ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Today a VAD has to become an orchestrator, someone who sits between an increasingly complex vendor landscape and an increasingly specialised partner base and makes sense of both sides for the other. support consumption billing at scale, because if we don’ t solve this problem for the partners, they’ ll solve it with someone else, or not at all.
Cybersecurity has become an increasingly important part of Mindware’ s portfolio, with recent additions including Rapid7, Veeam and Jamf. What is driving this expansion, and where do you see the biggest security opportunities for partners? Security has stopped being a category and become a layer across everything, infrastructure, cloud, endpoint, identity, data protection. Partners are being asked by their customers to be credible across all of it, and no partner can build that depth alone. That’ s what’ s driving our expansion. At Mindware, we fill such gaps across the security stack, example detection and response with Rapid7, resilience and ransomware recovery with Veeam, endpoint and device management with Jamf, so a partner can build a coherent security practice with us rather than stitching together five different distributor relationships.
The biggest opportunity I see for partners right now is less in point products and more in managed security services. Customers, especially mid-market ones, don’ t want another dashboard they want an outcome, ideally delivered as a service. Partners who can package detection, response and resilience into a managed offering are the ones capturing the real margin in this category.
Mindware’ s MAGIC initiative brings together technical, financial, training, marketing and other forms of partner support. How important is this broader enablement model as partner margins come under pressure? As margins get squeezed on the transactional side, enablement becomes the differentiator, not a nice-to-have. MAGIC exists precisely because no single form of support technical, financial, marketing or training is enough on its own anymore. A partner might have great technical skills but no financing to close a large deal, or strong marketing but no training on a new AI workload. Bringing those threads together under one initiative means we can meet a partner wherever their actual gap is, rather than offering a generic programme and hoping it fits.
The more partner economics come under pressure, the more this kind of structured enablement matters. It’ s how a partner increases their win rate and their margin without simply cutting price.
You have been expanding geographically, including establishing East Africa operations from Nairobi. What is the opportunity you see in Africa, and how different are partner requirements there compared with the Gulf? Africa, and East Africa specifically, represents one of the clearest long-term growth opportunities in our footprint. The digital infrastructure, cloud, connectivity, data sovereignty is happening now in markets that are still in the early stages of channel maturity, which means there’ s real headroom for partners who get positioned early.
The requirements are genuinely different from the Gulf. Partners in East Africa are often earlier in their technical maturity curve and need more hands-on enablement and financing support; regulatory and data-residency requirements vary significantly country to country; and logistics and in-country presence matter more given infrastructure constraints. We’ ve had to build our Nairobi operation with that reality in mind rather than exporting a Gulf playbook. It has to be a market-specific model, close to the ground.
Saudi Arabia continues to be one of the region’ s fastest-growing technology markets. How important is the Kingdom to Mindware’ s growth strategy, and how are you strengthening your local channel ecosystem there? Saudi Arabia is central to our growth strategy, it’ s arguably the fastest-moving technology market in the region right now, driven by Vision 2030, sovereign cloud investment, and a genuine appetite from both government and enterprise to modernise quickly. There’ s no version of our regional growth plan that isn’ t heavily weighted toward the Kingdom.
We’ ve been strengthening our local presence deliberately, investing in in-country resources, working closely with local regulatory requirements around data residency and localisation, and making sure our vendor and partner enablement programs are tailored to Saudi’ s specific pace and priorities rather than treated as an extension of our UAE operations. The partner ecosystem there is maturing fast, and our job is to make sure we’ re growing with it, not catching up to it. •
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