Microsoft
Could you give us an overview of Redington’s volume business? Redington Volume Distribution is the largest broadline distributor in the Middle East region in terms of turnover, number of units sold, channel and product breadth and depth. The division distributes over 69 product categories with multiple variants for each category from over 28 global IT vendors. Redington Volume division transacted with over 1950 plus active partners across Middle East during the previous year FY 14-15 with almost 24 percent of partners increasing their transaction value year-over-year.
How does Redington reinforce Microsoft’s business in the region?
Cloud connect The Shelf talks to Jeetendra Berry, Vice President, PPS and COMP, Middle East, Redington Gulf, on how partners can grow their cloud market share. 16
Issue 08
Through our presence in UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain with local sales offices and experienced team, we are well positioned as Microsoft’s regional distributor for their cloud service offerings, providing them a leverage of cost and time to market by maximising channel reach and helping them build scale.
As a distributor, what is the value addition you are offering for Microsoft’s cloud products? In addition to the conventional value adds of credit, financing, logistics and partner management, we now need to play the role of a ‘trusted advisor’. We will continue to help channels to vet the various cloud offerings, provide training and enablement, marketing, sales and technical support and guide their choices with scope for consolidated billing. We need to hand hold and mentor channels to reach out and secure efficient scalable access to SMB organisations, which is key to succeed in the cloud environment.
For a partner who is interested to come on board, what are the incentives they can look forward to? We incentivise our partners’ business through Redington Cloud Club. This promotion is primarily focused on cloud product offerings such as Office 365, Azure and CRM Online. It is a well thought out promotion created to entice all the
For more information, please write to sales.volume@redingtongulf.com
stakeholders of the business, be it partner distributor, partner reseller or partner resellers’ sales team. The idea was to encapsulate all the benefits such as incentives, rewards, trips, training, and migration services, under one promotion. This way the promotion offers benefits to all and can help in influencing decisions.
As a distributor how do you groom your partners to go to the next level? We do this by encouraging our partners to invest in Microsoft Partner Network and achieve certifications, which differentiates them in the market and advertise their specialisations, opening them for new business opportunities. We will help partners make the right choices and be a one-stop-source for them to select their pick from across a suite of diverse vendor cloud offerings.
How do you see the cloud market shaping out within the Middle East over the next couple of months? With declining oil prices and uncertain economy, cloudbased solution is the answer to customers looking to upgrade their IT. This world will see 90 percent of commercial apps and 70 percent of CIOs adopting the cloud-first strategy by 2016. In this region, the cloud adoption evolution model may vary, which will be a hybrid cloud with combination of public and private cloud, depending on the customer’s workload need for an efficient environment. Public cloud will be preferred for standardised workloads such as e-mail, testing, development, collaboration projects (PaaS), incremental capacity for peak load times (IaaS), SaaS applications with well-implemented security strategy. Private cloud will be preferred where control, security and data privacy are paramount for business data and applications. As customers increasingly trust the cloud and as the services offerings become standardised, there could be a shift of such services from private to public cloud.
www.redingtonmea.com