Computer News Middle East

Big Data WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS

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The 4 new cios

Which one will you be?

balancing act BYOD: WHo’s in control?

Gulf air becomes one of the region’s first implementers of big data. and it did it all itself

Legacy vs. innovation

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EDITORIAL Sustainable data centres of the future

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

Last month, CNME organised the Data Centre Build roadshow across three major cities — Dubai, Doha and Riyadh. It covered all the key aspects of designing a next-gen data centre, right from networking, skills and cabling infrastructure, to power and cooling. The latter proved one of the popular topics at the event, which took me a bit by surprise. It is heartening to see that energy efficiency is top-of-mind for many in this neck of the woods despite being the oil capital of the world.

The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric from the Green Grid is the most common tool used to gauge the energy efficiency of data centres worldwide. The average PUE score of data centres in the US and European Union hovers around 2.2, though some recent reports suggest that it could be 2.9 in the case of some of the larger corporations in the States. PUE is normally calculated by looking at the total amount of power supplied to a data centre, divided by the amount of energy that actually reaches IT equipment. It helps you to measure how much power is being consumed by cooling systems and other non-IT related functions.

A PUE score of 1.0 is thought to be ideal and some large firms such as Google and Microsoft boast of scores close to 1.0 by investing heavily in IT efficiency. Though there are no benchmarking studies on the energy efficiency level of data centres in the Middle East, I suspect the average figure would be closer to 2.07, depending on the size. This can be attributed to climatic conditions, under-utilised servers, and older designs.

Though many data centres in the region have adopted virtualisation to dramatically improve the average server utilisation levels, IT managers will have to seriously think of remodeling their data centres to bolster efficiency of other assets. For example, it’s very common to see poor air management practices in the region, where cool and hot air is often mixed together, leading to higher energy demand from cooling systems.

The Green Grid has announced that it will make PUE an ISOrecognised metric this year and introduced three new energy efficiency metrics to help enterprises improve the performance of their facilities. The global authority on resource-efficient data centres has also published case studies, demonstrating how companies can use these tools and metrics to reduce power and cooling energy overheads, and the most notable is that of eBay, which runs one of the most efficient data centres in the world.

It is not easy to be a green data centre in the Middle East, barring some exceptions such as the Environment Agency of Abu Dhabi, but you sure can emulate some of these examples to use energy wisely, achieving higher performance levels for your facilities.

Publisher Dominic De Sousa Group COO Nadeem Hood Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409109 Editor Ben Rossi ben.rossi@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409114 Assistant Editor Joe Lipscombe joe.lipscombe@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9136 Online Editor Tom Paye tom.paye@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9103 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409131 Sales Managers Michal Zylinski michal.zylinski@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409159 Sami Sabbah sami.sabbah@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409152 Antony Crabb antony.crabb@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409108 Circulation Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409147 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409146 Designer Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 4409104 DIGITAL SERVICES Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy P Maagma Web Developers Erik Briones Jefferson de Joya Photographer and Social Media Co-ordinator Jay Colina webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

Big Data WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS

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The 4 new cios

Which one will you be?

balancinG act bYod: Who’s in control?

Gulf air becomes one of the reGion’s first implementers of biG data. and it did it all itself

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Legacy vs. innovation

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EDITORIAL Our events

The saviour

Ben Rossi Editor Talk to us: E-mail: ben.rossi @cpimediagroup.com

IT giants HP and Dell may have faced hell over the decline of their respective PC divisions, but all is not lost. There is a saviour in town, and it goes by the name of converged infrastructure.

Their decline was directly attributed to the innovation master class of Apple, which singlehandedly transformed the personal computing market with the introduction of the iPhone and iPad. But all great people, and companies, face a downfall at some point in their lifespans — you only have to look at Apple itself as a key example.

The true brilliance comes in rising again. And with a paradigm shift towards converged infrastructure emerging, Dell and HP are determined to take a market lead to offset their rapid PC losses.

Converged infrastructure solutions bring together networking, servers and storage into a single chassis, meaning all components are controlled by a single management console. Having just one console and vendor simplifies IT for the end user by eliminating the complexity, cost and sprawl of having disparate external devices and multiple management tools.

IDC has predicted spending on such systems to grow by over 54 percent between 2011 and 2016. It certainly appears to be the future of the enterprise, just as the smartphone arose as the future of consumer devices.

The latest move was played by Dell, which has launched the first converged solution specifically built for SMBs. The company hopes this will aid much-needed growth by capitalising on the service and software capabilities it has built in recent years.

Speaking of saviours — our cover star this month, Dr. Jassim Haji, could be described as just that. The Gulf Air IT Director experienced a realisation familiar to many Middle East CIOs when he discovered that implementing a Big Data solution from one of the big vendors in the market was just too expensive to justify. Rather than shelving the project, he assigned an in-house team to train themselves on do-it-yourself Big Data technologies, namely open source software.

Few people now doubt what Big Data has to offer the enterprise. With the huge amount of data currently available to organisations, it’s already breaming with benefits — let alone when that data continues to multiply in years to come. But with the technology still in its infancy, and a lack of use cases, widespread adoption was appearing a long way off as senior management simply cannot be convinced on ROI. That is until Gulf Air came along. Its results are astounding — Big Data value from minor investment — and should grab the attention of other CIOs looking to get around the hefty prices being quoted by the industry’s heavyweights. Read all about it on page 38.

Big Data

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HP Software CIO Speaker series Esam Hadi, Manager of Information Technology at Aluminium Bahrain BSC (Alba)

One of the things in manufacturing is that automated systems tend to be isolated and run and managed only by engineers. But today everything is connected. Therefore IT was brought into the picture to set best practices for automation usage. Today both IT and OT is managed under a single umbrella.

Today, the Alba way with vendors is not by buying. It’s about partnership with a technology vendor who believes in your dream. HP has been able to be that partner by offering us open contact with the entire chain.

Read more at www.hpsoftwaredelightme.com

Our Strategic Partners

Contents

Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic IT Transformation and Big Data Partner

Strategic IT NetworkingPartner

Strategic Technology Partner

ISSUE 258 | july 2013

30 76

CIO Spotlight: Dr Hazem Turki El Khatib of the Department of Finance, ABU DHABI

IT on the edge: Emergingmarket CIOs who (literally) keep the light on

34 46

Do-it-yourself Big Data: Gulf Air’s DIY implementation

The balancing act: Legacy vs. innovation

IN DEPTH 10 Building for the future

CNME racked up the air miles last month following its inaugural data centre roadshow, Data Centre Build, which saw it visit the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

12 Throwing down the gauntlet

The timing of Aruba Networks’ EMEA Airheads Conference 2013 in Alicante, Spain, shortly after news of falling profits, meant the knives were out.

70 6

Computer News Middle East

July 2013

14 The 4Gotten state no more

From a state of disarray to a state-of-the-art mobile network, Iraqi Kurdistan is poised for a huge 4G LTE push.

The 4 futures of the CIO

www.cnmeonline.com

16 Eying up the end-goal

Cisco is bored with dominating the networking world. At Cisco Live! 2013 in Florida, it made its end-goal clear by setting its sights on the ultimate accolade — number one IT company in the world.

2013

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ISSUE 258 | july 2013

40 In-memory of disk storage 1956 – ?

With application infrastructure technologies ever-maturing, the avenue is all but set for the mainstream emergence of in-memory computing. But is the Middle East ready to adopt?

73

Nationwide dominance: Motorola’s TETRA tech targets Middle East

16

Eying up the endgoal: Behind the scenes at Cisco Live!

The gift of foresight: KOJ and Oracle set deployment record

38

46 The balancing act

Decisions for IT are no longer made in IT — they’re made in business. So CIOs are feeling the pressure of the boardroom more and more as business leaders look to gain a competitive edge by embracing new technologies.

50 Who’s in control?

With BYOD becoming increasingly difficult to resist, how can organisations ensure that corporate data is safe on employee-owned devices?

56 You have 1 new hack request

It has taken a fair amount of time for business leaders to see the benefit in a company being social, and one of the main hindrances is the fear of not being able to protect your assets.

So, is social a platform for attacks?

60 Calculating the cost of profit

The fundamental backbone of any business transaction is profit. With competition in the Middle East building year-on-year, the challenges to successfully execute IT partnerships continue to harden.

27

66 Possibility in the privacy pitfalls?

Last month, a former CIA technician leaked information on the National Security Agency’s data gathering surveillance programme dubbed PRISM. Joe Lipscombe investigates what relevance this holds for the Middle East.

Laser treatment: Bank of Beirut implements electronic filing processes

Regulars

20 Infographic

The evolution of a data centre to the cloud.

22 Short takes

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

30 CIO Spotlight

Dr Hazem Turki El Khatib, of the Department of Finance in Abu Dhabi, tells his story of East to West during this month’s CIO Spotlight.

80 Product Watch

Apple returns to the limelight after announcing some fancy things at WWDC.

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July 2013

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82 Word on the street

CNME’s man about town, Joe Lipscombe, gives his spin on the latest IT news and trends. This month, he visits Mashreq bank’s new branch of the future.

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in depth Data Centre Build

I

Building for the future CNME racked up the air miles last month following its inaugural data centre roadshow, Data Centre Build, which saw it visit the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Delegates from across the Middle East gathered to discuss the trials and tribulations of the modern data centre.

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t doesn’t take a genius to realise that a key challenge for effective data centre management in the Middle East is keeping it cool. The Data Centre Build road show touched on many topics, including Big Data management, human error and skills training in the data centre, but the opening session was all about cooling technologies.

Munters Air Treatment’s data centre key account manager, John Pettitt, opened the events with a keynote which demonstrated the power of evaporative cooling — something the company specialises in.

The evaporative cooling technique, Pettitt explained, uses low-pressure fans and water pumps instead of higherpressure pumps. The air that passes through is cooled via the evaporation of the water, which is then ducted through to the data centre. Popular enough, but Pettitt used examples of when this solution doesn’t even need to be switched on due to outside temperatures. Of course the question raised here by the CIO and IT decision maker led crowd was one of just how valuable this method could be in a place where temperatures reach 50°C for months at a time.

The issue is humidity. Dehumidifying a data centre which sits in 70-plus percent humidity is apparently key to this method. The Middle East can sit in this bracket during the year, so it’s simply another layer of concern for data centre managers. Using evaporative cooling in a situation of over 70 percent humidity can condense on the surfaces of the data centre, causing problems. However, Pettitt claimed that the biggest issue is contamination of outside and inside air. Middle East CIOs can be forgiven for scratching heads when it comes to data centre management, it seemed.

Human error — the bane of the data centre Speakers throughout the roadshow touched on which elements are most costly when it comes to successful management of the modern-day data centre. Alberto Zucchinali, Data Centre Solutions and Services Manager, Siemon,

1.5%

of energy can be saved just by having white cabinets on the outside of your data centre.

followed Pettitt with an insightful look into cabling the physical layer.

Feras Zeidan, Channel Manager, Networking, Avaya, Sudheer Subramanian, Senior IT Solution Manager, Huawei, Andrew Stevens, CEO, CNet, and Kuldeep Bhatnagar, IT Advisor, Environment Agency, Abu Dhabi, completed the agendas,

“It’s always likened to the technician who pulls the wrong plug,” he said.

Stevens claimed that getting to the route of employee problems can save you valuable time and money. Replacing senior members of staff, he said, costs up to 400 percent of the cost of that original member of staff.

“There is a fear of training people, and investing in people. People always say to me, what if I train someone and they leave? I respond by saying, what if you don’t train them and they stay? It’s just as bad.” revealing the key data centre challenges CIOs in this region face.

A common theme throughout was the importance of people. “Human error is the cause of 37 percent of downtime in the data centre,” said Zeidan.

“It’s the simple things that are costly in the data centre,” Stevens claimed. “We pick black cabinets in the data centre because it looks nicer. Which colour attracts the most heat? Black. White cabinets would save you 1.5 percent of energy — simple things.”

Stevens said he believes that investment in people is the better way to ensure a successfully run data centre.

“There is a fear of training people, and investing in people. People always say to me, what if I train someone and they leave?

I respond by saying, what if you don’t train them and they stay? It’s just as bad.”

And on the contrary from Zeidan’s point, Stevens claimed that 70 percent of all failures are caused by human error. www.cnmeonline.com

“78 percent of staff members in a recent poll said they were unhappy in their current role. That means they’re likely to leave, and that will cost you big time. So what is it that will keep them there?”

Not the money, Stevens assured.

According to CNet research, a pay rise is only set to improve morale for a maximum of six weeks.

“They get the pay rise, spend it, and go back to the same level of living within six weeks, so it’s not about the money.

Twenty-nine percent of IT staff have been in their roles for under one year. This means that nearly 30 percent of the IT spectrum is under-developed at this time."

Investment in staff, sophisticated cooling treatments, good cabling, and virtualisation remain top trumps in the data, if these events were anything to go by.

“We build the most exciting and technical data centres here, why?

Keep it simple, support the business,” Stevens concluded. july 2013

Computer News Middle East

11

in depth Aruba Networks EMEA conference

Throwing down the gauntlet

Keerti Melkote, founder and CIO, Aruba Networks

The timing of Aruba Networks’ EMEA Airheads Conference 2013 in Alicante, Spain, shortly after news of falling profits, meant the knives were out. Aruba’s CEO and CTO promised to “fire back” at Cisco, which they accused of unfair and underhand tactics.

W

hilst this conference was largely about Aruba’s technology, there’s no doubt there were also some scores to settle.

The wireless-networking vendor’s revenue over recent years has grown in parallel with the proliferation of mobile devices, and the increasing preference of wireless over wired lines.

However, its profit for the latest quarter fell a greater-than-expected 31 percent, signalling its shares to plunge on the stock market. Whilst revenue grew to $147.1 million for the period ended April 30, it reported a loss of $20.2 million, compared with the $6 million profit it enjoyed a year earlier.

“We have been growing as a company about 20 to 30 percent every year, but last quarter we only grew 12 percent, and Wall

Dominic Orr, CEO, Aruba Networks

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Street was disappointed in our stocks drop,” said Dominic Orr, CEO, Aruba Networks, who addressed Aruba customers and partners at the conference.

The reason for this, according to Orr, was underhand tactics by Aruba’s main competitor, the behemoth Cisco.

If its accusations are to be believed, Cisco supposedly compensated its late arrival into the rising wireless market by “attacking” it with unethical discounted offerings through the form of bundles.

“I think for the first time in their 30-year history, [Cisco] accepted that wireless actually is the future, so it has been shifting its sales force to start to attack wireless,” Orr said. “They have become very alarmed that Aruba has big architectural benefits.”

By offering these drastic discounts, Cisco ensured Aruba projects were delayed and therefore not counted in the all-important quarterly earnings call, Orr said.

Keerti Melkote, CTO, Aruba Networks, said the situation stemmed from the overall “macro slowness” witnessed by much of the IT industry, including Cisco.

“What big companies do when such a time comes is they bundle different products and say if you buy all of this, I’ll give you a better discount,” said Melkote, who also cofounded Aruba. “This is something we have been fighting forever now.

“It’s not legal, but they do it.

We’ve complained to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). They investigate, but something has to happen.”

Melkote compared the situation to the famous court case involving Microsoft’s supposed attempts to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows and subsequently monopolise the browser market. Microsoft was found guilty of monopolisation, “but it was too late because Netscape was dead,” Melkote said.

However, Melkote also claimed Aruba has been competing against bundling for 10 years, and it only became a big problem this year because the enterprise decision-making process changed.

“Normally our decision-making process is under the CIO, so the networking guy, VP of infrastructure and CIO make the decisions, and usually it doesn’t go beyond that,” Melkote said. “But in desperate times, when these big bundles comes together — I’m

talking about a $10, 20, 30 million bundle, not $1 or 2 million — the CFO gets involved because it’s a big deal.

“The CFO usually tells his CIO to take a look at it once more. Then there is another round of justification and selling that needs to happen before you can close the deal.

That causes a delay, so instead of a deal closing April 1, it closes May 1. That, to us, is elongation of the sales cycles, and we just need to plan for that better.”

Despite all this, Melkote said the bad results have not bothered Aruba’s existing customers.

“None of our customers have complained,” he said. “Our stock price went down $2, and we still had customers.

“It always helps to have a good stock price for employee morale more than anything else, but the customers don’t seem to care a whole lot actually. I don’t think we’ll go straight back to our previous levels of growth, but we are definitely planning to go back.”

Orr added: “We expect that this quarter we will continue to capture those projects that slipped out, and to fight back.”

He went on to list four major differentiators that he believes Aruba holds over Cisco.

“One is 11ac — real 11ac, not toy 11ac,” Orr said to sniggers from the audience.

“Second is Aruba Instant, which is a very strong offering for the midsize and small branch environment.

“Third is ClearPass, and there is no contests here. Then, particularly for the public-facing enterprises, with the

“What big companies do when such a time comes is they bundle different products and say if you buy all of this, I’ll give you a better discount. This is something we have been fighting forever now. It’s not legal, but they do it. We’ve complained to the FCC. They investigate, but something has to happen.” www.cnmeonline.com

Aruba’s profit for the quarter ended April 30 fell by

31% high-density, high-interference, locationbased projects, we are having a very strong offering, particularly now with the Meridian addition.”

Orr was referring to the recent acquisition of Meridian Apps, which creates indoor location-based mobile applications for public-facing enterprises, like shopping malls, convention centres and museums. Aruba hopes this will prove a strong value-added service to complement its wireless offerings.

“So I think those are the four missiles we have to fire back, and I think we will win,” he said.

Where the market goes now is anyone’s guess. Aruba believes organisations that are being lured by Cisco’s cheap bundled offers will soon realise the technology is not as strong as its own, and that the market leader’s tactics are not only clear signs of worry, but also unsustainable in the long term.

On the other hand, Cisco’s recent comments regarding WLANs, and CEO John Chambers’ very vocal commitment to growing that part of the business, may not bode well for Aruba. Melkote believes this declaration was a “sign of desperation” from Cisco.

“They admitted it themselves,” Melkote said. “John Chambers said the world is moving from wired to wireless. Until now, they were basically blind to wireless. They said wireless doesn’t exist, but they can’t ignore it anymore.

“I think if you look at their business, the bright spots that grew were data centre, wireless and video for the service provider.

Nothing else grew. Everything else shrank — routers, switches, unified communications, telepresence. Ultimately, wireless is cannibalising their wired business in a big way. That is a structural change and they’ll have to fight for additional business.” july 2013

Computer News Middle East

13

in depth Iraq 4G

The 4Gotten state no more From a state of disarray to a state-of-the-art mobile network, Iraqi Kurdistan is poised for a huge 4G LTE push. Regional Telecom believes the high-speed network holds the key to unlocking the region’s true economic potential. Steven Bond ventured to the autonomous region to find out more.

“

This is Dubai 20 years ago” is the tenet that tends to welcome all first-time visitors to Erbil — the heart of Iraqi Kurdistan and the home of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

Erbil, or Hewler to the local population, is also the base of Regional Telecom (RT), a group providing communications services which has readied Iraq’s first 4G LTE network under their FastLink brand. The new service is now live, and various personal 14

Computer News Middle East

july 2013

and enterprise packages are going to market in the coming weeks.

Many are using grandiose superlatives to describe the speed of LTE, but this “lightningfast” network is striking for the first time in not only Iraq but in all of the surrounding countries. Not only that, the nation as a whole is currently running on Edge (or 2.5G), so the launch completely bypasses the 3G network many of us have become accustomed to over the past half a decade or so. www.cnmeonline.com

The 3G licence had been granted in 2006 but the holder could not implement the network — for reasons unknown.

Adjacent to RT’s new office compound, pockets of open spaces remain scorched from Saddam Hussain’s brutal al-Anfal Campaign, known to many simply as the Kurdish Genocide. But look closer and you may catch a glimpse of Dubai contractor Emaar’s flags flapping away in the baking hairdryer wind.

“Unfortunately for Kurdistan, we’re still seen by many as an unstable country,” said Kawa Junad, RT’s CEO. “Only two years ago, bigger companies began understanding the stability of Kurdistan compared with other parts of Iraq, and that was the time we had the opportunity to bring in Alcatel-Lucent.

“This wasn’t only because of their services and equipment, but the eagerness to partner with us and guide us through the project.”

RT had previously encountered problems with Chinese vendors, and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 made it difficult for many multinationals to enter the market.

“All my respect to Huawei and ZTE, but the quality was never there,” Junad admitted.

The last terrorist attack was over seven years ago now, and the economy has since flourished. But the arrival of the mega malls and shiny new apartments are not the hottest prospects at this moment.

Long-term evolution — immediate benefits LTE, or long-term evolution, could not be more aptly named for Kurdistan. The super-fast connection has been flagged as the technology to significantly boost Web connectivity for both home and office use. The new network also brings other advantages. “The new LTE network will lead to develop the region as a whole, because there are other services it will provide,” vowed Junad.

“For example, we’ve already had discussions with the KRG for an e-government platform, there will be an e-learning programme with the Ministry of Education, and we’re even talking to the Ministry of Interior, which is interested in linking its surveillance cameras, as well as a range of other enterprises.”

RT, while already a cluster of brands, is now running in two distinct divisions, the CEO told CNME; one for its own subscribers, and another focused solely on integrating government services onto the network. Despite such close ties, none of the CAPEX has come from the KRG. The “partnership” is merely a matter of provision, Junad claimed.

“We are also in discussion with the Ministry of Electricity, which wants to use

85%

of mobile devices being bought in Kurdistan are smartphones

Kawa Junad, CEO, Regional Telecom

our network to control smart metres to monitor utilities,” he added. “Until now, it simply relied on GPS, but has come to us to switch to LTE. So many ministries, focused on many sectors, will come to us for benefits — not only our existing subscribers.”

Smartphones and networks — chickens and eggs With a lack of a 3G network and patchy ADSL offerings, high demand for LTE in Iraqi Kurdistan is a no-brainer. As a telecom leader in the region, RT is even better positioned to gauge the extent of the readiness of the public to adopt 4G-enabled devices.

“We have an accurate understanding of the demand,” Junad explained. “We’ve been in this business for nine years, as a wholesale provider for 90 percent of the companies here, through Newroz.

“We have an accurate understanding of the demand. We've been in this business for nine years, as a wholesale provider for 90 percent of the companies here, through Newroz. There's also a penetration rate of almost 75 percent, so we know the market very well." www.cnmeonline.com

“There’s also a penetration rate of almost 75 percent, so we know the market very well. Demand has never been the problem — only services.”

People are already buying LTE devices, Junad claimed. Around 85 percent of mobile devices being bought in Kurdistan are smartphones and, while many of these will not be LTE-ready, RT has readied portable SIM-loaded 4G modems for up to five users at a time.

This is the real potential coup for RT — even with lower-grade smartphones, users will have connectivity on the go. Handily monikered as “My-Fi”, the device is no bigger than an old-school Nokia handset.

“The My-Fi will be a pocket modem with charge for up to eight hours, supporting 3G and 4G — as long as your device supports Wi-Fi,” Janad said. “You don’t need to change your phone or provider, just connect through the Wi-Fi that’s in your pocket.

“Once we have connected all of Iraqi Kurdistan, then we will move forward.

We’re about to be operational and we will have blanket coverage in eight to 10 months — maximum one year. We are already planning, with discussions going on, and I think we will move into other parts of Iraq soon.”

RT’s priority is to cover all of Kurdistan and be the first company in the region to connect rural areas, as well as cities, with 4G, Junad claimed. “Even the UAE announced they have 4G, but I couldn’t even get a connection in the Palm Jumeirah,” he joked.

RT has positioned itself for what it calls a “slow launch” with very limited advertising, but Junad is convinced that word of mouth and the keenness of Kurdistan’s populous will beat the sales inertia. july 2013

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15

in depth Cisco Live! 2013

Eyeing up the end-goal Cisco is bored with dominating the networking world. It’s already shown that it can branch out and become a leading solutions provider. At Cisco Live! 2013 in Florida, it made its end-goal clear by setting its sights on the ultimate accolade — number one IT company in the world. The route?

A new industry it calls the Internet of Everything.

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Y

ou can’t fault Cisco’s ambition, and you can’t blame it either.

In an era when many IT companies are floundering, Cisco is bucking the trend. The networking giant has been growing at juggernaut speed in recent years, and shows no signs of stopping.

The latest example was its flagship Cisco Live! event in Florida, which attracted 20,000 attendees and 250,000 online — double that of when the same event came to Florida five years ago.

The reason for such growth? Well, one thing is Metcalfe’s law, which the folk at Cisco just love to quote. And why wouldn’t they — Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the number of connected users of the system.

There are currently about 2.4 billion people and 20 billion things connected to the Internet. For a vendor that rules the networking market, that’s an awful lot of value. What’s more, by 2020, those numbers will grow to more than 5 billion people and 50 billion things. You do the maths.

Another reason is that, whilst it would be easy to stick with its cushy networking market, Cisco is hell-bent on world domination. It has already impressed the IT world with its transformation into a top IT solutions provider by growing businesses in cloud computing, collaboration, video and security, as well as building up its software capabilities.

The software part is important.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new paradigm sweeping across the industry. Previously, Cisco was none-toopleased about the trend as it threatened its dominance in routers and switches.

In SDNs, many behaviour functions are detached from hardware and centrally administered by software controllers, making networks less reliant on specific hardware and operating systems, and

“This is one we waited too long on to address. You won’t see us do that again. If you look at softwaredefined networks, there are elements of it that are of major interest to us. But we will fold that into a total architectural play.” more compliant to open-source software and commodity switching.

Subsequently, as others have raced ahead to embrace this new paradigm, Cisco has held back. Until now.

At Cisco Live!, the company revealed a major product refresh for its enterprise network portfolio, which it said brings applications and network services software, and hardware networking functions, together to enable its new Enterprise Network Architecture.

The architecture expands the scope of its Open Network Environment (ONE) framework, a portfolio-wide strategy that applies software programmability to ASICs, operating systems, networking functions, and services across the data centre, WAN and LAN. Cisco hopes its ONE framework will protect it in the SDN era. By tightly linking software programmability of network infrastructure to custom-developed ASIC hardware and hardware-specific operating systems, Cisco believes it can combat the trend.

It will support onePK across its entire enterprise routing and switching portfolio within the next 12 months, beginning with www.cnmeonline.com

50bn

things will be connected to the Internet by 2020.

july 2013

Computer News Middle East

17

in depth Cisco Live! 2013

the newly-announced ISR 4451-AX and ASR 1000-AX routers. “That’s a strategy we should have announced a year ago,” said CEO John Chambers, who openly admitted to lagging behind in the embrace of SDN. “This is one we waited too long on to address,” he said. “You won’t see us do that again. If you look at software-defined networks, there are elements of it that are of major interest to us. But we will fold that into a total architectural play.

“Very complex software on top of very complex software, which is what we’ve got, is the definition of insanity if you think it’s going to make things easier.

What we will do is open up interface to

Internet of Everything Cisco said the Enterprise Network Architecture positions its enormous routing and switching franchise, and much of the company’s customer base, for the future of networking.

This future, it said, will evolve around the “Internet of Everything” (IoE), providing the network infrastructure for an ever-diversifying set of applications that run businesses and people’s lives.

Research released by Cisco ahead of Cisco Live! revealed that IoE is expected to enable enterprises to generate at least $613 billion in global profits in 2013, and represents at least a $14.4 trillion market over the next decade.

“Very complex software on top of very complex software, which is what we’ve got, is the definition of insanity if you think it’s going to make things easier.

What we will do is open up interface to the network for not just OpenFlow but also COI capabilities. We’ll do it much quicker so we don’t let our competitors set the definition.” the network for not just OpenFlow but also COI capabilities. We’ll do it much quicker so we don’t let our competitors set the definition.”

The most significant release is the Catalyst 6800 backbone switching line.

An update of the long-running Catalyst 6500, the 6800 is targeted at campus backbone 10/40/100Gbps services. Cisco also revealed a new supervisor engine for Cisco’s 4500-E chassis-based access switch, and a new high-end ISR branch router.

18

Computer News Middle East

july 2013

IoE is the networked connection of people, process, data and things, and the increased value that occurs as “everything” joins the network. Several technology transitions — including the "Internet of Things" (IoT), increased mobility, the emergence of cloud computing, and the growing importance of Big Data, among others — are combining to enable IoE. And Cisco is not just talking about it.

It revealed at Cisco Live! it has formed a www.cnmeonline.com

business group to specifically address the IoT opportunity, funded with $200 million in R&D resources, hundreds of people in development and 500 people in sales and marketing.

The IoT Group combines Cisco’s Connected Industries, Connected Energy and Physical Security groups into a coordinated unit with consistent product development foundations and go-to-market directives. It is focused on the four vertical markets of discrete and process manufacturing, transportation, energy, and public sector.

The group is led by Rob Soderbery, Senior VP and GM of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Group, and Wim Elfrink, Executive VP, Industry Solutions and Chief Globalisation Officer, whose current duties do not change.

“This is a today business,” Soderbery confirmed. “This is already a multihundred million dollar business for us.”

Future of the data centre Cisco also used the event to unveil its vision for the next-generation data centre, which it calls application-centric infrastructure.

It said its architecture aims to transform data centres to better address the demands of new and current applications in the cloud era.

Accelerated to market by the company’s investment in Insieme Networks, this transformation requires an open, programmable and automated infrastructure that is ready to handle the challenges of cloud deployment models and today’s Big Data applications, Cisco said.

Cisco also announced two key innovative enhancements to its unified fabric portfolio: Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) to automate network provisioning, simplify fabric management and optimise fabric; and extensions to the Nexus 7000 portfolio with new Nexus 7700 Series switches and new F3 Series I/O Modules that deliver 40G/100G scalability.

The

Evolution DataCentre

of a

to the

Cloud

Data centres are evolving from isolated resources "islands" to multiple data centre locations — effectively creating "data centres without walls" that help businesses cut costs and maximise IT effeciency.

2.2

zettabytes a zettabytes is 1027 bytes - that’s a billion terabytes

Businesses are having to store more and more digital content and files everyday

The total amount of information stored today by all the businesses worldwide is 2.2 zettabytes.

Information is expected to grow 67% in 2015 for enterprises and 178% for SMBs. 1

This demand comes at a cost - 7.5 million data centres worldwide - 165,000 greater than 1,000 sq. ft.

- More than 15,000 data centres are the size of football fields

2

$ Total investment in data centre IT infrastructure will grow 5% on average per year to reach $152 billion in 2016. 3

These costs and space requirements will grow: 84% of enterprise plan to add centre capacity due to the influx of new applications and efficiency constraints. 4

84%

1 Symantec: “2012 State of Information Survey” 2 IDC: “IDC Datacentre Interconnect 1/11 (study done for Ciena)” 3 Canalys: “Data centre infrastructure market will be worth $152 billion by 2016” 4 Digital Reality trust: “US Campus Survey Results 1/12” 5 Gartner: “Forcast: Public Cloud Service Services” 6 Ciena

How are businesses

How much data could be travelling between average virtualised data centres?

tackling 12%

UNPLANNED

PERIODIC

1TB Cloudbursting for capacity

10TB Workload balancing, follow

B

augmentation (e.g. 50 VMs

Peak Peak

2014 60% of server workloads will be virtualised by 2014. 5

A

100TB Disaster avoidance, DC

)

B

consolidation

(e.g. 5,000 VMs

A

)

A 2015 estimated average Virtual Machine to take 20GB Requires 10x bandwidth if simultaneously moving associated data store

Providing enterprise-class cloud

Up to

35%

services that can scale flexibly will result in lower costs for businesses than today’s isolated data centres.

lower

When data centre resources are pooled

Before: Must size for sum of peak usage

sun/moon

(e.g. 500 VMs

Businesses can reduce IT expenses up to 35% by moving to a virtual data centre environment.

Peak

60% virtualisation

)

B

2008 In 2008, only 12% of server workloads were virtualised.

A

B

BULK

After: Can size for sum of peak

To be more agile, businesses can move some of their virtual servers to the cloud and virtualise their data centre resources. Now, by pooling these virtual datacentres, total resource requirements can be reduced by up to 33%.

Businesses can reduce capacity needs by 50% using fully automated, cloud driven network provisioning that allocates assured resources where and when they are needed.

Cloud access and networking costs can be reduced by up to 40% for business virtualising their data centre resources. 6

35%

this problem?

short takes Month in view

Middle East in dire need of skilled IT pros Middle Eastern businesses want to invest in IT during 2013 but are struggling to find skilled candidates to fill posts, according to new research by CompTIA. The International Technology Adoption & Workforce Issues study revealed that 62 percent of Middle East executives plan

to hire IT staff this year. In contrast, the global average of execs looking to hire IT staff this year stands at 39 percent, CompTIA said.

Despite wanting to hire more IT staff, though, CompTIA said that 85 percent of Middle Eastern businesses believe they are faced with

a gap in the regional skilled labour market. It added that 33 percent of respondents described the skills gap as an “extensive” problem.

CompTIA said its findings highlight a challenge that it expects to impact today’s business competitiveness and corporate security, as well as the adoption of new technologies to support growth.

Cisco leaps IBM

Oracle and Microsoft announced a partnership that will see Oracle’s database, application server and other products find a home inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. "Customers need and want more flexibility to adapt in a rapidly changing business landscape,” said Oracle co-President Mark Hurd.

Firms take 10 hours to spot data breaches

The average organisation believes it would spot a data breach in 10 hours, a McAfee global survey of IT professionals has found. The firm’s interrogation of 500 decision makers found that 22 percent thought they’d need a day to recognise a breach, with one in 20 offering a week as a likely timescale.

Forrester founder and CEO George Colony has touted the shift from IT to business technology and urged CIOs to get closer to their marketing colleagues in the age of the customer.

Computer News Middle East

Apple took the wraps off iOS 7, revealing a dramatic new design that sheds sixyear-old interface elements, and replaces them with a cleaner, more modern aesthetic. From top to bottom, the OS that powers the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch has been renovated for both looks and usability.

“It’s the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of iPhone,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Apple

Cisco has overtaken IBM as the leading provider of cloud infrastructure, despite the latter hitting a two-year high for supplying cloud equipment, according to analysts at Synergy Research.

22

WHAT’S HOT?

July 2013

UAE takes centre stage for BlackBerry The UAE became the first country in the world to offer BlackBerry Q5 smartphones to the public on June 21.

The devices were released to the public in conjunction with the launch of the Middle East’s first dedicated BlackBerry store, at Dubai Mall.

The Q5 — which is being targeted at emerging markets and, at Dhs1,499, is a cheaper option to the Q10 and Z10 — is the latest BlackBerry smartphone to sport the BlackBerry 10 operating system.

The new device features a QWERTY keyboard, and is available in red, white and black. Smaller than its aforementioned predecessors, the Q5 sports a 3.1-inch touchscreen and is aimed at the middle segment rather than the flagship segment.

“As one of the leading smartphone brands in the Middle East, our customers are our number one priority and, along with our partners, we are always seeking ways to provide them with the optimal BlackBerry experience,” said Robert Bose, Regional Managing Director EMEA, BlackBerry.

www.cnmeonline.com

Oracle LeaseWeb, one of Europe’s biggest hosting providers, wiped 630 servers that contained Megaupload data, signalling founder Kim Dotcom to call it the “largest data massacre in the history of the Internet”.

Megaupload was shut down in 2012 following allegations that it facilitated copyright infringement. LeaseWeb disputes Dotcom’s claims that it didn’t inform him prior to the wipe.

Megaupload The National Security Agency (NSA) has been under fire after reportedly obtaining direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US Internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed programme called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document revealed.

National Security Agency

WHAT’S NOT?

Cyber threat extra high during Ramadan Enterprises should be on the look-out for increased security threats during the holy month of Ramadan, according to security firm Symantec.

Justin Doo, Security Practice Manager, Symantec ME, said that cyber-based attacks were more likely during Ramadan because of reduced working hours and a more relaxed business environment.

“People were breached in the same period last year, and it’s likely we will see breaches again this year,” he claimed.

Heightening security risks over a long period of time can spell trouble for businesses, however.

“If you’ve asked for extra people to cover the opening weekend but nothing happens, management isn’t going to allow you to keep extra people on high alert for the following week or so,” Doo said. “The company goes back to normal after this, and then two or three days later the breach happens, and you’re not ready.” However, Florian Malecki, Product Marketing Director, Dell Software, quashed the claims, saying that if a company is fully secure, the time of year shouldn't make any difference to the level of risk.

IT managers believe their role will change

Smartphones soar

Emerging markets and lower prices will push worldwide smartphone shipments close to the billion-unit level this year, according to the latest forecast by IDC.

Training scheme boosted by Omani government partnership SAP has partnered with Oman’s Information Technology Authority (ITA) in order to boost its Mawared graduate training programme in the sultanate.

The tie-in with the ITA came as the software vendor called on government entities and the private sector to offer more support for the programme.

Currently, the Oman-based Mawared programme is educating 20 Omani graduates, who were selected from a pool of 300 applicants. SAP said that a further 20 students are set to join in the fourth quarter of 2013.

The programme aims to provide students with essential business, IT and leadership skills. Training includes handson project experience, negotiation, conflict management and “design thinking”. The programme also offers SAP certifications to associate level in core business and industry solutions.

Google detects phishing attacks in Iran Google detected large-scale phishing attacks targeting users in Iran ahead of the country’s presidential elections last month.

The company detected and disrupted for almost three weeks email-based phishing campaigns that are aimed at compromising the accounts of tens of thousands of Iranian users, Eric Grosse, Google’s vice president for security engineering said.

Phishing emails claim to be from legitimate sources, and steal information often by directing users to a fraudulent website where they are required to fill in their personal or financial information.

The timing and targeting of the current phishing campaigns suggest that the attacks are “politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election,” Grosse said. The campaigns, which have their origin in Iran, represent a significant jump in the overall volume of phishing activity in the region, he added.

www.cnmeonline.com

Microsoft CIO Tony Scott has left the company after five years. Jim Dubois, the company’s vice president of IT product and services management, has been named interim CIO.

BYOD, cloud and virtualisation will transform the role of the IT manager from technical specialist to central business communicator, according to new research

by Aruba Networks. The ‘20/20 Vision’ report found that 89 percent of IT professionals believe policy communication and business change are the biggest on-going challenges they face.

Mashreq launches E Cube Retail Concept Mashreq Bank has steered its Dubai Internet City branch away from a traditional platform with the launch of its E Cube Retail Concept.

The project is a first-ofits-kind initiative in the UAE, which the bank said is based on keeping pace with evolving needs of customers and its eagerness to engage with them in effective ways.

The concept offers customers speedy and smart banking options, and interactivity with the latest technology-led devices.

Upon entering the branch, customers and July 2013

passersbys will be greeted by a 75” exterior attractor screen. This screen visually interacts with people, engaging them with products and lifestyle choices to accommodate their requirements.

When customers step into the branch, they are greeted by interactive screens which they can carry-out their banking activities on.

There are also eight interactive tablets, which enable customers to browse through products and services, and apply for them then and there.

Computer News Middle East

23

Find us online

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Analysis: Prism doesn’t have CIOs in a panic, yet

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Oracle’s Q4 results: What to watch

New MacBook Air undergoes battery test

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by Chris Kanaracus Read more online

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Insight:

Blogs: Running through a minefield — Google’s Play store is still unsafe

5 BYOD pitfalls and how you can avoid them

Conquering the next big challenge – data at the edge

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5 products Facebook should announce instead of Instagram video

ComputerNewsME CALLING ALL APPLE USERS! have you seen the new iOS7 design? Like it? Will you consider the switch elsewhere? Let us know! #Apple http://bit.ly/133qaHd

llen Mitchell, Senior Technical Account Manager, MENA, CommVault Systems

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ComputerNewsME BREAKING: Virgin Radio #Dubai website hacked, database apparently on sale #UAE #Security #hack http://bit.ly/14R2eob

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ComputerNewsME BlackBerry COO Kristian Tear launches the Middle East’s first #BlackBerry store at Dubai Mall http://bit.ly/17vDZzF

ComputerNewsME Fantastic turnout for the Doha, Qatar leg of our Data Centre Build road show in the W Hotel’s magnificent ballroom http://bit.ly/16rfkrr

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on location Bank of Beirut

Laser treatment The Bank of Beirut is a trusted and wellknown financial service in Lebanon’s capital, and has been offering its expertise since the early 60s. However, tradition can cause you to lose pace in a modern day business, and so the bank set about electronically updating its manual filing procedures to provide a clearer, faster and more accurate service.

W

ith 65 members coming together to create an IT team which watches over 60 branches, the technical side of the Bank of Beirut is no mean feat. Josephine El Koreh, IT Development and Maintenance Manager, IT Department, Bank of Beirut, explains that keeping the bank relevant, modern and competitive often means investing in up-to-the-minute IT solutions.

As well as this, the sensitivity of information has never been more recognised in business. With many processes moving online in the last decade, financial services continue to rank highly in IT security; customer information, customer data, account details, passwords, etcetera. El Koreh says that the bank recognises the criticality of information, and sees it as an asset. In that vein, she decided that it was about time that the bank updated its manual filing processes, which included copying and storing files related to account openings, loans, customer inquiries, and banking vouchers.

“We had trouble storing files and documents, and then finding them at a later date. We were wasting a lot of hours making copies of vouchers and loan inquiries, and we weren’t able to offer the customer a symmetrical copy of an account opening receipt,” says El Koreh.

www.cnmeonline.com

july 2013

Computer News Middle East

27

on location Bank of Beirut

“We needed to make these processes electronic so that we could file them better, locate them easier, and save time on copies.”

The solution that Bank of Beirut was looking for had to ensure that tellers didn’t need to manually make copies of each file, by enabling scanning of files electronically, and then having them filed in a specific way which allowed tellers to locate them later on when needed.

“We needed a solution that would file our documents for indexing, such as by date and importance,” El Koreh explains.

“Also, we needed tellers to be able to search and print vouchers when they need. On top of this, we didn’t have any copies of account openings, which is risky. Now when we have a client coming in, they have a booklet which we can scan and save in an index, which can be retrieved easily.”

Moreover, El Koreh adds that physical storage has been saved, another basic need for the project.

Easy selection The Bank of Beirut then set about scouting the market for the right solution and vendor to get the project underway. However, this wasn’t a lengthy process due to the relationship that it already had with one particular vendor, Laserfiche.

“We checked with other vendors, but we’ve known Laserfiche for a long time. They have a good reputation and so we were confident to go with them. It was partly loyalty and partly because they had a good solution — it was the best on the market.”

El Koreh says that Laserfiche came into the bank and performed the implementation itself.

“We did the analysis together, they proposed a good study and we were happy to go with them. It took us about three months to do the initial set up, then we started implementing throughout the 60 branches.”

Laserfiche helped with the training from the get-go, and then El Koreh and team continued by themselves once enough IT members had become confident with the system.

“The person from head office who is responsible for all branches got certified in the technology, not the branch members themselves — this was the only challenging part; user resistance. The tellers don’t want to scan documents, it’s more work for them — but the benefits are very high for us.”

User resistance is normal, according to El Koreh, but aside from this hurdle, the system was stable enough to cause minimal disruption.

“The users were not sure, but from our perspective it was a good

65 employees work within the IT team for the Bank of Beirut.

“We checked with other vendors, but we’ve known Laserfiche for a long time. They have a good reputation and so we were confident to go with them. It was partly loyalty and partly because they had a good solution — it was the best on the market.”

Ms Josephine El Koreh, IT Development and Maintenance Manager, IT Department, Bank of Beirut

implementation. The users are not used to scanning documents, so when we asked them to scan each document so that we could have copies for the customer, it was new to them — this was the only major change.”

Instant benefits Now, El Koreh says, users have instant access to the documents, whereas before, it would take a few days for original documents to be sent from one branch to another via regular mail.

“Now users can see any document whenever it’s needed, some have up to four copies — some in branch and some in other departments.”

Securely does it On top of all the concerns of a regular implementation, Bank of Beirut had the added headache of security. When it comes to electronically processing customer data on a system, great lengths have to be taken to ensure that sensitive data is dealt with correctly.

Laserfiche, according to El Koreh, had already proved itself as the stand-out vendor in this category too.

“It was a reason we chose to go with them,” she says. “The security is very good. You can apply any security you like on top of this system. So we set out our information security for each user individually, and have prevented any issue which may occur. We’re very happy.”

The solution has been recognised with such high regard that the bank already has plans to roll it out to its international branches in the future, El Koreh says.

“The project was up and running within four months and we’ve dramatically reduced our labour hours and efficiency since,” she reiterates.

www.cnmeonline.com

july 2013

Computer News Middle East

29

CIO Spotlight Dr. Hazem Turki El Khatib

Dr. Hazem Turki El Katib, CIO, Department of Finance, Abu Dhabi

30

Computer News Middle East

july 2013

www.cnmeonline.com

Man of the world They say nothing broadens the mind like travel — if this is true, then the mind of Dr. Hazem Turki El Khatib should be fairly well-stretched. Having travelled from East to West, with family dotted everywhere in between, Hazem now sits in the chair of the CIO of the Department of Finance, within the Abu Dhabi government, and is recognised by IDC as one of the top five in his field.

T

hough of Palestinian decent, Hazem was born in, and spent his childhood in, Kuwait, before moving to Jordan to undergo his Bachelors. He studied database technology, the area of interest which drew his attention toward IT in the first place.

During this time, Hazem’s supervisor recommended that he head to Scotland, in the UK, to study for his Master’s degree. And so, in 1996, a young man from the Middle East set off to Edinburgh for the first time, replacing the sand and sun for more brisk climes.

“It was my first visit to the UK, a real leap of faith. I knew nothing about it, I landed in Heathrow and looked to get a taxi to Edinburgh from the airport,” laughs Hazem.

“Luckily I had someone to advise me, he told me it would take me a good seven hours, it’s a long way, but I didn’t know this, I was only 21.”

In light of his discovery that a taxi from Heathrow Airport in London to Edinburgh in Scotland would cost the majority of his life savings and potentially take up the best part of his weekend, Hazem spent the night in London before hopping on another plane the following day and heading north.

Hazem remembers Scotland with great passion. “It was very calm and nice,” he says.

“Princess Street and the castle was interesting to me, though the accent was difficult. The first couple of months I spent trying to socialise with the people, but I found the accent so difficult to get used to, but it is still a very lovely city, and I still love it to this day — and eventually I got used to the accent.”

Highland guidance Hazem recalls a special role model during his time studying, a time which he remembers as extremely tough. Tough enough, in fact, to make him question whether he could succeed there at all.

“My supervisor, a professor, he was my role model, I appreciated him very much, he gave me so much support. It wasn’t easy for a chap from the Middle East to go to the UK and do a PhD. In the first couple of months I wanted to quit — I felt I couldn’t make it. I called my father and he told me I had to continue, he said I must keep going.”

Hazem was spending nearly 12 hours a day studying for his PhD and recalls not seeing Edinburgh in the evening before his first four months had passed due to his high work rate.

An irrefutable offer The hard work didn’t take long to pay off though. Hazem hadn’t even

www.cnmeonline.com

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31

CIO Spotlight Dr. Hazem Turki El Khatib

graduated from Edinburgh before he was on his way to Heathrow again to meet for an interview for a consultancy job in California in the United States of America.

“I’d had a job opportunity in Silicon Valley and was offered a job right there on the spot,” he says.

“I had two offers in fact; I was also offered a role at Motorola, based in Reading, in the UK. I obviously chose California. I liked California before I’d even moved there. I had read all about the people and cultures, it seemed so exciting.”

Hazem moved to the west coast in early 2001 to begin his consultancy role, which allowed him to travel each week from state to state.

“It’s a multiport kind of state, it’s great. If you’re in Silicon Valley then you know you’ve got a talent. Not just anyone could work there, it means you have a reputation. These are profit companies, so working here gave me the impression that I had the right skills and education.”

TIMELINE 1992 Undertakes Bachelor’s Degree in Jordan

1996 Moved to Edinburgh, UK, to study for Master’s and PhD

2001

Takes consultancy job in Silicon Valley, San Francisco

2003 Heads back east and lands professor role in Al Ain, UAE

2007

Relocates to Abu Dhabi as IT Director at government

2010 Offered role as CIO of Department of Finance

“It wasn’t easy for a chap from the Middle East to go to the UK and do a PhD. In the first couple of months I wanted to quit — I felt I couldn’t make it. I called my father and he told me I had to continue, he said I must keep going.”

Student to teacher However, this role wasn’t forever for Hazem, and his family’s wishes helped to persuade him to relocate back to the Middle East only a few short years after. In 2003 he took up a post as a professor at a university in Al Ain, UAE. “Having a PhD meant that I had to experience a few different things, so the move to teaching was good for me. I achieved a lot while there, I was promoted to an associate professor level, which, at my age, was a massive accomplishment. At this point in my career I had gained my Master’s and PhD by the age of 26, and then become an associate professor by 33.”

It was from this position that Hazem was offered a CIO role in one of the government departments in Abu Dhabi before the Department of Finance snapped him up in 2010.

Since joining the Department of Finance, Hazem has received multiple awards and accolades and claims that many government entities find it hard to believe that the department is really attempting and achieving what they is.

More to achieve But this may not be the final step of the ladder for Dr. Hazem Turki El Khatib. He still claims to have more fire in his belly, and believes that a more executive role in business could be on the cards, either in his motherland or even back in the West.

“I know the IT business, but maybe I need to know more about other areas; economics, finance, etcetera. I know how to make projects succeed — I’m a workaholic. I’ve always been really focused on my work in any job I’ve had.”

Though, he has no plans to leave just yet, Hazem and family are happy in the UAE. However, labelling home comes with difficulty.

“I am a Jordanian national, a Palestinian national, my children have US citizenship, I was born in Kuwait and lived there for 15 years, I have family in Holland, America, Germany, Canada — the world is my country.”

Hazem, to this day, believes that this wide cultural exposure throughout his life helps him, day-to-day, to communicate with all types of people and has been one of the key skills that has led him to where he is today. www.cnmeonline.com

july 2013

Computer News Middle East

33

on location Gulf Air

Dr Jassim Haji, IT Director, Gulf Air

Do-it-yourself

Big Data Gulf Air shunned the expensive solutions of the big vendors jumping on the Big Data bandwagon, and became the first Middle East organisation to implement the technology by embracing open-source software with an in-house team.

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T

here is no doubt that Big Data is the hottest IT topic of 2013. Everybody is talking about it as the next big technology to revolutionise the enterprise.

Unsurprisingly then, every man and his dog wants a piece of the action. All the industry heavyweights have been touting their own solutions, ranging from hefty appliances to in-built analytics technology.

Many are saying the truly mammoth frequency of data being generated by organisations warrants a completely new approach to IT infrastructure. Others are saying the related skills are so sought-after that ‘data scientists’ — a job spawned from the trend — are now amongst the most in-demand and, subsequently, highly-paid professionals in the IT world.

The trouble is, it’s expensive. Very expensive. Which is fine when the business case and ROI is clear — but right now, that is not the case.

Yes, we all get the benefits in principal. The data is at the disposal of the organisation and can be turned into actionable information thus generating business value. But “in principal” isn’t enough to get senior management to sign off the budget for an extremely pricey project.

“It wasn’t something structured where a vendor had come up with a solution and said here is the ideal solution for your problems. We just made sense out of it and created from scratch, and whoever we talked to said they had never heard of anybody using Big Data for such things. But that didn’t justify that we shouldn’t go for it, so we started.”

What they need is guarantees; clear use-cases of enterprises that have made the investment and seen the returns.

So therein lies the hurdle. Big Data is so young in its infancy, that CIOs — whilst enthused by the technology — simply cannot justify the investment it warrants at this stage.

In step Dr Jassim Haji, IT Director of Gulf Air, the national carrier of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Like everyone else, Dr Haji took an interest in the subject.

“You won’t find any issue of any IT magazine these days that does not have an article or piece of news about Big Data,” he says. “Its growing popularity is very interesting and shines the light into its wide and attractive potential.

“However, we have to be careful not to lose our way in this big hype. It is easy for IT managers to become over-excited about such hypes and dive directly into the implementation of Big Data without aligning it with the business vision. Everyone is eager to get a piece of the action, but this has to fit into the greater picture of the business.”

Dr Haji took the standard approach when in the initial stages of an IT implementation, and looked at what was on the market.

One initially took his eye. “To be honest,” he says, “we tried with Microsoft.

“But with Microsoft, like others, there were lots of hidden costs, and it was going to take time, and we were restricted with lots of technological restraints from Microsoft.

“So we came to a stage where we said, if doesn’t work with Microsoft and it doesn’t work with others, maybe it’s not worth going for.”

It is this stage where many CIOs are getting to and, just like Dr Haji says, deciding to put a project on hold until the technology matures and more success stories emerge.

Not Dr Haji, however. With the airline evolving towards restructuring, and opening and closing routes, he was determined to draw value from the hordes of comments they were getting on social media.

“They started tweeting and retweeting, so we found thousands of those comments going around,” he says. “It’s difficult to track them and understand where they’re coming from and how business should respond. And it’s not quantative — it’s something very qualitative that is hard and subjective to understand.

“We said, well, we’ve got so much data, we look at it every day, everybody thinks about it differently — how do you go about it?”

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on location Gulf Air

Furthermore, more than 80 percent of social-media posts about Gulf Air are in Arabic, Dr Haji reveals, and, as such, he wanted to experiment in Arabic sentiment analysis.

Having neglected the big vendors, Dr Haji took the bold decision to assign a project manager and four or five staff, from his existing team, and execute a part-time assignment to train themselves on Big Data.

“I sent them to various seminars on Big Data and they went online and researched and looked at different software,” Dr Haji says. “Then we had a backroom of staging to try these kind of things.

“When you have limited resources and you don’t have a big budget, it’s a good way to do it. To be honest, there was no proof of concept that I could take to the management and say let’s spend that much and this will be the result. It was all unknown.

“So I told the team let’s go after this and if we can do it good and well, we will be the first and would have done something unique. If we couldn’t do it, we had at least tried.”

Having done their research and self-training, the team opted for Apache Hadoop-based software from Cloudera.

Apache Hadoop is an open-source framework that allows organisations to process large amounts of data, regardless of its structure, at a low cost, and has largely been attributed to driving the growth of the Big Data industry.

However, Hadoop has presented the industry with challenges related to a lack of talent in those that can use the technology.

“We ended up with an open-source system where the vendor doesn’t support you beyond certain levels,” Dr Haji says. “You get the structure from the vendor, but you have to rely on yourself for everything else.”

“It was just a trial — it wasn’t something structured where a vendor had come up with a solution and said here is the ideal solution for your problems. We just made sense out of it and created from scratch, and whoever we talked to said they had never heard of anybody using Big Data for such things. But that didn’t justify that we shouldn’t go for it, so we started.

The “off-and-on exercise”, as Dr Haji calls it, took around a year between him appointing the team and the solution going live.

“They’ve never been entirely dedicated to the job and still aren’t now,” he says. “When you do a trial-and-error it takes lots of times, and you can’t afford to put five or six people out of their jobs.

80%

of social-media posts about Gulf Air are in Arabic

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“It was a challenge taken up by the team and myself to just go after it, keep it quiet, and see what we come up with. If it was successful we would announce it and tell everybody, and if it wasn’t we wouldn’t have told anyone,” he laughs.

The biggest challenge Dr Haji and his team faced was getting the system to compile all the different Arabic slangs and dialects that make up the language in order to understand the comments and translate them into English.

Having overcome that, the project, which required an extremely small investment, has been a great success.

However, the work is not done. The IT department has done the hard work, but for real business gain to come out of it, other departments must use the information to generate value.

“The implementation has already been a success,” Dr Haji says. “The data we got is very useful and valuable. Now, I’ll have to push others to do their job to make sure the success comes to the company. Whether they need other tools to go integrate with this to make sure we increase our sales or reputation, or not, that’s a different story.”

Having taken the route he did, Dr Haji is now firm in his opinion that it is not viable at this stage to be investing in the expensive Big Data solutions seen on the market.

“The investment they are asking the customers to make towards what they are going to get out of it is too much,” he says.

“I think even Big Data at its highest capabilities that vendors are offering does the same thing. It doesn’t do the work for you, it brings you the data.

“If we draw value from 10 percent of the comments, we’ve already made a return. Sometimes, through difficult times you learn innovations. When you don’t have that much money to spend, there is a pressure on you. To deliver, you come up with creativities. That’s where we ended up being.”

He is also keen to emphasise that Big Data will have different meaning to each organisation, and each must be clear of the expected benefits of such a project.

“Despite the term, Big Data does not necessarily have to be big in size or volume; it is how to use the outcome of Big Data that is of big importance,” he says.

Looking forward, Dr Haji plans to extend the sentiment analysis to handle the English language, as well as expanding to other modes of media, like Facebook, newspaper articles and travel sites.

Furthermore, he wishes to take another challenge, which could see Gulf Air’s IT team help other organisations in the region embrace Big Data.

“I said, since we got to this stage, why not build on it. We have the expertise, maybe we can come up with something they are offering in the market at high prices. I’m not saying we’re going to sell it tomorrow, but maybe we can do part of that.”

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on location KOJ Group

Martin Healey Alexander, Group HR Director, KOJ

Richard Winsor, Group Chief Financial Officer, KOJ

The gift of K foresight Though Kamal Osman Jamjoom Group has not deployed what it believes to be the current number one solution on the market to boost its HR processes for staff, the company believes that its roll-out of Oracle Fusion will prove a winning move as the product matures into the industry’s best choice.

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Thameem Rizvon, IT Director, KOJ

OJ’s IT director has taken on many challenging tasks in the past, as highlighted in last month’s CIO Spotlight — Thameem Rizvon doesn’t shy away from a technical conundrum. However, perhaps even he would have been slightly put out by the scale of the challenge set by the business this year to transform the manual staff appraisal service for the HR department in record breaking time.

“Personally, I don’t think IT projects are IT projects anymore — it’s about the business, so it’s a business project,” says Richard Winsor, Group Chief Financial Officer, KOJ, who helped drive the project from the executive level.

“We’re trying to improve the business — we use the appraisal system to see if people are better placed elsewhere in the company. If IT owned this project, technically, it would be brilliant, but it wouldn’t be what the business wants.”

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Winsor set clear objectives from the off, following the proposal from the group HR director, Martin Healey Alexander, who initiated the project.

“This was my idea,” says Alexander. “I’d been used to working in Western Europe where we were using SAP management systems, and I realised here that a lot of our processes were manual, and so we needed to automate to make the situation easier for staff. I pitched the idea to Richard and then to the board.”

Winsor adds: “What we wanted to achieve was a more proactive approach on staff rotation and internal promotions. Our system for doing this was not consistent across the business, Martin highlighted this.”

The role of IT With that, it was down to Rizvon to come in and head the project from a technical angle. He had previously moved KOJ to the cloud with Oracle E suite a few years back, but when the company wanted to move from an on-premise model to a cloud model in 2011, it faced some challenges which would shape the decisions for the HR project from the offset.

“We stuck with Oracle for this project,” Rizvon confirms. “The reason was that we had a previous solution, and it was a great stand-alone product. It looked nice, it integrated with our other applications, and strategically, the clients in the region were strong.

However they couldn’t sustain themselves. The company was bought out and it killed them — therefore we had speed issues, productivity issues, and we quickly learnt that the vendor needs to have the right strategy and cash to sustain themselves in the industry.”

Rizvon claims that he has no problem with purchasing the outsider’s product, but if that company is going to be acquired in five years’ time, then it’s difficult to predict how that product will evolve.

“The way I work is to let the users step up and fight. We still wanted to maintain our cloud strategy so we changed to ServiceNow

by Oracle. And for this project we decided to stick with them and implement Fusion Performance Appraisal.”

Record breaking implementation Winsor says that KOJ was working on a very strict timeframe due to appraisal deadlines. He claims that although the Oracle product wasn’t the best on the market at the time, it was the best option for them in terms of its growth potential and sustainability, and in hindsight, the decision to implement Oracle could have been made sooner.

“This was a very vanilla project, very plain and simple. We put a lot of emphasis on Oracle to support us and we stated a pre-condition that they must achieve our deadlines — our other

3500 employees cover KOJ’s 65+ stores.

“We made the decision in January, we started the project on the 27th and it went live on March 12th — it was touted the fasted Fusion implementation in the world.” fall-backs had already agreed to our strict timeline and I think that helped Oracle to try and achieve this,” he says.

“We made the decision in January, we started the project on the 27th and it went live on March 12th — it was touted the fasted Fusion implementation in the world.”

Inside knowledge Since Rizvon heads the Oracle User Group locally, he was able to secure a direct Oracle sponsor for the project in the form of Clive Swan, the SVP for Fusion. Rizvon consulted with Swan regarding who to partner with for the implementation, and Swan held extensive meetings with all Fusion partners; Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro.

“We told Clive (Swan) to speak to all the partners involved with Fusion and he liked Infosys. So we flew them out and they began the project for us almost immediately,” Rizvon says.

“We were the first, regionally, to go live with this, so the stakes were high. I run the User Group for Oracle here, so had there been a failure then all the group would know the details — therefore Oracle was deeply committed to this. We chose Oracle on the 15th of January, Clive approached the partners between the 22nd and 25th, and then we were away. Since the deployment it’s just got better and better because Clive is directly involved, so if we have any feedback he can relay that directly to the developers.”

ROI for business The product itself has since been used by KOJ’s 3500 employees across its 65+ stores. The initial phase was the appraisals, which are still in progress, according to Rizvon, but obvious ROI is apparent.

“I have a status chart where I can see all of my reports here on a clear dashboard. We already have a 90 percent completion rate of phase one — I can see what’s happening at a store level which I couldn’t’ before,” adds Winsor.

“Phase two will be the talent management. Once the first phase is complete, we will have a lot of data on people, so if we get opportunities abroad, for example, we can pull information on all staff and see who will be good for these roles.”

In summery for KOJ, the group, along with Oracle and Infosys, deployed the region’s first Fusion implementation in just 32 working days, and without any investment in hardware.

The group’s strategy to continue moving to the cloud is on target and Rizvon and team appear to have set a benchmark for future Oracle deployments in the Middle East.

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FEATURE

In-memory computing

With application infrastructure technologies ever-maturing and the cost of semiconductor technologies everdeclining, the avenue is all but set for the mainstream emergence of in-memory computing. But is the Middle East ready to adopt?

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STRATEGIC IT INNOVATION PARTNER

SOLUTIONS WORLD

C

IOs’ ears perked up a couple of months ago when Gartner declared that in-memory computing (IMC) is racing towards mainstream adoption, and that CIOs must reskill their teams if they want to fully exploit it.

Shifting away from the norm of electromagnetic disks, IMC stores application data in a computer’s main DRAM without compromising its availability, consistency and integrity.

This allows organisations to develop applications that run advanced queries or perform complex transactions on very large datasets much faster than when using conventional architectures.

The result is an opportunity to change the way in which organisations support business requirements. Batch processes that normally take hours are completed in minutes or even seconds, enabling processes to be delivered to clients, suppliers, citizens or patients as real-time cloud services.

From a security perspective, IMC can also be used to quickly detect correlations and patterns to help pinpoint emerging opportunities and threats as things happen, across millions of events.

According to Gartner, a rapid penetration of IMC is likely to lead to it being adopted by at least 35 percent of midsize and large organisations by 2015.

Furthermore, the in-memory data grid (IMDG)

market — a key IMC segment — is forecasted by Gartner to reach $1 billion by 2016.

But what part does the Middle East play in this global forecast?

The US and EMEA regions probably account for 45 to 50 percent and 35 to 40 percent of the installed-base, respectively, says Massimo Pezzini, VP & Gartner Fellow, Gartner. “The rest of the world accounts for the remaining 10-20 percent,” he adds.

One worthy insight comes from SAP, whose in-memory offering, SAP HANA, has been the most successful product launch in the company’s history.

“Regionally there is extremely high interest and the market is beginning to understand the potential of this technology,” says Sam Taha, Principal InMemory Architect, SAP MENA. “As a result, we expect that adoption in this region will soon catch up with other parts of the world such as Europe and America.”

Holding back that adoption, for the time-being at least, appears to be the factor of awareness, amongst others.

“There may be a lack of understanding of what IMC actually does,” says Nassir Nauthoa, GM, GCC Intel Corporation. “But, also, there’s a lack of standards and a generally unfamiliar architecture to most organisations’ IT departments. In time these points will get addressed to enable wider adoption.”

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FEATURE

In-memory computing

As a result of this, many IT organisations are still investing in traditional application infrastructures, Taha says.

“Also, many businesses have already invested heavily in legacy and home-grown applications, which have likely grown in undocumented complexity over time, making it difficult to migrate to a new environment,” he adds.

So, the key step towards increasing Middle East adoption is increasing the awareness and understanding on its capabilities.

This comes only through educating customers, and the customer’s willingness to adopt new technology, according to Nauthoa.

“It’s about sailing in unchartered waters sometimes and it is incumbent on suppliers to accelerate know-how around IMC in order to grow adoption,” he says.

Once that understanding is there, the burden falls onto the CIOs to ensure their teams have the right skills to exploit in-memory computing.

“IMC skills are scarce and rare,” Pezzini warns.

“So they are not easy to find in the market.”

The best way to start building these skills internally, he says, is by proof of concepts.

“Another way,” he adds, “is through pilot projects that target circumscribed, but not trivial, projects targeting grow-the-business types of requirements.”

However, Taha, perhaps understandably, disagrees. He believes most existing database and application development skills are directly transferrable to in-memory computing platforms, particularly when these platforms adhere to industry standards.

He does add, however, that in-memory platforms also introduce new paradigms in the way data is managed, modelled, and presented.

“For example, logical views and virtual models are powerful new concepts that should be learned and exploited,” he says. “The new skills required will be focused on exploiting the in-memory platform for increased productivity, agility and flexibility, rather than on tuning and administration as with traditional systems.”

Nauthoa adds it is vital for vendors to offer IMS training. “We encourage CIOs to make sure their teams take up all opportunities to learn about this new technology to capitalise on sales opportunities for IMC enabled systems,” he says.

An important consideration when planning an in-memory deployment is the amount of reengineering that may be required to make the most out of the new platform.

According to Pezzini, in many cases, the reengineering efforts are not that extensive, although testing the application for the new environment can require substantial efforts.

“In order to get the most out of IMC, such as introducing real-time analytics to transactional processes, significant application engineering may be needed,” he says. “Often, this re-engineering can be done incrementally, rather than through a “big bang” approach.”

Considering no one application is built the same as another, Nauthoa adds that it really depends on the applications in question.

“Some may require a minimal investment to re-engineer in order to maximise the in-memory platform,” he says.

“Regionally there is extremely high interest and the market is beginning to understand the potential of this technology. As a result, we expect that adoption in this region will soon catch up with other parts of the world such as Europe and America.”

Sam Taha, Principal In-Memory Architect, SAP MENA

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35%

of midsize and large organisations are expected to adopt IMC by 2015.

FEATURE

In-memory computing

“Once the industry regulates by creating standards — APIs, tools and protocols — then it will become much easier for developers to create applications that are in-memory computing efficient, and in turn much more cost effective to engineer or re-engineer applications.”

Perhaps more vitally, implementing IMC brings with it a requisite for CIOs to rethink their application architectures.

IMC opens new, partially unexplored opportunities that may imply dramatic changes in organisations’ application architectures.

However, many vendors are laying out approaches CIOs can take to deploy IMC in a minimally disruptive way, Pezzini explains.

But before that is done, CIOs must of course face the task of selling the project to senior management and thus securing the necessary project budget.

According to Taha, with IMC, ROI can be based on various metrics.

“These could be time and cost saved running a month-end closing cycle for financials, which has an immediate impact on bottom line,” he says. “Additionally, intangible benefits have to be taken into consideration, such as the cost of an IT employee’s time to maintain outdated database techniques.”

Pezzini says that, although it is possible that IMC helps reducing certain types of IT costs, IMCadoption ROI can only be measured in business terms by looking at things like customer retention, revenue growth and greater product quality.

“IMC skills are scarce and rare, so they are not easy to find in the market. The best way to start building these skills internally is by proof of concepts.

Another way to build skills is through pilot projects that target circumscribed, but not trivial, projects targeting grow-thebusiness types of requirements.”

Massimo Pezzini, VP & Gartner Fellow, Gartner

By 2016, the inmemory data grid (IMDG) market — a key IMC segment — is forecasted to reach

$1bn

“At a global level we think it will take at least another three to five years, possibly longer in some cases, for IMC to be adopted on a mainstream basis. The Middle East is likely to follow a similar path.”

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“For example, IMC enables ecommerce websites to run faster, and this turns into revenue growth,” he says. “But entire industries, such as online gaming, financial trading, online advertisement, travel reservation, SaaS and social networking, could not exist — at least not as we know them today — without IMC.” Thus, the original question remains, when will adoption of in-memory computing reach a mainstream level in the Middle East?

This will depend on things such as expanding messages on the benefits, investing in enabling the sales channels to seek-out opportunities, and being able to demonstrate tangible gains in ROI to CIOs for adopting IMC systems, Nauthoa says.

“All this is readily achievable and the more that such things are done the quicker the technology will gain traction,” he adds.

Taha says that SAP is seeing the growth of in-memory at a “very fast pace” in its MENA customers. “And lots of interest from businesses that aren’t SAP customers but are extremely excited by the prospect of holding all their data in an SAP HANA database.”

Pezzini concludes that, given the significant SAP penetration in large Middle East organisations, he expects a “pretty rapid uptake” in the region, at least on the part of the most advanced IT users.

“However, at a global level we think it will take at least another three to five years, possibly longer in some cases, for IMC to be adopted on a mainstream basis,” he adds. “The Middle East is likely to follow a similar path.”

10 September | Atlantis Palm, Dubai 9 October | St Regis, Doha 26 November | Four Seasons Hotel, Riyadh http://emc.com/campaign/global/forum2013/index.htm

EMC2, EMC, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. Š Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

FEATURE

Balancing legacy and innovation

The balancing act

Decisions for IT are no longer made in IT — they’re made in business. So CIOs are feeling the pressure of the boardroom more and more as business leaders look to gain a competitive edge by embracing new technologies. However, does the business truly understand the complications of balancing new trends with less glamorous legacy applications? Joe Lipscombe investigates the balancing act.

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strategic it networking partner

network WORLD

R

esponding to customer demand, market trends, recessions and piling competition is the new bread and butter for a good CIO. But not every CIO and IT decision maker has the skills, budget and resources to be able to answer these calls. When the IT landscape began to make a dramatic shift into a new social era, not so long ago, the rules of the game changed and the traditional IT team was handed a fairly harsh wake-up call.

The new role Instead of being the chaps who stood in the back and monitored servers and tweaked desktops, the IT

team became the forefront of a company’s business plan, pitching innovative ideas which would provide great strides for the C-level executives. On top of this, they had to shield constant and ever more sophisticated threats from the outer world while opening up their networks to fussy employees who wanted to embrace BYOD, mobility and social platforms. It’s been a rough ride.

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FEATURE

Balancing legacy and innovation

The next step, following the inevitable passing of the business torch, is for CIOs to begin attacking these challenges. And one such challenge is incorporating new trends into a web of legacy applications.

“The business pace and rate of change is accelerating,” says Mervyn Kelly, Marketing Director, EMEA, Ciena. “As a result, CIOs face increasing pressure to provide an agile and responsive infrastructure delivering communications, computing and storage. CIOs need to accommodate new business applications, increased workloads, demand for faster performance and growth, not only in the size of data but also from more numerous data sources and destinations. At the same time, more industry regulations and laws are driving greater data security and data protection measures.” e-Hosting Data Fort’s CEO, Yessar Zeineldin, adds: “As CIOs brace for a phase of renewed confidence and an upward trend in business, they are faced with a new challenge — innovation. They are now expected to provide excellent support for the growth and expansion of the business. The buzzword, innovation, is not related to the physical IT infrastructure, but on transforming IT into an integral part of the business and aligning it to the future growth of the organisation.

“The expectation is to provide end-to-end programmes; it’s no longer about just enhancing applications or improving work flow. It is about providing a holistic model that will work to accomplish business objectives and be an integral part of the establishment.”

Disturbing the peace Many of these new trends are seen as business musthaves, but the challenges surrounding integrating them can be difficult. Experts are suggesting that the major disruptions will be found by implementing social, mobility, analytics, and cloud.

“CIOs need to accommodate new business applications, increased workloads, demand for faster performance, and growth not only in the size of the data but also from more numerous data sources.”

Mervyn Kelly, Marketing Director, EMEA, Ciena

1,800

The amount, in exabytes, of data that will have been generated by 2015.

“Legacy is only one part of the equation. Skill-sets and mindsets towards innovation are also important and the jury is out on whether organisations in the Middle East will indeed embrace these technologies.”

Sid Deshpande, Senior Analyst, Data Centre Infrastructure and Management, Gartner

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“The SMAC (social, mobility, analytics and cloud) stack is disrupting not only the applications used by businesses, but is also poised to transform the business model itself,” advises A. N. Rao, Senior Vice President, IT Infrastructure Services, Cognizant. .

“By 2015, we will have around 10 billion computing devices in use, generating 1,800 exabytes of data. Big Data or analytics will provide insight and trends from data that’s growing exponentially, which can be leveraged to focus on fewer, more important things. Mobility solutions enable anywhere, anytime, access to employees, customers and partners. But most legacy applications have to be re-coded or new apps built for multiple mobile platforms. Organisations also have to re-engineer the way software distribution happens for mobile devices,” Den Sullivan, Head of Architectures and Enterprise, Emerging Markets, Cisco, agrees that the SMAC stack will cause disruptions, but points to video technologies as another communication channel which will grow in need and interest while causing trouble with traditional systems.

“Video is becoming the new voice, and so integrating this with legacy is difficult. But I think all of the highlighted trends — cloud, Big Data, mobility — will give an opportunity for companies to take old legacy applications into cloud. With legacy ERP, for example, there’s an opportunity here to move it into the cloud if you’re embracing a new layer of application. You might have your own in-house built ERP system that is old and costly — this is the chance for a new breed,” he says.

Running through the green fields It has been claimed that a lack of legacy in the Middle East makes this transition a little easier for companies

here than in the US or Europe — is there truth in these claims?

“There is strong potential here [to leapfrog technologies] particularly in the SMB segment,” says Sid Deshpande, Senior Analyst, Data Centre Infrastructure and Management, Gartner.

“However, legacy is only one part of the equation. Skill-sets and mind-sets towards innovation are also important and the jury is out on whether organisations in the Middle East will indeed embrace these technologies. So far we have seen a heavy focus on legacy infrastructure from large enterprises. This may change depending on how providers position and market these emerging technologies, as MEA has a very provider-driven purchasing profile.”

Sullivan of Cisco echoes this sentiment, but again points to video and communications in an attempt to further drive the point home.

“Clearly the challenges of large enterprises over in the US and Europe that obviously have been able to not only afford the technology but to introduce the capability is quickly embracing new ones,” he says.

“Service providers here are rolling out technologies quicker into market and at less of the cost because they’re not backing onto legacy systems. That goes across service providers, collaborations, network, and integrations. Don’t forget, there’s a lot of copper still in the ground in other regions, whereas here, for service providers to provide bandwidth for video streaming, they can use fibre, and avoid copper. Also, you’ve got wireless. People are not doing the traditional fixed line; they’re going for wireless. It’s quicker and easier to deploy. Then at the application level, they haven’t got the entrenched load of data in certain databases which need to be retranslated. Starting over from scratch is a competitive advantage for sure.”

“As CIOs brace for a phase of renewed confidence and an upward trend in business, they are faced with a new challenge — innovation. They are now expected to provide excellent support for the expansion of the business.”

Yessar Zeineldin, CEO, e-Hosting Data Fort

BYOD

is one of the major trends which has forced CIOs to evolve their strategies.

“Service providers here are rolling out technologies quicker into market and at less of the cost because they’re not backing onto legacy systems.”

Den Sullivan, Head of Architectures and Enterprise, Emerging Markets,Cisco.

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In cases such as these, it’s important for vendors to collaborate with customers to ensure that the education levels of the region are high enough for the right decisions to be made.

Vendor assistance Kelly of Ciena explains that, in some situations, replacing legacy systems isn’t the best way to embrace new technologies.

“Vendors can help CIOs by better understanding how the legacy versus new trade-off fits with their business and technology priorities. For example, if the focus is on delivering improved operational results, the trade-off may favour making the investment to replace a legacy system with new technology. If the business priority is reducing costs, perhaps the best action is to leave the legacy system in place for the time being.”

Rao, Cognizant, adds: “Service providers need to work as trusted partners, work with the CIOs to understand the overall business objectives, and then decide on fit-for-business solutions. While it is easy to jump on the bandwagon, it is extremely important to look at the overall organisational objectives, longterm strategy, and business case before adopting new technologies. CIOs and IT teams should engage service providers in defining or reviewing the IT roadmap in a strategic and holistic manner. Service providers should bring to bear their expertise and experience of working with many customers around the world in similar industries.”

In the Middle East, vendors and end users must collaborate in order to maintain the strong regional growth which has quickly placed it as one of the musthave markets for all global players, as well as creating opportunities for local start-ups and regional experts that have fared so well over the past decade.

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FEATURE

BYOD

Who’s in control?

With bring-your-own-device (BYOD) becoming increasingly difficult to resist, how can organisations ensure that corporate data is safe on employee-owned devices, and how can they balance that with respecting employee privacy? Tom Paye reports.

H

ere’s a question — if I use my personal smartphone to access emails, calendars and corporate contacts (which I do), does my employer have anything to worry about? So far, it’s been going well. My device is secured with a password and a mobile management suite that can delete data if it’s lost. I’m even using my own laptop to type up this article, instead of a company-issued one.

Certainly, I’ve embraced the BYOD trend with gusto. But is this a safe way to go about things? Am I inadvertently putting my company’s data at risk? And if I am, what can be done to remedy the situation?

“The challenge that the Middle East and Africa will face with BYOD is introducing, and managing, a solid security strategy,” says Osama Al-Zoubi, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, Cisco Saudi Arabia.

“As more and more employees are using devices for both personal and business activities, the issues with potential loss of confidential company data increases as IT departments are less in control.”

His comments reflect what is becoming a burning issue among regional IT departments — as more employees demand to use their personal devices for work, IT managers are struggling to both accommodate them and safeguard confidential company data.

There’s no denying that BYOD is beginning to take off around the region. Indeed, according to Leif-Olof Wallin, Research Vice President, Gartner, you’d be hardpressed to find any company in the Middle East that isn’t struggling with BYOD in some form or another.

“An organisation that claims they don’t have BYOD usually needs to look harder for it,” he says. “Generally, 50

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you might find executives taking notes on personal iPads in sensitive meetings, or other employees taking a photo with a smartphone to document the sensitive content of a whiteboard. Resisting BYOD will become increasingly difficult, as it often comes from the top as a mandate.”

Maan Al Shakrachi, Networking Solutions Sales Leader, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, Avaya, adds that the uptake of BYOD is steadily increasing in the Middle East. “The Middle East has always been keen to adopt all sorts of new technologies and BYOD trends are no different as it can be clearly seen in many public and private entities across all industry verticals. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed has just recently announced moving from the e-government towards the mobile government model, where people will have the capability of accessing all sorts of government applications and information they need using their own devices anytime, anywhere, to accomplish their tasks. This reflects the importance of BYOD in this region, and the innovation that our leaders are building on it,” he says.

But while the trend is somewhat unavoidable — not least because it can save organisations huge amounts of money — this doesn’t mean that business leaders are wrong to be concerned about their data.

Shakrachi explains the problem.

“Employees with critical company information on a personal device take that device with them everywhere.

That means that, if it is lost or stolen or even misused by a family member, financial applications or important data can easily be swiped or stolen. This risk doesn’t only apply to handheld devices, but also personal laptops where certain security policies may not be in place, such as the latest anti-virus, patches, or personal firewall, which can easily put a network at risk,” he says. www.cnmeonline.com

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FEATURE

BYOD

So how can companies get around the worries over data loss while also providing their employees with what they want? According to Ian Lowe, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Identity Assurance, HID Global, there are three key factors to a successful BYOD programme: policy, security and education.

“It’s important that you have a clear policy around your BYOD strategy. It’s not just about control; it’s about enabling secure, trusted and convenient access. Be sure to implement security that has minimal impact on the employee’s experience, whilst maintaining the levels of security that your organisation is happy with. Provide clear guidance on best practices for use of personal phones and tablets in the workplace. Ensure employees know how to act responsibly when using their personal devices for professional purposes,” he says.

Some organisations, however, opt for a semi-BYOD policy — they’ll allow their employees to use their own devices so long as they comply to a list of company-approved devices, taking any mystery out of what smartphones and tablets the network will have to accommodate. Wallin believes that this — or at least offering a list of supported platforms — is a good way to go about things. “iOS is a natural platform to include,” he says.

“Windows Phone 8 and BB10 are also meeting most enterprise requirements. Android requires a more thoughtful approach as securability and manageability varies greatly between the versions of Android as well as between vendors.”

However, Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, Help AG, says that, while it would be ideal for companies to be able to dictate which devices their employees buy, it wouldn’t really amount to BYOD. He says that BYOD is an employee-driven phenomenon, so companies need to find out how to support every operating system.

“An organisation that has taken the leap of faith and decided to support BYOD should invest in

“Generally, you might find executives taking notes on personal iPads in sensitive meetings, or other employees taking a photo with a smartphone to document the sensitive content of a whiteboard.”

Leif-Olof Wallin, Research Vice President, Gartner

42%

of those who are being monitored by their employers are concerned by that fact.

“It’s important that you have a clear policy around your BYOD strategy. It’s not just about control; it’s about enabling secure, trusted and convenient access.”

Ian Lowe, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Identity Assurance, HID Global

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technologies which ensure that it is implemented in the most secure way possible. This should include support for the major mobile operating systems such as iOS, Android and Blackberry,” he explains.

Whichever devices the company decides to support, though, it’s a given that it should have some degree of control over the employee’s device. However, this presents a dilemma because, at the end of the day, the employee owns the device, meaning he or she may not be happy with the company having access to everything on it. On the flip side, the company will own much of the data on the device, meaning the employee should relinquish some control. According to Wallin, just how much control a company should have over the device is still a delicate area.

“Most employers will have a policy about what they do with a personal device and how they’ll handle any information they collect (like location of device).

In general, these tools provide access to a lot of potentially sensitive information. In real life, most organisations are able to sensibly handle the difference between private and company information,” he says.

To keep both parties happy, Sowri S. Krishnan, Vice President for Mobility, Cognizant, suggests finding the “middle path” between the two extremes of the complete freedom that employees desire and the full control that organisations seek over devices.

“Implementing the BYOD strategy is possible only with a comprehensive policy. To develop an effective policy, organisations need to define and understand factors such as which devices and operating systems to support, security requirements based on employee role and designation, the level of risk they are willing to tolerate, and employee privacy concerns,” he says.

According to Tareque Choudhury, Head of Security and Advisory Services, BT, this trust issue is beginning to improve — it seems that employees are happy to

66%

of employees are aware of what their employees have in place by way of a security system.

“To develop an effective policy, organisations need to define and understand factors such as which devices and operating systems to support, security requirements based on employee role and designation, the level of risk they are willing to tolerate, and employee privacy concerns.”

Sowri S. Krishnan, Vice President for Mobility, Cognizant

give up a little corporate access if it means they can use their own devices.

“Many employees — 66 percent of those surveyed [in over 2,000 in cross-regional and sectoral interviews during the BT and Cisco Beyond Your Device research project] — are aware of what their employers have in place by way of a security system, a number unchanged from 2012. But only 42 percent of those who are being monitored by their employers are concerned by that fact. That number was 46 percent in 2012, indicating the possibility that employee trust of their employer may be on the rise.”

Get the balance of trust right, and the experts suggest that the benefits of BYOD are more than worth the risk.

Cisco Consulting Services estimates that the annual benefits of BYOD range from $300 to $1,300 per employee, depending on the employee’s job role, according to AlZoubi. And Wallin says that BYOD programmes empower users, improving their personal productivity.

Choudhury explains a little about why organisations are working out how to mitigate the data-loss risks associated with BYOD to accommodate their employees.

“BYOD policies are popular, and popular programmes help to improve worker efficiency,

“An organisation that has taken the leap of faith and decided to support BYOD should invest in technologies which ensure that it is implemented in the most secure way possible.”

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, Help AG

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happiness, and productivity. In addition, they have the ability to greatly affect innovation amongst smart device users. Many professionals — 76 percent of those surveyed — indicate that they believe their employers need to do more to fulfill the potential productivity inherent in smart devices. And 84 percent of IT managers believe that a BYOD policy conferred a competitive advantage,” he says.

Indeed, some companies have already found their mobility BYOD programmes to be so successful that they have extended them to include personal laptops and PCs. Wallin says: “Some organisations are looking to introduce BYOD policies for PCs, very frequently in order to support Macs in the enterprise and sometimes to avoid a situation where the company issues corporate PCs to contractors and consultants.”

According to Help AG’s Solling, this is a natural progression, as people want to work with interfaces that are familiar to them. Of course, IT departments may squirm at the idea of allowing personal devices such as laptops into the work network — after all, they’re capable of storing much more data, and, if it’s a Windows laptop, the risk of malware increases, too.

However, Solling points to desktop virtualisation as a solution to the problem — with this, employees using their own laptops needn’t be too much of a headache for IT departments.

“As efficient as employees may be with their smart devices, there are still a large section of employees who would prefer the familiar interface of a traditional desktop or laptop. This is why we are seeing increases in the number of organisations opting for desktop virtualisation,” he explains.

“I am definitely of the opinion that desktop virtualisation can assist in mitigating many of the issues with BYOD, simply because, once the user logs out of the virtual desktop, the data is removed from the device. In fact, the data was never there — only the VDI environment.” july 2013

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FEATURE

BYOD

Just how quickly companies begin accommodating personal laptops as well as personal mobile devices remains to be seen. However, if the experts are right, IT departments may soon have no choice but to accept that employees are going to use their own devices whenever they can. As Krishnan says, “Organisations currently have only two choices when it comes to BYOD — adopt it now or later.”

Later might be best for some companies, but there’s no doubting that change is on the way when it comes to securing corporate data. And what of me using my own devices for work? Well, just as the experts suggest, the IT department and I have a perfectly workable understanding over it. And it seems we’re both happy with the results.

What the experts say Mathivanan Venkatachalam, Director of Product Management, ManageEngine We need to understand that technology has a life cycle and, to utilise it to its maximum advantage, the technology needs to be developed completely. I believe BYOD is in its nascent stages. As of now, to overcome security concerns, companies need to put stringent IT polices like dos and don’ts with work related tasks, owner responsibility, in order to avoid maximum threats. Finally, companies need to be cautious at utilising the BYOD advantages.

Muhammed Mayet, CTO, Security, Dimension Data Middle East and Africa The BYOD trend has led to employees utilising their own devices to access and store corporate data. This corporate data could take the form of email (in the most common case) and data available via access to ERP and other internal systems. The primary concern to companies should be the damage caused in the event that this data is leaked through acts of omission (no security precautions like pass codes on the device) or commission (deliberate exposure of data to unauthorised parties) by the employee.

Gihan Kovacs, Solutions Sales Manager, FVC Most security concerns used to arise around external threats; however, these breaches are frequently extending to internal threats. Corporate data is always the most crucial element to be protected in any organisation, and often millions are spent by companies to provide layers of additional security to protect their infrastructure. Access to corporate data, especially sensitive data, held on employees’ personal devices is often viewed as dangerous or risky to any organisation’s network. Access to non-business applications and data on a device that is running business applications can provide a gateway for malware to enter companies’ networks.

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Hani Nofal, Director of Intelligent Network Solutions, GBM The real concern in BYOD is the potential security issues and gaps created by the lack of a comprehensive policy. A GCC-specific GBM survey, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2012, showed that very few of the 62 percent who implemented BYOD have invested in the infrastructure to understand who is connected and what devices are being used to access private and confidential data. The lack of focus on data is leaving corporate data and networks exposed.

Sébastien Pavie, Regional Sales Director, MEA, SafeNet Smartphones and tablets are being increasingly used to access corporate data and, as security is one of the main priorities for IT departments, it’s important to determine which corporate applications can be accessed from an employee-owned device. IT departments need to be able to manage device and access policies, preferably from a single point of control, so IT can ensure that security policies relating to VPN, anti-virus software, activation of personal firewalls or use of encryption are enforced, and that, in the event of a device being lost or stolen, IT is able to remotely wipe corporate data. Security issues around non-managed devices are on the rise, with 46 percent of IT executives admitting to experiencing a security problem related to an employee with an unprovisioned device.

Companies not only need to consider the value of their data and the risk of losing it, but also the potential compliance and reputation implications.

Florian Malecki, EMEA Product Marketing Director, Dell Software Data and applications security is the number one concern when employees bring their device to work and use it to connect to a company’s network. Personal devices can be risky because it can download/store/forward sensitive information and has access to corporate networks, systems and data. Areas of risk include data loss, a lost mobile device, data leakage such as unauthorised data access and downloads, and unauthorised network access.

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FEATURE

Social security

You have 1 new hack request The consumerisation of IT has completely altered the way in which the enterprise works — erasing the line between business and personal. One major culprit is social networking. It has taken a fair amount of time for business leaders to see the benefit in a company being social, and one of the main hindrances is the fear of not being able to protect your assets. So, is social a platform for attacks?

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security advisor

S

ocial has arrived, but it took time.

The crowds of people fluttering around the IT industry claiming to be social experts because they can define a ‘retweet’ and have 700-plus friends on Facebook has frustrated many, with companies struggling to get a real grasp of how social media and networks can effectively help power businesses into the next generation of trade and success.

What social media does do is collect an impressively large amount of customer data — positive and negative. It offers a constantly reachable platform of customers and partners from across the globe. It allows casual engagement and coherent communication channels. All-in-all, social networking is a powerful tool when businesses realise its potential.

Socialbakers.com reported that there are 3,370,780 Facebook users in the United Arab Emirates alone, making it the 48th highest country in the world for users. The survey also suggested that 35 percent of Internet users in the region do so for business purposes. In the UAE, that suggests that around 1,179,773 of these Facebook accounts

Strategic IT BYOD Partner

are businesses — that’s a large database which is instantly reachable and easily contactable.

Saudi Arabia represents the highest percentage in the region; 43 percent of the 35 percent is driven from there.

3,370,780 Facebook users in the UAE.

The danger of numbers So what do these numbers mean for security? It’s been said that nearly 80 percent of Internet users have the same basic email address, username and password for social media as they do for critical accounts such as online banking, and business databases. Consider this idea with the numbers mentioned above; if 3,370,780 UAE residents use Facebook, and 80 percent of those replicate their passwords for other accounts, then the opportunity for cyber theft and hackers to infiltrate personal accounts is extremely high.

“Answers to the simple questions you get asked when logging securely into financial sites — like when were you born, where were you born, what’s your mother’s maiden name, etcetera — can be found easily on Facebook if you’re a sophisticated attacker. It’s very easy for someone to hack you using your social activity,” says Justin Doo, Director of Security Practices, Symantec.

“In June of last year, over 6.5 million user passwords were leaked from LinkedIn’s database.

And earlier this year, as many as 250,000 of its user accounts may have been compromised by the online conglomerate known as Anonymous.

It is shocking that despite the widespread media coverage that such events have received, users still choose to believe that they will not fall victim to the effects of such attacks.”

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, help AG

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FEATURE

Social security

This is a basic risk for employers who now have the added concern of BYOD — with many devices being constantly logged into social sites on an operating system which is also hosting the company’s applications.

“Maybe it is not so much BYOD that has changed this, but more that social media is available on the smartphones that we all now possess. Today any smartphone will have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other services installed — to some extent, social media has been one of the major drivers for smartphone adoption,” says Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, help AG. “With that, organisations needs to understand that most of their employees have a device in their pocket which connects them to social media, which the organisation may not have any control over. Again this means that social media usage is closely linked to acceptable usage policies and, very importantly, the acceptable communication policies which should apply to the individual both on and off work as long as they are under the employment of the organisation.”

Khalid Abu Baker, Corporate Sales Director, Kaspersky Lab Middle East, adds: “Staff are now ‘always-on’, working from a range of different locations and using a variety of devices. This has widened the attack surface that a cyber-criminal can aim at. Staff may access a corporate Facebook or Twitter account using an insecure public Wi-Fi network.

“This introduces the risk that information sent or received could be sniffed by a stranger on the same Wi-Fi network. It’s also very easy for mobile devices to be lost or stolen; and if data isn’t encrypted, and there’s no passcode set, corporate data — and automatic access

“BYOD further adds to the complexity because staff are combining personal and corporate activities on the one device — and companies may not have technology to ‘containerise’ personal and business data.”

48th UAE’s world ranking in terms of Facebook users.

“The lack of control over the use of social media in the workplace could cause irreparable damage to the person and the company he or she represents. To avoid this, we encourage the promotion of public awareness in order to eliminate the misuse of this technology.”

Jamil Ezzo, General Director, ICDL GCC Foundation

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to social networks — is wide open to whoever takes the device. BYOD further adds to the complexity because staff are combining personal and corporate activities on the one device — and companies may not have technology to ‘containerise’ personal and business data.”

Behind enemy lines Once in, the effects can be harshly damaging. As Abu Baker explains here, many elements must be taken into account when attempting to limit postbreach consequences.

“There are several risks. First, if the security on the account is weak — for example, a weak password — and it’s hacked, the attacker can post things that could seriously damage the company’s reputation.

An attacker could post something embarrassing, or post misinformation about the brand, or use the account to spread malware. If the account is a shared account (e.g. a corporate Twitter feed), with a shared password, there’s a greater risk of the account falling into the wrong hands — people are more likely to choose an easy-to-guess password, so that everyone accessing the account can remember it easily.

Second, information posted by employees in social networks can be used to gather information that can be used to launch a targeted attack.”

And according to Solling, despite the obvious risks and publicly noted cases of breaches and compromises, employees still have a very relaxed approach to social security.

“In June of last year, over 6.5 million user passwords were leaked from LinkedIn’s database.

And earlier this year, as many as 250,000 of its

user accounts may have been compromised by the online conglomerate known as Anonymous.

It is shocking that, despite the widespread media coverage that such events have received, users still choose to believe that they will not fall victim to the effects of such attacks,” he says.

On top of this, LinkedIn itself has spoken out and claims that as much is being done as possible to protect its users and secure their data.

“LinkedIn are constantly looking for ways to improve the security of member accounts. All LinkedIn accounts are already protected by a series of automatic checks that are designed to thwart unauthorised sign-in attempts. Now, LinkedIn are introducing a new optional feature that adds another layer of security to LinkedIn sign-in— twostep verification,” a spokesperson said.

“Most Internet accounts that become compromised are illegitimately accessed from a new or unknown computer (or device). Two-step verification helps address this problem by requiring users to type a numeric code when logging in from an unrecognised device for the first time. This code will be sent to users’ mobile devices via SMS. When enabled, two-step verification makes it more difficult for unauthorised users to access user accounts, requiring them to have both personal passwords and access to the user’s mobile phone.”

“Phising is one of the key threats, even more so with variants such as Vishing — the social engineering approach that leverages voice communication.”

Mahesh Venkateswaran, Managing Director, Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud, Cognizant

35%

of Internet users in the region do so for businessrelated purposes.

Social malware The challenges faced by LinkedIn should highlight the need for a far sterner view on social security

“Most Internet accounts that become compromised are illegitimately accessed from a new or unknown computer. Two-step verification helps address this problem.”

93%

of businesses find social networking effective and useful.

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risks. The multi platforms from which we access these certainly increases those risks, but the fundamental issue is always the same.

Mahesh Venkateswaran, Managing Director, Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud, Cognizant, explains that subtle and common attack methods are effective when targeted at social networks. And as we evolve our communications, the threats evolve to counteract this. Though the given names might not be terrifying, the consequences certainly are.

“Phishing is one of the key threats, even more so with variants such as Vishing — the social engineering approach that leverages voice communication — and Smishing, a form of social engineering that exploits text messages,” he says.

“Short URLs can readily become a destination of malicious links — users do not know the links are malicious unless they click them. There is also the risk of malware spreading through mobile devices to others on the contact list. Access to online shopping accounts through mobile devices is another potential threat.”

Jamil Ezzo, General Director of ICDL GCC Foundation, concludes, suggesting that public awareness must improve to better promote safer use of social media channels. But the attacks will continue to come, it’s a simple case of having the correct steps in place to react to post-breach, as well as the awareness to recognise potential threats.

“The lack of control over the use of social media in the workplace could cause irreparable damage to the person and the company he or she represents.

To avoid this, we encourage the promotion of public awareness in order to eliminate the misuse of this technology,” says Ezzo. july 2013

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FEATURE

Maximising profit

integration advisor

Calculating the cost of profit The fundamental backbone of any business transaction is profit. With competition in the Middle East building year-on-year with the increase of international brands setting up camp in the region, and more and more local start-ups in the integrations, distributions, and solution providers arena, the challenges to successfully execute IT partnerships continue to harden. CNME calculates the cost of profit.

C

an you maintain cost leadership, service levels, solution quality, and deliver projects flexibly and to schedule? You’re worth your weight in gold, no doubt. But the differentiators can be few and far between, and during a time of economic belt tightening, the region may be asking for more damning evidence that your business is a suitable partner for a critical implementation.

Also, as trends become more and more specialised, it’s no longer good enough for a systems integrator to be well versed on a broad range of topics, the chosen partners must be certified in highly specific areas, be that cloud, mobility, social, or Big Data. Many vendors believe that systems integrators that are solely focused on a specific trend, to the degree that it can forecast user demand and profit capabilities, are valuable in today’s market.

“Red Hat selects partners who embrace an open cloud mentality as customers are increasingly 60

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What are the key elements that integration partners should take into consideration in order to maximise profits?

Increasing responsiveness: By reducing the time to market, adapting to new rules, policies, and changing business environments, and handling complex and ever changing exchanges with business partners and other affiliates.

Flexibility: Adding new channels, consumption routes and services, and integrating disparate applications.

Improve utilisation: Rationalising the existing architecture, leveraging legacy investments, and reusing software components.

Stability and availability: Eliminating downtimes, increasing service quality, and hardening data security.

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FEATURE

Maximising profit

looking for cloud capabilities,” explains George DeBono, General Manger, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Red Hat. DeBono highlights that particular interest in a trend that continues to see momentum can be a real attraction to vendors who may be looking to prove market leading quality to end users — in this instance, cloud capabilities.

“We look out for systems integrators that are increasingly building up their cloud capabilities — both consulting and infrastructure, as well as platform-as-a-service. Through our partnerships, the systems integrators are able to leverage innovative Red Hat open-source technologies, which give them and their customers flexibility, choice, cost improvement and future-ready technology platforms.”

Though, on the contrary, partnering with someone who has a deep industry knowledge and strong relationship skills are also highly sought after. As Hatem Bamatraf, Executive Vice President, Enterprise, du, explains.

“The successful partner nurtures existing relationships and drives a deeper wallet share through engagement throughout the organisation, rather than taking a product or a point approach.

We may be using a cliché, but the ideal relationship with a customer is that of being a partner or an advisor, rather than a seller of products or solutions. Any partner who displays and

“Cost isn’t the only driver.

Innovation, cloud readiness and Big Data are other major industry trends which are important to IT decision makers.”

George DeBono, General Manager, Middle East, Turkey and Africa

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“The successful partner nurtures existing relationships and drives a deeper wallet share through engagement throughout the organisation rather than taking a product or a point approach.”

Hatem Bamatraf, Executive Vice President, Enterprise, du

Common pitfalls of an integration which have a direct effect on profits:

Timelines which are out of sync with the reality of the integration: Integration is difficult and takes time.

Unrealistic project timelines that are not driven by actual business needs will only lead to premature failure in execution.

Integrating legacy systems: This will pose challenges with regards to how they fit into modern architectures.

False assumptions: Assuming that the systems being integrated are well documented and that the people who designed them are aware of the enterprise-wide architectural constraints.

demonstrates these elements will be more likely to succeed,” he says.

Weighing up costs Though like all regions, the Middle East is still trying to work on a shoe-string budget, despite popular belief, perhaps, in other areas of the world.

This can have a heavy influence on who a company partners with or which vendor a customer chooses.

Depending on the project, cost can be one of the key differentiators, depending on who the project involves, what solutions are involved, and what the scale of the project is.

“There is no doubt that cost is still a key criteria for migrating existing legacy systems,” says DeBono.

www.helpag.com

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FEATURE

Maximising profit

“But cost isn’t the only driver. Innovation, cloud readiness and Big Data are other major industry trends which are important to IT decision makers.”

Bamatraf feels that two key elements, combined with cost, are the crucial aspects of any integration.

“In any project, there are three key elements that affect the quality of delivery and these are time, resources and cost. There is always a constant balance and trade off on these elements and these affect the quality of the delivery of a project if any of the parameters are compromised. More often than not, trying to reduce cost will have a direct bearing on the quality of the delivery. The best approach in reducing cost while ensuring quality is to get more from the resources, deliver faster than promised and work closely with partners in negotiating better commercials during the execution phase.”

Revenue growth — best practises The be-all-and-end-all of the project is to gain revenue. For both vendor and integrator, the success is measured in the margins. But the revenue may not always be birthed from the services and sales — over time, it could quite as easily come down to the longevity of the partnership, reputation and collaboration.

“Companies continue to look at how they best retain and grow revenue from their current customer base and at the same time are successful in attracting new customers. Through continuous innovation — in all industries — lies the promise to keep customers satisfied and engaged,” DeBono believes.

The path to profit needs to be laid with strong foundations. Considerations into each aspect are critical for success.

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FEATURE

NSA

Possibility in the privacy pitfalls?

Last month, a former CIA technician leaked information on the National Security Agencyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s data gathering surveillance programme dubbed PRISM. Edward Snowden has since made a disappearing act, leaving a trail of destruction for the US government to clear up. Questions have been raised in regards to the ethics behind this revelation. Joe Lipscombe investigates what relevance this holds for the Middle East.

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strategic telecom partner

telecoms WORLD

S

ince the outing of PRISM, plenty of high-calibre spokespeople from the world that governs have spoken out regarding the high-level backlash of the reports. However, what has been fairly limited is information which is useful to Internet and phone users in other parts of the world, particularly surrounding local regulations.

Legal questions?

Snowden claimed in an interview that his motive was driven by the fact that this programme posed an “existential threat to democracy”. When working in the industry, Snowden revealed that he had the “authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president,” if he had a personal email.

But once the investigation had become more intense, the initial uproar regarding legality was placed into question. Had the US government, and, subsequently, the nine technology companies named, actually participated in anything illegal at all? And was this as outrageous as first thought?

Former NSA employees believed so, one of which, Thomas Drake, was reported as saying, “Leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden published early this month give more evidence of widespread privacy violations at the NSA. We need to confront the reality that we have a secret government that’s not operating in our best interests.

Drake reportedly added at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in Washington, D.C., “What’s at stake is the very essence of what it not only means to be an American, but also what it means to be a citizen.”

Drake claimed that since 9/11, the government had revoked the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, www.cnmeonline.com

“Giving US residents freedom from unreasonable searches,” and had “violated the legal regime” against domestic spying that the NSA had operated under since the late 1970s.

Home truths?

But for residents in the Middle East, this activity isn’t actually anything new at all, and that’s no secret. The lack of transparency surrounding the US surveillance programme may have been the main cause of unrest following the leak, not so much the information itself, due to the privacy laws which were amended by the Bush administration. However, in the UAE, according to Norton Rose Fulbright, there isn’t actually any specific federal law covering this topic. The website quotes: “The UAE does not have any specific federal laws on data privacy, but various pieces of legislation may have an impact on businesses that engage in data processing activities.” It continues, “The UAE Constitution of 1971 guarantees the right to secrecy of communications.”

And historically, some countries in the Middle East have openly attempted to block some communications services because they could not monitor the engagements. In 2010, Saudi Arabia and the UAE both announced they wished to ban BlackBerry’s iconic device-to-device BBM service, and for a short time, Saudi did. More recently, in March this year, the BBC reported that Saudi Arabia was threatening to ban Skype and WhatsApp for the same reasons. A news report on the website quoted: “It is demanding a means to monitor such applications, but Saudis say that would seriously inhibit their communications.”

In this vain, monitoring communications in the Middle East could cause more concerns than other regions. In the same report, it was claimed that a Saudi user told the local media that “she would feel july 2013

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FEATURE

NSA

uncomfortable talking to her relative on Skype without her hijab if she believed someone might be monitoring her.” Moreover, expatriates have reportedly messaged newspapers pleading with the Saudis “not to stop their only affordable means of communication to their families back home”.

It appears to be more than apparent, then, that regulatory bodies in the Middle East have been actively seeking the means to monitor internal communications for some time. The major difference here may be that, in these cases, there has been far more transparency during the ordeal, as opposed to the US, where users have claimed to be unaware of such surveillance. This is not to mention the major technology companies involved, many of whom have failed to comment, regionally.

Much ado about nothing?

But regional experts take another standpoint, claiming that government data collection is nothing new. This information is the result of what happens when a society chooses to digitise its common processes, and, in fact, this finally shakes the shackles of unanswered questions from our shoulders, allowing us to properly focus on our online persona. Florian Malecki, Product Marketing Director, Dell Software, believes that this highlights the choices that Internet users have when communicating online.

“When you choose to go online, then you must accept that your data isn’t ever going to go away. It’s always going to be stored and at some point accessible.

Using the Internet is like walking in snow or sand — you leave footprints. It’s difficult not to be invisible.

But if you’re not doing anything dodgy then what’s the problem?” he said.

“What’s important for the public to know is that it is

Internet penetration in the Middle East and Africa is

39%

machines doing the listening, not people. So you’ve not got a man sitting there listening to your conversations.

You know now that your actions are being traced, what you decide to do online is your choice.”

Internet users in the Middle East may benefit from these revelations; there are 3,370,780 Facebook users in the UAE alone, which is the world’s 48th highest Facebook user population. Ipsos claims that Internet penetration in the Middle East and Africa is 39 percent, which sits above the world average. And recently, Ipsos claimed that over 25 percent of daily news was consumed online in the UAE. Moreover, the UAE has the highest ecommerce penetration in the Middle East with 46 percent of its Internet population, generating the highest amount of financial details online in the region.

Awareness of this data being collected and monitored could be seen as a healthy heads-up to users.

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services at help AG, adds that we’ve always been aware that some kind of government surveillance has been going on. “We’ve known for decades that telephones can be tapped — we didn’t stop using the telephone. What this does is free us from the question, are we being tracked and watched? And allows us to say, okay, I know that what I’m doing is being watched, so now I can make better decisions around what I post online — that’s a positive from this. I’ve never been naïve enough to think what I do online is private.”

However, he does believe that there are some major risks in terms of hacking. Not so much that government agencies have information on us all — that’s no surprise, he claimed — but that major technology companies, such as Google and Facebook, have been collecting data and allowing an entity to access it through back-door channels. This could become a prime target for hackers.

The Power To Say Yes To BYOD THE BYOD CHALLENGE As smartphones and tablets multiply in the workplace, do you know the best way to take advantage of these devices while retaining control of your network?

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With promises of increased productivity and worker satisfaction Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is now at the forefront of most IT discussions today. From a security perspective BYOD opens up numerous challenges around network, data, and device security. It blurs the lines between privacy and accessibility, security and usability.

Many organizations have tried a variety of approaches to allow for BYOD, to capitalize on this trend by shifting maintenance costs to the employee, eliminating the standard-setting role of IT, with limited success. Workers have discovered the power of constant connectivity and have come to expect secure access to their corporate network regardless of location. End users want the ability to use personal devices for work purposes, their belief being that personal devices are more powerful, ďŹ&#x201A;exible, and usable than those offered by corporate.

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analyst corner John Mahoney

The

4 futures

of the CIO The growing strategic importance of technology, and impact of the “nexus of forces” (cloud, mobile, social and information), are redefining the role of the CIO, writes John Mahoney, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner.

John Mahoney, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner

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he CIO will continue to be known as leader of technology brokering and delivery — a viable, important and long-term job — but the role will be fundamentally changed by the nexus of forces.

As enterprises confront global economic uncertainty, changing market dynamics and cultural discontinuities created by technology innovation, different parts of the business are requiring different ways of interacting with IT. The changing delivery pattern and increasingly strategic role of IT are causing CIOs to question the future role of IT in their organisations, and the part that they as IT and business leaders will play in them.

They see the importance of making a distinction between technology and information throughout the enterprise, and the identification of “enterprise IT”, which most often refers to a specific organisation.

In the past, the CIO’s role was primarily to run the IT organisation. In the future, it will be to ensure that the enterprise as a whole achieves strategic value from the use of technology and information.

However, the change in the CIO’s role is www.cnmeonline.com

not as simple or as one-dimensional as that.

We have identified four future role types for CIOs. Moreover, the 2013 Gartner CIO survey found that more than half of the CIOs who responded have responsibilities beyond managing the IT department, and are taking on additional roles, such as chief process officer and chief digital officer, and deep engagement with enterprise business strategy.

So the real-world choice of CIO style and role will very often be some blend of those we present here, although one will typically dominate at any given time in each individual situation.

None of these roles, not even the broker and engineer, is the same as an old-style CIO. Just as many enterprises will require a blend of organisation styles from the four futures of IT, they will also require that their CIOs blend two or more styles from the four CIO futures.

In some cases of significant complexity and of strong need for in-depth capability in contrasting dimensions of the four futures, we expect to find two or more IT executive roles within one enterprise. For example, the role of broker and engineer could lead ‘IT as engine room’, designated as a CTO, and the role of explorer and pioneer could lead ‘IT is the business’, designated as CIO or chief digital officer (CDO). The CTO might report to the CDO, or the two roles could report to the same superior or to different top executives.

As the role of the CIO develops in response to the four futures, it will become increasingly important for CIOs to extend their influence beyond the boundaries of the IT organisation.

This will require CIOs to transform their personal networks among senior leaders from traditional stakeholder-supplier relationships to mutually beneficial alliances. These alliances will also need to extend across the full business ecosystem, including business executives, key suppliers and key customers.

In many cases, CIOs can provide unique support and insight that meets the needs of specific stakeholders. For example, increased transparency to the drivers of enterprise cost is a valuable asset for CFOs, and one that CIOs can provide through focused analytics on key enterprise data. In return, CIOs can

CIO as broker and engineer

benefit from a closer relationship with the CFO, which can be leveraged for better access to the executive board when a decision is needed on important IT issues.

As CIOs begin to develop their new roles based on the emergence of one or more IT future, they should identify the most relevant senior business leaders for the specific nature of their roles, and begin to build closer, mutually beneficial alliances.

CIO as enabler and conductor Corresponds to ‘everyone’s IT’.

The role aims to facilitate wide and creative exploitation of technology throughout the enterprise by all who use it for their own work, rather than mainly relying on dedicated technology organisations. This is a style whose success rests on the power of purpose, on trust, agility and wide engagement. The metaphor of a conductor of an orchestra is a helpful way to envisage aspects of this role. A typical example is the CIO of a university.

Corresponds to ‘IT as engine room’. Chiefly concerned to deliver IT capabilities with efficiency, reliability and operational excellence, this style nevertheless needs good contact with the external IT market, and with evolving trends in sourcing models and costs. In other words, it does more than simply run the internal IT factory, because it repeatedly brokers the best sources of capability from in-house and outside resources. A typical example is the CIO of a construction company.

CIO as integrator and optimiser Corresponds to ‘IT as global business service provider’. The role is sometimes called head of business services, and its mission can well be described as creating the conditions for the maximum possible sustainable and profitable growth of the enterprise. A typical example is the CIO of a consumer packaged goods company.

CIO as explorer and pioneer Corresponds to ‘IT is the business’. This visionary leadership role continually seeks new ways to deliver existing enterprise outcomes and — through a strong focus on trends and issues outside the enterprise — identifies and creates new outcomes to deliver and expand the business strategy. It’s a role that leverages IT to meet and drive business strategy. A typical example is the CIO of a media company. www.cnmeonline.com

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Face to face Tom Quirke

Nationwide dominance Motorola had much to boast about during this year’s Critical Communications World event, and Tom Quirke, VP and General Manger of Motorola Solutions’ Global TETRA Organisation, tells CNME that the worldwide leader in TETRA technologies has set its sights on the Middle East.

W

hat was the major takeaway from the Critical Communications World event this year for you?

I think one of the big things was the realisation that we’ve hit a third year in a row with record growth in this industry.

You have to ask why this is, why is technology that’s been around for 10 years suddenly seeing rapid growth? The customer base we have is risk-avoidant and cautious, and they’re beginning to see TETRA technology do what it claims to do.

Take the royal wedding in the UK for example, they’ve seen it prove itself in so many venues.

The other side is that mission critical entities are starting to move into the digital age. Take utilities for example — water and electricity — they’re moving from traditional analogue to digital, and see us investing heavily in TETRA technologies. It’s public safety that controls the standard of TETRA.

Tom Quirke, VP and General Manager, Motorola Solutions’ Global TETRA Organisation

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Face to face Tom Quirke

What are the key areas you’re focusing on now that the interest is growing?

I think that certain countries have adopted it because they’re coming to the point where they need to make nationwide decisions, and TETRA gives them this nationwide ability.

We focus on a few key areas which are beneficial for any region — voice and data are critical. Voice is very important, if you have no voice then you have no situational awareness, so we’re investing heavily on the voice aspect.

This tells you if there is about to be a full-on riot, and you cannot be looking down waiting for a message — this is eyes-up, preparing to request for help while the voice guides you.

You’re a leader in this sector, but who is your major competition?

You need to be of a certain scale if you’re doing nationwide networks, and I only know of two that can do it; us and Cassidian, which is a sub-company of EADS, well-known for its work with Airbus.

From our perspective, we’ve planned for the future. We understand that when you make an investment into a nationwide network that you need that investment future proofed. In that sense, we make it easy to upgrade, it’s an IP core, and it’s virtualised. So we’re not linked to hardware for switching, we totally decoupled the hardware from the software. What this also means is that with LTE, for example, we can add parts to the core network to support this.

It gives you a unified LTE TETRA network.

What does TETRA’s future in the Middle East look like?

I think it will play two roles. Nationwide technology for public safety will be a big priority and inevitably that will be TETRA. People’s lives can be at stake all the way to the border of any country. TETRA will allow nationwide resources — this will be a driver.

Secondly, a commercial community will build. Oil and gas is a massive market for www.cnmeonline.com

“This tells you if there is about to be a full-on riot, and you cannot be looking down waiting for a message — this is eyes-up, preparing to request for help while the voice guides you.” us here, they want secure communications and they’re based in places where there’s nothing. They have specialist requirements which we can deliver.

In summary: we’re looking at making cities far safer with better audio quality and data quality; we’re making sure that the commercial sector gets a return on its investment immediately; and then we’re future proofing networks. These networks run for over 20 years, all of our conversations are about refreshing TETRA. This tells us clearly that people are already looking to refresh and move into the next phase of TETRA. july 2013

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Insight Emerging markets

on IT

the

Emerging-market CIOs who (literally) keep the lights on.

ge ed

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A

ny IT leader in the mood to complain about excessive regulation should first have a coffee with Murat Mendi of Nobel Îlaç, an Istanbul-based manufacturer of generic pharmaceuticals.

Mendi, formerly CIO and now general manager of the firm, which operates in 25 countries around the world, can talk about the time an overzealous bulldozer operator started excavating the foundation for a new structure next to his company’s building without bothering to confirm what might have been underground first. It tore through Nobel’s Internet cables, leaving hundreds of employees offline all day.

Arguably, such events happen in more developed countries as well as Turkey, but with a few key differences: In Turkey there tends to be little regulation of excavation protocol beforehand and few options for restitution after. “That’s part of the culture here,” Mendi says. “If something happens, they’ll say oops, sorry, and move on.”

The event neatly encapsulates many of the issues CIOs in emerging markets have to deal with every day: an unreliable infrastructure, the twin devils of too much or too little oversight, and the need to understand local culture, whether they’re onsite or managing from a continental distance.

And yet, like Mendi, tech leaders overseas persevere and sometimes even find joy in conquering the seemingly endless challenges, little and big, that crop up day in, day out in emerging economies.

Business practices that are commonplace in large and mature locations can be “a completely different ballgame” in developing geographies, says German Valencia, CIO of shared services for DHL, the Bonn, Germanybased logistics company whose 500,000 employees do business in almost every country around the world.

“We cannot assume everything is the same everywhere,” Valencia says, citing varying costs of technology, connectivity issues, skill sets of the local population, and age of equipment as just some of the challenges.

“Telecoms may be unreliable, outdated or even government-controlled. Something as simple as Internet access can be exponentially more expensive than what you’d pay in the US, Europe or Asia,” he warns.

“When you’re in the US, you assume abundance. The mindset shifts completely in a developing country,” agrees Niraj Jetly, CIO of Edenred USA, who previously served as CEO of a healthcare startup with offshore operations in Delhi, India. “You have a mentality of scarcity. You think about how you can be frugal while still meeting business needs.”

Venkat A. Krishnan discovered all that and more when his CEO charged him with building a factory from the ground up. In Chakan, India, a former agricultural hub some 20 miles from Pune, the nearest city,

“Learn to bridge cultures, time zones and distance,” advises DHL’s Valencia. “Team engagement is essential everywhere, because our local IT teams know what’s best in their environment.” “from the ground up” means something a little different than it does in the US or Europe, Krishnan relates.

In 2008, Mahindra, a diversified conglomerate with 18 divisions, committed to building an automobile factory in Chakan, part of a manufacturing hub that the government hoped would someday mirror Detroit (General Motors, Volkswagen and Mercedes Benz are among 10 manufacturers with facilities there now). But not only did the site not have a factory, it was what’s known in the industry as a “greenfield” -- meaning it didn’t have roads, water or electricity, explains Krishnan, Mahindra’s head of IT. Krishnan first brought in modular computer systems, which India calls trolley www.cnmeonline.com

containers: 20-foot trailers powered using generators. Inside each unit was a network rack with 24U HP ProLiant servers running everything from file-and-print services and databases for attendance tracking to project management tools and Cisco VoIP services for telephony and videoconferencing. That got the project started.

Next came contingency planning.

With food and water being trucked in and infrastructure being laid, the biggest challenge was connectivity, Krishnan says. “There was a lot of simultaneous development activity. The bulldozers would routinely cut through the fibre, and getting it back up again took four to eight hours,” Krishan reports. His solution: “We set up a hybrid system that combined wired and wireless.” When the wires were cut, the wireless was there for backup.

That wasn’t the only contingency planning Krishnan employed. “From day one, we focused on building high availability into every layer of the plant. We have 100% redundancy on everything — servers, storage, databases, applications.”

The reasoning? When you’re in “the middle of nowhere”, it’s hard to call in replacements — whether hardware or staff — and have them arrive quickly, says Krishnan. “Building in redundancy protects you from the tyranny of distance.”

Labour and laws Finding and retaining employees, already a challenge in developed countries, is especially tricky in emerging markets, CIOs say. The astonishing growth in some areas only aggravates the issue. “The vast majority of companies in India and Asia are driven by one characteristic: growth,” says Ralf Dreischmeier, global leader of the IT practice for Boston Consulting Group. “I’ve seen banks in India growing revenues by 30%.

Telcos might grow even faster.” That makes it hard for companies to keep employees, especially when they’re enticed by large, established firms like Infosys and Wipro.

Just as in developed countries, Dreischmeier says, emerging-market organisations that cannot pay as well need to attract employees with other enticements. “We suggest companies offer training programs that make employees july 2013

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more advanced in their capabilities. In many countries, it’s easier to get government funding for a training program than it is setting up a business. That’s a key lever to get the right talent on board.”

In particularly remote regions, the question of skills takes on a new urgency.

Mark Reilley is director of IT for the Washington, D.C.-based Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which has medical facilities scattered across subSaharan Africa. “Our onsite IT staff has to be multi-skilled,” he says. “The team here in Washington uses remote tools to log into a desktop to tweak settings, and we visit on a fairly regular basis, but the IT technician there has to be able to deal with desktop, server and connectivity issues.”

To offload work from those key employees and make the entire team more productive, Reilley has set up internship programs in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Mozambique (with more planned in Tanzania and Ivory Coast) to bring in college students with a major relating to IT to help the onsite staff. “They may not have a full IT skill set, but they can set up printers to free up the dedicated IT person to focus on higher-level issues such as business continuity.”

How to make IT work from anywhere Simplify. “It’s tempting to try new stuff,” says the Pediatric AIDS Foundation’s Reilley, “but you have to think about who’s going to support it. Define and enforce standards, and then choose your policy exceptions carefully.” For instance, the foundation has standardised on Windows PCs to the

exclusion of Macs, not because Macs are harder to support, but because they would be an additional platform to support.

That policy can extend to staffing as well. “My experience in India taught me to think in terms of living with scarcity but still delivering results,” says Jetly. “I’m always thinking about how I can do the same thing with fewer resources. If I think I need a team of 10 people for an optimal solution, can I deliver something that might be less perfect with fewer people?”

Mitigating is also important. Think about what can go wrong and plan for it. In emerging countries, that can be anything from floods to civil unrest to unruly customs regulations. “When you’re venturing into unknown territory you have to mitigate risk,” says Seshadri, That’s why system redundancy comes up so many times in conversations with emergingmarket CIOs. Reilley, for example, issues satellite phones in Africa as a backup to the network going down.

IT leaders were likewise in agreement that another simple way to mitigate infrastructure risk is to build browserbased solutions that let employees work offline, inputting data into the application and then uploading it when a connection becomes available.

If you need help, ask for it. Increasingly, they say, CIOs are working with local vendors and outsourcers to fill the gaps in their team. That means relying on third parties to bring in staff resources when the CIO’s company might not be able to. Because they’re “on the ground”, they can help with cultural and transactional issues.

“We cannot assume everything is the same everywhere. Telecoms may be unreliable, outdated or even government-controlled.

Something as simple as Internet access can be exponentially more expensive than what you’d pay in the US, Europe or Asia.” www.cnmeonline.com

100%

The amount of redundancy Mahindra has on its IT infrastructure to protect it from the “tyranny of distance”.

At the same time, if you’re a global CIO, work with your onsite staff. “Learn to bridge cultures, time zones and distance,” advises DHL’s Valencia. “Team engagement is essential everywhere, because our local IT teams know what’s best in their environment.”

Silver linings in emerging markets All this may make being an emergingeconomy CIO sound difficult, but the fact is that there are innumerable silver linings, sources say — which CIOs in developing markets would welcome as well.

Take Africa. Its more-recent business development means that wireless communication is actually more prevalent than wired. Reilley says that gives his colleagues more flexibility to work wherever and whenever they need to.

Dealing with a greenfield deployment means you have no legacy issues to deal with and are able to leapfrog technology cycles and derive a competitive advantage from the outset.

In general, starting with a blank slate lets IT leaders be more innovative.

Mahindra’s Krishnan was able to deploy from day one a dashboard that lets his IT team monitor every device in the factory, from the servers to the controllers. The factory itself, to increase sustainability and reduce dependence on other power sources, uses solar, wind and other renewable technologies.

And then there’s the personal payoff.

Says Krishnan, “Every challenge is an opportunity. Faced with building a factory in Chakan, I believed that my staff could do it and I could lead it. And now we’re up and running.” july 2013

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PRODUCTS

Launches and releases

PRODUCT WATCH A breakdown of the top products and solutions to launch and release in the last month.

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Product: Mac Pro Vendor: Apple What it does: Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s here. Apple has finally put long-standing Mac Pro users out of their misery with the unveiling of the new cylindrical Mac Pro. First shown at the WWDC last month, the 9.9 inch tall machine is about one-eighth the size of the Mac Pro Tower. The unique design is said to be based around a unified thermal core in order to help keep it cool. The Mac Pro boasts a Xeon E5 processor, based on Intelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Haswell microarchitecture, and now uses 1866MHz ECC DDR3 RAM. What you need to know: The computer is set to come with two workstation-class ATI FirePro GPUs as standard, each packing 384-bit memory busses and 528Gbps of memory bandwidth. Rumour has it that the GPUs are said to be able to drive three 4K displays at the same time. The Mac Pro also models a handle on top, not only for carrying around, but also to allow the user to spin it and reveal ports on the back of the unit. The ports include Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI out, audio, four USB3 jacks, and six Thunderbolt 2 ports.

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Product: iOS 7 Vendor: Apple

Product: Ascend P6 Vendor: Huawei

What it does: Entirely redesigned, iOS 7 boasts some rather dramatic changes and developments far removed from the previous system. With plenty of exciting new features for Apple fan boys to drawl over, users will also experience a number of revamped classic apps. Weather, Calendar, Mail, Messages and Phone have all been given a makeover. The backgrounds change in a parallax effect when the phone is moved, and things in the background move subtly behind those in the forefront.

What you need to know: Much like all the major vendors, Apple has focused on its new Control Center; the iOS notification hub. By swiping up from the bottom of the device, you activate a centralised control area which allows you to quickly access apps, AirDrop and adjust currently playing tracks. On top of this, Apple has added a flashlight, and loads iOS 7 with new camera options. Speaking at WWDC, Apple’s senior vice president, Craig Federighi said the camera app is now four cameras in one; a video camera, still camera, square camera, and panorama camera.

Product: BlackBerry Q5 Vendor: BlackBerry

What it does: Huawei releases come thick and fast these days. The Chinese smartphone maker seems to be obsessed with designing and releasing a product that is the market’s only something. That particular something this time is thinnest, floating around at just 6.18mm. Though it probably shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as the HTC One, Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5 just yet, this is certainly Huawei’s best smartphone to date.

This model may be the device that finally lands Huawei the respect it’s overdue in the market.

What you need to know: The Ascend P6 doesn’t boast the specs of a top model, but the Androidbased model features a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, a 4.7 inch high definition in-cell display, and a fairly impressive 5MP front-facing camera.

Again, at 6.18mm thick and weighing in at 120g, it’s the slimmest phone on offer, and includes a MagicTouch feature for enhanced screen responsiveness.

What it does: Finally, those mid-market lovers and classic Curve users can make the transition into the world of BlackBerry with this new QWERTY smartphone targeted at emerging markets. Released in conjunction with the UAE’s first dedicated BlackBerry store in Dubai Mall, the Q5 costs a nifty Dhs1,499. Compact as only BlackBerry knows how, it’s built around a 3.1 inch 720x720 pixel LCD touchscreen, propped above a recognisable BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard.

What you need to know: Packed with a dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU, a 5MP camera and 8GB storage, the Q5 is a tidying offering for the midmarket. The third release in under six months from the Canadian company hopes to attract some of the traditional fan boys into the new era. Running, of course, on the new BlackBerry 10 OS, with Qualcomm Snapdragon, the Q5 is available for a v10.1 upgrade.

www.cnmeonline.com

july 2013

Computer News Middle East

81

Column The word on the street

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

82

Computer News Middle East

O’ Mother, where art thou?

I

have an adequately tech savvy mother. I’m still undecided as to whether this is a good or bad thing. She has the ability to ‘like’ and comment on absolutely each and every piece of content I post to Facebook — bad. Her face appears on Skype after moments of fumbling behind a loading screen, paired with subtle curse words — good.

However, not everyone’s mother has the confidence to say yes to technology, and this creates a divide, which is growing larger by the minute as companies embrace this evolution of social wizardry. When guileless minds were armed with iPads, a bizarre kind of techy beau monde was born. This merging of technology and business is erasing traditional processes; processes that you and I will be happy to see the back of, but it’s not just about you and I, is it?

Last month I visited the experimental branch of Mashreq bank in Dubai Internet City to see how it had embraced technology to ‘revolutionise’ the inbranch experience for its customers.

Customers are becoming more and more inclined to do everything from home; shopping, booking travel, even watching live concerts, thanks to YouTube. However, banking is a sensitive sector and people are still wary about how much information they share over the Internet when it comes to banking. As a result, there are still a few scenarios where people, reluctantly at best, will have to visit a local branch.

What Mashreq has done, or objectively, shall I say, tried to do, is embrace technology in-house in order to change the experience of traditional banking, changing the stigma of physically visiting a branch. My immediate concern here was that I always felt that traditional, personal banking experiences were necessary for the older generation or those who don’t happen to have much confidence in technologies which are placed in the hands of the uninitiated.

Whenever somebody in this industry tells me that they’ve got something that will revolutionise the way I live, I always ask them, can my mother use it?

Secondly, I ask, is it necessary?

When I walked into Mashreq, the first

july 2013

thing I saw was my own body on a very big screen. As I approached the screen it simulated smashing, which made me jump out of my skin.

So the first technical experience I had gave me a mini heart attack, and that was before I even made it into the branch. My mother probably has a higher blood pressure than I do, therefore this is dangerous. Also, in the branches located inside shopping malls they’re not allowed to play out audio, so this unnecessary feature then becomes redundant. Part one; pointless.

Upon entering I was taken to another screen which was, again, interactive. This screen had another talking person on it which walked me through banking opportunities, loan options, credit card choices, basic things that the Internet could tell me. Turn around, you are presented with eight tablets. These are Windows 8-run with digitised banking forms — I’m ok with this. This is a decent investment — physical forms are annoying; the pens are always tied to the desk and chewed, and tablets are just far more professional. This should have happened some time ago. However, these tablets are also equipped with Windows apps which are apparently a great way to entertain children.

Sure, but when I come into my branch I want to get out in quick time. This can’t be done if young Toby is heavily invested in Temple Run. “A tablet will always be available,” I was told.

“But what if one isn’t, can I kick the kid off?”

“A tablet will always be available,” was repeated to me. I wasn’t convinced. What was wrong with the abacus?

The final piece in the puzzle, prior to reaching an actual desk (all of which were vacated) was a video call centre. Mashreq lured me all the way to my local branch, sat me down and made me talk to someone in another state. Fooled.

It was exciting, don’t get me wrong. But I’m a technically stimulated chap — I am excited by these things. My mother isn’t. She goes to the branch for face-to-face engagement and trusted advice, not to be guided through a labyrinth of holograms and interactive sensoractivated adverts. This is the divide that consumer technology is creating. This kind of fruitful, futuristic banking branch leaves people, like my mother, with nowhere to go.

This evolution is upon us and will continue to show itself more and more as traditional and personal services disappear. I can handle it, but your poor mother, well that’s another story.

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