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ISSUE 231 | April 2011 | www.computernewsme.com

GOING GLOBAL Foreign affairs ministry uses technology to ensure a unified view of the nation

Dr Saeed Al Dhaheri, advisor for information systems at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), UAE

INSIDE:

E n t e r p r i s e m o b i l i t y | F i n a n c i a l s y s t e m s | ICT s p e n d i n g s u r v e y | C l o u d

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ISSUE

231

going Global

Foreign Affairs ministry uses technology to ensure a unified view of the nation. 6 From data to business agility >> Business analytics is being trumpeted as this year’s disruptive technology by industry commentators. Data warehousing pioneer Teradata claims that it will finally unlock the real value of company data and deliver a single view of the enterprise. 8 Regional CIOs pick priorities >> CPI’s ICT Spending Trends Survey 2011 finds that, hype or no hype, not many regional end users are implementing cloud technologies this year. 10 Disrupting the market >> Oracle has decided to discontinue development for Itanium, shaking the market and worrying customers. 14 Round-up >> A quick round-up of IT industry news in the MENA region. FEATURE 24 Mobile independence >> Consumerisation of IT has created a desire in every employee to access corporate information using an array of personal devices. Nancy Sudheer discovers that today’s CIO faces the challenge of ensuring a device-independent mobile environment thatwill allow users to access information from anywhere, at anytime. 30 Bridging gaps >> As the market moves towards a point where mobile transactions become the norm, the next generation of core banking solutions have to be developed keeping these changes in mind. Nancy Sudheer finds out how ‘smart’ the future of banking can be.

April

2011

36 Sales pitch >> Here’s what finance execs would like to know - before you come knocking. INTERVIEW 42 Knowing thy application >> SonicWall once focused on SMEs, but the introduction of its next-gen firewall line dubbed SuperMassive leaves no doubt that the company is now aiming at larger enterprises. In this interview, the next-gen firewall vendor’s chief Matt Medeiros addresses the challenges of securing everything from cloud computing to iPhones and Facebook at work. INSIGHT 48 Getting CRM wise >> The CEO has called and asked for some training on the CRM system. A great opportunity, but there are a hundred things you could train him on. Where do you start, and where do you place your bets? 50 The best path >> Cloud-based SaaS applications need to live in an ecosystem, integrated with the rest of your infrastructure and enterprise applications. Sure - but what integration strategy actually works best? HOW TO 52 Devise a social business strategy >> Untapped data. Inability to scale. Dismal adoption. Overspending. Gaping security holes. These are some of the most common challenges that enterprises encounter following a social solution deployment, according to a new report by Forrester Research 54 WHAT WE’RE READING >> We select the best international technology blogs and books, and bring them to you.

A congress for clouds

Sathya Mithra Ashok Senior Editor

Publisher Dominic De Sousa COO Nadeem Hood

The last month has been one of the busiest at CNME. We have been working on events, round-tables and a lot of other CIO-oriented activities on our online platform (which you will hear of more in the near future), apart from the magazine itself. Yet the team could not help but notice all the changes that have been happening on the international cloud-services front. For example, there has been Amazon’s recent launch of a music service on the cloud, which encourages consumers to download, stream and store music playlists on Amazon. Customers are provided upto 5GB of free storage, and any music obtained from Amazon’s music store will be stored free, and not counted in the limit provided. The service is likely to give iTunes a run for its money, and beats Google to the market with a similar service that it has been talking about for a while. Now, this is strictly not of enterprise interest. However, it is very interesting to note how cloud players on the international front are mixing and moving between different market segments – both enterprise and consumer – and designing services that address both. Most of these services – both enterprise and consumer – will reside on the public cloud, and the public cloud is still considered with suspicion and caution by most enterprises, especially in developing markets like the Middle East. Among the general hype of what the cloud can do, there remains a large majority of endusers who are yet to understand how the cloud can actually help them, the services that exist in the cloud and how they could manage the cloud efficiently to profit further from it. Despite a couple of regional conferences that have tried to address the issues, there are several gaping holes in the cloud story that need to be filled as soon as possible in order to help enterprises along the path to smoother adoption. CNME’s Cloud Congress 2011 will address these issues, and highlight the easier path to cloud adoption for enterprises. The three-day event will focus on everything from building the cloud to managing it, and analyse the state of services and the relevant contracts provided by some established cloud providers from the region and globally. The third day of the conference will concentrate on the crucial link in the chain for cloud provision – the partners – and enable them to learn more about this new technology, while understanding the certifications that are available and how they can address customer needs better with the cloud. In short, Cloud Congress 2011 is the place for you to be in early June if you want to know all there is to know about the cloud in the Middle East. Visit www.cloudcongressme.com for more information on the event, and if you need any further details feel free to email me at sathya@cpidubai.com.

Commercial Director Richard Judd richard@cpidubai.com +971 4 4490126 Editorial Dave Reeder dave@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409106 Senior Editor Sathya Mithra Ashok sathya@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409111

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GOING GLOBAL Foreign affairs ministry uses technology to ensure a unified view of the nation

Dr Saeed Al Dhaheri, advisor for information system at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), UAE

INSIDE:

EntErprisE mobilit y | Financial systEms | ict spEnding survEy | cloud

Regional partner of

© Copyright 2011 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

analysis | month in view Name the major technologies that you plan to invest in 2011

CIOs > Regional pick networking and security as investment priorities

CPI’s ICT Spending Trends Survey 2011 finds that hype or no hype not many regional end-users are implementing cloud technologies this year. Networking infrastructure

remained the top major technology stack that end-users will be looking for from across the region in 2011, gaining more than 33% respondents, in the groundbreaking ICT Spending Trends Survey 2011 conducted by CPI. This was closely followed by security at 27%. Broadband issues came to the fore, as more than 14% of the respondents picked WAN optimisation as one of the major technologies they would be looking to invest in this year. Around 11% chose unified communications, and another 11% picked managed services. Contact centre systems were chosen as a solution stack of interest by a marginal of respondents. The survey revealed that more than 50% of IT end-user respondents were already, or would soon be, actively looking for solutions around network security protection over the next 12 months. While around 20% stated that they would be looking for end-point protection solutions to invest in, around 15% stated they would be looking for risk and compliance options and another 15% opted for content protection this year. The survey, which was conducted from December 2010 to the end of February 2011, brought in responses from over 1000 CIOs, IT managers and IT decision makers from across the GCC region. VoIP (voice over internet protocol) and unified communications topped the list of applications that end-users

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

believed would become critical over 2011, bringing in 37% responses. IT decision makers also picked video conferencing and/or telepresence (25.7%), cloud and/or software-as-aservice (SaaS) (24.3%) and

Are you implementing cloud technology currently?

What do you plan to implement in the next 12 months?

Name the major technologies that you plan to invest in 2011

video streaming and/or on-demand video apps (10%), as applications or software solutions of critical interest through the rest of the year. Interestingly, in spite of the huge

hype surrounding cloud technologies and the relevant benefits it can provide organisations going forward, an overwhelming 77.4% respondents stated that they were not currently engaged in implementing any cloud-related technologies or solutions. However, as more is revealed in terms of the cloud and its related services in the region, cloud implementations are likely to

increase in 2012. The ICT Spending Trends Survey 2011 was sponsored by Gartner, Aspect, Du, McAfee, EMC, HP, SonicWall and Blue Coat Systems.

Respondents also stated their views on different issues that they face in the local ICT market, including staff training, vendor relations and support challenges. CNME will soon reveal more of one findings from the ICT Spending Trends Survey 2011. Read the next issue, or catch us online (www.computernewsme.com) for more on the survey.

APRIL 2011

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analysis | month in view data to > From business agility Business analytics is being trumpeted as this year's disruptive technology by industry commentators. Data warehousing pioneer Teradata claims that it will finally unlock the real value of company data and deliver a single view of the enterprise.

systems, he urges being pragmatic to start getting business value. "If you think all your data is perfect, you're delusional," he believes, suggesting that if you think that data capture was the name of the game then you're just plain wrong. "Look," he argued, "it's just not a workable data warehouse until there's a data model where you understand the relationships." And understanding the relationships between your data means analysing your internal and external business relationships. "Don't waste your time reinventing things," he urges, pointing

Barely three years after its

spin-off from NCR, Teradata is riding high, outperforming most of the IT industry even during the worst days of the global crisis. Formed three decades back with a vision of large data warehouses, it has since led the field. In terms of large global implementations, household names like eBay, Amazon and WalMart all use Teradata's massively scaleable appliance-based data warehouses, with some implementations now in the multi-petabyte range. "I believe there is no future for companies not engaged in data analytics," claims Hermann Wimmer, EMEA President. "Data analytics is no longer a by-product but a core business driver." The point is taken up enthusiastically by Dr Stephen Brobst, the company's CTO. "Metadata - the context of data - is critical to get full value from data. Without it, data just isn't information." His theme is simple: capturing data is not enough. There has to be a system for managing the collection, storage, analysis and dissemination - only this, he argued, will give you "a single source of truth" about data. Pointing out common mistakes in implementing enterprise information

Dr Stephen Brobst, CTO, Teradata

out that for, for instance, in a bank, where many data sets are repeated across lines of business - customer name, address, etc. "Data marts are just islands of analytic application - that's why they don't work. You need to integrate, not federate, otherwise you're condemned to redesigning the same framework over and over again. Be smart: leverage your effort via establishing the right Enterprise LDM (Logical Data Model) framework." His view on wasted effort and misdirected internal analysis is robust. "Look, face it, you're not 'unique'. Every

"A functional view of your data is okay for OLTP, but it just causes data chaos for BI applications. However, if you can't build an enterprise and logical data model within 100 days, then you've failed."

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

APRIL 2011

Ka-ching acquisition 1 Earlier this year, Teradata acquired Aprimo, a global leader in cloud-based integrated marketing software. It is now expected to drive the future of integrated marketing, enabling companies to optimise marketing performance with more detailed, comprehensive insights from a universe exploding with so-called big data. Aprimo's fully integrated suite is used by hundreds of customers, including 36 of the Fortune 100, notably Warner Bros and Nestle. Marketing has long been seen as the dark hole of data analysis, made even harder to manage by the explosive number of new data sources driven by consumers who are adopting new digital channels and information sources to connect, converse and shop. By integrating global social media insight and unstructured data with detailed information collected from customer touch points can transform the enterprise data warehouse gold mine into an analytic diamond mine. Commentators are highlighting the combined capabilities of Teradata and Aprimo as a definitive sweet spot for business transformation. "Besides being a growth category – our last forecast estimated that this market is growing at roughly 17% – campaign management is mission critical," claims Forrester Research's Suresh Vittal.

bank is 'unique', right? No, it's not. There's maybe 10%-5% of your business that different so why waste time and energy - adopt industry frameworks. I mean, why redesign a data model for, say, a mortgage application?" Although many organisations have adopted data warehouses, Teradata believes that getting value from the data is still in its infancy. "Data integration

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"A hot button for our customers is their baseline infrastructure - that is, CRM or ERP and so on - and is realising that it's time to tackle data integration in order to drive business benefit."

Hermann Wimmer, President EMEA, Teradata

breaks down line of business silos," agrees Dr Judy Bayer, Director of Advanced Analytics at Teradata EMEA, but its business analytics that will provide business agility. As an example, Wimmer points to eBay, one of its key reference accounts with a Teradata data warehouse amongst the largest in the world multiple petabytes is the suspected but unconfirmed size. It has 5,000 data analysts working on that multi-petabyte data mountain, sifting and analysing over an astounding 1TB of customer data every eight seconds. It's an operation that large and complex that allows eBay "to analyse customer behaviour and optimise its business constantly", Wimmer added. Typical prospective customers for the company - from the banking and telecom sectors, say - are looking for ways to increase customer retention and increase customer value, both obvious targets for business analytics, according to Bayer. "Advanced analytics are going mainstream," she says, "precisely because it addresses issues like customer attrition, churn and the like." Historically, analysis focused on past behaviour; now, advanced analystics allows predictive analysis, from simple examples like stock planning levels for a food store against future weather patterns (better weather equals more barbeques, for example), to more complex examples like advanced analysis of mass customer behaviour. In the future, for example, the old analysis of analysing customer behaviour via credit card usage (where, when and what) will

morph into analysing customer behaviour via smartphone analysis. "What we're going to see" according to Wimmer, "is a massive shift from analysing historical data to predictive analysis in operational data warehousing environment. Look, we can do the historical stuff - we've led the data warehouse market for nearly three decades sicne we invented it. The challenge is dealing with new sorts of data. Three years ago, for example, we had no idea that social networking would explode and be so important for business. Unpredictability needs to be managed." Brobst agrees that the really interesting future comes when unstructured data enters the picture. "We have all this data which is not being captured and analysed, from social networking which every company is

now using. Dealing with this so-called 'big data' is critical, which is why we're acquiring Aster." The deal for the data warehousing and analtyics startup Aster Data Systems is expected to close in Q2. The acquisition will give Teradata the tools to analyse unstructured data, which involves complex interrelationships that do not lend themselves to analysis with traditional techniques. Oracle is already looking at such analysis with its Exadata initiative. With major regional customers like NBAD, Etisalat Misr and Batelco, Teradata, again experts outperforming the general IT industry, with projected growth of between 12% and 14% this year, according to Wimmer. The simple reason? CXOs today are not challenged by their business data. Instead, they want information that adds value.

Ka-ching - acquisition 2 Expected to be finalised in Q2, Teradata's acquisition of Aster Data Systems will bring the data warehousing giant a further early to market advantage in handling the large amounts of unstructured (big) data that organisations are struggling to store and analyse at present. Big data is generally defined as being massive in volume with a mix of structured and unstructured data involving complex interrelationships that do not lend themselves to analysis with todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s traditional techniques - sourced typically include Web applications, sensor networks, social networks, genomics, video and photographs. For these reasons, capturing, storing, managing

and analysing it is extremely difficult. Analyst group Gartner believes that "2011 will be the year when data warehousing reaches what could well be its most-significant inflection point since its inception. The data warehouse 'ideal' is changing and will give way to a new kind of warehouse that addresses more extreme types of information assets." Importantly, Gartner stresses that "organisations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%" over the next half decade.

APRIL 2011

COMPUTER NEWSâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;MIDDLEâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;EAST

analysis | month in view > Changing the market In what some say is an attempt to bolster its own hardware brand, Oracle has decided to discontinue development for Itanium, shaking the market and worrying customers. In a terse statement, Oracle recently said it would discontinue software development for Itanium, reasoning that Intel's strategic focus was on the x86 architecture, and that Itanium was nearing the end of its life. The decision has forced Oracle customers using Itanium servers to rethink long-term IT upgrade plans, as Oracle's decision limits future hardware and software options. Some customers are considering buying new hardware or porting code around a new chip architecture, which could cost millions of dollars. However, Oracle's continuing support of existing software on Itanium servers could protect investments and mitigate short-term issues. Intel's Itanium chips are primarily available on Hewlett-Packard's Integrity servers, which are designed to be mission-critical systems, built for high uptime. In reaction to Oracle's decision, Intel this week reiterated its commitment to Itanium, while HP said that Oracle's "anti-customer actions" were designed to force customers into buying Sun servers. Oracle has provided an end-of-life list for software on Itanium servers. The last version of the Oracle database to support Itanium will be 11gR2. The upcoming version 12g will not work on Itanium. Oracle's plans to continue supporting applications on Itanium could allay fears of switching hardware overnight. Analysts said that moving to x86 could entail buying new servers and rewriting and recompiling code, which could cost money, but provide long-term savings and an IT upgrade path.

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

There will be little incentive for companies to pay HP a hefty licensing fee for HP-UX when cheaper OS options like Linux are available, users said. Servers with x86 chips are also cheaper than Itanium, which could reduce IT maintenance and support costs. “Oracle renounced Itanium to lure buyers into purchasing its platform consisting of Oracle software and Sun servers with chips based on x86 or

APRIL 2011

Solaris, which competes with Itanium”, says Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat. Sales of scalable servers running Unix have been declining as x86 servers sales rise. Overall RISC (reduced instruction set computer) and Itanium Unix server revenue during the fourth quarter last year declined year over year by 19.3%, Gartner said in a study released in February. IBM was the market leader,

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Despite the x86 onslaught, there will be a market for mainframes and high-end servers running on Itanium, Solaris or IBM's Power to handle computer-intensive applications such as scientific modelling and analysis. But even in that market, pulling Oracle out of the equation could make Itanium servers less attractive.

with revenue growing 2.7% year over year, and holding a 38.3% market share. HP was second, with revenue declining 15.3%, while revenue for third-ranked Oracle declined by 45.8%. Intel, meanwhile, is also trying to push x86 chips into more IT infrastructures by adding advanced chip features derived from Itanium. Intel has adapted some RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) and error

correction features from Itanium for its fastest xeon 7500 eight-core chips, codenamed Nehalem-EX. The Itanium road map includes chips code-named Poulson, which could become available next year, and its successor, Kittson. Despite the x86 onslaught, there will be a market for mainframes and highend servers running on Itanium, Solaris or IBM's Power to handle computerintensive applications such as scientific modelling and analysis, McGregor said. But even in that market, pulling Oracle out of the equation could make Itanium servers less attractive. "Pulling Oracle out could be a significant hit. You're talking about the most powerful database on the earth," McGregor said. "MySQL is not in the same class as Oracle in terms of market penetration." “Possibly up to 50% of HP's f lagship Integrity Superdome servers run Oracle”, says Richard Fichera, principal analyst and vice president at Forrester Research. Though HP has said it will continue supporting Oracle installations on Integrity servers, the company needs to take additional steps to address customer concerns, said Steven Protter, owner of ISN Corp. and an HP-UX consultant. He is currently consulting with a Fortune 500 company on Oracle running on HP-UX Itanium-based systems. HP could port HP-UX to the x86 architecture, Protter said. This could help companies keep running Oracle on HP-UX.

APRIL 2011

But HP this week said the company has no plans to port HP-UX to the x86 architecture. "HP has no plans to port HP-UX to x86. HP and Oracle share more than 140,000 customers and HP is committed to supporting these customers with new innovations on HP-UX for the next 10 years," says Terri Molini, an HP spokesperson, in an e-mail. HP also said it will help customers migrate to other database software on Integrity servers. "[IBM's] DB2 runs great on HP-UX and we are happy to migrate those customers to HP Integrity systems. We are committed to ensuring that customers' IT environments are supported now and in the future on Integrity and ProLiant servers," Molini wrote. But the OS options for Itanium servers are withering fast. Microsoft last April said it has plans to phase out software development for Itanium. Red Hat also stopped Itanium software development in late 2009.

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round-up | month in view Jordanian > Royal signs deal with SITA Royal Jordanian and aviation IT specialist SITA, have announced a major deal for a fully managed service for desktops, printers, servers and infrastructure to the airline’s global network of 56 outstations over five years. The agreement covers desktop remote support and equipment for 56 out-stations which includes software support and more than 500 new PCs and 18 servers for major offices. In addition to on-site maintenance

consumers get > UAE more online-friendly: MasterCard

The percentage of respondents in the UAE accessing the Internet for shopping increased from 29% in 2009 to 42% in 2010 according to the results of a recent MasterCard survey on online shopping. Results of the fourth survey on online shopping conducted by MasterCard also revealed that growth in the UAE is led by consumers within the age group of 25-44 years, while those in the 35-44 years age group also purchased more items and more frequently than others. Involvement with online shopping also increased among women in the UAE, with 40% of respondents accessing the internet for online shopping in 2010, compared to 33% in 2009. The survey was conducted from 3 September to 1 October 2010 and reached 8,500 consumers from 15 markets across APMEA. Categories leading the growth in the UAE in 2010 include airline tickets (74%) and hotel bookings (66%), followed by home appliances and electronic products (32%), clothing & accessories (34%), restaurants/home delivery of food (32%) and supermarkets/superstores (32%). Notably, convenience shopping such as restaurants/ home delivery of food and supermarkets/ superstores grew to a third from about a fifth during last year. In addition, the proportion of online spending rose quite

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

support, there will be a SITA-operated helpdesk in Amman available 24/7. Hussein Dabbas, CEO, Royal Jordanian, said: “This enlargement of SITA’s support for our route network of 58 destinations is essential to maintaining our position as the Middle East’s leading airline and to enhance our standing as a member of the oneworld alliance. It strengthens our relationship with

SITA as we have also introduced SITA’s fare pricing software, Airfare Insight.” Royal Jordanian became a member of the oneworld alliance in April 2007 and operates a f leet of 30 aircraft which carried three million passengers last year. Hani El Assaad, SITA Regional Vice President Middle East and North Africa, said: “Following the successful deployment of Airfare Insight SITA is now looking forward to ensuring that the desktop backbone of Royal Jordanian serves the airline well and supports its annual growth rate of 10%.”

sharply for cinema (48% in 2010 versus 26% in 2009) and music concert/performing arts tickets (61% in 2010 versus 47% in 2009) while it fell sharply for music downloads (55% in 2010 versus 74% in 2009) and online gaming (60% in 2010 versus 74% in 2009). In terms of attitudes towards online shopping, 64% of respondents in the UAE stated that when they shop online, they would prefer to have a hotline number for enquiry versus 55% in 2009. Additionally, 48% of the respondents stated that most goods are much cheaper online than they are offline, versus 37% in 2009. The perception of online shopping as fun also continues to increase (46% in 2010 versus 39% in 2009). However, 45% of UAE consumers still do not feel secure shopping online. Amongst the top factors impacting online shopping, respondents chose price/ value of the items (84% in 2010 from 68% in 2009), secure payment facility offered by site (81% in 2010 from 72% in 2009), convenient payment methods (79% in 2010 from 70% in 2009), reputation of the website/ merchant (78% in 2010 from 68% in 2009) and speed of transaction (77% in 2010 from 68% in 2009). In terms of barriers to online shopping a preference to shop in-store/to look at the physical product and security concerns continue to dominate. However, interestingly, the concern with security has declined (49% in 2010 from 67% in 2009) and it is no longer the biggest barrier. Not having additional service charges and enhancement of payment security

continue to be suggested by two thirds of the UAE consumers as ways to improve online shopping in future. In terms of mobile shopping trends, the survey indicates strong potential for growth in the UAE. Only about 1 in 8 individuals made purchases through their mobile phones in the past three months; however, among those who did not purchase through their mobile phone recently, about one-fourth are likely to do so over the next six months. Airline tickets (31%), phone applications/software (24%) and products/services in online games/virtual world (18%) were the top three categories purchased by UAE consumers through their mobile phones. Eyad Al-Kourdi, vice president and country manager, UAE, MasterCard Worldwide said: “It is encouraging to see the positive trends in online and mobile shopping in the UAE. MasterCard is committed to contribute towards the development of the UAE as a leading global hub for retail and the latest MasterCard findings emphasise the market’s growing retail sophistication”. “We are seeing more UAE consumers going online for lifestyle purchases as well as day-to-day household items. This trend in consumer behavior shows that today’s tech savvy shoppers are diversifying not only what they buy, but how and where. A desire for convenience and value for money continue to be important to UAE consumers as they proactively seek better and more personal ways to shop online.”

APRIL 2011

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InfraStruxure data centres mean business!

We say that InfraStruxure data centres mean business. But what does that mean to you? The answer is simple. A data centre means business when it is always available, 24/7/365, and performs at the highest level at all times, is able to grow at the breakneck speed of business, lets you add capacity without waiting on logistical delays (e.g., work orders), continues to achieve greater and greater energy efficiency—from planning through operations, and is able to grow with the business itself. In addition, open architecture capabilities deliver any-IT vendor compatibility, affording you the flexibility and adaptability you need for speedy deployment of upgrades without overhauls.

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InfraStruxure data centres also enable you to: 1) Accommodate high densities easily 2) Add cooling quickly and easily 3) Monitor threats proactively 4) Upgrade instead of overhaul 5) Manage in a ‘single-pane’ view 6) Model capacity changes 7) Ensure your business drives your IT 8) Manage new equipment in seconds 9) Optimize reliability and efficiency 10) Move at business speed

Download the White Paper, ‘Implementing Energy Efficient Data Centers’, and get a chance to WIN a Lenovo® all-in-one touch screen PC! Visit www.apc.com/promo Key Code 85617t Call +9714 7099690 (Arabic) / +9714 7099691 (English) • Fax +9714 7099650 ©2011 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, and InfraStruxure are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. APC Middle East, PO Box – 53852, Dubai, United Arab Emirates • 998-3861_GMA

round up | month in view Times avoids > Khaleej bandwidth upgrade with Riverbed

Khaleej Times, a leading newspaper

in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its organisation to improve access to its business-critical applications that are centrally located in its private cloud infrastructure. By opting for the Riverbed wide area network (WAN) optimisation solution, Khaleej Times avoided a bandwidth upgrade that would have caused disruption to its IT services. Khaleej Times has locations in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Employees in the Abu Dhabi office were experiencing problems accessing digital publishing applications located in the central data center. The company relies upon publishing applications including DTI Advertising, DTI AudienceReach, DTI Circulation and DTI ContentPublisher, and an ERP system for managing news feeds, editorials and classified feeds. “Our business leadership is defined by timeliness and quality of content. This

tech > Palestinian venture fund

launches operations

MEVCF, the Middle East Venture Capital Fund, recently announced that it has secured $28.7 million from leading international companies, foundations, and other investors for the first venture fund targeting Palestinian technology companies. The Fund is beginning to evaluate investment opportunities from its office in Ramallah. MEVCF’s investors include Cisco, Google, the Soros Economic Development Fund, Skoll Foundation, Jean and Steve Case and the European Investment Bank, among others. The Fund will be managed by Saed Nashef, a software entrepreneur and industry veteran who recently returned to the region after nearly two decades in

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was being seriously hampered due to difficulties in accessing documents and files over the WAN,” said Mohan Kumar Shetty, systems manager at Khaleej Times. “We considered upgrading our bandwidth capacity. However, we found that the expense would be prohibitive and that it would only be a partial solution since it would not address latency issues caused by distance. In addition, the bandwidth upgrade would have been disruptive to our organisation. That was unacceptable to us.” Instead, Khaleej Times was introduced to the Riverbed WAN optimisation solution by its IT partner, Teksalah. As Shetty recalled, “We were delighted to learn that the Riverbed solution could be implemented in a matter of minutes without causing disruption to our IT infrastructure, and when we tested the appliances we saw an immediate improvement in file download speeds.” With Riverbed Steelhead appliances installed, Khaleej Times has experienced, on average, a 5x improvement in file download speeds. Files that were taking up to 50 seconds to download

can now be accessed in less than ten seconds, resulting in improved employee collaboration and productivity. Khaleej Times has also experienced a 30x increase in bandwidth capacity. “As a newspaper, time really is money to us, and we cannot afford to have our employees wasting valuable time waiting for files to download. Riverbed has enabled us to maintain our leadership position. We now consider Riverbed to be an essential component in our IT infrastructure, enabling us to achieve our overall business goals,” concluded Shetty.

the US, and Yadin Kaufmann, a longtime venture capitalist in the US and Israel. “We believe the Palestinian technology sector offers significant prospects for economic development and job creation,” said Nashef. “There is a vibrant community of software entrepreneurs who have ‘the right stuff’. We and our investors will aim to provide the access to risk capital and to international markets that these entrepreneurs need in order to compete on the world stage.” The MEVCF fund will invest in startup companies in the internet, mobile and software sectors created by ICT entrepreneurs in the West Bank. Palestine IT and software exports have grown consistently over the last decade. Several major multinational technology companies including Cisco, HP, Intel, and others have begun outsourcing development work to Palestinian software companies,

capitalizing on the educated and entrepreneurial population and developed IT infrastructure, which includes several thousand skilled Palestinian engineers and 13 higher learning institutions. “We are pleased to have the Google Foundation participate in the Middle East Venture Capital Fund as part of our effort to enhance Palestinian economic capacity in the ICT sector,” said Google’s Director of new business development, Gisel Kordestani. Yoav Samet, Cisco’s senior director of corporate development for Europe and emerging markets, said, “Our investment in the MEVCF further extends Cisco’s commitment towards creating a sustainable Palestinian technology sector. We are looking forward to supporting, through our involvement in this Fund, the development of innovative Palestinian technology companies.”

APRIL 2011

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round up | month in view Alfanar > KSA’s Electric completes

CRM implementation

Marco van de Sandt, CIO of Alfanar.

Saudi-based Alfanar Electric has

announced the successful implementation of SAP’s CRM solution, a technology provides increased visibility into front and back-office operations, helping to provide best in class benefits to dealers and customers. Alfanar Electric is the industrial arm of Alfanar, manufacturing a variety of low, medium and high voltage electrical construction products including power distribution and control, wiring accessories,

Acer aims to grow > faster than market Acer, the global ICT products and solutions firm, intends to grow by 30 to 35% in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region over the coming year. According to Giuseppe Mastandrea, the newly appointed regional director of the firm, the market is expected to grow at 26% and the company has set itself a target of growing at a 10% higher rate than the overall market. “That growth is excluding tablets, because they are a different game altogether and they will see a lot of growth by themselves. The further expansion of established names and the addition of new products over the next few months, across smartphones especially, will enable us to achieve this growth. Moreover, we are investing in marketing

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cables, transformers, and lighting. The company’s work ethic is characterised by quality products and services, excellence in practices, and values that nurture human potential. The integrated SAP solutions will assist in strengthening Alfanar’s IT and business processes infrastructure, facilitating the company’s plans for rapid growth and expansion. “With plans to expand and improve our regional service offering across MENA over the next two years, we needed a business solution that could be up and running quickly to support our superior customer service standards. We selected SAP’s fully scalable solution which is also completely integrated with our existing SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, providing a launch-pad for add-on functionality as needed in the future,” said Marco van de Sandt, CIO of Alfanar. The SAP business software, which went live in only six weeks following finalisation of the blueprint, will ensure Alfanar Electric achieves high levels of customer satisfaction by meeting customer expectations through active communication and the provision of value-added services and products.

The solutions will upgrade the level of services delivered to various customer segments, manage opportunities through coordinated product portfolios and forecasting, and ensure sales efficiencies making sure that the right team is in the right place at the right time. In addition, the technology will assist in preparing and adopting the programs and approaches necessary for implementing employee training and development plans. “As a leader in the Saudi electrical landscape Alfanar have plans for better integration and expansion across its divisions with a focus on reducing costs, while increasing innovation and improving their benchmark customer service and responsiveness,” said AbdulRaheem Bawazeer, MD, SAP KSA. “When it comes to addressing today’s most pressing line-of-business needs, such as sales, communications, procurement, customer service and callcenter operations, rapid-deployment solutions from SAP help companies find a f lexible path forward as they are affordable, easy to deploy, and are specifically designed to deliver faster time-to-value,” continued Bawazeer.

activities to help us strengthen our brand and make us much more recognised across the region,” stated Mastandrea. According to him, the company will equally push its products and solutions to the retail-prosumer market as it will to the SMB and corporate segments. According to Mastandrea, the company will be working on its channel strategy, re-qualifying partners and appointing new ones as well as it pushes more aggressively into the corporate segment, especially with its range of Gateway servers. “Currently, our revenues from the region remain a mix of 50% from the retail segment, 30% from the SMB segment, and 20% from corporates and government organisations – typically large accounts. In the next year, we can see that changing to around 30% from the retail segment, 50%

from the SMB segment and the rest from corporate and government organisations,” said Mastandrea. Acer has dropped a few places in the overall market share in the region over the past few years. However, Mastandrea assured that the firm’s new strategy, extended product roadmap including smartphones and tablets, and additional efforts for growth and brand recall will help it achieve its proper place on the ICT map in the region. According to him, Acer will soon also launch a solution meant for education institutions incorporating everything from interactive whiteboards to student netbooks. Mastandrea said that he expected this solution to gain a lot of customers in the region and the African countries soon after its launch.

APRIL 2011

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CASE study: MoFA, UAE

Dr Saeed Al Dhaheri, advisor for information systems at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), UAE

Going Global The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the UAE is unifying mission websites and building a new network to ensure that a single, consistent image of the country is projected outside. 20

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APRIL 2011

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs

(MoFA) in the UAE carries an important mission on its shoulders. As the UAE’s presence grows in countries across the world through several missions, the MoFA is responsible for presenting a unified image of the UAE to the outside world, and for ensuring that UAE’s citizens remain informed and connected. Both of these activities require a strong online presence. “Tawajadi is what we call the services that we provide our citizens abroad. One of our strategic objectives is to efficiently serve our citizens abroad. Citizens can register onto the service, based on the country that they are visiting, and they can be in touch with the embassy in case of an emergency situation. They can register either through the main MoFA website or through a particular embassy’s website,” says Dr Saeed Al Dhaheri, advisor for information systems at MoFA. “Our embassy websites also become the face through which the outside world perceives the UAE. They are

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the window through which people in foreign lands find information on the country. This was why it was imperative for us to present a unified vision of the UAE through our online activities,” adds Al Dhaheri. A number of issues were highlighted and the need for a unified presence was felt when MoFA conducted a study on their internet activities in 2009. It was felt that the Ministry’s sites were not presenting a unified vision, as each mission or embassy operated its own website, lacking a common structure, design or security. “The design for the websites was not always done in a professional manner – as befits the representation of a government – and the management of these sites were distributed. The cost varied from country to country as well. Another important element was the security. We cannot compromise on the security of a site. And we have very little control on this when the hosting environment is in a country outside the UAE,” says Al Dhaheri. “Most of the services we currently offer are information-based services. We have information on visas, and we also have an application form for requesting a visa. There are different information levels on this – costing, documentation that is necessary and legalisation of certificates. This is one of the most important services that the ministry offers abroad,” says Al Dhaheri. The ministry is also planning on launching e-services, where visa applications can be submitted online,

and applicants need visit the embassy only to receive the visa. The ministry is also working on an e-legalisation system, which will eliminate fraud and expedite the legalisation process for certificates, providing a costeffective way to deliver a service, while maintaining an account on the number and delivery of certificates.

Unification “Our website project started based on a need. We looked at the current state of what we had. We had our missions abroad – around 70 embassies and consulates – spread around the world. The number is increasing – we expect every year to have three to five embassies open missions around the world,” says Al Dhaheri. The ministry began to look for options to unify the structure of the websites. They also started looking for a hosting environment, that would offer them a centralised management option and also provide the security that they required for the websites. “We decided to host the embassy portals in a very secure environment, a trusted one and that remained within the UAE We looked at all the major service providers in the country. We visited their sites and researched the different options they provided. The offer that came from eHosting DataFort (eHDF) was the best in terms of different factors including, security, accessibility, services that were offered and cost,” says Al Dhaheri.

“Our embassy websites also become the face through which the outside world perceives the UAE. They are the window through which people in foreign lands find information on the country. This was why it was imperative for us to present a unified vision of the UAE through our online activities.” APRIL 2011

Once eHDF was chosent to provide the ideal hosting environment, the ministry began to look into the content and management of the sites. “The content can be broadly divided into two categories. There is the general content which is fixed for all embassies and that is related to investment, trade, tourisum and the culture of the UAE. This is content that can be unified across all embassies,”says Al Dhaheri. He adds, “The variable content is the one that is specific to each embassy. We give them the f lexibility to publish and manage this content – like the bilateral relations between the UAE and the country in question, information on the ambassador and the diplomatic team etc. At the same time the general content remains in a unified environment.” The ministry required a centralised content management system (CMS) for the sites, which would improve their effectiveness, and also enable people in different embassies to update to the CMS as and when necessary. Eventually, the ministry believed that the CMS would help in reducing complexity by doing away with different software, platforms. It would also help them reduce their cost. “We went recruiting for this rather huge project, and went with Spica as a strategic partner to provide the technology, manage the main MoFA website and the centralised content of the different embassies. Spica also helps in updation and maintenance of content on websites of embassies that are too small to have dedicated personnel to upload content,” says Al Dhaheri. The IT team partnered with the media department for the project. The media department is in charge of the websites and in charge of the content for the embassies. Information and content quality is reviewed by the media department before it is uploaded, and Spica works with the ministry to ensure that updation and uploading of the content is done effectively and is related to the particular embassy. “Working with Spica and eHDF we have already launched three embassy

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CASE study: MoFA, UAE

websites on the new platform. There is the UK website, the German one (which is hosted in three languages – English, Arabic and German) and the Australian one. We are working on a plan and a timeline, and would like to have all our mission’s websites on the same platform by the end of the year. Even if we are not able to achieve this, we will ensure that at least the big and medium embassy sites are on the platform,” says Al Dhaheri. According to him, the ministry is very happy with the service and support that it has received, and continues to receive, from Spica and eHDF. “Spica is proud to have partnered with MoFA for the embassies project. The biggest challenge in the project was for the embassies, with their diverse information and content, to congregate on a single centralised multilingual platform, which was achieved by our collaboration with the ministry,” says Bahaa Qasim, deputy GM at Spica.

Networking plans Tasked as it is to support the business and enable growth, the 20 member IT team is constantly working to ensure that it meets its goals. “We are embarking on a new project that we are going to implement very soon called the Global WAN project. This will link all embassies abroad, and our branch offices in Dubai and Sharjah, with one single private secure network and the head office here. This network will have capability of providing centralised apps to embassies abroad. If any of them need to access an app hosted at the main ministry location, they will able to access it in a very secure way,” says Al Dhaheri. He adds, “The global link is going to be provided through different means by leased MPLS connectivity, through a global provider and also through satellite. In countries that lack good land connectivity, the network will be offered through VSAT. The services provided will include voice, video, a global email environment, data transfer and app accessibility from the missions.”

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MoFA is also working on ensuring that communications across this network remain secure and encrypted, such that it is perfect for use by higher leadership for confidential communications. The value of this project was felt even more following the political disturbances in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. “Those countries were cut from the rest of the world when political turmoil happened as a means of trying to stop the communication, and we were affected by it. With the system that we will be building, we will have an independent secure infrastructure that we believe will be working even in instances where there is a break in communications. We will have satellite systems that will employ technologies like anti-jamming to facilitate and extend our reach to our missions abroad,” points out Al Dhaheri. The project was started and the RFP was f loated in 2009. The ministry plans to soon confirm a consortium – including local and global service providers – to start implementation of the network, which is scheduled to begin this year. “Currently there is no direct connectivity between the ministry and the embassies. They have the internet link and access to the email environment through the same. We believe that implementing Global WAN will reduce a lot of cost

APRIL 2011

associated with travelling, and improve the way we communicate between the ministry and embassies. People will have the confidence and trust to communicate via video conferencing and voice conversation. He will also be launching apps for the ministry and the embassies and the only way to access their will be through the Global WAN secure connection. The implementation of the network will be backed by a very strong SLA covering everything from response time to the accessibility of apps from remote locations,” says Al Dhaheri.

Streaming ahead The ministry believes that the network would not necessitate a huge number of changes in the internal infrastructure, but does believe that extensions and upgrades will be necessary on the existing setup. “We are considering virtualisation. We are not too keen on cloud computing, but we believe that virtualisation is one of the key technologies that can add to the efficiency of a data centre –using a minimum number of servers to achieve higher performance,” says Al Dhaheri. The IT team and Al Dhaheri take the ministry’s efforts to improve and provide better services to its citizens and foreign missions very seriously. And with such dedicated effort, there is little doubt that they will succeed in their future efforts and projects.

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feature: Mobility

Mobile independence Consumerisation of IT has created a desire in every employee to access corporate information using a array of personal mobile devices. Nancy Sudheer discovers that today's CIO faces the challenge of ensuring a device-independent mobile environment that will allow users to access information - anywhere, anytime.

In a business environment,

mobilising IT means taking information from inside the secure environment of a company’s IT infrastructure and delivering it into the hands of employees and partners outside in less secure or public places. Therefore, ensuring the secure transmission and storage of this information on mobile devices is a key concern with any CIO today. Across the Middle East smartphone uptake has been massive, led by consumers who appear to have great inf luence over the technology they use.

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It clearly indicates a great appreciation of the benefits of smartphone technology and a willingness to use it in their personal and professional life. According to market research, smartphones now account for one in four mobile handsets sold in the world and is experiencing around 20% CAGR per year. “This can be challenging for CIOs who need to deal with employees who insist in using a particular manufacture or type of device. Risk assessment of these devices is crucial before accepting these devices onto the network and is

APRIL 2011

one way CIO can retain control over their usage. Therefore, we expect to see companies provide recommendations to staff on appropriate purchases,” highlighted Matthew Hands, Enterprise Channel Manager at RIM Middle East (manufacturers of BlackBerry). Likewise with the fast emerging tablet devices there will be an appetite for individuals to use these devices connected to the corporate network. BlackBerry, one of the leading players in the enterprise mobility segment is now looking at integrating its smartphones with the new PlayBook. The tablet is focused on the business environment and utilises the same management infrastructure as that of any other BlackBerry smartphone. These devices will allow users greater functionality and is expected to further increase staff productivity. They are

likely to become more commonplace than laptops as they are lighter and more compact, yet deliver the equivalent computing power and with faster highspeed wireless networks like 4G LTE which are highly responsive.

Ensuring true mobility Employee productivity in the enterprise environment improves with device independence. Particular devices can be chosen keeping in mind whether it provides the best performance and usability for a particular task without

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worrying about whether apps and data needed will be available on that device. Nass Nauthoa, general manager, Intel, GCC said, “Today there are concepts like virtual containers on a notebook PC with hardware-assisted virtualisation capabilities, employees can have access to mulitiple environments (corporate and personal) on a single PC—something that is not possible on a mobile Internet device. However, employees may also want to carry companion devices for travel or home use for light computing tasks, such as access to the Internet, contacts, or schedules. Device independence gives employees the f lexibility to use the best device for each specific circumstance.”

Hozefa Saylawala, director, Motorola Solutions

True mobility facilitates business continuity, collaboration and increases productivity. True mobility expands beyond devices to processes and workgroups. Mobility in the workplace is about taking existing workf lows and creating a different kind of experience, not just for the individual, but for the group the individual works within. Tarek Abbas, systems engineering director at Juniper Networks MEA explained, “True mobility facilitates business continuity, collaboration and increases productivity. Mobility expands beyond devices to processes and workgroups. In the workplace it is about taking existing workf lows and creating a different kind of experience, not just for the individual, but for the group the individual works within.” Individuals often assume that because they have a smartphone or implemented a new WLAN network, they've embraced mobility – but they really haven't; more needs to be done to bring about precision and difference. Process within an organisation is important. It has to be made simple to be adopted and change working methods. And the outlook towards business. A good process will help employees make choices aligning with the top management requirements. “Organisational process will also be a large determinant in the success of mobility within an enterprise. Many a times by adopting an online presence via a portal can lead to successful deployment

Employee productivity in the enterprise environment improves with device independence. The best device can be chosen with the best performance and usability for a particular task in mind without worrying about whether apps and data needed will be available on that device. APRIL 2011

Matthew Hands, Enterprise Channel Manager at RIM Middle East

of enterprise mobility devices. This portal can look into aspects of ordering mobile devices, approvals, criteria determining which device is appropriate for the role of an employee by setting out a clear mobile policy. Helping employees report breakages and loss of devices,” explained Wael El Kabbany, general manager at British Telecom MENA. He added, “Having an enterprise mobility process in place for the management of enterprise mobility devices is critical. It is essential that an organisation truly understands its enterprise mobile estate, the associated costs and has clear policies in place for employees. Mobile asset requirements may also change depending on employees leaving the company or change of roles.” “True enterprise mobility” means a broad spectrum of solutions that leverage the latest in mobile technology from smartphones, to cameras, barcodes and mobile networks. Raj Bala, CTO at Cognizant stated, “To gain the most from mobility, enterprises must reshape themselves. This involves assessing how to achieve the enterprise’s goals using new technologies such as mobility. Often, existing business processes have to be reengineered to achieve optimal use of mobility. New business processes also have to be put in place to exploit mobility. Only then can true enterprise

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feature: Mobility

mobility be achieved, rendering a significant competitive advantage to corporations undertaking this transformation” The physical realities that used to be an important aspect of doing business, are paving way for virtual readiness, where businesses can be conducted from anywhere, at anytime, on any device and at much faster speeds, with complete f lexibility and security. Abdulla Hashim, senior vice president, business solutions at Etisalat noted, “Mobility has clearly emerged as a business transformation tool and Etisalat is all set to be at the driving seat to deliver value to customers with its range of innovative services. Mobile applications can be customised and applied across various industries to provide higher business efficiency and productivity.” “Mobility solutions have created a paradigm shift in the way businesses are conducted in the UAE. While on one hand, proliferation of mobile devices are help to liberate the workforce by creating on the move avenues for easy access to e-mail and business applications; on the other, the same proliferation and growing reliance on mobility is creates higher stress for the CIOs who have the additional task of integrating and

Wael El Kabbany, general manager at British Telecom MENA

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

controlling mobility to obtain optimum workforce efficiency. This is where organizations need to collaborate with solution partners such as Etisalat who understand every component of the mobility ecosystem.”

One device rule While some companies still follow the one-device rule most IT leaders today are moving away from it. The leading banks in the world are an example where they are now giving employees the option of choosing their own platforms. Manish Mishra, vice president, HCL Technologies Middle East has worked with customers to manage mobility and mobile device management solutions that can handle the complexity of managing multiple devices and platforms thus reducing the need for a one device rule. The implementation of a one-device rule depends on the type of enterprise or division, where the maximum devices are deployed. This is closely linked to the applications needed by the employees, added Sylvaine Dekeyrel, marketing virtualisation manager, NEC IT platforms (EMEA). Given the multiple end-user environment, a mobility deployment can be classified into different categories, Hozefa Saylawala, director, Motorola Solutions said, “Consumer, rugged or semi rugged are classifications which are important as connectivity has to be ensured with the integration of the real time information. This is accessed by mobile and multiple back-end systems. End-user access devices must also suit different user and environmental needs.” Today there are secure mobile application accesses, strong authentication, high availability, scalable architecture, and compliance reporting available in a seamless system. This brings the same level of control to mobile devices-including employee-owned smart phones that IT applies to laptops and desktops. “Comprehensive and robust management features enable IT to effectively secure its mobile workforce, ensure that policies and configurations

APRIL 2011

Sylvaine Dekeyrel, marketing virtualisation manager, NEC IT platforms (EMEA)

are persistent, and deliver automatic and real-time compliance management. Most solutions today also help enterprise end-users drive down support costs and overall TCO by leveraging the native capabilities of each enterprise’s existing data center infrastructure and IT network, including directory services,” said Abdelhamid Gamal, Telco AM from McAfee Middle East. It is equally essential that security policies must be consistent and uniform across an enterprise, regardless of access, “A secure mobility solution should provide a simple deployment mechanism for enforcing role-based granular access control to corporate applications with a zero-touch provisioning access for new employees and authorised users in the organisation,” added Abbas. As safeguards are put in place to protect data and intellectual property, companies can allow employees to select the tools that suit their personal work styles and facilitate their job duties, improving employee productivity and job satisfaction manifold. Even technology majors like Intel have opted to allow their employees to use personal mobile devices in the enterprise. The IT team is actively involved in integrating employee-owned hand-held devices into the enterprise environment.

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feature: Mobility

Secure mobility Employees must understand the value of data on their devices. This must be clearly understood by setting security policies (such as web browsing) down to the end of the device. Device encryption is another important element which must be integrated for stolen or lost devices. “To understand the value of data it is important for an organisation to explain the corporate value of the available information to the users. Training of users is another essential element as any technological solution always needs the support of the users to ensure that it works,” stated Nigel Hawthorn, vice

president EMEA marketing from Blue Coat Systems. This same level of control must be brought to mobile devices — including employee-owned smartphones — that IT applies to laptops and desktops. “Comprehensive management features enable IT to secure its mobile workforce, ensures that policies and configurations are persistent, and deliver automatic and real-time compliance management. This helps drive down support costs and overall TCO by leveraging the native capabilities of each enterprise’s existing data center infrastructure and IT network, including directory services,” added Gamal. A comprehensive policy within the organisation ensures restricting transfer of specific files and documents, blocking email attachments using user-configurable criteria, customising application control, and denying internal and external Web access based on various user-configurable options. Florian Malecki, senior product marketing manager from SonicWALL EMEA explained that IT still finds it challenging to manage mobile devices as data and network resources have to be clearly defined. “Data and network resources have to be accessed from mobile devices. Security companies today are supporting clients on this front providing easy to install, manage and use solutions.

Raj Bala, CTO at Cognizant

‘True enterprise mobility’ means a broad spectrum of solutions that leverage the latest in mobile technology from smartphones, to cameras and barcodes and mobile networks. To gain the most from mobility, enterprises must reshape themselves. This involves assessing how to achieve the enterprise’s goals using new technologies such as mobility.”

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

APRIL 2011

Nigel Hawthorn, vice president EMEA marketing from Blue Coat Systems

Organisations need to understand that there will be many rapid changes in the smart phone platform, beyond the control of corporate IT. Administrators must deal with multiple operating system platforms, including Apple iOS, Google Android, Nokia Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile, with an additional potential for new providers from emerging technology powerhouses.” The burden of juggling support for multiple smart phone platforms can also take IT resources away from securing other aspects of the network. Smart phones operate in two worlds: they can connect to the corporate network over wireless, or bypass the network entirely using mobile cellular connections. An employee might download Malware from the Web over 4G, and then disseminate it to the network over the corporate WiFi. Today, a CIO cannot restrict “Personal-Liable” devices as they bring both benefits and disadvantages to any organisation. While having your employee pay for and manage their own device has cost-savings benefits, supporting an unrestricted number of platforms is a nightmare for any CIO. This is not going to change in the near future as the adoption by employees of converge devices increases within an enterprise environment.

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CLOUD CONGRESS 2011 Charting Technology Future 5th â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 7th June 2011 The Westin Hotel, Dubai, UAE General enquiries Sathya Mithra Ashok Senior Editor, CNME Email: sathya@cpidubai.com Tel: +971 4 4409111

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feature: Financial systems

Bridging gaps As the market moves towards a point where mobile transactions become the norm, the next generation of core banking solutions have to be developed keeping these solutions in mind. Nancy Sudheer finds out how 'smart' the future of banking can be.

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APRIL 2011

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A key driver for the financial

systems of the future will be the provision of support for highly specialised solutions with an open and reliable infrastructure. Wissam Khoury, MD at Sunguard ME said, “Institutions need to run more efficiently, decrease time to market, achieve process optimisation, utilise the latest technologies and provide tools for sustainable growth. This leads to a growing need for sturdy support system for an efficient IT infrastructure.” “As requirements also vary for financial solutions across enterprises, a common theme across all customers in the region is for solutions that can help their organisations be more transparent, efficient and expand their networks to make them more profitable and competitive. This alignment will help organisations achieve operational efficiency whilst at the same time set them on the right track for growth and expansion,” added Khoury. New financial systems will be a combination of managing hard facts such as banking transactions and soft facts that relate to the customer's behavioral environment such as his appetite for risk and his transaction patterns with integrated processes. “The compliance concept will move to a larger framework

that will include internal risk, external risk with regulatory wishes and customer expectation from different arenas. An integrated network of capital markets in the GCC will be a fact, with effective market surveillance and integrated GCC level regulatory oversight,” points out Mohamed Daoud, banking and financial solutions and services practice leader at Gulf Business Machines. As the popularity of mobile related applications and technologies continues to expand exponentially, organisations will look at integrating and building data-marts to get better customer insights. This will encourage crossselling and derive business analytics “As analytics move from being predictive to interactive, cloud and BPaaS also gain momentum. In addition to which tighter regulatory governance will move focus towards compliance rather than financial engineering. We foresee greater convergence in media, telecom and banking services,” states Jaideep Poondir, vice president, banking and financial services practice, Cognizant.

Tapping new sectors Financial solution companies are today looking at new sectors for capturing a larger market share of the business. SMEs

“Organisations now have some flexibility to tweak their business processes as required by the product during implementation. They are looking at converting their capex to opex by going for hosted solutions around these products. In this region, IT is viewed as a support function rather than one that could provide competitive advantage, and hence, enterprises want to maintain a very lean internal IT team.” APRIL 2011

with limited budgets are now looking for financial products which can be implemented in a short period of time ,giving them the time to gain market advantage. This sector is increasingly being targetted by large and medium financial solution companies to rake in revenue and profits in an environment where large enterprises have tight IT budgets. “Considering the scale of operations, these organisations now have some f lexibility to tweak their business processes as required by the product during implementation. They are looking at converting their capex to opex by going for hosted solutions around these products. In this region, IT is viewed as a support function rather than one that could provide competitive advantage, and hence, enterprises want to maintain a very lean internal IT team. However, some organisations are indeed leveraging IT to enable their business transformation,” adds Poondir. This sector's specialities require a high amount of local packaging and configuration. Typically they demand an end to end solution that covers both software licensing and consultancy driven by best practices. Companies like Sunguard have forged ahead in creating specialised solutions for organisations with multiple activities and verticals of financial institutions. This specialisation is essential as a successful solution designed for a US, European or even Australian market will not automatically fit in the GCC. “Regional SME financial institutions are looking for sizeable ‘localised’ or ‘regionalised’ solutions specifically adapted for this market, as a majority of applications are not adapted for the GCC banking and finance sector due to architecture size or deployment costs. This is where the role of a focused software boutique is a fundamentally better approach than that of other 'supermarket' providers, where most of the banking solutions in the market are too large and are designed for developed markets and supermarket-style banks,” points out Daoud.

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feature: Financial systems

He adds, "This is where financial solution providers must excel; by selecting, crafting and shrinking sizeable state of the art solutions specifically for this region. This includes culturally customised project management methodologies and consulting-led delivery approach.”

It’s not about the money Organisations are no longer looking at accounting and financial solutions as mere software programs to maintain the monthly balance sheeta. During the last decade, financial institutions have largely reshuff led their core banking solutions and improved their back-office processes. “This is why, at present, changing the core chassis does not bring significant added value since these only address the back-office oriented processes which have already reached a very high level of maturity. In fact, most of the core banking systems are very similar in functionality and comply with more than 80% of any financial institution’s back-office needs. Therefore, today’s challenges are more related to front office customer services and front middle office compliance, both with a tougher regulatory environment and more sophisticated customer’s demands,” highlights Daoud. He also points out that regional financial institutions are asking for advanced risk management and compliance solutions, state of the art branch and multi-channel delivery systems. This must be embedded with customer relationship monitoring, a more customer-centric solution and design, BI and advanced reporting tools. “Investment and private banking institutions the worldover are increasingly asking for integrated wealth and portfolio management solutions, a complete mutual fund suite with integrated administration, multi-markets on-line trading and online brokerage solutions adapted to regional capital markets. These are all crucial since these markets are standardising their platforms to comply with international market practices and transparency.”

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Jaideep Poondir, vice president, banking and financial services practice, Cognizant

As these solutions get analytical they are also expected to be delivered via new channels. Mobility is becoming the key word in the region especially with Islamic banking business growing aggressively. These new elements of banking require enhanced features and even transformations in certain cases. “Enterprises are constantly trying to ensure consistent and seamless customer experience across channels, and are working toward providing personalised and transparent communication to customers. There is a greater involvement of end customers in banking operations and technology through self service” adds Cognizant's Poondir. Financial institutions in the region are growing out of tailor made standalone solutions. They are now seeking solutions that can expand their horizons

APRIL 2011

and help them grow locally, regionally and internationally. The need for internationally proven and specialised solutions is growing at the expense of generic systems that are locally or regionally developed. Specialisation is a key driver for institutions seeking differentiation and higher profit margins. “Stand-alone solutions have to be part of the wider solution set that many institutions require. It is difficult for a stand-alone solution to be well integrated and share data and information across an entire organisation. It is much more efficient, cost effective and manageable to have a solution well integrated across an institution’s various activities.” states Sunguard's Khoury. The region’s financial institutions have a tendency to prefer integrated modular suites of applications although it is not

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feature: Financial systems

always easy to find a small integrated solution specifically designed for this market. Regional enterprises also do not always like to depend on one single solutions provider. Best of breed solutions are chosen from different international providers to build an integrated solution architecture as a single modular solution to deploy under one methodology. Consolidated solutions are built from disparate breed of products. Daoud opines that the market is not yet mature and there is still a large market share for stand-alone financial systems although most of the time they are already commoditised packages. Regional financial institutions have not specialised their products and services along very narrow vertical offerings such as those of institutions in the developed world. Therefore, there is still a large need for stand-alone solutions – especially the ones that complement core business and chassis to comply with today’s challenges which are advanced risk and compliance, customer relationship monitoring, frontend services cockpit, business intelligence and analytics dashboard, among others.

Cash on the cloud While certain segments, such as core banking solutions, are maturing, some areas such as multi-channel platforms can still accommodate a truly differentiated product. Organisations are also slowly looking at adapting a cloud offering for fully web developed solutions. “Since most of the current applications are still rather old designs with legacy

Mohamed Daoud, banking and financial solutions and services practice leader at Gulf

processes, only new generation applications will fully comply with Cloud facilities. The cloud offering approach will mature over time and

“Regional SME financial institutions are looking for sizeable ‘localised’ or ‘regionalised’ solutions specifically adapted for this market, as a majority of applications are not adapted for the GCC banking and finance sector due to architecture size or deployment costs.”

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

APRIL 2011

will take probably another five years before financial institutions will really start moving their core processes. For the moment, this move will concern stand-alone satellite applications that complement the banking core chassis,” explained Daoud. Organisations are able to achieve operational efficiency by outsourcing and utilising various cloud services. “In the Middle East, and for the time being, this is especially effective in industries such as brokerage and investment banking, and to a marginally lower extent in conventional banking. Having said that, market dynamics are evolving and outsourcing is becoming a hot topic in this area,” says Khoury.

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sales pitch Here’s what finance execs would like you to know - before you come knocking. You can't run a company

without technology, and you can't invest in technology without the approval of the finance department. And thanks to the stagnant economy, the pendulum of power between finance and IT is swinging decidedly toward the chief financial officer's door these days. "The power dynamic in the C-suite really does change when the economic times are difficult," says Bob Martins, a CFO partner at Tatum LLC, an executive services firm. "And right now, any kind of spending decision requires much more scrutiny." All of this means that now is an excellent time for you, as an IT manager, to hear what finance has to say.

Say goodbye to bells and whistles During better economic times, Don MacKenzie, CFO and chief operating officer at Accounting Management Solutions, could be persuaded to buy a more expensive system if it offered nice-to-have usability options or extra functionality. But these days, the age-old battle between cost and functionality is being won by cost. So when the professional services firm needed new customer relationship management software, MacKenzie told his CIO at the outset, "Maybe we don't need the Cadillac. Our problem might be better solved using a Chevy solution." MacKenzie expected the CIO to deliver an analysis that looked at several systems -- something he has always done, in good times and bad -- detailing how much each one cost, the features each one offered and what type of ROI

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

each one could be expected to deliver. But MacKenzie admits that given the financial pressure, the weight was almost all on the cost side of the equation. "I'm not suggesting that there wouldn't have been a financial analysis [in the past]," MacKenzie continues, "but the focus then would have been more on functionality and on [the software's] tie-in to other applications. That might have overridden the financial considerations." These days, that's not the case. One of the options the CIO presented was "a 300-pound gorilla with all the bells," MacKenzie says, "but we went with one that was a lot cheaper."

Play with the toys you already have Tibco Software has made significant investments in IT in the past, including the acquisition of an ERP system. So before executive VP and CFO Sydney Carey opens the coffers to buy more hardware or software, she wants to make sure that the company is making full use of its current resources. "The recession has focused us more on the fact that we've made investments," she says, "so we need to ask, 'Are we really getting all we can from them?'" Specifically, Carey explains, "we needed to leverage our systems, automating or integrating or getting the right information to the right people at the right time to make decisions" -- but without making any more big investments in infrastructure. That meant working with the CIO and the IT staff to get more value from the ERP system. Carey had the IT

APRIL 2011

staff add business process management software and other programs to the ERP front end to make the company's order fulfillment system run more efficiently. Although the software additions did require some in-house development, they represented a quicker and cheaper

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investment than buying and rolling out an entirely new system. Yet the results were significant: Carey says the department that handles orders has been able to increase accuracy and double the number of transactions handled each quarter without adding staff.

Know what the business needs Being aware of the company's business strategy is always a priority for IT managers, but in tough times, it's imperative for IT to be up to date and ready to help with corporate changes on an almost daily basis, CFOs say.

APRIL 2011

For example, Teknor Apex, a custom compounder of advanced polymers, recently completed a major acquisition, and CFO Jim Morrison says he had to make sure IT understood the challenges the merger presented. His message to IT: "Bringing the

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feature: money matters

new acquisition into the fold is your No. 1 priority for the foreseeable future. For six to nine months, IT will be 'pretty much consumed' with the acquisition -- indeed, 'the whole company will be,' says Morrison. The acquisition illustrates the need for the IT department to help drive forward the company's strategy and be able to rapidly adjust priorities as the strategy evolves. To be sure, Morrison supports his CIO's road map of long-term strategic initiatives intended to increase eff iciencies and save money, but he also needs IT to be able to shift resources as corporate events warrant. Tatum's Martins agrees. He says a CIO needs to understand his company's short-term financial situation, its nearterm tech requirements, and its current risk-tolerance level -- as well as its future vision. Understanding all that, he says,

"It's all about the short-term and mediumterm returns. We move quickly if we think there's a strong, quick ROI. If it's not obvious, we're probably not going to do it." will help a CIO better identify and prioritize the projects that mesh with the company's immediate needs.

Show me an ROI that I can trust Martins advises CIOs to look beyond price tags and projected savings when they're making a case for a tech investment. He says those figures aren't really enough to calculate the true return

How to Sell IT Projects to the CFO Most CFOs still see IT as a black box -- they have limited visibility into the value that IT creates for their organisations, says Gregg Rosenberg, managing director of the IT practice at The Corporate Executive Board, a research and advisory services company. So it's no wonder that IT managers have a tough time persuading their CFOs to spend money on new technology today, Rosenberg says. By making changes in their pitches, IT managers can overcome that roadblock and get the CFO's stamp of approval for more projects, Rosenberg and other consultants say. Those changes should include reframing proposals and spending requests to highlight the business value that technology creates. In a white paper, Rosenberg suggests that CIOs should take the following steps to get their economic houses in order and make it easier for CFOs to see the value of the services that IT provides to the business: • Find out the business objectives of the stakeholders. • Allocate all IT costs to a set of services that the business wants. • Hold IT service managers accountable for controlling the costs of the services they provide. • Define units of service in terms that the business understands, and show how changes in IT service consumption affect costs. • Reward IT staffers for lowering the total cost of service. • Set the prices for IT services to support overall business objectives, such as cost predictability. • Invest in IT asset management for making resource allocation decisions (not for reacting to audits).

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APRIL 2011

an IT investment will generate. "I see ROIs all the time that can have a wide range of values depending on how you work your assumptions," he says. Martins, who works as interim CFO for a government contractor and as a financial adviser to two other companies, says CIOs need to include more details in the ROI figures they present. For example, he says, if a $500,000 investment helps generate $2 million in revenue, the ROI needs to account for the revenue that would have been earned anyway. And IT managers also need to identify the risk associated with each investment. "If there's a $500,000 expenditure, you have to consider the magnitude of success, the probability of success, and the risk if you don't succeed," Martins explains. "Because if you properly discount the probability of return but don't factor in the cost of risk, then you're not really presenting an accurate ROI."

Emphasise short-term benefits Breslin Longstreth wants his CIO to seek out projects that deliver benefits quickly. "It's all about the short-term and medium-term returns," says Longstreth, senior vice president of finance at A Place for Mom, a service that helps people find care options for elderly parents. Case in point was the company's decision to revamp all software licenses, standardise equipment, and upgrade and integrate phone and computer services. Longstreth says the company was looking at a six-figure investment to get the project done -- he declined to disclose the actual price tag -- but found that the ROI would likely be realized within a year. "We move quickly if we think there's

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a strong, quick ROI. If it's not obvious, we're probably not going to do it," says Longstreth. He says A Place for Mom, a private, $50 million operation, is growing so quickly that it's hard to predict what it will require from IT beyond the next few years. That's one reason he encourages his top IT person, the vice president of development, to think about projects with quick returns. The economy is another reason, Longstreth says. Although the company is financially healthy, he says he doesn't want to risk leaving it cash-strapped by investing in technology that has a longterm ROI. "Making a bet on something with a return three to five years out has too much risk right now," he says.

Don't abandon long-term investments Even with the economy in the dumps, Teknor Apex's Morrison wants his CIO to continue proposing projects that will help the company reach its long-term goals. "If there's a project needed for our strategic well-being, I don't necessarily [want IT to] put it on a back burner because the economy has taken a downturn," Morrison says. As a private company that's not driven by quarterly performance, Teknor Apex has the luxury of being able to focus more on long-term results, Morrison acknowledges. But that doesn't mean he can fund IT projects that don't support the corporate agenda -- especially in today's economy. "Outside of upgrades of hardware, everything we do from an

Hint: CFOs Like Cloud Computing Perhaps you've already discovered this, but cloud computing (including software as a service) is a CFO-friendly topic. CFOs like the pay-as-you-go economics of cloud computing because it keeps cash in the bank longer, notes a Forrester Research report. "To a CFO, IT capacity or an application purchased from a cloud service provider is an operating expense that can be scaled up to meet a rising business need -- or turned off when the need evaporates. The same system hosted in the corporate data center is a sunk cost that includes a capital expenditure that must be carried on the balance sheet as an asset that loses value as it depreciates," the report explains. Forrester says that because of the difference between capital expenditures and operating expenditures, cloud computing yields the kind of financial benefits that CFOs value: • Better cash flow. The company avoids taking on debt and writing a big check upfront. Instead, checks are written monthly or quarterly. • Lower financial risk. With a cloud-based system, you pay only for what you use, and you can terminate the contract. An on-premises system means spending money upfront for benefits that may or may not materialize. • Greater financial visibility. A cloud services provider can tell you how much it will cost to add a user or process an additional transaction. Many IT shops would be hard-pressed to do the same for an on-premises system. • Healthier return on assets. Cloud costs are incurred in the same time period that the value is delivered, so the balance sheet doesn't carry an ever-depreciating capital asset of hardware and software, which lowers the increasingly important financial metric of return on assets.

IT perspective is put forth as either being strategic in nature or increasing our efficiencies," Morrison explains. When the market went south in 2007, Morrison says, the company reduced its head count by 5% to 10%, but at

“I'm not suggesting that there wouldn't have been a financial analysis [in the past], but the focus then would have been more on functionality and on [the software's] tie-in with other applications. That might have overridden the financial considerations.”

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

APRIL 2011

about the same time he OK'd spending $150,000 for software for the credit department. "It was probably one of the best projects we ever did," he says, explaining that it allowed the company to reduce staff in the credit department while improving performance. As a result, the new system paid for itself within two years. Morrison says those are the kinds of technology investments he'd like to see IT managers bring forward. "We look at IT as an enabler of a lean company. I don't think there's a function that doesn't feel that the IT systems are absolutely essential to their performance," he says. "So we give them what's needed. They just have to show there's a good return."

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q&a with Matt Medeiros

Knowing thy Application SonicWall once focused on small and midsize businesses, but its introduction earlier this year of a next-gen firewall line dubbed SuperMassive leaves no doubt that the company is now taking aim at larger enterprises. In fact, the San Jose company's CEO, Matt Medeiros, says the enterprise market accounted for nearly half of SonicWall's sales over the past six months. In this interview, the next-gen firewall vendorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chief addresses challenges and opportunities of securing everything from cloud computing to iPhones and Facebook at work. Q: What's SonicWall's general approach to IT security? A: There is still a substantial amount of bad malware, viruses and Trojans being written by sophisticated software development teams that are invading your networks at any moment, and our primary service is stopping that from happening. Second to that, it is our fundamental belief that organisations need to enable their networks and employees to be more productive. Four years ago, there were mostly really restricted policies -- you know, don't let things happen in your network that you're not in control of. Forbid people from bringing their own devices onto the network, using their own applications at home and even tapping into the network unless they're on the LAN. We fundamentally believe very differently. We have to unleash the power of the network. We want to enable people to use any device anywhere and use any type of application that is business worthy

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on the network and then give you the CIO, CFO or CEO the power to mitigate how much time, where, who and what has access to that information, those applications and those business processes that are important.

Q: Our readership deals with lots of security companies. What sets SonicWall apart? A: We provide the best firewall, which is primarily focused on malware. We also bring an integrated set of features that complement the security aspects of your network, but that enable you to maintain your network in a far more productive way. Instead of having a discrete device, we have integrated features like gateway AV, IPS, filtering and blocking, and there are now application awareness features allowing you to look at who's utilizing your network and the way that they are utilizing their network. In addition, we've incorporated things like SSL VPN, e-mail security/anti-spam.

APRIL 2011

Sonicwall CEO Matt Medeiros

Q: Who's the typical SonicWall customer? Traditionally you've been more SMB focused, but with the SuperMassive firewall you're moving upscale. A: About five years ago we made the decision to move upscale and the reason why we made that decision was because we not only were providing security for small businesses, we were also doing a lot of distributed remote branch office work primarily for corporate enterprises. They came to us and said "Look, you guys are doing a great job at the edge, at our remote branch offices and we think you have an opportunity to play here at the hub." So we developed a product road map that would suggest we could do that. I'm pleased to report that 45% of our revenue for the last six months has come from enterprises -anything above 1,000 employees. A lot of people challenge us over "Well, how are we going to get away from our SMB roots?" But I have never seen a virus or malware that is prejudicial. Sorry, you're a small company so you get a small virus and you know what, you're the big guy so we're sending you the big heavy load. It just doesn't work that way. So from our perspective, we always had the technology. What we needed to do is recognize it was a completely different capacity level at the hub of the data centre and there were certain features that were going to make a big difference in that data centre

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environment that we didn't necessarily have to provide in an SMB environment.

Q: Could you address your competitors in the heavyweight class as well? A: The 800-pound gorilla sare Cisco. Juniper, Check Point, Fortinet − those are the companies we are competing with as well. If we're up for a bonafide RFP where they truly aren't just shopping and trying to negotiate for the incumbent, we are doing very well. It's really all about just getting the at-bats.

Q: That was a good segue. Your appliance approach: how are you approaching this differently the Ciscos and the others? A: First of all, we believe in a multilayered approach, not only an appliance approach. We do provide things like a forced AV on a client. We do provide SSL VPN, which you could argue is all about mobility and the ability to create a far more secure environment with mobile types of infrastructures. At the appliance level, for the firewall we have a very strong belief that for the short term the appliance model is the most secure way of managing the data centre firewall. We can provide on an hourly basis updates and feeds to advance their signature database, to advance the performance of those products. You won't be able to get that in a virtualised world. It's not that we don't believe that the firewall will ever be virtualised. In fact, we have virtualised

firewalls within our firewall. But we believe that the hardware allows us to provide a level of security that you can't get just in a software environment. Think of it no differently than a key lock on your door. There are at any point in time hundreds of thousands of knocks on the door trying to get in. Somebody's trying that key to get in. I get to change not only the software signatures that prevent them from getting in, I do far more changes on a continued basis. The other issue is just purely network performance. People will argue with an appliance you actually induce latency. Well, the good news is Moore's Law applies to security hardware products as well, so you'll see today that we've introduced our flagship product -- the SuperMassive -- which is a multicore solution exceeding expectations on throughput and featuring full deep packet inspection.

Q: I want to ask you about three different trends and how you're helping customers deal with them. The first one is cloud computing and it really has two angles. One is how does cloud change the security issues that customers are dealing with and how do you help them with that, and two, are you going to be moving your capabilities into the cloud? A: For the last six years we've actually been deploying our products into clouds, so many of our resellers provide Managed Security Services that use not just our firewall, but our

APRIL 2011

e-mail security, our SSL VPN and even our CDP [continuous data protection]. When the company was founded all of its signature database and content management was managed in the cloud. Our customers don't see a dataset. The memory of our device, which makes our device extremely affordable, is not burdened by having to have a hard drive or having to have a substantial amount of memory to load all these signatures. We have over a million installed base users, so they've always been managed by a cloud, so we had kind of an advantage going into this cloud phenomena because we were in fact a cloud already. Where do I think the importance of the cloud relative to security is? First of all we see far more private clouds than public clouds, especially at the enterprise. People are learning their way about what things really make sense being in the cloud and what stuff really should be resident in the physicalness of a location. In our experience with branch office kind of work, we're watching customers take this whole cloud thing full circle. They thought they were going to do this in the cloud and are now back to pulling the hardware utilization back into the infrastructure.

Q: Don't you consider your managed service provider customers as offering public clouds? A: In some ways they are except for the fact that some of them will offer partitioned services for public and private cloud services.

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q&a with Matt Medeiros

Q: For anti-spam on content filtering, what's the ratio between appliance and service customers? A: About six months ago we made a decision to take anti-spam and move it onto the firewall, but it is a cloud service, so it's all done in the cloud. When I measure it from our traditional here's your e-mail security solution to the service that we're now providing on any firewall device it's been a massive migration. That's more of an admission that people are tired of manipulating or augmenting each change. I also think that it's an admission that we probably still have a substantial excess capacity of Exchange mailboxes. One of the first things that was a consequence of the great recession was the fact that from an IT perspective you were sitting on a whole more mail capacity than you probably needed and that Exchange is not easy to deal with and it's probably easier to just watch for spam at the first device, at the perimeter. People didn't have the microprocessor capacity to do it, but we overcame that.

Q: So you have partners that offer managed security services, but do you as a company offer cloudbased services? A: All of our services - content filtering, anti-spam, SSL VPN, etc. -- are really cloudbased. I think there will be extensions of this. I think you're going to hear from SonicWall as we develop the next generation of user portals - this whole application awareness campaign gives us great promise that there might also be different levels of cloud services that we can provide around applications and aggregation.

Q: In terms of the second major trend -- mobility -- we're hearing more and more about how mobile clients give people freedom to use what they want to use, but at the same time there's the challenge of keeping them safe and secure. How are you helping companies deal with that? A: Why I'm so excited about what we're doing is because it's no longer about tethering what gets done on my network. It's about unleashing what gets done on my network. We fundamentally believe if we can make your employees more productive in any way shape or form there's a huge ROI for that. SonicWall itself lets our people pretty much bring in what they want to use on the network. Now my job is to make them more secure.

Q: In terms of security for mobility, what needs to change? A: Very little has to change except for attitudes. Instead of stopping people from bringing in their iPads or iPhones, Android, Windows 7, the new Palm OS, start opening that up and encouraging it. Now you have to decide what you want that individual and device to really have access to [around the clock].

Q: But how does that work from a security architecture standpoint? A: It is difficult because now you have to make sure that you've got this flexible model that you can really deploy, but what it really says is your threat center has got to be very good at understanding where the malware really is and where the attack premise is going to be. Second, you need to provide

“About five years ago we made the decision to move upscale and the reason why we made that decision is because we were not only providing security for small businesses, we were also doing a lot of distributed remote branch office work primarily for corporate enterprises.”

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

APRIL 2011

application awareness because there are certain applications that even though I'm letting you bring in your own device I'm not going to let you get Limewire or BitTorrent up. I'll give you a great example. We use Facebook to market our company, but I don't let our people get on Farmville. It's just notorious for malware, so we're just going to stop that aspect of it. The other thing that I think the CIO, CEO and CFO want to know is OK great, Jack has responsibility for messaging what SonicWall is doing, but when we see Jack spending 30 hours a week on Facebook we probably have an opinion that that's not 100% SonicWall work and we can now start to have an informed way of helping that firm be more productive. If you can help change behaviour in a proactive way, you can enable a new purpose and a perspective of where IT becomes a healthier arm in the business.

Q: Let's talk specifically about social networking. How do you help them enable the good and disable the bad? A: One of the things we're really excited about with our new product introduction is this application awareness and the fact that we can get so granular at allowing, not allowing, even prescribing duration for someone. As much as I want Jack utilising Facebook and Twitter as a means for us to market and communicate, I certainly don't want Jack spending 30 hours a week there and if he's spending 30 hours a week, let's have an informed discussion with Jack about what is really happening. Behaviours start to change.

Q: Getting away from this topic a little bit. You acquired a continuous data protection company a while ago. How's that part of the business doing? A: We're very excited about a product that we launched at the very end of last year. It's our second generation continuous data protection backup and recovery product. It's really a solution for small networks and so we've got thousands of customers that are enjoying real-time backup. I can literally go back in and retrieve a file that I just screwed up. The user control elevates the backup and

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q&a with Matt Medeiros

recovery process. From an IT perspective, remote branch offices hardly ever get backed up. The cost of transmission to back up was really expensive.

Q: Do you plan on expanding that part of the business? A: Yes. I think it's an area that we've now had two, three years of good success in. I think you should look at continued investment on SonicWall's part. It's one of the reasons we are very excited about being taken private by Thoma Bravo. Look for things like virtualising the software. Look for us to start adding more application awareness in CDP and far more security features. I am still amazed at how many people back up the virus that brought the networks down.

Q: Talk about another product line: the next-gen firewall. What is it? A: We've always been a UTM (unified threat management) player so we understand what a UTM device is - it is a firewall. It is a gateway solution. It is an intrusion prevention, intrusion detection device. We stack on top of that content filtering, antispam, SSL VPN, so there's a few features that we've incorporated on top of that UTM device that others don't include in their definition of UTM, so that's the core of what UTM is today. Now when you add on top of that the ability to do application awareness and control as well as visualisation, you're at the next-generation firewall. The ability to see what's going on in your network, to visualise it and then prescribe specific ways to improve security, network productivity and employee productivity, that's the nextgeneration firewall.

Q: Talk about how that market is developing. There's a sense that next-gen firewall market is still down in the low gear. A: I don't think so at all. First of all, there are over 22 million first generation firewalls out there. Those firewalls, if you just look at our installed base, the average life cycle is three to five years, so there's a huge upgrade opportunity that's going to happen just because people will buy the logic that

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“The 800-pound gorillas are Cisco. Juniper, Check Point, Fortinet, those are the companies we are competing with as well. If we're up for a bonafide RFP where they truly aren't just shopping and trying to negotiate for the incumbent, we are doing very well. It's really all about just getting the at-bats.” this application awareness addition is a very important part of the way for IT departments to be far more in line with the business objectives of a company. They can be seen as a business provider, not a business limiter, and that's going to be a calling for CIOs to want to replace their existing firewalls. The second thing is you don't necessarily have to disconnect. We would argue don't disconnect your gen one firewall. Keep it in the same position it is in and let it just be a bump in the wire until you can start to roll out these new features and policies.

Q: Is there anything specific that you have had to do for highly virtualised environments? A: We do definitely see more virtualised environments for SSL VPN, for e-mail security in the traditional sense and certainly see it also in some aspects of virtualising the security feeds and signatures in the database. We are also working on virtualising firewalls within a firewall device.

Q: I was looking at research your folks put out about the amount of malware activity in the past year. Does it get to a point where we can't keep up with it the way we're dealing with it today? A: You could go do the math and suggest there's no way anybody's going to keep up with that type of growth rate. But we are keeping up -- we're ahead of it. Our technology is so different from anybody else's, reassembly-free deep packet inspection. The fact that we're looking at every packet, the fact that there's no proxy involved, the fact

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that we can look at any file size, any protocol, really gives us the advantage. Now, on the other hand, the math would tell you that if we start to see a substantial multiplication of malware we're all going to have trouble. The answer unfortunately is that you start to do more blocking. The answer is we've got to get better at IP reputation and that's where we're investing a substantial amount of our time and why we always believe that building that into the e-mail security business may not necessarily be about e-mail itself and spam elimination. But what we felt was the reputation of that spam provided us with a direct link to potential malware creation and we've proven that to be true. We think there's also more to be done around you and I from an authentication standpoint. I'm really excited about some of the stuff that we're seeing relative to two-factor authentication. By way of example, my iPhone has a camera. It also has a specific IP address. It also has my password. It also has a cell number. There's a lot of really good data that if we correlated this properly it would work. The camera, the benefit of it, is I can get a retina scan, so if all this data is lined up right and you have a retina scan it's probably me sending that e-mail.

Q: What are your development priorities for 2011? A: We want to perfect application awareness. We think that there is a tremendous amount of network and employee productivity that can be gained. There's so many new applications that are going to be important and possibly much more leading edge than your ERP or CRM applications today.

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INSIGHT

Getting CRM wise The CEO has called and asked for some training on the CRM system. A great opportunity, but there are a hundred things you could train him on. Where do you start, and where do you place your bets? CEOs are smart in both IQ and

EQ, but they're also really busy. They simply don't have the time for lengthy training sessions, and they certainly won't stick around long enough to be indoctrinated. Tons of business-school research indicates that a CEO will almost never give you more than five minutes of undivided attention -- so you must earn the right to talk for anything more than that. So how are you supposed to communicate anything of value

about CRM systems in the time of a commercial break?

Start with what the CEO thinks is important Different companies have different operational priorities -- it depends on your company size, age, industry, and other factors. But any CEO has an internal priority list -- revenue growth may be more important than immediate profitability, or manufacturing may be more important than customer service.

Different companies have different operational priorities – it depends on your company size, age, industry, and other factors. But any CEO has an internal priority list – revenue growth may be more important than immediate profitability, or manufacturing may be more important than customer service. Job one is to figure out the four or five top things on the CEO's mind, and deliver actionable information for at least one of them.

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APRIL 2011

step one is to figure out the four or five top things on the CEO's mind, and deliver actionable information for at least one of them. A good place to start is the measurements the Board has in place for the CEO. Let's suppose your CEO really values customer retention. A good topic, then, is measuring repeat business along the lines of revenue, profitability, and customer "churn". The CRM functionality you'd want to show would illustrate trends in customer retention, and highlights winning vs losing sales strategies.

Develop an opening gambit Given the limited time you have to make an impression -- and to get permission to go longer than five minutes -- it's important to start with a grabber. Starting with architecture or firstprinciples arguments is pretty likely to bore the CEO and will waste your opportunity. I like starting with a question or a business puzzle, something that invites curiosity and an open-ended conversation. The opening gambit could be something like: "with customer satisfaction at 95%, how come our XYZ line gets only 20% repeat business?" Developing an opening gambit of that sophistication will take some work (off to the data warehouse), but a good gambit allows you to illustrate the power and business value of a solid CRM system. For most CEOs, revenue is a lot more interesting than cost so bias your selection of opening gambits to things that effect this quarter's sales results. If you don't have enough data to focus on the revenue pipeline, at least bring in revenue proxies like "new customers" or "sales inquiries".

Keep it bite sized The best outcome for you is not a long sit-down meeting. If you can have a 20 minute session that the CEO actually remembers, terrific particularly if he/she is actually asking for a follow-up session. One of the tricks I use is to create a personalised feature that answers a very

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in the business, right? Problem is, dashboards are dependent on correctly constructed reports (particularly the filters and joins), and it's all too easy to show some report that leads to bogus conclusions. Perhaps more importantly, dashboards expose (or even magnify) problems with data quality and semantics. If your data has dupes, dashboards will show double-counting. If the data is incomplete (or has blurry semantics), the dashboards will show holes. • Mobile apps certainly check the "sizzle" box, but they can only look as good as the platform they are on. While an iPhone mobile CRM app usually looks great, if your corporate standard is Windows Mobile, the story won't be so pretty. There's an additional twist: as most serious mobile CRM apps involve extra charges per user, they risk some optics that backfire. • The Latest Greatest CRM Features also check the box for sizzle, but they can be high risk territory. The slickest demo of cool social CRM goodies can be beautiful, until you discover that the demo shows stuff that isn't really part of the product. Setting expectations around something cool that actually requires a $100K consulting engagement in order to work is not likely your best move. The key to an effective CRM training session for CEOs is to keep it at a level where the conversation is centred around business value and board-level topics. Anything you talk about in the training session must be bullet-proof (and idiot proof ) -- so you need to do some homework and careful orchestration.

specific CEO question in a simple, usable way. If you possibly can, have four or five of these goodies at the ready, you can deliver information and functionality in bite-sized chunks. What you don't want to do is deliver them all at once: less is more. Keep some dry powder, and have a planned sequence of "bright shiny objects" for the boss.

Beware dangerous sizzle It's tempting to focus your opening gambit on some piece of CRM tech that gives great demo, but involves risk (either of uncertain results or of losing control of the conversation). Let's look at some examples of dangerous sizzle: • Dashboards would seem a natural for showing off to the CEO: they're the top-down view of key success factors

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INSIGHT

The best path

Cloud-based or SaaS applications need to live in an ecosystem, integrated with the rest of your infrastructure and enterprise applications. Sure -but what integration strategy actually works best?

There's a lot of noise from

vendors of every stripe about the cloud. Unfortunately, in the vendors' efforts to show how all their products are cloudbased, there's a lot of blurring about the specifics of what it means to be a cloud application. Consequently, this article will apply differently to every cloud vendor. (And for the purposes of this article, let's keep the discussion to SaaS and cloud-based apps from a vendor or integrator, not ones you build yourself, although some of the same principles apply.) With that disclaimer behind us, one of the distinguishing characteristics of cloud software is the variety of ways it can be integrated. As most cloud applications present themselves as a series of Web services, they lend themselves to a service-oriented architecture, even if they don't follow all the SOA protocols. With the right toolkits and development attitude, you can integrate cloud

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services become commonplace as cloud services. AJAX can give the pages a modern, intuitive, and responsive UI. Unfortunately, mashups don't inherently offer much in the way of security, so you'll have to look at tricky coding practices and server-side validation for sensitive data, and you'll probably want single sign-on or other authorisation infrastructure to control access without irritating users. So the tradeoff at this layer is: simple code and read-only, or secured with complex code.

Layer 2: Presentation layer integration

applications with a variety of techniques and use as many of them concurrently as you like, even in the same application. Of course, you have to understand the limitations of each approach—but there's nothing wrong with getting things done quickly. Let's look at this as layers of an onion.

Layer 1: On-screen integration Otherwise known as mashups, this style of integration is the ultimate in quick and dirty. The coding exercise is the construction of iFrames for the screen layout and URLs with lots of parameters for grabbing the goodies from the other cloud. This is the baseline method for pulling images, maps, news items, and data feeds from publicly available services like Google or Yahoo. This method will become increasingly powerful (particularly for demos) as graphing packages and other document

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Depending on the way your cloud application generates Web pages, you may have a programming layer on the server side which provides fertile ground for cloud integration. (In contrast, the mashup strategy works almost entirely in the browser.) While the mashup strategy is great for stitching together entire segments of a page (eg adding a map or graphic to a layout), integrating at the presentation layer shines in its ability to add individual fields within a section of a page. For example, it would be nice to add an indication of "how many days overdue is a customer payment" to the summary area of the CRM account page, but this field might only be available in your accounting system. Pulling this in at the presentation layer gives the users what they need to see, and is faster than doing a full-blown integration. Of course, the strength of this approach is also its weakness: that payment overdue indicator would not be stored anywhere in the CRM system, so it wouldn't be available to support reports, alerts, or other functions. This approach is usually used for read-only data, as the presentation layer may not have the kind of security infrastructure available in the rest of the system. It all depends on the language you're using and the Web service security libraries available — but it usually doesn't make sense to attempt complex security mechanisms when integrating at the presentation layer.

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Layer 3: Business logic integration This is where the heavy lifting of integration gets done, because this is where the application context is kept and where the best security and Web services infrastructure is available. What really sets cloud applications apart is the richness and ease of their APIs: do they support call out and call in, WSDL/SOAP, RESTful APIs, or only simpler conversations with XML, JSON, or similar vocabularies? For productivity, there's no substitute for accurate documentation and code samples so evaluate cloud vendors on this basis. Most cloud applications' integration architecture is quite loosely coupled and based on a request/response model.

Frequent polling is rarely a good idea, and tight integration loops (like twophase commit) are tough. In situations where a cloud must push a message, your developers will have to create logic within that application to trigger sending the message. Your developers will also need to develop a strategy (perhaps using a dedicated integration server) to handle network timeouts, application downtime, and guaranteed message delivery. At this layer, integration code will have access to all system objects and functions, so security will be essential. But it's such a big topic.

Layer 4: Data integration This is dealing directly with the cloud application's database. In many

cloud systems, there is no real way to directly access this level because it's really not safe for writing. Even for read integration direct database access can be problematic, as the table has no indication of application state or transaction co-ordination. That said, for bulk reading of data (for example, to replicate it for an on-prem data warehouse or a cloud-based analytics tool), nothing beats the speed of direct database access. At this layer, security is an issue because the application's security model transcends what's visible in the tables' access controls. In most cases, data integration will be done with superuser privileges so the resulting data f low should not be directly accessible to standard users.

How To

Devise a social business strategy Untapped data. Inability to scale. Dismal adoption. Overspending. Gaping security holes. These are some of the most common challenges—and often sources of failure—that enterprises encounter following a social solution deployment, according to a new report by Forrester Research. As more companies continue to

embrace social technologies, the key to success, Forrester says, is in a social business strategy. "Yesterday's strategies built around market needs are outdated in today's empowered business world," writes report author and Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick. "Dynamic, f latter organizations built around social connections that focus on solving business and customer challenges are replacing old hierarchial organisations." But before developing a social business strategy, CIOs need to partner with the CMO and address two areas: Create a social business strategy council. Understand that neither the CIO nor the CMO owns the strategy, rather the executive team must own it. Enlist the CEO to create a social business strategy council, comprised of business leaders and managers from across the enterprise, including IT, HR and legal. This team's responsibility, states the Forrester report, is to help create the strategy and see the implementation through. Engineer your "aha" moment. This moment occurs when senior leadership realizes the full potential of social technologies to improve their business, according to the report. Forrester

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recommends creating a setting for this moment by bringing together business execs to explore how social technologies are transforming other organizations, and to discuss what is possible in your organisation. Here are the steps Forrester recommends when creating a social business strategy.

Social Business Strategy Step 1: Considering Your People Without an understanding of the expectations and experience of your employees, customers and suppliers, developing an effective strategy is difficult. Start by assessing how creative your employees are. In using technologies such as Facebook or iPhones, do they imagine how they could be used to help customers? Is your company set up in such a way that employees feel free to act on creative impulses? This will help determine how far along your workforce is in social technology adoption, the report says. Next, think about how social your customers are. Between 2007 and 2010, social networking usage more than doubled, according to Forrester, with 62 million US adults visiting a social

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The first challenge here is to accept that the CIO wants EA to solve problems â&#x20AC;&#x201D; not create elegant architecture. He doesn't mind if the architecture structure is a little messy if his issues are being resolved. EA's will gain much more CIO support if they embrace the product design axiom "form follows function". networking site at least monthy. "A clear understanding of your customers' use of social technologies yields potential insights into how to engage with them to create value," Fenwick writes.

Social Business Strategy Step 2: Listing Your Objectives What do you want to achieve in social business? List examples, such as "grow sales by x% a year" or "increase repeat customer business by y%," the report says. Each objective should have one or more strategies associated with it and should describe how to achieve the objective. Next, review each objective-strategy combination in terms of emerging social technology trends and describe how these technologies can support, enhance or replace the strategy. Keep in mind the associated costs, risk assessments and ROI, the report says.

Social Business Strategy Step 3: Formulating the Strategy Review your objectives and strategies and determine which of them has the greatest output (impact on achieving objectives) for the least input (risk, investment, effort and complexity), the report states. This will help determine which projects should be supported and which should be scrapped.

As a guideline: Low-input projects, that require little or no upfront investment, that little impact on business objectives but still do have operational advantages, should be piloted.

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Initiatives with a large impact on business objectives, but are costly or complex, should be piloted so the business can minimise risk while learning how to maximise returns. Projects with little risk, complexity, effort and cost that have a big impact on business objectives should be invested in, supported and fast-tracked. Scrap projects with high input and little return.

Social Business Strategy Step 4: Selecting the Technology In selecting the technology, the report says that "IT must mirror the technology market and provide business managers with an array of services to support the social business strategy". Consider all options, the report says, including a platform approach, SaaS service and cloud-based solutions. Keep in mind how these services tie into the company's existing technology architecture. And when it comes to partnering with a vendor, be sure you understand the differences between the pricing models, such as freemium, payper-view and per-month licensing.

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What we’re reading.. Shine

The Cloud kingdom

Edward M. Hallowell, MD

Alok Misra and Ian Gotts

Book If workers seem listless, this psychiatrist argues, it may not be because they or their jobs are inherently dull. The brain can train itself to work better, so Hallowell suggests a five-step process to help staffers achieve peak performance: Managers must ensure employees’ jobs suit them well, help overcome the digital disconnect with face-to-face interactions, engage workers’ imaginations, get them to practice the skills they need, and praise their success.

Book Ever get the nagging feeling there’s something important you’ve overlooked? This book can help make sure you’ve thought everything through before you jump into the cloud. After a quick overview of Salesforce.com and some implementation hypotheticals, the book moves on to page after page of questions to consider before jumping in. They’re divided into broad categories, such as necessary changes to the organization, and each question is accompanied by a brief explanation of why the answer matters.

Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best From Your People (Harvard Business Review Press)

Thinking of Force.com as Your Key to the Cloud Kingdom? Ask the Smart Questions (Smart Questions, $30.99)

Being the boss

Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback Book Being in charge is tough. You’re responsible for the work other people do. You have to work with people to help them improve while remaining clear-eyed enough to know if the attempt at development isn’t working. You have to cultivate personal relationships without giving up authority. The three keys to managing these competing duties, according to the authors, are managing yourself, your network, and your team. They advise against trying to be friends with all your employees, but also against relying on authority alone to get people to do what you want. They also include a number of self-evaluation questions to help you understand your management style.

Being the boss: The Three Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader (Harvard Business Review Press)

Not for free

Saul J. Berman

Book Everyone’s looking for a way make more money out of things they’re doing anyway, and IT has to be prepared to support those efforts. The book’s discussion of “componentization”— breaking up something, such as software, to sell its parts individually—is likely to be especially relevant. This kind of move is likely to require adapting programs and may call for a different kind of customer support.

Not for free: Revenue Strategies for a New World (Harvard Business Review Press)

Candid CIO

Will Weider

Blog Weider is CIO of the Ministry Health Care and Affinity Health System in Wisconsin. Fellow healthcare CIOs will find much of interest here, as he delves into the intricacies of healthcare law and its effects on IT, especially electronic healthcare records. About every third post is of more general interest—for example, he talks about leadership, the importance of change management, and what bugs him about that new series of Microsoft commercials where people exclaim, “To the cloud!”

http://candidcio.com

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