Reseller Middle East September 2015

ISSUE 225 | september 2015 www.resellerme.com

on target Arrow’s new MD looks to strengthen its market position as the quality solutions distributor

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CONTENTS

30

ISSUE 225 // September 2015

cover feature review

60

Razor Blade 3T

hot products

calling the shots

Arrow’s new MD, Richard Noujaim, looks to strengthen its market position as the quality solutions distributor.

Highlights

Feature

6

News

35 Budding businesses

We help you catch up on all the major news and announcements in the regional channel community.

opinion 26

An open mind

David Postel from Red Hat MEA, discusses key aspects to build an open source technology practice.

Reseller ME takes a look at emerging players, who have grown their business.

50 Strategy of services

How partners can maximise prospects in managed services.

Security of things

Philippe Roggeband from Cisco elaborates on how organisations can tackle the challenges around Internet of Things.

66

Canon’s new imagePROGRAF printer series

69

AMD unvaeils Radeon R9 Nano graphics card

Partner Watch 56

All about data

Condo Protego’s Savitha Bhaskar explains how the SymantecVeritas split affects the SI.

interview 28

63

Samsung unveils Galaxy Note5

Review 59

Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3

Analysis of Alcatel’s latest flagship smartphone.

Editorial GROUP Chairman and founder

Dominic De Sousa Group CEO

Nadeem Hood

Publishing Director Rajashree Rammohan raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5685

IoT – Are you tuned in?

Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5678 Deputy Editor Janees Reghelini janees.reghelini@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5681 Contributing Editor Annie Bricker Online Editor Adelle Geronimo Advertising Group Sales Director Kausar Syed kausar.syed@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 1647 Sales Manager Merle Carrasco merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5676

Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor

Circulation Database and Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5682

Talk to us:

Production and Design

E-mail: jeevan.thankappan@ cpimediagroup.com

Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5673

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Designers Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5680 Neha Kalvani neha.kalvani@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 3751644 Digital www.resellerme.com DIGITAL SERVICES Web Developers Jefferson de Joya Abbas Madh Photographers Max Poriechkin Charls Thomas webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

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Which is the most hyped technology in our industry today?

I’d say Internet of Things easily takes the top spot. Go to any technology seminar, and chances are that you will hear IoT being discussed with great zeal, and some staggering stats on the market opportunity. IDC estimates IoT market to reach 1.7 trillion by 2020. Cisco says Internet of Everything (as it calls IoT for some reason) will create an economic value of $19 trillion in the next five years. IoT is defined as a network of physical objects that can collect or transmit information, and we are talking about connecting more than 20 billion devices to the Internet by 2020. The IoT eco-system includes devices, connectivity and IT services, and is already being touted as a growth opportunity for the channel.

Is IoT really a new concept and disruptive? Maybe not.

Some of the industrial companies, especially in the oil and gas sector, have been running vast networks of sensors and devices for years now. But, the main difference with IoT is that all these devices will run on general IP networks rather than proprietary systems, and that could be a big change for channel partners offering industrial connectivity solutions.

So, what is the channel opportunity around IoT? The truth is nobody knows, and market pundits are divided in their opinions. What is for sure is that IoT will have profound implications across all industries, and optimise products, services and operations. A recent McKinsey survey of corporate leaders reveals that many lack a clear perspective on the concrete business opportunities around IoT because of the breadth of applications still being developed and the potential markets affected.

IoT might still be a nascent trend but this doesn’t mean channel has to wait and watch before jumping on the bandwagon. With many IoT solutions and products coming to the market, there is an opportunity for channel to get into the game early on, and develop solutions and services tailored to suit different industries. For channel, innovation in the services space will be the key to success, and companies in almost all verticals need the help of solution providers to upgrade their networks to integrate new intelligent devices. As an analyst from Canalys put it: “When developing sensor-enabled experiences, channel partners need to keep simplicity, intuitiveness, and instant gratification in mind.”

Registered at IMPZ PO Box 13700 Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 440 9100 Fax: +971 4 447 2409 Printed by Printwell Printing Press © Copyright 2015 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

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Reseller Middle East september 2015

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Aptec to distribute Emerson Network Power products in Gulf region

Martin Meitza, Aptec, an Ingram Micro company

Aptec, an Ingram Micro company has expanded its product portfolio with a new vendor partner, Emerson Network Power. Since July, Emerson Network Power’s single phase uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), racks and power distribution units are part of Aptec group portfolio.

The value-added technology distributor will now offer Emerson’s small and medium business (SMB) single phase UPS solutions to its customers and partners as the selected distributor in few Gulf countries: UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar. Aptec will also focus on promoting and distributing Emerson products through its vast reseller network.

Martin Meitza, Senior Business Unit Manager, Aptec, said, “Adding Emerson into our portfolio allows us to further enhance the ability of our partners to procure full solutions from one place. As we continue to focus on the SMB space, we will launch UPS up to 10kVA and Rack PDU with attractive sales bundles for cross-vendor converged data centre, networking and SMB tailored solutions.”

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Simplified Solutions joins Epicor Inspired Partner Network Epicor Software Corporation has announced that Simplified Solutions, a software sales and service organisation based in Dubai Silicon Oasis, UAE, will be joining its Inspired Anish Kanaran, Epicor Partner Network.

As a VAR, Simplified Solutions will focus on bringing Epicor nextgeneration software solutions to the rapidly growing ME hospitality industry.

The VAR partnership aims to pave the way for the promotion of Epicor iScala ERP to the hospitality industry.

Approximately 70 percent of the world’s top 20 hospitality chains, at over 300 hotels, in over 60 countries, already streamline their processes with Epicor iScala. The fully integrated ERP solution addresses the specific requirements of small, medium and large hotels and service organisations through its advanced capabilities including financial

management, integration with front office systems, multisite and multi-company financial consolidation, as well as its reporting and budgeting tools.

Anish Kanaran, Channel Director, Epicor Middle East, India and Africa, said, “Epicor iScala contains nextgeneration capabilities that address the specific needs of the hospitality sector. It includes an extensive range of modules, as well as powerful technology that helps an organisation focus on its primary business objectives while gaining an edge in the highly competitive Middle Eastern market. The system offers a rich user experience with high flexibility and performance capabilities.

“We welcome our strategic alliance with Simplified Solutions as we share an aspiration to bridge the gap between people and IT by simplifying system adoption.”

FVC boosts security portfolio with IronKey partnership As part of its newly formed IT Infrastructure and security division, FVC has signed an agreement with Imation to distribute its IronKey enterprise level mobile security K.S. Parag, FVC solutions across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The IronKey portfolio offers the enterprise mobile workforce a simple solution to provide end-to-end protection via hardware-encrypted USB drives, secure portable PC on a Stick Windows desktops for

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Windows To Go, all unified by cloud or on-premisesbased enterprise device management platforms.

K.S. Parag, Managing Director, FVC, said, “We are very excited to partner with IronKey. Given the growth of mobility in the enterprise sector, security is an important consideration for the management of these devices and the protection of critical data. With their solutions, our partners can now offer their customers a holistic BYOD solution alongside all our other infrastructure offerings.”

GBM is the region’s number one provider of IT solutions

GBM brings the power of the world’s most renowned technology providers, IBM from its outset and the addition of the Cisco portfolio in 1999. GBM today holds both the Master Collaboration and the Master Security Specializations from Cisco, the only partner across Gulf to be awarded these distinctions.

GBM’s 1,200 industry experts work across a broad range of market sectors, including: Government, Banking and Finance, Telecommunications, Retail and Oil & Gas. GBM lives the ever-evolving culture of the local IT landscapes in which it operates, continually investing in training and development to ensure its experts can fully understand and interpret the growing needs of their clients. As a result, GBM is always well-equipped to address the ever-evolving, industryspecific IT demands in every market. www.gbmme.com ABU DHABI • BAHRAIN • DUBAI • KUWAIT • OMAN • PAKISTAN • QATAR

Software AG’s Digital Business Platform revenues up 18% Software AG recently released its financial results for the second quarter of 2015. The Group’s total revenue for the period grew 10 percent to €205.6 million Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO, Software AG, said, “One year ago, we started to focus on a value-oriented strategy. Our positive business performance over the last three quarters again confirmed both our ability for fast execution and the value potential of our business. In the second half of 2015, we will continue to concentrate on profitable growth through world-class operations and organic growth with our leading digital portfolio.”

Software AG’s largest business line, the Digital Business Platform (DBP), reported revenue growth of 18 percent to a total of €99.8 million in the second quarter of 2015. Maintenance revenues increased 21 percent to €62.8 million.

Meanwhile, the company’s Adabas and Natural (A&N) database business posted revenue growth of three percent to total €57.5 million in the second quarter. Of that amount, €40.9 million (2014: €38.4 million) was generated by A&N’s recurring maintenance sales, which were up seven percent. And the consulting business line generated €48.4 million in revenue in the second quarter. Profitability increased significantly following the sale of non-strategic units. Segment earnings in the consulting line were €3.8 million; and its margin improved 5.2 percentage points to 7.9 percent.

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TP-LINK Middle East to promote SOHO offerings in Levant

Conrad Yang, TP-LINK ME

TP-LINK ME has launched a new promotion for its channel partners serving the Levant region, as part of its broader plan to grow its wireless router offerings.

The new plan comes as the company readies to unveil a barrage of partner promotions and incentives to all its channel partners selling the SOHO and SMB products in Levant.

Conrad Yang, Country Manager, Levant Region, TP-LINK Middle East, said as the business climate is improving even though there is conflict in some countries of this

region, the company has decided to promote and raise awareness around its wireless router offerings for the SOHO and SMB markets. “Throughout the holy month of Ramadan, we have been conducting promotions to our channel partners and their customers to stimulate growth in the region,” he said. “We have continued to see demand for our SOHO router range and as a result we are incentivising our partners that grow their share of business with us in Levant.”

Yang said they will continue to support these initiatives, hence, the company has approved a scheme that will see the company launch one training programme in the second half of this year in Lebanon and Jordan.

“For Iraq and Syria, we are trying to train our channel partners from our Dubai regional head office considering that the internal civil strife has persisted in the two countries.”

Alghanim, Belkin partner to launch WeMo Smart Home be instrumental towards fast Alghanim Industries tracking the smart home vision has announced its in Kuwait market with the partnership with Belkin help of our home automation International to introduce solutions.

WeMo’s smart home Joel Hanson, Director, solutions, to their Alghanim Industries, said, “We customers. are delighted to join hands WeMo offers smart Amanulla Khan, Belkin with Belkin International to home solutions that International introduce WeMo products to enables its users to the Kuwaiti market. We are manage and monitor their launching these products in eight stores home appliances and lighting from across Kuwait. Experiential marketing anywhere in the world from using for the offerings has been created handheld smart devices. across key stores wherein these smart Amanulla Khan, Director, MEA, home products are going to be live for Belkin International, said, “WeMo a touch, feel and see experience. Our products empower people to switch companies share a similar progressive their homes on and off from anywhere business culture and market leadership in the world. Their home automation within their respective industries. We solutions possess the quality of look forward to a successful partnership unmatched simplicity and scalability. that will benefit both the businesses.”

We believe working with Alghanim will

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emt conducts seminar for Avira channel partners

Mohammad Mobasseri, emt Distribution

emt Distribution has recently conducted a channel seminar for its dedicated Avira channel partners.

Erdal Ozkaya, CISO, emt Distribution, presided over the seminar with a presentation on ‘Data security and its importance.’ The seminar was designed at spreading the awareness and educating leading channel partners from the Emirates about the latest technology innovations and trends in the information security domain. During the event, the distributor’s Director for Sales, Nandini Sapru, also highlighted the features and key advantages of Avira security products available in the region. Jayampath Arachi gave a run down about the benefits of Avira partner programme.

Mohammad Mobasseri, Co-Founder and CEO, emt Distribution, said, “The seminar was aimed at educating channel partners understand the full benefits of the Avira partner programme and learn the sales techniques along with the technical advantages that enable partners earn excellent margins by selling Avira security products. All the partners were presented with a certificate of appreciation

by Avira and emt for their participation in the seminar.”

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Alpha Data wins Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award Alpha Data has recently won the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award for the UAE. The company was honoured among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

Amar Singh, Head of Enterprise Computing Systems, Alpha Data, said, “For years, we have been working together with Microsoft to provide advanced information and communications technology

infrastructure to drive the growth of the UAE’s government and private sectors. We thank them for this great honour and look forward to teaming up with them on bigger and better integrated projects for enhancing the UAE’s technological base and advancing the national development agenda overall.”

The Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Awards honour partners at the country level that have demonstrated business excellence in delivering Microsoft solutions to multiple customers over the past year.

Riverbed unveils new partner training programme realise the full benefits of Riverbed Technology the Riverbed Application has recently unveiled its Performance Platform.” new Riverbed Authorised To guarantee a consistently Training Partner (RATP) high-level of quality and Programme in the Middle expertise, each RATP instructor East, Turkey and North will be certified, using the Africa (METNA). same processes, materials and Under this initiative, tests as used by Riverbed’s the company’s Taj Elkhayat, Riverbed MEA internal instructors. All certified training courses will leverage the vendor’s partners will offer the full range exclusive eLab technology, which of technical education courses to allows students to simulate real-world customers, employees and partners, deployment scenarios for a true in accordance with Riverbed’s ‘hands-on’ experience. international processes and standards All existing and future courses of quality. will be offered in the METNA region Taj Elkhayat, Regional VP, Riverbed and the schedule of these courses MEA, said, “We have created a will be available on its training portal. standard, consistent programme Customers and resellers can sign that incentivises our training up for the training programmes partners while maintaining businesseither via this portal or directly with based accountability. The regional restructuring of our global programme the RATPs. Training credits are also available from both, the vendor and has brought it up to another level by its training partners. These credits streamlining a number of systems can be used to purchase classroom, and processes. This ensures that online and dedicated on-site our partners can focus on what trainings based on partner and end matters, which is to expertly deliver customer requirements. trainings that help our customers

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highlights

StarLink to expand geographical footprint in 2015 StarLink has announced its on-the-ground presence and team expansion plans for the second half of 2015.

The company’s 2015 mission includes launching their operations to new territories such as Europe, as well as, Nidal Othman, StarLink North, East and West Africa, with initial sales and technical management resources being deployed locally. Headcount in existing territories will also be enhanced with hiring activities taking place in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, Turkey, and the US.

Nidal Othman, Managing Director, StarLink, said, “We are excited to be able to continue working towards achieving our long-term strategic objectives by opening up new markets to replicate our business model, and to fill the multiple openings that have risen over the course of the year due to being on target with our revenue goals. We have 225 resources at the moment, and very shortly we will be launching a recruitment campaign to hire for sales, pre-sales, product management, channel management, professional services and technical support positions, expecting a total of 35 new hires by year-end.”

EES moves HQ to Dubai Media City As Emitac Enterprise Solutions (EES) continues their plans for growth and expansion, the company has recently moved to a new address.

Located at the Concord Tower, in Dubai Media City, the new facility houses hi-tech meeting/conference rooms with a great view, plus more space for further expansion.

More importantly, with this move, the company aims to enhance customer experience with the opening of their new NOC facility for managed services.

Miguel Angel Villalonga, CEO, EES, said, “We are expanding our practices rapidly with a number of new employees to support the execution of our 2015 plan. The new headquarter substantially increases the amount of desk space and meeting rooms, accommodating

Miguel Angel Villalonga, EES

our fast growth while promoting spaces that improve the experience of employees, visiting customers and partners.”

Furthermore, according to EES, the new office fuels a more productive environment, accommodating more employees to serve customers better and faster to bring more value to their businesses. Additionally, the location lets the team take advantage of the close vicinity to technology partners, which will enable them to further foster business relationships.

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Reseller Middle East september 2015

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highlights

Levtech wins Microsoft Dynamics reseller award Levtech Consulting has won the 2015 Microsoft Dynamics Reseller of the year for the Middle East and Africa region.

The award was achieved as a result of Levtech Consulting demonstrating exceptional business success by optimising the use of Microsoft Dynamics business applications to deliver innovative solutions that exceed customer expectations and surpass business goals.

This recognition was presented at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference which took place in Orlando, Florida this year.

Anilesh Kumar, Director, Business Development, Levtech Consulting, said, “We are delighted to once again, win a coveted recognition at Microsoft. The award underlines

our consistent commitment to customers and our technology partner, Microsoft, which has resulted in a strong regional track record in deploying Microsoft Dynamics solutions successfully.

Over the last five years, we have built a deep understanding of unique characteristics and challenges faced by businesses in the region, and have tailored our skills and deployment methodology to ensure that we are able to deliver tangible consulting value and process improvement, based on international best practices but with a pragmatic local flavour. We are enhancing our overall capabilities and resource depth with each passing year, and we are gearing up for further expansion in the region, and internationally.” www.whitehatsec.com

Global Distribution partners with GRENKE Dubai The partnership Global Distribution has entails leasing of recently announced small-ticket IT items, its partnership with such as PCs, laptops, GC Leasing Middle copiers, printers and East (GRENKE) Dubai, even software has to cater to more major advantages opportunities in the for companies SME space. including a more Mario Veljovic, secure capital and VP Solutions MENA, improved credit Global Distribution, ratings; having a said, “Our partnership more reliable budget with GRENKE now as planning for allows us to better Mario Veljovic, Global Distribution future costs is easier address small and with consistent mid-sized enterprises leasing payments; opportunities opportunities. The innovative for larger investments earlier, as financing solutions are optimally companies will be able to make customisable to the needs of each low and regular payments instead customer and thus ensure the of high upfront costs; and greater highest possible flexibility. This new flexibility which gives businesses partnership will offer our partners asset flexibility providing them with new sales opportunities. We are accessible cutting edge technology. pleased to team up with them.”

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SENSATION

NEW PREMIUM PanzerGlass for Samsung GALAXY S6 EDGE The New PanzerGLass for Samsung GALAXY S6 EDGE is now available. Celebrated as the strongest screen protection for mobile devices, the PanzerGlass now also comes in a PREMIUM version, which is a full frame Protection Glass specially designed to fit the S6 EDGEs curved edges.

The PanzerGlass offers great scratch resistance, superb shock absorbation and a flawless Touch ‘n’ Feel.

We are highly satisfied to offer the new PREMIUM PanzerGlass as a deluxe protection solution for the Samsung GALAXY S6 EDGE.

DISTREE DIAMOND AWARD WINNER PanzerGlass was in May celebrated as the Strongest and most Innovative Screen Protection for mobile devices

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+971 4552 0752 www.panzerglass.com

highlights

Axios Systems receives accreditation from Microsoft Microsoft has awarded Axios Systems with Silver status in the Microsoft Software Asset Management Competency.

This accreditation follows the successful launch of assystITAM, Axios’ integrated solution for IT Asset Management and Service Management (ITAM/ ITSM). The solution that aims to help increase productivity and reduce costs for IT and enterprise organisations.

To achieve this accreditation, Axios undertook a number of tasks, including passing a software asset management exam and completing a Microsoft

Business Assessment. Microsoft also sought written references from Axios customers.

Tasos Symeonides, CEO, Axios Systems, said, “Ensuring our customers receive marketingleading support and advice is a key part of the service we deliver.

We are pleased that Microsoft has recognised our commitment to ongoing ITAM education and training, and ultimately, to achieving customer satisfaction.

ITAM is critical to maintaining a cost-effective IT infrastructure, so we take great pride in helping our customers achieve greater efficiencies.”

Brocade expands OEM partnership with Lenovo Brocade has announced that it has expanded its OEM relationship with Lenovo, a global technology company that significantly increased its enterprise IT infrastructure offerings following the acquisition of the IBM’s x86 server business in October 2014.

Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel storage area networking (SAN) switches are now being sold globally

by Lenovo and its network of channel partners, in addition to embedded Fibre Channel and VCS Ethernet fabric switches that are available in solutions for all Lenovo x86based servers. Brocade fixed-port SAN switches integrate seamlessly into Lenovo’s server and storage solutions, including the recently announced Lenovo Storage S2200 and S3200 SAN arrays. Additionally, the switches have completed qualification testing for seamless interoperability with these new storage offerings.

“We are excited to expand our OEM partnership with Lenovo,” said Jack Rondoni, Vice President, Storage

Networking, Brocade. “New qualification Jack Rondoni, Brocade and support for the S2200 and S3200 enables Lenovo customers of all sizes to uniquely experience the performance benefits of Gen 5 Fibre Channel, from ThinkServer and System x users to enterprise-class Flex System clients.”

The Lenovo Storage S2200 and S3200 arrays are targeted at enterprise-class features at an affordable price point. These systems support a variety of workloads including online applications and virtualised environments. The S2200 and S3200 enable reliable, fast throughput for applications such as SQL, MS Exchange, and VMware virtualisation.

Embedded switches for Lenovo servers and Brocade SAN fabric solutions are available now from Lenovo and its global network of channel partners.

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Reseller Middle East september 2015

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eHDF signs MoU with IL&FS Securities Services

Yasser Zeineldin, eHDF and Anil Somaiya, ISSL

eHosting DataFort (eHDF) has announced its partnership with IL&FS Securities Services Ltd (ISSL), a securities services firms based in India, to provide innovative managed services covering IT infrastructure, remote disaster recovery and back office operations support for financial brokerage firms operating within UAE’s financial exchanges.

This partnership will allow users to choose from a wide range of solutions including primary IT infrastructure hosting, DR services and back office solutions.

An MoU was signed by Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHDF and Anil Somaiya, CTO, ISSL at an event that was also attended by senior member representatives of Dubai Financial Market (DFM), Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange (DGCX), Abu Dhabi Exchange (ADX), as well as members of leading UAE financial brokerage firms.

Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHDF, said, “The UAE is a regional financial and trading hub where financial brokerages operate with critical client information that needs to be secure and always available. It is important for their clients to be able to stay connected to financial exchanges for their everyday transactions. This prompted us to develop a unique solution for disaster recovery and business continuity for the financial markets.

We are extremely pleased to be working with ISSL to provide valueadded services to meet the unique requirements for this vertical.”

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Ctroniq launches new product in Sharaf DG Bahrain Ctroniq in association with AJM Kooheji Group has exclusively launched the latest tablet for kids at Sharaf DG, Bahrain City Centre.

The latest product Sharaf DG and AJM Kooheji team from Ctroniq is specifically designed for all the young Internet enthusiasts. with Sharaf DG will bring the right It’s a device which brings the best platform to drive the product and features and great quality for the brand,” he added.

Bahrain market, said Atheeq Ahmed, “The new tablet is designed General Manager, Ctroniq. for modern lifestyle. The product “It is indeed amazing to introduce is technically superior in design. this new tablet in Bahrain, I strongly Most importantly Ctroniq products believe that the Ctroniq K12 is a are competitively priced to suit the product that will be a big hit in the requirements of all customers,” said market, and there will be a lot of Sanjeev Awasthi, Chief Operations demand for it. The features in the Officer, AJM Kooheji Group device are impressive and the prices The Ctroniq Kinder Tab K10 is are very competitive giving the Ctroniq also available at competitive prices at Kinder Tab an edge above the rest. We all leading hypermarkets, electronic are very confident of our association retailers and dealer stores.

Metrade to implement Epicor ERP 10 Epicor Software Corporation has announced that Metrade International (Metrade) will be implementing the next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, Epicor ERP 10, to drive growth and collaboration throughout its business.

RiSOLVE Technologies, an authorised gold partner reseller and service provider for Epicor ERP 10 will carry out the implementation.

Metrade, a supplier of valves, pipes, flanges, fittings, and other essential materials for the energy sector, selected Epicor ERP due to its robust global functionality.

According to the company they were particularly impressed with the solution’s excellent back-office functionality, which can address key

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challenges in the order fulfilment cycle. The software deployment, will take place at Metrade’s Sharjah office, UAE, and will replace the business’ old ERP solution, increasing its operational efficiency, improving record keeping and enhancing regulatory compliance.

Anish Kanaran, Channel Director, Epicor Middle East, India and Africa, said, “Epicor ERP 10 is a complete solution based on the five basic principles of responsiveness, collaboration, mobility, choice and simplicity. It is designed to enable Metrade to streamline its processes and improve customer responsiveness. We are certain that they will benefit from the robust capability and agile platform of Epicor ERP 10, helping it achieve sustained growth and explore new possibilities.”

Symantec to secure more than 1 billion IoT devices semiconductor industries, Symantec has in addition to our work announced that in healthcare and retail it is securing markets.” more than one As part of its billion Internet broader Unified Security of Things (IoT) Strategy, Symantec devices, including is investing in and everything from offering the industry’s televisions and most comprehensive cars to smart IoT security solutions. meters and critical Shankar Somasundaram, Symantec This approach includes infrastructure. authentication, device The move, security, analytics and management is in line with its efforts to protect to help prevent cars, medical consumers from hacks against their devices, industrial control systems, always-on, Internet connected devices. and countless consumer electronics “As IoT innovation and adoption from becoming hacked, tracked and continues to grow, so has the electronically hijacked. opportunity for new cyber security The company’s future plans risks. This is the next frontier. In to help enterprises address IoT the automotive industry, hackers security include introducing new can literally steer the car and ‘hit technologies, such as an IoT portal the brakes’ from their keyboards,” for managing all IoT security from a said Shankar Somasundaram, single interface, and security analytics Senior Director of Internet of for proactively detecting anomalies Things Security, Symantec. “We’ll be that might indicate stealthy attacks partnering with manufacturers in the on IoT networks. automotive, industrial control, and

Optoma and Disway forge new partnership Optoma has formed a new distribution partnership with IT distributor, Disway, for its operations in Morocco, last month.

Disway will be Optoma’s main distribution partner across Morocco for its line of business projectors.

Mohsin Abakhti, Optoma Manager, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, said, “We are delighted to announce Disway as our new distribution partner. With Disway’s expertise in the markets of Frenchspeaking countries, we look to increase our presence across north and mid-Africa.”

Disway’s CEO, Hakim Belmaachi, said, “We know Optoma manufactures high quality projectors, so adding their products to our portfolio will enhance the range that we offer our customers.”

Anas Benjelloun, Disway’s Sales and Marketing Director, added, “We look forward to developing a strong partnership with Optoma.”

Disway will be stocking the popular bright business projectors S316, S310e, X312, X316, X350, X304M, W310 but all projectors from Optoma’s full range will be available to order from the distributor.

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Appointments

Fredrik Torstensson joins Wacom as new SVP for Global Brand Sales President, Wacom, said, Wacom has recently “Torstensson is a strong announced that addition to our executive Fredrik Torstensson leadership team, and he has recently joined the joins at a critical point in our company as the Senior company’s transformation Vice President of Global and expansion. He has a Branded Sales. proven track record, vision Charged with and expertise are uniquely overseeing the suited to accelerate our worldwide sales and Fredrik Torstensson, Wacom engagement with customers business partner as well as to identify new relationships, strategic partnerships and Torstensson will markets for our technology. We’re be responsible for accelerating confident that he will contribute greatly the company’s growth across both to the continued growth of Wacom.” developed and emerging markets, As a global sales specialist expanding the global sales organsation, Torstensson brings a wealth of industry strengthening strategic partnerships experience and proven track record of with customers and resellers and driving rapid revenue growth, executing helping facilitate faster sell-through at strategies worldwide and building highpoints of sale. performing sales organisations.

Jeff Mandell, Executive Vice

TP-LINK appoints new Channel Manager for UAE TP-LINK Technologies has announced the appointment of Shabih Ul Hassnain as the new Channel Manager for UAE. In this new role, Hassnain will drive and manage TP-LINK’s entire UAE channel business and support the retail and wholesale markets.

According to the company, Hassnain’s appointment as the new channel manager for the UAE will help TP-LINK to cement its footprint in the SMB segment in the country.

Denny Liang, Vice President, TP-LINK Middle East and Africa (MEA), said the company is delighted to have Hassnain join the team to continue the work in the retail and wholesale segments in the country. “We have been working closely with our distributors and channel partners to make sure product availability and market demand are met.

With Hassnain on board he will ensure

that the retail and wholesale sectors of the channel are properly Shabih Ul Hassnain, TP-LINK supported from TPLINK in order to stimulate business growth,” Liang said. “We have designed weekly promotion schemes, which will help partners in the retail and wholesale markets to earn better margins and this will be Hassnain’s priority.

Liang said the appointment of Hassnain will also help TP-LINK to extend its reach in the SMB segment.

“Our SOHO business has continued to grow and it’s driving us deeper into the SMB sector, where we need to put more focus and develop our business to get a larger share of the market.”

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Grant Bodley named as Dimension Data’s new MEA CEO

Grant Bodley, Dimension Data

As part of their strategy to double revenues in the nextfive years, Dimension Data has recently appointed Grant Bodley as its CEO for Middle East & Africa (MEA). Current CEO Derek Wilcocks, and Sean Joubert, current Managing Director for MEA will both be taking up executive positions within the global group.

Bodley joined Dimension Data in 2000. Prior to being appointed Sales Director of Dimension Data MEA in 2012, he headed up Dimension Data MEA’s IT outsourcing business.

Brett Dawson, Group CEO, Dimension Data, said, “Bodley has a strong business background, as well as an IT focus, which means he’s able to bridge the gap between IT and business for our clients. This, coupled with an excellent track record spanning 15 years with Dimension Data, positions him well to successfully lead the Dimension Data MEA business.”

Andile Ngcaba, Dimension Data MEA, Chairman, said, “Dimension Data has a longstanding commitment to promote from within. My board and executive team believe that Bodley, who is highly regarded internally and by our clients, is the right candidate to take our business forward in MEA.”

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Appointments

NetApp restructures regional management NetApp has recently announced that Alexander Wallner, Area VP, Central Europe and Russia, will now be responsible for NetApp’s business operations in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa. The region was previously managed by Thomas Ehrlich, Vice President, Partner Ecosystem, EMEA. “We are making these shifts for two reasons,” explained Manfred Reitner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, NetApp EMEA. “One pillar of our strategy is expanding our offerings and success into leading global enterprises. As Vice President Global Accounts and Partner Ecosystem EMEA, Ehrlich will take on the additional role managing our global customer accounts based in EMEA, and for capacity reasons transition his regional responsibility to Alex Wallner, who has successfully managed Central Europe, Russia and CIS.” The company will structure its African

Alexander Wallner, NetApp

and Middle East business from previously two to three regions, which are East and West Africa, and Angola; South Africa and Southern African Development Community (SADC); and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

According to the computer storage and data management company, the move demonstrates their commitment to NetApp’s growth strategy and affirms that they will continue to develop and prosper in these markets, extracting maximum impact from the expected high domestic growth.

Intel Security announces new channel leader

Richard Steranka, Intel Security

Intel Security announced the appointment of Richard Steranka to lead worldwide channels at Intel Security, heightening the company’s commitment to bring proactive, connected security to its partners and their mutual customers.

Steranka will report directly to Senior Vice President for Global Sales, Scott Lovett, and lead the

global team responsible for Intel Security’s ecosystem of distributors, value-added resellers, managed service providers, alliances and embedded OEMs. He joins the company from Avaya, and will also be responsible for the company’s continued development of the partner ecosystem, stressing the value for partners of buildingout integrated security capabilities with fewer vendors, but with richer services and deeper expertise to best protect customers.

“Security is perhaps the most rapidly evolving field within IT, with new threats and technologies coming to market every day,” said Steranka.

“Staying relevant and on the offense is imperative so that our partners can not only reach their own profitability goals, but also better protect our mutual customers from nextgeneration cyber threats.”

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VMWare appoints Jean-Pierre Brulard as new SVP and GM for EMEA VMware has announced the appointment of Jean-Pierre Brulard as Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMEA. Previously Vice President for the Southern Region of EMEA, Brulard will be responsible for delivering the company’s software-defined vision to customers across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Reporting to Carl Eschenbach, President and Chief Operations Officer, Brulard will drive strategy alignment and long-term planning, while continuing to drive growth and profitability across the company’s businesses including software-defined data centre, business mobility and cloud services.

Brulard replaces Maurizio Carli, who is now General Manager of VMware’s Americas region.

“I am delighted to be leading the company in EMEA and have the best team of people in the industry on-board,” said Jean-Pierre Brulard.

“VMware is an innovative company and we are genuinely helping our customers deliver business value and drive successful transformations in their organisations and businesses. It is a great time to be here and I’m looking forward to working with our customers, partners and employees in the weeks, months and years ahead.”

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GITEX PREVIEW

Innovation hub

The much-anticipated GITEX Technology Week is here once again, where technology goliaths come together to showcase their latest products and offerings under a single roof. The 35th edition of the ICT event will revolve around Internet of Everything and promises to be an indicator to what’s up and coming in the technology world. Reseller ME turns the spotlight on companies who will be participating at the event.

Crayon ME, Snow Software announce joint participation at GITEX

can help drive down the costs and risks associated with the growing use of applications across all platforms.

ATA to present new solutions and products at GITEX 2015 Joachim Hagström, CEO, Crayon MEA

Crayon Middle East and Snow Software recently announced their joint participation at GITEX Technology Week 2015, which will be held from the 18th to 22nd, October at Dubai World Trade Centre.

As more firms look to secure compliance and ROI from their IT estate investment, Crayon Middle East and Snow Software envisions to offer customers the right tools and assist them in identifying their IT assets and vulnerabilities while significantly reducing costs. Both experts aim to showcase during the event how Software Asset Management (SAM) technologies and services

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ATA, a company specialised in the design and manufacturing of electronic and metrological devices for taxis, recently announced their participation at GITEX 2015 to introduce their innovative and design line of products.

Products the company develops include taximeters, roof lights, printers, payment terminals, fleet management systems, dispatching services, tablets and cloud solutions for taxi companies. The company has developed solutions connected to the taximeters in order to manage fleet of taxis, vehicles and bring more fares and more visibility to passengers.

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GWAVA to take part at GITEX 2015

Dirk Schmidt, GWAVA

GWAVA has announced its participation at GITEX Technology Week 2015, where it aims to feature its unified archiving solution for email, social and mobile digital communication.

75 percent of global companies will have to produce electronic messages for eDiscovery and 46 percent of organisations will have had an eDiscovery request by the end of 2015 thus costing organisations millions in lost time, resources and regulatory penalties. With a proactive investment in a Unified Archiving Solution companies can ensure that they quickly and easily locate, produce and deliver required communications from within their email, mobile and social digital communications.

“GITEX is at the forefront of showcasing innovations in technology and we are proud to be a part of it,” said Dirk Schmidt, VP Business Development EMEA & APAC, GWAVA. “This aligns directly with the GWAVA vision to provide worldclass archiving solutions to organisations including corporations, financial services, government, education, and healthcare.”

Retain Unified Archiving is a centralised multi-platform unified archiving, eDiscovery, and publishing solution to assist customers in reducing costs, managing complexity and mitigating risk, on premise or in the cloud. Visit GWAVA at booth SR-L6 in the German Pavilion and during the GITEX Technology Week or go to www.gwava. com to learn how archiving is easy, important and saves your organisation time and money.

Xilopix to showcase solutions for omnichannel space at GITEX During their participation at GITEX Technology Week

GITEX PREVIEW

2015, in Dubai, Xilopix will demonstrate the benefits of its new Visual Recognition Omnichannel Search Engine, enhanced with Visual Product recognition for Smartphones.

There are nearly 2 billion smartphone users throughout the world. These devices are now the entry point to a continuous Internet experience, while shopping at home or on the go. Retailers are one of the main beneficiaries of this trend, which will rapidly empower customers with new shopping experiences.

Visually searching for products through a mobile app is the natural extension of that new habit, a trend retailers may heavily adopt in the coming two years, as eMarketer pictures it.

The company’s visual recognition solution is the mobile enhancement solution e-commerce. It is designed to fit the m-commerce segment that has been a trend worldwide, which is expected to reach $626 billion by 2018, nearly equalling global e-commerce sales for 2013 of $638 billion.

Xilopix for e-commerce offers a comprehensive Visual Search Engine solution, including a visual product recognition capability right from users’ smartphones.

Business France to host French pavilion at GITEX 2015

French Pavilion will host the Alliance Franco-Tunisienne pour le Numérique (FrancoTunisian Digital Alliance – AFTN), wherein six French firms will present their expertise alongside their Tunisian partners.

During the event, the company will also showcase its linguistic services including speech recognition.

Cirpack to exhibit at GITEX Technology

Fayssal Majid, Business France

Business France has announced that they will participate at GITEX Technology Week and will be hosting The France Pavilion.

The companies attending this year are specialised in various sectors of the IT industry, in particular the cloud, IT security, M2M and mobile applications.

GITEX is considered as the leading regional platform for marketing French technologies and expertise in the Persian Gulf States.

The UAE is the principal market for French firms keen to meet with decisionmakers in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Southern Asia and the rest of the world.

Fayssal Majid, Project Manager, Business France, said, “The 2015 exhibition will include French firms that are new to the region.

There will be around ten new companies keen to discover the UAE and the regional market.”

For the second consecutive year, the

SYSTRAN announces participation at GITEX 2015 SYSTRAN, a company specialising in languagetranslation solutions and products, will showcase its Enterprise Server Version 8 at GITEX 2015.

Enterprise Server Version 8, is a new machine translation solution that is targeted at assisting leading global companies and public agencies to quickly create and understand multilingual contents in a fully secure and costefficient way.

“We are very excited to exhibit at GITEX on the French Pavilion for the third year in a row,” said Gilles Montier, Sales Director, SYSTRAN. “GITEX provides a fantastic platform to showcase our intelligent language technologies.

We’re also looking for local skilled and experienced software integrators, eager to support organisations that need to take up the challenge of globalisation without jeopardising information security.”

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Patrick Bergougnou, Cirpack

Cirpack, a cloud telephony and core network software editor, will be presenting its UC solution and its IMS platform for telecom operators and cloud service providers at the 35th edition of GITEX Technology Week.

GITEX will be an opportunity for the company to promote its ‘Unified Communications Application Server’ to service providers, MVNO and fixed and mobile operators. They will also be presenting its ‘Cirpack Full-SIP’ programme based on IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem).

Patrick Bergougnou, Chairman, CEO, Cirpack, said, “Our desire to cover the ME region is part of our global growth strategy.

Thanks to our success in Europe and Latin America, we can provide regional operators with major guarantees.”

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OPinion

Red Hat

An open mind David Postel, Partner and Alliances Leader, Red Hat MEA, discusses key aspects to building an open source technology practice in the region.

Open source is no longer just another industry buzz word – whether it is Hadoop for Big Data, OpenStack for cloud computing or Contiki for the Internet of Things (IoT), open source now drives technology innovation to the point where even traditional proprietary vendors are (reluctantly) beginning to participate in the open source world. As awareness grows and we continue to debunk the myths around open source software, particularly around security, adoption levels are rising among both large

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corporations and small-tomedium-size businesses (SMBs). In fact, according to the 2015 Future of Open Source Survey sponsored by Black Duck and North Bridge, 78 percent of companies today run part or all of their operations on open source software. Another notable statistic from the same survey is that for 66 percent of respondents, open source is the default approach when it comes to hardware.

Given the growing popularity and importance of open source, one could argue that partners without an open source practice are

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already at a disadvantage, not to mention losing out on an extremely lucrative revenue stream. While the old adage - ‘better late than never’ - definitely holds true, simply putting a sign out front that reads ‘Open source sold here’ won’t cut it. Building an open source practice requires a different business model, skill set and sales approach.

Embrace a new business model The fundamental difference between proprietary and open source software solutions lies in the

development model. In proprietary solutions, the source code remains the sole property of the original authors, the only people legally allowed to make changes to it. On the other hand, in open source solutions, an organisation creates a piece of code for its own needs, and proceeds to make the code available for others to view, copy, learn from, alter or share.

While this might be stating the obvious, it is the economic implications that are important and relevant for partners. Organisations that sell proprietary software

need to recoup significant development costs and to that end, sell their software using a one-time license model. In this model, a significant portion of the solution cost is accounted for by the hardware, which doesn’t leave much for spend on services. But open source solutions are sold using a service-based subscription model where the subscription fee accounts for less than half of the cost while support services account for the balance.

Given the difference in how the two solutions are monetised, partners choosing to sell open source solutions will need to change their business model and switch from the traditional reseller approach to a consultative, service-oriented approach. While this is not an easy transition for most partners to make, those that do will not only have a competitive advantage, but more importantly will be able to capitalise on high margin service business and up/ cross selling opportunities.

Specialise, specialise and then specialise some more While the (seemingly) obvious choice for any partner looking to build an open source practice appears to be to acquire expertise and skillsets across all open source solutions, this approach is actually sub-optimal for the current business climate.

Enterprises these days would rather work with partners that they consider ‘trusted advisors’ rather than ‘resellers’. This is even truer for open source solutions

given that the concept is still foreign to many enterprises and that services are such a big part of expenditure. To that end, I would advocate that partners would be better served to start small - pick just one open source technology and then build a complete skill set around it to include implementation, integration, support, and maybe even development. In parallel to focusing on just one open source technology, I would also suggest that partners focus on just one or maybe two industry verticals – this way they can develop a very thorough understanding of the market and business challenges facing most enterprises.

Dispel myths and communicate value For most enterprises, the biggest roadblock to adoption of open source solutions is scepticism around security.

One frequently cited misconception is that open source solutions are more vulnerable to security threats than their proprietary counterparts, in large part because the source code is openly available. However, the opposite is in fact true – open technology allows entire industries to agree on standards, encourages their brightest developers to continually test and improve the code, and ensures that the best patches are released quickly and proactively in the event of any vulnerabilities.

For other enterprises, the roadblock is inertia.

Enterprises are often reluctant to switch to a new technology for technology’s

“Partners choosing to sell open source solutions will need to change their business model and switch from the traditional reseller approach to a consultative, serviceoriented approach.” sake. Partners need to be able to articulate both the business and the economic benefits. One of the biggest business benefits is that open source solutions are ‘vendor agnostic,’ increasing flexibility and interoperability as enterprises are no longer ‘locked-in’ with a vendor. From an economic standpoint, open source solutions have a much lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than their proprietary counterparts.

Pick the right vendor partner Partnering with the right vendor is critical to building a robust open source practice.

From a product standpoint, partners need to pick vendors that offer the solution sets that align with their choice of specialisation. For example, if you choose to specialise in cloud solutions, then pick the leading OpenStack vendor – this will ensure that you will always have access to the latest solutions and technologies. From a capability standpoint, the vendor needs to have an

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effective and efficient critical response system and have the ability to provide troubleshooting support and patches on extremely short notice to handle vulnerabilities. Secondly, the vendor needs to have a robust partner programme, as well as a comprehensive training programme to support the partner ecosystem. Finally the vendor should provide sufficient sales and marketing support, be it joint customer visits or joint participation in trade shows and other industry events.

In today’s hyper competitive world, enterprises are turning to IT solutions to gain the smallest (and in many cases fleeting) edge over the competition. The answer lies in cloud computing, Big Data, IoT, social and mobility technologies, and the way to effectively leverage these emerging solutions is through open source.

Building an open source practice today will ensure you are relevant tomorrow.

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Interview

CISCO

Security of things Philippe Roggeband, Business Development Manager, Cisco Security Architecture, explains in-depth how organisations can tackle the challenges around Internet of Things (IoT).

The Internet of Things technology is gradually edging into all aspects of business. How many objects can be connected and what are the related implications of these connections are some questions to consider when venturing into this space. In an exclusive interview, Philippe Roggeband, Business Development Manager, Cisco Security Architecture, outlines the security aspects to think about when it comes to IoT. What are some of the biggest trends within security today?

It is mainly around securing the Internet of Everything (IoE). It is one of the hottest topics at the moment. We are seeing a large number of objects getting connected to the Internet. With 20 billion devices expected to be connected within the next few years, I don’t think the IoE will exist unless security is a part of it.

What are the challenges around IoT for an organisation?

According to us, there are three types of IoT. The first one constitutes the

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enterprise world, where the connected object will typically be the RP camera, printers and fax machines – everything we are already accustomed to handling.

We can easily manage this because it is part of our policies. What we need to pay attention to is basically profiling those devices and ensuring they behave in an appropriate way.

The second category include the industrial networks. Here, we have programmable logic controllers and SCADA acquisition systems controlling industrial networks for quite a while.

They were connected between isolated networks where the danger is not coming from, it is the fact that the OT networks are getting connected with IT networks. The OT networks were not designed to be interconnected with anything else. Therefore in many cases, security was not built in and introducing security in that space is complex because you are not allowed to put in any latency. The moment you place a firewall or an intrusion prevention system, you put latency in.

This means you have to be able to integrate security into the fabric of those OT

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networks without disrupting them and that’s a challenge.

We have been working on this and have developed solutions in this space.

The third type of IoT covers consumer technologies and consumer objects, i.e, the connected bracelets, connected cars and connected refrigerators.

This is probably one of the biggest areas of concerns because when you are dealing in the enterprise world, you are going to have somebody who knows about security and will go about setting and applying policies.

However, in the consumer world, the consumer has to be knowledgeable in order to protect himself. Similar to PCs’ segment, it is the enduser’s responsibility to install anti-virus or other security measures. With connected objects in the consumer world, we will see similar challenges. I believe this will be a huge concern.

How can organisations prepare to face the IoT wave?

It is really all about understanding what you are trying to connect to the network. That’s going to be based on the customer’s outcome. Therefore, there

are a couple of aspects that needs to be considered.

First, organisations need to outline what the business outcomes are. Then they need to identify the business initiatives that customers are trying to reach and based on that they can then devise the appropriate security policies and determine what products and solutions need to be deployed.

What is Cisco’s differentiator in this space?

One of the things we are beginning to see with IoT is an increase in the attack surface. We are going to see many more operating systems and not all of them will have in-built security designed. One of the key challenges is being able to go on multiple platforms to get connected. This is where I see a big differentiator for Cisco. It’s the fact that the common element is going to be the network. Because no matter what’s running on the end point or what’s running on the connected object, the mandatory point of passage for the traffic is going to be the network fabric. We are well-positioned in this area because we can leverage network traffic analysis as a way of identifying new

threats coming from these new objects.

Most security vendors do only security but we do security, networking, collaboration, and data centre. For us, putting security as an adjective is a way of life. We wouldn’t consider selling an unsecure network, an unsecure data centre or an unsecure collaboration solution to the customer.

This is because the network was designed with security in mind. We have the mechanism to authenticate whoever is behind the object, profile the object and see how it is behaving. And if corrective measures need to be taken when we think the object is misbehaving, it is something we can do in the network fabric simply by blocking the access.

What are some of the key elements that are changing the way security is perceived in the region?

As a part of the emerging countries, technology in the region is moving extremely fast because business is moving extremely fast. One of the interesting elements is that security is no longer being added on as an after-thought, customers are integrating it as part of their initial plans.

And this is something I like to recommend to all our customers and partners – don’t leave security as a function to be handled after you have decided what IT infrastructure you are going to need. Make sure when you design what you want to do from the business perspective, you think about your security policies at the business level

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cover story Arrow

“ArrowSphere is our proprietary platform for distribution of cloud services, making it possible for our vendors and resellers to sell software and to sell IT as a service in the cloud mode.�

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Calling the shots Having taken over the Middle East business at the beginning of this year, Richard Noujaim, Managing Director, MEA, Arrow ECS, says partners can look forward to the distributor’s proprietary cloud platform, ArrowSphere among other things in 2015.

What are your expectations for Arrow’s Middle East business?

I expect Arrow to reinforce itself as the premier distributor for storage, networking and security solutions in the region. We are a premium quality solutions-oriented distributor.

The value-added distribution space is increasingly becoming very competitive. How does the company stay differentiated in such a marketplace?

Understanding the competitiveness of the market, we have created our catalogue to be top-notch and continue to invest in developing excellent technical skills.

Also, we have an unrivalled financial capacity compared to any other distributor in the region. We are able to invest and support the business.

When compared to other parts of the world, what are the opportunities you see in the Middle East region and what is driving the growth here?

In the Middle East, the factors driving growth are infrastructure projects, which are big in size and numerous in quantity.

Security is another prominent growth driver.

Tight information security is driving the demand.

What kind of value-adds can partners expect from Arrow?

As a premier distributor for our vendors, we provide extensive training to partners and to their end users. This is one of our specialties – we are a certified training centre for almost every brand we distribute.

We also have a very competent pre-sales and technically skilled sales

team. This year, we have offered all our partners, who are major systems integrators in the region, an elegant way to benefit from cross selling. This is to encourage them to look at the rest of our catalogue and not only focus on parts of our offering. Through the incentive scheme we have created this year, they can benefit from the total relationship they have with Arrow. This is new and unique to us.

find that the distributors ignore the rest of the portfolio and focus only on the easy gains. We work on having a strong and healthy relationship with our existing vendor partners. One of our differentiators is that we do the full catalogue. I want to exhaust the potential on the existing brands before signing up new ones and disappointing the previous ones. Loyalty is the primary focus of Arrow.

Are there plans to onboard new vendors to your portfolio?

Our priority is to do a good job with the vendors that we have. Onboarding new vendors is a regular process but there is more to gain by doing the breadth of our vendor portfolio as opposed to just doing the most popular products. Vendors are always disappointed to

And how do you develop partners’ loyalty to Arrow?

We do this by serving and responding to partners’ needs, which includes pre-sales, lead generation, overdue processing and financial support.

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Which are some of your focus markets within the region?

Our focus markets are no different from the others –

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cover story Arrow

UAE, Qatar, KSA and Kuwait.

We are starting to work in Egypt and Iraq as well.

There is a lot of potential in these two markets.

What do you believe are the challenges for resellers today?

The main challenges for resellers are project management and getting paid in an orderly fashion.

The other challenge is finding a way into the cloud infrastructure and into software-as-a-service platform. In this regard, Arrow is betting hugely on ArrowSphere, which is our own cloud platform. It is our proprietary platform for distribution of cloud services, making it possible for our vendors and resellers to sell software and to sell IT as a service in the cloud mode.

Could you elaborate on ArrowSphere and other services that the company plans to launch in the region?

ArrowSphere has been operational for the last three years and we have over 1000 customers globally. One of our objectives for this year is to launch it in the region.

And when we do launch it, it is going to be through our partners only. This is one way in which we benefit from Arrow’s European worldwide scale.

We will also be launching Arrow Support Service Contracts for end users.

These services allow end

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users to have 24/7 high quality support on their installation, configuration, customer experience and on understanding how to use the technology that they have just bought with the support of expertise from Arrow Europe and Arrow EMEA. Partners can look forward to these two services within this year. We are only able to offer these services because of the support of Arrow Europe.

VSPEX Blue has been a game changer in the data centre solution as a software space, however the adoption levels are still fairly low in the region. What is Arrow’s take on this?

We should not be despondent about the slow approach to take up VSPEX Blue technology in the region. I believe 2015 will mark VSPEX Blue move from a niche category to one that delivers real business value, reaching new levels of deployment as organisations take the steps required to embrace it.

Trend Micro Deep Security delivers automated and highly scalable cloud security already selected by thousands of global customers to protect millions of servers. Deep Security powers Trend Micro’s Cloud and Data Center Security solution, providing market-leading security capabilities for physical, virtual, and cloud servers from a single integrated platform.

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As Arrow is the only distributor for VSPEX Blue in the Middle East and the biggest distributor for Trend Micro, we took this opportunity and provided our complete solution compute, network, hypervisor, storage and security as well. We tested the integration of Deep Security with VSPEX Blue in our own lab and we achieved amazing results, which can help all our customers to have full data centre solutions that have been built with security in mind.

How has the distribution process evolved in the last few years and what do you think will be the future?

In the last 10 years I have been with the company, one of the most noticeable changes has been the decline of margins at a distribution level. It has been reduced to half.

Although this is being compensated by increasing volume, it is something we cannot ignore.

Another observation is that large systems

“As Arrow is the only distributor for VSPEX Blue in the Middle East and the biggest distributor for Trend Micro, we took this opportunity and provided our complete solution.”

integrators still do not represent much business for us. The traditional VARs continue to survive and are going strong. They remain an inevitable part of the value chain, although many had predicted that SIs would take over.

Do you believe this will continue over the next few years?

Cloud will impact the channel business greatly. As the mode of delivery changes, telcos and SIs will have a second opportunity to capture the share of the market from the central services. But as of today I can confidently say that VARs remain indispensable to SIs and even to the telcos in this region. The skills and knowhow of VARs continue to play an important role. I don’t see it changing soon, however I see a part of that market moving into the cloud mode.

Where do you see Arrow in the next two years?

I see Arrow doubling, if not tripling its business in this region.

Emerging players

feature

budding businesses The regional channel landscape is constantly evolving owing to the dynamic nature of the business and the market. However, the opportunities for growth are also continuously increasing especially as new and emerging technologies and business models are developed. From advanced data centre solutions, cloud-based platforms, Big Data and analytics to mobile and social media trends, the prospects are only multiplying by the minute.

This month we take a look at emerging players in the region, ranging from vendors, distributors and partners, who have enhanced their offerings and grown their business to become forces to be reckoned with.

Read on to learn about the top 20 players from the region and their plans for the future.

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feature

Emerging players

Acronis

AGC Networks

Headed by: Serguei Beloussov, CEO and Guurprit Ahuja, Director, MEA (in picture)

Headed by: Sanjay Ahuja, Vice President, Middle East and Africa

Year of establishment in the region: 2009

Year of establishment in the region: 2010

Business objective: Establish a scalable business with strong partner ecosystem ensuring that industry gets the state of the art Backup, DR and collaboration solutions both on premise and cloud models

Business objective: Architect our customer’s technology landscape to ensure Return on Technology Investment (ROTI) while being relatively brand agnostic

In-country presence in: United Arab Emirates

In-country presence in: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and Tanzania

No. of employees: 5 (including funded head counts)

No. of employees: 70 (Middle East & Africa only)

Top Distributors: iAxcess, Redington

Top vendors: Aruba, Avaya, Cisco, HP, Juniper, Polycom and Riverbed

Top partners: Fixit, Alphadata, Cadgulf, Enterprise Objectives Recent channel activities: Enabled and certified 50 plus partners in the past four months and launched a dynamic partner programme Factors driving regional growth: Partner enablement, POCs , end customer engagements Y-o-Y growth: 70 percent Market differentiators: Credibility of the Acronis backup and DR solutions that have been supporting physical, virtual and cloud environments with a clear migration path among them. Large enterprises have been using the same since more than six years and more are conducting POCs to validate it. Large SIs are adopting Acronis Cloud model to cater to the SMBs who have the compelling need for backup and DR but don’t want to invest into CAPEX or manpower.

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Factors driving regional growth • From solution perspective - Data centre solutions, cyber-security, A/V • From regional perspective – Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Saudi Arabia Future plans • Beef up technical resources in data centre, cybersecurity and A/V technology verticals to take advantage of growth in these three areas • Deploy Security Operations Centre (SOC) services to complement cyber-security portfolio • Round out data centre offering by adding solutions from Veeam and Sanovi Y-o-Y growth: 80 percent Market differentiators: Managed services offering, cyber-security solutions, business analytics, niche data centre technologies

AirWatch

Business DNA

Headed by: Ian Evans, SVP and EMEA Managing Director

Headed by: Tarek El Goweiny, CEO and Co-Founder

Year of establishment in the region: 2011

Year of establishment in the region: 2013

Business objective • In the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016, the AirWatch channel business objective is to grow the number of partners in each of the countries in the Middle East region.

• To achieve this, we’ll be leveraging the fully established partner network that VMware has successfully built over the past few years in the EMEA region.

Business objective: To develop and implement end-to-end mobility smart enterprise solutions to our customers, to earn outstanding customer satisfaction and to be a profitable venture for our shareholders.

In-country presence in: UAE No. of employees: 320 staff across EMEA region Top partners: EMW and ITS

In-country presence in: UAE, India No. of employees: 50 Top vendors: AT&T, Dell Sonicwall, Microsoft, Motorola, Revision, Sage, Wincor Nixdorf, VMware, Zebra Technologies, Cisco, HP, Samsung Recent channel activities: Events with HP and Samsung

Recent channel activities • In July 2014, AirWatch became available through VMware’s existing global VMware channel network.

• As a result, AirWatch gained access to a network of 75,000 established VMware distribution and reseller partners to bring AirWatch product offerings to the MENA region.

Factors driving regional growth: The need for enterprise solutions with mobility and smart options

Future plans • To focus on the newly acquired VMware resellers to ensure that we’re giving them the best support and capability to execute within the territory.

• To further develop our channel network by delivering in-country partner and reseller training and certification through our upcoming Dubaibased two-day AirWatch Connect workshop in November.

Market differentiators: End-to-end mobility smart enterprise solutions

Future plans: Participation at GITEX Technology Week 2015 Y-o-Y growth: 21 percent

Y-o-Y growth: 11.4 percent

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Emerging players

DVCOM Technology

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Evanssion

Headed by: Renjan George, Managing Director

Headed by: Ashok Chakravarthi Arulmozhi, Managing Director

Year of establishment in the region: 2007

Year of establishment in the region: 2010

Business objective: Determined to be recognised as a leading value-added distributor and solution provider for the Unified Communication needs of customers

Business objective: To passionately evangelise emerging technologies through our strong partner base in the field of cloud infrastructure and information security, which helps organisations, optimise and enhance IT operations. We support and enable our partners with intense domain understanding and technical capabilities through our centre of excellence.

In-country presence in: Dubai, Oman, KSA, Kuwait, Bahrain, Sudan and India No. of employees: 25 Top vendors: Digium, Yealink, Draytek, Yeastar and 2N Recent channel activities: Draytek Channel Champ Event, Yealink Marathon Factors driving regional growth: Increased adoption of open source telephony by large enterprises, focused roadshows and channel enablement initiatives in the region, diversifying into physical security, IP PA systems and surveillance Future plans: Participant at GITEX 2015 and is working closely with events in the Open Source space Y-o-Y growth: 65 percent Market differentiators: Expertise on the open source technology especially in the Unified Communication space

In-country presence in: UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, North Africa, India No. of employees: 35 Top vendors: Nutanix, Dell Security, Entrust, WatchDox, Elastica, Accelops, Skybox Security Recent channel activities: Partner enablement sessions, sales workshops, certified technical training, end-user roadshows Factors driving regional growth: Initiatives towards Hyper Converged Data Centres, key government initiatives towards Smart Government, private and public cloud adoption driven by cost optimisation and operational effectiveness Future plans • Implementing our effective model to reach out to large enterprise customers in the region along with our partner base by collaborating in areas of sales, pre-sales, consulting and training • Increase regional foot print and 100 percent increase in resources within the next 12 months • Enable and empower more partners in the region

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Emerging players

Go Green Solutions

Granteq Distribution

Headed by: Ramy Beddah, Managing Director

Headed by: Girish Narayanan, Managing Director

Year of establishment in the region: 2009

Year of establishment in the region: 2004

Business objective: Go Green Solutions is the authorised B2B partner and distributor of Samsung in the Gulf. The company’s vision is to be the region’s largest B2B distributor in the IT industry. Within the next three years, we aim to achieve this by adding value to the corporates and public sector through linking technological innovation with business solutions

Business objective: Growing market share via IT resellers and systems integrators

In-country presence in: UAE No. of employees: 25 Top vendor: Samsung Recent channel activities: Channel recruitment event, launch of channel campaigns such as Trade-In Program, Printer Replacement, Buy Back for Samsung Hospitality (exclusive partner since June 2015) Factors driving regional growth: Growth in hospitality and real estate sector, demand in smart homes segment Future plans: Provide packaged solutions for specific industries especially hospitality, healthcare and real estate Y-o-Y growth: 15 percent Market differentiators: Focused on Samsung Enterprise solutions in verticals such as education, healthcare, government, hospitality, retail and finance

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In-country presence in: Middle East, Africa and India No. of employees: 100 plus Top vendors: CTOUCH, Vidyo, Phoenix, Lightspeed, Vivitek have been our key vendors. Overall, we have 100 plus channel partners and vendors across the globe.

Factors driving regional growth: Single point of accountability, proven capability and expertise, reinvestment of revenue in R&D, long standing relationships with vendors and channel partners.

Future plans: Larger market reach Y-o-Y growth: 30 percent Market differentiators: Granteq Distribution is a technology melting pot and are rapidly expanding into MEA markets to bridge the gap of innovative integrated audio visual, communication and controls technology.

Interactive Intelligence ME

Inobits ME

Headed by: Dr. Don Brown, CEO and Shaheen Haque, Middle East Territory Manager (in picture)

Headed by: De Wet Klopper, Managing Director

Year of establishment in the region: 2008, although we have been here for around 15 years via partnerships

Year of establishment in the region: 2003

Business objective: Interactive Intelligence provides software and cloud services for customer engagement, Unified Communications and collaboration to help businesses worldwide improve service, increase productivity and reduce costs.

In-country presence in: UAE and KSA No. of employees: 2200 globally, 10 located in Middle East region Top partners: EMW Middle East, Fourth Dimensions Systems, TACME, Bahwan ITON, Ibtekkar, Universe Computers, ATSI Recent channel activities: MECC’15 Expo - Dubai UAE, Interactions 2015 – Indianapolis USA, Interactive Intelligence Middle East Users Conference – Dubai UAE Factors driving regional growth: Increased demand in replacement of legacy contact centre technologies and recent Smart Government and e-Government initiatives have paved the uptake of contact centres within the public sector Future plans • Focus on promotion of Interaction PureCloud Collaborate, which is a free of charge cloud communication offering • Exhibit and attend at some key events within the region.

• Complete sign-up of some key resellers

Business objective: Enable public and private institutions across the Middle East to quickly build and run any process-driven application they can imagine at the speed of their business demands. We are the sole regional distributor for K2 business applications software in the Middle East.

In-country presence in: Dubai, UAE No. of employees: 15-20 Top partners: Top K2 VAR partners for 2015 will be announced at the end of the fiscal year Recent channel activities • K2 raised more than $100 million in funding earlier this year to fuel global growth of the K2 platform • The ME saw 45 percent growth in new K2 customers so far in 2015 versus the same period last year • The number of VAR partners in the Middle East has doubled in the last 18 months Factors driving regional growth • Regional Smart Government initiatives and focus on eServices and process automation • The global rise of scalable ‘no code’/ ‘low code’ development platforms for mid-market and enterprise organisations Future plans • Expansion of K2 VAR partner channel to satisfy demand in growing markets such as UAE, KSA, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Egypt Y-o-Y growth: 25 percent

www.resellerme.com

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Emerging players

Levtech Consulting

OMA Emirates

Headed by: Manjunanth T.R, Managing Director

Headed by: Niranj Sangal, Group CEO

Year of establishment in the region: 2009

Year of establishment in the region: 1991

Business objective: To be a global consulting company with specialised expertise in multiple verticals and technology platforms

Business objective: Software Solution and Services

In-country presence in: UAE, Qatar, KSA, India, Singapore and US

No. of employees: 220

No. of employees: 175 Top vendors: Microsoft and Infor Recent channel activities: Signed a partnership for Infor Enterprise Asset Management, won award as Microsoft Dynamics partner of the year for MEA Factors driving regional growth: Focus on quality and customer service, differentiation through IP and vertical-specific consulting expertise, maturity in implementation and support services Future plans:  Growing our CRM practice on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, expansion in Qatar and KSA through deployment of local resources Y-o-Y growth: 20 percent Market differentiators: We have a very consistent track record in delivering successful implementations, which is backed by strong customer references. We deliver quality customer service and vertical-specific consulting expertise.

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In-country presence in: Sharjah, Dubai - UAE

Top vendor: Ingenico Group Factors driving regional growth: Market open to outsource its activities to vendors that have a professional setup and scope to its services.

Future plans: Expand our solution, value-added and managed services to other countries, provide ROI based solutions to different industries, keeping faster time for deployment and low cost in mind Y-o-Y growth: 48 percent Market differentiators: One-point-shop for all industry requirements in solution and services

Primavera Business Software Solutions (BSS)

QNAP

Headed by: Jorge Marques, Country Manager

Headed by: Teddy Kuo, CEO; David Chiang, MD and Alvin Wu, Sales Director (in picture)

Year of establishment in the region: 2014

Year of establishment in the region: 2015

Business objective: 1,500,000 AED in 2015

Business objective: QNAP Systems, as per its brand promise ‘Quality Network Appliance Provider’, aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting-edge Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Network Video Recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability. The Taiwan-based company integrates technologies and designs to bring forth quality products that effectively improve business efficiency on file sharing, virtualisation applications, storage management and surveillance in the business environments, as well as enrich entertainment life for home users with the offering of a fun multimedia centre experience

In-country presence in: Direct office in Dubai with partners in both Dubai and Sharjah No. of employees: 260 (globally) Top reseller partners: Abacus IT, Prologix, Transnational Computers Recent channel activities: Partner training sessions, launch of POLLEN – referral programme for accountants, ICAI sponsoring, joint marketing events, support in large scale events like GITEX Factors driving regional growth: Growing interest in specific solutions in verticals such as construction, motivated by the structural projects happening in the UAE and GCC, need of more sophisticated and integrated software solutions that at the same time are affordable Future plans: Support partners’ participation at GITEX, training for income new partners Y-o-Y growth: More than 100 percent Market differentiators: Primavera’s solutions are: cost effective, can be used per module according with the number of users that each company has, can be integrated with other business processes and software, ERP solutions allow consolidated performance from planning all the way through to reporting, boosting profitability

In-country presence in: UAE No. of employees: Globally – 800, Dubai - 2 Top reseller partners • NAS disty: Global Distribution, FDC, Logicom • NAS sub-disty: Microtop, Newcom, Datacare • NVR disty: NIT, IPTEC, Tabbara Recent channel activities • NAS technology information education for end user and reseller partners • Increase channel partners Future plans • New products launch conference in Dubai on 7th October • GITEX Technology Week 2015 • NIT ‘Growing together’ partner event in Muscat on 8th September • OFSEC from 14th – 17th September

www.resellerme.com

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Emerging players

Sirocco Arabia

Spire Solutions

Headed by: Niklas Wikström, Regional Managing Director

Headed by: Sanjeev Walia, Chief Executive Officer

Year of establishment in the region: 2015

Year of establishment in the region: 2008

Business Objective: To become the leading CRM consultancy firm in the Middle East In-country presence in: Sweden, US, UAE

Business objective: To be a continued leader in the VAD space focused on information security and be of constant value to partners and customers with matchless service

No. of employees: 30 globally

In-country presence in: Dubai

Top vendors: Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM

No. of employees: > 20

Factors driving regional growth: With a focused effort on the region from a global perspective, we view the MENA region as our biggest opportunity to grow, so our resources are very much aligned to support this region in particular in the coming years. I have 7.5 years’ experience in the region and have a good understanding of how to create business here.

Future plans: We are ready to take on large contracts and to continue our efforts in transforming the way many companies here view business and CRM into a more focused approach.

Market Differentiators: We are quite unique in that we focus solely on CRM, and we always work from a business value point of view rather than a technical point of view. The CRM platforms are there to support your business and they should be tailored to suit your business and your processes, not the other way around.

Top vendor / reseller partners: Rapid7, SolarWinds Recent channel activities: Rapid 7 Channel Partner meet in May 2015, Damballa Channel Partner meet in July 2015, SolarWinds Annual Partner Meets in April 2015, improved sales and support programmes, closed door round tables in three cities, continuous partner enablement and marketing support for partners Future plans • Provide a broader range of products and services for our clients • Sponsorship and active participation in the following high-profile cyber-security events: - RSA Conference 2015 Abu Dhabi | 4th-5th Nov - Cyber Defence Summit 2015 Qatar | 13th-14th Sept 2015 - GCC Cyber Security Summit 2015 Abu Dhabi | 13th-15th Sept Y-o-Y growth: 300 percent Market differentiators: We have successfully endeavored to anticipate and identify challenges faced by organisations and proactively provide effective solutions that help improve their security posture.

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Tech Forte Systems

Telephony Communication Technologies

Headed by: Nadeem Khan, General Manager

Headed by: Mohammed Shafi Abdullah, Managing Director

Year of establishment in the region: 2012

Year of establishment in the region: 2003

Business objective: Being a member of the Global Solutions Network and a leading systems integrator in the UAE, the aim is to continue offering valueadded solutions in data and networking, virtualisation, storage and security, enterprise and mobility, voice and telephony, CCTV, structured cabling, access control and backup. We provide complete end-to-end IT solutions catering to the ever evolving IT business needs, especially in the public sector and education verticals

Business objective: To be the leading ICT solution provider in the region with global reach by providing cost-effective customer-oriented services

In-country presence in: UAE No. of employees: 35 Top vendors: Microsoft, Huawei, Avaya, NetApp, VMWare, Veeam, HP, Overland, Pure Storage, Epson, Fujitsu, Kaspersky, ESET Future plans: We continue to strengthen our position in the public sector and education verticals and plan to win additional accounts, while further developing our offering and expertise in IT Infrastructure.

Y-o-Y growth: 20 percent Market differentiators • We do consultative selling, which is above and beyond simply responding to a request for a quote • We focus on developing ROI for your customer by helping them do what’s right for their business • We use our expertise and understand our customers before proposing a solution.

• We do proper due diligence before we approach our customer and work very close with vendors

In-country presence: UAE, Qatar, Oman, KSA and India No. of employees: 800 plus Top vendors: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, HP, Fujitsu, Dell Software Recent channel activities: Customer events, press releases, sales incentives, branding in showrooms Factors driving regional growth: Cost-effective, 24/7 support by well experienced engineers Future plans: Telemarketing with dedicated staffs, customer events in different locations across the region, customer testimonials Y-o-Y growth: 30 percent Market differentiators: Excellent after-sales support through strategically located support centres across the region within Middle East. We have one of the largest teams in the industry. We offer all ICT solutions under one roof, which delivers through in-house resources.

www.resellerme.com

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Emerging players

Think Software Services

Vocalcom ME

Headed by: Deepak Verma, Managing Director

Headed by: Ali Kassab, Executive Vice President, Corporate Growth, Middle East, Africa and APAC

Year of establishment in the region: 2004

Year of establishment in the region: 2006

Business objective: Systems Integrator with services as core focus In-country presence in: UAE and India

Business objective: Connecting to customers, effortless contact centre solution, cloud contact centre solution, enabling business growth and enhancing customer digital experience

No. of employees: 75

In-country presence in: Middle East, Africa & Asia

Top vendors: Dell, Dell Software, McAfee, Microsoft, Nutanix, EMC and Barracuda

No. of employees: 35

Factors driving regional growth: Increasingly complex solutions, lack of technical skills, high threat perception on security, spent on security growing in double digits Future plans: consolidate, build CoE (Centre of Excellence), skill engineers and onshore offshore delivery model Y-o-Y growth: 40 percent Market differentiators: SI capabilities across infra, network and security with skilled resources and onshore offshore delivery model

Top partners: NCR, Tech Mahindra, ILS, Hao Sao, KBM, IED, Dreambox and Infoline Recent channel activities: • Vocalcom Partner Conference 11th June • Vocalcom Partner Training 8th, 9th and 10th June • Tech Mahindra partnership agreement • NCR partnership agreement • Launch of Cloud Platform in UAE Factors driving regional growth: Customer journey mapping, cross industries expectations, 80 percent of customer interaction are done vocal and explosion of social media and mobile users Future plans: GITEX Technology Week, 2nd Annual Call Centre Summit and French Tech Tour 2015 JapanKorea-Taiwan Y-o-Y growth: 50 percent Market differentiators: Multi-channel unified operations, omni-channel, web customer engagement, social media monitoring and engagement, retail customer engagement, dash board and omni-channel survey, speech analytics and cloud available

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Inspiring . Enabling . Empowering

Channels Al-Jammaz Distribution is the leading Saudi based IT company, which distributes advanced technology products, solutions and services in the areas of networking, data and voice communications, Computers, Servers, storage, wireless mobility and broadband access.

We work with System integrators; VAR’s; , Retails; network solution providers and service providers as our main partners; therefore, Al-jammaz Distribution policy is to serve its partners as a trusted ally, providing them with the loyalty of a business partner and the economics of an outside vendor. We make sure that our partners receives what they need to run their businesses as well as possible, with maximum efďŹ ciency and reliability, so we give them the assurance that we will be there when they need us...

Sales: sales@al-jammaz.com

Support: support@al-jammaz.com

Information: info@al-jammaz.com

The Leading Saudi Arabian In-country Value-Added Distributor

920 000 230 | www.al-jammaz.com |

.com/aljammazdisti

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Managed services

Strategy of services Increasing number of partners are finding managed services as a lucrative business offering.

Reseller ME investigates how they can go the extra mile to further maximise the opportunities present in the market.

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Regional organisations are gradually beginning to outsource more and more IT functions to third party service providers in order to shrink their operational costs and enhance productivity. However, according to most experts, the adoption levels within the region continue to be sluggish. But the good news is this will not be the case for long. A report from the research firm, IDC, forecasts the market for managed and data centre services in UAE to reach a total of $971.8 million by 2018.

Managed services (MS) offer enterprises the chance to concentrate on its core business and leverage the opportunities from innovative technologies such as cloud, mobile, analytics and social, instead of fussing about upgrades and integrations.

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, Help AG, says, “The transition from product to service based sales is one that is driven by customer demands. In all fairness it is still limited what requirements we are seeing in this field.

We are living in a region where IT spending

Challenges for an MSP • Realising the need for an organisational transformation at the partner level • Staying at the top of the game in terms of the expertise partners offer • Remaining up-to-date on current and future market trends • Delivering correct quality service level to customers • Being able to offer customised solutions and services depending on each customer’s unique requirements • Acquiring skilled and experienced workforce and retaining them • Emphasising on the service aspect more than just devices • Ensuring to be a ‘trusted advisor’ for customers are increasing and organisations can spend money on solutions. In large parts of the world, the uptake of managed services is also driven by taxtechnical reasons, which are not present to the same extent here.

“For the same reason, uptake of services will be centered around the complexity in efficiently managing technology, which is why we are very optimistic about the aspects of information security as a topic for managed services.”

Agreeing, Emir Susic, Senior Director, Avaya, adds, “There is an operational

Managed services offer enterprises the chance to concentrate on its core business and leverage the opportunities from innovative technologies.

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as well as a competitiveness angle to this – the business that aligns its IT and business divisions seamlessly for disruptive transformation is also one that will be more competitive due to transformed operations and delivery systems.

“A shift in customer preference towards managed services means that the channel needs to establish themselves as the expert partners in this transformation. More experience would naturally improve the consulting offered, but proactive steps should become businessas-usual, such as intensified training and certification, and a stronger grasp of technology trends and their relevance.”

PARTNERS’ PROSPECTS The strive to be a trusted advisor for customers is something partners should look at more seriously, especially when it comes

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Managed services

to managed services. The prospects in this space are increasing rapidly as organisations seek to focus on what drives the most business.

“Partners are seeing the potential of managed services, particularly in the networks and security segments. Besides new business, there is also scope for repeat business if you deliver quality to your customers, so this is really a great form of sustainable business,” says Maya Zakhour, Channel Director, Middle East, Fortinet. “With the right level of education and support from vendors, partners will be well equipped to handle the demand and benefit from it.”

Ahmad Mike Khattab, Vice President, Sales, Growth Regions, Vision Solutions, says, “Our partners in the region are aware of the potential in this area. They also know how to profit from it. They structure the whole offering to serve their customer base around our solutions.

They are offering disaster recovery, or high availability depending on the RTO

Our partners in the region are aware of the potential in this area. They also know how to profit from it. They structure the whole offering to serve their customer base around our solutions. They are offering disaster recovery, or high availability depending on the RTO and RPO of their customer base.”

Ahmad Mike Khattab, Vice President, Sales, Growth Regions, Vision Solutions

and RPO of their customer base.”

Although the opportunities in this space are lucrative, partners need to identify what their business objective is first, as managed services may not be everyone’s cup of tea, says Naresh Kothari, Managing Director, Intertec Systems.

“There is a mix of what managed services means for partners and customers.

Some mix it with resource outsourcing and few do the capital investments to run an effective managed service. This could differ due to investment appetite, customer segment or experience. This is not a

short term profit business and is not meant for everyone. Typically it leads to three to five year recurring engagements requiring heavy investments upfront with NOC, tools and consultants.

It needs strong processes, operations and technology experience on service management,” he explains.

For organisations that are focused on IT service and IT service management, MS is a long-term business, irrespective of if it is managed services on IT infrastructure or applications.

According to Kothari, by being customer centric and close to customers,

Partners need to remember to simplify everything for the customer, from the very beginning. Make sure, the MPS solution that is being offered to the customer is explained in his own language and simplest manner. Don’t discuss complex workflows or solutions, and simply explain them the benefit derived out of the same.”

Ravinder Kumar, General Manager, Business Solutions Division, Sharp Middle East and Africa

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partners can identify and grab opportunities at an early stage for providing MS. Partners should find the repeat business aspect of MS most interesting.

In a time of declining margins and other financial challenges, being able to attain a steady and continuous income can go a long way in reducing cashflow issues.

Ravinder Kumar, General Manager, Business Solutions Division, Sharp Middle East and Africa, says, “We have seen that partners who are already engaged in Managed Print Services (MPS) have far better business insight about latest trends and applications, which are going to impact MPS business in the near future.

“Partners need to remember to simplify everything for the customer, from the very beginning. Make sure, the MPS solution that is being offered to the customer is explained in his own language and simplest manner. Don’t discuss complex workflows or solutions, and simply

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Managed services

explain them the benefit derived out of the same.”

VENDORS SPEAK As is the case with most upcoming technologies and new services, vendors have an important role in educating and training the partners to identify the potential of the managed services market.

Susic from Avaya says, “Some customers, and many partners in the early days of a new technology, place a premium on the vendor’s participation in the consulting and execution phases. Joint projects such as these can quickly ramp up the partner teams as they see the real-world application of solutions.”

“Partners are the touch points into the market, so it is important that vendors offer them as much support as possible.

This is why at Fortinet we continually invest time and resources into ensuring that our partners are always up-to-date on our solutions, and are aware of any new happenings in the field. We also have on-ground engineers who can assist partners if the need arises. It is a twoway street but vendors should take the initiative to cultivate productive relationships with their partners, so that mutual objectives are achieved,” explains Zakhour from Fortinet.

It is critical for vendors to spend the time and investments in enabling their channel partners to maximise the opportunities present.

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Keys to delivering managed services “Our approach is focused around delivering services locally, in line with leading security policies, frameworks and technologies, delivered by highly competent resources developed over years of protecting our customers. Of course local data collection is a must, so we will focus on offering localised event logging either through a UAE-based data centre or even a service offering where data does not leave the customer’s environment. One of the corner stones of our offerings is delivering flexible services which combines monitoring, event analysis, and remediation on customer equipment through either remote or on-site response teams defined by strict SLAs.” Nicolai Solling, Director, Technology Services, Help AG “Delivering managed services first starts with a deep understanding of current status and aspirational status of service levels, and understanding what is required to size and transition to meet the SLAs. This transformation involves a strong focus on end user satisfaction and productivity.”

Naresh Kothari, Managing Director, Intertec Systems.

“As in all market shifts, the primary responsibility for all players in the technology ecosystem – vendors and partners – is to upskill themselves to the level of trusted advisors to their customers.The channel market is moving up the value chain with more resellers becoming systems integrators at different scales. This also calls for an enhanced skill-set than was earlier sufficient, and while talent can be brought into supplement the skill shortfall, it often also calls for significant training for the broader team as well. At Avaya, we work with our partners to ensure that we jointly build expertise so that we can leverage existing and new opportunities effectively.”

Emir Susic, Senior Director, Avaya

www.resellerme.com

Managed and data centre services in UAE to reach a total of

$971.8 million by 2018. (source: IDC)

Kumar says, “Vendors can help partners by assisting them to choose the right product for the right customer, and communicating field-based training related to products, softwares and services.

Sometimes, it is beneficial for a little hand-holding in a few cases, which could take a partner to great distances.”

The single most important aspect for partners to keep in mind and acknowledge is that without upskilling or educating themselves on the latest developments in the market, they will not be in a position to be the trusted advisor that most customers are now seeking.

Only two types of partners have the potential to be successful in emerging business models such as MS – ones who work hard to take advantage of the existing opportunities in the market and the ones who look at a circumstance and creates the opportunity. Vendors can only do so much because at the end of the day it is really up to the partners to take charge and cash in on all the prospects.

Partner watch Condo Protego

All about data Savitha Bhaskar, CEO, Condo Protego, explains how the Symantec-Veritas split affects partners and discusses plans to tap into the SMB market.

Data is considered to be an important asset for not only the large enterprises but also the small and medium businesses. And increasingly it is becoming all about the data.

When Condo Protego was set up 10 years ago, the aim was not to be a generalist or a trader.

Observing that there weren’t too many pure play consultative-led companies in enterprise IT who focused on niche areas, the systems integrator was inspired to focus on the data stack.

The company, whose name means in Latin ‘to store and to protect’, was built around data - from developing a team that have a deep understanding of how data needs to be handled to grasping the concept of data being considered as business assets.

“It is truly all about the data – where it is stored, how to protect it and how to secure the access to it.

We decided to focus on the data stack and till date that continues to be our objective,” says Savitha Bhaskar, CEO, Condo Protego.

Symantec and Veritas separation news has been ongoing for the better part of this year. Last month, Symantec announced that the data storage company, Veritas Technologies has been acquired by the private equity firm, Carlyle Group for $8 billion.

What does this split mean for regional partners?

She says, “We were originally a Veritas partner and when Symantec acquired it in 2005, we became a Symantec partner too. And what that brought to us was an additional product set, from which we

“The criticality of data is as important to SMBs as it is for enterprises. They have the enterprise requirement to protect the crucial data.”

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could select what we needed and add to our portfolio.

“Similarly, now that they have split up, we have to evaluate what it means for us. The first thing to note is that the split does not take anything away because we build our practice around Veritas. Had the split happened four or five years ago, it would have made a difference to our business because then we wouldn’t have been skilled up on the Symantec products enough to qualify as their highest level partner.”

However, today the SI is focusing on security separately and can be Symantec’s independent highest qualified partner.

She adds, “We do enough revenue with them and have the technical capabilities around both solutions.

So going forward, we will be the top partners for both independently. The positive aspect from the split is that the companies are organically aligned to solutions – one is information management and the other is security. I believe that will bring in more focus.”

The regional partners who have invested

into upskilling on both technologies will not be at a disadvantage with the split.

And as far as Condo Protego goes, “There really aren’t any downsides.”

Although the SI boasts a customer base of 256 enterprises in the UAE, the company also has plans to tap into the SMB market.

“Initially when we started out, the solutions we sold were around enterprise class technologies needed by large enterprises. But today data is vital even for SMBs. The criticality of data is as important to SMBs as it is for enterprises. They have the enterprise requirement to protect the crucialdata.”

Currently, the company sells solutions across both segments, but are more focused on sales coverage in mid to large, rather than SMBs, strictly from a coverage perspective.

“We don’t have a sales coverage for SMBs but we do telemarketing and lead generation. However those are more referral businesses.

Although, we don’t proactively do business development, we do have a SMB customer base and will be developing this going forward.”

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Share faster as a tablet.

FZCO P.O.Box: 17543, Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 870 3333 Fax: +971 4 870 3330 www.fdcinternational.com Tests document performance of components on a particular test, in specific systems. Differences in hardware, software, or configuration will affect actual performance. Consult other sources of information to evaluate performance as you consider your purchase.

1 Test and System Configurations: Acer* IconiaA1-830 (A1311) – Intel® Atom™ Processor Z2560 (1.6 GHz, 4T2C) OS: Android 4.2.2; Mem: 1 GB; Storage: 11.52 GB; Display: 7.9 Inch; Res: 1024x768; Browser: Chrome v33.0.1750.136; Acer* IconiaA1-810 - MediaTek* MT 8125 (1.2 GHz, 4T4C) OS: Android 4.2.2; Mem: 1 GB; Storage: 16 GB; Display: 7.9 Inch; Res: 768x1024; Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U;Android 4.2.2; en-us; A1-810 Build/JDQ39);.

For more complete information about performance and benchmark results, visit http://www.intel.com/performance.

Copyright © 2015 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Atom, Intel. Experience What’s Inside, the Intel. Experience What’s Inside logo, Intel Inside and the Intel Inside logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. * Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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Alcatel OneTouch

REVIEW

Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 RME RATING

Adelle Geronimo test drives Alcatel’s latest flagship smartphone, and looks into the pros and cons of the device.

Snapshot Alcatel OneTouch has certainly done a great job to their latest flagship phone, making this mostly plastic device look elegant. The blend of the silver plastic edges, and the mattegrey back all contribute to making the Idol 3 eye-catching.

This lightweight smartphone offers good functionality which is notable, however, perhaps the phone’s ‘cherry on top’ is its reversibility.

Staying true to this product line’s slogan – ‘Upside Down,’ users will be very much impressed with Idol 3’s reversible feature where the whole display automatically flips upside down allowing continuous use of the phone for multimedia, messaging and even for answering calls, thanks to a microphone and a speaker both above and below the display. Unless you’re using the rear-facing camera, there really is no wrong way of picking it up.

The phone is equipped with a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 Octa-core 64-bit processor with 2GB of RAM, which makes it quite snappy when used for basic tasks. However, if you are a major multitasker this might not be a device for you, as it becomes a bit sluggish when used for more demanding tasks.

On another note, the battery life is quite impressive, it’s 2910 mAh cell guarantees more than enough juice for a usual busy day, and mostly lasts up to two days.

Idol 3 sports a 13-megapixel (MP) rear camera with a single LED flash, and an 8MP on the front. There really is nothing much to complain about the cameras as the quality of images they produce are generally good. The colours are great, so overall, great snappers.

The device also features Alcatel’s own apps built into the phone, but what makes the smartphone a bit more interesting is its music app.

5.5-inch Full HD 1080 IPS LCD screen Snapdragon 615 quad-core CPU with Adreno 405 GPU 13-megapixel main camera with LED flash JBL-powered front-facing speakers Android 5.0 Lollipop 8-megapixel front-facing camera 2GB RAM

It works like a typical music player, where you can browse and queue up tracks, but it also incorporates a DJ software by Mixvibes, so you can flip the app into landscape, a mixer comes up, and you can dial in your inner DJ. Available at reasonable prices, AED 899 (4.7-inch) and AED 1099 (5.5-inch), Idol 3 is a handy and satisfying mobile device to have even with some of its minor issues. It also comes in 16GB and 32GB storages, for single SIM and dual SIM variants, respectively.

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REVIEW

Razor

Razor Blade 3T

Razor’s latest Blade 3T is exceptionally designed for hard-core gamers with almost nothing to dislike, says Annie Bricker.

RME RATING

The Blade 3T is Razer’s newest and most powerful gaming laptop aimed at cornering the market in mobile gaming computers. The gaming powerhouse has an Intel Core i7 processor and a solid state drive under the hood, which Razer boasts as four times faster than previous models. But a gaming machine is about more than power, and Razer has given the B3T and Full 1080 HD, 3200 x 1800 resolution display with 262 PPI, which can also operate as a touch screen. Bringing the games to life on the anti-gloss display is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M graphics card. The machine itself is compact, with Razer purporting that it is literally “thinner than a dime”.

Designed specifically for gamers, the machine has many attributes 60

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that while nice to the average consumer, are probably overkill, like the gaming grade keyboard for instance. The green backlit keys are stylish, but not necessary for the word processing crowd. The same can be said for the anti-glare display, powerful graphics card and processor. However, with compact and sturdy construction, a powerful engine and full HD display, the B3T is a gamer’s delight.

Taking it on a test drive, the machine could handle The Witcher on maximum quality settings.

However, it was a little bit laggy when switching between the native 3200 x 1800 resolution and the game’s 2048 x 1152 resolution when optimised. At maximum settings, the FPS dropped slightly and the audio was out of sync at first. That being said, after a few hiccups, the video was absolutely

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amazing. Sharp details and vivid colours enhanced the overall experience.

As for hardware, it is a beautiful piece of machinery. It is light without feeling cheap and, in spite of its size, still perfectly capable of handling the most PCU heavy game of the year.

The resolution is great, and the audio was clear without any crackle or ping.

The screen is slightly small for gaming, though it is great for a secondary, portable machine. Backlit keys give it an exceptionally sleek look.

In all, this is a great machine. For basic office work, it is surely overkill, but that is akin to complaining that the latest Lamborghini isn’t a great family vehicle. That is simply not its function. For gaming, it hits all the marks, with the exception of the screen size – a small sacrifice for portability.

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For sponsorship enquiries

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The Hot 50 Awards honour channel players who have worked effectively to create value in the industry. The Awards are open to vendors, distributors, resellers, systems integrators and power retailers.

For the first time in the region, Reseller Middle East is organising an enterprise channel meet – Reseller MEet, offering vendors and distributors an opportunity to target partners they want to know better in a unique format, which allows a mix of methods such as – oneto-one meetings, company booths and private lunch.

To make the most of these two flagships events, hurry and contact us now.

Rajashree Rammohan Publishing Director raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5685 +971 50 173 9987 Chris Stevenson Commercial Director chris.stevenson@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5674 Kausar Syed Group Sales Director kausar.syed@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 1647 Merle Carrasco Sales Manager merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5676 For general and agenda-related enquiries Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5678 For registration enquiries

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Samsung unveils Galaxy Note5

Dell releases new SonicWALL TZ Wireless Firewall Series

Dell has launched the Dell SonicWALL TZ Wireless Firewall Series, a line of wireless network security solutions that enable both small- and mid-sized businesses and large distributed enterprises to realise the benefits of enterprise-class 802.11ac wireless performance and security, with a simple network set-up and management console, all at a lower total cost of ownership.

Among the key benefits of the new Dell SonicWALL TZ Wireless Series include having a deep packet inspection to scrub traffic using an array of intrusion prevention, SSL decryption and inspection, application control, and content filtering technologies, all of which provide broad protection from unwanted intrusions, corrupt websites, and hidden malware. The Dell SonicWALL TZ600 features 67 percent faster DPI performance than the Fortinet FG-100D firewall.

The Dell SonicWALL TZ300 Wireless-AC, TZ400 WirelessAC and TZ500 Wireless-AC are available immediately, while the SOHO Wireless-N solution will be available this month.

Samsung Electronics has unveiled the fifth generation of the Galaxy Note in the GCC. Sporting a better designed S Pen and next-level wireless charging technology.

Equipped with a 5.7-inch screen, the device is the latest addition to Samsung’s Galaxy Note series—the large-screen phone or phablet category.

The new Note is equipped with a large Quad HD Super AMOLED screen and a number of productivity tools such as ‘SideSync,’ along with much refined S Pen capabilities to better serve the major multitasker.

A unique clicking mechanism allows users to pop the S Pen out with just one quick click. Users can now quickly

jot down ideas or information when the screen is off without even unlocking the phone and this feature is known as Black Screen Memo. It also has an increased 4GB RAM and offers the most powerful capacity and processing power. It also features Samsung’s fast wired and wireless charging technology.

Brother launches new line of desktop scanners Brother International (Gulf ) has recently announced the UAE availability of its new desktop scanners– PDS-5000 and PDS6000 fit for high volume scanning needs.

These new and enhanced devices play an important role in the document lifecycle of small and mid-sized businesses (SMB); increasing efficiency for businesses in industries such as healthcare, retail, education, finance, legal and more, according to the vendor.

The new high-speed PDS-5000 and PDS-6000 scanners address SMBs’ needs of document capture workflow.

The new PDS models feature increased speed and throughput allowing for higher quality images and larger file sizes, as well as improved image

processing and compatibility through drivers and award-winning bundled software solutions.

Kofax VRS compatibility enables the PDS-series devices to deliver the bestpossible image quality through improved optical character recognition (OCR) processing. These models also support a USB 3.0 interface as well as speeds up to 60 pages per minute (PDS-5000) or up to 80 pages per minute (PDS-6000).

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HTC Desire 820G+ dual SIM now available

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 series ZOTAC International has unveiled the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 series. Taking power and size into our engineering, we finely tuned the balance between thermals and performance while accommodating even the smallest of desktop PCs. The AMP! edition has a dual 90mm IceStorm system finished with Carbon ExoArmor. The durable exterior with wraparound backplate is complete with an immense factory overclocked GPU that will push performance. The product is also available in single-

HTC has announced a new addition to the HTC Desire family, the HTC Desire 820G+ dual SIM, which is now available throughout the GCC. Powered by an Octo Core 8 x 1.7GHz processor, the smartphone also has a 5.5-inch high-definition screen.

The new device sports an 8MP front-facing camera. Users can also enjoy rich, clear sound offered by the front-facing stereo speakers and two dedicated amplifiers of HTC BoomSound. The vivid, 5.5-inch HD display on the smartphone also puts big-screen entertainment in your pocket for the ultimate nocompromise experience.

Available in an array of colours and featuring HTC’s iconic unibody design, the robust polycarbonate device is not only stylish but also boasts the excellent build quality that has become synonymous with HTC. The HTC Desire 820G+ Dual SIM is available in Marble White, Tuxedo Grey and Santorini White, and can be purchased from mobile operators and major retailers throughout the GCC.

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fan and OC versions for users who are looking for balanced performance.

The familiar Maxwell architecture continues the tradition of quiet cool efficiency without sacrificing power.

With DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.5 now available with Windows 10, the device is now even more efficient and more powerful. For gamers, this means more efficient use of PC hardware resources with less CPU usage, better optimisation, and less GPU overhead.

Toshiba introduces new Satellite L10W Toshiba Gulf introduces the new Satellite L10W, a convertible device that is part laptop and part tablet. It has as many as five modes to suit different users’ every need. With an 11.6-inch screen, the Satellite L10W with the latest Intel processors combines ultimate mobility and amazing precision.

It is equipped with a 360-degree hinge gives the Satellite L10W a unique elasticity. This high-performance mobile device can be used in various presentation mode, table top mode, laptop mode, tablet mode and audience mode.

Satellite L10W is powered by Intel Celeron and Intel Pentium processors, so consumers can choose whichever type better suits their usage style and

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requirements. It also has a 500GB HDD storage; an HDMI-out port; a USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port for the quick copying of files; and an SD card slot for seamless photo transfer and syncing. At merely 1.2kg, the Satellite L10W has a durable design and a Satin Gold finish is made for frequent travel. Featuring the DTS Sound audio enhancement, the device also sports speakers that consistently deliver sound that is deep, rich and precise at all times.

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LG unveiled new 4K OLED TV line-up The new LG OLED TV delivers perfect black and colours with an infinite contrast ratio as well as wider viewing angles thanks to its self-lighting pixels.

LG has launched three OLED TVs that differ in screen size and stand design, all three models 77EG9700 (77-inch), 65EG9600 (65-inch) and 55EG9600 (55-inch) boast stylish, striking profiles and measure just 0.24-inches at their thinnest points. The curved design ensures that the viewers are equally distant from each part of the screen.

All three models feature an infinite contrast ratio, 4K ULTRA HD (resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels), Tru4K Engine Pro, webOS, 4K 3D+ ULTRA

Huawei launches Honor 4X

HD and a HEVC Decoder. Completing the viewing experience, the TV’s ULTRA Surround and smart sound mode is a product of LG’s partnership with Harmon/Kardon, ensuring that the consumer is immersed in a rich and high-quality audio experience that perfectly matches the TV’s visual performance.

Synology releases VisualStation VS360HD Synology has released the VisualStation VS360HD, a versatile, durable, and compact monitoring solution. The device is suitable for both beginner and advanced users.

The intuitive interface ensures easy access to the most common functions, such as live view, customisable layout, and timeline. The recording list allows for browsing and exporting recordings.

With a few simple clicks, useful camera angles can be saved and grouped together to form “Patrol” cycles.

It has a total of three USB ports, the device allows the connection of a mouse, keyboard, and

even a joystick for PTZ control.

The whole system fits in a palmsized enclosure and can be easily attached to a wall or the back of a screen with the included VESA compatible mounting kit.

Synology VisualStation VS360HD is now shipping globally.

Huawei Honor has launched its second device to the Middle East market, Honor 4X, which will be sold exclusively on Souq.com at AED 599.

The mobile device has a 64bit Octa-core Kirin620 high speed processor for a super strong performance and its regularusage battery life of up to three days. It also packs a SmartImage 2.0 and Sony 13M camera with the option to refocus after taking pictures as well as a 5M front camera with an advanced selfie algorithm and beauty mode. Due to its performance and great value, the device is already doing a stellar performance for the Honor brand.

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Canon’s new imagePROGRAF printer series Canon Middle East has announced the launch of three new large format printers – the Canon imagePROGRAF iPF830, iPF840 and iPF850 - to bring reliable, precise and productive printing to architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), reprography and Computer Aided Design (CAD) environments.

According to the company, the printers’ upgraded system architecture delivers fast and continuous printing with the ability to replace ink tanks during print jobs and deliver speeds of up to 42 seconds for A0 plain paper in economy mode. At the same time, the imagePROGRAF iPF850 improves efficiency and usability thanks to a highcapacity stacker that can hold up to 100 sheets of different sized paper (up to A0), making it quick and easy to collect documents by ensuring that they are not curled. The iPF840 and iPF850 support

DVCOM launches 2N Helios IP Force with HD camera dual roll to easily handle different types and varying widths of paper up to 44-inches.

The new series also offers substantial cost savings over time, which is especially important for high-volume environments. The three printers feature low ink consumption, high capacity 700ml ink tanks and a built-in accounting function allowing accurate tracking of the cost per print.

Precise Group’s Ultimaker 2

Precise Group has released the Ultimaker 2, a versatile, high-quality 3D printer that can be used for multiple purposes.

Manufactured from premium parts and materials the Ultimaker 2 has been upgraded in design and features, it now adds a heated bed, which smoothens the print output, allows for ABS material

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printing and also prevents warping. According to the vendor, it has the highest speed and accuracy possible on any desktop 3D printer available today, the printer offers a print speed of up to 300mm/s and a layer resolution of 20 microns 0.02mm. In addition, it is an open – source 3D printer which gives it a more accurate, faster and simpler performance.

The Ultimaker 2 is available in a highly compact design with frame dimensions of 357 x 342 x 388mm (not including filament spool), offering an overall build volume of 230 x 225 x 205mm. The printer also comes with a standalone SD-card for 3D-model file upload and Ultimaker’s Cura opensource software, which essentially slices a 3D-model into the requisite layers in preparation for printing.

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A new variant of 2N Helios IP Force, now has an HD camera which will ensure superior and reliable security for entrances to premises.

According to DVCOM the HD camera of 2N Helios IP Force achieves a higher resolution as compared to the intercoms with an ordinary camera, plus a video communication that has greater quality. The new option of an intercom with an HD camera is also capable of adapting to the conditions of any time of the day and facilitates intelligent switching between daytime and nighttime.

The intercom can be equipped with buttons, a keypad, 1 or 10W speaker, card reader and pictograms.

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Linksys EA8500 Max-Stream AC2600 MUMIMO Gigabit Router

Featuring leading-edge MU-MIMO technology, the Max-Stream AC2600 allows every user and all their devices to access the user’s network at the same time at 3x faster speeds than traditional Wi-Fi, says Linksys. The combined 2.53 Gbps Wi-Fi speeds wipe out buffering and enable faster downloads. A supercharged 1.4GHz dual-core CPU and four Gigabit ports offer good speeds perfect for heavybandwidth gaming. Attach devices to the USB 3.0, USB 2.0, or eSATA ports for uninterrupted personal cloud content streaming or to share data across your network.

The four external antennas are adjustable for maximum coverage, while beamforming technology concentrates the Wi-Fi signal to each device for stronger, better performance and increased mobile speed and range.

Users can also remotely monitor and control their network wherever and whenever they want with exclusive Linksys SMART Wi-Fi. The Max-Stream AC2600 also integrates Network Map, a convenient feature of Smart Wi-Fi that provides a visual overview of a network that lets users view all devices on their network, online status and signal strength.

Samsung Electronics launches Galaxy Tab S2 Samsung Electronics has launched its latest offering, the Galaxy Tab S2.

The device is equipped with Super AMOLED display that is optimised for reading and viewing any type of digital content. At just 5.6mm thin and only 389g (9.7 -inch) and 265g (8.0 -inch) in weight, the tablet promises comfortability in reading e-books, magazines, webpages and newsfeeds.

The tablet comes fully equipped and preloaded with Microsoft Office Solutions and allows for storing around 100GB of files on the cloud via OneDrive for two years for free. It is also built with a touch-enabled ‘Fingerprint Scanner’ for hassle-free authentication. The tablet also has other highlights including the Smart Manager, Multitasking, Pop-up Window, and a ready installed anti-malware.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 will come in a variety of connectivity, storage and size options: 9.7-inch and 8.0-inch versions with Wi-Fi and LTE, available in 32 GB with MicroSD up to 128GB. Both Wi-Fi and LTE versions will be available at major retailers in the UAE for AED 1,599 (8.0-inch version) and AED 1,999 (9.7-inch version) and for AED 1,799 (8.0-inch version) and AED 2,199 (9.7-inch version) respectively.

AMD unveils Radeon R9 Nano graphics card AMD has announced its announcing its categorycreating AMD Radeon R9 Nano, Mini ITX graphics that can enable 4K gaming in the living room through ultra-quiet, ultra-compact PC designs.

First previewed during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles in June 2015, the AMD Radeon R9 Nano graphics card is based on the graphics chip codenamed ‘Fiji’, and is the third ‘Fiji’-based product to launch this summer alongside the AMD Radeon R9 Fury and R9 Fury X graphics cards.

The AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics family, based on the ‘Fiji’ chip, marks a turning point in PC gaming with the implementation of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which aims to deliver energy efficiency and performance for ultra-high resolutions, unparalleled VR experiences and smoother gameplay.

The six-inch long, air-cooled board

represents a new class of graphics card, enabling gamers, PC modders, and system integrators to build compact, unique, ultra-small form.

The AMD Radeon R9 line of graphics cards offers a spectrum of products ranging in price from $199 to $649. Delivering powerful graphics for unparalleled 4K gaming experiences in their class, the AMD Radeon R9 Series claims to meet virtually every need and budget for anyone who demands a premium gaming experience.

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Column

Channel surfing Reseller Middle East’s deputy editor offers her thoughts on the Middle Eastern technology channel.

Janees Reghelini, Deputy Editor, Reseller ME

When the going gets tough… … the tough gets going! As I write this month’s piece, this is the saying that comes to mind.

The first half of 2015 for most players in the region didn’t really take off or was disappointing to say the least, if compared to the same time frame last year. The reasons behind this are varied, and ranges from fluctuating currencies, declining oil prices, political instability in neighbouring countries and so on.

Although reports did predict things to look up in H2, observing from the state of affairs today, it seems unlikely.

If recent news reports of the devaluation of the Chinese Yuan is anything to go by, we can expect the regional market to be impacted greatly. The UAE is one of the largest markets in the region for Chinese products and with trade between the two countries exceeding $150 billion, the financial downturn in the mainland has the capacity to have a cascading effect here.

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The belt around organisations’ IT budgets across verticals have been tightened further and most players are in the ‘wait and watch’ mode with the thought of investments last in their minds.

According to research firm Gartner, the worldwide smartphone sales recorded the slowest growth rate since 2013 in Q2 of 2015. As per the report, the global sales of smartphones to end users totalled 330 million units, an increase of only 13.5 percent over the same period in 2014.

Another report from the firm indicates that the worldwide PC shipments have experienced a 9.5 percent decline from the Q2 of 2014.

While all of this is bound to and should sound alarm bells in the regional channel community, partners should note that there are opportunities within each crisis. But it is up to each partner to identify and define these silver linings.

It’s always a good idea to be cautious when the market is down.

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However, there is no gain without risks and those partners who study the market conditions and undertake calculated risks are surely on the path to success. In the past we have seen that diversification and venturing into new avenues of growth have helped maintain the bottom line. However, partners should remember to not move away from their main business focus, as a clear objective helps to emerge as winners.

Talking about winning, we are gearing up to tackle the 35th edition of GITEX Technology Week, the busiest time of the year for us. Not to mention also the most exciting!

The October issue will carry the results of the fifth edition of Annual Channel Industry Survey, where channel players are ranked as per their revenue figures. If you haven’t submitted yet, hurry up and do so before 10th September 2015.

Now I’m going to get my walking shoes ready, see you all at GITEX 2015.

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Š 2015 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell Emerging Markets (EMEA) Limited is registered in England and Wales. Company Registration No: 3266654. Registered address: Dell House, The Boulevard, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1LF. Company details for other Dell UK entities can be found at www.dell.co.uk

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