ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Walid Issa, Senior Manager Systems
Engineering Middle East and Africa, NetApp.
well. “Actually, the only selling criteria is
the business outcome of the collaboration
solution. It is not anymore how many users
can use the voice system it is the business
outcome. This is how our partners also
sell the solution, it has to be relevant to
the business from a collaboration point of
view and even internally this is how it is
positioned,” says Brocklehurst.
“As more and more businesses get
virtualised, they are increasingly realising
the benefits of using cloud-based services
to connect their teams across the globe.
We see an increased uptake of cloud-based
unified communications and collaboration
solutions in the next 12 months in the
Middle East,” says Zureiki.
Cloud-based unified communications
solutions are especially seeing strong
demand. According to a recent report, non-
premises consumption models for unified
communications and collaboration have
growth rates that are 1.5 to 2 times that of
traditional customer premise equipment,
with up to 30% of unified communications
revenue currently coming from hosted
unified communications deployments.
However, a significant limitation for
enterprises looking at adopting cloud
based unified communication platforms is
the legacy purchase approach of meeting
internal end-user demand needs. “It is
fair to say that how people are buying
currently is in silos. Even if they are buying
Cisco technology, they quite often buy web
conferencing and video conferencing or IP
telephony or buy separate projects. So, I
think it is not just in this region but in every
region, they still buying little bit in silos,”
adds Brocklehurst. “It is very much bimodal
and this is one of the biggest challenges
that we are facing is how does Cisco keep
its classic business model optimised as we
transition into a recurring revenue model.
So, it is changing our model, but imagine
the challenge that has got for our partners
who look a lot like us, so that is changing
the whole makeup of their sales operation,
into touching lots of small parts of the
business,” continues Brocklehurst.
Reinforces Zureiki, “We sell a
collaboration business that delivers a
business outcome. So, when it comes
to integration, which is mainly very
Firas Jadalla, Regional Director Middle East
and Africa, Genetec.
much related to the cloud, it is coming
to the region. We see a lot of interest
about having our collaboration tools,
integrated with third party tools.
Definitely this is what we get from the
market, and we see a lot of requests, but
we still have a huge opportunity.”
Skills shortage and knowledge of
the latest unified communication and
collaboration solutions are a few of the
challenges that some channel partners
face. Training and certifications are
imperative if channel partners want to stay
competitive. With the newer technology
trends, partners are now required to
add value services and implementation
support as a part of their solution selling.
Sometimes the high costs for training
and certifications and the challenge of
retaining staff could act as barriers for
channel partners.
File sharing through cloud
Enterprises face constant pressure to
enable new customer touch points, uncover
business opportunities, and optimise and
accelerate operations. For IT departments
tasked with supporting and advancing
their organisation’s digital transformation,
the rapid pace of new service deployments
and demand for increased service delivery
is making it difficult to maintain enough
compute, storage and networking resources
to meet customer demand. NetApp
storage solutions for Microsoft SharePoint
Server can help businesses go further by
enabling people to collaborate and share
information whenever they need to, so they
can perform their jobs more effectively.
“The demand for agile datacentres, driven
by the scope, scale, and complexity of this
era of digital transformation is a big driving
force. Today’s enterprises deploy content
management and collaboration systems to
increase productivity across the enterprise.
Reselling partners need to be aware of these
requirements to consult their customers
and prospects in the most efficient way. All
certified NetApp partners can basically resell
the mentioned solutions,” explains Walid
Issa, Senior Manager Systems Engineering
Middle East and Africa, NetApp.
Distributed teams and collaborating
together on shared files has not lost any
importance in the past few years. It will
become even more important over the next
few years as many applications and virtual
desktops will be moving to the cloud and
will live in a hybrid model. Inevitably,
file collaboration will follow that same
trajectory: some users will keep working
in an on-premise environment, but other
team members will be using a thin client
and work in the cloud.
“However, the requirement that teams
collaborate on the same shared files
without stepping on each other’s feet will
still be a hard requirement. The NetApp
SharePoint Server solutions are designed
by integrating Microsoft technologies and
they support both physical and virtual
environments. They can be hosted on
NetApp’s and Cisco’s FlexPod validated
converged infrastructure solution, on
premise, or in the cloud,” elaborates Issa.
Digital transformation should be the
focus of any enterprise’s IT strategy and
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