WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS
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How does a fresh graduate rise to Group CIO of the UAE’s largest bank in just 11 years? PUBLICATION LICENSED BY IMPZ
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Network world me awards | Cebit | outsourcing: future of it? | security guide to byod
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EDITORIAL Publisher Dominic De Sousa
Networking glory
Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor Talk to us: E-mail: jeevan@cpidubai.com
Group COO Nadeem Hood
Last month, we held our fourth edition of Network World Middle East Awards in Dubai, which brought together the who’s who of the regional IT industry. In a very short span of time, our Awards has become the most coveted honour in network wizardry. Now, I must tell you what goes on behind the scenes while we put together such an Awards programme. We started soliciting entries in late January and ended up with more than 250 nominations, mostly from the UAE. Moreover, a record number of 4,000 readers voted for their favourite networking vendor and value-added distributor via our online public voting system. Our phones have been ringing off the hook ever since we announced the Awards and the editorial team was busy fielding questions related to the nomination process and criteria, as well as taking special requests for deadline extensions. The first round of nomination scrutiny was done by the editorial team, and our fourmember jury panel picked the winners from the final shortlist. It was no minor feat, considering the quality of nominations we received this year. Though each shortlisted end-user nomination had a unique story to tell, there was an underlying common theme as well – all the CIOs were looking for a return on investment in the face of shoestring IT budgets, and an unwavering focus on IT transformation and business value. I am quite happy to report that two categories – data centre and virtualisation – had the most number of nominees, bearing testimony to the fact that enterprises in the Middle East are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption of advanced technologies. We were also surprised by the number of private cloud implementations that had taken place, and will most likely have a category devoted to this next year. Some of our winners are illustrious examples of how successful IT projects can generate value to business and save costs in the long term. We will feature these networking champions in the forthcoming issues of CNME. Keep an eye out.
Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409109 Editor Ben Rossi benr@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409114 Assistant Editor Joe Lipscombe joe@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9136 Online Editor Tom Paye tom@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9103 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar raj@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409131 Sales Managers Michal Zylinski michal@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409159 Sami Sabbah sami@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409152 Antony Crabb antonyc@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409108 Circulation Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409147 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409146 Designer Analou Balbero analou@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409104 DIGITAL SERVICES Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy P Maagma Web Developers Erik Briones Jefferson de Joya Photographer and Social Media Co-ordinator Jay Colina online@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by
WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS
ISSUE 255 WWW.CNMEONLINE.COM APRIL 2013
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How does a fresh graduate rise to Group CIO of the UAE’s largest bank in just 11 years? PUBLICATION LICENSED BY IMPZ
INSIDE
NETWORK WORLD ME AWARDS | CeBIT | OUTSOURCING: FUTURE OF IT? | SECURITY GUIDE TO BYOD
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EDITORIAL
A night of champions
Ben Rossi Editor Talk to us: E-mail: benr@cpidubai.com
Welcome to our Network World Middle East Awards issue. On March 27, we crammed 350 of the region’s networking elite into the Habtoor Grand’s ballroom in Dubai, as we crowned the recipients of this year’s prestigious honours. Now in its fourth year, the Awards has established itself as the Middle East’s premier networking awards evening, and this year was bigger than ever. After receiving over 250 nominations of exceptional quality, our judges had the extremely difficult task of analysing the strengths of each one to decide the winners. But the results are in, and are revealed from page 48. It was an extra busy day for us as we also gathered 10 leading IT decision-makers for a pre-Awards roundtable focusing on network security, which you can read all about on page 58. And stick around in the Network World section of the magazine for a meaty feature on software-defined networking, the new paradigm which I suspect could feature heavily in next year’s Awards. However, this issue isn’t all about networking, as we also delve into the rise of outsourcing, the pros and cons of third-party cloud agreements, and provide you with a security guide to BYOD. Furthermore, we have three great case studies for you to read up on, as well as the Group CIO of one of the Middle East’s largest banks gracing the pages of this month’s CIO Spotlight. We may have hosted the Network World Middle East Awards, but it wasn’t the only event we were at. You can also read full analyses of CeBIT from Germany, as well as the Gartner Symposium, Cisco Connect and the Cloud World Forum MENA, which all took place a little closer to home. As I said in my welcome note at the Awards, we are a young and vibrant team at CNME, full of energy and ideas, and always striving to improve. I think this is important, because it is a description that could also easily fit the Middle East’s IT industry. It is young and vibrant, and it is those attributes that have helped it already show the rest of the world that it can lead in innovation – something that was clearly displayed at the Awards. We thank you for your continued support of CNME, which was more than evident at what turned out to be a hugely successful event, and I hope you enjoy this issue.
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ISSUE 255 | april 2013
ANALYSIS 8
Proper planning
12
The tech revolution
As any CeBit visitor knows, it’s impossible to navigate the vast trade show without coming up with a decent plan. Tom Paye reports from Hanover, Germany. March saw Gartner bring its global Symposium series to the Middle East for the first time at the Madinat Arena in Dubai, UAE.
16 The next frontier At the Cisco Connect conference in Dubai, Cisco offered a glimpse into a fantastical world of next-generation technologies.
48
20 Month in view We round up the top stories that took our eye in the last month.
CIO SPOTLIGHT
24 The 10-year plan How long does it take a 23-year-old Emirati fresh out of university to rise to Group CIO of one of the biggest banks in the Middle East? For Ali Sajwani, just 11 years - but that’s one more than he wanted.
CASE STUDIES
28 Signed, sealed, delivered World leading logistics firm DHL is no stranger to making a first-class delivery. This means it was never in doubt that, when its Express division made the move to bring in virtual desktops, the project was fast, seamless and successful. 32 Virtual heights Over 200 students, enrolled on the Computer Information Sciences programme at the Higher Colleges of Technology, Abu Dhabi campus, had been suffering serious communication issues between peers and tutors. Huawei stepped up to take the college to new virtual heights.
SOLUTIONS WORLD
42 Whose job is it, anyway? A growing number of Middle East CIOs are hiring specialised service providers to manage their organisation’s infrastructure. Is this the future of IT? 6
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NETWORK WORLD
Network champions The Network World Awards has become a starring fixture on the region’s technology calendar. However, no one could have predicted how much of a success the fourth edition would be.
60 Soft launch The idea of SDN has taken off, though it has hardly seen a launch of epic proportions. We investigate the benefits behind the new networking trend, and examine why the Middle East is still taking baby steps in adopting SDN.
STORAGE ADVISOR
66 Three’s a cloud Businesses continue to plunge into the cloud with gusto, but are they fully aware of the challanges surrounding the amount of parties involved? Joe Lipscombe investigates third-party providers.
SECURITY ADVISOR
72 The security guide to BYOD
There’s no use in trying to resist it - BYOD is here to stay. To help in the transition, CNME rounds up tips from the security industry on how to cope with the inevitable risks it brings to the enterprise.
INTEGRATION ADVISOR
78 Paradigm shift It’s a time of transition for information technology. Are the solution providers experiencing a shift from a product-based model to a service-based model? CNME dives into the paradigm shift.
www.cnmeonline.com
TELECOMS WORLD
84 Carrying Ethernet forward The increasing dominance of IP and Ethernet is enabling a convergence of networks, thus providing cost efficiency to service providers.
CAREERS ADVISOR
90 The rat race With shrinking economies, unpredictable employment rates, and new technologies booming in the global markets, CNME looks into the race between IT education and innovation.
INTERVIEW
94 Healing the cracks Managing Director, Eyad Shihabi, discusses HP’s challenge to regain its innovation supremacy.
PRODUCT WATCH
96 CNME breaks down the top products that launched in the last month, including the new HP ElitePad 900.
THE WORD ON THE STREET
98 Marissa’s nightmayer CNME’s man about town, Joe Lipscombe, gives his spin on the latest IT news and trends. This month, he joins the Yahoo telecommuting debate.
CLOUD TRANSFORMS I.T. Learn more at www.EMC.com.
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Analysis CeBit 2013
Proper planning As any CeBit visitor knows, it’s impossible to navigate the vast trade show without coming up with a decent plan. Unfortunately, only a handful of exhibitors at this year’s event realised that the same applies to vendors, too.
Y
ou can never go to CeBit without a proper plan. The largest IT trade show in the world, the four-day event is spread across an enormous campus on the outskirts of Hanover, Germany. Halls as big as the entire Dubai World Trade Centre complex are dedicated to just one section of the fair each, and shuttle buses round up tired visitors wishing to get from one end to the other. To visit without a plan results in an overload of
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information, much aimless wandering and very, very sore feet. The funny thing is that every visitor to this year’s CeBit knew exactly what he or she was coming for, yet the vendors seemed to lack any real plan. With the exception of a few firms – such as Software AG, which we cover on the next page – exhibitors, on the whole, seemed to have simply set up their stands and hoped for the best. Yes, the likes of IBM and SAP had set up enormous, tripledecker stands capable of housing hundreds of www.cnmeonline.com
visitors, but for almost everyone else, it was simply a case of handing out a goody bag in exchange for sitting in on a quick sales pitch. Even the opening ceremony seemed bereft of direction. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, gave a heartfelt speech on the importance of technology in combating the effects of the still-struggling European economy. Education was important, too, she said, highlighting the need for the IT industry to position itself as attractive to the upcoming generation.
And Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, followed her rhetoric, at the same time promoting his own country’s growing number of skilled IT professionals. CeBit sees Germany partner with another country every year, and Tusk was keen to eek every cliché to do with international cooperation that he could out of this year’s arrangement. So far, so standard. But then, out of the blue came Tom Enders, CEO, European Defence and Space Company (EADS), who presented a futuristic Mars Rover called Bridget, which EADS subsidiary Astrium is working on with the European Space Agency. As interesting as the presentation was, it was genuinely unclear whether or not he’d come to the right show. What did this have to do with IT? Enders did eventually begin to hone in on the audience. He said that despite Bridget’s ability to climb over boulders, drill holes on the surface of Mars, and find its own way around the planet, its core processors were made in the 1990s. The Aerospace industry, he implied, could do with a lot more innovation, and IT could help. “When Bridget sets off for Mars in 2018, computer performance will have tripled in comparison to today,” Enders said. “By that point, her computer will be 30 years old.” The EADS CEO went on to describe the state of the aviation industry, which sees supervisory authorities freeze software components when certifying new aircraft. This makes the software outdated by the time airlines can put the aircraft into operation, Enders said. “In addition to the approximately €200 million in investments for the IT systems of a new type of aircraft, further high costs are incurred due to maintenance, as we are dealing with outdated systems from the very start,” he explained. “We need to increase the
speed of innovation without compromising on safety.” The IT industry could help with this, he said, though he failed to go into great detail over how. No doubt it was an interesting speech, but, like the speeches delivered by Merkel and Tusk, it seemed to have little point to it. But what of the show itself? Well, two gargantuan halls were dedicated to business IT, though they were largely taken up by SAP, Software AG and IBM. These stands were so large that they more resembled medium-sized villages. It also meant that lesser firms were relegated to the back-alleys of the conference halls, out of sight and out of mind. Though these were mostly made up of German and Polish start-ups, it seemed a shame to give so much prominence to just a few firms. That said, the Conference Centre in the middle of the grounds was packed with speakers from all walks of technological life. Covering everything from social media and mobile enterprise to data centres and business processes, the speakers from the likes of Microsoft, Cortado, and Huawei captivated audiences with insights on trends that could see businesses make better use of their resources for a reasonably small outlay. In terms of announcements, though, there was little for analysts to sink their teeth into. Fujitsu launched its new Lifebook E Line of laptops, which all share the same standard components such as main board, drives for the modular expansion bay and AC adaptors. While the new line comprises laptops that range in size from 13.3 to 15.6 inches, Fujitsu said it wanted to combat rising management costs and security risks by standardising components and BIOS software. The laptops can be equipped with Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 processors running at
In addition to the approximately €200 million in investments for the IT systems of a new type of aircraft, further high costs are incurred due to maintenance, as we are dealing with outdated systems from the very start.” www.cnmeonline.com
Tom Enders, CEO, EADS
speeds from 2.3 GHz to 3.6 GHz, with 2GB, 4GB or 8GM of RAM. Acer, meanwhile, unveiled a 21.5-inch, Android-powered tablet, the DA220HQL. More of a touch-screen PC running Android, it weighs 4.8 kilograms and has no battery, meaning it’s less portable than any laptop. Acer spokesman Manuel Linnig said that the new device could be used as an “information kiosk”, or else as a device on which to surf the Web or watch videos. Huawei also had its own announcement to make, having ramped up its European presence. The big news from CeBit was that the vendor’s servers had been certified by SAP to run the HANA in-memory platform. Huawei hoped that the announcement would make it more attractive for customers in the enterprise IT market. Smaller, Germany-based firms launched products or solutions, too, but on the international stage, that was about the lot. Perhaps simply having a presence at CeBit was enough for most of the vendors – no doubt plenty of business was done over the course of the week – but it seems those who made big plans got the best results. After all, you can never go to CeBit without a proper plan. april 2013
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Analysis CeBit 2013
In the in-memory groove One of the most prolific vendors at this year’s CeBit trade show, Software AG unveiled a host of new products and services powered by in-memory technology.
Robin Gilthorpe, CEO, Terracotta
S
oftware AG was arguably the most pro-active vendor at CeBit 2013. The firm may not have had the biggest stand at the show – though its size would still dwarf anything seen at GITEX – but it certainly showcased more new products than almost anyone else. At a press conference ahead of the show, the firm announced Version 9.0 of its webMethods server suite, which brings in-memory technology to the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The vendor said that webMethods 9.0 is the industry’s first inmemory enabled ESB on the market, and it will be available by Q2.
The new version of the platform focuses on integrating big data from any source, applications from the mainframe to the cloud, and also provides support for mobile devices. Software AG said that this allows customers to access huge amounts of data and distribute the relevant information to the relevant party on any device, providing a new level of business responsiveness. Another part of the webMethods announcement was the new Infostreams product, which brings real-time information and event streams to the right stakeholders, enabling collaborative actions and responses. The vendor also announced webMethods CloudStreams, a new product that allows customers to efficiently integrate SaaS applications, such as Salesforce.com, with other on-premise and SaaS applications, governing their integration. “With CloudStreams, we give customers the possibility of installing webMethods on the Web,” said Wolfram Jost, CTO, Software AG. “This will also allow the linking of public and private clouds to handle seasonal workload peaks.” The webMethods platform is now “tightly” integrated with its Terracotta business unit’s BigMemory in-memory technology. Version 4.0 of BigMemory was also announced at the show, with the firm showcasing integration with Hadoop, support for Java 7 and the ability to deliver up to 60-percent faster data access. Speaking of Terracotta, the Software
If the world is becoming more mobile, you need to be able to push the action out to where the work needs to be done. This is a first-of-its-kind platform.”
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AG press conference saw the unveiling of Terracotta’s In-Genius platform, which promises “intelligent action” on big data. Software AG said that In-Genius will allow organisations to discover hidden insights and act on them quickly, reducing risk, automating business processes and deploying new offers, products and services in real time. Robin Gilthorpe, CEO, Terracotta, said that new tools needed to be created in order to address the growing amounts of data that organisations find themselves with access to. “Volumes of data are increasing by between 40 and 60 percent a year, but IT budgets are not,” he said. “You’ll see 5 percent, per year, maybe, if you’re in an industry that’s doing quite well. So it’s clear that new tools are needed to address big data, and it’s not going away.” Gilthorpe said that In-Genius can effectively leverage such huge amounts of data by analysing it in real time. Users can then take real-time action, an point that Gilthorpe was keen to make clear. “If the world is becoming more mobile, you need to be able to push the action out to where the work needs to be done. This is a first-of-its-kind platform,” he said. He then gave three use examples, the first in the realm of a credit card firm or bank. He said that the new product could use “extreme” data processing to match patterns and establish a profile of what normal behaviour would look like. With every transaction, he said, it would be possible to analyse whether or not it is normal, and then either block it or approve it, all in real time. Lastly, Software AG announced the availability of ARIS 9.0, which can provide every user within the organisation with the right tools environment, product perspective and user interface, coupled with the right information, Software AG said. As shows go, it was quite a good one for this vendor.
Analysis Gartner Symposium
The tech revolution March saw Gartner bring its global Symposium series to the Middle East for the first time at the Madinat Arena in Dubai. The research company used the platform to make some damning statements to its audience of leading CIOs and senior IT executives, and challenged them to join the technology revolution.
Peter Sondergaard, Global Head of Research, Gartner
S
ome may say it’s quite bold to declare your IT expo as the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. But if you could forgive any company for making such an audacious claim, it would be Gartner, the world’s leading IT research organisation. It would, however, require for Gartner to be just as audacious, and equally as thought-provoking, in the content it chooses to deliver to those IT executives – especially for the first time it brings the show to the thriving Middle East. Thankfully, Garter brought its star players, Gene Hall, CEO, and Peter Sondergaard, Global Head of Research, the latter of whom was more than happy to fulfil the requisite for damning statements.
But for every damning statement comes an unfortunate victim, one of which was Microsoft, whose release of Windows 8 isn’t proving as popular in adoption as Steve Ballmer and co would have liked. “However good the prospects look for Windows 8 in the consumer market and on tablets,” Sondergaard said, “there are no compelling reasons or business imperatives to drive legacy desktop or laptop devices in business towards Windows 8 today. “Therefore, 90 percent of enterprises will bypass broad-scale deployment of Windows 8 through at least 2014.” Sondergaard referred to a “nexus” of forces – driven by cloud, social, mobile and big data – which create a “powerful vortex” that is rendering the world’s current IT architectures obsolete.
It will be your charge to demonstrate the business value of IT to your enterprise, and it will be up to you to lead a new work force. Each of you plays a critical role in leading the GCC through the technology revolution.” 12
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To lead through this change, he said, CIOs must selectively destroy low-impact systems and aggressively change their IT cost structures. He also created an analogy where consumers are the accelerator – driving down prices from their increased usage – and current security strategies are the brakes, holding CIOs back. “The nexus will therefore force you to rethink your security strategy,” he said. “Overall, the consumers create an accelerating speed of change and innovation, and the complexity of your IT infrastructure and lack of IT skills will be your Achilles’ heel.” Sondergaard then posed a question to the many CIOs in the audience, asking whether their vendors are helping to accelerate them into the future, or putting the brakes on their progress. “You can expect an increased number of disruptive vendors that will change the way IT is delivered,” he said. “You only have to look at what has happened in the mobile market to really understand this. “The top vendors a few years ago – Nokia, Motorola and RIM – are struggling
as we move away from purely mobile solutions to the nexus; to socially-capable, information-driven, built-in-the-cloud mobile ecosystems.” Sondergaard’s next big statement was the prediction that, by 2015, over a quarter of organisations will have a chief digital officer. According to Gartner, 18 percent of CIOs are already fulfilling this role, which Sondergaard said is driven by the digitisation of business segments like marketing and R&D spend; the digitations of how organisations service their customers to drive client retention; and how organisations are turning this digitisation into new revenue streams. “The result is every budget is an IT budget,” he said. “Digitisation of the enterprise is commencing as a result of the nexus. Therefore, organisations are going to create the role of a chief digital officer as a part of the business unit leadership – a new seat at the executive table. They will be responsible for the digital business strategy.” Meanwhile, Hall used his keynote to highlight the increasing importance of the Middle East to the global economy, attributing that to the reason for Gartner’s first Symposium in the region. Whilst acknowledging oil reserves as delivering a vast amount of prosperity to the region, he pointed to IT as its most important driver of innovation, growth and prosperity going forward. “IT will be central to the ongoing success of the GCC,” Hall said. “These are remarkable times for information technology. We’re in the cusp of a massive transition period, the impact of which will be on par with that of the industrial revolution.” Directing the CIOs in the room, he continued, “As technology leaders, it will be up to you to create IT strategy that leverages technology to improve productivity and drive long-term growth. “It will be your charge to demonstrate the business value of IT to your enterprise, and it will be up to you to lead a new work force. Each of you plays a critical role in leading the GCC through the technology revolution.”
Gartner also chose its Symposium in Dubai to reveal its latest IT forecast for the region. $192.9bn
$29.6bn
$32.7bn
Projection for total Middle East IT spending in 2013
Forecast of Middle East device spending in 2013
Total mobile phone sales between 2013 and 2016
5.5%
7.7%
64%
from 2012
from 2012
Middle East software spending is forecast to grow 7.1% in 2013 over 2012, driven by key markets such as security, storage management and customer relationship management.
The government sector in the Middle East and Africa will spend $17.7bn on IT products and services in 2013, an increase of 2.3% over 2012 revenue of $17.3bn.
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an increase of
The Middle East telecom services market continues to be the largest spending market, representing 77% of total IT spending in the region in 2013. Its growth will exceed 5% in 2013, with mobile voice services reaching $88.5bn and mobile data services at $23.2bn.
Telecommunications will remain the largest overall spending category throughout the forecast period within the government sector, expected to grow 4.54% in 2013 to reach $9.5bn.
The software market will achieve the next highest growth rate amongst the government sector – forecast to grow 4.53% in 2013 to reach $1.4bn.
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Analysis Cisco Connect UAE
The next frontier At the Cisco Connect conference in Dubai, Cisco offered a glimpse into a fantastical world of next-generation technologies, urging the UAE to be bold in its innovations.
Rabih Dabboussi, Managing Director, Cisco UAE
T
hough it may have poured vast amounts of time and energy into its Cisco Live conference in London earlier this year, Cisco has showed no signs of taking a rest period. Following the London event at the end of January, the vendor has been on something of a world tour, and arrived at Dubai’s Atlantis hotel for Cisco Connect UAE in March. To call Cisco Connect a scaleddown version of the enormous Cisco Live conference would be unfair. Yes, some elements of the Dubai-based event were lifted from Cisco Live – such as the demonstration of the firm’s new Unified Access innovations – but it would be more accurate to describe Cisco Connect as a localised version of the big event. The show began with a heart-tugging film about the UAE’s enormous growth over a short period, featuring interviews with local citizens all too happy to sing the country’s praises. The discussion focused on the UAE’s willingness to adopt cutting-edge
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technology, which, in turn, helps the country grow at a much faster rate than would be possible in mature markets. “We are witnessing a paradigm shift and a global transformation in everything we do,” said Rabih Dabboussi, Managing Director, Cisco UAE, following the introductory video. “The main ingredients driving this change focus on technology. I can’t think of a better community than the one in this room to lead the nation into the future.” For a glimpse into what the future holds, Dabboussi handed the stage to Howard Charney, Senior Vice President, Office of the President, Cisco. As a co-inventor of Ethernet, his work led directly to the global build-out of the Internet, making him something of a technological hero. He now guides Cisco on its vision and direction, making it his business to stay up to date on the latest technological advances and solutions. Charney began by speaking about the Internet of everything, a situation that could see every device hooked up online, communicating with one another and taking action without the need for human intervention. Cisco predicts that 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020, though, Charney admitted, the world has a way to go yet. “While we may feel all wired up, everything that is connected today is just 1 percent of what could be connected,” he said. “The value at stake, the bottomline revenue, could be up to $14.4 trillion worldwide over the next 10 years – just in the private sector. However, I’m a cynic and I’m also an engineer, so I’ve been looking for proof that the Internet of everything will be transformative.” Charney went on to describe Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a telecommunications network is www.cnmeonline.com
Howard Charney, Senior Vice President, Office of the President, Cisco
proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. While the law may be sound when discussing fax machines in the 1990s, Charney said, today’s world sees connections varying in value. “All connections are not created equal,” he explained. He then described the fascinating developments that are taking place around the world. From a $5 million project by NICTA, Australia’s ICT Research Centre of Excellence, to use big data in order to determine the source of geothermal energy, to the Danish government’s adoption of video-calling in order to provide government advice to citizens in far-flung regions, Charney catalogued fantastic applications for emerging technologies. Of course, this pie-in-the-sky talk couldn’t last forever, and following his speech, Charney brought the audience back down to Earth, inviting Ian Kennedy, CTO, Cisco EMEA, onto the stage. Kennedy explained what was being done now within Cisco in order to reach the fantastical ends that Charney had described. Whether or not the Middle East will one day contribute to the advancement of technology as a whole remains to be seen, but given the way in which the UAE audience lapped up these presentations, it would seem that the country’s brightest are willing to try. And Cisco was happy to make clear that it wanted to help.
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Analysis Cloud World Forum
Infinite power Cloud is the technology that knows no boundaries, but contrary to this, the entire cloud community, including CNME’s Joe Lipscombe, descended upon the JW Marriott in Dubai last month for the Cloud World Forum MENA.
P
aul Maritz, CEO, VMware, once said, “Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing.” But last month, absolutely everything cloud was under one roof. Over the past few years, cloud computing has been the major talking point in every business room, every technology magazine, every IT office, and every relevant conference in the world. Though cloud computing isn’t exactly new, its presence and adoption is not something many have recognised before the last few years. The traction has been overwhelming. You only need to go back as far as 2008 to realise this, when the following was said: “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud.” The self-proclaimed idiot in question was none other than Oracle’s CEO and innovation royal, Larry Ellison. However, at least he’s been consistent. Famously, Ellison has made many more comments about his understanding of the cloud since then, whether you’re supposed to believe those comments or not, I don’t know. However, the one thing we can all agree on is that cloud computing is not just another tech term dropped into the IT pool, messed around with, hyped up, and fished out. Cloud computing is the future of IT, and, inevitably, the future of business. Why this is, is the next question. What kind of technology attracts Etisalat, Microsoft, du, ASG, Google, over 700 delegates, and the biggest speaking line-up I can remember to a
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single event? Cloud. Experienced CIOs, CISOs, cloud directors, and specialists delivered insightful presentations on the important areas of cloud – which now, in the Middle East, have finally moved from being around what cloud really is to what cloud can really do, and how businesses then go and do it. “Look at the change in your lifestyle – you’re mobile, with your smart device, you’re always connected to your business. Your responsiveness to your employees, suppliers, and customers is much higher. Now, extend that to your applications by putting them into the cloud and you get the same benefit,” said Arun Tewary, CIO, Emirates Flight Catering. “At this point, I’m becoming convinced that we’ll use this technology more. When it first started, there was a lot of scepticism because it wasn’t very clear. But now, industry has put a lot of focus on this and it’s becoming mature,” he continued. However, Tewary does still have his concerns about core applications being in the cloud, which he was willing to defend. “My concern is that the reality is that any organisation’s core applications will have their own local flavour,” he said. “I’m not able to visualise how to make that work with shared people in separate locations. Therefore, I will continue to work my core applications in-house.” Events such the Cloud World Forum are highly beneficial for end-users and customers who are trying to learn more www.cnmeonline.com
about cloud offers and managing the cloud. However, a broader education of a vendorled technology may be hard to come by. The University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD)’s manager of information technology and telecommunications services, Joseph Aninias, claimed that talking cloud through marketing is not helping anyone. “Events like this are helpful for education on the cloud - how to manage financial aspects, etc. - but there isn’t any solid information you can find over the net, because it’s all driven by Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft. Then you’ve got the groups that call themselves solutions providers, they will do everything for you, whilst speaking a bit about all of these groups at once. It’s a push and pull scenario at this time,” he said. However, with the right understanding, deploying cloud solutions can be extremely beneficial, such was the theme of the event. “My private cloud has completely changed the education environment in terms of management. Delivering computers, applications, and desktops has significantly changed. Cloud World Forum 2013 was another example of the constant interest in cloud computing. The uptake, it appears, will keep increasing in the Middle East, and as the CIOs have stated, cloud will be the defining technology carrying us into the next era.
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- The report attributes this to strong regional market competition and falling handset prices.
391 million.
connections between 2002 and 2012, when 19 million connections grew to
32% average annual growth in mobile
2011 to 142 million.
255% by 2017, rising from 40 million in
Mobile broadband connections across the Arab States are expected to increase by a staggering
$132bn to the economies of the Arab States, or approximately 5.5% of total GDP, in 2011.
The rapid pace of mobile adoption has delivered substantial economic benefits for the region, directly contributing
by over
350%.
Mobile broadband connections have already outstripped fixed-line connections
The GSMA this year published its first in-depth assessment on the impact of the mobile industry on the Arab States. It highlighted the explosive growth of mobile services in the region and the urgent need for governments to release spectrum bands and revise regulations to reap the rewards.
Source: The GSMA report is based on research from Deloitte.
To extend mobile penetration and capacity, as well as reap the associated economic benefits, there is an urgent need for governments in the region to deliver adequate spectrum in line with internationally and regionally harmonised spectrum bands, including the Digital Dividend, 2.6GHz and 1.8GHz bands.
Release the spectrum bands and revise regulation
In addition to the economic value, the mobile industry has also contributed to employment in the region. The full-time employment created across the Arab States as a result of the availability of mobile technologies is estimated to have been more than 1.2 million jobs in 2011.
Stifling regulation
High taxation
Limited spectrum availability
between 2015 and 2025.
$108bn
If spectrum needs are met and regulatory certainty delivered, there is a major opportunity for governments to generate significant additional revenue from the mobile ecosystem, with the potential to raise $528.7m by 2025.
While highlighting the extraordinary development of the region over the past decade, the report identifies fundamental challenges that put the continued growth of the sector at risk:
The release of additional spectrum could raise the region’s combined GDP by
ROUND-UP Month in view
Red Hat announces 13-city EMEA tour Red Hat has announced that it is set to host a 13city tour of one-day events throughout Europe and the Middle East. The company said it hopes to share strategies and practices
on transforming enterprise IT architecture using open-source technology, and migrating from physical to virtual and cloud solutions. The tour will kick off on April 3 in Moscow, before travelling
to Poland, France, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Germany and Switzerland. It will reach Abu Dhabi for the Middle East event on April 22, before making four more stops in Italy, the UK, Holland and Turkey.
Rosetta Stone opens Dubai office
Job change
Sundar Pichai will take over Andy Rubin as head of Android, on top of his current role leading Google’s Chrome division. Rubin, who brought Android to prominence, will take on a new role.
71 percent of EMEA CIOs expect to increase IT spending in 2013, according to a survey by Riverbed Technology. The top five investment priorities identified by the survey were server virtualisation (50 percent), data centre consolidation (40 percent), storage consolidation (34 percent), desktop virtualisation (33 percent), and server upgrades (33 percent).
HP’s shareholders voted to reelect its entire board of directors, despite opposition from investors who wanted some members held accountable for HP’s recent troubles, including its illfated acquisition of Autonomy. All 11 HP directors were reelected, with at least 50 percent of HP’s shareholders voting in their favour.
Language-learning technology supplier Rosetta Stone has announced the opening of its first Middle East office. The company said its new Dubai office conveys its commitment to the Middle East’s innovative education initiatives. “The Middle East is a specific focal point for us and our business, not just from my view, but the head office in America and other regions recognise how important this region is for us,” said Donovan Whyte, Vice President of Sales EMEA, Rosetta Stone. Whyte claimed that Rosetta Stone as a technology service has never been more important for business and education. The company has a number of initiatives running with education and government entities to help up-skill children and employees, not only from a linguistic perspective but also from a personal development perspective. The Middle East sees higher public expenditure on education than the world average, with an 18.6 percent government spend compared to a worldwide government spend of 14.2 percent.
HP’s board of directors The knives are still out for Windows RT, with the latest blow for the doomed operating system coming from IDC. According to its latest forecast, RT tablets will end 2013 with only a 1.9 percent share of the year’s shipments. That’s 3.6 million devices sold, which is not much more than Apple sold in three days after the iPad Mini launched.
Windows RT
BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins described Apple’s iOS as outdated, and suggested that the iPhone could be at risk of being replaced if Apple doesn’t speed up its innovation process. Computer News Middle East
The Facebook COO has become a leading advocate for women in technology after publishing her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which highlights the lack of women in leadership positions. The part-memoir, part advice book has topped the hardback nonfiction bestsellers list in the New York Times, and continues to strike a chord in the industry.
Sheryl Sandberg
EMEA IT spending to increase
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The cloud storage and applications suite, used by millions at home and work, suffered three service interruptions in a week, making it impossible at times for affected users to access their files and applications. One of the incidents affected more than 30 percent of user requests to connect. Frustrated users took to social media to express their anger about losing access to their documents.
Google Drive
WHAT’S NOT?
PC shipments to drop again
Job change
Kevin Lynch resigned from his position as Adobe CTO, which he held for five years, to take a job at Apple, a once close partner of Adobe that became a vociferous critic of its Flash technology.
MEA external storage market in decline The MEA region’s external storage market suffered a year-on-year decline in the last quarter of 2012, according to the latest figures from IDC. The research firm announced that the region’s external storage market plummeted to a total of $272 million for Q4 2012, despite terabyte capacity rising by a modest eight percent over the same period. The report showed that Saudi Arabia was the only country to register strong year-onyear growth, expanding by 60 percent in Q4 2012. This growth was driven by projects in the Kingdom’s telecommunications and education sectors, IDC said. The UAE external storage market, meanwhile, experienced a year-on-year revenue decline of three percent during Q4 2012. In contrast, Qatar posted a modest growth of nine percent, which was fuelled by demand from the government and education sectors.
STC inaugurates Security Operations Centre Saudi Arabian STC has inaugurated what it calls the largest information security control centre in the region to improve the security features of the telco’s systems and applications. The Security Operations Centre was created in cooperation with Symantec, STC said in a statement, which also described the new centre as a “nucleus” for control, operation and surveillance services rendered to STC. This will ultimately lead to the telco being able to provide cost-effective security services to a variety of small and medium-size enterprises, STC said.
SAP, Saudia to combat KSA youth employment SAP and Saudia recently announced they had signed a MoU to set up a competency centre at King Abdullah Economic City in Makkah. The idea is to prepare Saudi graduates for the job market through teaching essential business, IT and leadership skills, the two organisations said in a statement. Training will encompass everything from negotiation and communication to conflict management and “design thinking”, the statement said. The centre will also offer SAP certifications on core business and industry solutions, the two companies confirmed. This announcement is extremely pertinent given the current state of Saudi Arabia‘s jobs market. According to government statistics, more than two-thirds of Saudis are under 30, and nearly three-quarters of all unemployed Saudis are in their 20s. The country will no doubt be pleased, then, that the MoU will explore how both Saudia and the Kingdom can benefit from the potential creation of a Saudi Arabian arm of SAP’s Training and Development Institute.
www.cnmeonline.com
Bill Gates said the student use of handheld devices and social media is creating a tipping point that could completely break down the barriers between teaching platforms within 10 years.
Worldwide PC shipments are projected to drop a further 1.3 percent this year, after experiencing the first drop on an annual basis for the first time in 2012, IDC said. It would, however, be a slight recovery on last year, which saw PC shipments drop by 3.7 percent.
Ericsson to upgrade Wataniya’s networks Ericsson has struck a deal with Kuwait’s Wataniya Telecom to upgrade the telco’s existing 2G and 3G networks. Aiming to meet the growing demand for 3G services in Kuwait, Ericsson will add WCDMA/HSPA capability on 900 MHz and LTE capability on the 1800 MHz band. This will result in higher connectivity speeds for Wataniya subscribers, a statement said. The terms of the deal also include Ericsson providing optimisation services, O&M support services, spare parts management, customer APRIL 2013
support and training. Describing the upgrade as a “transformation”, the two firms said it will prepare the network for future growth, which is being created by a strong uptake of smartphones and other handheld, dataenabled devices. This deal is the latest in what has become a strong relationship between Ericsson and Wataniya over the past few years. Past projects include a network-wide upgrade to Wataniya’s GSM infrastructure, and an upgrade to the telco’s charging and billing system, Ericsson said.
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Analysis: Virtually unstoppable – VMware: We’re miles ahead
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ComputerNewsME @MicrosoftEMEA 33% of business PCs are infected with counterfeit software. Malware/ botnets etc. Scary figures for consumers and industry. http://bit.ly/Zowu6r
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CNME Tweets: ComputerNewsME Our online editor, @MrTomPaye is at #CiscoConnectUAE and Assistant Ed, @joelipscombe is at #Cloudworldforum. Get involved. Tweet us. http://bit.ly/YbU7js
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CIO Spotlight Ali Sajwani
The 10-year plan How long does it take a 23-year-old Emirati fresh out of university to rise to Group CIO of one of the biggest banks in the Middle East? For Ali Sajwani, just 11 years – but that’s one more than he wanted.
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U
pon graduating from university with a bachelor of science in computer engineering, Ali Sajwani was thinking about his future. While many people in his position are still unsure what they want to do with their lives, Sajwani’s thoughts were clear. He wanted to be a CIO, and he was determined he would do it within 10 years. You can’t fault a young man’s ambition, and in Sajwani’s case, you can’t fault his courage, either. However, you might question the sanity of someone who moves from dry and sunny Sharjah to spend five years in a city that rains 11 months of the year. But that’s exactly what he did, and he still values his years at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, as a time which not only taught him about software and hardware, but how to mix with people from different cultures. “For me, moving to Seattle was a challenge, not only to learn, but also to shape my personality and get involved with different cultures,” Sajwani says. “It taught me to really shape the way I speak and how to think English when speaking English. “At the same time, I learnt to deal with all the cultural sensitivities, especially when talking about sensitive topics. So that itself really helped me in shaping my thoughts, the way I speak, and my personality. This was as important to me as learning, studying and coming back with a degree.” And the rain? “When it rains now, my kids become very excited,” he laughs. “But I tell them I had enough rain during my time in America to last me a lifetime!” After graduating, Sajwani returned to the UAE to join Abu Dhabi Polymers Company, also known as Borouge, a start-up which specialised in the polyethylene business. “I started my career with them and the beauty was that, when I joined, I was the first UAE national to join as a fresh graduate,” he says. “I started on the help desk side, but it was only for around 20 people.” Borouge’s nature as a start-up company allowed Sajwani to get to know different parts of IT, which led him into doing system administration, and then project management. “I managed the implementation of the HR module on SAP, as well as a B2B project. As a manager, that’s what I did, but as a team, I was involved in the overall set-up of the SAP system from scratch. I saw the
Whatever provides the highest value of return for the group, we go and implement. This is a very transparent approach that we have given to the organisation.” progress of the plant being just an empty space to being completely ready in two to three years.” Come December 2002, Sajwani was managing all the IT applications within Borouge, which he continued to do for 16 months, but an opportunity to become a project manager at Emirates Bank Group proved too hard to resist. “For me, banking was always a very aggressive environment that I wanted to jump into and start learning how businesses are run in that vertical, especially with the high levels of competition, complexity of technology and customer satisfaction that is needed,” he says. “Another reason for me leaving was the opportunity to move back to Sharjah and be close to my family, because the job was in Dubai. So I was very grateful for that.” During his first couple of years at the bank, Sajwani managed three main projects. The first of which was implementing the order management system for the securities of the shelf trading, and the launch of the first Internet trading platform for a bank in the UAE. “That was the first project we did and there were a lot of challenges because it wasn’t just a new experience for us, but for the market altogether,” he says. The second project was the implementation of a treasury back office system, and the third was the IPO for du. “Emirates Bank was the lead manager for the du IPO, which was more an end-to-end project than just a technology implementation.” From project manager, Sajwani became a senior project manager, before moving to manage all the applications in Emirates Bank in August 2007. That was when the challenges really began as the merger was announced between Emirates Bank and National Bank of Dubai (NBD), which Sajwani was to be a key architect of. www.cnmeonline.com
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CIO Spotlight Ali Sajwani
With each bank possessing its own CIO, the decision was made to split the integration between the two of them. The CIO of NBD looked after the applications’ portfolio for the integration, and the CIO of Emirates Bank looked after the infrastructure and operations. Sajwani was assigned to work on the applications side and was responsible for the PMO (project management office) of the integration. However, in the middle of that journey between 2007 and 2009, the CIO of NBD decided to leave both the project and the job. This left Sajwani to take over as vice president of all the applications, and to deliver the high-profile integration project with the CIO of Emirates Bank. The pressure was high, driven by high expectation on delivery time from the Dubai Government and His Highness, but the integration went live successfully in November 2009. Six months down the line of Emirates NBD behaving as one bank, the CIO of NBD left, and Sajwani was appointed as overall CIO. Whilst it had taken him one year more than his 10-year projection, Sajwani was very satisfied with his achievement. “I gave myself 10 years from graduating university – it took me 11 years. But I was a group CIO, and not only for Emirates NBD, but also for the subsidiaries, including Emirates Islamic Bank, Tanfeeth, and Network International (NI), which we provide infrastructure services and hosting for. “So it was a big challenge and I am still very proud of achieving that at that age. I have learnt from everyone around me and got a lot of support from my management and the people I worked with. It was a very exciting time.” Three years into the job that many would tout for someone far beyond his years, the begging question now is what the next 10-year challenge is? “I’m not sure if I have the answer!” Sajwani laughs. “It’s almost three years since I took over, so I am still trying to do my job in the best way, before thinking about the next step. “There is a mixture of things I have in mind now, but one of them is actually to move into something more like a technology company providing services on a large scale. Now we behave like a department within a bank, but we are supporting different subsidiaries, so we are trying to build core values inside our department on how we should manage the different clients we serve with a proper balance. 26
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“The fact that we are all on the payroll of Emirates NBD does not mean we don’t give priority to Emirates Islamic Bank, NI or Tanfeeth. We have to deal with them and the best way we have managed to implement in the past year is by saying that any requirement that comes has to come with a business case. Whatever provides the highest value of return to the group, we go and implement. This is a very transparent approach we have given to the organisation.”
TIMELINE 1993 Graduated high school in Sharjah, where he was born and raised
1993 Moved to Seattle to study computer engineering
1998 Moved to Abu Dhabi to begin career at Borouge
2004 Joined Emirates Bank in Dubai as a project manager
2007 - 2009 Played a key part in the integration between Emirates Bank and National Bank of Dubai
2010 Appointed Group CIO of Emirates NBD
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case study DHL Express
Signed, sealed, delivered Globally known logistics firm DHL is no stranger to making a fast, first-class delivery. So it was never in doubt that, when its Express division made the move to bring in virtual desktops, the project would be implemented quickly, seamlessly and successfully.
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“
It sounds like a cliché, but the information on the package is as important as the delivery of that package,” says Praveen Sashi, Head of IT, DHL Express, as he explains that the IT department of the world’s most successful logistics company is pivotal to how it operates. DHL Express in the UAE had been struggling with its desktop management during a difficult time for businesses. Back in 2009, when half the world was suffering from a recession, DHL was searching for ways to improve its financial efficiency, as well as improving its service maintenance and management. Praveen Sashi, who has headed IT at the company since that year, says that the idea of virtual desktops was like a light at the end of a tunnel. “We had a lot of systems which were coming to the end of their time and needed upgrading or completely replacing. Also, around this time, we were searching for ways to manage our costs and reduce our servers, even application convergence and things like this. We had a lot on, and virtual desktop technology was maturing at the time, so that’s when we started looking into it,” he recalls.
Scouting the talent With costs and timing playing a large role in the development of this project, DHL couldn’t really afford to make any ad hoc moves, so it set about a very thoroughly planned-out proof of concept (POC) in order to gain a broad view of the solutions on the market, and therefore make a highly educated decision on which vendor to choose. “We had a very specific set of criteria that we needed to fulfil. We wanted something that integrated into our existing infrastructure easily, something that was cost-efficient, something that was user-friendly. We run a real-time customer call centre here, so we needed something that was user-friendly and engaging.” DHL ran three separate 30-day POCs in succession and decided that the overall winner, which most closely matched the requirements needed, was VMware. Sashi believes that the choice to go with VMware made DHL one of the earliest VMware virtual desktop adopters, back when the project began in 2010. “They matched our requirements more closely than the other two vendors which we trialled. They began the implementation in early 2010 and within www.cnmeonline.com
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case study DHL Express
roughly three months, the majority of our office here was running virtual desktops,” Sashi says. “We obviously wanted someone in-house with the skills to manage this, so we had one employee shadowing VMware as it implemented the solution. We supported this with the VMware certification course and now we’ve one employee who is fully certified to manage the technology.” Sashi claims that the consolidation of workflows has improved significantly since the implementation of the virtual desktops. Provisioning a desktop from one central, virtual hub can take less than a few minutes and overall management of the entire centre is done with complete ease.
DHL Express ran three consecutive
30 -day POCs before landing on VMware.
Safety first Of course, transferring all desktop applications and managing data access in a roaming environment can raise the alarm bells when it comes to security. However, Sashi says that managing security has improved, too. “Now we’ve nothing being stored locally, people are accessing everything from one central location and in that regard, it’s easier to implement better controls on the server. The security is hugely improved in that way.” Moreover, the overall administration has become easier for Sashi’s team, not to mention disaster recovery. “If the facility went down, you wouldn’t be able to run a call centre. Now, if the facility goes down, we can just walk over to our alternative location across the road and download all of our desktop applications and data and we’re back on again. Then the employees can access anything they need to again, from wherever they may be.” Some main improvements which stand out for Sashi are, firstly, the fact that the server management has been so brilliantly improved
Customer service and business growth are a focus point for us now, and since we no longer need to concentrate on running and maintaining servers, we can put far more time into these two areas.” 30
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means that administrative staff have been able to free up far more time to do other tasks and learn new skills. “Customer service and business growth are a focus point for us now, and since we no longer need to concentrate on running and maintaining servers, we can put far more time into these two areas,” he explains. Secondly, the more obvious of the two, is the cost saving. “We had a lot of servers and desktops becoming redundant, and would have to upgrade software around every third year. Now, with the virtual desktop, we’ve increased that time scale to seven years.” Standing strong Since the implementation, Sashi says that DHL hasn’t needed to have too much communication with VMware; the stability of the project ensured that DHL would be able to manage and control the technology in-house. “We only really call on VMware if we wish to discuss ways of improving the product or the setup; we don’t ever need to call them with a problem or a technical issue. The model we put in was so robust and the effort it takes to maintain it now is so much less than before that we’re absolutely fine by ourselves.” The importance of this project cannot be understated – this is the first trial implementation for this technology and now Sashi and his team are being used as the example for the next wave of implementations elsewhere in the world. “We were the first to trial this, we’ve had a very successful time with it and now we’re pushing it forward for consideration by the rest of our company. As well as this, we still have plenty of other big projects lined up for the foreseeable future, our priority being projects that aim to improve internal efficiencies, deliver great service quality to our customers, and support business growth.” DHL Express is currently trialling the use of public cloud in order to deliver logistics and warehousing solutions in this region. The subscription-based model aims to utilise the benefits of cloud technology to deliver application services that add new business capabilities, improve operations, and overall provide better services.
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case study HCT
Virtual heights Over 200 students, enrolled on the recently coined Computer Information Sciences programme at the Higher Colleges of Technology, Abu Dhabi campus, had been suffering serious communication issues between peers and tutors. Huawei stepped up to take the college to new virtual heights.
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ith over 17 campuses spread out across the UAE, HCT is an education focal point for the country, supplying top quality education for over 18,000 students across the Emirates. Two-hundred of those students reside on the IT programming side and it was a simple lack of communication and collaboration that prompted the faculty to implement a solution that would set a benchmark for the rest of the institution. The colleges were stuck using an outdated file and folder sharing option via email, which prevented the students from accessing work outside of the network. Moreover, the college encouraged the students to purchase a laptop computer at the beginning of their studies, causing many to be outdated and slow by the time they’d reached the most critical stage of their education.
Time for change With this in mind, the colleges decided that the way forward was to introduce a smart-device BYOD policy, which would deliver a more efficient and faster service for both students and staff. Add this to a new resource pool accessible via the Web and the problem was sorted – virtual desktops. The college was convinced that virtualising the desktops and creating an accessible pool of resources, which students and tutors alike could tap into through any OS and from any device, meant that carrying laptops around was no longer necessary, as well as making all of the updated software applications the school was using far more accessible for those who didn’t have a device that could support it. “One of the challenges we face today is that while students are given laptops at the start of the www.cnmeonline.com
course, by the end of their third year, their laptops often become obsolete. The processing power of these laptops is also much slower due to having to install and upgrade new software on them frequently to support the latest applications they need to work with,” says Mohammed Amin, Professor, HCT. “However, with the virtual desktop, the shelf life of laptops remains longer and students will no longer need to replace their laptops as quickly, since all software updates will automatically be done at a centralised location without every individual user having to update their own laptops. We look forward to moving to a new era where students can do their exams and tests using their own mobile device.”
Seamless implementation
The institution turned to Huawei for this solution, april 2013
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case study HCT
and the firm began implementing its VDI during the early stages of 2012. Huawei offered HCT a trial rack of hardware which sealed the deal and when the college was ready to fully implement, the Chinese company got straight down to business delivering virtualisation, high-end servers, storage networks and more into one cohesive package. Besides Huawei, no other external body was involved in the implementation. HCT wanted to ensure that its students and teaching staff were all well educated on the technology in order to ensure minimal issues going forward. The men’s campus in Abu Dhabi is in fact the first site to implement the technology and has since been used as a testing ground. HCT hopes to implement this technology on its other campuses following more successful runs in Abu Dhabi. “It’s been running nicely but we’ve only tested it with a maximum of 15 students so far and for only a short space of time. The next step is to test it with a larger volume of students for a much longer time to make sure that the technology can handle the demand which we will ask of it,” says Amin. “It was important to know that it was a scalable technology, as we’ve been looking to expand it across our network. It will at some point be able to run 1,000 virtual desktops, so all of our students will be able to simultaneously access the resources from any device they choose.”
The HCT network will soon be able to run
1000
virtual desktops.
Doubling up on security
Of course, switching from physical servers to a virtual environment opens up some security challenges which need addressing by the parties. HCT claims that itself and Huawei both had a hand in doubling the security of the network. HCT has an internally closed system with a standard access-bypassword function, meaning that students can only work within the confines of the institution. Huawei also inserted its own security system into the box to add the inner layer of protection, and with that, Amin believes the system is more than secure.
It was important to know that it was a scalable technology, as we’ve been looking to expand it across our network. It will at some point be able to run 1000 virtual desktops, so all of our students will be able to simultaneously access the resources from any device they choose.” 34
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“I think this will bring students closer to us,” says Amin. “They can carry on with their work even if they’re not in classes, and they can continue to study to their own schedules. The service is totally applicationdependent, so it only requires basic PC tools to access it – it’s going to change the way we work entirely. “The virtual desktop allows for greater collaboration between students and teachers, and together, it will help to increase the teaching quality and overall learning experience. It can also create an online class community, like a virtual social network where a teacher, for example, will ask his class to design or publish an application. Each application can then be checked, marked, and then erased from the virtual desktop ready for the next class of students to repeat the same exercise.” The technology has been viewed as a kind of blessing by Amin and his students. The implementation has offered major cost saving, reduced energy consumption and double the security. Not to mention, the deployment was done so efficiently by Huawei that it caused minimal disruption to staff and students during implementation. Soon enough, Amin believes that the technology would have spread into the other Emirates and Abu Dhabi will be recognised as the starting point for what is sure to be a defining moment for the impressive programme.
case study Amman Stock Exchange
Cash cow When the Amman Stock Exchange’s IT team found problems with high availability last year, they came up with an elegant virtualisation solution to tackle the risks associated with downtime.
Engineer Mohammed Khatib, Director of ICT, Amman Stock Exchange
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“
The most challenging thing at a stock exchange is high availability. The stock exchange operates for three or three-and-a-half hours every day, and the trading system has to be available for every second of these three-and-ahalf hours.” So says Engineer Mohammed Khatib, Director of ICT, Amman Stock Exchange. Being at the digital helm of a stock exchange, where a country’s economy can either soar or tumble, he’s well aware of the problems that can come about when the IT system experiences any downtime whatsoever. “If you’re down for a few seconds, people will know about it,” he says. “There’s a process that you have to go through, where you have to disclose that you’ve had a problem, stop the service, and disclose when the service is going to come back again. The publicity is really bad and the reputational cost is extremely high.” Certainly Khatib was facing a large problem, then, given that last year, the stock exchange had issues with the high availability of its website and web services. “We’re running multiple domains – one is for the official website, and one is for a product that we call MarketWatch, which is where you can look at the prices of the stocks and see where they’re going,” he says. “All in all, we’re running approximately 60 apache servers, so it’s quite extensive. “ The Amman Stock Exchange hosts these services over an SDN1 link – the 155Mbps connection. Speed, Khatib says, was no issue. It was the disaster recovery site that caused headaches for the IT team. “We had a choice of replicating everything at the DR site, but that would create problems of replicas, and the integrity of the data and switching. We thought of using the traditional cluster technology that we always used for everything else, which is Cluster A at Site A, Cluster B at Site B, and then SAN to SAN mirroring,” says Khatib. The problem with this approach, however, was that the conversion would typically take three to five minutes – an unacceptable amount of downtime at a stock exchange. Impressively, Khatib came up with a solution using products for something they were never intended for, warranting him a speaker’s slot at the recent IDC Middle East CIO Summit. “I wanted a technology that would replicate while everything is being treated as one cluster stretched across two locations, rather than individual clusters at both locations, and it wouldn’t affect the high availability,” he explains.
“We started looking at storage virtualisation because any storage virtualisation appliance will give you a reliable replica of the data, while, if you have the fibre infrastructure that we have, you can have all the machines in both locations connected to the same appliance rather than to different appliances. At the same time, you cluster these appliances, so that, if one in one location fails, the other one takes over.” It sounds like a simple solution. However, Khatib and his team then realised that this would do nothing if the data itself was corrupted. Of course, the Amman Stock Exchange invests heavily in firewalls, IPSs and data leakage prevention, but a highly skilled hacker might still be able to get through. In this scenario, simple storage virtualisation would not cut it, Khatib says.
60 apache servers make up the Amman Stock Exchange’s IT system.
Inflection point The team moved onto another idea, then, but it seemed even more improbable: “We thought that the only solution was to create a redundant software environment that is updated and managed completely separately. This means 60 servers over here, 60 servers over there, then another 60 here and another 60 there. It becomes ridiculous,” he says. The answer, it seemed, was to look toward server virtualisation technology. Having scoured the vendor market for a viable solution, Khatib landed on VMware’s Enterprise Plus, the highest-tier product in the vendor’s portfolio. The attraction, Khatib says, is that the virtual machine will expand and contract according to the load it gets. “We thought that we’d create Environment A and B – software-wise – and we’ll put five gigantic servers at Site A, another five gigantic servers at Site B, virtualise everything and just throw it at the VMware.” The result, Khatib says, is that the virtual machines getting hits are fully expanded as they’re being hit, but the redundant environment is completely shrunk because the virtual machine just lies there. The redundant machine is being updated, but it does not actually manage any hits itself. Meanwhile, the IT team could switch between Environment A and B through their load balancers. Switching from A to B resulted in Environment A gradually shrinking back to the smallest size, while B would immediately expand to serve the extra traffic. It’s a simple yet elegant solution. The IT team completed the project with IBM, because, Khatib says, they liked the vendor’s storage virtualisation appliance, the Storage Virtualisation Centre (SVC). What’s impressive is that neither IBM’s www.cnmeonline.com
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case study Amman Stock Excahnge
SVC or VMware’s Enterprise Plus, were originally meant to improve high availability – they’re virtualisation solutions, sure, but Khatib and his team have combined them to solve an altogether different problem.
Market infancy But how well does the system work? Khatib, for one, seems happy with the results. “The services have always been running, but now all the high availability issues are done automatically, and the convergence time between the two sites is less than one second - it’s really fast,” he says. “I think we have managed to leverage storage virtualisation and server virtualisation effectively to achieve a goal that was not intended.” That said, the solution wasn’t simply made available overnight; Khatib says that it took months of work before he was able to even start thinking about migration from the old system. “These projects are complicated. You have to be patient, and your vendor has to be very patient,” he explains. “The implementation of something like this, it took two months of extensive work – two months of complete focus on the project – and then another four months for migration. It’s quite intense.” The migration itself took four months, much of which was still spent running on the old environment: “It is easier to have redundancy in equipment and redundancy of set-up is in fact cheaper for you than downtime,” Khatib says. “And downtime is really unmeasurable because of the reputational cost. Using the load balancers, you just switch between one or the other.” Of course, migration during the working week was hardly possible, given how important it was for the system to be online. Khatib says that he took to working on the weekends, starting at, say, 7pm on a Thursday, when the system is hardly receiving any hits at all. He monitored over the weekends, and then tested the new environment at the beginning of each week. If there was any hint of something going wrong, he’d immediately switch back to the old environment. “On Sunday, it’s live on the new set-up, and you’re on your toes – anything goes wrong, you switch back
6 The number of months it took for the stock exchange to migrate to the new environment.
We thought that the only solution was to create a redundant software environment that is updated and managed completely separately. This means 60 servers over here, 60 servers over there, then another 60 here and another 60 there. It becomes ridiculous.” 38
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to the old environment,” he says. And even after everything was set up and running smoothly, Khatib says that the team did a parallel run for a month, just to eliminate the threat of any downtime.
In the pink “It’s very smooth now,” Khatib says. “I think storage virtualisation is actually one of the best things that we have done, because now that the set-up is there, you can easily migrate your other applications into it. And it’s a very good luxury to be able to treat two sites as one.” The solution wouldn’t work for everyone, though, Khatib points out. The project was made possible by the Amman Stock Exchange’s fibre infrastructure, which, Khatib says, is either impossible to install or at least very expensive to install. Luckily for him, he was able to complete the installation of a fibre infrastructure last year. What’s more, Khatib was wise in his choice of vendors. Sure, the products might have been exactly what he was looking for, but given the set-up and migration time, his vendors had to be on-hand for six months – it comes as high praise indeed that Khatib came out of the process as a satisfied customer. “You look at partners who are willing to be committed, who are looking at this as strategic, who are looking at you as a business partner – not someone they want to make a quick profit from. These kinds of projects are really difficult, and you have to be very careful who you’re working with,” he says. In the current economic climate, there is no telling how the Amman Stock Exchange will fare financially in the coming years. But one thing is for sure: there’s no way the Jordanian economy will falter due to a lack of high availability.
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manageability without the complexity.
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STRATEGIC IT INNOVATION PARTNER
Solutions world
INSIDE
Whose job is it, anyway?
solutions world Managed services
W
Whose job is it, anyway? A growing number of Middle East CIOs are hiring specialised service providers to manage their organisation’s infrastructure. Is this the future of IT?
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ith the rise of cloud, everything can now be easily delivered as a service, whether it is business processes, infrastructure or security. As such, the outsourcing of IT functions and management is continuing to gain momentum among enterprises around the world. The same is the case in the Middle East, with one of the most significant findings of a recent IDC state-of-IT report showing that managed and data centre services have seen significant traction in the region over the last couple of years. The freedom of the concept allows CIOs to pick and choose what to keep in-house and what to outsource. With innovation continually moving closer to the heart of enterprise, it means CIOs can focus on big projects while outsourcing other time-consuming IT functions, or vice versa. “The managed services market is growing strongly in the region,” confirms Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHDF, a leading provider of managed IT services based in the UAE. “Traditionally, large businesses have relied on the expertise and services of managed hosting providers to offer secure, flexible and scalable solutions,” he continues. “However, over the last few years, we have been seeing a growing trend amongst SMEs choosing to work with service providers for their data centre requirements – a large part of which is due to the cost effectiveness that managed services offer.”
The last few months have in fact seen managed services evolve to become “the mainstream offerings” from service providers and vendors, according to Anurag Verma, Telecom Operations and Managed Services Lead, Smartworld. “As a result of this preference, the market for managed services has noticeably grown as well,” he says. “The early consumers for these services have been large enterprises - however, it has now percolated down to SMEs, also.” Wide adoption of public IT service management (ITSM) frameworks like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) 5 are further enabling outsourcing as it becomes easy to monitor and govern the managed services process to the end user, Verma adds.
6-10% of a company’s revenue is spent on print and documents.
Ahmed Marouf, Global Technology Services Leader, Middle East, Saudi and Levant, IBM
Outsource to be reckoned with As companies continue to search for ways to cut costs and optimise revenue, it is thought that CIOs will continue to turn to outsourcing to create new business values. That view is echoed by IBM’s Global Technology Services Leader for the Middle East, Saudi and Levant, Ahmed Marouf, who believes outsourcing eases the pressure on CIOs who are urged to significantly cut costs. “IT departments continue to be asked to take on more functions with limited resources and expertise,” he says. “As a result, we will continue to see, over the coming years, businesses use managed and outsourced services to allow them to focus on more businesscritical and strategic functions. “Businesses will not have the luxury of deciding to retain non-differentiating services in-house if a significantly more cost-effective, high-quality service is available from a third party. Given the variety of service options available, businesses would want to take advantage of a number of service types to meet their management needs both in IT and in line-ofbusiness functions.” Arup Roy, Research Director, Gartner, adds that the next two to three years will see the Middle East show enthusiasm for outsourcing deals in different sizes, scales and scope. However, he says this may not necessarily result in successful outsourcing relationships, since the companies in the Middle East are first-generation outsourcers. “It is expected that they will go through a learning curve in contracting and managing their vendor partners.”
Quality of service and proper service level agreements are some of the risks and challenges associated with an outsourced managed services model, according to Meera Kaul, Managing Director, Optimus Technology & Telecommunications. “The ability of an MSP to provide proactive and reactive support is based on its ability to lower a customer’s overhead costs whilst increasing the availability of the services,” she says. “The availability of different business models - like 24/7 availability, incident-based response or time-based response - further add to the terms that a customer can choose. However, the service delivered is a function of availability of network, quality and infrastructure of remote access, and, last but not the least, network security.” Further challenges lie in managed print services, which are growing at a rapid rate in the Middle East as organisations find an opportunity to cut costs. “Organisations in the region have grown quickly, which has led to a sporadic purchasing model,” says Dan Smith, Head of Integrated Marketing, Xerox MEA. “This model lacked structure, and now CIOs and CFOs are reverting their attention to an area which is causing them both cost and management issues, print. “With industry experts suggesting that six to 10 percent of a company’s revenue is being spent on print and documents, clearly it presents a significant opportunity for savings and positive results, regardless of economic climate.” www.cnmeonline.com
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solutions world Managed services
Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHDF
One of the challenges, Smith adds, lies with organisations not understanding the full scope of their print costs. “This is where the quality of the assessment becomes critical to the overall business case,” he says. “Once agreed, managing the change from an under-utilised, cluttered environment to an optimised, cost-efficient model needs careful planning and a focus specifically on change management. Without this focus, end users previously spoilt with a plethora of devices can impact the initial success measures.”
At your service Asides from print, some of the most common areas for managed services are task-based outsourcing, complete IT operations, or limited hosting with full IT operations. Some of the popular areas for managed services in the Middle East are enterprise computing management, end-user computing, remote infrastructure management, application value management, and managed test services. Stephen Fernandes, Assistant Vice President and Head of Middle East, Cognizant, says the rate of adoption of these services varies depending on the outsourcing maturity index of the organisation. “Clients look to outsource their non-core activities to a managed services model,” he says. “The decision to select the managed service has been fuelled largely by 44
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organisations’ priority to keep pace with their business expansion plans. In doing so, they prioritise the noncore areas that can be moved to a managed service model without impacting their business-as-usual.” An important aspect of any managed services project is the ability to measure the ROI, which Fernandes says should always be a subset of such an initiative. “To start with, it is important for organisations to baseline their IT spend calculations and business alignment assessments,” he explains. “All the hidden costs of current operations need to be analysed in detail to ascertain ROI. “While measuring ROI, clients should see their initial cost savings and the projected impact that outsourcing could have on their financial performance and underlying business processes. They should also compare their current and projected performance against industry peers inside and outside their particular vertical markets.” Roy adds that CIOs can measure ROI by setting clear business objectives and determining the business case of whether outsourcing is a better option than doing it in-house. “The CIOs would go through, for example, a benchmark in terms of the cost of operations at a certain satisfaction and service level,” he says. “They would then look at doing a vendor evaluation and selection process. Furthermore, it is important to have a well-written contract with business-linked SLAs.” So, are managed services and outsourcing the future of IT in the Middle East? It would certainly appear so. Now, more than ever, manage services are enabling IT organisations to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology and business demands. “IT managers today are under more pressure than ever to reduce the risks within their business and provide greater availability any time, anywhere, on virtually any device,” Marouf says. “At the same time, IT budgets are under increased scrutiny as companies try to deliver more with less amid greater complexity. In order to build greater IT impact on business, forward-thinking leaders will need to partner with managed service providers to take advantage of operational efficiencies, reduced complexity, and leading edge skills.” Managed services are an excellent choice in a highturnover market, both from a staffing and business perspective, adds Thomas Nordlander, Marketing Manager, Managed Services, GBM. “The dynamic delivery model with contained risk is something that customers find very attractive,” he says. www.cnmeonline.com
ROI The ability to measure this should always be an important aspect of a managed service.
Unleash the full potential of BYOD HP BYOD Solutions Built on HP Intelligent Management Center– a single pane-of-glass wired and wireless management system, HP BYOD Solutions enable seamless on boarding, managing, and monitoring of any device on your network. HP BYOD Solutions are: • Simple • Scalable • Secure Find how to enhance productivity and minimize risk with a comprehensive solution from HP Networking at hp.com/networking
© Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
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NETWORKING CHAMPIONS
PANEL OF JUDGES
Over the years, the Network World Middle East Awards event has become a starring fixture on the region’s technology calendar. As established as the ceremony is, though, no one could have predicted how much of a success the fourth edition would be. Causing the Habtoor Grand’s Andalus Ballroom to fill to the point of bursting, the 2013 Network World Awards saw the region’s leading IT figures turn out in droves. Vendor representatives rubbed happily alongside the clients they’d served, as well as their competition, while CIOs exchanged stories and insight on the challenges and successes they’d seen over the past year. Over the course of a five-star, three-course dinner, the hundredsstrong crowd was treated to a stellar presentation of awards. In between exchanging ties with help AG’s regional Managing Director, Stephan Berner, and being given a suitably trendy hat by the University of Wollongong in Dubai’s Joseph Aninias, CPI’s Ben Jacobs, the MC for the evening, announced the award winners. who were demonstrably ecstatic about having won. Check out those winners over the following pages.
MN Chaturvedi
Douglas Ian Wakeford
MN Chaturvedi is the Director of IT for Oasis Investment Co, which employs over 6000 people. He set up the IT division of the group with a clear mandate from the board to provide IT services to 30 companies under the group, and help CEOs of these companies to leverage IT to create support excellence.
Douglas is a Senior Advisor with the Experton Group. He has over 30 years of IT experience in various roles and responsibility areas, on both sides of the IT fence (as vendor and client). His professional career covers technical through to commercial.
Arun Tewary
Trevor Andrew Moore
Arun Tewary is CIO and Vice President for IT at Emirates Flight Catering in Dubai. Tewary’s domain expertise is in the successful implementation of large ERP systems in complex business environments with a strong emphasis on implementing best business practices and organisational change management.
Trevor is Chief Information Officer at Qatar University. He is a results and business oriented IT Director with extensive business transformation, innovative IT strategy development and robust IT delivery experience within large and complex global organisations.
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Data Centre Project of the Year
Winner: Abu Dhabi Ports Company
Finalists: • • • • •
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Aluminium Bahrain DP World Dubai Municipality Gulf Air Ministry of Hajj, Saudi Arabia
Virtualisation Project of the Year
Winner: Gulf Air
Finalists: • • • • • • • •
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Abu Dhabi Ports Company Aluminium Bahrain Dubai World Trade Center DHL Express Higher Colleges of Technology Ministry of Economy, UAE Takaful Emarat University of Wollongong Dubai
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Enterprise Mobility Project of the Year
Winner: General Civil Aviation Authority Finalists: • •
Storage Project of the Year
Winner: Commercial Bank of Dubai Finalists: • •
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Al Ain Cement Factory RTA
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Enoc Ministry of Economy, UAE
Collaboration Project of the Year
Winner: aeCERT Finalists: • •
Enterprise Telephony Project of the Year
Winner: twofour54 Finalists: • • • • •
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General Electric RTA
Abu Dhabi Water & Electricity Authority Aluminium Bahrain Al Shamel Rotana Saudi Airlines
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Network Security Project of the Year
Winner: Dubai Customs Finalists: • • • • •
Network Cabling Project of the Year
Winner: Dubai World Trade Center Finalists: • • •
Editor’s Choice Award
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Gulf Air Hyper One Jordan Millennium Jordan
Winner: Tawazun Finalists: • • •
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du Emarat Mednet OSN Twofour54
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Abu Dhabi Police EFS Facilities Services Landmark Group
Networking Vendor of the Year
Winner: HP Finalists: • • • • • •
Networking Value-Added Distributor of the Year
Alcatel-Lucent Avaya Brocade Cisco D-Link Huawei
Winner: Optimus Technology and Telecommunications Finalists: • • • • • • • • •
Almasa Value Distribution Bulwark Technologies ComGuard FVC Logicom Mindware Redington Value Spectrami Westcon Group
For the first time ever, there were two winners for the System Integrator of the Year award. Turn the page to see the other recipient.
System Integrator of the Year
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Winner: GBM Finalists: • • • • • • • • • • •
Al-Futtaim Technologies Almoayyed Computers Al Rostamani Communications Alrowad Help AG Itqan Sejel Technologies Seven Seas Smart world Visionaire Visiontech International april 2013
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System Integrator of the Year
Winner: Visionaire
Network Security Vendor of the Year
Winner: Fortinet Finalists: • • • • • • •
Wireless Vendor of the Year
Winner: Meru Networks Finalists: • • •
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Blue Coat Dell SonicWall D-Link Fidelis Kaspersky Symantec Trend Micro
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Aruba Networks D-Link Sitecom
Storage Vendor of the Year
Winner: EMC Finalists: • • • •
Structured Cabling Vendor of the Year
D-Link Seagate Symantec WD
Winner: Nexans Cabling Solutions Finalists: • •
Commscope D-Link
Enterprise Communications Vendor of the Year
Winner: Avaya
Finalists: • •
Alcatel-Lucent Cisco
Managed Services Provider of the Year (Enterprise)
Winner: eHosting DataFort Finalists: • • •
Managed Services Provider of the Year (Telecom)
BT Injazat Symantec
Winner: Ericsson Finalist: •
Huawei
Network Training Provider of the Year
Winner: CNet Training Finalists: • •
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Fast Lane Global Knowledge
Virtualization is as easy as 1. Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) provides everything you need to create an enterprise-wide private cloud infrastructure, built on open standards. With the touch of a button, you can provision next-generation applications, easily giving your users access to the tools they need, anywhere and everywhere. Your network will be more powerful and scalable, with dramatically improved performance and reliability. To learn how Avaya can help bring your business into the collaborative age, visit avaya.com/vena.
Mideast Data Systems
For more information, please contact MDS – PACC on Tel: +971 4 3370070 or email: shantanu@mdspacc.ae
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Part of
NETWORK WORLD Roundtable
‘The next generation is the BYOD driver’ In the build-up to the Network World Awards, CNME hosted a room full of some of the most influential CIOs and IT decision makers in the region to discuss one the hottest topics currently captivating the industry. BYOD – ignore or embrace?
E
verybody is talking BYOD – IT decision makers and CIOs are trying to decide whether to deploy BYOD strategies, and vendors are trying to figure out how to supply products and solutions that embrace the trend, be it an innovative security solution, network solution, or application solution. On top of that, everybody else is discussing these discussions. We, here at CNME, are constantly keeping you up-to-date with the developing trends and analyst talk. Last month, we rounded up a boardroom of CIOs and IT managers in order to gain some insight into the current understanding of BYOD policies over a number of verticals. The attendees were Praveen Sashi, DHL Express, Ram Mohan, ENOC, Ronald D’Sa, OSN, Joseph Aninias, UOWD, Einstein Johnson Rozario, MedNet, Fady Sleiman, General Electric, Ahmed Baig, Abu Dhabi Government Entity, Mohammed Al Shehhi, General Civil 58
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Aviation Authority, Shafik Hasna, Ministry of Economy, and Terence Sathyanarayan, Drake & Scull. On top of this, spokespersons from Dell SonicWall, the vendor driving discussions, gave a short presentation before the debate got underway. The presentation was led by Dominique Honnay, Director of Emerging Markets. Then the discussion opened up so that the region’s IT heads could dive into the realm of BYOD. There were several key points discussed throughout. However, the point that sparked the highest volume of input was in regards to spending priorities – does my company really need to spend on BYOD policies when it can spend in other areas? This seemed to be the question that was on the mind of every end-user in the room, and Dell SonicWall was in the firing line for an answer. “The next generation will be the driver for www.cnmeonline.com
BYOD,” chimed in another spokesperson from Dell SonicWall. “My kids communicate via social media, using smart devices. They talk through Twitter and Facebook. They’re going to demand that enterprise allows this when they move into the industry. Otherwise productivity will suffer.” So, it appears to be a question of preparing for the future, whilst working out exactly when the future is for your business. “People who are 22 to 23 have grown up with Netscape, AOL, and instant messaging – they have a completely different way of thinking about things,” said Honnay. “Think about where people connect, what they connect on, and why they connect. We have to change our strategy to embrace this.” But this was questioned by some. “It’s not a high priority for me, given the security issues and performance issues surrounding this trend,” stated Ram Mohan. Security then became a major talking point, with SonicWall demonstrating products and solutions which can be implemented at every layer of the network in order to incorporate mobile devices. However, Praveen Sashi questioned the performance level of a device which is heavy with protection. “Adding security at all these levels can have an impact on performance. Why would I want to slow my response time? We run a call centre, we can’t afford to decrease our response time. For us, this isn’t a priority,” he said. But Fady Sleiman cut in to suggest that this trend will arrive in the region. If not now, soon. “I’m told to focus on applications for mobile devices as opposed to an actual BYOD policy, that’s not a huge priority in the emerging markets at the moment, but it will come.” The issue with not embracing BYOD and setting strict policies in place seemed to be that most companies were aware of their employees using their own devices regardless. Synchronising desktops, connecting email accounts – all of the basic tasks you would do with a very light BYOD policy. However, above all of this, the end-users’ still fell back onto one main clause – costs. The cost of security and protection, the cost of developing the applications, the cost of data allowances, especially for those who travel a lot. What exactly is the company liable for and responsible for if it buys into BYOD? The trend continues to grow but these questions are still waiting to be answered.
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network world SDN
Soft launch The idea of software-defined networking (SDN) has taken off, though it has hardly seen a launch of epic proportions. We investigate the benefits behind the new networking trend, and examine why the Middle East is still taking baby steps in adopting SDN.
“T
raditional networks and data centres are being stretched to their limits. They were never designed for today’s astronomical growth in bandwidth-intensive applications and the growing demand for speed, scalability, and resilience.” That’s the opinion of Samer Ismair, MENA Systems Engineer, Brocade Communications, anyway. He argues that because traditional networks and data centres are failing to meet the demands of IT professionals, software-defined networking (SDN) is beginning to gain traction. A new approach to building computer networks, SDN provides plenty of things to get excited over, if, like many IT professionals in the Gulf, your network systems
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are a little outdated and feeling the strain. The ability to provision network connections on the fly instead of manually configuring policies, or being able to create and configure virtual machines remotely, for example, points to a new, much simpler way of doing things. “We can see a wide range of possible uses for SDN technology, including improved management of existing physical networks and potentially the ability to re-architect data centre networks, WANs and even LANs,” says Syed Parvez Akhtar, Network Consultant, Westcon Security. “SDN control software can control any OpenFlowenabled network device from any vendor, including switches, routers, and virtual switches. Rather than having to manage groups of devices from individual
vendors, IT can use SDN-based orchestration and management tools to quickly deploy, configure, and update devices across the entire network.” What’s more, Akhtar says, there are significant cost savings to be made when it comes to SDN. From reducing spend on hardware to reducing the time needed to manage networks, firms should be able to see a noticeable difference in the amounts of cash that they need to pour into their networks. Renton D’Souza, Divisional Director, Comstar, agrees that companies should take note of the cost savings that SDN could provide. “SDN will offer savings of both CAPEX and OPEX,” he says. “The efficient use of IT infrastructure resources and the ability of SDN to move the heaviest workloads off the expensive and relatively slow embedded systems to cheap and fast commodity hardware results in substantial CAPEX savings. Through the reduced network complexity there will be less operational overhead and fewer outages as well resulting in OPEX savings.” The potential costs savings, combined with the ability to manage networks much more easily, are beginning to make SDN look like too much of an opportunity to miss. And according to Ismair, the pull of SDN will soon become so great that it will change the way that world thinks about networking. “SDN has the potential to revolutionise networking, unlocking a wave of innovation for application services,” he says. “In fact, IDC forecasts that SDN will grow from a $200 million market in 2013 to $2 billion in 2016. SDN will transform networking infrastructure into a platform for innovation, enabling customers to deliver new services and applications faster and at greater scale.” To many, this might sound a little lofty, because, as with any other emerging technology trend, the dos and don’ts of SDN are hardly well defined. Akhtar acknowledges that the prospects of SDN look good, but for now, SDNs are better suited to some industries than to others. “While most talk focuses on data centre or carrier networks, the technology may have a more immediate role in the campus network, especially when it comes to improving security and managing bring your own device (BYOD), since network managers will be able to assign access policy by device type or user group and can then optimise specific applications - such as video for mobile devices,” he says. IT professionals form other industries are playing a waiting game to see where the SDN market goes. At
$2bn The amount that IDC predicts the SDN market will be worth in 2016.
Samer Ismair, MENA Systems Engineer, Brocade Communications
the moment, education over SDN and what it could mean for a specific business is still relatively low, and vendors have not yet made a clear case for why their SDN products make for a better investment than traditional network architectures. “Network professionals are not ready to invest in an SDN strategy, largely due to a lack of knowledge,” says Akhtar. “Additionally, many network pros believe they can get the job done with what they have. They also believe that there are ways of making their networks more programmable without an SDN strategy. Organisations are also hesitant as of now because of the lack of trust in emerging vendors that produce SDN technology and traditional vendors are yet to launch the full-proof SDN products.” The Middle East is hardly leading the way in SDN adoption, according to the experts. While D’Souza acknowledges that there are some early adopters, Akhtar believes that people are still researching the technology, waiting for it to mature. Not every provider is willing to throw money at SDN, he says, and, anyway, most aren’t even looking to completely rebuild their networks. Ismair, meanwhile, believes that SDN is still at a conceptual stage in the region. For the region’s interest to grow, he says, a few things need to happen. “The growth in the SDN market will be driven by companies working towards solving existing problems with networks – security, robustness and manageability and by innovating new revenue-generating services on network infrastructures,” he says. “Ultimately, the goal is to provide a highly flexible, cloud-optimised network solution that is scalable within the cloud. In our view, www.cnmeonline.com
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network world SDN
this ‘new’ network will be powered by fabric-based architectures, which provide the any-to-any connectivity critical to realising the full benefits of SDN.” Of course, the other thing holding the region back is the security around SDN. Everyone wants to know whether a new SDN will be as secure as a network running on traditional architecture. And until someone can provide a definitive answer to that question, customers are holding off. Laui Bahder, Technical Director, Smartworld, explains the concern. “In an SDN network, the controller is seen as a single point of failure, which means that if the controller is attacked, the entire network will be at risk,” he says. “Controller architectures are somewhat lacking when it comes to security. Visibility into all the different layers that might exist in an SDN network is also critical to effective security.” That said, Bahder reckons that SDN will eventually take off, in one form or another. “SDN will become a ubiquitous trend as SDN changes network infrastructures from static and weak ones into something more dynamic, more flexible, solving existing problems with networks like security, robustness and manageability, which will lead to make data centre management, cloud services and network operation easier and very simple,” he says. On the other hand, Michael Koons, Vice President of Worldwide Systems Engineering and Technology, Cisco, believes that it is too early to tell what SDN will eventually turn in to. What’s more, he says that it will take five to 10 years for SDN to become ubiquitous, and by that point, it could be a completely different entity.
10 The number of years Cisco believes it will take for SDN to become ubiquitous.
Michael Koons, VP of Worldwide Systems Engineering and Technology, Cisco.
“I’ve just seen a handful of proof-of-concepts in this region,” he says. “I don’t think SDN by itself will ultimately be what we see. I think SDN will be one component of a broader transition in the ICT space that will include virtualisation, orchestration and management automation. It’ll probably be closer to 10 years for that to happen, looking at the adoption curve for technology. This is a pretty big transition that we’re talking about, and it takes a while to get these things going.” Customers are right to hold off until they see where SDN is going, according to Akhtar, who also points out that none of the vendors have a fully fledged SDN solution to offer yet. That said, the likes of Juniper, HP, VMware and IBM have been making headway in putting products out there. Of course, Koons from Cisco and Ismair from Brocade also point out their own brands’ SDN products. Whether or not this will be enough to entice a so-far undecided market is unclear, given that the technology is still so young. “The skill sets just don’t exist within the customers or channel to correctly evaluate SDN and accurately predict benefits to an organisation,” says D’Souza. If IDC’s estimates are anything to go by, the trend could well and truly take off over the next couple of years. Perhaps the soft launch of this technology – seen by the emerging products being peddled by the handful of vendors involving themselves in SDN – will be enough to show the world that there really is a better alternative to the traditional network architecture. As things stand, though, it looks like the waiting game is the only game in town.
Syed Parvez Akhtar, Network Consultant, Westcon Security
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Three’s a cloud
storage advisor Corporate data in the cloud
Three’s a cloud Businesses continue to plunge into cloud computing with gusto, but are they fully aware of the challenges surrounding the number of parties involved? The element of risk and governance changes heavily depending upon who is in control – you, your provider or a third-party. Who’s in charge?
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here are many circumstances that can arise with the result of your data falling into the hands of a third-party provider, such as vendor acquisitions, mergers, or outsourcing to SaaS. The risks surrounding data in the cloud will rise and fall significantly if your business is not on top of the regulations regarding data ownership. It is vital for your business to be fully aware of the potential risks, and also what the possibilities are of a third party becoming involved and perhaps withholding your data. Customers must ask themselves some important questions – will a third party follow the same security regulations and guidelines as my chosen vendor? What’s the policy toward retracting my data from the third-party cloud? Do I have a business continuity plan if there is an issue with the third party? How much, if anything, do I know about this third party? “Generally, companies signing up to cloud solutions would be expected to do extensive research before investing in that solution and it is the CIO’s responsibility to make sure that sufficient due diligence is done to have cloud as part of their infrastructure plans. Nevertheless, businesses need to be aware of user access privileges and what sort of access they are granting a third-party cloud provider. Questions they need to ask are, ‘Who at the back end has access to my data?’ and, ‘If they do have access, how often and why?’” says Nassir Nauthoa, General Manager, Intel GCC. Joe Fagan, Cloud Sales Director, Seagate EMEA, believes it’s a little bit more complicated than this: “Few people really understand all the legislation surrounding third-party cloud services because the legislation itself has not yet caught up with reality.” “In fact, in most territories, there are conflicting pieces of legislation regarding retention and disposal of certain types of data. For the time being, best practice is to be able to demonstrate that reasonable efforts are being made to comply with the most relevant industry sector and geographic legislation that applies. The cloud service provider is normally aware of the applicable legislation and should consult partners in this regard.”
According to the experts, there are a multitude of
laws covering different areas that need to be considered when moving onto the cloud.
Joe Fagan, Cloud Sales Director, Seagate EMEA
Organisations that want to manage information have to define data strategy and clear visibility into the information value chain. Defining what ‘data ownership’ means is critical to identify stakeholders, align expectations and deliver value from data in the cloud.” www.cnmeonline.com
Who’s in control? Critically, once your contract agreement has been signed and your data is in the cloud, it’s important to understand who has ownership and responsibility for it. Too often, companies get into service agreements with cloud providers without understanding the regulations surrounding such issues. “One of the main challenges of adopting cloud solutions in the Middle East is that while there are regulations in place, they are confusing, inconsistent and in some cases contradictory. Lack of a clear regulatory environment is slowing down cloud adoption in the region,” says Kevin Harris, Enterprise Technologist, Cloud Computing, Dell Emerging Markets. “There is almost always confusion regarding the regulations involving third-party cloud services,” agrees Geoff Webb, Director of Solution Marketing, NetIQ. “This is because the multi-national nature of many cloud services makes it very difficult to get a clear picture of what regulations apply, and how. For example, organisations should consider if data stored in a U.S.-based service provider is affected by local laws – and how would that be different if the data centre was located in Europe, for example. The nature of cloud is that often customers do not see the exact details of how services are delivered, but this lack of clarity can also be a cause of problems, too.” Ash Ashutosh, CEO and Founder, Actifio, also believes that extensive research is critical. However, he says that cloud suppliers themselves should be the party doing investigation into regulations, suggesting that it can also double as a sufficient guide for customers. However, regardless of these arguments, someone has to take full responsibility of that data – but who? APRIL 2013
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storage advisor Corporate data in the cloud
“In a multi-tenant environment, cloud service providers bear a large responsibility for the security and access rights of the data held in their systems,” says Nauthoa. “This obviously has to be a central tenet of their value proposition to would-be users of their services. It’s also incumbent for customers to ensure that they work closely with service providers to ensure that their data integrity is being met through use of bestin-class technologies as part of their SLAs with these companies,” he adds. Rajesh Abraham, Head of Product Development, eHosting DataFort, says, “There are two key issues, which are data security and reliability. This is also a reason why users are slower to adopt cloud storage. Enterprises today focus on different aspects of data in order to protect the environment. “Organisations that want to manage information have to define data strategy and clear visibility into the information value chain. Defining what ‘data ownership’ means is critical to identify stakeholders, align expectations and deliver value from data in the cloud,” Abraham adds. Rajesh Ganesan, Director of Product Management, ManageEngine, takes the firm standpoint that single ownership is the wrong way to go. “Once corporate data is in the cloud, a single hand being fully responsible is not the right model. ‘Trust but verify’ works better in all scenarios, so both the business and the cloud provider are equally responsible for the corporate data in the cloud.
BYOD is a large concern for companies wishing to move onto the cloud.
Nassir Nauthoa, General Manager, Intel GCC
to control access to cloud-based applications and services,” he says. “This is especially true when these services are accessed via mobile devices which are owned by the employee, which is increasingly the case. By thinking carefully about the role of identity and access controls, each employee’s access rights can be more easily set to the appropriate level and therefore IT can help prevent sensitive information from being accessed in an insecure way.” If worse comes to worst Unforeseen circumstances may appear for enterprises that will have them worried about their cloud-based data. This could then quickly lead to the need to remove and retain corporate or sensitive data from the cloud. Contractual agreements will have policies in place surrounding this type of action. Webb says that this situation can be very sensitive. “Recovery of data from a cloud service is always a sensitive subject and must be addressed in the service level agreements and contract,” he stresses. “The real risk is that the service provider may not adequately destroy data on systems (and in back-ups and images of virtual machines) and therefore the data continues to represent a risk to the organisation long after they have terminated their relationship with the provider.” Third-party agreements in cloud contracts can pose obvious complications, as outlined here. As the experts have outlined, a fully fledged investigation into all parties involved is highly recommended.
Securing data access Questions of data responsibility and ownership surely spark the issue of governance and data control. Though all parties must be involved in the due diligence, not every part will end up pleased, as Seagate’s Fagan explains. “There are constantly new ways to reduce the chance of data disclosure. Physical access can be made even more secure, and the technology exists to reduce cyber access to someone else’s data. The trade-off is always the inconvenience to the legitimate consumer of the data. In that sense, it’s really a question for the corporate customer to decide.” Webb raises the topic of mobility and BYOD, and how employees wanting to embrace this trend need to be properly considered if the company wishes to move into the cloud. “To minimise the risks of moving into the cloud, businesses need to be clear on the use of ‘identity’ 68
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The security guide to BYOD
security advisor BYOD
The security guide to BYOD There’s no use in trying to resist it – BYOD is here to stay. To help in the transition, CNME rounds up tips from the security industry on how to cope with the inevitable risks that the trend brings to the enterprise.
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t used to be so simple. A new employee joined your organisation and you gave them a laptop, which was entirely under your control. You could lock down the operating system to prevent the installation of potentially insecure or unapproved applications, and you could ensure the device was suitably up to date with your security solutions. Weren’t they the good old days? Now, there are all these people telling you that employees should be able to bring their own devices to work. They say they should be able to access your beloved network with their shiny new smartphones and tablets that are apparently the best things since sliced bread. As a result, your company has established a BYOD policy, enabling them to do just that - all in the name of mobility, which is supposedly something every CIO in the world should be embracing. But these devices are corrupt. They’re vulnerable
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and they’re creating risks. The worst culprit of this is Android, which just so happens to be the most popular mobile operating system out there. This is a painful fact for any CIO when you consider that 99 percent of all mobile malware detections in 2012 were threats targeting Android devices. “However, not a single platform is protected against threats such as phishing or loss of a device,” says Konstantin Voronkov, Systems Management, Mobile Devices and Virtual Environments Group Manager, Kaspersky Lab. “Loss or theft of an employee’s gadget represents not a lesser threat to a company than malware infection. The loss of a device leads to a corporate data leak which may have negative impact on business. That is why IT staff must be able to control data remotely, for example, by blocking the lost device or by deleting all the information and mail stored on it.”
So these mobile threats are real and costly, which Sowri S. Krishnan, Vice President of Mobility, Cognizant, more than testifies to. “A lack of integrated mobile security is costing companies in terms of everything from lost productivity to lost data,” he says. As a result, transitioning to a BYOD model should be phased in over time. “Organisations need to mitigate security risks, such as inappropriate usage or loss of corporate data and the ensuing financial and legal implications,” Krishnan says. “Establishing effective governance mechanisms to ensure data privacy and security can be challenging when embracing a BYOD philosophy.” According to Florian Malecki, Head of Product Marketing, Dell SonicWall, different security practices apply depending upon whether the mobile devices are connecting from outside or inside the network perimeter. “From a security perspective, tablets and smartphones are vehicles for information flow and so users may inadvertently - or sometimes even intentionally - relay malware into the secure network,” Malecki says. “Employees using their own devices could cause the network to be vulnerable. But nevertheless IT managers must at all times be able to guarantee bandwidth to critical applications while limiting undesired or dangerous traffic.” The good news is that implementing a BYOD policy doesn’t require a complete redesign of an organisation’s IT infrastructure. “Many vendors and solutions providers have started to address these challenges and build a framework around them,” says Hani Nofal, Director of Intelligent Network Solutions, GBM. “By making sure that personal devices meet certain security standards such as Wi-Fi security, VPN access, and perhaps add-on software to protect against malware, a high level of security can be guaranteed.” Bulent Teksoz, Chief Security Strategist, Emerging Markets, Symantec, agrees, but says businesses should prioritise educating employees about mobile threats and protecting business-critical information that employees are accessing remotely. “Businesses can use mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) tools to help maintain an inventory of the devices connecting to company resources and also make sure employees are adhering to policies. Reputable MDM tools also allow businesses to ensure both personal and company-owned mobile devices are wiped
of business information if an employee leaves the company or a device is lost or stolen,” he adds. While a complete network overhaul is not required, the big question does remain – how much of an investment does it require to implement a secure BYOD infrastructure? This is of course not possible to answer without knowing the exact details of each individual company, and as such the solution can vary considerably from case to case. “This entirely depends on the starting point,” says Mikael Hansson, Head of Delivery Management, Middle East, Ericsson. “The current status of the IT infrastructure will determine whether any company is in for a large investment or a relatively small one. “Large companies with high internal and external requirements on information security, evolving from customer requirements, like SOX, tend to have a relatively robust IT infrastructure, which then would result in relatively marginal IT investments to secure the infrastructure for BYOD. Other companies might face considerably larger investments.” The main investments will be in extending corporate infrastructure, as well as operation costs, adds Alexander Zarovsky, Head of International Business Development, InfoWatch. “To create a secure BYOD network,” he says, “the organisation needs to expand its staff for proper administration of these devices within the network, which requires extra investments. “There’s also the up-skilling and -scaling of support personnel and network engineers, plus spend on applications to support things like performance monitoring and security tools. We estimate the extension volume to be around 20 to 30 percent for infrastructure.” Once that investment has been made and the implementation done, soon will come the time when management want to see ROI. Such a thing for BYOD is difficult to measure because the costs and benefits are very distributed, and the potential cost savings found by not providing devices are often offset in management and support costs. “Productivity benefits are often real but difficult to measure,” Richard Marshall, Research Director, Gartner. “Extended day access to company email, for example, is very difficult to assess but can represent additional work per week for authorised staff. “Providing direct access to work orders rather than field staff having to call in the office could save hours of travel time each week. The key is to define clear KPIs www.cnmeonline.com
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99% of all mobile malware detections in 2012 were threats targeting Android devices.
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security advisor BYOD
17,000 of Intel’s employees were using personally owned smartphones by the end of 2011.
Haroon Iqbal, Sales Manager, MEA, Watchguard
and track them. Companies should not expect instant results as people adapt to new processes slowly.” Intel refers to its own example in early 2010, when around 3,000 of its employees were using personally owned smartphones. By the end of 2011, this number had increased to 17,000. “We found that employees who were using their own devices gained an average of 57 minutes of productivity per day – an annual total productivity gain of 1.6 million hours for Intel,” says Nassir Nauthoa, General Manager, GCC, Intel. “The reason we witnessed such an increase in productivity is because users are usually more comfortable when working with a familiar device. They spend less time worrying about how to do certain tasks and are able to just execute them, which means a more efficient employee and in turn less time wasted for the business.” However, while more and more organisations in the Middle East embrace BYOD initiatives, Stephan Berner, Managing Director, help AG Middle East, believes most are still not tackling some of the biggest issues. “The solutions I have seen are mostly around making sure there is a pin on the phone and that a user’s phone can be remotely wiped,” he says. “These are just sub functions of what a proper BYOD policy should consist off. “Really, BYOD is about taking a holistic view of what happens to corporate data when it is traversing a non-corporate device and then understanding the threats that are imposed on it.” Despite this, the adoption and implementing of 74
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BYOD policies continues to expand, largely supported by the use of user credentials and access policies, independent of devices. Strong authentication and content security facilitate the adoption of logically defined perimeters, which include the realm of BYOD, according to Miguel Braojos, Vice President of Sales, Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, SafeNet. “We can say that BYOD is just a symptom of the changing landscape of corporate IT and its role in the company, from just an internal service provider to a business facilitator and stakeholder of the company success,” he says. It shouldn’t be forgotten, of course, that the option still remains for CIOs to not let all employees bring their own device. Does the cost saving of not implementing a BYOD solution and security comfort outweigh the benefits of embracing BYOD? “This is really a question every CIO needs to ask based on their business,” says Haroon Iqbal, Sales Manager, Middle East and Africa, Watchguard. “If a business has a large mobile workforce that needs to reach certain internal assets regularly, then adopting BYOD may have a high value - higher than the cost of adding new security controls,” he says. “However, if a business has a large manufacturing team, where most of the employees work in a factory doing very specific tasks, perhaps BYOD offers very limited value, and is not worth the trouble.” Nader Henein, Regional Director, Security Division, BlackBerry, adds that companies which require their employees to travel a substantial amount of time are likely to benefit most from implementing BYOD. “Companies which are encouraging the innovative use of technology in enabling collaborating amongst all of their teams will also benefit from giving their employees the flexibility in the choice of device they use in these innovative processes. “The driver here, then, is executive and employee satisfaction, with IT then having to go and find a way of securing these solutions, which, more often than not, involves limiting their capabilities and tends to throw satisfaction back into a vicious circle.” Looking forward to the next year, organisations need to focus on monitoring and enforcing access to information and linking everything back to identity, says Geoff Web, Director of Solution Marketing at NetIQ. “Employees within organisations, having had overlyrestrictive MDM forced down their throats, have tended to revolt. Too often, these can also get in the way of business. It is more important to have a mobility strategy and manage mobile employees, not mobile devices.”
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Paradigm shift
C
ustomers are constantly pressing solution providers to assist them in achieving new business delivery models via technologies such as cloud. Major technological trends have become the template for solutions and services as opposed to the more traditional client-demand template. Now, customers want to utilise these trends in order to drive business, cut costs, increase efficiency and produce results. This has presented solution providers with an opportunity, but one that needs gut and the ability to adapt. Mobility, virtualisation, and big data are more key trends which are forcing a change in the way we work and operate. More and more enterprises are realising the potential of adopting services over products which can help them take advantage of these technologies and propel them into the future of business. Aneeta Gupta, CEO and President, Visionaire, says that she has witnessed these shifts. “The technology paradigm used to be a client– server type of canvas of technologies, which could be discreetly segregated into niche domains,” she explains. “Today, at Visionaire, we can clearly see that the business model is driven by enabling technology for the cloud, big data, tablets, mobility and collaboration. More than new technologies, we are witnessing a transformation of the user demand, which leads to huge integration requirements to achieve the business results required for the success of our CIO customers.” Anurag Verma, Telecoms Operations and Managed Services Lead, Smartworld, adds a telecoms perspective to this: “To date, there are two frontiers that are ushering in the biggest model change among solution providers. These are innovative FTTP technologies like Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) on the access side and IP Multimedia System (IPMS) on the core side. On the wireless forefront, broadband services like LTE are also being seen as game changers for the industry.”
Aneeta Gupta, CEO and President, Visionaire
how to solve business challenges that are not core to their business,” says Verma. However, Gupta believes that the uptake of this is a little stagnant in the region, and the CIO is the victim. “In the Middle East, the realisation is catching up at a slower rate than the rest of the world. This is because there is a huge push by vendors to dump box-based technology on CIO and IT procurement decision-makers, and there is an inevitable lock-in that is difficult to rid yourself from,” she says. “There is also the dominance of the single vendor approach, which limits the capability of the CIO to make their own choices based on best-of-breed multi-vendor solution stacks. However, the solutionsoriented business model’s success is inevitable as the CIO becomes the driver of business transformation.” Salil Dighe, Managing Director, Meta Byte Technologies, also feels that the region is struggling in this department, but believes that lack of understanding towards customers’ issues may be the problem. “Unless you understand the customer’s business needs, it will be very difficult for our regional system integrators to move away from traditional technology push or box moving. A solutions provider will definitely have products, but to be able to provide a solution is to understand the issue in depth, not necessarily in a restricted technology vertical - be it security or infrastructure. An IT domain expertise, in its entirety, is needed today, which is something we do not see.” It may be time for businesses to start looking toward smaller companies for solutions and services,
Fewer products, more services The transformation has also shown itself in how customers want to purchase. Make no mistake, this influx of new technologies has completely changed the needs of enterprises, and as such, more and more businesses are turning their noses up at products and opting for service solutions, saving time, management and, in some cases, costs. “Customers are now demanding more and more solutions to their business challenges, and are not so keen on buying products and figuring out themselves
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integration advisor Solution provider secrets
very good at their core niche domains and leave the complexity of systems integration to the specialist SIs to achieve. Several vendors are trying to latch onto the single-vendor approach to augment their requirements to meet shareholder value creation, stock price management and the ability to keep exceeding revenue and profit growth. This seems like a bubble which is likely to burst in the long term.” It’s critical that vendors try and push innovation as well as offer consistent support at this time. The Middle East is investing in IT again and all major vendors will want to be on the receiving end of this cash flow. However, Dighe stresses that solution providers are being shunned. “There’s a lack of strategic understanding and a big disconnect between IT and business. Although no one likes to accept this, it is in fact the reality. There is this element of only allowing big fives to provide a solution, without exploring what new exists. This way, customers are restricting their own vision and seem happy to pay high costs. The management needs to ask queries around why only the big fives are considered. Solution providers lack the opportunity provided by customers today.”
Salil Dighe, Managing Director, Meta Byte Technologies
according to Dighe. Locked in a state of traditional technology on a local scale, the answers may lie with regional expertise. However, the iron fisted grip the vendors have on the market makes this difficult. “Unfortunately, businesses are still looking for large conglomerates for providing solutions - ‘the big fives’. If businesses in this region need to be creative and effective, they should look at the smaller and leaner solution providers, as opposed to large organisations who generally end up recovering their large overheads instead of providing real and costeffective solutions.” But it’s no secret that the large vendors are not only witnessing the shift, but also experiencing it themselves, too. Gupta feels that vendors in the region need to transform their business ideas if they’re to keep up with demand. “The vendors are currently going through several challenges to meet and exceed the demands of the market and are conducting technology wars against each other, and in the race for meeting stock price, expectations are embroiled in short-term, tactical moves of acquisitions, mergers and layoffs, which come and go in repeated cycles,” she says. “Then there is the vendor move into systems integration, and recently, single vendors have adopted the theory of offering integrated systems in order to augment revenue numbers, even though it may not necessarily add value. “I would think it’s better for vendors to become 80
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Influence of the cloud Overall, larger vendors and solution providers that have been able to perfect cloud services have been more successful than those that haven’t. Cloud computing, not only as a service, changes the way customers work, but for solution providers, using cloud technology for integrations and sales changes the entire way they operate. “Cloud services will fundamentally change how end-users purchase, access, consume and utilise the services. In addition, this will change many of the existing business models, which are product-oriented or product-enabled,” explains Verma. Gupta adds, “First, the cloud should have impacted the SP’s own processes and work delivery model. The Middle East has been slower to take advantage of the benefits offered by cloud and it may not have changed much in the way the SPs work. This is inevitable - cloud will change the way everyone works and not just SPs. There is the whole new opportunity to offer SaaS, IaaS and CaaS. It’s not change – it’s transformation.” The general message has been clear: solutions providers must transform their business models to suit cloud computing. In an industry that changes with each passing week, business strategy and adaptability are critical elements – only the lenient will survive. www.cnmeonline.com
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Telecoms World
INSIDE
Carrying Ethernet forward
telecoms World Carrier Ethernet
Carrying Ethernet forward The increasing dominance of IP and Ethernet is enabling a convergence of networks, and allowing for a wide range of services to be carried over the same infrastructure, thus providing cost efficiency to service providers. CNME speaks to the industry to draw up some carrier Ethernet essentials.
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he rise of tablets and smartphones has had a vast effect across many different areas of telecoms. One of particular significance is the subsequent wide adoption of carrier Ethernet, driven by a combination of the high bandwidth requirements of mobile applications and the rapid growth of 4G. Most global carriers are gradually moving toward the trend and away from time-division multiplexing (TDM)-based services, driven by Ethernet OAM (Operations, Adminstration and Maintenance), the interoperability between hardware manufactuers, and the development of devices that improve end-to-end SLA and service assurance capabilities. Furthermore, Ethernet services provided by today’s carriers are playing an increasingly dominant role in wireless backhaul, growing beyond the metro network as customers are now demanding for quality of service (QoS) beyond the home network and are transcending into multiple provider networks. In the Middle East, service providers appear to be following suit. ”We are working with a variety of providers, not only in the Middle East but throughout the globe, who want to provide these services,” says Mervyn Kelly, EMEA Marketing Director, Ciena. ”Not only for their customers, but for wholesale to other operators that might not have a footprint in their territories.”
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Leo Xu, Vice President, Huawei Middle East, says service providers in the region are investing in highspeed, low-latency networks to support growth and new services demands. ”In that pursuit,” he says, ”we have seen a strong interest in carrier Ethernet solutions over the past year when considering network transport, aggregation, and Ethernet-based services. ”From LTE backhaul to routers, optical gear, and especially carrier Ethernet switches, the technology can be used in a variety of ways to realise higher bandwidth and evolve services offered on the network.” It would now seem that carrier Ethernet has become the technology of choice for business-class data service users with defined SLAs. Furthermore, service providers are offering ’classes of service’ (CoS) as monitor and measurement of service quality have become increasingly crucial, according to Anurag Verma, Telecom Operations and Managed Services Lead, Smartworld. ”Smartphone growth, coupled with the deployment of LTE, is creating a demand for bandwidth, which legacy mobile backhaul networks cannot provide.” Verma says. The big selling factor of Ethernet is its ability to provide this added bandwidth and network capacity, whilst also improving speed and, most importantly, cutting service delivery costs.
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”For the end-user, Ethernet has proven to be the most cost-effective cost-per-bit service,” Kelly says. ”For operators, the savings come both in terms of CAPEX – Ethernet switches can be significantly more cost-effective than IP/MPLS routed solutions – and OPEX, which can amount to as much as 40 to 50 percent of the operator’s total cost of ownership.” Indeed, Ericsson recomments all operators to move to Ethernet, whilst also emphasising the importance of keeping existing SLAs. ”When an operator oversubscribes and overallocates bandwidth,” says Jörgen Eriksson, Head of Fixed Broadband and Convergence, Ericsson Middle East, “it follows that they find themselves with a critical need to monitor and shape the traffic appropriately to avoid customer dissatisfaction and churn. “That’s especially true in an increasingly competitive environment, but this opens up for additional revenues as operators can leverage guaranteed SLAs for Ethernet services in order to differentiate services.” It is also important that the network infrastructure be architectured to support varying levels of QoS, with both protected and unprotected offerings, using a common infrastructure, Kelly says. ”Ethernet can accommodate these needs and yet remain manageable and flexible to grow with demand,” he explains. Xu adds that operators should ensure congestion on the network is held relatively low so as to avoid delays whilst ensuring that there is spare capacity for fail-over. ”Carrier Ethernet also needs to work effectively with the software side of the network,” he says. ”Making investments in carrier Ethernet scalable – particularly its integration with cloud architecture – is a further consideration that needs to be addressed in network planning.” With every project comes challenges, and that is no different when considering carrier Ethernet essentials.
OPEX savings can amount to as much as
50%
of operators’ TCO.
Jörgen Eriksson, Head of Fixed Broadband and Convergence, Ericsson ME
When an operator oversubscribes and overallocates bandwidth, it follows that they find themselves with a critical need to monitor and shape the traffic appropriately to avoid customer dissatisfaction and churn.”
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Accommodating the rapid growth of services, both in terms of bandwidth per service and the number of end-users, will be the main challenge, Kelly believes. ”Architecting the network to be scalable in order to absorb the coming growth in services will be the critical challenge for some time,” he says. ”Fortunately, Ethernet has a track record of such growth and flexibility in terms of topologies and services it can support.” Verma points to the the presence of high QoS and its availability requirements as the major challenges that mobile backhaul networks currently face, which are easy to manage in legacy TDM networks. ”Specialised operations, administration and management (OAM) and SLA solutions are required to complement the technology to suit the needs of the service provider,” he says. For operators that take the shared infrastructure approach, it’s important to ensure that it doesn’t result in congestion that could negatively impact the customer experience. “Better capacity planning and demand management is the key,” Verma explains. ”Network topology should be optimised to handle the varied need of residential, mobile backhaul and business customers.” Improved QoS and OAM capabilities enable sharing the Ethernet infrastructure between service types. ”Guaranteed end-to-end SLAs can be fashioned using committed information rate and excess april 2013
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information rate traffic, along with OAM tools that guarantee and verify the quality of services delivered,” Kelly says. He adds that service providers should consider techniques to minimise the time and hassle of turning up new services as the volume of subscribers increases. “Competitive markets will require very rapid service turn-up and, in such markets, the advantage will go to operators that can respond to service requests quickly and efficiently.” Xu believes there are in fact new challenges that LTE brings to mobile backhaul, especially in the era of all-IP networks and in scenarios where operators must support legacy 2G and 3G networks in parallel. ”Service providers need a ‘green’, low-power, and more cost-effective solution. Carrier Ethernet is evolving to meet these challenges, although solutions are still quite niche and not common to all vendor offerings,” he says. Looking forward, experts agree that the significant changes in the Ethernet world will continue in the coming years. The move to a more open environment will support a more rapid deployment strategy, and is key to driving continuous revenue growth. “Carriers’ control of their network, along with end-to-end SLA, puts them in a favourable position to provide more cloud services,” Eriksson says. “I also expect both the wholesale and retail Ethernet market to develop and grow a lot in the coming years.” The trend is likely to continue unabated for the foreseeable future, Kelly believes. ”With increased availability of carrier Ethernet services, and the cost-effective availability of
Leo Xu, Vice President, Huawei Middle East
bandwidth, new applications will arise, most of which will be cloud-based,” he says. ”These are increasingly critical to business performance and profitability, so high-quality, resilient services will be required.” Industry experts are predicting that the gigabit Ethernet market will grow significantly over the next few years, eventually surpassing the 10/100 mbps market in terms of the number of port shipments. ”This growth is mainly attributed to the wide deployment of broadband wireless networks,” Verma says, ”in addition to HD IPTV and OTT requirements, which is currently pushing the customer service experience to have QoS requirements.”
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careers advisor
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strategic it networking Strategic IT partner Storage Partner The rat race
careers advisor Accommodating technology
The rat race With shrinking economies, unpredictable employment rates, and new technologies booming in the global markets, CNME looks into the race between education and innovation.
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ach month, we discuss the impact that technology has over a number of verticals and how new trends can change the way we live and do business. However, we often forget to take a step back and look at the situation objectively. The industry speaks of automation, doing more with less, and saving man hours. But what does all this mean for the decreasingly critical handy man? From a business perspective, it’s no argument – technology is a winning asset to your company. Virtualisation is a cost- and time-saving trend. Cloud – the same. Mobility – allowing the work day to be stretched out into times of convenience. Everyone is suitably more at rest with these technologies. What this does suggest, however, is that when companies are scratching their heads, searching for methods to push performance, they most likely won’t be considering mass employee adoption. Recruitment of services, solutions and technologies will be far higher up on the agenda than some graduates willing to run around and fill in the gaps. But, with these new technologies, the ability to utilise them is becoming ever more important. Businesses are beginning to recognise just how critical it is that these technologies are run by the right people. Too often, in the Middle East at least, enterprises are not getting the most out of current technologies because they haven’t recruited the appropriate personnel. Companies will not get the most out of social media by recruiting someone who is ‘active’ on Twitter. The same goes for mobility – employing someone who has the ability to use mobile devices isn’t going to be a differentiator. 90
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“Over the last 10 years, businesses have become more nimble and adaptive for a number of reasons. One of the most significant drivers has been the emergence of increased competition from both local and international firms, which is creating the need for greater focus on innovation,” says Bashar Kilani, Territory Manager, Gulf and Levant, IBM. “Along with that shift, there is greater need for technologies, or systems organisations to drive the development of these new products or services. Companies are looking for a talent who can straddle both those needs and deliver the capability to think creatively and innovatively.” The crux of the story is that if businesses can integrate the recruitment process with the way the market is going in terms of new technologies, then new opportunities will open up and a new wave of employee will begin to surface. Nicolai Solling, Director of Technical Services, help AG, outlines the point. “The ability to do more with less and the streamlining of operations through deployment of technology are often seen as the precursors to staff cuts. This is true in that it will eliminate redundancies but that has always been the case with any business hoping to increase efficiency,” he states. “The smart employee who is capable of adapting and delivering services that cannot be replaced, made redundant or outsourced will find employment even in such a competitive job market. Furthermore, these new technologies which are touted to shrink employee counts, will in fact generate an entirely new set of opportunities for employment which did not exist before.”
13% of UAE students will hope to move into IT following their graduation.
Bashar Kilani, Territory Manager, Gulf & Levant, IBM
The mini revolution Such new technologies, then, have appeared to create new platforms of employment. As Solling said, new technologies and solutions for manually minded problems will always cause redundancies. But, with that comes new opportunity. “The development of these technologies has opened up new markets and new possibilities. The need to manage these opportunities is increasing the workforce and driving employment space. Companies
With the development of technology, companies are able to accomplish aspects of their business that they were not able to before. However, technology is never going to be able to replace the human element of a workforce.” www.cnmeonline.com
need to ensure that they have the right people on their team that can best utilise these different technologies and address these new markets more effectively,” says Graham Owen, Regional Sales Director, MEA and Turkey, Cambium Networks. He adds, “With the development of technology, companies are able to accomplish aspects of their business that they were not able to before. However, technology is never going to be able to replace the human element of a workforce. Technology is there to assist people and improve response times and information sharing, it will not retract the requirement of the human influence in the work place.” Kilani agrees, saying that an important aspect of embracing new technologies is adapting your workforce that comes with it. What this means for the older, traditional workforce is hard to say. But businesses do not appear to be too concerned with that at this moment in time – the priority is utilising new technologies and turning them into productivity and results. “These new dynamics mean that we must start to hire talent that is able to quickly absorb and understand how their companies can transform their processes to leverage cost saving technologies to benefit from more efficient solutions such as analytics or cloud,” he says. “Companies are cultivating more open and collaborative cultures—encouraging employees to connect, learn from each other and thrive in a world of rapid change. Companies must now engage employees to embrace working in a more open and collaborative environment as well as develop more technology-savvy and socially minded employee interactions.” april 2013
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careers advisor Accommodating technology
Seizing opportunities With IT becoming such a big business enabler over the past few years, more and more opportunities to progress in the IT space are cropping up. With every new technology or trend, new roles formulated around driving those trends are introduced—a good example at the moment being the increasing need for data scientists. Condensing, collecting and making use of the big data jungle is a high priority for many. Someone who is purposefully trained in this space will be a major asset for companies going forward. help AG is one of those companies investing in big data. “There are a number of trends that we see when talking to customers and also from our own company. One of them is big data and how we use that to align our offerings to the market. This can be something as simple as understanding which search phrases are being typed in on Google search when it comes to IT security, and then making sure that our product portfolio aligns,” explains Solling. Although experts strongly believe that innovation will continue to inspire and offer new opportunities,
Nicolai Solling, Director of Technical Services, help AG
when it comes to technology, being part of the old school will leave you in a position to lose out if you’re unable to adapt and progress with the times. This makes the market a very competitive place. It seems in the technology field, if you fall behind, you get left behind.
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interview Eyad Shihabi
Healing the cracks As the dust begins to settle following, arguably, HP’s most challenging era, Middle East Managing Director, Eyad Shihabi, talks to CNME about where the wheels came off, and how retracing the steps back to the beginning will provide the spark needed to launch the company into the future.
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t’s been a challenging time recently at HP and you’ve struggled to keep out of the news – how has that been from your perspective? Firstly, we’ve been fortunate to be the biggest supplier of IT news over the past few years, but joking aside, it has been challenging, personally. Since the Autonomy scandal, I’ve found myself spending most of my time defending the company, the policies, the innovations, but not anymore. Now, when I go into a meeting with a partner, I ask if I have to update them on HP and they say no, they’re confident, they’re happy. HP is most definitely in the turnaround phase.
How much of this turnaround is down to Meg Whitman? What Meg did was come in and recognise our problems and issues, honestly and openly admit these and then set about publicly rectifying them. She is exactly what this company needed, she instils confidence and enthusiasm into this company and every team, partner and customer believes in her.
One of the main issues, from a customer perspective, was that many products were too complicated and the innovation aspect of HP had become slightly distorted - how did Whitman address this? We had multiple products that were largely doing the same thing - too many silos, too many complications. Meg has given us new standards, we listened, we innovated. Now, take our converged cloud as an example – we’re the only company which can deliver the flexibility to our customers that we do, with no lock in - we’re proud of that. We give the tools to administrators in this space with over 100 maps for them to implement. 94
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We’ve completely simplified the experience - that’s what we’ve been strictly focused on over the past year. This is about recognising where we went wrong, stripping it down and starting again. Technology can always be improved. The last few years have been confused; we were focused on acquisitions and not innovation. Now, we’re back in R&D and 100 percent of our energy is in investing in technology and innovation.
HP has had a fair share of CEOs in recent years. Why is Whitman the right person for the job? What Meg has done has recognised the culture of the company, the roots that Bill (William Hewlett) and Dave (David Packard) installed and made it what it once was. About four or five years ago, we started to deviate from this culture and then the cracks started to show. Meg has made it clear to all of us that this company needs to be run on the culture of Bill and Dave, and that’s where we’re headed now. We’re growing now, and we’re pulling away from our competition. Competition won’t have any reason to make noise about us anymore. In November last year, HP took an $8.8billion writedown following the news that Autonomy had grossly misrepresented its finances. What was the reaction like from your customers and partners in the immediate aftermath? I went into meetings thinking I was going to have to do some explaining. However, when I arrived I was stopped and told to deliver a message to our CEO saying they salute what Meg has done. They believe in the technology and that’s different to the acquisitions. I replied, ‘You just saved me half an hour’. Smart people, business people, understand
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what Meg has done and the culture she has inspired. When we make a mistake, we acknowledge it and move on.
And since then, what has the vibe at HP been like? Look, we’re one of the most successful and vigilant brands in the world. Last quarter, we over-achieved and that brings confidence to us. Before, in the big quarters, we were under-shooting the mark, because our vision wasn’t clear and we had problems in-house. But we cleaned up the foundations, we changed things, and now we’ve never been more confident. And in regards to your channel – partners recently expressed their concerns with HP going into direct competition with them. Locally, 99 percent of your business is channel-driven, so how have you dealt with these concerns? The channel plays a vital role, more so here than anywhere else globally perhaps. We did have some issues where, in places, HP was stepping on the toes of partners, because we didn’t have an aligned channel policy. We didn’t have a single channel that dealt with the service channel and the product channel - this caused confusion and a lack of trust. So we restructured this so it was all under one simple leadership. I went on a tour to meet all the partners, lay out the foundation of the changes, explain the alignment and now our satisfaction has tripled. We will never increase our direct business here. Those partners are crucial to us.
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PRODUCTS Launches and releases
PRODUCT WATCH A breakdown of the top products and solutions to launch and release in the last month.
PRODUCT OF THE MONTH
Product: ElitePad 900 Vendor: HP What it does: The HP ElitePad 900, which weighs 680 grams and is 9.2 mm thick, is designed with IT managers in mind. It packs in the full service ability, enhanced security and manageability found in HP Elite PCs, with a battery that passed over 115,000 hours of tests. The 16x10 aspect ratio and 10.1-inch display maximises the display area for ideal viewing of traditional business applications, as well as video content. Powered by next-generation Intel mobile processors, the Windows 8 tablet delivers PC productivity for those on the go and Intel x86 compatibility for existing business application support. What you need to know: You may recognise the ElitePad 900 as the subject of CNME’s March cover story, along with Emirates Airlines, which was announced as the global launch partner back in December. Emirates started rolling out the tablets in January, but the official release came in March. Designed for business, government, healthcare and retail, the tablet features ‘Smart Jackets’, which add connectivity options and longer battery life, along with specific add-ons that customise the device for specialised uses.
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Product: XPS 18 PC Vendor: Dell
Product: Xperia SP and L smartphones Vendor: Sony
What it does: The XPS 18 PC is an 18-inch all-in-one PC that can double as a supersized tablet. In tablet mode, the device provides up to five hours of run time on a single battery charge. Two stands that pop out on the back provide balance when the all-in-one is resting on a table. The device’s touchscreen can display images at a high-definition resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, according to Dell, which is calling the device a “portable all-in-one”. What you need to know: This product announcement comes as Dell’s commitment to the PC market is under question as the company pursues a leveraged buyout by founder Michael Dell and equity investor Silver Lake. PC makers have been introducing all-in-ones that transform into large-sized tablets since the start of the year, and whilst this device’s size and 2.2 kg weight doesn’t make it highly mobile, it is easier to carry around than typical all-in-one.
What it does: Sony’s Xperia SP handset will feature a 4.6-inch screen with 1280 x 720 resolution, as well as a 1.7 GHz dual core processor and an 8 megapixel camera. The phone has an aluminium frame and a new version of Sony’s Bravia graphics software that adjusts images automatically, and can run on high-speed LTE networks. The company’s lowerend Xperia L will have a 4.3-inch screen with 854 x 480 resolution, a similar dual core processor and 8 megapixel camera. What you need to know: Following the launch of its flagship Xperia Z smartphone in February, Sony has announced two middlerange models to go on sale during the next three months. Sony is building out its Xperia mobile phone line as it pursues a stated goal of becoming the world’s third-largest smartphone maker behind Samsung and Apple. Both phones will support NFC technology and run Android 4.1, or Jelly Bean.
Product: Galaxy S4 Vendor: Samsung What it does: The Galaxy S4 has a slightly bigger screen than the S3, at 5 inches, and weighs a fraction less, at 130 grams. It’s also slightly slimmer, at 7.9 millimeters thick. It will be offered with a 1.9GHz quad-core processor or a 1.6GHz octa-core processor, depending on the market. The screen is a Super AMOLED display with 441 pixels per inch. It comes with 2GB of DDR3 memory and storage options of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. A MicroSD card slot can expand that by an extra 64GB. What you need to know: The S4 will support global LTE roaming and has front and rear-facing cameras that can be used simultaneously. This will allow a person to make a video call while simultaneously showing people on the other end of the line what they’re looking at. Two photos taken simultaneously can also be combined in various ways. The smartphone, which will run on Android 4.2.2, Jelly Bean, will be available from 327 operators in 155 countries starting at the end of April.
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Column The word on the street
Joe Lipscombe CNME’s man about town gives his spin on the latest IT news and trends.
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Marissa’s nightmayer
A
llow me to begin with a disclaimer – the word ‘Yahoo’ will be used tirelessly throughout this article, therefore to maintain the morbid tone with which I speak, I shall not be including the unnecessary exclamation point often found at the end of the word. Yahoo’s CEO is one successful lady, and you don’t become successful without making a few bold moves. However, Marissa Mayer’s most recent bold move to ban Yahoo employees from working from home has sparked an industry-wide debate which has top CEOs, analysts and journalists all over the world talking about her. The key issue with her decision to ban Yahoo workers from telecommuting, says Jonathan Budden, Microsoft’s HR business partner for the Gulf, is the affect it will have on employee morale. “If it were me, I’d begin questioning my value,” he says. “It’s a total devaluation. Employees may start questioning whether they want to work for a company like that.” Moreover, Budden feels like this is a step backwards for a technology company trying to rebrand and rebuild itself. “It’s a complete contradiction to where the company is going,” he continues. “People are far more productive when they’ve got the option of balancing their work life around their social life.” And although Mayer may believe that this is the right way to bring the team ethic back to the company and create a stronger, more personal work force, Budden thinks that the move itself will be the main talking point for the foreseeable future. “People will begin talking more, obviously, but they won’t be saying they’ve got some great ideas; they’ll be saying they’re annoyed at being in the office all day,” he says. But I think there’s more to the Mayer
april 2013
decision than meets the eye. This isn’t a kneejerk reaction from an inexperienced boss, remember. This is a strategic shift in company policy, led by a CEO who was hauled in to resurrect a flailing Yahoo. Mayer will know exactly which employees are and are not delivering what she believes they should be. If the next logical step in a journey even Frodo would puff his cheeks out to is bringing the employees of that company into work, then why is that even being questioned? I’m a reporter. I work in and out of an office on a daily basis. If I’m not attending events or conducting interviews then I can be found at my desk, as expected. However, it’s understandable that those with families which rely on company flexibility will be ruffled by this change. But this isn’t an off-the-cuff decision made to impose leadership – it’s a measurement of the state of a company which has turned to Mayer in a time of crisis. And it may well be (Mayer will know more than I do, and for the sake of my opinion I hope she does) that these work-at-home employees are part of the problem. Personally, I believe that a number of Yahoo employees can thank their lucky stars, and perhaps Mayer whilst they’re at it. As a student, I was told to recognise a bad investment and cut my losses. But what Mayer has done is avoid mass execution and recalled her team for, perhaps, one final huddle. Budden believes that this kind of decision will fail to engage employees, “And if you’re not engaged, you’re not productive,” he says. And maybe this will show itself to be the case, but in the meantime it’s only right - not to mention, fair - that the witch hunt subsides and Mayer, the CEO, is allowed to lead her company the way she sees fit. As Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” With a subtle grin, I bet Mayer has recited this quote over and over.
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