February 2012 - VAR MEA

Issue 152

Mobility acceleration

News - In Search

What’s New

GRAND FINALE concludes the search for the 2011 champions

The Big Picture BenQ currently has over 40 projector models designed to fit a wide range of requirements from personal lifestyle, to corporate, education, home video and many more. According to the company, its sales in the MEA region increased by 35% in terms of both revenue generated and units sold (in comparison to 2010) . In the following interview, Manish Bakshi, General Manager of BenQ for the Middle East and Africa discusses the various growth trends in its Projectors Business.

How is the Home Cinema segment growing?

It is in an embryonic stage but is growing fast. In some of the Middle Eastern countries, there are not many movie theatres. In KSA for instance, people set up home cinema ambience in villas where they ...continued on pg 6 stay. This is a segment of good potentially growth ... ...continued on pg 16

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In Focus - HP PSG

February 2012

Eaton 5PX

The Power stakes Leading manufacturers, as this feature finds out, are well prepared to meet the growing needs of the SMB, soho and the home segment users for uninterrupted power solutions.

The Uninterruptible Power Supply Market is a significant growth opportunity. According to a new report from Pike Research, the global market for UPS systems will expand from $8.2 billion in 2011 to $9.4 billion in 2012, a year-on-year growth rate of 14%. The market is expected to grow to $13.2 billion by 2015. While the small UPS segment ( less than 10 KVA) still continues be the largest in terms of revenues, it is losing ground to large UPS solutions.

Rahul Sikka Sales Director - Power Quality, EATON

...continued on pg 4

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4

February 2012

News

Feature

ComGuard and GFI Software train their channel partners

...continued from pg 1 Like other segments, the recession did hurt the UPS market but there is a resurgence in demand with the increased penetration of power electronic devices, more deployments in networking, datacentres as well as additional projects coming up in manufacturing, construction etc. Further, the faster pace at which the global population is adopting a digital lifestyle, with multiple computing and storage requirements is expected to continue to drive demand for reliable power solutions.

ComGuard, a Dubai based leading value added distributor for IT security products and solutions in the Middle East and North Africa region recently held special training program for its channel partners on GFI Software products in UAE and Oman.

Businesses of all sizes from modest soho profiles and the SMB verticals to the larger enterprise users cannot afford the potential risk of power failures causing IT system breakdown, loss of critical data, inability to provide customer services and business losses etc. Therefore, the growing need to protect sensitive electronic devices from any potential grid power quality instability as well as the decreasing tolerance of downtime will be key drivers of growth in the power solutions market.

ComGuard conducted these training programs in association with GFI Software designed specifically to help channel partners to capitalize on the fast-growing email archiving and web monitor market in the region.

Experts from both ComGuard and GFI Software provided an overview and technical training on GFI Software solutions.

SMB powers ahead Leading UPS manufacturers are addressing the evolving needs of the market by focusing on greater efficiency in their product designs. While the requirements in the large data centres are by far the most viable opportunities, there is a significant uptake of power solution products in the SMB and Soho segments as well. As the SMB sector becomes more vibrant as well as reliant on more use of IT for Business productivity, failover backup power solutions are becoming increasingly important for them and manufacturers are benefiting from the rising demand.

Thierry Chamayou, Director - Business Development , Middle East& Africa, APC by Schneider Electric says, “Our Small Office Home Office (SOHO) and Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment is growing, and is partly attributed to the rise in demand for products that require fail over protection. Over the years we have successfully established a reputation for solid products which offer an almost instant ROI. Our aim is to simply offer best in class, robust solutions which offer peace of Mind whether it is for commercial or residential applications.”

He adds, “Amongst our most recent solutions for the SMB market we have introduced our Containerised Power and Cooling Facility modules which enable data center power and cooling capacity to be added in 500kW increments. During GITEX 2011 we also launched for the SOHO market our high performance UPS - BX650CI Back-UPS, which offer high backup power, maximum battery life to protect from loss of data, and also allow users to work through short power outages.”

Most top manufacturers offer a comprehensive suite of products that address all needs around power protection of sensitive equipment. EATON which offers a complete suite of power quality products for all customer segments has a broad product portfolio targeting SMB, SOHO & Home users as well. These include multi-socket surge suppressors, entry level basic UPS systems and advanced fully-featured premium products.

Rahul Sikka , Sales Director, Power Quality, says, Eaton“For most SMB customers today, work would come to a grinding halt without access to PC or Internet etc. IT is very integral to their everyday work. Further, you cannot discern the quality of power that is coming in as to whether it is within a frequency window or the ideal voltage window. In that case, they cannot afford to take a risk in case of power outages, power fluctuations etc which can affect critical applications. They need to get clean and secured power. “

Mohammad Mobasseri Sr. Vice President, ComGuard

Thierry Chamayou Director-Business Development, MEA, APC by Schneider Electric

He adds, “It is absolutely a necessity in the lesser developed economies of the region. Even some of the Northern Emirates for instance don’t have a good record when it comes to quality of power.

This is an unfortunate truth. There are outages and there are fluctuations. Since all of the IT systems run on electricity, you can’t afford not to secure all of that without proper UPS solutions. Of course, laptops may be used on batteries for a few hours but the rest of the infrastructure needs secure power backups, which is where UPS solutions come in,” adds Rahul.

The demand in the SMB segment is quite strong and presents an exciting opportunity for vendors and their distribution as well as reseller channel.

Akram H. Ayyad, General Manager of GBM Distribution, distributor of Socomec in the region notes that the segment presents one of the faster growing opportunities for the company’s business.

GBM Distribution is a fast growing focused distributor that is also associated with distribution of premium brands including IBM and Lenovo.

He says, “Socomec, a premium UPS brand with an outstanding track success record of producing quality products and solution since 1922, offers a comprehensive range of products for Home, SMB and corporate sectors and complements our existing portfolio of solutions. We have been working with the brand for some time now and are seeing great acceptance of these products by our customers across all segments.”

Having the distinction of being the single largest IBM Intel Servers, Storage and Lenovo distributor in the region, GBM Distribution covers the markets of UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq and Jordan and is aggressively building market share for Socomec in all these markets through its extensive channel network.

Ayyad adds, “The sales in the SMB segment are showing significant growth. This is in direct co-relation of increased IT usage among SMB sector clients for their critical Business operations.

We see a great potential for Socomec solutions in the SMB segment as it offers a complete suite of products that meet the different needs of customers depending on their size.” ...continued on pg 6

Brian Azzopardi, Product Manager of GFI Software who conducts training workshops, programs for GFI across world presided over the training programs for the channel partners both in UAE and Oman to provide the in-depth knowledge about WebMonitor and GFI MailArchiver. He also highlighted the key new features of GFI MailArchiver, called 'MailInsights' an Business Intelligence (BI) functionality embedded in MailArchiver, which extracts intelligent information from the emails to enhance the productivity.

The training was attended by a large number of channel partners both in UAE and Oman. And, at the end of the training programs, ComGuard offered its successful channel partners free of cost training certification from GFI Software.

Mohammad Mobasseri, Sr. Vice President, ComGuard, said, “We believe Information is key to success, hence we decided to roll out such a unique program to train and educate our partners on GFI WebMonitor and GFI MailArchiver to enable them to win more customers, as well as deploy and configure GFI Software solutions on their own in their respective countries”.

With the overwhelming response received from its channel partners ComGuard plans to conduct similar training programs for its channel partners to Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon among others in the Middle East region.

John Spoor, Channel Manager for Middle East and Africa, GFI Software, said, “The purpose of such training workshops is to update the skills sets of channel partners and provide them with necessary knowledge that equips them to maximize the potential of GFI software solutions in the growing marketplace”.

ASUS wins six CES 2012 Innovations Awards ASUS announced that six of its products have been selected for the CES 2012 Innovations Design and Engineering Awards honoree program. The products span four categories and include one Best of Innovations Award in Wireless Handsets.

Chosen by a pre-eminent panel of independent industry designers, engineers and journalists, the CES Innovations Design and Engineering Awards program recognizes the most innovative consumer electronics products across a broad range of categories. The awards have become a hallmark for the best-designed products in consumer technology and ASUS is thrilled that its brand promise of Inspiring Innovation Among the selected products, the new Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201 has been selected for an honoree award in the Personal Electronics category. With its quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, 10.1” Super IPS+ display and a sleek 8.3mm-thin spun metal case, the Transformer Prime is an eminently portable and powerful Android tablet that further sets itself apart from other tablets in the productivity stakes by way of a keyboard dock.

7

February 2012

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10 In Focus

February 2012 Febru

HP PSG

Mobility acceleration

GRAND FINALE concludes the search for the 2011 champions

HP PSG continues to be one of the top performing PC manufacturers worldwide as well as in the region. Salim Ziade, GM at HP PSG, Middle East in the following interview speaks about trends in the Mobility market.

Is the growth in Tablet shipments coming at the expense of the notebook shipments?

Tablets are experiencing significant uptake from consumers in the region, and are poised for further exponential growth in the coming year. As a result, the notebook market has been affected as tablets capture more of the market.

However, the impact on standard laptops has been negligible and tablets have yet to make a noticeable impact in the enterprise sector.

Are Ultrabooks seeing strong demand?

The introduction of the new Ultrabook has been an exciting moment for HP and our consumers.

Though the product has just been introduced in markets in limited quantities, the initial response far surpassed our expectations. The real question now is how far the Ultrabook will grow and what share it will gain in the longer term, across the wider market.

Will major launches expected this year such as Windows 8, Ivy League CPUs from Intel etc will give a momentum to PC sales overall?

Absolutely. The introduction of software, such as Microsoft Windows 8 and the Ivy League CPUs from Intel, are important and innovative developments that will transform the way consumers utilize and interact with their PC. These breakthroughs will further accelerate the demand for tablets, and also the use of cloud computing, a term that many consumers are still unsure of, amongst other trends.

Will the success of Ultrabooks in the market come at the expense of some of the conventional range of Notebooks although they have a premium price tag?

HP’s new Ultrabook combines HP’s most innovative business-rugged features and latest technologies with

manageability, business continuity and enhanced durability. Although the Ultrabooks come with a higher price tag than the conventional range of notebooks, we do expect consumers to pay the premium price for the additional features, security and flexibility that come along with the portability of the unit. This will undoubtedly affect other units in the notebook market, as consumers will be able to merge their personal and business requirements by using the Ultrabook.

Discuss some of the performance differentiators that some of your top of the range models offer vis-à-vis comparable competition products?

With higher customer satisfaction than its competitors, HP offers the highest-quality and most-reliable technology that is critical in today’s world. The top of the range model HP PSG offers is undoubtedly the workstation, which is a leader interms of its mobility and desktop features across the market. These high performance computers are engineered to deliver premium experience to satisfy the most demanding customers. For example, the HP Z800 Workstation, HP’s most powerful and expandable workstation for power users working with applications such as 3D animation, broadcast video, and medical imaging, can manage up to 192 GB of RAM. This line of workstations are developed and certified together with major software companies, such as Adobe and Schlumberger, and offer ground performance levels, at starting prices that rival those of traditional desktop computing systems.

How does HP make sure that consumers are grasping the differences in performance expectations from different models before they buy?

Our aim is to ensure that all our consumers worldwide are getting the most value from HP technology and are able to identify their requirements in the different models.

The key to this is providing specific and differentiated market messaging across our range of products and services. In addition, we invest significant training in the HP Sales Force on the ground, as well as organizing roadshows and briefings with our highly qualified chain of partners, who are then able to guide customers on buying the ideal product that meets their requirements.

The search for the champions of the In Search of a Champion 2011 edition came to a conclusion at a very competitive Grand Finale session which was held at the City Max Hotel in Bur Dubai on the 20th of January 2012. The Grand Finale included

several rounds of competition to select the best among the best. Initially, 20 finalists from over 150 participants of the year’s Training sessions were part of the first elimination round in the finals. The elimination round was based on a written quiz that included questions from vendor presentations during the year, to test the preparedness and dedication of the participants as well as included some additional general Awareness questions.

The list was pruned to 10 for further advanced rounds that aimed at testing selling skills and product knowledge.

Eminent jury members drawn from vendors and distributors who were associated with the In Search of a Champion 2011 edition asked the participants questions during the round and evaluated their performance. Based on the comparative scores at the end of this round, the list was pruned to the final five champions who are all entitled to different grand

their approach towards winning and losing through questions from the Jury. In order to ensure they were answering extempore and not giving prepared answers, they were called in one by one.

Following this, there was a Group Discussion round that tested the debating and persuasive skills of the salespeople as well as their drive to take the initiative as a leader. The final round included an activity that tested their innovative skills as they were asked to build a paper model of the Burj Khalifa.

There were at least three towers that were standing tall at the end and revealed the tenacity of the champions. It was a fitting and absorbing closure to the Grand Finale.

The results of the Grand Finale would be declared at the first round of the In Search of a Champion 2012 edition.

Top Champions Transworld Computer LLC Saqib Nisar TOP 5

Salim Ziade GM, HP PSG, Middle East

prizes. The prizes will be given away at the first edition of the 2012 In Search of a Champion.

The final three rounds were the highlight of the grand finale as participants saved their best for the last. The champion in each of them emerged as three different types of rounds tested their all round skills.

One was a personality round that tested

Scantrans Computers LLC Vishal Beriya Pc Me Computers

Mohammed Ahmed

Capsoft LLC

Rehan Ahmed

Tangerine LLC

Elyas Muriyala

Crown Tower Trading

Venkatraj

Complex Technologies LLC Mohammed Taqi Smile Computer

Mohammed Ali

Smile Computer

Mohammed Naseeruddin

Om Computers

Kishore Kumar

Luckystar Computers

Sujith Raju K

The Champion of Champions and the other winners will be declared at the next session of ISC

14 In Focus

February 2012

News

E2E

The Build up E2E is one of the distributors assigned by GFI Software for distribution of the AV software in the region. Terence Koshy, Senior Business Development manager at E2E Secure speaks to VAR Magazine in the following interview about how the distributor’s go to market strategies.

Xerox’s SmallPrinters for more small Businesses As workspace is at a premium and budgets are tight, small and midsized businesses can turn to ultra compact printers and multifunction device for high quality, affordable, documents.

Internet Security 2012 for one year, one PC and also Internet Security 2012 lifetime for 1 PC. For the consumer market, we offer AV with license for one pc for one year, AV with license for one year for 10 PCs and AV with lifetime license for one PC. Similarly, we offer three versions for Internet security.

We don’t have the 10 PC license available currently in market but will offer as the market builds up.

Are you looking to expand your security portfolio?

We manage only Vipre products as of now and are focusing on building marketshare for the products. Vipre is expanding into mobile security with a product that includes remote monitoring, data wipe etc. We are positioning ourselves as a value add distributor for Vipre with its growing range of products, providing training sessions, installation services etc as required. We will also finally have a team of people that would be dedicated to this product in the region.

Once we have fairly consolidated the reach for Vipre, we will look at adding products at the next stage of expansion which should be in the area of cloud computing solutions.

This would be our approach for all products we add in our portfolio.

Terence Koshy Senior Business Development Manager, E2E Secure

Discuss E2E’s distribution focus E2E was launched to provide end to end security in a scenario where the threats to network are increasing by the day. E2E is headquartered in Saif zone. E2E is a distributor for the AV and Internet security suites from GFI which owns the Vipre brand. We are assigned for the entire Middle East including GCC and the Levant countries as well as India and Pakistan.

Discuss some of the performance highlights?

This is a new generation AV that is built by GFI without customizing existing old engines that are available. It has all the relevant modules including Anti-Malware, Anti-Phishing, Anti-Rootkit built into one whole program.

The product is quite sparing in terms of memory utilization.

The product merely uses between 19-25 MBits of memory usage even during deep scans. This speed is much faster than many of the competitor products in the market.

One of the strengths of Vipre is that it features the Virtual malware analysis engine (MX-V). This isolates a suspicious looking/behaving program in the main memory and evaluates if it is a virus. Traditional AV products compare it to a database of virus signatures only. Vipre does signature scanning, does an indexing on those files and does a behavioral scanning and this is done by taking the program to a virtual environment and by executing it finds out if it is a virus or not. It then communicates to the database which is updated to include the new virus. Due to this reason, the scan success rate is quite high.

It is the only AV available that engine provides lifetime protection to PCs without the hassle of yearly renewals. We have a very good footprint in the US and UK. There are several Fortune 100 companies and even some critical government and military clients that use Vipre. Vipre itself stands for virus intrusion, protection, and remediation engine although its name also recalls the word Viper.

What are the different versions available?

We have the AV-consumer and Business versions. There are two versions in the latter- Vipre Antivirus Business and Vipre Business premium. The difference between the two would that the Vipre Business premium would have a bi-directional firewall. It also has a anti spam and the HIDS (host intrusion detection system) integrated into that. In the consumer side, there are currently Vipre AV 2012 1 year license for 1 PC; Vipre

How does lifetime free option benefit?

The retail prices for the version that offers lifetime warranty would be three and half times more than the one year license version. A PC that is being bought today may last 5-6 years and in its lifetime with no renewal fees involved, there would cost savings.

Dan Smith Marketing Head, MEA, Xerox’s

Xerox’s new ultra compact printers and multifunction device meets these requirments of the small and mid size Business customers.

Standing at just over 208 mm tall, nearly the size of a standard sheet of paper, the Xerox Phaser 3010/3040 offers print speeds of 20 to 24 pages per minute (ppm). The WorkCentre 3045 multifunction printer (MFP) copies, scans, faxes, e-mails, and prints documents all in one and produces output at 24 ppm. The products are among the smallest devices in the market and are powered by Hi-Q LED print engines – the same breakthrough technology found in some of Xerox’s higher-end graphic arts devices.

“Businesses of all sizes are faced with doing more with less – and small companies are especially challenged by this trend,” said Dan Smith, Head of Integrated Marketing for the Middle East and Africa region of Xerox’s Developing Markets Operations. “The Xerox Phaser 3010/3040 and WorkCentre 3045 MFP pack the productivity and functionality punch of high-end machines, at a fraction of the size.”

When we says lifetime protection including updates with the interface free for lifetime of the PC would be a strong message to buyers. This is highlighted quite visibly on the packaging.

The Phaser 3010/3040 printer and WorkCentre 3045 MFP run on Xerox’s EA toner, which uses up to 20 percent less power for fusing than conventional toner. And, with only one consumable item -- the toner cartridge -- users replace just what they need. The Hi-Q LED print engine makes the products quieter and more energy efficient than comparable products using laser technology.

When a PC in which the lifetime free version is formatted and rebooted, what happens to the AV license?

Viper lifetime free version takes three IDs into consideration.

It takes the Mac ID (Media Access Control address) of the NIC into consideration, the Mac ID of the hard disk as well as the IP address as well. Obviously the IP would not remain the same all the time. However during your next installation, atleast one of these three should remain the same.

PC DealNet to be Iomega B2B Distibutor

Are there versions for other operating systems?

It supports Windows OS but doesn’t offer support for Mac or Linux. Windows is the largest deployed OS while Mac is supposed to be a largely secure platform worldwide with chances of virus intrusions very slim.

Discuss your go to market strategies with retailers and resellers?

We are in discussions with power retailers such as Lulu.

Several power retailers have limited their portfolio currently to only three AV brands. Their reasoning is also that the shoppers who frequent their outlets is that they already have pre-decided choices of what they need to pick up and don’t have time to pick and choose.

In addition, the volume sales happen in reseller streets like Khaleed bin Waleed where large buyers are frequent. We are forging strong partnerships with several of them.

From our engagement, we noticed there are two kinds of resellers- who are price oriented and who are quality focused. We signed up with resellers Speed computers and Compuneeds Dubai who were on the lookout for an AV product that doesn’t slow down PC performance during scanning for the corporate segment customers.

We are educating our resellers and we are looking for stable organic growth. We are also exploring at ideas like reaching out through alternative channels like petrol stations, universities, schools etc. The acceptance level for Vipre is strong globally and it should be easier to build on that acceptance and credibility of the product. Plus Vipre has very less support issues.

Data protection solutions vendor Iomega, which is a subsidiary of storage giant EMC, has strengthened its small and medium business presence in the UAE, Oman & Bahrain distribution network, striking a deal with PC DealNet. Iomega believes that this channel move will ensure its B2B products and solutions are readily available to system integrators, surveillance SMB market, SMB resellers and VARs in QATAR & JORDAN. “With our focus on the SMB channel, this comes as part of a wider plan in Iomega’s investment in the ME region, to be on the ground to support the SMB market as well as the SMB business-to-business distribution structure. With PC DEALNET, we are fulfilling another part of our B2B formula. PC DealNet has been chosen because of its strength and reach to different channel segments, whether it is system integrators, resellers or corporate resellers. We are confident PC DEALNET will be an important addition to our existing distribution partners in the region," explained Cizar Abu Ghazaleh, regional director for the META at Iomega.

Cizar Abu Ghazaleh Regional Director, ME, Africa & Turkey, Iomega