Storing future gains

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Juergen Arnold.

Every year SNIA - the Storage Networking Industry Association - comes to town to report on progress in the Middle East storage space and lay out the trends that will have strong repercussions in the market from the CIO, through the vendor, to the resellers. Channel Middle East talked to SNIA Europe chairman Juergen Arnold (JA) and Mahesh Vaidya (MV), recently-appointed SNIA Middle East committee president and CEO of ISIT, to find out what the group has done to make business plainer for the channel.

SNIA recently opened the door to channel membership. What benefits are there for the channel community to join up?

JA: The key benefit for the channel player is that it allows them to be presented as vendor-neutral through certification and training. Thus they are not coming in with the vendor-specific approach.

They are pointing out the specific concept and then selecting the appropriate vendor. Many VARs have specific vendors that work with them and this is where there is benefit because if you have this branding from SNIA you are recognised as being an expert in storage and not just representing one vendor. That is important in this region as all of the business is done though the channel.

How does that work when end-users may not be fully-versed in storage and therefore search out familiar vendor names?

JA: We have discussed this with the local team and now that we have a local presence here SNIA needs to grow, which means being seen as a vendor-neutral entity. This reputation needs to grow here. This acceptance is the task of the local team, as well as making us readily available. With the correct communication and events like the SNIA Middle East Academy, end-users will begin to understand what it is that we have to offer.

This region is still covered under SNIA Europe because there is no SNIA Middle East yet. Why is that?

JA: I cover SNIA Europe, and the Middle East is our first entity outside of Central Europe. That is why I have the mandate to cover the EMEA region. We have no staff here in the Middle East, but we have created a country committee, which is actually more than one country. Mahesh is the chairman of the country committee for the Middle East. We have opened this local chapter and it shows we see this as a booming market and we have a clear engagement here.

How many Middle East partners are members of SNIA?

MV: We have just started partner recruitment and ISIT and Tech Access have joined. We have other partners as well but they are vendor members of SNIA Europe that have come out here. What we are trying to do now is get more channel partners involved, as well as end-users.

What are the requirements for a Middle East partner to join SNIA?

JA: It depends on the size and the metrics of the company, and whether they are in just one country. There is an entry point for the channel and this is set at US$1,338. From a marketing point of view, this is a very low cost to be placed on our website, carried as part of our programmes and to use the SNIA logo.

When a partner joins, what sort of participation would you like to see from them?

JA: We expect them to be engaged and serve the industry by passing on information. We feed them with state-of-the-art information and trends, and then they can relay that to their customers. We enable channel members to have a broader and higher knowledge in their field. They can read the white papers and become certified by professionals. In the Middle East we already have a lot of professionals that have gone through our process and are highly specified and recognised as top professionals.

MV: Let me give you an example of this. Last week, our sales guys were in Abu Dhabi meeting a major government institution and the talk was around solid status.

The top CIO was comparing solid status to his USB drive and suggesting that solid status was not reliable. We were able to access the SNIA tutorials on solid state and present them to the end-user. They were then able to understand that solid status is ready for enterprises and can no longer be compared to a USB stick.

How much do you apply local knowledge and specifications to the tutorials?

MV: In the first meeting as a local committee we drafted an agenda catering to the requirements in the Middle East region. In the future, what we are going to do is host webinars with either local speakers or someone from the US or European branches of SNIA. We will do more things like this that are specific to requirements in this region.

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