Stefan van de Giessen - Afrikan Heroes

Networks Unlimited Wins 2 Channel Awards at Fortinet Africa Virtual Security Day

November 8, 2020

Networks Unlimited Africa, a leading value-added distributor operating within sub-Saharan Africa, received two awards, namely the Technical Support Distributor of the Year: Southern Africa award and the DLB Growth Distributor of the Year: East Africa award at the recent Fortinet Africa Virtual Security Day.

This was the first time that the event took place via a virtual platform, due to the current restrictions around the global COVID-19 pandemic. The online nature of the awards ceremony also ensured that this broadened its reach to other parts of Africa, and not only within South Africa.

Stefan van de Giessen, General Manager: Cybersecurity at Networks Unlimited Africa, comments, “We have proudly maintained our business partnership with Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, for over eight years now, while we have been trading in East Africa, operating out of Nairobi, Kenya, since 2016. We receive these awards as an acknowledgement of the strength of our relationship.

“The Southern Africa award is based on our technical ability to resolve all Fortinet customer-related support enquiries and requests within stringent parameters across the African region, while the Distributor-Led Business (DLB) East Africa award speaks towards our SME partners and shows great growth in our channel here, enabling and developing our smaller partners to sell Fortinet solutions. This is an important point for us, as security has no boundaries and our smaller partners are generally less equipped to deal with the ever-changing security landscape. Our sales and technical enablement have assisted them in maturing their offerings.”

Van de Giessen notes that the accolades represent more than simply awards for Networks Unlimited Africa. “Awards like these mean that our partners and their customers will receive an excellent level of support from our certified security engineering team,” he concludes.

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Networks Unlimited Africa keeps Value Offering Promises despite Lockdown Challenges

October 23, 2020

Despite challenges of constraint, Networks Unlimited Africa has managed to maintain its standards during the lockdown in order to keep its unique partner offering intact. So says Anton Jacobsz, CEO at this leading value-added distributor in the sub-Saharan Africa market. He comments, “Networks Unlimited delivers products and solutions that are affordable, better than the competition, and with faster service delivery to our partners and end-users within the converged technology, data centre, networking, and security landscapes

“We are proud to have maintained our standards during the lockdown despite the difficult environment, especially during the initial phase of the early ‘hard’ lockdown. I commend the three general managers of our divisions and their teams – Cybersecurity, Enterprise Systems Management, and Networking and Storage – for playing their parts in keeping our high standards flying during this difficult year.”

Stefan van de Giessen, General Manager: Cybersecurity, explains, “In the cybersecurity space, the general rule of thumb is that if you compromise on quality, you will compromise your network. Networks Unlimited works closely with our partners and end customers to understand their respective security needs. Once this has been established, we will prioritise the biggest threat vectors and create a project plan according to the available budget.

“It should also be noted that the quality of our selected vendors is more than just a datasheet or a rating by Gartner. Along with leading products, we offer experienced certified security engineers to implement the solutions according to best practices. In our industry, you can buy the most expensive solution but cut costs on the implementation, which will result in a very weak security posture, and vice versa, and obviously neither of these situations is to be recommended.

“As regards timely and efficient service delivery, our regional footprint throughout Africa allows us to keep stock in the required areas, and during the lockdown, we were still able to deliver timeously across the continent. But fast service delivery is more than just logistics: when it comes to post-sales support, we have over 10 years of combined experience on the edge, endpoint, datacentre and cloud areas.”

The Cybersecurity division was recently able to cement a new partnership because of the company’s commitment to affordability, quality and service delivery standards during the lockdown, explains Van de Giessen.

He clarifies, “We have onboarded a vendor with one of the big five systems integrators in South Africa. The reasons for this integration with our product included the following: the costing from the vendor in the vulnerability space is market-related; their product has been rated as a leading product, and our teams integrated well from both a sales and technical perspective to deliver on the agreed KPIs.

“In general, it is accurate to say that we have seen new business success with our three marketing pillars, based on the value we are able to deliver with an ever-growing pipeline. Once the relationship has been established and the value of the product is known to all parties, our partners keep their relationship with us based on being a trusted advisor with consistent fast delivery throughout the product sales cycle.”

“The lockdown has placed a tremendous amount of pressure on company CIOs, CEOs, CISOs and IT managers. Marketing to them was therefore key in order to deliver the message around reliability, flexibility and value, during this time when so many more employees are working from home and creating additional threat vectors within their network,” concludes Van de Giessen.