Techtimes Feb - April by Tech Data

Spring 2016

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Spring 2016

Comments, suggestions? Tell us what you think! jillian.cahill@techdata.ca

Executive Address

President’s Club

Tech Data Canada wins America’s Cup

TechSelect Member Profile

Thank you!

Winners are making a difference in 2016 Keeping the cup at home for another year We catch up with Mantralogix of Mississauga, Ontario

19 22

Cyber Security

What to look for in 2016 and beyond

Circle of Excellence

Recognizing top partners of 2015

Editor Jillian Cahill Art Direction and Design Julie MacAulay Contributing Writers and Editors Irene Buchan, Jillian Cahill, Tarek Kerdasi Project Manager Monisha Sharma Tech Times is published and distributed six times per year to channel resellers across Canada. ©2016 Tech Data Canada Corporation. Prices, promotions, offers & terms and conditions of sale subject to change without notice. Errors and omissions excepted. All manufacturers’ names are registered trademarks of their respective corporations. This publication comes to you free from Tech Data Canada Corporation. We received your mailing address from your Tech Data customer account information. To make changes or to unsubscribe, please contact your Tech Data sales team at 800.668.5588 or notify us at emailcanada@techdata.ca. www.techtimesmagazine.ca

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Spring 2016

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ExecutiveAddress www.techdata.ca

Thank you! Dear Valued Partner, I’m delighted to announce that Tech Data Canada was named Distributor of the Year at the highly respected Reseller Choice Awards for the ninth consecutive year. Thousands of reseller partners vote annually in this once a year opportunity to rate vendors and distributors within the Canadian IT industry.

BEST DISTRIBUTOR WINNER 2015

Thank you to all of you who voted for Tech Data Canada! Tech Data Canada was also honoured with awards in four other categories. • Best Customer Service • Best Product Support • Best Terms and Conditions • Best Industry Event recognizing our Business Builder Tour These awards are a reflection of our excellence in execution and the best-in-class service and support our teams provide our partners every day. It is because of your engagement and the feedback you provide us throughout the year that we continually refine our processes and practices to better serve you and your evolving needs as leading Canadian IT solution providers.

BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE

BEST PRODUCT SUPPORT

WINNER 2015

BEST TERMS AND CONDITIONS

BEST best INDUSTRY industry EVENT event

WINNER 2015

WINNER 2015 2010

It is an honour to accept this award on behalf of the entire Tech Data Canada team. Thank you for your continued support and for this outstanding recognition in each of these areas.

Sincerely,

D.R. (Rick) Reid

President

Spring 2016

Tech Data’s President’s president s Club Members are Making a club Difference in 2016 2016

Tech Data Canada is proud to recognize top performers in the organization for their outstanding contributions in FY2016. This elite group will enjoy President’s Club status and the exciting rewards and privileges that go with it throughout 2016! All of this year’s winners were selected from Tech Data Canada’s quarterly “Over the Top” departmental awards program. The executive committee then selects each winner based upon their continued leadership and success over the past year. 2016 winners will be spending the day working as a team along with the executives and representatives from Cisco, HP Inc. and Lenovo at the Daily Bread Food Bank in April to help make a difference in our community.

HotSpots

The Daily Bread depends on 10,000 volunteers each year to help sort and package nine million pounds of food to make sure it can be delivered to people in need. Not only will they be helping the Daily Bread downtown Toronto achieve its daily goals, but as a team, they will also be helping make our city a great place to live, work and play for everyone.

HOTspots

Thank you for your tremendous and valuable contributions to Tech Data Canada.

Transceivers are perfect for data centres. These devices are used to interface the electrical bus of the networking equipment to the structured cabling. C2G offers a variety of transceivers to fit the needs of any customer. Guaranteed lifetime warranty and 100% OEM compatible help ease the mind for any solution. Highlighted SKUs: TD SKU C2G # 0558CN 39504 1353CK 39551 0777ZC 39497 0740ZC 39460

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Contact your Tech Data sales representative at 1-800-668-5588 for more details.

Check Point Mobile Threat Prevention

Check Point Mobile Threat Prevention protects iOS and Android devices from advanced mobile threats, allowing your business to deploy and defend smartphones and tablets with confidence. It delivers the industry’s highest threat catch rate and is the only mobile security solution that detects device, application, and in-network threats. Highlighted SKUs: Term 1-year 2-year 3-year

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Contact your Tech Data sales representative at 1-800-668-5588 for more details.

Spring 2016

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meraki (n.) the soul, creativity, or love put into something, the essence of yourself that is put into your work pronunciation / mA-rak-E

Cisco Meraki available at Tech Data!

Meraki is HERE!

Call your Tech Data sales representative at 1-800-668-5588.

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Spring 2016

Congratulations Tech Data Canada!

Winners of the Tech Data Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cup recognizing best performing region in the Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s for the second straight year! Thank you to the entire Canadian team. We are proud to keep the cup at home where it belongs for another year.

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Spring 2016

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Spring 2016

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Spring 2016

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In this issue of Tech Times, we sit down with Mantralogix to hear how TechSelect membership has provided them with valuable industry knowledge and networking opportunities that help them accelerate their business.

Tell us a little about your organization: First and foremost, Mantralogix is a people centric organization. We know that systems and applications need to support human talent and experience. To effectively set your business apart, it’s people first. We are a managed services provider for Sage ERP/ Accounting systems and IT services. We pride ourselves on being able to support our customers with their end to end technology needs as we provide managed services for enterprise wide applications. Our customers have one point of contact across all of their technology needs which ensure continuity and efficiency. We work hard to anticipate our customers’ business needs and challenges so that we can be proactive in solving them, AND we are really nice people! Mantralogix was also nominated and won the Mississauga Board of trade small business of the year award for 2015. Q: What are your thoughts on the industry in general? The SMB space is thriving, especially in North America and there are so many different ways to add value to our customers’ businesses. Technical knowledge is important for sure, but it’s secondary to the fact that in the end we are serving people. Building relationships is key and that starts with taking the time to really hear what companies are challenged with and working creatively to solve for those challenges. Our industry needs to work extra hard on the “soft skills” as well as keep their technical knowledge current.

investment! Traditional “break/ fix” solves the immediate issue but it makes it challenging to grow your business. We have been designing solutions and offering consulting to our customers to allow for a more proactive approach. This lowers the risk (and related stress) of all the variety of security challenges out there. We are continuing to invest in technical training and relevant certifications for our team and have researched and implemented managed service tools to become more proactive by monitoring our customers’ infrastructures. We publish new learning all the time (in the form of blogs) as we feel it is so important to be part of the education process. Q: What would you like to see from vendor partners?

Q: What challenges are you facing and how do you overcome them?

Our success and our vendors’ success are very much interdependent. We are looking for our vendors to support our technical upgrading and are also looking for innovative products and programs to support our managed services approach. How do we offer more proactive services? How we increase our speed to solve for customer problems? Operationally we are looking out for demo programs and of course welcome referrals.

Companies that see technology as an expense as opposed to an

Q: What are your organization’s goals for the next five years?

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We are definitely in growth mode! We want to continue to grow our customer base, our team, and our cross-sell between IT services and ERP services. We are focused on client experience and aspire to provide all customers with a WOW experience. We want deep, mutually respectful relationships with customers and with vendors. It’s personal, not just business. Q: How has the TechSelect program helped you? Or helped you meet your organization’s goals? We made the decision to become a TechSelect partner about a year ago. We believe that the partnership has helped us be more knowledgeable about industry trends, allowed more access to our vendor community and has offered awesome networking with our fellow managed service providers across Canada and the US, extending our strategic goals for our organization. Q: What is your outlook for 2016. Very positive. Some very cool trends (please see our recent blog http:// insights.mantralogix.com/blog/topinformation-technology-trends-for-2016) are keeping the industry hopping and we are so excited to work with customers to educate, recommend and manage one of their most important investments!

Spring 2016

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Cyber Security

What to Look for in 2016 and Beyond By Tarek Kerdasi, Intel Security Specialist

Malcolm X once said that “education is our passport to the future.” Being prepared for the challenges of tomorrow will set you apart from other security providers. In the last five years, we all saw the storm brewing. More users, more devices and more data pointed towards more threats and more vulnerabilities. As we look forward to the next five years, the storm continues to intensify. Today, we see a dynamic workplace environment and highly mobile workforce. One thing is clear, security vendors will need to keep up with networks that become more complex each day.

The Challenge

The biggest security challenge of tomorrow will be the growing number of connected devices. The forecast for connected devices by 2020 is now 200 billion and climbing. It is estimated that by 2019 there will be 4 billion users, 24.4 billion IP-connected devices and 168 exabytes per month in IP traffic. By 2020, we will see the number of smartphones connected

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rise to 5.9 billion that equates to 79% growth in five years. Combine these numbers with a well-documented shortage of security talent and you will see a big need for automated defenses.

Ransomware on the rise

While there are many different threats to worry about in 2016, I wanted to pay a special tribute to ransomware. CryptoWall and CryptoLocker are words that we hear from our customers far too often. Late in 2014 we witnessed the rise of ransomware, in 2016 ransomware is still a very real problem.

A World of Information in the Cloud

Cloud services have caught fire, cloud adoption is on the rise. It’s not hard to see why, cloud services offer convenience and cost effective storage. The amount of confidential data being shared on these cloud services and platforms makes this trend a cybercriminal’s dream. Most businesses today use low-cost or free cloud collaboration services but are still unaware of the risk of data breaches. Many forms of cyber criminals, unethical competitors and nation states will be target hacking into cloud service platforms to steal valuable information or gain a competitive advantage.

Being Preemptive with Intel Security

These are just a few examples of what the future of security holds. According to the McAfee Labs 2016 Threat Report, some of the main factors influencing the cyber security market in the future are “the continuing expansion of the attack surface, increased attacker sophistication, the rising cost of breaches, the lack of integrated security technologies and a shortage of skilled security talent to take up the fight.” Intel Security has researched these trends in depth to understand and adapt to the ever-changing security landscape. The main takeaway from this is that the security market is and will continue to grow. The stronger the defense gets, the more sophisticated the attacks become. This cycle is guaranteed to produce profits and by partnering with Intel Security you can stay ahead of the market and be a trusted security advisor for your customer. To read the full McAfee Labs 2016 Threats Predictions, visit: http://www.mcafee.com/us/ resources/reports/rp-threatspredictions-2016.pdf

Spring 2016

2015

Congratulations to our Reseller Partners who were recognized with the Circle of Excellence award! Each year, Tech Data recognizes reseller partners from across Canada that have demonstrated best-in-class commitment to the channel and in partnership with Tech Data. They have shown excellence in revenue achievement, along with strong dedication and leadership. The nominees for the awards are reviewed by Tech Data’s executive team who are looking for resellers who have demonstrated excellence in four key categories: growth, partnership, electronic commerce integration and joint strategic initiatives.

This year’s Circle of Excellence reseller award winners include: • Compugen (National Partner) • SHI (National Partner) • Boardwalk Communications (Western Region) • Powerland Computers (Western Region) • WBM Office Systems (Western Region) • DNR Consulting (Capital Region) • Northern Micro (Capital Region) • TeraMach Technologies. (Capital Region) • Zycom Technology (Capital Region) • Benchmark (Central Region) • Radiant Communications (Central Region) • Scalar Decisions (Central Region) • SolidCAD (Central Region) • Irisco (Region du Quebec) • Micro Logic (Region du Quebec) Tech Data executives will be visiting each of the winning reseller partners throughout 2016 to personally distribute the Circle of Excellence awards. Each of the recipients will also receive a commemorative glass plaque.

Thank You CDW Canada! CDW Canada recently hosted their 10th annual Partner Awards recognizing partners that went above and beyond in their engagement with CDW. We are delighted to have been recognized with two prestigious awards. Best Effort for a Developing/Strategic Distributor Award - recognizing the distributor partner who is always working towards identifying, cultivating and bringing to fruition new business opportunities that facilitate the long-term growth of their partnership with CDW. They target critical areas to develop growth and commit the necessary resources to building key relationships in pursuit of working with CDW to continue to drive and strengthen their position within today’s market Best Overall Distributor Award – recognizing the distributor partner who is always looking for innovative ways to drive incremental business, think outside the box, and work alongside CDW Canada to win together! Thank you to our friends at CDW Canada for this outstanding recognition! We look forward to our continued partnership throughout 2016. 22

Spring 2016

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