VMware appoints new regional director for the Middle East

Today at GITEX, VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced the hiring of Sam Tayan as its new regional director for the Middle East North Africa region. The appointment comes at a time when organizations in the region are increasingly looking to virtualization and cloud computing to control costs and become more efficient.

Based out of Dubai, Tayan will be responsible for delivering VMware’s sales strategy and customer service operations in the region. With over 20 years experience in the IT industry across Europe and the Middle East, Tayan will work closely with customers to drive VMware’s leading evolutionary solutions that enable organizations to lower costs, enhance security and increase business agility as they look to benefit from virtualization and proceed on their journey to the cloud. 

“I am very excited to lead VMware’s business strategy in the MENA region. Middle East businesses are keen to accelerate their move towards more virtual environments, enabling accessibility while enforcing security,” said Sam Tayan, regional director, MENA, VMware. “VMware’s approach to IT as a Service will enable them to control critical elements as they build infrastructures tailored to address their unique challenges.”

VMware’s focus on this region follows findings such as that from Forrester Research (April 2011) that the regional IT market may grow to US$6.5 billion by the end of 2014*. According to the research, the UAE’s total IT market amounted to US$4.49 billion in 2010, registering growth of 8.6% over the previous year, with the public sector, telecom and oil and gas industries recording the highest IT spending.

“The importance of virtualization technologies is now accepted in this region,” said Jean-Pierre Brulard, vice president for the South region of EMEA, VMware. “Specifically, there’s tremendous interest from VMware customers for reliable, high-performance, secure clouds that are compatible with their existing applications and datacenter operations. Enterprises in the Middle East are primarily concerned with providing secure access to an increasingly mobile workforce and managing the burgeoning diversity of data, applications and devices needed to run their business.”

Mashreq Bank is one company using VMware’s virtualization technology. According to David Horton, head of infrastructure & security, Mashreq Bank: “Our return-on-investment calculations gave us a compelling reason to deploy VMware and reduce the proliferation of hardware in our data center while securing all of the performance and cost-saving benefits of virtualization, including maximising system availability for Mashreq’s customers. We believe that VMware is the de facto standard for virtualization – VMware delivered and we’re very pleased with the results.”

For VMware partner Aptec, the opportunity in this region is also an exciting one: “Enterprises in the Middle East are increasingly adopting cloud computing technology and Aptec is very enthusiastic about its partnership with VMware. It has the capabilities to offer an end to end solution, including pre-sales, sales, post sales and training, to businesses in the region looking to benefit from VMware’s cloud offering,” said Santhosh Kumar, business unit manager – Software, APTEC Distribution FZ LLC.

Tayan joins VMware from Getronics Middle East, where he served as Regional Director for six years. Prior to Getronics, Tayan held management positions at Sun Microsystems, EMC UK, and Veritas Software.

VMware will be discussing the future of IT and making a a series of announcements at VMworld 2011 taking place the following week in Copenhagen, Denmark on the 18^th - 20^th of October. The event, hosted by VMware, is the leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure event of the year specifically designed for IT professionals in the Middle East and Europe seeking to accelerate success in their enterprises as they preserve existing investments while aligning their specific requirements to enable the cloud.