Making a mark

 Shahnawaz Sheikh, VP Sales – META at Cirruslabs Middle East discusses the company’s strategies for the region.

Please elaborate on your operations and focus in the region.

At CirrusLabs, we focus on Digital transformation and help companies in their digital transformation journey. We are headquartered out of Atlanta in the US and have offices in Canada and India. The Middle East Business reports to US headquarters. We are around 600 employees and majority of them are in the US.

We started out operations here about seven months ago. Our focus is UAE, then Saudi, and Qatar. These are the three countries that we are focusing on from services perspective. But eventually we will expand into North, East and West Africa and other markets. We are also a local office partner for ScienceLogic, a software and service vendor that offer information technology (IT) management and monitoring and automation platform for IT Operations on-premise and cloud computing. For ScienceLogic, we are a local office partner for META region. We have the responsibility of developing distribution and channel partners. So, we have appointed distributors for Africa, and Middle East. We are in the process of recruiting partners across the region. For ScienceLogic business development, we have a wider scope to cover Middle East, Africa and Turkey. However, from our services perspective, we want to stay focused only on these three countries to begin with, until we create a significant impact and increase our customer base within UAE, Saudi and Qatar.

What are your partnerships in the cloud space?

We are a gold partner of Microsoft. We have expertise across major cloud platforms including Azure, AWS, AWS Connect, GCP and we recently acquired certification on G42 as well. So primarily we cover major, public cloud providers, and local as well. We have certified experts and have delivered many large projects, helping companies move their on-prem data centers onto the cloud, even to the tune of like 2000 plus applications. On the cloud, it is not just lift and shift, we work on microservices, help build data lakes, and have done work in the AI space as well.

Can you elaborate on what you do on the data front?

If the companies wanted data lakes or data to be centralized, in one place, which helps query or retrieve the data, it requires an engine to be built for faster access to the data, and it will be specific to that particular organization’s business only. Especially for enabling AI, if you have a data lake, then it becomes easier to look at the data relevant to your business, rather than looking at everything else. From that perspective, companies who are looking at deploying AI, will also prefer to have their own data lakes or data warehouses for faster machine learning and execution.

Elaborate your focus on testing services?

We represent a company called Tricentis on the testing front. Tricentis provides AI-based, continuous testing portfolio of products with approach that’s totally automated, fully codeless, and intelligently driven by AI. It addresses both agile development and complex enterprise apps, enabling enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation by increasing software release speed, reducing costs, and improving software quality.

We help companies in their application testing, both the DevOps and DevSecOps teams with any new development or any new piece of software that they develop, that requires to be tested before it is rolled out into production. We bring in those testing tools and expertise. We bring in the application testers, application architects, and Scrum Masters for the process. The right combination of all of these will help customers test the applications before they are rolled out into production. A piece of software that’s been developed requires testing from multiple perspectives. If an upgrade has happened on the payment gateway, it needs to be tested if it is working properly. This testing is required from software development and execution perspective. So that’s what we do with the test automation solution.

Elaborate on your product focus

We have products as well in addition to our services. On the product side, we have some in house products like product called LockThreat, which is into GRC. That’s a product that helps companies with managing risk and compliance. We are now introducing an AI-based GRC solution, that we believe offers a unique proposition that nobody else offers today. We believe that we have an edge for the next few quarters. This AI approach simplifies human efforts. For example, if there are hundreds and thousands of submissions from users or entities with respect to compliance assessments, then, someone from within the organization or external audit team has to validate all those responses, and then score it as compliant or non-compliant. In this case, a manual process will take a lot of time to process and report. If for instance, there are 3000, to 4000, submissions, even if you have a decent size team, for the management to see the result, it could take several days to several weeks before the results are published for them to see. This can be done much faster with our solution using AI audit engine with no possible human errors.

Discuss the focus of ScienceLogic?

ScienceLogic offers a single pane of glass as far as monitoring goes for IT infrastructure that can look at the entire infrastructure ie., On-premise, Virtual Networks, Multiple clouds and all other assets in their network.

ScienceLogic focuses on IT monitoring and Automation. It integrates with all the servers, storage, network devices, IoT devices, and access to public and private cloud services and helps monitor all the infrastructure from a single pane of glass. It also helps with identifying the root cause analysis. If for instance, typically in a large complex network, there is a problem in one area of the network, it will be time-consuming for a human to isolate and identify the issue by checking multiple other assets, applications or networks. ScienceLogics Root Cause Analysis can discover this in minutes and also provide predictive analytics so that the customer can proactively prepare themselves from any possible business or network downtime. Identifying root cause, storing the backup of network devices and firewall devices configurations for restoring in case of downtime is another functionality provided.

Overall, ScienceLogic helps with asset discovery, as you cannot monitor what you cannot see. It then integrates with most of the other solutions like ITSM tools, APM’s, Network monitoring solution, SIEM etc., to contextualize the data and provide a meaningful insight for remediation and automation.

In all, this platform helps with IT tools consolidation, Automation, Root Cause Analysis, single pane of glass for monitoring that helps in productivity increase, human resource optimization to manage IT infrastructure, faster mean time to remediate with the help of automation and eliminating complexities from your IT infrastructure.

How are you enabling partners?

For ScienceLogic, as part of the two-tier partner model, we are continuously recruiting partners and enabling them with sales and technical trainings, equipping them with business tools such as access to Partner portal, use of demo environment, certification trainings, lead generation initiatives etc., as part of the enablement plans.  Our commitment is to hand-hold partners until they are fully enabled and independent to handle ScienceLogic sales and technical queries and demonstrate to them a strong business value in this partnership.

Elaborate on your SAP focused services?

We acquired a company at the beginning of this year, who are into SAP services. More than engaging ourselves in deploying SAP applications, we bring our expertise in offering cloud transformation of SAP applications and how we can help our customers transition seamlessly from on-premise SAP applications onto cloud without disrupting their business.  As there is a strong drive from the vendor advocating their customers to transition to cloud, we are here at the right time offering our expertise to help in this transition.