Computer News Middle East August 2014

WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS issue 271 | august 2014 WWW.CNMEONLINE.COM

trading up How DWTC’s new IT infrastructure supports business growth

retail riches

The LuLu Group CIO redefines retail

Smart centres

The data centres of the future

Mind and the machine

Motivations of a modern day hacker

Over-analysing

Can Big Data analysis go too far?

PLUS: hybrid cloud storage | mobile user experience | lte-advanced | software-defined networking

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EDITORIAL

We’re still digitally divided

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

Chairman Dominic De Sousa CEO Nadeem Hood

The first time I heard of Facebook’s Internet.org project was at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, when Mark Zuckerberg spoke excitedly of his company’s plans to bridge the digital divide by offering some form of Internet access to 2-3 billion more people. In his keynote, Zuckerberg said that while 85 percent of the world’s population lived in areas that already have 2G or 3G networks, only about a third of humanity is online. He sounded like a man with a mission to connect the entire world’s population to the Internet.

The pilot project was rolled out first in Paraguay and later in Philippines, where it partnered with service provider Globe to offer services for free. The result, Facebook claimed, almost doubled the number of Internet users in the country. Recently, Internet.org, which is an Android app, was launched in Zambia, enabling mobile phone users to browse a set of health, employment and local information services without data charges.

Internet.org was pitched as a win-win: Though carriers have to provide basic Internet services for free in underdeveloped places, they could still generate revenue through up-selling. For example, if a user accessed a link on Facebook that isn’t part of the basic services, operators could offer a cheaper data plan which allows more bandwidth.

The social network’s lofty goal of bringing free Internet to developing countries along with its coalition partners such as Ericsson and Samsung was applauded by one and all in the industry when it was announced. Now, it turns out the company’s humanitarian mission may not be very altruistic. According to a news report from TechHive, the first-time Internet users, who can’t afford a data plan, will be stuck with only Facebook-approved apps. In other words, they can’t access any other social networks or messaging services unless they pay for it.

Carriers around the globe are making a bee line to work with Facebook as part of the Internet.org coalition to offer free or inexpensive Internet access. After all, they stand to gain more subscribers and spur consumer interest in data plans. And, to state the obvious, the biggest beneficiary among them all is Facebook. Now, the question is, do we want a significant chunk of the world’s population to see only Facebook’s version of the Internet? Personally, I believe the right to Internet access should be made a fundamental human right but then, nothing in life comes free, as Facebook has just shown us.

COO Georgina O’Hara Publishing Director Rajashree Rammohan raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9131 Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9133 Editor Annie Bricker annie.bricker@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9116 Online Editor James Dartnell james.dartnell@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9140 Contributors Randy Bean Mary Brandel ADVERTISING Senior Sales Manager Michal Zylinski michal.zylinski@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9119 Circulation Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9142 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9136 Designer Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9132 DIGITAL SERVICES Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy P Maagma Web Developer Jefferson de Joya Photographer and Social Media Co-ordinator Jay Colina webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100

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trading up How DWTC’s new IT infrastructure supports business growth

retail riches

Printed by Al Ghurair Printing & Publishing

Madhav Rao redefines retail

Smart centreS

The data centres of the future

Mind and the Machine

Regional partner of

Motivations of a modern day hacker hackhac

Over-analySing

Can Big Data analysis go too far?

PLUS: hybrid cLoUd Storage | mobiLe USer exPerience | Lte-advanced | Software-defined networking

© Copyright 2014 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

BIG DATA

actionable intellige for operation efficie Ericsson can use its extensive experience in network data analytics to harness the potential of “Big Data� and offer an unparalleled value and efficiency.

ence ency

EDITORIAL Our events

London linked

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

Last month I had the pleasure of attending two London tech events hosted by two of the industry's top vendors. The city was a pleasure to visit – the sun shone and the clouds - those in the sky at least - stayed at bay. Though my instinct was to lay out in a park and soak up the good weather while I had the chance, powerhouses EMC and SAP made shirking the cool English breezes a bit easier with entertaining, and wholly informative events.

EMC’s Doctor Who-themed storage solutions launch truly “redefined possible” with an event that combined flashy TARDIS boxes, time tunnels and breakdowns of the company’s new products and updated platforms.

SAP especially impressed with its experience centre and Big Data truck.

However, what sticks in my mind in terms of my trip isn’t necessarily the the events themselves – it is how thoroughly emerging technology has integrated itself into our lives.

This is particularly true for travel with mobile technology. From the moment my flights were booked, I was hooked to my smartphone for confirmations and updates. In the airport, I immediately connected to the public Wi-Fi to update my social media accounts with my travel plans and locate the closest, fastest coffee in the terminal.

Upon landing, I used my smartphone to text - for free - a note to my mother to inform her that I had safely completed my journey. I then downloaded a private car app to call for a car to pick me up. With this app, I could see the name of my driver the make and model of the car, and even the immediate location of the vehicle with a GPS-enabled map.

Speaking of cars, as I made my way to the hotel, listening to a BBC podcast on my smartphone, I learned that the UK government is currently outlining safety measures to permit driverless cars on the streets of Britain.

The UK isn’t the first nation to plan for driverless cars, following cities and states in the US and Sweden.

Everywhere I walked in London, guided by my native smartphone map, QR codes and Twitter hashtags were available for consumption and information redistribution. In a tiny café in Shoreditch, a server took my order using a tablet. When I wrote up the articles on the EMC and SAP events for this issue of CNME, I stored them using a free cloud service and later, when I was delayed in the airport, I pulled out my smartphone, accessed the cloud and proofread them.

This proliferation of technology is, of course, not limited to London.

Here in the Middle East, more and more of our everyday transactions and lives are being carried out via mobile technology. Even Ramadan gifts are technology-centred, from new mobile devices to free Wi-Fi on the Dubai metro. There is no question that technology is a driving force in our lives, with the ability to streamline business, entertainment and even travel.

Big Data

Symposium

Our online platforms

Our social media

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august 2014

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Contents

Our Strategic Partners Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic Technology Partner

Strategic Innovation Partner

ISSUE 271 | august 2014

20

Retail therapy

trading up

34

50 8

future data centres

hacker mentality

Computer News Middle East

august 2014

24

10 Crafting space

This month EMC hosted an event in London to with a preview of what is coming up for the storage virtualisation leader.

44 Over-analysing data

There can always be too much of a good thing. Planning is the key for Big Data analytic projects, and CIOs need be aware of when enough is enough.

20 Retail therapy

Madhav Rao has 20 years' experience in retail IT. The Lulu Group Chief Information Officer has gained a unique perspective over the years and keeps his finger on the pulse of the retail world.

50 Hacker mentality

Cybercrime is at an all-time high, and security should be at the top of every IT department's list. CNME investigates the motivation of hackers, and how criminals can gain access to devices and systems.

24 Trading up

DWTC is the hub of business tourism in the Middle East. Keeping the centre on the cutting edge of technology is no small task. CNME explores how Avaya stepped up to the challenge.

56 Advanced Airwaves

LTE-Advanced has hit the market with a bang, providing faster speeds, sability and better coverage. With a potentially large increas in users, can LTE-Advanced live up to everything it promises?

34 Rack to the Future

Data Centre technology has been rapidly changing. With virtualisation solutions on the market, speed, agility and security are paramount.

62 Experience is everything

Gartner's Nick Jones discusses the evolution of mobile devices and what this means for the user experience of the future.

38 Best of both worlds

As we deploy more applications in the cloud, the complexity of integration and management become key issues. CNME explores the latest strategies in the cloud.

70 Enabling innovation

Yarob Sakhnini of Brocade discusses the latest networking trend that is predicted to take the Middle East by storm. SDN is here - how will it effect regional IT?

www.cnmeonline.com

in depth EMC

Crafting space Last month in London, EMC gave the media a peek of what is coming in the future for the technology leader and what is available now to help CIOs manage their data.

S

torage virtualisation leader EMC held a Doctor Who-themed product launch in London on July 8th with the tag line, “Redefine Possible.” The venue, holding true to theme, was dotted with TARDIS booths to frame EMC’s virtualisation news and announcements. Attendees were able to take a peek at new EMC products as well as updates to the company’s XTremIO platform.

After a round of live music, David Goulden,

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august 2014

Information Infrastructure CEO, EMC, kicked off the event. Goulden outlined a few issues that CIOs are burdened with as virtualisation takes hold. “Dealing with existing workload growth, infrastructure application drag and performance-hungry workloads were the most prominent problems for end users,” said Goulden. EMC, he said, is dedicating their new products to redefining what is possible with hybrid cloud storage.

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Jeremy Burton, President of Products and Marketing, then took to the podium to give attendees a deeper look into EMC’s new product offerings as well as XTremeIO. “The array has already taken in more than $100 million for EMC in less than six months, making it one of the fastest growing all-flash arrays on the market,” said Burton.

Newcomers on the EMC menu, Burton said, are the Starter X-Brick storage array and

the addition of up to six X-Bricks for customers with heavier workloads. Snapshots for the XTremIO are available with the new arrays.

EMC assured attendees that there will be no limitations on performance, features or capacity reservations with the system’s in-memory metadata architecture.

Updates to XtremIO 3.0 are also in the pipeline. EMC’s newest free software code update is said to increase the efficiency of its existing all-flash arrays. The software adds in-memory, metadata space-efficient snapshots to create high-performance application copies while providing inline, always-on data compression, according to EMC. EMC is also preparing for a release of the new VMAX series. VMAX will be the first all-flash arrays available in the market with open-enterprise data service platforms. The VMAX series is slated

for release later on this year. The release will include three new models and the HYPERMAX OS open converged storage hypervisor and Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture.

HYPERMAX OS enables users to embed storage infrastructure services such as cloud access, data mobility and data protection directly to their arrays without the hassle of having to save it remotely, according to EMC. “The OS can help customers lower their total cost of ownership by up to 50 percent while reducing their physical footprint and energy needs,” Burton said.

Another new offering from EMC, the Dynamic Virtual Matrix, provides the ability to dynamically allocate processing power to meet distinctive service levels across their workloads.

This allows users to control which areas receive the most processing power.

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Burton then offered information on the company’s acquisition of TwinStrata. The new member of the EMC family will enable the company to deliver new embedded cloud access capabilities to customers with its cloud-tiering technology.

Finally, EMC announced an update to its Isilon storage unit. The update will enable enterprise users to take advantage of a “Data Lake” of compiled information. Isilon One FS provides an enterprise-grade scaleout Data Lake. This Lake has twice the performance of other platforms, according to EMC. The Isilon X210 and X410 platforms are the latest additions to EMC. In addition, a Data Lake Hadoop Bundle will be released allowing users to streamline business backup and replication abilities while linking Big Data projects with Data Lake architecture.

august 2014

Computer News Middle East

11

in depth SAP

Out of office One of the largest software companies in the world, SAP is positioned firmly as an underpinning force of business IT infrastructure. However, it is evident by its recent developments that the company is ready to move beyond the confines of the office.

O

n July 10th, SAP hosted a media roundtable at their London headquarters to reveal the ways in which they are loosening their collective neckties and implementing SAP Big Data solutions outside of the workplace. The initiatives announced included an effort to understand the planet’s diversity and enhance food safety, solve crime, provide relief in disaster situations and track athletic statistics.

Demonstrated in the SAP London headquarters, experts displayed the work they have undertaken with the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario. The partnership has used SAP solutions to show that food contamination and mislabelling is prevalent across the herb and

12

Computer News Middle East

august 2014

spice, as well as the fish and seafood industries.

The SAP Experience Centre also hosted experts that demonstrated the ways in which SAP can help track criminals, as well as assist in disaster prevention, alert and relief.

In addition to improving the lives of the globe’s citizens via environmentalism and food safety, SAP also displayed the ways in which it is fast becoming involved in recreation and in everyday life. For example, it has long been leveraging SAP HANA to analyse sports statistics.

Currently parked outside its headquarters, the mobile Big Data truck features a number of demonstrations on how Big Data can be leveraged for recreation.

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SAP HANA collects data during training sessions and matches from football and women’s tennis among numerous other sports. With this data they are able to analyse player statistics and give a deeper understanding of sport to both professionals and fans. With SAP HANA coaches and athletes are able to analyse weaknesses and strengths, and fans are able to pinpoint information about their favourite players.

SAP is also changing the way that people consume products. In the Big Data truck, SAP experts demonstrated the future of snacking using SAP products. A “smart” vending machine in the truck can track what snacks are consumed by an individual and predicts what sort of goodies they may want in the future. With the swipe of a smart card, a hungry snacker can not only pay for their own nosh, but also “friend” other users and even gift snacks to friends.

SAP hasn’t left the office entirely; their products still make up the backbone of countless IT infrastructures worldwide. However, it is clear that the company is stretching its solutions to reach users in their everyday lives. From sport to snacking, SAP is showing how Big Data can personalise experiences by extrapolating from existing data.

short takes Month in view

Microsoft: Kuwait & Algeria malware culprits

Apple and IBM pair for iOS apps Apple is making a push for the corporate IT market through a partnership with IBM, which will develop iOS apps for its Big Data and analytics services and promote iPhones and iPads to clients.

The deal will see IBM, one of the industry’s largest providers of corporate IT, develop more than 100 apps and services exclusively for Apple’s iOS, the companies said in a statement.

It will also tailor its cloud services for iOS and provide iOS device activation, supply and management to its customers, including the ability to lease rather than buy Apple hardware.

Apple, meanwhile, will offer new AppleCare warranty services for enterprise customers that include 24hour assistance and on-site support.

The first IBM apps to stem from the collaboration could be out by autumn, the companies said – which is when Apple’s iOS 8 platform is expected to launch.

Initial apps will be targeted at the retail, healthcare, banking, travel, transportation, telecommunications and insurance industries.

IBM claims three-quarters of Fortune 100 companies use its enterprise software, and that it has had top market share for five years in IDC’s ranking of the world’s biggest enterprise social software makers.

WHAT’S HOT?

Microsoft has taken legal action to combat the spread of malware that the company says can be traced to bad actors in Kuwait and Algeria.

In a recent civil suit, industry giant Microsoft named Mohamed Benabdellah and Naser Al Mutairi, as well as the U.S. domain hosting company Vitalwerks Internet Solutions, for their respective roles in the creation of malicious software that has since infected millions of computers and devices, including Microsoft

Chinese hackers target Iraq experts A sophisticated Chinese hacker group that had been stealing information from U.S. policy experts on Southeast Asia suddenly changed targets last month to focus on the Middle East – Iraq, in particular – security researchers CrowdStrike said.

‘Deep Panda’ switched from exploiting one area of expertise to another because of

Apple reports huge profit but sales disappoint

Apple has racked up another profitable quarter on iPhones and Macs, though its revenue growth was slower than expected.

Apple reported a profit of US$7.7 billion, up 12 percent on the same period last year which beat analyst estimates of $7.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

14

Computer News Middle East

customers. Vitalwerks operates as No-IP.com, a free domain-name service.

The case is focused on the family of malware known as Bladabindi and Jenxcus. The malware was promoted via social media, Microsoft said, and was spread through No-IP. Over the past year Microsoft said it has seen more than 7.4 million cases of Bladabindi-Jenxcus malware, which can take control of people’s computers, steal passwords, and turn on webcams and microphones.

august 2014

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the march of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) towards Baghdad, and the collapse of Iraq’s security forces in the north and west of the country.

China is the largest foreign investor in Iraqi oil fields, and draws about 10% of its oil imports from the country. Most of China’s oil investments, however, are in southern Iraq.

Beta BBM coming to Windows Phone Blackberry has announced that it will bring its BBM messaging app to Windows Phone.

For now, the app is in a filled-up closed beta, though customers can register to join the waiting list.

Users will be able to swipe through each section of the app, and can pin any contact directly to the Start screen for faster access.

Intercept: NSA targets American Muslims More than 40 privacy, civil rights and religious groups have called on President Barack Obama’s administration to provide a “full public accounting” of email surveillance of prominent Muslims living in the U.S., following a news report detailing the spying by the U.S. National Security Agency and FBI. The Intercept published a story showing records at the NSA targeting five prominent

Muslim Americans, including a Rutgers professor, a lawyer and the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a Muslim civil rights group. The NSA and FBI are secretly snooping on several other Muslims living in the U.S., the story said.

CAIR, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Free Press, and the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. sent a letter to the

IBM lines up $3 billion cognitive chip investment IBM will pour $3 billion into computing and chip materials research over the next five years, as it rethinks computer design and looks to a future that may not involve silicon chips.

The computer design initiative could pave the way for functional quantum and cognitive computers that mimic brain functionality.

Silicon design has stalled and the ability to shrink chips is reaching its limit. IBM is looking at graphene, carbon nanotubes and other materials to replace silicon in computers, and will try to develop chips that can be scaled down to the atomic level.

IBM’s goal is to provide the building blocks for systems that can intelligently process vast amounts of data while consuming less power, said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, Systems and Technology Group, IBM.

administration to strengthen protections for civil liberties and human rights.

The surveillance raises concerns about potential abuse, the letter added. “We cannot presume that the government acted without prejudice or bias,” the letter said. “Too often, both in the past and the present, we have observed the government engaging in patterns of discriminatory and abusive surveillance.”

UK rushes data retention bill

The U.K. government has pushed through a new surveillance law to replace one a European Union court said interfered with fundamental privacy rights – but, say civil rights campaigners, the new law is worse than the one it replaces.

The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, also known as DRIP, was fasttracked by the U.K. government after European Union laws requiring communications

providers to retain metadata were ruled invalid by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in April because they seriously interfered with fundamental privacy rights.

On 10 July the U.K. government introduced an emergency bill to provide law enforcers and intelligence agencies access to telecommunications data to help them investigate criminal activity.

Top vendors unite for IoT ring Leading hardware companies have established a new Internet of Things consortium to create standards so that billions of devices can connect to each other.

Intel, Samsung and Dell are among the

RSA: Brazilians lose $3.75 billion to Bolware Brazilians using the country’s Boleto Bancrio online payment system may have been swindled out of as much as $3.75 billion by malware called ‘Bolware’ according to a new analysis by RSA Security.

Boleto is a popular system that can be used online or offline to pay for anything from goods to taxes.

founding members of Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), which will deliver the first of many specifications for hassle-free data flow between devices, regardless of the OS, device type or wireless communication technology.

The OIC companies will contribute opensource code so developers can write common software stacks for communications and notifications across handsets, remote controls, wearables, appliances and other sensor devices.

Microsoft may drag out layoffs for a year

WHAT’S NOT?

Microsoft has said it could take as long as a year to lay off 18,000 workers.

According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft said it would “substantially complete” the layoffs by the end of this year, and that they would be “fully completed” by 30 June, 2015.

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august 2014

Computer News Middle East

15

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Feature: Nadella seeks to axe failing hardware

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Analysis: Building the future

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Cutting edge

Rubbish rebooted

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Money making machines Peter Middleton, Research Director, Gartner

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in

60 SEC O NDS

A lot can happen in just a minute. CNME takes a look at one turn of the sweep hand in numbers.

710 COMPUTERS SOLD

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COMPUTERS INFECTED BY MALWARE

CIO Spotlight Madhav Rao

20

Computer News Middle East

august 2014

www.cnmeonline.com

Retail therapy With 20 years’ experience working in retail IT, Madhav Rao has gained a unique perspective on how technology has transformed the industry. The Lulu Group Chief Information Officer’s commitment to “best of breed” technology and the training of his staff has ensured his status as a mainstay in the company’s progression.

H

aving spent his youth across the Indian states of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu – in conjunction with the international experience he would go on to accumulate - it seems only natural that Rao would become fluent in five languages, along with having a strong grasp of Arabic.

He completed a Maths and Computer Science degree at Vivekananda College, Chennai, in 1985, and moved on to undertake a position as a Trainee Researcher at Spencer’s Retail Limited in the south-Indian city.

His work focused mainly on the importance of the trade supply chain, and Rao says the experience was a perfect start in understanding the fundamentals of wholesale distribution, “I was fortunate to be accepted onto the programme, as there were only enough spaces for a select few candidates,” he says. “It was a fantastic opportunity that gave me invaluable insight into the supply chain, and to meet industry veterans who had been in the business for 30 years.” During his research stint at Spencer’s, Rao studied for a six month postgraduate diploma in Advanced Computer Science, which involved a great deal of academic study. Fortunately for Rao, he was once again one of a lucky few to be given a unique opportunity – this time to operate as a computer lab assistant, “This was a formative stage of my career,” he says. “In our lab sessions we had to write a lot of COBOL code, and my experience was put to use in working with commercial applications.”

Following his completion of the course, Rao joined MJS Consulting –

“When I’m explaining something I always give my staff an example to make it relatable. Hard work is a prerequisite of success but teamwork is very important in my opinion.”

a Chennai firm who dealt in outsourced IT contracts – and it wasn’t long before he was leading a team of 16 on a three-and-a-half month project at Singapore’s famous Changi Airport. “Back then the computer industry was growing, and we were expected to install software that allowed a 45-second check-in time,” he says. “That was very demanding, but an excellent experience.”

In 1991, Rao took the decision to move to Abu Dhabi, to work as a Senior Training Consultant at Syscoms College, an arm of Lulu Group.

Whilst there, he was responsible for teaching “three or four” classes a day, including corporate clients. He taught a course preparing students for a SCOTVEC-affiliated national diploma, which was the first of its kind in the region. Rao says he relished the experience of being back in the classroom, only this time as a teacher, “Teaching is incredibly satisfying,” he says. “I would honestly consider doing it again part-time. I love how a lot of the top guys who are working at regional banks, oil and gas firms and embassies in the UAE come up to me and say, ‘Hey teacher, do you remember me?’ That gives me enormous pride.”

Three years later, Rao transferred officially to Lulu Group, where he was made Electronic Data Processing Manager. “In those days there wasn’t even an IT Manager,” he says. “I was in charge of IT but back then it went by a different name.”

Formed in 1991, Lulu Group is now worth almost $500 million. Rao recalls how the company has gone from strength-to-strength in that period, “After 1994, Lulu really began to gather pace,” he says. “Originally we only had offices in Abu Dhabi, but the progress Lulu has made now means we have offices in 24 countries.” Until 2005, Lulu was using inhouse ERP, and Rao saw the need for change. “We consolidated things into one multi-currency, multi-country and multi-legal ERP,” he says. “It really lives in the memory as being a big step. I believe we took a ‘bigger man’ approach by instigating the change, and it was hugely satisfying once it went live across the GCC.” In the midst of his duties as Lulu CIO, Rao found time in 2005 to complete an online MBA in Information Technology from Dubai Knowledge Village. As large elements of retail overlapped with the IT aspects of the course, Rao describes his studies as “a cakewalk.”

He is fiercely proud of overseeing a team that became the first in the region to convert from using traditional Business Warehouse

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august 2014

Computer News Middle East

21

CIO Spotlight Madhav Rao

TIMELINE 1985

“I love how a lot of the top guys who are working at regional banks, oil and gas firms and embassies in the UAE come up to me and say ‘hey teacher, do you remember me?’ That gives me enormous pride.”

Acceleration technology to SAP HANA in a scale-out model, going live in November 2013. “BWA was fantastic, it gave realtime information on transactional information,” he says. “Data mining is a huge challenge, so anything that could tell you which items are selling, and which categories are performing well was hugely advantageous. However, by 2013 the move to HANA became necessary.” In addition, Rao takes huge satisfaction in saying that he has virtualised “everything” under his control “storage, networks, you name it.”

In terms of his own motivation, Rao says he is driven by “best of breed” technology. “At Lulu we’re always trying to be a frontrunner for having the best technologies available,” he says.

“No one asked me to implement SAP HANA, or for the best ERP and point of sale technologies, but I demand the best for the company. I get immense satisfaction from proactively delivering technologies to the business, helping to empower everyone with access to better information.”

Rao draws on his teaching experience to define his management style of Lulu’s IT team. The first ever staff member in the company’s IT arm says he values the importance of preparing his “impeccable” 500-strong team. “I love putting a team together,” he says. “I think it’s important to motivate them and lead by example; when I’m explaining something I always give them an example to make it relatable. Hard work is a prerequisite of success but teamwork is very important in my opinion.” Rao recounts how recent projects have kept his team at the office until the early hours of the morning, “At the end of the day you can’t force people to work,” he says. “Most of my staff seem to enjoy the training they do, they understand that making themselves business process experts will make them more technically aware.

High end programmers need to understand these processes.”

Rao names Lulu’s Managing Director M.A. Yusuff Ali as his inspiration. “His passion and strength is incredible,” he says.

“He is personally attached to each and every employee. From a personal point of view, the support I receive as part of the central management is also fantastic.”

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Graduated from Vivekananda College with Maths and Computer Science degree

1986 Begins research role at Spencer’s Retail

1986 Undertakes international projects at MJS Consulting

1991 Takes teaching role at Lulu Group’s Syscoms College in Abu Dhabi

1994 Made Lulu’s Electronic Data Processing Manager

2005 Completes online MBA at Dubai Knowledge Village

2013 Oversees Lulu’s move to SAP HANA

www.datacenterfuture.com

CASE STUDY DWTC

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Trading Up With an undeniable dedication to world-class service for its countless visitors, vendors and exhibitors, Farid Farouq, Vice President, IT, knows the Dubai World Trade Centre must stay on the cutting edge of technology. When it came time for an infrastructure upgrade, Farouq knew it would not be a small task.

A

s Dubai becomes the centre of business trade in the Middle East, Dubai World Trade Centre stands at the heart of this growing city. As the number of visitors, exhibitors and events continued to grow, it became clear to the IT team at DWTC that is was time to streamline their technology infrastructure.

Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) is renowned for its world class events, venues, conferences and exhibitions. The epicentre of business tourism in the Middle East, DWTC can confidently claim credit for a great deal of the growth in the international trade industry in the region. Since the creation of its first tower in 1979, DWTC has been a vital part of the Dubai economy, creating around 36,000 jobs in 2011 alone, and attracting revenue from international businesses and visitors.

Dubai has undoubtedly grown since the inception of the DWTC and so too have the demands of exhibitors, vendors and visitors. It is with this in mind that Farid Farouq, Vice President, IT, Dubai World Trade Centre, realised that the IT infrastructure of the event giant needed to be streamlined. “We were doing many things manually,” Farouq recalls, “we have always provided an extremely high level of customer service, but I knew we could do it even more efficiently.”

With over 500 events annually ranging from exhibitions, conferences, meetings, concerts, and even weddings, Farouq realised that the network infrastructure must be agile, reliable, resilient, and able to quickly adapt to fast changing requirements. “The

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CASE STUDY DWTC

best way forward to maintain a converged, secured and highly adaptable infrastructure is by introducing a new network concept throughout the convention centre,” he says.

Indeed, when DWTC went in search of a solution that would provide the ability to support its extremely demanding and dynamic business requirements, Farouq knew that the project would be enormous. Not only would the job entail long hours and attention to detail, but as the MENASA region’s largest venue operator and event organiser, DWTC truly cannot afford a moment of downtime. The search for a vendor that had the technology and would be up to the task was the first step in what would be an important journey.

Farid then began his search for a solution that would provide the ability to meet the dynamic business needs of DWTC. After accessing what the full project would entail, it was clear that only a next-generation, virtualised network infrastructure would be able to deliver on DWTC’s

“It’s essential that IT and business work together on projects such as this,” says Farouq, “without that type of communication, a project cannot succeed.” stringent business requirements. In addition to logistical sense, the project had to make business sense. To assess the bottom-line, a business case with the feasibility study was developed to secure the necessary project funding. “It’s essential that IT and business work together on projects such as this,” says Farouq, “without that type of communication, a project cannot succeed.”

Once Farouq knew what DWTC needed, it was a matter of finding the appropriate vendor. Initial technology tests and proof of concept sessions were conducted with various vendors to ensure that they understood the requirements of the project and to assess their overall fit with the project.

During this time, the technology department at DWTC was drafting the project plan, including the scope of work, expected schedule of delivery and high level design.

When the search was finally over, one vendor stood out as the clear leader - Avaya’s offering was the most suitable solution. Although others had technologies very similar to what DWTC required, Avaya came through first both technically and commercially. “Other vendors were developing the technology that Avaya already had,” says Farouq, “we went with Avaya because they had the technologies we needed to streamline our IT infrastructure and they had it available at that moment.”

Shortly following the tap to Avaya, to implement what would

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be perhaps the most technically difficult IT project the DWTC had ever embarked upon, a kick-off meeting was held with all interested stakeholders and key players. There, they developed a solid schedule for the project that would work well with DWTC’s packed event calendar.

A four stage roll-out plan was adopted. The implementation began with the migration of access switches. “This phase was the most challenging,” says Farouq, “it involved the replacement of over 130 access switches scattered across the venue. It was a tedious and labour-intensive task that involved not only the technical aspects, but manoeuvring the events schedule to find empty slots.”

Following the migration of access switches, Avaya and the team at DWTC moved on to the migration of core and distribution network elements. The challenge faced in this phase was the scale of the downtime required to complete each site. Each distribution location was connected to tens of access switches. As such, engineering the shift from the previous vendor’s switches to the new Avaya ones was a challenge as the implementation could not be done during show hours.

When all the switches had been migrated, it was time to move the data centre network to the new system. The planning and design for the migration of the data centre network took a great deal of detailed work, recalls Farouq. “Each interface connected to each server and device within the data centre must be well documented. In addition, its migration must be as accurate as possible to avoid any interruption after the change, minimising services’ outage,” he says.

With all of the major parts in place, the final task was to address security issues. With over 2.2 million trade delegates and attendees visiting the venue each year using the DWTC systems, security is paramount. One chink in the security armour could mean disaster. The crux of this project was the delivery and configuration of the Intrusion Prevention Systems which are key in the protection of data centre servers from any malicious activity.

The result of the hard work and planning on the part of DWTC and Avaya were instantly realised. The new system is a fully integrated, end-toend network virtualisation solution. The new technology helps automate service provisioning, improve performance, and reduce network outages.

“With this deployment, Dubai World Trade Centre is striving to deliver best-in-class interruption-free networking services to all its clients and across all applications,” says Farouq.

As a visitor to DWTC, one might not be immediately aware of all the changes in its IT infrastructure. However, behind the scenes, the changes are quite clear. “Thousands of network switch ports, hundreds of access switches, tens of core network elements serving over 2.2 million visitors and exhibitors with their devices and applications, all work seamlessly during mega shows such as Gitex, Gulfood and Arab Health, yearlong with no interruptions,” says Farouq.

The end result is clear, without the road blocks of manual systems and the anxiety of potential downtime, the IT department at DWTC is able to concentrate on creating great opportunities for businesses to connect, worrying less about “data networks” and more about “human networks”.

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FEATURE

Help desks

Help at hand An IT help desk is the central organ of technical support for any business, and the first place employees look when facing such problems. How can organisations best equip their help desks so they are ready to tackle any problem, and what are the most pressing issues they currently face?

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solutions World

T

he IT help desk’s role is something of a poison chalice. On the one hand, its duty is vital, one that an organisation depends on to function efficiently.

On the other, employees are demanding, and often expect that IT should be easily kept under control without any unnecessary glitches. A well-organised help desk can not only serve as a firefighting unit, but can help drive business value through various means of support. A disorganised one will find itself facing plenty of difficulties.

A commitment to IT governance and policy-driven issues is key for help desk staff, ensuring some form of order within the diagnosis and action stages. Over 50 percent of IT service disruption issues that are reported by end users are undetectable with traditional back-end monitoring tools, so a help desk must be well-prepared www.cnmeonline.com

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Help desks

when it comes to tackling threats. Help desks need solutions to diagnose and proactively fix issues, before more users become victims to the same problem. A help desk that has a strong grasp on KPIs, with a list of metrics that can track performance, including SLA compliance, response and resolution times and support costs will be on the front foot in dealing with the challenges ahead.

“An effective help desk should have clear visibility on what needs to be achieved,” says Kumaravel Ramakrishnan, Marketing Analyst, ManageEngine.

“Whether it is a customer satisfaction rating of 90 percent for the quarter, or an 80 percent SLA compliance for the year, or to bring down the cost per ticket by 20 percent this year; the IT team needs to clearly know what they are working towards.

There needs to be a concrete plan that lays out a roadmap to achieve these goals. This involves people - hiring, identifying skillsets and training; process incorporating best practices, identifying and closing gaps in process workflows; and technology - identifying areas of automation, and the selection of right tools.”

As the first point of contact with end-users, the IT help desk’s efficiency and level of service can impact an organisation’s brand image. Ramakrishnan sees the value of internal forums and specific training plans for each individual in the team, “Every help desk team should have a focused training plan for staff in different job functions,” he says. “New recruits to the team should have a training plan with a checklist of items to be covered in different time frames. Training can be structured to be a mix of on-the-job and classroom

Getting team members together in workshops is vital to develop a common understanding of terminology and processes, and also to be able to share experiences and examples so that a full understanding of the benefits of a structured procedure can be absorbed.”

Bryan MacKenzie, Managing Director, Middle East & North Africa, Quintica

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An effective help desk should have clear visibility on what needs to be achieved.

Whether it is a customer satisfaction rating of 90 percent for the quarter, or an 80 percent SLA compliance for the year, or to bring down the cost per ticket by 20 percent this year; the IT team needs to clearly know what they are working towards.”

Kumaravel Ramakrishnan, Marketing Analyst, ManageEngine

training with continual assessments to measure progress. Depending on the need, training can be outsourced. There can be an internal knowledge forum or a closed group within the company intranet where questions can be asked, and topics discussed. These can spur discussions, sharing and contribution of new artifacts to the knowledge base.”

Bryan MacKenzie, Managing Director, Middle East & North Africa, Quintica, also believes workshops are key, “Getting team members together in workshops is vital to develop a common understanding of terminology and processes, and also to be able to share experiences and examples so that a full understanding of the benefits of a structured procedure can be absorbed,” he says.

The age of BYOD poses another headache for the help desk, with employees demanding the use of their own devices on company premises, posing both network and security issues. In addition, incident tickets must be effectively used to ensure the help desk’s priorities are clearly defined.

“Care must be taken to ensure that incident tickets are categorised according to urgency and impact on business, which often means ensuring resources are allocated to more critical matters than the HR Director being unable to find an email, or an office printer paper jam,” MacKenzie says. “To avoid any negative perceptions, successful service desks will initiate communication plans to make sure service level expectations are shared, and know that the ultimate

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FEATURE

Help desks

improvements in service performance and availability are published.”

Two of the biggest issues for employees are when a fault reoccurs, or when changes to a system fail. Both reflect poorly on the help desk. Root cause and impact analyses and change management are vital processes in ensuring that user satisfaction remains high and the risk of problems is minimised. In addition, help desks should be there to provide support to projects that often get left on the backburner; ones that are sidelined due to a lack of resources. Infrastructure visibility is a key advantage for a help desk.

“The biggest challenge the help desk faces is lack of accurate information,” Maged Eid, Regional Director, Nexthink, says. “The ability to have real-time visibility across the entire IT infrastructure and endpoints makes it easy to find the source of an issue, the number of end-users impacted and identify axes of investigation.”

As well as expected ticketing systems to log and track status, efficient solutions are key, says Eid. “Help desk staff need solutions with advanced analytics and dashboards to ensure all end-users are experiencing the best performance with their workstation and the right configuration of their computing environment,” he says.

“IT analytics solutions provide help desk staff with a complete view across the enterprise from the end-user perspective. This real-time view gives help desk staff the visibility to rapidly diagnose problems, and accurately understand and evaluate how the organisation is performing.” In other words, this is tantamount to

“Every help desk team should have a focused training plan for staff in different job functions. New recruits to the team should have a training plan with a checklist of items to be covered in different time frames.

Training can be structured to be a mix of on-the-job and classroom training with continual assessments to measure progress.”

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The biggest challenge the help desk faces is a lack of accurate information. The ability to have real-time visibility across the entire IT infrastructure and endpoints makes it easy to find the source of an issue, the number of end-users impacted and identify axes of investigation.”

Maged Eid, Regional Director, Nexthink

possessing monitoring tools that allow support staff to identify existing and potential problems before users begin to report them.

Communication, in many cases entailing feedback, is an important aspect of assisting a help desk to improve its performance. Analytics can offer easy access to the knowledge required by help desk staff to restore or preserve the level of service that end-users expect. Modern service applications usually have a portal interface to provide a self-service capability to end-users. Indeed, most employees in this age are able to fix many problems themselves with an easily accessible knowledge base.

MacKenzie feels that feedback surveys are antagonistic, “Although survey feedback is useful for IT management, it should be simple and limited - because users don’t like filling in feedback forms,” he says.

Ramakrishnan, however, sees them as an important part of the process, “Feedback surveys can be an ongoing exercise or scheduled at pre-defined frequencies,” he says. “Two key areas where organisations can collect feedback are the help desk performance and the usefulness of knowledge base articles. Just like how a help desk can have different channels of ticket logging like email, self-service portal and phone calls, feedback should also be collected from as many channels as possible. End users must be given an option to provide ongoing feedback from their self-service portals on issue resolution and knowledge base items. Survey emails, live chat and remote support tools are a few other systems that should be in place for feedback collection at the end of a customer session.”

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FEATURE

Data centres

Rack to the Future Data centre technology is rapidly changing.

With the advent of virtualisation and increasing speed and agility may come a sense of impending doom for IT staff. However, more efficient centres do not necessarily mean the end of a robust technical department.

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Strategic Innovation Partner

network WORLD

T

he face of the data centre is quickly changing, particularly in the Middle East. Virtualisation technology is reducing the physical space needed for data centres, and in an effort to go green, businesses are building data centres with environmental solutions in mind. In these smaller, more efficient data centres, business can do more with less. However, some are rightly concerned that this may mean a paring down of IT staff dedicated to maintaining such a data centre.

Data centre layout and technology has transformed in the past few years. “The role of data centres has changed to resemble the way power plants developed in the industrial age,” explains Tim Hardy, Vice President, SAP HANA Global Centre of Excellence, SAP. “In the early 19th century, large industrial companies operated their own power plants because there was no uniform standard pertaining to the power supply, nor was there a reliable power grid.” Once both were available, he explains, companies were happy to forego generating their own power. Newly created utility companies delivered the electricity reliably, and because of economies of scale, more cost-effectively than when generated by their own power station. As such, electricity became a commodity.

The analogy works for the modern day data centre as well. Data centre strategies continue to evolve with new technology innovations such as Big Data, cloud computing and mobility taking hold. The infrastructure of a data centre is no longer enclosed by four walls, and data that was once confined to the building is now being hosted by external service providers. Space is also being utilised differently in new data

FEATURE

Data centres

centres. Furthermore, servers are now consolidated and virtualised.

Virtualisation has truly been a catalyst in the changing face of the data centre. A few years ago, applications would sit on individual servers and were supported by their own storage. More applications meant more servers and storage.

However, this expansion was dependent on the actual physical space of the data centre. This started the era of virtualisation as we know it today. With the advent of server virtualisation, space issues are all but eliminated. Servers that would have taken up rack after rack are now drastically downsized.

Still, data centres do need space and power to function. Increased flexibility and agility has resulted in a huge jump in density. This means that power consumption has increased to give faster processing power and speeds. Speeds have grown almost 40 fold and 100 GB processing speeds are coming in the near future.

With the amount of power required to support a modern data centre, cooling systems are a fundamental element to the overall set up. The modern data centre requires a state-of-the-art cooling system.

“Technologies such as cooling of racks – liquid cooling in racks, horizontal cabinets instead of vertical ones for better cable management are the most recent,” says Mahesh Jaishankar, Vice President, datamena.

“Nowadays, newer processors can run cooler and at higher temperatures which means that data centres can now run at a slightly higher temperature than before.”

Cooling presents a particular problem in the Middle East, with outside temperatures soaring for much of the summer months. “Data centres in the Middle East face both temperature swings, and increasing density that drives demand on cooling, especially as data centres grow,” says Den Sullivan, Head of Enterprise &

“CIOs expect simple, flexible, automated, and agile infrastructure, instead of the increasingly complex virtual overlays that dominate current SDN.” Den Sullivan, Head of Enterprise & Architectures, Cisco Middle East, Africa and Russia

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Where companies in the past spent the majority of their IT budget on operations they can now re-invest that budget into uplifting the skills of operational staff to work at the application and infrastructure API development level – which can also lead to improved innovation within the business.”

Mechelle Buys du Plessis, Solutions Director, Dimension Data Middle East

Architectures, Cisco Middle East, Africa and Russia.

Jim Curran, Vice President, Enterprise Sales, Middle East and Africa, Commscope agrees that regional temperatures can wreak havoc on Middle East data centres, “In the region, outside air cooling is not viable for most of the year, which means that companies need to develop more creative solutions to cool their data centre efficiently without using huge amounts of power.”

The modern data centre, both regionally and worldwide, must also put security at the forefront of their infrastructure. As data is being pushed into the cloud, protecting sensitive data is paramount.

According to a report by Gartner, industry analysts have projected that worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will exceed $107 billion by 2017.

What’s more, public cloud is growing by leaps and bounds with predictions of revenues reaching $20 billion by 2016. “Since a company’s most important information is stored in the data centre security is a vital element, network, access, content and even physical security in both access control and video surveillance is vital, especially with access control,” says Sullivan.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is also a key element in the portfolio of technologies changing the shape of the data centre. SDN goes hand-inhand with virtualisation efforts, and as such plays an important role in the new, more virtualised data centre.

“Management models are shifting from checking boxes to a holistic approach,” explains Sullivan. “CIOs expect simple, flexible, automated, and agile infrastructure, instead of the increasingly complex virtual overlays that

Where companies in the past spent the majority of their IT budget on operations they can now re-invest that budget into uplifting the skills of operational staff to work at the application and infrastructure API development level – which can also lead to improved innovation within the business.”

Mahesh Jaishankar, Vice President, datamena

900,000 The estimated number of servers Google maintains

dominate current SDN.” With virtualisation and downsizing of equipment as the lead game-changers in the modernisation of the data centre, IT staff may begin to worry if their positions may not make the cut. However, a smaller physical set up may not translate directly into the need for a smaller staff. Instead, members of staff may need to take on different roles and learn new skillsets.

“As an example,” says Mechelle Buys du Plessis, Solutions Director, Dimension Data Middle East, “where companies in the past spent the majority of their IT budget on operations they can now re-invest that budget into uplifting the skills of operational staff to work at the application and infrastructure API development level – which can also lead to improved innovation within the business.”

A more efficient data centre, therefore, does not necessarily mean a small staff. Instead, it can translate into a more efficient team. IT employees need to use their newfound free time to explore new technologies and strategic IT issues. Efficient data centres translate to better and more optimal utilisation of resources rather than cutting-down of staff.

The face of the data centre is undeniably changing.

Though change can be difficult to accept, comfort can be taken in the fact that these changes will result in more efficiency for the user. The abiltiy to adapt, in the end, will be of great benefit. Smaller racks, more efficient cooling systems and streamlined storage will all undoubtedly result in a staff with more time to dedicate to strategy and development.

FEATURE

Hybrid cloud

Best of both worlds As enterprises deploy more and more applications in the cloud, the complexity of deployment, integration and management increases. Many CIOs are finding that integrating cloud services with existing architecture is more difficult than anticipated. CNME throws the spotlight on cloud integration strategies that reduce complexity and IT oversight.

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integration advisor

A

n agile hybrid cloud promises seamless integration between on-premise and cloud applications, and many people in the IT industry will argue that the future of the enterprise will be defined by hybrid cloud technology. Corporations have many enterprise applications installed on-premise, and find it preferable to deploy solutions in the cloud thanks to its benefits. With already-existing investments in traditional hardware, companies are often concerned about how their on-premise applications and cloud can co-exist. However, hybrid cloud can allow organisations to embrace and leverage old and new technologies in a single IT structure.

FEATURE

25%

Hybrid cloud

of organisations say concerns with technical aspects of integrating cloud applications is their greatest problem

Nonetheless, a variety of impeding factors halt the adoption of cloud, and should be considered by systems integrators when embarking upon a cloud application integration. Over 46 percent of organisations have reported concerns over the security of proprietary data and applications as the greatest barrier to adoption, with 32 percent naming concerns over cloud services performance as their greatest worry.

When undertaking a cloud to on-premise integration strategy, CIOs must consider long-term business and infrastructure needs and consult with financial directors on IT budgets to avoid the time and financial costs of reversing systems further down the line. Compliance issues must also be addressed, particularly in terms of where the data is stored, and recovery and backup tools.

“The first thing that CIOs need to consider as part of their cloud strategy is what functions in the organisation can be hosted as business applications in the cloud, and what functions must be kept in the data centre,” says Deniz Kilyar, Director, Cloud and Line of Business Applications, SAP MENA. “Secondly, they should plan for the transformation of their IT capabilities. In the era of cloud, we anticipate IT teams to be smarter in the service delivery to the internal organisation, and to act more like service brokers, leading the organisation through innovation by bringing all of what the company needs to develop into the digital age. Connectivity and data security are additional items that CIOs should take into account.”

In order to leverage maximum benefits from a hybrid model that treats all data and applications equally, no matter where they’re based, CIOs must make sure they avoid any vendor lock in.”

Sadi Aweinat, Chief Technology Officer and Global Services Lead, Gulf and Pakistan, EMC

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“The first thing that CIOs need to consider as part of their cloud strategy is what functions in the organisation can be hosted as business applications in the cloud, and what functions must be kept in the data centre. Secondly, they should plan for the transformation of their IT capabilities.”

Sadi Aweinat, Chief Technology Officer and Global Services Lead, Gulf and Pakistan, EMC, believes it is important for CIOs to keep their options open when it comes to choosing vendors, “In order to leverage maximum benefits from a hybrid model that treats all data and applications equally, no matter where they’re based, CIOs must make sure they avoid any vendor lock in,” he says. “They must look to leverage open platforms and standards to keep maximum control of their operations and infrastructure, avoid any single vendor solutions or strategies to avail the maximum benefit of choice and flexibility, no matter how appealing the call from a vendor may be.”

The shift to a hybrid environment will require an architectural change, as on-premise and cloud integration need to be built. Kilyar, however, does not see this as the greatest challenge for the CIO, “The biggest impact is not the changing landscape, but rather the way the IT services value chain will function,” he says. “This includes delivery from the vendors to system integrators, the ongoing relations between the hosting vendors and system integrators, and providing the services to companies. Overall market dynamics will change.

Since the IT services value chain will become ‘leaner,’ value will be created by eliminating waste.

For example, investments that will be written off

within two-to-three years will be shared between the customers and suppliers, both vendors and SIs.” Although it may be hard to envisage, there is software in existence that can enable real-time and seamless transfer of data, at optimal costs.

These are able to bypass a complete architectural transformation, as there are various benefits to a hybrid approach. Integration can be carried out through public cloud and on-premise platform mechanisms.

“In order to move to the cloud, enterprises do not have to discontinue their on-premise systems,” says Rajesh Abraham, Director, Product Development, eHosting DataFort. “By implementing hybrid integration, on-premise applications can be seamlessly incorporated into cloud systems. By leveraging technology, enterprises can drive new business models through hybrid integration as a bridge between legacy and cloud systems.”

Enlisting a third party to manage a cloud application integration is generally seen as wise, as experts who have a comprehensive knowledge of specific requirements are able to consult CIOs through the process. They are able to put the correct solutions in place to reduce TCO, and the risk of migration. Crucially, they are a useful asset in terms of delivering a project on time while meeting implementation objectives.

This allows SMEs to achieve scalability, and for enterprises, security offered through multiple channels. It also frees up in-house IT teams to focus on internal business functions and data maintenance, rather than additional integration issues that may arise.

“There is no ‘one size fits all’ policy when it comes to creating a hybrid cloud environment. Organisations need to take into consideration their existing infrastructure and where they want to, choose the right solution sets that emphasise business value, rather than IT optimisation.”

FEATURE

Hybrid cloud

Integrating cloud applications with existing infrastructure is an important consideration.

Rapid deployment solutions, which standardise integration services between on-premise and cloud solutions, facilitate the process, and using tools provided by the vendor – a form of middleware for cloud solutions – is ideal.

“There is no ‘one size fits all’ policy when it comes to creating a hybrid cloud environment,” Aweinat says. “Organisations need to take into consideration their existing infrastructure and where they want to, choose the right solution sets that emphasise business value, rather than IT optimisation.”

This integration with existing infrastructure naturally brings challenges. When shifting from an on-premise system to a hybrid landscape, CIOs must be aware of procedural and policy differences between their enterprise and external companies and software vendors. “For some organisations, hosting the data off premise or outside the data centre may cause compliance and privacy related issues,” Aweinat says. “This has to be taken into consideration when designing the architecture and executing the implementation for critical industries such as finance and healthcare where data compliance and regulations regarding the movement and transfer of data are extremely stringent.”

Cloud application integration can bring technology, upgrade, master data and a variety of

The biggest impact is not the changing landscape, but rather the way the IT services value chain will function. This includes delivery from the vendors to system integrators, the ongoing relations between the hosting vendors and system integrators, and providing the services to companies.”

Deniz Kilyar, Director, Cloud and Line of Business Applications, SAP MENA

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In order to move to the cloud, enterprises do not have to discontinue their on-premise systems.

By implementing hybrid integration, onpremise applications can be seamlessly incorporated into cloud systems. By leveraging technology, enterprises can drive new business models through hybrid integration as a bridge between legacy and cloud systems.”

Rajesh Abraham, Director, Product Development, eHosting DataFort

other challenges, so ideally, integration technology that is used will bring real time bi-directional process integration, with centralised monitoring and compatibility with the existing enterprise service bus.

According to Forrester, there are two main challenges when merging on-premise and a cloudbased platform within an enterprise IT space. These are the interoperability of different integration technologies, and maintaining the consistency of business logic and data structures in the heterogeneous environment.

“IT managers may find themselves trying to standardise multiple user interfaces, custom codes and programming languages when implementing integration tools,” Abraham says. “We recommend consulting a managed services provider to achieve the promised benefits of cloud, its lower costs and accessibility of data. A provider should be able to choose the best platform to unify IT systems seamlessly. To successfully combat these challenges, the hosting services provider can utilise Application Program Interfaces as the primary mechanism to assist with interoperability. The stronger your APIs, the easier the complementary functionality across platforms.”

FEATURE

Analytics

Indulging in Analytics Big Data analysis can give businesses a great deal of insight into their processes, weaknesses and strengths. However, over-investment and lack of planning in these projects can result in a waste of resources for already stretched budgets.

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Strategic Technology Partner

storage advisor

B

ig Data has been making headlines for a number of years now. There is a massive amount of information that is generated by our online actions, transactions and M2M communications. The question now is how organisations can leverage all of this information to boost business. Big Data analytics projects are the next step, but while some analysis may benefit one business, the same analysis could be worthless for another company. In the same vein, www.cnmeonline.com

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FEATURE

Analytics

analytics can only paint a part of the picture and relying solely on Big Data analysis alone can be a risky move.

Big Data analytics projects are being implemented across a range of industries. Retail outlets are using Big Data to customise shopping experience by highlighting which consumers are likely to purchase which products. Companies are able to target those customers with personalised offers. In the banking industry, banks can use analysis to understand which customers are likely to default and pre-emptively put strategies in place. In production, industrial machines can be outfitted with sensors to use predictive analytics to determine which machines require maintenance and replacement before they fail.

There is a great deal of information to be gleaned from a Big Data analysis. Analysis can provide strategic value, with insights that can help business make faster, more efficient and pre-emptive decisions. “These insights can help enterprises gain a significant competitive edge, create market differentiation and aid customer satisfaction,” says Sadi Aweinat, Chief Technology Officer and Global Services Lead, Gulf and Pakistan, EMC. Big Data analysis can also go a long way to improve a company’s overall efficiency. Insights garnered from a Big Data project can improve existing structures and processes within the organisation. With a clearer view of existing issues,

Today, human intervention is still required in the final decision-making process on what to do next with the analysis.

Companies tend to have benchmarks for performance, so it is usually pretty easy to catch skewed data or skewed analytics.”

Paul Devlin, Head of SAP Platforms, SAP MENA

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These insights can help enterprises gain a significant competitive edge, create market differentiation and aid customer satisfaction.”

Sadi Aweinat, Chief Technology Officer and Global Services Lead, Gulf and Pakistan, EMC

business can address nagging problems, identify successful areas and focus on opportunities for growth and improvement. Leveraging Big Data insights to implement automation can minimise errors and redundancy and allow business to focus on what is most important.

As useful as a Big Data analysis project can be, businesses need to avoid the temptation of relying solely on numbers to have a clear view of their operations. What is most important in Big Data analysis is what the numbers actually mean – an analysis that only a human can determine. “Today, human intervention is still required in the final decision-making process on what to do next with the analysis. Companies tend to have benchmarks for performance, so it is usually pretty easy to catch skewed data or skewed analytics,” says Paul Devlin, Head of SAP Platforms, SAP. Indeed, there are right and wrong approaches to a Big Data project. “It is tempting at the start of the Big Data analytics journey for companies to take on too much up-front,” says Raj Wanniappa, General Manager, Big Data, Dimension Data Middle East and Africa. “A common term used is ‘store all data’ for analysis later.” While this approach has been successful with huge enterprises like eBay and Nike Fuel Band, it is not financially viable for the average company to adopt similar practices.

“The recommended approach would be to start with a platform - a set of analytics technologies and methodologies - and a limited amount of data sets and then expand from there once the business benefits have been confirmed.”

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200 petabytes the amount of data currently managed by Yahoo!

FEATURE

Analytics

The average big data project goes

45% over budget

To begin a Big Data analysis, there are a few steps that need to be taken that are universal to all businesses, large or small. “First, business must define key metrics,” says Boby Joseph, Data Practice Head, Data Science Technologies. “Then they must gather the appropriate data, and iterate through the analytics quickly to find reliable, repeatable, and relatable patterns.” Business sectors need to be included throughout the process, and IT and business need to remain in constant communication. Also, analysts must be willing to adapt models as needed during the process.

Even done right, there is such a thing as ‘overindulging’ in analytics. “You can analyse anything and have irrelevant metrics,” says Megha Kumar, Research Manager, Software, IDC MEA, “The executive board and LoBs should look at what is relevant and create the analytics and dashboards accordingly. Also procuring a Big Data engine should be done with an end goal in mind or basic analysis is more than sufficient for organisations of a certain scale.”

Still, Big Data analysis projects certainly should be implemented. As to how the analysis is interpreted, that is up to the stakeholders of the business. “This becomes the personal choice of the business and business stakeholders,” says Andrew Calthorpe, CEO, Condo Protego. “Ultimately information is key, and most organisations would rather have excessive information and then decide on importance than have too little and risk missing out on important insights.”

outcomes.”

It is quite possible to fall in the trap of simply overdoing it when Big Data and analytics initiatives are not clearly aligned to well-defined focus areas and business

Karthik Krishnamurthy, Vice President, Enterprise Information Management, Cognizant

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First, business must define key metrics, then gather the appropriate data, and then iterate through the analytics quickly to find reliable, repeatable, and relatable patterns.”

Boby Joseph, Data Practice – Head, Data Science Technologies

Karthik Krishnamurthy, Vice President, Enterprise Information Management, Cognizant, agrees that overdoing analysis can be an issue . “It is quite possible to fall in the trap of simply overdoing it when Big Data and analytics initiatives are not clearly aligned to well-defined focus areas and business outcomes,” he says.

Analysis projects can also fall short when initiatives go to extreme lengths to prove technology capabilities that do not really matter to the business. Investments made for the sake of creativity without a defined purpose also result in a similar situation.

Indeed, it goes without saying that Big Data analytics can be very useful to businesses of all sizes. However, a little can go a long way in these situations. When taking on an analysis project, it is essential to ensure that all the proper metrics are decided upon beforehand and, perhaps more importantly, that limits are put in place as far as budget and time limitations. When the analysis is complete, ensure that all stakeholders are involved in the interpretation of the data.

At the end of the day, a properly implemented Big Data analysis can give valuable insight into a business’ processes. A sound analysis can identify strengths and weaknesses within a company and allow businesses to focus on the improvement of key areas and processes. With a clearer understanding of the status of the company, businesses stand to gain both in the short and long term.

FEATURE

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Hacker mentality

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security advisor

Hacker Headspace With cybercrime an ever-present danger, hackers around the world attack user data for financial and political gain. But they are not all bad. CNME takes a look at the mindset of hackers good and evil, and how they constantly ask questions of governments and top companies.

W

ind the clocks back 20 or 30 years and the first thought that sprung to mind when ‘hacker’ was mentioned could have been a sun and soapdeprived teenager tapping into local networks for personal kicks. But times have changed.

True, today’s hackers still retain an interest in the inner workings of devices and software, but the goalposts have shifted, and the stakes are higher.

Although attackers cannot be pigeon-holed as having a single aim and inclination, they are, broadly speaking, driven by one of several things. While many are motivated to reveal weaknesses for the force of good, others seek to attack corporate firms for financial gain, or are government actors hoping to inflict espionage on other nation states. Those attacking large businesses search for customer financial and personal information, and may have commercial interests in acquiring product plans or intellectual property.

Financial services firms and retailers with lots of credit card information are also likely targets. In addition, businesses’ critical infrastructure, such as utilities, power generation, and oil and gas are in the firing line.

“Money-motivated cybercriminals usually work for themselves or in small organised gangs,” says Guillaume Lovet, Senior Manager, EMEA FortiGuard Labs, Fortinet. “Most of them buy the tools needed to go after bank accounts - via ransomware and banking Trojans - very few of them make and sell those tools.

Hacktivists tend to work alone, in tight gangs, or in loosely organised herds; political activism is their goal.

State-sponsored hackers are hired - and sometimes trained - by governments, to perform political and economic espionage, or conduct cyberwar strikes.

Freelance vulnerability researchers selling zero-day vulnerabilities to the highest bidder somehow fit in this category - since bidders are states.”

Ghareeb Saad, Senior Security Researcher, Global Research & Analysis Team, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Kaspersky Lab, is all too aware of the meticulous planning that hackers use to achieve their means. “Cybercriminals can make millions of dollars in their own homes, with a rather low risk of getting caught,” he says. “There are large cyber-gangs with members all over the world. Instead of hiring muscles and guns these gangs are searching for hackers

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FEATURE

Hacker mentality

and malware developers. They have very organised structures like large enterprises, they have top managers who form strategies and select targets, and they have technical teams which consist of hackers and developers to create malware, fake websites and find vulnerabilities used for attacks.”

Nicolai Solling, Director, Technology Services, Help AG, sees the Middle East as an attractive prospect for attackers, “Location is very important in determining whether or not you will be attacked,” he says. “Typically the Middle East has seen a very high level of infections which is often attributed to English not being the first language, a lot of money in the region as well as critical installations such as oil and gas, which are often targets of cybercriminals.”

The rise of the Internet of Things serves as a 21st century headache for security, echoing the Greek mythological monster Hydra, who would sprout two more heads every time one was cut off. With 50 billion ‘things’ destined to be connected to the Internet by 2020, IT will have to find a way to secure the explosion of endpoints around the world.

The IoT promises to bring more threats, but in the meantime, there are other more pressing concerns, says Jason Hart, Vice Presdient, Cloud Solutions, SafeNet. “Hackers are quite resourceful and target a host of different frailties including Web vulnerabilities; some specialise in rehashing tried and tested vulnerabilities as

“Typically the Middle East has seen a very high level of infections which is often attributed to English not being the first language, a lot of money in the region as well as critical installations such as oil and gas, which are often targets of cybercriminals.”

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Cybercriminals can make millions of dollars in their own homes, with a rather low risk of getting caught. There are large cyber-gangs with members all over the world. Instead of hiring muscles and guns these gangs are searching for hackers and malware developers.”

Ghareeb Saad, Senior Security Researcher, Global Research & Analysis Team, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Kaspersky Lab

part of a modern attack,” he says. “Organisations can easily be vulnerable to a denial of service attack, spear phishing, targeted email attacks, as well as computer network attacks, which can disrupt the integrity or authenticity of data. This is usually done through a malicious code that alters the program’s logic that controls data, leading to errors in output. Some of the other most common vulnerabilities are those found in Web application frameworks, password vulnerabilities, as well as the lack of security in public wireless networks.”

In the age where security firms are constantly doing their utmost to thwart the actions of malicious hackers, one flaw that they perhaps cannot directly prevent is attacks that occur via social engineering techniques. “More and more hackers are using social engineering techniques to manipulate trust,” says Dr. Tamer Aboualy, Chief Technology Officer, Security Services, IBM MEA. “For example, hackers can provide free USBs which contain malicious software, or email attachments that contain malicious content. If it is easier to compromise the CEO, COO, CFO or other executives due to relaxed security on their phones, mobile devices, or computers, then this is much easier than hacking the corporate website.”

Keeping pace with hackers is a never-ending cat and mouse game for security firms and law enforcement agencies, with evidence proving hardto-come-by and the attackers’ element of surprise always rendering them the reactive parties. This unpredictability means that a variety of victims face

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FEATURE

Hacker mentality

the constant menace of the hackers’ technical skill and strategic offense. Getting to the bottom of attacks often poses a huge challenge, with sophisticated malware and obfuscation capabilities leaving incident response and forensics investigations as some of the few procedures of repair, not initial prevention. The UAE’s penalty for cybercrime is a maximum fine of 200,000 AED or even jail time, but if authorities are left chasing shadows this can be difficult to impose.

“When it comes to cyber-attacks, attribution is very difficult, often impossible,” says Mahmoud Samy, Regional Director, Middle East, Russia, CIS, Arbor Networks.

“There are many reasons for this, from the sophisticated malware they use with extensive obfuscation capabilities built-in to the very nature of distributed, connected global networks. Understanding how an attacker succeeded can be exceedingly difficult, resulting in lengthy and costly incident response and forensics investigations.

Increasingly, organisations are looking to use security analytics to help speed up the IR process."

Crucially, the ability for attackers to hack into systems from remote locations means authorities are often powerless to act against such individuals.

“The threat of prosecution will deter only the least malicious attackers living in the country or the region,” Vanja Svajcer, Principal Researcher, SophosLabs,

“When it comes to cyberattacks, attribution is very difficult, often impossible. There are many reasons for this, from the sophisticated malware hackers use with extensive obfuscation capabilities built-in to the very nature of distributed, connected global networks.”

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“It will always be a catch up game and that is the nature of the attacker, because they will always have the element of surprise as they chose the time for an attack.

We need to accept this fact, and establish critical incident response centres and build the capabilities to detect attacks as early as possible.”

Alaa Abdulnabi, Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey, Emerging Africa & Middle East, RSA

says. “However, we live in a connected world and the attackers can physically be anywhere and employed by any organisation. The threat of prosecution will certainly not be enough to deter persistent, serious attackers backed by strong organisations and motives.”

With few examples of successful prosecution, hackers know that only in the case of high profile financial loss cases will they be brought to justice.

However, before legal action can even begin, security firms first need to find a way to have a proactive, rather than a reactive approach. This is a huge challenge, simply because the side that strikes first – that of the hacker – has the upper hand. This means that as well as knowing that prosecution remains unlikely, they invariably remain on the front foot, allowing for more ambitious – and audacious – moves. “It will always be a catch up game and that is the nature of the attacker, because they will always have the element of surprise as they chose the time for an attack,” says Alaa Abdulnabi, Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey, Emerging Africa & Middle East, RSA. “We need to accept this fact, and establish critical incident response centres and build the capabilities to detect attacks as early as possible, before it is too late.

We will not be able to prevent every attack, but we can definitely arm organisations with the best monitoring, detection and response solutions to keep an eye on the environment in real time, looking for suspicious activities. Early detection means minimal damage.”

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FEATURE

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LTE-Advanced

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in association with

telecoms WORLD

Advanced Airwaves LTE-Advanced has hit the market with a bang, providing faster speeds, more stability and better coverage for heavy users. With an enormous increase in users, can LTE-Advanced truly live up to everything it promises?

C

ommercial LTE-Advanced is fast hitting the telecoms market. The next major step in LTE networks, LTE-Advanced is said to help assuage the massive increase in demand for mobile data as well as deliver much higher data speeds for all. That means better coverage, stability and speed.

Telecom infrastructure vendors are claiming the difference between LTE and its new, faster sibling is astronomical and that users of LTE-Advanced will experience mobile technology in a whole new way.

However, with the roll out of 4G technologies that fell short a few years ago, consumers are reasonably sceptical.

Smartphone usage has visibly increased in the past few years, particularly in the Middle East, which has a high penetration in the market. Of course, users in the Middle East market are known for demanding the latest and greatest in technology, however, the increase in usage is also correlated to the improvements made to mobile broadband connectivity.

As technologies improve, users rely more heavily on their smartphones for everyday transactions and communication. The Middle East is one of the fastest adopters of next-generation mobile broadband networks. www.cnmeonline.com

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FEATURE

LTE-Advanced

According to an Ericsson “Mobility Report,” mobile data traffic will grow ten fold between 2013 and 2019. This rapid increase in usage is driven by data-hungry applications such as video during the coming few years, which is challenging even for current, non-advanced, LTE tehcnology. This makes LTE-Advanced an imminent solution to the forecasted capacity demand.

As technology continues to improve, smartphones that are 4G LTE and LTE-Advanced compatible are proving to be popular among heavy smartphone users who want faster, more responsive devices. LTE-Advanced offers advanced standards and technologies that are able to satisfy the demands of so-called power users.

“While many consumers are getting their first taste of speedy 4G LTE connections, carriers around the globe have begun pouring resources into building LTE-Advanced networks, which promise even faster and more reliable mobile access,” says Vick Mamlouk, Vice President of Wireless Sales, Middle East and Africa, Commscope.

When analysing the new technology, one must first determine how it differs from its predecessor.

“LTE is the main building block of LTE-Advanced, which introduces significant technological enhancement and features to LTE,” explains Ala Jarrar, Mobile Broadband Manager, Ericsson, Region Middle East.

Operators can select from a group of functionalities to that come with the LTE-Advanced technology. These upcoming benefits include carrier aggregation where two or more carriers are combined

While many consumers are getting their first taste of speedy 4G LTE connections, carriers around the globe have begun pouring resources into building LTE-Advanced networks, which promise even faster and more reliable mobile access.”

Vick Mamlouk, VP Wireless Sales, Middle East and Africa, Commscope

3Gbp the downlink speed of LTE-A in low mobility situations

Many of the LTE frequency bands are already in use for other cellular systems, whereas other LTE bands are new and being introduced as other users are re-allocated spectrum elsewhere.”

Naveen Sharma, Principal Solution Architect, Tech Mahindra

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for more speed and capacity, multi antennas, spatial multiplexing, and relaying where radios with low power are located at a cell edge as well as heterogeneous network deployment.

This evolved version of LTE is being developed by 3GPP to meet or exceed the requirements of the International Telecommunication Union. The new technology will deliver a true fourth generation radiocommunication standard - a welcome change from previously promised, but unachieved, 4G speeds.

LTE-Advanced is focused on higher capacity with increased peak data rate, higher spectral efficiency, increased number of simultaneously active subscribers, and improved performance at cell edges.

In theory, LTE-Advanced will provide around 3Gbps in downlink and 1.5 Gbps in uplink. The new technology will address next generation service requirements and will operate with existing networks.

LTE-Advanced will provide better management of microcells and interwork with macro cells. Advanced relays, multi-point operation and enhanced solutions for robust services are set to improve the customer’s quality of service.

Carrier aggregation is particularly attractive to network operators. “On every operator’s list of what to implement is carrier aggregation, a feature that enables bundling of diverse frequencies into a larger, single-channel bandwidth to achieve significantly higher data rates,” says Mamlouk.

“This feature could be a game-changer for operators with limited spectrum and no new allotments on the horizon," Mamlouk explains.

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FEATURE

LTE-Advanced

LTE is the main building block of LTE-A which introduces significant technological enhancement and features to LTE.” Ala Jarrar, Mobile Broadband Manager, Ericsson, Region Middle East

"The bottom line is that LTE-Advanced promises to deliver actual 4G speeds, unlike some current LTE networks. LTE-Advanced will be a whopping three times faster than current technologies, with few dropped connections.”

As the technology inevitably grows and matures, there are more and more frequency bands being used for LTE. “There are growing numbers of LTE frequency bands that are being designated as possibilities for use with LTE. Many of the LTE frequency bands are already in use for other cellular systems, whereas other LTE bands are new and being introduced as other users are re-allocated spectrum elsewhere,” explains Naveen Sharma, Principal Solution Architect, Tech Mahindra.

Though LTE-Advanced will surely bring faster speeds and more robust connectivity to the market, like any technology in its infancy, there are still

“Support for voice services is provided through various oaptions including carrying voice over LTE infrastructure or using existing 2G and 3G network.”

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technical issues to be addressed. Potential bumps in the road may cause users to wait to invest in LTEAdvanced technology.

These challenges will no doubt be met and addressed in the coming months, however, new users still need to be made aware of LTE-Advanced potential pitfalls, at least in the short term.

LTE-Advanced is still facing challenges around service coverage, mainly because of fragmented and higher frequency bands allocated to it.

“Support for voice services is provided through various options including carrying voice over LTE infrastructure or using existing 2G and 3G networks,” explains Sriram Vaithamanithi, Vice President, Communications Practice, Cognizant. “But these have certain quality concerns such as circuit switched fallback, and the return time may not provide good customer experience.”

“Most people in the critical communications industry see LTE and LTE-Advanced as the logical next steps to providing enhanced capabilities to a host of operators, such as public safety, mining and utilities. But LTE’s more advanced features bring with them a number of challenges,” warns Mamlouk.

Challenges with the new LTE-Advanced technology include handing interference that may come with the interactions of multiple layers of cells and other devices sharing the same frequency, maximising power efficiency and bringing products to the market ahead of official authentication testing.

Regardless of potential challenges, operators and users alike are looking forward to the benefits that come with LTE-Advanced and developers are confident that any challenges can be met head on.

The effect that LTE-Advanced will have on the market is not limited to pushing mobile phones and devices. There are many ways that operators can leverage LTE-Advanced technology to monetise on its increasing popularity, particularly in the emerging Middle East market.

LTE-Advanced is rapidly gaining momentum in the Middle East region as well as worldwide and the telecommunications industry is abuzz with its evolution.

The advent of LTE-Advanced has brought the technology into new arenas, including direct-todevice services and terrestrial broadcast television that are ripe for monetisation in the region.

Analyst corner Gartner

People-centric experiences

By Nick Jones, Vice President and Analyst, Gartner.

D

evices continue to evolve rapidly, and in the future will include features such as flexible screens, pressuresensitive touch, new sensors that will provide new interaction opportunities and additional clues to context. New styles of experience will also be required by wearable devices such as smart watches, which will likely prove useful for “glanceable” information such as notifications. Consumer technologies such as beacons will be adopted by enterprises,

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enabling new experiences and applications. The fast evolution of consumer-oriented mobile apps is also creating a growing ‘experience gap’ between consumer and corporate mobility.

Faced with these revolutions taking place in the mobile UX domain, organisations must address several challenges: Becoming a more experience-aware and literate organisation Most organisations don’t need to become

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experts in leading-edge mobile UX, but equally, most organisations will need to become better at mobile UX design to (a) understand what’s possible; (b) exploit new and sophisticated UXs when appropriate; and (c) understand when specialists should be called in.

To achieve these goals, it’s necessary to build a hierarchy of UX design skills varying from universal awareness of the issues through to a few staff who may be professional full-time designers.

From a mobile UX perspective, organisations should strive for universal design awareness in all staff, universal design literacy in the IT organisation, plus some professional UX designers capable of design thinking. For most IT organisations, leading edge design practice is better handled by external partners. Achieving these goals requires a mixture of self-education, formal training and recruiting.

To acquire skills in design thinking and perhaps advanced design practice takes time and some aptitude; many organisations won’t be able to train existing employees, so recruiting

Analyst corner Gartner

and sourcing will be key components of the mobile UX strategy. Organisations that can’t justify full-time teams capable of the most advanced UXs must work with external partners such as digital marketing agencies. It’s likely that many organisations will need to ramp up their UX design capabilities, so CIOs should plan to recruit staff with the necessary skills.

However, recruiting alone isn’t enough. UX specialists need to be integrated with the app design and delivery life cycle and must have the time and resources needed to achieve their goals; handing an existing app to a designer and telling him/her to create a better interface isn’t enough. We have seen situations where UX experts had little or no impact on an organisation after they’d been hired because they didn’t have the time or influence necessary to do their work, or weren’t involved early enough in the design process.

Justify new and better mobile experiences Sadly, most IT organisations under-invest in UX because there are few incentives to provide better experiences for employee-facing apps.

The average CIO is seldom directly measured on UX, and much of the third-party software that the IT organisation buys delivers a poor level of experience, so many employees have low expectations of internal apps. Furthermore, many organisations find it difficult to value UX investments, which contributes to the growing experience gap that I already mentioned.

Poor experiences are most common in employee-facing apps. However, consumer apps and app stores are setting expectations of good experiences that, combined with the need to deliver more mobile and multiplatform apps, can be a catalyst to help organisations highlight the need for increased UX investment. In most cases, this will demand a multipronged campaign. Tactics include: Evangelising: Organisations that are design-aware and design-literate are more likely to appreciate the opportunities and value of UX investment, so our previous best practice will contribute to this goal. In some cases, user satisfaction surveys can highlight the deficiencies of current app interfaces. Any organisation delivering customer-facing apps through app stores should monitor app reviews and comments for issues related to UX and use these as evidence to justify investment.

Great UXs are in a sense self-evangelising, so

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organisations wanting to justify better internal experiences should concentrate on improving a few high-impact applications that will hopefully generate a demand for wider investment.

Explain the value of a better mobile UX: Metrics are a powerful tool to highlight UX deficiencies and poor user satisfaction.

Link new UX principles to key business goals such as efficiency and effectiveness or reduced error rates. Lobby key stakeholders to create demand for more effort in the mobile UX area. Suggest ways that consumer technologies such as wearables and beacons can be exploited internally. Develop prototypes of improved interfaces to generate awareness and demand, especially from internal business users.

Position UX as a quality process, not as an ROI: When the organisation finds it difficult to value UX investments, it may be helpful to position UX as a quality or risk reduction measure rather than an ROI measure.

Adopt development approaches that encourage better UXs We’re motivated by what we’re measured on, so metrics will play a role in the adoption of new styles of UX design. Therefore, adopt app design approaches that encourage the use of experience metrics; for example, metrics are fundamental to approaches such as HEART, which require that designers define and measure key app satisfaction metrics and then optimise them through iterative development. Metrics aren’t just for use during development, but will increasingly be deployed in the form of monitoring tools tracking user behaviour and technical performance of applications in the wild. Such application performance monitoring (APM) tools can identify performance bottlenecks and report on how successful users are at achieving tasks using an app, so they can help quantify the value of UX innovation.

Another dimension of UX optimisation is testing; however, conventional mobile app testing approaches tend to be poor at assessing “soft” metrics such as user satisfaction. Consider using test approaches such as crowdsourcing, which can sometimes be better at identifying usability and user satisfaction issues than internal testers. In cases when the UX is both novel and critical to app success, consider approaches such as focus groups.

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Monitor and evangelise emerging UX technologies and principles I noted in the introduction that mobile UX will be a fast-moving area driven by new features in mobile devices, new types of devices such as wearables and by new goals in UX design such as influencing emotion and behaviour. Because UX design is a craft or art, it’s also something of a fashion business subject to trends - for example, the enthusiasm for skeuomorphism spawned by early versions of iOS has fortunately faded.

However, some trends will deliver new forms of value, and the fast-moving mobile technologies we described in the introduction will continue to create new opportunities involving new types of interactions. So it’s important for organisations to keep abreast of developments in the space.

Monitor UX-related technology and design principles: IT organisations should monitor device features, new devices and new UX principles, many of which will emerge first in consumer apps and devices. Consider circulating a periodic “weather report” to both IT and business staff suggesting how these might benefit the business. This can be a part-time activity requiring only a few hours a week so it doesn’t take much effort, but it pays back both in terms of increasing the design awareness and design literacy discussed above and establishing IT professionals as thought leaders in the UX area.

Consider prototypes and showcases: UXs are easier to demonstrate than to explain, so when time and budget permit, consider developing prototypes of key innovations. Some organisations go further and create more complex showcases, such as “branch of the future” or “store of the future” scenarios in banking and retail.

opinion Mobile security

5 things you no A longer need to do for mobile security

By Subbu Iyer, Director of Product Management, Bluebox Security

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couple of years ago companies were dismissive of BYOD, but as they’ve realised that the cat is out of the proverbial bag, they are adopting policies and next-generation technologies to help manage BYOD. They also recognise that successful mobile security requires a cooperative partnership with employees, so are working with them to determine what policy works best for both parties, allowing BYOD to become part of the enterprise mobile security framework.

As mobile security matures, some of the burden on IT has been alleviated. Thanks to next-generation technologies, there are several things enterprises no longer need to do in order to keep mobile data secure. Here are five of the most important: • Invest developer and IT time wrapping apps - Mobile security in the enterprise used to be synonymous with containerisation.

Traditional solutions included containers and app wrapping, which relied on software

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development kits (SDK) to modify and secure applications. These approaches required business development relationships to get access to the mobile application source code and forced developers and IT to invest time to use the SDK to secure the application initially, as well as every time the application was upgraded.

Needless to say, these were timeconsuming cycles. However, next-generation mobile security offers the ability to secure applications on-demand at the employee’s request without the intervention of IT. Next generation mobile security vendors are offering on-the-fly app wrapping that doesn’t modify the original app code, as well as the ability to attach dynamic app policies that give security professionals the controls they need. Now IT can confidently allow functional departments and employees to serve themselves, giving them immediate access to the applications they prefer, enabling productivity. Before, IT was a bottleneck having to constantly approve, wrap and maintain application security. Now, IT can allow the employees to use the apps they want, without sacrificing security.

• Use containerised apps and app ecosystems - The removal of reliance on SDKs for securing apps has eliminated the need to create app ecosystems. Today, enterprises can simply utilise any application available in app stores for iOS and Android as well as internally developed applications. Businesses are no longer constrained to a handful of applications, which have agreed to work with particular mobile security vendors. Now they can move at the ‘speed of business’ and access the millions of mobile apps available today, while preserving the native user experience of the

Privacy dashboards and dual personas allow companies to not only provide users with visibility into what IT is and is not tracking, but also ensure that only business data will be wiped if a security situation arises. app, staying up-to-date with new versions, and having instant access to emerging applications.

• Require MDM – Mobile Device Management doesn’t apply in a BYOD world.

Employees resist having an application installed on their personal devices that monitors personal as well as work related activity. Additionally, contractors and external vendors won’t accept device profiles as they may be working for several different clients and can’t share that information. However, by changing the focus from securing devices to securing the data, you eliminate the need to manage devices. Not only can personal and work related activities be cleanly separated, but greater visibility, security and control at the document level is now possible, all without managing the device.

• Infringe on privacy - The No.1 concern of employees embracing BYOD is privacy.

Employees fear their personal activities are being watched and that once they are locked into an MDM solution, their personal data - contacts, family photos and more - can be wiped at any time. In order to achieve compliance you need to win the trust of employees, and paying attention to their

Today, enterprises can simply utilise any application available in app stores of iOS and Android as well as internally developed applications. Businesses are no longer constrained to a handful of applications.

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privacy concerns is key.

Privacy dashboards and dual personas allow companies to not only provide users with visibility into what IT is and is not tracking, but also ensure that only business data - not personal data - will be wiped if a security situation arises. Some solutions even grant employees the freedom to un-enroll temporarily and reclaim their phone as a personal device. Whether on vacation, a date night, or just hanging out with friends for an hour, an employee can temporarily opt from accessing work related apps and data, without compromising security.

• Manage devices and apps using multiple dashboards - With the new era of mobility, IT no longer needs to use multiple dashboards to manage different devices they can be viewed through a single pane of glass. Web based consoles now support centralised administration of both managed and unmanaged devices for IT convenience.

It is now possible to integrate the device, application and user data management in one place instead of entering different portals to manage each one. By providing all three tenants of mobility management in a single pane, IT can make more informed decisions much quicker.

BYOD raises many issues for IT and the enterprise in general. However, there are ways to enable users to bring their own device, enhancing productivity without sacrificing security. Adopting a BYOD policy that is user-friendly and that secures corporate data will ensure that the goals of the enterprise and IT remain intact while ensuring user buy in a necessary component of any security policy or program.

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opinion SDN

Enabling innovation and business agility through SDN Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, Brocade, discusses the latest networking trend that is predicted to take the Middle East by storm.

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he network has never been more critical to business success of enterprises in the Middle East. For organisations of any size and in any sector, it is the network that will turn the promise of new and evolving technologies like cloud, Big Data, machine-to-machine communications, bring your own device and seamless mobility into reality.

Yet the network that will underpin these shifts cannot cope with today’s pressures, let alone tomorrow’s. Exponential traffic growth and increased server virtualisation are putting more strain on the network than ever before. And, with nine out of ten IT decision makers admitting that their infrastructure requires substantial upgrades, it is clear that the network has to evolve. If it does not, the potential benefits of these new technologies will never be fully achieved.

Fortunately, the next stage in the network’s evolution is almost here. Software-Defined Networking will radically transform the network, unlocking its intelligence to provide the new services and powerful analytics that are needed to deliver the applications and services demanded by today’s business leaders and their customers.

What is SDN? As a technology, SDN is still in its infancy. However, it is already clear that it has the potential to profoundly change the way that enterprise networks and data centres are built, managed and provisioned. Given SDN’s huge potential, it is no surprise that IDC has predicted it will be a $3.7 billion market by 2016.

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From a technology standpoint, SDN refers to the separation of the part of the network that is responsible for routing and directing traffic from the part that carries the traffic itself.

The goal is to allow organisations to respond rapidly to changing business requirements. By simplifying how network resources are deployed and managed, SDN gives businesses far greater control of their data and applications and makes network management simpler and faster.

So, what benefits can SDN deliver for Middle East businesses?

Faster application deployment Increased network intelligence and an open environment centralise network operation and management and facilitate rapid application development. This means that businesses are able to offer and scale an increased number of network applications to support new services.

At a business level, reducing the time taken needed to manage the network and deploy new resources or applications can have a major impact. If an employee does not have to manually provision the compute, storage and network resources needed to deliver an application, businesses are able to get new services up-and-running far more quickly.

As well as greatly increasing an organisation’s agility, this also boosts competitive advantage by reducing the time it takes to get new offerings to market.

Greater automation We are already seeing cloud service providers adopting SDN functionality for precisely this reason. With traditional networking technologies, a business that wants to run an

application within a public cloud environment would use a self-service portal to manually provision the required resources. This is not only time consuming, and therefore costly, it can also result in misconfigurations through human error.

SDN allows this process to be automated.

Customers simply need to select what kind of application they want to run in the cloud and the resources required. The intelligence of the control plane, through orchestration, will then automatically deploy the service using the optimal configuration of compute, storage and network resources.

Simpler network management SDN will also significantly alter the way that network infrastructures are configured and managed. By separating the control function from the rest of the network, SDN will give IT teams the ability to manage network environments at a higher level. This will make it easier than ever for businesses to take a holistic approach to network infrastructures; managing them as a unified whole rather than a collection of siloes, and increasing overall network efficiency.

The principle is similar to that of a road network. Often, the most direct route will also be the most popular, resulting in traffic jams and, therefore, delays. In those circumstances, the sensible approach would be to take an alternative route, one that might be a longer distance but will allow you to travel faster. SDN gives the network the holistic viewpoint to make these sorts of decisions, optimally directing data traffic across the entire infrastructure according to current usage levels.

SDN will also significantly alter the way that network infrastructures are configured and managed. By separating the control function from the rest of the network, SDN will give IT teams the ability to manage network environments at a higher level.

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Improved policy control However, it is not just about getting data from A to B. By giving organisations greater control over every aspect of their network, SDN will also make it possible for IT teams to design and implement effective security policies and controls.

Given the proliferation in mobile devices and BYOD schemes, policy based networking is an increasingly popular way for organisations to control how users can access sensitive data or applications. For instance, a policy might be implemented so that the network will allow users to access work email from a tablet or smartphone, but not the company’s CRM or payroll system. With traditional network architectures, these policies are vendor-specific and have to be configured for each element of a campus or local area network. The higher level of control enabled by SDN solves this problem; you simply have to configure a policy once and it can be applied automatically across the entire network.

SDN will deliver significant return on investment for IT teams. Michael Kennedy, a principal analyst at ACG, has predicted that it could reduce total cost of ownership for enterprise networks by up to 50 percent. He explains, “Most of the cost reduction is derived from the automation of operations and the centralisation of network control. In addition, further savings are realised from much faster service delivery and maintenance processes that reduce service intervals from weeks to minutes.”

The adoption curve Enterprises are keen to be among the first to see how deploying SDN in private or hybrid clouds can deliver greater business agility and to roll out innovative services faster. With IT departments becoming increasingly serviceorientated, the ability to support business units by quickly and easily deploying new services through SDN will become hugely valuable.

One thing that will be vital to the future of SDN is the establishment of open standards. These are crucial since they guarantee that network products will be interoperable regardless of which company manufactured them; something which is a key factor in enabling a more holistic approach to network management.

insight Apple and IBM

Apple, IBM spell out enterprise support The two are finally coming together, but how will they split their duties?

A

pple will provide an expanded set of support services to IBM customers with iPhones and iPads under a new enterprise-grade AppleCare plan, the support and warranty extensions Apple has long sold to consumers and businesses.

Under the alliance announced this week between the two companies, Apple will essentially handle all telephone support, while IBM will provide optional on-site support and act as a buffer between enterprise customers and its Cupertino, California partner.

“Apple is going to do all the telephone support, IBM will do the on-site support, but there aren’t a lot of details,” said Patrick Moorhead, Principal Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy, who was briefed by IBM earlier this week.

AppleCare for Enterprise, as the plan is called, offers 24 hour telephone and email support for end users, with calls automatically routed to Apple’s Tier 2 technical reps. The plan also touted one-hour initial response times for calls from IBM customers’ IT staffs, Apple’s fastest.

Service issues covered by the plan will include on-site repair or replacement of the covered iOS devices, fee-based on-site technical support, and an assigned technical support advocate.

As Moorhead said, Apple and IBM will split

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the support duties, but the latter will be the primary contact for customers. “The buffer will be IBM, they speak enterprise, Apple does not,” said Moorhead.

“IBM will be the single point of contact.”

Moorhead said IBM did not spell out prices for the enterprise plan, but clues can be found in AppleCare’s plan for businesses, which Apple already offers. The highest-priced plan on Apple’s website, labelled “AppleCare OS Support - Alliance,” runs $49,995 annually, and as its name implies, focuses more on operating system issues, with optional hardware coverage.

Other business-grade AppleCare plans cost between $5,995 and $19,995 annually, with a Help Desk plan - designed as a backup for a company’s own support staff, which can ring up Apple for unlimited assistance - running $2,799 a year.

“IBM will have to keep a current stock of devices,” said Moorhead, of the plan’s device replacement coverage, an inventory that will have to include older models, models that Apple may have discontinued years before. “Whenever there’s an iPad form factor change, IBM will have to keep an inventory of older models. If a company has standardised on a specific iPad model for a strategic app, or a case, on iPad 5, for example, you can’t expect that app to run or that case to fit, say, an iPad 10.”

Enterprises demand longer lifecycles for the

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devices they buy than many consumers, so it will be imperative for IBM and Apple to pledge longerterm support for the hardware, and for iOS, than has been the case so far, Moorhead argued.

That will run counter to Apple’s usual practice, which has been to deprecate hardware as succeeding editions of iOS roll out. When iOS 8 launches this autumn, for example, it will run only on the iPhone 4S and later, and on the iPad 2 and newer. Consumers who bought an iPhone 4 in 2010, for example, or the original iPad, which debuted the same year, will be out of luck.

Moorhead was curious as to how Apple will handle the needs of enterprises for long-lived support. “This could be really, really interesting,” Moorhead said. “Microsoft’s burden has always been its backwards compatibility, but now as Apple rolls forward it will have to support legacy hardware and older versions of iOS, too.”

Current AppleCare plans for businesses, including the pricy Alliance package, only cover the currently available versions of iOS and OS X, and as such the new Enterprise plan will have to go beyond that to satisfy companies that buy into IBM’s deals. Moorhead assumed, for a variety of reasons, that prices for AppleCare Enterprise will be even higher than what Apple now offers.

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Face to face Tom Georgens

Mastering the data

Moving virtual servers around a hybrid cloud environment isn’t hard, but managing the data is. That’s why NetApp wants to be “the enterprise data-management standard across the enterprise,” says CEO Tom Georgens.

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Y

ou announced a cloud strategy late last year so why don’t we start with an update on what cloud means to NetApp. The cloud could be a ten-hour conversation, but to distill it down, I think customers are wrestling with the role of the cloud. We all get Software-as-a-Service. And certainly we see workloads that are temporary or changing in nature that could use access to infrastructure that you can use on demand and then unwind. That transient capability is something that just can’t be emulated with on-premise computing. And we see use cases with very, very low utilisation, where data wouldn’t be stored if it weren’t the cloud. And things like archiving and backup, where you see cloud as a repository, those use cases make a lot of sense as well. But on the other

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Face to face Tom Georgens

hand, cloud is not a panacea. Leaving aside things like performance and security, the cloud is not that flexible and is not that inexpensive.

A CEO said to me recently, “Nobody goes to the cloud for price.” I found myself coming to the defense of Amazon, but his point was that, given the transaction orientation and the bandwidth requirements of his workloads, the economics of doing it himself were far better.

Twenty four hours later I was at an SaaS vendor that is half in the cloud and half on-premise, and they said they need to move on-premise because of the economics.

So I think there are workloads where it is compelling, where it offers a set of capabilities that can’t possibly be matched on-premise. But there are other workloads that are problematic from an economic point of view, or where security is the concern. It’s inevitable that enterprises, for a very long period to come, are going to have some combination of on-premise and off-premise computing. The hybrid cloud is going to be the dominant model here.

The real challenge, then, is how do you enable customers to create a seamless extension of what they do on-premise, so when they go to the cloud they don’t have to run different sets of data management tools. That is, if I can move my apps from on-premise to the cloud and back, how do I make the data management seamless?

Since data management is the hardest problem, NetApp wants to be the enterprise data-management provider. NetApp’s value proposition is primarily the software. We already manage data on other people’s hardware, and we sell systems bundled with our software and also unbundle the software. We have a version of our product that basically allows access to the elastic compute of an Amazon or a Microsoft, while letting you maintain control of your data, and you can expect to see us offer more tools that even more closely integrate with the cloud.

NetApp wants to manage data whether it’s on our equipment or not, and whether it’s onpremises or not. We want to be the enterprise data-management standard across the enterprise. We don’t make disk drives. We’re not Seagate. We basically make software that makes disk drives reliable, high performance and easy to manage. And if we viewed Amazon and some of these services as basically the new disk drives, we can manage those as well and enable

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We have no desire to offer an undifferentiated cloud service. Our view is the cloud is not a target, the enterprise customer is the target and the cloud is a tool available to them.

customers to operationalise the cloud.

We have no desire to emulate the cloud. We have no desire to offer an undifferentiated cloud service. Our view is the cloud is not a target, the enterprise customer is the target and the cloud is a tool that is available to them.

Do you need to partner with cloud providers to do that?

Actually there are some clever things we’re doing that are unique and make the cloud providers want to partner with us. I mentioned the cloud enabling you to spin up 500 servers for a short period of time and then spin them down, but once you move data there it costs you money to pull it out, it costs you money to access it. So we have this collaboration with Amazon that we call NetApp Private Storage for Amazon that allows you to keep the data on your network and connect through a highbandwidth pipe to their compute farm. So you keep the data under your control, under your tools, with all of your security, but still have access to the elastic compute.

We see people using that for everything from test and development to backup. Disaster recovery is another interesting application. You keep replicating data and if there is a disaster you spin up all the servers and networking.

Customers see value in the cloud, but they don’t want to have to use a separate set of tools, a separate set of processes, and they’re having a tough time operationalising it. We want to come in and say, “If you standardise on NetApp data management we will seamlessly integrate the cloud for you and it will make the cloud look like it’s actually part of your own infrastructure.”

Do your customers typically refer to their internal systems as private clouds?

The vast majority of enterprise deployments would be described as private clouds. If you go back to the

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server virtualisation revolution of five years ago, the original premise was, I have all these servers running individual apps and they’re all grossly underutilised.

So, if I can encapsulate those apps and run multiple apps simultaneously on servers, I can drive up utilisation rates, lower my server footprint, and the economics are compelling. And that’s all true.

But now that my apps are no longer tied to hardware, I can move them from server to server for load balancing, or data centre to data centre for disaster recovery, so I can think about my infrastructure independent of my apps.

So I can build a very homogeneous, very highly automated, very efficient infrastructure that’s application-dependent, and I can run many, many apps on it with a set of tools that automate all that. That’s my definition of the private cloud. And there’s no doubt that companies are moving to that model for on-premise computing, outside of very specific dedicated applications, simply because of the flexibility and the cost. But that said, if you own infrastructure you’ll never match the flexibility of being able to turn on 1,000 servers and then turn them off a month later like you can with an Amazon.

Switching gears a bit, what do you make of the promise of big data?

People are intrigued with the possibility of gleaning more intelligence from all this data. But the transition into production is complicated.

For NetApp, we have our own Big Data project that has to do with how we monitor all of our equipment and analyse the data that gets reported back to us. And that’s been very successful.

NetApp is not an analytics company, so we don’t compete with Oracle, Teradata or SAP. All three are important partners for us. The NetApp advantage is we’ve got multi-protocol storage and we can build a big pool of storage, whether its file-oriented or database-oriented or blockoriented, and it’s easy to extract that data and have access to your analytics tool.

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Launches and releases

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

PRODUCT WATCH A breakdown of the top products and solutions launched and released in the last month.

Product of the Month: My Book Duo Brand: WD What it does: The latest in the WD family of desktop storage solutions, the My Book Duo utilises two drives, hardware-level RAID and USB 3.0.

The kit is optimised for small RAID environments and offers massive capacity and file transfer speeds.

The dual drives maximises capacity, of course, but also reduces transfer bottlenecks. The desktop system is fairly sleek, considering its capacity and power. It is available in 4TB, 6TB and 8TB storage capacities. The My Book Duo could be the storage answer for users that have a large amount of data to store, but not so much that they need to move off the desktop.

What you should know: Like all external storage solutions, the My Book Duo comes with its own proprietary software and security measures. The drive provides data protection with local, cloud and system-level backups available through WD Smartware Pro and Acronis True Image software. It is also integrated with Dropbox accounts to provide multiple data protection and access benefits. In terms of security, it has 256-bit AES hardware encryption and password protection. The My Book Duo is available for online purchase starting at $279.99 USD.

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Product: AC1900 Dual-Band Gigabit Cloud Router Brand: D-Link

Product: LG G3S Brand: LG

What it does: The DualBand Gigabit Cloud Router is a new device from D-Link that aims to be a solution for homes and small businesses. The product promises wireless speeds of up to 1.9 Gbps as well as beamforming technology and remote access and management features. External antennas extend signals to reach further and Gigabit Ethernet ports provide high-speed wired connections for up to four PCs and other devices. The advanced QoS automatically distributes Internet traffic across both wireless bands for optomised performance.

What you should know: This router is meant for the home or small office, so don’t expect to connect your whole building with it. Still, it is more powerful than most home routers and could probably do the job, depending on office layout, for a mediumsized enterprise. As with most devices these days, the router is compatible with a host of proprietary cloud products. In this particular case users can take advantage of mydlink cloud solutions and mydlink Zero Configuration. For mydlink account users, simply connecting the device will automatically log in to their accounts.

Product: Lenovo S850 Brand: Lenovo What is does: Released on July 15 in the UAE, the much anticipated Lenovo S850 smartphone has finally hit the Middle East market. Hot on the heels of its Vibe line, Lenovo has placed itself solidly in the smartphone race. First and foremost, the headset is fashionable. It’s slim, and ultra-light with a 5-inch HD with wide viewing angles. In the rear, the smartphone boasts a 13MP camera, and in the front a 5MP lens for optimum selfie capturing. In addition the product runs with a quad-core processor, dual-SIM capability and Android KitKat. What you should know: One of the most interesting things about this new smartphone is its focus on security. Among other, perhaps less practical pre-installed apps, the S850 comes with SECUREit, an Lenovo original that protects users’ mobile data. With a single touch, it protects against viruses, spam and malware, and if the device becomes lost or stolen, anti-theft protection locks it down. SECUREit also acts as a privacy guard to protect against unwarranted access to users’ private information and also makes the device operate faster by taking actions such as closing redundant background apps.

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What it does: A smaller, more affordable variation of its big brother the LG G3 is the answer for those who want a sleek phone without the heavy price tag. The LG G3S is more than 10 grams lighter than the LG 3G and the screen is 137.7 x 69.6mm in comparison to the original 146.3 x 74.6mm screen. Though the screen is smaller, the LG G3S is a bit chunkier than its full-sized brethren at 10.3mm up from 8.9mm. The LG G3S has an 8 megapixel main snapper with an LED flash, a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera and can shoot 1080p video at 30fps.

What you should know: The LG G3 has a far better processor, a far higher clock speed and twice as much RAM. It’s a truly top-end phone, while the G3S is, again, mid-range. It should still have enough power to perform well enough but it’s not going to be winning any power or processing awards. The phone is obviously not on par with its predecessor, but that wasn’t really the point.

It is still a solid mid-range phone which should compete well with the HTC One Mini 2 and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini.

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Column The word on the street

James Dartnell

Fresh blue Apple L

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

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ast month it was announced that two of the world’s ten most valued brands were joining forces on an enticing enterprise application venture.

Engineers, designers, and developers from Apple and IBM are working on more than 100 endto-end mobile solutions, including a new category of mobile apps that are ready for the enterprise.

IBM will provide cloud software services for analytics, data security, and device management native to iOS. Its MobileFirst Platform will provide an enterprise-class cloud solution for building and deploying integrated apps for iOS, while Apple’s support service AppleCare will include consultative telephone and email support, onsite repair, and replacement.

The move should boost Apple’s ability to sell iPads and iPhones to businesses, while extending the reach of IBM’s Big Data and analytics software.

The enticing marriage of IBM’s analytics and enterprisescale computing to the slick user experience offered by Apple’s iPhone and iPad is a shrewd move for both parties.

With a staggering 500,000,000 iPhones in circulation, the ability to make them enterprise-friendly was inevitably going to be a necessary step for Apple.

Google recently announced an initiative to help business users adopt Android tablets and smartphones with new mobile device management software, including the ability to separate work and

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personal data.

The business-related features are part of the coming Android update dubbed “L,” which was announced in June.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry and Dell are both exploring more enterprise-focused business models after unsuccessful attempts to establish their devices in the consumer market.

The pair have failed to appeal to mobile consumers as Apple and Samsung have dominated in the field.

Although Apple has enjoyed this dominance, its pre-emptive move to offset a potential decline in its consumer business via an increasing enterprise drive is decidedly astute.

With the ownership of iPhones and iPads in the enterprise widespread, enlisting the leader of enterprise-wide system management was what the doctor ordered to make them more manageable.

From IBM’s point of view, their services have undergone something of a makeover with Apple’s conscription.

What could be crucial in determining the success of the move is the employees’ ability to manage their own devices, as a result of IBM’s mobile device management tools.

In the age of BYOD, this ploy is sure to appeal to users as well as IT departments, who can sleep soundly in the knowledge that devices being brought into the organisation are well-secured.

What’s more, IBM’s Watson will surely benefit from the move.

The deal will see IBM sell iPhones and iPads to its enterprise customers and develop cloud services optimised for those devices. Apple, meanwhile, will provide hardware support with a new dedicated AppleCare programme for enterprise customers.

Although competitors have been quick to play down the partnership, seeing the two powerhouses combine will be a highly influential move in the world of BYOD and technology.

How can you adapt easily to

today’s evolving IT needs?

CONVERGED SERVER CHALLENGE In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, managing the IT demands with traditional servers can be a real challenge.

Different products from different vendors rarely converge easily. So how can you adapt to new trends and innovations easily, swiftly and cost effectively?

A BETTER WAY HUAWEI TECAL E9000 BLADE SERVER

Supporting IT evolution with converged technology Huawei Tecal E9000 blade servers are advanced and powerful integrated platforms that combine computing, storage, high-speed networking and management. Based on Huawei’s Open Server Converged Architecture Platform, the E9000 supports different standardized products easily and flexibly to optimize system expansion. In addition to high-performance computing and massive data processing, the Tecal E9000 is designed to support the next three generations of processors and network technologies likely to be in use during the next decade. This means you can adapt swiftly and easily to changes and maximize your IT investment costs more efficiently for years to come.

Single chassis offers • 64 X86 processors for high-performance computing •12TB cost-effective memory, to handle virtualization and big data analysis easily • 5.76Tbps of backplane bandwidth for high-speed database cluster interconnection To find out more, please visit: enterprise.huawei.com

Huawei Tecal E9000 Blade Server