Talking tactics

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Paul Sherry, Regional Director Middle East & Africa, F5 Networks.

Channel Middle East talks strategy with some of the leading networking vendors in the Middle East. We find out how they are managing and developing their channel approach to meet the demands of modern enterprise end-users and the changing landscape brought about by budgetary concerns in the midst of the financial crisis.

The Middle East networking market is a diverse business with incredibly sophisticated vendor solutions, being implemented by equally as skilled resellers, to fulfill the demands of modern enterprise’s in a region that has seen incredible growth over the last years.

Many of the solutions on offer very unique features to answer the in-depth demands of the CIO and the IT manager. These include serious inroads being made into next generation technologies such as cloud computing, hosted services and virtualised environments.

It is very interesting then, that on the face of it, there is relatively little to choose between the tactics that a vast majority of the networking vendor’s employ in the interaction and positioning of their Middle East channel.

Largely speaking, the two-tier model is favoured, with a distribution partner being responsible for fulfilling the needs of resellers, but also acting in a value added capacity to ensure that those resellers can maximise revenue streams from additional services and product pull-through.

Also, although all vendors will vehemently claim that they would never consider a direct sales approach with the end-user, and chastise competitors accordingly for supposedly doing so, there are plenty that work directly with systems integration partners supporting the work these partners do and carrying out pre-sales and occasionally post-sales support.

“Our current model is through distribution so we have a two-tier model, the [reseller] partner and the distribution layer,” explained Mahmoud El Ali, general manager of 3Com. “We are however, working with a number of different integrators and discussing with them a kind of tier-one partnership,” he revealed.

This sentiment from 3Com reflects the play-book that many channel managers follow in the Middle East, but despite the intricate nature of the networking business, with large scale implementations and long term commitments lending themselves to a close vendor and reseller partnership, the size, breadth and variety of countries in the region means a Middle East distributor is almost always an important ally for vendors looking to prosper.

The role of the tier-two players is often much more than just a logistical aid. Due to the fact that some vendors have not been here for a great deal of time, or do not have physical presence in some of the countries around the region, a distribution partner will often be appointed by networking vendors to work as a master distributor or an agent.

That distributor will shoulder a great deal of the responsibility for the market development, reseller support and product fulfillment in most, if not, all of the markets under their agreement.

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