NEC and Netgear win Perfect Project Awards at Digital Business Channel Middle East and Africa in Fujairah

The event closed on 21st November with a record 1,000 one-on-one meetings taking place, including more than 700 pre-scheduled meetings during the two-day event.

DBC MEA also introduced the Perfect Project Awards at this year's event. This new award format, which multiple vendors entered, saw business partners voting in two award categories: Best Partner-Vendor Project Delivery and Most Innovative Solution.

The Best Partner-Vendor Project Delivery Award is given for a successful recent deployment, which highlights the role of its channel partner in the delivery and implementation of the solution. The Most Innovative Solution Award was judged on the level of innovation and ingenuity shown by the project. Vendors were eligible to enter implementations from across the globe, allowing business partners to see world-class examples of successful channel engagement and solution innovation.

"The fact that NEC won with 68% of the votes is the perfect example that the Middle East is willing to invest in state of the art technology solutions," said Johan Degroote, regional director for NEC Computers. "IT managers in the region are looking more and more into centrally manageable solutions where the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure is crucial including security and business continuity."

Inaugurated by Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Saif Al Sharqi, Head of Fujairah's Government Electronic Department, DBC MEA is a high-level, full service event that brings together influential decision makers from the region's IT business channel with multiple vendors. This year's event welcomed several new vendors including Atlantis-Land, AEG, Aten, Atlantis Land, Micronet, Productiva and SW Soft.

Farouk Hemraj, CEO and co-founder of Distree Events, said, "With the rapid rate of change in technology, we feel that it is important as a conference organiser to create a platform for new and upcoming technology providers to meet with potential partners from across the region. The MEA region includes several important markets that show some of the highest global growth rates in the technology sector. We also pre-qualify the channel partners that we invite to our events, rejecting those that do not fit the right profile, to ensure that quality takes precedence over quantity."

In addition to the 1,000-plus one-on-one meetings that took place, DBC also arranged workshops covering topical issues including IT security, enterprise printing solutions, storage and networking technologies, as well as channel credit and financing.

"We are very pleased with the quality of the attendance and the meetings we had at DBC," said Bruno Haubertin, Partners & Alliances Sales Organisation Manager for Sun Microsystems. "We see great value in focused events like this that provide tangible ROI. This is our third year at this event and we plan to return next year."

This year's DBC MEA was sponsored by AMD, and supported by Secureway, Sun Microsystems and Xerox as Gold sponsors, with Atlantis-Land, FVC, Juniper and Oki as silver sponsors.