Dr. Cherif Sleiman, Vice President, Middle East & Africa shares an overview on the technological innovations that are happening around the ICT domain. He also spoke about how Infoblox is adding value in today’s market requirements.

According to you, what are the major driving trends of today’s ICT market?

Trends such as cloud, Big Data, virtualization, security and mobility are showing great impact on the Middle East market and they are creating significant pressure as well as opportunities for some of the largest enterprises in the energy, government, telecom and finance sectors.  We are in the midst of a wave of IT transformation and modernization and Infoblox is playing a critical role in helping enterprises manage and secure their IT infrastructure. The above mentioned trends are leading to some great transformational technology innovations.

How is information security landscape evolving in the enterprise ICT market?

Regional organizations in the Middle East and Africa region are focusing on security as their top priority area within their IT spends. Given the fact that not only is the threat landscape constantly changing, but also the political turmoil in certain countries is adding another dimension of cyber warfare. DNS Security is an area that we believe regional organizations will start paying greater attention to as they begin to understand the damaging consequences of inadequate DNS security measures including lost revenue due to downtime, diminished customer satisfaction and lost productivity.

We are working on educating the overall market including customers and partners about Infoblox’s credentials of being the only vendor worldwide to provide holistic end-to-end DNS security and defense against the widest range of DNS-based attacks such as volumetric, exploits, and DNS hijacking attacks.

How do you witness the growing complexity of ICT environment impacting your business?

Networks are growing, applications are getting advanced but, ICT budgets are not growing as per the growing complexity of ICT environments. We at Infoblox, consider this as a great opportunity as we focus on bringing the element of affordability in the advanced technologies.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has also become a major trend in today’s data center environment. According to you, what are the advantages of SDN?

Agility and efficiency are the two major advantages of SDN.  Unlike traditional networks that required the setting up of physical racks, with SDN, you basically have drawers of services – storage, compute, security, memory etc. Organizations can access these drawers and pull information elements as and when they need in order to respond to a specific market shift, business unit need or a market trend, something that would be impossible with the current archaic IT infrastructure.

Similarly, efficiency also comes as bundled with SDN. Approximately 80% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on. By switching to SDN, organizations can optimize capabilities of commoditized hardware which translates to lower CapEx. Also, many of the mundane and manual network administration tasks can be automated which should translate in to lower OpEx. These CapEx and OpEx savings can be ploughed back in to the business, be it for technology upgrades or R&D or to focus on other innovations.

What is your advice to enterprises moving to SDN?

When it comes to trends, I like to draw the analogy between technology and fashion – what is in vogue one day is out the next (and sometimes back in again!). The point I am trying to make is that in the technology world, we shouldn’t just adopt trends because they are cool. There always has to be a business case – the trend needs to cause sufficient disruption in the productivity or in the way we do business and the current economics before we decide to adopt the new technology.

So to that end, before an organization decides to make the transition to SDN, it should take into account three critical considerations:

Firstly, the organization should define exactly what SDN means for its enterprise – what is the disruption that it will cause, how does it map to what is already available on the market today and finally and probably most importantly what will be the benefits of making the switch to SDN.

Secondly, with the adoption of SDN, there is a blurring of lines between applications and services and the networks that they ride on. This will require new organizational models in terms of accountability, responsibility and governance. The organization needs to determine if it is culturally agile enough to be able to realign internal teams to meet these requirements.

Finally, SDN is a multi-vendor, multi technology platform and the organization needs to ensure that the SDN vendor it chooses can support a rich ecosystem of integration and interoperability.

In order to expand and grow in the Middle East region, what is your go-to-market strategy?

Channel is the key area for us. Since there is a great action in the technology landscape and we are witnessing many newer trends it is high time for partners to respond to these market changes. Partners must have to work on enhancing their capacities and upgrade their skillset to deliver the best at the customer level. We are working closely with our partner network in order to help them grow in the right direction.

In last 18 months we have registered 10X growth and the credit to such great success goes to our channel partners. Our priority is to further strengthen this area.

Which are the flagship technology innovations that Infoblox has designed for market trends such as Cloud, Big Data and Mobility?

Our Cloud Network Automation technology was introduced early 2015, which bought a scalable network control to the next generation of private cloud deployments. Infoblox Cloud Network Automation delivers control that scales from pilot to production to multi-platform, so that private cloud deployments—regardless of size and scope—aren’t hobbled by manual processes for managing core network services.

Similarly, Infoblox’s Global Server Load Balancing can significantly enhance network response times and availability by distributing traffic among different servers based on server load, server health, and geographical proximity to the user. Infoblox DNS Traffic Control is the first solution to add global server load balancing to enterprise-grade DNS appliances—enabling customers to use a single appliance to provide critical DNS network services while leveraging DNS to optimize network performance by intelligently directing traffic to appropriate servers.