Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 21 | Page 61

CHANNEL CHIEF For Infoblox Regional Channel Manager FERAS MASOUD , having a strong team and a proper planning strategy is vital to ensure his targets are met. D What is your style as a team leader? Describe your current job role and the parts that are somewhat challenging? My current job role is Regional Channel Manager for Middle East and Africa at Infoblox. The main challenge in this role is the size of the region which covers around 10 focused countries and about 10 high touch countries with over 100 partners. When you look back at your career, what has been the most memorable achievement? At Polycom, I was the first Channel Manager across the Middle East region and in one year, I managed to build a solid channel foundation for the company along with my colleagues. The very next year, I achieved the CEO Circle of Excellence Award and was selected as the best Channel Manager across Polycom EMEA team. What made you think of a career in technology? I was very good at maths and physics at school and always had this dream of wanting to be a computer engineer in order to build my own desktop computer. I completed my computer engineering degree and got the opportunity to start my career as a network engineer. What style of management philosophy do you employ at your current position? I’m a big believer in team work and keeping the morale of the team very high. I am not a micro manager. I trust my team to do the tasks assigned to them. However, they know that my door is always open in case they need my help. INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 21 Each great achievement starts with proper planning, but to make sure the plans are going well I need to have a proper mechanism of follow up within my team and my partners across the region. Feras Masoud, Regional Channel Manager, MEA, Infoblox What do you think will be the hot technology talking point of 2019? Most centre around the importance of analysing and securing the huge amount of data around us. Some of the hot topics are: securing customer data wherever it resides; managing and analysing huge amounts of data; Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Moving from on-premise to the cloud or hybrid cloud mode; subscription model and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). What are your personal interests and where do you like to spend most of your time after work? I’m a family person so after work I like to spend my time with my wife and kids, although I do find some time for friends as well. How do you cope with stress and demands of your career? By spending quality time with my family and by playing sport whenever possible. What gives you great job satisfaction? Achieving the assigned business target, developing the partners across the region and aligning well with my managers and my colleagues provides me great job satisfaction. What are your personal interests? Playing football and fishing. ˜ 61