Issue 14 // August 2017
MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES PARTNER-FIRST STRATEGIES The technology giant introduces Microsoft 365 and new ISV Cloud Embed program along with updates to the Azure stack.
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icrosoft Inspire, the company’s annual partner gathering, which has been rebranded from Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) this year, took place in Washington, DC, last month. One of the biggest announcements the technology giant has made is the introduction of Microsoft 365. The new offering draw the best across Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility and Security.
Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business organization, Microsoft, said, “Microsoft 365 is designed to empower all companies and all workers, recognizing that
people are at the heart of digital transformation. It puts people at the center, giving them flexibility to work where and how they want and giving them new ways to collaborate with others — all while
Redington Value wins Microsoft ‘Distributor of the Year’ award for MEA The distributor was awarded for driving the company’s CSP business.
Redington Value has announced its achievement of being recognized as the Microsoft ‘Distributor of the Year
Award’ for highest revenue attainment as an indirect Cloud Service Provider (CSP). The award was announced at Microsoft’s annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, which took place in Washington DC, USA. “We are honored to recognize Redington Value as this year’s winner of the Microsoft ‘Distributor of the Year’ award, and commend their transformational efforts on driving the CSP business,” said Tareq
Hijazi, Director of Commercial Partner Group, Microsoft Gulf. “Redington Value is a prime example of the excellent talent we see in our Microsoft partner community to deliver innovative and transformative solutions to our mutual customers.” As a Microsoft CSP, partners can go beyond reselling licenses and being more involved with customers. “We at Redington Value are thrilled to be named Microsoft’s CSP
protecting company data.” Partners will soon have access to two Microsoft 365 offerings – one for enterprises and the other for small to medium sized businesses. Microsoft 365 Enterprise is the evolution of the vendor’s Secure Productive Enterprise offering, and includes Office 365 Enterprise, Windows 10 Enterprise, and Enterprise Mobility and Security. Microsoft 365 Business, available in public preview beginning from 2nd August, is designed to give small-tomedium sized businesses a complete productivity and security solution, while streamlining IT management. It includes Office 365 Business Premium, security and management features Continued on page 3
Distributer of the year for the MEA region; an honor that underscores our commitment to driving innovation and business transformation across the cloud ecosystem,” said Ramkumar Balakrishnan, President, Redington Value. “The Microsoft CSP program offers us an excellent platform to function as a comprehensive provider for customers’ complete cloud requirements. In our role centered on the emerging cloud era, we look forward to continuing this momentum of empowering our partners with innovative services and tools; and accelerating the cloud business with Microsoft in this everchanging IT market.”
Redington Value is a value added distributor for the following brands in parts of Middle East & Africa:
For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com
3 COLUMN: REDefined
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Microsoft... for Office apps and Windows 10 devices, all managed in a centralized console for deploying and securing devices and users in one location, said the firm. The second key announcement is that Microsoft has delivered Azure Stack software to its hardware partners – Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo – enabling the firm to begin the certification process for their integrated systems, with the first systems to begin shipping in September. Microsoft believes this will play a critical role in enabling it to meet its goal of $20 billion cloud run rate by 2018 and further accelerate partner success. Under business applications, the Redmond-based vendor had piloted a new Azure co-sell program to offer comprehensive
sales and marketing support for partners building solutions with Azure. According to the vendor, Azure is the only public cloud providing partners with this benefit through which Microsoft sales reps are paid up to 10 percent of the partner’s annual contract value when they co-sell qualified Azure-based partner solutions. To build on this momentum, the firm is now making additional investments to accelerate Azure co-sell over the next 12 months. “We are also creating a new dedicated Channel Manager role in Microsoft that will be 100 percent focused on supporting partners go to market efforts, helping ensure their solutions reach new customers and integrating with our co-sell motion,” Althoff added.
“Together, these represent a quarter of a billion dollar investment that materially increases our partner-dedicated personnel, and adds to Azure cosell incentives.” Through Microsoft’s new program – ISV Cloud Embed – partners can purchase core Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps and Microsoft Flow capabilities as embeddable “building blocks” at discounts of up to 50 percent. The firm said that in the same way that partners build their apps on Microsoft Azure today, they can now also use its business applications platform to easily add sales automation, service line and operational backend functionality to their own apps.
Cisco introduces new training and developer programs Designed to be intuitive, Cisco’s new network can recognize intent, mitigate threats through encryption, and learn over time.
Scott Harrell, Cisco
Cisco has announced that its global ecosystem of customers, developers and partners are embracing the company’s ambitious vision for a new era of networking. Cisco’s new network can recognize intent, mitigate threats, and learn over time, said the firm. This new network is the result of years of research and development by the firm to reinvent networking for an age where network engineers managing hundreds of devices
today will be expected to manage one million by 2020. Companies that are managing their networks through traditional IT processes will not be able to scale in this new age. Cisco’s approach creates an intuitive system that constantly learns, adapts, and protects, to optimize network operations and defend against today’s evolving threat landscape. “Cisco is delivering a more intuitive system that automates the edge of the network and embeds machine learning and analytics at a foundational level,” said Scott Harrell, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Enterprise Networking, Cisco. “Intent-based networking signifies a paradigm shift for our industry and a completely new era of networking. It’s exciting to witness our global ecosystem— three million network engineers, 60,000 partners and 450,000
developers—embrace the future of networking.” To drive adoption of its intentbased networking solutions, Cisco has announced new training and developer programs to 28,000 networking professionals at the company’s annual user conference, Cisco Live. Attendees received firsthand knowledge about the impact intent-based networking will have on their organizations and begin developing the skills needed in the new era of networking. The shift from hardware- to software-centric networking is driving Cisco’s channel partners to evolve their networking practices, develop new skills and pursue new business opportunities. The company said it is providing the programs, incentives and tools to help its partners build networking practices that incorporate software, security, automation and analytics for their customers.
Soaring to the cloud By Cherian John, Vice President – Converged Infrastructure Systems
Oracle Cloud is the industry’s broadest and most integrated public cloud. It offers best-in-class services across Software-asa-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and even lets you put Oracle Cloud in your own data center. Oracle PaaS delivers the industry’s best database (Oracle Database) and application server (Oracle WebLogic Server). Oracle IaaS offers a comprehensive set of infrastructure services — including elastic compute and storage. Oracle SaaS covers everything from customer experience to ERP. Available on a subscription basis, Oracle Cloud helps organizations drive transformation by increasing business agility, lowering costs, and reducing IT complexity. Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Cloud Program is designed to help partners accelerate innovation, lead business transformation and leverage the competitive advantages offered through Oracle Cloud. It also allows partners to get trained, differentiate their cloud offerings, develop new solutions or move their existing on-premise applications on to Oracle PaaS. They can then integrate these applications with Oracle SaaS, following which they can market and resell these solutions using the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. At Redington Value, we are focusing on the journey ahead on the cloud – building internal skill sets and expertise to handle the new trends from a sales and technical perspective. The RedCloud platform, which will be launched in September 2017, will handle the traditional distribution roles and help us monetize our engagements within the channel. We are also setting up Cloud Centers of Excellence (COEs) across the region to showcase and demonstrate Oracle Cloud Solutions, facilitate trainings and workshops, and build use case scenarios. Over the coming months, we are keen on cementing partnerships with our channel community to help them leverage the opportunities with Oracle Cloud and expand their businesses profitably.
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Fujitsu updates its server portfolio The new server models offer a full set of workload-optimized servers that can help build secure, agile and multi-cloud data centers. Fujitsu has announced the availability of its fully refreshed range of dual- and quadsocket PRIMERGY servers and octo-socket PRIMEQUEST business critical server systems designed for Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The new server models offer a full set of workload-optimized servers that make a perfect foundation for building secure, agile, multi-cloud data centers. Featuring the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY and PRIMEQUEST business model server systems are designed for exceptional workload-specific performance and hardwareenhanced security. Built for trusted data service delivery, the new models were designed with
advanced I/O, memory, storage and network technologies. The PRIMERGY CX400 M4, offers workload-specific computing power in a compact and modular form factor, said the company. It combines the density and efficiency of blade-like servers with the simplicity and cost efficiency of rack-based systems, and presents a versatile and future-oriented platform for building integrated systems and software-defined technologies. The PRIMEQUEST server supports SAP HANA with up to 12TB of in-memory database. It is embedded with the new Fujitsu ServerView Infrastructure Software Manager (ISM), which allows consolidated, efficient operation and management of converged infrastructures and facility equipment that runs in data
Our new PRIMERGY and PRIMEQUEST system line-ups offer a comprehensive portfolio of powerful server systems for all usage scenarios, company sizes and workloads.” centers and server rooms. Olivier Delachapelle, Head, Enterprise Business, Category Management Data Center, Fujitsu EMEIA, said, “Our new PRIMERGY and PRIMEQUEST system line-ups offer a comprehensive portfolio of powerful server systems for all usage scenarios, company sizes and workloads – systems that are easily able to handle whatever performance demands you make
Trend Micro and VMware collaborate to enhance Enterprise Mobile Security The technology partnership will accelerate customer access to threat and mobile device management information in one console.
Adam Rykowski, VMware
Trend Micro has joined the VMware Mobile Security Alliance (MSA) and announced the integration of its Mobile Security for Enterprise solution with VMware Workspace ONE and VMware AirWatch.
According to both firms, this technology partnership will accelerate customer access to threat and mobile device management (MDM) information in one console. By enabling communication between the Trend Micro and VMware solutions, customers will be able to secure corporate data from mobile threats more effectively through policy enforcement and compliance and sharing device security posture information. Trend Micro Mobile Security for Enterprise provides mobile device security and data protection, for an increasingly mobile workforce. Mobile Security
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for Enterprise easily identifies unprotected mobile devices, displays compromised devices within the security dashboard, and immediately takes action against compromised devices with compliance policies. The Trend Micro Smart Protection Network sources threat information globally through application store harvesting, sample submissions, research and an internal network of global sensors. Based on the collected data and threat intelligence, an administrator can create policies and compliance rules in VMware Workspace ONE and VMware AirWatch. After these have
of them. Choosing these newgeneration systems is a guarantee that you are ready for the digital future.” The all-new range of dual- and quad-socket x86 PRIMERGY servers and octo-socket PRIMEQUEST business model server systems is available worldwide from Fujitsu and via distribution partners. Prices vary by region, model and configuration.
been created, the policies can be assigned or pushed out to one or more mobile devices for enforcement. All the data surrounding threats or violations, such as outof-compliance devices or a user attempting to install a malicious application, are sent back to VMware AirWatch for inclusion in the security dashboard. “As mission-critical business processes become more mobile, threat security and unified endpoint management strategies must be tied to one another,” said Adam Rykowski, Vice President, Product Management, Mobile Products, End-User Computing, VMware. “Our continued partnership with Trend Micro enables our mutual customers to bridge the gap between mobile security and management with an integrated, secure and simple platform.”
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Malwarebytes unveils enterprise cloud platform for next-gen endpoint protection The firm also announces validation as replacement for antivirus.
Marcin Kleczynski, Malwarebytes
Malwarebytes, an advanced malware prevention and remediation solution provider, has released its new single endpoint agent cloud platform for business featuring Malwarebytes Incident Response, Malwarebytes
Endpoint Protection and a new cloud-based management console. Malwarebytes Endpoint Protection, now delivered as a service by the platform, features a signature-less Anomaly Detection Engine powered by machine learning. Combining seven protection layers, this new Malwarebytes solution is a more effective and efficient replacement for antivirus, said the firm. The new Malwarebytes cloud platform makes deployment and ongoing management of Malwarebytes solutions easy. Administrators benefit from broader visibility into endpoints that exist within their environment. Malwarebytes Endpoint Protection, built on the Malwarebytes platform, is an endpoint security solution
featuring layers of detection technologies with a unified endpoint agent. The new Anomaly Detection Engine has been integrated into the firm’s layered approach to security. Malwarebytes’ machine learning approach, powered by the new Anomaly Detection layer, provides real-time, signature-less detection against new and unknown threats by modeling known trusted files rather than attempting to model historical malware samples. Malwarebytes Incident Response is a threat detection and remediation tool also built on the highly scalable, cloud-based management platform. Powered by the company’s proprietary Linking Engine, the solution provides the most complete and thorough remediation
possible, improves threat detection for businesses of all sizes, and minimizes the time it takes to respond to an attack with the added benefits of scalability, flexibility and automation. “The threat landscape is changing every second with new malware variants arising every day,” said Marcin Kleczynski, CEO, Malwarebytes. “As security professionals, it is our responsibility to protect businesses from these threats, but most competitive offerings take a singular approach to the problem that cannot keep up with how fast malware is evolving. That is why we are now equipping businesses with seven different layers for stopping and remediating today’s and tomorrow’s threats.”
Red Hat debuts hyperconverged infrastructure solutions The solution is designed to help enterprises to bring data center capabilities into locations with limited space.
Ranga Rangachari, Red Hat
Red Hat has introduced softwaredefined compute and storage platform designed for remote sites and edge deployments – Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure. The solution is designed to help enterprises to bring data center capabilities into locations with limited space, such as branch offices and other remote facilities, said the firm.
Ranga Rangachari, Vice President and General Manager, Storage, Red Hat, said, “With Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, customers can now provision compute and storage resources for remote sites to run local instances of applications with the same proficiency as inoffice operations. Integrating our widely-deployed virtualization technology and our softwaredefined storage platform gives organizations the confidence of easier procurement, deployment and interoperability, ultimately enabling them to save time and money.” Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure integrates compute and storage together on a single server, making it a well-suited solution for low-footprint remote or branch office installations and
With Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, customers can now provision compute and storage resources for remote sites to run local instances of applications with the same proficiency as in-office operations.” edge computing. The solution is designed to enable organizations to deploy and manage distributed infrastructures centrally, enabling remote locations to benefit from high-performing systems without requiring extensive or highly specialized on-site support staff. According to the company, this is the only production-ready offering with an entirely open source infrastructure stack
and that is developed, sold and supported by a single vendor. An open source, community-based approach helps to avoid the vendor lock in of a proprietary approach and enables customers to take advantage of the faster innovation emerging from open source communities. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is available now through partners.
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EVENTS
StorageCraft Enablement Session with SkaiTec - Dubai - 6 July
Malwarebytes Partner Recruitment Day - Dubai - 13 July
Barracuda-Partner event-Beirut - 6 July
Splunk4Rookies Bootcamp - Dubai - 16 July
Aruba Deep Dive Workshop - Dubai - 17 July
Nokia - Partner event - Cairo 17 July
Barracuda - Launch event - Cairo-19 July
HPE - Red Tech talk session-Riyadh- 20 July
Fortinet Power to Secure Workshop - Dubai - 25 July
Malwarebytes Workshop - Dubai - 27 July
For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com
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Dell EMC - Partner Enablement Session - Riyadh - 27 July
TCG Digital Launch Event - Dubai - 27 July
Dell EMC - End-User Event - Riyadh - 31 July
Nokia - Partner Event - Kenya - 11 July
Cisco - Sales Floor Day & Demos - Kenya - 7 July
Veritas - Partner Event - Kenya - 19 July
Cisco - Sales Floordays and Demos - Nigeria - 12 July
Avaya - Partner Enablement Session - Kenya - 25 July
Splunk - Partner Bootcamp - Kenya - 20 July
Fortinet - End Customer Event - Kenya - 28 July
For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com
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Oracle Monetization Cloud enables recurring revenue models for digital services providers It combines the power of scalable monetization capabilities with the simplicity, agility, and security of Oracle Cloud to accelerate time to market for digital services. Oracle has announced Oracle Monetization Cloud, which is a new cloud service that accelerates time to market for digital and subscription-based products and services by enabling the full life cycle of customer on-boarding, offer creation, robust rating and discounting, billing, customized invoicing and reporting. Oracle Monetization Cloud combines the power of scalable monetization capabilities with the simplicity, agility, and security of Oracle Cloud to accelerate time to market for digital services. “In today’s competitive business environment, customers are demanding the power to
purchase the products and services that they want, when they want them, at a price point that they can afford,” said Doug Suriano, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Communications. “Oracle Monetization Cloud enables digital service providers to quickly launch innovative offerings and deliver a positive customer experience while reducing revenue leakage and improving financial reporting and compliance.” With Oracle Monetization Cloud users benefit from: Full life-cycle capabilities: The service supports the full life-cycle of subscription services, from on-boarding subscribers, to
rapidly launching and modifying innovative offerings, to leveraging flexible rating, discounting and billing capabilities, to customizing invoices, to analyzing business performance through robust reporting. Easy integration: Newly developed out-of-the-box connectors and standard webbased SOAP and REST APIs enable customers to integrate easily with front-office and back-office systems, including Oracle, Chase Paymentech and other third party CRM, e-commerce, ERP systems and payment and tax gateways. Risk and cost reduction: Full compliance and certification
Avaya introduces new Customer Engagement Cloud solutions The new comprehensive set of advanced capabilities and services help customers stay engaged.
Savio Tovar Dias, Avaya
Avaya has unveiled Avaya Customer Engagement Cloud solutions, a comprehensive set of advanced capabilities and services to help businesses keep customers engaged. Comprised of Avaya Oceana for omni-channel customer engagement and built on Avaya Breeze, Customer Engagement Cloud solutions
provide the flexibility required for adopting and integrating new digital technologies through a portfolio of hybrid, public and private cloud offers and developer tools. Avaya Oceana delivers context-driven, fully integrated and customizable customer engagement that allows companies to easily bring together newly emerging and existing technologies to benefit the customer and agent experience. The enhancements on the Oceana platform will help
organizations equip agents with a visual, chronological map of the customer journey with a actionable interface that can increase opportunities for upselling and repeat business; provide a foundation for growing digital channels, with support for Bots that extend sentiment, automation and analysis to all text channels including social media; adopt exciting new technologies. It will also enable them to provide a seamless customer
With our rollout of Avaya Oceana, we’re focused first on automation technologies to greatly enhance the customer experience and gain insight into the customer journey.”
with Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) as well as support for fully compliant re-invoicing and recognition of seven types of revenue allow customers to reduce risk, combat revenue leakage and ensure audit compliance. Full suite of monetization capabilities: The monetization solution is part of a full platform that spans the customer journey from engaging on social channels to tracking a sales lead to creating and offering innovative services to on-boarding subscribers to rating and billing to revenue recognition and compliance.
experience by providing the full context of an interaction when shifting from AI to human connections; create a more accurate picture of a customer’s experience, search for patterns and trends, proactively inform campaigns and personalize interactions through Avaya Oceanalytics; and customize workflow automation and proactive notifications with ease to address use cases in vertical industries. Savio Tovar Dias, Senior Director, Sales Engineering, Avaya, Asia, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, said, “There are three things that we look at as key to transforming service interaction: connectivity to serviced things, context, and frictionless engagement. With our rollout of Avaya Oceana, we’re focused first on automation technologies to greatly enhance the customer experience and gain insight into the customer journey. Once we know the product, the conversation, and the customer journey, we use Oceana’s attribute-based matching to bring the right people and content to the engagement.”
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Symantec to acquire cybersecurity firm Fireglass With this acquisition, the vendor aims to strengthen its Integrated Cyber Defense Platform and extend its leadership in Secure Web Gateway and Email protection.
Greg Clark, Symantec
Symantec has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Israelbased Fireglass, the agentless isolation solution provider that eliminates ransomware, malware and phishing threats in realtime by preventing potentially harmful content from reaching
user endpoints or the corporate network. Symantec said with this acquisition, it further strengthens its Integrated Cyber Defense Platform and extends its leadership in Secure Web Gateway and Email protection delivered both on premises and in the cloud. Fireglass’ approach to browser isolation substantially reduces the attack surface, strengthening an enterprise’s security posture and as a result, significantly reduces the burden on the company’s security operation center (SOC) and IT help desk. “Integrating Fireglass’ isolation technology with Symantec’s existing endpoint, email and secure web gateway solutions could reduce security events by as
Isolation is a key element of securing the cloud generation and is even a productivity gain for both the end user and security operations center.” much as 70 percent, while virtually eliminating advanced threats spread by web browsing or email content,” said Greg Clark, CEO, Symantec. “The ability for the security team to take an aggressive stance on unknown websites and questionable attachments without causing chaos for a company’s users and IT help desk is now a reality. Isolation is a key element of securing the cloud generation
and is even a productivity gain for both the end user and security operations center.” The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2017. Symantec expects Fireglass’ technology to be available to its customers and partners soon after the transaction closes. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Palo Alto Networks unveils new cloud-based application framework It enables rapid adoption of new security offerings; removes operational friction; dramatically improves security outcomes.
Nir Zuk, Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks has announced the Palo Alto Networks Application Framework, a cloud-based framework that extends the capabilities of the firm’s nextgeneration security platform, which will allow organizations to rapidly consume and implement a variety
of cloud-based security applications from any provider, large or small. The framework introduces a SaaS (software-as-a-service) consumption model, allowing customers to rapidly evaluate and deploy new capabilities via security applications built by Palo Alto Networks, third-party developers, MSSPs, and their own teams to solve a myriad of security challenges and use cases, said the firm. This new model will leverage the company’s existing sensors, customer-specific data stores and security infrastructure, enabling organizations to instantly activate cloud-delivered applications from different providers and without deploying or managing additional products. “Incremental change and
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siloed security technologies are unacceptable approaches to counter the escalating cyber threat landscape. To achieve better security outcomes, the Palo Alto Networks Application Framework changes the game against cyber adversaries. Its new access model will unleash the next generation of innovative security services, delivering them in a manner that enables rapid adoption of new capabilities, more automation and consistent security enforcement throughout the organization,” Nir Zuk, Founder and CTO, Palo Alto Networks Benefits of the Palo Alto Networks Application Framework: A new cloud-based application consumption model: Applications can be consumed and updated quickly through the cloud with
no additional infrastructure or on-premise hardware changes, eliminating operational friction, fragmented workflows and redundant infrastructure. Drives innovation and entrepreneurship: Palo Alto Networks, third-party providers, customers and entrepreneurs can rapidly build, commercialize and scale new applications that deliver value and extend the capabilities of the new security platform. Economic model of choice: SaaS delivery model minimizes upfront infrastructure investment costs and offers customer organizations predictable operational expense options. The Palo Alto Networks Application Framework is expected to be generally available in early 2018.
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