Magirus clear on Middle East future

Enterprise distributor Magirus is reducing its investment on standard EMC hardware as part of its transition to a pure software-focused business model, but has dismissed speculation that the move means it is considering its future in the region.

Magirus Middle East boss Vimal Kocher confirmed the company is no longer seeking to “aggressively” market the storage vendor’s hardware and has parted ways with “one or two” staff members who worked mainly on the EMC business.

However, he said the departures have been balanced out by investments in new resources to handle the primary areas of its business, which consist of VMware virtualisation solutions and products from complementary vendors in the ILM and security sectors.

This follows the adoption of a new strategy last year after the company sold its HP and IBM enterprise hardware business to Avnet.

“Customers want to see value add and consulting rather than pure distribution so we decided we should come out with solution stakes,” explained Kocher. “That has resulted in us moving towards solution-centric distribution rather than vendor-centric distribution.”

Magirus claims to hold more than 80% of the VMware business in the Middle East, as well as being a major partner for niche vendors such as PlateSpin, Vizioncore and Veeam.

Kocher insists the company is looking to develop the Middle East business further and is even preparing to appoint an in-country manager to handle its affairs in Saudi Arabia.

“Only in January this year we enlarged our team in Dubai in order to address new markets and technologies,” he said. “We have also invested in an in-house training facility where we conduct certification training on VMware. Furthermore we are establishing a new team in Riyadh after the former team left the company in the course of the Avnet transaction.”

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