Tell us about your role at Extreme Networks.
I joined Extreme Networks as the regional director for Middle East, Turkey and Africa in October 2019. This region is the hub for technology and innovation. Extreme Networks is going through a big transition towards cloud infrastructure and my role is to lead the team in the META region.
‘Extreme networks is going through a big transition,’ please elaborate.
The networking market has been relatively stable over the last years, whereas other markets and IT industry have really been transformed. Networking has been at bit behind that curve because of the hardware being on-site. Now we’re moving towards cloud managed infrastructure. And what that allows you to do is get centralised management and monitoring of your entire infrastructure across the world. When this end-to-end visibility is combined with artificial intelligence through machine learning what we get are autonomous networks that drives themselves somewhat like autonomous cars. They know when there is an issue and they’re able to self-heal. They’re able to detect when there is a security breach and able to contain it and so on.
We believe that it is the right time for the networking industry to move towards the cloud architecture. Following our recent acquisition of cloud-managed networking company Aerohive, our complete portfolio, wired and wireless is moving to the cloud.
Increasing investment in the region
Extreme Networks has taken the decision to embrace cloud networking globally. We have the most comprehensive cloud portfolio and have a cloud strategy for our entire infrastructure. We chose the META region is because it is one of the most vibrant regions, both from a technology adoption and customer maturity perspective. We’re investing in resources by hiring new talent in sales, channel, sales engineering and marketing. We are also investing in developing our ecosystem of channel partners. As a channel focused organisation, we are not only transforming channel and our distributor ecosystem but our alliance partners as well.
Expanding channel ecosystem
Earlier networking used to be about switches, routers and access points. Now we are moving towards solutions that have business benefits that are tangible for customers and specific verticals. So we work very closely with system integrators that focus on healthcare, retail and higher education. We operate through the channel and as we grow, it is also important to expand the channel ecosystem. We are looking to on-board channel partners that can take our enhanced portfolio to the market, especially our vertical-specific solutions.
We have enhanced our existing partner program to include best practices from the vendors we acquired and integrated it under a new unified partner program. We are now looking for networking partners, ideally with customers in the enterprise segment.
Vertical focus
Our prime focus is the retail sector. In January, we launched our retail select solution, which brings value to the retail sector through business analytics. Another important vertical is the education sector. On the commercial side, we are focussing our efforts on the healthcare industry and government sector. Having said that, our solutions are compatible with the majority of verticals.
Future outlook
In the region, our focus is on the transformation of our customers; we are going with the customer first approach. We meet our customers to explain how they can maximise their business benefits and then build custom solutions for them with our channel partners.
In addition to regular engagement with partners and customers, one of our key priorities is to keep them informed of our roadmap, market developments, best practices from global customers, and so on. We spend a lot of time in cross pollination between customers. So, we introduce customers to each other. We also have a customer advisory board to share knowledge and experiences amongst our largest customers. So all of those initiatives I think will drive the talent development.
For partners it is important to understand that as organisations undergo digital transformation we need to ensure talent transformation within our workforce as well. Our portfolio is expanding and we are improving our partner program to help our partners run successful business. Partners must understand this change and utilise the training resources included the partner program. To enable our partners, we are going to launch a new MSP program to educate partners on how to sell a product-as-a-service.
