For value added distributor Arrow, the Middle East and Africa region is an opportunity to rebuild the enterprise data centre around new pillars of hyper-convergence. Research reports indicate that hyper-converged infrastructure market has emerged to be one of the fastest-growing and most valuable technology segments in the industry. End customers are attempting to transform the datacenter infrastructure into a more agile, scalable, and predictable one while operating under budget constraints.
Enterprises are also facing challenges on how to deploy IT solutions not only to reduce costs and drive efficiency improvements, but also what digital transformation initiatives they need to embrace to drive competitive differentiation and achieve success in current prevailing economic environment. The focus will be how to do more with less. How to achieve automation, orchestration, and agile IT infrastructure that intelligently scales as and when the business needs it. How to achieve cost efficiency but not at the expense of availability or reliability.
“The impact of the slowdown in global economy on the Middle East was just like everywhere else in the world, though demand for technology in our region continues to grow. However, during times like these, you certainly need to evaluate with whom you deal with, because payment cycles are getting longer,” remarks Vimal Kocher, Managing Director Middle East for Arrow ECS EMEA.
In the current scenario, data needs to flow effortlessly through an organisation using applications that are accessible anytime, anywhere while complying with security policies, standards and legislation. IT security, just as any other area of investment, has to deliver a measurable return. Meeting customer needs and into the future takes insight and expertise not just in their business environment, but also in all the potential technology options available to them.
With progressively complex technologies, distributors can help by offering strong technical support services to compliment what the channel is able to offer in-house. In an increasingly global economy, the channel may even need help with deployment of these technology solutions in geographical markets that the partner may not have a footprint in. Distributors with strong experience in this area can prove invaluable at this stage.
Organisations in the region are in the midst of digital transformation where major importance is to ensure that systems and solutions are integrated and work in tandem. Since the industry is moving towards an integrated solution-oriented model, channel members are striving to enhance their offerings and expertise to prove their relevance in the market.
These include areas like mobility, big data analytics, cloud, security and data centre. Strong education and enablement programmes to help the channel benefit from these areas are key. Other services, like flexible finance programmes are also important as customers look to pay for their IT in different ways.
“Given the breadth of IT areas and the amount of disruption that is happening in the market, it is more critical than ever that channel partners align themselves with distributors that really understand and can support in delivering end to end solutions,” stresses Vimal Kocher, Managing Director Middle East for Arrow ECS EMEA.
The regional Arrow portfolio for channel partners includes infrastructure, network and security solutions, including data centre, storage and threat protection solutions. A key offering from Arrow is to assist SMEs and enterprises to evaluate their current data centre capability and assess what hyper-converged infrastructure solutions and best practices they should consider.
For data centre and storage solutions, the vendor partner is Dell EMC. For threat protection, the vendor partners are RSA, Check Point, Intel Security, Trend Micro, Forcepoint, F5 and IBM Security. Other vendor partners include Netscout and Infoblox. Arrow provides official training courses for IBM, Forcepoint, RSA, F5, Checkpoint.