Channel Post caught up with Shahnawaz Sheikh, the Regional Director for Middle East, North Africa and Turkey at Dell Sonicwall, to speak about the annual channel partner event which was held on 12th March 2014
What is this event all about?
This is our annual channel partner event. Couple of years back, we decided to conduct an EMEA-wide event as well for our partners which takes place in Europe every year. However, since not every partner from our region can travel to Europe to attend the channel event, we wanted to conduct a channel partner event for the MEA region.
We still however continue to do in-region and country events. This particular event is perfect because it is at the beginning of this year for us. In addition to that, we wanted to present lots of product information to our channel partners in addition to product road maps, channel strategies and marketing strategies.
This event is also an opportunity for us to recognise, reward, and promote our top performing partners. We are also presenting technical awards to individuals to those who have a better understanding of our products and solutions, thereby offering a better experience for our customers when it comes to deployments, and so on.
How many channel partners are participating in this event?
We have had around 140 registrations which includes sales, pre-sales, and technical executives. We wanted all the customer-facing personnel to come to this event. We have about 35 partners participating in this event, which is obviously a very conservative number from across the region. All levels of partners are participating at the event.
What are the major initiatives being discussed and announced through this event?
This event is all about giving our channel community, the One Dell message. We want to explain to them how a Dell organisation looks and works like. We wanted to speak about the products and solutions we offer in addition to the different business units within the Dell organisation.
We also wanted to show how our partners can make use of these various business units to conduct their business in a much better way. For instance, we are telling our security partners selling firewall as to what sort of opportunities they have when selling solutions such as backup and recovery, networking and so on, on the software side of business.
We want to assure them that if a partner is interested in servers or storage solution nothing is stopping them. They can very well go with such solutions and products from other Dell business units.
What sort of trends have you seen in the region when it comes to security solutions?
We have seen very positive trends on the regional market. Customers are interested in next-generation technologies, and the ageing UTM technology is phasing out. Next-generation technologies are nothing but UTM appliances with controls such as applicaition control and visualiation.
Most IT managers today will buy a security appliance that can give them threat protection components and controls that can let them balance the users’ needs and business needs.
How is the use of social media at companies and BYOD changing the role of CIOs?
Social media today is a powerful platform for businesses and individuals as well. For users it is like a new era. However, it can also become a concern for the IT department in a company, if the use of social media goes unchecked.
The bandwidth consumed should not only be for personal use. When setting up IT policies, the IT department needs to realise that though the users on their company’s networks use bandwidth for business apps, they are also not depriving the users from using social media apps.
Balancing the needs is important due to consumerisation of IT and BYOD being adopted by companies in the region. CIOs today need to think about how they can optimise and securely allow remote users to come into the network.
