The iconic toy chain is undergoing a digital transformation in the KSA backed by Capillary Technologies as a strategic partner

Capillary Technologies, a leader in omnichannel engagement solutions along with its partner Naizak AlElm have become a key technology enabler for ToysRUs in Saudi Arabia by providing the popular chain of toy stores with its AI based Instore solution. ToysRUs will benefit from Capillary’s retail marketing solution to accurately identify in-store walk- in’s and derive rich insights about customer behaviour and buying patterns to help plan store operations efficiently. 

According to research from Euromonitor International, Saudi Arabia’s retail market is expected to grow at 12.3% to be worth US$119 billion by 2023. Having recently established its regional entity ‘Capillary Arabia’ in the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia is the fastest-growing market for Capillary in the region. With this latest partnership with ToysRUs, Capillary aims to further consolidate its presence in the country. 

Offline retail in Saudi Arabia continues to contribute about 95% to the total spend. Consumers still prefer to visit brick-and-mortar stores to experience and feel the product before a purchase. Keeping customers at the center of attention, ToysRUs wanted to build an offline clickstream of data, similar to what ecommerce does, to support the company’s mission to provide an exceptional retail experience to customers.

ToysRUs deployed Capillary’s VisitorMetrix which not only enables it to analyze historical store traffic patterns to determine staffing requirements through power hours, but also gives immediate responsive data to changes, including studying the impact of promotional campaigns. ToysRUs uses this information to strategize their operations and marketing campaigns to look deeper at their performance and pull the right levers for improved productivity.

“While our ecommerce business is growing, we did not want to lose focus on the offline stores. Combining the instore consumer behaviour with the transactional data will give us a complete 360 degree view of our customers and will help us personalise our offerings and services,” said Mr. Mansour Al-Akeel, Managing Director and CEO at ToysRUs.

Capillary’s President and General Manager for META, Nitin Kaushal said, “Saudi Arabia is one of our key markets in the region and we are pleased to partner with ToysRUs and be involved in their digital journey. We will soon be launching VisitorSense to help retailers capture more in-store data. It will provide brands with demographics and fashion profiles of store visitors to better understand their buying habits, patterns and preferences. We look forward to establishing a long-term partnership with ToysRUs and help elevate their customer experience.”

Capillary has also partnered with Naizak in Jeddah to leverage its rich and localised expertise in the market to design localised loyalty solutions for homegrown brands. 

FVC, a leading value-added distributor in the Middle East and Africa, today signed a strategic partnership with  Virsec, a cybersecurity company delivering a radically new approach to protect organizations against advanced cyberattacks. The partnership will enable FVC to distribute Virsec’s cybersecurity solutions throughout the Middle East region.

Responding to a sharp increase in cyberattacks targeting businesses, Virsec has validated its patented Trusted Execution™ technology with FVC’s partners and customers to provide unprecedented protection against advanced cyberattacks. High-profile attacks such as WannaCry, NotPetya, Black Energy, Industroyer, and others have used advanced hacking techniques and memory exploits to hijack control, cause disruption, shut down critical business applications or worse. These techniques bypass conventional network security tools and have been considered “indefensible” by many security experts.

“Cybersecurity is a top concern for our customers today as hackers are evading conventional security defenses,” said K.S. Parag, Managing Director, FVC. “Virsec provides effective runtime application memory protection against fileless and memory-based exploits, helping our customers eliminate these dangerous attacks. Through this strategic partnership we have strengthened our IT security portfolio to provide our partners and customers with a complete suite of complementing security solutions required to protect their businesses and critical assets.”

Virsec is the only security vendor that protects processes and memory in real-time. The solution maps acceptable application execution, and instantly detects deviations caused by attacks. This deterministic process takes the guesswork out of cybersecurity by detecting and blocking application attacks within milliseconds, with precise forensics at every step. Analyst firm Gartner has stated that memory protection should be considered “mandatory” and has recognized Virsec for its unique technology.

“It’s time to rethink how we approach security as hackers are using increasingly sophisticated attacks to expose holes in an organization’s infrastructure,”said Bobby Gupta, Managing Director for International Business at Virsec.“These attacks affect all industries from critical infrastructure, government and defense, to financial services, healthcare, telecom, retail, and more. Our philosophy is simple – rather than eternally chasing elusive threats, we need to eliminate the guesswork in cybersecurity and stop attacks at the application, in real-time.” 

Alaris, a Kodak Alaris business,successfully hosted its Middle East Partner Conference October 2^nd– 3^rd, 2019 in Dubai. 70 partners from 20 countries across the region attended the event, which was held aboard the historic Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2) floating hotel and retired ocean liner. 

Executives from Alaris delivered a number of informative sessions including an overview of the company, latest insights into the future of information capture and management, the latest hardware, software and service solutions and how these could help grow revenues and profitability for partners’ businesses. One of the highlights of the event was an interactive session focusing on the value of the Alaris partner program and latest updates including the launch of a new partner portal – a one stop location for sales, marketing, competitive and training materials and other valuable resources that will help partners grow their businesses. A sales master class on generating more demand and new customers leveraging the power of social media saw strong interest from partners. 

There was a dedicated session on the Alaris network scanning portfolio with a focus on the recently launched Alaris INfuse Smart Connected Scanning Solutionand the Kodak Scan Station 730EX Plus Scannerthat automate business processes by seamlessly connecting document capture to existing business systems and the cloud. The conference also included a ‘Solutions Expo’ where partners were given a demo of the unique capabilities and features of the company’s software portfolio including Alaris Info Input Solution. 

Naji Kazak, General Manager – Middle East, Africa, Turkey & Russia at Alaris, a Kodak Alaris business said,“The Alaris Middle East Partner Conference is our flagship partner event in the region and presents our company with an opportunity to connect with our key partners to share the latest product updates and insights into our future strategy. It also gives us a chance to understand our partner’s pain points and address them. The event agenda and networking opportunities provide the insight and content our partners need to build a comprehensive plan to successfully grow their business with Alaris products.”

As part of the event, Alaris organized a desert safari which was a thrilling first-time experience for many of the partners. The company also hosted a gala dinner to commemorate the end of the event. 

“It’s clear that the team at Alaris is committed to their partners’ success and expect that same level of commitment in return. The interactive training sessions during the partner conference ensured that we remained focused so the company’s message was properly received – no “death by PowerPoint” here!! It was a most informative event, while still keeping the crowd involved. It’s a pleasure to work with a vendor that gives back as much as they receive. A BIG thank you to Alaris on the huge success of the Summit. Their efforts made every partner feel welcome and part of the Alaris family,” said Bren Miscia, Managing Director, ScanServ (Pty) Ltd.

HPE GreenLake for Nutanix and ProLiant DX Solutions Increase Business Agility, Lower Costs and Provide Greater Choice for Customers

Hewlett Packard Enterprise(HPE) and Nutanix(NASDAQ: NTNX) today announced the general availability of HPE’s integrated hybrid cloud as a service (aaS) offering, HPE GreenLake for Nutanix, and the HPE ProLiant DX solution. Today’s news delivers on the partnership announced between the two companies in April, through which HPE and Nutanix are providing customers and partners greater freedom of choice for building their hybrid cloud strategy.

“Hybrid cloud today offers a strategic advantage for organisations by granting them the flexibility to store data where they want it, maintain the level of control they desire and scale workloads more efficiently, to provide the level of service their customers expect,” said Pradeep Kumar, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Pointnext Services. “Through our combined offering with Nutanix, we’re helping customers deliver cloud capabilities with greater agility, flexibility, control and choice, so that they can focus on driving digital initiatives that allow them to innovate and move their business forward.”

“Companies around the world know that hybrid cloud is the ideal IT model and they need solutions that make it easier to deploy,” said Monica Kumar, Senior Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing of Nutanix. “Our goal is to make the underlying cloud infrastructure invisible so leaders can focus on what matters most to their businesses: their applications. By partnering with HPE, we’re paving pathways for more enterprises to easily find the right hybrid cloud solution and focus on what moves the needle to scale.”

The HPE GreenLake solution leverages Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software, including its built-in AHV hypervisor, to deliver a fully HPE-managed private cloud that dramatically lowers total cost of ownership and accelerates time to value, while allowing customers to pay for the service based on actual consumption. With HPE GreenLake, businesses can design IT solutions with their chosen technologies and consume them easily, reduce CapEx up to 30 percent due to reduced overprovisioning, increase IT resource utilisation by 40 percent by lowering the support load on IT operations staff, and as a result speed time to value for their critical IT projects.^[1]The as a service solution is now available to order across the 50+ countries where HPE GreenLake is offered. The HPE GreenLake for Nutanix offering will be initially focused on simplifying customer deployments of End User Computing initiatives, databases and private clouds.

The HPE ProLiant DX solution is built on HPE ProLiant and Apollo servers with Nutanix software pre-installed and shipped from HPE factories. HPE ProLiant DX brings together industry-leading Nutanix software and server technology into a turnkey solution, enabling enterprises to accelerate the adoption of modernised datacenter architectures.

HPE and Nutanix showcased their combined offerings at the Nutanix .NEXT Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 8-10, 2019. As part of its platinum sponsorship at .NEXT, HPE lead several presentations and other engagement activities with joint customers and partners at the conference.

For more information, please go to www.nutanix.com/hpe and www.hpe.com/greenlake.

Customer and Partner Quotes

“Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software running on HPE ProLiant systems has proven to be an easy-to-deploy, flexible and reliable solution for my IT team,” said Herman Brown, CIO for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. “Since putting it into production, my team has been able to focus more time bringing online new applications and services and much less time managing underlying infrastructure.”

“As a partner of both HPE and Nutanix, PQR has been waiting for the day that the Nutanix proposition and the HPE proposition would come together. Now that it has, we are especially pleased to see that the joint proposition is also available as a service through HPE GreenLake,” said Marco Lesmeister. Commercial Director of PQR. “PQR as a company is always looking for a simple and understandable offering to our customers. In taking the responsibility to manage all of the IT infrastructure for our customers and then bill them on a usage basis, the GreenLake proposition gives us the opportunity to do just that. We can scale up and down easily, without any financial risks for PQR or our customers.”

“We are very excited about the partnership between HPE and Nutanix. The combination of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software and HPE hardware results in a highly scalable and easily upgradeable solution for our customers,” said Jon Lankert, Principal Partner with Summit Partners LLC. “The opportunity to sell Nutanix software with HPE technology as a service through HPE GreenLake has been very good for our business. With this partnership, our customers receive the benefits of HPE with Nutanix, while just paying for what they use each month with no payment upfront.”

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^[1]The Total Economic Impact of HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity, Forrester, May 2018