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Dear reader, We held the 4th edition of the Integrator ICT Champion Awards on the 18th of May at St. Regis in Dubai. The gala evening was a powerhouse in terms of attendance from the stakeholders of the ICT value Business. The increasing number of votes with each edition proves that the credibility of these awards are on the ascendancy. The increase in number of votes polled is also driven by the mobilization drive of participating nominees with their partners. Further, from our end, we ensure that our communication to our database is consistent in the build-up to the survey so that the voter turnout is maximum, a key criterion for ensuring greater legitimacy for these awards. The event brought to a culmination a process that lasted over two months. While the whole exercise demands painstaking attention from the team, the end results are gratifying as it helps recognize so many deserving companies. Further, the fact that this is the only media platform that is dedicated to the value Business ecosystem in the region means that the responsibility is immense to get it right. The winners of the awards truly deserve these honours for they have come up trumps via the online survey. I hope you will enjoy perusing through this compilation.
Contents NetApp- Betting on a Flash future - 8
................................................................................ AvayaAn integrated approach - 12
................................................................................ GenetecScalable solutions - 16
................................................................................ Schneider ElectricA Power Centre - 20
................................................................................ Condo ProtegoQuest to excel - 24
................................................................................ FinesseGrowth with a plan - 28
................................................................................ Global DistributionEnabling partners - 32
................................................................................ Promise Technology Forte in storage - 34
Vivek Sharma Founder & CEO VAR Marketing Management LLC JNS Media International
Publisher: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. Narayan Art Director: Faiz Ahmed
Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Business Development Manager: Mallika Rego Sales Manager: Christopher David Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh
Published by: JNS Media International MFZE
P.O. Box: 121075, Montana Building 404, Zabeel Road, Near GPO, Karama, Dubai-UAE Tel: 04-3705022 Fax: 04-3706639 Disclaimer: While the publishers have made every attempt possible to get accurate information on published content in this handbook they cannot be held liable for any errors herein.
Integrator Awards 2016 Ceremony
2016 Integrator ICT Champion Awards celebrates the best The 4th edition of the prestigious ICT Champion Integrator Awards ceremony, held at the majestic St.Regis hotel on the 18th of May applauded the best performing vendors, distributors and system integrators of the year in the ICT solutions business. The Awards are held by The Integrator magazine, the unrivalled leader in channel publications catering to the value add ICT segment and which is published by JNS Media International MFZE. The Integrator Awards come under the broader banner of the ICT Champion Awards initiative that include the highly popular VAR COC (Choice of Channel Awards) that have concluded 10
editions to date. The process included a nominations phase and an online survey. The awards survey witnessed a significant rise in number of votes from the SI database across the region vis-a-vis past years. The winners were decided on the maximum votes polled in each category by participating nominees. Mr. Vivek Sharma, CEO of
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JNS Media International and publisher of The Integrator said, “The Integrator ICT Champion Awards follow a comprehensive methodology in helping recognize the best performances over the past year. It is heartening to see that the ICT value Business is continuing to show resilience and growth, which these awards applaud.� One of the highlights of
The 2016 Integrator Awards Winners
the evening’s gala event also included a brilliant but brief sketching session by Victor Sitali, a gifted young artist from Zambia that was much appreciated by attendees. Victor Sitali got an opportunity to showcase his talent in front of a large audience and his speed Painting of Sheikh Mohammed was applauded by everyone. Victor overcame his handicap of losing his power of hearing at the tender age of three and has discovered his talents with the paintbrush. The organizers of the Awards are also thankful to Mr. Jude Pereira, Managing Director, Nanjgel Solutions who came forward and in a wonderful and spontaneous gesture, announced his willingness to sponsor the further education of Mr. Victor.
Cloud Computing Vendor of the Year Virtualisation Vendor of the Year Converged Infrastructure Vendor of the Year SMB Storage Vendor of the Year Enterprise Storage Vendor of the Year SMB Networking Vendor of the Year Enterprise Networking Vendor of the Year Unified Communications Vendor of the Year Data Management & Analytics Vendor of the Year Disaster Recovery and Backup Solutions Vendor of the Year Endpoint Security Software Vendor of the Year Network Security Appliance Vendor of the Year IP Surveillance Solutions Vendor of the Year Secure Access Solutions Vendor of the Year Applications Delivery Solutions Vendor of the Year Enterprise Mobility Management Vendor of the Year Power Solutions Vendor of the Year DCIM Solutions Vendor of the Year Cabling Infrastructure Vendor of the Year Print Management Solutions Vendor of the Year Network Monitoring Solutions Vendor of the Year Networking VAD of the Year Information Security VAD of the Year Storage VAD of the Year Mobility Solutions VAD of the Year Unified Communications VAD of the Year Networking Integrator of the Year Storage Integrator of the Year Security Integrator of the Year Enterprise Applications Integrator of the Year Telecom Integrator of the Year Managed Services Provider of the Year Emerging Integrator of the Year Emerging VAD of the Year Visionary Integrator of the Year Visionary VAD of the Year SMB Channel Champion Vendor of the Year Enterprise Channel Champion Vendor of the Year IP Surveillance Storage Vendor of the Year Datacentre Integrator of the Year Endpoint security VAD of the Year
Microsoft Gulf FZ - LLC VMware FZ-LLC Pivot3 Middle East NetApp Dell Middle East Linksys Cisco Systems International Avaya SAP Middle East & North Africa LLC Dell Software Kaspersky Lab Fortinet Middle East Sony Middle East Genetec Middle East Barracuda Networks Sophos Schneider Electric FZE ManageEngine Nexans Xerox Middle East Riverbed Technology FZ LLC Aptec, an Ingram Micro Company Spire Solutions StorIT Distribution FZCO Oxygen Middle East Almoe Digital Solutions LLC Alpha Data Condo Protego Nanjgel Solutions Finesse Emitac Enterprise Solutions OMA Emirates-Solution Gulf Genome Technology Consultants TNC Middle East FZE Help AG Middle East FZ-LLC Global Distribution FZE D-Link Middle East & Africa Avaya PROMISE Technology EMEA STME Al Hosani Computer LLC
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Integrator Awards 2016
Cloud Computing Vendor of the Year
Microsoft,, the winner of the category for the third successive year, is among the top vendors in the space and offers a comprehensive range of cloud computing products as well as services
Converged Infrastructure Vendor of the Year
Pivot3, the winner in the category is a company that has seen more than 50 per cent revenue increase from the final 2015 quarter to the latest quarter. It has considerably grown its development team, sales team and channel network. 6 | Integrator Awards 2016 - HandBook
Virtualisation Vendor of the Year
VMware, the winner of the category is a vendor that has been a pioneer and continues to be the leading choice among Businesses and data centres globally looking to implement virtualization.
Enterprise Storage Vendor of the Year
Dell was the winner yet again as it follows a strategy to deliver on an open, scalable design to make enterprise features a reality for companies of all sizes, as well as to make advanced storage functionality affordable to own and operate
SMB Storage Vendor of the Year | NetApp
NetApp, a vendor that takes pride in offering simplicity and affordability through its solutions for small and midsize businesses, emerged the winner in the SMB Storage Vendor of the Year category. Fadi Kanafani, Regional Director Middle East & Africa discusses various aspects of the company’s storage focus
Betting on a Flash future Discuss how the Middle East has shaped up for NetApp in recent years? The MEA region is a promising market for NetApp. Although MEA has lagged a little behind other regions in the adoption of virtualisation technology, cloud is driving significant IT infrastructure spending in enterprises and government departments. The traditional storage market is slowing while segments that customers are shifting towards, new workloads and architectures, are growing. Furthermore, the digital world is generating exponential data growth. Data is at the heart of IT transformations and the hybrid cloud. Data management is
our core value proposition – this is our big opportunity. Are Flash solutions of significance to the region? Certainly, Flash is currently one of our core priorities in terms of our offerings to the MEA region. This is mainly because Flash solutions are changing the expectations and economics of enterprise IT. NetApp offers the industry’s broadest all flash portfolio, allowing customers to move toward an all flash data center while still using what they’ve already deployed and leveraging the cloud. Our new Flash Advantage 3-4-5 Program makes flash even more affordable, efficient, and risk-free – and we guarantee it.
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Comment on demand for all flash enterprise storage solutions? Now, many regional organizations are in the midst of a transition as they evaluate the role of new technologies and delivery models for their IT environments. For instance, businesses are looking to tightly couple rich data efficiency and management with their business critical, revenue generating applications to strengthen their position in the local markets and deliver better results. By combining responsiveness and reliability, flash can help companies achieve faster business results and enhance their
customers’ experience. NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) built on the clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system, addresses enterprise storage requirements with high performance, flexibility and best-in-class data management. Elaborate about NetApp’s strategy for software defined storage? NetApp has been working for a number of years to ensure that its SDS software is able to interact with a number of other vendor storage platforms. NetApp’s FlexArray allows users to virtualise existing NetApp or competitors’ arrays and create software-defined storage – effectively enabling a Data Fabric and clustered data management functionality. This is essential not only for businesses but also for resellers. It is vital to give customers the choice and agility within their IT infrastructure, not locking customers into one line of products. The focus is on providing solutions that enable the CIO to mix and match to answer their business’s needs effectively. Are there enough options of cloud based solutions for
SMB customers in market? The fact that the cloud model enables companies to leverage brand-new solutions and only pay what they consume makes it extremely attractive for SMBs. As a consequence, IT decision makers in the SMB now increasingly look to move to the cloud. One important step here is to analyse which business applications are cloud-ready and are the easiest to be migrated. Today, there are multiple cloud based storage solutions available in the market and SMB customers can customise them according to their requirements. The Data Fabric allows companies to implement a multi-cloud infrastructure. With the NetApp solution for Private Cloud Storage, customers. E.g. can use different hyper-scale cloud offerings, yet retain sovereignty over their data. What should be the back-up strategy of SMBs in MEA? To manage the ever-growing flood of data, SMBs need a long-term functioning backup strategy with solutions that scale with the growth of their own business. The integration of cloud technologies such as Backup-as-a-Service in the owned IT infrastructure
is the first important step in improving data security. Here, backup is stored with the service provider. They are responsible for making sure you stay compliant with internal and external data safety policies. This will also allow you to restore data quickly and safely in the case of any data loss. Not only does this improve business efficiency: it streamlines the daily routines of the in-house IT teams, relieving them of daily workload and freeing up time for strategic IT projects. Ultimately, this will enable them to effectively support the overall business strategy. How does benefits of Flash storage translate to business benefits for organisations? Business competition demands companies to have high responsiveness from key business operations. Faster time to market translates to greater customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. That's why forward-looking IT professionals increasingly embrace all-flash storage. By speeding performance and reducing latency, flash accelerates business value— driving revenue, enhancing the customer experience, and reducing costs through consolidation.
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Integrator Awards 2016
SMB Networking Vendor the Year
Linksys, a brand that re-launched its SMB portfolio over two years ago, emerged winner of this category. Linksys offers a wide range of Routers, Range Extenders, Access Point, Power Line Kits, Switches, etc and has a strong channel reach.
Data Management & Analytics Vendor of the Year
SAP, the winner of this category, offers software solutions which help realize the potential of analytics, Big Data, the business network, and IoT to innovate new business models, deliver unique customer experiences, and run world-class business processes. 10 | Integrator Awards 2016 - HandBook
Enterprise Networking Vendor of the Year
Cisco, the winner of the category, has expanded its vision of emerging technologies like SDN and IoT and is offering a range of solutions that can help organisations innovate faster, simplify operations, and reduce risk.
Disaster Recovery and Backup Solutions Vendor of the Year
Dell Software, the winner in the category is a vendor that has strengthened its portfolio in the segment with new launches and is leveraging its overall enterprise portfolio and channel reach.
Endpoint Security Software Vendor of the Year
Kaspersky Lab, the winner of the category’ has unveiled a multilayered solution aimed at targeted attacks, and also announced new enterprise-focused Security Intelligence Services.
IP Surveillance Solutions Vendor of the Year
Analysts forecast the global security appliance market to grow at a CAGR of 11.38% during the period 2016-2020. Sony Professional, the winner, is a manufacturer that has been a front runner in the 4K based security solutions.
Network Security Appliance Vendor of the Year
Fortinet, the winner of this category is a company that is a leader in firewalls and has recently unveiled its new ‘security fabric’ that aims to unify what have been autonomous systems for stronger security.
Applications Delivery Solutions Vendor of the Year
The Application Delivery Network Market technology deals with the demand for greater application mobility and security in a distributed enterprise. The winner of this category for the year is Barracuda Networks Integrator Awards 2016 - HandBook | 11
Unified Communications Vendor of the Year | Avaya
An integrated approach Avaya, the winner of the category is a vendor that is a global leader in team engagement solutions based on unified communications and collaboration technologies. The company is working with some of the largest organizations in the region to help them achieve the goal of improved user productivity and to enhance business processes as related to communications and collaboration. Fadi Moubarak, Channel Leader at Avaya International discusses the vendor’s extensive focus on UC. Elaborate how unified communications is today an integral part of Business environments and is seeing rising adoption in the region? Internal and external business communications are crucial to the speed and success of digital transformation strategies, and are at the center of the convergence of service, sales and marketing. The relevance of unified communications further increases in a world of mobility, apps, social, and cloud, where the workforce
becomes more seamlessly connected and productivity increases. Currently we see that the small-to-medium enterprise – not the small-to-medium business – market is driving demand for UC services from cloud providers as more entrepreneurial companies are willing to design business processes from scratch, based on the utilization of technology. With an entire range available from cloud to on premises, how do you
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help customers choose best options? We are actively encouraging our channel partners to be close to their customers, and work with them to start defining the right unified communications solution to benefit their business outcomes. We believe that Cloud providers delivering Unified Communications-as-a-Service ( UCaaS) are going to bring adoption barriers down and exponentially accelerate UC adoption. This is because of the ease of provisioning such
services for organizations that do not have internal expertise and the elimination of front end CAPEX. How you are rolling out UC as a cloud service across the region? We are working with VIVA Bahrain, a leading telecommunications provider in Bahrain, to offer Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaas) to businesses in the Kingdom of Bahrain. VIVA Bahrain will host Avaya’s innovative Unified Communications, Video and Contact Center solutions and make them available to enterprises in a cloud services model, enabling organizations to purchase the capacity and services they require, as and when needed, without large upfront costs. How Avaya has integrated mobility into your set of UC solutions? Avaya’s integrated approach to Team Engagement Solutions enables richer, more productive interactions with both customers and teams while allowing the technology to ‘disappear,’ for a more natural, less disruptive means of meeting across distances. Avaya creates a seamless engagement
experience for customers and employees where users can have telephony, messaging, conferencing, contact center, video, and unified communications—all in a flexible platform from Avaya regardless of their locations, devices, or applications. In the Middle East, Africa and India, Avaya’s videoconferencing solution has been delivering an outstanding growth, and is becoming an essential tool, not only for collaboration, but also the basis of innovating mobile solutions for a number of vertical industries. Highlight how Avaya Breeze is helping enhance UC deployment options? Avaya Breeze is a single integrated environment that allows UC applications to be built in a way that reflects real business processes and customer requirements and not technology silos. It is the next generation of the Avaya Engagement Development Platform which provides an entirely new way to develop business communications applications, profoundly simplifying application development, while delivering built-in capabilities for enhanced mobile, customer-facing and hybrid/
cloud requirements. With Avaya Breeze, organizations can deliver enhanced business value and execute on their digital strategies by integrating communications and collaboration into workflows, business processes and existing applications. The open framework allows organizations to automate manual processes to improve digital experiences, while workflow-based applications can be created within a matter of hours or days, rather than months. The Avaya Snapp Store provides a delivery mechanism, allowing a single integrated experience via browsers and native smart apps for entirely new customer experiences. Discuss innovations built in for customer analytics? Built on Avaya Breeze, Avaya Oceana is a truly multi-touch customer engagement solution which gives companies the freedom and flexibility to create, innovate, optimize and future-proof customer journey-driven experiences. Fueling the real-time decision capabilities and customer journey insight is Avaya Oceanalytics, a modular and flexible analytics and reporting platform.
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Integrator Awards 2016
Enterprise Mobility Management Vendor of the Year
Sophos, the winner of this category is a company that was placed in the Top Players quadrant by The Radicati Group in its Enterprise Mobility Management – Market Quadrant 2016 report.
Cabling Infrastructure Vendor of the Year
Nexans, the winner in this growth segment is a company that provides a complete range of solutions for segments including Power transmission and distribution, Energy resources, Transportation and Building. 14 | Integrator Awards 2016 - HandBook
DCIM Solutions Vendor of the Year
ManageEngine, the winner of this category is a company that provides realtime IT management tools and serves over 120,000 companies around the world, including several Fortune 500 companies.
Print Management Solutions Vendor of the Year
Xerox, the winner of this category is a company that has been a pioneer and leader in Managed Print Services over the years and offers the full spectrum of services from managed print services to workflow automation.
Secure Access Solutions Vendor of the Year | Genetec
Discuss the company’s focus on the Middle East region’s surveillance market? Genetec has always been true to its commitment of providing its customers with the option of greater choice. This started with our initial offering of an open architecture video management system called Omnicast, which dates back to the time when closed architecture analogue systems were king. Our offers now extend to the subscription-based model for our unified security platform, Security Center. Customers want more options, and their buying behaviors have now shifted towards solutions that require lower upfront costs. These preferences have prompted us to offer Security Center Subscription--a new model that allows client access to the on-premises Security Center System with a term contract that includes updates, support and trials to cloud services. While our perpetual license model for Security Center is always available, some customers might prefer to make monthly or annual payments for the duration for which they require the security system. And that’s what it is all about—letting our
Genetec, a leading vendor that develops openarchitecture software, hardware and cloudbased services for the physical security and public safety industry emerged the winner of the Secure Access Solutions Vendor of the Year category at the 2016 Integrator ICT Champion Awards. Firas Jadalla, Regional Director – MEA, Genetec discusses the company’s focus in the segment and the region.
Scalable solutions customer decide what is best for their organization. Elaborate on the inroads you have made in the region? More than ten years ago, the Dubai International Airport sought to upgrade its existing closed-architecture analogue system, wanting to implement a more robust, user-friendly and scalable network-based platform that would be capable of handling over 1,000 cameras and accommodate its then expansion plans. In addition, the new video surveillance system also had to be successfully implemented
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at other international airports. After much deliberation, Dubai Airports chose Genetec’s Omnicast IP video surveillance. The selection was attributed to the system’s proven ability to scale up to thousands of cameras, while maintaining high system availability. Today, Dubai Airports has over 6,500 cameras on the Omnicast system at Dubai International and another 1,200 cameras at Al Maktoum International, which were gradually upgraded in three phases. The flexibility of the open architecture video surveillance system
allowed Dubai Airports to preserve existing analogue investments by simply adding IP encoders, while also installing newer IP camera models throughout the expansion. Elaborate on your secure access solutions under Synergis and key customer verticals? Synergis is the IP access control system that heightens an organization’s security and increases readiness to respond to incidents—while also leveraging an existing network and security equipment investments. Its access control is engineered to handle the needs of modern and growing organizations, which ranges from controlling access to managing cardholders and visitors, printing badges and running investigations. Discuss your IP surveillance appliance portfolio for various customer profiles? We have a diverse portfolio of offerings that cater to a wide range of customers, who come from various industry verticals. As what has been pointed out earlier, our products and services include Security Center, a unified security platform
built on an open-architecture that seamlessly combines IP-based access control, video management systems and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) within a single intuitive interface to simplify operations and Synergis, an IP access control system that heightens an organization’s security with increased readiness to respond to incidents, while leveraging the existing network and security equipment investments. Omnicast, Genetec’s IP video management system (VMS) provides organizations of all sizes the ability to deploy a surveillance system that truly matches their security needs. Supporting a wide range of industry-leading cameras, encoders and CCTV equipment, Omnicast™ scales and adapts to the changing demands of any security department and AutoVu, an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) system in Security Center. Aside from these products, we also have Network Security Appliances like the SV 16 V3, a compact, lightweight turnkey appliance that enables customers to implement a unified video surveillance and access control system within a small
installation, supporting 16 cameras and 16 readers and the SV-32 V2, a turnkey hybrid system supporting analogue and IP video surveillance and access control preinstalled with Security Center, supporting 32 cameras and up to 100 readers. Have you increased your channel in the region? Genetec provides solutions that offer clear addedvalue to our customers. We create this value by partnering with likeminded organizations, which demonstrate equal dedication to shared causes and commitments, especially in hearing what customers say and driven to innovate. We focus on building strong relationships with dedicated integrators and distributors in the region. Much of our success in the region comes from the mutual respect and long-term loyalty built with all our partners. Have you appointed any distributors? To date, Genetec is closely working with Aligntech and Connexion, which allows us to expand our reach and cover the whole Middle East region.
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Integrator Awards 2016
Network Monitoring Solutions Vendor of the Year
Riverbed, the winner of the category is a company that has successfully completed its transformation from a mono-product company focused on WAN-optimization to the provider of the most comprehensive platform for application performance.
Information Security VAD of the Year
Spire Solutions, the category winners is a company that is a specialist in the Information security software solutions space and brings leading edge solutions in this space to the region consistently.
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Networking VAD of the Year
Aptec, an Ingram Micro company, a leader in bringing innovative new technologies to complement its expanding portfolio is the winner of the category ‘Networking VAD of the Year’. The company allies with several leading enterprise technology vendors.
Storage VAD of the Year
StorIT Distribution FZCO, with a strong forte in the data management, cloud and storage domain, scored a fourth successive win with this year’s win in the Storage VAD of the year category.
Power Solutions Vendor of the Year | Schneider Electric
A Power Centre The rising adoption of energy efficient power technologies in the growing datacentre market will see the power market growing considerably in the coming years. Schneider Electric, the winner is of this category is a company that offers one of the largest portfolios of products and solutions for small, medium and large data center environments. Ziad Youssef – Vice President of IT Business, Gulf Countries, Schneider Electric discusses the company’s extensive solutions focus on the datacentre Elaborate how your datacentre solutions business is growing? APC by Schneider Electric is witnessing steady demand in the region due to the growing uptake of datacentres as well as the increasing IT and digital readiness. Regional governments are heavily investing in state-of-the-art technologies to re-vamp its industries to make them more efficient, smart and interconnected. The datacentre market will further grow as the region aspires to create smart, sustainable and
digitized cities. With the onset of Internet of Things (IoT) connecting more devices than ever, a solid infrastructure will be essential to industrial and manufacturing enterprises and for all businesses. The UAE’s data center market – for instance expects significant growth, with International Data Corporation (IDC) predicting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3 per cent for the 2013-2018 period. According to a 2015 MicroMarket Monitor report, the GCC is seeing
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an increasing demand for datacentres, due to the broad adoption of cloud computing and related technologies. This has directly impacted the DCIM sector across the Middle East and Africa, which is expected to reach USD 397.1 million in 2017, up from USD 41.6 million in 2012 - at a compound annual growth rate of 57 per cent. APC thus sees tremendous opportunities for growth and anticipates the expansion of its loyal customer base.
What have been key recent product announcements over the past year? Schneider Electric has always kept up with evolving technologies and changing demands. In order to address the growing need for latency as data multiplies faster than ever before, Schneider Electric has been invested in expanding solutions and applications to support Edge Computing. This new trend addresses latency challenges and enables companies to better leverage a cloud-based architecture. Some of Schneider Electric’s applications which contribute to the Edge Computing include localized datacentre infrastructures, racks, and prefabricated or modular datacentres. Schneider Electric also introduced Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize, a software module available within the Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) suite StruxureWare for Data Centers. This new capability adds intelligence to existing data center cooling systems, enabling significant energy reduction and cost of operations, as well as reduced risk of cooling incidents. Earlier this year, Schneider Electric launched its second-
generation InRow DX, expanding Schneider Electric’s vast cooling portfolio to meet the evolving cooling needs of an ever-changing data center environment. Given the growing demand for density cooling and temperature management in data center, the InRow DX has been designed to lower energy costs and features enhanced controls and a new user interface. Discuss your Data Center Consultancy services? Our partners are crucial to our success, are a core component of our business model. We work closely with them to showcase our innovations in this space to a large and evolving customer base. Our Data Center certified professionals support partners to deliver critical consultancy for customers. We have training programs, online datacentre design tools, a datacentre reference library and other tools which enables our partners to reliably help customers through consultancy of critical IT infrastructures and advice on best practices. Discuss some of the innovations in your cooling solutions for datacentres? APC by Schneider Electric
offers a complete line of cooling products that range from Rack to Row to Room to Building, as well as solutions that enable the monitoring and management of the cooling systems. These solutions cater to the growing demand for cooling solutions. These solutions are offered a suite of services, including the industry’s leading warranty for perimeter cooling solutions. This means that for the first year that the system is in operation, in the event of any downtime or parts replacement requirement, there is no need for a financial transaction between the contractor and APC by Schneider Electric. We also offer technical support to our customers whenever needed. APC’s EcoAisle, for instance, is an intelligent thermal containment solution designed to increase cooling system efficiency, predictability and capacity at the rack, row or room level. Another example is InRow Chilled Water Cooling for medium to large datacentres, which prevents hot air recirculation, while improving cooling predictability and comes with scalable, flexible payment plans.
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Integrator Awards 2016
Mobility Solutions VAD of the Year
In the past few years, Mobility solutions have come to the fore in enterprise environment. Catering to this demand, Oxygen, the winner of the category is a company that has a comprehensive focus on offering Secure Mobility Solutions.
Networking Integrator of the Year
Alpha Data, the winner of this category is one of the leading integrators of the region, offers a vast range of solutions and has a focus on emerging areas including IoT and cloud services.
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Unified Communications VAD of the Year
The winner of the category, Almoe Digital Solutions, is a company that offers a large number of technologies to provide high definition and high quality communication hardware and services to allow quality collaboration.
Security Integrator of the Year
Nanjgel Solutions, the winner is a company that is one of the faster growing integrators in the segment and provides solutions around data security, network security, application security, user security, security intelligence and analysis.
Identifying Channel
Enabling Partners
Distributing Solutions
Promoting Vendors
Supporting Business
Storage Integrator of the Year | Condo Protego
Condo Protego differentiates its market strategy as consultative. Discuss this approach in detail with enterprise customers? We are not a traditional reseller focused on trading and supplying technology. It is our view that purchasing even the best technology does not necessarily address the customer’s business requirement that led to the investment in the first place. Instead, our approach is to work with the customer to understand their business need, and help them develop and quantify their requirement. We then design a customized reference architecture to meet this requirement. Of course, this also means we need to have a deep understanding of the technology so that we are able flesh out and execute this reference architecture. This bespoke approach is what our enterprise customers need. Are key verticals in the region showing a healthy pace and readiness in spending on modernizing storage infrastructure? In the past 4-6 quarters, we are seeing organizations continuing to invest in modernizing not only their
Quest to excel Condo Protego, winner of the Storage Integrator of the Year category for the second successive year at the ICT Champion Awards is a company that has a strong focus on storage systems, data availability, management, protection and recovery. Savitha Bhaskar, COO, Condo Protego discusses the outlook for storage investments as well as emerging trends storage but also their datacenters. We see this across all verticals from government/public sector, to banking and finance, retail and distribution, transport and tourism, oil and gas and education. Discuss the key solutions from key vendors you are allied with for software driven storage? Is this key to next generation infrastructure? Software-defined storage and
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software-defined data center solutions are among the top 5 growth areas for us. Condo Protego is aligned with leading software-driven storage innovator EMC, which offers a wide array of software-defined storage solutions such as VIPR, VPLEX and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). In the software-defined data center space, there is increasing demand for EMC’s converged and hyperconverged infrastructure from VCE.
Discuss adoption trends of all-flash storage in enterprise segment for various use case scenarios? Is this a growth area for Condo Protego? All-flash storage, is the approach of choice for almost all our customers. All-flash is no longer a luxury option. With Flash drives offering much larger capacities, and costs going down, the acquisition cost for All-flash arrays has never been this low or attractive. Also operational cost for All-flash is lower due to its smaller footprint in terms of datacenter space, power and cooling consumption. All this has accelerated its adoption. We have various All-flash options from EMC for different use cases and are seeing strong growth in all segments, particularly at the very highend; for example, one of the very first EMC VMAX All-flash arrays was delivered by us last quarter. Comment on milestones for the company over the year including accolades from vendors. Condo Protego continues to go from strength-to-strength as one of the region’s leading Storage and Security VAR. We have continued to achieve double-digit revenue growth
in 2014 and in 2015, and our H1 2016 achievement is higher compared to last year’s same period. In 2015, Condo Protego topped 250 enterprise customers, including the region’s leading educational institutions, banks, hotels, airports, utilities, and government entities. Condo Protego also earned the highest-possible partnership status with all of its industry-leading technology partners. Condo Protego was recently crowned by Veritas as the “Most Valuable Partner” in the Middle East and Africa and “Enterprise Partner of the Year – Gulf”. Similarly, EMC also recognized Condo Protego for having the highest growth in incremental business in the South Gulf. Condo Protego was a finalist in several categories in the 2016 Industry awards and won Storage Integrator of the Year at The Integrator’s ICT Champion Awards 2016. You have been focusing on growing your security line of Business. Discuss the inroads? In 2015, Condo Protego accomplished its goal of becoming a serious player in the cybersecurity field. Condo
Protego is now continuing its growth plan. In the past 6 quarters, in addition to domains we already offered, we are seeing success in domains like Security Analytics, user authentication, and hosted and cloud-based security solutions, from leading vendors such as RSA and Symantec. Mention any large key projects completed over the year? Condo Protego was fortunate to have successfully deployed a number of key projects in the recent months. In the UAE, a leading higher education institution adopted an innovative Data Storage and Data Protection Consolidation Project across 17 campuses, and Condo Protego designed a highperformance computing platform running on EMC XtremIO for two of the UAE’s largest banks. In the region, Condo Protego consolidated the storage of one of the world’s largest insurance companies across its Middle East, Turkey, and Africa offices, and consolidated backup solutions across the UAE and Asian operations of a major oil and gas company.
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Integrator Awards 2016
Telecom Integrator of the Year
The category recognises a company that has been quite successful in delivering solutions for different industry verticals and has a strong reach in the Telecom sector. Emitac was declared this year’s winner
Emerging Integrator of the Year
This award went to a Genome Technology, a company which is relatively young as an SI and has been building its Business through focus on chosen domains including networking and UC.
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Managed Services Provider of the Year
OMA Emirate, the winner of the category is a company that has been a cutting edge provider of technology for the payment industry and has received a tremendous response to the company’s Managed Services offerings.
Visionary Integrator of the Year
The award recognizes outstanding vision of an integrator in specific domains and verticals. This year’s winner was Help AG, a company that is a leading cyber security services, solutions and consultancy provider in the region.
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Enterprise Applications Integrator of the Year | Finesse
Finesse, a company that provides services to over 60 banks & financial institutions internationally, was the winner of the Enterprise Applications Integrator of the Year at the ICT Champion Awards 2016. They are lead players in the areas of BI, ECM, Governance, Risk & Compliance and Corporate Performance Management apart from many other banking & finance applications. Sunil Paul, co-founder and COO of the company discusses how the company pursues excellence in all its domains of focus Does the BFSI sector continue to the single largest vertical of focus for the company in terms of solutions you offer? Discuss other key verticals? Large chunk of Finesse revenue is always contributed by the BFSI sector as we work with almost 70% of the banks in the region. We have a suite of domain solutions for financial sector covering Customer On-boarding, Core / Islamic, Trade Finance, Treasury, Lending, AML, Real Time Fraud Management, Risk Management, Regulatory Reporting, Digital Channels etc. However we also
Growth with a plan have a sizeable business coming from other verticals including Education, Energy, Government, Healthcare etc. Elaborate on key highlights for the company in the past year in terms of investments in specific domains of competence? We have heavily invested in building our practice on Big Data Analytics, IOT solutions and future infra solutions including converged infrastructure, SDN etc. We have had our first customer going live for Real Time Fraud Management in the financial services industry and have launched a suite of
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Healthcare IOT solutions. We continue to build up the Big Data & IOT eco-system with new partners and innovative solutions. You have had some announcements including the partnership with EMC? Discuss others as well that you may have executed in the past year? We have signed up with EMC to primarily focus on their content and enterprise information management solutions. We have signed up with one of the world’s fastest growing software solutions company, Salesforce to offer their CRM & Customer
Experience Management Solutions. Our partnership with IBM lead us into enterprise segment providing end to end solutions. We have also brought in the world’s top BPM vendor Appian into the region. Discuss your focus in Enterprise Content Management and the demand in the region? Which are the solutions you offer in this domain? The region may take some more time to embrace EIM implementations, however there are enough projects on Document Management, Imaging & Archival, Work flow automation / BPM etc. We implement EMC Documentum for Enterprise Document management, represent Kofax for Enterprise Scanning / Imaging and use Appian for Business process Automation among other tools. At Finesse, we have created a library of processes for which will drastically reduce the time of BPM deployments. Elaborate on the converged solutions portfolio you offer? What is the demand from your clients? We have recently added Infra solutions to our portfolio with
the partnership with VCE. We have seen that many of our clients are asking for faster deployments, agility and reduced maintenance, hence solutions such as converged infrastructure and SDN are making way into our offerings. We are working on to close some large enterprise deals shortly in the converged solutions sector. You also offer Corporate performance management from Tagetik – why should companies look to deploy these solutions? would these be in addition to other Finance management modules they may have deployed? Corporate performance management (CPM) is the area of business intelligence (BI) involved with monitoring and managing an organization's performance, according to key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, return on investment (ROI), overhead, and operational costs. CPM is an umbrella term that describes the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise. Tagetik CPM helps organizations to do
better planning, budgeting, forecasting and efficient consolidation of their financial reports. Tagetik CPM sits on top of any ERP or other financial systems and also can work with the existing BI systems. Discuss other areas of focus for the company including analytics? We are investing and bringing in a plethora of analytics frameworks into the region using big data platforms or otherwise. Apart from Real Time Fraud management, we have also introduced analytics solutions for government, healthcare, retail and telco sectors. We will bringing in more solutions into this segment in the coming months. What are the strengths you would summarize are key to Finesses when compared to larger SIs in the verticals that you focus on? Our domain knowledge is always our strength. To our clients, we are much more than a technology company and always a partner who understand their business and work closely with them to increase their revenue and improve efficiency while reducing costs.
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Emerging VAD of the Year | TNC
The Network Center - also known as TNC Dubai was declare the Emerging VAD of the Year at the Integrator ICT Champion Awards 2016. The company won its award as a recognition of being a fast emerging value add distributor focused on network testing and monitoring solutions. Nabeel Ahmed, Founder and CEO of TNC Middle East FZE speaks about the company’s focus on distribution and services
Tested winner What have been the highlights in the distribution business for the company over the year? Do you see demand growth focus network visibility and testing solutions across verticals? It has been an important year for us. We have seen increased revenues over the year. We have added more customers and strengthened business with existing customers. We have added partners in some countries. We have opened our testing and visibility lab in our DSO facility and have strengthened our own expertise in testing and professional services.
This is where we stand apart from the classic distribution model as we don’t have to depend on vendors for expertise and can directly support our partners. We have continued to train our staff in new technologies and also done training for our partners so that they in turn have the expertise to deal with customer needs themselves and don’t have to depend entirely on us. Our team continues to spend enough time in R&D on emerging technologies and simulating different possible customer scenarios so that we are prepared in
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advance to deal with customer requirements as they come up. We have also noticed that while about three years ago, customers may not have been very aware of the importance of testing and visibility solutions, more customers now understand the need for such solutions. We are also constantly educating the market Elaborate on the vendors you have tied up with for distribution? Which are the likely new areas you will look to add? IXIA is a major vendor with an extensive range of visibility solutions that have tied up
with. It gives us a sizeable portfolio to focus on and taking to market. In addition, we have partnered with Neotys which has solutions for Application performance testing specifically. Overall, we will continue to be quite selective about adding vendors and don’t want overlaps in our portfolio. We work very closely with the vendors we work with. We also have a professional services and training partnership with Extreme Networks and are authorized to train partners and customers. We are focused on MEA and Asia at the moment. In addition we are also a professional services partner for Dell in emerging markets. Being a training and professional services partner for leading vendors helps us enhance our in-house expertise to deliver services to partners and their customers. We are now focusing on Openstack and SDN. We are building a lab for Openstack. We believe this is a huge growth area and will be adding vendors in this area. With the technical expertise of your team, how do you
help partners deploy network testing solutions and support their customers? Since we have our established in house resources, we are quite capable to help partners. We make sure customers have two to three options to choose from when it comes to solution deployments so that their budgetary constraints may not hamper their decision. We are also leasing out software and hardware for testing purposes in case customers have such requirements. We support customers through the entire cycle that extends to post deployment. Are you continuing to grow your network of reseller partners? Which are your stronger markets in terms of partner reach? While we are increasing our partners selectively in some markets, we are careful not have too many partners as there is no need to have many partners in our domain. The key is to have capable partners who are well versed with the domain. We have partners in all key markets of the region. We are now extending our focus towards
Asia and Africa in terms of increasing our channel network. Comment on solutions you offer for virtualized environments? Is this growing? As I mentioned, we are now focusing on enhancing our capabilities and offerings in Openstack; virtualization is a key component of this. Over the past year, our team has been in trained about virtualized environments. We are also helping out some vendors with their professional services in virtualisation. Elaborate on customer relationships as a key focus for the company? We value our customers. Their continued trust is key to our success and therefore they are first for us. The strong relationships we share with our existing customers is why vendors approach us. We have had successful relationships with customers across verticals including service providers, oil & gas, finance and government entities over the past 14 years and more. Majority of our business continues to come from existing customers.
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Visionary VAD of the Year | Global Distribution FZE
Enabling partners Global Solutions Network is part of the Global Distribution Group and is a fast growing value add distributor in the region. It was the winner of the Visionary VAD of the Year. Mario M. Veljovic, VP Solutions MEA at Global Distribution FZE discusses the company’s focus Discuss some highlights of the company’s milestones over the year in value distribution? Global Solutions Network has made its name as a true Solutions Distributor and is defining a new era of Distribution. The Solutions business is growing strong. Furthermore, we improved our return on investments, made and maintained our annual growth expectations. The product portfolio has been optimized and expanded across all core Divisions. Geographically we have been able to broaden the Product
Portfolio, especially for Africa. We invested into Technical Skills and made strategic acquisitions in that area. Last but not least, we moved to our new Office in JLT, which allowed us to further optimize and centralize our Operations and improve synergies between the various divisions. Have you been able to increase your reach with the SI channel across the region over the year? Yes, our Solutions Business has seen an increase of active Partners that are keen to work with us. However, our aim has
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never been to just increase the number of partners, rather increase the business with the Partners we aim to work strategically with. Which have been the solutions areas that have been showing strong potential demand over the year? Actually all of them, which is thanks to the Portfolio we have built. We are in key growth markets, such as IP Surveillance, Flash Storage and Hyper Convergence Infrastructure. All of them are the hot trends of the market,
as they help customers to achieve fast ROI. While your portfolio looks quite comprehensive, are there any segments you are looking to add a vendor agreement in the shorter tem future? It has to be comprehensive if you take “Solutions Distribution” seriously. At the moment we are happy with the portfolio we are carrying, but are always on the lookout for new disruptive Technologies and vendors with a strong Solutions Offering. Discuss how as a distributor
have brought in partner enablement initiatives to increase sell out opportunities? Our new website www. gsnfzco.com, outlines the details of our approach towards successful Partner Enablement. Our focus is clear and our team understands the channel in depth right from beginning of finding a net new partner, driving partner on boarding process, partner enablement, business planning and demand generation activities and solution selling focus. In short it’s all about analyzing the market landscape and mapping your channel
partners accordingly. The remaining gap is the opportunity to add true value and develop the Partners to self-sustainability. Apart from enterprise focused solutions, do you offer SMB grade solutions? Discuss your SMB channel strategy? Of course, what is good for Enterprise is good for SMBs, too. I think we tend to see the market to strictly split into those two categories, which is not appropriate any longer, especially, as vendors have started to offer workload focused “Solutionsin-a-Box”.
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IP Surveillance Storage Vendor of the Year | Promise Technology Promise Technology emerged the winner of the IP Surveillance Storage Vendor of the Year category. The vendor was recognized for its strong proposition in the expansive IP surveillance segment and with its wide range of of NVR appliances and external storage solutions. Santosh Kumar, Regional Manager, Promise Technology MENA discusses the storage solutions that Promise offers for the surveillance segment
Forte in storage Elaborate if there is a growing demand for surveillance solutions to include high end reliable storage solutions for longer term archiving? Does this scenario hold true in the region? There is a huge demand for IP video surveillance solutions and reliable storage throughout the Gulf region. This is largely driven by massive infrastructure projects and some of the most progressive legislation in the world in regards to retention time and minimum camera resolution requirements. It is obvious that security and safety is taken very seriously here and that’s important not only to businesses but the people who live here and the growing number of tourists in the region.
How many storage appliances optimized for surveillance environments are part of the VESS range? Promise Technology is the developer of the open storage platform for video surveillance. We develop a range of network video recorders (NVRs) and external storage solutions. In regards to NVRs, we have the Vess A2330 for small scale deployments, Vess A2200 and A3340 for mid-sized projects and Vess A26000 for large scale projects. Our Vess R2000 external storage solution can be added to provide additional storage space to between the retention requirements of even the largest projects. Discuss highlights of your surveillance solutions in terms of versatility for
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different use case scenarios? In order to understand what Promise offers, it’s important to understand a little about the history of Promise. Since 1988, we have been a leader in the storage industry with a specialization in developing solutions that offer incredible performance for video centric environments. The world’s largest media and entertainment organizations are just some of the companies that make up the thousands of customers who rely on Promise to ingest, edit, deliver and archive high resolution video. The performance requirements in rich media are significantly higher than is required in video surveillance but even with these difficult performance requirements this is where Promise has
proven to excel. And if you excel in delivering storage solutions for rich media then you can deliver outstanding products for video surveillance. We have taken our expertise and knowledge in storage for video environments and designed a wide portfolio of solutions custom built for video surveillance. These surveillance solutions have been protecting the assets and interests of organizations around the world for years in every industry. Elaborate the focus on training engineers of your partners in the region? What has been the success so far in terms of number of engineers trained? When it comes to IP video surveillance, training and education are vital as certified integrators install cleaner systems that work more smoothly with fewer issues. For Promise, we believe heavily in the value of hosting onsite trainings as it allows security professionals to install, maintain and configure our systems in the field. This in term results in greater confidence from the integrator in Promise and ultimately end-user
satisfaction. So far in 2016 alone, we have already certified over 250 engineers in courses around the world, including Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait and Egypt in the MENA region. We are always planning more courses, so interested security professionals can preregister by visiting http://www. promise.com/Promotion/ certified-training Discuss the surveillance summit that happened earlier this year and the outcomes of this engagement? An important pillar to Promise’s success in video surveillance has been developing a strong partner ecosystem with the leading video management software and IP camera vendors which offer our shared customers more integration possibilities. The Promise Surveillance Solutions Summit 2016 in Dubai was a great representation of this as we hosted this event along with our distributor Musallam Trading at the Palace Hotel. Promise, together with our partners Axxonsoft, Intel, Microsoft and Toshiba held this summit to discuss the latest trends in the surveillance industry and how
we are working together for a safer future. The feedback from this event was excellent and we look forward to hosting more summits where we can share more about the latest technologies and trends that are shaping the industry. Comment on any recent product launches or upcoming ones? We are really excited that we have just brought two new NVRs to the market which will be very attractive to the MENA region. Vess A2330 is a cost-effective and reliable 2U 6-bay NVR storage server for small sized surveillance projects of up to 35 IP cameras per system. This product is really ideal for entry level surveillance and for projects requiring an excellent price. Vess A3340 is a 2U 8-bay NVR appliance designed for mid-sized surveillance deployments of up to 80 IP cameras per system. All of our Vess NVR appliances are purposebuilt for video surveillance environments and are able to handle a much higher number of IP cameras than competing solutions. Plus, we can easily add multiple NVRs and external storage to meet the performance and storage needs of any project.
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Integrator Awards 2016
SMB Channel Champion Vendor of the Year
D-LINK, the winner is a company that has been among the leaders in SMB networking and has executed regular channel promotions to cushion our partners so that they remain afloat despite the precarious market conditions they faced
Datacentre Integrator of the Year
This award recognizes an integrator that has a range of solutions from storage to virtualization as well as security solutions, and has several success stories in data centre integration. STME emerged the winner in this category 36 | Integrator Awards 2016 - HandBook
Enterprise Channel Champion Vendor of the Year
Avaya, the winner has enhanced its channel partner program with new incentives to break new ground in key markets, a greater focus on selling solutions, and a reduction in administrative requirements.
Endpoint security VAD of the Year
The winner of the category is a company that has always focused on endpoint security solutions and continues to be a sought after distributor by leading endpoint security vendors. Al Hosani was the winner of the category.
Promise Vess A-Series
NVR Storage Server for IP Video Surveillance
We’ve got you covered Vess A2330
New Vess A2330 NVR
Cost-effective NVR that offers low latency recording for entry level deployments of up to 40 cameras per system
Vess A3340
New Vess A3340 NVR
Powerful and reliable NVR for mid-sized deployments of up to 80 cameras per system
P.O. Box No. 1398OďŹƒce #406 Atrium Centre, Bur Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) Tel: +971-4-3865144 | Fax: +971-4-3865133 | mfawzi@musallamtrading.com Promise Technology EMEA B.V. | www.promise.com | Tel.: +31 (0)40 235 26 00 | sales@eu.promise.com
Integrator Awards 2016 | Snapshots
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