24
MINDWARE
All about Cloud AS WE WELCOME THE BEGINNING OF A NEW DECADE AND AN EXCITING YEAR FOR THE UAE, PHILIPPE JARRE, CEO AT MINDWARE GIVES HIS TAKE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF CLOUD FOR THE UPCOMING EXPO 2020.
PHILIPPE JARRE, CEO, Mindware
Give us a brief overview of some of the highlights at your company in 2019. 2019 has been an extremely successful year for Mindware kicking off with the acquisition of Arrow Electronics’ enterprise computing solutions business in the Middle East. The acquisition reinforced Mindware’s strategy to support the digital transformation of the regional IT industry and the high demand for storage, cloud, and security solutions. It also strengthened the company’s position in this rapidly growing segment. In October last year, Mindware launched a new ‘Solutions Unit’ comprising of Presales and Services teams focusing on infrastructure, security and cloud solutions. The company also unveiled an end-toend desktop and application virtualisation infrastructure solution, that resellers can offer their customers, that is flexible, reliable, scalable and easy to deploy. One of the highlights of 2019 was the launch of the company’s new cloud Marketplace. Offering superior transactional experience to the channel community as well as a wide variety of cloud solutions and services, the Mindware Marketplace will increase cloud adoption for partners and their customers. The new Marketplace which is hosted on Microsoft Azure, will also offer Mindware’s regional partners the ability to set up and manage their own “white labelled storefront”, thereby offering cloud solutions directly to end-customers. Despite the general recessionary market conditions, as a result of all its ‘partner focused initiatives’ during the year, Mindware boasts financial stability and the success of the company is evidenced by the fact that it has achieved revenue growth of over 20 percent in 2019 over the previous year. Which technologies do you think will take centre stage in 2020? Cloud computing is definitely reaching a point of maturity and hybrid cloud is fast becoming the cloud environment of choice for a large number of enterprises. There has been an acceleration in cloud adoption in the region as a result of major cloud service providers such as Microsoft establishing physical data centres in the Middle East. Organisations are more comfortable with consuming these services now that data sovereignty and security matters are no