Online, Self-paced Training Courses Previously Open to Partners for Free Now Also Available for Anyone to Expand Technical Security Skills and Broad Cyber Awareness At No Cost

“In the wake of the global health crisis, organizations in the region had to make a rapid shift to accommodate their remote working models. As a result, businesses face several challenges but key among them is dealing with new security risks targeting remote workers,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East, Fortinet. “IT teams are under pressure to secure not only the organization’s network, but also a remote workforce, and this requires a broad and varied skill set. To help our partners and customers in the Middle East region update and gain new skillsets in this time of crisis, we are making our entire online, self-paced catalogue of advanced training courses available for free so that any IT professional can expand timely knowledge and skills on-demand as needed to effectively protect their organizations.”

Increased Risk With Distributed Workforces

Globally, organizations have had to quickly adapt their network to support their workforce transitioning from their traditional on-premises work environment to remote telework. To maintain business continuity, IT teams are strained with ensuring everyone in their organization is securely set up to remotely access critical resources and applications on the corporate network. In parallel, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the unprecedented increase in remote access of sensitive information and data by searching for security gaps and shifting attack strategies to target teleworker environments.

 According to a recent study from ISC2, nearly two-thirds of companies lacked the skilled staff they needed to maintain effective security operations. With the rapidly expanding attack surface that a distributed workforce at scale has introduced, IT teams need broad security skillsets more than ever, to protect their organizations.

Free Training to Help Develop Timely Security Skills

Fortinet is leveraging curriculum from its NSE Institute’s training and certification program to offer 24 advanced security courses for free to help IT professionals expand their cybersecurity knowledge and address new risks.

By learning about Fortinet technologies, such as FortiGate firewalls, FortiNAC and FortiManager, training participants will acquire an array of skills to defend any network against threats. Recorded lab demos for these courses will be available for on-demand viewing and supplemented with regularly scheduled live sessions with Fortinet Certified Trainers. During these live sessions, trainers will be available to demo labs and conduct Q&A sessions. Anyone interested in getting started with Fortinet’s free training courses can visit here.  

 For anyone interested in training options beyond self-paced, Fortinet has a worldwide network of Authorized Training Centers (ATCs) providing Fortinet training in a variety of formats.

NSE Institute’s History of Addressing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap

Today’s introduction of additional free cybersecurity courses further builds on Fortinet’s existing efforts to address the cyber skills gap through training and education. With over 300,000 NSE certifications issued, Fortinet established the NSE Institute in 2015, comprised of the NSE training and certification program, the Fortinet Network Security Academy, and the Fortinet Veterans program. In addition, Fortinet was named “Professional Certification Program of the Year” by the 2019 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards.

As part of the program’s free training catalogue, Fortinet provides foundational cyber awareness courses for anyone through levels NSE 1 and NSE 2. In addition, the FortiGate Essentials training was recently added as an additional course for anyone interested in learning how to use firewall policies, user authentication, routing and SSL VPN.

Securing the Expanding Attack Surface Beyond Free Training

Fortinet is committed to customers and partners not just through free trainings but also through existing functionalities embedded in Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. For example, existing Fortinet customers already have remote worker solutions embedded in their FortiGate firewalls that can be used at no additional charge. Powered by custom security processors (SPUs), FortiGates are capable of scaling to a significantly higher capacity. Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution is included in every FortiGate appliance, providing customers reliable and cost-effective connectivity for their branch workers, improving their application performance. And Fortinet’s free FortiClient software can be quickly installed on both business and personal devices to create encrypted VPN connections to the enterprise network.

 

Huawei Consumer Business Group (BG) announced that the Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) has given the HUAWEI P40 Series the highly coveted TIPA World Awards 2020, crowning the three flagship smartphones – HUAWEI P40, HUAWEI P40 Pro and HUAWEI P40 Pro+ – the Best Photo Smartphones of 2020. This marks the fourth consecutive year that the HUAWEI P Series has been recognised by TIPA, standing alongside a range of exceptional gear and solutions that professional photographers have come to love and rely on.

Founded in 1991, TIPA is a highly respected industry association with member publications hailing from photo and imaging fields across the globe both print and online. The association bestows TIPA World Awards annually to companies and new products that TIPA editors deem to deliver the best quality, performance and value to consumers. In the TIPA World Awards 2020 Official Product Citation, TIPA writes: “Smartphone photographic capability takes another great leap forward with the latest generation of Huawei’s P-Series. All three smartphones – the P40, P40 Pro and the P40 Pro+ – have the Kirin 990 5G chipset, a large 1/1.28-inch sensor, and were developed in conjunction with Leica. Noteworthy features of the models include AI-powered white balance algorithms, including those dedicated to optimise skin-tone and texture, greatly enhanced dynamic range and low light performance, colour temperature sensors, focus capability on all pixels, and an XD Fusion Engine for smooth zoom and optimisation of image quality.”

 

The TIPA World Awards 2020 adds to HUAWEI P40 Series’ expanding list of accolades. The HUAWEI P40 Pro was recently given a DXOMARK rating of 128, the highest overall score ever seen on the recognised leader board. In the same review, the flagship smartphone also earned the highest scores for photo and selfie performances, at 140 and 103 respectively

A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN) today announced its participation in IDC’s regional webinar entitled ‘Envisioning a Resilient, Cloud-Based Digital Infrastructure’ taking place on April 21, 2020 at 11:00am (UAE time). The event is tailored for IT leaders and executives looking to enact resilient, long-term, cloud-based digital infrastructures that drive their future-of-work, data management, customer experience, and digital innovation strategies.

 

Mohammed Al-Moneer, Regional Vice President of Sales, MENA at A10 Networks will be part of the panel discussion (Track B) with the theme ‘Security and Digital Trust Model for the Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Era.’ Panelists will discuss software-defined security and automation, digital trust-based models for security services, new architectures for cloud workloads, and novel approaches to ensuring governance, risk, and compliances.

 

“Organizations in the Middle East are increasingly adopting hybrid IT and embracing multi-cloud strategies as part of their digital transformation initiatives. To an unprecedented extent, all organizations are digitizing aggressively, and all enterprises are becoming more like technology companies. Although the benefits that can accrue from multi-cloud environments are compelling, the networking and security implications are profound,” said Mohammed Al-Moneer.

 

“The vision of A10 Networks is to enable a secure and available digital world and deliver better business outcomes that support investment protection, new business models and help future-proof infrastructures. Our solutions provide always available application delivery and security – on-premises and in the cloud and protect networks from cyber security attacks that threaten network availability. As cloud computing brings in additional complexities, our technology simplifies IT operations with connected intelligence, automation, machine learning and DevOps/SecOps tools. We are excited to share all these insights during the panel discussion.”

 

IT executives interested in attending the webinar can register at the following link – https://www.idc.com/mea/events/67332-idc-regional-webinar-middle-east/registration#category_0

 

Only 9% of organisations say customers rate brand experiences as fully satisfactory, with satisfaction around AI and robotics experiences faring

Customer experience continues to be one of the greatest challenges to businesses across Middle East and Africa, at a time where customer expecations are the highest they have ever been. This disconnect is exposed as Dimension Data reveals its findings in NTT Ltd.’s annual Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report titled “The Connected Customer: Delivering an effortless experience”. According to the research, only 6% of organisations are delivering a fully functioning experience, yet more than half (63%) consider CX to be their primary differentiator.  

The report revealed that organisations struggle to align their CX strategies to voice of customer (VoC) feedback, with 68% having no formal process for considering this data and 28% capturing no feedback at all. Only 31% fully define and track the value contribution of CX and just over a third (38%) are able to connect data relationships across customer service channels – leaving the rest operating ‘blind’ with no full view of the customer ecosystem.

Paul Potgieter, Managing Director at Dimension Data Middle East explained, “This research comes at a time when current global challenges and driving more digital engagements than ever before. This is consequently exposed gaps in the service strategies of many organisations.”

“Modern customers expect seamless, personalised service via the channel of their choice and organisations that can deliver this will be market leaders. To achieve this on an enterprise scale, while balancing resources, businesses will need to automate and integrate artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and data analytics into their day to day customer interactions to enable intelligent self-service, augment agents’ response rates and thus enable a fluid customer journey,” he added.

Listening starts with strategy

A successful CX strategy is proven to improve customer and brand engagement, and drive commercial performance, yet many organisations are still stuck in the developmental stage due to siloed technology systems, inconsistencies in experience, and a lack of clear processes. Specifically, challenges include:

 

• Faltering technology systems: Nearly one in three (30%) say their technology systems are failing to meet current needs and many teams still struggle with legacy systems (52%) and the integration of multiple technology systems (43%). Additionally, the inability to secure budgets (57%) remains a concern and skills shortages is seen as a growing concern (38%)

• Siloed channels and internal business organisations: Almost two thirds (63%) of organisations agree there is only partial collaboration between functions when it comes to designing CX, and 11% don’t collaborate at all. More than two thirds (69%) still have no cross-channel contact management strategy and only one third (33%) claim to have good or complete consistency across contact channels.

• Inconsistent priorities: Personalisation capabilities have surged from 49% to 73% in one year, but just 12% of organisations place “customer delight” as the top driving force behind their customer journey design strategy. This may account for why over one third (36%) of assisted-services enquires fail to be resolved during first contact, while automated channels fare worse with a 45% fail rate.

 

Creating a smarter CX with data analytics

While just over three quarters (78%) of organisations indicate that they are satisfied with their customer satisfaction capability, only 9% of their customers rate customer experience at ‘advocacy’ level. Worryingly, just 5% of AI and robotics users say customers rate their experience at advocacy level, exposing the gap between emerging technologies and satisfaction levels.

 

This demonstrates that businesses need to create a smart strategy which bases AI on optimum data, organisations must learn to fill the gap between data management and integration, and prioritise an efficient data management platform. As it stands, more than half (62%) of data capture needs are defined and aligned to desired business outcomes, and just 19% have a dedicated team managing the company’s entire data lake. In fact, 18% have no data management strategy at all. Because of this, data is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. More than half (54%) of all teams are evaluating and learning how to use available data and over a third (35%) do not have the required data management skills or resources to do so.

 

An increasing number of organisations are moving towards the use of smart data to inform CX decisions but are often overwhelmed by this transformation. Half of businesses confirmed data analytics and data management will be one of the top three tech initiatives prioritised by the CX team. Analytics (61%) is expected to be the top factor in reshaping the CX industry within the next five years. This is closely followed by artificial intelligence (57%), service personalisation (48%) and technology integration (45%).

 

Overcoming business organisational structure challenges

Many organisations believe AI and automation is the future for creating operational efficiency, hyper personalisation and providing an effortless customer experience. Rules-based robotic solutions “are the preferred option both now and in the short term with AI being the top five year priority.”

 

The vast majority (81%) of organisations also believe customer operations will be positively impacted by AI and CX robotics in the future, followed by business insight and customer intelligence (66%) and workplace management/operational productivity (53%). However, the implementation of AI remains difficult. Looking forward, businesses must find a solution for the current lack of skills across the business, which is currently considered a challenge for more than half (58%) of organisations today.

Veeam announces program enhancements and new integrations with ConnectWise for additional partner support of Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS solutions

Veeam® Software, the leader in Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management™, today celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program with the release of program discounts and updates, and the release of NEW Veeam Service Provider Console v4. Veeam Service Provider Console v4 includes new capabilities that make it easier for service providers to remotely manage and monitor their customers’ Veeam environments and is offered FREE to VCSP partners.

Launched in March 2010, the VCSP program enables service providers to leverage Veeam software to offer reliable, revenue-generating Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings. Driven by more than 25,000 Cloud & Service Provider partners, the VCSP program reported an annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 33 percent year-over-year (YoY) for Q4’19. A decade after launching, Veeam continues to add value and innovation to its VCSP program.

“Veeam’s vision has always been to deliver simple, flexible and reliable backup solutions to customers. Some customers prefer to set up and manage their own backup and recovery solutions while others prefer this as a service. This is why Veeam has invested in building a robust ecosystem of cloud and service providers, allowing companies of any size to have a Veeam-powered solution delivered in the manner that’s best suited for them,” said Jim Kruger, CMO at Veeam. “To celebrate 10 years of the VCSP program, we are introducing new discounts and capabilities that will help cloud and managed service providers profitably scale their managed BaaS and DRaaS business. Today, many of our VCSP partners are reporting double, even triple, digit growth in their businesses. We look forward to celebrating future successes with our VCSP partners as we focus on our ‘better together’ strategy.”

To mark the 10-year anniversary, Veeam is releasing the new VCSP program discounts and updates for 2020, including:

• Point Reduction for Enterprise Plus: Bring Veeam’s top features to market and build competitive BaaS and DRaaS offerings without eating into margins, as the result of a 15 percent price reduction on Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Plus edition.

• Volume Rental Agreement (VRA) Discounts: New VCSP VRA tiers help super-charge margins by rewarding new partners ready to commit to Veeam and our long-time high-consumption partners.

• Veeam Universal Licensing (VUL) for Rental: Leverage all Veeam features with a simple pay-as-you-grow program that makes it easy to create or expand any Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS offering, without needing expensive CapEx to build from.

• VCSP Pulse: EMEA and APJ partners will now be able to join the 6,000+ North America VCSP partners that are able to connect with Veeam and their Aggregator on a single, purpose-built platform, offering the simplicity and reliability needed to build Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS solutions at scale.

In addition to new discounts and tier changes for the VCSP program, Veeam is launching NEW Veeam Service Provider Console v4. Formerly Veeam Availability Console, the product now includes remote monitoring and management capabilities directly integrated with ConnectWise Automate. This integration consolidates client data into a single, proactive and centralized user interface, reducing resources and enabling faster response times. As a result, service providers can invest more time in growing their business and less time with administrative tasks.

Veeam Service Provider Console v4 makes offering Veeam-powered services easier than ever with new capabilities to help scale partner offerings, collaborate with channel partners, and manage Veeam consumption all in one place. New features include:

• Enhanced Usage Reporting Engine: Automatically generate the single usage report for all workloads without spending time manually aggregating points and  workload counts .

• Full Support for Veeam Backup & Replication™ v10: Leverage powerful new capabilities of NAS Backup and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows v4.

• Enhanced API Interface : Construct advanced pathways to further automation for service providers and their customers with NEW RESTful API actions and endpoints, with API usage now extended to the users with the Reseller role.

Veeam Service Provider Console v4 is available now and free to all VCSP partners. For more information, visit https://www.veeam.com

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today that it has been named by Gartner, Inc. as a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Hyperconverged Infrastructure. This is the second year that Nutanix has been recognized as a Customers’ Choice.

“At a time when many organizations are struggling with the day-to-day realities of running a business remotely, we are continuing to focus on our customers by delivering an IT infrastructure that is invisible and automated, allowing teams to focus on more immediate business needs,” said David Sangster, Chief Operating Officer at Nutanix. “To us, being recognized as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Hyperconverged Infrastructure is a great honor, and only strengthens our commitment to deliver cloud computing solutions that are flexible, simple, resilient and adaptable to customers’ changing needs, including widespread remote work.”

Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) integrates compute, virtualization, storage, networking and security, making tasks like deploying a virtual desktop environment much easier and faster. Something that would take weeks with legacy IT, can take just hours with Nutanix. Portable, subscription-based software licenses deliver valuable flexibility so IT infrastructure is no longer coupled to specific hardware devices and configurations, which could be critically important in situations where the global supply chain is impacted.

 This Customers’ Choice recognition is based on detailed feedback from 68 customer ratings in the past year across multiple vendors in the hyperconverged infrastructure space. Nutanix has 301 reviews since the market began to be tracked within the Gartner Peer Insights platform and holds an average score of 4.7 out of 5.*

Nutanix customers said:

Can Handle Complex Data Center Workloads Across All Industries

“We have fully implemented our Nutanix platform here. The staff at Nutanix have been very helpful from helping us plan our implementation to providing us with solution architects to help us through solving how to incorporate some of our challenging gaming software pieces.”

• Database Administrator in the services industry

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform Review

“Nutanix is clearly making IT jobs easier due to its capacity of Virtualization, compute and storage. Well I have to say, not only for IT, also for the company since it reduces cost a lot! […] The platform delivers scalable high performance storage and virtualization services. Giving us the tools to upgrade our VM in a very easy way and basically with the same price. Something that would be really hard to do in a regular environment because we have to think in many factors before doing it. ”

• Computer Engineer in the services industry

 The Best Hyperconvergence Infrastructure Of All Time

“The best hyperconvergence infrastructure, I have used for several years helping us manage our entire virtual environment and at the same time monitoring the services and something very important maintaining the continuity of the business since it is composed of nodes that share their resources and this is shown as a single resource say disks, memories, CPU and other resources found in each of the nodes. ”

• System Operator in the healthcare industry

Easy Implementation And An Ever Growing Product

“The product and professional services exceeded our expectations. We are still using VMware with Nutanix, but the swap from the traditional 3-tier system to Nutanix was simple. We used professional services as well, but after having them onsite, I think we could have gone without them it was that easy to setup. The product works great, it’s easy to navigate, and it’s pretty intuitive. Nutanix continues to innovate and create new products and integration. ”

• IT Manager in the finance industry

Easy Installation And [An] Awesome Growing System

“It’s a complete 100% software defined beast that works well. We have not had any issue[.] I still have yet to see something not working.”

• Network Engineer in the education industry

Customer focus is one of Nutanix’s core tenants, and the commitment to delighting customers is recognized in the company’s average net promoter score of 90 over the past six years, as well as the 97% customer retention rate as of the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2020.

As many companies are gearing up for remote work, Nutanix continues to deliver intelligent, easy and resilient cloud software solutions, along with excellent customer service, to its nearly 16,000 customers worldwide, including nearly 880 Global 2,000 customers. The company’s flexible and scalable hyperconverged infrastructure solutions deliver the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed during these uncertain times, along with the easy deployment and management Nutanix products are known for.

More customer reviews on Nutanix are available here.

Disclaimer: 

*Ratings and reviews current as of March 24, 2020. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

Author: Sherifa Hady, Channel Sales Director, EMEA, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

 

In a world of consumer changes and connectivity everywhere, channel partners are primed to sell new services and products and play a key role in the development of the next wave of technology trends. The channel is now being driven by three key trends: partner digital transformation; new business models with a focus on services; and customer trends driving new types of demand.

It’s not just about what’s in the box anymore, we’re seeing networks open up a new world of services and solutions for the channel to offer, and customers who are eager to tap into these to deliver a cutting-edge customer experience.

TREND ONE: Channel business models – it’s not just about the box, it’s about what the box gives you Across the entire channel, from alliance partners to distributors and systems integrators, we’re seeing partners start to ready themselves, and their business models, for a new technological landscape and how to keep their offerings relevant within it. Partners are looking five years ahead to anticipate what they will be selling, and where their revenue will be coming from.

Distributors who once would have been a logistics partner or driving channel enablement are now rethinking their role for example. The cloud is a prime example of this – it’s changed the business model of partners significantly. Hardware is no longer the key revenue driver, and whereas before you might have expected hardware sales to account for most of your business, it’s now completely swapped to be a software-first market instead.

The role of the vendor to help support and enable partners through this transition is vital. It’s about ensuring the incentives and support you give your partners is correctly aligned to the market they are trying to sell to. It’s also about how you advise on the advantages and disadvantages of CAPEX and OPEX installations, and ensuring you’re embedded within the channel to give your partners the use cases, case studies, and best practice to sell in this new type of market.

 Some partners are already there and know where they want to go next. Others are still figuring out what their path ahead looks like.

TREND TWO: Channel partners race to bring new service offerings to the market  

The channel knows that services are an essential part of their business model. The future lies in consumption.

There are three ways that partners are pursuing this now. They might be reselling the services offered through vendors, managing assets and services for customers, or developing their own services and intellectual property offerings.

Here again, we can clearly see the role that the cloud has played in influencing the market. It was a wake-up call for partners – if everyone goes straight to the cloud provider to buy their services then how do you sell around this? The cloud has hugely disrupted how people consider buying IT.

For partners who embrace services however the rewards can be significant. From a profitability perspective, if everyone is just selling the same AP then the opportunity for margins is limited – but if you can sell maintenance and services on top of this then there’s a huge business opportunity.

It also means you can get much closer to your customers. Longer term service agreements mean you learn to understand their challenges and how you can solve them together. The benefits for customer retention are huge.

Finally, partners with the technology and technical skills to develop their own IP offerings will be able to really stand out and differentiate themselves in the market. It drives their capabilities beyond just vendor specific offerings.

By the end of 2020, this is one of the most significant developments we expect to see in the channel market.

TREND THREE: Partners who focus on selling based on business outcomes can win big

Customer needs will always be a driving force in the market. For many companies, IT is no longer just a cost centre in their business, used for data analysis and report creation. Instead it’s often a profit centre, driving revenue, new business models, and enabling the creation of billion-dollar companies along the way.

For partners, reacting to these changes is central to setting themselves up for success in the year and decade ahead.

Fundamentally the usage of IT has become very different. The customer may want a new system for their hotel in order to allow their guests to check in via their phone and get straight onto the Wi-Fi, but they’re unlikely to be interested in the detail of the systems they are buying. They just want to be able to deploy.

 This is a huge opportunity for partners to talk to their customers about business outcomes and take a more significant role within solution development. However, as customers move away from hardware to services partners won’t be able to rely on them ringing up to order new parts – this sell requires a much more proactive approach.

The rise of the Edge is one of the final parts of this puzzle. Over the course of this year we will continue to see the exponential growth of connected devices, and within that a need for data and network power to sit at different points of the network.