Network visibility vendor Gigamon has taken the last couple of months as an opportunity to explain to customers and resellers exactly why its products are relevant to the Middle Eastern market.
While the firm has achieved plenty of recognition outside of this region, Gigamon’s focus recently has been about bringing brand recognition to the Middle East, said Trever Dearing, EMEA Marketing Director, Gigamon.
“The key reason we’re here is just to tell the story. Everyone we’ve told the story to has said they’ve never heard of us before, and it really is like that. We’re probably, in the UK and Germany, a year ahead, so when we’re at a trade show there, people sort of know who we are a bit. We’re now starting to build the brand here and make people aware of the market,” he told Reseller ME.
The market in question lies in network visibility. Dearing claimed that what the vendor does is new across the world anyway, but he added that customers were really beginning to see benefits from Gigamon’s products.
“People more and more want to get monitoring information out of their networks – for compliance reasons or whatever it happens to be. But what’s happening is, as more and more people are buying these monitoring tools, there’s nowhere for them to plug it into the network,” he said.
“What we do is we sit between the network and those tools, and allow people to centralise all of them, so they just plug them into us. And then we collect the data from around the network. And we can apply some rules and do some clever stuff like deduplication and time-stamping etc. The whole thing is quite new, and it’s sort of driven by people’s move to take gigabit Ethernet and that sort of stuff.”
The vendor has already gained some large customers in the Middle East, but Dearing said that Gigamon was looking to reach out to far more customers in the coming year. The problem, he said, was convincing people that Gigamon’s solutions really do answer issues that customers may face.
“A lot of the time, if you’re entering a new market with a new product, what you have to do is create the problem. It’s like the first person to invent glasses. They’d go up to someone and say, ‘Look, I can make your sight better.’ But they thought they didn’t have a problem. It’s a bit like that – we’re having to educate people on the problem they’ve got,” he explained.
