Computer News Middle East August 2016

ISSUE 295 | AUGUST 2016 WWW.CNMEONLINE.COM

Union Insurance Bahri & Mazroei Trading Company Inforum 2016

STRATEGIC ICT PARTNER

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

TWOFOUR54’S HUSSAM AL NOWAIS TALKS TECH, CULTURE AND STAR WARS

FOUNDER, CPIMEDIA GROUP Dominic De Sousa (1959-2015) Publishing Director Rajashree Rammohan raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100

EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9129

Play it, SAM

Editor James Dartnell james.dartnell@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9153

Ask any CIO in our region what their immediate mandate Talk to us: E-mail: is, and the answer is likely to be cost reduction while jeevan.thankappan@ maintaining a competitive advantage. In this age of cpimediagroup.com economic uncertainty and contracting budgets, ‘doing more with less’ has become the oft-repeated mantra for IT departments. When CIOs are under pressure to cut corners, the first thing they normally focus on is visible costs such as support and maintenance, or putting pressure on suppliers to drop prices. Though this might work in the short term, IT organisations will have to look at other strategies such as getting more out of existing technologies or outsourcing projects. Another opportunity to reduce cost Enterprises is better management of their IT assets. A can drastically recent Gartner study says that enterprises cut software can cut spending on software by as much spending by as 30 percent through the use of software using SAM asset management (SAM) and reharvesting software surpluses.

According to the research firm’s latest global IT spending forecast, globally organisations will spend $332 billion on software this year, and with tools such as SAM, enterprises now have the opportunity to automate the whole software license procurement and audit process. Navigating the complex world of software licensing is always a daunting and labour-intensive task.

Many IT departments still depend on spreadsheets and, as a result, end up buying more than what they need. SAM might be a relatively new discipline but it provides IT with an excellent opportunity to renegotiate software licenses and reduce costs.

Online Editor Adelle Geronimo adelle.geronimo@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 913 Deputy Editor Glesni Holland glesni.holland@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9134 ADVERTISING Group Sales Director Kausar Syed kausar.syed@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9138 Sales Manager Merle Carrasco merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9147 CIRCULATION Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9119 PRODUCTION AND DESIGN Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5673 Senior Designer Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5680 Designer Neha Kalvani neha.kalvani@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9159 DIGITAL SERVICES Web Developer Jefferson de Joya Abbas Madh Photographer Charls Thomas Maksym Poriechkin webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

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Union Insurance Bahri & Mazroei Trading Company Inforum 2016

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

TWOFOUR54’S HUSSAM AL NOWAIS TALKS TECH, CULTURE AND STAR WARS

© Copyright 2016 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

EDITORIAL

Our events

Join the search party Having witnessed Yahoo become a leading player during the dot-com boom, it makes your heart sink to see it agree to a $4.83 billion buyout from Verizon.

It’s cringeworthy to think that the company was valued at $125 billion in January 2000, having gone public four years prior, and – nobly, albeit – resisting an aggressive $44 billion acquisition attempt from Microsoft in 2008.

You don’t have to look far to see why Yahoo! Inc. finds itself in this position. Hindsight vision is 20/20, but the company’s stubbornness – and poor choices at a series of crossroads – has cost it dear.

Yahoo will now combine with another former online giant, AOL, as a component Hindsight of Verizon’s strategy to compete with vision is 20/20, Google and Facebook in the search and social spaces. but Yahoo's Ultimately, although Yahoo still has stubbornness over a billion users of its search engines, has cost it dear. it will always be marked as a cautionary tale of failing to keep pace with other tech giants, those who it could now so easily be competing with.

A few of those featured in this month’s issue of CNME have thrived at the crossroads they’ve faced.

Our cover star is twofour54’s Hussam Al Nowais, who tells us how his life’s work has culminated in a dream job providing IT services to some of the world’s top film producers in the Abu Dhabi free zone.

Union Insurance’s Anshul Srivastav, meanwhile, shares his ambitious plans to ensure the company is a pacesetter in terms of digital disruption.

Enterprise applications firm Infor is beginning to reap the rewards of its acquisition and product development strategy. I recently attended Inforum 2016 in New York City, where I learned how the firm’s $2.8 billion investment in its application layer is beginning to reap rewards, ensuring it isn’t outdone by more attractive competitors.

Talk to us:

E-mail: james.dartnell@ cpimediagroup.com

CONFERENCE

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Contents

Our Strategic Partners Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic Technology Partner

Strategic Innovation Partner

ISSUE 295 | AUGUST 2016

24

CASE STUDY: UNION INSURANCE

20 CIO SPOTLIGHT: TWOFOUR54'S IT DIRECTOR HUSSAM AL NOWAIS

16

28

BAHRI & MAZROEI TRADING COMPANY

Through the looking glass James Dartnell reports from Inforum 2016 in New York City, where Infor executives eyed up Middle Eastern opportunities

32 The race to 5G

While it still may be years away, developing an understanding of how 5G will impact your enterprise will be hugely beneficial in the long run.

50 Not-so-Smart technology

Automation is convenient and seemingly brilliant, but does that mean we should be handing over all responsibility to the machines?

52 Revolutionising retail

The world of retail may never be the same again, thanks to the IoT and it's ecosystem of computers, smartphones, stores, wearables and more.

36 The infrastructure of things 56 Are we running out of Wi-Fi?

44

INTERVIEW: ORACLE'S VP OF SYSTEMS SOLUTIONS MARSHALL CHOY

Are networks ready for the era where tens of billions of connected devices dominate the enterprise?

48 Inhumane

IT leaders must learn to respond to non-human customers, says Jenny Sussin, research director at Gartner.

F5's Bart Saelets investigates whether or not we really are heading towards a 'capacity crunch.'

60 Square deal

Tim Armandpour gives his take on how IT leaders can negotiate good service level agreements.

CIO SPEAKER SERIES

BlaBlaCar takes customer experience to new level HPE Vertica harnesses Big Data analysis to improve marketing campaigns and enhance customer experience.

Headquartered in Paris, and with teams in Madrid, Milan, Warsaw, Hamburg, London and Moscow, BlaBlaCar - an online community marketplace that connects drivers with empty seats to passengers looking for a ride - has created an entirely new people-powered transport network.

Running on a Cloudera Distributed Hadoop cluster, HPE Vertica provides BlaBlaCar with a real-time Big Data analytics platform. Designed for read-intensive workloads, its fast, ad hoc SQL query performance has increased the effectiveness of the company’s marketing campaigns, by enabling data manipulation and analysis with greater frequency, at a higher granularity, and from multiple touch-points.

“Over two million people use BlaBlaCar every month, and HPE Vertica helps us harness the power of that Big Data to optimise the performance of our CRM campaigns and develop programmes to improve our customers’ experience.”

- Gaëlle Periat, Business Intelligence Manager, BlaBlaCar Read more at www.cnmeonline.com/hpe

DATA DIGEST The importance of data will only continue to rise, with the majority of sales decisions being expected to be influenced by customer data by 2020. However, the increasing appetite for data does not necessarily mean that businesses are able to adequately manage and use it.

On average, 23% of all customer or prospect data is believed to be inaccurate.

For the 6th year in a row, the #1 cause of inaccurate data globally is human error.

from

Over the past year, businesses noted an increase in the frequency of data errors in the following areas: *Only asked in 2015 SOURCE: EXPERIAN

Incomplete or missing data increased

from

to

51%

60% from

to from

2015

2016

Outdated information increased

37%

2015

2015

2016

Duplicate data increased

to 30%

from Inconsistent data

to 54%

48%

2016

Typos increased

22% 2015

Outdated information increased

51%

32%

2015

to from

2016

23%

2016

28%

19% 2015

2016

Over the next five years, businesses believe data management will evolve to:

95

%

Improve the overall customer experience

93

90

%

Protect customer security

88

%

%

Make sure of real-time analytics to help inform decision making

Make sure of data science to help inform decision making

87

%

Uphold governance and regulation

The responsibility of data is currently very fragmented, with multiple stakeholders and measures done department by department, rather than across the business as a whole.

79% The biggest internal challenges to improving data quality are: Lack of knowledge/skills

of businesses believe responsibility for data quality should ultimately lie within the business, with occasional help from IT.

The biggest external challenges to managing data are:

46%

Lack of human resources/employees Time-to-value expectations

94% of companies have experienced internal challenges trying to improve their data quality

This is a shift from the historical mindset that anything to do with data should always be governed by the IT side of business.

Issues around data capture/ validation

34% Data profiling

40% Security/ governance risk

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.com/LANsystems

COLUMN

O

Adelle Geronimo Online Editor, CNME

A SUITE DEAL

racle has just announced its acquisition of cloudsoftware company NetSuite in a cash deal worth $9.3 billion. The deal is yet another multi-billiondollar agreement to have made recent headlines in the IT industry, following Verizon’s purchase of Internet giant Yahoo, and Microsoft’s $26.2 billion takeover of social networking site LinkedIn. An increasing number of big tech players are coming together to beef up their expertise and diversify the capabilities they offer to the market. In the case of Oracle, the company has been aggressively shifting to the cloud for some time, and it is estimated that the acquisition will boost its revenue by around $740 million.

CEO Mark Hurd has said that both companies are “complementary and will coexist in the marketplace.” While that may tell half the story – NetSuite is being acquired, after all – the idea of the companies’ products offering a more complete suite rings true. www.cnmeonline.com

As with all acquisitions of this magnitude, prioritising effective integration and transparency are imperative, in order to ensure that deals work favourably for both parties and their customers. Oracle has a track record of effectively integrating various products, solutions and support functions in its previous acquisitions.

While Oracle’s performance in cloud is growing significantly, it is still chasing players like Amazon and Microsoft. As such, in the past few years, the company has aggressively built up its offerings through acquisitions and internal developments, and has invested heavily in developing and onboarding the right talent. Through the NetSuite acquisition, the firm is hoping to extend its reach into the mid-market space, where NetSuite is a significant player. Conversely, NetSuite will benefit from Oracle’s global reach and scale.

It’s a classic case of ‘build or buy’ for Oracle, but one which is likely to pay off.

AUGUST 2016

13

SHORT TAKES

Month in view

HUAWEI AND DUBAI SOUTH COLLABORATE ON SMART CITY INNOVATION

Huawei has signed an MoU with Dubai South to bring "future city" capabilities and services to Dubai South’s Business Park.

Located at the gateway of Dubai South and comprising 11 modern buildings, the Business Park offers commercial space to support sectors including aviation, logistics, general trading, finance, business consultancies, training institutions, retail, fitness and F&B. “The MoU will see the deployment of Huawei’s Smart City and Safe City Solutions to provide enhanced services to residents and businesses in the Park,” said Colin Hu, managing director of Huawei Enterprise, UAE. “Huawei will also provide strategic counsel to support the development of a blueprint for Dubai South’s smart initiatives.”

According to Huawei, its Smart City and Safe City Solutions will deliver end-to-end network planning and the development of cutting-edge technologies by bringing together an open ecosystem of partners.

In addition, its capabilities include mobile and fixed broadband infrastructure, while its Internet of Things platform allows "rapid connectivity" across smart city sensors and devices.

14

AUGUST 2016

VERIZON BUYS YAHOO FOR $4.83 BILLION Verizon Communications has confirmed its acquisition of Yahoo’s core Internet business for $4.8 billion in cash.

For Verizon, the acquisition will help it gain Yahoo’s 1 billion monthly active users, its Internet properties and key applications like search and email, and its advertising systems.

Verizon is not unfamiliar with the acquisition and integration of web companies after its 2015 acquisition of AOL for $4.4 billion.

The transaction is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2017, subject to regulatory approvals, ending a drawn out bidding process for the company. After the transaction is closed, Yahoo will be integrated with AOL under Marni Walden, its executive vice president and president of the Product Innovation and New

Businesses organisation at Verizon.

The price Verizon is paying for Yahoo’s assets is a small percentage of its market capitalisation of over $125 billion during the peak of the dotcom boom, reflecting how badly the company has fallen out of favour.

Yahoo emerged as the entry point to the web for a large number of users of its services such as its portal, search engine and email back in 1994.

But it was later overtaken in markets including search engines by newer competitors like Google.

In 2012, the company appointed Marissa Mayer as its CEO, amid high expectations that she would turn around the company.

“It’s poetic to be joining forces with AOL and Verizon as we enter our next chapter focused on achieving scale on mobile,” Mayer said in a statement.

53

%

OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION ARE STILL OFFLINE.

Source: International Telecommunication Union www.cnmeonline.com

XEROX HAS APPOINTED JEFF JACOBSON AS ITS NEW CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER. THE APPOINTMENT WILL TAKE EFFECT UPON THE COMPLETION OF THE FIRM’S PLANNED SEPARATION INTO TWO PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANIES.

ETISALAT LAUNCHES VOLTE SERVICES Etisalat has announced the launch of the UAE’s first Voice over LTE (VoLTE) service.

According to the company, the new service will allow its mobile customers, both prepaid and postpaid, to use LTE for full voice and data services on a single LTE-enabled device.

Etisalat’s VoLTE service will bring about major improvements in the quality of voice and video calls, the company says, allowing customers to enjoy seamlessly maintained voice calls. It will also provide customers with high-definition voice calls and many media services.

At the time of the launch, the VoLTE service will be enabled on Samsung devices. The announcement

ERICSSON CEO DEPARTS Ericsson’s board of directors has announced the departure of the company’s president, CEO and board member Hans Vestberg.

Jan Frykhammar, executive vice president and CFO, will assume the CEO position until a new CEO is in office.

Leif Johansson, chairman of the board, Ericsson, said, “Hans Vestberg has led the company for seven years through significant industry and company transformation. He has been instrumental in building strong relationships with key customers around the world and his leadership and energy have been an inspiration to employees and leaders across Ericsson.

However, in the current environment and as the company accelerates its strategy execution, the board of directors has decided that the time is right for a new leader to drive the next phase in Ericsson’s development.”

Vestberg said, “I have had 28 fantastic years at Ericsson, the last seven as CEO. As the industry enters a next phase, driven by 5G, IoT and cloud, it is time for a new CEO to step in and continue the work to ensure Ericsson’s industry leadership.”

Frykhammar steps into the position as president and CEO until the now initiated recruitment search has been concluded.

Hans Vestberg will be available to support the board and management during his term of notice of six months. www.cnmeonline.com

of the service on other devices will be made available soon to consumers.

Saleh Al Abdooli, Group Chief Executive Officer, Etisalat, said, “In today’s highly-connected world, customers increasingly want faster, more reliable and richer experience. In addition, given the multi-tasking needs of the UAE’s smartphone consumers, Etisalat’s top priority is to improve the customer’s overall experience with high-quality services. We are constantly working to deliver the most innovative services to its customers and are excited to be the first in the UAE to launch VoLTE.”

ALPHA STAR AVIATION ACHIEVES THREE ICT ISO CERTIFICATIONS

Alpha Star Aviation has announced that it has received three global ISO certifications – ISO 20000-1:2011 for quality in IT services, ISO 27001:2013 for information security and ISO 22301 for business continuity.

The company underlined that receiving the ISO 20000-1:2011 reflects its commitment towards the implementing best practices in IT service management.

Moreover, according to Alpha Star Aviation, receiving the ISO 27001:2013 certificate is a recognition of its strict adherence to the highest standards in information security, and its continuous pursuit to spread information security culture and protect information privacy and confidentiality.

The company also received the ISO 22301 certification, which, according to the company, confirms that it has attained all the necessary competencies on business continuity management as well as the knowledge of BCM tools and techniques.

The ISO certificates were presented by Khaled Al Taher, general manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to Salem Al Muzaini, CEO, Alpha Star.

AUGUST 2016

15

EVENT

Inforum 2016

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS James Dartnell reports from Inforum 2016 in New York City, where Infor executives eyed up the range of application opportunities that await in the Middle East.

T

he analogy of glassmaking held a certain irony. Chief executive Charles Phillips kicked off proceedings for the latest edition of Infor's biggest annual meet with a nod to the rise of an industry that migrated from the Middle East to Venetian island Murano. Initially confined to the production of beautiful glass products, Murano would become a hub for an industry that spawned the lens, microscope and telescope, Phillips said. If the conference that followed his keynote was anything to go by, it may be the Middle East’s turn for a defining import.

“Adjacent innovation across verticals is something we’re passionate about; we want to transform industries by looking across them and cross-pollinating,” Phillips said. He conceded that his company’s progress has been a gradual evolution under his stewardship. “We’re a company that’s always been in 16

AUGUST 2016

transition for the last five years. It can be difficult to know what to talk about at Inforum because there’s always so much going on.”

Nevertheless, Phillips stressed that the transition facing business in 2016 would move at a considerably faster pace than the centuries it took for Murano to reach its production peak. Infor president Duncan Angove echoed this sentiment, saying that the company had defined its niche with multi-enterprise ERP. “Digital disruption is now all around us,” he said. “Kodak didn’t realise it was in the memories business.

Blockbuster didn’t know that it was an entertainment company. The way that Instagram and Netflix have surpassed these companies is staggering.”

Infor has invested $2.8 billion on developing its application layer over the last five years. Their number of customers has risen to 90,000 in the process, and a striking stat accompanies it – as of April 2016, “50

Who’s next? Look at the Middle East.

We’re talking about billions of dollars of future opportunity.”

percent” of Infor’s sales came from cloud products.

“We’re staying focused on the application layer, and industries, not infrastructure,” president Stephan Scholl said. “It was maybe a case of ripping off a band aid for us, and moving away from infrastructure, which has now become www.cnmeonline.com

commoditised. We realised that building complete industry solutions would be the way forward.”

Along with other executives at the event, Scholl was at pains to stress the importance of user experience in Infor’s applications. H&L Digital – Infor’s new division to provide “end-to-end digital cloud solutions with design at their core” – was also announced in New York. “We don’t believe users should have to modify their software,” Scholl said. “Two years ago at Inforum, Charles said that the quality of enterprise software in the market sucked. We’ve strived to make beautiful applications for our customers.”

World-leading cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides Infor’s infrastructure. AWS is yet to build a data centre in the Middle East, however. With that in mind, Scholl was also at pains to highlight how the Middle East was exactly the kind of market that Infor is trying www.cnmeonline.com

to capture. He used Germany – a country that has stringent regulations regarding data governance – as an example of the promise that awaits the GCC in terms of its cloud prospects.

“It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build a data centre.

Salesforce just built their first data centre in the UK. Nobody has a share of wallet to build out data centres in the Middle East, Asia and China like AWS does. They’ve built a data centre in Frankfurt, which is now their fastest growth centre in the world. Now who’s next? Look at the Middle East. We’re talking about billions of dollars of future opportunity where companies are leapfrogging the notion of going to on-premise systems; they’re going purely to the cloud.

“Nobody except us today is running the biggest business opportunity – business critical applications – in the cloud.”

Scholl’s comments around the

region are seemingly not just empty words. Infor also announced the establishment of its IMEA – India, Middle East and Africa – business unit, which Tarik Taman will lead from the Dubai Internet City office. Taman had been Infor’s global head of its human capital management business since 2009, and he has said he plans to “quintuple” Infor’s IMEA market share by 2020. The primary focus industries for the company in the region will be manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality, and healthcare.

“With oil prices declining, and governments investing in initiatives to spur growth in other sectors, there is a thirst for cloud software that provides flexibility and solves critical business issues and can be deployed quickly without a massive, costly customisation project,” he said.

To support its IMEA business, Infor has made many new recruits for its DIC office, and in its newly-opened base in Riyadh’s Kingdom Tower.

AUGUST 2016

17

Symmetrix

S

ymmetrix was the flagship product that put EMC on the map as the world’s enterprise storage leader in the 1990s and 2000s.

Founded in the 1970s by Richard Egan and Roger Marino – the ‘E’ and ‘M’ of EMC – the company’s growth soared after the development of the array.

The product – led by its vice president Moshe Yanai – was designed for the large-scale, hightech environments of modern enterprises.

It was particularly popular with the airline industry when it was first introduced, as well as those who were willing to risk deviating from the safety net of IBM’s disk subsystem.

EMC’s first milestone was the introduction of the Symmetrix 4200 Integrated Cache Disk Array in 1990, which had a capacity of 24 gigabytes, and used RAID technology.

RAID (redundant arrays of inexpensive disks) used a large number of small, commonly manufactured disk drives, such as the hard drive found in many personal computers.

Five years later saw the arrival of Symmetrix 3000, the world’s first platform-independent storage system, for the open systems market.

Throughout the 1990s, EMC continued to develop further Symmetrix models, which consequently resulted in the company expanding massively – both in size and value.

Symmetrix was at the core of EMC’s fast growing revenue, and the company can still today pride itself as the world’s largest provider of data storage systems by market share.

More recent storage systems under EMC, known as the VMAX generation, are platforms intended for open systems and mainframe computing.

18

AUGUST 2016

www.cnmeonline.com

CIO

Spotlight

BYTES, CAMERA, ACTION Hussam Al Nowais' cultured background befits a media industry pro. The twofour54 IT director's upbringing in Japan and Egypt has prepped him well for a career that now sees him delivering IT services to some of the world's top production companies.

t was a moment he had always dreamed of.

Since he was a small child, figurines had adorned his bookshelf, and still do – with his wife’s permission. At last, Hussam Al Nowais was toe to toe with the stormtroopers. “I was just disappointed that Yoda couldn’t make it,” he quips. Al Nowais names last year’s Middle Eastern premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens as his number one night of 2015.

Delivering the showpiece of the evening – the film itself – demanded first-class IT infrastructure and services, provided by IT director Al Nowais and his employers, twofour54. But more on that later.

Born in Abu Dhabi, Al Nowais spent long periods of his childhood living abroad, his father working as a UAE foreign ambassador. “I attended kindergarten in Japan, and was schooled in Egypt,” he says. “I then studied in the US, before returning to the UAE. It was an absolute privilege to have grown up across a range of different cultures. It helps you to think outside of your traditional bubble, and instills respect for the way others live and work.”

I

20

AUGUST 2016

Al Nowais remains in awe of Japan. “I’ll always have a soft spot for it,” he says. “The country is incredibly modern, but has always stuck to its culture. It’s highly systematic, with very hard-working people.”

Initially enamoured with the sciences, Al Nowais began a biology undergraduate course, before deciding to change paths and follow his burgeoning passion for technology. He undertook a degree in computer network technology at Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi, and his major would become a recurrent interest throughout his career. “I’d initially wanted to be a dentist,” he says. “Networking just grabbed me, though. Everything in life is networked, electronic or otherwise. Humans can’t survive on our own; we are always networked.

The more networked you are, the more advanced you are.”

While studying, Al Nowais joined Abu Dhabi’s General Civil Aviation Authority as an IT officer, where a diverse and challenging role would prepare him well for the coming years. “I was fortunate to have a lot of responsibility and gain a lot of experience there,” he says. “I worked

across networks, applications, Web design, security, you name it. A lot of people do the same job for 10 or 15 years but I was privileged to have that variety at that point in my career.”

Next up for Al Nowais was a move to Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR) in 2004, this time as a network engineer. He gained fantastic project management experience at the company, overseeing the rebuild of IT infrastructure including a security refresh and a new data centre build when ECSSR moved offices. “It was a rare opportunity for me,” he says. “I was also involved in the selection of technology, which added another string to my bow in terms of developing my network skills.”

The “other side” beckoned for Al Nowais, and in 2007 he joined Injazat Data Systems as a client delivery manager. In his role, he was responsible for the delivery of infrastructure projects for a company client that operated in environmental initiatives. However, he found working as a vendor challenging.

“It was a completely different - but important - role,” he says. “I certainly enjoyed learning what it means to be www.cnmeonline.com

“

Everything in life is networked. The more networked you are, the more advanced you are.”

a service provider, but I prefer being the client, where I can be in control of projects and strategy. It was certainly interesting to learn about balancing the priorities of earning revenue for your employer, but looking after what’s best for your client.”

Al Nowais caught the attention of Masdar, who hired him as IT manager in 2009. The company’s www.cnmeonline.com

work continues to inspire him.

“I think Masdar’s work is key for what the Abu Dhabi Government is trying to achieve,” he says.

“Programmes like Solar Impulse 2 are making a difference and I hope they can continue.”

In 2010, Al Nowais joined MZA, twofour54 as head of IT infrastructure, beginning a tenure

that befits his open-minded nature.

“I’m extremely fond of twofour54,” Al Nowais says. “I believe in the benefits of long-term partnerships, in business and technology. I’m delighted to have established that in terms of my relationship with the company, and with our technology partners. If you are able to negotiate the right deals from the off it can set the tone for beneficial relationships.”

Shortly after joining, Al Nowais and the IT team set about establishing the company’s disaster recovery and business continuity processes. “They’re such important issues in the media industry,” he says. “In order to provide the best possible services to our partners, we need a robust infrastructure with redundancy layers for minimal downtime.” Al Nowais has overseen AUGUST 2016

21

CIO

Spotlight

the establishment of dual ISP connectivity with providers Etisalat and du. “We’re able to switch between them if there are any issues,” he says. “We’ve had minimal downtime over the last five years as a result.” By 2011, Al Nowais’ progressive work earned him a promotion to the role of IT director.

One of the key mandates of twofour54’s IT department is the delivery of a range of IT services to media companies operating within the free zone. “It’s our job to provide IT infrastructure-as-a-service to them, across offices and filming locations,” Al Nowais says. This includes world-renowned clients.

separate security, applications and infrastructures-as-a-service across both studios.”

Production was successfully completed without any hitches, allowing Al Nowais to draw extra satisfaction on the film’s opening night, where he was a guest. He was even lucky enough to meet Hollywood star Richard Dreyfuss.

“On screen you think these guys are eternal, until you meet them up close,” he jokes.

Al Nowais attributes those closest to him as his biggest inspiration.

“My children never cease to amaze me,” he says. “I actually think they’re smarter than adults because they

“

The most important lesson he taught me was to never say ‘I don’t know’. That really is fantastic advice.”

An avid Star Wars fan since his youth, Al Nowais was elated to learn that Disney – who acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 – had decided to shoot a host of scenes for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in Abu Dhabi, with the film’s 600-strong production crew using a site under twofour54’s authority in April 2014 requesting 24/7 IT support. Disney’s arrival coincided with that of Universal pictures, who would be filming scenes for Fast & Furious 7, and were also using twofour54 support services.

Their presence provided an opportunity for twofour54’s IT to shine. The Star Wars production team were on-site “three months” before filming started, and were in need of Al Nowais’ expertise from the get-go. “We were their IT department,” he says. “We provided 22

AUGUST 2016

don’t understand boundaries. They are uninhibited and naturally think outside the box.”

He goes on to add that his father set a shining example in delivering conscientious and insightful work.

“Watching him operate as a diplomat was a learning process in itself,” he says. “The most important lesson he taught me was to never say ‘I don’t know’. That really is fantastic advice.

‘Let me get back to you’ or ‘Let me find out’ are perfectly acceptable responses, but it’s important to have a hunger for knowledge that underpins what you do.” This philosophy has pushed Al Nowais to question whether such a thing as peak performance even exists. “I don’t believe there’s such a thing as your best,” he says. “You can always find a better way of doing things.”

TIMELINE

2004

Graduates from Higher Colleges of Technology Abu Dhabi

Joins Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research

2004

2007

Joins Masdar as ICT manager

2010

Becomes an Injazat Data Systems client delivery manager

2009

Hired by twofour54

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CASE STUDY

UNION INSURANCE

usiness isn’t the only thing being disrupted by digitalisation. Just ask Anshul Srivastav.

“Digital has become my way of life,” he says. “I consider myself to be a practitioner of digital, disruption and innovation.”

His neat acronym summarises his definition of digital strategy.

“Disruptive In Globally Inclusive Transformational (and Transitional) Analytical Leadership,” Srivastav says.

“It defines exactly what digital means to me and how digital is pervasive across my thought process.”

While Srivastav is clearly motivated by the prospect of taking Union Insurance to a different level of operation, he is increasingly aware that a failure to do so will put the company’s future in serious jeopardy. He is unequivocal in his belief that various physical objects that underpin our society will be destined for extinction in the near

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Anshul Srivastav, CIO, Union Insurance

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STAKING A CLAIM

'Digital' is no mere buzzword for Anshul Srivastav. The Union Insurance CIO has developed a comprehensive roadmap to ensure the organisation thrives against the tide of new business models and technologies.

future, and will be superseded by digital products and services. “I think cash will disappear in the next five years,” he says. “If the banking industry is pushing applications to users, and apps are taking care of transactions, where is cash needed?

In the next 10-15 years, I also expect the death of credit cards. Wallets will cannibalise ATMs. That will be a huge cost-saver for banks, while mobile wallets will take away huge amounts of their operations.”

The disruption that banking faces will sweep across the financial services industry, causing an unavoidable impact for the insurance business, he adds. “There are so many examples of disruptive technologies changing operating models. Driverless cars, telematics taking care of commercial insurance, mobile payments. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are running pilots on Bitcoin and Blockchain. And you can’t ignore www.cnmeonline.com

healthcare, which is going through a massive digital transformation, with wearables playing a huge role.”

These wearables stand to have a major impact on insurance. The collection of user health data has the potential to transform the way that insurance packages are put together, with the prospect of customer health improving as a result of new streams of information. “Wearable data will be transmitted to insurers, and they will use that to rate premiums and have a constant check on individuals and organisations for health and life insurance,” Srivastav says.

“Wearables will be – and already are – a part of daily lifestyles. This data can be mapped to motor and life insurance. Customers will be able to track what is going on in their body on a real-time basis. Someone has to front-end that, whether it’s the healthcare or insurance industry.”

Srivastav also believes that health-conscious customers will

be enticed by cheaper policies if they can share their data on a more frequent basis. “Customers who want to buy life or health insurance have to share certain pieces of information, and using this data, we will be able to advise them to take certain medication or adopting lifestyle changes,” he says. “The continuous monitoring of medical conditions is something that I believe people will subscribe to. Local hospitals and pharmacies will be mapped, and you will be supported on a self-service basis.

Grievances and claims can be settled using this data.”

The use of such measures would be particularly apt in the treatment of diabetes, Srivastav says. Instead of bi-annual medical tests, real-time monitoring of sugar levels could allow insurance companies to adjust their premiums accordingly. Srivastav believes that this could lead to a drastic shift in payment models.

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“Monthly payments are currently the shortest on offer, but that could go down to daily or weekly payments,” he says.

Pushing disruption As with any IT decision-maker, Srivastav’s time is largely spent on shaping technology strategy around the business’s needs, a portion of that being dedicated to simplifying IT operations. “Around 20 percent of my time is spent on that side of things, but I am working on initiatives that can reduce that number by at least 10 percent over the next year,” he says.

The remainder of Srivastav’s time consists of “connecting dots” across the enterprise, meanwhile. “I have to work with the business and business partners on new initiatives, and gaining backing for them,” he says. “These typically revolve around driving customer engagement, process efficiency or evolving into new market areas. It’s about going shoulder to shoulder with the business to find ways for technology to improve how Union be run.”

Over the last six months, Union has transitioned to a private cloud model under Srivastav’s direction, representing huge progress in terms of the efficiency it has delivered.

Srivastav estimates he has saved almost “40 percent” of his team’s time spent on Union’s IT operations through its deployment. “On a day-to-day basis, the move to cloud has alleviated the concern of managing operations,” he says. “The management of our own data centre, servers and networks is taken care of by cloud.”

The move to the cloud has formed a key part of Srivastav’s long-term 26

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plan. “It was driven by digital thinking,” he says. “If you are not pushing disruption, you will keep working on operations, and not giving enough attention to new ways of doing things.”

Analytics At the core of Srivastav’s digital strategy is analytics. He appreciates that in order for it to introduce disruptive means of doing business,

“If the banking industry is pushing applications to users, and apps are taking care of transactions, where is cash needed?”

Union will be forced to gain unprecedented insight into the data at its disposal. “Without analytics, no digital strategy can get moving,” he says. “You need to analyse

structured, non-structured and semistructured data sets to continuously evolve, make, predict and prescribe decisions. Anything I want to attempt in the digital space is meaningless without analytics. It’s the thing that will help organisations move ahead.

You need data to support initiatives.”

Cultural change The ‘transitional’ element of Srivastav’s thinking, meanwhile, applies heavily to Union’s uptake of BYOD strategies, he says. “The policies have been approved,” he says. “We are starting by working on things internally, then we will extend them to the outside world. We want to be a device-less organisation, and that will free up more time as well. We need to initiate new transformations that will support cultural change.

BYOD a cultural change. People are not used to a BYOD setup.”

Looking at the bigger picture, he believes mobility will open doors for a series of new opportunities for Union.

“Mobility will be a line of business in itself. It will have its own set of revenues and its own balance sheet. It will take away lots of operations from our back end, and will be a question of self-service.”

Security concerns are also chief among Srivastav’s priorities. “Around 20-25 percent of what I spend will go towards digital security, to make sure information is protected and systems are compliant,” he says. The layers of protection delivered by Union will be to an IT and business environment that will see significant changes. “The way we will operate will be drastically different in three or four years’ time,” he says.

“If we don’t push ourselves, auxiliary industries will push us to change.” www.cnmeonline.com

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CASE STUDY

BAHRI & MAZROEI TRADING CO.

Madhusuthan, IT manager, Bahri & Mazroei Trading Company

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ACCESS DENIED Recognising the potential harm of a host of threats brought on by employee naivety, Bahri & Mazroei Trading Company’s IT manager Madhusuthan opted for a fresh security solution to tackle social media overuse and abuse. nly the foolhardy – and the uninitiated – now doubt the benefits of social media. The ability to interact with and learn from an estimated 2.3 billion users around the globe is a huge opportunity for enterprises. The UAE in particular is primed for social media opportunities, with the country boasting the world’s highest smartphone penetration at 74 percent. The other side of the coin, however, is that social media can be a thorn in the side of a business keeping an eye on employee productivity.

Worse still, it can be a magnet for security threats.

Bahri & Mazroei Trading Company (BMTC) could relate all too well to that predicament.

Established in 1968 in the UAE, BMTC started its operations in product supply and the distribution of electrical and lighting solutions.

Over the last four decades, the company has expanded its portfolio to include urban and water solutions, and its work has gone on to touch some of the region’s biggest landmarks. These include world-renowned sites including

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the Burj Khalifa, Dubai Metro, Dubai International Airport and the Madinat Jumeirah.

Besides catering to projects within the construction industry, BMTC also serves industrial and government departments, traders and export customers through its network of seven showrooms across the country.

The back office operations that make all this possible, however, require levels of IT security that cannot be compromised by user ignorance. BMTC’s IT manager Madhusuthan recognised that inappropriate use of social media on company time held the capacity to cause a number of problems.

“We wanted to make people use technology, so rather than controlling them, we decided that monitoring them was the best policy,” he says. “I think there’s a risk that if you block certain services, it becomes increasingly likely that people will be deterred from using technology altogether.”

Madhusuthan concedes that although social media is prevalent in the modern enterprise, he and BMTC’s senior management could not justify a lax policy towards its use.

“While there are some businesses that use social media as their CRM solution, it’s not really applicable in our case,” he says. He does feel that certain platforms should naturally be exempt from the ban, however.

“LinkedIn is a tool which can be used at full value for business opportunity management. It’s a great source of new professional information.

Everyone is using LinkedIn these days so it has to be used.”

Skepticism around employee use of social media was more than justified. BMTC had previously experienced the effects of ransomware, with company endpoints being held hostage to cybercriminals.

Suffice to say, Madhusuthan was keen to avoid a repeat of that process. “We needed better security of our network, with reduced risk for these kinds of threats,” he says.

With IT security always a sensitive subject, Madhusuthan opted to continue using the services of one of BMTC’s long-term partners. “We have been using Cisco for the last twenty years, so there is an established level of trust with them,” Madhusuthan says. BMTC decided to implement a suite of Cisco security solutions, AUGUST 2016

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comprising its Next Generation Firewall, which integrated ASA 5545 – X with FirePOWER Services, centralised authorisation tool FireSight Management Centre 750, Cisco’s URL filtering service and Advanced Malware Protection.

The BMTC IT team set to work on the initiative, and, eager to realise the benefits of effective social media monitoring, completed the implementation in the space of a month, with work largely completed outside of office hours to avoid downtime. Madhusuthan’s strong relationship with the company’s senior management – who were very keen to experience benefits of a new solution – was a catalyst in the project’s haste. “Getting their approval was fairly straightforward,” he says. “The implementation was a case of revamping existing firewalls and solutions, but updates that stood to provide a great deal of new value to the company.” Nonetheless, BMTC became “one of the first” companies in the Middle East to implement the solution, a source of pride for Madhusuthan.

BMTC’s IT department now has a centralised management platform for security threats, and has helped to accelerate the company’s smart initiatives. The solution has allowed BMTC to filter employees’ social media use according the classifications set by Madhusuthan.

“Previously, we didn’t know how much time employees spent on social media, but we have now implemented an effective tool to give us peace of mind that they are not abusing the limits that we set for them,” he says. “We don’t want to cut their use off altogether, but it’s more about 30

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“We have to show how our changes can benefit employees and help the work they do.” bringing in reasonable levels of control. Employees who frequent sites like Facebook and YouTube too often, as well as those who are downloading content – which creates bottlenecks – can be stopped.”

Madhusuthan says that the solution has already prevented a host of employees from downloading film torrents via the company network, which is already reducing the risk of malware being brought into BMTC. “These attempts are immediately blocked,” he says. “This has saved the time of our IT staff in protecting BMTC from viruses that can easily be introduced.”

As attempts to determine the solution’s impact continue, Madhusuthan is confident that tangible benefits will be apparent in time. “Our analysis is still ongoing, but the solution is allowing us to monitor the management of a variety of technologies, so I’m sure it will be deemed a success.”

Well aware of the need to educate employees about the range of cyberthreats that BMTC is exposed to through accessing malicious content, he has spearheaded a campaign to educate users about the importance of safe online practices. The IT department now “frequently” sends information to employees and gives face-to-face tips on how they can be more cautious.

Madhusuthan feels the way that this information is shared can be the difference between whether an employee takes note or simply discards what they are sent. “If we send them an email with links, people don’t necessarily understand what we are trying to convey,” he says.

“The information that we send our employees has to give short, sharp tips on simple things that they can do.

Most importantly, we have to show how it can benefit them and help the work they do, so it’s important for the IT department to translate business value into employee value.”

He opines that user education is paramount in ensuring the success of the initiatives that IT delivers.

“It’s essential,” he says. He has also partnered with the company’s HR department to ensure that staff take the threats seriously, and that safe IT practices have to be a firm pillar of company policy.

“When alerts flash up from the IT or HR department, people tend to look,” he says. “It’s not always clear for employees what company policy can be, so that’s why we’ve brought HR on board to clarify this. They can then take this information on board in a matter of a few short bullet points.

In terms of IT security, educating users about devices and products is still so important.” www.cnmeonline.com

TELECOMS WORLD

5G

THE RACE TO 5G

While it may still be years away, developing an understanding of how 5G will impact your enterprise will be hugely beneficial in the long run.

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ith 5G likely to debut by 2020, it is important for IT leaders to know what this generational mobile technology is all about, especially in terms of planning and strategy purposes. .

You may have already heard that 5G will be 10-100x faster than 4G. This could mean real-world speeds of about 4Gbps or more.

Lan Yun, president, Carrier Network Business Group, Huawei ME, says 5G will be the key to a better connected world, and will be far superior to 4G or even LTE in terms of latency and its number of connections. “5G will have a fundamental impact on the industrial transformation of ICT and human life as we know it," he says. "As a key enabler of future digital connectivity, the technology will serve as the platform for a connected world.”

According to Rakesh Lakhani, head of Network Products Solutions, Ericsson ME, the move to 5G will a new element – the industrial Internet. “We will see new as-aservice business models based on network slicing. Network slices in the context of 5G will be like virtual networks on demand. 5G will enable more secure transactions and expand the battery life of IoT devices by 10x. All this will create opportunities for new cases that we haven’t yet dreamed of,” he says.

Network slicing divides the infrastructure into several virtual networks optimised for things such as high speed, low latency and low power consumption. Each virtual network gets its share of a pool of computing power, and if one gets overloaded, the others aren’t affected.

With the goal of 1 millisecond latency, which would require networks do some things as much as 10x faster than they do with 4G, the new generation of mobile technology offers many potential use cases, including connected cars, industrial robots and remote medicine.

Ericsson divides 5G use cases into six categories: Broadband and media everywhere: When 5G becomes a reality, users will be able

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We will see new as-a-service business models based on network slicing. Network slices in the context of 5G will be like virtual networks on demand. 5G will enable more secure transactions and expand the battery life of IoT devices by 10x.”

Rakesh Lakhani, Head of Network Products Solutions, Ericsson ME

to communicate in crowded or remote areas with lightning fast broadband. Media has the power to become on-demand from any location and any device.

Smart vehicle and transport: The movement towards 5G means massive machine-type communications that will allow cities, transportation and infrastructure to transmit real-time data for improved maintenance and greater operational efficiency.

Critical services and infrastructure control: The high reliability and low latency of 5G unlocks the ability to control critical services and infrastructure. This creates new opportunities for public safety, government, city management and utility companies.

Critical control of remote devices: 5G introduces the ability to remotely control devices and heavy machinery, thus unlocking the potential for improved medical services and surgeries that would otherwise be unavailable to rural communities. 5G would also allow for heavy machinery to be controlled from a distance, making hazardous situations safer for humans.

Human and machine interaction: 5G means unlocking the potential for us to interact and connect with machines in unprecedented ways.

Sensor networks: 5G technology will expand business opportunities and business models through monitoring, tracking and AUGUST 2016

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automation capabilities on a large scale. From connected farms and agriculture to smart cities and buildings, 5G technology reduces costs, improves efficiency and provides realtime data in amazing new ways.

The speed boosts, low latency, and backwards compatibility with existing networks will provide a good framework for new architectures we have not seen previously, says Akshay Sharma, a research director for carrier infrastructure at Gartner.

“5G wireless will add new architectures like Cloud RAN (radio access network) where localised nano-data centres will occur, supporting server-based networking functions like industrial IoT gateways, video caching and transcoding at the edge for ultraHD video, and newer mesh-like topologies supported with more distributed HetNets (heterogeneous networks),” he says.

Industry experts point out that IT leaders should view 5G as more than just a speed boost. In fact, it is mostly related to making sure networks can handle a massive spike in the number of devices. In addition, 5G is expected to decrease the energy requirements for devices, enabling battery life up to 10 years in some cases. This will significantly reduce maintenance costs, making large IoT installations more practical and cost-effective.

Now for the bad news. Besides the lack of handsets, part of the plan for reaching very high speeds in 5G is to use frequencies far above anything ever used in cellular. There is a lot of spectrum up there, but regulators around the world first have to agree on how to assign it. That won’t happen until the next World Radio Communication Conference in 2019, putting a dampener on hopes for real 5G before 2020.

“There is a need for spectrum harmonisation between countries planning early 5G deployment," Lakhani says. "This needs to be done in addition to the current process for WRC-19, which focuses on spectrum for commercial 5G deployment beyond 2020. Backhaul spectrum for 5G 34

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“5G will have a fundamental impact on the industrial transformation of ICT and human life as we know it. As a key enabler of future digital connectivity, the technology will serve as the platform for a connected world.”

Lan Yun, president, Carrier Network Business Group, Huawei ME

networks also needs to be considered as additional challenges exist for microwave backhaul for the evolution of 4G towards 5G. Frequency bands used for microwave vary greatly from one location to the next. This is because the most appropriate band depends on the regional climate and the national spectrum regulations, among other factors."

Yun from Huawei adds that the major challenge today is determining how to achieve the vision of 10Gbps throughput, 1ms latency and capacity for 100 billion device connections.

“With extensive experience in 2G, 3G and 4G solutions, and now with 5G research underway, we believe the timetable set by 3GPP is a realistic one. The 5G market should therefore be ready for commercial deployment by 2020. Obviously, this is still a work in progress, as 3GPP began working on 5G from March 2016 and will continue over the next 4-5 years,” he says.

Though the much-anticipated 5G stand won’t be finished before 2020, trials are already underway from companies including Nokia and Samsung. Industry analysts say South Korea will likely have 5G running in time for the Winter Olympics in 2018. If that happens, the enterprise will be able to how those launches transpire, how users respond, monitor which devices become available to support the new standards and be mindful of any infrastructure glitches. www.cnmeonline.com

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NETWORK WORLD

IoT Infrastructure

THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THINGS Are networks ready for the era where tens of billions of connected devices dominate the enterprise?

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he possibilities that the Internet of Things creates for a business will require a drastic rethink of operating models and IT infrastructure. A factory, for instance, will have the potential to run several times faster with connected sensors. These sensors collect and analyse data to improve the efficiency of the company. But what use are these ambitions, if network infrastructures are simply too immature to react to the findings, preventing the delivery of real-time data that could affect business outcomes?

Cisco estimates that a whopping 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020 – a bold prediction, soaring above the mid-range estimates of Gartner at 20.8 billion, and BI Intelligence at 34 billion. The exact figure remains to be seen, but the sheer variety and volume of devices entering the enterprise are sure to be a major disruptive influence.

So how does the idea that anything could be connected encourage or induce panic among enterprises? Opening up and adjusting IT infrastructure to allow for these benefits to fall into place is a necessary plan of action for companies who are keen to leverage the benefits of machine to machine communication.

The IoT, however – with all of its potential to effectively collect and analyse data to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, cut operational expenditures and improve productivity – requires businesses to perform some behind-the-scenes revamping if they are to appreciate the full extent of its benefits.

Narender Vasandani, technical manager, Siemon, believes that companies need to firstly optimise a series of physical issues within their data centres if they are to support IoT. “As organisations strive to capitalise on the IoT revolution and effectively manage Big Data, many will be looking to cloud and colocation data centres to handle much of the data,” he says.

“To ensure low latency, high bandwidth connections, data centre managers need to properly support the greater amount of active equipment that comes with IoT. Data centres www.cnmeonline.com

need to therefore be designed to optimise space, power and cooling. This can include everything from high-density copper and fibre patch panels, to cabinet designs that allow equipment in two cabinets to share power distribution and connectivity in the zero-u space between bayed cabinets and aisle containment systems that optimise cooling and enable increased capacity.”

Handling the high volume of traffic that is expected from IoT processes is one of the main concerns for businesses. Last year, IDC predicted that by 2017, 90% of enterprise systems management would have rapidly adopted new business models to accommodate this.

Sunil Paul, co-founder and chief operating officer, Finesse Global, believes softwaredefined networking (SDN) – which simplifies IT network configuration by decoupling the control from the physical network – is the answer.

“As sensors and devices start transmitting huge amounts of data, one needs to plan for an agile network, as the output needs to function based on the input. For example, traffic has to be automatically diverted based on the congestion, an irrigation system will function based on the weather, and the manufacturing equipment will listen to the various sensors providing information. SDN is a valid solution,” he says.

Vasandani agrees that SDN is one method of maximising the performance of IoT devices.

“SDN that allows for managing switches and controlling data traffic in the data centre from a centralised location offers greater ability to respond to changes driven by dataintensive applications,” he says. “The use of standards-based structured cabling in the data centre offers interoperability, allows for easy implementation of SDN without the need to reconfigure the entire cabling infrastructure.”

According to Fady Younes, acting managing director, Cisco UAE, “SDN simplifies and accelerates the deployment of applications, reduces IT costs and operational errors, and helps make businesses more agile.” He goes on to say: “Thanks to network abstraction and automation that reduce network operations AUGUST 2016

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IoT Infrastructure

workloads, SDN enables companies to grow their network to meet demands, and to scale back if and when necessary. IT departments can apply a change once, and it is then distributed across all networks, scaling delivery, and driving new business models and growth.”

However, attempting to implement automation via the IoT could be disastrous if infrastructures are unprepared, especially when it comes to security. Depending on the nature of the business, enterprises need to ensure that their network complies with their industry-standard regulations.

“When it comes to IoT in general, there is some concern regarding lack of consumer privacy and the concern of secure information getting into the wrong hands,” says Vasandani.

“Not only are advanced encryption and firewall technologies imperative for networks, but data centre managers also need to ensure physical security. While locking cabinets and deploying surveillance cameras and access controls are common security measures within a data centre, security threats from within also require the ability to detect unauthorised connections in the network.”

He goes on to add how AIM systems may help solve this issue. “Automated infrastructure management (AIM) systems provide real-time monitoring of a network’s physical connections and IT device status, with the ability to send alerts when unauthorised changes occur. AIM systems also help to maintain an audit log of all network events, which can help simplify compliance with regulatory mandates.”

“To ensure low latency, high bandwidth connections, data centre managers need to properly support the greater amount of active equipment that comes with IoT.” Narender Vasandani, technical manager, Siemon

“As sensors and devices start transmitting huge amounts of data, one needs to plan for an agile network, as the output needs to function based on the input.”

Sunil Paul, co-founder and chief operating officer, Finesse Global

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In order for there to be a successful transformation within a business to enable IoT devices to run smoothly, various departments within the company need to combine forces if it is to be a success. Younes believes that organisations which are agile enough to innovate rapidly and unbridle their capacity to create cost value, experience value, or platform value for their customers will be the winners.

He adds: “The real question for CIOs who are considering the need for change is how to make the required transformation. They need to work closely with the business leadership teams to show them the opportunities and challenges that come from digital transformation.”

A pressing consideration for organisations implementing a reformed infrastructure for IoT processes, is where the huge quantities of data will be stored once it has been collected from the devices. Businesses use IoT to make better decisions and improve customer satisfaction, and Younes believes that those that opt to store this data in the cloud must have a smart underlying network in order for it to be able to cope with the demands of Big Data.

“Organisations that have embraced cloud or virtualisation in their data centre environment or have started the journey down that path are the ones that benefit most from SDN, as they give customers the promise of achieving in their network what virtualisation has given them in the data centre,” he says. “The increased emphasis on cloud computing is placing new demands on the network. For cloud services to be seamless, the underlying network must be intelligent, carrier-class and virtualised.” www.cnmeonline.com

SOLUTIONS WORLD

Hyper-converged infrastructure

BELIEVE THE HYPE With an increasing number of vendors entering the hyperconverged infrastructure space, end-users are spoiled for choice with the array of appliances now in the market. How big a jump is the shift to a hyper-converged system, and what risks should CIOs consider before opting for the move?

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hey’re the appliances that the IT managers of yesteryear could only have dreamed of.

The ability to pool compute, storage and networking functions – not to mention the gamechanger of data centres, virtualisation – into a single appliance smacks of simplification and lower cost. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), however, may seem a distant dream for some enterprises in the Middle East. With many organisations still yet to adopt converged infrastructure, they may be left scratching their heads as to whether a move to HCI is necessary.

Shams Hasan, enterprise product manager, Dell Middle East, believes that although there are similarities between converged and hyper-converged systems, owning the former is not a prerequisite for HCI. “A common misconception in the industry is that to take advantage of HCI opportunities, customers need to have experienced adoptions or implementations of conventional converged infrastructure, but this is not the case at all,” he says. Hasan adds that the lack of converged infrastructure could also allow many end-users to get their nose ahead of their competitors. “HCI solutions usually come in a package of their own. They actually offer customers who may not have yet taken advantage of conventional converged infrastructure solutions the opportunity to leapfrog the trend and go straight to HCI.” Hasan goes on to add that the scalability of HCI means it is an always viable option for smaller enterprises. “HCI also beats conventional converged infrastructure in two key dimensions,” he adds. “It can start small, which has the advantage of low upfront CAPEX, and it has the ability to grow at a much more granular scale, which gives customers better control of the budget and ability to align technology growth to business workloads. Therefore, for customers who couldn’t take advantage of conventional converged infrastructure in the past, HCI actually makes it possible to really try for small workloads and grow as the workload grows.”

Taj ElKhayat, regional vice president, www.cnmeonline.com

“With the promise of less hardware, reduced cost of equipment and power, as well as consuming less IT staff resources, the benefits of HCI are significant.”

Taj ElKhayat, regional vice president, Middle East and Africa, Riverbed Technology

Middle East and Africa, Riverbed Technology, believes that there are huge advantages to HCI, but that having an allencompassing approach to its use across the enterprise is necessary.

"With the promise of less hardware, reducing the cost of equipment and power, as well as consuming less IT staff resources, the benefits of hyper-convergence are many and significant," he says. "Currently, technology has remained focused on the data centre, with little applicability to the branch. This is a shame, given that the majority of business today is actually conducted at the branch.

Vendor lock-in Whatever the benefits of HCI, there will be one concern that could inevitably deter many CIOs from opting for it. Vendor lock-in will always be the elephant in the room in terms of HCI, and this worry is certainly justified to an extent.

A deep level of trust is undoubtedly necessary if an end-user is to set store by using one provider for its server, storage and network in a single appliance. However, all these concerns could well be redundant if the right partner is chosen for HCI. Partners who can provide the right support, and the best possible hardware and software can bring a host of benefits to any enterprise.

Hasan believes that risks regarding vendor lock-in can be mitigated if vendors take responsibility in delivering choice and quality of solutions to customers. “Bringing the right vision, ensuring a broad approach, and affording customers the broadest portfolio of the most trusted hyper-converged infrastructure solutions ensures customers AUGUST 2016

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SOLUTIONS WORLD

Hyper-converged infrastructure

have zero bottle-necks to new IT trend adoptions,” he says.

If this attitude becomes widespread, the possibility of HCI becoming commoditised in coming years is sure to increase. An increasing number of vendors are spying opportunities with HCI, especially those who have the ability to marry their own hardware or software (or both), or provide one of the two and employ their partners for a complete solution. CIOs are becoming spoiled for choice when opting for an HCI partner.

ElKhayat is realistic about the risks surrounding HCI, saying that in order to achieve its full benefits, a number of aspects need to be carefully considered and managed. “While hyper-converged architecture does provide solid value in the data centre in terms of simplicity, scalability and ease of manageability, it is does raise some risks and challenges when it is simply copied over to remote and branch office environments,” he says.

Nevertheless, the issue of managing IT infrastructure at separate sites can present issues. While a centralised HCI brings a series

“A common misconception in the industry is that to take advantage of HCI opportunities, customers need to have experienced adoptions or implementations of conventional converged infrastructure.”

Shams Hasan, enterprise product manager, Dell Middle East

of operational benefits, the management of hardware at remote sites can be a nuisance to manage, according to ElKhayat. “Traditional HCI solutions lower the physical footprint to be managed at remote locations,” he says.

“However, functionally, each location is like a scaled-down data centre containing miniature versions of the same components that require the same distributed management. Managing many moving parts in multiple locations is challenging enough; coupled with managing these remotely is a pain all IT shops can relate to."

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INTERVIEW

Marshall Choy

MICRO MANAGEMENT Marshall Choy, Oracle’s vice president of systems solutions engineering, tells James Dartnell about the firm’s incorporation of security and analytics into its latest microprocessor, and how it plans to balance its IaaS and server interests.

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hen were you last in the Middle East and what changes have you noticed since then?

I was last here in December, and it’s got much hotter! Oracle’s local team is continuing to have great success, especially across our engineering systems and server portfolio, and we have no reason to think that will change. A lot of that results from having a highly skilled sales and support function that is well connected to our headquarters, which we don’t necessarily have across all our worldwide offices.

That connection has been made over many years, and the relationship has grown over time. We’ve just had a team come over from HQ to deliver some enablement activity in anticipation of the roll out of some new products locally.

Has your announcement to build a data centre in Abu Dhabi affected customer sentiment?

I think it will change things. If your only inhibitor to public cloud is that you need customer data residing in the country of origin, then that inhibitor is now gone. It doesn’t solve 44

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The three-letter agencies in the US have come to realise that Oracle has added additional layers of protection and security to its hardware that did not exist before.”

everything for everybody, but no solution will, which is why we’re not a single solution company. At the end of the day, our goal is to be able to provide whatever customers need.

Is your worldwide decline in hardware revenues a major concern? Is this region consistent with the rest of the world in that respect?

I can’t talk about revenue numbers, but in general we have a healthy business across the board, so have no concerns there. There will always be challenges in various segments and markets. At any point in time you’ll see some areas that are improving, and some that are improving at a slower rate.

Is there a conflict between Oracle’s aggressive pursuit of Infrastructure-as-aService sales and its server business?

That’s an interesting question. The answer www.cnmeonline.com

to that would be different from virtually any other vendor on the planet.

Oracle is the only vendor that provides a complete solution, ranging from on-premise hardware and software to a public cloud solution. All of our traditional hardware competitors don’t offer cloud services, and vice versa.

Unlike other vendors, we’re designing our hardware and software to run in our Oracle public cloud, so we

www.cnmeonline.com

can provide those as cloud services.

Every hardware infrastructure platform that we’re building to run in our public cloud, we can also sell to run on-premise.

Should things change, customers can seamlessly move workloads back and forth. From an engineering perspective, the advantages are significant. Engineering runs our public cloud, and runs in our products and cloud deployment.

Tell me about your SPARC S7 processor that you’ve recently released.

It’s not just another SPARC announcement, which would’ve been a new chip and set of servers.

This time it’s a new chip in three different forms of consumption: public cloud services that are now available as dedicated compute IaaS, a new engineered system – the Minicluster S7 – and two new servers, the S7-2 (1u) and the S7-2L (2u).

We’ve built on our existing M7 portfolio. The M7 processor comes in the form of mid-range and high end servers, and the M7 SuperCluster we announced in Fall 2015.

We’re not replacing this line, but expanding the M7 line with S7-based products, to extend our reach to customers for different workloads.

The S7 has achieved x86 commodity cost points, and we’ve done AUGUST 2016

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INTERVIEW

Marshall Choy

this through engineering and integration to maintain the same level of enterprise functionality and differentiation that we deliver with the M7, with Software in Silicon.

We’ve taken things around security and analytics acceleration, and implemented things typically done in software into the microprocessor. We’ve put I/O and memory controllers into the microprocessor in order to give lower latency, higher bandwidth, and therefore better transactional throughput. It costs less, because you have less components. The notion of price comparisons with x86 no longer exists, so you can have a business-related conversation rather than the distraction of who’s cheaper.

With the MiniCluster, the software and design work we’ve done has brought a lot of things that are typically enjoyed by high end and mid-range users to virtually any customer regardless of their capabilities and skillsets.

M-7-based systems are deployed in high end and mid-range environments, where customers have very sophisticated skillsets for general systems admin. The MiniCluster is ideal for remote or branch offices and SMEs. We’ve taken over 200 previously manually implemented security controls and implemented them in a way that allows customers to secure their system with click of a mouse.

Don’t you think that’s a complacent approach to security from a processes perspective?

We’re not saying security is 46

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guaranteed; that’s a great invitation for every hacker out there. It’s been an interesting discussion that we’ve had with the three-letter agencies in the US, who have come to the realisation that Oracle has added additional layers of protection and security to its hardware that did not exist before. The exercise of securing systems is non-stop. We think we’ve solved a performance

The journey to cloud won’t happen overnight. It’s not a magic pill that you swallow and it solves all your problems.”

issue by and large, but the next issue is security. We don’t have a separate group that’s focused on point security solutions per product.

We’ve made security a part of the development lifestyle, for all hardware and software products.

That means it’s seamless across our products. Our advantage is having the whole stack of hardware and software. In order to enable application level benefits,

sometimes you have to do very low level integration work. Our ability to do that differentiates us.

From what you’ve seen, does the Middle East have a preference towards on-premise or cloud deployments?

It varies across industries. Banks and telcos are obviously regulated, and you have sovereign data rights which can be inhibitors for public cloud. I would broaden the answer to your question and say that cloud adoption as a whole is advancing quite nicely. Even for customers where we see constraints around regulation, we see a lot of private cloud infrastructure activity.

Does the lack of resources in this region concern you?

No, it doesn’t. This is exactly the type of region that a system like the MiniCluster was designed for.

We have eliminated 90 percent of administration and the requirements in terms of skills needed to operate the system, so the notion of needing highly skilled people goes away. We think that will play very nicely in the Middle East.

The journey to cloud won’t happen overnight, it’s not a magic pill that you swallow and it solves all your problems. While it is very exciting, it also presents customers and vendors with a lot of challenges and opportunities. It will take 5-10 years. That’s not to say there won’t be computers or data centres and everything will be done on cloud.

Customers are figuring out what workloads they want to acquire asa-service. www.cnmeonline.com

ANALYST CORNER

Jenny Sussin, research director at Gartner

RESPONDING TO NONHUMAN CUSTOMERS IT leaders must learn to support “thing service”, says Jenny Sussin, research director at Gartner.

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illions of things – buildings, machines, devices and other materials embedded with sensors — will begin to request support on behalf of human customers during the next two years, so how should businesses respond?

It’s essential to identify the level of intelligence of the things that will most likely be your customers. Things as customers will vary in their level of maturity, as well as in terms of the complexity of the service requests and the need for human intervention, all of which place different demands on customer service organisations.

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The level of intelligence of things becoming customers can be summarised using three groups: fixed, adaptable and autonomous (see Figure 1). Things in these groups are not bound to one group, but can function interchangeably, depending on their needs.

Fixed Things Fixed things as customers exist today in B2B and B2C environments and will continue to impact all industries at a much higher volume during the next three years.

A number of questions must be asked around these things.

What can they do? Things only request a specific type of customer service, as predefined by the human customers they support.

Who sets the rules and makes decisions? People set the rules that are then used by things to execute support requests; fixed things use simple reasoning rules.

What types of rules are in place? Things will be able to identify and make requests. They will already know their supply or service threshold and their product or service condition.

For example, Preventice Solutions’ BodyGuardian Heart is www.cnmeonline.com

a wireless external monitor that allows medical teams to monitor patients while they’re in their typical environment. The monitor sends information on heart rhythm to the Preventice Services Monitoring Centre and can request customer support when abnormalities are detected.

Adaptable things Adaptable things as customers show up in some B2B manufacturing environments today and are most likely to appear in the agriculture, automotive, financial services, healthcare, IT, transportation and utility industries during the next three years.

What can they do? Things can choose between competing service providers or channels and decide which one to work with based on predefined rules.

Who sets the rules and makes decisions? People define the rules, and things are entrusted with decision making.

Autonomous things are given explicit instructions on what they can and cannot do, both legally and ethically.

www.cnmeonline.com

What types of rules are in place? In addition to the capabilities of fixed things, adaptable things can understand option ranges, price or budget thresholds and preferred selection criteria.

Example: Ambyint sensors, which are mounted to oil well pumps, alert operations managers of issues with machinery or the site, and recommend solutions either automatically or with human intervention.

Autonomous things Autonomous things are the least likely to be an immediate concern for customer service organisations, despite their use in financial services environments such as for algorithmbased trading.

What can they do? Things can request support by predicting customers’ needs based on the context and learned customer preferences.

Who sets the rules and makes decisions? Autonomous things are given basic guidelines, but have predictive and prescriptive engines, as well as machine learning, so they become smarter as they learn more about customer preferences.

What types of rules are in place? In addition to the capabilities of fixed and adaptable things, autonomous things are given explicit instructions on what they can and cannot do, both legally and ethically.

Example: One example would be a smart car that knows it will need an oil change within the next 2,000 miles. The car would know that its owner typically drives 2,000 miles in one month, so it has one month to identify the best deal on an oil change from a shop with the best reviews. It would then schedule the appointment directly with the shop’s service team, handling all of the relevant details and requests, as well as prepayment.

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INSIGHT

By Mike Elgan, IDG News Service

CAN WE TRUST SMART TECHNOLOGY? Automation is convenient and seemingly brilliant, but does that mean we should be handing over all responsibility to the machines?

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id we learn nothing from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey?

In the film, astronauts on a mission to Jupiter discover that the HAL 9000 artificial intelligence computer that controls and automates all functions on the spacecraft starts glitching.

The astronauts get worried, HAL gets paranoid and - *spoiler alert* - kills everyone on the ship.

The moral of the story is that when lives depend on fully automated systems, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on them.

How do you use something that’s fully automatic, anyway? What is the responsibility of the user? Can we just hand over control to the bots? Recent events in the news suggest that when it comes to using our automatic products and features, some people are doing it wrong.

Petnet is a $149 cloud-controlled smart feeder for dogs and cats that automatically dispenses pet food on a schedule. The feeder connects to the Internet via your home Wi-Fi network, and you control the feeder with an iOS app, and even dispense treats manually.

Petnet is also tied to a pet food 50

AUGUST 2016

delivery service, which can also be automated through Amazon’s Dash programme. You don’t have to order pet food; the feeder will do it for you.

Crucially, Petnet monitors your pet’s food and water consumption to make sure it doesn’t get fat.

Sounds awesome, right?

But when a Google-provisioned service that the Petnet cloud depends on went down, some 10 percent of Petnet feeders stopped working properly for about 10 hours. Although the company claims automated feeding schedules were unaffected, users lost the ability to feed manually or change schedules. Some pets went hungry.

Petnet sent an email to customers, advising them to “please ensure that your pets have been fed manually.” But many customers are relying on Petnet to feed their pets while they’re on holiday.

This is just one example of how we’re rapidly screaming towards a future where many of our appliances, equipment, vehicles, gadgets and services are completely automated, controlled remotely by artificial intelligence or locally by algorithms.

It’s important for us, as consumers and users, to learn how to safely incorporate these technologies into

our lives. What these events tell us is that the right way to use automation is to treat it like the convenience it is, and not a replacement for human awareness, monitoring and judgment.

Pets can’t be left in the care of a cloud service entirely. As with before the automatic pet feeder era, a human guardian who cares must be available to check on, feed, or pet-sit any pet when we go on vacation. We can’t turn pets’ lives and well-being completely over to an app.

Climate control, and by extension smoke and carbon monoxide detection, can’t be left entirely in the hands of the machines. The elderly, or others who might not be able to take care of themselves, can’t be placed in the hands of algorithms, because sometimes algorithms go haywire.

What we need is a set of cultural norms that make it clear to people that automating important things doesn’t and can’t replace a human being paying attention.

Because, in the words of HAL 9000, any harm that results from turning our loved ones’ safety over to the machines “can only be attributable to human error.”

Words of wisdom from HAL. www.cnmeonline.com

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INSIGHT

By Sharon Goldman, CIO

HOW THE IOT IS REVOLUTIONISING RETAIL

The world of retail may never be the same, thanks to the Internet of Things and its ecosystem of computers, smartphones, stores, vehicles, wearables and more.

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hroughout all industries, a majority of large companies (those with 1,000 employees or more) are using or planning to use IoT technologies, according to Forrester Research’s 2015 Global Business Technographics Networks and Telecommunications Survey. Those enterprises are hoping to gather data that can be leveraged to improve efficiency, serve customers better and gain insights into new ways of doing business.

But IoT technology is already reshaping and revolutionising the retail industry, yielding advances and new opportunities in customer service, throughout the supply chain and in brick-and-mortar stores and other channels. Tech-savvy retailers looking to gain a competitive advantage are installing smart shelves that detect when inventory is low, RFID sensors that track goods throughout the supply chain, systems that send personalised digital coupons to shoppers when they enter the store, and sensors that monitor the quality of perishable items.

Today’s consumers expect their shopping experience to be seamless across every channel, whether it’s a brick-and-mortar store, an 52

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ecommerce site, a mobile app or even a phone call with customer service. IoT technologies offer an almost endless capacity for transforming the retail consumer experience. In addition to potentially revolutionising customerfacing applications, IoT technologies may play a big role in retail supply chain and delivery operations, says Gene Wojciechowski, former CIO of Walmart.com and current CIO at Newgistics. “Retail is detail — they want to understand the minutest detail, where the goods are and how up-to-date they are,” he says. “The desire for information is insatiable, and IoT can provide some of that.”

Wojciechowski adds that not only will IoT technology allow for better visibility, such as identifying within a 10-minute timeframe when goods will be delivered, but it can also aid in loss prevention and be used to measure the impact of environmental factors, such as heat on goods moving through the supply chain. “Damages to goods can be recorded with the exact time and location of the damage, providing an audit trail to identify the responsible party,” he says.

Automating and optimising the supply chain is one of the key uses of IoT among retailers, says Nayaki Nayyar,

General Manager and Global Head of IoT and Innovation Go to Market, SAP. “Everyone knows in advance not to run out of chocolate before Valentine’s Day or beer around the Super Bowl, but the real question is how to handle an unexpected surge in demand due to an unscheduled event,” she says. Getting this on-shelf availability right is possible with a highly responsive IoT-enabled supply chain system, shelf sensors in the stores and warehouse systems that automatically re-order products when inventories reach certain levels.

In retail specifically, the biggest immediate hurdle for companies to overcome is how to manage, analyse and act on the reams of data pouring in from all of the connected devices.

To quickly and accurately understand shopper behaviours, for example, high-performance analytics must be applied to the data to separate noise from meaningful signals.

The retail industry is at the beginning of the IoT journey, says Nayyar. And the important thing for merchants to recognise at this point is that the IoT isn’t just about sensors and connectivity - it’s really about business outcomes, such as creating new customer experiences, revenue streams and business models. www.cnmeonline.com

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INSIGHT

Alexander Rauser, Chief Executive Officer, Prototype

REVOLUTIONISING HEALTHCARE WITH SMART DEVICES Smartphone healthcare is gathering momentum, and altering the way in which we receive advice and treatment from professionals. Alexander Rauser, Chief Executive Officer, Prototype, analyses how healthcare brands can evolve by adopting a digital strategy.

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martphone healthcare is becoming a huge business.

Industry giants such as Apple and Microsoft all want a piece of the pie and are facilitating the rapid rise of the business. Cloud-based services that claim to offer a complete portable medical service are starting to materialise, allowing users to book an appointment, video conference with a doctor, order a prescription and even view medical results. With the rise in wearables, cloud services can also receive chart information and store data from Bluetooth-enabled devices.

Integrating a smart digital strategy into healthcare can help reduce costs significantly. Many beta services have been trialling remote services on desktop, however there is a shift towards mobile, which will require a certain change in behaviour. From blood pressure to oxygen in the blood to lung function, smartphones can highlight a multitude of signs about a patient’s health, and monitor these trends over time, offering data to healthcare practitioners that they have never had access to before.

Three major areas where healthcare brands can evolve using smartphone devices include: • Filling in the void for healthcare staff. Smart devices provide an 54

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alternative means of communicating with colleagues. Staff can also access the Internet, use a healthcare app to find information on certain ailments and communicate with patients across multiple channels whether in person or virtually. The concept of patients and healthcare staff bringing their own device to work supports a digital healthcare strategy. Doctors and nurses can show patients test results and diagnoses on a tablet or smart device, as well as showcasing useful resources to help patients recover.

Logistically, smart devices also help patients navigate hospitals, receive reminders from their physicians and help monitor their health.

• Enabling the remote doctor.

Smartphones don’t only support patients and practitioners in the doctor’s office, but also do so remotely.

For the most part, routine labs can be performed with just a drop of blood.

Add to this a smartphone attachment and you can perform smaller physical exams on yourself from checking ear wax for an ear infection, to swabbing your throat to check for a virus. Smart devices can also measure factors of your environment such as the quality of the air you breathe to the pesticides in your food. The potential

You can perform smaller physical exams on yourself, such as swabbing your throat to check for a virus.

for patients to monitor every aspect of their health and well-being is right at their fingertips.

• Using data to diagnose common medical problems.

Refining the computer software algorithms within each channel used by patients and by aggregating data into quality recommendations can help solidify the existence of smart health. A Smart device can then warn patients of certain symptoms such as a heart attack, well before they become severe. www.cnmeonline.com

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INSIGHT

Bart Saelets, Solution Architect, F5

ARE WE RUNNING OUT OF WIRELESS BANDWIDTH? As the use of wireless connectivity increases across the globe - and increases at such a startling rate - bandwidth is being squeezed. Bart Saelets, Solution Architect, F5, investigates whether we really are heading towards a ‘capacity crunch.’

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hen you work for a tech company, you're always on call for support. I remember fixing a family member’s Wi-Fi connection that had slowed to a crawl. “Maybe our Wi-Fi’s nearly full?” they’d suggested.

It wasn’t the issue with their WiFi, but it wasn’t such an outlandish suggestion. Hitting bandwidth capacity is an issue the industry is slowly facing up to. By the year 2020, there will be 4.6 billion mobile subscribers across the globe, according to the GSMA. Those with more than one mobile service, such as one for work and a personal one, will push that figure of actual mobile subscriptions even higher. By 2020, it is thought that spectrum demand will triple.

For service providers, the reality is that at the end of the communication path there is less bandwidth available.

This means overall networking performance can suffer, while average latency increases to negatively impact the user-experience. Slow data transfer rates and high end-to-end latency are a real thorn in the side for service providers, disappointing customers, leading to subscriber churn and lost revenue.

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Traditionally, methods such as video compression and caching have helped, but encrypted connections and developments such as HTTP 2.0 have made this more difficult.

Reliable and consistent data delivery is achievable however, even when more and more subscribers are being added to the network. This happens by optimising the TCP connections that deliver data to and from the subscribers with a solution that sits between the Internet and the wireless network.

This way it can manage both sides of the connection - the wireless network on the subscriber side and the wide area network on the internet side - ensuring the different performance characteristics of these network technologies are accounted for.

There’s a reason this is an important step: the Internet side of the connection doesn’t generally suffer from much congestion, latency or packet loss, and therefore requires different TCP settings than that of the wireless side of the network, which does suffer from those issues.

Standard TCP stacks in web servers are often fine-tuned for internet-side characteristics only, and therefore can perform poorly over radio networks.

A more modern approach to TCP optimisation solutions is one that can adapt to both sides of the connection. At F5 we are facing up to service provider demands through TCP Express, which is part of our BIG-IP platform. One advantage of this is that the enhancements can be applied to each individual connection, meaning each one is tuned to get the maximum benefit.

And it’s not just bandwidth that can be improved with TCP optimisation. For example, network monitoring technologies can be used to improve the stability of the connection. Additionally, optimising the TCP protocol this way means the solution is not dependent on inspecting the content of the connection, which means encrypted traffic can be optimised as well.

Using a TCP optimisation solution of this nature can offer anything between 15 and 100 percent broadband data transfer improvement. More than ever, the pressure is on to future-proof with the user-experience in mind. Those that delay on making the leap with solutions like TCP optimisation will soon feel the heat. www.cnmeonline.com

INSIGHT

Sajid Iqbal, co-founder & director of strategy & operations, Buzinessware

WHY SHOULD UAE BUSINESSES CHOOSE LOCAL HOSTING? Thousands of UAE companies are still using offshore host providers at unnecessarily high prices.

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he International Monetary Fund has forecasted that the UAE’s economy will expand by 2.3 per cent with Dubai, in particular, entering a phase of rapid acceleration as it prepares to host Expo 2020. The region’s digital economy is poised to double its growth in the next three years, passing over $30 billion by 2018, according to a recent report released

by Deloitte Middle East. The report further states that the growth is key proof of the continuing expanding reach of the Internet across the Middle East and North African (MENA) region.

According to a report from Buzinessware, a small fraction of today’s UAE-based companies (9 percent) host their online content locally. The remaining 91 percent, which is composed of around 335,450 companies, are hosted offshore at an average cost of AED 800 per annum.

This is far more costly than local hosting packages that are priced at AED 365 and offer the same service and data privileges. With this in mind, the report states that over AED 132 million can be saved annually by switching from offshore host providers to local web hosting options.

When choosing to use local host providers, there are a number of 58

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factors to consider before making the switch. There are many benefits to be gained from switching to a local provider, including efficient and quick responsive customer service, cost savings and increased security and performance. Accessing content through an overseas host goes through costly and under provisioned international links - causing increased delays for the user.

Meanwhile, if done locally, only one phone call can easily connect the business owner to the support team, which can easily resolve all website administration and technical problems while also saving time in the process. Small business owners are able to meet with the web hosting company personnel in person.

The owners are able to establish a professional business relationship with the web hosting company.

Other advantages that a local hosting provider can deliver are speed and performance. Website owners should know that a locally hosted website loads approximately three times faster than hosting the website with an international web hosting company - mainly because the site is physically closer to the website data centre. Search engines such as Google often use geographic location of site as a ranking factor.

Small business owners should also consider other factors like the capacity of bandwidth needed to handle a large volume of visitors to the website; the number of email accounts that are allowed to be created by the locally hosted company; the enhancement of customer reliability and website security. Small business owners need to know how to choose web hosting plans according to the best features and services needed by the business instead of by the lowest price.

Some local businesses will have international audiences, and hosting with a local provider does not offer the same advantages for smaller businesses. For instance, since the audience is international, there is no single location that will serve webpages quicker for all site visitors.

In this case, content delivery networks are often employed such that copies of the website and its images and scripts can be served from physical locations close to the current visitors.

For example, visitors from the US would be served from a US-based data centre, while visitors from Europe would be served from a data centre somewhere in Europe. In this sense, even internationally targeted websites can benefit from the advantages of local web hosting. www.cnmeonline.com

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OPINION

Tim Armandpour, VP, Engineering, PagerDuty

SQUARE DEAL Tim Armandpour, VP, Engineering, PagerDuty, gives his take on how IT leaders can negotiate good service level agreements with vendors.

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number of companies are now using a range of cloud applications. Their uptime performance is measured

by Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

These agreements define different expectations and responsibilities, which should be met by vendors during instances of glitches, system crashes and downtime that may impact an organisation’s business continuity.

Gartner estimates that downtime caused by these issues can cost major corporations as much as $100,000 per hour.

However, not all SLAs are created equal, and worse, some SLAs are downright deceptive. Therefore, IT decision makers must evaluate SLAs to assure they cover minimum requirements for business continuity.

When negotiating SLAs, watch out for these common traps: SLAs with matching numbers of 9s are equal. If a vendor’s SLA guarantees a certain percentage of uptime during the month — such as 99.999 percent, or ‘five 9s’ — that means the site won’t be down more than one percent of the time during the month, right?

Don’t be so sure. First, get in writing that the definition of downtime includes not just ‘inaccessible,’ but also considerations for unreliable and unusable service caused by service performance degradation.

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Another common malpractice is when vendors exclude scheduled maintenance from their definitions of downtime. Don’t let them get away with it. Customers will be upset any time they cannot transact necessary business, whether one of your vendors foresaw the problem and ‘scheduled’ the downtime or not. You don’t want diminished customer turnover because your vendor allows timeouts that don’t count against their five 9s.

Look for vendors who have eliminated scheduled maintenance by using iterative maintenance strategies that avoid downtime. If your vendor doesn’t use this method, be sure to clarify the following areas: • Performance indicators (What does ‘so slow as to be unusable’ mean?)

• Problem management (What problem resolution responsibilities fall to the customer?)

• Terms and penalties (If terms aren’t satisfied, what exactly are the penalties and how are they enforced?)

‘Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back’ is a panacea. It turns out even the most generous fee refund or penalty for downtime doesn’t cover your losses. Here’s why: Consider a cloud vendor’s selfdescribed ‘industry-leading SLA’ of 99.95 percent that credits your account five percent of the paidin-advance monthly fee for each 30 minutes of downtime, up to 100

percent of your fee. Full refunds are only issued when downtime reaches 10 hours in a month. More importantly, a fee refund is trivial compared to the true potential cost of a 10-hour outage, which could include a loss in sales and customer confidence and result in customer churn.

SLAs will scale with my business. SLAs are negotiated to meet the needs and size of the customer at the time of negotiation.

Many businesses, however, change dramatically in size — even as often as quarter over quarter. A good SLA will outline specific intervals for reviewing the contract to ensure it meets changing business needs.

Some vendors take this a step further by building in notification workflows that indicate when an SLA is close to being breached so you can begin negotiations based on changes in scale. These tools also help ensure that scheduled SLA review meetings actually take place.

Good SLAs protect both businesses and suppliers from disappointment and missed expectations. When entering SLA negotiations, IT leaders can protect their business interests by clarifying what five 9s entails, by seeking vendors with methodologies to avoid downtime and by setting specific intervals for contract renegotiations that can scale with the business. www.cnmeonline.com

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INSIGHT

By Thornton May, Computerworld

A BLEAK FUTURE FOR THE CIO?

A

group of CXOs and I recently pondered the question: what will the role of the CIO be in 2030? To answer this question, we have to make some forecasts regarding what the social, political, economic and technological environment will look like.

Do a search of the term “2030” and the results will span a spectrum of macro and micro issues (the x-axis) and attitudes (the y-axis), ranging from utopian to dystopian. They all will tend to reflect the current concerns and agendas of insulated and isolated elites.

Spending a day or so online on the macro level, you might learn about the evolving state of global trade, the pace of the move toward global gender equality and the chance that Earth could be struck by an asteroid within the next 14 years. One concludes that, barring wide-scale behaviour change, there will be no shortage of shortages: food, water, energy and housing.

Spending a similar amount of time online on the micro level, you might learn how crowded London will become and the rising price of homes there, the losing battle to reduce male obesity and the evolution of global personal sanitary habits.

Not immediately forthcoming is what the role of the CIO will be in 2030.

The CIO at one of America’s most 62

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prestigious institutions of higher learning, addressing an audience of over 160 no-nonsense CXOs recently, suggested that we are living in the best of times technologically.

He recalled that in the mid-1980s, ahead-of-the-curve CIOs told their organisations, “There will come a time when everybody in the enterprise will have the technology kit they need, and it is going to be dirt cheap and really reliable. That is going to be nirvana.”

They were right. We are living in an age of cheap, reliable and readily accessible technology. Non-IT professionals in the enterprise don’t need us to buy technology. They don’t need us to deploy technology.

But they do need CIOs to create a curated buffet of technology options. They do need CIOs to sculpt a technology decision-making process that makes it easy to do the right thing.

They do need CIOs to euthanise legacy systems with minimal disruption.

The problem is that they can start to feel autonomous in the technology sphere and not recognise that they need IT professionals to extract full value from an exponentially expanding technology choice set.

The danger, as that higher-ed figure opined, is that CIOs will not correct that misperception — will not materially intervene in the current flow of their

career trajectory — and, come 2030 or so, will find themselves essential but not strategic.

Essential but not strategic?

Are you wondering whether something that is essential cannot be strategic? Well, if the CIO’s role is just to make sure that everything is running, what is the difference between the CIO and the guy in charge of the air conditioning? In the overheated and globally warmed climate of 2030, you will absolutely need to have air conditioning.

Similarly, in a totally chipped, omnisurveilled, algorithmically analysed 2030, you’ve got to have IT. A world where IT is perceived as essential but not strategic is an ugly place to be. If IT is not up and running, you will be fired, but there is no upside to being great. IT just has to work. It has become air conditioning.

Madge Meyer, the author of The Innovator’s Path: How Individuals, Teams, and Organisations Can Make Innovation Business-as-Usual, made a similar point back in 2011, “There will not be an IT group managing technologies since everything will be available in the cloud. Technologies will be utility like electricity. It will be there for people to use when they need it.” www.cnmeonline.com

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PRODUCTS

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Launches and releases

Brand: BlackBerry Product: DTEK50

Brand:

Xiaomi

Product:

Mi Notebook Air

WHAT IT DOES: Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air’s 13.3-inch notebook version is equipped with Nvidia GeForce 940MX dedicated graphics card, Intel Core i5 processor, 256GB PCIe SSD with expandable SATA SSD slot, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. According to the Chinese firm, the device can last up to 9.5 hours on a single charge and charges to 50 percent capacity in 30 minutes. It weighs 1.28 kilograms and measures 309.6 x 210.9 x 14.8 millimeters. It features Type-C USB for charging, and two USB 3.0 ports and a single HDMI interface.

Meanwhile, the slightly smaller 12.5-inch version weighs 1.07 kilograms and has a battery life of 11.5 hours on a single charge. It runs the Intel Core m3 processor with integrated graphics and has 4GB of RAM and 128GB expandable SSD. The devices run on Windows 10 and come in gold and silver.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: The notebooks will be targeting the Chinese market for now, given how the ‘Mi Ecosystem’ has so far been largely contained in the country.

There’s still no news of its global release. The devices are priced at $525 for the 12.5-inch and $750 for the 13.3-inch variation.

WHAT IT DOES: The DTEK50 is the latest Android-powered smartphone released by BlackBerry. Fully equipped with Android Marshmallow 6.0, the mobile company highlights that the DTEK50 combines its security, privacy and productivity capabilities in an alltouch design.

The new device sports a 5.2-inch full HD display, capable of displaying 16 million colours. The screen is made of scratch-resistant glass and features an oleophobic coating to protect against smudges and fingerprints. It is also equipped with 16GB of internal memory and is expandable up to 2TB through microSD cards. DTEK50 has an 8MP front facing camera and a 13MP autofocus rear camera, with features like

Phase Detection Auto Focus and a dual-tone LED flash.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: DTEK50 encrypts all users’ information, including business critical data and personal data such as pictures, videos and contacts. Malware protection is also builtin along with back-up, wipe and restore capabilities. Additional software provides users with visibility and control over which apps get access to personal info or device features such as the microphone or camera.

The smartphone will soon be available in the UAE and Saudi Arabia from leading retail stores and will be available at a suggested retail price of AED 1199 and SAR 1199.

Brand: Sennheiser Product: PXC 550 Wireless WHAT IT DOES: The PXC 550 Wireless, according to Sennheiser, has been designed to meet the demands of the frequent traveller, with long-haul battery performance of up to 30 hours. It has features like NoiseGard hybrid adaptive noise cancellation, and an intuitive, earcup-mounted touch control panel and voice prompt system allows for a convenient selection of settings, and can automatically pause music and calls when the headphones are taken off.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: The headphones have four presets for adjusting sound and one customisable Director mode

that can be modified using Sennheiser’s companion app, CapTune, which is available for Android and iOS. The app also allows sound adjustments with the equaliser, and features SoundCheck with which users can tune their music’s sound by A/B-testing different set-ups. The plug-in for the PXC 550 Wireless also facilitates personalisation of adaptive noise cancellation, audio prompts, and the activation of Smart Pause.

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Tony Carter, Rafael Grossman, Co-Founder, Atom Healthcare Factory, Global Futurist, Head - Creator 1st Google VR Services, Spotify Surgeon

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Paul Clarke, CTO, Ocado

Assine George, CIO, University of Western Australia

Pascal Dauboin, R&D and Innovation Director, Total Russia

Greg Cannon, VP Dr. Timothy Low, of Marketing & CEO, Farrer Park, All Things Digital, Singapore Caesars Entertainment

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BACKLOG

5 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN Blockchain technology is everywhere, but what does it do and how will it affect us?

1. Don’t call it 'the' blockchain The first thing to know about blockchain is, there isn’t one: there are many.

Blockchains are distributed, tamper-proof public ledgers of transactions. The most well-known is the record of bitcoin transactions.

However, in addition to tracking cryptocurrencies, blockchains are also being used to record loans, stock transfers, contracts, healthcare data and even votes.

2. Security, transparency: the network’s run by us There’s no central authority in a blockchain system: Participating computers exchange transactions for inclusion in the ledger they share over a peer-to-peer network. Each node in the chain keeps a copy of the ledger, and can trust others’ copies of it because of the way they are signed.

Periodically, they wrap up the latest transactions in a new block of data to be added to the chain. Alongside the transaction data, each block contains a computational ‘hash’ of itself and of the previous block in the chain.

Hashes, or digests, are short digital representations of larger chunks of data.

Modifying or faking a transaction in an earlier block would change its hash, 66

AUGUST 2016

requiring that the hashes embedded in it and all subsequent blocks be recalculated to hide the change.

That would be extremely difficult to do before all honest actors added new, legitimate transactions – which reference the previous hashes – to the end of the chain.

3. Big business is taking an interest in blockchain technology Blockchain technology was originally something talked about by antiestablishment figures seeking independence from central control, but it’s fast becoming part of the establishment. Companies such as IBM and Microsoft are selling it, and major banks and stock exchanges are buying.

4. No third-party in between Because the computers making up a blockchain system contribute to the content of the ledger and guarantee its integrity, there is no need for a middleman or trusted third-party agency to maintain the database.

That’s one of the things attracting banks and trading exchanges to the technology – but it’s also proving a stumbling block for bitcoin as traffic scales. The total computing power devoted to processing bitcoin is said

to exceed that of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers combined, however, recently, the volume of bitcoin transactions has increased that the network was taking up to 30 minutes to confirm that some of them had been included in the ledger. On the other hand, it typically only takes a few seconds to confirm credit card transactions, which do rely on a central authority between payer and payee.

5. Programmable money One of the more interesting uses for blockchain is for storing a record not of what happened in the past, but of what should happen in the future. Organisations that are using blockchain technology to store and process ‘smart contracts,’ executed by the network of computers participating in the blockchain are doing so on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The technology allows them to respond to transactions by gathering, storing or transmitting information or transferring whatever digital currency the blockchain deals in.

The immutability of the contracts is dependent on the blockchain in which they are stored in. www.cnmeonline.com

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