“Our product portfolio is unparalleled and unmatched”: Dell EMC’s Azeem Mohammed

CNME Editor Mark Forker spoke to Azeem Mohammed, Enterprise Distribution Lead at Dell EMC – Middle East, to find out how the technology leader is leveraging its expertise and knowledge to help their customers and partners deal with the challenges caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Mohammed has enjoyed a decorated and distinguished career in the IT industry – and has served Dell EMC with distinction for 17 years.

He started his Dell EMC career in Ireland, before relocating to Dubai in 2008. In the 12 years he has spent in the Middle East, he has firmly established himself as a key figure in the IT distribution ecosystem.

In a compelling interview the charismatic executive at Dell EMC began the conversation by outlining what his primary responsibilities at the company consists of.

“My main responsibility is to support the distribution of the Dell EMC-ISG channel business, which mainly revolves around servers. It is also my role to support our partners and train them to ensure that our resellers and distributors are stocking the right products at the right price, which makes us stand on par with the competition,” said Mohammed.

Mohammed also highlighted how he believes that the sheer diversity of Dell’s product portfolio was a key reason in cementing its status as an industry leader.

“Dell EMC has a comprehensive portfolio that is unmatched and unparalleled in the industry. We want our partners to drive that strategic message and cascade it into our customers and system integrators, so they understand our story and vision. We’re industry leaders from endpoints all the way to servers, storage, HCI, networking and security,” said Mohammed.

COVID-19 has ground the global economy to a halt and every industry has been affected in some shape or form.

However, Mohammed believes the outbreak has represented an opportunity for Dell EMC to communicate their vision to their customers, whilst assisting them in resolving some of their key challenges, namely the transition from a traditional office environment to a virtual workplace.

“The wonders of modern technology ensure that we’re still able to speak to our customers, and we can conduct meetings with them via video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, so we haven’t been impacted from that perspective. However, we’re trying to help our customers in terms of enabling their remote endpoints and its workforce to work remotely in an effective way. There has never been a better time for us to communicate our story to our customers and convey to them what exactly Dell EMC can do to help them in this current crisis,” said Mohammed.

The dynamic Dell EMC executive also pointed out that in some cases they have customers that have 80-100% of their entire workforce working remotely from home – but stressed that it’s not just about enabling the workforce.

“It’s not just about working remotely, it’s also about supporting the IT needs. It’s about supporting the systems that are backing everything up, there are entire infrastructure and applications that need to be protected at all time. There are remote workers who are using various types of endpoints such as a corporate notebook, personal iPad or a handheld device, and we totally understand the security concerns of the customers. We’re aligned with what they need from us in terms of ensuring their security on these types of endpoint devices,” said Mohammed.

Mohammed said that the predominant challenges that customers are coming to them with are issues they’ve previously dealt with in the past, which are primarily focused on security.

“A lot of our customers are encountering challenges that isn’t something new to us. We’ve been asked these questions in the past from customers who already had adopted the concept of remote working prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The question we’re typically being asked by customers is how do we ensure that all their workers are protected and secure when working remotely? What has happened is that traditionally sensitive information, which was managed onsite, is now being manage remotely, so instead of being inside the firewall, it is now outside of the firewall,” said Mohammed.

The Enterprise Distribution Lead at Dell EMC concluded a fascinating conversation by explaining the nuanced challenges facing some employees working remotely. A large portion of employees will need high-speed broadband connections and a strong network to process some of the data on their intensive applications. If connectivity is disrupted, then it can be financially detrimental for businesses.

“We need to extend the security profile for these endpoints or end-user devices which are remote to ensure that these workers get a high level of network performance. Some workers will need a high level of network performance in terms of downloading a lot of data. We need to make sure that these latency intensive applications don’t create a bottleneck on the network. If some of the workers don’t have access to intensive applications and are unable to download large files, then that can result in the company losing millions. However, we’re well-positioned, and well-placed to help customers overcome all these challenges – and they’ve entrusted us to help them achieve their business goals and objectives during these unprecedented times,” concluded Mohammed.