GEC NEWS WIREWe live in an age where connectivity is the key to competitive advantage. With BlueCat, IP address management is tightly integrated with our hardened DNS/DHCP servers, enabling visibility and control of “everything IP” from a single pane of glass. Luca Maiocchi, Regional Manager – Southern Europe & ME, BlueCat speaks to the EC MEA team about how BlueCat enables organizations to convert connectivity to a competitive advantage. BlueCat in ME is a pure channel oriented company, with Comguard as its VAD.
“We are expecting a tremendous growth, because finally a valid, important, serious and reliable alternative to the current DDI vendors is now available for every customer and partner in this region.”
Luca Maiocchi, Regional Manager Southern Europe & ME, BlueCat
What is the importance of BlueCat to this region?
The Middle East is a key territory for BlueCat and the company will be investing with additional local presence very soon. BlueCat already has multiple customers in the region and is going to add additional important names to the Customer Portfolio.
What are your competitive advantages over others?
I think the most important advantage is the company itself: BlueCat is a company that wants to support the customer during the life cycle of their products, and collaborate actively with every customer to reach the maximum level of satisfaction. That’s why the biggest and largest companies from across the world are our customers. Technically and product wise, we are really software oriented, so with a completely different approach from our competitors: for example we are happy to support perpetual (it means without End of Life date for ever) virtual environments and even if the customer would like to still have appliance based products, our HW life cycle is really long (5-7 years) without any forced “refresh” requested to the customer.
Today’s enterprises are focusing more on connecting Big Data and IoT, how BlueCat is becoming relevant to this environment?
This is exactly the world where BlueCat is moving towards. Managing million of IPs coming from IoT and huge amount of data provided in a cloud/virtual form, is exactly what we are able to do today with our unlimited scalable IPAM solution, and that’s the model that we will be implementing very soon with our next releases, for example DNS deployed directly in the cloud.
What is your channel strategy in this region?
BlueCat in ME is a pure channel oriented company, with Comguard as our VAD; and Certified and Authorized Resellers. We already have developed our reseller ecosystem in every GCC country, but we are still looking for key partners for many regions and verticals.
What is your partner program to empower and incentivize the partners?
We are offering, after the Reseller Authorization agreement signature, a full technical and sales enablement. For technical support, up to 2 partner resources can be trained by BlueCat for free, through a complete training path. Regarding Sales, we are providing sales training sessions, mainly at the partner office, to provide and transfer our proposition and product positioning and to teach how to approach customers and get them interested in the niche yet really valuable technologies around IPAM and DDI.
Why should a partner go with BlueCat rather than your competitors?
We are able to offer the best DDI architecture for mid and large enterprise companies and the best company related experience with BlueCat. Our channel is really well managed and every sales process is shared in a transparent way. In addition BlueCat team is always available to actively collaborate with the Authorized Partner for any sales or technical related request. Finally every BlueCat End User Customer and Partner is recognizing our Support as one of the best on the market.
What is your marketing strategy in this region?
We are focusing on few but key initiatives, like key trade shows (like GISEC/GITEX) and mainly on customer oriented initiatives, like specific technical seminars and face to face meetings. We will be more present on Social Networks in the near future.
Tell us about your major customers in the region.
We have customers in the Finance, Central Government, Education and Industry sectors in the region. We are working with some of them to provide an official Case History that will be provided and published through BlueCat official channels.
What kind of growth are you expecting in this region?
We are expecting a tremendous growth, because finally a valid, important, serious and reliable alternative to the current DDI vendors is now available for every customer and partner in this region. BlueCat is one of the most fast growing companies in the IT, we are completely debt-free and the plan for the next quarters is to invest a lot on hiring key people in the sales, technical and development divisions. BlueCat is expecting to grow his headcount by 30% just in the current Fiscal Year: this is a sign of a very healthy company and of an organization actively looking to the next great revolutions inside the IT.
