Leveraging a strong portfolio of observability and security solutions from Dynatrace and other leading IT vendors like Dell and VMware, VAS Integrated Solutions is using stable operations in Egypt and Libya to expand into Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
Digital transformation is accelerating and taking place in hybrid and multicloud environments. This shift yields undeniable benefits for organisations, from faster development speeds to increased operational efficiencies, and also provides IT distribution companies and channel partners with opportunities for growth.
To leverage this shift in the market, channel partners must invest into new talent and develop skills specifically for digitisation initiatives, cloud adoption and migration, because the challenges are unique and vary from customer to customer and industry.
“Partnering with Dynatrace helps channel partners address these concerns, as we are a key enabler for organisations’ digitalisation strategies. Dynatrace helps organisations manage complexities of the digital age through hybrid and multi-cloud platform that accelerates observability, security and automation through real-time intelligence,” says Jorge Longo, Vice President Middle East and Africa, Dynatrace.
Dynatrace portfolio
Earlier this year, Dynatrace launched its Services Endorsement Programme which provides channel partners access to new trainings that focus on unified observability and security, AIOps, advanced DevSecOps and CloudOps. The curriculum is designed to equip partners with skills to architect, implement, and manage Dynatrace solutions.
Partners must first complete the programme and receive the Dynatrace Services Certification, after which channel partners can be awarded the designation of Dynatrace Services-Endorsed Partners. This designation validates services capabilities and demonstrates ability to help customers drive cloud modernisation and optimisation faster and securely.
Dynatrace, a unified observability and security platform, collaborates with various vendor partners to offer a comprehensive solution stack for monitoring and optimising digital performance. Its alliances span cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, ensuring integration with diverse infrastructures.
Dynatrace has a multi-year consumption commitment and go-to-market partnership with Microsoft, which the two companies established to meet the growing demand for the Dynatrace platform on Azure and help accelerate joint customers’ cloud migration and optimisation initiatives.
Bringing Dynatrace’s latest platform technologies to Microsoft Azure enables customers and teams within organisations to harness AI, analytics, and automation capabilities to modernise cloud operations. Observability and application security have become essential for organisations as they embrace cloud-native development and migrate more workloads to Microsoft Azure.
Dynatrace also announced its new Kubernetes Experience for platform engineering teams. The Dynatrace platform and its new Kubernetes Experience, enables platform engineering teams to improve developers’ productivity and empower them to deliver high-quality software quickly and securely without the burden of managing complicated cloud-native architectures.
With the new Dynatrace Kubernetes Experience, platform engineers can now visualise and manage their entire Kubernetes environment in one location, leveraging AI-powered answers and automation to proactively identify and address issues before they impact customers.
Go to market in Egypt
With partnerships extending to global system integrators as well as local VARs, Dynatrace delivers a unified solution for organisations. In July this year, Dynatrace announced VAS Integrated Solutions as its representative for Egypt.
VAS Integrated Solutions provides organisations in Egypt easy access to the Dynatrace platform. This enables Egyptian organisations to modernise and automate cloud operations, deliver software faster and more securely, and ensure flawless digital experiences.
VAS Integrated Solutions is a subsidiary of Giza Systems, a systems integrator in the MEA region. VAS Integrated Solutions has operations in Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabia. It focuses on datacentres, virtualisation, cloud enablement, middleware, security, and network infrastructure solutions. VAS offers VMware services covering Egypt, USA, Canada, UK, Angola, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Algeria, and Morocco.
Since its establishment in 2006, VAS Integrated Solutions has been instrumental in creating business infrastructure that enables clients to strengthen their core operations. VAS Integrated Solutions offers solutions around vendors like Dell Technologies, VMware, Dynatrace, Fortinet, Palo Alto, SecureWorks, Forcepoint, and RSA.
Egypt continues to make strides in the direction of a competitive, balanced, and diversified economy by laying the groundwork for a knowledge-based economy. Development of Digital Egypt, which is part of Egypt’s ICT strategy, is considered as one the critical pillars of realising the goals of the country’s Vision 2030.
Highlighting the current state of digital transformation through cloud in Egypt, the findings of an independent global survey of 1,300 chief information security officers by Dynatrace, reveal that only 20% of large organisations in Egypt have a mature development, security, and DevSecOps operation culture.
Additionally, the Dynatrace survey stated that 92% of CISOs in Egypt say automation and AI are critical for a successful deployment of DevSecOps and overcoming resource challenges.
Opportunities, challenges for VAS partners
Security and IT teams manage monitoring solutions, multiple data repositories on average and often rely on time-consuming manual procedures to manage the complexities of modern cloud environments and extract value from data, IT, development, DevOps, SRE, BizOps.
In order to keep up with customer demands and outpace the competition, teams need technologies that enable them to innovate faster, collaborate more efficiently, deliver more predictable results, minimise attack surfaces, and drive greater business value.
Says Mohamed Abdel Gawad, President at VAS Integrated Solutions Integrated Solutions, “Growing cloud complexity causes organisations to hit a wall.”
With only 20% of large organisations in Egypt having a mature DevSecOps culture, the opportunities for VAS channel partners are tremendous. Channel partners need to be aware that digitisation has initiated a dynamic shift within the market, and it is constantly expanding with new customer stakeholders.
They need to target these new personas and entities. One of the key ingredients to achieve this is through building a strong knowledge and skills base, because customers need trusted advisors to guide them into making the right decision in terms of technology and investment.
Amid a volatile socioeconomic environment marked by rising costs and weakened consumer confidence in Egypt, IT leaders experience growing pressure to deliver more with less in order to keep their organisations ahead of the competition. As a result, organisations are increasingly adopting DevSecOps practices to drive faster innovation without amplifying security risk.
Most of these efforts remain relatively immature, as development, security, and operations teams continue to work in silos and rely on their own patchwork of point tools to manage their individual tasks. The Dynatrace platform can help VAS partners overcome these challenges and provide their customers unified observability and security to support more effective data-driven DevSecOps automation.
Channel partners are expected to possess IT skillset to understand and communicate the value proposition of their offerings, address customer needs, and provide technical assistance which includes, product features, functionalities, and benefits of the offerings. They should have a good understanding of underlying technologies and architectures of IT offerings to provide effective pre-sales and post-sales support.
This allows them to address technical inquiries, conduct product demonstrations, and assist customers with installation, configuration, and troubleshooting. They should possess strong sales and business development skills including lead generation, prospecting, negotiation, and closing deals.
This will help them to convert the ongoing progress of digital transformation in the region into an opportunity rather than a challenge.
From the top executive
Growth
VAS Integrated Solutions has plans to engage into strategic partnerships and alliances with additional suppliers and partners to collaborate on specific projects, share resources and access new markets and verticals.
VAS has a plan to extend operations into other markets in 2024 like Saudi Arabia and Sudan, which will allow us to establish a presence, access local customers, channels, and infrastructure, and leverage the knowledge of the new markets.
VAS is in the process of establishing a new subsidiary in Saudi Arabia and has plans to enter the Saudi market backed by shareholder stc.
Leadership
This means having a clear vision for the organisation capabilities and markets, inspiring our teams and partners, setting strategic objectives, analysing trends and positions the organisation for success. Strategic talent management is essential to embrace change and foster innovation and adaptability.
Communicating and making impact is a key influencing skill which drives collaboration. More importantly, relationship building with partners is a key factor to achieve growth.
Achievements
VAS Integrated Solutions has achieved a great milestone of being awarded Distributor of the Year from Dell Technologies in Egypt for the third year in row. We have managed to build a diversified product portfolio by adding strategic partnerships with additional top IT brands like Fortinet.