Computer News Middle East April 2016

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Suite life Accor Hotels Middle East’s Jeroen Wisse on his passion for guest-pleasing IT

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EDITORIAL

Publishing Director Rajashree Rammohan raj.ram@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5685 Editorial

The future of networking When we started Network World Middle East Awards seven years ago, the first from CPI Technology Division’s stable, we had a little more than ten categories. Back in those days, networking was perceived as just ‘plumbing’ and with good reason too. Ever since the 1990s, when we witnessed the wave of convergence, which integrated multiple communications services into a single network, the world of enterprise networking has been bereft of any innovations. Things started changing around the time we introduced our awards programme with the advent of cloud computing, mobility and software-defined everything technologies. Suddenly, the spotlight was on networking as the cornerstone of IT transformation. Meeting the demands for an efficient, flexibility and highly available technology infrastructure depended on Over the next network capacity and coverage. couple of years, The appreciation of growing relevance of network we may see a infrastructure in enterprises is reflected in our awards radical change in as well; this year we had 22 categories, starting from network IT and high-end data centre networking all the way down how it operates. to physical infrastructure. I think we have barely scratched the surface of what is really possible with these advanced networking technologies. Over the next couple of years, we may see a radical change in network IT and how it operates. Though the adoption has been a little slow, SDN is emerging as the next technology frontier and it offers the promise of changing enterprise networks for the better. Security and Internet of Things initiatives will also drive the investments in next-generation network infrastructure and in the future, network managers are also likely to take on new tasks such as virtualisation, analytics and programming. I think we might also see a radical change in the way we design networks – the basic tenet of design has always been speed rather than flexibility. Now, with the new breed of business technologies and user demands for high-performance applications, the focus will be on building networks that can dynamically respond to user and bandwidth demands, with flexibility and scalability at its core.

Talk to us:

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Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5678 Editor Annie Bricker annie.bricker@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 1643 Deputy Editor James Dartnell james.dartnell@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5684 Online Editor Adelle Geronimo adelle.geronimo@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5683 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Chris Stevenson chris.stevenson@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5674 Group Sales Director Kausar Syed kausar.syed@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 1647 Sales Manager Merle Carrasco merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5676 Circulation Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5682 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5673 Designers Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5680 Neha Kalvani neha.kalvani@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 3751644 DIGITAL SERVICES Web Developer Jefferson de Joya Abbas Madh Photographer Charls Thomas Maksym Poriechkin webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

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EDITORIAL

Our events

Shukran and goodnight With a bit of nostalgia, a great deal of gratitude and a dose of anxiety, I have to reveal that this editorial will be my last for CNME. When I joined CPI Media Group just over two years ago, I was not only new to the GCC technology world, but new to Dubai itself. Everything impressed me. As I travelled more around the region – to Bahrain, Muscat and Doha – I became more and more enamoured with the charm of these places. However, the thing that truly had me wide-eyed, was that it was my job to meet the men and women that are positioning this region as one that can compete with the world’s best – the chief information officers.

Perhaps twenty to thirty years ago it would have been an overstatement to claim that the IT departments were the foundation upon which the region was being constructed.

These days, it has become a reality that the CIOs are running the show. No business, no government, no organisation of any kind would stand a chance in these modern times without a solid IT strategy. IT is no longer one department, it is every department across an entity. Business leaders expect availability 24/7, security from the darkest of bad actors, and the comfort of knowing that their IT infrastructure is scalable enough to handle any adaptation.

Goodbye, y'all!

In the past two years I have been struck by the ambition of the CIOs of this region. An area with a mix of legacy systems and greenfield IT is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we are able to escape the deadweight of stagnating old boxes, but on the other, jumping into innovative technology head first can seem risky. The thriving IT industry in the Middle East is a testament to your success in walking this line.

As I part from CNME I want to say thank you. Thank you to the amazing team we have at CPI Technology and Finance, and thank you as well, CIOs, for trusting us to do your stories justice. I trust that our paths will cross again, and I leave you in the capable hands of CNME’s new Editor, Mr. James Dartnell.

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Contents

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ISSUE 291 | april 2016

32

Qatar’s Sidra Medical and Research Centre

28 Accor hotels middle east Jeroen Wisse

16 Safety first

40 Migration made easy

19 Cloud care

54 The In-Thing

20 Testing transformation

62 The future perfect

42

network world middle east awards 2016

66

Huawei put the spotlight on 'Safe Cities' at the technology showpiece CeBit in Germany. We bring you highlights of the event.

Representatives from Blue Coat Systems met with top CIOs from the region to discuss data protection, tokenisation and the cloud.

CNME together with TransSys Solutions hosted an enthralling roundtable discussion on the rise of as-a-service models.

36 City as a service CXO CORNER UAE Exchange cfo pradeep kumar

www.cnmeonline.com

CIO Mahmoud Kamal discusses how he plans to deliver a fresh and powerful infrastructure to Habtoor City visitors.

Oasis Investment Company's MN Chaturvedi on how he implemented a new system that enabled them to have a seamless migration of data.

How can telcos differentiate themselves in delivering IoT infrastructure, and what hurdles must be overcome in this process?

Artificial Intelligence technologies are already changing the way we consume data. We take a look at why AI is is only likely to grow in the coming years.

70 The digital future

Gartner’s top 10 predictions herald what it means to be human in a digital world.

april 2016

7

CIO Speaker series

Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage adopts private cloud to streamline IT service delivery HPE Cloud Service Automation delivers faster services and better use of resources Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH) is responsible for developing the tourism sector within Saudi Arabia. It is a state-owned entity but works alongside hotels, museums and other stakeholders within the tourism sector, at home and abroad. It has 33 locations throughout the Kingdom and over 1,300 employees.

“

“We had major challenges with our virtual environment. Whenever the QA team or Development team requested a virtual machine it would take us a minimum of three hours to be up and running.

We’d have to check space, storage, whether we had enough CPU, and what IP address to assign. Now, with HPE Cloud Service Automation we’ve reduced the time taken by 88 per cent.”

— Yazeed Al-Marshoud, IT operations manager, Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage

Within the Saudi Government sector, SCTH has a reputation for being progressive and willing to embrace change. Given the nature of its focus, SCTH is seen as more international in its outlook, and actively recruits senior management with international experience. The IT department reflects this.

SCTH has adopted a private cloud, the first of its kind in the Saudi Government sector. HPE Cloud Service Automation (CSA) is a cloud based self-service portal that gives a menu of services for users.

This allows SCTH to automate and simplify the deployment and management of its hybrid IT services. HPE CSA supports SCTH’s heterogeneous IT environment, helping reduce service deployment time and costs and providing a menu of services for users.

Read more at www.cnmeonline.com/hpe

10

HOT CONSUMER TRENDS

1. The lifestyle network effect

HOTEL

With diversifying online use, social effects like crowd intelligence and the sharing economy multiply

2. Streaming natives Teenagers watch more YouTube video content daily than other age group

5. Sensing homes Bricks used to build homes could include sensors that monitor mould, leeks and electricity issues

4. Vitual gets real

3. All ends the screen age Artificial intelligence will enable interaction with objects without the need for a smartphone screen

NEW 3D PRINTED MEALS HERE

Consumers want virtual technology for everyday activities such as sports and 3D food printing

6. Smart commuters

7. Emergency chat

Commuters want to use their time meaningfully and not feel like passive objects in transit

Social networks may become the preferred way to contact emergency services

8. Internables Internal sensors in our bodies that measure wellbeing may become the new wearables

9. Everything gets hacked Most smartphone users believe hacking and viruses will continue to be an issue

10. Netizen journalists Consumers share more information than ever and believe it increases their influence on society Source:

James Dartnell Deputy Editor, CNME

T

hey were always going to find a way in.

Following a request for Apple to build a backdoor – a modified OS to bypass security – into one of the San Bernadino killers’ iPhone 5c’s, the FBI has now dropped the case, having successfully accessed the desired data via a third party hacker.

Having nobly defended its customers’ right to data privacy, Apple – in an ironic twist of fate – is demanding to know how their software was breached.

Their decision not to collaborate with the US government has made them a champion of user rights, but it needs others to follow suit.

Looking forward, this is perhaps most alarming for citizens as we move into the age of the Internet of Things.

The weaknesses of IoT are often pointed out; an increased number of endpoints giving a greater attack surface, and intrusive levels of data collection chief among them.

However, arguably the greatest threat to citizen security and privacy could www.cnmeonline.com

Column

Show them the door be the ability of technology vendors to collaborate with governments.

Cryptographer and director for the University of Pennsylvania Distributed Systems Lab Matt Blaze aptly pointed out that, “We can’t discuss how to make our systems secure with backdoors until we can figure out how to do it without backdoors.”

In that sense, for the time being, at least, this threat is not any more serious than that of being affected by cybercriminals anywhere.

The ease with which the FBI’s third party obtained the desired information from Apple once again confirms – if proof were needed – that no system or technology is unhackable. Far from it, in fact.

However, if we can envisage a time where security flaws are all but removed from technology products, and one in which IoT is an integral part of our daily lives, then we have a problem.

It’s widely accepted that for IoT to succeed, an open, interoperable –

and crucially, secure – ecosystem is needed.

This will encompass hundreds of technology vendors, who operate across jurisdictions.

When a situation akin to the San Bernadino case inevitably arises in this age, how easy will it be for that user privacy to be breached?

All it takes is one vendor to cave in to government pressure, and any virtually impenetrable security system of the future would be broken.

The amount of data that this could leave exposed to government scrutiny is mind-boggling.

What’s more, this is merely the thin end of the wedge once one vendor decided to cave in to the state – more would follow immediately sacrifice confidence in a system.

Drawing the line in terms of regulations regarding IoT is tough in this respect.

In future, it will need firms to follow Apple’s example in putting the interests of customers – and subsequently, the integrity of technology – first. april 2016

13

short takes

Month in view

Trend Micro completes acquisition of HP’s TippingPoint

Osman Sultan, CEO, du; and Dr. Aisha bin Bishr, DG, Smart Dubai Office

Eva Chen, CEO, Trend Micro

Trend Micro International has announced the closure of an agreement to acquire TippingPoint, a provider of intrusion prevention systems and integrated network security solutions, from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

“We are very excited to see this agreement come to fruition as it demonstrates our ongoing commitment to enterprise security,” said Eva Chen, CEO, Trend Micro.

“With the addition of TippingPoint, Trend Micro provides customers with the unmatched ability to respond to known and unknown threats, exploits and vulnerabilities across the entire attack lifecycle. Trend Micro is now in a unique position to deliver these integrated, layered capabilities to address the complex network security challenges facing global companies today.”

Trend Micro TippingPoint includes threat intelligence from Digital Vaccine Labs (DVLabs), as well as the power of the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the bounty program that encourages and rewards independent security researchers to identify previously unknown vulnerabilities. When combined with Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, it is hoped it can provide capabilities to protect enterprises across the network, data centre, cloud and endpoints.

14

april 2016

Smart Dubai and du introduce new digital platform Smart Dubai, in partnership with du, has launched the Smart Dubai Platform.

Smart Dubai Platform, according to both entities, will be the central operating system for the Dubai Smart City, providing access to services and data for all individuals, private sector as well as public sector entities.

The platform will be developed and implemented by du, in a public-private partnership model, which the telco company hopes will set net benchmarks for cross-sector partnerships for Smart City initiatives globally.

“Our vision has consistently been to transform Dubai into the happiest city on Earth," Dr. Aisha bin Bishr, Director General, Smart Dubai Office, said. "The Smart Dubai Platform forms the backbone of our Smart City transformation. Uniting the city’s physical infrastructure, open and shared data, and city-wide smart applications, the Platform will become the central ‘operating system’ and the nerve centre for Dubai.

“We envision radical enhancements to our city leadership decision-making, operational efficiencies, and daily quality of life: for a city planner, directing operational cost savings into data-driven research and development. For a parent, checking health data from a child’s school to determine if a flu vaccination is

required or reviewing household energy consumption to conserve resources and save money for a family vacation; for a tourist, utilising the live public transportation data to make the most out of their time spent in the city; and for all commuters, enjoying reduced traffic congestion as more and more services are transacted online.”

$185

billion forecasted

annual spending on mobility across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa by 2019 Source: IDC

www.cnmeonline.com

According to the fifth annual Global Cloud Index

by Cisco, by 2019, 83 percent of all MEA data centre traffic is expected to come from the cloud with the region expected to have the highest cloud traffic growth rate at

41%

Nedaa selects Nokia for next-gen Smart City services Nedaa, Professional Communication Corporation, the Dubai Government security networks provider, and its approved technology provider Esharah Etisalat Security Solutions, have commissioned Nokia to deploy a Smart City solution based on a 5G-ready nextgeneration network.

The solution is expected to enable high-bandwidth voice, video and other data applications for missioncritical services and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The comprehensive scope of the project includes the supply of

Lenovo, Juniper Networks sign global partnership the data centre, the two Lenovo and Juniper companies intend to bring Networks has open, flexible solutions announced a global to market, leveraging strategic partnership the ONIE (Open Network to leverage synergies Install Environment) in their respective model. product and Rami Rahim, CEO, technology portfolios Juniper Networks, said, to build data centre “Partnering with Lenovo infrastructure Rami Rahim, CEO, expands Juniper’s strategy solutions for Juniper Networks to deliver a full-stack enterprise and Websolution for a wide-range scale customers. of data centres, from the mid-range According to both companies, enterprise to private cloud and the alliance reflects a shared to hyper-scale customers. We are commitment to deliver simplified, excited about collaborating with flexible, and high-performance Lenovo to leverage the full power solutions that will provide of our IP-networking portfolio customers faster time-tobased on JunosOS and Contrail, in application value with reduced delivering the next generation of operating costs. converged, hyper-converged, and Under the terms of the hyper-scale solutions to customers agreement, customers will be able in China and globally.” to purchase Juniper’s portfolio of Lenovo and Juniper aim to networking products directly from develop joint go-to-market plans Lenovo for easier acquisition, and a tailor-made resell model as well as consolidated support. to address unique localisation With the move to disaggregation requirements in China. of hardware and software in www.cnmeonline.com

5G-ready, mission-critical networks consisting of security solutions, core and radio access solutions, and IP/ MPLS, optical and microwave backhaul network, along with professional services.

Yousif Al Ali, Chief Technical Officer, Nedaa, said, “Dubai has historically pioneered in providing exceptional quality of life, and an unparalleled business and technology innovation environment, inspired by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s vision to make Dubai the happiest city on earth. Nokia has been an integral part of Dubai’s security communications network since 2001, and the company’s eagerness to adapt to our new, stringent security requirements gives us the confidence to make our city the safest and smartest in the world.”

Etisalat appoints new CEO Etisalat has announced the appointment Saleh Abdullah Al Abdooli as its Chief Executive Officer.

With the restructuring, Al Abdooli will now manage the company’s international operations as well as local UAE operations.

Saleh Abdullah Al Al Abdooli has over Abdooli, Etisalat 25 years of experience in the telecommunication sector and a career dotted with accomplishments, most notably the establishment of Etisalat Misr in Egypt.

In 2012, he returned to the UAE as CEO of Etisalat UAE, where he led several initiatives across various verticals including financial, marketing, technology and infrastructure.

In addition to his newly appointed position as the Chief Executive Officer of Emirates Telecommunications Group Company (Etisalat Group), he is also the deputy chairman of the board of directors, chairman of the executive committee for Etisalat Misr, chairman of Etisalat Services Holding Company and chairman of Thuraya. He was most recently appointed as Etisalat’s representative n Mobily’s Board of Directors. april 2016

15

EVENT

huawei CeBit

Safety first Mid-March saw Huawei’s return to technology showpiece CeBit in Germany, with a booth that engulfed most of Hannover Exhibition Centre’s Hall 2. There, they put an emphasis on ‘Safe Cities’, making it clear that the Middle East is in their sights for a range of new solutions. t first glance, governments of the GCC countries will have been intrigued by the prospect of Huawei’s solutions portfolio on offer at CeBit 2016.

While most of the leading cities across the region fit the bill of feeling ‘safe’ – Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha featured in The Economist’s Safe City Index 2015 Top 50 – it’s impossible to sit still when it comes to the security of citizens.

Huawei executives highlighted the potential of their ‘Safe City’ solutions during a media roundtable, and it became clear that the Middle East would be a key focus market for the firm in years to come.

There are several core components of Huawei’s Safe City portfolio.

A

16

april 2016

The company’s Converged Command Centre solution converges IP contact centre, computer-aided dispatch, videoconferencing and telepresence into a centralised operating picture for visbility and accessibility.

The Cloud-based Intelligent Surveillance Solution provides video content analysis and cloud-based video recording.

Perhaps of most interest to the GCC will be the Smart Road Safety solution, which offers automatic number plate recognition along with the ability to clock driving offences such as speeding, red light running and illegal turns.

Powering these technologies are Huawei’s 4G/eLTE Mission Critical Broadband Trunking solution, which

provides a “mission-critical” wireless broadband network for front-line responders.

Meanwhile, its Agile Network solution provides connectivity from the command centre to the field via either WAN, LAN, microwave, LTE or GPON networks.

Huawei has been at pains to stress the importance of its portfolio, in line with the launch of its Connected City Light solution.

Joe So, Chief Technology Officer, Industry Solutions, Enterprise Business Group, used examples of Huawei’s work in the GCC and East Africa to highlight the purpose of the services.

Implementing a ComputerAided Dispatch system, broadband trunking eLTE and video surveillance systems in Nairobi, Huawei claims the additions led to a 46 percent drop in crime rates in the city, as well as a 75 percent drop in incident response times. So highlighted how the visit of Pope Francis in November was met with no injuries or incidents as a result of the solutions.

“Having a system that allows for better management of the police force has been transformative for Nairobi,” So said. “Would-be criminals are more likely to be deterred when cameras www.cnmeonline.com

“Every government that I meet has different demands, expectations and priorities. Turkey, for example, wants to address civil unrest, while Dubai is concerned about reducing speeding offences.”

Connected and surveillance City Lighting systems are solution. Swift in place, and, Liu, president crucially, citizens of switches feel safer knowing and enterprise they are there.” communications, So went on highlighted how to highlight how Joe So, Chief Technology lighting consumes Huawei had Officer, Industry Solutions, 19 per-cent of the helped Saudi Enterprise Business Group, world’s energy Arabia to converge Huawei. supplies, and its emergency a solution was services contact needed to reduce numbers, as well this relative waste. as building the infrastructure needed The multi-level control solution for a command centre. connects street lamps to lighting “This has unified security agencies management applications via so that officers can be more efficiently Huawei’s Agile IoT Gateway and Agile dispatched,” So said.

Controller, and adopts a GIS-based He underlined the solutions as management system, using 6LoWPAN having the potential to tackle specific to automatically diagnose, network, problems faced by governments and trouble-shoot problems. across the Middle East.

Huawei also made its presence “Every government that I meet felt in a number of other industries, has different demands, expectations signing a memorandum of and priorities. Turkey, for example, understanding with robot technology wants to address civil unrest, while firm KUKA, to develop smart Dubai is concerned about reducing manufacturing solutions for industrial speeding offences. Our solution markets in Europe and China. relies on a collaborative and open Under the new agreement, the ecosystem for customisation on top of firms will collaborate in the areas of what we offer.” cloud computing, Big Data, mobile A key aspect of Huawei’s Safe technology, and industrial robots.

City initiative was the launch its www.cnmeonline.com

Research and development will be central to the new partnership.

Key areas of R&D include the use of small cell Internet of Things, wireless and 5G networks, as well as Big Data solutions in manufacturing and factory environments.

The deployment of Huawei’s infrastructure-as-a-service solutions will be used to develop cloud-hosted smart manufacturing services. In addition, KUKA and Huawei will set up a joint robot programming team to explore the use of imitative deep learning in advanced manufacturing environments.

“The manufacturing industry is undergoing profound transformation, and robots will be critical in revolutionising factories and driving new opportunities,” said Ryan Ding, executive director and president of products and solutions, Huawei. “KUKA plays a central role in promoting and developing smart manufacturing solutions in Germany and across the world. We’re confident that our strategic partnership with KUKA will enable Huawei to lead the way in helping global manufacturing enterprises transform their factories and gain significant competitive advantages from realising smart manufacturing.” april 2016

17

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EVENT

bluecoat roundtable

cloud care On 28th March, representatives from Blue Coat Systems met with top CIOs of the region to discuss data protection, tokenisation and the cloud.

B

lue Coat Systems, the enterprise security firm, along with CNME, hosted a CIO Roundtable at Jumeirah Emirates Towers. Representing Blue Coat were Bashar Bashaireh, General Manager, Middle East, and Bayan Achkar, Senior System Engineer. In attendance were a number of top CIOs from around the region, hailing from industries such as aviation, food and beverage and healthcare.

The subject of the day was cloud security, a topic which as a top provider of on-premise, hybrid and cloud-based solutions for protecting web connectivity, the experts at Blue Coat were more than prepared to share thought leadership with the attendees.

After a brief presentation from Achkar on the latest threats and corresponding solutions, the floor was opened up for general discussion.

The CIOs present shared where they were in terms of adopting cloud solutions. “We are preparing to move some things into the cloud,” said Samir Khan, CIO, African and Eastern. www.cnmeonline.com

“There are many factors to consider, and preparation is important.”

In contrast, some companies had already moved some of their core apps to the cloud. Vignesh Unadkat, CIO, Thumbay Group, for example said, “Our data is still on-premise, but we have many applications on a private cloud. The privacy of our data is extremely important, as we are bound by legislation to retain patient health records for three to seven years.”

In terms of legislation, the CIOs present also expressed some concerns regarding data loss and cybercrime. “It doesn’t seem clear,” said NSN Murthay, head of IT, Avivo Group, “where the law lies when it comes to data. If a criminal steals data from your company, but the data is stored in a centre in another country, and the criminal is in a third country, everything becomes more complicated.”

Hashem Neama, IT Project Manager, Gulf Air reported that the company is leveraging cloud-based technology in myriad ways. However,

he understands the general concerns around the issue. “We all need to ask ourselves, ‘How do you know where the data is?’” he said.

Bashaireh and Achkar agreed that data sovereignty is an issue, but put forth Blue Coat’s system of tokenisation as a solution.

“Tokenisation replaces sensitive data with a surrogate value. If the tokens are somehow taken, they are useless to the criminal,” explained Achkar.

“Tokens can be used to achieve compliance with requirements that dictate how sensitive data needs to be treated and secured by companies, and keep sensitive data out of the wrong hands.”

All in attendance agreed that cloud computing and storage were no longer an option, and that cloud technologies were the way of the future. The consensus was, however, that there needs to be a way to protect and monitor data in the cloud. Technologies such as Blue Coat’s tokenisation, it was agreed, are valid options in protecting this data moving forward. april 2016

19

EVENT

transsys roundtable

Testing transformation The rise of as-a-service models will play a pivotal role in the digital transformations of organisations worldwide. With this in mind, CNME hosted an enthralling roundtable discussion in partnership with TransSys Solutions to gauge senior decision-maker sentiment on the topic.

T

ransSys representatives Prabu Balasubramanyan, executive director and Stephen Fernandes, executive vice president, got the discussion underway by asking what digital transformation meant to the executives around the table.

Dr Jassim Haji, director of IT, Gulf Air, said that digital transformations had the power to be game-changing, but only if organisations had the appropriate strategy and infrastructure to deliver on their promise. “The customer has to be the driver of the move,” he said. “Co-existing architectures are a general indicator of not being fully prepared, but once you are, a digital transformation is a pure business driver. Many organisations use a ‘digital transformation’ as an umbrella of promise, but are not able to deliver proper ROI.” Representing the Dubai Smart Gov organisation was Matar Saeed Al Humairi, director of the infrastructure management department. He highlight the use 20

april 2016

of PaaS and SaaS models in Dubai and how they are playing a key role in the emirate’s digital journey.

“The Smart City initiative has been based on this,” he said. “We’re producing personalised dashboards for government officials which will enhance their experience.” He went on to highlight how government initiatives will leave slow adopters of digital solutions behind. “His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has made it clear in the context of this digital journey – change will come.”

Saeed Al Ghailani, director of IT, Department of Transport Abu Dhabi, described how the customer would have to be put first in this journey.

“We have to ask ourselves what it means for them,” he said. “I believe digitalisation will be driven more by governments than the private sector.

The Abu Dhabi Government is building its own cloud for its infrastructure and applications and this is setting the tone for the next few years.”

Anshul Srivastav, CIO, Union Insurance – a relative newcomer to

Dubai, having arrived three months ago – explained how his previous experience with digitalisation had been pivotal for his former employers. “It worked wonders at AXA,” he said. “It’s important to stay ahead of the curve in this journey.

IT is now advising CEOs and CXOs what should be done, and we need to continuously improvise what we do.”

Al Safeer Group CIO Kumar Prasoon discussed his work in the retail industry, and how he has modernised legacy architecture to improve customer experience.

“I consider the process as a digital metamorphosis,” he said. “We’re on a journey to digitalise the core components of our back office, with Oracle Retail at the centre of that.”

Sreedhar Reddy, IT director, Aldar Properties, discussed his implementation of a marketing platform for improved campaign visibility. “The platform gave improved visibility for sales and marketing teams,” he said. “We need to convince business users who aren’t in favour of ERP to see its benefits.” www.cnmeonline.com

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Mubarik Hussain, Head of IT, Petroserv

Fresh infrastructure: the grass is greener Bogged down by legacy systems and stubborn employees, Petroserv’s IT was suffering. The Qatari firm’s Head of IT, Mubarik Hussain, shares his story of how he instigated a complete technology overhaul, and has since reaped the rewards.

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’ve seen the before and after of an IT infrastructure revamp from an IT decision-maker’s perspective, and I’m sure I speak for many endusers when I say the process isn’t pretty.

Our previous infrastructure was slow, expensive and prone to security breaches. It wasn’t viable for the IT department, and even less so for the business.

With approval from Petroserv’s CEO, we opted to transform our legacy IT to a purpose-built dynamic virtual private cloud infrastructure.

Our previous legacy infrastructure was prone to downtime and disruption, there was limited availability of IT services, recovery was restricted, while collaboration and the ability to work flexibly severely hindered.

This was a greenfield build of the data centre and involved a complete replacement of all data centre hardware and software. This included a new physical data centre, physical security, environmental monitoring system, redundant power, redundant cooling, SAN storage, core and edge swtiches.

The list goes on. Blade servers.

Backup storage. HA firewalls. AD, Exchange DAG. Windows server infrastructure. SQL Cluster. ERP. VMWare. Citrix deployment. The work was seemingly endless.

The Petroserv Group of companies’ IT infrastructure was migrated into this new private cloud infrastructure. www.cnmeonline.com

After an arduous, hard-fought revamp process, work was eventually completed by Q2 2015.

Transforming to a greenfield, dynamic virtual infrastructure has provided a whole host of benefits for the Group.

The Group’s IT infrastructure is now unrecognisable, and has transformed the way we do business, and how we approach new challenges.

The revamp has showed the enhanced capability Petroserv – and indeed any business – can have through the use of technology.

The new environment has enabled greater collaboration between business units. There are now high availability systems that enable staff to work from any location and at anytime.

Business processes have been tailored to gain the maximum benefit from the technology, which has enhanced the capability of the business as a whole.

Speed has proven key. Technology has highlighted areas of the business which needed improving, as you start to get real-time accurate information on the business.

As improvements have been made, this has created better collaboration across business units as people start to work together towards the same goals, which has resulted in business units and the company as a whole performing better.

blog Resistance to change was the greatest obstacle I faced throughout the course.

Over time, this gradually diminished as people began to feel that they were truly benefiting from the initiative; it takes time for people to see the results and benefits it offers to them.

That being said, opposition was often fierce, and it was an incredibly stressful period of my career!

Once staff do see the benefits, and begin to realise that an important part of the initiative is to make their jobs easier, resistance to change subsides and greater collaboration occurs. This is an ongoing process as new change initiatives occur and new challenges are faced.

Looking forward, all the hard work we put in has increased the organisation’s faith in us, which has given us greater licence for more adventurous projects.

We have now begun to build a cloud infrastructure for Aperture Group, the management company for Petroserv and its group of companies.

At Petroserv, we are also developing a greenfield cloud infrastructure using Microsoft Azure. This give us HA, DR capability and speed to deployment. On the Azure cloud infrastructure, we are deploying a new Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 ERP, as well as Sharepoint and other IT services.

We are also using analytics to gain insights into real-time, accurate information on the Group.

If change can result in making people better, making them want to achieve more, making them happier, then that for me is successful change. Regardless of the challenges we face, that is something I believe we should all strive for daily as that for me is the pursuit of excellence.

The whole experience has been a turning point in my career, not only furthering my knowledge of IT but also serving as a defining example of how IT must be married to the business. april 2016

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gartner symposium

EVENT

The age of digital ecosystems The regional IT industry is being driven by the increasing digitalisation, but don’t expect purse strings to loosen this year, says research firm Gartner at its annual CIO event.

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artner has projected the Middle East IT spending to reach $212.9 billion in 2016, a 3.7 percent increase compared to previous years.

The latest outlook for the regional IT industry was provided at the Gartner IT Symposium held recently in Dubai.

“The Middle East IT spending growth rate is in line what we have seen in the past, and it is higher compared to other markets. One of the good things happening in GCC is that you are moving away from an over reliance on telecom service provider being primary technology spenders to enterprises building out infrastructure and spending more towards software platforms,” said Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP and Global Head of Research, Gartner.

Though telecommunications still account for the lion’s share, Gartner expects enterprises in the region to spend more on analytics and tools for managing information, and above average spending on security.

“We see positive IT growth and scenarios in the Middle East despite some level of economic uncertainty in world markets. The substantial industrial refocusing to generate new economic development beyond the oil industry, with dependence on Smart City initiatives and adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), is of utmost importance in this region. We are witnessing priorities for Smart City governments www.cnmeonline.com

in education, transportation, safety and health,” added Sondergaard.

With devices representing close to 19 percent of total IT spending, tablets and PCs are showing good momentum in the forecast period. Tablets and PCs sales are forecasted to reach nearly $8 billion in 2016 and surpass $10 billion 2018. Mobile phone sales will grow from slightly above $30 billion in 2016 to nearly $37 billion in 2019.

With IT services doubling software expenditures in 2016, Gartner said business IT services will represent 84 percent of to the total services segment.

Meanwhile in software, enterprise application software will present the largest growth rate in the forecast period. However, in actual spending dollars infrastructure will lead.

The data centre segment is forecast for relatively flat growth in 2016. This segment includes network equipment, external controller-based storage, servers and unified communications.

In five years, Gartner predicts one million new devices will come online every hour. These interconnections will create billions of relationships, and will be driven not solely by data, but by algorithms.

“Data is inherently dumb. It doesn’t actually do anything unless you know how to use it; how to act with it,” said Sondergaard. “Algorithms are where the real value lies. Algorithms define the action. Dynamic algorithms are the core of new customer interactions.”

Outlining the key trends, Gartner has also predicted that with technology becoming pervasive, every budget will eventually become a technology.

“The biggest change you will see is that the CIO is no longer in control of technology. Central IT budgets are flattening out from a global perspective.

It used to account for 70 percent of total spend, and it was just at 58 percent last year and will only be at 50 percent next year,” said Sondergaard.

Another main focus area at the Symposium has been the key trends in digital commerce industry. According to Gartner, delivery, payment and customer service are the top things regional digital commerce players should focus on to grow their business.

“More than half of the population in the Middle East have Internet access while only less than 20 percent are online shoppers. The region has a lot of growth potential,” said Gene Alvarez, Managing Vice President, Gartner.

“Today only 15 percent of the business in the region have an online presence, and only 10 percent of the digital commerce transactions are between the local residents and businesses based in the region. The rest is bought from outside the Middle East. With a GDP per capita among the highest in the world, a young population, and encouraging government initiatives, the Middle East will see strong growth for digital commerce in coming years.” april 2016

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CRT Monitors The first computer monitors used cathode ray tubes (CRTs). Prior to the advent of home computers in the late 1970s, it was common for a video display terminal (VDT) using a CRT to be physically integrated with a keyboard and other components of the system in a single large chassis. The display was monochrome and far less sharp and detailed than on a modern flat-panel monitor, necessitating the use of relatively large text and severely limiting the amount of information that could be displayed at one time. High-resolution CRT displays were developed for specialised military, industrial and scientific applications but they were far too costly for general use.

Early home computers were limited to monochrome CRT displays, but colour display capability was already a standard feature of the pioneering Apple II, introduced in 1977, and the specialty of the more graphically sophisticated Atari 800, introduced in 1979. Either computer could be connected to the antenna terminals of an ordinary colour TV set or used with a purpose-made CRT colour monitor for optimum resolution and colour quality. Several years later, in 1981 IBM introduced the Colour Graphics Adapter, which could display four colours with a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels, or it could produce 640 x 200 pixels with two colours. In 1984 IBM introduced the Enhanced Graphics Adapter which was capable of producing 16 colours and had a resolution of 640 x 350.

By the end of the 1980s colour CRT monitors that could clearly display 1024 x 768 pixels were widely available and increasingly affordable. During the following decade maximum display resolutions gradually increased and prices continued to fall. CRT technology remained dominant in the PC monitor market into the new millennium partly because it was cheaper to produce and offered viewing angles close to 180 degrees. CRTs may still offer some image quality advantages over LCDs but improvements to the latter have made them much less obvious. The dynamic range of early LCD panels was very poor, and although text and other motionless graphics were sharper than on a CRT, an LCD characteristic known as pixel lag caused moving graphics to appear noticeably smeared and blurry.

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april 2016

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CIO

Spotlight

suite life With hotel experience across Europe, Asia and the Caribbean, hospitality is Jeroen Wisse’s passion. The Accor Hotels Middle East IT Director draws on experience from a series of regional management roles, and tells CNME about his love of blending technical expertise and hotel know-how to drive guest satisfaction.

I didn’t dare say anything for the next four hours,” Jeroen Wisse recounts his first professional scare. As a 16-year-old hotel receptionist on Caribbean island Aruba, the Accor Hotels Middle East IT Director returned from a bathroom break to find the property’s cash register missing. “I finally plucked up the courage to tell our manager – an inspirational figure in my career – and after making me sweat for a few minutes, he pulled the cash drawer out from under his desk. Then he told me ‘look after other people’s interests before your own.’”

The adage has stuck with Wisse.

Living in the Netherlands until the age of 15, his family then moved to the exotic island, where he would complete his high school education.

It was there where the notion of a career in hospitality was crystallised, with his part-time job bringing fantastic early experience. “Work was

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never dull,” he says. “It was great to meet so many different people and nationalities, and interact with all the different areas of hospitality – the back and front of house, F&B, IT.” The new-found passion would drive a move back to the Netherlands, as he studied for a degree in hospitality management in The Hague. Graduating in 1990, Wisse earned a six-month internship at The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Singapore, during which he sufficiently impressed to be offered a permanent role as a cost controller.

He spent two-and-a-half years in the Southeast Asian city, and during that time he got his first proper taste of IT in the industry, working on an ERP implementation for the hotel.

Having caught the eye of employers Rogner International, he was offered an operations analyst role after the firm’s management established a new company in Europe. His first assignment would

be in Warsaw, where he was involved in the networking infrastructure, inventory and accounting processes during the hotel’s construction phase. The relatively recent collapse of the Berlin Wall presented certain difficulties. “Sourcing the right equipment and maintenance wasn’t straightforward,” he says. “End-users needed a lot of training and weren’t as tech-savvy as you’d expect.”

After two years in the Polish capital, the Jan III Sobieski was successfully opened as a result of WIsse’s work. Approaching the end of his contract, he was offered an internal audit and financial control role in Vienna by Rogner. A year into his tenure, the firm entered into a joint venture with German firm Dorint, which would see Wisse transitioning into an IT manager role for the first time. Wisse would be responsible for the planning, monitoring, maintenance and support for their hotels’ IT environments in www.cnmeonline.com

Austria and Eastern Europe. The role demanded a lot, particularly in terms of travel, and overseeing hotels across Eastern Europe. “I travelled a lot across the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Albania,” he says.

Following the takeover of Dorint by Accor in 2007, Wisse’s responsibility increased, and he was tasked with integrating the IT of 95 hotels into Accor’s operations.

In 2008, and still based in Vienna, and now IT Director for Austria and Eastern Europe, the territory under WIsse’s control increased to include more work in Russia – including opening hotels in Moscow and for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics – Turkey, Ukraine and Turkmenistan. While the integration created numerous technical and procedural challenges, the broad travel opportunities were Wisse’s greatest learning experience. “It was a great challenge, dealing with the specificities of each country,” he says. For several years, he would commute from Vienna to Munich, returning home on weekends. “I was travelling “My manager 60-70 percent of the time, told me ‘look and must have after other clocked over people’s 160,000 km over the course of a interests before few years,” he your own.’” says.

Transitioning into IT allowed Wisse to gain insight into both the www.cnmeonline.com

april 2016

29

CIO

Spotlight broad range of figures to whom he operations and technology of hotels, is accountable. “I have four types of and he firmly believes in ensuring clients,” he says. “Suffice to say the that IT can speak a language that guests are top priority. I also have to guests can understand. “Guest-facing provide services that our staff use. The IT has to make sense,” he says. “It’s no interests of the owners of the property good having a purely technical person have to be respected. And let’s not responsible for guest satisfaction. I forget the purpose of any business is think my experience has put me in to make money, so that shareholders a good position to ensure hotels are have to be considered too.” strong technically and in terms of A fan of the business landscape guest satisfaction.” in the Middle East, Wisse has already After a track record of grown fond of the dynamic pace of impressive work in the Austrian development. “The scale of projects capital, Wisse caught the Dubai’s and services here is fantastic,” he eye. In January 2014, he was offered says. He also believes the region is yet another exciting international misrepresented worldwide, with move, this time as Director of IT many people for Accor Hotels harbouring Middle East. Now “I was travelling incorrect in charge of the IT perceptions of for 10 countries 60-70 percent the GCC. “I think - comprising 73 of the time, and there are a lot of hotels, and with must have clocked misconceptions “60 more projects in the pipeline” – over 160,000 km about the Middle he says. this is the largest over the course of East,” Having met his portfolio that Wisse a few years.” wife in “fine city” – has ever been both in terms of its responsible for. culture and its penchant for penalties He is currently getting his teeth – Singapore, Wisse is an advocate into a range of exciting projects, of respecting your host. “There may including the delivery of Accor’s be rules that are slightly different to regional digital strategy, as well elsewhere in the world, but people as introducing new guest and staff who don’t want to, don't have to stay services. He is also relishing the here. It’s important to respect the challenge of ensuring the company’s culture of the place you reside.” regional hotels comply with rigorous Not an advocate of conservative PCI standards. “I like that it’s not a approaches to work, WIsse believes pure IT issue,” he says. “Any aspect in the value of learning through of dealing with cardholder data is experience. “I firmly believe that you stringent. Client data is critical, and need to make mistakes, then learn we have to be on the ball in terms of from them,” he says. “That being said IT and operations to ensure we meet I also believe that it’s important to these requirements.” channel your energy into battles that Guests are not the only audience are winnable, and in ways that you can that have to be impressed in Wisse’s make a difference. It’s futile to waste industry. His experience in hospitality your time on unimportant things.” has painted a clear picture of the 30

april 2016

TIMELINE 1990 Completes hospitality management course in The Hague

1990 Joins Mandarin Oriental Singapore

1993 Moves to Vienna with Rogner

2008 Named Accor Director of IT for Austria and Eastern Europe

2014 Becomes Accor Middle East IT Director

www.cnmeonline.com

case study

Sidra Medical and Research Centre

Digital diagnosis

With medicine set to be administered after barcode scans, and all clinical devices hooked to the network, Qatar’s Sidra Medical and Research Centre is going purely digital. Chief Technology Officer, Michael LeRoy, was tasked with guiding the facility into the digital age.

n paper – or not, as the case may be – Sidra Medical and Research Centre is the hospital of the future.

While the main hospital building is still under construction, its outpatient clinic is due to open on 1st May, shortly after construction on the site has been completed, with more clinics opening over the next few months. It has all the hallmarks of any modern hospital, but with one key difference – Sidra is on a journey to be a purely digital facility.

Like any modern organisation, IT will be omnipresent and essential to Sidra’s operations. Technology will traverse areas like HR, payroll, the company’s supply chain, ERP and accounting to name a few. However, every aspect of Sidra’s IT architecture has been built with digital in mind, with the aim of making the facility as paper-light as possible. Every function will depend on the digital model.

An academic medical centre, the 490-bed facility is due to specialise

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in paediatrics and women’s health – especially in high-risk deliveries - with around 90 sub-specialties, including dermatology and oncology.

With Qatar’s Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned – who is also Chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation – at the centre’s helm, Michael LeRoy, Sidra’s chief technology officer, has had a mandate to make the facility a “beacon” of learning, discovery and care – through digitalisation.

“Sidra has not been built as a normal hospital,” LeRoy says, “it has been built to be purely digital.

This has necessitated different methodologies in our IT design; we’ve had different procurement methods, different IT infrastructure and different wireless.”

Sidra has also entered into a partnership with Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar – situated locally – to train new medical students, setting the tone for long-term development.

“Our overall aim is to provide worldclass healthcare,” LeRoy says. “We also aim to be a major contributor to the

Qatar National Vision 2030, especially in the fields of human and social development.”

Initiating such an ambitious technology project was always going to present a challenge for LeRoy and his team, demanding patience and precision. “When you’re dealing not only with digital workflows and processes – which are tough in themselves – but also in the context of a new building and with fresh employees, bringing things together under this mandate was extremely challenging.

It’s akin to conducting an orchestra, and ensuring that all different components work well together.”

The demands of the medical profession necessitate extremely high levels of attention and care, and LeRoy has been acutely aware of the need for Sidra’s IT to satisfy that need. “The biggest challenge we’ve faced is ensuring that our technology and systems will be available 24/7,” he says. “A hospital does not shut down. All our solutions have to be available and redundant, from our www.cnmeonline.com

“Bringing together digital workflows and processes in the context of a new building - and with fresh employees was extremely challenging.”

data centre to our communications provider and applications.” A large part of this availability has been the delivery of aligned systems that can talk and interface with one another, in terms of standards, protocols and security alignments. The latter is of particular importance. “Privacy is paramount in healthcare; data must be safe and uninterrupted.”

The recruitment aspect was one of the most important parts of the hospital’s design. A digital facility has necessitated workers with particular skillsets, and this was not restricted solely to the IT department. “The whole hiring process had to account for digital-based skills,” LeRoy says. “Staff either had to be already familiar with, or had to display the ability to quickly adapt to a digital

www.cnmeonline.com

environment.”

Once staff had been hired, the training processes have entirely digitalcentric. “For those who are ready to begin work when the facility opens, they aren’t used to anything except digital,” LeRoy says.

From an early stage, LeRoy also decided that the culture of seamless integration in terms of technology had to extend to IT staff, and their ability to interact with all aspects of the business. “In order for them to understand the business, it’s important that their work is shared, and that can also interact with the clinical teams,” he says. “This has undoubtedly helped with their ability to understand exactly what doctors and patients need. We’ve worked closely with customers to ensure that

we can improve their experience in a number of aspects.”

Identifying exactly what customers want from IT has been a question of simplicity for LeRoy, with his belief in patients’ strong knowledge of technology dictating what Sidra has employed. “It’s easy to gain customer sentiment from social media,” he says.

“They also expect real-time, mobile information and better outcomes.

They are now more educated than ever before in terms of technology.”

This demand for mobility has not only played a huge part in satisfying customer expectation, but is now at the core of the technology used for patient care. As well as networking staff members’ handheld biomedical devices to patient medical records, clinical devices have also been connected through networks and hubs. “This extends from blood pressure monitors to ultrasound scanners,” LeRoy says.

This also applies to the administration of medicine, a vitally important process for hospital staff that can often result in needless errors. The drug administration process has been barcoded, whereby the patient and medicine are scanned, allowing the system to undertake a safety check to see if prescriptions are correct and timely. “This has the power to reduce potentially fatal human errors,” LeRoy says.

The facility will be using palm vein scanning technology at registration desks, allow for faster recognition, as well as use in more extreme cases.

“This can be used in emergency situations,” LeRoy says. “If a patient is already on the system and is brought in this can save valuable time.”

A crucial pillar of Sidra’s IT strategy is being able to not only create a digitally-empowered hospital, but also one that can provide remote care for its patients. “Where possible, we want to expand our april 2016

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case study

Sidra Medical and Research Centre

healthcare to the home,” LeRoy says.

“Our technology is fit for mobile, with the ability to monitor info and take remote action.”

Sidra’s biomedical research team is undertaking a lot of research programs to help facilitate the prevention, early and targeted intervention for certain conditions such as cancer, obesity, preterm birth and genetic disorders that are affecting the local population. These research programs rely on the centre’s biomedical informatics division for data analysis and the sequencing of the data from the samples.

For example, as part of its support and the roll-out of national research programs like the Qatar Genome Project, Sidra has implemented a fully integrated and scalable bioinformatics system for ramping up the sequencing data management and analysis efforts for the project. It has also put in place an end-to-end 34

april 2016

“Patients expect realtime, mobile information and better outcomes.

They are more educated than ever before in terms of technology.”

next generation sequencing data analysis system to manage and mine sequences.

This has also allowed Sidra to build a global standard database and tools using population genomic and medical data to benefit research and clinical care.

Back at base, Sidra’s medical research team is undertaking a lot of work surrounding genomes, while the IT department moves towards a comprehensive database. “We’re building a resource that allows all clinicians across the country to share data,” LeRoy says. “If there is a disease or outbreak that our experts need to be notified of, we will have the means to monitor alerts from public health organisations, allowing us to act faster.”

Looking forward, LeRoy believes the infrastructure that has been laid will reap huge benefits for patients and hospital staff alike, in a modern, highly reliable service. “Anyone wants their wife, father or child to have the best possible care. This can be delivered through a digital environment that prevents errors and has the alerts and protocols for better decision-making.”

In terms of engaging with the hospital, a portal has been designed for accessing results and making appointments, which can be “easily navigated”. This is expected to provide an extensive channel for communication. “All our work will provide a safer, more efficient process of patient care,” LeRoy says. www.cnmeonline.com

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case study

habtoor city

City as a service

Habtoor City is almost live. The Business Bay complex features a trio of five-star hotels, a showstopping aqua-theatre and tennis academy.

Mahmoud Kamal, Chief Information Officer, Habtoor Hotels, was tasked with delivering a fresh and powerful infrastructure that could satisfy the needs of an expected 20,000 daily visitors.

t’s hard not to fall under the spell of the St. Regis Hotel lobby.

Even those who are habitual recipients of five-star treatment in the UAE will be hard-pushed not to be charmed by the huge portraits, chandelier and marble staircase. It serves as a first taste of one of the latest additions to Dubai’s roster of superb five-star hotels, and is the first of a trio that will soon form one of the most exciting property developments of 2016 – Habtoor City.

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The complex – when completed – will consist of the three hotels, as well as a series of other exciting developments. While the St. Regis opened before Christmas 2015, the Westin – which is attached to its sister building – and the W Hotel are due to opened by the end of Q2 2016.

Combined, the trio are expected to draw over 1,700 guests per day.

While the ceiling-high stone pillars of the St. Regis lobby may be the first thing that guests notice, Habtoor City’s newly-established IT infrastructure provides a strong, www.cnmeonline.com

invisible support of its own for the complex. Mahmoud Kamal, Habtoor Hotels’ Cief Information Officer, has overseen a vast project to ensure that Habtoor City is able to meet the high standards of its guests, and simultaneously deliver a smooth experience across venues.

“The hospitality industry is demanding for a number of reasons, not least in terms of the technology it provides,” Kamal says. “In their homes, hotel customers have widescreen TVs and high quality Internet – and they expect the same from a hotel. We have the tough task of exceeding that expectation, or at the very least, closing the gap.”

In addition to Habtoor City’s hotels, the complex is also due to contain a hugely ambitious 1,400-seat aqua-theatre, similar to the Dragone venues in Las Vegas and Macau, as well as a tennis academy, which is due for completion late 2017. Central

to the ‘City’ meanwhile, will be a boulevard with restaurants, bars, shopping venues and a landscaped canal. The complex will also contain 1,700 luxury apartments – all of which are more than 20,000ft2, which Kamal describes as “mansions in the sky”.

Accompanying this development is the demand for satisfying a broad range of clients. In addition to providing the standard home comforts of guests who stay for leisure purposes, Kamal is tasked with ensuring the Habtoor City complex will also translate to being a business-friendly environment. “It’s imperative that we have the same meeting and IT services across the hotels,” he says.

Meeting these high standards required a breadth of technology services to be delivered to a seamless standard. “First and foremost, we need high quality bandwidth for our Internet,” Kamal says. “This is to power video conferencing, up-to-date IPTV services, CCTV and security systems, as well as a parking system that allows customers to locate their vehicle amongst thousands of others.”

In order to ensure guest satisfaction in terms of the bandwidth april 2016

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case study

habtoor city

that they could consume, Habtoor City would need effective gateways to accompany the high-speed Internet.

“The network needs to differentiate between three or four rooms who may be downloading content, while other guests are using lowbandwidth chat services,” Kamal says.

“I’ve experienced problems before where guests complained because they received no Internet as all the bandwidth had been consumed.”

In 2014, Kamal and his team began implementing the IT solutions that would be needed for the broad and ambitious project. His 12-strong team set about establishing a networking infrastructure that was “secure and compliant”, and could segregate traffic from guests, the complex’s CCTV cameras and administration staff.

The project began with the “challenging” design phase, in which Kamal worked closely with consultants to define a roadmap for the solutions. Striking the right balance between cost and quality was key, with Kamal taking great care in engaging operators, integrators and vendors to ensure the best possible value. “If you make the right choices, you could save half the cost, without sacrificing a project’s quality,” he says.

The security aspect would take on particular importance for the City, with a system that could track who enters and exits the complex a must. “This is important from a safety perspective, both for the complex and for those who are being tracked; in the case of an emergency we need to know who is in and who is out.”

In terms of the networking hardware, Kamal opted for Cisco’s access points and switches, as well as its internal voice communications system. Dell’s virtualised servers and HP’s PCs were also enlisted, while www.cnmeonline.com

the Simphony point of sale solution was also introduced. In terms of guest-facing technology, Kamal opted to purchase Samsung TVs for hotel rooms.

Naturally, the process of bringing all these technologies and vendors under one umbrella had the potential to pose a problem for Kamal, and this complexity, in line with added pressure from key stakeholders, proved a test of timeliness.

“The strict enforcement of target dates meant that a lot of people pushed for faster delivery, meaning things were not mature,” Kamal says. “Vendors need to meet their milestones in terms of infrastructure, active components and educating endusers, and these aspects are all inter-dependent.

At the same time, you need to complete one stage before another.”

In addition, Starwood Hotels – managers of the development – expected Kamal to comply with USA technology standards, which were “not appropriate” for the Middle East.

“Their standards did not reflect the levels of local support,” he says. “I had to manage expectations to ensure that realistic targets could be decided.”

Throughout the process of the implementation, Kamal took a hands-on approach in terms of supervising deliverables. “I was keen

to check if vendors were delivering what we had asked, and if they were meeting or exceeding expectations,” he says.

With the opening dates for two of Habtoor City’s hotels on the horizon, Kamal is confident that work he and his team have carried out will be able to deliver a first-class tech experience for complex guests. The technology infrastructure is now ready to serve guests’ high expectations.

“They’ll get the Habtoorian experience,” he says. “That means that everything they need will be at their disposal.

Ultimately we have to ensure that we deliver user satisfaction, in particular through our Internet and IPTV services.”

Kamal also believes that delivering scalability, and the ability to expand services are two areas in which Habtoor City will be wellequipped. “Services need to be able to fulfil customer demand when it comes,” he says. “Companies like Google and Facebook have built their reputation on the ability to deal with enormous volumes of search queries and subscribers, and that’s a blueprint we want to follow. With 1,700 guests, who have two or three devices each, we’ll need to be able to accommodate thousands of concurrent connections.

“We need to be ready to deal with that pressure, and we are.”

“Companies like Google and Facebook have built their reputation on the ability to deal with enormous volumes of search queries and subscribers, and that’s a blueprint we want to follow.”

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case study

oasis

Migration made easy Six years after implementing an Oracle ERP solution, Oasis Investment Company knew it was time for a change. However, for IT Director MN Chaturvedi, ensuring a seamless migration of data to a new system was a matter of critical importance, and had to be carefully delivered.

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ike many businesses in the Middle East, Oasis Investment Company had depended on its legacy IT infrastructure. The diversified firm – and the holding company of Al Shirawi Group – was founded in 1971 by company chairman Abdulla M. Al Shirawi, and operates in a range of industries, including printing, logistics manufacturing and contracting.

Nine years ago, the company began to experience a period of organic, yet sharp growth. The Group’s companies had separate systems, and the IT department decided a change was needed.

Chaturvedi opted for an Oracle ERP solution, deployed on top of a HP Unix, which was chosen for its “stability and cost-effectiveness”, while opting for Emitac’s integration expertise.

The package served Oasis well over a long period of time, but by 2013, Chaturvedi realised that a change was needed. The company had made signigicant progress by a number of measures, including an average compound annual growth rate of 15 percent, a hike in employee numbers – from 6,000 to 10,000 – and doubling of the Oracle user base, from 400 to 800. All of these changes had taken their toll on Oasis’ IT, with system performance suffering.

“Meeting the demands of our users is naturally a top priority,” Chaturvedi says. “We knew that we had to halve response times.”

The tech vendor’s importance was clear to the firm. “The new solution would have to be cost-effective, be able to provide business continuity and at a low cost,” Chaturvedi says. “The infrastructure had to

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be replaced; we were open to new hardware options but wanted to continue with Oracle ERP. Delivering a seamless migration of data was critical in this process.” What’s more, a new solution would be required to serve Oasis for at least the next five years, with key stakeholders determined to see clear ROI on the fresh investment.

Chaturvedi invited tenders from a range of firms for the change, but yet again opted for HP, having established a level of trust with the firm over the previous years.

With continuity proving a KPI in terms of the project, Chaturvedi also opted to avail the services of Emitac once again.

The upgrade consisted of shifting from the existing rx3600 Itanium server - for the database layer – and the rp3440 server – for the application layer – to a fresh model.

This would be the HP rx2800 i4, which could accommodate both the database and application layers.

Migrating data to the new system would be a major hurdle. “Data cleanness was very important to us,” Chaturvedi says. “We had to have a 100 percent success rate in our data transportation, as well as ensuring that all software versions would be in the new system. Carrying out backups was also very time-consuming.” Once the implementation was complete, users would have to be educated about the implications of the upgrade on their duties, particularly in terms of new Oracle processes.

Prior to the migration, Chaturvedi also wanted to make use of a staging area to trial the migration process, which was carried out successfully.

“We had minor changes in our platform, but still wanted to ensure the process would be smooth,” he says.

The solution went live on 31st January 2014, ahead of schedule.

The change has already brought a series of benefits to Oasis. “Archival recovery and backup time has been reduced to almost two hours,” Chaturvedi says. “That has been achieved without physically changing the system or removing data. Response time is also vastly improved, which has reduced frustration amongst users as well as boosting our overall operations efficiency.”

The new system now provides a “99.99 percent” level of uptime, while tangible ROI has not been hard to identify, something that has greatly satisfied Chaturvedi. “At Al Shirawi, we don’t invest in anything unless it has clear ROI,” he says. “The HP solution was far better value than the other options. The change in quality has been a paradigm shift for us.”

Chaturvedi speaks very highly of long-term partner Emitac. “They met and exceeded the SLAs that we set out,” he says. “They always had resources available to satisfy our needs; it’s been like having someone next door to us that they’ve been so efficient in their service. They have a comprehensive understanding of systems and provided cost-effective solutions.”

“Meeting the demands of our users is naturally a top priority.

We knew that we had to halve response times.”

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Masters of networking

The seventh annual Network World Middle East Awards honoured organisations that have made the best use of networking technologies to extract strategic value and maximum returns for their businesses.

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he winners were chosen from a pool of more than 250 organisations that submitted their nominations this year. To make it to the level of finalist, the systems had to have been deployed for at least two years, and the applications had to satisfactorily demonstrate the benefits of those systems for the entire enterprise.

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Each nominee was reviewed and judged by our panel in terms of achievements as demonstrated by the depth and breadth of initiatives, creativity and specific measurable results.

The awards ceremony was kicked off by Rajashree Rammohan, Publishing Director of CNME, followed by a keynote address from Shams Hassan, Enterprise Product Manager of Dell Middle East. www.cnmeonline.com

PANEL OF JUDGES Madhav Rao Madhav is the Chief Information Officer of Lulu Group International, with a Masters in Business Administration and over 20 years of experience in managing the technology infrastructure and applications for the Group’s diverse business units such as retail, importdistribution and food processing. He has been instrumental in keeping the Group abreast of IT developments and emerging technologies by way of implementing appropriate, innovative and cost effective solutions.

Paul Black Paul Black is responsible for all telecoms and media consulting and research projects for the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey at IDC. With over 14 years’ experience in telecommunications spanning Europe, the MEA region, he has managed a vast array of high-profile projects including startup operations, business processes, strategic planning, product and service portfolio creation, BSS deployment, and go-to-market planning.

SEBASTIAN SAMUEL Sebastian T Samuel is the Group Head of IT at AW Rostamani Group, Dubai. He has more than 20 years of experience in Information www.cnmeonline.com

Technology across industries including Automotive, Property Management, Manufacturing, Logistics, IT Consulting, Trading, Retail, Transportation etc.

He is also an Enterprise Architecture (EA) practitioner who has actively participated in many EA implementations in the region. Sebastian has also expertise in implementing ERP, Corporate Strategy & Performance Management (Balanced Scorecard), GRC and Disaster Recovery Implementations.

SREEDHAR REDDY Sreedhar Reddy has 25 plus years of experience in IT strategy, planning, design, implementation, and management of IT systems and services in large real estate, engineering, and local government organisations.

Sreedhar is currently working as the IT Director at Aldar Properties PJSC, the largest property development and asset management company in Abu Dhabi, with responsibility for IT services for the whole group. Sreedhar had led the integration of IT Services during the successful merger of ALDAR and Sorouh in 2013 and ALDAR now has one of the most advanced, stable, and integrated IT applications and services among the Real Estate Developers in UAE. april 2016

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Enterprise Collaboration Project Winner: African Eastern Finalists: Abu Dhabi University ADMA OPCO Bits Pilani Electronic Government Authority, RAK Department of Economic Development

Gulf Air Hilton Worldwide University of Sharjah Waha Capital Tajawal

Storage Project Winner: Gulf Air Finalists: Department of Transport, Abu Dhabi Summit Bank Waha Capital

Network Cabling Project Winner: Roads and Transport Authority Finalists: Department of Transport, Abu Dhabi Gulf Air Mobily

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Network Optimisation Project Winner: Nakheel Finalists: General Civil Aviation Authority, UAE Gulf Air

Data Centre Project Winner: ADMA-OPCO Finalists: Abu Dhabi Ports Company eHosting DataFort Electronic Government Authority, RAK General Civil Aviation Authority

Gulf Air Roads and Transport Authority Saudi Electricity Company Union Insurance

Enterprise Mobility Project Winner: Al Safeer Group

Finalists: African Eastern General Civil Aviation Authority Gulf Air

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Virtualisation Project Winner: Dubai Smart Government Finalists: Electronic Government Authority, RAK General Civil Aviation Authority Gulf Air Indevco Group Ministry of Infrastructure Development

Motivate Publishing Thumbay Group Thuraya Telecommunications University of Sharjah

Network Security Project Winner: General Civil Aviation Authority, UAE Finalists: BMTC EZELink Telecom Gulf Air

Ministry of Economy Nakheel Port of Fujairah Roads and Transport Authority

Public Sector Networking Project Winner: Dubai Financial Market Finalists: Department of Economic Development Dubai Customs Dubai Healthcare City Etisalat General Civil Aviation Authority Ministry of Economy, UAE 46

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Private Sector Networking Project Winner: Marsa Malaz Kempinski, Doha Finalists: Canadian Specialist Hospital Cara Jewellers Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority Emirates Palace

Gulf Precast Concrete Jumeirah Group Creekside Hotel Habib Medical Group Sheraton Doha

Editor’s Choice Winner: Department of Transport, Abu Dhabi

Best Return on Investment Award Winner: TransSys Solutions

Finalist: 3CX

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Network Security Vendor Winner: Fortinet Finalists: Aruba, a HPE Company Cisco Dell

FireEye RSA Sophos VMware

Network Management Vendor Winner: ManageEngine Finalists: Riverbed Fluke Networks Infoblox

Network Optimisation Vendor Winner: Riverbed Finalists: F5 Networks InfiNet

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Wireless Vendor Winner: Aruba, a HPE Company Finalists: D-Link Infinet Wireless Huawei Linksys

Network Cabling Vendor Winner: Nexans Cabling Solutions Finalists: Excel Networking Leviton

Best Communications Solutions Vendor Winner: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

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Data Centre Networking Vendor Winner: Huawei Finalists: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Avaya Brocade Dell

Enterprise Collaboration Vendor Winner: Avaya Finalists: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Polycom

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Networking Vendor Winner: Dell Finalists: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Aruba, a HPE Company Avaya Brocade Cisco Huawei

Networking Value-Added Distributor Winner: Mindware Finalists: Aptec, an Ingram Micro Company Bulwark Technologies Redington Value StorIT Westcon Group

www.cnmeonline.com

april 2016

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Telecoms World IoT Infrastructure

The In-Thing In a world driven by as-a-service models, telco providers stand to suffer if they do not get their fair share of the services they provide. How can they differentiate themselves in terms of delivering Internet of Things infrastructure, and what hurdles must be overcome in this process? s communications service providers shift to data-dependent business models – away from those relying on voice and messaging revenue – Internet of things infrastructure will be one of their most important considerations. Over the past five years, the IoT sector has yielded 20-50 percent

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annual increases in device connections. IoT will provide vast data resources to be analysed for marketing gain, and ubiquitous service that spells gold for telcos. That being said, they also stand to miss out if inappropriate action is taken.

Despite the promise of IoT, there will many in the telecom industry who are keen to tie up the appropriate partnerships to ensure that their business doesn’t suffer. In the same way that over the top providers have leveraged telco services to their advantage, a new wave of IoT-based services is likely to emerge, and they could well earn an imbalanced share of profits if the right frameworks aren’t in place.

Paul Black, Director of Telecoms and Media, IDC Middle East, Turkey & Africa, is all too aware that telcos face the risk of not receiving a fair cut given their level of work in the ecosystem.

“Over time, telcos have been responsible for much of the costs involved in developing and upgrading network infrastructures used by other service providers, who rarely partake in supplementing costs of implementation,” he says. www.cnmeonline.com

“Telcos have been responsible for much of the costs involved in developing and upgrading network infrastructures used by other service providers, who rarely partake in supplementing costs of implementation.”

Paul Black, Director of Telecoms and Media, IDC Middle East, Turkey & Africa

Andy MacDonald, Vice President, Global Service Provider, Middle East, Africa & Russia, Cisco, believes that services providers will need to determine the extent to which they need to collaborate with partners to avoid selling themselves short. “Customers using telcos’ services need to pay a fair share of this huge infrastructure cost,” he says. “Given that 70 percent of the revenue and profitability of IoT offerings will come from application level services, SPs need to determine what capabilities they will drive themselves and bundle and what they are going to rely on partners to provide offerings.

This can vary from the SP being the responsible counterparty where they bundle

“While there is still ground to cover since we are still at the formative stage of IoT evolution, all businesses are in the process of adopting IoT initiatives.”

Wael El Kabbany, Vice President for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, BT

www.cnmeonline.com

all services underneath them to being an IoT IaaS/PaaS platform for others to offer service.

This is a critical risk/reward decision.”

As infrastructures are developed to support IoT demands, a crucial aspect for competitive advantage will be the ability to gauge customer sentiment, and adapt to these needs in a timely fashion. Wael El Kabbany, Vice President for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, BT, believes that service providers need to shift their focus to scalable platforms that can allow for comprehensive data analysis.

“Being connected to numerous sources of data, service providers will be able to act on a massive pool of it," he says. "They will be able to leverage this data to gain further insights and respond to customer needs in real-time.”

Along with a range of technology vendors investing heavily in IoT R&D and ecosystems that will lay the groundwork for the future, firms in the GCC are already make swift in-roads deliver on the promise of Smart Cities. These telcos are setting the pace across a number of verticals that will be huge customers of telco IoT services.

“At GITEX Technology Week 2015, Etisalat demonstrated a number of solutions which included smart home, e-health, connected car, education and smart parking for consumers in tandem with their work in enterprise IoT platform development,” says Safder Nazir, Regional VP, Smart Cities & IoT, Huawei. “du also showcased similar services in the consumer space and for the automotive, transport and logistics

Protects Against Dynamic Security Threats Simplifies IT Security Structure Provides Security for Email, Web and Database Systems

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Telecoms World IoT Infrastructure

industries. We see similar initiatives from many operators.”

Looking forward, the region can count itself lucky in this respect. An ecosystem of telco providers, platform services and the hardware providers will have to ensure interoperability. “The Internet of Things is dynamic in nature both in implementation and operation so much so that a single provider in the ecosystem is incapable of developing a complete solution alone,” Black says. “As a result, service providers will need to look beyond DIY business models and engage in strategic partnerships to develop innovative solutions.”

Against this backdrop, the question has to be raised if the Middle East’s SMEs and enterprises are in fact prepared to deliver these services, and if their IT infrastructures can cope with new demands. El Kabbany believes that although IoT is not exactly present yet in the region, steps are quickly being taken to make it a reality. “The Middle

“Given that 70 percent of the revenue and profitability of IoT offerings will come from application level services, SPs need to determine what capabilities they will drive themselves and bundle and what they are going to rely on partners to provide offerings.”

Andy MacDonald, Vice President, Global Service Provider, Middle East, Africa & Russia, Cisco

www.cnmeonline.com

East is witnessing one of most rapid rates of urbanisation and industrialisation in the world, as well as connectivity between residents, businesses and government entities,” he says. “While there is still ground to cover since we are still at the formative stage of IoT evolution, all businesses are in the process of adopting IoT initiatives.”

While the concept of data-generating sensors is nothing new, the introduction of autonomous IoT-enabled devices has to be carefully managed when designing this new ecosystem. Traditional sensors often require human interaction, and can be expensive to replace. MacDonald believes that CSPs have a crucial role to play in this transition in a region where large amounts of legacy technology are present.

“Companies that want to link new and legacy sensors to realise value from the IoT need to work closely with CSPs,” he says.

“CSPs will act as master contractors of these implementations and have to develop the SI capabilities to offer these services.”

Arguably one of the most important considerations in IoT infrastructure design – and perhaps the greatest barrier to overall IoT success – is the issue of security. MacDonald gives a comprehensive outline on what he believes is needed to satisfy this potential pitfall. “Each device should have an identity that is persistent and can be relied on as a unique identifier for security and management purposes,” he says. “A secure IoT solution will provide a mechanism for keeping track of device versions and rolling out over-the-air updates to maintain a desired level of security.

Many IoT devices are designed to last a decade or more, so leading IoT device and gateway vendors must make their devices updatable and upgradeable. Keeping devices secure aids in keeping the CSP’s network secure.”

He goes on to highlight physical security concerns “A solution should only store data that is needed for accomplishing business objectives at the edge. Physical security of edge devices augments cybersecurity by creating a barrier to entry and reducing available attack vectors.” april 2016

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network World Virtualisation 2.0

The virtual shift As IT systems become more complex, so do the quality of service demands from customers. People are now demanding better performance and speedier response times from enterprises. How can the second wave of virtualisation enhance a company’s business model?

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ver the last few decades, companies of all sizes are leveraging virtualisation as a way to keep operational costs down. Consolidating an organisation’s hardware does not only bring IT flexibility - it also enhances security and increases operational efficiency.

The IT industry has come a long way from the traditional, physical world where a server could only run one application. Now, more complex applications are the norm, and the desire to leverage aspects like the public cloud places new requirements on virtualisation technologies.

These requirements call for ‘Virtualisation 2.0,’ a more evolved aspect of the technology that should bring more speed and agility to IT systems.

“The virtualisation of work is shifting,” says Arthur Dell, Director, Technology and Services, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Citrix, “the practice of moving work to a more optimal place and time is becoming critical to business and employee performance. By centralising IT resources and delivering virtual desktops and applications as secure, on-demand services, companies empower a workforce that’s efficient 58

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and able to respond to business opportunities at any moment.”

The adoption of virtualisation technology in the region is continuously accelerating as organisations consolidate critical applications on virtual machines. “These deployments will see organisations exploit other benefits of virtualisation, such as high availability, increased flexibility and scalability, and simplified disaster recovery. The adoption of ‘virtualisation’ today is broadening to storage, network and desktop virtualisation,” says Swapna Subramani, Research Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC MEA. Dell agrees, explaining that the highest levels of adoptions are seen amongst desktops and applications. However, some aspects remain in a business where this new form of technology isn’t being utilised. “For example, certain programmes used within some specific industries still require physical hardware in the form of dongles to function,” he says. “This is usually implemented by the manufacturer in order to prevent piracy attempts. Operating software with licencing agreements in places that don’t permit virtualisation, are also difficult to convert to a virtual environment.”

In addition, Dev Anand, Director of Product Management, ManageEngine, highlights that servers, storage, network, desktops and applications are the elements that are primarily being virtualised. “Some of these technologies are in the early stages of development while others are mature and are widely deployed,” he says. “Server virtualisation is still the foundation on which the entire virtualisation story is built.

According to the Gartner MQ for x86 server www.cnmeonline.com

“By centralising IT resources and delivering virtual desktops and applications as secure, on-demand services, companies empower a workforce that’s efficient and able to respond to business opportunities at any moment.”

Arthur Dell, Director, Technology and Services, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Citrix

virtualisation infrastructure, about 75 percent of x86 server workloads are already virtualised. This means server virtualisation is ahead of other categories when it comes to virtualised elements within a data centre.”

Today, customers are hungry for quicker response times. CIOs are expected to look at virtualisation as a tool to keep their revenue producing applications running latency free. With this in mind, more and more organisations are moving certain workloads into the public cloud, which takes the management burden off IT departments.

“Virtualisation should not be treated as a one step process towards consolidating enterprise resources,” says Subramani.

“The approach to virtualisation needs to be more holistic. Apart from virtualising servers, storage, network and client devices, the virtualisation journey needs to be complemented with management platforms, applications, security and controls that will enable seamless organisation and utilisation of resources. Once the resources pool is agile, it becomes easier to assess the cloudreadiness of applications.”

Dell complements this notion, and explains that maintaining manageability of systems is essential in order for businesses to maximise the potential of virtualisation.

This means that a vision needs to be in place that puts people at the heart, as opposed to www.cnmeonline.com

data centres. “Having the right virtualisation strategy will not increase complexity, but rather dramatically reduce it," he says.

"This means ensuring having both the people and systems in place. With virtual desktops and applications, IT won’t have to build new infrastructure to handle more projects and new business requirements such as compliance, expansion, and improved services. Instead, simplifying the deployment of new applications, platforms and business services will be simplified and accelerated, ultimately translating into a competitive advantage.”

Migrating applications to the cloud can result in improvements in resource utilisation, scalability, functionality and maintenance costs. Organisations are pursuing as much flexibility as possible and are looking at the cloud as a possible solution to their problems.

“The road to the cloud goes straight through business-critical virtualisation,” says Anand. “An application is deemed to be cloudready if it can be effectively deployed into either a public or private cloud. This means the application needs to be designed so that it can leverage the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layer on which it runs, and won’t break because of design limitations that collide with assumptions made in the layer. If you follow some simple rules in your application design, you can usually make your existing applications cloud-ready without having to go through an entire re-implementation.”

Virtualisation 2.0 is also expected to bring organisations benefits such as data centre consolidation and standardisation, streamlined, automated data centre operations and stronger security and compliance.

“The data centre has transformed from being a business support function to a business-enabling function,” explains Subramani. “The hardware landscape within the region's enterprises have significantly transformed to adapt to the cloud with latest hardware innovations essentially proving to be technologies that enable the cloud. Several technologies from a hardware perspective are april 2016

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AD

network World Virtualisation 2.0 easing enterprises into gradual cloud usage.

Virtualisation 2.0 is an essential enabling technology in the next-generation data centre where consolidation and convergence are keys to an agile cloud deployment.”

Anand agrees, explaining that in nextgeneration data centres, virtualisation will extend beyond servers to include storage, backup, and the entire network ecosystem.

“Performance management tools will have deep dive monitoring and management capabilities that provide the IT teams with the visibility to truly see every layer, platform, app and device in their virtual environments,” he says. “With virtualisation 2.0, organisations will be able to monitor

far more efficient to backup a virtualised infrastructure, rather than one comprising of disparate hardware servers. Furthermore, the ability to replicate business services and offer access to them from any device will accelerate and in some cases eliminate outages.”

With all the major leaps that the region has accomplished in the virtualisation space, Subramani believes that organisations are already heading towards a fully virtualised environment. “The Middle East has graduated from the mere adoption of virtualisation to utilising the virtual infrastructure towards creating a private cloud environment,” he says. “As of 2015, 68 percent of CIOs in the region have already

“The approach to virtualisation needs to be more holistic. Apart from virtualising servers, storage, network and client devices, the virtualisation journey needs to be complemented with management platforms, applications, security and controls that will enable seamless organisation and utilisation of resources.”

Swapna Subramani, Research Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC MEA

the whole virtual environment, analyse workloads, detect glitches and deliver insights via custom dashboards. They will proactively analyse performance data, help identify trends, and pinpoint the root cause of performance degradation as it occurs within the data centre.”

Apart from more flexibility in data centres, efficiency is one of the most soughtafter key outcomes from virtualisation 2.0 and cloud adoption. “The consolidation of resources induces agility and control and enables disparate data centre resources to be managed through a unified management console,” says Subramani.

Dell adds that virtualisation 2.0 can also give better support to an organisation’s backup and disaster recovery strategy. “Its cost-effectiveness is ideal for businesses with smaller budgets that cannot afford multiple servers to host their data,” he says. “It’s also www.cnmeonline.com

adopted server virtualisation within their organisation. So, the journey to being 100 percent virtualised is well-underway and will be complete within the next five years.”

However, Dell disagrees. This is because, in many cases, existing technologies, applications and systems are tied to complex and cumbersome business-defined work processes. “It is impossible to switch one system off at night and switch a brand new one on in the morning,” he says.

“Since start-ups in the region don’t have to deal with IT legacy, it will allow them to make technological and business process choices that rely on virtualisation. For those organisations grappling with legacy systems and their associated costs, the ability to virtualise may offer a vehicle to extend the life of legacy applications as a transition strategy that will offer near seamless cutover to new systems when required.” april 2016

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solutions World Artificial intelligence

Future Perfect

John McCarthy, who coined the term, defined Artificial Intelligence as ‘the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.’ Recently, intelligent machines – their creators, specifically - have taken leaps and bounds when it comes to meeting humans as equals in terms of processing power and the ability to make informed decisions. hat was once the stuff of science fiction is fast becoming a reality.

In the age of driverless cars and computers that beat us at our own games, it is undeniable that the dream of artificial intelligence is becoming a reality. The use of intelligent systems – that is systems with built-in processors and intelligent code – is only likely to grow in the coming years.

There is hot debate among top IT experts as to what the future of AI will mean for its consumers.

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In fact, there are many AI-related technologies already in use today. “AI technologies have long been used across gaming and social networking,” says Tareque Choudhury, Head of Security and BT Advise, Middle East and Africa, BT Global Services, “For instance, in 2015, Facebook announced that their AI Research (FAIR) team have been developing computers that can plan, recognise images, understand language, and learn, all with the aim of building intelligent machines that help

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people.” Experts predict that by 2025, AI will be built into the functions of a wealth of business and communications functions. In their most positive light, these predictions see AI reducing noise, increasing efficiency and reducing risk.

AI technologies play a huge role in cyber security and that role is only set to increase.

AI technologies with advanced mathematical techniques across networks are currently being adopted to better understand the cybersecurity landscape. “Instead of relying on traditional signature and sandbox technologies to detect and block threats, the use of artificial intelligence allows organisations to take a new proactive, intelligence-driven approach to understanding and predicting threats, enabling organisations to stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat landscape,” explains Choudhury.

Though AI is likely to have a positive effect on enterprise security, the technology itself can be seen as a threat. Though he sees primarily beneficial effects of AI, David Emm, Senior Regional Researcher, UK, Global Research & Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab, adds a note of caution. “Regardless of how ‘smart’ a system is, if it can be designed for our benefit, there’s the possibility of someone subverting that design to achieve goals that were not intended. We can already see signs of this in the smart devices that make up the Internet of Things,” he says.

“For this reason, it’s vital that security is built in to any computer system at the design stage, not least because trying to retro-fit security after something bad happens is likely to be difficult and expensive.”

“If we become so dependent on smart devices, we begin to lose the ability to do those tasks for ourselves.

This phenomenon is not peculiar to computers, but the process is likely to become greatly accelerated with the digital revolution.”

David Emm, Senior Regional Researcher, UK, Global Research & Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab

“Instead of relying on traditional signature and sandbox technologies to detect and block threats, the use of Artificial Intelligence allows organisations to take a new proactive, intelligence-driven approach to understanding and predicting threats, enabling organisations to stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat landscape.”

Tareque Choudhury, Head of Security and BT Advise, Middle East and Africa, BT Global Services

www.cnmeonline.com

AI technology is also set to change the way that we consume information. “Machine learning, the Internet of things and the ability to collect information from sensors is going to explode,” says Sunil Paul, Co-Founder & COO, Finesse. “When Big Data, data visualisation and predictive analytics are used along with the sensor, robotics and AI technologies, both the process and the end product will be smarter.

Obviously, AI technology will change the way we look at information, not just about past and present scenarios, but also predict future trends and possibilities. The systems will become more intuitive and will start asking you ‘Are you sure’ ‘How about doing it this way?'”

AI technology has myriad use cases, however, it seems that is may take decades for it to reach its full potential. “It is time we look at AI as much more than just robots,” says Paul.

“We have to understand its potential to change human life to make it much smarter and explore how it will imitate how humans think and act - a machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can."

“Take the example of security operations centres that today, struggle to cope with the volumes of events, intelligence and related information they deal with. This means that key information or insight can be lost in the white noise of daily operations. It can be difficult to know where to look for an organisation’s high priority vulnerabilities or threats,” says Choudhury. Using AI technology, security firms can leverage visual analytics to enable teams to find that pertinent data more quickly, and to provide an appropriate automated response.

Once the potential of AI is realised, it is imperative, as end-users that we do not april 2016

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solutions World Artificial Intelligence forget our technological past. “One of the potential problems that arise from using technology to perform tasks that were previously done manually, is that we are not psychologically disposed to think about security,” Emm explains. “This is the case today with smartphones. We think of them as phones – not as computer devices that have a security dimension. This is, I believe, one of the key reasons why so few people install security solutions on their smartphones – notwithstanding the alarming growth of mobile malware. I think the more discrete the technology is (i.e. the less apparent it is that it is a computer), the less we focus on security.”

There is the added danger, says Emm, that comes with complacency. Users put their trust into intelligent devices and simply assume that nothing will go wrong. “Last year, Kaspersky Lab highlighted this problem, that we termed ‘digital amnesia’,” he explains. “If we become so dependent on smart devices, we begin to lose the ability to do those tasks for ourselves. This phenomenon is not peculiar to computers, but

“When Big Data, data visualisation and predictive analytics are used along with sensor, robotics and AI technologies, both the process and the end product will be smarter. Obviously, AI technology will change the way we look at information, not just about past and present scenarios, but also predict future trends and possibilities.”

Sunil Paul, Co-Founder & COO, Finesse

the process is likely to be accelerated with the digital revolution.”

Artificial Intelligence technologies are already changing the way we consume data, and this shift is only set to continue. As we move forward and see our greatest hopes for the technology come to fruition, we will inevitably see streamlined solutions. However, with these automated responses creators and consumers need to keep a mindful eye on AI technology.

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CXO Corner

The Ex factor

With 775 branches worldwide, UAE Exchange is a cornerstone in the remittance market.

Determined to deliver an enhanced customer experience and improved back-end operations, CFO Pradeep Kumar opted for fresh budgeting and accounting solutions to keep track of the $25 billion in salaries that is transferred annually through its channels.

R

esidents of the seven emirates have a fond association with UAE Exchange. In a country that is reliant on its 90 percent expatriate population - where citizens migrate for better job and salary opportunities - sending money back home takes on huge importance for people of the United Arab Emirates. For them, and 400,000 others worldwide who use these services monthly, UAE Exchange is a vital channel that helps them feed, house and clothe loved ones around the world.

The company was founded in 1980, with just one branch to its name. Joining 25 years later, chief financial officer Pradeep Kumar has seen a great deal of change since his arrival. “Back then, we had 27 branches and no global presence,” he says. “There’s no doubt that the complexity of the operation – and of technology in general – has greatly increased since then.”

UAE Exchange now boasts 772 branches worldwide, but 70 percent of its revenue still comes from the Middle East, a region – like the UAE that is highly reliant on migrant labour. “This region obviously has 66

april 2016

huge numbers of workers from South Asia,” Kumar says, “but our expansion strategy involves having a presence in all markets worldwide.”

Aside from having a 6.51 percent share in global remittance services, the firm also offers a range of Forex, prepaid and distribution services, among others. These include its

pre-paid card scheme in partnership with MasterCard, and GoCash, a multi-currency travel card that can be used in a six countries of the customer’s choosing.

Ensuring the $25 billion of customer remittance money transferred annually is delivered in a secure and timely manner, is no easy task. Behind the customer-facing in-store staff and online transfer services, a series of advanced technologies and processes are needed to ensure transactions don’t go awry. “Our greatest ambition is to automate everything,” Kumar says. “This stretches from delivering an errorfree experience for the customer, to ensuring there are limited back-end costs for human resources.”

Although their services may seem smooth, Kumar knew that UAE Exchange’s budgeting and accounting processes could not be classed as seamless. “A number of department heads in other countries were using Excel to manually input their budgets,” Kumar says.

“This was very time-consuming and compromised the quality of their work. We needed to ensure a smooth flow of information, both internally and in terms of www.cnmeonline.com

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CXO Corner

the integration with our 150 correspondent banks.”

Keeping track of working capital also takes on huge importance for the firm, both in terms of its internal operations, and in dealings with these external banks. “We always have to ensure that there is enough money available,” Kumar says. Furthermore, the competitive nature of the money transfer business necessitates a complex pricing model for the company. All financial planning is undertaken in Q4, with a timeframe of 60-90 days needed to create a fullyfledged budget for all operations, encompassing all types of KPIs. Additional change to the company had put greater emphasis on the need for change. As of 2016, a new corporate structure has been put in place. This will bring all the Group’s companies under one umbrella, into a single holding company, while UAE Exchange will also maintain dealings with multiple intermediary firms. “This has necessitated further automation,” Kumar says. “There are different levels that need to be considered when consolidating accounts. The more companies that this applies to, the more complex the process.”

After a series of meetings with senior stakeholders across UAE Exchange and his finance department, Kumar decided to opt for SAP’s Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) software.

Kumar opened discussions with UAE Exchange’s CIO, and enlisted the IT department’s expertise for the design phase of the budgeting module, a key component in the new strategy. He also sought assistance 68

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with the integration process from MDS ap.

Facing “rigid” timeline and budget – some of which were unanticipated – constraints, the process of implementation was not without certain difficulties. “We were certainly concerned that we would not complete the project by the end of 2016,” Kumar says.

Adding to these woes were the challenges in deployment and user testing, giving an extra headache to the finance and IT teams. “Seamless” movement of data to the SAP modules was also imperative.

Nonetheless, the end-to-end implementation of the project, from design to user access tests, took nine months to complete, with Kumar keen to stress the physical implementation was “much quicker.”

The budgeting module of the software has now been successfully deployed, with 2016’s work being carried out on the platform. The accounting module, meanwhile, is due to be completed in two months’ time.

Kumar says the completed installations have already proved a fantastic value-add for the organisation. With the module now available to all appropriate stakeholders, the system is automatically updated to reflect budgeting changes. “It’s been a great help in terms of tracking and meeting our timelines,” he says.

“It’s improved our accuracy, and really enhanced our governance.

Beforehand, it wasn’t uncommon to make modifications to our budget via email. Now, any change goes through the system, giving greater

transparency to our governance and planning.” Kumar is also confident that once complete, the accountancy aspect will bring similar benefits.

The project has added broader operations capabilities to UAE Exchange, releasing bandwidth for the accounts team, which has proved very useful. “The new system will help us have faster time to market,” Kumar says.

He speaks highly of the support he received from integration partner MDS ap. “They were supportive in terms of meeting our deadlines, which meant they often had to work overtime,” he says. “They did a great job in supporting our domain team for budgeting and accounting and were highly knowledgeable.”

Given the project’s fresh implementation, Kumar says tangible cost savings are yet to be realised, but he is sure they will be evident over time. “By the end of 2016, we will know the full extent of them,” he says. “But I have no doubt it’ll be a substantial amount.”

Although Kumar recognises the importance of keeping up with the pace of digitalisation, he is adamant that customers will continue to crave traditional service models.

“The in-store model won’t die any time soon,” he says. “If customers are sending home their hard-earned money, they’ll often want to speak with a human being rather that dealing with a machine.” He is bullish about UAE Exchange’s broad service offerings. “We reocgnise that digital will be the order of the day, and we’re prepared to deliver services over any device,” he says. “Our overriding aim is delivering the best possible customer experience.” www.cnmeonline.com

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ANALYST VIEW

Daryl Plummer, Vice President, Distinguished Analyst and Gartner Fellow

Gartner Predicts Our Digital Future Gartner’s Top 10 Predictions herald what it means to be human in a digital world.

H

ere’s a scene from our digital future: You sit down to dinner at a restaurant where your server was selected by a “roboboss” based on an optimised match of personality and interaction profile, and the angle at which he presents your plate, or how quickly he smiles can be evaluated for further review. Another scenario is you walk into a store to try on clothes and ask the digital customer assistant embedded in the mirror to recommend an outfit in your size, in stock and on sale. Afterwards, you simply tell it to bill you from your mobile and skip the checkout line.

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These scenarios describe two predictions in what will be an algorithmic and smart machine driven world where people and machines must define harmonious relationships.

1

Gartner’s Top Predictions Robo-writers create content By 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines.

Content that is based on data and analytical information will be turned into natural language writing by technologies that can proactively assemble and deliver information through automated

composition engines. Content currently written by people, such as shareholder reports, legal documents, market reports, press releases and white papers are prime candidates for these tools.

2

Things will need help By 2018, six billion connected things will be requesting support.

In 2021, one million new IoT devices will be purchased every hour of every day. What happens when they require help and support?

Organisations will need to develop strategies and mechanisms for responding to things in different ways www.cnmeonline.com

ANALYST VIEW than when communicate with and problem-solve for people.

3

Agents get independence By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five percent of all economic transactions.

Algorithmically driven agents already participate in our economy, but are tethered to mechanisms controlled by humans in our corporate, legal, economic, and fiduciary systems. In what Gartner calls the programmable economy, new autonomous software agents will hold value themselves and be set free on the blockchain. It will be capable of banking, insurance, exchanges, and all other types of financial instruments.

4

You work for a robo-boss By 2018, more than three million workers globally will be supervised by a “roboboss.”

Some performance measurements can be consumed more swiftly by smart machine managers aka “robobosses,” who will perform supervisory duties and make decisions about staffing or management incentives.

5

Smart buildings are vandalised By year-end 2018, 20 percent of smart buildings will have suffered from digital vandalism.

Digital vandals will plunge buildings into darkness or deface signs in exploits that may be more nuisance than threat, but which require adequate perimeter security and a strategy that links building security with the larger organisational security process.

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By 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines.

6

More smart machines go to work By 2018, 45 percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines.

It will happen with startups and new companies first, but the speed, costsavings, and productivity improvements of employing smart machines means that some companies will use machines over human workers, such as in a fully automated supermarket, robotic hotel, or security firm with drone-only surveillance services.

7

Customer digital assistants hold conversations By year-end 2018, customer digital assistants will recognise individuals by face and voice across channels and partners.

Multichannel customer experience will take a big leap forward with seamless, two-way engagement between customer digital assistants and customers in an experience that will mimic human conversations, with both listening and speaking, a sense

of history, in-the-moment context, tone, and the ability to respond.

8

Employees wear trackers By 2018, two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.

For people whose jobs can be dangerous or physically demanding, wearable devices can provide remote monitoring of heart rates, respiration, and potentially, their stress levels, to send help immediately if required.

9

Smart agents manage our tasks By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40 percent of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate.

Instead of using discreet apps, we’ll rely on smart agents in the form of Virtual Personal Assistants (VPA) or newly built business agents to predict our needs, build trust, and act autonomously on our behalf.

10

Customers cause cloud failures Through 2020, 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.

Many organisations still harbour security concerns about use of public cloud services.

However, only a small percentage of security incidents impacting enterprises using the cloud have been due to vulnerabilities that were the provider’s fault. Customers increasingly will use cloud access security brokers products to manage and monitor their use of SaaS and other forms of public cloud services.

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BLOg

Rhonda Chicone, Faculty Member, Kaplan School of Business and Information Technology

BYOD is here to stay Y

our employees are undoubtedly bringing their own devices to work, whether or not you have a BYOD policy in place. If you don’t, you need to settle on one now.

A BYOD strategy is the best way to address the considerable risks that come with employees using mobile devices for work. One thing that users like about their mobile devices is that they are small but nonetheless powerful, but that combination has a lot to do with the risks they pose.

Something that can fit in a pocket can easily be lost or stolen, and when a stolen or lost device has massive amounts of storage that contains lots of data, both personal and workrelated. That’s where the problem lies.

A growing risk is mobile malware.

I can think of four major mobile malware threats attacking ActiveSynconly devices: YiSpecter, Stagefright, Keyraider and XcodeGhost.

So what form should your BYOD strategy take? Start with some common-sense practices. Have your employees become human firewalls by educating them about the risks that come with mobile devices — not just smartphones, but 74

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also USB drives, microSD cards and devices that are part of the Internet of Things. Make them adhere to security best practices such as using strong passwords, saving sensitive information to a device only if it is necessary, encrypting data (at rest and at motion) whenever possible (Google can show you how), applying OS updates, never connecting to an unsecure network and regularly backing up important data locally (which doesn’t mean in the cloud on services such as Google Drive or Dropbox).

But while your BYOD policy won’t succeed without the active cooperation of your users, it can’t be entirely dependent on them.

That’s where enterprise mobility management (EMM) systems come in.

EMM systems are what mobile device management (MDM) systems have evolved into as the technology has advanced. EMM systems help you keep straight who has employeeowned devices as opposed to company-owned devices, and more importantly, they help protect a company’s digital assets (data). One of the most important developments since the days of MDM is the ability

of EMM systems to create secure containers to hold all corporate files, other sensitive corporate data and approved mobile applications.

(The applications are likely to be restricted to those that have been approved, because today’s EMM systems typically restrict users to applications from the company’s enterprise app store.) Containers solve a big BYOD headache, because they separate personally owned data from company-owned data. So, if a device were to be lost, stolen or used in a way that was against corporate policy, the secure containers can be remotely wiped. In addition, some EMM systems can fight off malware or at least monitor it (whether a device is jailbroken/rooted or not).

EMM vendors support not just large enterprises, but also the SMB market. Most offer free trials, which should make it easy for you to persuade leadership to set up a proof of concept. To convince them that EMM will be a good investment, show them the value of assets that are now being accessed on employees’ mobile devices and fill them in about the growing problem of mobile malware.

They’ll probably see the light. www.cnmeonline.com

Insight

Robin Schumacher, VP Products, DataStax

Hybrid cloud H

ybrid cloud implementations are becoming standard for companies building nextgeneration cloud applications. The following are three key questions that need to be considered to be able to run and manage database operations that support both environments.

How simple is it? The underlying architecture of a database plays a big role in how simple it is to make hybrid cloud a reality. For starters, a masterless database architecture that sees every installation and running instance of the database software in the same way will inevitably be simpler to run and manage versus a master-slave or other similarly styled design. The latter will almost always have parts of the deployment devoted to different activities and functions and be more difficult to handle.

The foundational architecture of a database is closely tied to its replication capabilities, which also plays a key part in how simple the deployment is to run and maintain.

Part of the idea in using a hybrid cloud database deployment is being able to have multiple copies of the data in various locations that serve to: (1) provide consistent performance no matter the location 76

april 2016

of the web/mobile user; (2) deliver continuous uptime and no outages at the database level vs. the legacy failover capabilities of centralised databases; (3) supply location independence where both write and read operations are concerned; (4) keep certain data local, other data cloud-only, and some data shared in order to satisfy legal and other business requirements.

How scalable is it? One of the biggest draws of the hybrid cloud model is the ability to quickly scale and meet the rapid demands of more application users and growing data volumes. The key is to avoid idle compute resources and elastically expanding or shrink a database deployment so its capacity matches either current or forecasted demand.

While a nice idea, predictably scaling a database across on-premise and the cloud is not an easy task.

Many DBaaS offerings appear to provide easy scale, but underneath the covers it involves a tremendous amount of structure that, in the end, will not deliver the performance and scalability needed to meet the growth requirements of successful cloud applications.

How secure is it? Security is top of mind for every organisation considering hybrid cloud deployments. Some studies show

that nearly 70 percent believe moving any part of their database to a cloud increases their chances of unauthorised access, with others pointing to common concerns that includes account compromise, cloud malware, excessive data exposure and over-exposed personally identifiable information.

To alleviate these bottlenecks, the database being targeted for hybrid cloud should have an enterpriseclass security feature set providing the same levels of protection and security management for data regardless of where it is housed.

Encryption should be utilised for all data transferred over the wire, between nodes and at rest.

Beyond standard security management, there is another consideration becoming more prominent every day – data sovereignty (sometimes referred to as data residency). Data sovereignty addresses the idea that stored data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located.

Hybrid cloud is here to stay. Since database is the heart of nearly every application, it’s important to ensure any database being considered for a hybrid cloud deployment is simple to operate in such environments, can scale in a predictable fashion, and ensures solid data security. www.cnmeonline.com

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interview

Jean Turgeon, Vice President & Chief Technologist, SDA/SDN, Worldwide Sales, Avaya

A blueprint for transformation On the sidelines of recently held Avaya Technology Forum, Jean Turgeon, Vice President & Chief Technologist, Software Defined Architecture(SDA/SDN), Worldwide Sales, Avaya, spoke to us about the evolution of digital enterprise and networking trends.

T

he theme of this year’s Avaya Technology Forum has been digital transformation-as-aservice. Isn’t that stretching the concept too far?

No, I think it’s all about giving our customers choices. We’re not going to impose a deployment architecture; it’s all about us bringing technology that is adaptable to whatever is best for our customers. That’s what we mean by digital transformation as-a-service.

We want our customers to tell us what they want as a service – whether they want their cloud infrastructures to be private, public or hybrid. It doesn’t matter to us. The same technology that we bring from our communications platform with network and workflow automation can be deployed in whatever fashion they want. It’s pushing the envelope but it’s more about showing the flexibility that we bring to the market.

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Technology is just one part of digital transformation. It’s also about business strategies and operational efficiencies, so how can you help your customers achieve digital transformation?

The key for us is our consultative sales model. It’s no longer just about software or platform upgrades; it’s also about understanding the customer’s business priorities.

So, operational efficiencies is key, and that aspect comes from a deep understanding of the business as opposed to just the IT side of things. In the past we used to have these two silos. What we want is to bring operational effectiveness to the IT world, then follow it with the right business processes. Bringing these two elements together is what we aim to continuously promote in the market. However, if you don’t this consultatively, then you might miss a step and end up just selling products and platforms as opposed

to bringing more value from business strategies.

You also put emphasis on the move to a software-defined world – networks, data centres and so on.

So, do you think the underlying infrastructure – the hardware – will just be a commodity?

No, never. I think too many vendors have been trying to commoditise hardware. Right now the areas of hardware like compute and storage are slowly being commoditised. But that is quite unfair to some of the new entrants. Look at the transition from traditional storage and compute to hyper-converged platforms now.

You have new entrants that are transforming the way storage works, optimising and leveraging Ethernet transport to scale and deliver on linearity and scale. The same thing is true for Ethernet switching. An Ethernet port is just an Ethernet port. And this is why I keep talking www.cnmeonline.com

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interview

to customers about SDN. Most customers want to buy software from one vendor and hardware from a different one. So I ask them what cost can they reduce from an Ethernet switch. I can build a 48 port switch with one ASIC. And I need power supply, fans, LEDs, Ethernet ports, power cords and so on. So, help me understand what can be commoditised beyond that?

Avaya said, 2016 is going to be the year for SDN. Do you think the technology will go mainstream this year?

The way we approach SDN has already been mainstream for the last 18 to 24 months, and this is where you’ll see this exponential endorsement of the technology.

What we did differently is we looked at the business challenges that end-users hoped SDN can solve and we started documenting these things. These challenges include business continuity, enhanced security, automation, application profiling and so on. We started documenting these and there’s a series of 10 to 12 attributes that always come up. We took a look at all these and applied our technologies, we solved around 80 to 85 percent of those problems with our existing technology. So you don’t have to wait for SDN to become mainstream to be able to address these issues. What we are starting to see is, of course, the competition has to play that it’s a “tsunami” that’s happening. They’re trying to milk these revenues by convincing customers that buying a controller is going to be the holy grail of all your problems, which we don’t necessarily resist, but what we’re saying is “the path to SDN does 82

April 2016

not have to be just one particular vendor’s path.”

The path to it is to identify the business problems, apply technology solutions that solve those issues, then the piece that is really offers value proposition- application profiling – is very complex. Because now you need to have open APIs – from load balancers, firewalls, IDS/IPS, wireless controllers, SDC, policy engine and so on. So when will all of these vendors expose APIs in the same manner, so that the controller

"What we want is to bring operational efficiencies to the IT world, then follow it with the right business processes.

Bringing these two elements together is what we aim to continuously promote in the market." can control them all and what are the benefits. It is going to take a mindset transition in the marketplace before all of these things are consolidated and can be done with a single controller architecture.

Avaya said, SDN is going to be like a journey with the various technology components. Where do you get started? Do you need an Ethernet fabric to move to SDN? We believe that we do, and more and more of our competitors are coming

into the same conclusion. If you look at a recent announcement from a small vendor, they said that “we need to move to the next-generation architecture, the current one is not going to bring us to where we need to be.” We have been saying this for so many years now. Then in the same announcement they emphasised the need for automation over virtualised infrastructure.

Well, the fabric virtualises not just the data centre but with SDN-Fx we virtualise the whole enterprise.

I can virtualise my data centre, my campus and so on, over any WAN technology. Done, delivered, stamped and approved.

Do you think virtualisation eventually will come out of the data centre right to the edge of the network?

I totally believe that that is the best way to go. It has to be a mesh of open fabric architecture, it has to be servicing the application which is why we’re not resisting SDN. Because that’s what SDN says. The application has to take control of the network. We kind of modified slightly and said no, the applications have to be serviced by the network, which is slightly different as it’s not about control, its about servicing.

We’ve already built the services and architecture that is fabricbased, agile, and has all kinds of attributes from security. So there’s a lot of benefits from the SDN-Fx architecture that differentiates us from the competition. But when you start hearing our competitors use the term fabric, without the fabric technology, you can see that we are having an impact in the marketplace. www.cnmeonline.com

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Big A

Data, benefits

s organisations work to make Big Data broadly available in the form of easily consumable analytics, they should consider outsourcing functions to the cloud.

By opting for a Big Data as a Service solution that handles the resourceintensive and time-intensive operational aspects of Big Data technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive and more, enterprises can focus on the benefits of and less on the grunt work. www.cnmeonline.com

Insight

The advent of Big Data raises fundamental questions about how organisations can embrace its potential, bring its value to greater parts of the organisation and incorporate that data with pre-existing enterprise data stores, such as enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) and data marts.

The dominant Big Data technology in commercial use today is Apache Hadoop. It’s used alongside other technologies that are part of the greater Hadoop

ecosystem, such as the Apache Spark in-memory processing engine, the Apache Hive data warehouse infrastructure, and the Apache HBase NoSQL storage system.

In order for enterprises to include Big Data in their core enterprise data architecture, adaptation of and investment in Big Data as a Service technologies are required. A modern data architecture suited for today’s demands should be comprised of the following components: april 2016

85

Insight High-performance, analyticready data store on Hadoop.

How can Big Data be speedy and analysis-ready? A best practice for building an analysis-friendly Big Data environment is to create an analytic data store that loads the most commonly used datasets from the Hadoop data lake and structures them into dimensional models. With an analytic-ready data store on top of Hadoop, organisations can get the fastest response to queries. These models are easy for business users to understand, and they facilitate the exploration of how business contexts change over time.

This analytic data store must not only support reporting for the known-use cases, but also exploratory analysis for unplanned scenarios. The process should be seamless to the user, eliminating the need to know whether to query the analytic data store or Hadoop directly.

Semantic layer that facilitates ‘business language’ data analysis.

How can Big Data be accessible to more business users? To hide the complexities in raw data and to expose data to business users in easily understood business terms, a semantic overlay is required.

This semantic layer is a logical representation of data, where business rules can be applied.

Previously, business users would have to query Hadoop directly, which is impractical, or request information from IT, which means waiting in a queue of reporting requests. A semantic layer enables business users to analyse and explore data using familiar business terms — without the need to wait for IT to prioritise requests. It also allows for the reuse of data, 86

april 2016

reports and analysis across different users, maintaining alignment and consistency and saving IT the effort of responding to every individual request on a case-by-case basis.

A multi-tenant Big Data environment. How can Big Data be accessed throughout the organisation, no matter where people sit? With widespread demand

With an analyticready data store on top of Hadoop, organisations can get the fastest response to queries. for analytics, organisations need to embrace a hybrid centralised and decentralised approach to data. This allows different teams to incorporate local data sets and semantic definitions while also accessing the enterprise data resources that IT creates.

This hybrid approach can be achieved with a multi-tenant data architecture. In this architecture, IT collects and cleanses data into a shared Hadoop data lake and prepares a central semantic layer and analytic data store from that data.

IT then creates virtual copies of the centralised data environment for different business groups, such as finance, sales, marketing

and customer support. This way, IT keeps the authority in data governance and semantic rules, while business groups and departments can truly see the impact of their daily business activities against historical or corporate data stored in Hadoop.

User-friendly ways of consuming analytics. How can the experience of Big Data analysis be user friendly? A final consideration for the end-user delivery of Big Data is the form in which data will be represented. These data interfaces should meet the unique and individual needs of all users.

This requirement includes providing highly interactive and responsive dashboards for business users, intuitive visual discovery for analysts and pixelperfect, scheduled reports for information consumers.

While each style is unique, the best practice is to ensure that each interface is not a separate tool, so that creating, collaborating and publishing information is done with consistency and accuracy.

This is only achievable through a semantic layer that ensures data values remain consistent, while data presentations might differ from one user interface to another.

Big Data is increasingly vital to the enterprise and a fundamental part of the enterprise data architecture. To tap its full potential, enterprises need to accelerate investments in technologies that efficiently and effectively analyse and store data. Cloud solutions for Big Data and analytics make that possible. With them, enterprises can position themselves well for future data growth, and in turn, excel in the ever evolving Big Data ecosystem.

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OPINION

Major IoT challenges hindering success

eralded for driving positive transformations in consumer products, retailing, healthcare, manufacturing and more, the Internet of Things (IoT) promises a “smart” everything, from refrigerators, to cars, to buildings, to oil fields. But there’s a dark side to IoT, and if we don’t overcome the challenges it presents, we will be heading for trouble.

The easiest way to see these challenges in action is explore a possible IoT deployment.

For example, a very large industrial food storage warehouse and distribution centre is using Internetconnected devices to ensure the proper temperature of various zones, such as a massive refrigeration area for items requiring constant, non-freezing cooling and a massive freezer area for items requiring constant freezing.

• Some of the requirements of the deployment include: • Several dozen zones, placed strategically in the layout of the warehouse to optimise energy efficiency.

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• Several thousand thermostats as well as ventilation and humidity sensors inside the warehouse.

• Several hundred sensors outside, including on outer walls, roof top, intake vents, exhaust vents, and so on.

• Dozens of vendors providing the required devices and sensors.

• Real-time notification of climate changes that may put inventory at risk.

• The elimination of security breaches and malfunctions that could cause a temperature imbalance and ruin inventory.

With this use case in mind, let’s explore today’s top four IoT challenges and what we need to solve them.

Problem 1: Not understanding the data Having a lot of data doesn’t mean you can understand and use it. Because of the range and diversity of IoT use cases, it is unlikely that a single vendor can create a comprehensive solution for an environment of the scale of this warehouse. Even if one

were created, it would likely force a rip-and-replace approach that would be cost prohibitive.

Instead, creating a fully functional, secure, and robust IoT environment requires a complete peer-to-peer solution in which devices from one vendor can translate the information from the devices of the other vendors.

This, however, isn’t feasible, given the possible involvement of perhaps hundreds of vendors, including legacy devices. Without a better solution, the warehouse solution designer is facing a modern day Tower of Babel.

A more practical solution to ensuring all data can be understood and fully utilised across the deployment is to create a hub model in which one or more IoT gateways and IoT central servers are constantly receiving data from all the devices and sensors. A rules engine can analyse the incoming data, and the hub can then pass on appropriate commands to a receiving controller, such as turn the refrigeration up in Zone 2 where the sun is heating up the southwest outer wall. april 2016

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OpINION Such a hub needs to be able to translate different data types or units of measure, such as Fahrenheit to Celsius. It also requires a common data model to make it possible to compare and integrate data from any vendor’s devices, thus making it possible for the system to “understand the data.”

Problem 2: Too much data In some cases, the total amount of data being collected may be so great that moving it over the network to a central location may not be viable. Consider an individual outside temperature sensor on the warehouse. To serve its various purposes, including maintenance, it transmits temperature, humidity, hardware version, software version, battery level, motion/position changes, and the list goes on and on.

This information may be sent every 30 seconds – maybe even every second depending on the criticality – and there are several hundred sensors on the outside of the large warehouse. And this is only one type of perhaps dozens of types of sensors.

What’s needed is an integration solution with the ability to aggregate only the desired data from wherever it resides, normalise it into common data models, and make it accessible as needed for monitoring, reporting, maintenance, and other scenarios. For example, the warehouse solution should be able to pull the outside temperature and humidity readings from only the 50 outer wall sensors in Zone 3 to check the climate balance for Zone 3.

Problem 3: Security While the IoT peer-to-peer model (i.e. multiple connected devices working together) is essential for the warehouse solution and similar large-scale IoT use cases, this approach introduces an important security issue.

The overall security profile is only as strong as the weakest device that is part of it. If the security on a particular 90

april 2016

vendor’s outdoor sensors is weak, and a number of the other vendors’ sensors and devices depend on the data from those potentially compromised sensors, the possibility of a critical “indirect” impact is strong. For example, a breached sensor could deliver the wrong outdoor temperature to the system, resulting in a system decision to adjust a zone temperature in a way that ruins the food in that zone.

To solve this problem, the warehouse IoT peer-to-peer model

"Another dark side of IoT is what I call 'psychotic devices,' IoT devices or sensors that simply go bad and start sending false readings to the system." must be implemented in a way that enables the system to doublecheck a particular sensor’s reading by checking with other physically colocated sensors to confirm that reading.

For example, if one outdoor sensor is reading particularly high while its neighbouring sensors uniformly read a lower temperature, then the system should not make an immediate decision to adjust the relevant zone temperature. Instead, the system should issue an alert to validate the functionality of that sensor and to check the physical area around the sensor.

While checking with neighbouring sensors is an important technique to help detect a possible breach, the

security profile of the solution could be further strengthened by adding the capability to look at historical data to see if an anomalous reading has a precedent, based on, for example, weather conditions, time of year, time of day, amount of inventory and so on, that would account for the aberration.

Problem 4: “Psychotic devices” Another dark side of IoT is what I call “psychotic devices,” IoT devices or sensors that simply go bad and start sending false readings to the system.

The cause of the psychosis can be any number of issues, from the obvious, such as a software bug, a low battery, or a simple device failure, to the not so obvious, such as a construction worker inadvertently splattering a sensor with paint or covering one up with a sheet of plywood.

While psychotic devices are not an external security threat, the impact of such devices can be just as destructive. In the case of the warehouse, they could certainly bring on the ruin of the inventory inside if the precautions already mentioned in this article aren’t followed. Likewise, the approach to preventing psychotic devices from compromising an IoT environment is similar to the approach to improving security. Techniques such as comparing an anomalous reading to the output of neighbouring sensors can prevent dangerous and destructive system decisions.

Many companies see IoT as an opportunity to improve their businesses. For this to become a reality, it is imperative that IoT solution providers are aware of – and are developing solutions to resolve – these dark side challenges. The moral of the story? Choose vendors carefully. Adopt a platform designed to integrate and scale. Develop common data models.

Proceed with caution, implementing only the most critical scenarios first.

Then build on your success.

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PRODUCTS

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Launches and releases

Brand: ASUS Product: ROG GX700

Brand: SanDisk Product: SanDisk Extreme PRO microSDXC

What it does: The Extreme PRO microSDXC UHS-II card, according to SanDisk, enables action camera, drone and smartphone users to offload huge video files at unprecedented speeds.

The new card, which is available in 64GB and 128GB capacities, delivers transfer speeds of up to 275MB/s2 to offload high-quality content.

Featuring Class 10 and UHS Speed Class 3 (U3), the SanDisk Extreme PRO microSDXC UHSII card can store full HD and 4K Ultra HD video. It also includes a USB 3.0 card reader to conveniently offload files to a PC. It is backwards-compatible with UHS-I host devices, performing up to UHS-I speeds allowed by the host device.

What you should know: SanDisk highlights that the new card is also designed for today’s durable devices, as it can keep up in extreme environments. The Extreme PRO microSDXC UHS-II microSD cards4 are shockproof, temperature-proof, waterproof, and X-ray-proof.

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What it does: According to Asus, ROG GX700 runs a desktop-class Nvidia GTX 980 GPU with 8GB of GDDR5 memory and Intel Core i7-6820HK Skylake processor at full speed. It has a detachable liquid cooling module for extreme overclocking. The device is also equipped with a pair of traditional blower fans to help it exhaust hot air when the dock is not attached.

It has up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and is compatible with either Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro. Along its sides are the standard assortment of ports you’d expect from a gaming machine. These include SD,

USB-C, USB 3.0, Display and Mini Display connectors.

What you should know: Asus claims that this device is the “first ever” 17-inch real 4K UHD gaming laptop to feature Nvidia G-Sync. The laptop is priced at AED 19,999 and will be available for pre-order soon.

Brand: Apple Product: iPhone SE What it does: Apple’s latest smartphone launch, iPhone SE, combines the size and body of the iPhone 5s and the capabilities of iPhone 6s.

It has an A9 chip with 2GB of RAM for a speedy interface and performance. The device has an integrated M9 motion coprocessor which enables the always-on ‘Hey Siri’ functionality. It has a 12MP rear camera and a 1.2MP FaceTime HD camera. Other features include faster LTE with support for up to 19 bands at speeds of up to 150MB/s, plus it has fast 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 support. It is available in 16GB and 64GB configurations.

What you should know: The iPhone SE can shoot 4K video and capture 63-megapixel panoramas, and it can take Live photos, but there is no 3D Touch support. A first-generation Touch ID sensor and an NFC chip are also integrated in the iPhone SE, enabling Apple Pay functionality. april 2016

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Backlog

5 1

things you need to know about 5G

It’s much more than a speed boost

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

Most of the speed increases are due to how carriers will be adding more wireless channels, using millimeter wave technology, installing small cells that dramatically increase the coverage map, and pumping up the wired backhaul locations, according to Hank Kafka, VP, Network Architecture, AT&T. Kafka points out that IT leaders should view 5G as more than a speed increase. In fact, it is mostly related to making sure the networks can handle a massive increase in the number of devices. The Internet of Things will usher in a new age of connected devices, everything from the security system at the office to the radio in your car. By 2020, the number of added devices will take a dramatic jump as objects that were never on the network – such as clothing, sports equipment, bridges, and even your body – come online.

2

There will be brand new architectures

The speed boosts, low latency, and backwards compatibility with 94

april 2016

existing networks will provide a good framework for new architectures we have not seen previously, says Akshay Sharma, Research Director, Carrier Infrastructure, Gartner.

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

3

The trials are already underway

many companies have announced trials in the 5G wireless space, including Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Fujitsu, NEC, Nokia and Samsung.

Sharma says there are many key players to keep an eye on. Google recently acquired Alpental to help with millimeter wave access for more precise location tracking. Microsoft has started a TV White Spaces trial, which taps into the unlicensed spectrum not used by TV broadcasters. And, Facebook has created the Open Compute Initiative as

part of Internet.org to build wireless networks for developing countries and provide access.

4

Wi-Fi won’t be going any anytime soon

5

It will come online soon

Kafka mentioned how it might seem like Wi-Fi technology will not be as important over the next few years as 5G becomes available. That’s a mistake, he says, because both networks will continue to co-exist, and Wi-Fi technology will also evolve rapidly.

“We need faster speeds and more devices on the network than we expected 10 years ago and we need to solve with a new approach rather than duct tape and spit," says Roger Entner, Founder, Recon Analytics. "It will help businesses to connect more wireless devices with faster speeds and lower latencies.”

Sharma says that NTT Docomo has also announced trials in Japan, and Entner says that South Korea will likely have 5G running in time for the Winter Olympics in 2018. This will give an indicator of how those launches transpire and how users respond. www.cnmeonline.com