Computer News Middle East March 2014

WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS issue 266 | March 2014 WWW.CNMEONLINE.COM

Converged storage MWC 2014: It’s all about mobile

Innovation on Tap

African + Eastern powers business with new technologies

Getting smarter

The global rise of Smart Cities

true calling How Khalifa Fund IT Director, Dr. Zuhair Lardhi combined IT success with academic rigour

PLUS: jumbo’s cloud journey | virtues of virtualisation | Mobile number portability

EDITORIAL Chairman Dominic De Sousa

Affordable Internet

Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor Talk to us: E-mail: jeevan.thankappan@ cpimediagroup.com

CEO Nadeem Hood

The 2014 edition of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was an eyeopener of sorts for me. Though I’d been to the show couple of times in the past since it moved from Cannes to the majestic Catalonian city, what struck me this time as I walked through the eight halls of Gran Via was the pervasive nature of mobility. The Congress was no longer about just mobile technology or networks; there were connected cars, wearable technology and an array of other smart devices on display at the show floor.

While in the past the show was dominated by operators and telecom network players, this year a sizeable number of IT vendors had their presence at MWC. This clearly indicates that the lines between telecom and IT are blurring. I was hosted by SAP at the show, which showcased an impressive line-up of solutions targeted at telecom carriers. Not far from SAP was Ericsson, a traditional telecom infrastructure vendor, strutting their wares around security, cloud and OSS/BSS, something you normally associate with IT. As expected, all the major smartphone vendors launched something new at the show but what really caught my eye was the prototype of sub-$25 smartphone running on Firefox OS. Sure, it might lack the finesse and features of what you normally expect of a smartphone, but this will surely be appealing to users in cost-sensitive markets such as India and Indonesia. Incidentally, BlackBerry showcased its sub-$200 touch screen smartphone, borne out of its recent alliance with Foxconn, again targeted at markets such as Indonesia.

This augurs well for the industry and consumers alike. First, the emergence of Firefox OS based on HTML 5 is likely to break the duopoly of Android and iOS in the smartphone space. Second, with the emergence of low-cost smartphones, mobile is indeed going to connect the next five billion people, who do not even have basic Internet connectivity yet. This is why Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the show was widely discussed – he spoke of his company’s Internet.org initiative, which aims to make Internet access free or low cost to under-served communities. Mobile operators have a key role to play in this and I hope the Middle East players jump on the bandwagon soon.

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MWc 2014: it’s all about Mobile

InnovatIon on tap

Tel: +971 4 375 1500 Fax: +971 4 447 2409

African + Eastern powers business with new technologies

getting sMarter

The global rise of Smart Cities

true calling How Khalifa Fund IT Director, Dr. Zuhair Lardhi combined IT success with academic rigour

Printed by Al Ghurair Printing & Publishing Regional partner of

PLUS: jUmbo’S cLoUd joUrney | virtUeS of virtUaLiSation | mobiLe nUmber PortabiLity

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Indoor Performa was left out What happens to connectivity when we enter subways, high-rise buildings and shopping malls?

And how can we make networks perform as well inside as they do outside? Increased urbanization means people are spending more time indoors than ever before. Indoor performance will be the next big differentiating factor between operators.

This is what we call Real Performance.

#REALPERFORMANCE

ance

EDITORIAL Our events

Risky business

Annie Bricker Deputy Editor Talk to us: E-mail: annie.bricker@ cpimediagroup.com

As I settle in to CNME, and Dubai, I have been hugely impressed by the city. Once a small desert backstop, Dubai’s skyscrapers and lit-up towers loom above a town that craves progress. Dubai is growing faster than its reputation can keep up, but it is undeniable that the word is out—some of sharpest minds and most influential companies are converging to build something new and exciting in the GCC. In a city that is relatively new on the scene, companies have to take risks.

And it is obvious that the risks that are being taken in Dubai are paying off. Industry-based hubs like Media City, Knowledge Village and Internet City have created pockets rich with intellect and collaborative spirit. The city is abuzz with progress, and its position as the region’s leader in IT has been solidified with the tap for EXPO 2020. Technology giants are supporting the city’s push forward, and companies in the region are thinking outside the box every day to find solutions to help business increase.

This month we were lucky to meet with some of the region’s top CIOs at a very lively roundtable event hosted by Cognizant. I was impressed, not only with the quality of the participants, but by the honesty of the discussion. Participants discussed the difficulty of implementing new technology in the shadow of flat budgets and the meaning of the word innovation. While the table agreed that innovation should be a top priority, we debated the risks and potential pitfalls in implementing unproven solutions.

Dubai is in perpetual transition—a canvas upon which a vision of the future is being painted. So what is the next step for this intrepid and innovative community? In this month’s issue CNME delves deeper in to the future of Smart Cities. With EXPO 2020 on the horizon, what is Dubai doing to evolve into a Smart City? What are some of the lessons we have learned from Smart Cities of the recent past? Will Dubai be able to reach its connectivity goals in time to be an example for the world?

Further, we discuss the past and future of virtualisation trends in the region. As virtualisation takes hold in Middle East markets, the face of the region’s IT departments will inevitably change. What this means for the region’s enterprises, only time will tell. However, the effect of virtualisation on businesses in the Middle East are already apparent.

Moving to Dubai was nerve-wracking. I had never been to the emirate, and it was not without some butterflies in my stomach that I boarded a plane and flew into new territory. As I meet more people, particularly CIOs, I realise that I am in esteemed company. The technology industry here moves forward into domains not without caution, but without fear. I am relieved to know that I have landed in a region of such potential, and look forward to what comes next in the region’s IT industry.

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Contents

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ISSUE 266 | March 2014

38

Getting smarter

Features 38 Getting smarter

Smart Cities are being planned across the globe. Is the GCC ready to take on a connected urban area?

44 The virtues of virtualisation

Why did virtualisation take so long to take hold in the Middle East, and what is it's future in the region?

50 Bringing it all together

How can the rise of convergance drive efficiency and save money for enterprises?

56 Clear and present danger

Knowing is half the battle and a new class of network visibility solutions is emerging to help spot trouble before it starts.

56 48

Clear and open up Present danger

62 Mega projects

With EXPO 2020 on the horizon, there is a huge opportunity for enterprises to take on mega projects. But what will it take for these projects to succeed?

68 Down to the wire

How will mobile number portability benefit business users and enterprises alike?

Regulars

62

Mega Projects

22 Short takes

We round up the top stories to take our eye in the last month.

74 Insight

We look at the virtues and pitfalls of public, private and hybrid clouds.

80 Interview

Arun Khehar, Vice President, Applications, Middle East and Africa, Oracle chats with us about the region's jump into the clouds.

89 Product Watch

Check out the new smartphone from Huawei, a slim external harddrive and the new Sony tablet that is really making a splash.

68 8

90 Column

CNME’s man about town, James Dartnell, breaks down the Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp.

Down to the wire

Computer News Middle East

march 2014

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in depth IDC CIO Summit

Embracing third platform to survive Following its prediction that Middle East IT spend would top $32 billion in 2014, IDC hosted its 7th annual CIO Summit at Jumeirah Beach Hotel, hosting over 300 delegates from across the region.

M

arking its 50th anniversary, IDC recently hosted its 7th annual Middle East CIO summit at Jumeirah Beach Hotel in Dubai.

With CIOs from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, and Iraq, the event served as the biggest gathering of IT executives and vendors in the region.

Over 300 delegates attended the event, from sectors including banking and financial services, government, oil and gas, construction and real estate, utilities, and healthcare.

His Excellency Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, the UAE’s Minister of Culture, Youth, and Community Development inaugurated the event, and outlined the potential for development and innovation in the Middle East IT market in his opening address.

IDC recently forecast that regional IT spending will top $32 billion in 2014, and 10

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CIOs and vendors were attending in eager anticipation of finding the best ways to turn this spend to their advantage, and to forge and cement business relationships that could benefit them in the long term.

In his opening address, Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director, Middle East, Africa, and Turkey, IDC, highlighted insights from IDC’s recent CIO Survey, which prioritised a number of key themes based on their varying levels of importance to CIOs and other key stakeholders. “Our extensive research shows the region’s technology leaders are primarily concerned with driving innovation through IT, managing growing expectations from users, and measuring the ROI of their IT initiatives, he said.

“The proliferation of 3rd Platform technologies is not only changing the www.cnmeonline.com

solutions that CIOs need to implement, but also fundamentally affecting the role of IT in the organisation, the tasks and responsibilities of the IT department, and the skill sets required by CIOs and their IT staff.”

With the emergence of the third platform of IT—encompassing social media, mobility, Big Data analytics and cloud—it was inevitable that this would be a key theme on the agenda at the summit.

Mitchell Rose, Global CIO, IDC, delivered his speech ‘Developing enterprise mobile strategies: devices, infrastructure and applications’ and homed in on the need for exploring the role of technology convergence and the importance of redefining the network to create an open and simplified framework for businesses. “The way we define the network is rapidly changing thanks to the technological innovations that are emerging to combat the many challenges faced in the world of business today,” he said.

“CIOs are always asking how they can better manage their IT networks to ensure they are always optimised. As such, it is crucial that they fully understand the potential benefits of accommodating the future of softwaredefined networking: faster business decision making, a freeing up of resources for core business needs, and greater flexibility to address future business challenges.”

IDC also invited a number of international CIOs from leading organisations in India and China to share a variety of global best practices, with the aim of assisting the region’s technology leaders in their triple-pronged quest to optimise their IT infrastructures, enhance the efficiency of their operations, and align their IT strategies with the wider business aims of the organisation.

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in depth MWC

It’s all about mobile Around 75,000 people descended on the Catalonian city for the 2014 Mobile World Congress, which showcased faster and more flexible mobile networks and shiny new smartphones, among other connected things.

A

mong the biggest draws of the event this year was the maiden appearance of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right on the heels of his company’s humdinger of a deal with Whatsapp. He used his keynote address to talk about Internet.org project, a collaborative effort among telecommunications carriers, Facebook and other groups to provide free or inexpensive Internet access.

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“The issue is not a lack of infrastructure, at least in areas near major cities. More than 80 percent of people worldwide have 2G or 3G access. But the problem is that many people do not understand why they would want the Internet or what to do with it,” said Zuckerberg.

IBM CEO Virginia Rometty also took to the stage to announce a global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by its Watson supercomputer platform.

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in depth MWC

“By 2016, a quarter of the apps in the world will be in the cloud,” Rometty said.

These apps are generating massive amounts of data, she said.

On the carrier technology front, LTEAdvanced and small cells dominated the show.

LTE-Advanced consists of a number of different technologies designed to help improve performance, and the most important of these is carrier aggregation. It allows network to devote more resources to some users by treating two or more channels in the same or different frequency bands as if they were one.

Among the smartphone manufacturers, Samsung used the Congress for the debut of the fifth version of its Galaxy 3 flagship family.

The dust-and-water-resistant Galaxy S5 runs Android 4.4, is powered by a quad-core processor running at 2.5GHz, and has a 5.1inch screen with 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution.

Another high profile launch that caught our eye was that of Android-based X family from Nokia, which also launched the Nokia 220 feature phone and the Asha 230.

Sales of smartphones accounted for 53.6 percent of overall mobile phone sales last year, and exceeded annual sales of feature phones for the first time, Gartner said earlier this month. But while a growing number of users are choosing to buy a smartphone, Nokia thinks there is still room for feature phones.

Not to be outdone, Sony announced a slim, light and waterproof Android-based Xperia Z2 tablet and two new Xperia smartphones.

The 10.1 inch high-definition display tablet and the high-end Xperia Z2 smartphone, with a 5.2 inch display, will be available globally in March, while the Xperia M2 with a 4.8 inch display, will ship in April.

Pricing was not announced, although Sony said the M2 will sell at a “mid-range” price to reach new buyers, such as those moving from feature phones to smartphones for the first time.

While Mobile World Congress has typically been dominated by operators and telecom infrastructure players in the past, this year has seen many dominant IT players making their presence felt at the show. A case in point was SAP, which showcased its telecom solutions spanning customer experience management to BSS to Big Data.

Among the announcements made by SAP 14

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at the show, the most important one was the alliance with Xamarin, making it easier for developers to integrate their apps with the company’s mobile platform.

Xamarin’s platform lets developers use C# to build native applications for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows, and share on average 75 percent of the source code across the different operating systems, it said. The deal with SAP aims to make it easier for enterprise developers to www.cnmeonline.com

integrate SAP mobile solutions as well as other back-end data sources with their cross-platform applications.

Bringing in a regional flavor, SAP has also announced a couple of partnership agreements with STC and Etisalat. The Saudi operator has signed up SAP for network life-cycle management. This is expected to help STC gain visibility into equipment and assets, including muti-faceted historical details at every step of the life cycle.

in depth Cognizant Roundtable

Run different, run better CNME's Cognizant roundtable, held at the Habtoor Grand Hotel on February 19th, gathered some of the region's IT leaders to discuss innovations in the industry, key data trends and market movements. Innovation was the word of the day as CIOs from around the region sat down to talk about time, budgets and moving forward.

T

he Cognizant presentation, hosted by Stephen Fernandes, Regional Assistant Vice President, Cognizant and Steven Parry, MDM Practice Director, Cognizant, focused on ways IT professionals can work more efficiently and “run different and run better.” Be it by leveraging existing technologies in a new way, efficiently staffing projects, or taking on new applications and systems, CIOs should always be exploring new ways to streamline their businesses. The presentation also touched on the next master architecture of enterprise IT, the value of implementing new technologies to cut down on redundancy and overall

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costs, as well as ways to unbundle and transform tightly-coupled, industrial-age key processes. Overall, the main focus was how to take effective and efficient steps to transform enterprise IT. An active roundtable with regional CIOs lead to a fruitful discussion on topics ranging from IT budget constraints to the meaning of innovation. Participants also discussed the role of the CIO and how IT departments need to compartmentalise their time between innovation of new ideas and maintaining necessary systems.

CIOs are often faced with the challenge of moving forward and implementing new strategies while maintaining their business’ www.cnmeonline.com

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in depth Cognizant Roundtable

bottom line. The roundtable discussed how to explore new technology options when they are hamstrung by budget constraints.

“The challenge is that when we take on new costs, we have to pass those costs on to our customers. When we do that, we risk our business,” said Arun Tewary, Vice President, IT, Emirates Flight Catering.

The conversation then turned to when the costs of top-tier technology should be passed on to the customer, and when they should be absorbed by the enterprise.

“For example,” said Mahmoud Kamal, CIO, Al Habtoor Group, “Our guests expect to have wireless high-speed internet for free.

But that is a cost that we have to take on.

However, if they don’t have it, they feel like their quality of stay is not as good as other establishments.”

Beyond the budget, CIOs and IT teams are often pressed for time when it comes to implementing new technology. With so many moving parts, many CIOs find that they must dedicate much of their time to maintaining existing systems and supporting IT operations with little time left to dedicate to exploring new technology. Though technology innovation can decidedly be a potential differentiator, most IT departments struggle to find the time and resources to make it happen. Dr. Oualid Ali, Head of MIS Department, Sharjah University, put forth that IT should be looked at as an investment, not a cost. “We have to look at IT in terms of a return on investment,” said Ali, “IT needs to always be exploring new innovations to facilitate the bringing of new revenue through other departments to the organisations." Budget,

time and other resource constraints, the participants agreed, are the major limitations when it comes to the number of innovations in technology an IT department can produce and implement.

The discussion then turned to the role of the CIO, both as the technology lead of an enterprise and as a facilitator for new, innovative ideas throughout a business. “I think the key thing when you are looking at innovation,” says Terence Sathyanarayan, Corporate Director of IT, Drake & Skull International PJSC, “is selling internally and getting everyone in the business to think about innovation in driving progress in a business.” The roundtable participants agreed that everyone in a business, whether they be in the IT department or

“On the topic of the future shape of IT departments, the idea of the emerging role of the Chief Data Officer was discussed.

The roundtable concluded that such a role would just be an extension of the Chief Information Officer.”

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not, is responsible for thinking of new and innovative ways to cut costs and maximise revenues.

On the topic of the future shape of IT departments, the idea of the emerging role of the Chief Data Officer was discussed.

The roundtable concluded that such a role would just be an extension of the Chief Information Officer, and that the two positions would work collaboratively to mine and manipulate data to support smart business decisions. Where as the role of the CIO may differ slightly from that of the CDO, all agreed that the two positions must work together. “CIOs or CDOs, whatever we are called isn’t as important as the role we play,” said Michael Bowen, IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager, Averda. In short, the roles, if they are indeed different, should create a team.

A lively discussion, the participants of the roundtable went on to discuss the meaning of innovation and the impact and meaning of trends such as ‘Big Data’ and ‘cloud’ as well as the role of the CIO in relation to the CEO in driving business.

“The relationship between the CIO and the CEO,” said Amin Al Zarouini, Head of ICT, Bee’ah, “should be a partnership, with both roles working to better the business.”

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THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE CIO THE WORLDS INFORMATION DOUBLES EVERY 2 YEARS

Find out what 5 top Chief Information Of icers say that means for IT. 2011

2015

Number of IT HOURS required, will be

lowered by 25% by 2015

Among current cloud users, 84% said they cut application costs by moving to the cloud

A CIOs JOB to apply technology to increase productivity and time to market while at the same time reducing costs.

by Cloud Anatomy.

Straight from the CIO

TOP 2 CIO ROLES

• Supporting business transformation • Supporting business's mission through the application of technology

TOP PRIORITIES

for IT Decision Makers

60% 58% 31% CLOUD COMPUTING

SECURITY

IT CONSOLIDATION

Source: Wikibon.org

coming soon…

BIG DATA APPLICATION MODERNISATION

80

PERCENT

get some amount of their current server infrastructure delivered through a private cloud

48

of data managers currently use cloud to consolidate IT Infrastructure

49

PERCENT

of data managers currently use cloud to reduce IT energy/power consumption

49

PERCENT

of data managers currently use cloud to Enable of Improve "anywhere Access"

52

of data managers currently use cloud to reduce IT Capital Requirements.

PERCENT

(includes mobile)

not yet in the budget, but they need to be educating on it now

PERCENT

cloud

Transformation includes

HOW CIOS SPEND TIME

data usage

mobile

(big data)

on various issues on various issues Cloud users save an average of

63

%

37 Other

%

IT Related

spend more time on business

54

IT Related

46 Other

%

37

Business Leaders The Board, C-Level

27%

Other Stakeholders

% 36 IT Team

SUCCESSFUL TOP 6% OF CIOS

spend their time differently

46

%

Business Stakeholders The Board, C-Level

WOMEN

as CIOs

5 10 of the top

1. COURAGE

to reimagine IT

2. CLOUT

HIGHEST PAID CIOS

to guide IT through a period of creative destruction.

are women

Even though only 10% of the CIO positions at Fortune 500 companies are held by women.

3. ASTUTENESS

On average, most CIOs Spend their time with:

%

annually by moving apps to the clouds

3 Essential Qualities the best CIOs have.

SUCCESSFUL TOP 6% OF CIOS

%

21 PERCENT

26 IT Team % 28 Elsewhere

%

to build on good results.

Top 3 technologies

Top 3 priorities

1. Increasing enterprise growth 2. Attracting $ Retaining new customers 3. Reducing costs

1. Cloud computing 2. Virtualisation 3. Mobile technologies 5 Hot CIO Focus Areas

1. converged infrastructure 4. Cloud 2. Information optimisation 5. Application modernisation 3. Security

29

%

37%

SOURCES OF CIO SUCCESS by percentages

14

%

8% 6% 3% 1 2% %

Business results Business knowledge C-Level Relationships Business Relationships IT Knowledge IT Relationships Authority as CIO Vendor relationships

short takes Month in view

Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $16 billion

Facebook plans to pay $12 billion in shares and $4 billion in cash to acquire the company. It will also grant $3 billion in stock options to WhatsApp’s founders and employees. The deal is expected to close

WHAT’S HOT?

this year pending regulatory approval, Facebook said.

The size of the deal shows the value that Silicon Valley firms now place in mobile users, and what a high-stakes industry mobile computing has become.

Facebook paid $1 billion when it bought Instagram almost two years ago, and even then some said it had paid too much.

WhatsApp has 450 million monthly users, and 70 percent of them access the service daily, Facebook said, making WhatsApp one of the leading mobile messaging services.

WhatsApp will operate “independently” inside Facebook and retain its own brand, Facebook said, a similar model it has used for its Instagram acquisition.

Yahoo reported attackers using computer software to steal credentials to log into Yahoo Mail accounts and search for names and email addresses.

Yahoo shutdown the affected accounts and alerted users.

Simoco secures DMR Bahrain Airport deal Simoco Group has secured a five-year contract with Bahrain International Airport to deliver a Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) solution to the facility.

The mobile radio firm has teamed up with its partner UCA (United Commercial Agencies) to deliver the service to BIA, which sees 1,052 flight departures per week.

This new move follows Simoco’s demonstration of its DMR range during the Bahrain International Airshow (BIAS) last month.

The technology aims to address a number of issues the airport

Satellite communications company Iridium has developed a Wi-Fi hotspot that brings Internet connectivity to almost every corner of the planet.

The pocket-sized device, due for release in Q2, connects to the company’s satellite voice network to provide services similar to the analog modems that were used for landline Internet access until about a decade ago.

Iridum The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to make web browsing on mobile more secure. The digital rights group recently released a mobile version of its HTTPS Everywhere add-on for Android.

Most sites offer HTTPS only on request, not by default. HTTPS Everywhere solves this problem by forcing websites to connect to a device using HTTPS encryption whenever possible.

Firefox

operator faced with its current TETRA communications system, which includes poor coverage and low channel capacity.

Microsoft reaches a sales milestone

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 8 has crossed the 200 million mark in license sales.

It’s been some time since the software giant released figures for Windows 8 but it has now reached the milestone. The last time Microsoft gave figures was in May last year when Windows 8 had reached 100 million.

ACQUISITION WATCH

LinkedIn is acquiring Bright—a startup that has developed technology for matching job hunters with employers—for USD$120 million. Bright’s technology scores job seekers and employers to show their compatibility.

Retailers face greater risk of data breaches after Microsoft ends support for Windows XP, Symantec has warned. Many POS devices run a scaled-down version of the system.

Microsoft will no longer provide patches for Windows XP as of 8 April. Microsoft will offer support for Windows XP Embedded systems through 2015.

WINDOWS XP A new exploit that prompted Adobe to release an emergency patch for Flash Player was used in targeted attacks that distributed malware designed to steal log-in credentials, according to researchers from Kaspersky Lab. Eleven SWF exploit files that targeted this vulnerability were found, but only one of them contained an executable file as a payload.

ADOBE

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Ryanair boosts boarding technology

Ryanair is investing “heavily” in IT and plans to roll out a new website and mobile boarding passes by the end of April.The budget airline is boosting technology spending despite reporting a thirdquarter loss of $35 million, which it said was in line with guidance.

MENA public cloud services to total $620 million in 2014

The public cloud services market in the Middle East and North Africa region is on pace to grow 21.3 percent in 2014 to total $620 million, up from an estimated $511 million for 2013, according to the latest outlook by Gartner, while Software-asa-service (SaaS) is expected to grow 29.1 percent in 2014 to $126 million.

Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2017, $3.8 billion will be spent on cloud services in the region, $1.1 billion of which will be spent on business-processas-a-service (BPaaS).

“Public cloud services continue to grow rapidly around the world and MENA is no exception,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “Growth in MENA is expected to be slightly higher than the rest of the world led by strong growth in SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Organisations are turning to cloud computing to realise business benefits such as increasing their speed in responding to changing market conditions and lowering IT costs.”

Huawei and NSSN sign inter-operability deal Huawei has announced the signing of cross-license agreement for an Operations Support System Interoperability Initiative (OSSii) along with Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN).

The OSSii aims to simplify interoperability between Operations Support Systems (OSS) in a multi-vendor environment.

OSSii will provide access to interfaces that earlier were subject to restricted use, and will enable interoperability testing services.

In May 2013, Huawei and NSN took part in the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for OSSii. While the MoU set the general guiding principles of the initiative, in the meantime Huawei and NSN reached an agreement on the technical details of configuration, performance, and fault northbound interfaces for Radio Access, Circuit Core and Packet Core.

ACQUISITION WATCH

Nvidia, one of the biggest GPU manufacturers in the world, made a series of code contributions to the open-source project Nouveau late last week, signalling a possible thawing of relations with the Linux community.

Japan’s Rakuten will acquire instant messaging and calling app developer Viber Media for US$900 million, the e-commerce giant revealed this month, highlighting its moves to penetrate new markets.

Syrian Electronic Army breaches 1 million Forbes accounts The Syrian Electronic Army has defaced the Forbes news website and published the names, email addresses and encrypted passwords of over a million of its users.

The group claimed responsibility for the attack on Friday, showing off screenshots taken from the site’s WordPress publishing system and suggesting that the stolen user credentials for 1,057,819 accounts would be put up for sale. Instead, the SEA later dumped the cache as a file on a third-party site.

Forbes quickly admitted the breach, warning on Facebook that “the email address for anyone registered with Forbes.com has been exposed. Please be wary of emails that purport to come from Forbes, as the list of email addresses may be used in phishing attacks.”

Microsoft sets 31st October as stop date for Windows 7 consumer PC sales Microsoft has set 31st October as the end of sales of new consumergrade Windows 7 PCs, but for now has left open the sell-by date for business machines.

On the site where it posts its policies, Microsoft now says that 31st October 2014, is the end-of-sales

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date for new PCs equipped with Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium or Ultimate. All three are consumer-oriented versions of Windows 7; Home Premium has been the overwhelming choice of OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) for consumer systems.

Microsoft’s practice, first defined in 2010, is to stop selling an older operating system in retail one year after the launch of its successor, and halt delivery of the previous Windows edition to OEMs two years after a new version launches.

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Deliver On

CIO Spotlight Dr. Zuhair Lardhi

Thirst for knowledge Khalifa Fund IT Director Dr. Zuhair Lardhi has been a mainstay of the Middle East IT industry, but in the midst of his career progression he found the time to satisfy his passion for academia.

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D

r. Zuhair Lardhi has been a witness to a lot of comings and goings in the Middle East IT industry. Less than 15 years ago, the IT Director for Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development was working in a region where Microsoft’s presence was minimal. Since then he has gone on to oversee some of the biggest IT projects in the UAE. Born and raised in Abu Dhabi, Lardhi was initially a stranger to IT, instead putting his focus toward representing the UAE in basketball at junior level.

After leaving high school, he began a course in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1983, but upon his return to Abu Dhabi after the first year of his studies, it was clear to him that IT would shape the future. “My father arranged for me to work part time in the oil fields over the summer, and it struck me that there was no computerised automation as part of their process,” he says. “It was used solely for keeping financial records, and nothing else.” This realisation would prove to be one that would shape his career, “I saw IT as a new career path that would offer not only validity, but also serious demand. It was something I had to be involved with,” he says. He abandoned his electrical engineering studies, and started a fresh degree in computer science. Lardhi fondly recalls being given a unique opportunity whilst at university, “One of my professors took me under his wing and gave me the opportunity to work for six months in an IBM R&D team. It was a fantastic taste of the professional world.”

He graduated in 1989, and moved back to Abu Dhabi, where he joined oil exploration firm ADCO as an Analyst Programmer. A lot has changed in the regional IT scene since then, but Lardhi has not forgotten the faith that was placed in him by his former ADCO boss, “I owe a lot to that man,” he says. “He always challenged me, he entrusted me with project management and delivery of IT systems at the age of 26, and that had a big impact on my career. Having said that, I certainly suffered a lot of sleepless nights at the time!” With his mentor’s help, he progressed quickly in the company, being promoted to several different roles, before he joined computer giant Microsoft – whose Middle East presence was in its infancy—in 1999.

Lardhi compares the move to Microsoft to “arriving on a different planet.” Serving local and federal government contacts, as well as figures in the oil and gas industry, his experience as Business

“I saw IT as a new career path that would offer not only validity, but also serious demand. It was something I had to be involved with.”

Development Manager at the PC giant was pivotal, “Working at Microsoft really allowed me to see things from the other side of the table. I got excellent experience working the sales and marketing side of things, and it gave me a better understanding of what customers want. It made me realise the business opportunities of IT.” Given the huge technological progress the UAE has seen in the last 15 years, it seems surreal that Microsoft had no presence in Abu Dhabi at the time. Lardhi fondly recalls the birth of Microsoft’s presence in the Middle East, and his role in establishing it: “Microsoft’s first Middle East office was in Dubai, and that was managed by Istanbul. I was certain that they should open one in Abu Dhabi. I made my feelings clear to my superiors, and once they had gone on to open the Abu Dhabi office, more followed in Kuwait and Lebanon.”

Much like his stint at Microsoft, Lardhi’s next role, IT Manager at Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (TRANSCO), would provide him with a culture shock. The company was undergoing privatisation at the time of his arrival, and he says the transition left the firm’s IT department in chaos. “When I arrived IT was a new concept there; servers, laptops and emails did not exist.

TRANSCO had to transform itself from being a government entity into a profitable organisation, and so IT was a secondary consideration.” However, his five year tenure can be labelled a success after a variety of progressive project deliveries, “In my time there we successfully implemented ERP, storage management and infrastructure for the whole utilities sector, so in that respect my time there was a success,” he says.

During his tenure at TRANSCO, Lardhi found time to fulfill a long-running ambition to continue his studies. He began a master’s degree in Quality Management, studying after his daily hours at the office were complete. “I had always wanted to do a master’s degree whilst studying for my BSc,” he says. “I felt it was important to continue learning, and that’s something I still feel is essential for me today.”

After a five year stint at TRANSCO, the company’s IT operations were outsourced to Injazat Data Systems on a 10-year contract, and they took Lardhi with them as their IT Manager. There he was responsible for dealing with outsourced staff and delivering Injazat’s service for his form employers. “My role at Injazat entailed a lot of work in dealing with quality control,” he says. “I was responsible for monitoring a lot of contracts and ensuring they were properly delivered.”

Lardhi’s thirst for knowledge would not evade him during his time at Injazat. He took on the additional pressures of studying for a PHD course in Organisation Leadership, and it was a decision that he did not take lightly. “I had done the master’s, but a PHD was a completely different challenge,” he says. “I had consulted with my family before as to whether it was a good choice, but they supported me so I did it. There were times when it really affected www.cnmeonline.com

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CIO Spotlight Dr. Zuhair Lardhi

TIMELINE

1962

“Working at Microsoft allowed me to see things from the other side of the table. It gave me a better understanding of what customers want. It made me realise the business opportunities of IT.” my performance at work and at home; it was a constant extra weight. It was challenging, but when I earned the qualification it was worth the hard work.”

In the process of completing his impressive balancing act, Lardhi caught the eye of Injazat. The company had been delivering projects for Aldar Properties, and in 2008 his work paid off when he was recommended for the role of Group IT Director for the estate development firm. The move ran parallel to his early days at Microsoft, the change in work culture serving as an eye-opener, “Operations there were scattered,” he recalls. “There were a lot of contracts, and it was difficult to say where some had come from.”

Nonetheless, he set about implementing a widespread wireless network which covered all Abu Dhabi and Al Ain development projects. The wireless P-P network he established supported projects including Al Souq Towers, Yas Island and five schools situated in Abu Dhabi. He was also charged with implementing the IT requirements for the Emirate’s Ferrari Park, whose opening coincided with the first Grand Prix event in 2009.

In 2013 Lardhi joined Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development—an organisation established to finance local entrepreneurs in Abu Dhabi—as IT Director. The fund provides training, development, data and consulting services, and Lardhi takes personal pride in working for the not-for-profit group. “It’s really satisfying to lead projects that do real good to people’s lives,” he says. “We’re able to provide resources to those who have suffered difficulties, and I believe we make a difference. For example, we’ve set up kiosks at Etihad Airlines which serve as a great advert that we’re approachable and open to help people.

Our Ishraq initiative helps those who have recovered from an addiction at the National Rehabilitation Centre, while Amal supports special-needs Emiratis.”

Unsurprisingly, Lardhi has remained grateful to his family for the support he received whilst studying for his master’s degree and PHD, “My wife and parents were an inspiration to me throughout that time,” he says. “They were incredibly patient with me and I will always remember that. A lot of people in life come and go, but they’ve always been there for me. In life I value honesty and hard work, but above all else team work.”

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Born in Abu Dhabi

1989 Graduates from the University of Minnesota with a degree in computer science

1999 Joins Microsoft as Business Development Manager for the Middle East

2001 Assumes IT Manager role at oil exploration firm TRANSCO

2006 Moves to Injazat Data Systems

2008 Takes on Al Dar Properties Group IT Director role

2013 Becomes IT Director at Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development

On location African Eastern

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Innovation on Tap As the largest importer of alcoholic beverages in the region, African + Eastern is leading the way in both distribution of products and sales innovation. Far from sticking to the status quo of antiquated sales and monitoring systems, Samir Khan, Regional IS Manager of the company, is always looking for new ways to streamline the business using cutting-edge technology.

A

frican + Eastern owns and manages 26 retail stores in the UAE and Oman, and is the largest importer and exporter of alcoholic beverages in the Middle East and Arabian Gulf. With over 300 employees and countless brands and customers to please, there are many key cogs in the machine. From sourcing to distribution to point of sales, there are a lot of moving parts to African + Eastern’s business in the Middle East. Khan’s task is to provide African + Eastern employees, the brands they support and their customers the IT tools to keep things running smoothly.

What does it take to keep a company that imports almost seven million cases of product per year on track to keep customers smiling at happy hour? Quite a lot, it would seem, and IT is the backbone of the operation. “For example,” says Khan, “There are taps in many bars in the UAE. African + Eastern maintains a large number of those taps. They need to be serviced and cleaned, and wait staff need to be trained on how to pour the product and how to serve it.

In the past the department in charge of, for instance, maintaining those taps, would keep track of what needed to be serviced via a large white board—literally updating each task by hand.”

African + Eastern knew they had to move on from this antiquated system. Now, teams can go out to the distributors, service equipment such as taps, and record that service using a tablet. The service dates and types are then shared on the system and all team members are updated. Employees can even take pictures of products or equipment, and maintenance dates are automatically generated. In this way, African + Eastern can keep track of what needs to be done where and on what date.

“With a robust ERP system, African + Eastern is able to monitor both their inventory and their point of sales in all of their stores around the region.”

“This system started feeding us important data to confirm that our products were visible in the points we wanted to be in the right quantity and temperature. We find this helps us make decisions on brand strategy,” says Khan. This mobile system was developed totally in-house at African + Eastern and was the result of a collaborative effort between a number of different departments.

The system is unique to the region, and is in fact, the only mobile system of its kind in the world. The benefit of a system that automatically generates maintenance schedules is clear, and it is likely only a matter of time before other businesses begin following in the footsteps of African + Eastern.

Indeed, it is not just maintenance of taps and equipment that has been updated and modernised by African + Eastern. One of the most important applications running in the company’s IT infrastructure is, of course, the ERP system. “We knew before we moved beyond ERP, we had to get the basics right,” recalls Khan. “If the information is not right, our teams cannot make the right decisions, so accuracy and availability are paramount for our ERP systems.” With a robust ERP system, African + Eastern is able to monitor both their inventory and their point of sales in all of their stores around the region. The data generated by the ERP system allows the company to move forward and make sound decisions on future marketing and sales efforts.

With CIOs everywhere buzzing about “moving beyond ERP,” African + Eastern is actually taking steps to do just that.

“Undeniably, our ERP is the most important system – it is where we run all of our revenues. But having said that, to get real value you need to move beyond ERP—now that we have our basics right, we are now looking beyond ERP,” says Khan. African + Eastern has developed a platform aptly named ‘Enabling Working Out of Office.’

Using this platform, the company has been developing a suite of mobile applications that allows it to support a mobile workforce.

Soon, they will also be launching a new, agile CRM program that can be accessed on the cloud and integrate with social media. This will be a nimble and extremely useful tool for the African + Eastern sales and marketing team.

Indeed, African + Eastern strives to go beyond just maintaining the IT systems that keeps the business running. www.cnmeonline.com

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On location African Eastern

Khan and his team are always looking for and developing new innovations, some of which have changed the face of product distribution in the region. The company, for instance, had a hand in streamlining the UAE licensing procedures. “Just a few years back,” recalls Khan, “Licensing records were kept by pen and paper in enormous books.” Working with the UAE government, African + Eastern helped to develop the smart chip card that is in use today. “Now we can collect data on license applications, card usage and limits in real-time at the point of sale.” Though the license procedure may be unique to the region, the concept of real-time point of sale data tracking could be used globally in any number of retail outlets. “As we sell our products we take the data into our system—licenses, product sales, even inventory. It is all updated into our virtual private network. In the past it wasn’t live, but now we can received data in real-time, or in a once per day update. We have applied robust VPN systems to ensure that all our stores are live. This helps us secure our end-points.”

Of course, with all the data being generated by the applications created by African + Eastern, Big Data is on Khan’s mind. Khan maintains that the biggest issue in dealing with all this data, is to determine what information is important for the company. “It isn’t really about mining unstructured data, but looking at the structured data that is created by our applications in a new and useful way.” In the past, Business Intelligence was about looking at the data on spreadsheets and programs and asking it specific questions. Now, CIOs everywhere, including African + Eastern, are working with various departments 32

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to work out what the data is revealing about business. “The IT department can create the tools to mine this data, but the most important thing is to be able to put the leads in other departments in control of viewing and manipulating the data.” African + Eastern has, to this end, partnered with some of the lead data visualisation firms to be sure that the data can be presented in a way that is useful to each department. “Business Intelligence should be driven more by the business itself than by the IT department. Right now what we need to do is unlock our structured data that we produce in our systems and make it available in a clear manner to those who need it. We are going beyond canned reporting. We want the people that need it to be able to use and visualise the data they need rather than mining through sets of data,” says Khan. Giving the business control over its own data, and allowing the various departments to manipulate that data for their own ends is the goal of the African + Eastern IT department.

Far from just a place to top up on supplies, African + Eastern has positioned itself as a leader in innovative sales technology. Through collaborative efforts within the company, and partnerships with government and other firms, African + Eastern is constantly innovating and researching new ways to leverage IT to do business more efficiently. “The backbone of this whole operation is IT, which is making it tick,” says Khan, “This is especially true when it comes to our import operations because we need to always be up and running. This IT department is always working with our branding, marketing and sales teams to ensure everything is running as smoothly as possible.”

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On location Jumbo Electronics

Quest for growth Jumbo Electronics taps new technologies as it forges the path to business innovation

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C

loud. Mobility. Social media. The UAE-based retailer Jumbo Electronics ticks off all these boxes in the technology menu. It also has to its credit many firsts in the region – being one of the early adopters of Microsoft Office 365 solution, and the first customer of IBM’s AS 400 system.

Jumbo currently has 22 store locations across the UAE and two in Oman. It has around 800 active IT users and the most important applications running on the network include ERP, warehouse house management and PoS solution.

The retailer embarked on seven major IT projects in 2012, with a vision to streamline IT operations and lower TCO. This included a major upgrade of the ERP system (JD Edwards), implementation of business intelligence tools and a retail POS based on Oracle.

“Once that was done, we started focusing on our infrastructure, and moved some of our applications to the cloud and implemented a mobility solution for our sales force,” says V Suresh, Head of Management Services Division.

Jumbo was running on a network infrastructure, which was implemented in 2001. But this proved to be inadequate with the company’s expansion of remote locations and surge in bandwidth demands. “We had to rethink the complete data network infrastructure and finally zeroed in on a 10G core switch from Alcatel-Lucent along with 14 POE edge switches. And we use Solarwinds for managing and monitoring our network,” says Suresh.

Implementation of a secure WLAN was the next major project implemented by Suresh’s 20-member IT team. “At our corporate offices, users are provided with notebooks and they were facing problems with connectivity as they moved between floors and

“Mobility was another key area tackled by Jumbo’s IT team. The company’s van sales team was having difficulty with manual sales process, which led to backlog of data entry in the system and reconciliation issues.”

locations. We implemented a WiFi solution from Aruba, which also has pre-defined security controls using the Clearpass appliance,” he says.

Along with rolling out wireless to all its locations, Jumbo also migrated from an analogue telephone system to IP-based telephony to improve its communications efficiency. “As part of this, we also implemented an e-fax system which eliminated all the fax machines and dedicated fax lines,” says Suresh.

Jumbo, which is a big user of server virtualisation technologies, is also one of the early adopters of desktop virtualisation. “We are using the desktop virtualisation platform from Citrix, which helped centralise administration, improve efficiency and made data retrieval really easy. We are using Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform for server virtualisation and even our production systems are running on virtualised environments now,” says Suresh.

Another bold step for Suresh was the move to the cloud.

Jumbo was running a Microsoft-based email system since 2005 and it was running with MS-Exchange 2003. Both the hardware and software infrastructure for this collaboration and messaging application was coming to end-of-life support and started facing lot of maintenance and support issues. “We started evaluating both options—either onsite Exchange upgrade or a cloud-based solution, and finally implemented the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 solution.

“After moving to the cloud, we were able to achieve many technical improvements and reduce the total cost of ownership in both maintenance and infrastructure. With this solution, users can now have bigger mail boxes and do unlimited archival. This also paved the way for our corporate Intranet portal and IM using Lync,” says Suresh.

Mobility was another key area tackled by Jumbo’s IT team.

The company’s van sales team was having difficulty with manual sales process, which led to backlog of data entry in the system and reconciliation issues. “We selected a third party custom-built solution using PDA devices with integrated printers. With this, sales personnel can carry out sales online and print receipts on the spot. They can also check inventory online, track payments, resulting in huge improvement in efficiencies,” says Suresh.

Jumbo has big plans going ahead, including implementing DR in a hosted location and rolling out a fully blown BYOD solution.

“This is our big plan and we are scouting around for a BYOD solution that comprises both MDM and desktop virtualisation,” says Suresh. www.cnmeonline.com

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FEATURE

Smart cities

Getting smarter How technology innovation is smartening up our cities, making them a better place to live and work

T

he new millennium brought with it a distinct shift from the 1960s-70s visions of suburban corporate parks to centralised, ‘virtually’ enclosed urban spaces, interconnected by crossfunctional technologies. There are many factors driving the creation of Smart Cities, the need to best prepare for a sustainable future being the main one.

“We are already witnessing an incredible global rise in Smart Cities – with cities of all sizes leveraging the power of fibre optic and Wi-Fi networks to enhance daily life for residents and businesses, and promote sustainability,” says Rabih Dabbousi, Managing Director, Cisco UAE. Smart Cities may be the answer to the loud cry for urban areas that encompass modern production 38

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factors in a common framework, while optimising intelligent management of integrated ICTs and providing citizens and companies with an environment that support well-being and collaboration – all wrapped up in a socially conscious, environmentally sustainable package. Though it is an undeniably large order to fill, these visions of well-planned, digitally integrated futurescapes are coming to fruition in cities around the world, including Vienna, Malta, Kochi, California and, soon Dubai. With the global urban population expected to increase by 1.5 percent per year between 2025 and 2030, developing smart, sustainable urban spaces is paramount.

But what makes a city smart? The concept of a Smart City revolves around the citizens’ interaction with goods, services, government and environment.

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While not necessarily an enclosed urban space, a Smart City is ‘virtually connected,’ allowing its citizens to work, connect and recreate from anywhere, while maintaining connections on a virtual grid.

“A Smart City is where the ‘Internet of Things’ is a reality,” says Ammar Enaya, Regional Director, Aruba Networks Middle East & Turkey, “It is a new model of a community where high speed internet is available anytime, anywhere—where people can consume and exchange information at the touch of a button.” Citizens of Smart Cities are connecting to their governments and communities in ways not yet seen before. “People will be able to pursue more agile and contextualised opportunities, such as senior citizens staying longer in their common environment or small businesses having more transparency about new contract opportunities in public tenders,” says Bettina Tratz-Ryan, Vice

President, Research in Lead Environmental Sustainability Vendors and Markets, Gartner.

Though the concept of a Smart City may seem futuristic, it would seem that the future has arrived. Utilising the enormous amount of data created by mobile devices, consumer outlets and public service portals, Smart City planners set out to streamline daily life. The most widely-cited example of this is transportation within a smart city. “Network operators can deliver locationrelevant content to users based on their proximity to points of interest, including timely retail offers—even security and safety notices,” says Nadar Baghdadi, Middle East and North Africa Regional Director, Rukus Wireless. www.cnmeonline.com

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FEATURE

Smart cities

Imagine waking up and receiving an SMS from the city’s transportation authority advising of an accident or traffic and suggesting an alternative route. Imagine, then, the traffic lights reporting the incident to the transportation authority and adjusting automatically to assist with the flow of traffic to eliminate the problem.

It is this sort of seamless and instant service that is the dream of the Smart City. Big Data analytics are key for planning and managing a potential Smart City. “Cloud, Big Data and trust delve deep into the foundation of Smart Cities as the ‘Data Capitals’ are fuelled by the need to secure intelligent insights from the mass of powerful data that is being collected from weather channels, street security cameras, social networks, sensor networks, in-car devices, location-based smartphone apps, RFID tags, and more. All these things add deep insight into the life and choices of the citizens and residents of a city,” says Zaher Haydar, Senior Regional Manager, Systems Engineers, Turkey, Africa and Middle East, EMC. These planned urban areas, laced together with a mesh of fibre optic cable, have been popping up all over the world. Cities built from the ground-up take previously unpopulated areas and equip them with office space, residential courts and recreation areas. “Different cities may also engineer different approaches to sustainability, citizen-focused urban planning and a focus on providing innovative solutions to chronic urban problems,” says GB Kumar, Vice President and Geo Head, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, Tech Mahindra.

While these newly-crafted cities hold the appeal of brand new spaces that can be customised to citizens and businesses alike, the challenge is making these areas appealing. Projects constructed from the ground-up run the risk of appearing sterile or insular. As most individuals do not want to live in a city with no character, Smart City planners run the risk of constructing technologically wired ghost towns.

“I think Smart Cities are the next evolution of telecommunications and will become resilient foundations for future technology development.”

George Galica, Head of Business Solutions, Vodafone Qatar

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“Smart cities are just cities, they will not become digital ghost towns, they will just become cities, and that is how it should be.”

David Socha, Utilities Pratice Leader, Teradata International

“Smart Cities are just cities,” says David Socha, Utilities Practice Leader, Teradata International, “they will not become digital ghost towns, they will just become cities, and that is how it should be.”

However, top-down approaches to creating technology-enabled, ecologically sustainable cities are taking hold around the world as well. “Cities can become ‘smart’ in a host of domains, ranging from public transportation, utilities, environmental sustainability, education, health and public safety,” says Rami Khoury, Director of Public Sector Practice Middle East and North Africa, Infor.

The most basic requirement to put a city on the track to become smart is a readily available wireless broadband network. “The base requirement for a Smart City ecosystem is connectivity, without which services cannot be delivered,” says Sherry Zameer, VP Telecommunication Solutions for Middle East and Africa, Gemalto. Cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam are already in the process of putting their citizens on the web 24/7 by supporting free access to Wi-Fi in public areas.

However, smart city projects are coming to light a great deal closer to home than in the US and Europe.

Unsurprisingly, Dubai is on the cutting-edge of such retrofitting initiatives. “The goal of making Dubai a Smart City is definitely attainable with the complete support of the government. We are already working towards this goal by working with the government to incorporate smart services in the city,” says Abdulla Hashim, Senior Vice President, Digital Services, Etisalat.

Of course, constructing planned urban areas that are heavily reliant on technology and Big Data analysis does not come without concern. Traffic lights that scan for incidents are one thing, but when it comes to sharing more sensitive data, such as information about personal healthcare or banking activities, people understandably begin to express some discomfort.

“Security is a very sensitive subject these days, particularly in light of what has recently come to light in the US in regard to the NSA,” says Danny van Heck,

HP Software CIO Speaker series Yousef Al-Naama, CEO, malomatia

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FEATURE

Smart cities

“Cloud, Big Data and trust delve deep into the foundation of smart cities as the ‘Data Capitals’ are fuelled by the need to secure intelligent insights from the mass of powerful data that is being collected from weather channels, street security cameras, social networks, sensor networks, in-car devices, location-based smartphone apps, RFID tags, and more.”

Zaher Haydar, Senior Regional Manager, Systems Engineers, Turkey, Africa and Middle East, EMC

General Manager, Public Services, SAP. While making data available to government organisations and public services may streamline activities like transportation, health services and energy, this open access does not come without significant risks.

“We need to be very careful about what data we need to share, and what data we don’t need to share.

Value-added data, such as how many people are using certain transportation, or certain healthcare related data should be shared, but security needs to be managed.

We need to put a clear security strategy in place, but we don’t see security as a prohibitor,” says Dima Kandalaft, Smarter Cities Leader, IBM Gulf & Levant.

The balance citizens have to strike, it would seem, is between sharing their data and receiving services based on their activities, or keeping their data private and foregoing those services. “The most important thing to keep in mind for city planners, government officials, service providers and citizens alike,” says van Heck, “is that personal data ultimately belongs to the individual.” Indeed, to make a Smart City viable, there has to be a great measure of trust between those creating data, and those analysing data to provide goods and services.

It would seem that Smart Cities, or at least smart

“Value-added data, such as how many people are using certain transportation, or certain healthcare related data should be shared, but security needs to be managed.”

Dima Kandalaft, Smarter Cities Leader, IBM Gulf & Levant

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technologies implemented on existing urban areas, are here to stay – and it is no wonder. “The desire to improve service delivery and streamline internal operations is high enough to maintain a Smart City.

This kind of transformation is needed to cover all aspects of local government,” says Hussein Hamza, Gulf Cluster Leader, Oracle.

According to a study conducted by Aruba Networks, almost half of this new generation of employees, aptly dubbed #GenMobile, want their cars connected, and almost a fifth expect their clothing or shoes to be connected in the next five years. Almost 40 percent of #GenMobile would rather be able to bring their own device to work than have an office with a window, and 53 percent would rather their company paid for their choice of device than provide them with lunch. Clearly, expectations of connectivity from the new generation of urban citizens support efforts to connect retail, services, employment and recreation instantly and constantly.

“Better mobility, smart living, smart governance and sustainability are all key characteristics of a Smart City and there has been a lot of investment in these areas,” says Shibu Vahid, Head of Technical Operations, R&M Middle East.

The movement toward smart, or smarter, cities is an intensive undertaking and requires a measure of forethought and planning that has not been broached before. Indeed, city planners, government officials and businesses are embarking on a journey into the unknown. While utilising new technologies and feeding into a Big Data framework does come with risk, it seems likely that the gamble will pay off in the long run. “I see Smart Cities as the new digital frontier,” says George Galica, Head of Business Solutions, Vodafone Qatar, “Smart Cities are the next evolution of telecommunications and will become resilient foundations for future technology

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FEATURE

Virtualisation

Virtues of Virtualisation While virtualisation of servers, desktops and applications is not a novel concept, only recently has this trend begun to take hold in the Middle East market. We explore why the region is just now warming up to the idea of virtualisation and what the future holds for virtualised infrastructure in the Middle East.

V

irtualisation isn’t a new trend and these days it has become a crucial element of any IT infrastructure design and management. In tune with the global trend, virtualisation remains a top priority of CIOs in the region, and it has undoubtedly found its footing in businesses of all sizes. However, the technology is still catching on when it comes to the other elements of IT infrastructure as the focus so far has been on virtualising servers, applications and desktops. But, that’s all set to change with CIOs throughout the region starting to implement virtualisation solutions that go beyond just servers.

There has been enormous progress in the field of virtualisation in the last 15 years. In a growing 44

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business where the bottom line is key, virtualisation is moving from an option to a business necessity.

Virtualising IT infrastructure, from servers to networks, allows businesses to do more with less. As the virtualisation industry expands, major players like VMWare, Oracle, Citrix and Microsoft are providing CIOs with a wealth of virtualisation products from which to choose. The challenge in today’s virtualisation landscape is determining which product is right for which system and business, and taking that giant leap into the world of virtual space.

Whichever product is used to implement a virtualisation project, one thing is clear—costly centres housing enormous machines that eat up bottom lines with cooling, electric and staffing

network WORLD

costs are going the way of the dinosaur. “No longer do businesses want to retain racks upon racks of under-utilised servers in a leviathan data centre, that consume huge resources to power and cool, and that require dozens of personnel to manage,” says Samer Ismai, MEMA Network Consultant, Brocade Communications.

With large enterprises struggling to accommodate growing business demands within their existing budgets, virtualisation of IT systems, including network and storage, is the obvious way forward. “IT leaders can save enterprises 20 percent to 50 percent with virtualisation projects, providing increased flexibility and speed, and improved quality of service,” says by Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner.

In truth, until recently businesses in the Middle East were a few steps behind the US and European markets in terms of infrastructure. “Typically, the Middle East takes a cautious approach for any new technology adoption,” says Swapnendu Mazumdar, Network Infrastructure Manager, eHosting, DataFort.

“This could be attributed to the lack of awareness and shortage of skills. We have generally seen service providers and system integrators acquiring the skills first and slowly integrating virtualisation into corporate IT departments.”

As the Middle East was a quickly growing, but underdeveloped market, there was little need to virtualise. Where the Middle East may have lacked in infrastructure, it has historically been flush with spare capacity, further negating the need

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Virtualisation

for virtualisation. However, times have changed.

Businesses in the Middle East are now well on par with their global competition, companies are rapidly expanding, and the need for virtualisation is becoming apparent.

As such, many CIOs in the region are warming up to the virtues of virtualisation, but admittedly, a few are slow to jump on the bandwagon. “While ICT services such as server virtualisation, client virtualisation, public, private and hybrid clouds are gaining traction in the region, they are still relatively new concepts for Middle Eastern CIOs,” says Amit Mathur, Senior IT Solutions Manager, Huawei. “However the benefits and efficiency gains of a virtualised network are beginning to influence decision makers to a steady increase in deployments.

We believe that we will witness an increase in CIOs virtualising other elements of their networks in the near future.”

Though perhaps slow, the shift toward virtualisation is inevitable. “Most organisations will adopt a virtualise-first approach to IT once the benefits become apparent,” predicts Stephen Green, Executive, Next Generation Data Centre, Dimension Data. “Provided that the virtual environment is adequately managed and quality of services is maintained, the practice of virtualising workloads will snowball and continue to the point where only business-critical workloads remain physical.”

Server virtualisation has certainly been the most ground-breaking step in virtualisation for its sheer impact on the IT industry. Whereas previously, every instance of a server OS required a physical server to be installed, server virtualisation has eliminated the need for bulky, maintenance heavy machines.

Industry leaders agree that as CIOs see the realworld benefits to server virtualisation, they will be

“IT leaders can save enterprises 20 percent to 50 percent with virtualisation projects, providing increased flexibility and speed, and improved quality of service.”

Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner

encouraged to extend such projects to other areas such as storage, network and desktop clients. “Server virtualisation is prevalent among enterprises,” says Abdualla Hashim, Senior Vice President of Digital Services, Etisalat. “However, network and storage virtualisation is at its infancy today. It’s not adopted on a large scale, but I believe as server virtualisation picks up in the market, users will realise the benefits of network and storage virtualisation.”

From servers, to storage, to networking and computing, virtualisation is taking hold from start to finish in enterprise IT processes – but how far across the infrastructure can virtualisation go? “Today, virtualisation has a broader prospective,” says Ismai, “in which virtualisation is seen as a general approach to decouple logical resources from physical elements, so that those resources can be allocated quickly, more cost-effectively and more dynamically, wherever the business requires. This can all occur in real time to meet changing demand levels or business requirements.”

Gartner’s Mahapatra agrees, “You can theoretically virtualise anything which has a hardware with software running on top of it. As of now it is about network virtualisation, server

“There are a variety of benefits enterprises can enjoy by adopting software-defined technologies.

For example with an SDN architecture individual enterprises can develop tailored network operations that are flexible, cheaper and that can be rolled out quickly, improving capital efficiency and OPEX over the long term.”

Omar Alsaied, Middle East Carriers Sales Director, Ciena

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FEATURE

Virtualisation

“Provided that the virtual environment is adequately managed and quality of services is maintained, the practice of virtualising workloads will snowball and continue to the point where only business-critical workloads remain physical.”

Stephan Green, Executive, Next Generation Data Centre, Dimension Data

virtualisation, desktop virtualisation and client virtualisation – however I will not be surprised as more and more are added.” In short, so far, the only real limitation to the extent to which a business can virtualise is that enterprises’ business needs and requirements.

With no real ceiling to hold it back, it seems that most network functions will soon be virtualised. As we approach that state, it is impossible to avoid a conversation about software-defined networking.

“I don’t buy into the notion of ‘software-defined everything,’ as we are still some distance away from this to take place in enterprises on a scale that actually impacts the business model. The technology is available, though at early stages, and every adoption has its own curve,” says Hashim.

Though still in a very nascent stage, the idea of ‘software-defined everything’ is at the very least being researched and heavily considered by enterprises in the Middle East. “There are a variety of benefits enterprises can enjoy by adopting software-defined technologies. For example with an SDN architecture individual enterprises can develop tailored network operations that are

“No longer do businesses want to retain racks upon racks of under-utilised servers in a leviathan data centre, that consume huge resources to power and cool, and that require tens of personnel to manage.”

Samer Ismai, MEMA Network Consultant, Brocade Communications

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flexible, cheaper and that can be rolled out quickly, improving capital efficiency and OPEX over the long term,” says Omar Alsaied, Middle East Carriers Sales Director, Ciena.

Still, caution when it comes to adopting virtualised processes is not without cause. “Server virtualisation has created an on-demand expectation from the business that hasn’t been fully vetted yet.

Mobility, specifically the ability for a virtual machine workload to take on migratory attributes, creates massive performance problems, not only for that workload, but for all the other workloads on the same physical kit. Worse yet, you can’t see it. You only know it when the phone rings and everyone is screaming at you,” says Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. One of the great benefits of virtualisation is being able to separate services to an individual machine. However, managing VM sprawl is also one of its biggest problems. Enterprises exploring a virtualisation project need to keep in mind administrative overhead, licensing and other associated costs.

Though the road may be rocky, the path is clear—virtualisation of IT infrastructure will become the norm in the Middle East and globally. As businesses grow and innovate, and we all head into the clouds with virtualised computing and storage, the virtualisation of the IT landscape is inevitable. Though it will certainly be a learning curve for many enterprises, CIOs and IT professionals are sure to reap benefits to virtualisation of servers, storage, networking and computing in real time. “With virtualisation, the physical handling of resources and avoided,” says GB Kumar, Vice President and Geo Head, Tech Mahindra, “And due to abstraction, one can perform all operations remotely. Soon everything will be defined and controlled through software.”

FEATURE

Converged storage

Bringing it all together Converged storage has transitioned from hype to market reality. Combining compute resources with storage delivery promises to drive efficiency and save money for enterprises reeling under the data deluge.

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Strategic Technology Partner

storage advisor

T

he research firm Gartner says data centres are reaching an unsustainable point with the average enterprise expected to see data growth of more than 800 percent in the next five years. This exponential growth in the production and storage of data is driving the next generation of data centres, which will allow businesses to manage new applications such as Big Data and analytics while using delivery models such as cloud and virtualised infrastructure.

This trend has led to the creation of converged storage, a new architecture that combines compute and storage in a single scale-out unit. Converged storage is designed primarily for virtualised environment with quick provisioning, which promises to reduce hardware and ease management.

What is driving the adoption of converged storage?

“Organisations today are looking to make their IT infrastructure simple and easily manageable. Earlier, storage and computing would be separate entities but with the increase in data and the growing demand for resources in the virtual, physical and cloud-based environments, it has become necessary for companies to look at converged storage solutions, where the storage and computing hardware are integrated to optimise network and application performance, minimise physical space requirements and increase speed of delivery,” says Ranjith Kaippada, Product Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution.

Husam Abdul Hamid, Manager, Channel Sales, Gulf, North Africa & Pakistan, NetApp, offers a different perspective,“The data centre infrastructure is critical to the evolution of IT from a cost centre to a business enabler, and the adoption of converged infrastructure is a critical component in making the transition. This transition helps IT become an active participant in the business, enabling profit centres by delivering the infrastructure and applications required rapidly and efficiently. When you eliminate the boundaries and simplify IT infrastructure by using converged solutions, you get a scalable, sustainable model that delivers productivity as well as savings.” www.cnmeonline.com

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FEATURE

Converged storage

Converged storage is more suited for virtualised and cloud environments, where it can significantly reduce the cost of flash-optimised application performance to generate faster business returns, and simplify application mobility from public to private clouds to deliver secure service levels. It also creates an agile pool of resources that can deploy quickly, accelerate results and transform an organisation’s most valuable asset—data—into actionable competitive insight.

“Virtualised and cloud environments often require distributed, performance-scalable, inexpensive and massively pooled nodes. Converged scale-out storage appliance vendors offer an alternative approach to data centre infrastructure by using all-in-one server/storage applications. Converged storage vendors have put most of the emphasis of convergence on the processing and movement of data, while delegating compute resources as a given — supplied by the vendor or viewed as an inexpensive and interchangeable processor-feeding storage resource with file management,” says Arun Chandrasekaran, Research Director, Gartner.

Though the majority of converged storage adoption has been among mid-market and enterprise markets, industry experts say SMEs are the sweet spot for systems such as this. “Converged systems are ideal for small and medium-size businesses that require easy-to-deploy solutions that consolidate application and data requirements, while providing greater value for their data centre budgets. It reduces the number of servers and storage capacity required for applications, simplifies overall infrastructure, optimises architecture and accelerates deployment times, letting SMEs streamline their servers and storage to build a costeffective IT infrastructure,” says Hamid.

Converged storage is not without its challenges.

One of the biggest drawbacks of this technology is the

“The data centre infrastructure is critical to the evolution of IT from a cost centre to a business enabler, and the adoption of converged infrastructure is a critical component in making the transition.”

Husam Abdul Hamid, Manager, Channel Sales, Gulf, North Africa & Pakistan, NetApp

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“Converged scale-out storage appliance vendors offer an alternative approach to data centre infrastructure by using all-in-one server/storage applications.”

Arun Chandrasekaran, Research Director, Gartner

fact that users will have to buy compute and storage at the same time. However, not all vendors agree. “The fact that “traditional” data centres are made up of silos of infrastructure and organizations cannot be ignored.

Servers, storage, networking resources, and management systems are often delivered individually to each application or group with very few economies of scale; all these factors are considered when building a converged infrastructure,” Hamid says.

Faycal Saile, GM, Red Hat Middle East, echoes a similar opinion: “Customer can buy industry standard servers and decide whether they want to use them as compute nodes, storage nodes, network switches or a combination of these. Software-defined storage solutions support a wide variety of deployment models (physical, virtualised, converged and cloud-based) and provide much more flexibility than classical solutions.”

As converged storage gains steam, another key question is how does it differ from unified storage, which also seeks to blur the distinction between server and storage? “The main differentiator between converged and unified storage is the simplicity of scaling up and out. In unified storage, scaling might require moving to a bigger box with higher computing power which means a downtime and more cost, whereas in converged storage scaling required adding additional unit to existing solution without the complexity or the downtime,” says Abdullah Hashim, Senior VP, Digital Services, Etisalat.

Chandrasekaran offers another simple explanation: “Converged storage infrastructures typically have configurations that include computing and storage integration, virtualisation and resource management. Unified storage refers to a storage system that supports NAS and SAN access protocols, typically Network File System (NFS), CIFS, HTTP, FC, iSCSI and FCoE. Some vendors are adding object storage protocol support as well.”

FEATURE

Converged storage

“The main differentiator between converged and unified storage is the simplicity of scaling up and out. In unified storage, scaling might require moving to a bigger box with higher computing power which means a downtime and more cost.”

Abdullah Hashim, Senior VP – Digital Services, Etisalat

Buying more storage?

Are enterprises going to buy more storage in 2014 to deal with the surge in data? IDC says lean storage techniques will keep a lid on storage investments over the next few years, though the world’s enterprises still are on track to buy 138 exabytes of storage system capacity in 2017.

Annual sales of storage capacity will grow by more than 30 percent every year between 2013 and 2017, according to IDC. But the growth will be slower than the steep pace recorded a few years ago because organisations have adopted ways of using storage more efficiently, including cloud storage services.

IDC adds that data deduplication, data compression, thin provisioning and storage virtualisaiton all will help enterprises limit their purchases of new storage capacity. Those techniques can reduce the amount of space consumed by a given bit of information or help companies allocate new storage as needed instead of overbuying.

Although most organisations are generally risk-averse to storage spending, Gartner sees more customers questioning the status quo of expensive storage area networks (SANs) as general-purpose

“Customers can buy industry standard servers and decide whether they want to use them as compute nodes, storage nodes, network switches or a combination of these.”

Faycal Saile, GM, Red Hat Middle East

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storage for all workloads. Storage procurements are tied closely to use cases, such as server virtualisation, virtual desktop infrastructure, transaction processing, analytics, collaboration, backup and archiving, which enable vendors to innovate and differentiate for specific workloads and use cases.

“In particular, there are a few paradigm shifts in technology architectures that are impacting the storage industry. First is the shift from spinning disks to flash, which is putting many of the incumbents on the defensive as new vendors are able to architect more flash-optimised systems with a better fit for virtualisation-related workloads,” says Chandrasekaran.

Second is the gradual shift from scale-up to scaleout systems, which enables IT to add capacity and performance at lower incremental costs with lower staff costs, as well as to expand systems over time versus making larger initial purchases, he adds. The rise of commodity components (such as generalpurpose processors, standard servers and off-theshelf disk and flash drives) versus custom-designed application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and specialised hardware has enabled new suppliers to come to market faster than they previously could have. In addition, the rise of public cloud storage and open-source frameworks are already altering storage buying centres.

“Customers are increasingly considering how to evolve their infrastructure to best support virtualisation and cloud computing, while building on the high availability, security, and application awareness that are fundamental features of the current data centre. Customers are particularly looking for infrastructure that increases IT flexibility and efficiency, while maximising the savings in power, cooling, and space utilisation,” sums up Hamid.

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FEATURE

Network visibility

Clear and present danger Knowing what is happening on your network is a prerequisite for security now. A new class of network visibility solutions is emerging to help you spot trouble and address issues.

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security advisor

T

o state the obvious, expanding the reach of IT security and protecting the organisation from cyber-security threats remains the primary challenge for CIOs. The number and complexity of threats is increasing, and the increased use of cloud computing, mobility and social media has made strong security the highest priority.

As enterprises grapple with an increasing number of threats, one thing has become clear: Network security is the foundation for cyber strategy. This is because only the network has the ability to see every connection from every end user, regardless of where the user connects from—be it a teleworker in a home office or on the road, or an employee accessing applications while in the corporate office. With this detailed view the network can identify connected assets, provide visibility into their actions, and stop attackers before they steal critical information.

Strategic IT BYOD Partner

Though the security industry has provided valuable tools to defend against attacks for years, they have been limited in their effectiveness largely due to their inability to quickly scale to meet today’s threats. “The enterprise network today no longer sits within four secure walls. Traditional security solutions are often distributed and deployed in larger numbers across the entire enterprise network—from wired to wireless to remote access. This is unsustainable. Maintaining network security and operational efficiency in today’s distributed enterprise networks demands new technology that takes a more holistic approach to network access security,” says Rabih Daboussi, Managing Director, Cisco UAE. GB Kumar, VP and Geo Head, Tech Mahindra, agrees: “Traditional defenses are increasingly becoming policy-enforcement points rather than robust defenses against cyber intrusions. For example, URL filters are still useful for enforcing acceptable-use policies around employee Web surfing, but no longer effective at

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defending against dynamic drive-by download attacks.

Integrating these traditional defences does little to thwart the new generation of threats. Against dynamic threats, traditional defenses like firewalls, IPS, AV, anti-spam, and security gateways collapse, leaving a wide-open hole for cybercriminals.”

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technical Services, HelpAG, says traditional security tools can’t protect against the complex malware types we are seeing today. “Take, for example, firewalls which are essential part of network security. They are very limited in their features and lack the ability to close unnecessary ports, dynamically route packets and protect against denialof-service attacks. They also lack the ability to analyse packets for malware and identify if an attack is taking place on the network,” he adds.

As IT trends such as mobility and cloud blur the lines of technology, the network remains the only platform that provides real-time cyber awareness and protection mechanisms. This is where network visibility solutions step in.

“A network visibility solution gives the administrator the power to monitor traffic, regain control of the network in some cases, monitor the network usage, redistribute limited resources to where they are needed and identify compromised hosts.

All this together provides a security enhancement to the network while optimising it,” says Khalid Muasher, Business Development Manager, Middle East, Bitdefender.

With disparate devices and hosts, enterprise security teams need a holistic view of their network.

With such a comprehensive view of the network, security teams can view hosts in the network, as well as configurations, classifications and other pertinent information.

“It’s important to have granular visibility and

“It’s important to have granular visibility and control across the network. This visibility into network behaviour helps administrators get to the root of the attack’s cause.”

Kalle Bjorn, Director, Systems Engineering, Fortinet

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“Traditional defenses are increasingly becoming policyenforcement points rather than robust defenses against cyber intrusions.”

GB Kumar, VP and Geo Head, Tech Mahindra

control across the network. This visibility into network behaviour helps administrators get to the root of the attack’s cause and block flood traffic while allowing legitimate traffic to pass freely. It also hands administrators the ability to conduct real-time and historic attack analysis for in-depth forensics. In addition, advanced source tracking features can help defensive efforts by pinpointing the address of a nonspoofed attack, and can even contact the offender’s domain administrator,” says Kalle Bjorn, Director – Systems Engineering, Fortinet.

Ideally, network visibility solutions provide a macro view and also allow network managers to drill down into a micro view of each device, providing information on users, applications, vulnerabilities, and more. But, does this affect the performance of the network? The industry is divided on this.

“In our experience, the performance of these networks is actually enhanced by the network visibility solutions. This is because network visibility gives administrators critical information about all the application traffic volumes, times which traffic peaks, potential bottlenecks in the network, etc. Furthermore, these solutions are specifically designed to identify and flag unauthorised and unwanted traffic that can result in the consumption of large amounts of bandwidth,” says Solling.

Muasher says network visibility solutions may affect network performance as they actively inspect packets. “This causes specific overhead. Depending on the amount of data being transferred across the network, the amount of noise and configuration, the impact can be visible or not.”

Visibility in detecting security events still remains a huge weakness for most enterprises. Companies often buy best-of-breed solutions from different vendors and then don’t have the means to correlate and analyse

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FEATURE

Network visibility

information across these solutions. The SIEM industry was created to pull all these log files back into one location for analysis, but few companies have actually achieved this objective.

In this context, can some of these network visibility solutions be described as SIEMs? Yes, says Daboussi, pointing to Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), which is a next-gen identity and access control policy platform that enables enterprises to enforce compliance, enhance infrastructure security and streamline their service operations.

Kumar from Tech Mahindra says SIEMs are a different class of products. “SIEM products are a different category of security solution that collect and correlate data from different networking and security appliances. Network analysis and visibility solutions capture the network traffic and perform analytics on that to identify security threats.

Ray Kafity, Regional Sales Director, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, FireEye, says the real business problem is to know exactly when an incident has occurred, respond to it—ideally in a real-time, automated fashion where appropriate—and prevent it from happening again. “All the device configuration, log correlation logic, data storage, compute power, and bandwidth required to correlate disparate logs into a set of possible events to investigate produces a lot of work for analysts with far too many false positives. For this reason, we’ve started to see companies changing the way they use SIEM products.”

Currently, only a few security vendors play in this area of technology and one can expect to see more network visibility solutions to hit the market over the next year or so. “Robust security capabilities (both logical and physical) and privacy policies are critical enablers of the Internet of Everything Economy.

The IoE Value at Stake projections are based on increasingly broad adoption of IoE by private-sector companies over the next decade. This growth could be inhibited if technology driven security capabilities are not designed to protect the privacy of both

“The way to ‘see’ into your network often comes with a hefty price tag, as these solutions are much more expensive than traditional security solutions. “

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“ The real business problem is to know exactly when an incident has occurred, respond to it (ideally in a real-time, automated fashion where appropriate), and prevent it from happening again.”

Ray Kafity, Regional Sales Director, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, FireEye

company and customer information. This is the time for security vendors to be enhancing their offerings for customers globally,” says Daboussi.

The way to ‘see’ into your network often comes with a hefty price tag, as these solutions are much more expensive than traditional solutions. This brings up the question as to what kind of customers would benefit from a network visibility solution?

“Targeted customers for network visibility products are governments, enterprises, internet service providers and data centres because they rely on network security as they work with it on a daily basis. Financial and insurance companies, banks and public services are also major customers, as the use of a SIEM/network visibility tool is required for compliance reasons. However, there is a growing demand in small and medium businesses as well for network visibility appliances, as the latest security breaches have once again served a tough lesson about the devastating effects of data theft,” says Muasher.

Solling says today any organisation, regardless of size, could benefit from network visibility. “Better still, is to consider the implications of not having such a solution in place. The results of a study recently conducted by Forrester Consulting have indicated that a lack of network visibility negatively impacts the ability of IT staff to identify and resolve critical application performance issues, leading to substantial losses in business productivity and revenue.”

As organisations become more and more dependent on IT systems to support business processes it is important that critical systems and the network are protected and suffer little or no downtime. Network visibility makes plays a key role in this and is therefore a vital part of the security.

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FEATURE

Mega projects

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail With Expo 2020 coming to Dubai, a huge opportunity lies in wait for the Middle East’s CIOs to leave a legacy of first-class mega projects. What will it take for these projects to be a success and what timeframes and budgets will IT decision makers need to do them fair justice?

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integration advisor

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ransforming an industry, society or nation in a single project is a daunting task. When taking on the long-term burden of a mega project, Systems Integrators and CIOs are often attempting a task that to a certain degree ventures into the unknown, and with that move comes risk.

The promise of Expo 2020 in Dubai offers exciting opportunities for IT, in the form of wholesale technology implementations that have the power to transform a generation. This puts great pressure on CIOs, but in difficulty lies opportunity, and if ambition can be coupled with precise planning, the Middle East can reap the rewards of mega projects.

“The purpose of driving the adoption of a mega project is to enhance a nation’s reputation, by showcasing its commitment and capability,” says KC van Straaten, General Manager, Special Projects, Dimension Data Middle East and Africa. “This enhanced reputation positions that nation well to contest more effectively in the future, in the increasingly competitive global market. The key test of a mega project is the exponential demands on complexity it assumes due www.cnmeonline.com

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FEATURE

Mega projects

“Project stakeholders should spend as much time as required to plan the needed activities as this time will be rewarded by smooth execution of the required activities. The rule here is that the time spent in planning is never a loss even if takes great portion of the project timeline.”

Wesam Jammoul, Projects and Consultancy Services Director, Smartworld

to increased scale. This amplification factor against scope, financials, time, and quality is huge and must be managed carefully.”

With all the expectation that rides on mega projects, it is important for CIOs and SIs to know exactly where they stand in terms of their duties and to what extent they are accountable in terms of a project’s success or failure.

Mohammed Zameer, General Manager, Al Rostamani Communications, feels that the CIO is responsible for setting a project’s wheels in motion, and that clear communication is essential from the outset, “Primarily CIOs should ensure proper scoping of the project, giving a clear and defined expectation from the SI,” he says. “Users must be briefed properly on the benefit of the project and the CIO should ensure their acceptance of it.

“SIs should ensure they understand the end result the CIO is expecting, have a consultative approach in shaping the final requirements in coordination with CIO, and share their knowledge of similar projects with the CIO to fine-tune the project deliverables and timelines.”

Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner, sees the potential for long term disaster if all parties

“The process of selecting the right technology for each project is one that requires precision.

Technologies that are chosen must traverse a diverse set of applications and industries.”

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do not take equal responsibility from the off. “It is a joint effort, and any negligence on one side can have cascading effects,” he says. “All the stakeholders are equally responsible including the management and business owners. However there has to be one single office, person, team or steering committee headed by a competent authority like a CIO, Director General of IT or even a CFO who should take the ownership of driving and implementing the project, and they should take the responsibility.”

Although they do not have always have an active part to play in the implementation of the project, there is certainly a school of thought that says end users play a key role in mega project implementation.

They act as an important link to CIOs and SIs, and it is important they are briefed regularly and thoroughly about progress.

The process of selecting the right technology for each project is one that requires precision.

Technologies that are chosen must traverse a diverse set of applications and industries.

“Choosing technology for a mega project needs a requirement study to be conducted by an expert consultant and an RFI is sent to major technology vendors based on this study,” says Zameer. “The proposals received through RFI can be consolidated together to arrive at the best technology requirements of a mega project.”

“The technology chosen depends upon the kind of project, the size of project, the investments involved, the level of planning and detailing required and the kind of technologies to be used,” says Mahapatra. “Normally the best practice is to have a single dashboard to show the health of project—at any time, real time. Heads of the project should be able to drill down into the details of each aspect to get more information”

FEATURE

Mega projects

“In light of ever-shortening technology life cycles, IT programs must deliver functionality within months instead of delivering it with a ‘big bang’ at the end of a multiyear development cycle.”

Stephen Fernandes, Assistant Vice President and Head of Operations, Middle East, Cognizant

A key concern is contingency, and what to do if a nasty, unforeseen surprise pops up. Wesam Jammoul, Projects and Consultancy Services Director, Smartworld, believes that it is worth investing time in the initial planning phase to avoid panic further down the line, “Despite the fact that different types of projects require different percentages of the time spent on planning, planning is a key factor in delivering mega projects,” he says. “Project stakeholders should spent as much time as required to plan the needed activities as this time will be rewarded by smooth execution of the required activities. The rule here is that the time spent in planning is never a loss even if takes a great portion of the project timeline.”

But is IT granted the time it needs to do this?

Zameer does not think so, “Planning is one of the key milestones of mega projects, but in technology projects CIOs do not have the luxury of planning for a long time, as the life cycle of technology is very short and hence thorough planning is important but it should be as short as possible,” he says.

In essence, ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ is an apt summary. CIOs are frequently left hamstrung by time constraints and a wide of variety of logistical issues that need careful consideration.

But with risk comes reward, and if executed correctly, benefits can be reaped. How exactly can an IT mega project’s successes be measured?

“A project’s success is difficult to quantify accurately,” van Straaten says. “However, the aggregation of enhanced reputation and branding of the region or country, new capabilities, new standards of achievement, newly developed people skill sets and experience, a positive national psyche of achievement, all blend into a return of enormous value.”

The UAE has had a successful track record of mega project implementation. Projects like the smart government, smart healthcare and elearning have the 66

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potential to change how business is done in the Middle East. They have the chance to make processes more transparent, agile and effective, and could lead to faster throughput and lead to higher overall growth.

Finding the right people for the job is a key component in almost anything, and in IT mega projects CIOs and SIs are needed as drivers for success.

Technology cannot perform on its own, and it is crucial that the Middle East region can attract the right talent to maximise a project’s smooth deliverance.

Choosing the right partners to be involved is as important as assembling the right team. On top of that, if organisations can leverage their existing infrastructures, then the process will be less costly and more efficient.

Van Straaten believes that the use of cloud is a key area that costs can be cut, “Cloud computing platforms can dramatically accelerate the deployment of an application as well as link the money flow closely with actual compute usage requirements, with no lingering expenses post the event,” he says.

Stephen Fernandes, Assistant Vice President and Head of Operations, Middle East, Cognizant, feels that the bottom line is that CIOs working on mega projects must ultimately deliver instant success, “To achieve the best out of their budgets for mega projects, CIOs need to show business value and—in light of the ever-shortening technology life cycles—IT programs must deliver functionality within months instead of delivering it with a “big bang” at the end of a multiyear development cycle,” he says.

“Organisations that are driven by best practices schedule releases in shorter, well-defined timeframes—at least every 6 to 12 months. The projects must specify well thought out business objectives, a vision of the future-state of IT architecture, guiding principles for agile design and development, and a sourcing plan.”

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FEATURE

MNP

Down to the wire The recent introduction of mobile number portability will be a significant opportunity for business users as service providers start focusing more on customer service and plans targeted at specific categories of subscribers.

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in association with

telecoms WORLD

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obile number portability (MNP) is a regulated facility that enables subscribers of publicly available telephone services (including mobile services) to change their service provider while keeping their telephone number.

The mobile portability program was introduced across the UAE in December 2013 as a consumer protection tool that would help improve quality of services and push competition to new levels in the mobile telephone industry.

The TRA has recently reported that 61,000 mobile number porting requests were received by both licensees since the official launch, and said the overwhelming response reflects the strong interest by subscribers in the services and the willingness to use a service that enables the switch from one provider to another whilst keeping their original phone number.

“The launch of the Mobile Number Portability service falls in line with the wider TRA strategy aimed at promoting strong competition between the country’s two mobile services providers. This move will enhance the quality of services offered to consumers and in turn, drive levels of performance upwards,” says H.E. Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanim, Director General of the TRA. “The significant number of porting requests received reflects the real interest of UAE consumers in the MNP service. The TRA is responsible for monitoring the service mechanisms, ensuring all the necessary documents and information is submitted to complete the transition and ultimately, ensuring the switchover process runs as smoothly as possible,” he added.

To date, more than 23,000 mobile numbers were ported out of the total requests, while many requests were resubmitted in order to obtain the required documents for the switchover. www.cnmeonline.com

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MNP

Introduction of MNP in the UAE is expected to increase competition and act as a catalyst for them to improve quality of services. However, industry expects do not expect this to lead to a dramatic shift by subscribers to another, as quality of service and network coverage are not significant differentiators in the UAE market, which is still dominated by prepaid subscribers.

Will MNP force providers to concentrate on more competitive pricing and services? “History has shown that mobile number portability has a short term impact on pricing. However, it does prompt the market leading mobile operators to take steps to prevent churn,” says Shalini Verma, Principal Analyst with Gartner.

There are many arguments for the introduction of MNP. “From a regulator’s perspective, it will increase competition in the mobile market and ultimately result in better services and choices for consumers between two strong competitors (Etisalat and du). It should also make the market more attractive for future investors. From an operator’s perspective, it may be an opportunity to increase market share, offer new services and increase the loyalty of existing customers,” says Chris Appleby, Head of Technology, Media and Telecommunications at Al Tamimi & Company.

These opportunities are driven by the knowledge that an operator’s subscribers can more easily switch to another operator under MNP. There is every incentive for operators to become more competitive in holding on to existing customers and attracting new ones. From the consumer’s perspective, MNP will lead to better value products, better quality solutions and eliminate previous problems such as losing the original number and needing to advise all contacts

“The launch of the Mobile Number Portability service falls in line with the wider TRA strategy aimed at promoting strong competition between the country’s two mobile services providers.”

H.E. Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanim, Director General of the TRA

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“From a regulator’s perspective, it will increase competition in the mobile market and ultimately result in better services and choices for consumers between two strong competitors.”

Shalini Verma, Principal Analyst with Gartner

of a new mobile number, reprinting business cards and so on.

Number portability isn’t without its hassles and can be a difficult technical solution for operators to introduce. “It requires close collaboration between regulators and operators on matters such as the technical architecture, guidelines on cost allocation, recovery, tariffs, rules for porting numbers and the ability for the solution to integrate with future technologies,” says Appleby.

Porting mobile numbers in the UAE is a ‘recipientled’ process. This means that if a subscriber wants to change to a new operator, all they will need to do is contact the new operator. That operator will then contact the old operator on behalf of the subscriber and make arrangements for the mobile number to be ported to the new operator’s network. This avoids the need for the subscriber to make contact with the original operator.

Appleby adds that in every case where MNP is introduced there is a debate about the “porting time,” or the time it takes to switch over the number from one operator to another. Regulators seek to keep this to a minimum, in some cases to a few hours, to give the greatest benefit to the consumer.

Such short turnaround times can be challenging for the operators and the MNP service provider (who typically will run the MNP system on behalf of the operators and the TRA), especially in dealing with surge periods such as weekends and evenings.

Will MNP help new entrants in the market? “I do not believe that mobile number portability will have a lasting positive impact on the entrants. It will however, provide pointers to the mobile operators that offer more value and quality of service as they will see less churn and perhaps a surge in subscriber numbers,” says Verma.

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MNP

According to GSMA Intelligence, only a quarter of developing markets have introduced MNP to date, while only a further 15 percent are known to implementing MNP in the future. This suggests that about 60 percent of regulators in the developing world have either decided against introducing MNP, or have made no progress to date.

“The impact of MNP in developing markets is linked to two factors: the time taken to port numbers and the fee charged to the subscriber to use the facility. The porting time after submission of request varies from as long as two weeks in some countries to just a few minutes in others,” says Akanksha Sharma, Analyst, GSMA Intelligence.

Appleby expects the introduction of MNP in the UAE to increase customer “churn” (one operator losing customers to another operator) which, depending on the position of the particular operator, will either benefit it if it gains more customers, or will be detrimental if it loses customers to a competitor.

KYO_BusinessEntry_SmeAdvisor_17.5wx11hcm_revised.pdf

FEATURE

“In every case where MNP is introduced there is a debate about the “porting time”, or the time it takes to switch over the number from one operator to another.”

Chris Appleby, Head of Technology, Media and Telecommunications, Al Tamimi & Company

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“In order to attract or keep customers, it is expected that operators will become more competitive by launching products at attractive prices and further developing their product offerings. Another factor which impacts operators is the cost of developing and maintaining a MNP system and the porting process.

Despite this cost, it is expected that the prices for mobile services will decrease,” he adds.

1:28 PM

Insight Cloud

Weighing public cloud against private cloud A few years ago the only cloud game in town was the public cloud, but today private and hybrid clouds are also true contenders. In fact, private cloud implementations address a prevalent set of challenges and issues that public clouds cannot and can help speed up and smooth the way of cloud adoption.

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ere are five core tenets you should assess when weighing private cloud against public cloud options: 1. Ease of Use. IT’s responsibilities lie not just in the implementation of technology, but in its ongoing operation and support.

Unfortunately, from both an operation as well as a utilisation perspective, new technologies tend to be a time and resource drain. Today’s public cloud technologies require IT teams learn a new vocabulary and new operational practices. Arguably, this hurdle has been one of the largest barriers for a more rapid rate of cloud adoption and the cause of much pain for those that have.

Private cloud technology stacks are building upon the promise of a simpler path to implementation and on-going operation. For

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private cloud to be widely adopted, IT buyers should look for simple offerings that eliminate installation and operational burdens while easing the long-term support load.

2. Security policy control. Data security is the most frequently voiced concern around the adoption of public cloud. While public cloud infrastructures can most certainly be effectively secured, those implementations rely on an intimate knowledge of a new security model and require consistent application against new APIs and tools.

As organisations face greater compliance pressures, they should seek solutions that provide a physical “air gap” around their cloud infrastructure. Inherently, private cloud is single tenant from the metal on up

into actionable budgets a true struggle.

Furthermore, shadow IT operations and developers can cause significant budgeting challenges by running under the radar or forgetting about the instances they have running. When an unexpectedly large bill arrives at the end of the month it can cripple an IT department or organisations bottom line.

Traditional private cloud infrastructure deployed on-premise has solved this billing problem. Deployed on top of acquired hardware, traditional private cloud provides an organisation with a single pool of non-elastic resources that makes budget estimates easy to calculate, but eliminates the value of pay as you go economics, and removes much of the agility that cloud

Adding capacity to on-premise private cloud is a drawn-out process involving finance, procurement, data center operations and IT and can often be measured in weeks or months. and provides a clean point of demarcation.

The air gap it provides can be secured with physical security appliances, ensuring full segregation from software defined security groups and allowing for security policy to be defined one level down the stack.

This air gap eases implementation of security practices without requiring an entire re-work of the security approach, ensuring IT teams can focus their energy where it is most impactful.

3. Cost predictability. While “pay as you go” cloud infrastructure has brought an entirely new economic consumption model to IT, many organisations become frustrated when attempting to predict how much they’ll owe at the end of the month. IT budgets are projected a year in advance, yet multi-vitiate billing methodologies make projecting capacity plans 76

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infrastructures have promised.

Organisations should search for an ideal implementation that delivers a consistent and predictable billing methodology coupled with the ability to elastically add and remove resources from that capacity pool.

4. Integration with existing IT infrastructure. To stay current, many organisations have made significant investments in existing data centre infrastructure, including load balancers, IDS/ IPS, SAN, database infrastructure, and more.

These legacy networks are often still very early in their lifespan and an investment IT departments are very hesitant to waste.

Public clouds offer the capability to directly connect to these legacy networks, but those connections often impact the economic benefits of private data centres and come with their own

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set of hurdles, including ease of use penalties.

On-premise private cloud, with its flexible configuration capabilities, has historically been touted as an easier way to bridge this legacy infrastructure with modern cloud environments. Yet these on-premise offerings miss the benefits of elastic infrastructure and still require capital spending.

With the addition of provider-based direct connect, organisations should now consider the possibility of deploying hosted private cloud infrastructure still integrated within this on-premise equipment. In this scenario, capacity management is the responsibility of the provider eliminating the capital expenditures for initial infrastructure builds and ongoing physical scaling while delivering the benefits of directly connected cloud infrastructure and ensuring elastic capabilities.

5. Elastic capabilities. One of the primary benefits of cloud infrastructure is its elastic capabilities. Public cloud providers validated this as a highly demanded characteristic.

Yet elastic capabilities within private cloud technology stacks have been elusive.

With traditional on-premise private cloud, delivering elasticity creates a unique challenge as capacity is governed solely by the infrastructure an organisation has deployed. Adding capacity to on-premise private cloud is a drawn-out process involving finance, procurement, data center operations and IT and can often be measured in weeks or months.

Enterprise IT buyers are searching for providers who can deliver on the top four characteristics of private cloud infrastructure, but also deliver elastic resources and pricing.

It’s important to remember, this isn’t a zero sum game and organisations can and should ultimately use a combination of private, hosted private and public infrastructure. Each addresses certain business needs and use cases, and when combined truly deliver on the promise of the cloud.

About the author: Jesse Proudman founded Blue Box Group Inc. in 2003 to deliver reliable open managed cloud hosting solutions.

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Opinion IT operations

Driving user satisfaction with IT With growth in the Middle East at a high pace, IT departments today are under high pressure to continue to deliver rapidly as well as contain costs. Along with faster delivery, IT operations have the responsibility to ensure services meet quality standards with high availability, writes Steve Dulvin, who works in a senior technology role in the banking industry.

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he need to be agile and have solutions that will allow elasticity has been increasing in order to keep up with the changing business demands.

The use of technology has transformed dramatically over the last five years; today, technology plays a key role in most people’s lives. Self-service technologies are becoming the norm, tech-savvy employees are becoming more self-empowered and rapid business change is widening the gap between what IT provides and what the business needs.

For IT operations to improve end user satisfaction, it’s important to first understand the current gaps and business perception of IT by opening communication channels using surveys, interviews, regular meetings and asses capabilities with the business strategy.

Some of the most common challenges businesses face today with IT departments is lack of innovation, delivery time, service quality and availability.

Actions IT operations can take to improve user satisfaction Increased demand for IT services to meet business demands for quicker and more cost-effective solutions for the business could increase risks and challenges. To keep up with the business growth, IT operations need to evolve from back-end support that spends most of the time in administrative activities and firefighting to oversight and direction setting.

Communication plays an important role in understanding the gaps between user perceptions of a service versus IT. This can be achieved by opening communication channels with business leaders and understanding their perspectives on the quality of existing

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services. Surveys are great tools that can be designed to target two levels of users within an organization - users and management.

User-based surveys will focus more on end-user services whereas management surveys will portray an overview of IT performance on project delivery, IT innovation and management perception. This will also enable IT operations to understand business priorities, allowing IT operations to target high-impact, high-value items from a business perspective. Conducting technology workshops will educate the business on market trends and new technology; vendors can also be invited as part of the agenda to talk about their solutions.

IT departments generally have the insight to new technologies that are emerging in the market and this knowledge needs to be shared with the business.

A clear understanding of services being provided and mapping each activity within IT operations to business value will enable IT, along with the business, to conduct a costversus-value analysis, therefore identifying suppliers that provided optimal value to the organisation. With the implementation of ITIL best practices, IT operations will be able to document business expectation on quality and availability of services and work towards a documented service level agreement (SLA).

Pitfalls IT operations should avoid along the path of improving end-user satisfaction With the increase in business demands, IT operations could end up with a highly complex architecture with limited control. Implementing technologies to enable virtualisation, cloud and automation does not mean IT operations’ focus on technology has reduced; it only means it’s shifted to a much higher level.

Lack of customer understanding can lead to a poor strategic plan. IT operations needs to segment its customers depending on their needs. In a typical IT operations organisation, customers could vary from internal customers within IT, business users and overall customers of the organisation.

As part of prioritization, it’s important to segment them based on business value.

Without clear, documented value statements and cost elements for services all customers

Lack of customer understanding can lead to a poor strategic plan. IT operations needs to segment its customers depending on their needs. will demand the highest priority in terms of SLAs and best-of-breed technology.

Strong governance and control is an important element that needs to be considered during each and every step of implementing business supporting services, outsourcing and moving into a cloud environment. With the increased pressure on IT operations to deliver on time and at a lower cost, documentation and compliance needs are generally ignored.

Security, BCP and compliance play an important role in strengthening the existing architecture, which needs to be considered and built into the process. While trying to implement solutions like BYOD, IT operations need to consider that not every employee is a candidate of BYOD; a clear analysis has to be done considering all elements which include regulatory, sensitivity of data being handled, legacy application dependency and security.

With the implementation of cloud, virtualisation and automation, it is important to reallocate staff on other activities that will be required to manage these environments. A clear understanding of cost—both capital and operational—needs to be understood by all IT operations organisations. With the necessary tools, IT operations need to focus not just on existing business demands but forecast the growth and required resources as well.

With new ways of doing things, IT operations tends to ignore the need to create new roles that will include architects, vendor managers and process experts. Employee morale needs to be considered as part of outsourcing certain functions in IT operations.

Although, with the help of reallocating staff to other functions, it’s inevitable that some of the employees will have to leave the organisation due to lack of motivation to take on the new role, lack of skills or the role becoming redundant.

Rewarding staff based on how quickly www.cnmeonline.com

a problem is solved rather than fixing the underlying problems can lead to temporary fixes. IT operations management needs to develop measurements and rewards that favour long-term improvement in both efficiency and performance. Objectives for operational staff are not set on the quality and availability of services and more around implementing or upgrading solutions.

Recommendation for action It’s important to understand the direction of the organisation and build your strategic plan according to the business needs. All of the above technologies will ease the operational and repetitive administrative activities to focus more on transforming to a business partner by not only giving solutions but into becoming more proactive and consultative to the business. The pitfalls that have been listed are few elements to consider as part implementing technology and processes.

Once the business directions are well understood by IT operations management, it’s important to understand existing weakness and strengths that help achieve the business objectives. Conducting a self-assessment with tools that are readily available, such as SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats) and balance score card to understand the organisation’s maturity level that will enable IT operations to design the strategic plan which will include all elements required to support the business.

The strategic plan needs to be agreed by both business and IT with clear buy-in from senior management. The strategic plan needs to be a living document and could change based on the direction of the organisation or the external market. In today’s era, it is not feasible to set the strategic plan in stone due to an evolving dynamic market and the pace at which new technologies are being introduced. march 2014

Computer News Middle East

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Face to face Arun Khehar

On cloud nine

Arun Khehar, Vice President, Applications Business Unit Middle East and Africa, Oracle

Oracle’s Dubai offices have been busy indeed, and none more so than that of Arun Khehar, Vice President, Applications Business Unit Middle East and Africa. In the last year alone, Oracle has hired some 200 employees to support the region. We sat down with Khehar to talk SaaS, 12C database and why Oracle is uniquely positioned to take the Middle East into the clouds.

I

n the past, Oracle seemed to push back against cloud computing. Now that you are moving forward with cloud computing efforts, do you feel like you are playing catch-up these days?

Not in this territory, because here we are all starting at the same time. SaaS was a natural development in this part of the world.

And some of the players you see in the US our competitors—haven’t really made many in-roads in the region. From our perspective, we are as early as anyone else. We waited for the right environment, technology, readiness and, in some cases, government and large account understanding of what cloud is.

Our market is a little different than Western Europe and the US. In those markets, the challenge was if you didn’t sell on SaaS you would be out of business. We didn’t have that problem—our on-premises business has been growing in double digits for the last 10 years.

It has never been better. What we are trying to do is grow the apps business even further by adding cloud to it.

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Face to face Arun Khehar

You said that you were waiting for the right environment in the region—what do you think constitutes the right environment for cloud computing to take hold?

First, a lot of people were concerned and asked, “What is cloud?” We had to educate them. We run a lot of marketing events and a lot of product events. We have a lot of “gurus” come in, and our partners as well. We talk to governments, we talk to large accounts. Many of them have been to our data centres because security was a concern, so they’ve seen how we handle it. We have people who have come back and said, “You are more secure than we could have been.” We cleared those doubts.

We showed them our level of security and they were amazed. They’ve never seen anything like this and very few people, if any, would have it in this region. Then we looked at some low hanging fruits—products and customers who understood the value of SaaS. We started with banks – they are the ones who are usually ready with acceptance of new technologies.

We went to airlines because they have the infrastructure and skills on the ground. Some of these industries are so competitive in the region that if they don’t keep pace they will be left out. What that means is if they didn’t do customer experience fast somebody else would have done it. The next step was the skills gap.

They said, “Well we don’t have people—we don’t have IT skills for all that.” So we said, “We will do it for you—that is what SaaS is.” That means we will own, run, manage, secure and deliver it in four or five months, not 18 months, and we just need one or two people from the customer. The story, then, became much more attractive.

What has been the reaction generally to 12C database?

Very positive since we launched it. We launched 12C over a year and a half ago.

Again, it is technology ready, cloud ready and it has been localised for multiple applications.

The technology in C was meant to create the readiness to go into the next level of cloud.

That is happening with that product.

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How do you plan to take on competitors such as SAP in the in-memory market?

If you look at our background, 30 years back we started as a database company, so we have a lot of skills and knowledge on how to run databases, how to analyse those databases, position them into the cloud and how to bring them into the new level of industry where people are crunching Big Data. That has been our bread and butter for many years. We provide technology stack, middleware stack, the hardware or engineered stack with applications. I think that is a position that we are in that is so unique—you can’t find that with our competitors because they don’t have all the pieces. They have one or two pieces.

Do you think that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems has really been paying off?

Absolutely, and our results show it. It is in our last few quarters’ growth. We are measured on all our products and one of the key components of our measure in the stock market has been our success with hardware business and engineered systems.

The reason our ratings have gone up in the last couple of quarters is because of how well we have managed to deliver revenues and margins, specifically on hardware.

It seems like there will be an inevitable slide in hardware revenues. How do you plan to address it?

For us it’s not a plain vanilla hardware business. We are in a business that adds value to our software. We are not selling a desktop or a box like others are doing.

These are intelligent boxes. Meant to run our software and others faster and better. This is really what the difference is here.

Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by “intelligent boxes?”

If you have requirements for business intelligence and you put this on our engineered systems, the stack in there has all the layers tuned to run those dashboards. www.cnmeonline.com

We are giving you a car fully loaded with the right oil, with the right gas, with the right horsepower to run. You no longer have to figure out if this horsepower matches this fuel.

When you tune it, you can bring the cost of ownership down and you may not need those levels of blades to run a certain application.

This is just one example. We have many products today that are tuned—in database, in middle ware in dashboards, in budgeting and planning applications and it’s going to go across all of our products—that’s the strategy.

How do you plan to make Oracle an easy company to do business with in the region?

I think we are getting better. Earlier you had maybe certain bottlenecks when people wanted to talk to us. Now we have specialisation by product, by industry and by region. We made those kind of changes in the last two years. Now if you are a banker looking for an HR application, you will know who to address that question to. We will have a specialist who’s not a generic account manager, but someone who specialises in banking for a product. We also brought skills down to the region. One thing we don’t like to do anymore is put people on flights. We are trying to create full teams in every large country possible.

Any last words?

I think these regions are more ready for and more in need of SaaS than anywhere else in the world. We have more small and medium enterprises here than in other regions. From the US perspective, we are an SME region. Typical projects in the Middle East would have budgets of between USD $75,000 and USD $100,000. If I were an entrepreneur, I would go to Oracle and say, “I don’t know where I want to go, but I know I want to start small, get the value and go to the next level.” I think these countries have the perfect readiness from that perspective. We are pretty charged up with what is happening here. We’ve seen that in our growth. We are one of the leading countries now in Oracle with the growth percentages.

Insight APT

6 tips to combat Advanced Persistent Threats Experts say takes time, training and collaboration to thwart APTs. But with these best practices, you can keep your defenses high.

T

he success of Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) is reportedly so pervasive that detecting and defeating them with any consistency may seem to be a hopeless battle. APTs are also no longer solely the domain of nation-states with vast resources, nor are they focused only on espionage or attacks against military and other government entities.

They are “living” on networks in IT, energy, news, telecom, manufacturing and other

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sectors of the economy. But according to a number of security experts, while it will probably never be possible to eliminate them entirely, it is possible to detect APTs and minimise the damage they cause.

“There are solutions—the sky is not falling,” says Wade Williamson, Senior Security Analyst, Palo Alto Networks. “A lot of times security folks use APTs as an excuse for failure, but it shouldn’t be. There are technologies that can help.” www.cnmeonline.com

Williamson is among those who also argue that detecting and defending against APTs effectively will take more than technology. In general, he says, “the biggest change we need is not one of tactics, but strategy. Security must evolve to become a very creative discipline.

“Historically, security held the view of saying no to requests and blocking 100% of threats. Neither of these maxims is practical today. We need security professionals to be inquisitive—to be looking out for the things that don’t exactly make sense, and to ask themselves what it could mean, and how they should look deeper into the issue.

“We will always need automated security that blocks bad things,” Williamson says, “but we also need creative, engaged security experts to be looking for the creative, engaged bad guys on the other end of the connection.”

That said, there are a number of practices security experts recommend for organisations that are serious about the battle with APTs. 1. Use Big Data for analysis and detection The word from RSA Executive Chairman Art

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Coviello during his keynote address at the 2013 RSA conference is, “The whole game here is to shift away from a prevention regime—Big Data will allow you to detect and respond more quickly.”

That is endorsed by people like Aviv Raff, Co-Founder and CTO, Seculert, who notes that prevention from the perimeter is impossible; therefore, detection must be “based on the ability to analyse data, which must be gathered from and analysed over sustained time durations. And that’s where Big Data analytics enters the picture.”

Of course, that takes an investment in analysis tools. “IT does not have the automated tools needed to identify infections in a timely manner,” says Brian Foster, CTO at Damballa. “Instead they just have a ton of data. The industry needs to provide Big Data approaches to IT for detecting infections in their network.”

2. Share information with the right people According to Anton Chuvakin, writing on the Gartner blog last year, the bad guys share “data, tricks [and] methods” much better than the good guys. “It is considered acceptable to sit on the ‘hard-earned’ knowledge of ways you used to detect that proverbial advanced attacker while your peers in other organisations are being owned by the same threat,” he writes.

To get an edge over APTs, he writes, organisations must share information in a way that helps them but doesn’t benefit the attackers and doesn’t violate laws or regulations governing the sharing of sensitive information.

Beyond the legal considerations, however, there are also economic constraints

to sharing information. Brian Krebs, a former reporter at The Washington Post and author of the blog Krebs on Security, says he has seen progress in information sharing, but also efforts to hoard it to exploit it financially.

“The past few years have seen the emergence of several companies that make decent profits selling and exploiting this intelligence, so there remains a fair amount of tension between sharing and hoarding information about threat actors and indicators,” he says.

3. Understand the “kill chain” This is a so-called “phase-based” model to describe the stages of an APT attack.

Those stages include reconnaissance, weaponisation, delivery, exploit, installation, command & control and actions. As Lysa Myers, a virus hunter for Intego, put it in an InfoSec Institute article, “In essence, it’s a lot like a stereotypical burglary—the thief will perform reconnaissance on a building before trying to infiltrate it, and then go through several more steps before actually making off with the loot.”

Obviously, the closer to the beginning of the chain that one can detect and stop an attack, the better. Damballa’s Foster says attackers “leave a trail of breadcrumbs that can lead right to the infected system.

Understanding and analysing this kill chain can be the key to implementing the appropriate defense controls at the necessary stage.”

4. Look for indicators of compromise (IOCs) This is connected to “kill chain” understanding.

No organisation can stop every attack, so the IT team needs to know how to look for symptoms—or breadcrumbs. “This includes

“There is a need for more than 30,000 APT specialists, but that only about 1,000 to 2,000 have the necessary skills to combat the numerous real-life scenarios happening in today’s organisations.”

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looking for the unique ways that an APT might communicate out of the network. Any unique DNS queries or websites it contacts are common IOCs,” Williamson says.

“APTs will often customise their tools to their own needs, which will often provide the anomalies needed to distinguish an APT from normal traffic,” he says. “They will also use a variety of common applications like remote desktop applications, proxies or encrypted tunnels to communicate.

Unusual use of these and other applications can be key to finding a true APT. This, of course, requires IT to have a very solid baseline for what is normal in their networks.”

5. Test your network This can include active analysis or sandboxing. “One of the best ways to determine if something is bad is to actually run it and see if it behaves badly,” Williamson says.

Blogger Krebs adds that while there are vulnerability management tools to help close obvious holes, “there is no substitute for periodically hacking your own networks (or paying someone else to do it) to find out where you are vulnerable. As the saying goes, everyone gets pen-tested, whether or not they pay for it.”

6. Support more training for APT hunters.

Edwin Covert, Cybersecurity Analyst, Booz Allen Hamilton, argued recently in a post on Infosec Island that the industry needs a “new training model” for APT hunters, since the standard skills of an information security specialist are not enough.

“APT mitigation requires the ability to see things that are not readily apparent,” he writes. “The CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) was designed for technical managers, not APT hunters.”

And the need for specialists is critical.

Covert quotes SANS Institute Director Alan Paller as saying there is a need for more than 30,000 APT specialists, but that “only about 1,000 to 2,000 have the necessary skills to combat the numerous real-life scenarios happening in today’s organisations."

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Launches and releases

PRODUCTS

Product: My Passport® Slim™ Vendor: WD

Product: Xperia™ Z2 Tablet Vendor: Sony

What it does: WD has come out with a new line of portable drives, the first superslim drives to offer up to 2TB capacity. This lightweight external storage device has a metal enclosure for enhanced physical protection and 256-bit hardware-based encryption to protect the sensitive data stored inside. The included WD SmartWare Pro data protection software allows consumers to back up their data to their My Passport Slim and keep an extra copy in their Dropbox account for peace-of-mind. The software also lets consumers back up their Dropbox account to the My Passport Slim.

What it does: For the water loving techies of the world, Sony has unveiled something we didn’t even know we needed – a waterproof tablet. Sure, you aren’t going to be able to SCUBA dive with it, but this waterproof tablet can go by the pool or on the boat without concern. In addition to being water-friendly, it is also light and fast. The tablet features the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 801 processor, Sony’s Front Surround™ audio technology and 10.1-inch Triluminous display allowing for a bright, fast HD movie watching experience.

What you should know: It is slim – very slim. At a scant 4.33 x 3.14 x 0.48 inches the My Passport Slim is all about portability. With consumers in mind, WD created an external drive that can carry a heavy amount of data without being a burden. The My Passport Slim also incorporates super-fast USB 3.0 connectivity for quick transfer speeds of high resolution digital files. Available in both 1 TB and 2 TB capacities, the My Pro Slim is a good buy for those with a lot of data and a little room.

What you should know: This tablet also comes with a plethora of proprietary accessories. For a bigger, fuller sound, audiophiles can purchase the BSC10 Bluetooth® Speaker dock. Lest you run out of power on the go, the speaker dock comes with a magnetic charging pad. The BRH10 Bluetooth® Remote with Handset Function adds full multimedia remote control functionality to give a more authentic movie or gaming experience. The Xperia™ Z2 Tablet will be available in the Middle East in April.

Product: Ascend G6 Smartphone Vendor: Huawei What it does: Unveiled at this year’s Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain, Huawei’s new 4G LTE-enabled smartphone features a 4.5-inch qHD display, 5-megapixel front-facing camera and Emotion UI 2.01. Released along side a suite of other smart devices by Huawei, the Ascend G6 absolutely puts emphasis on the camera and the ability to share photos taken with aforementioned camera. The idea behind this smartphone is to enhance the user’s ability to connect and share.

What you should know: The G6 is no replacement for its big brother the P6. It is, instead, a budget version of its suped-up counterpart. As it is a budget version, it does feel a bit toy-like and it’s all plastic construction does nothing to help with that fact. The phone isn’t blazingly fast, but it gets the job done. This is a great phone for those social media power users that just need a handset that will allow them to snap and share pics on the go www.cnmeonline.com

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Column The word on the street

James Dartnell

Making sense of the WhatsApp deal

F

acebook’s $19 billion acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp will certainly disrupt and enrich the social media market.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees WhatsApp as a critical element in Facebook’s pursuit of connecting more people around the globe, and he’s absolutely right to think so.

He was doubtless aware that his social network was running a serious risk of being left behind, with the rise of more satisfying messaging alternatives.

Revelations soon emerged following the deal’s announcement that in the summer of 2009 Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton for a job. An expensive mistake it would seem, but in time they will doubtless reap the rewards in having acquired a service that has 450 million worldwide users.

WhatsApp’s service currently lets people use their Internet data plans to send messages to each other as an alternative to paying a carrier such as AT&T or Verizon for SMS. The app is slicker and more complete than Facebook’s messaging service. Its rise from being a startup in 2009 to a company that serves six percent of the world’s population has been swift.

CNME’s man about town gives his spin on the latest IT news and trends.

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The deal could hail the start of a strong year for technology mergers and acquisitions, following Lenovo’s recent announcement that it would buy Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.9 billion, and agreeing a deal to buy IBM’s x86 server business for $2.3 billion.

The number of tech M&A deals in the first half of 2013 fell below 2009 recession levels, according to the PwC 2014 Technology M&A Insights report, but now looks set to rise.

WhatsApp will offer Internet-based voice calling by the end of June, CEO Jan Koum said during a speech at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona.

With the announcement, WhatsApp will be a more complete and a smarter alternative than competitor Viber, and it serves to open new doors for Facebook.

It seems likely that in the near future Facebook will use WhatsApp to mount a platform that can rival video-calling service Skype.

Both Zuckerberg and Koum have sought to quiet rumours they might use ads to make more money from WhatsApp, but WhatsApp’s pledge to charge users 99 cents after a year of use will surely come into question.

Equally the acquisition raises questions over the role of Facebook’s messaging app, Messenger, which offers a similar service to WhatsApp. Perhaps more problematic is that fact that Facebook will soon have access to the data of WhatsApp users. No question, its security policy is in jeopardy.

Time will tell, but the acquisition has surely prevented a likely long-term slump for the social network. Watch this space.

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