Channel Post speaks with Elie Dib, Senior Managing Director, METNA at Riverbed on how they will leverage their participation at this year’s GITEX to engage with customers and partners.
Is this your first time at GITEX Technology Week or have you participated before? If yes, what were your takeaways from last year’s event?
Riverbed has been a regular participant at GITEX and in addition to our own presence at many editions of the show, we have regularly co-funded the participation of our distributor partners, and have had a presence on the stand of our Technology Alliance Partner, Microsoft.
The takeaway from last year is that to be successful at GITEX, you need to have a clearly defined multi-faceted strategy that is set in place weeks if not months before the show. This includes clearly identifying the solutions we want to demonstrate, and the customers and partners we hope to engage with. We also successfully maximized the utilization of our executives by enabling customers to set up meetings with them weeks prior to the event.
Why did you choose to participate in GITEX Technology Week 2017 and what are your expectations from this year’s participation?
GITEX gives us the ability to make a significant impact in a relatively short amount of time and we have designed our product demos to be concise and yet highly informative.
Our focus this year is on IT decision makers and CIOs. It’s imperative to approach high-level executives to demonstrate why their businesses need our solutions. As always, we will also utilize the trade show as an opportunity to deepen our ties with our value-added distribution and channel partners.
Do you have standalone presence at the event or will you be showcasing with your partner(s)?
We will be present as a ‘Gold Sponsor’ with Microsoft, our Technology Alliance Partner. This helps us drive the synergy between our organizations such as the work we are doing to deliver optimization, visibility and control for their Office365, Azure and SharePoint cloud platforms. As a Gold Partner, we will have a dedicated area on their stand (B7-10 in Hall 7) where we will conduct live demos of our solutions.
We will also be participating through our distributor partners Mindware and StarLink.
What technology trends have you seen in the Middle East and Africa market?
Our participation is centred around the theme ‘Experience the Future of Application Networking’. In the era of digital transformation, delivering a flawless end-user experience for employees and customers has never been more critical to give businesses a competitive edge. As Middle East organizations double down on their digital investments, their IT infrastructure needs to adapt and support this transformation.
With Riverbed’s solutions, enterprises benefit from an intelligent and simplified approach to designing, deploying and managing distributed networks for today’s cloud-centric world. This is the future of Application Networking and is precisely what we intend to highlight at GITEX Technology Week.
Do you have any plans to launch any new products, solutions or technologies at GITX Technology Week this year?
We will showcase the Riverbed SteelCentral portfolio, our visibility solution for end-to-end network, application and end-user experience monitoring, and our application-defined Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solution, Riverbed SteelConnect.
SteelCentral solution now provides integrated visibility into Digital Experience, reduces the risk during application migrations, both on and off the Cloud, enables businesses to manage outcomes across the application lifecycle, and delivers integrated network and infrastructure troubleshooting and monitoring.
SteelConnect is the industry’s first and only product that unifies deployment and orchestration of hybrid WANs (Internet & MPLS), branch networks (LAN & WLAN), and cloud environments, including one-click connectivity to AWS and Microsoft Azure.
