Steve Lockie, Managing Director of TechBridge Distribution MEA, explains why market creation, local execution and partner profitability are at the heart of the company’ s strategy.

Steve Lockie, Managing Director of TechBridge Distribution MEA

TechBridge entered the Middle East at a time when the distribution landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. What gap in the market did you identify and how are you differentiating yourself from established regional distributors? The Middle East does not lack distributors. If anything, finding another distributor in Dubai is considerably easier than finding a parking space. What we identified was a gap between the scale-driven broadline distribution model and the level of market creation required by technology vendors seeking to establish and grow sustainable regional businesses. That led us to develop our CVAD – Channel Value-Added Distributor – model, built around a strictly channel-first philosophy and three pillars: the challenger vendor, the channel partner and a highly localised go-tomarket strategy. We identify differentiated technologies capable of challenging established market leaders and build focused ecosystems of partners around them.

We provide market development, technical enablement, pipeline creation and hands-on commercial support. Increasingly, we are focused on major technology transitions where partners can create sustainable growth:

Secure AI, cyber-resilience, infrastructure modernisation, Intelligent Edge and enterprise mobility. Our differentiation is not based on having the largest portfolio or recruiting the greatest number of partners. Distribution agreements are relatively easy to sign; creating revenue is considerably harder. TechBridge exists to create markets for our vendors, profitable opportunities for our Channel partners and greater choice, innovation and value for customers across the region.

AI is reshaping almost every technology category. How is it changing the role of distributors and what new opportunities do you see for channel partners over the next few years? AI is accelerating the evolution of distribution from product aggregation towards ecosystem orchestration. Customers are not buying AI as a single technology. Successful environments require compute, storage, networking, data management, cybersecurity, cloud platforms and professional services. Unfortunately, there is no large red button marked“ Install AI and Increase Revenue.”

At the same time, AI is creating an entirely new attack surface. Employees are adopting generative AI, enterprises are embedding AI into applications and autonomous agents are accessing corporate systems, data and workflows. The security industry must therefore protect the entire AI lifecycle and this is where from our portfolio Check Point’ s AI Defense Plane illustrates this evolution through a unified, prevention-first architecture protecting employee AI usage, enterprise AI applications and autonomous agents. Protect AI provides further opportunities around securing machine learning models, AI applications and the AI development lifecycle.

For channel partners, the opportunity extends far beyond infrastructure resale. Customers need help identifying use cases, preparing data, designing infrastructure, governing AI adoption and securing and managing these environments. The distributor’ s role is to bring technologies and capabilities together, enabling partners to build Secure AI practices combining consulting, implementation, cybersecurity and managed services that deliver recurring revenue and long-term customer value.

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