Reseller ME catches up with Ajay Singh Chauhan, Group CEO, Spectrum Group to get the lowdown on the company’s perspective in the changing landscape of the channel.

Xerox: 60% of employees don’t need office for productivity
Xerox has released results of surveys into mobility in and out of the workplace, which reveal that 38% of workers feel most productive when at home.

Cyber-crime will not stop for Christmas
Threats lurk within networks, endpoints or devices, often hidden in poorly configured settings or permissions, ineffective data governance, access management and usage policies. These unseen threats come from all perimeters of the organisation and major trends such as BYOD, big data, cloud, and mobile apps have increased the challenge faced by IT leaders.

Trend Micro reveals 2014 security forecast
Trend Micro has outlined its security predictions for 2014, and it has forecast that one major data breach will occur every month next year.

Interactive Intelligence hires senior staff
The three new VPs are appointed to enhance cloud communications infrastructure, service and support.

Infor, Automation Consultants announce partnership at Cairo ICT 2013
Business application software provider Infor announced today during Cairo ICT 2013 it has signed a partnership agreement with ILA Advanced Technology – the holding company of Automation Consultants.

Red Hat: ME enterprises should not be fooled by the false ‘open’
IT analyst firm Gartner placed ‘Software Defined Anything’ in its list for Top IT Trends for 2014. Within the storage market, software-defined storage is rapidly gaining importance and becoming a growing market trend in the Middle East.

Home appliance makers connect with open source ‘Internet of things’ project
Home appliances, cars and computers could soon be talking to one another thanks to an open source framework that has the backing of consumer electronics manufacturers in a new industry alliance.

Is data complexity blinding your IT decision-making?
According to a new study by Forrester Research, commissioned by Data-as-a-Service firm BDNA, 73 percent of high-level IT decision makers cite the complexity of data as the largest challenge in making effective IT decisions in the next 12 months.

CFO panel: relationship with CIOs often ‘confrontational’
CIOs need to get their house in order before they get a seat at the top table, a panel of financial executives said at a briefing by the Financial Times in England.

Through the looking glass
And it was all going so well. As vendors began to build more comprehensive cloud-based product roadmaps, Middle Eastern users were beginning to see just how cloud services can streamline their businesses. According to a Gartner report from earlier in the year, cloud adoption was due to grow monumentally in the region up to 2016. This was largely due to issues surrounding security and compliance being ironed out.

How to simplify your infrastructure
It’s a cold, hard fact that enterprises are putting more strain on their networks now than ever before. On top of this, never before has the risk of downtime been more pertinent―businesses simply can’t afford for their networks to be down, even momentarily, meaning the pressure is on CIOs to ensure that all services are up-and-running all of the time.

Gartner: future data centres will have more flexibility
Tomorrow’s data centre will be mobile, flexible, highly efficient and secure, says David Cappuccio, Managing Vice President and Chief of Research for Gartner’s infrastructure teams.
Ellucian Live Middle East 2013 highlights role of technology in higher education
The three-day higher education conference, attracted participants from not only the region but also Asia, Europe and the USA.

Middle East, Africa record highest Ethernet sales in Q3
The growing popularity of 10 Gigabit and 40 Gigabit Ethernet in data centres helped the Middle East Ethernet switch market record the highest third quarter increase, according to IDC.
In the virtual realm
Redington Value has been recently signed up by VMware to distribute its whole portfolio in MENA region, with a special focus on software-defined data centres. We speak to B. Ramkumar, Senior Vice President, Redington Gulf-Value Division, about the deal and further plans for 2014.
New game, new rules
Havier Haddad, Channel and Alliances Director for Turkey, Emerging Africa and the Middle East, EMC

Brocade worldwide channel survey
The survey reveals that channel partners who can help customers migrate to fabric-based networks will succeed in new networking landscape

Riverbed appoints new worldwide channels SVP
Application performance infrastructure firm Riverbed Technology last week announced the appointment of Keith Hoskison as Senior Vice President of their Worldwide Channels and Strategic Account Programmes division.

Cisco: SDN, internet of things main 2014 concerns
Next year will see demonstrable evidence of the Internet of Things, real-time communications on the Web, and SDN-enabled platforms with killer applications for them, says Cisco.