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Publishing Director Rajashree Rammohan raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5685 Editorial
Fail securely
Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5678
Over the last couple of months, some security breaches have E-mail: made the headlines all over the world. First up was the cyber jeevan.thankappan@ caper at Bangladesh Bank, where hackers broke into the system, cpimediagroup.com and tried to steal close to $1 billion. Though this audacious attempt was foiled by a spelling mistake, they still made off with more than $100 million. Back here in the GCC, Qatar National Bank was the victim of a hack last month, with 1.4GB-worth of sensitive customer data leaked onto a file-sharing web site. The leaked documents contained not only financial information, but detailed profiles of specific individuals as well, including members of the Qatari royal family. Hot on its heels came the news that millions of stolen Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail passwords are being traded in Russia’s criminal underworld by hackers. The adage ‘fail to As we continue to read about breaches almost prepare, prepare every day, one can’t help but wonder if we should to fail’ may ring plan to fail. Despite investing heavily in the latest true in most and greatest security technologies, businesses are walks of life, but struggling to keep cyber-attacks at bay. This begs in the case of the question, should the focus of cybersecurity cybersecurity, be on detection and remediation, rather than just maybe that’s protection? With all prevention-focused security exactly what is strategies failing spectacularly, it’s time for CIOs to needed. accept the fact that organisations will be breached, and should take steps to limit the damage these breaches can cause and recover lost data. To do that, they would need granular visibility into digital assets and systems, in addition to continually evaluating their organsations’ defence posture. Planning for security should broaden the scope and cover all the outages and scenarios that can have a disruptive effect on business. The old adage ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ may ring true in most walks of life, but in the case of cybersecurity, maybe the second part of that saying is exactly what’s needed. Talk to us:
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Our events
Digital and diverse We’ve all heard the stats and facts. Roughly 90 percent of all the data in the history of mankind has been generated over the last four years. By 2020 there will be 20/30/50 billion objects connected to the Internet. Some of the world’s biggest media, retail and accommodation companies – Facebook, Alibaba and Airbnb – don’t own any intellectual property, physical retail space or their own property. In the technology industry, we're constantly reminded of the reality in which we now live. What’s interesting to note is that other industries are beginning to put technology – and digitalisation – to the top of their list of priorities. The Institute of Management Accountants, one of the world’s biggest accountancy and finance professional bodies, recently hosted its fourth annual conference in Riyadh. Its theme? ‘The Techno-Finance Era’. No, that wasn’t some perverse reference to the role of dance music in compiling spreadsheets, but rather a nod to the There will be a host fact that other board members – CFO and CMO of figures waiting to chief among them – are beginning to realise that embracing technology is an absolute must. gazump the CIO in It’s also a firm indicator that in the coming coming years. years, CIOs will face competition from these figures. If the CIO fails to differentiate their ability to drive business value, then there will be a host of figures waiting to gazump them. I’m certain that the solution to this issue for a number of regional IT decision makers is diversification. If, at first glance, your existing product may not seem suited for a digital platform, there’s bound to be a related service you can provide that will be. The IT industry constantly reminds us of analytics and cloud services that drive valuable insight, and provide more agile platforms for internal users and customers. I believe that these insights and platforms – which need IT professionals to get the best out of them – will be the key to this diversification, and for a number of businesses, their survival. If we acknowledge the coming of digitalisation as a fact, there’s really nothing to do but embrace it, and plan for tomorrow. Talk to us:
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Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2016 31 October – 1 November | Dubai, UAE | gartner.com/me/security
Build Trust and Resilience at the Speed of Business
Topics to be covered: • Cybersecurity • Data loss prevention • Enabling a safer cloud • Security and risk strategy • Governance, risk and compliance • Mobile security for digital business • Crisis/incident command and management • Recovery from a targeted cyberattack • Internet of Things, network and endpoint security challenges
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Contents
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ISSUE 292 | may 2016
24 20
AVIVO GROUP HEAD OF IT NSN MURTHY
28
ayla aviation academy
CASE STUDY: Emirates National Oil Company
16 New vision, new innovations 50 Food for thought We bring you the highlights of the spring edition of the Hong Kong Electronics Fair and International ICT Expo.
56 Cloud on your terms
40 Faster than fast
58 Learning curve
44 An eye to the future
64 Big opportunities
32
www.cnmeonline.com
Webcor Group's CFO Frederic Marret discusses how he opted for a fresh treasury management system which he expect to bring benefits to the firm.
36 Broadband boost
international smart card
Operators are increasingly investing in fixed broadband networks. How quickly can they monetise them?
Is the Middle East ready for 100GbE, and will it suffer if it does not opt for the standard in the coming years?
For businesses who want to stay ahead of competition, predictive analytics offers ways to use data to make effective business decisions.
Find out why cloud is a game changer for SMEs, and how Microsoft's Azure services are geared towards this market segment. Jeevan Thankappan caught up with John Kopcke, CTO of Ellucian, to talk about the company’s technology strategy.
Schneider Electric's Ghassan Barghouth highlights how Big Data can ease the impact of the economic downturn on GCC Petchems.
may 2016
7
What scares you the most about The top 4 things that scare IT professionals
Security Failures
22%
Lack of QualiďŹ ed Resources
Rapidly Changing Technologies
Risk of System Failures
22%
16%
15 %
Networking is Complex
Human Error
Fears specifically related to the complexities of networking concerns 7% of respondents.
More security concerns are related to user error rather than brute-force attacks.
USER ERROR,
BRUTE-FORCE ATTACKS,
15% > 9%
COMPLEX NETWORKING,
7%
Fear of Cost Cost is always a concern with IT professionals. This concern was also seen across all categories.
Security / Business Continuity Costs
Support Costs
Training Costs
Difficulty Forecasting Costs
5%
3%
2%
1%
(Security Failures)
(The lack of qualified resources)
( The lack of qualified resources )
( Rapidly changing technologies )
your IT infrastructure? Fear of Change
Changes causing security issues
7%
Changes to infrastructure and software
3% 2%
Changes outpacing training
Not all fears are rational... 15%
Human Error
12%
Unplanned Changes
9%
Lack of Training Bodily Harm -
1%
Genetically Modified Spiders -
.05% SOURCE: logentries.com.
ADVERTORIAL
Madinat Jumeirah Dubai, UAE
Leading New ICT, Making Cities Safer
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ublic safety and security continues to be a primary concern for governments around the world and the Middle East region. As population levels rise, the need for more effective ICT solutions to protect citizens becomes crucial for all governments. They are challenged with the task to combat threats, and in many cases thwart them before they occur. To address these issues, Huawei, a leading global ICT solutions provider, will share global insights on effective public safety solutions to regional government audiences at its Safe City Summit 2016 in Dubai. At the summit, Huawei will showcase its portfolio of public safety solutions drawing from its experience in building Safe City infrastructures for the government sector. Huawei will also demonstrate advanced technologies such as high definition video surveillance, broadband trunking, multi-media dispatching, and intelligent analytics to increase situational awareness of emergency service agencies. Huawei Safe City solutions have been deployed across the globe in countries like UK, Netherlands, Russia, Turkey, Kenya, Egypt and China to name a few. By the end of this event, you will learn about: • Global best-practices in effective public safety and national security • Emerging technologies and solutions for disaster preparedness • Significance of public and private collaboration in safeguarding citizens About Huawei Safe City Summit 2016 The summit will bring together, international experts, regional government agencies, telecom operators, technology partners, industry analysts and opinion
leaders, to discuss and share knowledge towards making cities safe and secure. The summit will pay attention on several safety and security issues being deliberated by regional governments to leverage new ICT solutions that empower civil and security departments. The summit will also showcase emerging technologies and demonstrate the use of innovation in disaster preparedness as-well-as explore the roles both public and private partnerships can play to ensure the safety of citizens and visitors. Huawei will cover a wide range of public safety threats drawing from its extensive global experience where its solutions are critical to the public safety and protection of over 400 million people in more than 100 cities across 30 countries, and demonstrate its leadership in effective ICT solutions that address social security and unrest, accident, public health and natural disaster. Huawei Safe City Solutions In today’s cities, police and security personnel need intelligent IT, communications, and video-analysis technologies to ensure public safety. These proven technologies offer powerful capabilities for multiplying the effectiveness of personnel. Huawei has joined hands with global security specialists to provide end-to-end public safety solutions. These solutions include capabilities such as convergent command and visualized dispatching to improve emergency response time. Cloud platforms and intelligent analytics combine to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of law enforcement and ensure a safe environment for the public. For maximum cost-effectiveness, Huawei’s public safety solutions can be rolled out as part of a broader Smart City initiative.
Column
W
Adelle Geronimo Online Editor, CNME
the odd couple
hat will the future look like? When asked this question, some people will respond that it will be filled with flying cars, robots, talking buildings and so on. While these possibilities may seem vague in the not-so-distant future, we have been witnessing continuous and rapid advancements in robotics technology, signalling that over the next few years, robots will be involved in basically every aspect of our lives. According to IDC, the robotics industry is one of the six innovation accelerators that will drive digital transformation by opening new revenue streams and changing the way work is performed. In the last year alone, we saw many big IT players - the likes of Google, Facebook, www.cnmeonline.com
Amazon and Apple - betting big on automation and robotic projects. In fact, a recent study by the analyst firm also forecasted that spending on robotics and related services in the EMEA region will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13 percent, from nearly $14.6 billion in 2015 to $23.8 billion in 2019. As exciting as this may be, there remain natural concerns about machines taking over our jobs. However, industry experts have noted that today, emerging technologies are more focused on enhancing manmachine collaboration. Good examples for this are robot-assisted surgeries, and initiatives like the TALOS “Iron Man” suit for US soldiers. Robots may have the abilities to work in precarious environments and move with precision, but they
still lack cognitive abilities like creativity, curiosity, empathy and self-motivation that humans have. Therefore, robots can’t just simply replace workers on the assembly line, and innovators believe that future technologies will be more effective if we marry the best of human abilities with advanced robotics. There’s no denying that advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence will displace some jobs we have today. But for every job that is lost, it is very likely that new and interesting jobs, which only humans can do, will take their place. Rather than fearing a scenario where machines will take over the world we should start cultivating ideas that promote man-machine collaboration to innovate, grow, and invent entire new categories of work. May 2016
11
short takes
Month in view
Ooredoo, Arabsat sign satellite communications deal
Ahmad Abdulaziz Al Neama, Ooredoo Qatar and Wael Al-Buti, Arabsat
Ooredoo and Arab Satellite Communication Organisation (Arabsat) have signed a strategic partnership agreement that will see the two companies work together to develop new satellite services for customers. Under the terms of the agreement, Ooredoo and Arabsat will review the current satellite projects they have in progress, with a view to collaborating on technology and design, and will aim to work together on future projects to deliver satellite services. In particular, they will look to collaborate on new VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) services, as demand rises for the technology in Qatar and across the region. Waleed Al-Sayed, Chief Executive Officer, Ooredoo Qatar, said, “Ooredoo continues to grow our global network of world-class partners in every area, as we look to increase the range and diversity of ICT services that we offer. As one of the world’s top satellite operators, Arabsat has developed a reputation for delivering cutting-edge services, so we see strong potential to work with them to deliver robust solutions for our customers.” 12
may 2016
Hany Hussein, Huawei Middle East
Huawei inks IoT and Big Data alliance with SAP and Seidor MENA Huawei has announced a regional joint innovation partnership with enterprise software provider SAP, and systems integrator Seidor MENA. According to the ICT company, the collaboration with SAP and Seidor MENA will focus on establishing a technical alliance to provide a comprehensive Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data solution that will digitally transform the region’s enterprises, offering more agility and allowing them to run more efficiently. Under the agreement, customers of the three companies can benefit from Huawei’s hardware and infrastructure solutions, SAP’s wide application software portfolio and Seidor MENA’s technology consulting services. Hany Hussein, Vice President of Partners and Alliances, Huawei Middle East said, “Huawei values our new winwin partnership with SAP and Seidor MENA, which allows us to offer a truly unique IoT and Big Data for regional enterprises looking to streamline their business processes. With our expertise in ICT hardware infrastructure, Huawei is committed to collaborating with SAP’s application software solutions and Seidor MENA’s consulting services so that we can market our combined capabilities to develop differentiated IoT and Big Data solutions. This innovation partnership is
designed to help local enterprises across different sectors deploy new technologies easily and quickly, making them more efficient and allow them to save bottom line costs.” The joint innovation partnership follows previous collaborations between Huawei and SAP, which saw the companies integrate Huawei’s ICT infrastructure and connectivity solutions with the SAP HANA cloud platform, SAP applications and analytic tools. Meanwhile, Seidor MENA provides SAP’s platform technology services covering consulting, infrastructure, implementation, development, and maintenance of applications.
$2.31 billion total enterprise
hardware revenue in the Middle East and Africa region in 2015 Source: IDC www.cnmeonline.com
After more than a decade, Apple has posted its first quarterly decline in profits and revenue due to low smartphone sales. The firm reported profits of $10.52 billion, compared with $13.57 billion, last year. Revenue declined 13 percent to $50.55 billion, from $58 billion.
WhatsApp turns on end-to-end encryption Facebook-owned WhatsApp has strengthened the encryption of its widely used instant messaging app. WhatsApp’s founders said recently that the application now implements end-to-end encryption, which means only authorised users can decrypt messages. “The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you sent that message to,” Jan Koum and Brian Acton wrote in a blog post. “No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us.” The move by WhatsApp comes
Citrix study reveals impact of mobility on UAE businesses Citrix has announced the results of a research study detailing the impact of enterprise mobility Johnny Karam, Citrix in the UAE workplace. The report, entitled 'The BYOD phenomenon: harnessing the disruptive influence of mobility', was commissioned by Citrix in partnership with IPSOS. The survey polled both employees and senior IT decision-makers who were asked about the advantages and challenges associated with implementing mobile workplace initiatives. Key findings from the report reveal that 83 percent of employees in the UAE have already harnessed remote working in some form and believe that it leads to greater job satisfaction and allows for a better work-life balance. However, with 45 percent of companies offering just partial mobility solutions, the data is also indicative of the increasing need for businesses to move to a completely mobile and secure working environment. The research also outlined that the number one concern for IT departments restricting mobile workspace solutions was due to security fears, with 44 percent of IT decision-makers citing security as the top reason, followed by cost and investment. Johnny Karam, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Citrix, said, “The UAE has become a cosmopolitan society in such a short period of time, where the work culture in the region has evolved to become competitive, fast-paced and demanding. In this evolving work environment, businesses must look very closely at the provisions they make for flexible working. This study indicates that firms who fail to respond, will fall behind their more forward-thinking competitors. They will also lose out in recruiting and retaining the best staff as today’s generation of tech-savvy ‘digital natives’ is increasingly become intolerant of poor technology access at work.” www.cnmeonline.com
after fierce debate over the increasing use of encryption and how it affects law enforcement investigations. In February, a federal magistrate judge ordered Apple to create a special version of its mobile operating system that would help the FBI get into a phone used by one of the San Bernardino mass shooters. Apple objected, setting off a widespread debate. Devices using WhatsApp hold the encryption and decryption keys to messages sent over the service. That means law enforcement could not go to WhatsApp or another service provider to obtain the keys.
Google and Microsoft agree to end regulatory battles Google and Microsoft have agreed to end their long-running regulatory battles and stop complaining to government
agencies about one another. Over the years, Microsoft has been one of the leading companies calling for governments to investigate Google over potential antitrust violations in recent years. Earlier this year, however, Microsoft withdrew its support for FairSearch, a coalition of companies pushing the EU to file formal antitrust complaints against Google. This new announcement of the agreement between the companies came only two days after the European Commission filed new antitrust charges against Google related to its packaging of apps on phones operated by Android. Microsoft had also agreed to withdraw its complaints to regulators against Google, reflecting the changing priorities in legal value, a Microsoft spokesperson said. The new detente stems from a global patent deal the two companies signed last September. That deal ended about 20 patent lawsuits between the two companies in the US and Germany. may 2016
13
CIO Speaker series
Vodafone Qatar advances testing for application development process Application Development Management transforms testing and defect management
“Overall, we’ve seen application defect levels fall from 15 to six per cent over a two-year period, a significant quality improvement as we have a more structured testing process with HPE ALM on SaaS.” – Sivaranjini Saravanan, quality assurance manager, Vodafone Qatar
Vodafone Qatar traditionally employed spreadsheets to track test cases and manage defects during the application development process. Typical software developments include the billing and charging system and subscribers’ mobile phone applications. To streamline the testing process and support multiple IT projects, Vodafone Qatar required a more structured approach to maintaining test cases and defects followed by a shift from manual to automated testing. To address this, Vodafone Qatar deployed HPE ALM Software, which provides the operator with a powerful, single repository for its testing team to plan, build and accelerate the test delivery of reliable, high-quality applications with high-performance functionality. It is further enhanced by local Customer Success managers fully committed to ensuring customer excellence.
Read more at www.cnmeonline.com/hpe
Smart Choices for Digital Infrastructure Digital transformation requires agile, carefully planned IT infrastructure, efficient data access and exchange. Each of these factors is vital to success. The challenge is making smart, correct choices in line with performance requirements, without over- or under specifying. Nexans supports you in making smart choices that will help you build and operate the most efficient and costeffective digital infrastructure to support your business goals. • • • • •
Flexible, cost-effective bandwidth achitectures Optimised space usage Performance protection and enhancement Faster modular deployment Design through to operational support services
www.nexans.co.uk/datacentres
EVENT
Hk Electronics fair and ict expo
New vision, new innovations The spring edition of the "Biggest electronics event in Asia", Hong Kong Electronics Fair and International ICT Expo hosted a total of 3,400 exhibitors from 24 countries and regions. Adelle Geronimo reports from the city's Convention and Exhibition Centre.
N
ow in its 13th edition, the twin fairs showcased the latest trends, products and insights in the technology space. Dr. Lo Wai Kwok, Chairman, Hong Kong Trade and Development Council (HKTDC) Electronics/Electronic Appliances, Industries Advisory Committee, said, “Almost every device that is within our reach today is becoming ‘smart’. At the same time, end-users or consumers are constantly on the look-out for products that are not only functional but also promise ease of use. This creates tremendous opportunities for innovators as there is a high demand for smart technologies." Wai Kwok added that technology, particularly the electronics segment, remains one of the highest contributors to Hong Kong’s exports, with 64 percent of their total exports being electronic products. “While the US and China are our major trading partners, we are actively exploring new opportunities. The government and other businesses here in Hong Kong are also very committed to forging alliances and attracting investments from potential markets, www.cnmeonline.com
including the Middle East.” Among the topics highlighted during the event's sessions were robotics and the latest trends in wearable technologies. Decades ago, robotic technologies could only be found in companies operating in the manufacturing sector, typically on assembly lines doing a variety of repetitive tasks. Today, robotics are increasingly being utilised in a variety of sectors including education, healthcare, energy and more. Ongoing developments in the field of artificial intelligence have brought a certain maturity in robotics technology. “Traditional robotics tend to be more controlled and are pre-programmed," said Brian Tang, Founder, Young Makers and Changemakers, an inclusive educational platform and community fostering young innovators. "They were also more about mechanical manipulation. Now, the next-generation of robotics are much more connected and are smarter. It’s no longer just about how precise they can be, but also on how easily they can be controlled by an end-user. “As we are in the age of the machines, with the ubiquity of the
Internet, mobile penetration and the cloud, there are more channels to which we can connect to monitor and manage robotic technologies. This is game-changing not only for consumers but also, of course, for organisations who want to harness the many advantages and business opportunities that robotics and artificial intelligence technologies can bring,” he continued. Putting the spotlight on the latest in wearable technologies, Trish Blomfield, Sales Director, Intel China, said with IDC’s prediction of 50 billion connected devices by 2020, the wearable tech segment is growing at an unprecedented pace. “Today, almost everyone is buying into the wearable trend. Intel’s initiatives are mainly focused on the transition to a new era – a smart and connected era. For a few years, the cloud has been mainly driven by people. Our view is that in the near future the cloud will be driven by ‘things’ acting independently and this will spring a big change in the tech industry that we’d like to call the data revolution, which promises numerous opportunities for consumers and enterprises alike.” may 2016
17
Dot matrix printer
18
may 2016
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Internet of Things is in our DNA
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CIO
Spotlight
Murthy’s law After moving to Dubai in 2013, NSN Murthy is thriving in his new role. Armed with a passion for compliance and watertight IT security, AVIVO Group’s IT head is now relishing the opportunity to build a formidable tech team.
20
may 2016
www.cnmeonline.com
“I absolutely love CPD. I want to enhance my skills continuously, and with the pace that technology is moving it’s imperative that I do so.” t a glance, NSN Murthy seems to pine for the IT of old. “In some ways, technology is almost too much now,” he says. “There are so many messaging, video and audio services, that if you don’t answer your phone, someone immediately asks ‘where are you?’” Look a little deeper, however, and it’s clear that this longing is driven by an admiration for the services that are now on offer. “I never dreamt of the growth that we’ve seen in technology. When I started my career, a mobile device was a luxury, and you had to pay for incoming calls.” Born and raised in Andhra Pradesh, India, Murthy graduated with a BSc in computer science in 1992 and launched his career with coconut oil producers Regent Agro Products, as a systems supervisor. Murthy gained a solid grounding at the “automated” plant, spending three years at the firm before joining the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation in April 1996, where he was placed in charge of corporate IT training. His stint at the organisation was short-lived, however, and after six months, the travel-intensive job took its toll. “APSRTC was a semigovernmental organisation, and there was a lot of work that involved journeying across regions, which became too much after a while,” he says. In October, Murthy joined the Bureau of Data Processing and Systems Limited for a network and
A
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systems management role, where he remained until April 1998. His next venture would see him move into the higher education space, joining Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University as a systems administrator. “Working in education IT was comparatively easy back then,” he says. “The faculty only ran between certain hours, so we only received queries from 9-5. Transport was a much more demanding industry.” However, Murthy does acknowledge that times have changed. “It’s very different now, where students demand IT services 24/7.” Hyderabad came calling, and in October 2000, Murthy took his first venture into the healthcare industry, joining Apollo Health Street as IT manager. In charge of a team of 18, Murthy “built the IT from scratch” at the firm, as well as introducing 60 servers, core switches and firewalls for the healthcare IT and business process outsourcing firm. After four years of diligent work, Murthy was rewarded with a promotion to the role of company chief information security officer. The position brought a series of new challenges to Murthy’s professional life, not least meeting the demands of international customers. “Apollo had a number of healthcare clients in the US, and information security – amongst a range of other important standards – was mandatory for them,” he says. With patient data taking on critical importance in terms of privacy,
Murthy says he felt he was working in a “totally different world altogether”. He took over the firm’s compliance activity, and in a sevenmonth period, implemented ISO9001 AND ISO27001 standards, as well as HIPAA controls. The swift pace with which Murthy oversaw the standards’ installation prompted Apollo to make him a compliance officer for the company’s Indian operations, which meant more US-Indian work. “In 2008, we had 19 offices across India and the US, and there was a vast amount of US compliance interaction for Group requirements.” In line with the Global Recession that struck in 2008, Murthy opted to go solo in August, working as a freelance compliance consultant. He enjoyed great success in the new role, and sufficiently impressed to be offered an IT and compliance consultancy role at Fernandez Hospitals. The company specialised in female and newborn care, with four hospital facilities in Hyderabad. “We worked on streamlining our networks, connecting all four hospitals together,” he says. A passionate believer in education, Murthy obtained his MBA in information systems from Manipal University in 2010. “I absolutely love CPD,” he says. “I want to enhance my skills continuously, and with the pace that technology is moving it’s imperative that I do so.” In parallel with his work at Fernandez, Murthy also became lead may 2016
21
CIO
Spotlight
auditor, audit program manager and an executive committee member at North American quality assurance firm Perry Johnson Registrars in June 2011, positions which he holds to this day. “Perry Johnson is my retirement plan,” he says. “I want to continue working with them, and continue my passion for compliance. Murthy is responsible for third party audits at the organisation, and works around ISO9001, ISO27001 and ISO27006 standards. After spending his whole career in India, Dubai finally beckoned for Murthy, joining Healthcare MENA as IT head for the Group in 2013. As could be expected, the first things that struck him about Dubai life were the relative lack of congestion and abundance of service in the city. “India obviously has a vast amount of resources, which made Dubai seem small by comparison,” he says. “I quickly realised the lifestyle here was great, and that everything is available to you.” Upon joining, he was tasked with a number of IT consolidation projects. “When I arrived, there was no centralisation in our IT,” he says. Murthy set about establishing a hospital information system – the
“Whenever a member of my team comes to me for help, I’ll always do my best to support them. I never get angry and try my best to listen and be patient.” 22
may 2016
implementation of which continues – and an enterprise-wide ERP system. He has also developed a mobile application for AVIVO’s laboratories in Kuwait, allowing patients to access their medical reports with no hassle. AVIVO Group now has 32 centres – including hospitals, clinics, primary care clinics and pharmacies and diagnostics facilities – across the UAE and Kuwait, and has plans to increase those numbers to around 50 in the coming years. The development plans have brought new challenges for Murthy. “We have to study how to migrate into a central environment for software collaboration,” he says. “Then the struggle will start.” With AVIVO Group planning to be listed on the London Stock Exchange in the coming months, Murthy has also been forced to ensure that the company’s front and back end systems and financials all make solid progress. He has started work on establishing a contact centre, which will be integrated with the HIS. Reporting to AVIVO Group’s CEO and COO, Murthy engages in monthly meetings with the board, and his role is now the go-between for business and IT, especially following the company’s decision to rebrand from Healthcare MENA to AVIVO in October. He describes his style of management as centring around being a “people person”, and not in a selfsatisfying sense. “If a member of my team comes to me for help, I always do my best to support them,” he says. “I never get angry and always do my best to listen and be patient.” Murthy is relishing his management role within the company, where he now has the chance to ensure technology runs his way. “I now have the chance to build a team, which is fantastic,” he says.
TIMELINE 1992
Graduates with BSc in computer science
Joins Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation
1996
2000
Takes Apollo Health Street role in Hyderabad
Named Apollo Health Street CISO
2004
2010
Joins Healthcare MENA in Dubai
Obtains information systems MBA
2013
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case study
Emirates National Oil Company
Fuel efficient Recognising the need for less paper-based processes in its operations, Emirates National Oil Company embarked on a journey to implement a new document management system. What ensued was a long-term partnership that has greatly smoothed its administrative processes and offered tangible ROI.
mirates National Oil Company (ENOC), a wholly-owned entity of the Dubai Government, has been a leading force in the economic diversification and sustainable development of the United Arab Emirates. Operating since 1993, it has over 30 subsidiaries and services thousands of customers across 58 markets. Providing a host of valuable commodities to a burgeoning region comes with a great deal of complexity behind the scenes. It’s easy to envisage how a company with such broad operations and so many clients is heavily reliant on smooth business administration, and when any sort of office
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environment comes to mind, there’s one thing we all think of: paper. ENOC’s reliance on paperbased processes left the firm facing a number of administration difficulties, not least the sheer volume of physical documents that required storage. In 2009, ENOC’s IT department has been working with the business to implement an effective and efficient document management solution. “We had a room full of files that must have covered around 400 or 500 square feet,” Abdulmajeed Malek, Director of IT Services, ENOC, says. “If we received any queries, it would take a lot of time - including the services of two or three members of staff - to come up with the relevant information. If bank guarantees had expired, this caused real problems
for us. Sometimes we would be supplying things without the proper collateral. Processes had to be automated.” Malek says the initiative to automate processes was driven by business users rather than by ENOC’s IT department. “A host of departments were pushing us for work to be done,” he says. “From an operations perspective, things had to change.” Forms that had to be filled in by supervisors, checklists and contract closing documents all generated vast quantities of paper and excess work for ENOC staff. The ability to streamline these processes with the use of technology would be a major timesaver and provide consolidation, a significant benefit for ENOC’s operations.
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Enabling growth and process improvement ENOC’s retail department deals with a range of corporate fleets, and has agreements with a number of high profile organisations in Dubai including the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), Dubai Taxi Corporation and Dubai Police. With operations typically running on a credit-based supply, paper documents were rife. “So many documents needed to be signed, including bank guarantees and supply issues,” Malek says. ENOC first began investigating enterprise content management for one of its subsidiaries, Emirates Petroleum Product Company. Like its parent company, the subsidiary faced a lot of difficulties in keeping up with the paperwork that resulted from steady customer growth.
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“There’s always a degree of resistance when it comes to breaking employee habits.”
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Emirates National Oil Company
ENOC evaluated a number of vendors, however, Laserfiche was the final choice. “It had several features that immediately stood out,” Malek says. “Its document management features and workflow were concise and userfriendly. It had a good interface for Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, and its integration was built well for an Oracle backend.” Laserfiche also came across as an attractive option in terms of value. “Its TCO made it very easy to justify to senior management,” Malek says. “It fit the bill commercially and technically.” ENOC leadership made sure that users had the proper guidance and training with the newly reengineered processes. “Users were obviously used to handing physical documents for a manager’s signature,” Malek says. “There’s always a degree of resistance when it comes to breaking habits.” The IT department was instrumental in implementing the system, providing the foundation for the electronic repository by converting the backlog of files into the electronic system. “This could be classed as a growing pain, but a necessary one,” Malek says. “Putting the files into an organised system undoubtedly paid off in the long run.”
Borderless benefits Since implementing Laserfiche, ENOC has seen improvements to its customer service, organisational efficiency and ease of compliance with industry mandates. The reduced dependency on hard copies has made a whole host of processes 26
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much smoother. By digitising customer request documents and automating the document approval process, ENOC and its subsidiaries have been able to deliver faster, more streamlined customer service. “First and foremost, the changes have made a huge difference to our speed of operations,” Malek says. “The system provides complete visibility to our workflows, which ultimately allows for better decision-making.” He estimates that ENOC realised a full return on its Laserfiche investment in just eight months. “By using Laserfiche to scan and store paper files, we save at least 6,000 hours of staff time a year, which translates to $240,000. We’ve also been able to eliminate $28,800 in paper storage costs per year.” After the solution was fully implemented, other departments quickly began to take notice. The HR department was eager to use Laserfiche to enhance operations, and was making full use of the system by 2011. “HR was a major consumer of paper documents,” Malek says. “Things ranging from degree certificates, employment contracts and photos obviously create a lot of paper.” Soon enough,
the Laserfiche software was integrated with ENOC’s Oracle HRMS module, allowing HR staff to easily find their desired transaction on the system. The procurement department followed soon after, and then ENOC marketing - tasked with managing contracts with international distributors - was quick to avail the service. Over the years, ENOC has built a strong partnership with Laserfiche. “That’s the mark of its value, that we’ve stayed with them throughout this time and the software continues to evolve with our business needs,” Malek says. The project has also played an important part of ENOC’s efforts to be environmentally conscious, having saved vast sums of paper, and costs associated with it, including purchasing, ink and printer maintenance. Malek is also contemplating the possibilities and benefits of expanding ENOC’s application of Laserfiche, saying it could be a platform for further technology implementation including data analytics and process automation. “It’s a very agile tool for us, and gives us the opportunity to introduce a lot of new things in terms of document management,” he says.
“We have been able to save at least 6,000 hours of staff time a year, which translates to $240,000.”
www.cnmeonline.com
case study
Ayla Aviation Academy
eye in the sky Jordan's Ayla Aviation Academy has taken huge strides to benefit its students. The institute has pioneered video capture for its training flights, and implemented a cloud-based training management system to track cadet progress. Ammar Yousef, President and CTO, shares the impact of the technology on the cadets, instructors and the academy’s data centre.
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ucked between the ocean and the mountains on the southernmost point of Jordan is the city of Aqaba, home to Ayla Aviation Academy. Founded in 2006, Ayla Aviation Academy has, in its ten years, already graduated hundreds of pilots who now fly aircraft for commercial airlines throughout the region, including Qatar Airways, Emirates, Etihad and, of course, Royal Jordanian. With nearly 100 aspiring pilots enrolled at any given time, Ammar Yousef, President and CTO, Ayla Aviation Academy is dedicated to leveraging technology to keep his fleet, cadets and flight instructors in line and safe. In early 2014, Yousef and the team at Ayla began to develop a plan to create a unique, streamlined and wellrounded experience for their cadets through the use of technology. “We began in the cockpit,” says Yousef. “The cockpit is our training ground – you could say the most important classroom for a cadet.” Ayla’s fleet includes the modern all-glass cockpit Diamond DA40, Diamond DA42, Cessna 172 aircraft that seat two – the cadet and the flight instructor. Yousef went searching for a way to enhance the learning experience, knowing that technology would be the key. “It was at an aviation expo in the United
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States that I found inspiration,” recalls Yousef. “There was a display of mounted cameras for recreational pilots. These cameras were used to capture the in-flight experience of aviation hobbyists.” Though his cadets are far from recreational flyers out on a weekend jaunt, Yousef saw the potential to use the same infrastructure as a teaching tool. “We took the idea back to Ayla, and created compact camera mounts for each aeroplane in our fleet,” explains Yousef. “We installed a video filter that removes the aeroplane propellers from the video stream, giving us a clean feed.” In addition, Yousef’s team routed the audio feed through the pilot’s mouth piece, to pick up uninterrupted dialogue between the cadet and the flight instructor. Those outside the field of aviation may not realise that cameras in the cockpits can be controversial these days. “Installing cameras in the cockpits of commercial airplanes is one subject that generates heated debate between proponents and opponents. Having knowledge of what has transpired inside a cockpit seconds or minutes before a catastrophic malfunction or mysterious crash is crucial in determining the root cause and any contributing factors,” explains Yousef. The controversy arises, he explains, in
“If there is an incident, we need to know how and why it occurred. This is both to correct and protect the cadet as well as the flight instructor.”
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the case of commercial airlines as liability for incidents is a factor. “At Ayla, however, we put safety and excellence in training first,” he says. “If there is an incident, we need to know how and why it occurred. This is both to correct and protect the cadet as well as the flight instructor.” Ayla’s goals were met almost immediately with the inclusion of the cameras. The videos are used as a debriefing tool, to provide evidence of instructional progress. In addition, cadets are able to watch their flight immediately after landing as a selfassessment. There have been unintended benefits of the programme as well. “Even though cameras were not intended to police students and instructors, the presence of a third set of eyes in a training cockpit played a significant part in elevating the instructional atmosphere and established a new bar for the instructor-student relationship,” says Yousef. Unexpectedly, the cameras have created an auditing system for the administration at Ayla. “In addition to the regular standardisation sessions conducted for instructors, the chief flight instructor now has the opportunity to conduct "unannounced” spot checks or audits of video-recorded missions with the aim to provide feedback to the instructor as part of continuous improvement. The same thing works during a solo flight where a flight instructor is able to monitor the student progress and provide feedback.” However, as with all new technology, the cameras have put additional pressure on the IT department at the academy. “With so many hours of video, we ran into may 2016
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case study
Ayla Aviation Academy
“Even though cameras were not intended to police students and instructors, the presence of a third set of eyes in a training cockpit played a significant part in elevating the instructional atmosphere and established a new bar for the instructorstudent relationship.” some data storage issues,” explains Yousef. “We considered storing the data in the cloud, but because of our location, upload speeds were simply too slow.” The solution to the data volume issue was two-fold. “First, we implemented new policies. Videos older than six months would be deleted. With four courses of students each year, this gives the cadet ample time to view their videos and chart their progress,” explains Yousef. This policy, however, was not enough to stem the tide of video data. “We decided that the programme was valuable enough to invest in additional storage space for the newly created data.” With that, Ayla doubled its on-premises data storage capacity. Taking a peek into the progress of the Ayla cadets is not limited to cameras in the cockpit. Each course of cadets goes through a rigorous schedule of training on the ground as well. Earlier this year, Yousef and the team at Ayla worked to implement a tool that would keep students on course, and give their instructors and sponsors a glimpse into their progress. “In 2015 we implemented schoolwide software called FlightLogger,” 30
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says Yousef. FlightLogger is a cloud-based solution, designed by pilots to reduce paperbased records and keep aviation training on track. The solution includes document management, certificate management, scheduling and more. “We use FlightLogger to manage and monitor our cadet’s theoretical knowledge instruction and flight training,” says Yousef. Students are able to access their class schedule, documents and coursework on any mobile device or computer, as well as receive immediate updates to their schedules via the FlightLogger app. In addition, FlightLogger gives insights into a cadet’s academic performance – information that is particularly important to the cadet’s sponsor. “Many of our cadets’ attendance at Ayla is sponsored by commercial aviation outfits that intend to employ them after graduation,” explains Yousef. “They have a great deal invested in the success of their sponsored cadets.” As FlightLogger also records scheduling, attendance and monthly reports, a sponsor can see clearly and
immediately if their investment is paying off. “Transferring to a cloud-based system has been hugely beneficial to the Academy. While we still retain hard copies of critical documents, it has allowed us to maintain a tight schedule – something that as professional pilots, our cadets will need to learn to rely on,” says Yousef. The cadets at Ayla Aviation Academy are the future pilots of the region. Before they are ready to transport passengers all over the world, the instructors, sponsors and administration of Ayla are committed to giving them the most comprehensive training experience possible. For Yousef and his team at Ayla, technology is the answer when it comes producing top-tier pilots. “As far as I know, we are the only aviation academy that provides technology such as in-flight cameras,” says Yousef. “I would absolutely recommend it. It has worked for us, and it can certainly work for us if deployed correctly.” www.cnmeonline.com
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case study
international smart card
remote remittance
International Smart Card plays a crucial role in Iraq’s economy. The firm delivers salary and pension e-payment services to four million citizens across the country, and last year sought a new partner to deliver secure and reliable SIMs to connect its 6,000 points of service.
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onvenience has always been the norm for a lot of the GCC’s residents. Home delivery of just about anything you desire, service with a smile and glitzy, five-star malls are never far away. In recent years, this level of expectation has become the norm in the mobile payments industry and e-commerce, where the region has made good progress. Cash and comforts are available at the touch of a button. Suffice to say, the satisfaction that this region can provide does not extend across all of the Middle East. Against a backdrop of years of political instability, Iraq had faced a whole host of challenges in its internal affairs. For large numbers of Iraqi citizens, an issue as simple as salary collection became a source of immense frustration – and injustice. A resolution to the ongoing problem was in dire need. Founded in 2008, International Smart Card (ISC) was the result of a partnership between Iraq’s two biggest state-owned banks, Rafidain Bank and Rasheed Bank, along with the Iraqi Electronic Payment System. To combat the challenges faced in regions with poor telecommunications networks, ISC developed its ‘Qi Card’ to deliver payments to citizens across Iraq. It became the first biometric
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international-standard card used to provide payment services in financial industries in the country. Shortly after its inception, ISC quickly garnered a large customer base, including 100,000 citizens in Baghdad, who would make withdrawals from 10 bank branches. “Our core service remains the same today from when we started,” ISC CEO Bahaa Abdul-Hadi says. “Our aim is still to deliver payment services to people who need them most – people who are in need of automated services.” For ISC, this customer base would also include a number of the neediest people in society, including pensioners, and recipients of a social assistance programme, including 28,000 citizens who were receiving disability benefits. “We wanted to prove to the government that we could serve customers and enjoy automation with banking solutions,” Abdul-Hadi says. “Our objective was to help the government automate processes in finance.”
“Fraud was rife when we first started. There was no national ID project at the time, so criminals were able to generate multiple identities and collect wages on other peoples’ behalf.”
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In addition to the practical uses of setting up the payment service, thousands of Iraqi citizens had been crying out for a trustworthy system to deliver wages. “There was a lot of corruption when we were established,” Abdul-Hadi says. “That meant that fraud was rife in terms of citizens collecting their wages. There was no national ID project at the time, so criminals were able to generate multiple identities and collect wages on other peoples’ behalf.” Consequently, large numbers of Iraqi citizens would
Bahaa AbdulHadi, CEO, ISC
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case study
international smart card
arrive in branches to find they had none of their hard-earned cash waiting for them, or that only a portion of their salary would be left. To make matters worse, there was little hope of tracing the crime, with no biometric system in place. Seven years down the line, and it was clear that ISC had provided a much-needed service to the market, boasting over four million cardholders and 6,300 point of service (POS) terminals across the country. Nonetheless, the company felt that more could be done to secure and facilitate payment delivery. In February 2015, ISC began meetings with Orange Business Services, with a view to enhancing connectivity from POS’s to the back end. ISC had previously partnered with other service providers, but had not received exactly what they had wanted. “Their services were satisfactory, but lacked advanced features,” Abdul-Hadi says. “It was important for us that we had a global partner; we would have POS’s outside of Iraq,” Abdul-Hadi adds. “We wanted an alternative to our existing partners for our network of communications.” For him, the memory of the fraud that citizens had suffered continued to live fresh, with data security remaining top of the list of priorities. “We needed a reliable partner who could provide secure and scalable solutions.” With the quality of telecoms services in parts of Iraq lacking, and with coverage often weak, ISC were conscious of selecting a partner who could
overcome these hurdles. A key part of fulfilling this reliability requirement was the inclusion of multiple SIM cards in the POS’s, in case of any potential failure. In addition, any new partner would have to be able to scale their service levels for expected increases in the number of Qi Card users, which Abdul-Hadi says is certain to increase in the coming years. Having evaluated a number of other potential solutions partners, ISC – via its Dubai-based technology and business development partner Canny Quest International – signed an M2M agreement with Orange Business Services for the delivery of the new service. MPLS was established between Orange and the terminals, which features Orange SIMs. “The process took a few months, but was straightforward,” AbdulHadi says. The SIMs are connected to the card management system, which in turn validates transactions through the Orange network. Orange interconnects with the country’s mobile telecoms operators to ensure widespread coverage and optimised signal quality. Following the implementation work, the solution went fully live by November 2015. All that a user needs to withdraw money is a bank account, a Qi Card and their biometric details on the system. Once they are validated on the system, they can claim their cash. ISC customers can access a broad range of virtual financial account management services to access their money including smart cards
“Distributing funds for financial aid is a matter of necessity, not convenience.”
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(closed and open loop), mobile apps and wallets, and the Internet. One of the major advantages brought from the new solution is the enhancement of connectivity quality – the Orange SIMs have raised the quality from GPRS to 3G standard. “POS’s are connected wirelessly and are a digital alternative to government channels,” Abdul-Hadi says. He is also satisfied with the level of security in the new solution, one of the key mandates of the project. “It’s so important to us that they’ve managed to develop a secure channel, and a service for servers outside of the country,” he says. ‘We’ve improved our security through end-to-end encryption and improved monitoring. “Orange Business Services provides a business-critical part of our solution and enables us to monitor and control our POS terminals. This service has the potential to grow and develop and positively impact the country’s GDP.” In terms of return on investment, Abdul-Hadi says he expects ISC to have broken even in “18 months” in terms of its investment with Orange Business Services, a result from which he draws great satisfaction. Looking forward, Abdul-Hadi is looking to expand ISC’s POS network, with an additional “8,000” planned retail merchants to be added throughout the country and be online by mid-2016. Furthermore, he says that mobile payments could well be introduced by Q3 of this year, and that the existing solution may not be limited to Iraq. “I see no reason why we couldn’t export this solution to similarly challenged countries,” he says. “Distributing funds for financial aid is not only a matter of convenience, but a matter of necessity.” www.cnmeonline.com
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Telecoms World Fixed broadband
Broadband boost The exponential growth in IP traffic, driven by new devices and applications, has made it imperative for operators to invest in fixed broadband networks. But, with prices stagnating, how quickly can they monetise these high-capacity networks?
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hough mobile broadband is the most dynamic telecom market segment, fixed broadband uptake is growing at a healthy pace, with a seven percent annual increase over the past three years and reaching 11 percent penetration by end of last year. With the number of the subscribers forecast to reach one billion by the end of this decade, the case for investment in broadband infrastructure – whether upgrades of copper or deployment of pure fibre – is more compelling than ever for telecom operators. “Fixed broadband usage along with subscriber numbers are growing consistently at strong levels both globally and especially locally. This trend is accelerated in countries which possess two key drivers - access to reliable, ultra-fast fibre networks and new HD and 4K content consumption habits by consumers. The advent of fibre to the home has opened new media consumption trends and both individual consumers and families are drawing down on this by subscribing to fast, reliable and consistent home broadband services,” says Jonathan James Haysom, VP-Home Product Marketing, Etisalat. from Etisalat. Matthew Smith, Head of Engagement Line Smart Networks, Ericsson, agrees that the fixed broadband growth spurred by the capacity demands driven by insatiable consumer usage of video on a myriad of smart devices, and the storage and fast access to cloud content. “This is fueling new fibre rollout, including government driven intiatives like National Broadband Networks. Fixed broadband traffic is currently around 60 Exabytes per month, growing at 20% CAGR over next five years.” Mohamed Salama, Head of Regional Business Center, Fixed Networks, Nokia MEA, adds establishing a fixed network that can meet the
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“Many governments in the region are investing heavily in broadband infrastructure including fibreoptic rollouts and improved mobile broadband networks.” Mohamed Salama, Head of Regional Business Center, Fixed Networks, Nokia MEA
increasing and evolving data capacity requirements for both residential and business subscribers continues to be the leading trend in the region. “Many governments in the region are investing heavily in broadband infrastructure including fibre-optic rollouts and improved mobile broadband networks,” he says. According to the FTTH Council Europe, the UAE has the highest FTTH penetration globally (around 75 percent) – even ahead of Korea, followed closely by Qatar with 64 percent penetration. Since 2010, fibre broadband has become the fastest growing technology in the UAE. Jordan is rate of FTTH penetration deploying a fibre network and has in the UAE been working towards a national broadband network since 2003. In Oman, there has been recent and renewed push towards improving fixed broadband infrastructure, particularly fibre based networks. “The fixed broadband market is at different levels of maturity in various GCC countries. In the UAE for example, where there is more than 2.5 million kilometers of fiber laid out, fixed broadband accounts for majority of the internet traffic. Businesses too "Fixed broadband usage leverage the advanced fiber-based fixed connectivity along with subscriber numbers for Internet and internal business connectivity needs are growing consistently at as well. In other markets such as Kuwait, where fiber rollouts have been slower- much of the internet strong levels both globally and traffic is carried on mobile networks. So it is difficult especially locally." to generalize a particular trend and one needs to Jonathan James Haysom, VP-Home Product Marketing, Etisalat takes a nuanced country-wise view,” says Paul Black, Director of Telecoms and Media, IDC.
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Telecoms World Fixed broadband According to the latest figures available from International Telecom Union (ITU), the prices of fixed broadband plans dropped sharply between 2008 and 2011, especially in developing countries, and have been stagnating since then. This presents telecom operators with a daunting challenge – how to manage growing traffic and spur new revenue steams at the same time? “Operators with intense FTTH/B roll-out and penetration targets can leverage bundle packages including broadband and IPTV services to foster the adoption of fibre and improve loyalty rates. Most of the operators with such bundled offers typically do not allow the consumer to purchase the service as a stand-alone, driving the adoption of multi-pay bundle services,” says Joe Abi Akl, Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton MENA. He adds that operators should forecasted number of aim to monetize fixed broadband networked devices in a typical by offering discounts or by family home by 2020 focusing on value-added services for consumers (IPTV, online gaming, etc.) and for enterprises (cloud services, IT services, etc.). Salama from Nokia says for operators, monetization is closely tied to the assets they have and their ability to deploy and deliver ultrabroadband services over those assets – either on their own or via profitable partnerships. “On the business side, it is largely driven by the quality of service provided, how much data capacity can be accessed and if it is symmetrical or not.” Haysom from Etisalat offers a different perspective: “Fixed broadband has many virtues. Firstly, it doesn’t have many external factors which can affect its performance. Secondly, it is very
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Most operators with broadband and IPTV bundled offers typically do not allow the consumer to purchase the service as a stand-alone, driving the adoption of multi-pay bundle services. Joe Abi Akl, Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton MENA
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efficient in delivering rich, ultra-high definition media services. The key then is to deliver services and features, which can leverage these qualities. “The key then is to deliver services and features which can leverage these qualities. Full service operators who deliver fixed voice, broadband Internet and TV entertainment services are able to monetize the networks in a far greater capacity than carriers who don’t. Leveraging the network’s marginal utility and delivering quality services which subscribers both want and demand is key to monetising fixed broadband.” The global average price of a basic fixed broadband plan is 1.7 times higher than the average price of a comparable mobile broadband plan. With 4G delivering real-world performance, and impending 5G promising a giant leap in throughput, the vexing question before the industry is whether mobile broadband can replace fixed broadband. “I can’t foresee a future where fixed broadband is no longer applicable or relevant. Its usage will become more discreet as we move towards a heterogeneous network (het-net) future to deliver 5G services. Phones and networks in a 5G future become more intelligent and will combine many of these services concurrently to deliver the bandwidth and reliability consumers seek. Many carriers are re-investing in WiFi, fibre access as well as mobile to ensure a consistent and reliable 5G future,” says Haysom. Salama echoes a similar opinion: “We don’t see wireless replacing fixed but rather complementing it. Often, people only think of fibre deployments as only addressing household and industry connectivity to ultra-broadband access. However, 5G roll out will require the low latency and high capacity fibre can provide. Expanding fibre to the most economical point will be important for operators preparing their networks for big data, data centre connectivity and mobile backhauling of macro cells and a huge number of small cells.” Besides, IoT applications may also require fibre broadband and network capacity may be critical to the success of smart cities. Considering that Cisco predicts consumers will use four-times the amount of data than businesses by 2019 and Gartner says the typical family home could have as many as 500 networked devices by 2022, it is imperative for operators in invest in high-capacity networks, and fixed broadband seems to the only choice before them. may 2016
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network World 100 GbE
Faster than fast When will 100 GbE become a necessity for the enterprise? Is the Middle East ready for it and will it suffer if it does not opt for the standard in the coming years?
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irst defined in 2010, the 100 gigabit Ethernet (GbE), or 100 gigabits per second standard may seem a long way off for a number of organisations. While there is no denying that 100 GbE is not for everyone – many smaller businesses will doubtless be asking if they will ever have such high network demands – the technology is sure to become a creeping issue for a number of the region’s CIOs in the coming years. Increasing volumes of video content and bandwidth intensive applications – not to mention soaring levels of data centre traffic – are pushing 100 GbE up the list of future priorities. The shift in networking models has a lot to answer for in the drive towards 100 GbE. So called ‘east-west traffic’ – traffic that goes between servers in a data centre – is overtaking an architecture of north-south traffic, where traffic goes from servers to the edge of the network. In the age of machine to machine communication, this will only increase. Where traffic traditionally came from external sources to a server, necessitating access, aggregation and core switch layers, traffic is now split between servers focusing on different purposes within a data centre. Against this backdrop, 100 GbE is the ideal solution to deal with the increase in east-west traffic. Joseph Habib, Head of Wireless, CommScope Middle East and Africa, believes that the pace with which the Middle East is developing – and its thirst for modern technology – is sure to leave the region in need of higher quality bandwidth. “Today, across the Middle East, there seems to be a never-ending appetite for more and more bandwidth, an explosion of demand for more and more data,” he says. “This demand is driven by many factors but chief among them are the socio-economic and cultural demands of people in all demographics who now see access to their data, entertainment, music, friends and family as a natural extension of their lives.
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“Today, across the Middle East, there seems to be a never-ending appetite for more and more bandwidth, an explosion of demand for more and more data.” Joseph Habib, head of wireless, CommScope Middle East and Africa
With the continued growth in data, communications infrastructure should be designed to accommodate speeds of 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps.” Many of the larger data centres in the region will already be prepared for 100GbE. They have the options of 100GBASE-CR10 or 100GBASE-CR4, and work is currently underway to define 200GbE solutions. While the usual suspects such as telecoms and cloud providers will undoubtedly be in need of 100 GbE services, other businesses may laugh off the prospect of upgrading to such a high standard. They may well feel that their organisation is too small for such an upgrade. Indeed, this could be backed up but the knowledge that SMEs account for 95 percent of the enterprise population in Dubai. However, things could well be very different for the business landscape in the coming years. As an increasing number of businesses in the Middle East shift their focus to digital platforms, even companies with less than 500 employees could find that the quantities of data passing through their organisation will vastly multiply. Huge quantities of customer data will drive the need for new platforms and networks that can support business demands. Prem Rodrigues, Director, Sales and Marketing, India and Middle East, Siemon, believes that certain aspects of an enterprise IT department’s hardware will simply not be equipped to handle demands that are on the may 2016
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horizon. “New traffic patterns and network fabrics are driving demand for bandwidth, “New traffic patterns and but the question to be asked is if network technologies are ready to meet this challenge,” network fabrics are driving he says. “When it comes to servers, the demand for bandwidth, but answer could be ‘no’. With each virtualisation the question to be asked is if host server needing a minimum of two Ethernet ports for redundancy purposes, it’s network technologies are ready to likely that a higher-bandwidth generation meet this challenge.” of server bus will be needed to support a move to 100GbE capable of delivering full Prem Rodrigues, director, sales and marketing, India and Middle bandwidth on both ports.” East, Siemon Rodrigues adds that the near future is likely to bring this demand for the region. “Given the growth of traffic in data centres and Things, always-on mobile devices, centralised the predication by the Ethernet Alliance that enterprise desktops, the explosion in cloud terabit per second speeds may be required computing, more pressure is felt at the back as soon as 2020, planning for 100GbE in the end. Virtualisation, too, has changed the data Middle East is absolutely justifiable today,” centre data traffic pattern resulting in a need he says. “In the data centre, fabric networks to support faster transmission speeds.” can satisfy the immediate need for 100 Gb/s Even in the next four years, Dubai in connections by aggregating links to create any particular is sure to be in need of enhanced needed bandwidth.” network solutions. The emirate’s drive to He does, however, concede that there become a fully-fledged Smart City by 2020, in may lighter options available for customers line with the international Expo due to take who do not need such a powerful solution. place the same year, will prompt a rethink of “Those who aren’t looking at fabrics IT solutions that can cope with the influx of probably aren’t the sort who will need 100 citizens and their online transactions. What’s Gb/s connections any time soon and 40GbE more, as applications continue to evolve, and will be a more cost-effective route in the as enterprise IT undergoes a pivotal digital medium term for these customers.” transformation in the coming years, the As well as increased traffic resulting potential of virtualised servers will need to from virtualisation, the huge quantities of be unlocked. objects being connected to the Internet in the “Although the major impact of the coming years are certain to IoT may be three to five years away, the put huge strain on current technology is gathering speed as a key “As data becomes networks, and may push business disrupter,” Habib says. “It is richer and grows CIOs of businesses in specific already transforming the way buildings are in size due to the verticals to consider 100 maintained and offices managed, as well as increase in video and GbE as a worthwhile long impacting how employees perform.” the Internet of Things, term investment. He highlights the power of – and need for – always-on mobile “There has been huge new solutions in demanding industries. “With devices, centralised growth in both the volume global sporting and business events around enterprise desktops and types of traffic flowing the corner, the number of people visiting the through the data centre,” region will increase. Be it banks, universities, and the explosion in Rodrigues says. “As data airports, hospitals, hotels or communication cloud computing, more becomes richer and grows service providers – organisations needs pressure is felt at the in size due to the increase to be ready for huge demands on their back end.” in video and the Internet of communications infrastructures.” www.cnmeonline.com
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solutions World Predictive analytics
An eye to the future No one has the ability to alter history or tell what’s going to happen in the future. But, for businesses who want to succeed and stay ahead of market competition, there is a way to predict the future using data from the past.
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very day, people around the world create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. In fact, 90 percent of the data existing in the world has been created in the last four years alone. As the Internet of Things gathers steam, it is expected that the number of data that will be generated globally will reach a staggering 44 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020. All these data present numerous opportunities for enterprises - it is deemed useless until organisations are able to use it to better their services and offerings. This is where predictive analytics come in. “The evolution of the digital economy is having a profound impact on how Middle East organisations are managed,” says Amir Sohrabi, Director of Business Analytics, SAP MENA. “The deluge of data being created from this digital evolution needs to be harnessed and rationalised, and predictive analytics provide organisations with the foresight to manage risk proactively in order to meet their operational and strategic objectives.” Sohrabi further explains that predictive analytics is no longer just a ‘nice to have’ tool for Middle East organisations operating in the 21st century, rather it has turned into a ‘must have,’ and a lack of investment in a solid predictive practice will create a blind spot for any organisation. “Conversely, a number of organisations that base their decision-making on data, apply solid predictive analytics practice to anticipate opportunities and risks,” he adds. Predictive analytics is not a new concept, however, the value it brings in contributing business intelligence to organisations has definitely grown. As a versatile tool offering a plethora of business and IT benefits, numerous organisations are utilising predictive analytics. Rami Kichli, Vice President, Software AG, UAE, Gulf and Levant, explains, “The rise of predictive analysis is a result of the mindboggling amount of data being generated today. This tool was developed to address the market gap for an efficient platform that can effectively
E
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The deluge of data being created from this digital evolution needs to be harnessed and rationalised, and predictive analytics provide organisations with the foresight to manage opportunity and risk proactively in order to meet operational and strategic objectives. Amir Sohrabi, Director of Business Analytics, SAP MENA
analyse all collected data that amount to terabytes, petabytes and exabytes and efficiently use them to an organisation’s advantage.” According to Kichli, among the trends that have fuelled the growth of predictive analytics include the plummeting hardware costs over the last decade, distributed data processing, and machine learning – all of which have made predictive analytics more affordable and precise. Compared to traditional business intelligence practices, which are more backwardlooking in nature, predictive volume of data generated by analytics approaches are more 2020 focused on providing companies with actionable intelligence based on historical data. “The first step Middle East organisations can take in predictive analytics is assessing their business analytics maturity, by examining processes, people, and technology,” says Sohrabi. “Following the analytical maturity assessment, an organisation can create a roadmap towards a predictive organisation. Predictive analytics is not just technology, it is an organisational mindset that needs executive-level sponsorship to drive the culture of datadriven decision-making.” The goal of predictive analytics is to go beyond descriptive statistics and provide the best assessment on what will happen in the future. If applied correctly, it can streamline
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solutions World Predictive analytics
decision-making and produce new insights that lead to better strategic actions. Wael Elrifai, Director, Enterprise Solutions EMEA, Hitachi Data Systems, agrees with this approach, explaining that organisations can start by creating a vision of what they believe could be improved if they had perfect, timely, and universal data. “They can then set about finding out where this information can be obtained. Some may be from internal systems, new sensors, or external providers. Consider the infrastructure required (hardware or software – perhaps cloud) that will be needed to gather your data. Look at visual programming paradigms that can abstract complexities. Finally, make sure you have competent data scientists working on your team who know which algorithms should be applied to which problems.” Predictive analytics offers advantages for organisations that recognise the inherent value locked within their existing enterprise data. Strategically, it can provide a quantitative basis identifying and objectively evaluating new market opportunities. At the same time, it can also help in identifying target markets and customers – how to reach them, when to make contact, and what messages should be communicated. “Almost every vertical in the Middle East is investing aggressively in adopting predictive practice," Sohrabi from SAP says. "They understand the necessity to better comprehend their clients’ needs and desires, and predictive analytics is the key to customer intimacy and to helping optimise organisational operations." Industries including manufacturing and logistics, retail and hospitality, financial services and telecommunications, all fully embrace the technology. This is primarily because these verticals are the ones that generate the largest amounts of data. Leena Jayachaandran, Director, Enterprise Business, Genome Technology Consultants, explains, “For organisations in these fields, the goal is to radically improve efficiencies, reduce costs, create new revenue opportunities and www.cnmeonline.com
“Machine learning is a more reactive system, while predictive analytics changes customer service from being reactive to being proactive.” Rami Kichli, Vice President, Software AG, UAE, Gulf and Levant
take customer satisfaction and loyalty to new levels. The concept of prediction is not new in technology. However, what has changed was the availability of mass of data, from the thousands of sensors that constitute the Internet of Things and the ability to use it for continuous prediction without manual intervention.” With almost every line of business becoming web-based nowadays, another sector where predictive analytics is instrumental is in the e-commerce industry. “Companies doing business in this industry segment are investing heavily in predictive analytics tools,” says Thabi Pulikkotil, Business Intelligence Consultant, Finesse. “These tools help sales associates identify traits in potential customers that match their existing customer base. This also helps these companies track potential customers by launching targeted promotional campaigns. According to an ATG web commerce report, 98 percent of e-commerce sites believe it is important to have seven targeted marketing strategies. Predictive modelling tools also help these retailers optimise their pricing to stay ahead of the competition.” As the IoT era involves multiple devices generating data, machine learning, a facet of predictive analytics comes to light. “Machine learning is often considered a subset of predictive analytics,” highlights Elrifai from HDS. “In traditional predictive analytics one has a ‘target’ variable (the prediction to be made) defined by a formula of inputs ‘explanatory variables’, and may 2016
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solutions World Predictive analytics
one sees a clear relationship between the variables in that formula driven by the data scientist formulating and testing hypotheses. Most machine learning techniques like neural networks attempt to mimic human cognition by reducing the focus on the relationships between variables, and ‘automatically’ attempting to ‘teach’ a computer to find potentially very complex, multi-layered relationships between the outcome and the inputs.” Predictive analysis and machine learning are both essential tools for organisations that provide complementary information and actionable insight. “Machine learning is a more reactive system,” explains Kichli from Software AG, “while predictive analytics changes customer service from being reactive to being proactive. For one, it allows telecom companies to accurately predict which customers are likely to have apprehensions when their contract expires by analysing their usage and billing patterns
combined with the sentiments reflected in call notes taken by customer service representatives. “Predictive analytics tools, on the other hand, enable telecom companies to predict which customers are likely to be unhappy. This information allows customer service reps to concisely and proactively reach out to customers and address their concerns immediately. rate of global organisations relying strongly on analytics Predictive analytics brings - IDC some tangible business benefits from gathering and storing Big Data,” he adds. Predictive analytics do not tell us precisely what will happen in the future. However, when utilised correctly, it can provide highly accurate predictions that allow for more effective business decisions and investments. Moving forward, businesses who fail to look into the future could well find themselves longing for the comfort of the past.
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Food for thought Following a period of vast economic transition in its primary market, Angola, Dubai-based food distributor Webcor Group needed better visibility over its cash flow and liquidity. CFO Frederic Marret opted for a fresh treasury management system which is due to bring untold benefits to the firm.
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or Webcor Group, visibility has become its bread and butter. With 3,500 employees in the firm, and with operations stretching across Europe, Africa and Asia – whilst being headquartered centrally in the UAE – keeping track of its finance supply chain and dealings with banks is crucial for the finance team. Founded in 1992 in Congo, the family-owned firm expanded its operations to Angola, Mozambique and various other African locations over the course of a decade, initially focusing on its food business, and the distribution of rice, sugar, flour, vegetable oil and FMCG products. Webcor’s business now focuses on supplying a variety of
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consumers these FMCG products. “We sell our product to the last procurer in the process before it touches the consumer,” CFO Frederic Marret says. “This includes supermarkets, wholesalers and even local traders for markets.” Their business, however, is being affected by a shift in consumer preference to different products. “Yoghurt, cheese and packed rice are becoming much more popular.” With this in mind, Webcor has introduced four new supermarkets in Angola, as well as opening an industrial flour mill, and is beginning the process of importing vinegar to the country, before diluting it to be sold on. As the company’s operations have grown, Marret and his team have focused more on optimising
their supply chain in order to accommodate international buying processes. “We need to ensure that processes have the best possible transparency, from the unloading of boats to our customers,” he says. The breadth and complexity of Webcor’s operations have put extra strain on its treasury department. After joining the firm in December 2013, Marret appointed a global treasury head to give them an enhanced understanding of cash flow. With finance departments in each operating country needing better visibility over this, Marret sought a new solution that could ensure a swift exchange of information for transparency. “An important part of our strategy is being able to fund our business from trade finance activity
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CXO Corner to long-term financing,” he says. Against this backdrop, Marret had faced a major challenge, in the form of local, regional and international banks having no clear channels of communication between one another. At the same time, there was an expectation that Webcor could increase its compliance and regulatory processes. “Failure to adhere to these demands can result in blocked transactions or worse,” Marret says. “You’ll be exposed if you don’t do your homework. Banks in Africa have become more cautious of late; investors are there for low risk ventures.” What’s more, Angola, Webcor’s primary market, is in the midst of economic transition. Although it has been one of the world’s fastestgrowing economies in the last 20 years – with capital Luanda having boasted the world’s highest cost of living, its GDP decelerated by 3.8 percent last year. The oil-exporting nation has suffered as a result of the drop in prices, prompting the government to tighten the process of clearing imported goods before their arrival, while its currency, the Angolan Kwanza, has depreciated by 60 percent in the last year. Meanwhile, the country is one of many in Africa to have halted a series of large infrastructure projects, with local demand and housing costs decreasing. “We need to secure our payments abroad so as to avoid the risk of defaulting,” Marret says. “Everything that has happened in Angola necessitates greater visibility and less margin for error.” The series of obstacles faced by Webcor in Angola served as a timely incentive to refresh its relationships with investors. “We www.cnmeonline.com
needed a stronger grip on our operations, cash and liquidity,” Marret says, “as well as reviewing our trade finance structures.” Together with Webcor’s senior management, Marret decided that a new treasury management system (TMS) was in order. At the start of 2015, Marret and his team began a rigorous POC process, meeting with seven different service providers to determine whose solution could best suit their needs. “We were keen to know exactly how they could help us manage whatever we installed,” Marret says. Eventually opting for the Kyriba solution, Marret highlights the vendor’s “flexibility” as being their USP. “They seemed to understand how we work, and how their system could solve our issues,” he says. While work on getting the solution completely up-andrunning is still ongoing, the team at Webcor has already begun to notice the impact that awaits. Over time, Marret began to realise that the solution could bring more benefits to Webcor than he had initially envisaged. “It’s already evident that the TMS can bring new features to us that can help in a way we hadn’t expected,” he says. “What’s also very important is its user-friendliness; it’s very easy to
navigate for non-finance users.” This was even more important, given Marret’s description of Webcor’s IT team as lacking in TMS exposure. “It has certainly been a learning curve for them,” he says. “Detailed RFPs certainly made this process much smoother.” Although Webcor is still in the midst of completing the final phases of the project, Marret is enthused by the progress has been made, and says that being based in the Middle East has brought its unique challenges. “We’re still getting there in terms of our final stages,” he says. “For our previous implementation, there was no local functional consultant, while a lot of TMS forms are not set up for the Middle East. Most service providers want to sell you the whole package, but Kyriba were very understanding in terms of our needs.” Nonetheless, Marret has high expectations for the changes. “I certainly expect it to give us full visibility over our cash flow, which is obviously a huge benefit,” he says. “Once we have full visibility over bank charges, that will give us much greater leverage in negotiating them, will reduce time lag, as well as improving reconciliation with banks.” Marret plans to establish a “two-way” treasury, with in and out flows.
You’ll be exposed if you don’t do your homework. Banks in Africa have become more cautious of late; investors are there for low-risk ventures.
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ANALYST VIEW
Brian Prentice, research vice president at Gartner
We will all be
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he concept of ‘digital natives’ versus ‘digital immigrants’ is increasingly problematic. Since education consultant Marc Prensky coined the term “digital native” in a 2001 article, the concept of digital natives and digital immigrants has moved well beyond the scope of education to become a common theme in the enterprise. Leaders in both private and public sector enterprises often speak about the need to source technology and adapt it to the needs of digital natives. They express great concern that the tools of late 20th to early 21st century collaboration are ill-suited to a workforce increasingly made up of millennials. One of the obvious flaws in this concept is the idea that someone’s age exclusively dictates digital technology prowess, when in fact it is significantly shaped by race, class, geography and cultural background. There is also often an assumption – one prone to be anecdotal and prejudicial – that the technology young people use for interaction outside work directly translates into expectations inside a work environment. This is a far more compelling and inclusive way to think about technology than a dichotomous world of digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. It is also much more likely that this type of approach will lead to improvements in employee engagement.
IT – not people – should adapt Part of the fascination with the concept of digital natives versus digital immigrants is based on a perception that it is people who need to adapt to digital technology. But the IT industry is moving into a new phase of maturity, one in which technology solutions will fail in the market if they are not immediately intuitive and operable without training or support.
Part of the fascination with the concept of digital natives versus digital immigrants is based on a perception that it is people who need to adapt to digital technology.
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Searching for the types of employee most adaptive to digital technology is a futile undertaking because digital technology will be adaptive to people. People-centric design processes, the evolution of human computer interfaces and the blurring of the digital and physical worlds will negate the need to do so.
Innovation in the age of digital business will not be driven through a subset of the workforce that management believes is endowed with technology prowess. If anything, that is likely to result in a form of banal technology advancement increasingly seen in Silicon Valley, where new solutions seldom extend beyond the limited personal experience of the highly educated, decidedly nondiverse under 30s predominantly leading the consumer startup scene. Instead, innovative, successful digital businesses will be led by those who understand how to connect workforces with rich generational, gender, racial and cultural diversity.
The role of the CIO There is enormous scope for CIOs in the future to orchestrate a wider array of technology in ways not currently imagined. Managed effectively, everyone becomes a digital native because all digital technology is created to be contextual, intuitively obvious and immediately beneficial. The popular concept of ‘digital natives’ versus ‘digital immigrants’ is not supported by evidence and increasingly problematic. Senior leadership needs to be actively discouraged from believing that the concept of digital natives or millennials is valid for digital business or workplace planning. Instead, apply ethnographic research techniques to surface nuanced behavioural factors that are influenced by more than age. may 2016
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interview
Haider Salloum, Director for Small & Medium Enterprise, Microsoft Gulf
Cloud on your terms H aider Salloum, Microsoft Gulf’s Director for its Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) segment, explains why cloud is a game changer for SMEs, and how the firm's Azure services are geared towards this market segment.
Can smaller and medium-sized firms also reap huge benefits from cloud computing? Regardless of the size of your business, leveraging cloud technology today offers huge benefits. The cloud has taken the lead as the single most transformative entity since the arrival of computers. It has single-handedly enabled small businesses to enter the market and compete with much larger enterprises. Driven by the increased demand for greater flexibility and improved customer service, SMEs can now take advantage of an increasingly cloud-enabled world where technology once deemed too complex and expensive for an SMB is now affordable and provides invaluable returns to a business. It also enables innovation. Companies are taking services and data and linking them together to create new and innovative applications for business processes. According to a Boston Consulting Group study, SMEs adopting modern IT have seen 15 percent faster revenue growth in comparison to those not leveraging cloud technology. These businesses also created twice as many jobs. One of the reasons for this is that the cloud negates the need for large upfront investments in on-premise solutions. Instead, you only need to pay for what you need, when you need it. This means if your business receives 56
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an unexpectedly large order, or if you want to open a new store or develop your e-commerce site, you have the ability to scale and grow quickly.
What are the features you offer to make it easier for SMBs to move inhouse systems to the cloud? We offer many forms of support when it comes to the migration and deployment of Azure. There are great online forums such as MSDN and Stack Overflow where SMEs can get instant access and answers about Azure from Azure experts. As an SMB you can also connect with @AzureSupport – the official Microsoft Azure account for improving customer experience by connecting the Azure community to the right resources: answers, support, and experts. Support is also offered via telepresence, where customers can speak to an Azure experts regarding any technical assistance they may require. There is also unlimited subscription management support offered with Azure, in case you have billing, quote adjustment or account transfer queries. Microsoft has, over the years, created a culture of supporting SMBs through its wide network of channel partners, who play an indispensable role within SME ecosystems in terms of Azure migration and deployment. Our partners are on the frontline of helping businesses to use technology to transform, through our powerful offerings, ubiquitous mobile solutions and intelligent cloud.
Do you offer a hybrid cloud platform? Some cloud providers make you choose between your data centre and the cloud. However, Azure easily integrates with your existing IT environment through
the largest network of secure private connections, hybrid database and storage solutions, and data residency and encryption features — so your assets stay right where you need them. And with Azure Stack, you can bring the Azure model of application development and deployment to your data centre. Azure hybrid cloud solutions give you the best of both worlds: more IT options, less complexity and cost. It’s why it’s one of the best cloud computing services available. How easy is it for customers to scale on-demand resources up and down? Azure’s pay-as-you-go services can quickly scale up or down to match demand, so you only pay for what you use. Per-minute billing and a commitment to match competitor prices for popular infrastructure services like compute, storage and bandwidth mean you’re always getting unbeatable price for performance.
How secure is Azure? Microsoft understands that in order to realise the benefits of cloud computing you must be willing to trust your cloud provider with your data. When you invest in a cloud service, you must be able to trust that your data is safe, that data privacy is protected, and that you own and control your data in all its uses. We have broad experience running enterprise online services, and we’ve made major investments in foundational processes and technologies that build security and privacy into development and operations. We’ve also implemented industry-leading security measures and privacy policies, and participated in international compliance programs www.cnmeonline.com
with independent verification of the Azure controls. Microsoft has applied more than 20 years of experience of building enterprise software and running some of the world’s largest online services to create a robust set of security technologies and practices. These help ensure that the Azure infrastructure is resilient to attack, safeguards user access to the Azure environment, and helps keep your data secure through encrypted communications. We also use sophisticated threat management and mitigation practices, including regular penetration testing.
What factors should SMBs keep in mind while evaluating a public cloud platform? It’s vital to assess the reliability and capability of a service provider that you plan to entrust with your organisation’s applications and data. The following are some things to consider: Financial health. The provider should have a track record of stability and be in a healthy financial position with sufficient capital to operate successfully over the long term. Trust. You should like the company and its principles. Check the provider’s reputation and see who its partners are. Find out its level of cloud experience. Read reviews, and talk to customers whose situation is similar to yours. Business knowledge and technical know-how. The provider should understand your business and what you’re looking to do and be able to match it up with their technical expertise. Service level Agreements. Providers should be able to promise you a basic level of service that you are comfortable with. Ease of deployment, management, and upgrade. Make sure the provider has mechanisms that www.cnmeonline.com
make it easy for you to deploy, manage, and upgrade your software and applications. Data backup and retention. Policies and procedures to ensure the integrity of customer data should be in place and operational. Billing and accounting. This should be automated so that you can monitor what resources you’re using and the cost, so you don’t run up unexpected bills. There should also be support for billing-related issues.
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interview
John Kopcke, CTO of Ellucian
Learning curve At its annual conference Ellucian Live, the higher education software vendor previewed its new technology platform and announced its plans to move aggressively into the embryonic competency-based education market. Jeevan Thankappan caught up with John Kopcke, CTO of Ellucian, to talk about the company’s technology strategy.
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sn’t it way too early to be talking about CBE, given the technology landscape for it is still evolving? I don’t think so. It's a hot topic in the industry today, But, it certainly reminds me of cloud because ten years ago if you talked about it, people would say, ‘yes, I am interested in the cloud but I am not really sure what it means’ and then that changes to ‘I know what it means but I am not sure about all the implications.’ We are entering into CBE at the right time so we are not playing catch up. However, it would be too early to say it is clearly defined and all the requirements are well understood. The only way to understand those requirements is to get into the game and play it.
What will be the implication of CBE on existing networks and business processes? I don’t see anything in the CBE world that is dramatically different from learning management systems (LMS). Most institutions have been moving their LMS into the cloud, so the traffic is routed through a cloud service so it doesn’t have much of an impact on infrastructure. Where there are still things to be determined are the changes to business processes. For Ellucian customers who want to move into CBE in the future, we will take care of most of the changes to the back office. Your CBE solution– Brainstorm – is still in beta. Have you set a launch date for it yet? It is a work in progress. When the requirements are still not nailed down, it is hard to claim victory. There is a lot of difference in attitude towards cloud than what we are used to with on-premise software because it doesn’t really matter whether you are in alpha, beta or general availability stage. A case in point is Google mail, which was in beta for over eight years and that didn’t stop people from using it. The www.cnmeonline.com
difference with cloud software is that you are updating it weekly or monthly and making continuous improvements. With Brainstorm, there is a lot yet to be figured out, not just by us but by our customers as well, and that is why we haven’t set a launch date.
When it's finished, will you offer customers the flexibility of buying it in modules? First off, in the case of Brainstorm, you are not going to buy anything; you are going to have a subscription because it is a completely cloud-based product. As it matures and our Ethos platform evolves, if someone wants to integrate something else, we are not going to stop them and we would obviously tell them that it’s better to use CBE with our student systems and all of that.
Is the Ellucian Ethos platform the key to integration? Ethos is a platform for our solutions. We are not going to sell Ethos to someone else to do something else. One of the reasons for is that there are lot of general purpose platforms and this one one is specifically for higher education. Having said that, one of the major components of Ethos is integration and we want to make it easy for others to integrate with Ellucian ecosystem, so that our partners and customers can benefit from it. You are making a major cloud push but the adoption has been rather slow in the education sector. How do you plan to address this challenge? We have been talking to our customers about cloud for a long time and one of the things that we see repeatedly is when asked the cloud question, customers would be cautious but they change their minds quickly. People who were cautious about cloud have changed their opinions and more and more education institutions are moving to cloud. Of course, it will take time for it to happen across the world but I think
that will happen eventually Is Ellucian offering any BI and analytics tools? Historically, we have done what most ERP vendors have done – to have a BI offering as an add-on to another product. So you would see BI products for our Banner, Colleague and CRM software and they do a very good job within their world. This year, we have started promoting our cloud-based analytics product and it is the first time we are not thinking about higher education analytics as a part of an another product. It is a product in its own right and its data could be coming from anywhere – be it Ellucian or non-Ellucian products. We think there is a big market out there for higher education analytics. Traditionally, higher education has always been intimate, and face-toface, but is rapidly moving to online now. How do you see future learning models evolve? If you look up education in any dictionary, it never refers to schools or colleges; it refers to transfer of knowledge. One of the stumbling blocks when it comes to innovation is that people tend to think in terms of status quo. What I have seen in my life is that you have a new idea emerge and then you have the status quo, and it never ends up one or the other; it ends up in another idea that is an amalgamation of them both. Frankly, what I am excited about is CBE and its impact on higher education.
What do you think are the top technology priorities for higher education CIOs? I think the top priority for higher education institutions is their cloud strategy and I think many of them don’t have one in place yet. This is going to be particularly important when a higher education institution has a hardware refresh coming up and it seems to the forcing function for cloud. may 2016
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BLOg
Adam Philpott, Director of Cybersecurity at Cisco EMEA
To combat a new wave of threats, get your head in the cloud If you want to tell someone to be more realistic you might say: “Get your head out of the clouds.” But in fact, you have to do the exact opposite if you’re an IT security professional charged with managing security in today’s increasingly cloud-based world.
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hat you need to do is get your head in the cloud in order to understand a new wave of threats and identify ways to strengthen defences. I’m not just talking about the benefits of using the cloud for security – unlimited storage capabilities for global threat intelligence and historical data, powerful processing capabilities for security analytics, and the ability to deploy security technologies to even the most remote outposts. You also need think about how attackers are now banking on the increasing usage of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps and the advent of shadow IT and resulting shadow data to steal valuable digital assets. These attacks often incorporate basic tactics but with a modern twist. Take for instance the String of Paerls attack. The approach starts with spear phishing, targeting specific individuals with email messages that contain a malicious Microsoft Word attachment that poses as an invoice. But when the document is opened it triggers a macro that downloads malware from Dropbox and then launches the malware on victims’ machines. As another example, so called “man in the cloud” attacks steal a token from a user’s account with a cloud-based service and use it to add a device to the account without the owner’s knowledge. And then there’s ransomware which encrypts users’ files and provides the keys for decryption only after users pay a “ransom.” Ransomware can be 60
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delivered through a number of vectors including endpoints that subscribe to cloud-based storage solutions such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. Attackers can also use the credentials to encrypt backed-up cloud storage data, further vexing users. So how can you go about getting your head in the cloud? To ensure you understand and can address the main security challenges cloud apps can introduce to your organisation, you need additional visibility and context. Start by ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do I know which cloud apps employees are using and how risky they are? To help solve the shadow IT problem, you need to be able to see a complete list of all cloud apps that employees are using and understand the level of risk associated with each app. A cloud app that is considered ‘enterprise quality’ supports multiple enterprise security requirements. With a complete list of cloud apps in use and their associated risks levels, you can decide whether an app should be sanctioned or blocked. 2. Do I know what files and data are exposed through these cloud apps? Even sanctioned apps can be used in unsanctioned ways, creating shadow data. By requiring employees to use corporate provided credentials to access sanctioned apps, you can access the data and metadata of all users
within the cloud app, gain visibility into SaaS content, and assess risk. 3. Can I control the sensitive data shared through cloud-based apps? File sharing is much more fluid in a cloud-based world and sooner or later value data can end up in the hands of someone who shouldn’t have it. You need a comprehensive way to prevent sensitive data and compliance-related information from being uploaded to sanctioned and unsanctioned apps.
4. If an attack happens, can I get to the bottom of it and set policy to prevent future attacks? As the examples above show, hackers target cloud app users with weak passwords on their accounts, or target users with malware meant to take advantage of the sharing potential of cloud apps. With visibility into traffic activity and the ability to detect anomalies you can then conduct further investigation to detect malicious activity and take quick and decisive action. The cloud is transformative in its impact to create new business models, enable more effective collaboration, and increase productivity and agility, but it also adds increased risk of malicious or accidental leakage of business-critical data. Only by getting your head in the cloud can you fully understand the risks of each app, control how users share and access data, and combat zero-day malware. www.cnmeonline.com
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OpINION
Peter Waterhouse, Senior Strategist, CA Technologies
DevOps and deviance Peter Waterhouse, Senior Strategist, CA Technologies, discusses the ‘normalisation of deviance’ phenomena among IT teams.
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egardless of whether you lead a start-up or work in an established business, we all have a tendency to accept dodgy behaviour. Even if outsiders see it as wrong, our IT teams are so accustomed to using it (without any adverse consequences) that it's quickly established as ‘normal’ and accepted. Studies into what’s commonly referred to as the ‘normalisation of deviance’ have been conducted in areas such healthcare and aerospace, with evidence showing that many serious errors and disasters occur because established standards have been bypassed and bad practices ‘normalised’. While examining this phenomena is critical in the context of safety, it’s equally applicable in how we develop, secure and operate software applications. With the boundaries blurred between the digital and physical world, any adverse behaviour leading to security and reliability issues could have dire consequences for customers. The DevOps movement, with its focus on collaboration across development and other IT functions, is now regarded as the best way of establishing the culture and environment needed to support fast and reliable software delivery. In the healthcare sector, for example, studies illustrate seven 62
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factors that lead to a normalisation of deviance, all of which are IT relevant: The rules are senseless and inefficient – in healthcare, accidents occur when practitioners disable equipment warning systems because alarms are seen as distracting. Knowledge is imperfect and uneven – employees might not know a rule exists, or they might be taught a practice not realising that it’s sub-optimal. In IT this persists because many new employees feel uncomfortable asking for help. The work itself, along with new technology, can disrupt work behaviour – to support goals of more continuous software delivery, organisations are introducing many new technologies and methods – like microservices and containers. New work practices and learning demands may lead staff to poorly implement technology or use it to perform functions it was never designed for. We’re breaking rules for the good of the business – staff may bypass rules and good practice when they’re incentivised on faster delivery times or delivering new functional software enhancements. The rules don’t apply to us, trust us – autonomous agile teams are beneficial, but empowering them to select their own one-off tools or to bypass compliance policies can compromise programme
objectives or lead to security breaches. Unfortunately in today’s fast-paced digital business, talented professionals often feel completely justified in playing the trust card. Employees are afraid to speak up – violations become normal when employees stay silent. Poor software code, costly projects (and bad managers) have been tolerated for so many times due to people being afraid to speak up. Leaders withhold or dilute findings on application problems – rather than present ugly news, many will distort the truth; presenting diluted or misleading information up the command chain. In IT this behaviour is easily normalised, especially if teams get away with reporting technical vanity metrics over business outcomes. No sudden cultural reawakening in IT or liberal sprinkling of collaboration fairy dust will eliminate ingrained bad practices, but DevOps and lean thinking can help identify warning signals. This starts with leaders visualising the flow of value delivered by software applications, pinpointing all the bottlenecks and constraints impeding delivery. As with anything involving people, the organisational and psychological barriers encouraging staff to break rules or for their colleagues to remain silent is where most attention should be focused. www.cnmeonline.com
Cybercriminals Now there’s nowhere to hide Conventional security strategies just aren’t working against today’s cybercriminals. But what happens when you bring the power of network visibility to the security fight? With the world’s first Security Delivery Platform, your existing security tools can see what kinds of data are flowing inside the most complex network. As a result, the threats are identified, isolated and eliminated before they do their damage - giving you far more value from your security investment.
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Insight
Ghassan Barghouth, VP Middle East, Strategic Customers and Segments, Global Solutions Schneider Electric
Big opportunities Schneider Electric's Ghassan Barghouth shares insights on how Big Data can ease the impact of the economic downturn on GCC Petchems.
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ince the first petrochemical joint-venture in the Middle East in 1981, the industry has rapidly expanded with mega projects still underway, especially in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait. The GCC petrochemicals industry manufactured 136.2 million tons (m/t) of products in 2014 – 13 percent of global output – and generated $87.4 billion in revenue, according to the Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association. With oil prices sinking since mid2014 to a 12-year low in early 2016 at just below $30 a barrel, the GCC’s national oil companies are following a wise strategy and redirecting their budgets into the more profitable downstream sector. Growing competition from a sanctions-free Iran and a tightening economic outlook are refocusing Gulf petrochemical producers’ attention on Big Data analytics. Companies are exploring how to integrate Big Data into their daily operations in a way that can cushion the inevitable budget pitfalls and establish improved benchmarks of performance - but is that enough? Big Data is a term for data sets – structured, non-structured, relational, non-relational – that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Such data is usually generated from sensors and machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies within a facility. 64
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The number of M2M technologies in use in the oil and gas sector could rise from the 423,000 in late 2013 to 1.12 million by 2018, according to analyst firm Berg Insights. Each ‘dialogue’ between the machines feeds into the wider Internet of Things (IoT). The greatest value of this data gathering lies in the compounding impact; building an organised portal of useful data today will place a company at the forefront of innovation in five, or ten years. These systems have evolved and matured to operate alongside today’s IT systems and standards. Looking ahead, the refining and petrochemical industry can benefit from technologies that are able to gather data from field devices and instruments and then integrate the information into the electrical distribution system and automation. Process automation and safety systems on a single platform can manage and standardise the visualisation of the data within an organisation. On top of this data management, software applications have been developed to provide realtime simulation and optimisation. These can then be integrated to create the necessary workflows for crude planning, production scheduling, yield accounting, dispatch billing and regulatory filing, for example. However, while it is necessary to maximise the performance
within the process of a facility itself, producers can reach a saturation point, or technical bottlenecks that make further improvement a challenge. It is imperative that producers move to the next level of productivity in their supply chain, using marketing and distribution to maximise their profitability. Big Data can also make a difference at terminals, as operators can have access to timely and accurate insight of terminal inventory positions after any product movement. Operators are then able to integrate it into the corporate network. An aggregated and standardised inventory process gives operators a more accurate picture of daily product positions. This empowers supply teams to make optimal decisions on the finished products, prevent run outs and increase profits. Looking ahead, technology advancements, web application developments and increased collaboration platforms will also help significantly boost productivity. As global competition grows, the adoption and application of Big Data analytics, IoT and cloud services across the supply chain and distribution networks is vital for the survival and streamlining of the GCC’s petrochemical market. Big Data gives producers the tools to shrug off the growing number of downward economic pressures. www.cnmeonline.com
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OpINION
Chakra Devalla, CEO, tekVizion
Decent proposals Purchasing new products and solutions can take a lot of time, effort and, of course, money. Chakra DeValla, CEO, tekVizion, shares insights on how organisations can optimise the RFP process.
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equests for proposal (RFPs) are rarely easy or even straightforward. No one wants to forget anything, so RFPs typically become long, unwieldy lists of questions – the proverbial kitchen sink. And that translates into even more work when the answers come back – hours and hours of scrutinising answers to narrow down the field to the short list. Sadly enough, all too often the RFP process raises even more questions and adds to general confusion. It’s not uncommon for a business to re-issue an RFP for a second round due to inadequate submissions. Getting it right the first time would save a great deal of time and trouble for both the business and the vendors. This requires a closer look at the actual RFP. Three simple strategies can make the process more effective. Streamline the RFP One of the most common complaints about the process is repetition of information. Go through the RFP and tag questions that are similar then consolidate them into one question. Avoid tech rat holes and stay focused on business benefits. Vendors are all too happy to focus on feature comparisons and discuss how their widget is better than their 66
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competitors’. The discussion gets too granular, focusing on supporting points as opposed to the main argument – how will this product or service benefit your business. Develop questions that keep the answers at the benefit level and avoid descending into mind-numbing tech talk. Focus every question on your key objectives for the evaluation – business benefit, cost, ROI, deployment timeframe, support, proof the solution will work and remedies if it does not. If a question does not directly answer your objective, remove it.
User case vs. feature laundry list Responses to RFPs can feel like product manuals. Often the questions are a big part of the problem, all but asking vendors to cut-and-paste product feature lists and content from manuals into the RFP. Consider asking for user case studies that illustrate how the solution has helped other companies. This can significantly cut down questions and streamline the responses. If a particular tech feature is important for your evaluation, ask for it specifically. “Do you have a cloud option?” “What video conferencing capabilities do you offer?” “How many users can the solution support?”
Keep the question focused on what is important to you. Ask for use cases that show how the solution might benefit your organisation. Not only companies within your same vertical industry, but also similar in size or trying to solve similar issues. Get independent proof upfront that the solution will actually work. One of the biggest oversights in many RFPs is lack of proof that the solution will actually work with your infrastructure. A solution can be the absolute best in the industry, but if it doesn’t work with your platform, then it is completely meaningless to you. The RFP is your best opportunity to get a vendor to validate interoperability and it only requires a simple question. Ask the vendor to provide interoperability verification through an independent testing lab. Vendors will always say that their solution will work within your environment. Especially the sales team. Demand third-party verification from a trusted, independent lab. Make sure the vendor verifies the correct versions. Not only the correct version of their solution, but on the correct version for technologies within your company. Each business has a unique blend of technology, often including some older versions of apps, servers and even hardware. To ensure interoperability, pay attention to what the vendor verifies. Speaking of unique IT environments, factor in future plans. Your tech platforms are not static. If you are planning to migrate to a new server or move to a cloud-based PBX, then have the vendor verify interoperability for them through an independent lab. www.cnmeonline.com
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Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop
OpINION
A whole new network With the evolution of IT, the network has undoubtedly changed from what it was a decade ago. Enterprise organisations need to look at upgrading their network management and monitoring tools to keep up with more demanding network activities.
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tep back and imagine the world of technology 10 years ago. YouTube was in its infancy, the iPhone was more than a year away from release, BlackBerry was the smartest phone in the market and Twitter was barely making a peep. While the masses are now glued to their iPhones watching cat videos and pontificating 140 characters at a time, the backend infrastructure that supports all of that watching and tweeting - not to mention electronic health records, industrial sensors, e-commerce, and thousands of other serious activities - has also undergone a massive evolution. Unfortunately, the tools tasked with monitoring and managing the performance, availability, and security of those infrastructures have not kept up with the scale of data or with the speed at which insight is required today. www.cnmeonline.com
There is no nice way to say this: What worked 10 years ago will not work now. Today, exponentially more data is moving exponentially faster. IT organisations who cling to the old models of monitoring and managing will be at a significant
IT organisations who cling to the old models of monitoring and managing will be at a significant disadvantage to their counterparts who adapt by embracing new technologies.
disadvantage to their counterparts who adapt by embracing new technologies. Take Ethernet, for example. It’s been less than 20 years since the standard for 1Gbps was established, and less than 10 years since 10Gbps started to gain a meaningful foothold. Now, we’re looking at 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds. It is a different world, and it’s not slowing down. According to the Global Cloud Index, “global IP traffic has increased fivefold over the past five years, and will increase threefold over the next five years.” Between 2014 and 2019, IP traffic is expected to grow 23 percent annually. Speeds and feeds are not the only forces at work. Server and application virtualisation, software-defined networking and cloud computing are also catalysts for IT change, reshaping how may 2016
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OpINION
Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop
infrastructures are architected and resources are delivered. Increasingly complex, dynamic and distributed, the network is a different place today than it was 10 years ago. Some view that as a problem to be solved. On the contrary, it’s an opportunity to be seized by forwardthinking network professionals. The reality is that traditional network performance monitoring (NPM) technologies like packet sniffers and flow analysers can’t scale or evolve to meet this new demand. Capturing, storing and sniffing packets was relatively straightforward for ‘fast’ Ethernet supporting 100Mbps of throughput. At 100Gbps, capturing and storing terabytes worth of packets would require massive time and infrastructure investments, not to mention hours of a person’s life just to sniff a small subset of those packets. The market is starting to take notice. In its most recent Magic Quadrant and corresponding critical capabilities report for NPM and diagnostics, Gartner placed a high emphasis on operational analytics functionality capable of elevating network data beyond the realm of the network and even IT. At the same time, the analyst firm also noted stagnating innovation in the space, the result of legacy frameworks built for speeds and
architectures that were already being phased out more than a decade ago. Put simply, these legacy architectures are illequipped to address the new realities that modern IT delivers. While legacy architectures are stymying technological innovation, marketing innovation abounds. The monitoring and analytics markets have long been fraught with misleading statements, and vendors in these sectors are growing more and more adept at applying the latest buzzwords to antiquated technologies in the hopes of extending their lifespans by a few short years. Compounding this problem is the lack of transparency in these markets. Reasonable comparisons of competitive offerings are nearly impossible because so few vendors publish their performance numbers. Even when they do, definitions are often fluid, confusing, or outright misleading, making it a massive challenge to put those numbers in context. As enterprise customers increasingly look for next-generation solutions, it will be critical for them to understand the nuances of vendor terminology and architecture in order to separate and effectively assess what is actual functionality versus what is marketing gloss. IT buyers deserve to be able to make a fair, real, honest
Increasingly complex, dynamic and distributed, the network is a different place today than it was 10 years ago.
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comparison of vendor offerings, which is nearly impossible in the current climate where performance numbers are obscured and terms are loosely defined. It is time for every vendor in the network performance monitoring sector - and frankly, every vendor in the IT operations management sector take action. Customers deserve the opportunity to make an apples-toapples comparison of claims around performance, scale, and deployment. Every IT person should be able to get a real answer to these and many other questions: • How are services discovered and classified? Are they automatic, or do they rely on manual tagging and configuration? • Can the solution be deployed in hybrid and cloud environments? • Can it scale to 40Gbps or have a path forward to 100Gbps? • Does it decrypt SSL traffic at line rate? • Does it provide visibility into Internet of Things devices? • Is there a way for users to easily program the analysis or extend functionality? • Does the product store packets before analysis? • What are the storage requirements associated with data captured by the product? Information technology is a different world than it was 10 years ago, and the demands a typical organisation experiences are increasing. Over the next 18 to 24 months, the massive shift IT is undergoing will start to meaningfully separate the wheat from the chaff in the NPM market, if for no other reason than because the solutions that cannot evolve will start to fail in deployment.
www.cnmeonline.com
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OpINION
Gary Kaiser, Dynatrace
Consumer is king
As data centres move towards being software-defined, application response time is deemed as more important than infrastructure capacity management. With applications consisting of a plethora of services delivered from a range of resources, end-user experience (EUE) is key.
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he adoption of softwaredefined data centre (SDDC) technologies is driven by tremendous potential for dynamic scalability and business agility, but the transition is fraught with complexities that need to be considered. This ecosystem relies on the abstraction or pooling of physical resources (primarily compute, network and storage) by means of virtualisation. With software orchestrating new or updated services, the promise is these resources can be provisioned in real-time, without human intervention. In essence, this is the technology response
to the agility demands of the modern digital business. The term SDDC can be applied to today’s public clouds - the likes of Amazon and Google and Microsoft clouds qualify - and tomorrow’s private and hybrid clouds as organisations accelerate their transition towards providing data centre infrastructure-as-aservice (IaaS). And as in today’s enterprise data centres, tomorrow’s SDDCs will likely support a mix of packaged applications and applications you develop and maintain. One of the tenets of the SDDC is that capacity is dynamically scalable; not unlimited, of course,
How do you, as a member of an IT team responsible for your organisation’s application services, evaluate service quality?
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but that’s not necessarily a bad way to think of it. This means capacity is treated differently than in the past. The ability to spin up new servers to meet spikes in demand, automatically connect these based on pre-defined policies, and then destroy them as demand wanes, will become the new SDDC paradigm. Instead of being used for alert-generating thresholds, resource utilisation becomes an input to the scale-out algorithm. The infrastructure may be selfregulating, elastic and automated, but that doesn’t absolve us of the requirement for performance monitoring. Instead, it shifts the emphasis from infrastructure capacity management to application (or service) response time. The applications served can be made up of a medley of components and services relying on different stacks and platforms, requiring at least a few different approaches to performance monitoring. In fact, the adoption of multiple monitoring solutions – while a www.cnmeonline.com
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OpINION
Gary Kaiser, Dynatrace
practical necessity – can lead to some operational challenges, including: • Inconsistent depth of monitoring insight • Limited end-to-end performance visibility • Service-focus instead of userfocus And with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of services required to deliver an application, service quality can no longer be defined by the performance or health of individual components. Virtualisation can obscure critical performance visibility, and at the same time, complex service dependencies challenge even the best performance analysts and the most effective war rooms. To attempt this is to face avalanches of false positives, of 'internal' alerts that are more informational than actionable. Consider for a minute a popular SaaS application – Salesforce. It’s delivered as a service from a cloud, just as your own internallybuilt applications might someday be delivered as services from your private SDDC cloud. How do you, as a member of an IT team responsible for your organisation’s application services, evaluate Salesforce service quality? It’s unlikely you care about the number of VMs used, the utilisation of these VMs, or the network congestion in the tunnel between the app and DB server tiers. You don’t want to hear about throughput on Salesforce’s REST API to KiteDesk. Instead, you care about the experience of your end users. How long does it take to login to the application? How responsive is site navigation? Are users encountering errors or availability problems? 74
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This example illustrates how the service quality of a SaaS application can be abstracted to end-user experience (EUE). And as your private SDDC increasingly facilitates the delivery of applications as services, it holds a valuable lesson – service quality is in the eye of the consumer. This doesn’t mean that data centre monitoring is passé. You will still need to monitor infrastructure and application services, at least as a means of refining automation behaviour and policy definitions. But insight into EUE does provide a lens through which to qualify these internal metrics. As another example, let’s say a new app server is dynamically added to help support increasing demand, connected to the DB tier via a new network tunnel. The new location of the app server adds a few hundred microseconds to the tunnel’s latency. Could this be a problem? That depends. For some applications there would be no noticeable difference in EUE. But for others, even a few hundred microseconds of network delay at this tier might degrade the user’s experience to something on the wrong side of tolerable. Clearly, one scenario can be ignored, while the other demands immediate attention – to fix of course, but also to ensure that policies are adjusted to prevent recurrence. Only EUE can put service quality into meaningful perspective.
While EUE has become popular over the last few years as a shared business and IT metric – a ‘nice-to-have’ view – the abstractions and complexities of the SDDC will make it a critical metric for applications delivered as services. Just as the applications rely on multiple platforms and stacks, so do your end users. Browsers and mobile apps may dominate the news, but there are many applications that use different client types, ranging from Oracle Forms and SAPGUI to RMI and virtual desktops infrastructures. As such, you’ll need to choose appropriate EUE monitoring approaches to ensure all of your important applications (at least) are represented. Four popular approaches include: • JavaScript injection for browserbased apps • Synthetic monitoring (generally for browser-based apps as well, although some include non-web) • Probe-based monitoring, where the network probe includes transaction-oriented decodes with an understanding of enduser operations • Code injection (or “decoration”)
EUE will become the overriding quality metric used by successful organisations.
As IT continues on the path towards service-oriented IT, IT’s role must shift to become a competitive provider of application services – and EUE will become the overriding quality metric used by successful organisations.
www.cnmeonline.com
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Launches and releases
Brand: Microsoft Product: Surface Pro 4 What it does: At only 8.4mm thin and a mere 766g, the device features a 12.3-inch PixelSense display and sixthgeneration Intel Core processor. It is also equipped with a multi-position kickstand, which allows the device to become a full-functioned laptop as needed. It comes with a pen with precision ink on one end and an eraser on the other. It also has the Windows Hello feature, which according to Microsoft, allows for a fast and secure login.
Brand: HTC Product: HTC 10 What it does: According to the Taiwanese company, the new device combines 4K video with the world’s first stereo 24-bit hi-res audio recording, capturing 256 times more detail than standard recordings, across twice the frequency range. It is equipped with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with enhanced 4G LTE and runs Android OS, v6.0.1. The device also features a fingerprint sensor with smart algorithm for security. HTC 10 comes in 32GB and 64 GB variations both with 4 GB RAM. What you should know: Built for audiophiles, the HTC 10 is certified for Hi-Res audio. It also includes the latest in-box quick charge 3.0 Rapid Charger with improved thermal management, so the battery can be charged by up to 50 percent in just 30 minutes. The HTC 10 comes in variants such as Carbon Grey, Glacier Silver, Topaz Gold and Camellia Red. www.cnmeonline.com
What you should know: According to Microsoft, Surface Pro 4 is equipped with a touchscreen that uses palmblocking technology to provide users with
the best possible writing experience. The new Surface is supported by a slew of accessories, such as the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover, which comes in both English and Arabic.
Brand: TP-LINK Product: Archer VR2600v
What it does: Archer VR2600v is TPLINK’s latest AC2600-VoIP-WLAN-DSLrouter. According to the vendor, the new router suits well for gaming enthusiasts and entertainment aficionados, as it features 2600Mbps of Wi-Fi speed. It is also equipped with multi-user MIMO technology, four-stream 11AC wireless technology, and a 1.4GHz dual core processor, which allows it to support high-bandwidth activities such
as multi-player online gaming and multidevice, high definition video streaming. What you should know: With DETC base station services, the device allows up to six cordless connections or CAT-iq 2.0 telephones and which backs a range of features, including caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calling, and voicemail.
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Backlog
5
steps to launching SDN
Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises increased agility, enhanced security and automation - all while saving time and money. Here’s a fivestep process for efficient, effective SDN implementation.
1
Define a use case. SDN is a broad, multi-faceted technology. It is ideal to identify a narrow use case or problem that you believe SDN can solve. Whether that problem involves network automation, security or agility, the important thing is to start with just one. A single use case offers more reliable, measurable outcomes than implementing SDN across your entire network. Moreover, instead of explaining SDN’s value in abstract terms, you can proceed backed by proven success. By familiarising yourself and your colleagues with SDN on a gradual, focused, limited scope, you can adopt SDN and not disrupt your entire infrastructure and staff.
2
Assemble a cross-functional team. SDN is a silo-breaking technology. Implementing it correctly requires a well-rounded team with a broad range of skills and a comprehensive approach. Ideally, that team fosters efficiency and collaboration - both are critical to maximise the benefits of SDN. Consider, for example, a network security issue. To successfully address it with software-defined networking, an organisation needs people who define or write security policy, the 78
may 2016
network engineering team and those charged with network management. Just as importantly, users need them all working in tandem, or else something will be overlooked or left out of the solution. Regrouping IT resources can be difficult. But, even with separation of duty, collaboration is crucial and achievable. It’s also the only way to ensure SDN success. Companies must keep in mind, this isn’t about eliminating jobs, but increasing efficiency. This way, their IT staff spends less time on operational overhead and more time on engineering and enabling their IT infrastructure to better meet the needs of your mission.
3
Test in a less critical network area. Implementing SDN doesn’t require uprooting a company’s entire network. That only leads to massive risks as you struggle to manage an unfamiliar network. Just as you tested SDN using a limited use case, the same principle applies to testing it on the network. Find a less critical network area where you can work without disturbing the network as a whole. This small-scale SDN implementation lets you safely test your use case without subjecting the rest of your team and infrastructure to undue risk.
4
Review your test case. After working with SDN for a while, IT teams will eventually have enough data to measure your outcomes against their original goals. While this
sounds like a given, many organisations take this type of review for granted. Without thoroughly reviewing SDN’s effectiveness, you can’t answer three important questions: Did it solve your current problem? Is it a wise investment to expand SDN throughout the network? Do you have the infrastructure (both personnel and technical) to maintain software-defined networking across the organisation? With performance, efficiency, security and budget all at stake, it’s important to understand SDN’s results before staking your organisation’s IT future on it.
5
Gain maturity before expanding deployment. Even if your SDN test case performs beyond expectations, there’s one final step before expanding it across your network. Slowly increase your project’s footprint and gain maturity before fully expanding deployment. This might seem overly cautious, but there’s a good reason. Even if SDN worked on a limited scope and in a seldom-used portion of the network, the rest of your network and organisation might not be ready. Are you able to set up the crossfunctional teams needed for largescale success? How will SDN affect performance among more-trafficked areas of the network? Are there other basic challenges that software-defined networking might solve? While answering these questions can sometimes lead you back to step one, they are still necessary to ensure that your SDN technologies are properly implemented to get the results you want. ” www.cnmeonline.com