Channel Post spoke to Nat Pisupati, the Regional Sales Director – Identity and Access Management for Middle East and Africa at HID Global to find out a bit more about his company, the solutions they offer and their strategies for the Middle East and Africa market.
Tell us about HID and the solutions you offer.
HID is a trusted leader in providing solutions for the delivery of secure identity. We manage identities in the most secured way through use of ID card makers, physical access control, logical access control, authentication, visitor management systems, and so on.
We focus on creating customer value through identity-based solutions that apply to either physical or logical access, card issuance, asset and animal identification, as well as embedded technology solutions that are used by a worldwide network of development and integration partners for a broad variety of applications.
Which industry verticals do you currently focus on?
We focus upon a wide range of industry verticals such as government, oil and gas, healthcare, and education. I can say that in physical access systems, we have a dominant position today.
Industry verticals such as government, oil and gas and so on, are all prime areas where identity and the management of identity are becoming more and more important. Convergence of various technologies and usage is today one of the key challenges as far as security systems are concerned.
A couple of years ago, physical access used to be separate from logical access. Today, you just need one ID card to access everything – from using it as a gate pass to enter your office building, to using it in the lift, to inserting it into your office workstation to log into the corporate network.
What sort of security trends have you seen in the Middle East region?
The Middle East is a very dangerous neighbourhood, and this is mainly because of the very volatile political situation. Hence, many government agencies are taking precautionary steps to safeguard their interests by implementing very secured authentication solutions, which cannot be compromised.
They don’t want their national IDs to be duplicated, their access controls to be intruded upon and certainly they don’t want unauthorised access to secret government documents. In addition, companies from the oil and gas sector do not want people walking into their facilities and indulge in unauthorised acts.
Most corporates in this region, do not want unauthorised personnel having access to their systems on their network. They want to keep corporate espionage at bay. This is where HID comes into play. We provide a variety of security solutions that cater to such needs in keeping security threats at bay. We also provide logical access control systems through two-factor authentication to prevent those security threats.
Going forward, what are your strategies for the Middle East region?
The Middle East market is a very important market for the growth of HID Global. Major markets in the Middle East for us includes KSA, Kuwait, UAE, Yemen, and Bahrain. We also do business across the border in the African market.
Our business is divided into strategic business units. Though each of the business units have their own strategies, we work on one common foundation – we do not work with end customers directly. We only work through our channel partners in the region. Currently, we have a three tier partner programme based on the kind of value-add our channel partners can provide to end customers.
