By Editor
SNB Middle East, a company that has a dedicated focus in areas including IP surveillance and storage, is fast emerging as a distributor of scale with reach into several markets. Abdul Rauf Chougle, Group General Manager discusses the company’s growth and focus
Please elaborate on the milestones achieved in terms of growth over the year?
Last year has been an extremely successful year for SNB. In 2013-14, our business not only grew by almost 100%, but also helped us grow our market reach and product portfolio. SNB now has an office in Riyadh catering the ever-exciting KSA market with local sales and technical resources. Last year was also very positive in terms of the new tie-ups, namely leading brands like EVault, Extreme Networks, GTB Technologies and Cyberoam coming into our portfolio.
Elaborate on the storage portfolio you hold as of now? Do you have solutions to address different requirements from SMB and enterprise segments?
SNB’s Data-Storage portfolio comprises of Disk, Tape and Backup & Recovery solutions. We represent Nexsan and Infortrend on Disk, TandbergData on Tape and EVault on Backup & Recovery. All brands we represent have products to address SMB and Enterprise requirements.
What are the value-add service you provide your partners?
SNB has always been a Value-Add distributor along with being an end-to-end solution provider. SNB has a strong technical team to offer pre and post-sales technical support to all our partners. SNB also offers sales and technical trainings to partners and also helps by getting involved in end-user interactions.
Besides data storage and recovery solutions as well as networking solutions and IP security, which are the domains that you are looking to extend into?
Besides Data-Storage, Security Surveillance and Networking, SNB is now a well-established distributor for IT security solutions. Currently, SNB offers IRM (Information Rights Management), DLP (Data Leakage Prevention) and UTM (Unified Threat Management) solutions in the IT security segment. Also, SNB is in the process of expanding into the Cloud Storage Services segment with EVault as the first brand in this segment.
Elaborate on the new vendor associations you built up over the past year
SNB has been very successful in terms of signing up new vendors in the last one year. SNB signed up with Extreme Networks for its entire range of Networking products, GTB Technologies for DLP (Data Leakage Prevention), Cyberoam for UTM (Unified Threat Management), Evault for Backup and Recovery and Infosec for its range of UPS.
Discuss your expansion initiatives such as the Kenya office you have opened in the past year?
Kenya office is so far just a sales office and still depends on the UAE operations for support. The plan is to grow it into a full-fledged branch in 2015.
You have done some channel roadshows across several territories including Saudi Arabia. Discuss how these have been ideal for you to meet with the channel there? Did these events open up opportunities to increase your channel base?
SNB has been conducting roadshows since its inception. We firmly believe that roadshows have helped SNB reach where it is now. Roadshows have always given us the exposure, helped us increase our channel base and opened up a lot of opportunities.