Logicalis hoping to grow more with Microsoft and Cisco in 2025

Chong Win Lee, CEO of Logicalis APAC expects the distributor to continue to grow from strength to strength with both Cisco and Microsoft, given the mega tech trends in Asia Pacific.

As a global IT solutions and managed services provider, Logicalis continues to build on its relationship with Microsoft and Cisco by investing in and innovating more solutions with the vendors for their customers.

According to Chong Win Lee, CEO for Logicalis APAC, Microsoft and Cisco are two key vendors for the distributor, given the strategic relationship they have. Lee mentioned that Logicalis continues to invest heavily in both these vendors, especially in developing deeps skills and right capabilities across their offerings.

“We work very closely with Microsoft and Cisco to co-create solutions that deliver additional impact to customers. This may be in terms of managed services as well as leveraging the tools and APIs that the vendors have to create unique offerings for the various markets and industries we’re targeting,” said Lee.

To explain more, Lee said he expects Logicalis to continue to grow from strength to strength with both Cisco and Microsoft, given the mega tech trends in Asia Pacific. The APAC region continues to experience increased investments in both GenAI and cybersecurity with businesses wanting to ensure they get the most out of their investments and are taking the right strategies as they continue to embrace more technologies.

“If you look at AI, for example, Microsoft was one of the first large tech giants that embraced a GenAI with their investment in OpenAI. They were the first markets with copilot. So, we're one of the key partners that help our end customers adopt copilot, for example. At the same time, we're also leveraging the Microsoft Open AI interfaces to create our own GenAI applications that that we are offering to customers as the service model,” explained Lee.

The GenAI application referred to by Lee is called CrampasAI. Lee mentioned that CrampasAI is an AI application developed by Logicalis that allows customers to maintain their own SOC in their own secure area and also own secure space that their private data can interact with using GenAI. This is just one of the applications Logicalis has worked on with Microsoft and provided to the market.

Meanwhile, with Cisco, Lee mentioned that partnering with the vendor has enabled them to offer solutions that truly prevent and mitigate risks at this point in time. For example, prevalent ransomware attacks require cybersecurity to be managed more proactively instead of reactively.

“The problem is many customers are still reacting to cyber security incidents. Cisco introduced new capabilities in their solutions deck called Cisco XDR. So, what we've done is, we've taken the Cisco XDR solution, and we’ve enriched the data that Cisco XDR offers, and we've made it into a managed solution called Cisco Managed XDR. We've now brought it into the market and that taps on the core functionality that Cisco XDR offers and reach by all the other telemetry that we're able to ingest, be it from endpoint security solutions, from the firewalls, and from other networking devices as well. We then transform that into meaningful dashboards that we can manage and monitor on behalf of our customers,” added Lee.

On Cisco’s Splunk acquisition, Lee believes that Splunk’s visualization tools and data capabilities will allow them to integrate into many different subsystems in the IT ecosystem. He believes his team will be able to leverage Splunk’s tools to develop more unique high impact business applications for their customers in the future.

“As a leader, I went out to complete the Splunk accreditation myself as I believe this will be a gamechanger and we’re pretty excited about the integration with Cisco’s offerings,” said Lee.

Democratizing managed security services

For Lee, when it comes to cybersecurity, one of the biggest challenges for organizations is managing it. While funding is also a challenge, managing cybersecurity continues to be an obstacle for all organizations, be it large or small enterprises.

“We’re democratizing managed security services and proactively securing security management for large enterprises all the way down to midmarket and small organizations. In the past, organizations could manage security events correctly, but they needed to invest in security information and event management (SIEM). SIEMs are typically prized in a way that if you’re a midmarket size company, it is going to be very difficult to afford,” said Lee.

As such, with Cisco XDR, Logicalis is making cybersecurity available to a much larger addressable market. Lee pointed out that Logicalis is helping address a very key industry problem, whereby there is a lack of proactive security protection and management that many of the midmarket and midsized companies are not able to afford today.

A customer success story example is how Logicalis provided the Canadian International School of Hong Kong (CDNIS) with a comprehensive proposal for upgrading and modernizing digital infrastructure and connectivity. CDNIS required rapid deployment, centralized visibility, enhanced security authentication, and optimized network solutions.

Logicalis leveraged its multi-disciplinary expertise across cloud, network infrastructure, and security to execute a strategic roadmap with scalable and future-ready technology, replacing legacy systems. This resulted in CDNIS experiencing significant improvement in efficiency as well as attaining enhanced visibility and centralized management. CDNIS also elevated security posture and improved its sustainability strategy by adopting Cisco Green Pay aligning with its ESG objectives.

CDNIS is just one of the many successful customer stories that Logicalis has worked on. Lee believes that customers are looking towards taking better control of their overall security and actively mitigating risks against cyber security incidents.

“If you look at business continuity considerations, given that ransomware is so prevalent these days, just one incident alone could bring down a whole company. As such, if customers are not actively trying to protect and mitigate against such risk, I think they're just putting themselves potentially in a space where business continuity is compromised significantly,” concluded Lee.