Redington Value Plus Oct 2014 by Reseller Middle East

valueplus presents

the

q u a r t e r ly

A special publication from Redington Gulf Value Division

Gitex special

Redington Value presents Advanced Enterprise Solutions

contents Published by

Decoupling performance from capacity

Enhancing business efficiency data centres Transforming

The road ahead

Simplifying the journey towards cloud computing

from the director: Dear Partners,

t is an exciting time to be a part of the IT industry. IT deployments are on the rise the world over, and complete solutions that are driven or defined by software are the buzzword of the day. Those within the industry who position themselves correctly, offer the right solutions and back it all up with a fully-fledged support system will be able to reap significant benefits. With this in mind we are very much looking forward to our comeback to Gitex Technology Week this year. The regional IT industry has matured significantly in the last

several years, and technology shows such as Gitex continue to enable all of the industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s players to effectively leverage the market. In fact in recent years there has been a marked improvement in the quality of visitors to the tradeshow, so now more than ever, it is critical for vendors, distributors and resellers to collaborate and deliver state-of-theart solutions to customers. With our participation this year, we look forward to educating the regional channel on the opportunities that lie ahead, as well as give partners relevant training and information. To this end our booth will have two presentation areas that will be

disseminating information throughout the show, and we will also have a presales consultant on hand to address any technical queries. The road ahead is exciting but as always it is up to all of us to engage with each other and move towards a common objective. We look forward to meeting each and every one of you and wish you business success for the next quarter. Yours sincerely,

Raj Shankar, Managing Director, Redington Gulf

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

For more information or to place an order on VMware, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

Viewpoint by Ramkumar

Adapting to a software-defined world Dear Partners The IT industry moves at the speed of light and it continuously challenges entities that are part of it to transform themselves to keep pace with the changing business dynamics. Today ’s world is one that is defined by software - it is a highly virtualised world where fluidity is the order of the day, and where software defines everything from compute, to networking, to storage. It is also a world that offers enormous opportunities to those with the right skills, capabilities and partners. That is why Redington Value is undergoing a fundamental transformation to be a full-fledged solutions provider. We are focused on moving beyond offering just pre-sales support, proof of concepts, training and support and aim to become a partner that walks the solution talk. At the same time we will continue to work indirectly, in a strictly B2B fashion, and therefore look forward to working with our existing and future reseller partners to reach end customers. In the coming weeks Redington Value will differentiate itself within the regional channel by offering full-on build, deployment and integration capabilities. Our goal will be to take our business, and yours, to the next level by offering a one-stop-shop where, even if a partner doesn’t have the necessary expertise,

they can approach Redington purely on a consultation basis in an effort to transform the opportunity into business. To support us in this endeavor, we will deploy the services of ADEO - a pure play consulting and training organisation. ADEO Middle East is in the process of being established and will function as the dedicated consulting and training arm of Redington Value. ADEO is a wellrespected entity in its home market of Turkey, and is the perfect fit for Redington Value’s transformation, as it also operates on a strictly indirect, B2B basis. The strategic engagement will add a plethora of capabilities to Redginton Value’s portfolio; we will be able to fully assist partners with everything from remotely deploying Microsoft’s Azure platform, to conducting secure audits and much more. Redington Value is excited about its transformation, and the road ahead, and we look forward to discussing the opportunities with each and every one of our partners at Gitex Technology Week 2014 and beyond. See you at Gitex.

Regards, Ramkumar B President, Redington Gulf Value Division

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

focus | HP

Transforming data centres HP explains how its ProLiant Gen8 servers give businesses a competitive edge by delivering maximum performance and reliability while simplifying day-to-day management.

nformation flows through businesses constantly, which puts increasing demands on server infrastructure. All of that data has to be stored, protected, analysed, and shared to create business insight. For today’s data centres, small advances in technology won’t solve the issues that come with handling such large volumes of data. To respond

effectively the IT organisation needs intelligent technology built for the challenges of the cloud computing era. That’s IT convergence: servers, storage, and networking that integrate into your existing data center infrastructure, supported by intuitive management tools. HP ProLiant Gen8 servers give businesses a competitive

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

edge by delivering maximum performance and reliability while simplifying day-today management. Designed with several innovations and featuring the latest Intel Xeon v2 processors, the HP ProLiant Gen8 family provides the heart and mind of a self-managing and intelligent HP Converged Infrastructure strategy.

HP converged infrastructure HP ProLiant Gen8 servers have been tailored for the emerging realities of today’s enterprise data centers. More than 150 clientinspired design innovations help increase application performance, shift staff time to more productive uses, extend data center capacity, and improve uptime by preventing data loss and failures.

automated energy optimization, and HP Proactive Insight experience - automate and simplify all aspects of server administration. The HP ProActive Insight Architecture continuously analyses thousands of system parameters and resolves potential issues before they turn into problems. Every HP ProLiant Gen8 server is built with these capabilities - providing the foundation for an intelligent, responsive, and converged infrastructure that transforms the entire server experience. Creating next generation data centres Eliminate tedious tasks with integrated life cycle automation. Too often workdays are a stream of error alerts, system events, installation and update issues, and calls to support desks. HP ProLiant Gen8 servers help IT

HP ProLiant Gen8 servers include automated controls that help minimise energy consumption. The Gen8 family is powered by the HP ProActive Insight Architecture - a range of intelligent automation and management features that provide an organisation with insight into virtually every aspect of the IT infrastructure. The four pillars of this architecture - integrated life cycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration,

teams eliminate these tedious, time-consuming tasks and get back to focusing on more strategic objectives. Turbo-charge performance with dynamic workload acceleration. To stay ahead of information and application demands, the IT team needs smarter servers that converge storage, computing, and input/output

Why choose HP From core to cloud, HP ProLiant Gen8 servers are transforming data centre expectations and economics with the world’s most intelligent servers. Since 1989 when HP developed the first x86 servers, the company has focused on making the HP ProLiant series deliver what businesses need and expect from an industry leader - reliability, innovation, quality, and best-in-class embedded server management.

(I/O). By bringing server and storage solutions together, and optimising them for solid-state disk (SSD) performance, HP ProLiant Gen8 servers get rid of the bottlenecks and accelerate the most demanding, dataintensive applications. Fine-tune space, power, and cooling demands with automated energy optimization. As data centers grow, power and cooling costs consume an ever-larger piece of your IT budget. HP ProLiant Gen8 servers include automated controls that help minimise energy consumption. And HP 3D Sea of Sensors technologies deliver unmatched visibility and control over the energy use and efficiency of your data center. Resolve issues quickly with HP Proactive Insight experience. IT support issues often consume an excessive share of attention and distract IT teams from more important work. The HP Proactive Insight experience simplifies IT infrastructure management through a unique, end-to-end offering that combines HP Insight Online monitoring, HP Proactive Care Services problem prevention, and HP remote support. This helps IT teams prevent problems,

minimise unplanned downtime, and create an IT environment that can better support growing business demands. Selecting the right server HP ProLiant Gen8 servers are efficient and flexible enough to handle today’s enterprise computing requirements, while safeguarding the future growth of data centres. HP makes it easy to achieve the ideal combination of performance, availability, expandability, and manageability. The two-processor (2P) servers are well suited for more modest demands such as web hosting, file and print management, and email or other collaboration workloads. For more challenging business demands such as complex file and print management or applications, HP ProLiant Gen8 four-processor (4P) servers let businesses scale up to higher levels of compute performance, memory capacity, and I/O bandwidth. Whether it’s a departmental server, an enterprise data center, or anything in between, HP can meet a business’ exact needs. HP has the most extensive server portfolio in the industry - the designs include tower server (ML), rack-optimized (DL), server blade (BL), and extreme HyperScale (SL).

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

focus | Pernix Data

Decoupling performance from capacity Today’s virtual data centres can benefit immensely from deploying Flash Hypervisor technology. Poojan Kumar, CEO, Pernix Data explains.

irtualisation has been the biggest trend in data centers over the last 10 years, resulting in enormous cost savings and increased operational efficiencies. But as more applications become virtualised, companies are experiencing an interesting and discouraging trend – a decrease in application performance. The root cause is commonly being tracked back to a single source, the storage infrastructure. I/O bottlenecks in primary storage can add significant latency to virtual applications, resulting in slow response times at best and unusable applications at worst. Aside from frustrated end users, this creates numerous problems for IT such as unpredictable expenses, increased vendor lock-in, hardware sprawl, and increased help desk calls. To date the only option when faced

Poojan Kumar, CEO, Pernix Data with the above challenge is to throw storage hardware at the problem. Storage administrators can improve the capabilities of their Storage Area Network (SAN) by moving to faster interconnects and by upgrading the SAN itself with faster disks and processors or more capacity. Unfortunately, these are all very expensive

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

and disruptive solutions, which don’t even guarantee an improvement in application performance. This has created an enormous market demand for server side flash, which in turn has created a need for new ‘Flash Hypervisors’. Flash to the rescue Many companies are looking at flash as the saviour for their storage performance woes. Flash has microsecond response times and delivers over 10x the

performance (measured in I/O per second, or IOPS) as spinning disk. But what is the best way to implement flash? One approach is to use flash in the storage array, either in conjunction with spinning disk or as a replacement. First, it is costly - a new array can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Second, it is very disruptive - any time that changes are made to the SAN, the new device needs to provide the same level of data services as

enables IT administrators to quickly, easily and costeffectively scale-out storage performance completely independent of storage capacity. Just like traditional hypervisors abstract physical CPU and RAM into a logical pool of resources, a Flash Hypervisor does the same for all server flash devices across a data center. More specifically, the Flash Hypervisor provides a resource management scheme that multiplexes multiple VMs to a set of flash devices according to userspecified policies. The result is dramatically faster and truly scale-out read and write performance for all VMs, without the need to change existing storage infrastructure.

the old device, and applications need to be migrated to the new device. Finally, upgrading SAN hardware is usually just a temporary fix. At some point, even the new array will reach peak capacity, resulting in the need for constant future upgrades. The need for a flash hypervisor From a performance, ease and cost standpoint, it is clear that server side flash shows the most potential for solving storage

With a Flash Hypervisor storage performance is now decoupled from capacity so that it can cost effectively scale-out with demand. performance problems. But the issues raised above need to be addressed for server side flash to be implemented as a strategic, enterprise class

solution. This has given rise to Flash Hypervisor technology. A Flash Hypervisor virtualises all server side flash into a clustered acceleration tier that

A revolution in storage design Flash Hypervisors fundamentally change data center design. In the past storage was designed with performance and capacity in one tier, both being serviced by a monolithic (expensive) piece of SAN hardware. With a Flash Hypervisor storage performance is now decoupled from capacity so that it can cost effectively scale-out with demand. For example, a single midrange SAN costs about $60,000 and delivers about 50,000 IOPS. Need more IOPS? You have to buy another storage array. In contrast, a Flash Hypervisor deployed across just two hosts can deliver 2x more IOPS (approximately 100,000) using the same backend storage device. Need more performance? Just add more inexpensive flash. For example, six hosts will deliver over 350,000 IOPS! This provides a massive increase in storage performance, at a fraction of the cost.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

focus | Veeam Software

Enabling always-on business Gregg Petersen, Veeam Software’s Regional Director discusses how his company enables regional businesses to remain ‘always-on’.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

eadquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Veeam Software enables ‘always-on business’ by offering solutions that deliver availability for data centres, which provides recovery time and point objectives of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data. The company was established in 2006 and currently has 25,000 ProPartners and over 111,000 customers globally. Globally, Veeam grew 30 percent in the first half of 2014 over the corresponding period last year. The second quarter of 2014 marks Veeam’s 26th consecutive quarter in which quarterly total bookings revenue has experienced double-digit percentage growth over the same period during the previous year. The company has experienced tremendous success in the region having reported a 50 percent increase in total bookings revenue, and over a 90 percent increase in new customers (totalling over 700 clients) when compared with the same period last year. “There are excellent prospects in the UAE for us to increase our footprint in the region and bridge the gap between the requirements of the always-on business and IT’s ability to effectively deliver business continuity as well as IT resilience to the majority of businesses in the country,” said Gregg Petersen, Veeam Software, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC. Veeam’s Backup from NetApp SnapShot enables IT to create backups from NetApp SnapShot every 15 minutes or less with no impact on the production environment. Always-on businesses have high

Gregg Petersen, Veeam Software, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC requirements regarding both the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO), measured in minutes rather than hours or days. With Veeam Availability Suite a RTPO of less than 15 minutes can be achieved for the majority of applications and data. Additionally Veeam’s new features in the upcoming Availability Suite v8 include EMC Data Domain Boost Integration that enables 50 percent faster backups. Regional deployment The company recently deployed its Backup & Replication

solution in Saudi Arabia with the Arabian Geophysical and Surveying Company (ARGAS). ARGAS helps oil and gas companies increase their reserves, decrease exploration costs and optimise their production activities. The company was one of the first in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia to virtualise its entire IT infrastructure on the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. Soon after ARGAS implemented Microsoft Windows Server 2012, the company decided to replace its slow and disruptive backup process. ARGAS wanted to back up and recover its Hyper-V environment quickly and reliably in Windows Server 2012, including the VM that would run a new enterprise resource management (ERP) system. ARGAS turned to FutureTech Solutions - an IT services firm known for helping clients achieve ROI by applying the industry’s best practices. FutureTech reviewed ARGAS’ list of requirements - fast, reliable backup of all VMs daily, built-in deduplication and compression to decrease

There are excellent prospects in the UAE for us to increase our footprint in the region and bridge the gap between the requirements of the always-on business and IT’s ability to effectively deliver business continuity as well as IT resilience to the majority of businesses in the country.

backup storage requirements and fast recovery to meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) - and recommended Veeam Backup & Replication. The solution met every requirement ARGAS identified as critical to its Hyper-V backup strategy. At the time, Veeam was the only solution on the market to support Hyper-V in Microsoft Windows Server 2012. The performance improvements were dramatic backups with Veeam were considered lightning-fast compared to ARGAS’ legacy backup system. Before Veeam was deployed, backing up four VMs took two hours. Using Veeam backing up 55 VMs takes just four hours. When ARGAS combined the deduplication feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Veeam’s built-in deduplication and compression, the size of VM backups decreased significantly, requiring 150% less storage and saving the company up to 50% in storage costs. Recovery with Veeam has proven much faster as well restoring a deleted email takes approximately three minutes whereas prior to deploying Veeam, restoring a deleted email could take up to 30 minutes. ARGAS now meets its RTOs easily. Veeam also reduced the time ARGAS spent monitoring and troubleshooting backups. Before Veeam the manual backup process took several hours each day, tying up at least one member of the IT team. With Veeam the IT team checks reports for a few minutes each day, freeing up time to focus on new ways IT can move the business forward.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

focus | Vision Solutions

Setting the standard For over 20 years Vision Solutions has set the standard for replication and availability across platforms. Ahmad Khattab, VP of Sales, Growth Regions, explains his company’s offerings.

High availability & disaster recovery: Vision’s High Availability & Disaster Recovery solutions (HA/ DA) have been relied on for over two decades and were among the first replication software products ever created. Today’s HA/DR solutions are ready to scale and handle any challenge, on any platform, in any combination of physical, virtual or cloud servers. The products were designed to ensure that businesses can be protected from data loss due to natural disaster, system failure or human error while meeting their service-level agreement (SLA) guidelines.

ased out of Irvine, California Vision Solutions offers cloud protection and recovery, high availability, disaster recovery, migration and crossplatform data sharing solutions for platforms such as Windows, Linux, AIX, IBM Power Systems as well as cloud computing. The company has been serving enterprises and managed service providers through its portfolio of Double-Take, MIMIX and iTERA product brands for over 25 years. Its solutions can benefit organisations that run Windows, Linux and/or IBM Power Systems servers, have forthcoming migration projects, use a mix of physical, virtual, cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures, and rely on a variety of storage types or brands within their environments. Vision Solutions can also support organisations with virtualisation initiatives that are struggling with inefficient backups on VMs, have business objectives to limit data loss in the event of a failure (RPO) and have concerns over meeting recovery time objectives (RTO) using tapebased backup solutions. The company is keen on expanding its footprint in the region having recently signed a strategic partnership with Redington Gulf. Ahmad Khattab, Vice President of Sales, Growth Markets, Vision Solutions said, “The appointment of Redington will support the growth of Vision Solutions regional channel scope and reach, whether it is system

Ahmad Khattab, Vice President of Sales, Growth Regions, Vision Solutions integrators, resellers or corporate resellers. We are pleased to be working with Redington as it offers strategic steps to expanding our channel programs in the Middle East region. Vision Solution is confident Redington will be an important addition to the existing distribution partners in the region.” Today’s consumers expect service and information that is available around the clock from businesses of all sizes and in every industry. When systems or applications fail, downtime is measured in lost revenue, trust and reputation. IT teams are looking for the most reliable ways to protect, move, and share the data and applications that are vital to maintaining competitive edge. Vision Solutions’ products are divided into three categories; Cloud Protection & Recovery, High Availability & Disaster Recovery and Migration & Cross Platform Data Sharing.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

provided through a pay-as-you-go metered system reducing business risk for cloud providers and their customers. The solutions allow recovering data, applications and/ or servers to the cloud and, when required, returning cloud-based workloads back ‘to the ground’.

Cloud protection & recovery: Organisations are turning to the cloud as a scalable way to improve service to their customers and to enable their always-on and always-mobile workforce. Adoption of public clouds and hybrid clouds is helping IT departments to reduce capital expenditures and improve business agility. As a result, assuring uninterrupted availability of cloud-based applications and data has never been more important. Achieving this level of availability requires a robust cloud-based solution that supports complex high availability and disaster recovery needs, one that can fully protect their heterogeneous IT environments. Vision’s Cloud Protection & Recovery solutions virtually eliminate planned and unplanned downtime by replicating data, applications and servers to the cloud in real time. Services are

Migration & cross-platform data sharing: Migrations which involve moving applications and data to new systems are risky and usually entail significant amounts of downtime. With the increasing pressure on businesses by consumers to operate around-theclock with no downtime, organisations simply can’t afford for migrations to take servers offline for hours let alone days. Vision Solutions provides products and services to enable easy, no-risk, near-zero downtime migrations to and from any combination of physical, virtual or cloud platforms. And when it comes to data sharing, the company provides an easy-to-use, real-time solution that allows business-critical information to be shared between just about any mix of databases, operating systems and storage hardware as rapidly as the data becomes available.

For more information or to place an order on Trend Micro, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

FOCUS | Trend Micro

Assisting with payment compliance Trend Micro explains how merchants and service providers involved in processing credit card payments can comply with version 3.0 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

erchants and service providers that process credit card payments must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), now at version 3.0. Whether the transaction occurs in a store or online and regardless of the environment, PCI DSS 3.0 mandates that these organisations are responsible for the security of their customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; cardholder data. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new in PCI DSS 3.0? PCI DSS 3.0 was published in November, 2013 and became effective on January 1, 2014. The majority of changes that were introduced are clarifications to 2.0 guidance, and focused on evolving the way that organisations protect sensitive cardholder data. At a summary level, the new

guidance can be grouped into three main areas; increased education and awareness, greater flexibility and security as a shared responsibility. As a part of the guidance requirement 12.9 specifically spells out PCI DSS responsibilities for service providers, including hosting providers like a cloud service provider (CSP), such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Regardless of size or locations, CSPs will need to review the list of changes (there are many small changes and clarifications) and plan for the potential business impacts before the deadline of June, 2015. There are several highlights that are relevant to cloud service providers including increased education and awareness for employees who manage the infrastructure and applications

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

that may involve cardholder data, clarity around the use of encryption and cryptographic keys for data protection, account access procedures that limit CSP access to any card payment infrastructure and more detailed and flexible guidance about password strength and usage. Turning to Trend Micro As a part of a broad Trend Micro Cloud and Data Center Security Solution, Trend Micro has three security offerings that provide proven security across the modern data center (including

physical and virtual environments) and the cloud. These offerings complement the security provided by service providers, including cloud service providers (CSPs) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, and can help organisations achieve PCI DSS 3.0 compliance. Trend Micro Deep Security is a comprehensive server security platform that is designed to protect physical, virtual and cloudbased servers from data breaches and business disruptions while enabling compliance. This

With SecureCloud, organisations can ensure data is not only protected while stored in the cloud but can also help with data destruction needs. offering simplifies security operations while accelerating the ROI of virtualisation and cloud projects. Tightly integrated security modules provide flexible deployment options and enable

organisations to ensure server, application, and data security across the modern data center as well as the cloud, including virtual desktops and embedded devices.

Trend Micro SecureCloud provides data protection for cloud deployments using encryption and leveraging policy-based key management to ensure effective protection of sensitive corporate information. This protection applies to securing both boot and data volumes on servers deployed on leading cloud service providers, including AWS. This allows businesses to control their own keys, ensuring they aren’t tied to one provider’s encryption system. SecureCloud provides a patent-pending key

management system that enables organizations to set policies that determine where and when encrypted data can be accessed. With SecureCloud, organisations can ensure data is not only protected while stored in the cloud but can also help with data destruction needs, with the ability to destroy the keys used to encrypt data and effectively make it inaccessible. This protection helps support internal governance and ensures compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, HITECH, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLB and PCI DSS 3.0. Trend Micro Deep Security for Web Apps is a comprehensive application security solution that delivers continuous vulnerability detection with automated scanning, expert business logic testing and comprehensive reporting. It also protects applications with unlimited globally-trusted SSL certificates and speeds mitigation of discovered vulnerabilities through native web application firewall rule integration and intrusion prevention capability. Whether an application is hosted in the data center or in a public cloud like AWS, Deep Security for Web Apps can ensure that applications are scanned for vulnerabilities continuously, helping with compliance with PCI DSS 3.0 requirements. Merchants and service providers that are involved in processing credit card payments must comply with PCI DSS 3.0, and the Trend Micro Cloud and Data Center Security Solution provide valuable capabilities to assist with achieving compliance. For more information on Trend Micro’s Cloud and Data Center Security solutions visit www. trendmicro.com/cloud.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

FOCUS | Lifesize

Simplifying virtual meetings Video conferencing is an important tool in the business world and Lifesize explains how its solutions provide the best user experience and flexibility.

ifesize came into being in 2003 in Austin, Texas with a goal to transform the world of video conferencing into one where universal video collaboration is the norm. Through innovation in hardware and software solutions the company has created a high definition video collaboration experience where people feel like they are all in the same room regardless of how much geography separates them. In 2009 the company was acquired by Logitech, and today serves over 100 countries, has in excess of 15,000 customers and has shipped over 121,000 video systems to date. Customers

include PayPal, NASA, Twitter, LinkedIn, ebay, Standford University and many others. The companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solutions deliver video conferencing via a system that was conceptualised to connect conference rooms to everyone who needs to be in a meeting, from anywhere, and from any device. Complication free In an effort to simplify virtual meetings that were previously overly complicated and

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

Lifesize Icon also includes a fully integrated HD audio conference phone, touch-screen user interface and enables the user to manage HD video, audio and presentations.

ultimately limited productivity, Lifesize created a solution based around a flexible and rich user experience. With the solution in place anyone in an organisation is just a single click away - it allows users to dial a person or virtual meeting room by name rather than by dialing a long and hard to remember access number. The system also offers the flexibility to invite someone for an instant meeting or join a scheduled meeting using a virtual meeting room. Once deployed the solution enables company employees to

work smarter around a connected experience via a single solution that is accessible from any connected device. The system is based around a simple cloud video service that is connected to Lifesize’s video conferencing systems and mobile apps. With the Lifesize system in place it’s easy to start connecting using the highest quality video on any room video system, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, which means it’s possible to instantly meet with individuals or teams, inside or outside the organisation. Once a new person is added to Lifesize Cloud, they’re instantly added to the directory. The system is also designed so that once the organisation has connected the Lifesize Icon room video system to Lifesize Cloud, the directory of contacts automatically populates with names. This means that each person and video conferencing system can instantly access one another through the directory. The perfect match No other video conferencing system offers the ease, versatility and complete connected experience of Lifesize Cloud together with Lifesize Icon. The solution gives users the ultimate combination of unmatched simplicity and brilliant video, letting you meet with anyone, anywhere just like you’re all in the same conference room. Lifesize Cloud ships preloaded on every Lifesize Icon room video system and all devices including laptops, tablets, and smartphones, will update automatically too,

ensuring you’ll always have the latest features to enjoy. Lifesize Icon has over the years won multiple awards and is designed to be the industry’s most intuitive video conferencing experience. Together with Lifesize Cloud, Lifesize Icon aims to deliver video conferencing that’s as easy, as lifelike, and as remarkable as meeting a friend or colleague in person. The video system is ideal for meeting rooms or home offices and delivers an intuitive, frustration-free user interface. The system boasts a click-to-call directory and allows for instant and scheduled meetings. The system’s camera captures video at Full HD 1080p resolution and relies on a wide-angle zoom lens with a 70-degree ﬁeld of view, which means that every detail is visible to the other party and every person fits into a single frame. The camera also offers 10x optical zoom, which means it’s possible to focus on details when necessary. Lifesize Icon also includes a fully integrated HD audio conference phone, touch-screen user interface and enables the user to manage HD video, audio and presentations. A digital microphone offers pro-audio 48 kHz sampling rate, reduces ambient room noise and features a touch-sensitive mute button and ‘Mute’ and ‘In-Call’ indicators. An ergonomic remote is also included to aid usability. Lifesize is the only company that connects its simple cloud service to an award-winning room video system and mobile apps. Learn more by visiting www.lifesize.com.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

ADEO partnership

Towards a collaborated future Selçuk Ekin, CEO, ADEO IT Consulting Services, on the company’s market focus and partnership with Redington Value

an you give us an overview of ADEO? ADEO IT Consulting Services is an IT services focused consultancy and training company formed by professional consultants from around the world. We offer improvements and latest developments with a devotion to providing high-quality services ranging from network, server and storage to private, public cloud. ADEO is the first IT consultancy company in both Turkey and the surrounding region to follow Corp-to-Corp business model.

What is the thought-process behind the Corp-to-Corp model? What we saw in the market is that IT firms interested in technology sales had difficulty in investing with the same focus and level of motivation as that of the staff. The other issue was that human resource investments were too fastidious and questionable due to the fact that IT professionals’ cost was too high. All these reasons as well as lack of technical experts and executives with skills and competencies required were causes for failure of major projects. Thanks to the business model we

Selçuk Ekin, CEO, ADEO IT Consulting Services adopted as ADEO, all IT ecosystem focused on technology sales can also manage the design, implementation, support and management of any project by using ADEO’s consultants. We focus only on consultancy and implementation of services requiring specialization and take them with the badge of other IT companies, to the end user without selling hardware or software to the end user directly. Since 2008, this business model has received broad acceptance from both IT integrators and vendors and has created opportunities to

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

carry out many industry-focused projects, not only in Turkey but also in Middle East and Africa. What are your short-term and longterm market focuses? ADEO’s short and long-term focus will be concentrated on Gulf countries and in particular – Saudi Arabia. ADEO has been positioned in MEA Region as an IT Consultancy arm of Redington Value, which has made a difference with the collaboration and technological support that it has been offering, especially to vendor and partners. Redington Value – ADEO integration is a collaboration which is in line with ADEO’s regional targets in 2013. I am sure that this partnership will consolidate Redington Value’s ‘value-added approach’ by means of ADEO’s project experience and will enhance training service competency. Partners of Redington will be delivered services from a broader array of services and support. I have complete confidence that ADEO’s experience in cloud, IT security, e-governance projects together with a collaboration with Redington Value’s regional partners, will yield excellent results. Will you be using the same business model in MEA region? This business model closed a huge gap and became a flexible and reliable model for both IT firms and customers. In short, this business model means that ADEO is working as a service distributor, reaching customers only and only through partners, systems integrators and vendors. In this scenario, the role of ADEO is to manage a team of consultants from which all sales focused IT firms can benefit. Naturally, they work with ADEO in a major project phase requiring specialization as well as in turn-key projects. All installation, integration

and support activities from demo and POC to design and technology positioning are carried out by ADEO’s expert teams on behalf of vendors or partners with whom they work. From the customer’s perspective, ADEO, with no hardware or software sales targets, becomes of value by understanding the needs correctly and addressing correct technology to them and thus seen and adopted as a reliable consultant by customer. Anything else you like to add? I would like to add that as ADEO, we are a team which enjoys reaching hundreds of customers with a different business approach combined with technical experience and we take great pride in customer satisfaction. This focus and approach have brought us many awards. ADEO IT Consulting Services has received the ‘Best Training and Consultancy Special Award’ and the ‘Best on-site Support Partner Award’ by HP in 2012 and the ‘Best Customer Experience Satisfaction Award’ by Microsoft in 2013. Integration of Redington Value and ADEO is an exciting one. I wholeheartedly believe that Redington’s value-added distribution approach will add another dimension to itself with ADEO’s experience and competencies. From now on, our partners will be able to make use of ADEO’s consultancy and training services and with Redington Value’s collaboration, they will be able to deliver projects with higher quality to more customers by strengthening current competencies and field forces. We are entering into a new era with enthusiasm of offering these services to our partners under the guarantee of Redington Value while assuring the highest level of quality possible in UAE and Saudi Arabia.

For more information or to place an order on Redhat, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

FOCUS | RED HAT

Open source leads the way In a competitive market business agility and costeffective technology make all the difference. Red Hat explains how it is facilitating business needs with open source software.

ed Hat, like most organisations, is conservative when it comes to investment in offices and manpower. However, Red Hat is investing significantly in the region and expanding rapidly across MENA not because of the opportunity in three years but because of the opportunity that exists right now. If you look at the numbers from IDC and Gartner, it is very clear that in the near future, there will be only two operating systems for the enterprise space, one of which is Linux. If you look at this transition towards open source in the middleware space, it is causing many of Red Hatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s competitors to rethink their market approach, price levels and other business strategies. Red Hat believes this overall drive is resonating with a large number of enterprises in the region, and it is really starting

to impact how a lot of them think about their business. From a customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s point of view the general trend has been to do more with less. This means that while IT budgets see little or no increase, enterprises still turn to their IT departments to help streamline processes and increase productivity. This is why Red Hat is approached by customers who are aware that by working with Red Hat, they can run their operations at a fraction of the cost of the solutions from other vendors. At a time when IT budgets arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t growing sufficiently to keep up with growing IT demands, such cost savings are essential as these funds can then be allocated to future development projects which help enterprises maintain their competitive advantage. Communities are active around open source There are several open source community projects like

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

Fedora (Linux distribution), JBoss Community (application server and middleware projects), GlusterFS (for Storage), oVirt (for Virtualization) and OpenShift Origin to name a few that provide freely-available versions of software. The Fedora Project is an open source community project that leads the advancement of free and open source software and content. It produces and releases a complete Linux-based operating system approximately every six months. This distribution incorporates

leading edge technologies that are built by free software developers around the globe. The Fedora platform is free for anyone to download, use, modify, and distribute. The Fedora Project contributes everything it builds back to the free and open source world and is open for anyone to participate. Open Compute Project was established by Facebook with the goal of building one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. With this project Facebook embarks on

the need of the business - if the solution solves their need, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the goal for any business in building out their IT strategy. At Red Hat our solutions include the core enterprise OS platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the enterprise middleware platform, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, as well as the virtualisation, cloud, and storage offerings and other Red Hat enterprise technologies. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an enterprise-class operating system that runs on a broad range of hardware, including mainframes, servers, work stations and personal computers. It is designed to meet the performance, reliability and scalability demands of large and small enterprises, from the data center to the edge of the network to cloud deployments. Red Hat JBoss Middleware delivers a range of middleware technologies for developing, deploying and managing applications that are accessible via the Internet, corporate intranets, extranets, clouds and virtual private networks. a mission to build datacentres using the traditions of open source software, and with the intention of sharing its technologies as they evolve. Red Hat has been collaborating with the Open Compute Project and its members on technologies, design, and development to redefine the next-generation datacentre. A great option for business Software or any technology solution has to solve a business need for a customer before that customer will buy

Software or any technology solution has to solve a business need for a customer before that customer will buy or use it.. or use it. If the software does not solve the need, the business would be unwise to use to. There are definitely cost savings to using open source solutions over proprietary solutions but it boils down to

Examples of applications deployed on Red Hat JBoss Middleware include hotel and airline reservation systems, online banking, credit card processing, securities trading, healthcare systems, customer

and partner portals, retail and point-of-sale systems and telecommunications network infrastructure. Red Hat Virtualisation is open source software used for server and desktop virtualisation. Virtualisation allows a single computer system to function as multiple virtual systems by abstracting operating systems and application software from the underlying hardware infrastructure, thereby allowing customers to use a common hardware infrastructure to run multiple operating systems and applications. Here to stay Red Hat also provide other infrastructure enterprise technologies, including storage, systems management, software development tools, higher availability clustering of systems and services, and directory services. The company intends to continue expanding the capabilities available under the open source architecture to help meet the performance, security, reliability and scalability requirements critical to enterprise customers. Enterprises across the MENA region are keen to facilitate innovation as IT becomes more dynamic. No one can afford to ignore the latest technology trends, in particular the explosive growth of data and cloud computing. At the same time, business enterprises want to leverage investments while optimising strategic flexibility and enjoying freedom of choice. Red Hat helps businesses get the best out of their technology and remain agile in a competitive market.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

FOCUS | Alcatel-Lucent

Staying in touch Alcatel-Lucent Enterprises highlights its range of cost-effective solutions that are designed for SMBs and MLEs to boost productivity and overcome communication challenges.

lcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALUE) provides communications, networking and cloud solutions for businesses of all sizes, and serves over 500,000 customers globally. The companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solutions are designed to help enterprise organisations make the shift from proprietary technologies to industry standards such as IP and SIP, and shift to cloud-based architectures, while enhancing the user experience and lowering total cost of ownership. The company operates through a global ecosystem of over 3,000 accredited business partners in over 100 countries. From September 2014 Redington joins the ALUE family as a value-added distributor for the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s converged portfolio of voice, data and wireless solutions. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is entrenched across verticals such as retail, healthcare, hospitality, government, and education with clients such as Al Futtaim Group, Dubai Airport, Dubai Economic Department, Dubai Bank, DUCAB, Etisalat, Jumbo Electronics, Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information and Tamdeen Shopping Center Kuwait.

The SMB conundrum SMBs face numerous challenges that are similar to those faced by a medium and large enterprises (MLE) but the magnitude of which could either make or break the SMB. As an example, consider issues like cashflow and credit lines which impact SMBs and MLE but the magnitude of impact differs. While a MLE might be

Figure 1

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

able to buffet these winds for a few weeks, it would sink the SMB boat in a matter of days. The SMB market is a volume driven game requiring local warehousing, prompt delivery and service. To top it all off a SMB needs to keep customer satisfaction and employee productivity high while maintaining low operational costs. Controlling

costs is not just about getting a solid ROI, it is about managing expenditures - especially communications expenses - in a way that suits your budget and your organisational structure. ALUE helps SMBs interconnect its people, knowledge and communications network so SMBs can focus on growing their business. The AlcatelLucent OpenTouch Suite for SMB portfolio includes a wide variety DeskPhones combined with rich voice/data collaboration and mobility solutions specifically tailored to meet SMB needs (see Figure 1). The portfolio is reliable, open and standards-based. The OpenTouch Suite for SMB is modular at every level, from communication suites and software licenses to communication servers and

The ALUE range of Premium DeskPhones are composed of five models including the Alcatel-Lucent 8068.

The solution can be bought with a hardware warranty and a variety of services, evolving from a simple maintenance contract to a complete system with new applications and technology. networking infrastructure that meet customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; exact requirements. The solution can be bought with a hardware warranty and a variety of services, evolving from a simple maintenance contract to a complete system with new applications and technology. Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch Suite for SMB is future-ready, based on a powerful and flexible IP

communication server, OmniPCX Office Rich Communication Edition (RCE) using standard protocols and offering a number of powerful features. Efficient communications An understanding of what peers and partners tell a SMB is the basis of any business relationship but today, in a

BYOD world, audio seems to be the weakest link. The ALUE range of desk phones are composed of five models called Alcatel-Lucent 8068, 8038/8039 and 8028/8029 Premium DeskPhones. The enhanced ergonomics such as adjustable foot stand, alphabetical keyboard, backlit display, dedicated function keys, user friendly navigator as well as a dynamic set of accessories are all elements that enable a superior IP and digital telephony user experience. These elegant devices complement and leverage all the rich telephony capabilities of the AlcatelLucent OmniPCX Office RCE platform. The 8082 My IC Phone delivers a multimedia communication experience with a seven-inch wide capacitive touch screen, enriching communications and productivity at work. A peer-topeer video call, as well as dedicated communication services serving the managerassistant relationship enriches that SIP device capabilities. The Alcatel-Lucent 8012 Deskphones complement the low end of this newly designed phone family. Applications The Alcatel-Lucent PIMphony Softphone, personal communication manager, optimises team performance by greatly reducing response time and eliminating missed calls. The My IC Web for Office on the other hand is a web-based solution for call handling,

which can be used with a standard browser, which makes it optimal for off-site use or even for use at home. Last but not least, the My IC Social Networks is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides the capability of federating directories, presence information, and interacting with existing social networks within Outlook. This converged user interface also provides telephony services from OmniPCX Office RCE, unified communication, and an offline mode.

Alcatel-Lucent offers several apps to intuitively enrich communications including the My IC Social Networks app.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

FOCUS | vmware

The road ahead

VMware’s Herve Renault talks about the company’s journey towards being a true cloud-provider and the role of the channel partners in the transformation.

oftware-defined networking (SDN), a relatively new trend, has been a buzz word in the regional IT space for a while now. However, organisations are only now understanding the full extent of advantages it has the potential to offer, and are becoming more open towards it. A new market trend, as ambiguous as it may seem in the

beginning, is an ocean of opportunities for the channel players. Renault says over the last few years the company has been moving towards network and storage virtualisation, besides just dealing with servers. He explains, “Today server virtualisation is becoming a commodity. Two years ago we announced the concept of

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

software-defined networking which has the capacity to not only categorise the server but also to network and storage.” In the last six months the company has been focusing on delivering the SDN promise by positioning the right products in place. An eye on bottlenecks One of the biggest bottlenecks in implementing SDN is the

network. Without a robust network in place it is challenging to deploy SDN solutions. But although it is a work in progress, Renault says, the technology is taking off rapidly. “We are seeing that large banks, insurance and telco companies that have a huge IT system identify with SDN the capacity to modernise and become agile enough to answer business issues.”

its partners and is investing in training to ensure they are ahead of the curve. One of the plans the company is undertaking through this focused approach is a programme called Value Velocity which is targeted at distributors, where they are enabled to train their partners. Renault adds, “What we are doing directly with our top partners, we help the distributors to do it with their partners through Value Velocity.” Around 18 months ago the channel network for VMware wasn’t very strong in the region, but this is changing fast, says Renault. “We have plans to hire senior managers to look after our

top partners. We want to be with our partners on a day-to-day basis and help in making more business.” The company is also looking at extending its footprint across the region. As one of the first steps in this plan, starting this year, all the North Africa and French speaking regions will be now linked to the Middle East. “We are hiring manpower who are ready to have a presence in these countries and we are also looking at dedicated marketing professionals for these regions. The approach to the channel, depending on the people, will be programmatic,” explains Renault.

Channel growth in Africa By Mark Reynolds, Partner Lead, Southern Africa, VMware Herve Renault, Director, Channel, Alliances & General Business, SEMEA, VMware

For partners Renault says, this is a big job as they are traditionally used to selling server virtualisation. And moving away from the comfort zone might require the initial push. “We need to firstly educate, enable and incentivise our partners in this journey. Because we are in the middle of a transformation the transformation is already in advance stages and now we need to have our partners come on board with a good investment plan and we need to offer better incentive plans and new certificate programmes,” he explains. The transformation to SDN, although in full swing, is far from being completed. “Many of our partners are competent and selling end user computing

products or are selling our monitoring solutions. The first step is to automate with virtualisation,” he says. Especially when in most cases 70 percent of the old data centres are being used, there is a distinct need to monitor it. Making progress VMware’s partners have been receptive and have progressed well in this ride, comments Renault. “Through a focused approach, we are only concentrating on a couple of partners. We expect SDN to be mainstream by next year and it will open up much more broadly.” It is important to not only sell but implement it correctly, he adds further. On a global level, the company is building a plan together with

While vendors often view Africa as the last green patch of economic freedom and see the absence of technology in some areas as an opportunity; the real business prospect on the continent is the current growth of new businesses and their appetite for new generation technologies. VMware specialises in technology that proposes using less physical infrastructure to do more, which is attracting a lot of interest from regions such as Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. All of this is good news for the channel and our partners but there are some key factors that partners and even vendors have to consider. The first is that if you want to grow your footprint on the continent, you have to have skilled people on the ground. Another factor that is paramount to success is having a distributor who has a physical presence in the region. This component of a channel strategy, to us, is non-negotiable. Another aspect to consider is that if you are serious about a region, invest in it. Open an office, deploy partner programmes that are tailored for that region and aren’t just blueprints of global programmes that bear little relevance to the local customer. Then work with your partners and through your partners, because their hunger to grow their own business will ultimately assist you in fuelling your expansion goals and getting product and tech on the ground. We have grown our business exponentially by factoring in and focusing on the importance of our channel partners throughout the value chain and then investing in them.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

IN BRIEF

Nexans eyes regional growth

Tarek Helmy, Regional Director Gulf and Middle East, South & East Africa of Nexans Cabling Solutions

ith a regional presence that dates back to 1998, Nexans is no stranger to the Middle East market. The company has a strong partner network, which when combined with the company’s strategic approach to marketing, has enabled the company to maintain consistent growth even through economic turmoil. “We signed Redington Value as our distributor for East Africa in 2013 as it is a reputed and experienced value-added distributor with a strong channel network across the Middle East and Africa. With their extensive experience, market knowledge and strong technical expertise, they have helped grow Nexans’ business significantly in East Africa over the last one year. Hence we have now extended our distribution partnership to include Saudi Arabia as well,”

comments Tarek Helmy, Regional Director Gulf and Middle East, South & East Africa of Nexans Cabling Solutions. The company offers a wide range of solutions that fit a customers’ present and future needs. With energy as the basis of its development, the French company offers an extensive range of cables and cabling systems. Over the last 22 years it has developed a complete range of copper and fiber network solutions to meet clients’ network requirements, including innovations such as the GG45 Cat7A system and LANsense - an intelligent infrastructure platform with power management and environmental monitoring tools. These innovations allow companies to invest in a future proof network today and lower IT costs for the next decade.

The business of apps

oogle Enterprise is a collection of services that allows businesses to customise various Google products to suit their specific needs. The service features a number of Google’s web services such as Google Apps for Work, Google Cloud Platform, Google Drive, Google Maps for Work and others, in an effort to offer functions that are similar to those provided by more traditional office suites. Google announced at its recent Google I/O in June, 2014 that Google Drive had 190 million monthly active users, and that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies as well as many universities are using Google Drive. A recent non-independent study from Forrester Research indicates that large

enterprises can achieve up to 329% ROI and a breakeven point of 1.4 months - a model company of 18,000 employees was used for the Forrester study. If a business is undertaking a Google Apps deployment, it has two choices when it comes to acquiring licenses and setting up the service; the business can either purchase the licenses directly from Google and take on the technical setup

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

and data migration in house or work with a Google Apps partner for licensing, setup, data migration, training, and support services. Redington Value has partnered with Google Apps and can fully support companies with licensing, setup, data migration, training, and support services. Since its inception, over five million businesses rely on Google Apps for Work.

IN BRIEF

Symantec emphasizes partner focus

ecurity specialist Symantec is fully committed to its focus on partners. The company is realising its vision by enabling partners to differentiate their business and accelerate profits, while keeping a close eye on the goals and effectiveness of its partner strategy. “We are a partner-focused company; the majority of our revenue is generated through the channel, and our channel partners extend our presence and strength in every market in the world. Our vision is to give every Symantec partner opportunities for predictable, profitable business growth, relevant market-leading solutions to protect and

All about SPLA

icrosoft’s Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) program targets service providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) who are interested in licensing the latest eligible Microsoft software products. Those participating in the SPLA program can provide hosted applications and software services to their end customers. With the SPLA, service providers and ISVs can license eligible Microsoft products on a monthly basis, during a three-

manage their customers’ information and the skills and tools to deliver superior value to their customers,” said Gordon Love, Middle East, Africa and Turkey Regional Director, EMEA Mid-Size and Growth Countries, Symantec. Symantec partners have exclusive access to security and information protection solutions that offer strength across storage, security, management, and data protection. The company furnishes its partners with new marketing tools, as well as turnkey co-branded campaigns, and also and provides new sales support resources to help partners quickly turn sales opportunities into profits that can be found on PartnerNet - Symantec’s site for tools and resources dedicated to partner success. The company actively evaluates the effectiveness of its strategy by measuring partner revenue, readiness, reputation and relevance. The US based company is keen on making sure its partners achieve lasting, prosperous partnerships that help build customer confidence.

year agreement term, to host software services and applications for their customers. The SPLA supports a variety of hosting scenarios to help partners provide customised and robust solutions to a wide range of customers. The program offers several benefits including acquiring the flexibility to deliver tailored IT services to customers through a dedicated or shared hosting environment. Partners enrolled in the program can also pay only for licenses based on what they make available to provide software services for each month, meaning there are no start-up costs or long-term commitments. The SPLA program also helps partners provide their customers with the most current and

Gordon Love, Middle East, Africa and Turkey Regional Director, EMEA Mid-Size and Growth Countries, Symantec

capable Microsoft platform. Partners can also take advantage of Microsoft products to deliver software services to end customers in and from any part of the world where distribution is legally allowed. SPLA members can also look forward to expanding their business reach to small and midsize businesses that provide software services through additional resellers and, they have the option to focus on hosting application solutions and acquire infrastructure as a

service (IaaS) from a Data Center Provider, including Windows Azure. To participate in the SPLA program, partners have to sign-up through a SPLA reseller however the organisation must meet a few prerequisites to do so. This includes enrolling in the Microsoft Partner Network, and the interested party must also sign a Microsoft Business and Services Agreement (MBSA). Service providers with existing MBSA via another volume licensing agreement can however work with their Microsoft account manager or reseller to provide their MBSA number and link the MBSA to their SPLA.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

FOCUS | Check Point

The results are in Check Point shines a light on the importance of having a security solution that can deal with threats from advanced and sophisticated malware.

usinesses today are facing unprecedented growth in the diversity and number of security threats from malware. New attack types combine known and unknown threats to exploit ‘unknown’ vulnerabilities. Attackers are also hiding malware inside documents,

websites, hosts and networks. These attacks have many purposes including financial and ideological motives. They focus on stealing data, sabotaging business continuity or damaging a company’s reputation. This article describes Check Point’s testing methodology for catching malware and provides

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

critical advice on what security solutions should be able to do in order to protect your network. Test overview Check Point research analysts downloaded a sample set of 300 well-known malicious PDF, DOC and executable files from Google’s ‘VirusTotal’ database.

The analysts then used a simple technique to create new and unknown variants from existing malware. The resulting 300 samples (Unknown 300) preserved the original malicious functionality but are unknown and unregistered in any hash-based database such as VirusTotal. With this set of unknown malware samples the analysts tested Check Point and other vendors’ solutions ability to detect new and unknown malware. To ensure the test validity all the platforms were updated and patched with the latest firmware and updates available from each vendor as of mid July, 2014. The test configuration also matched

the vendor’s best practices. The only objective of the test was to test the catch rate of malicious files. Performance was not tested and did not influence the test results in any way. Creating the ‘Unknown 300’ To develop the unknown malware test researchers queried VirusTotal for PDF, DOC and portable executable files that were detected as malicious by at least 10 antivirus engines. All candidate files were uploaded to VirusTotal after July 2014, had a size of 1Mb or less, and demonstrated various malicious behaviors. From this selection, 300 files were randomly chosen (120-PDF, 120-EXE, and 60- DOC). Using this sample of 300 known malware, Check Point research analysts added a null to the end of each PDF and DOC file (e.g. “echo `0000’ >> 1.doc”). In addition an ‘unused’ header section was modified on each executable file. The analysts then opened and ran each file to validate that the original behavior was kept unchanged. For the executables, a free tool named LordPE was used to change the checksum. LAB setup A lab was created to simulate the reality of a user downloading an infected file. All platforms in the test were activated with the maximum number of threat prevention services (IPS, antimalware, anti-bot, threat emulation) and with the most upto-date signatures. The Unknown 300 files were a mix of 40% PDF files, 40% EXE files and 20% DOC files. The files were downloaded to a host behind the security device, simulating the accidental downloading of malware from a malicious web page by an

internal user. A different host header was used for each of the files to avoid ‘blacklisting’ of the destination IP. Security findings As the Check Point research analysts were conducting the ‘Unknown 300’ test, they came across security findings that are important to consider in the fight against malware. File size. Malware comes in many sizes and a security solution should offer the flexibility to accommodate varying file sizes. One vendors solution offered a default size limit of only 500Kb up to a maximum of 1Mb for PDF files that can be scanned. However, many of the PDF files queried by VirusTotal were above 1Mb in size. SSL Traffic. Malware doesn’t discriminate whether it arrives at your network encrypted or not. It is critical to scan inside SSL traffic, the same way nonencrypted traffic is examined. One vendor’s solution did not support scanning inside SSL traffic, creating a potential vulnerability for the network. Detection versus prevention. Many security solutions tested can detect unknown malware but cannot prevent it from entering the network. For example, two vendors’ solutions allow all files into the network while the suspicious files are being uploaded and emulated. There is a delay of 30 minutes for one vendor and 60 minutes for the other before updated signature blocks are created to block the unknown malware. This timeframe is a significant window for malware propagation in the network.

Sandboxing considerations Consider the following when using sandboxing solutions:

1 Protect against the latest cyber threats: It’s important that the solution has multiple layers of protection to deal with the latest cyber threats - both known and unknown. 2 Inspect SSL Traffic: A solution that cannot scan for malwares in SSL traffic is blind to an important vector of attacks used by attackers. 3 Prevent files from entering your network: Many solutions can only detect malware but not prevent it from infecting the network in the first place. This increases risk and compromises the security posture of the organisation. 4 Number of appliances required to inspect both web and email: Some solutions require a dedicated appliance for each protocol scanned (i.e. web, email, files) increasing TCO and complicating management. 5 Inspect all archive types: Malware that is compressed in an archive file (zip, rar, etc.) cannot be detected by some solutions, making this attack a very common vehicle for hackers.

It is critical to scan inside SSL traffic, the same way non-encrypted traffic is examined. Additionally, the emulation time for one solution was the longest - more than 10 minutes a file on average. Archived files. Many organisations use archived files such as ZIP or RAR. A security solution must support the inspection of archived files. Researchers found however that although one vendor stated that it can emulate ZIP files, when tested, the software would not allow it. Total cost of ownership. Many security solutions require separate appliances and do not support multi-protocol scanning

on a single appliance. It is optimal for ease of deployment and management to choose a solution that can support multi-protocol scanning. For example, one vendor’s solution needed a separate appliance for email protection and for web protection, increasing the total cost of ownership to the customer. In closing Given the disruption and loss of productivity that both known and unknown malware can cause, taking the time to verify claims by various vendors on their catch rate is a worthwhile effort.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

IN BRIEF

Deploying virtualisation

Focusing on infrastructure

Computing is one of the fastest growing desktop virtualisation organisations in the world, with over 50,000 customers and 20 million daily users across 140 countries. The company, which was founded in 2003, serves end customers large and small in diverse markets, and with varying use cases across education, government, and industry segments, helping to transform their use of computing. Redington Gulf assists NComputing with sales of its products by leveraging its expertise in IT products, supply chain management and logistics in the Middle East region. The company’s virtual desktops have been deployed everywhere, from classroom labs to large VDI deployments with more than 30,000 workstations. The NComputing solution provides the lowest-cost computing solution to schools and small businesses, plugs into existing enterprise deployments, provides secure access to information in hospitals, and withstands extreme conditions in factories. By leveraging a single commodity computer and operating system, NComputing can deliver up to 100 independent user sessions, greatly increasing computer access to users and reducing hardware and maintenance costs by 75%. This allows limited IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than an endless set of PC upgrades. NComputing innovation makes it possible for customers to transform existing equipment (legacy PCs, netbook and laptops) into new virtual clients, expanding the ability to address today’s top IT priorities: supporting mobility, enabling BYOD, and managing Windows OS transitions. NComputing’s solutions support the Linux and Windows operating systems. The company’s access devices drastically reduce e-waste due to their size and lifespan. The devices only weigh 150 grams compared to 9.6 kilograms and last nearly 3 times longer than a typical PC. The systems use as little as 1-watt of electricity (compared to 110-watts for a regular PC) often saving more than 90% on electricity bills. The advantages exist beyond hardware as well as NComputing’s software client allows customers to breathe new life into older PC’s and laptops, preserving scarce resources and reducing the need to scrap older systems once they are obsolete.

ujitsu is an information and communication technology (ICT) company offering a full range of technology products, solutions and services. Approximately 162,000 Fujitsu employees support customers in more than 100 countries across the globe. The company leverages its experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with its customers. In the Middle East Fujitsu is focused on delivering IT infrastructure across desktop, mobile and data centre environments, together with a full range of related services, from infrastructure consulting through integration and deployment. The company offers a full range of infrastructure products, solutions and services that are designed to fit to a variety of customer infrastructure needs: Infrastructure Products including hardware ranging from servers, PCs, notebooks to workstations, thin clients, tablet PCs, monitors and peripherals as well as middleware, storage and networks, along with all product-related services. In 2010 Fujitsu appointed Redington Value to serve as its distributor for the Middle East and Africa for Fujitsu’s Primergy servers and Eternus storage solutions. The partnership enables Fujitsu to provide resellers with madeto-order solutions that are

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

Fujitsu certified, tested and cost-effective, with Plug-andPlay capabilities that were never before offered in the market. Fujitsu’s Primergy systems provide the most powerful and flexible data center solutions for companies of all sizes, across all industries and for any type of workload. This includes expandable Primergy tower servers for remote and branch offices, versatile rackmount servers, compact and scalable blade systems, as well as density-optimized scale-out servers. They convince by business proven quality with a wide range of innovations, highest efficiency cutting operational cost and complexity, and provide more agility in daily operations in order to turn IT faster into a business advantage. Under the direction ‘business-centric storage’ Fujitsu provides its ETERNUS DX disk systems and ETERNUS CS data protection appliances, which allow customers to flexibly manage their increasing data volumes at less costs of growth, to benefit from a very reliable architecture as well from radically simplified operation.

IN BRIEF

Enhancing partnerships

he proposition of competing with the Public Cloud giant AWS on price and scale can be daunting if not challenging to execute on. So as they say, “if you cannot

beat them, join them”, right? Lucky AWS has a partner network and channel reseller program you can leverage to divert your enterprise customers towards AWS and start making pure profits

from your discounted reseller arrangement. Differentiate your business and leverage the changing economic model the cloud provides for Solutions Integrators and Managed Service Providers. Diversify your offerings by leveraging the AWS cloud: · Offer immediate financial and operational savings to your clients · Create new opportunities within your existing business around expansion into the cloud for Storage, DR, Big

Data Analytics and Web Applications. Benefits of the AWS Channel Reseller Program · Monetize your expertise in Datacenter solutions and expand your offerings to your current clients · Benefit from AWS’ focus on value added partners Redington can help AWS partner for subscription, setup, data migration, training, support services and make more margin.

HP Software: Raising the bar

unique opportunity to help your customers build the foundation for the CIO’s and IT leadership team’s performance system. A system that can gather data across the infrastructure, digitize data from all sources, and integrate that data into an accessible repository for use in performance tracking, measurement and evaluation.

P IT Performance Suite offers customers a way to systematically manage their IT organization and better demonstrate to the business IT’s effectiveness, efficiency, and value. See Effective IT Performance Management requires an IT performance system that is digitized and automated. Manually created, spreadsheet-based performance reports from your various teams just aren’t sufficient to track today’s complex IT environments. The HP IT Performance Suite

features the industry’s deepest and broadest insight into ITcontrolled assets, a cascaded optimization system, and a secure, comprehensive, operational environment for a hybrid world. As a partner, you have the

Understand The HP Executive Scorecard is not just a tool of performance management. It is a tool to translate strategy into action, to remove silos, and to promote a culture of high performance. It is as much

about people and process as it is about tools, but tools can capture best practice and help automate time-consuming tasks. Act For resource-constrained organizations, HP’s IT Performance Suite can be implemented in a gradual, phased approach with the ability to integrate with alternate data sources to achieve a single pane of glass view. Partners can leverage their business expertise for additional value by developing vertical and other LOB custom KPIs for their clients.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

ADVANCED ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS

GITEX Technology Week 2014 A2-5 at Hall 2

Day 2

SECURITY

Monday, 13th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

Ground Floor

SonicWall Delivering deep protection

10:00

Ground Floor

RSA Security Analytics Detect and Investigate Advanced Threats

16:00

Day 3

Tuesday, 14th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Ground Floor

HP Fortify End to end software security for the new style of IT

10:00

CheckPoint: 3D Security vision

12:00

TrendMicro Deep Security Advanced protection for physical, virtual, and cloud servers

16:00

First Floor

Day 4

Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mobile, social, and collaborative lifestyles have transformed the way technology is used at home, at work, and everywhere in between. Hence there is a want and a need to secure devices, personal information, and business data; to keep families safe online, and employees productive; to take advantage of all that new technologies can offer us while minimizing the risk. Redington Value brings to you Advanced security solutions on Next Generation Firewall, Network Security, Real Time Security Management, & much more.

Day 1

Sunday, 12th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

First Floor

HP ArcSight Advanced Persistent Threats and Identity View

15:00

First Floor

HP TippingPoint NG Firewall Advanced Protection for Advanced Threats

17:00

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

The ValuePlus Quarterly October 2014

Time

Wednesday, 15th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Ground Floor

Barracuda Web Application Firewall Security and DDoS Protection Against Automated & Targeted Attacks

10:00

First Floor

TrendMicro Deep Discovery Network Traffic 360-degree

11:00

Ground Floor

Barracuda NG Firewall: Next-Generation Firewalls for Distributed Enterprises

15:00

First Floor

Palo Alto: Ultraspeed NG Security

16:00

Day 5

Time

Thursday, 16th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

First Floor

RSA ECAT: Signature-less Malware Detection

10:00

First Floor

Palo Alto: APT - Expose the Underground

11:00

First Floor

Palo Alto: MSM - Safely enable Mobile devices

12:00

Time

* Technology sessions dates & time are tentative and subject to change

Attend informative Technology Sessions at Redington Value stand to win an i-Pad Day 4

SOFTWARE

Wednesday, 15th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

First Floor

Extend the transformational power of online communities to anyone, on any device with the NEW Zimbra Community 8.0.

11:00

Ground Floor

Availability for the Modern Data Center (New Veeam Availability Suite v8)

12:00

First Floor

Oracle Remarketer

17:00

Day 5

Software can change the way you do business. It lets you make your own technology choices: hardware, systems, and applications. Learn more about open source technology, backup & disaster recovery solutions at the technology sessions on the stand.

Day 1

Thursday, 16th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

First Floor

Double Take High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Physical and Virtual Servers

15:00

NETWORKING

Sunday, 12th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

Ground Floor

Red Hat Choose open technology made for the cloud

15:00

Day 2

Monday, 13th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

First Floor

Acronis More than just backup

10:00

Ground Floor

Google Apps solution Achieve up to 329% ROI and a breakeven point of 1.4 months using

17:00

Day 3

Social media, cloud, mobility, and Big Data are re-defining how IT is purchased and consumed. Key technologies are required to meet these demands. Redington Value with HP delivers technologies that are based on open-standards to drive simplification into IT operations which span network unification to virtual network management. The HP Softwaredefined Networking (SDN) provides an end-to-end solution to automate the network from data center to campus and branch.

Day 2

Tuesday, 14th Oct 2014

Monday, 13th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

BYOD and Cloud Based Wireless Network

15:00

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

Ground Floor

First Floor

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

10:00

Day 4 Presentation Area

Topic

Time

Ground Floor

Mobilize: Acronis Access Secure content access, sync and share solution for the enterprise. Control. Secure.

16:00

First Floor

Software Defined Networking

15:00

* Technology sessions dates & time are tentative and subject to change

Wednesday, 15th Oct 2014

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtongulf.com

October 2014

The ValuePlus Quarterly

ADVANCED ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS Cloud Computing

GITEX Technology Week 2014 A2-5 at Hall 2

VIRTUALIZATION

Today’s workplace is an entirely different animal to just five years ago - and it’s growing and changing at a rapid rate. The huge amount of enterprise mobility solutions on the market are enabling employees to do various tasks on their smartphones and tablets. Yet none of this could be possible without the cloud powering it. Register with sessions below to know more on how you can augment your IT with cloud offerings.

Day 1

Sunday, 12th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

Ground Floor

PERNIX DATA: New Ways to Save Money On Storage

16:00

Day 2

Monday, 13th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

Ground Floor

PERNIX DATA: FVP Software

11:00

First Floor

AWS: Choosing a Cloud Platform

11:00

Day 3

Tuesday, 14th Oct 2014

Presentation Area

Topic

Time

Ground Floor

LifeSize Cloud