Mindware, one of the leading Value Added Distributors (VAD’s) in the Middle East and Africa, announced the launch of its new cloud Marketplace today. Offering superior transactional experience to the channel community as well as a wide variety of cloud solutions and services, the Mindware Marketplace will increase cloud adoption for partners and their customers. The new Marketplace which is hosted on Microsoft Azure, will, in addition to making cloud services purchase easy and intuitive, offer Mindware’s regional partners the ability to set up and manage their own “white labeled storefront”, thereby offering cloud solutions directly to end-customers. 

Vijay Kumar, CTO and cloud Director at Mindware said, “There has been an acceleration in cloud adoption in the region as a result of major cloud service providers such as Microsoft establishing physical data centers in the Middle East. Organizations are more comfortable with consuming these services now that data sovereignty and security matters are no longer a concern. As a leading regional distributor and in line with our ‘partner experience first’ philosophy, we realized the need to offer a feature-rich platform to enable our partners to develop their capabilities and offerings and to take their business to the next level.”

“We’re transforming the way our partners define their growth, and we’re helping them drive digital transformation in their customers’ businesses. Mindware is a great example of how partners are differentiating themselves today and recognizing the changing digital technology to solve problems utilizing cloud computing. There is a huge opportunity around cloud migration and together with our partners, our goal is to help our customers find the right solution at the right time,” said Karim Hanafy, Microsoft Area Services Partners Lead, One Commercial Partner – Middle East & Africa.

The new marketplace, which can be custom-branded by partners, has several new and enhanced capabilities including a robust and customizable billing engine, which allows partners to easily automate ordering and billing the entire Microsoft portfolio including Office 365, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft ESD. Partners can monitor and control their customers’ Microsoft Azure consumption with automated provisioning of cloud services and utilization-based billing. 

The Marketplace will allow partners to deliver hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings via the platform. The interface is intuitive and helps partners to place orders faster and it offers recommendations when products are being purchased to provide an optimized solution. 

Mindware has more than 2 decades of product, technical and licensing expertise as an Authorised Microsoft Distributor and collaborates with qualified cloud consultants throughout the region. 

“Mindware is delighted to announce the launch of its new Marketplace. With Microsoft, being one of our strategic partners in our cloud journey, this new Marketplace, built on Azure, allows our partners to be more productive and profitable. In addition to the platform, Mindware is launching various joint solutions with Microsoft, including Mindware Secure and Connected Workplace® – a novel cloud solutions approach based on Microsoft 365 that will enable resellers to provide customers with an “all-inclusive” migration, productivity, device management and collaboration solution.”-Philippe Jarre, CEO, Mindware

Abu Dhabi Municipality has overhauled its legacy networking infrastructure and deployed powerful new Wi-Fi 6 technology from Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, that has laid the foundation for its Smart Digital Workplace initiative, which will transform digital experiences for employees, suppliers and citizens. 

Mr. Ahmad Al Hammadi, IT Manager at Abu Dhabi Municipality says, “We understand that the future of work will be defined by smart work experiences enabled by the right technologies. Our intention was to create a smart workplace that will enables creativity, collaboration, speed, and freedom. Our legacy networking infrastructure was a big hurdle in achieving this objective, with operational complexities and security issues, and hence we decided to work with HPE Aruba, a pioneer in the wireless networking space. They were one of the vendors capable of delivering a unique wireless ecosystem, thus acting as an overall solution provider for all our mobility needs.”

Aruba’s latest 802.11ax AI-powered WiFi 6 solutions were selected for the deployment across Abu Dhabi Municipality’s headquarters and 35 branches across the city. As defending against internal threats was a critical security requirement, the government agency automated security access control across its entire access network with Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager, and enforced the continuous analysis of Network Traffic and User and Entity Behaviour with the deployment of Machine Learning technologies provided by Aruba’s threat detection platform, Introspect. 

With a high speed, secure wireless infrastructure as the foundation, Abu Dhabi Municipality will introduce a number of new applications that will enable employees to utilize their smartphones to become more productive. One such application will allow employees to book meeting rooms on their smart devices. The implementation will benefit third party suppliers who visit the Municipality, who will now be able to connect securely and speedily to the new network and transact business without having to go through slow and lengthy authentication procedures. Citizens visiting the four customer happiness centres in Abu Dhabi will also experience gigabit speed browsing capabilities when connecting to the new wireless network. 

“We are proud to have been able to play a role in Abu Dhabi Municipality’s digital transformation journey by delivering a robust wireless ecosystem, incorporating high-speed connectivity, secure access, BYOD support and centralized monitoring and management in a single solution. We hope to be able to continue this partnership as the Municipality’s digital aspirations evolve in the future,” concludes Gamal Emara, country manager – UAE at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. 

Value Added Distributor to unveil new technical sales and service unit as well as end-to-end desktop and application virtualization infrastructure solution 

Mindware, one of the leading regional IT Value-Added Distributors, has announced its participation under the theme ‘Embark on a Customer Journey’ at GITEX Technology Week taking place between 06 -10 October 2019 at the Dubai World Trade Centre. The highlight of the company’s participation this year is the launch of a new ‘Solutions Unit’ comprising of Pre-sales and Services teams focusing on infrastructure, security and cloud solutions. The company will also unveil an end-to-end desktop and application virtualization infrastructure solution, that resellers can offer their customers, that is flexible, reliable, scalable and easy to deploy. 

Mostafa Kabel, Solutions Unit Manager at Mindware said, “Technological mix and complexity in the ever-changing IT landscape require successful implementation of IT solutions which are critical to customer business success. Mindware helps its partners achieve this with its newly formed Solutions team, which includes a pool of exceptional technical subject-matter experts capable of addressing technology concerns, simplifying technology and deploying it efficiently in complex IT infrastructures, cyber security and cloud environments.”

The collective experience of the Solutions team covers all areas of IT such as strategic consulting, designing, planning, deploying, implementing and technical trainings.

The Pre-sales Unit will comprise of technical engineers with the highest levels of training and certification in relevant vendor technologies. There will be two separate teams – one focused on datacenter & infrastructure solutions and the other on security. The teams will add value to partners by helping them qualify leads, conduct proof of concepts (PoC) and close projects. 

The Solutions Unit will focus on three areas – professional services, cloud services and training. The professional services team will assist partners in designing and implementing the best possible solution, if required, at the customer’s premises. The cloud offerings include areas such as Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and BackUp, cloud security, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Mindware training services reflect the latest practices and procedures which help in increasing the value to customer environments. The company is an Authorized Training Center (ATC) with fully certified and authorized trainers who offer specialist knowledge reinforced by extensive practical experience. 

GITEX is also the launchpad for Mindware’s new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) bundle – an end-to-end solution stack comprising best of breed technologies including infrastructure-servers by Dell Technologies, security by RSA, virtualization software by Citrix and a choice of Wyse and OptiPlex client endpoints. The solution stack has been fully optimized and validated for interoperability and offers customers cost savings of up to 39% as compared to traditional solutions. Mindware’s services bundle includes consulting, deployment, support & management and training.