EDITOR’S QUESTION
Helping partners build
successful businesses
Graham Porter, Regional Channel Head, Middle East
at Veeam Software, outlines four key trends to help
channel partners evolve.
F
rom an IT perspective, there are four
key trends that businesses in the
Middle East will need to embrace
to exceed the expectations of customers.
These trends will give channel partners
an insight into the opportunities that lie
ahead and where they need to develop
their capabilities:
1. Blurring lines between public,
private and hybrid clouds: A few years
ago, the thought of extending datacentre
infrastructure to a hyper-public cloud
may have seemed a futile endeavour
of connectivity, security and a mix of
unknown surprises. However, now the
market is ready to accept the adoption
of hybrid cloud architectures from both
the infrastructure and application side.
It’s already happening and much greater
mainstream adoption is on the horizon as
enterprises look to enhance operational
agility and reliability, while ensuring that
data and applications are available at any
time, from anywhere.
2. The explosion of the software-
defined infrastructure. It’s no secret
that the software-defined datacentre has
been a huge trend in recent years, thanks
in part to the popularity of virtualisation.
Running applications in a virtualised
environment brings many advantages
for companies to help build efficiencies,
provide reliability and a flexible IT
infrastructure to ease management and
free time and resources. As businesses
evolve, expect to see more demands on
vendors to provide software and services
to meet the expectations of the next
generation of innovators.
3. Stay one step ahead of hackers.
Threats from hacking, as well as the
proliferation of botnets and malware
(specifically ransomware) will keep
IT managers up at night. We’ve seen
50
enormous burdens placed on organisations
looking to maintain availability, with large
attacks on DNS services causing major
companies and services to be unreachable
during critical times. As more businesses
look to provide digital services, the hackers
will be nipping at their heels. More than
ever before, businesses will need to place
additional emphasis on end-to-end data
security, backup and recovery to ensure
their services remain available for partners
and customers.
4. More data, more possibilities:
The datacentre of today, and definitely
of tomorrow, will increasingly hold more
data, both historical and mission-critical.
Whether it be an influx of inputs from the
Internet of Things, more complex business
systems, or growing amounts of existing
data sets, the conclusion is obvious: the
data deluge will continue. On the positive
side, this will bring benefits to businesses
looking to leverage advanced analytics to
hone their existing operations and provide
new services to customers. Businesses will
be able to gain more insight from the data
they have collected; helping shape decisions
and inform business strategies. However,
these analytic capabilities will only bear
fruit if data is both available and robust. For
businesses relying on advanced analytics
to drive operations, any downtime not only
halts the ability to transact with customers
and suppliers, but also stymies informed
decision-making. Businesses will need
to direct their attention to maintaining
availability of mission-critical systems that
underpin their analytics.
Partner programme
Channel partners need to evolve and have
a better understanding of the modern
datacentre. Moving to a consultancy-
based solutions approach in datacentre
A
s a global
software
company, give
us an overview of the
market opportunities
and partner programme
for regional channel
partners.
Graham Porter, Regional Channel Head,
Middle East at Veeam Software.
integration and packaging it with a
complete managed services offering is
what customers are looking for from a
value-added reseller.
When 100 per cent of your business is
through partners, then anything relating
to partners is of the utmost importance.
It is through our partner programme
that we have been able to build value
for our partners by creating a forum
for open and transparent dialogue,
a continuously evolving enablement
programme and ultimately a profitable
business relationship with our channel.
These in turn create loyalty and
continuously feed our exponential growth
strategy. At Veeam, we are committed
to helping our partners of any size and
any business model to address the
challenge of Availability for the Always-
On Enterprise™ and build a successful
business around our Availability solutions.
The comprehensive Veeam ProPartner
programme gives authorised reselling
companies the tools they need to become
a trusted adviser to customers and gain a
long-term competitive advantage in their
virtualisation practice.
Issue 11
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS