Contents 1 SLA – Senior Level Advisory – OCSL

2 Key Announcement implications – Cisco Midyear 17 Cybersecurity Report

3 In Depth Focus – The Digital Workplace Report – Didata

4 Financial Round up – Arista, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, D-Link,

Extreme, Mitel and Nutanix

THE CHANNEL has been designed specifically for senior-level channel executives. It provides guidance

and highly strategic advice on the channels and what senior channel executives should be aware of. It will guide management teams on the impact of competitor announcements, insights into the market, brief focus on services sub-segments, value stack, vertical focus and key director messages.

THE CHANNEL

| Channel Issues and Advice |

August 2017

1 SLA – Senior Level Advisory

Tim Thrower,

Founder and MD

Jane Ayres, Chief

Marketing Officer

Martin Hess,

Chairman

Anthony May,

Director

OCSL

Founded in 1990 by two brothers, Tim and Neil Thrower, with the original name of Organised Computer Systems Ltd; hence OCSL. The focus was initially on Hewlett Packard products but has increased the number of

vendors represented, increased its technology focus and moved away from product resale to an annuity revenue and services led model.

OCSL remain, however, a key HPE partner and was one of only three partners worldwide to pilot an HPE cloud services growth program. Martin Hess was VP, Enterprise Services at HPE before joining OCSL as chairman

in 2016 and CMO, Jane Ayres, is in on the HPE Cloud28+ Advisory Board.

OCSL Managed Services offered included IaaS, PaaS, B(ackup)aaS, ST(orage)aaS, G-Cloud 9 and G-Cloud Framework services.

Financials

Data Centre

OCSL boosted its Data Centre and Managed Services business 9 years ago by acquisition in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. OCSLs Data Centre is Tier

3 built to N+1 standards and offer UK data sovereignty to customers. OCSL Data Centre features:

• Government OFFICIAL Supplier • N3/HSCN Supplier

• G-Cloud Supplier • Cyber Essentials + IASME • ISO 27001, 20000 & 9001

£52.70 M

£63.20 M

£80.50 M£78.40 M

£85.00 M

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

£0.00 M

£20.00 M

£40.00 M

£60.00 M

£80.00 M

£100.00 M

Revenue

Adam Courtney,

Operations Director

Dave Wood, MD at

Project Services

Neil O’Meara, Chief

Financial Officer

Steve Wilson, Sales

Director

Iain Maclean,

Director at Project

Services

Partners

OCSL also has key vendor relationships with Commvault, Cylance,

DELL/EMC, HP, IBM, Pure Storage, NetApp, SAP and Veeam

Cloud

OCSL is one of Microsoft’s chosen UK Tier 1 Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) offering one contract, supported by a single point of contact for

Office 365, Azure and Enterprise Mobility Suite as well as OCSL’s Azure Fast Start offering – an entry level cloud offering starting at £2k.

OCSL Cloud Control Service is a unique portal allowing control of workload management, deployment, security and compliance, and billing for

multiple clouds namely Azure, AWS, Google and OCSL clouds.

Awards

OCSL were recognised as the 2016 UK Rising Star Partner of the Year at Cisco’s UK Partner Forum. Other awards:

Analysis

OCSL are focussed on Digital Transformation (DX). At the beginning of 2017 euroLAN surveyed 1300 UK channel partners for a focus on DX solutions and OCSL were one of only a handful of a partners.

Services revenue represent half total revenue. This positions OCSL

strongly in its transition from a product reseller to Digital Transformation integrator.

As OCSL transitions to “the Cloud” and increases its annuity business it must feel a flattening of revenue. EBITDA is a better measure during this

phase and we believe OCSL will be enjoying an improved profitability. NEXT >

2) Key Announcement Implication

2 Key Announcement Implications

Steve Martino, Cisco

VP and CISO

Most commonly

observed malware

(top malicious blocks)

November 2016–May

2017

Cisco Midyear 2017 Cybersecurity Report

For nearly a decade, Cisco has published comprehensive cybersecurity

reports that are designed to keep security teams and the businesses they support apprised of cyber threats and vulnerabilities—and informed about steps they can take to improve security and cyber-resiliency. In these reports, we strive to alert defenders to the increasing sophistication of

threats and the techniques that adversaries use to compromise users, steal information, and create disruption.

Major Findings

• Business email compromise (BEC) has become a highly lucrative threat vector for attackers. According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), US$5.3 billion was stolen due to BEC fraud between

October 2013 and December 2016. In comparison, ransomware exploits took in US$1 billion in 2016

• Spyware that masquerades as potentially unwanted applications

(PUAs) is a form of malware—and a risk that many organizations underestimate or dismiss completely. However, spyware can steal user and company information, weaken the security posture of devices, and increase malware infections. Spyware infections are also

rampant. Cisco threat researchers studied three select spyware families and found that they were present in 20 per cent of the 300 companies in the sample

• The Internet of Things (IoT) holds great promise for business collaboration and innovation. But as it grows, so too does security risk.

Lack of visibility is one problem: Defenders are simply not aware of what IoT devices are connected to their network. They need to move quickly to address this and other hurdles to IoT security. Threat actors are already exploiting security weaknesses in IoT devices. The devices

serve as strongholds for adversaries, and allow them to move laterally across networks quietly and with relative ease

• Cisco has been tracking our median time to detection (TTD) since November 2015. Since that time, the overall trend has been

downward—from just over 39 hours at the start of our research to about 3.5 hours for the period from November 2016 to May 2017

• Cisco has been observing an overall increase in spam volume since

mid-2016, which seems to coincide with a significant decline in exploit kit activity during the same period. Adversaries who had relied heavily on exploit kits to deliver ransomware are turning to spam emails, including those containing macro-laden malicious documents that can

defeat many sandboxing technologies because they require user interaction to infect systems and deliver payloads

• Supply chain attacks offer adversaries a way to spread malware to

many organizations through a single compromised site. In an attack studied by RSA, a Cisco partner, a software vendor’s download webpage was compromised, allowing the infection to spread to any organization that downloaded the software from this vendor

• The dramatic increase in cyber-attack frequency, complexity, and size over the past year suggests that the economics of hacking have turned a corner, according to Redware, a Cisco partner. Redware notes that the modern hacking community is benefiting from quick

and easy access to a range of useful and low-cost resources

Download the report:

https://www.cisco.co

m/c/dam/m/digital/

elq-

cmcglobal/witb/1456

403/Cisco_2017_Mid

year_Cybersecurity_R

eport.pdf?elqTrackId

=f6ccd8439e9945639

096a9846044695a&el

qaid=5897&elqat=2

Steve Martino video:

bit.ly/2uRfcXx

• When it comes to enterprise security, cloud is the ignored dimension: Open authorization (OAuth) risk and poor management of single

privileged user accounts create security gaps that adversaries can easily exploit. Malicious hackers have already moved to the cloud and are working relentlessly to breach corporate cloud environments, according to Cisco threat researchers

• In the exploit kit landscape, activity has declined dramatically and innovation has stagnated since Angler and other leading players have disappeared or changed their business model. This situation is likely temporary, given previous patterns in this market. But other factors,

such as the greater difficulty of exploiting vulnerabilities in files built with Adobe Flash technology, may be slowing the resurgence

• DevOps services that have been deployed improperly or left open

intentionally for convenient access by legitimate users pose a significant risk to organizations, according to research by Rapid7, a Cisco partner. In fact, many of these instances have already been ransomed

• A Threat Connect analysis of collocated domains used by adversaries connected to the Fancy Bear cyberespionage group showed the value of studying bad actors’ IP infrastructure tactics. By studying this

infrastructure, defenders gain a larger list of domains, IP addresses, and email addresses to proactively block

• In late 2016, Cisco threat researchers discovered and reported three remote code-execution vulnerabilities in Memcached servers. A scan of

the Internet a few months later revealed that 79 per cent of the nearly 110,000 exposed Memcached servers previously identified were still vulnerable to the three vulnerabilities because they had not been patched

Conclusion

As Steve Martino, Cisco VP and CISO, states in an accompanying video, in the last 6 months Cisco has seen many geo-political and competitive business impacts that it, and its business partners, had to deal with.

Simultaneously it has had to adapt to and defend against many new cyber-security attacks like Wannacry and Petya.

NEXT > 3) In Depth Focus

3 In Depth Focus

European Results

Flexible workstyles

are on the rise

dramatically

There will be an increase of more than 40% in the

proportion of large EU businesses that support flexible working within two years. 49% of European organisations say they will have employees working from

home full time two years from now, and 76% say they will have employees working from home part time in two years

Devising and

executing on a digital

workplace strategy is

a collaborative effort

40% of European organisations say line-of business heads take a leading role in defining workplace strategy; a further 39% say that IT

leads, together with significant input from LOB heads. In most organisations (70%), IT leads in implementing workplace technology, although in many cases

LOB heads take a significant role too

The Digital Workplace Report: Transforming Your Business

To gauge the state of the digital workplace, Dimension Data surveyed 850

business and IT leaders driving technology and organisational changes in their companies. The goal was to determine how organisations are evolving from a traditional office environment to a digital workplace. Survey participants work at organisations with at least 1,000 employees,

representing seven industries. To get a global perspective, we included participants at organisations based in 15 countries. In Europe, we spoke to 346 respondents from large businesses with headquarters in Belgium,

France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK.

Employee needs are driving changing workstyles

Seeing the big digital transformation picture

Mobility is core to

the digital workplace

in Europe 50% of European organisations

say that managing and leveraging the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise is a major driver of digital workplace strategy. 42% say that

mobile devices and the applications running on them have significantly improved business processes

Most organisations –

even large ones – don't

have a comprehensive

digital workplace

strategy 60% of European organisations don’t have a formal and comprehensive strategy around how they deploy or plan to benefit from workplace technology,

although many of them have parts of a strategy

Trusted partners are

vital for implementing

digital workplace

technologies More than 70% of European organisations need support from external partners when planning,

designing, deploying, and benefitting from workplace technology solutions. 33% require a significant amount of support, with third-party partners taking a central

role

New and innovative

technologies will have

a place in the future

workplace More than 20% of European businesses believe that workplace analytics tools, augmented reality tools and micro learning/

training will have a role in the office environment within 12 months

Mobility is core to the digital workplace

The place for new technologies

Executive Summary

European organisations are ahead of global competitors in driving workstyle changes among employees and using workplace technology to drive operational and financial efficiencies. The foremost

driver of workstyle change in Europe is employee demand for greater flexibility, with employee productivity improvements and environmental policy as well as mobility.

In common with the global findings are CEOs, CIOs, and IT directors drive

change, IT and organisational issues are mostly likely to hold organisations back from adopting new workstyles and growing revenues, improving business processes, gaining competitive advantage - dominate digital workplace strategy and Cloud services continue to attract large

enterprises executing on a digital workplace. NEXT >

4) Financial Roundup

4 Financial Roundup

Recently Released Financials

Arista Q217 – Growth of 51 per cent YoY and 21 per cent sequentially. The geographic breakdown:

o US 75 (77) per cent o International 25 (23) per cent

Avaya Q317 – Growth was down 20 per cent YoY but flat sequentially. The geographic breakdown:

o US 54 (55) per cent o EMEA 25 (23) per cent o Asia and ROW 20 (22) per cent

Brocade Q317 – Growth was down 7 per cent YoY and 13 per cent sequentially. No change in geographic breakdown

Ciena Q317 – Growth of 9 per cent YoY and 3 per cent sequentially. The geographic breakdown:

o US 64 (65) per cent o EMEA 13 (16) per cent

o Asia and ROW 23 (19) per cent

Cisco Q417 – Growth was down 4 per cent YoY but up 2 per cent sequentially. The geographic breakdown:

o US and Canada 59 (60) per cent o Europe 24 (25) per cent o APAC incl Japan 17 (15) per cent

D-Link Q217 – Growth was down 15 per cent YoY and 1 per cent sequentially. The geographic breakdown:

o EMEA 26 (20) per cent

o North America 14 (16) per cent o AsiaPac 60 (64) per cent

Extreme Q417 – Up 28 per cent YoY and 20 per cent QoQ. First

results since acquisition of Avaya Networking business. The geogrhic breakdown:

o EMEA 32 (37) per cent

o Americas 58 (54) per cent o AsiaPac and LATAM 10 (9) per cent

Mitel Q217 – Down 19 per cent YoY. The geographic breakdown: o EMEA 49 (47) per cent o Americas 48 (50) per cent o AsiaPac 4 (4) per cent

Nutanix Q417 – Up 62 per cent YoY and up 18 per cent sequentially. The geographical breakdown (Q3 breakdown):

o EMEA 20 (17) per cent

o Americas 59 (67) per cent o AsiaPac 18 (14) per cent o Car and LATAM 3 (3) per cent

For further information, please contact:

Keith Humphreys – Managing Consultant at euroLAN – keith@eurolanresearch.com