FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
From top to bottom: Osama AlHaj-Issa, Channel Director MEMA, Aruba HPE; Hesham El Komy, Senior Director, International
Channels, Epicor; Jason Roos, Channel and Alliances Director, Mimecast; Maya Zakhour, Head of Distribution and Alliances,
Middle East and Africa, NetApp; Christian Putz, Director, Emerging Markets EMEA, Pure Storage; Elie Dib, Regional Vice
President METNA, Riverbed; and Graham Porter, Head of Channels, Middle East, Veeam.
CHANNEL OUTLOOK
FOR 2018
The regional channel industry is working its way forward through the changing
opportunities presented by software defined everything, digital transformation,
analytics, cloud, mobility, and others. It is also adjusting to the demands from its
end user community to move into a bimodal, pay-as-you-go, utility consumption
approach, to access the latest vendor products and solutions. And finally, as
vendors readjust and rebuild their partner programmes to the changing realities
of the global and regional markets, it is channel partners who again reposition
themselves to be part of a successful sell-out process. Key executives from Aruba,
Epicor, Mimecast, NetApp, Pure Storage, Riverbed, and Veeam, roll out their
impressions of the channel outlook for 2018.
ARUBA
Professional services and digital workplace,
opportunities for Aruba channel
I
n 2017 HPE Aruba channels grew in
most countries but sectors varied. The
vendor had strong business in UAE,
Bahrain, Kuwait and Turkey in hospitality.
Education was strong in Turkey and UAE
while telecom was strong in Oman with
some signs of return from Saudi Arabia.
Public sector was strong in Egypt, Turkey
and Qatar. Market in Africa grew in the
SMB segment and education vertical.
Scorecard
Aruba will expand its channel growth in
North Africa and continue to focus on the
Middle East. North African boost will come
from helping distribution to focus more
on Aruba opportunities and supporting
them with creative sales and marketing
programmes. For the vendor, the digital
workplace and transformation will be a
main area of focus for customers in these
regions and accordingly the channel is being
enabled on delivering related solutions.
Also, HPE Aruba is putting focus on
securing the network edge and edge of
IoT platforms. SMB is expected to be a
major growth area and channel partners are ready to pick up the
momentum. Fiscal 2017 was a tremendous success especially in
mobility. The channel is looking at technologies they can grow with
and this is the opportunity the vendor can give to them.
Opportunities
Channel partners must have a balance between near future
objectives such as top line and bottom line goals and industry
trends so they can keep growing and evolving with the fast pace of
technology. For example, cloud solutions are in a strong adoption
phase in the US and is gaining momentum in Europe. In Middle
East and Africa, cloud solutions are still being contemplated by
the market, but it is clearly coming of age in a couple of years.
Some solutions are already being deployed and others will
be soon, such as network related cloud solutions. So, channel
partners who build readiness for cloud will earn the advantage of
selling and serving this solution. Similar logic regarding IoT and
other new solutions like security at the edge can be applied.
HPE Aruba’s strategy for the channel is to fully delegate
services to its partners. This is an attractive margin opportunity
for channel partners since most of vendor competitors have
professional services practices that compete head to head with
their own partners. This was our Aruba’s 2017 strategy and the
vendor remains committed to it in 2018 and beyond.
Related to this is an offering of value based solutions where a
channel partner integrates several solutions based on software
21