Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 11 | Page 50

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