FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
“Privileged account management is a
complex technology, partners need to fully
commit to enabling themselves in order
to deliver successful projects. 2017 has
seen this part of the channel business grow
significantly. Political instability is still a
key factor in this market. It is extremely
difficult to mature channel relationships
in these countries due to changing market
conditions, a lack of skills and lack of
funds to develop those skills adequately,”
says John Hathaway, Regional Sales
Manager Middle East at BeyondTrust.
In terms of new products, BeyondTrust
made significant announcements in
2017. In May it announced support
for Microsoft Azure. With this
announcement, BeyondTrust enables
organisations to maintain their privileged
access management and vulnerability
management solutions in the cloud via
Azure and manage them in a hybrid
environment, without security gaps.
In addition, BeyondTrust solutions
perform security scans of Azure cloud
instances to prevent unwanted intrusions
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as a result of unpatched or known
vulnerabilities. The technology manages
the customer’s Azure environment with a
management console, connectors, agents,
assessment capabilities, and privileged
access management in a single instance
verses multiple point solutions and
software deployments.
Building competence in
innovative field services
2017 has been an exciting year for IFS.
With a growing interest in adopting IoT
especially in the enterprise sector, IFS
continued to work with customers to raise
awareness of IFS IoT Business Connector
that shortens the time from ideas to
tangible benefits for their IoT initiatives
by providing an end-to-end architecture
and the ability to turn IoT discoveries into
actions. This initiative adds the ability to
turn an investment in IoT connectivity and
data analytics into savings through process
efficiencies, and into new revenues through
service innovation. This year, IFS expanded
partnerships with key partners across the
globe including Middle East and Africa, and
regionally, partnered with ISYX and Fasyl
to expand reach in the key vertical sectors.
IFS was also named leader in the Gartner
2017 Magic Quadrant for Field Service
Management for the third consecutive year.
The outlook of analysts such as
Gartner about the future development
of the enterprise software market has
been slightly revised in the past quarter,
reflecting stronger-than-expected growth in
the adoption of cloud technology. Industry
analyst projection for the ERP market
shows a growth rate of around 8% for
2017–2018 and a compound annual growth
rate for the coming five years of around 7%.
IFS will continue to invest in a
strategy that delivers enterprise software
for customers around the world who
manufacture and distribute goods,
maintain assets, and manage service-
focused operations. “We will also continue
to work closely with our customers, to
share ideas and have an open customer-
centric R&D organisation, while providing
an open technology that seeks to enable
Issue 13
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS