Small Enterprise speaks to Sanjay Ahuja, the CEO of FVC about their participation at the recently concluded GISEC 2018 and his plans for the region

What value-add does FVC bring to the table?
FVC is one of the leading value-added distributors in the region. We have been in the market for over 18 years and we have offices in entire Middle East and Africa region. This includes places such as Morocco, Nigeria, East Africa, Saudi Africa, Levant, UAE, and Pakistan.

Our core ethos has always been to onboard new vendors and ensure that there is enough growth opportunities so that they become a dominant player on the market. So we like to think of ourselves as an extended arm of the OEM. We also do lots of investment on behalf of the OEM in terms of technical skillsets both from people’s perspective, training, and onboarding partners.

Tell us about your first-ever participation at GISEC?
GISEC as a platform is extremely important for us. This is the first year we participated in the event, and we feel that security is a big concern for almost all the CIOs in the industry. It is a topmost challenge for the CIOs.

Thus, GISEC is a single window to look at all sorts of solutions and products in terms of security. You have endpoint security, application security, network security and data security. FVC is a major player in all these areas.

We also used GISEC as a platform to look for new partners, whom we could represent in this region. There are lots of vendors who come to the event who look for potential relationships. We are looking for new markets such as Jordan and Egypt. We are also onboarding new partners, so we can do more with the existing set of people we have.

Does FVC focus on training and certification programs?
Absolutely! We have got training centres in all our offices. We are also the authorized training centres for few of the technologies we represent. We have a proper training program, where we get all our partners to come, train, and certify in order to be equipped with the latest technologies and innovations available on the market.

What sort of challenges is the CIO facing these days?
People are getting very innovative with attacks and that is a major challenge for CIOs these days. When they see a financial motive behind the attack, it’s now all about how fast you react to it and isolate that affected part of the network from the rest of the IT infrastructure.

So the CIO is looking for solutions that are not reactive, but proactive. Another major challenge is the fact that majority of the security attacks happen internally, from within the organisation. Thus, it is no longer a CIO agenda, but a CEO, companywide agenda. Employees need to be trained and educated about the perils of wrongly using technology. And this all starts from within the organisation.