SonicWALL establishes presence in Asia West with new representation in Dubai

The UAE representative office, located in the Dubai Internet City (DIC), will be responsible for managing SonicWALL's operations, sales and marketing activities in the Asia-West region, which includes the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), India and Pakistan.

"SonicWALL recognizes the value of the Middle East market, which has one of the highest technology adoption rates in the world. Our strategy over the short to medium term is to build a team of seasoned professionals familiar with this region dedicated to developing and supporting our valued channel partners and thereby increasing our market share," said Antony Chapman, SonicWALL's Director of Sales, APAC. "Today's move demonstrates our ongoing commitment to serving the needs of customers in the Asia West region. Demand for our services and products continues to exceed expectations. Our team has also secured a number of strategic customer accounts since the beginning of this year."

The move into the Asia West region comes on the heels of successful business results in the Asia Pacific region, where revenues generated over the past quarter contributed to 11% of the company's overall business results.

SonicWALL builds its business model through partnerships with carefully selected key distributors and resellers. For Asia West, its distributors are Haris Al Afaq Ltd in Dubai, Ora-Tech in Pakistan, and ITSecure Software Pvt. Ltd in India.

SonicWALL believes that business in the Asia West region, especially in the GCC, will grow significantly over the next few years, given the increased attention to IT security. Changes in the method, frequency and delivery of malicious attacks have led to the need to enhance the detection and prevention capabilities of the firewall protecting companies' networks at the perimeter. Viruses and other attacks targeting application vulnerabilities have been plaguing networks since Nimda and Code Red in 2001 and SQL Slammer and MS Blaster in 2003 infected computers worldwide. More recently, threats have come from the use of peer-to-peer and instant messenger applications, including the recent Mydoom virus, which was propagated through the file sharing application Kazaa as well as through e-mail. Costs associated with these attacks grew to over US$50 billion last year alone.

SonicWALL's new Asia West representation in the UAE increases the company's presence in Asia Pacific to 8 offices: Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, China, India, Pakistan and now UAE.