Brocade appoints Cherif Sleiman as Saudi Country Manager to drive business growth in the Kingdom

Brocade is driving its business expansion in the Middle East by announcing the appointment of networking industry veteran Dr. Cherif Sleiman to the position of country manager, Saudi Arabia. In this role, Dr. Sleiman is responsible for developing and executing strategies to expand Brocade’s customer base and capitalize on the huge business opportunities arising as a result of key industry trends such as cloud computing, data center virtualization and software-defined networking. According to Business Monitor International’s Saudi Arabia Information Technology Report Q2’ 2013,  IT spending in the Kingdom is forecast to increase by 6.6% to SAR15.3bn (US$ 4.08bn) in 2013.

Dr. Sleiman has more than 20 years of sales, technical and business experience in some of the world’s leading networking and telecommunications technology companies. Prior to joining Brocade, he held key executive roles including chief operating officer and chief technology officer at Core Communications, a software and IT services company focused on cloud based business services and web & mobile apps. He spent more than six years at Cisco in various leadership positions, the last being senior director, where he led the enterprise business for Middle East and Africa. He also developed the strategic vision and technology roadmap and managed all aspects of Research & Development for Nortel Networks in his role as CTO, Enterprise Business Unit.

“We are very pleased to have an industry veteran like Dr. Sleiman leading our company’s efforts in Saudi.  The Kingdom is the largest IT market in the Middle East and is of strategic importance to Brocade as large enterprises and telecom service providers look to overhaul their networking infrastructure and implement the latest technologies. Looking at Dr. Sleiman’s track record, we are confident that under his leadership our company will be able to rapidly increase its footprint and market share in Saudi and cement Brocade’s position as the industry’s leading provider of data center networking solutions,” says Sufian Dweik, regional director, MEMA at Brocade Communications.

“Saudi is an exciting market as it is stable, self-sustaining and having one of the highest GDP growth figures in the world, largely due to progressive government initiatives in areas of education, healthcare, security and information technology. We intend aligning our company strategy with the Saudi government’s vision and we believe that this will drive growth. We will focus primarily on growing our data center business where we have a strong advantage of being one of only two companies with technologies across all four areas - application networking, virtualization, infrastructure and storage. The other two focus areas will be service provider business and campus networking where Brocade leads the market with innovative products and solutions. We already have great customer references and are currently deploying our solutions in several government agencies, telecom operators and a leading national bank,” says Dr. Cherif Sleiman.

Sleiman added: “Service providers and enterprises in Saudi find Brocade’s proposition of ‘simplifying and flattening’ the network very attractive compared to the complex network architecture of incumbent vendors.  Our company’s unique innovations in the areas of  Data Center Ethernet Fabric, Software Defined Networking and 100GbE are also  resonating strongly with customers. ”