

VAD Technologies is an established IT and technology valueadded distributor, headquartered in Dubai, UAE. Catering to enterprise and SME markets through a strong channel footprint across Middle East and North Africa, it delivers innovative technology products and solutions to transform the IT landscape.

Mario M. Veljovic, general manager, VAD Technologies, said, “At GITEX, for us, it’s all about strengthening our existing relationships with vendors and partners, as well as building many new ones. GITEX is the key event of the year for the ICT Industry and all that are actively involved.” He added, “As most of the key senior executives are in town, GITEX still remains a key venue to finalise new agreements and seek more investments into the region’s channel ecosystem.” According to Veljovic, partners should look out for new disruptive and innovative solutions this GITEX. “Do some research before stepping into the show,” he urged partners. Heads up: We will see the distributor signing new vendor partnerships and strengthening its portfolio further.

Westcon-Comstor is a value-added technology distributor of category-leading solutions in security, collaboration, networking and data centre. The company is aiming to transform the technology supply chain through its capabilities in cloud, services and global deployment. Through a unique physical and digital distribution network, Westcon-Comstor extends its partners’ global reach while providing the local expertise needed to successfully navigate worldwide opportunities.

About a year ago, Synnex Corporation had announced the completion of the acquisition of the Westcon-Comstor Americas businesses and minority investment in Westcon EMEA and APAC businesses. At GITEX, Westcon-Comstor will be hosting the CONNECT lounge on the 16th, 17th & 18th of October 2018 at the lobby area in IBIS hotel in DWTC. Steve Lockie, group MD, Westcon-Comstor, said, “Over the past years, Westcon-Comstor’s CONNECT lounge has continued to be an ideal platform for B2B meetings with vendors and resellers during GITEX.” Heads up: The resellers visiting CONNECT lounge can learn about the various vendor solutions offered by Westcon-Comstor. They can also schedule meetings with the senior sales and technical teams from the distributor as well as from the vendors.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

FEATURE // HUAWEI ENTERPRISE MIDDLE EAST

‘INNOVATE FOR A DIGITAL MIDDLE EAST’

Alaa ElShimy, vice president and managing director of Huawei Enterprise Middle East, gives a preview of what GITEX Technology Week 2018 visitors can expect from the tech giant’s presence.

s ICT technologies develop rapidly and become integrated into more and more verticals, the digital economy is becoming the fastestgrowing, most innovative, and widestreaching economy. It is an important driver of global economic growth and recovery, playing a vital role in unleashing the potential of economic development, driving the transformation of traditional industries, fueling sustainable economic development, improving social management and services, and fostering innovation. New technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence, and smart cities are revolutionising how governments, businesses, and consumers interact with the world around them. Huawei is committed to helping our partners in the Middle East navigate the changing times. In the spirit of openness and sharing wisdom, we are hosting our third annual Innovation Day on the

sidelines of GITEX Technology Week 2018. Held under the theme, ‘Innovate for a digital Middle East’ the one-day event is a platform for luminaries and industry experts to gather and discuss how all can work together to embrace digital transformation and forge ahead on the road to an intelligent world. With the aim of promoting a 5G ecosystem in the Middle East region, we will start the day with a 5G Ecosystem Conference held under the theme ‘5G is Now, from eMBB to Digital Society.’ The second part of the event will focus on AI and smart cities, under the theme ‘Embrace digital transformation, the road to intelligent world’, where discussions, opinions, and sharing experiences will take place on how AI and smart cities are transforming and reshaping the world we live in. As the Middle East undergoes rapid digital transformation, the leadership is putting in place strategies to accommodate their digital agendas

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

in their national visions. As a leading global provider of information and communications technology infrastructure and smart devices, Huawei views the Middle East as a significant market where the company can contribute to the development of the ICT industry, bringing digital to every person, home and organisation for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei’s end-to-end portfolio of products, solutions and services are both competitive and secure. Through open collaboration with ecosystem partners, we create lasting value for our customers, working to empower people, enrich home life, and inspire innovation in organisations of all shapes and sizes in the Middle East region. Driven by customer-centric innovation and open partnerships, Huawei has established an end-toend ICT solutions portfolio that gives customers competitive advantages. Huawei is committed to bringing its global expertise and latest innovations

HUAWEI IS COMMITTED TO BRINGING ITS GLOBAL EXPERTISE AND LATEST INNOVATIONS TO THE MIDDLE EAST REGION.

Alaa ElShimy, vice president and managing director of Huawei Enterprise Middle East

to the Middle East region and creating maximum value for governments, telecom operators, enterprises and consumers. We are rapidly progressing on the digital agenda and entering the all-intelligent world. Our long-term enterprise strategy in the region is to build a digital ecosystem through which Huawei can help our Middle East channel partners meet their customers’ needs by bringing in the most cutting-edge artificial intelligence products and solutions, enhancing connectivity and improving user experience across different domains. Through joint innovation with our customers, partners, and peers, we hope to achieve growth across all industries, creating a robust win-win ecosystem for organisations throughout the region. As one of the largest ICT expos in the world and a gathering place for the Middle East’s government and industry leaders, GITEX is an ideal opportunity

for Huawei to showcase our innovative products and solutions which are being deployed across multiple vertical sectors. This year, our presence at GITEX will be building on the importance of AI as one of the future’s leading technologies. Our participating in GITEX is designed to help all businesses and organisations step over the threshold and stake their claim in the intelligent world. We will use GITEX as a platform to launch and showcase a range of exciting new products, with a particular focus on AI. These will include: • Huawei’s full-stack, all-scenario AI solutions • The FusionCloud 6.5, a nextgeneration enterprise-class full-stack intelligent private cloud solution • The FusionAtlas intelligent computing solutions: an AI enablement platform based on ‘One Cloud, One Lake and One Platform’ architecture to help enterprises accelerate cloud

•

migration and achieve digital transformation For unified cloud communication, we will showcase EC3000, the latest integrated platform to facilitate enterprise video conference and cloud communication In the field of wireless technology, we will showcase the latest eLTEDSA solutions, which overcomes the challenge of insufficient continuous dedicated spectrum resources around the world by using 4.5G technology to aggregate traditional VHF/UHF narrowband discrete spectrum into broadband spectrum resources

To make the most of opportunities in this new world, all organisations need to embrace and activate intelligence through digital platforms that are open, agile and equipped with state-of-theart AI capabilities. We look forward to seeing you there!

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

FEATURE // PARTNER TRAINING

Learning the ropes Inadequate skillsets and lack of effective trainings around existing and emerging technologies continue to be one of the biggest challenges in the regional IT channel. Reseller ME speaks to industry players to understand how trainings can be made an intrinsic part and parcel of everyday channel business.

takeholders across the technology spectrum are grappling with finding and retaining resources with adequate skillsets to efficiently handle new and emerging technologies. In the dynamic world of IT, this poses as a serious problem. While customers and vendors are constantly on the lookout for trained employees, it is also a concern on the partner’s end of business. Partners without the right knowledge and skillsets for particular technologies will affect not only their individual business but also that of their vendors. This is why partner training is a critical aspect. Zameer Qureshi, AVP Middle East, Centra Hub, says, “Partner training is a crucial aspect of the ecosystem of tech delivery to end customers. Product vendors are constantly investing in product enhancement, verticalisation, best-practice approach methodology, and boosting feature richness. As a

consequence, it is imperative that partners are always brought up to speed with the latest offerings of the vendor solution landscape.” Also, he adds that it is imperative that the partner and delivery teams constantly update themselves with business domain knowledge of their customer segments as well. “When they understand customer business and speak the customers’ vocabulary, the end result is that customers are confident on the tech investments that they are making, the delivery process goes through much faster, and there is minimal risk involved in the entire project,” he says. This is even more so the case when it comes to advance emerging technologies that digital transformation strategies rely on such as IoT, cybersecurity, cloud, big data, blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Shadi Salama, channel lead, East Region, Cisco Middle East, says,

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

“In order to capitalise on these technologies, enterprises will need well-trained and skilled staff. For partners to be successful in this area, they need to play key roles in defining, selling, deploying and optimising these megatrends that will deliver clear business outcomes and meet customers’ needs.” “In the highly competitive Middle East channel market, partners are undergoing a major shift from being sales focused to needing to know their solutions and how to support their customers in implementing them. Increasingly, the best channel partners are those that serve as trusted advisors in digital transformation, with a strong focus on being specialised in solutions and delivering value to customers,” says Savitha Bhaskar, COO, Condo Protego. Partners surely have a responsibility to ensure they are proficient in the solutions and technologies that they

sell. However, which stakeholder should be held more accountable to ensure trainings take place regularly? According to Hesham El Komy, senior director, International Channel, Epicor Software, the responsibility

Zameer Qureshi, Centra Hub

needs to be a 50-50 partnership. He says, “On one hand, the partner must be willing to invest time in training their staff. On the flip side, the vendor must have a programme that is comprehensive enough to ensure

highly trained and knowledgeable teams within the channel ecosystem.” He believes vendors should start by extending their own training programmes—”what you teach your staff you should teach the partner.”

“When they understand customer business and speak the customers’ vocabulary, the end result is that customers are confident on the tech investments that they are making, the delivery process goes through much faster, and there is minimal risk involved in the entire project.”

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

FEATURE // PARTNER TRAINING

IMPORTANCE OF CERTIFICATIONS

“Training and certifications give channel partners a competitive edge and allows them to derive higher values for their businesses. They also help them to gain in-depth product knowledge and stay up-to-date with the industry. Our partners have ManageEngine certified technicians that can provide consultation, training and implementation services. In addition to this, partners in the region are trained to provide Level 1 and 2 end user technical support.” NIRMAL MANOHARAN, REGIONAL DIRECTOR OF SALES, MANAGE ENGINE “The sense of progression and achievement as a result of professional growth through training and certification programmes maintains a high level of mindshare among partners and their teams. Thus, channel partners are continuously motivated to go after higher success and navigate challenges with confidence. This also enables them to effectively gauge their level of engagement based on their participation and performance during the course of the training.” MAYA ZAKHOUR, HEAD OF DISTRIBUTION AND ALLIANCES, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA, NETAPP “Trainings and certifications help partners upgrade and update their skills on a regular basis, and help them advance their technical knowledge and careers as well. Being trained and certified is the crucial step in establishing customer confidence, equipping oneself for the upcoming assignments and keeping resources up to date on latest technology trends. Customers need to feel confident that their needs are being understood by experts who are industry certified and can comprehend the product and are able to build, modify or enhance their IT environment and architecture. Investing in training and certifications also demonstrate a partner’s commitment towards growing a vendor’s footprint, and providing customers with specialised product expertise. Partners can also utilise their trainings to upsell and crosssell solutions.” KS PARAG, MANAGING DIRECTOR, FVC

Shadi Salama, Cisco Middle East

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

“Look at this way,” he says, “why would you expect less from the partners resources than you do from your own? The expectations should be the same, so starting with the same programme, that obviously must be tailored to suit the channel, is the way to go.” “I believe that vendors should be aligned with the distributors who drive and deliver the training to partners,” says Zacky Vaz, regional channel manager, Fortinet. “Customers consider partners as being their trusted advisors. If partners have a specialised skill set they not only earn a vendor’s confidence, but also gain customer trust. If partners demonstrate their commitment to extending their capabilities beyond simply solution selling, and focus on building skills, they are able to benefit on a profitability front as well.” The partner community along with its vendors must bear in mind that the lack of sufficient skills or training has the potential to hamper bottom lines. Not only is it essential for channel partners to have the right talent in place, but they also need to transform processes, says Amir Kanaan, managing director of Kaspersky Lab for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa. He adds, “They need to be knowledgeable about new solutions,

FEATURE // PARTNER TRAINING

Key factors for channel partner training strategies

Amir Kanaan, Kaspersky Lab META

“They need to be knowledgeable about new solutions, and develop new competencies that can help them create new avenues of revenue and ensure business sustainability.” and develop new competencies that can help them create new avenues of revenue and ensure business sustainability.” How can partners themselves develop their expertise and enhance their skillsets? According to El Komy, partners need to have a broad set of skills and many of the basics should be provided online by the vendors. He explains that to supplement the online learning, vendors should have ‘live’ training courses covering all functions such as sales and marketing. He adds, “Another aspect, which is as important as the other modes, is the importance of ‘learning on the job’ with support of the vendor. This form of support can come in a variety of forms, for example, vendor resources can ‘shadow’ the partner during consulting and implementation phases, providing invaluable advice along the way.” Centra Hub’s Qureshi also urges

“We believe the best channel programmes succeed when partners have space to create value in the customer lifecycle. When we train partners well, we help them better support their customers when moving to and consuming our services. As we evolve our products and introduce updates, enhancements and new products frequently, it is important that our partners are equipped to bring that value to the customer in the pre-sales, sales and support steps of the journey.” JASON ROOS, CHANNEL AND ALLIANCES DIRECTOR, MIMECAST “The number one element is flexibility. With the dynamic nature of the channel business and the growing time demand on partners, it has become increasingly difficult for employed individuals to take time off from their career to pursue any type of training, upskilling or formal education. In some parts of the world, this challenge has been addressed effectively by eLearning. Luckily, new and flexible forms of delivery are available today for partners in the Middle East. The other element to be considered is ensuring training is linked directly to the industry and providing skills required to get onto the job immediately.” ROY STRIK, HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, PEARSON PROFESSIONAL “At Sophos our goal is to provide channel partners with the tools and training they need to sell and deliver our complete security solutions. Our training and certification programme provides a full curriculum of enablement materials and courses, designed to increase the skill and competency of sales and technical teams of partners.” HARISH CHIB, VICE PRESIDENT, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, SOPHOS

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

partners to attain relevant certifications to strengthen their offerings to customers. He says, “Training certifications carry a lot of weight and provide confidence to the end customers that the partners are well equipped to deliver value to them in their realm of business. As a consequence, certification plays a huge role in the selection process of partners by the end customers in their digital transformation journey.” Partners need to also remember that the more recent or current the certification, the more the end customers are assured that they are receiving the latest in best practices. “And as a consequence, they are more confident about their tech investments resulting in faster project acquisition for the partners and quicker delivery for both the partners and the end customers,” Qureshi explains. Partners along with vendors and distributors need to have constant discussions and trainings to ensure the channel community is competent to deliver technologies expertly and be customers’ trusted advisors.

INTERVIEW // REDINGTON

The value of data

Redington Value’s president Ramkumar Balakrishnan and vice president for VCG (Virtualised Computing Group) and data analytics Sayantan Dev, share details of the firm’s new data science and analytics practice launched regionally and how partners can cash in on market prospects.

egional value-added distribution (VAD) firm Redington Value has introduced a new practice around data science and advanced analytics to capitalise, together with channel partners, on the opportunities that the $4 billion data analytics market has to offer. Ensuring it is in sync with market evolution and trends, the distributor has been piloting its own transformation journey over the past three years. Ramkumar Balakrishnan, president, Redington Value, says, “From being a value-added distributor to becoming

THE EVOLVING TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE IS COMPELLING CUSTOMERS TO SEEK PARTNERS WHO CAN SOLVE THEIR BUSINESS PROBLEMS COMPREHENSIVELY.

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

an aggregator and a solutions provider for the channel, we have always endeavoured to be ahead of the market curve. And this is why we needed to transform into data science and advanced analytics experts.” The evolving technology landscape is compelling customers to seek partners who can solve their business problems comprehensively. “This is a fundamental change in the market today. In order to augment this, we will have to move away from people who are product sellers to those who are able to consult, understand a business problem, put together a

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

technology solution and also offer the most efficient or pragmatic ways on how customers can consume the technology.” The two top priorities for the distributor over the past three years have been – how to remain relevant in the cloud consumption model and develop its own consulting arm. In line with these objectives, the distributor had spun off its cloud business unit separately and built its own marketplace, which is now becoming mainstream. “Our monthly run rate on our marketplace is now more than a million dollars,” he adds. “Besides being the only go-to-market route for AWS and the most relevant one for Microsoft, our offerings, both, from a technology standpoint and an ISV perspective, is really growing in the marketplace.” The distributor had also set up its own consulting arm – Citrus Consulting. “We are the only distributor, globally and regionally, who has been able to successfully introduce a consulting arm, right from ground up. We now have more than 30 consultants and we expect this to continue to grow. The team has also won their first million-dollar project and is increasingly becoming more prominent in the market.” Having achieved substantial success in these two areas, Redington saw that it was time move on to phase two – setting up data science and advanced analytics practice. “We knew that there is huge opportunity in these areas, however, we noticed that our partners are not taking

Ramkumar Balakrishnan, Redington Value

advantage of it. This is primarily because of the skills gap in this space. We then came up with a strategy to help bridge this gap in the market. “One of the first plan of actions for setting up the data science and advanced analytics practice include investing in 25 people in Redington and an equal number in Citrus, from a delivery standpoint. This is a serious investment from Redington’s end,” he adds. Over the next few weeks, we will see the distributor strengthening its vendor portfolio by partnering with global leaders in the data analytics space. Redington already boasts relationships with companies such as Splunk and TCG Digital and has most recently added Talend, SAS and Tableau Software, who have expertise on advanced analytics. “This is the first time that several of these vendors are globally steering a two-tier model. This is quite an honour for us, as these world leaders have chosen Redington Value to lead their two-tier goto-market businesses,” he adds. If partners invest into this practice, they also have the opportunity to climb up the value chain, Balakrishnan explains. “Besides cloud, this is the first time when there is a net new opportunity on the table, which partners need to look into seriously. They need to build a model where they are able to leverage the investments we are making and then get themselves specialised in different areas of this segment.” Data analytics is a broad area with several segments for partners to develop their niche in. Sayantan Dev, vice president for VCG

“Besides cloud, this is the first time when there is a net new opportunity on the table, which partners need to look into seriously. They need to build a model where they are able to leverage the investments we are making and then get themselves specialised in different areas of this segment.”

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

INTERVIEW // REDINGTON

and Data Analytics, Redington Value, says, “When building the team for this new practice, we are ensuring extensive specialisation is a key component. We will also enable partners with trainings, programmes, events, workshops and one-on-one meetings.” Dev says partners have an opportunity to become experts in the four pillars of the practice – data management, data cleansing or ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), prescriptive and predictive analytics and finally descriptive analytics to provide insight into the past. He says, “Partners are seeing great value with our new practice and

Sayantan Dev, Redington Value

currently trying to figure out the area they want to invest and specialise in.” Dev encourages partners to either specialise in a particular vertical or in a specific technology within big data and analytics. “If a partner selects a vertical, for example, retail, then he can leverage all the technology aspects from Redington and Citrus. Alternatively, if he decides to go deep on technology, then he can rely on our expertise for vertical specialisation or other technologies that might be needed to design a solution,” he adds. According to Balakrishnan, the next steps will be around spreading

awareness, educating partners along with creating and building joint business plans and go-to-market strategies. The distributor will also host several CEO roundtables to increase awareness as Redington believes that the practice cannot be built without the support of CEOs. “We have to make joint business plans. Based on our initial survey and conversations with partners, there is definitely a tremendous amount of interest. We are going to create the most interesting practice that our partners are going to leverage into and ensure we start addressing this $4 billion opportunity together.”

“When building the team for this new practice, we are ensuring extensive specialisation is a key component. We will also enable partners with trainings, programmes, events, workshops and oneon-one meetings.”

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

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PARTNER WATCH // SPECTRAMI

Beyond borders Anand Choudha, managing director, Spectrami, shares the company’s future plans and strategies in conquering the EMEA market. What have been the highlights at Spectrami over the last few months? Over the last few months, we have set up ambitious targets, which we have backed up with our actions on the ground. It is no secret that the current market situation is tough and that’s why we have decided to take a different approach to our growth strategy. We have focused on our geographical expansion and extended our footprint into emerging markets where we believe there are huge opportunities for us. In line with this, we have recently started our operations in Turkey, which is an important cybersecurity marketplace for us. While there are challenges, such as the currency fluctuations due to the current political scenario in the country, we believe that there are avenues for growth in this specific market. The political scene in the country sheds light on the issues on security vulnerabilities and this presents us an opportunity to showcase and deliver our expertise. The Saudi Arabian market was very good for us last year. We expanded our office and now have a team of over 10 people. Previously, most of our people in Saudi were focused on Riyadh. But now we are also keeping an eye on the business opportunities in the Eastern Province. We are also finalising our launch in Egypt towards the end of the year and we are very excited about that. More than the Middle East region, which are the other markets you wish to penetrate, where you believe your capabilities are wellsuited? Spectrami aims to be an EMEA distribution company. Last year, we had

United Kingdom, and Africa. Our business in the Middle East and Turkey are well underway with Egypt set to launch in the coming months. We are gearing up to set up shop in Kenya and Nigeria by Q1 of next year. The goal is by the beginning of the new financial year, we would have covered the whole of the Middle East and North, East and West Africa. As for the European operations, we will continue strengthening our ventures in Germany and in the UK, while we are doing this, we’ll be on the look-out for new acquisition targets. Moreover, there are four regions where we are focusing our European expansion plan on – Benelux, Nordics, Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. We aim to achieve this in the next financial year. The idea is by the end of 2020, we should have completed our EMEA expansion. By then we believe we would reach our $100 million mark. We are very much on track with our goals. successfully set up our operations in Germany and in the United Kingdom. So, I believe, the foundation is laid so now we can focus on growing the business there. It was not without its challenges, however, we were able to emerge successful. We have invested resources in ensuring that we have the right team in place. As an entity, we have been focused on onboarding people that have the capabilities to push our go-to-market strategies. In fact, we are very bullish on the UK market because of the people that we have associated with. Going forward, our operations will primarily be focused on three key areas – the Middle East, Europe and

What will be the focus of your participation at GITEX this year? Will you be announcing new partnerships? We will be there to showcase our capabilities and offerings as well as contribute knowledge and insights into the discussions that will take place at the show. As for vendor partnerships, right now we have about 20 vendors, and we are not rushing for new ones. We have been in the market for seven years and believe that we have already established ourselves in a niche space. However, we are very much open to new partnerships and if we can find a vendor that can offer something unique and can fill any gaps in our portfolio, we’ll be more than happy to open any dialogues.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

SONICWALL RECEIVES STRONG NSS LABS RATING. AGAIN. NSa 2650 Awarded ‘Recommended’ Rating in 2018 NSS Labs NGFW Group Test After putting the NSa 2650 through rigorous testing, NSS Labs validated SonicWall next-generation ﬁrewall value and security effectiveness by placing SonicWall in the coveted ‘Recommended’ quadrant of its 2018 NGFW Group Test.

98.8%

100%

Block Rate

Evasions

Stability & Reliability

www.sonicwall.com

PARTNER WATCH // EMITAC ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS

Sky is the limit

Emitac’s recently appointed CEO Gautham Raj on top priorities that take precedence for the firm over the next few quarters.

egional systems integrator Emitac Enterprise Solutions (EES) has stood witness to the evolving technology landscape for over four decades. The company had undergone a rebranding exercise during its 40th anniversary, where it reinforced its objective to scale the business to newer heights by offering managed and cloud services beyond traditional infrastructure systems. Two years on, the recently appointed chief executive officer Gautham Raj, is aiming to continue this mission. Due to the data sovereignty law in place in the region, businesses couldn’t host their date outside. However, with both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announcing plans to set up data centres in the Middle East by 2019, it opens up massive opportunities for regional partners. According to Raj, one of his immediate priorities will be to examine workloads and help customers migrate to a public cloud. While that might sound like an easy task, the reality is far from it, he says. “There are behavioural changes that need to happen for customers when they decide to migrate to the public cloud. A number of aspects would have to be considered such as the different ways an application can be used and what services will be available and the like, on the cloud,” he explains. “Therefore, this is the area where we will invest. We aim to be a leader in the marketplace for offering advisory services to clients and controlling costs as well.”

“This is the area where we will invest. We aim to be a leader in the marketplace for offering advisory services to clients and controlling costs as well.” In line with these objectives, the systems integrator has signed an exclusive partnership with CloudHealth Technologies. The US-based vendor boasts a platform through which they are able to compute granularity and automatically suggest changes in behaviour to bring down the cost of public cloud consumption.

“This will offer significant value to our customers. Our aim is to help customers to move to public cloud and offer managed services to bring in genuine efficiency in operations.” In order to be able to do this, Emitac has also signed another exclusive agreement with 3i Infotech, a global IT firm offering IP-based software solutions. Raj says, “Because of the innovation that 3i brings in the managed services industries, we can now connect our NOC back to their offshore. This provides us the ability to offer around the clock expertise for various technologies.” According to the CEO, the third big opportunity for the firm is with public cloud. “If you have your own IP, then you have the ability to host it on the cloud and offer it as a Software-asa-Service globally. This way we are not restricted to any one geography and gives us true systems integration capabilities. With this in mind, we have acquired a company and are currently in the process of concluding all the legal work. Our objective was to have intellectual property and software development capabilities with this acquisition.” Over the next few quarters, we will see the CEO taking the capabilities gained from both partnerships and the acquisition into the market. “While we have already begun to seriously engage with customers in this journey towards public cloud, our aim is to further strengthen all our activities towards this objective. Our second most important priority will be execution on managed services over the coming months.”

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

VENDOR FOCUS // TABLEAU SOFTWARE

Knowledge is power James Eiloart, senior vice president, EMEA and Ed Dolman, vice president, EMEA Partner at Tableau Software, on how regional partners can leverage market opportunities around business intelligence solutions to address growing demands in the digital era.

lobal business intelligence and visual analytics expert Tableau Software has appointed regional VAD Redington Value as its first Middle East and Africa distributor. This appointment also marks as the first time the company has announced a distributor globally. The company is now looking to on-board new partners while also strengthening its existing channel relationships. Tableau Software has been operating in the region for over six years or so, building the business with strong local channel partners. The firm’s senior vice president for EMEA region James Eiloart says, “We have developed great customer relationships in the region, however, now we are identifying

James Eiloart, Tableau Software

bigger opportunities. Many regional enterprises are investing in growing their own use of data in order to become more competitive in the marketplace. We’ve been looking for a way to accelerate our growth and found an ideal partner in Redington Value. Their expertise and market leadership will help us scale our business to the next level.” Tableau is reinforcing its operations in the region at a time when regional customers are looking for innovative ways to expand their businesses through intelligence from actionable and insightful data. Increasingly customers are realising the power of data and the impact it can have on everyday business. Traditionally, business intelligence solutions are delivered by IT professionals to the business. This

meant customers required a resource who understood the nitty-gritties of the solution implemented and someone who could decipher the reports. According to Eiloart, most organisations today struggle to empower the ordinary business person to use data in their day-today job. “We believe that access to data and the ability to get answers to questions from it should be ubiquitous.” Tableau’s “unique and differentiated tool” allows business executives to effortlessly gain a clear visual picture of their data without relying on technical specialists. Eiloart adds, “Years ago, as a company, we decided this is where our focus was going to be – helping customers see and understand their data easily.”

“We’ve made great progress and we stand absolutely right at the beginning of the journey. We are focusing our efforts on making our customers successful – we believe there’s a huge opportunity for everybody involved.”

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

With the goal of driving a largely partner-centric business, the Middle East and Africa region plays a critical part in the Seattle-based firm’s growth strategy. Ed Dolman, vice president, EMEA Partner at Tableau Software, says, that the region is one of the fastest growing ones and with data exploding at an exponential level through a number of drivers, the opportunities in the market will only get bigger and more advance. He says, “We’re now looking to see how we can help customers across this region harness the massive prospects we are seeing. The answer is our partner ecosystem. For us to be able to scale effectively, we need to work with an established leader in value-added distribution, such as Redington, to add capacity, scale, capability and expertise into this region.

Ed Dolman, Tableau Software

“This will allow all partners, existing and new ones, to leverage Redington’s dedicated resources, skills through authorised training centre and consulting arm Citrus Consulting, among other benefits; enabling them to become a true extension of Tableau in this region.” While Eiloart and Dolman don’t see any specific challenges for partners to effectively deliver Tableau solutions to the market, they believe partners will have to change their approach from when they used to deliver first-generation business intelligence solutions. Eiloart says, “Partners will have to think a little bit differently when delivering modern business intelligence solutions. Usually, customers would think in this manner – build a data warehouse first, examine the governance rules and then put data visualisations

and reporting capabilities on top. However, this whole process takes far too long, especially in a dynamic marketplace.” He explains that by the time customers get to the last step, technologies or processes would have already evolved, which means they will have to start all over again. Instead he urges partners to begin with the questions that businesses want answer to and enable them to explore the data, so that they have adequate information on what the data warehouse should have and how it should be structured. Dolman adds, “Partners need to focus on how they can now start to have business outcomes from their discussions with customers. They should look at ways on how to have conversations with multiple lines of business outside of IT because that’s where the opportunity is. Also, this is where the data is being created a lot of the time. We encourage our partners to think outside of IT and that will open up a whole world of new opportunities.” Eiloart reiterates the company’s commitment to delivering solutions and services that will help partners succeed. “We’ve made great progress and we stand absolutely right at the beginning of the journey. We are focusing our efforts on making our customers successful – we believe there’s a huge opportunity for everybody involved.”

“Partners need to focus on how they can now start to have business outcomes from their discussions with customers. They should look at ways on how to have conversations with multiple lines of business outside of IT because that’s where the opportunity is.”

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

EVENTS // INFOBLOX

ZEROING IN ON SERVICES

Service providers are increasingly targeting a customer base that is looking for flexibility in deployment with scalable solutions and a convenient pricing structure. Identifying this, Infoblox lays emphasis on focus partners and pushes subscription-based pricing model.

nfoblox is changing the way it does business across the region, with a greater push for consumption or subscription-based model, amidst increasing demand for security and hyper-converged infrastructure. The secure cloud-managed network services provider has been shifting its focus to incorporate integrated security solutions. It recently launched a consumption-based pricing model for its DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (DDI) and DNS-based security solutions. More and more service providers are targeting a customer base that is looking for flexibility in deployment with scalable solutions and a convenient pricing structure. “Budgets are being shifted from infrastructure to applications as the latter is driving the business. Today, the two major areas where we are witnessing huge growth is Security and Cloud based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS),” said Feras Masoud, the firm’s new regional channel manager for Middle East and Africa (MEA). In an effort to increase its foothold across the Middle East and North Africa region, Infoblox has been working with a select group of partners - which it terms as Focus Partners - who contribute to about eighty per cent of its sales. “Infoblox is a channel-oriented company. This is a pattern across the globe, but it is more prevalent across MEA. We know eighty percent of our business comes from about 20 per cent of our partners, who in a way understand our value propositions,” he said.

The company has also been laying emphasis and urging its partners to shift from regular sales to a new model – selling cloud-based solutions and subscription-based model. “We need our partners to understand this arena. With subscriptions, we are looking at a constant revenue stream for both parties,” said Masoud. Companies are also moving towards creating more hybrid solutions - a combination of cloud and on-premise infrastructure, he said. According to him, not all solutions need to be in the cloud. “A hybrid model is more sufficient. It will provide better visibility, stronger security, scalability and higher availability,” he argues. “We are witnessing a rapid shift towards this approach. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are driving this momentum, while companies like VMWare with their virtualisation are pushing this ahead in a major way,” he said, adding that acceptance among companies is also growing fast. “And it is going to increase rapidly in the coming years. Within the region, we still see some hesitation. But the customers who have adopted it have been leading the market,” he added. Infoblox has been shifting from hardware to software, digging more and more into the security scenarios like threat intelligence and behavioral analysis. As Ahmad Al Abbadi, regional sales manager, UAE and Pakistan at Infoblox said the company has been into DNS security for many years now, DNS being Infoblox’s bread and butter. “We truly understand the criticality of the DNS service, and how the threat landscape is evolving around it.

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

“Couple of years ago, we used to filter, analyse, and block attacks based on reputation. But today the methods point to more sophisticated ways of attacks. Malware is now leveraging new methods of misusing the DNS to exfiltrate information and confidential data from organisations that can only be mitigated using behavioral analyses, which Infoblox does like no other.” Infoblox is able to offer the advanced solutions to its customers, thanks to increasing investment into the R&D. “We spend on research and development more than our competitor’s overall revenue,” he added.

“A hybrid model is more sufficient. It will provide better visibility, stronger security, scalability and higher availability.”

of being prepared with highly secured infrastructure,” he added. However, he warned companies that fail to keep up pace with the latest technological advancements and secure the critical systems accordingly. “Organisations are adopting diverse technologies towards their digital transformation initiatives and Internet of Things projects not taking into consideration a fully ready security infrastructure. If companies do not really adapt and are not fast enough to adopt the latest security solutions, will be in serious trouble,” he warned.

The company has been expanding its business and registering significant growth over the past few years. “We just closed our fiscal year 2018 on a very successful note. We are expecting to further register a 15% to 20% growth during the coming year,” said Abbadi. “We are continuously urging our customers to take the DNS threat very seriously, as we believe this is the latest way that attackers are leveraging their campaigns, with highest threat vector on records today. DNS has been taken for

granted for a very long time as a service running in the backend, while it sits at the heart of every IT infrastructure, and it’s about time we start protection right at the core.” Commenting on UAE’s push towards smart government and smart cities he said, “Everything will be connected. Securing the system is extremely critical. With regard to the UAE, we have been witnessing heavy investment going into putting in place a stable security infrastructure. “From our engagement we have seen advanced mechanisms in place. The UAE continues to be on the right track

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

EVENTS // ESET MIDDLE EAST

“OUR VISION IS TO BECOME A TRUSTED IT SECURITY PARTNER FOR ENTERPRISES”: ESET GM

“Every 40 seconds, there is a company hit by ransomware and 25 percent of these companies are enterprises.”

ESET Middle East’s Security Days forum in Dubai had experts discuss the evolving threat landscape and how the firm can play a vital role in enabling enterprises build robust security strategies.

t ESET Middle East’s action-packed Security Days customer event, which took place at Shangri-La in Dubai, attendees had an opportunity to discover the cybersecurity leader’s strengths and learn about its vast

portfolio. Dimitris Raekos, general manager, ESET Middle East kick started the halfday session by sharing the company’s milestones over its 30-year history. Attendees had a chance to know more about the evolving threat landscape and how ESET can play a

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

vital role in enabling them to secure their enterprises in the digital era. “There are a number of measures regional customers can adopt to ensure a robust security strategy,” said Raekos. “The first and foremost step will be to deploy a reliable multi-layered solution. They need to ensure their data’s backup is stored in an offline location or in a location that will not be affected by LAN infections.” He also urged customers to never pay for ransomware. “This will only further fuel the ransomware economy.” Explaining the dangers of ransomware and how it can cripple an

“Our vision is to become a trusted IT security partner for the enterprise space by providing cutting-edge technology and knowledge that integrates with and enables key areas of security, and by offering top quality security and professional services.”

organisation, Sameer Halawani, Technical Manager, said, “Every 40 seconds, there is a company hit by ransomware and 25 percent of these companies are enterprises.” Raekos then advised customers to ensure network configuration and segmentation while also constantly monitoring traffic and behaviours. “Users need to manage their passwords carefully and avoid having the same ones across applications. It is worthwhile to ensure a multi-factor authentication process to be better safeguarded against adversaries,” he explained.

“Enterprises need to invest in educating their employees on the consequences of security breaches and how simple measures can help avoid several incidents.” Halawani added that despite its ease of use “two factor authentication remains underutilised security measure in businesses.” Along with Halawani, Shabil Basheer, Presales Engineer, ESET ME elaborated on the firm’s Security Management Centre and Threat Intelligence solutions. Basheer said, “ESET Security Management Centre (ESMC) provides real-time visibility for on-premise and

off-premise endpoints as well as full reporting for ESET enterprise-grade solutions from a single pane of glass securely deployed on premise or in the cloud.” Raekos also elaborated how ESET solutions can be effective for the current challenges in IT security, which includes ransomware, employee behaviour, targeted attacks and phishing, diversified landscape, lack of network visibility as well as inadequate workforce and skillsets. ESET’s technology alliance partners such as Safetica Technologies, GreyCortex and Xopero Backup were also present at ESET Security Days event. Peter Zikes, CEO, Safetica Technologies, said, “The most frequent causes of data leak are human error, problems in processes and disgruntled employees.” Further into the forum, ESET GM Raekos shed light on the myths and realities around machine learning. He discussed the security gaps in machine learning and how customers should be aware about these scenarios to be able to take appropriate measures. The audience also had a chance to understand the implications in the Middle East of the recently implemented GDPR regulation at the session. “We want to transform our company from just being a supplier of software to a supplier of security services,” said Raekos. “Our vision is to become a trusted IT security partner for the enterprise space by providing cuttingedge technology and knowledge that integrates with and enables key areas of security, and by offering top quality security and professional services.”

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

REVIEW

TP-LINK: NEFFOS C7

RATING

Designed for a specific target audience, Neffos C7 offers smartphone productivity and functionality without breaking the bank.

P-Link is not a traditional brand that you associate with smartphones, but so is the case with more than a dozen other players trying to create a brand name within the Android OEM space. The company, which is relatively more known for its wireless routers, have been operating within the smartphone segment since 2016. So, when TP-Link released its Neffos C7 earlier this year, it had in mind the precise target audience and what it offered in terms of value proposition. Despite being a budget smartphone, Neffos C7 offers some great value for money. It’s polycarbonate unibody, while simplistic and banal, provide a fantastic grip and feels firm and secure in the user’s hand. Neffos claims that its nanoscopic silver paste is what gives the device a metallic finish making it look sleeker. It has a micro USB port at the bottom, an audio out port or the headphone jack at the top, the power button on the right side and the volume rocker right below it. The C7 is a slim and tiny device, measuring at just 7.0 mm in width and weighing 157 grams. The smartphone is available in only two colours – gold and grey – which might be a downer to some consumers. TP-Link has done well to incorporate fingerprint support into the device as the smartphone is equipped with multiple sensors including ambient light and proximity sensor. It supports dual Nano SIM cards. In terms of display, the 5.5-inch device has a IPS LCD capacitive HD touchscreen with a resolution of

720x1280 pixels at 267PPI, which is more than decent for an average user. Colours look slightly washed out, which could be a deal breaker for those who are accustomed to more vivid displays. The camera is one of the key features in any smartphone these days and the Neffos C7 is equipped with a 13MP rear camera with autofocus and f/2.0 aperture. The rear camera is at the top left with the dual-LED flash right underneath. It features multiple customisation modes giving users various options to achieve the right shot in any situation. The image captured outdoors can look a little underexposed, but this can be easily adjusted by changing the white balance setting on the smartphone. Neffos C7’s boasts an 8MP frontfacing camera with 10-level real-time Beautify feature from Arcsoft, which gives the most natural enhancement of selfie images. Under the hood, the device is powered by a 64-bit Octa Core ARM

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

Cortex A53 processor and MediaTek MT6750 Chipset. The speed at which the device functions is proportionate to its 2GB RAM capacity. It comes with a built-in storage of 16GB but features an expandable slot where memory can be upgraded to 128GB with a microSD card. In terms of software, Neffos C7 runs Android 7.0 Nougat operating system with a custom-built user interface. The NFUI is the mobile operating system that TP-Link has customised for Neffos. The interface has a clean and simple design and is ideal for smooth multitasking and fast application launching, considering the 2GB RAM. The 3060mAh battery can ensure the device lasts for almost 6 to 8 hours based on the number of apps running in the background and the average use. Priced at just under AED 500, the Neffos C7 is ideal for the budgetconscious consumer who is looking for smartphones that can help them achieve basic tasks.

14 - 18 OCTOBER 2018 DUBAI WORLD TRADE CENTRE

Experience Future Urbanism WELCOME TO THE LARGEST TECHNOLOGY EVENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA & SOUTH ASIA

Big on numbers. Bigger on opportunities. At the centre of the global tech revolution and the region’s digital transformation, GITEX Technology Week brings together the most powerful innovations influencing the future – right from AI to Smart Cities to Blockchain.

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PRODUCTS

TRANSCEND EXPANDS STOREJET SERIES

Transcend has expanded its StoreJet for Mac series, which is an external storage pre-formatted with the Macspecific HFS+ file system, allowing it to be used right out of the box. The series now includes StoreJet 600, a portable solid state drive specifically designed for Mac. It is equipped with the USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface with the support of UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol), providing transfer speeds of up to 500MB/s. Natively formatted to the HFS+ file system, the StoreJet 600 enables users to utilise portable SSD right after connecting it to their Mac. Supporting Time Machine, the StoreJet 600 provides additional space for easy backups. The StoreJet 600 provides up to 480GB of storage capacity to store high-resolution images, 4K videos, and other media files. With both a USB Type-C cable and a USB Type-C to Type-A cable, the StoreJet 600 accommodates Mac models featuring the USB Type-C or USB 3.0 interface.

“WORLD’S THINNEST LAPTOP” SET FOR 2019 ROLLOUT: ACER Acer has announced the launch of a series of new products in the UAE including the thinnest laptop – Swift 7. The second edition of Swift 7, which was showcased at CES 2018 has further reduced in size by 1mm, as the company attempts to stretch the limits of how thin its devices can get. The initial Acer 7, which was showcased in 2016, was the first device to break the minus 10mm barrier. “We have reduced the size of the Swift 7 from 9.98mm to 8.98mm (0.394 inches). We have been focusing on keeping our devices thin and slim. It has been a conscious effort,” said Paul Collins, GM, Acer Middle East and Africa. “The latest Swift 7 is so thin that in comparison it is only slightly bigger than the Type B USB port. The Swift 7 comes has a 14-inch Full HD screen and

with very thin bezels with a 92 percent screen to body ratio and weighs about 1.18kgs.” The device is powered by a 1.3GHz Intel Core i7 machine with 8GB LPDDR3 RAM and 256GB SSD ROM. It also consists of two thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports. Acer Swift 7 – the thinnest laptop will not retail until mid-2019

SAMSUNG GALAXY A7 TO ARRIVE IN THE UAE Samsung Galaxy A7 features a premium 6-inch Super AMOLED display, letting its users experience and share the world as they see it, the company said. It sports Samsung’s signature Infinity Display makes for uninterrupted, immersive viewing. The Galaxy A7 also supports Dolby Atmos immersive sound technology, bringing entertainment to life through moving audio that flows all around you. The device flaunts a powerful triple lens camera: a 24MP primary sensor with PDAF feature, an 8MP telephoto camera with 12-degree ultrawide lens as well as a 5MP shooter for depth of field. It is also integrated with Samsung’s AR emoji tech and flattering filters. The latest device boasts a premium glass design, a side fingerprint sensor for greater convenience and smooth seamless curves. The A7 is available in four stylish colours – blue, black and gold. The smartphone also comes with Samsung Health.

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

The Samsung Galaxy A7 will be available for pre-order on Shop. Samsung.com at AED 1,399.

PANASONIC TO DEBUT LATEST 4K PROFESSIONAL INTEGRATED CAMERA PORTFOLIO

Panasonic is set to unveil for the first time in Middle East its 4K 50p, HDR integrated PTZ camera at GITEX Technology Week Among the devices the company will launch is the AWUE150, according to the firm, provides images with a smooth and natural look thanks to its 50p sensor, making it well suited to scenes featuring fast movements and high-end applications in commercial settings across industries. The 4K integrated Camera AW-UE150 delivers smooth and high-quality 4K 60p/50p, 20x optical zoom and 32x intelligent zoom (in HD mode), and a wide shooting angle of 75.1 degrees horizontally expand the range of the PTZ camera’s applications. The camera is equipped with a variety of interfaces and supports simultaneous 4K/HD operation which allows for versatility in current and future production systems. The camera allows up to three Full HD crops from the single 4K image canvas, which offers greater flexibility and, alongside its compact size, makes it ideal for more challenging camera locations. Other features include a 1-type MOS sensor, large size tally, various optical stabilizers and New Web UI support.

AOC UNVEILS AFFORDABLE CURVED GAMING DISPLAYS AOC has launched two new gaming monitors, designed for gamers who want to play at a competitive level but at a value price: AOC C24G1 (23.6”) and C27G1 (27”). The AOC G1 series has a monitor for all the core specs needed for performance at a pro gaming standard, yet providing an immersive and entertaining home experience at an accessible price for almost everyone. The AOC G1 monitors come with pro gaming anti-lag and anti-stutter measures like AMD FreeSync, 144Hz refresh rate and Low Input Lag, which decreases delay between video source and display. Additionally, AOC G1 displays feature fast VA screen technology with 1ms Moving Picture Response Time (MPRT). The MPRT standard is a highly accurate way to measure visible motion blur based on pixel visibility time. This is achieved by an intuitive display feature that automatically modulates backlight

intensity between image refreshes – hiding any jagged image refresh lags and reducing unseemly motion blur, according to AOC. AOC G1 monitors provide an intense gaming experience with a curved screen and sleek narrow bezel. It also integrated with Flicker-Free and Low Blue Mode technologies ensure the users’ eyes are protected from potential strain and harm. Prices: C24G1 – $279 and C27G1 – $309

ALARIS OFFERS FLEXIBILITY WITH NEW OFFERINGS Alaris highlighted that it is expanding its S2000 Scanner line with the addition of the Alaris S2040 Scanner. The new 40 page-per-minute device delivers all the embedded image processing power of the S2050 and S2070 Scanners at a lower price point for customers who want a more affordable option. The S2040 features the latest Alaris Perfect Page technology and is bundled with Smart Touch Software. It also supports the Alaris Passport Accessory and the Integrated A4/Legal Size Flatbed Accessory. In addition, Alaris is also expanding its portfolio to support its information capture solutions. Alaris Capture Pro Software and Alaris Info Input Solution are now available as one-year subscriptions in addition to existing perpetual licensing options. The company highlighted that an

added benefit is that subscription-based pricing gives customers the flexibility to scale up and down based on needs of the business.

www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // OCTOBER 2018

Tech talk Reseller Middle East's Online Editor Adelle Geronimo shares her views on the current tech scene.

Adelle Geronimo, Online Editor, Technology Division

Smart living

overnments in the Middle East are stepping up investments and projects focused on making cities more efficient, safe and sustainable, ultimately making citizens’ lives easier. Today, smart cities are increasingly going beyond the conceptualisation stage and becoming a reality. We can see this in a number of government-driven goals, especially here in the region – UAE Vision 2021, Saudi Vision 2030, Oman Vision 2020 and New Kuwait Vision 2035 to name a few. But what exactly do nations aim to achieve by making cities smarter? The world’s population is continually growing, and cities are getting more crowded. According to the United Nations, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas and this number is expected to increase to two thirds by 2050. Because of this, government leaders face enormous

pressures to come up with solutions addressing challenges in urban living through smart policies. Essentially, a smart city is all about using information and communication technologies to deliver sustainable economic development and a higher quality of life, while effectively managing natural and man-made resources. Technologies centred on Big Data, smart sensors, AI, Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles have the potential to dramatically reduce the negative effects of urbanisation. Among the cities leading the charge is Dubai, which over the next decade aims to make transportation trips automated and driverless; integrate passenger drones as well as hyperloop transport systems; install solar-powered artificial trees with WiFi capabilities; and become one of the top 10 sustainable cities by 2020, ultimately making the Emirate the “smartest and happiest” city on earth. All this being said, the theme of the

OCTOBER 2018 // Reseller Middle East // www.tahawultech.com

2018 edition of the GITEX Technology Week, ‘Experience Future Urbanism,’ is nothing if not apt. The much- anticipated technology event in the region will see global experts, technocrats and business and government leaders descend to Dubai to exchange new and ground-breaking insights on how to collaborate on building the foundations of a smart future. While it is thrilling to imagine a completely urban futuristic city, stakeholders need to note that this cannot be a one-man mission. Only with strong partnerships and business associations, can a government achieve all the elements of a smart city in its true sense. This is where tradeshows such as GITEX will play a critical role. GITEX has, over the years, become a staple melting pot of ideas and innovation. It is truly exciting to get a glimpse of what the future may hold through innovative showcases from exhibitors hailing from all corners of the world.

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