Computer News Middle East April 2019 by Computernews Middle East

ISSUE 326 | APRIL 2019 TAHAWULTECH.COM

MICROSOFT AZURE GENERAL MANAGER “HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY MISMANAGING PATIENT DATA” ARUBA CTO

HEAD OF EMIRATES NBD’S LIV AZIZI DEVELOPMENTS CEO HPE DISCOVER MORE

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UAE MINISTRY OF INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT IT DIRECTOR HESSA AL SUWAIDI BUILDS THE FOUNDATIONS FOR AI

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Banks aren’t particularly loveable and often fail to understand their customers.”

KNOWING ME, KNOWING YOU

his month’s cover interview features the UAE Ministry of Infrastructure’s director of IT Hessa Al Suwaidi, who talks us through the ways that MoID is using smart systems to plan the country’s future development of roads and buildings. Turn to page 27 to find out why Hessa’s keen to get the fundamentals - automation, processes, the foundations, if you will - spot on before MoID ventures into AI and blockchain. Are so-called ‘digital banks’ just another fad? Are some of them merely freeloading off their legacy parent companies? Is their very existence nothing but a dirty lie? Not so, according to Jayesh Patel, head of Emirates NBD’s digital-only bank Liv. Jayesh reckons banks aren’t particularly loveable (hard to argue there) and that they fail to understand their customers. He reckons Liv knows how to get into customers' hearts as well as their wallets. More on page 32. Unsurprisingly, Aruba’s CTO Partha Narasimhan is one smart man. Partha recognises that businesses sometimes get so wrapped up in their own IT melodrama that the answer to their problems is often not what they expect. Partha shares all on page 36. In other news, this editor turns a year older on 30th April. All cards, complimentary battery packs and flash drives can be sent to Office 804, Grosvenor Business Tower, Barsha Heights (formerly Tecom). Thanking you all kindly.

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CONTENTS

Transformation and Technology Specialist Partner

Advance Computing Partner

ISSUE 326 | APRIL 2019

27 UAE Ministry of Infrastructure

18 8

HPE Discover More Dubai

End product

JAYESH PATEL, HEAD OF LIV

ARUBA CTO

FOUNDER, CPI MEDIA GROUP Dominic De Sousa (1959-2015)

James Dartnell reports from Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Discover More conference in Dubai, where president and CEO Antonio Neri put the spotlight on edge computing.

Data on tap NetApp’s senior director for the Middle East and Africa Fadi Kanafani gives his take on the importance of high-speed data management in the digital age and the inevitability of cloud computing.

40 Huawei “ready” for edge,

CNME hosted a roundtable in partnership with Epicor, which focused on the ways that manufacturing CIOs can look to automate a range of their most critical processes.

Huawei claims it is ready to win a sizeable chunk of the edge computing and driverless car technology market after announcing the full readiness of its AI-powered Atlas platform.

48 How to love cobots

Healthcare “failing patients”

CNME hosted a roundtable in partnership with Forcepoint, which focused on the ways that healthcare technology leaders can ensure that patient data remains protected.

ServiceNow’s vice president of innovation Chris Pope believes collaborative robots will transform the workplace, and that they should be embraced sooner rather than later by IT.

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SEIDOR MENA SIGNS MCDONALDS UAE TO IMPLEMENT SAP S4HANA, SUCCESSFACTORS

Ignacio Ruiz de Eguilaz, managing director, Seidor MENA

Fast food chain McDonalds UAE has chosen SAP’s business suite S/4HANA and Cloud HCM SuccessFactors., working with Seidor Middle East and North Africa as the

strategic implementation partner for the project. “We are happy to serve our digitalera customers the experiences they expect to be served, better

and faster,” said Walid Fakih, general manager, McDonald’s UAE. “Embracing SAP technology and partnering with Seidor MENA, SAP’s top implementation partner, will help us to be everywhere our customers expect us to be. For us, it is very important to digitise business processes and improve the overall customer experience in services delivering and user experience.” “SAP will play a key factor in optimising operational performance,” said Ignacio Ruiz de Eguilaz, managing director, Seidor MENA. “It is a big step for the entire McDonalds team to identify ways to leverage the data in areas such as supply chain, sales and procurement in order to achieve their desired objectives.”

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APRIL 2019

ANALYSIS HPE Discover More

LIFE ON THE EDGE JAMES DARTNELL REPORTS FROM HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE’S DISCOVER MORE CONFERENCE IN DUBAI, WHERE PRESIDENT AND CEO ANTONIO NERI ANNOUNCED A SERIES OF UAE-BASED INITIATIVES AND PUT THE SPOTLIGHT ON THE SHIFT TO EDGE COMPUTING. 8

ewlett Packard Enterprise president and CEO Antonio Neri marked his latest visit to the UAE by saying he hoped to drive the firm’s transformation into the age of edge and memory-driven computing, as well as turning raw data into valuable information for enterprises. HPE’s technology strategy will be centred around edge computing, which Neri said was an opportunity in spite of the current challenges businesses face in managing their dark date. HPE is investing $4 billion in developing the “intelligent edge”, which Neri believes holds the answers in delivering faster data analysis. “I’m very excited to write new chapter for this company,” he said. “The

APRIL 2019

market is changing faster than ever before. Digital transformation is increasingly happening at the edge and changing industries, and opening new possibilities. “Today, you can only get value from 6% of your data, so 94% of it is wasted,” he said. “There isn’t the time or technological capacity to generate value, but that’s an opportunity. The first step is to help you unlock the value of your existing assets. We want to help you monetise your data. “You’re all at different stages of your unique transformation journey,” he added.

“Speed and agility are your main goals in most cases. By 2023, most of your data will be created at the edge. The edge must work in harmony with cloud, which is an experience, not a destination. The cloud experience should be open and seamless across all clouds. The best cloud partner is unbiased, without an agenda. We have to create cloud “2.0” to deliver the next experience. We want to connect all your data, clouds and edges together.” Neri announced HPE’s “global” Digital Life Garage innovation centres, the first

Today, you can only get value from 6% of your data, so 94% of it is wasted.”

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Antonio Neri, president and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

of which will be opened in Dubai in September. “It’s a very exciting announcement for us and for the region,” he said. The centres will be used to incubate and test local technology, as well as showcasing HPE’s own solutions. He also touched on one of the most critical components of digital transformation - that of preparing a workforce for cultural change. “My biggest challenge is finding and reskilling talent,” he said. “Another major challenge is the management of all that change. The hardest part of digital transformation is changing skills, culture and people. We want to enable the transformation of technology, people and economics through apps and data.” Before wrapping up his keynote, Neri homed in on HPE’s www.tahawultech.com

Dr Fabio Fontana, vice president and managing director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Middle East

partnership with Mercedes AMG Petronas, and how the firms have collaborated to design a “car of the future”, in order to accelerate the Formula 1 team’s race times. Mark Potter, CTO of HPE and director of Hewlett Packard Labs, then delved into the ways that HPE is looking to deliver products that make it stand out from its competitors. “We look at innovation in three different ways,” he said. “Innovation is about human talent, ideas and building a culture of thinking differently. We bring in talent from around the world with the best ideas, and do a lot of work through our mergers and acquisitions activity. We also do a lot through our partnerships, like those with Intel. “We do a lot of innovation

9 organically across the business continuously. We look at how we can take emerging technology into our products as well as making long term bets. Part of our innovation process is thinking about how we can tackle problems differently by anticipating issues that will exist in seven or eight years’ time, and looking at what we didn’t anticipate seven or eight years ago.” Potter highlighted HPE’s work in building the “world’s largest” supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories, which features 2,600 two-socket nodes. He said memory-driven computing would be at the core of the firm’s technology strategy in the coming years. “We have to think unconventionally from a Labs APRIL 2019

ANALYSIS HPE Discover More

and HPE perspective,” he said. “It starts with memory-driven computing and how you connect that from a data and fabric perspective. We know that deep neural networks will need a next-generation set of computing elements.” Potter said HPE’s “analogue neuro-inspired accelerator” and Dot Product Engine architecture can deliver almost “11 thousand billion times” more solutions per watt per second than a state-of-theart quantum computer. “The human brain creates permanent pathways to do things more efficiently,” he said. “We’re doing the same thing with this generator, and with less energy.” Discover More guest speaker Sarah Al Amiri, the UAE’s minister of state for advanced sciences, discussed how the country is aiming to think outside the box in its approach to scientific and technological R&D, and alluded to the importance of the ministry’s partnership with HPE. “The UAE is investing in science and technology to diversify its economy,” she said. “This is not a luxury and we’re not merely jumping on the bandwagon. Our future economy will be rooted in knowledge. Our partners are so important for our development efforts. Identifying niche areas that the UAE’s scientific and technology sector can focus on is key. Only then will our research deliver the right outcomes. We want our homegrown technology being taken to the global market. APRIL 2019

Sarah Al Amiri, UAE minister of state for advanced sciences

We want to test the wildest technological and scientific ideas.” HPE’s vice president and managing director for the Middle East region, Dr Fabio Fontana, used his keynote to attribute the firm’s development to its strong network of partners and the ecosystem it has fostered in the Middle East. “We’ve created close relationships with qualified partners in our ecosystem,” he said. “Success isn’t a one-man job and is about partners

working together. Most importantly, it’s about culture and people. They’re key to success. Diversity levels are second to none in this region. We want to bring the genius out of every employee, customer and partner to help contribute to the UAE’s economic growth. We want to build the next generation of talent.” In a separate interview with CNME, Fontana added that HPE had “no plans” to build a data centre in the UAE or GCC.

We try to anticipate issues that will exist in seven or eight years’ time, and look at what we didn’t anticipate seven or eight years ago.”

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ROUNDTABLE Epicor

END PRODUCT CNME HOSTED A ROUNDTABLE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH EPICOR, WHICH FOCUSED ON THE WAYS THAT MANUFACTURING CIOS IN THE UAE CAN LOOK TO DIGITISE AND AUTOMATE A RANGE OF THEIR MOST CRITICAL PROCESSES.

Epicor’s regional vice president Hesham El Komy

APRIL 2019

Anish Kanaran, Epicor’s director of global systems integrators

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ndustry 4.0 is set to have ramifications throughout the manufacturing industry, and the majority of technology experts agree that what is being referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution will also have significantly affect the distribution and retail sectors. A host of connected technologies are advancing quickly, including highquality sensors, more reliable and powerful networks, high-performance computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies and augmented reality. These connected technologies, along with 3D printing, cloud computing, mobile devices and big data will change how products are designed and produced. Together, these technologies will have a profound impact that can change manufacturing in unprecedented ways. Industry 4.0 is also having a significant impact on the industrial www.tahawultech.com

13 workforce, and one of the top challenges will be the lack of qualified employees both from the perspective of retraining the existing workforce and ensuring our educational systems are preparing their students with these new skills. Other key challenges include concerns around data security and the need for significant technology invest. These challenges and more were discussed in the recent roundtable hosted by Epicor in partnership with CNME. The discussion sought to understand the main hurdles that manufacturing CIOs face in introducing technological change, as

well as their ambitions for the future. Epicor’s regional vice president Hesham El Komy kicked off the discussion by framing the most pressing technological challenges currently faced by the manufacturing industry. “Digital transformation means different things to different people,” he said. “It is certain to have both positive and negative effects on the manufacturing industry, and if organisations aren’t able to react quickly enough then they are sure to lose market share and customers.” Anish Kanaran, Epicor’s director of global systems integrators and

Factories today don’t feed enough information into their back end systems.”

APRIL 2019

ROUNDTABLE Epicor

alliances, said that factories weren’t currently “smart” enough. “Digital transformation is easier said than done,” he said. “Factories today don’t feed enough information into their back end systems. That isn’t the case with a smart factory, which needs to be the end goal for manufacturers.” Different functions within the organisation may claim ownership and IT and engineering are common ones that may each take ownership in an Industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing initiative. However, if it is not driven by senior management teams from the top floor to the shop floor and embraced across the entire organisation, success may be limited. Additive manufacturing is gaining momentum around the world. In fact, a number of national governments have committed sizable resources to the development and advancement APRIL 2019

of the technology. Additive manufacturing – or 3D printing is now mainstream and becoming a reality for many manufacturers. Additive manufacturing is changing the way the world makes everything. By enabling manufacturers to produce prototypes, tools and final parts directly from CAD data, additive manufacturing creates dramatic reductions in delivery times and production costs, which increase the speed of response to customer needs and reactions to changes in the market. Recent research on worldwide growth trends by Epicor found that companies in high growth markets demonstrated a strong inclination to invest in technology to empower their workforces, drive efficiencies and increase agility. In the study around three-quarters (74%) of Chinese firms, for example, cited IT investment as important, compared to a global figure of 54%. The survey, sponsored by Epicor,

highlighted how high-growth companies embrace change. 76% of high-growth companies prefer constant innovation to business stability, while only 49% of lowgrowth companies do so. In an age where innovation is driven by rising customer expectations, growing companies have distinct short-term goals that embrace innovation and business change as part of a wider transformation journey for growth. Yet transformation is different for every business. For some, it may encompass the adoption of the latest technologies – such as 3D printing, robots, sensor technology, and artificial intelligence, areas that some more traditional businesses have previously been slow to embrace. For others, their digital transformation journey will see them embrace the world of Industry 4.0, where all equipment in their production lines is online, connected, and capable of making its own decisions. www.tahawultech.com

ANALYSIS Forcepoint

FORCEPOINT: HEALTHCARE FAILING PATIENTS WITH WEAK DATA PROTECTION CNME HOSTED A ROUNDTABLE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH FORCEPOINT, WHICH FOCUSED ON THE WAYS THAT HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY LEADERS CAN ENSURE THAT PATIENT DATA REMAINS PROTECTED AND EFFICIENTLY MANAGED. 16

Duncan Brown, chief security strategist, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Forcepoint

he healthcare industry is not doing nearly enough to protect sensitive patient information, data protection expert Forcepoint warned in a CISO roundtable hosted in partnership with CNME. Duncan Brown, Forcepoint’s chief security strategist for the Europe,

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Middle East and Africa region, kicked off the seminar with a selection of regional healthcare technology experts by discussing some of the challenges that healthcare providers face in managing patient data. He highlighted how the UK’s National Health Service was “collateral damage” to 2017’s WannaCry ransomware attack, which ground operations to a halt for a third of the UK’s hospital trusts. “It’s key that you can prove to the board that you’ve tried to prevent an attack,” Brown said. “There’s often an attitude with cybersecurity that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, but 10% of UK hospitals still had machines running on Windows XP. Tests carried out before WannaCry showed that 88 out of 236 trusts weren’t meeting

the necessary cybersecurity standards - look what happened.” Brown also used the example of a Portuguese hospital that was forced to pay a fine of €400,000 after failing to manage the ways its doctors accessed data, causing them to be in breach of GDPR. “All doctors had access to all patient accounts,” Brown said. “If your access is out of control, you have no control.” Brown went on to highlight some of the biggest challenges that healthcare technology decision makers face, including the value of data they need to protect, and securing the necessary organisational buy-in for IT. “The most concerning thing about healthcare is the nature of the data we’re protecting,” Brown said. “It’s personal, sensitive data. It must be protected as a priority. Doctors understandably want to see money spent on patients instead www.tahawultech.com

Healthcare providers owe it to patients to protect their data.”

17 of IT, but technology also helps to protect patients in other important ways. Healthcare providers owe it to patients to protect their data. Medical practitioners sometimes overlook the reality that that’s a moral obligation.” Brown went on to highlight the need for a balance to be struck between protecting patient data but also sharing it where necessary if it can help to deliver an improved outcome. “The second major issue is that as well as protecting data we also want to share it where appropriate,” he said. “If you see a GP and are referred to a specialist or consultant, you want data to be shared so that it doesn’t impair the right outcomes. There’s a balance that has to be struck of sharing data for medical and research purposes in a controlled, predictable way.” Brown added that the healthcare www.tahawultech.com

industry has not yet done enough to prioritise data protection in the same ways that other critical industries have done. “Health data has value,” he said. “If a credit card is stolen, the data value is measured in minutes and maybe hours - the time that the threat actor has to monetise it. Financial services companies and banks have the infrastructure and legacy to understand criminal transactions and fraud. That’s reassuring. “Healthcare doesn’t have that background in protecting data. Banks cancel cards within hours. Healthcare data is stolen for life and can be monetised through being sold for blackmail and other sensitive means. It’s much more valuable to attackers.” Brown was followed by Forcepoint’s head of sales

Ozgur Danisman, head of sales engineering, RCIS, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Forcepoint

engineering for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region Ozgur Danisman, who highlighted the importance of building flexible data access policies. Forcepoint has added a layer of behavioural analytics to its platforms, which records activity as evidence instead of blocking access across the board for certain users, he said. “In this day and age you cannot have black and white policies for data access,” he said. APRIL 2019

INTERVIEW Microsoft

"AZURE HELPING DEVELOPERS INNOVATE": MICROSOFT GM JAMES DARTNELL SPOKE WITH MICROSOFT’S OMAR KHAN, GENERAL MANAGER OF AZURE, AT THE CLOUD GIANT’S IGNITE CONFERENCE AT DUBAI WORLD TRADE CENTRE, AND HEARD HOW THE FIRM IS AIMING TO HELP DEVELOPERS BUILD INNOVATIVE SERVICES.

Omar Khan, general manager, Microsoft Azure

APRIL 2019

hat has Microsoft tried to highlight at its Ignite conference in Dubai? As a bit of context, Microsoft has been evolving its approach and is now talking to developers and IT professionals through Ignite, as we’re seeing increased demand for technical knowledge and upskilling around cloud. The content we deliver at every event is centred more around practitioners. We want to go deeper with technical upskilling, and we provide 10 different learning paths at every Ignite tour to supplement our content. Each learning path has a five-module unit, with a start-tofinish learning experience. www.tahawultech.com

What levels of interest have you seen from regional developers in Ignite and Azure? We’ve had over 3,000 people at this Ignite event, which highlights the demand for knowledge around more advanced and innovative topics around what cloud enables. We’ve seen a lot of interest from developers and customers that we’ve met here regarding AI and other emerging technology and scenarios. Azure has unique capabilities to allow customers the flexibility to adopt cloud at their own pace. We have a hybrid approach globally. Organisations have different levels of maturity. Some have a higher velocity around cloud adoption, while some are more reserved and controlled, whether that’s because of regulatory or internal reasons. Azure is unique because we provide a hybrid approach from the ground up, which lets customers adopt cloud at their own pace. The one thing we emphasise with Azure is that it’s an open platform for first or third parties, and has a very broad set of services for developers. A lot of Azure’s workloads are Linux-based, which is a testament to how diverse it is. What kind of services can developers and enterprises take advantage of with Azure? Azure has over 100 services, from core infrastructure to moving existing workloads to advanced services around the intelligent edge and emerging AI services. Azure has three main categories of services. It has a set of capabilities that lets developers build AI into their apps, with cognitive services and a bot to provide that human touch. It has knowledge finding services, which www.tahawultech.com

allow you to extract value that could be latent in your data. We also provide expertise in AI and machine learning, which helps developers focus on building custom services. On an enterprise level, there are two journeys to the cloud that we see. Enterprises are following both paths to various degrees. One main driver is operational efficiency. The other motive is innovating at a faster pace to provide agility, better connect with customers and to empower employees. What advantages does Azure offer compared to cloud platforms offered by Microsoft’s competitors? Azure focuses on a few main areas of differentiation. The first is productivity. We’re focused on making services more productive for IT professionals. It has DevOps built in, with continuous integrations. Our productivity focus is on enabling the best open source platform, and includes Github, the world’s largest open source platform. The investments we’re making in open source really deliver the best ability to run any workload. We focus on a hybrid approach from the start. Organisations at different levels of maturity have different needs. Azure Stack allows you to have the whole version of Azure hosted locally in your data centre. You can build apps in the cloud and not have to rearchitect them.

We’re very focused on enabling trust from a compliance and security point of view. We have the most compliance and security certifications of any cloud provider and are very engaged with standards bodies. We were involved in influencing the GDPR standard, and were the first to declare our support for that. What are the biggest challenges enterprise customers face in migrating to cloud? I think a lot of organisations are very early in their cloud journey and require guidance for how to leverage cloud. We emphasise the importance of providing help to customers at every step, whether that’s providing early guidance or assistance at a technical level. A lot of that is through technology we build into our platform to help make things easy. We also have offers to make things attractive for Windows and SQL servers and have an Azure hybrid benefit offer. If you use Windows or SQL Server 2008 we provide extended support on those workloads for free. You can can achieve 5x cost savings in moving workloads to cloud. We also have an ecosystem for support and a vast ecosystem of partners to help customers implement that transition.

Some organisations have a higher velocity around cloud adoption, while some are more reserved and controlled.”

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FUTURE NETWORK AWARDS 2019 LAST MONTH, TAHAWULTECH.COM HOSTED ITS FUTURE NETWORK AWARDS AT THE HABTOOR GRAND HOTEL IN DUBAI. THE AWARDS HONOURED THE MIDDLE EAST’S MOST INNOVATIVE NETWORKING PROJECTS, SOLUTIONS AND ORGANISATIONS FOR THE WAYS THEY HAVE DEPLOYED TECHNOLOGY OR BUILT ROADMAPS THAT WILL TRANSFORM THEIR IT INFRASTRUCTURE. CPI MEDIA GROUP WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE ALL THIS YEAR’S AWARD WINNERS.

Cabling vendor of the year Norden Communication Middle East

CX Innovation Vendor of the Year Avaya

Enterprise Collaboration vendor Veritas

Network management and monitoring vendor ManageEngine

Network optimisation vendor Citrix

Network security vendor Sophos

APRIL 2019

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Networking vendor Dell EMC

Best return on Investment 2CRSI ME

Wireless vendor D-Link

Collaboration project Visiontech Systems International

Data centre project Al Yousuf Group

Network Optimisation Project Al Rawabi Dairy Company

Network Security Project RAK Bank

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choice Injazat Data Systems

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Storage Project MDC Business Management Services (A Mubadala Company)

Network Training provider Siemon

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choice Riverbed

Networking value-added distributor ASBIS Middle East

APRIL 2019

INTERVIEW NetApp

“WE HOLD THE KEY TO CLOUD”: NETAPP 22

Fadi Kanafani, Senior Director, Middle East and Africa, NetApp

hy will data management be so keyin the coming years? More and more customers are demanding higher performing data management platforms that support their growing business requirements and the changing nature of their workloads. Businesses want to remain competitive, grow and innovate, and the best way to do this is to leverage all the data that is available. Analysing available data APRIL 2019

NETAPP’S SENIOR DIRECTOR FOR THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, FADI KANAFANI, GIVES HIS TAKE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF POWERFUL DATA MANAGEMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE, AND BELIEVES THAT ENTERPRISES WILL NEED TO RECOGNISE THE IMPORTANCE OF MANAGING THEIR ON-PREMISE AND CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS.

sources is essential in order to deliver the needed outcome. This process requires high-performance systems and powerful data management across the hybrid cloud. As a leader in flash, we help our customers modernise their on-premise data centres with the latest flash technologies. NetApp is a market leader in flash technology in the EMEA region and has been steadily growing its footprint across the Middle East and Africa. We have announced new platforms to support the increasing

demand for solutions that meet high-speed data requirements. With NVIDIA, we launched ONTAP AI that leverages GPU computational processing with NetApp’s superior flash solution. Just recently, we announced FlexPod AI with Cisco, our longstanding Global Technology Alliance partner, which matches customers’ artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning needs. With a strong eco-system we can innovate and always stay ahead of market trends. www.tahawultech.com

Why is it so important for customers to effectively manage on-premise and cloud environments and to be able to move workloads efficiently between the two? There are many challenges when it comes to leveraging the cloud for any business workload. First is data gravity – putting data in the cloud is easy; but retrieving it is another complex and costly exercise. Once data is retrieved from the cloud, it returns in a different format, which means that a company will need to rewrite its application to make sense of that data. With NetApp, we take that complexity away. Our customers will be able to manage their data in the cloud as if it is onpremise. When the need arises to bring the data back, it will be in the same format as initially provided. Second is cloud occupancy cost – a cloud resident will have to pay for the occupied space in the cloud. There have not been many tools to push efficiencies in the cloud. However, a customer of NetApp will be able to apply the same on-premise featurerich software to drive the needed efficiencies in the cloud, rendering the occupancy bill much lower than what it should have been. Third is speed – once data is in the cloud, the retrieval process and speed of access are determined by many factors that sometimes become the main preventer of cloud adoption. This is another advantage of NetApp’s Data Fabric that allows complete mobility of the data and access irrespective of where it resides – on-premise, in the cloud or multicloud. www.tahawultech.com

We understand data sovereignty as well as data protection regulations. Certain data will always reside on-premise; however, with the proper data classification exercise NetApp assists its customers to leverage the cloud and the available resources within it – without a large CAPEX spend on-premise. NetApp Data Fabric allows customers to move to the cloud quicker, and ensures that they have full mobility in the cloud, while paying less for it. Cloud has to provide a valid business advantage. With our solutions and services, we help NetApp customers to build one.”

make the right decisions every time. That’s just one example that shows the increase in complexity that is on the horizon. The data that is being gathered from sensors, smartphones, cameras and databases are all good sources of intelligence if properly leveraged. Those sources will become the fuel for AI and analytics that will impact our lives and businesses directly or indirectly. Having the right data management strategy in place will determine how well the business will perform. What are your expectations for the GCC market? We’re seeing big shifts in policies in Saudi Arabia and there is enormous potential for growth. They’re making huge investments in digital transformation and are looking to forge strategic partnerships, including those around NEOM and national transformation initiatives. The leadership is taking bold steps to make the country a digitally driven economy. Other GCC and African countries are also taking their own steps forward. We’ve seen various bold initiatives to transform the way companies operate and people live, with huge projects over the last 1218 months.

Cloud has to provide a valid business advantage. With our solutions and services, we help NetApp customers to build one.”

What challenges will increased data volumes present in the coming years? Analysts say that in the near future, we will be dealing with exabytes, not petabytes. There will be an exponential increase in data due to the fact that technology is becoming the core of everything. For example, autonomous cars have sensors everywhere. The data that is picked up on a daily basis is in the tens of terabytes. Soon, there will be thousands of driverless cars on the street, and they will generate a multitude of data. A car needs to be connected in order to transmit data and to

APRIL 2019

INSIGHT Huawei

WI-FI 6: THROUGH THE EYES OF THE STANDARDS WORKING GROUP HUAWEI’S CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FOR THE MIDDLE EAST FAISAL MALIK EXPLAINS WHY WI-FI 6 HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE A GAME-CHANGER FOR DELIVERING BANDWIDTHINTENSIVE APPLICATIONS, DELIVERING A SUPERIOR USER EXPERIENCE.

Faisal Malik, chief technology officer, enterprise solutions sales, Huawei Middle East

APRIL 2019

ince its humble beginning in 1997, Wi-Fi has become an integral part of our daily lives. We pretty much take for granted the connectivity through Wi-Fi and depend on it to maintain our productivity and business agility — to innovate faster to meet new challenges and customer demands. Since the introduction of protocol 802.11b, each subsequent generation of the Wi-Fi protocol has brought more speed and better throughput for users. As we embark on this journey of digital transformation, especially in the era of connected devices and edge computing, the new standard has to deal with different challenges to keep up with the demands of user traffic. In May 2013, the High Efficiency WLAN Study Group, a study group within the IEEE

802.11 working group, started to consider the spectrum efficiency improvement to enhance the throughput in high-density scenarios of APs/users and that is how the project 802.11ax, also known as WiFi 6, got started in May 2014. Huawei’s Osama Aboul Magd was chosen to lead the IEEE 802.11ax WLAN standard task group. Recently, Osama was interviewed about the latest Wi-Fi standard and its implications and various use cases relevant to the new standard. He discussed why the change of name and why customers should start thinking about Wi-Fi 6 now if they haven’t been planning for it already. As Osama explained, “WiFi 6 is essential for transforming the way we support applications on today’s Wi-Fi networks. Its deployment allows a new and improved user experience in dense deployment scenarios compared to that of previous Wi-Fi generations.” One of the goals of 802.11ax was to have a better user experience and increase throughput by a www.tahawultech.com

factor of four or more to individual network clients. The 802.11ax standard was expected to improve Wi-Fi performance in dense environments with high numbers of users, like public venues, by using the available spectrum more efficiently, managing interference, and making enhancements to protocols such as Medium Access Control (MAC). Also, the idea was to start using OFDMA, a standard that was already used in LTE and earlier Wi-Fi standards. This would eventually help to pack more data into the same air space. Given that the standard names for Wi-Fi have been a bit of a mouthful, it was decided late last year to make the Wi-Fi names more user friendly. In short, the new 802.11ax standard will be called ‘Wi-Fi 6’ while the two previous Wi-Fi technology generations will be called ‘Wi-Fi 4’ (for 802.11n) and ‘Wi-Fi 5’ (for 802.11ac). The name change also highlights the fact that 802.11ax is indeed the sixth generation of Wi-Fi networking technology — very appropriate from a numbering point of view. From the visual point of naming, users will be able to look at their smartphones and see the numbers next to the Wi-Fi icon, and be able to confirm if it is Wi-Fi 4 or Wi-Fi 5, or Wi-Fi 6, helping to simplify the protocols being used. Also, from a technological point of view, Wi-Fi 6 is not simply just a performance upgrade for Wi-Fi 5, but Wi-Fi 6 also makes some fundamental changes to the standard including a broad range of Physical (PHY) layer and MAC layer features complemented by multi-user MIMO and special reuse. Wi-Fi 6 adds significant improvement by supporting up to eight spatial streams. Wi-Fi 6 features transmit beamforming www.tahawultech.com

that enables more users to connect to APs simultaneously while still providing high throughput. One of the major use cases of Wi-Fi 6 is in dense environments where there is a large number of users such as outdoor venues like stadiums, shopping malls, and airports, or indoor places like auditoriums or classrooms. Wi-Fi 6 becomes really useful where the number of clients are engaged in bandwidth-intensive or latencysensitive applications. Not only the throughput increases, but also the technological advances in Wi-Fi 6 help to deliver superior user experiences for application performance whether it is ondemand learning or AR/VR applications. IoT applications will get an extra uplift using Wi-Fi 6 given the features like Target Wait Time (TWT) that helps to reduce the power consumption and conserve battery life. In university environments with more than 30,000 students, or in outdoor sports arenas with 80,000 fans who are all trying to connect to the Wi-Fi at the same time, congestion can easily result with Wi-Fi 5, but Wi-Fi 6 alleviates this problem by enabling more clients to connect to a single AP simultaneously, and allows neighbour devices to transmit at the same time — as long as interference levels are acceptable. In fact, for the same number of users and same coverage area, the

number of access points required for Wi-Fi 6 is significantly less compared to previous standards, leading to substantial savings in capital expenditure. Not only with existing applications — Wi-Fi 6 also becomes an enabler of many new applications, especially when it comes to UHD and 4K videos. According to Osama, companies like Huawei have played a key role in the development of the Wi-Fi 6 standard and protocol. Huawei delegates provided almost 25 percent of the contributions submitted to the technical group. Most of these submissions were adopted in the standard document. Huawei has been one of the early adopters of Wi-Fi 6 by releasing its prototype as early as 2014 and rolling out its AP way back in 2017. As for adoption, now is the good time to start planning for Wi-Fi 6. By looking at your digital transformation strategy and how it is going to impact IT infrastructure changes, CIOs and IT managers need to start thinking about Wi-Fi 6 upgrades for smoother migration. Many hardware manufacturers and chip vendors have already come out with chips for Wi-Fi 6 and are ensuring interoperability among them. We expect 2019 to be the year of adoption for Wi-Fi 6, as many organisations start evaluating their long term Wi-Fi strategy in the wake of new challenges from digitisation.

Wi-Fi 6 is essential for transforming the way we support applications on today’s Wi-Fi networks.”

APRIL 2019

REDEFINING technology transformation

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GovTech APRIL 2019 TAHAWULTECH.COM

BUILDING ‫أساسات‬ BLOCKS ‫البنــــاء‬ James Dartnell spoke with the UAE Ministry of Infrastructure Development’s director of IT Hessa Al Suwaidi, who outlined the organisation’s technology strategy for the coming years.

PUBLICATION LICENSED BY DUBAI PRODUCTION CITY, DCCA

‫تحدث جيمس دارتنيل مع مدير قسم‬ ‫تكنولوجيا املعلومات بوزارة تطوير البنية‬ ،‫التحتية بدولة اإلمارات العربية املتحدة‬ ‫ التي أوضحت إسرتاتيجية‬،‫حصة السويدي‬ .‫تكنولوجيا املنظمة للسنوات القادمة‬

GovTech UAE MoID

Hessa Al Suwaidi, director of IT, UAE Ministry of Infrastructure Development

BUILDING BLOCKS

JAMES DARTNELL SPOKE WITH THE UAE MINISTRY OF INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT’S DIRECTOR OF IT HESSA AL SUWAIDI, WHO OUTLINED THE ORGANISATION’S TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY FOR THE COMING YEARS.

an you give us some background on MoID? The Ministry of Infrastructure Development is tasked with building houses, schools, hospitals and roads for the UAE. We construct roads and federal buildings for ministries, as well as maintaining and operating roads.

APRIL 2019

How long have you been working for MoID? Where did you study? I’ve been at MoID for 15 years. I started as a programmer, then was head of the e-services section and have been IT director for five years. I studied at Zayed University. What are the most important elements of MoID’s IT strategy?

Whether it’s a case of artificial intelligence, blockchain or whatever other technologies we’re looking at using, we do the correct evaluations and assessments first around our current technology. We look to deliver readiness reports to assess whether we are really ready for any proposed changes. We want to deliver a fully automated infrastructure for our business. We cannot move to AI or blockchain until then. We’re building the first steps for both of them. The market is moving but they will take time. We have around 400 processes related to our core business. When we started our smart government journey, we focused on customer service, but now we’re thinking internally about how to automate our processes for our core business cycle. In order for AI to work, it needs data across the value chain. We’re reengineering our value chain to make www.tahawultech.com

it easier and more automated, to deliver smart dashboards and smart reporting systems.

processes that need re-engineering. We want to cut our processes to hours instead of days.

What aspects are important in measuring your AI maturity? Everybody has a chatbot these days, but I don’t believe that constitutes a mature level of AI. Across the world, some countries are ready for AI, but generally speaking most aren’t. Real AI is when you let the machine do the full work of a human, using different data and databases, all of which is integrated. You need to build the right platform and start by looking at your processes. You need to make processes more realistic and then automate them. Once you’ve automated all of the value chain, then your system will be more AI-ready. We’re looking to re-engineer our processes, which should take eight months, and then automating our value chain, which should take a year.

How do you think robotic process automation could improve your operations? Our engineers now visit construction sites on a regular basis. They report to the contractor and meet with the project manager. With RPA, we could use hologram cameras to monitor the state of sites and compare these with plans and ensure the exact size for various specifications in order to monitor the progress of construction. We can generate reports in real time. What kind of smart systems is MoID using? We’re implementing our road asset management system (RAMS) for collecting data and analysing our future needs. It collects data to improve the maintenance of the roads, and can give insights and suggestions such as whether we should extend a two or three-lane road into one with six lanes. We’re always looking to integrate new devices to our RAMS. There’s also our geographic information system, which we’re using to building our spatial data infrastructure (SDI). That’s an integrated system that collects data across our projects and gives us a futuristic plan for where we should build schools, houses etc. We keep customising our platforms according to our needs. MoID currently receives requests from federal entities, but

Real AI is when you let the machine do the full work of a human, using different data and databases.”

How is the role of IT changing within MoID? The IT function was previously there to develop systems and to manage the IT infrastructure and IT operations. We’re now being asked to innovate and identify where we can fill gaps with innovative technologies. We’re using robotic engineers to predict some data, and we are testing ways we can collect data for full automation. We need to think about how we can reduce the number of processes and procedures for the government. We have a lot of old www.tahawultech.com

soon, with our GIS, we will know that certain land is better for certain types of development. For example, there may be an area that is densely populated with children and could be experiencing high demand for new primary schools. How is MoID aligning with the UAE’s smart government objectives? It’s so important for us to have accurate data and be integrated with other entities. We’re working on various projects with other entities. Data is now the most important aspect of that. The TRA is evaluating us on implementing smart government criteria, and we’re working with them to identify ways we can make life easier by integrating with Emirates ID and make procedures easier for internal and external customers. MoID was named in the top five UAE government entities in 2018 for its smart initiatives. How do you think technology will disrupt the development of infrastructure? It will bring in a lot of change. It will deliver the seamless transaction of data and services, greater accuracy and will ensure no human interaction is needed at stages of the value chain. It will deliver faster decision making through dashboards, which will provide better governance on projects. Entities currently apply for requirements, but the right data around UAE land and urban planning will provide governance to see what’s needed. Knowing the exact land needs will be more systematic, so governance will be improved. In turn, that will improve customer satisfaction levels. APRIL 2019

‫واالستبيانات الصحيحة ً‬ ‫أوال حول تقنيتنا‬ ‫الحالية‪ .‬نتطلع إىل تقديم تقارير االستعداد‬ ‫لتقييم ما إذا كنا مستعدين ً‬ ‫حقا ألي تغيريات‬ ‫مقرتحة‪.‬‬

‫نريد تقديم بنية تحتية مؤتمتة بالكامل‬ ‫ألعمالنا‪ .‬ال يمكننا االنتقال إىل الذكاء‬ ‫االصطناعي أو بلوك تشاين حتى ذلك الحني‪.‬‬ ‫نحن نبني الخطوات األوىل لكليهما‪ .‬السوق‬ ‫يتحرك لكنه سيستغرق بعض الوقت‪ .‬لدينا‬ ‫حوايل ‪ 400‬عملية متعلقة بأعمالنا األساسية‪.‬‬ ‫عندما بدأنا رحلتنا الحكومية الذكية‪ ،‬ركزنا‬ ‫عىل خدمة العمالء‪ ،‬لكننا اآلن نفكر داخليًا يف‬ ‫كيفية أتمتة عملياتنا لدورة أعمالنا األساسية‪.‬‬ ‫ليك يعمل الذكاء‬ ‫االصطناعي‪ ،‬فإنها تحتاج إىل‬ ‫بيانات عرب سلسلة القيمة‪.‬‬ ‫إننا نعيد هندسة سلسلة‬ ‫القيمة الخاصة بنا لجعلها‬ ‫أسهل وأكرث آلية ‪ ،‬لتقديم‬ ‫لوحات معلومات ذكية‬ ‫وأنظمة تقارير ذكية‪.‬‬ ‫ما هي الجوانب املهمة‬ ‫يف قياس نضج الذكاء‬ ‫االصطناعي؟‬

‫كانت وظيفة تكنولوجيا املعلومات موجودة‬ ‫يف السابق لتطوير النظم وإدارة البنية التحتية‬ ‫لتكنولوجيا املعلومات وعمليات تكنولوجيا‬ ‫املعلومات‪ .‬تتم مطالبتنا اآلن باالبتكار وتحديد‬ ‫األماكن التي يمكننا فيها ملء الفجوات‬ ‫بتقنيات مبتكرة‪.‬‬

‫نحن نستخدم مهندسني آليني للتنبؤ ببعض‬ ‫البيانات‪ ،‬ونخترب ً‬ ‫طرقا لجمع البيانات من‬ ‫أجل التشغيل اآليل الكامل‪ .‬نحن بحاجة إىل‬ ‫التفكري يف الكيفية التي يمكننا بها تقليل عدد‬ ‫العمليات واإلجراءات للحكومة‪ .‬لدينا الكثري‬ ‫من العمليات القديمة التي‬ ‫تحتاج إىل إعادة هندسة‪.‬‬ ‫نريد خفض عملياتنا‬ ‫لساعات ً‬ ‫بدال من أيام‪.‬‬

‫إن الذكاء‬ ‫االصطناعي‬ ‫الحقيقي هو‬ ‫عندما تسمح لآللة‬ ‫بالقيام بالعمل‬ ‫الكامل لإلنسان‬ ‫باستخدام بيانات‬ ‫وقواعد بيانات‬ ‫مختلفة‪".‬‬

‫يستخدم الجميع غرف‬ ‫الدردشة يف هذه األيام‪،‬‬ ‫لكنني ال أعتقد أن ذلك يمثل‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ناضجا من الذكاء‬ ‫مستوى‬ ‫االصطناعي‪ .‬يف جميع أنحاء‬ ‫العالم‪ ،‬تكون بعض الدول‬ ‫مستعدة لتقنية الذكاء‬ ‫االصطناعي‪ ،‬ولكن بشكل عام‬ ‫ليس جميعهم كذلك‪ .‬الذكاء‬ ‫االصطناعي الحقيقي هو عندما تدع الجهاز‬ ‫يقوم بالعمل الكامل لإلنسان باستخدام‬ ‫بيانات وقواعد بيانات مختلفة‪ ،‬وكلها مدمجة‪.‬‬ ‫تحتاج إىل بناء النظام األسايس الصحيح‬ ‫والبدء من خالل النظر يف العمليات الخاصة‬ ‫بك‪ .‬تحتاج إىل جعل العمليات أكرث واقعية ثم‬ ‫أتمتتها‪ .‬بمجرد االنتهاء من أتمتة كل سلسلة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫جاهزا بدرجة أكرب‬ ‫القيمة‪ ،‬سيكون نظامك‬ ‫للذكاء االصطناعي‪ .‬نحن نتطلع إىل إعادة‬ ‫هندسة عملياتنا‪ ،‬والتي يجب أن تستغرق‬ ‫ثمانية أشهر‪ ،‬ثم أتمتة سلسلة القيمة لدينا‪،‬‬ ‫والتي يجب أن تستغرق سنة‪.‬‬

‫‪www.tahawultech.com‬‬

‫كيف يتغري دور تكنولوجيا املعلومات داخل‬ ‫وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية؟‬

‫كيف يمكن ألتمتة‬ ‫العمليات اآللية من‬ ‫تحسني عملياتك؟‬

‫يزور مهندسونا اآلن مواقع‬ ‫البناء بشكل منتظم‪.‬‬ ‫يقدمون تقارير إىل املقاول‬ ‫ويلتقون بمدير املشروع‪.‬‬ ‫باستخدام ‪ ، RPA‬يمكننا‬ ‫استخدام كامريات‬ ‫الهولوغرام ملراقبة حالة‬ ‫املواقع ومقارنتها بالخطط‬ ‫وضمان الحجم الدقيق‬ ‫للمواصفات املختلفة من‬ ‫أجل مراقبة تقدم البناء‪.‬‬ ‫يمكننا توليد تقارير يف‬ ‫الوقت الحقيقي‪.‬‬

‫ما نوع األنظمة الذكية التي تستخدمها‬ ‫وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية؟‬

‫نحن ننفذ نظام إدارة أصول الطرق (‪)RAMS‬‬ ‫لجمع البيانات وتحليل احتياجاتنا املستقبلية‪.‬‬ ‫فهو يجمع البيانات لتحسني صيانة الطرق‪،‬‬ ‫ويمكنه تقديم رؤى واقرتاحات مثل ما إذا كان‬ ‫ينبغي لنا توسيع طريق مؤلف من ثالثة حارات‬ ‫ً‬ ‫دائما إىل‬ ‫يف طريق واحد مع ستة حارات‪ .‬نتطلع‬ ‫دمج أجهزة جديدة يف ‪ RAMS‬لدينا‪.‬‬ ‫يوجد ً‬ ‫أيضا نظام املعلومات الجغرافية الخاص‬

‫بنا‪ ،‬والذي نستخدمه لبناء البنية التحتية‬ ‫للبيانات املكانية (‪ )SDI‬الخاصة بنا‪ .‬إنه نظام‬ ‫متكامل يجمع البيانات عرب مشاريعنا ويعطينا‬ ‫خطة مستقبلية للمكان الذي يجب أن نبني‬ ‫فيه املدارس واملنازل وما إىل ذلك‪ .‬ونواصل‬ ‫تخصيص منصاتنا ً‬ ‫وفقا الحتياجاتنا‪ .‬تتلقى‬ ‫وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية حاليًا طلبات من‬ ‫الكيانات الفيدرالية‪ ،‬لكن قريبًا‪ ،‬من خالل‬ ‫نظام املعلومات الجغرافية ‪ GIS‬الخاص بنا‪،‬‬ ‫سنعرف أن بعض األرايض أفضل ألنواع معينة‬ ‫من التنمية‪ .‬عىل سبيل املثال‪ ،‬قد يكون هناك‬ ‫منطقة مكتظة بالسكان مع أطفال ويمكن أن‬ ‫تعاين من ارتفاع الطلب عىل املدارس االبتدائية‬ ‫الجديدة‪.‬‬ ‫كيف تتماىش وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية مع‬ ‫أهداف حكومة اإلمارات الذكية؟‬

‫من املهم للغاية أن يكون لدينا بيانات دقيقة‬ ‫وأن يتم دمجها مع كيانات أخرى‪ .‬نحن نعمل‬ ‫عىل مشاريع مختلفة مع كيانات أخرى‪.‬‬ ‫البيانات هي اآلن أهم جانب يف ذلك‪ .‬تقوم هيئة‬ ‫تنظيم االتصاالت بتقييمنا من خالل تطبيق‬ ‫معايري الحكومة الذكية ‪ ،‬ونحن نعمل معهم‬ ‫لتحديد الطرق التي يمكننا بها تسهيل الحياة‬ ‫من خالل االندماج مع هوية اإلمارات العربية‬ ‫املتحدة وجعل اإلجراءات أسهل للعمالء‬ ‫الداخليني والخارجيني‪ .‬تم تعيني وزارة تطوير‬ ‫البنية التحتية يف أفضل خمس هيئات حكومية‬ ‫يف دولة اإلمارات العربية املتحدة يف عام ‪2018‬‬ ‫ملبادراتها الذكية‪.‬‬

‫كيف تعتقدين أن التكنولوجيا ستعطل‬ ‫تطوير البنية التحتية؟‬

‫سوف يجلب الكثري من التغيري‪ .‬ستوفر املعاملة‬ ‫السلس للبيانات والخدمات‪ ،‬ودقة أكرب‬ ‫وستضمن عدم الحاجة إىل تفاعل بشري يف‬ ‫مراحل سلسلة القيمة‪ .‬سوف تقدم عملية‬ ‫صنع القرار بشكل أسرع من خالل لوحات‬ ‫املعلومات‪ ،‬والتي ستوفر حوكمة أفضل‬ ‫للمشاريع‪ .‬تطبق الكيانات حاليًا عىل املتطلبات‪،‬‬ ‫لكن البيانات الصحيحة حول تخطيط األرايض‬ ‫والتخطيط العمراين يف اإلمارات ستوفر‬ ‫الحكم ملعرفة ما هو مطلوب‪ .‬ستكون معرفة‬ ‫االحتياجات الدقيقة لألرض أكرث منهجية‪،‬‬ ‫وبالتايل سيتم تحسني الحكم‪ .‬بدوره‪ ،‬من‬ ‫شأنه أن يحسن مستويات رضا العمالء‪.‬‬

‫‪APRIL 2019‬‬

‫‪30‬‬

‫جوف تك‬ ‫وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية ‪ -‬دولة اإلمارات‬

‫حصة السويدي ‪ ،‬مدير تقنية المعلومات ‪ ،‬وزارة تطوير‬ ‫البنية التحتية في دولة اإلمارات العربية المتحدة‬

‫‪31‬‬

‫أساسات‬ ‫البنـــــــــــاء‬ ‫تحدث جيمس دارتنيل مع مدير قسم‬ ‫تكنولوجيا املعلومات بوزارة تطوير البنية‬ ‫التحتية بدولة اإلمارات العربية املتحدة‪،‬‬ ‫حصة السويدي ‪ ،‬التي أوضحت‬ ‫إسرتاتيجية تكنولوجيا املنظمة للسنوات‬ ‫القادم‪.‬‬

‫‪APRIL 2019‬‬

‫هل يمكنك أن تعطينا بعض املعلومات‬ ‫األساسية عن وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية؟‬

‫تتوىل وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية بناء املنازل‬ ‫واملدارس واملستشفيات والطرق لدولة اإلمارات‬ ‫العربية املتحدة‪ .‬نقوم ببناء الطرق واملباين‬ ‫الفيدرالية للوزارات‪ ،‬وكذلك صيانة وتشغيل‬ ‫الطرق‪.‬‬

‫منذ متى وأنت تعملني يف وزارة تطوير البنية‬ ‫التحتية؟ أين درست؟‬ ‫لقد كنت يف وزارة تطوير البنية التحتة ملدة ‪15‬‬ ‫سنة‪ .‬بدأت كمربمجة‪ ،‬ومن ثم أصبحت رئيس‬ ‫قسم الخدمات اإللكرتونية وبعدها أصبحت‬ ‫مدير تقنية املعلومات ملدة خمس سنوات‪.‬‬ ‫وحصلت عىل شهاديت من جامعة زايد‪.‬‬

‫ما هي أهم عناصر اسرتاتيجية تكنولوجيا‬ ‫املعلومات يف وزارة تطوير البنية التحتية؟‬

‫ً‬ ‫سواء كانت تقنية الذكاء االصطناعي‪ ،‬أو‬ ‫"بلوك تشاين" أو أي تقنيات أخرى نتطلع‬ ‫إىل استخدامها ‪ ،‬فإننا نقوم بالتقييمات‬

‫‪www.tahawultech.com‬‬

FEATURE Liv

ALL YOU NEED IS LIV

JAYESH PATEL, HEAD OF EMIRATES NBD’S DIGITAL BANK LIV, TELLS CNME WHY THE PLATFORM IS COMMITTED TO WINNING CUSTOMERS’ HEARTS.

Jayesh Patel, head of Emirates NBD’s digital bank, Liv

elebrating its second anniversary last month, Emirates NBD’s pure play digital bank Liv has already made its mark on UAE consumers. Liv currently boasts over “200,000” customers, and over a five-month period last year acquired more customers than any other bank in the UAE. APRIL 2019

Targeting the UAE’s millennial market, which Liv estimates to be worth $16 billion of spending per year, Liv is hoping to be tailored to its customers’ lifestyles, and looks beyond their bank balance, according the bank’s head, Jayesh Patel. “Banks are good at building trust and looking at money, but are they good at building love? We were set up to rethink the ways banks serve their customers,” he says. “That has to happen if you want to mean more to them. Our executive team is clear about us being leaders in innovation, testing things and failing where it is needed. We’ll build a lifestyle proposition that helps customers get more from what they have. We want to deliver a product that is digitally grown, not digitally adopted.” UAE residents can scan their Emirates ID and submit their biometrics to set up an account in just two minutes, according to Liv, who Patel says “won’t have a branch”. www.tahawultech.com

According to Patel, there was recognition within Emirates NBD that emerging Fintech players could “take their lunch” if they didn’t take action, and that the bank had to deliver a proposition that could contend with the industry’s impending transformation. “Liv was incubated like a Fintech, and 90% of initial our staff were non-bankers,” he says. “A next-generation bank has to be built by this generation. If bankers built another bank, it would be the same as before.” Patel says that delivering “better financial health” was Liv’s thinking behind its decision not to sell credit products and to move away from “traditional” banking products. The platform includes a feature that breaks down customers’ spending by product category and merchant with the aim of providing improved visibility into how they can save money. “Savings rates in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are very low,” Patel says. “The UAE is very consumer-driven, and people easily get sucked into the spending economy. A lot of people don’t realise how much they spend on food or coffee every month. Savings is an abstract concept. It’s hard to save generally but is easier once you have a purpose.” Liv features customised settings that allow users to create bespoke savings goals and dates, including the date their salary is paid or whenever they splash out on a particular product. “If I can save a dirham every time I swipe my credit card it soon adds up,” Patel says. “With this kind of goal you don’t even realise you’re saving.” www.tahawultech.com

There will soon be an insurance marketplace within the app, according to Patel, as well as a Facebook-like news feed, which will allow users to like and dislike content. Liv has also partnered with Careem, Fetchr, Voucherskout and Zomato to foster an “ecosystem of startups”. If Liv is to survive and thrive in the new age of banking, it will forced to fight off competitors in both the digital and physical spaces and ensure it can get the best possible understanding of its customers to retain their loyalty. “Consumers will switch banks more easily as a result of their being digital,” he says. “The entry and exit from one to another becomes easier for consumers, so they win. The challenge for us is creating loyalty when the cost of switching is so low. Banks that don’t take care of consumers due to their system challenges will be prone to digital disruptors. All traditional banks are working on that, including Emirates NBD, FAB, ADCB and Mashreq.” Patel says that artificial intelligence will inevitably play a part in gaining that understanding. “We need to do a better job with AI and algorithms,” he says. “Consumers don’t want to be spammed and they want to be known. We need clean and organised data, and to

figure out how to communicate effectively.” This grounded outlook ensures that Patel is not getting carried away with the prospect of digital banks supplanting traditional ones. “I’d like to say that everyone will join pure play digital banks, but I think after a certain level of affluence, consumers do like a human touch, so the traditional way of banking will still be there. That being said, consumers will move to digital banking. Most interactions are on digital channels anyway so that transition has already happened and will only continue.” The banking industry, according to Patel, is already experiencing similar challenges that the retail and e-commerce industries have had to overcome. “Banking will become more and more like e-commerce,” he says. “Consumers will demand more self-service, empowerment and insight. The other big technology challenge is building scalable platforms. E-commerce guys talk about scalability. Our customers are growing at a pace that we’d never anticipated. We need to show that our systems are resilient. We’re re-architecting everything to be more scalable.” Although Liv inevitably has close ties with parent company Emirates NBD, Patel believes the platform

Banks are good at building trust and working with money, but are they good at building love?”

APRIL 2019

FEATURE Liv

has its own distinct identity and technology strategy. “Some organisations run on cloud,” he says. “Digital banks will all get SaaS platforms. The way I see it, my SaaS platform is Emirates NBD, which is one of our many partners. We have created a new middle layer which is where we’re doing a lot of innovations that are specific for Liv. Our approach is like that of a tech firm. We launch in one country, scale things up and will bring it to other countries. We have pitching

sessions every two weeks. If the ideas put forward are viable, they go through to the next stage. “When we launched Liv people obviously didn’t know who we were. Emirates NBD is a super solid brand and that helps us a lot. One of best thing about Emirates NBD is I can leverage their capabilities. It’s a luxury we enjoy.” Patel believes that digital banks are already beginning to enter their “second generation”, and that Liv has already completed its nascent steps. “The first generation of digital banks were just prettier apps of

If bankers built a new bank, it would be exactly the same as before.”

APRIL 2019

their previous version,” he says. “I was an early Monzo customer. Their prepaid card didn’t work on weekends. Can you imagine Barclays doing that? There would be chaos. Monzo has got where they are today in spite of those issues because they’re a brand that consumers love. Three or four weeks after we launched, people were opening accounts at 2am on Fridays – we learned how to create an operating model beyond traditional working hours.” Patel draws on tech CEOs Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for inspiration. “Whether or not you agree with Elon Musk, he’s changing the game. They have clear intentions to change things. They aren’t just tweaking things, but are redesigning them to the core.” www.tahawultech.com

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INTERVIEW Aruba CTO

ARUBA CTO: CUSTOMERS AREN'T ALWAYS RIGHT 36

ARUBA’S CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER PARTHA NARASIMHAN TOLD CNME WHY EDGE COMPUTING REPRESENTS A “PENDULUM” SWING FOR COMPUTING AND WHY GIVING CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY WANT ISN’T ALWAYS A GOOD THING.

Partha Narasimhan, chief technology officer, Aruba

APRIL 2019

hat are your impressions of the Middle East? I’ve watched the Middle East from a distance. If you look at some European countries and the US, digital transformation here is much more advanced than in some of these countries. In Silicon Valley,

there are a lot of startups driving digital transformation. Digital transformation in the Middle East is much further along than most people realise. HOW DO YOU SEE THE BALANCE OF PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE SECTOR INNOVATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE US? I’ve met some public sector CIOs www.tahawultech.com

in the Middle East who have been really active in driving that change. In the US, innovation is primarily seeded over to the private sector, but transformation in the public sector in the US doesn’t have the same intensity or pace that it does here. Some processes are much more advanced here, like those around national identity cards, which are much more cumbersome in the US. HOW DO YOU EXPECT EDGE COMPUTING TO TRANSFORM NETWORKS IN THE COMING YEARS? The shift from centralised to decentralised computing has been like a pendulum. It started with mainframes, which are centralised, then in the late 80s things started being driven by a client-server architecture. We saw compute and storage shifted to the client side, then to the adoption of smartphones and cloud. The pendulum is now going to swing back, and we believe it will swing back to the edge. The biggest difference with this swing is with smartphones and some of the things we’re seeing at the edge, where physical and digital aspects are coming together. With mainframe and client-server architectures it was mostly around the digital side of the world. You didn’t care where clients were or about physical locations. Now, it’s a combination of both and with mobility, where you stay connected as you move, and the network becomes the first point of impact and a window to getting www.tahawultech.com

insights around users and the physical space occupied at the edge. We’re making a lot of investments that are enabling mobility, security and machine learning, processing large data sets as a way to improve network and security operations. Datasets are becoming useful in understanding users. We’re putting a lot of focus on leveraging the network as a sensor and for physical world experiences.

Automation is key for us to deliver an essentially invisible network.

Transformation in the US public sector doesn’t have the same intensity or pace that it does here.”

HOW CRITICAL IS THE NETWORK BECOMING IN DELIVERING THE BEST POSSIBLE USER EXPERIENCE? More and more IT teams are being measured not just on uptime and ROI but against end user experience by line of business stakeholders. The end user experience is very subjective - how do I get science from that? Automation is key – the detection, resolution, prediction and prevention of problems. Data is now coming out of the infrastructure that we hadn’t noticed before. If we tap into this, we can get insights into how well we are delivering the end user experience. I can also work backwards to predict problems to resolve them before they occur. To the end user, the network infrastructure becomes invisible.

HOW ARE SECURITY CONCERNS TRANSFORMING APPROACHES TO NETWORKS? The same goes for security. The biggest concerns from CISOs centre around IoT, which is a big unknown in terms of the diversity of devices and behaviours. It takes five months on average to detect something bad on the network, but it only takes two hours for malware to propagate naturally. The inside of a network is no longer a trusted zone. Customers need to deploy the best possible security perimeter they can. Every time I leave my office with a company device then the office has no visibility over it. The device could get infected and then bring malware through the front door the next day. No perimeter will stop that. IoT opens up attack surfaces. How do we deploy detection mechanisms to detect behavioural changes for pieces of malware? Anything bad outside of a network will show changes. The amount of time it takes to detect malware on the network is decreasing. We’re leveraging AI and machine learning investments we’ve made that help improve network and security operations. APRIL 2019

INTERVIEW Aruba CTO

38 WHAT ARE ARUBA’S MAIN PRINCIPLES AROUND R&D? Customers are key here. Sometimes they express problems clearly, but sometimes we need to read between the lines to identify problems that they don’t explicitly understand. My role involves talking to customers, not just evangelising a roadmap, but also understanding what we’re doing well and what we aren’t. We develop tools and technologies that address these issues and find areas where we don’t have the right DNA, and that’s what pushed us to an AI and ML experience. We look for trends and things customers are expressing that we think we should help them solve. Sometimes it’s a question of acquiring talent, and sometimes technologies, but ultimately it’s how you piece together what you have to deliver the right experience. We believe in doing things APRIL 2019

openly and where possible by not locking customers in. We make a lot of investments in supporting standards bodies. We develop technology where we see the most value, and aren’t just about proprietary technology. Sometimes customers can articulate their issues, and at others they don’t know fully what’s possible. If they don’t know what those problems really are, they won’t be able to ask for a solution, so it’s our but our job to get customers to describe their

Sometimes customers express problems clearly, but sometimes we need to read between the lines to identify problems that they don’t understand.”

problems, and not just what they want. Sometimes customers don’t know their issues. It’s a about striking a balance between what they want and what they need. What they want is important, and we provide that when it’s clear but we also engage to degrees where we start a conversation and help them understand the real problem. Then, if we can find an alternative way of solving their problems, then we’re giving them what they need rather than what they want. www.tahawultech.com

HOW BIG A CHALLENGE IS THE CONSUMERISATION OF IT IN DELIVERING THE RIGHT NETWORK EXPERIENCE? End users now demand that high level of experience. Experiences are starting in users’ personal lives through consumer apps that deliver a superior experience. Those expectations carry over into the enterprise. If what I see is possible on one side or the other, end users demand more. In 2002, Wi-Fi was a largely consumer technology. We used to say if you don’t employ Wi-Fi then employees will. But as enterprises deployed Wi-Fi rogue AP’s went away. If enterprises cannot deliver those things then it could affect

their ability to attract younger talent. Employees and end users are manufacturing their own solutions. HOW IS ARUBA EMBEDDING AI AND ML INTO ITS SERVICES? We’ve embedded both in our connectivity layer. If you have a large college campus of 300 buildings, the team that manages that layer is very small, maybe three or four people. Not every building will be same. The environment plays an important role in Wi-Fi. If you’re managing this with human energy, the number of exceptions to manually handle things can’t be too high. If we use network data for performance anomalies for zones or buildings, we can then create more homogeneous

connectivity environment. That’s one example of where we’re using AI and ML to adjust and finetune things. Four or five buildings on campus may be different compared to the 300 other buildings, and we can make recommendations based on patterns from our other other customers. We’re recognising patterns and seeing things instantaneously everywhere else to automate and recognise where we can deliver a superior experience. Machines can spot these differences. This automation will permeate Aruba and our partners. These investments give us a serious edge over our competitors and help us to work with partners to develop solutions.

www.tahawultech.com

APRIL 2019

NEWS Huawei

HUAWEI TO LAUNCH ASSAULT ON EDGE, DRIVERLESS CARS MARKET WITH AI CHIPSET

HUAWEI CLAIMS IT IS READY TO WIN A SIZEABLE CHUNK OF THE EDGE COMPUTING AND DRIVERLESS CAR TECHNOLOGY MARKET AFTER ANNOUNCING THE FULL READINESS OF ITS AI-POWERED ATLAS CHIPSET.

H Alaa Elshimy, vice president and managing director, Huawei Enterprise Business Group Middle East

APRIL 2019

uawei has announced that crucial AI elements are now “fully integrated” into its Atlas chipset, signalling the firm’s readiness to deliver a wide variety of processing solutions in the age of edge computing and driverless cars. www.tahawultech.com

Middle East vice president and managing director of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group Alaa Elshimy added that Huawei has also signed “more than 30” 5G contracts across the world, including deals for over 25,000 5G base stations, including those in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. “Over the last two years, our strategy has been platform plus ecosystem plus infrastructure and hardware,” Elshimy said. “Our AI strategy is now to deliver a full stack for all technology scenarios. Our chipset is integrated into our hardware to give a standard interface for any computer or device. We’ve created a platform that makes this hardware talk to any software and APIs. We’ve created a library of APIs for any solution. The biggest challenge with processing is CPU power, but this chipset runs algorithms independently from the CPU. “Today, we have the infrastructure ready for all applications to run on this chipset,” Elshimy added. The Atlas Intelligent Computing Platform comes in the 200, 300, 500, 600 and 800, models, catering for different levels of computing power needs. The 200 and 300 modules cater mostly for “servers or robots”, allowing for “pieces of plastic” to have chips attached and become “intelligent”, while the 600 model caters “mostly” to car manufacturers. Huawei’s Atlas 500 runs edge computing workloads, and has the ability to recognise more than 200 www.tahawultech.com

The biggest challenge with processing is CPU power, but this chipset runs algorithms independently from the CPU.” objects per frame at the edge, including faces. The 800 model is an appliance used for banking and credit card processing. Huawei is currently working with Swedish car giant Volvo to deploy the Atlas 600 “mobile data centre” to develop an intelligent car, which provides high speed break alerts. German automobile giants Audi and Mercedes Benz are also working with Huawei to build connected vehicles. “Autonomous cars will not happen without 5G,” Elshimy said. “The latency of 4G is not enough to prevent accidents, so we need to process things in the car. Intelligence in the edge is an option in solving that, and will make things faster and deliver real-time data.”

The Atlas chipset has use cases for drones, according to Elshimy, including for 4K live streaming “regardless” of weather conditions. It can also be used for the inspection of oil and gas pipelines, and to deliver predictive maintenance for digital oilfields, Elshimy said. The includes live data around pipe pressure, and could also trigger alerts that automatically order spare parts when necessary. In terms of logistics, Elshimy said that the chipset could help to accelerate the process of organising the order in which cargo should be loaded into containers in order to maximise space usage, as well as inspecting for them contraband, cutting inspection times. Shenzhen Airport in China, meanwhile, has created a video cloud “brain” for airport surveillance, which is integrated into Huawei’s video cloud and command and control centre. The solution has reduced waiting times by 15 minutes per passenger and increased airport efficiency by 60%, according to Huawei. Elshimy also highlighted Huawei’s smart city project with Saudi city Yambu, which has already implemented Huawei systems to deliver smart traffic, which has reduced road maintenance costs by monitoring the weight of trucks. It has also delivered smart waste management and smart street lighting systems through its command and control centre. APRIL 2019

OPINION Azizi Developments

HOW BLOCKCHAIN WILL AFFECT UAE REAL ESTATE AZIZI DEVELOPMENTS CEO FARHAD AZIZI GIVES HIS TAKE ON THE WAYS THAT BLOCKCHAIN CAN SHAKE UP THE UAE REAL ESTATE MARKET.

B Farhad Azizi, CEO, Azizi Developments

APRIL 2019

lockchain technology is revolutionising the real estate sector and transforming how business in this realm will be conducted in the future. Though initially created to support cryptocurrency, blockchain technology has now made a quantum leap, going beyond the purview of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, it is possible for people and companies to make high-value transactions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; including those of immovable www.tahawultech.com

assets like property — without the need for intermediaries. By undermining the liquidity challenges associated with owning hard assets, tokenisation is democratising asset ownership with blockchain-stored tokens. Reselling assets is now easier and geographic boundaries in real estate transactions are becoming confined to the dustbin of history. The enormous potential of blockchain is being leveraged by Dubai, which is at the forefront of driving the smart transformation of the world economy. The Dubai Blockchain Strategy, announced by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, sets a clear roadmap for businesses to tap into the potential offered by blockchain technology. The strategy aims to make Dubai the first city to be fully powered by blockchain by 2020 through the three strategic pillars of government efficiency, industry creation, and international leadership. For the real estate sector, Dubai Land Department is the main organisation driving this transformation, which has created a blockchain system using a smart and secure database of all real

estate contracts. The move to smart contracts will cover lease registrations and link them to utility and telecom accounts as well as all property-related bills. The end-to-end transactions recorded on the real estate blockchain will provide scalable, secure, transparent, shared, and immutable property data for all the participants in a trusted network. This means that data relating to real estate can be shared and accessed across different government and private sector entities, all of which benefit from real-time insights. Eliminating all manual processes, real estate transactions are not only becoming faster but also more flexible and relevant. The immediate impact of this transformation is the speed in which property transactions will be conducted; what would have taken 20 days to be concluded can now be accomplished in less than 30 minutes. For customers, the advantages are manifold: By creating a single platform for all the different services provided by various stakeholders, blockchain will enhance the customer experience and make the journey — from

For an industry that has long been influenced by brokers, this transformation will mean greater value for customers.” www.tahawultech.com

What would have taken 20 days to be concluded can now be accomplished in less than 30 minutes with blockchain.” sales to after sales — seamless. A significant effect of Dubai’s move to blockchain technology in the real estate sector is the reduction in the need for pureplay brokerage services, as the single digital real estate platform will oversee all sales and rental transactions as early as next year. For an industry that has long been influenced by brokers, the transformation will mean greater value for customers. Smart Dubai also recently integrated blockchain technology into its online payment portal — DubaiPay — to enable the realtime reconciliation and settlement of transactions. In short, Dubai not only has set in place a strategy but is also implementing impactful tech reforms that will make blockchain an integral part of the industry’s operations, with the winners being all stakeholders, but predominantly the customer. APRIL 2019

ANALYSIS Gartner

HOW TO “DO” DATA LITERACY 44

Valerie Logan, senior director and analyst, Gartner

magine an organisation where the marketing department speaks French, the product designers speak German, the analytics team speaks Spanish and no one speaks a second language. Even if the organisation was designed with digital in mind, communicating business value and explaining why specific technologies matter would be challenging. That’s essentially how a datadriven business functions when there is no data literacy. If no one outside the department understands what is being said,

APRIL 2019

GARTNER’S SENIOR DIRECTOR AND ANALYST VALERIE LOGAN BELIEVES ORGANISATIONS SHOULD CHAMPION DATA LITERACY, AND TEACH DATA AS A SECOND LANGUAGE.

it doesn’t matter if data and analytics offers business value and is a required component of digital business. The prevalence of data and analytics capabilities, including artificial intelligence, requires creators and consumers to ‘speak data’ as a common language. Data and analytics leaders must champion workforce data literacy as an enabler of digital business and treat information as a second language. As data and analytics become a core part of digital business and data becomes an organisational

asset, employees must have at least a basic ability to communicate and understand conversations about data. In short, the ability to “speak data” will become an integral aspect of most day-to-day jobs. WHAT IS DATA LITERACY? Gartner defines data literacy as the ability to read, write and communicate data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques applied — and the ability to describe the use case, application and resulting value. www.tahawultech.com

DO YOU SPEAK DATA? The ability to understand and communicate in a common data language is a core skill for a core technology. It is the difference between successfully deriving value from data and analytics and losing out to competitors who have made it a core competency in their organisations. Furthermore, data literacy is an underlying component of digital dexterity, which is an employee’s ability and desire to use existing and emerging technology to drive better business outcomes, another important skill for digital business. WHY IS DATA LITERACY IMPORTANT? Poor data literacy is ranked as the second-biggest internal roadblock to the success of the office of the chief data officer, according to the Gartner Annual Chief Data Officer Survey. Gartner expects that, by 2020, 80% of organisations will initiate deliberate competency development in the field of data literacy to overcome extreme deficiencies. By 2020, 50% of organisations will lack sufficient AI and data literacy skills to achieve business value. As organisations become more data-driven, poor data literacy will become an inhibitor to growth. ASK THE RIGHT DATA AND ANALYTICS QUESTIONS Data and analytics leaders are responsible for creating the narrative for data literacy, highlighting the business value to be gained. Start by assessing data literacy at your organisation with a few questions: www.tahawultech.com

• How many people in your business do you think can interpret straightforward statistical operations such as correlations or judge averages? • How many managers are able to construct a business case based on concrete, accurate and relevant numbers? • How many managers can explain the output of their systems or processes? • How many data scientists can explain the output of their machine learning algorithms? • How many of your customers can truly appreciate and internalise the essence of the data you share with them?

and architects who are able to speak data naturally and effortlessly. Also, identify skilled translators who can serve as mediators for business groups. Secondly, look for areas where communication barriers mean that data isn’t being utilised to its full business potential. Conduct data literacy assessments to identify gaps and use as a baseline. When it comes time to teach groups about data, make sure it’s in a fun and open environment, and think outside the box for training ideas. Don’t focus solely on slides or presentations — use games, quizzes and other creative ways to teach. Next, try a data literacy proofof-concept workshop in an area where language gaps exist. Have participants describe real-life common use cases as well as a use case specific to the organisation. Make sure you capture lessons learned and then repeat the exercise, ensuring that participants use others’ languages. Share the lessons with other groups to raise awareness and understanding of the literacy gap. Finally, don’t forget that data and analytics leaders and data teams must lead by example. Ensure that teams are speaking data in all meetings when discussing business outcomes and in other business situations.

By 2020, 50% of organisations will lack sufficient AI and data literacy skills to achieve business value.

Not only must organisations take steps to educate professionals who are involved in crafting data-driven solutions, products and services, they must also ensure those steps achieve the goal of teaching all relevant employees to speak data as their new second language, as well as developing and nurturing communities in which the language will flourish. ESTABLISH A DATA LITERACY PROGRAM Start by identifying fluent and native data speakers. Look at business analysts, data stewards

APRIL 2019

OPINION Finesse

SHOULD YOUR BUSINESS USE CHATBOTS? FINESSE CO-FOUNDER AND COO SUNIL PAUL GIVES HIS TAKE ON HOW CHATBOTS CAN IMPROVE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES AND GIVE AN ENHANCED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, AND LOOKS AT USE CASES FOR ENTERPRISES THAT ARE CONSIDERING ADOPTING THEM.

Sunil Paul, co-founder and COO, Finesse

oday, there are already so many examples of chatbots at work that you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even realise. When a virtual assistant greets you when you call your bank, when a chat box solicits your contact details on a travel website, you are experiencing chatbots at work. If one examines the many definitions of chatbots over the Internet, they all broadly agree that they are computer

APRIL 2019

programmes or software that engages with human users with pre-determined messages in a conversational format. Thanks to artificial intelligence and natural language processing capabilities, the current crop of chatbots are able to mimic human conversations. As a result, diverse sectors, from banking to healthcare to industrial services are turning to chatbots to drive their customer service interactions and glean valuable www.tahawultech.com

intelligence on customer and market behaviour. There are many platforms that can be used to build both AI-based and command-based chatbots. Before jumping on the chatbot bandwagon, enterprises need to answer three basic questions: A) Do you need a chatbot? B) What problem or challenge will it solve? C) Who are the target users? What value will it offer them? Once you have answered these questions, also spare some time to find successful use cases – only a consistent return on investment can justify your investment. The business case for chatbots is that they help automate routine functions and free up the company’s human resources to deal with more complex and value-added tasks. Most companies look to chatbots as a means to reduce overheads and,

Chatbots sift through vast amounts of data to provide a customer with clear-cut and personalised information.” www.tahawultech.com

thus, operational costs. Chatbots are typically embedded in customer engagement channels like websites and apps, or within chat platforms such as Facebook Messenger or SMS so that customers can enjoy 24x7 access to a company without experiencing waiting times. Chatbots sift through vast amounts of data to provide a customer with clear-cut and personalised information so that customers don’t have to undergo the tedious exercise of navigating websites or IVR menus or wait over the phone to be attended by a call centre agent. Whenever querying gets too complex, chatbots can escalate the case to a human agent. For companies hawking consumer-facing products and services, chatbots can boost conversion rates and increase sales. Companies using such solutions are perceived as innovative. Where companies have to deal with multicultural environments like the Gulf region, chatbots can help them listen to the needs and preferences of their customers better. Consumers are increasingly favouring chat over email for communication. Dealing with millennials - who have grown up with Alexa and Siri, and are accustomed to instant responses - has pushed companies to integrate virtual agents or artificial conversational entity (ACE) technologies like chatbots into their customer outreach strategies.

The business case for chatbots is that they automate routine functions and free up human resources to deal with value-added tasks.” Gartner has predicted that 25% of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants by 2020. Organisations report a reduction of up to 70% in call, chat and/or email inquiries after implementing VCA (virtual customer assistance), according to Gartner research. They also report increased customer satisfaction, and a 33% cost saving per voice engagement. The use of chatbots isn’t limited to customer facing operations. Companies could also use chatbots for internal operations. For example, they can be used as personal assistants for scheduling appointments or ordering office supplies. They can be also used in project management for automating team communications and reporting and tracking expenses. APRIL 2019

OPINION ServiceNow

HOW TO LIVE WITH, WORK WITH AND LOVE COBOTS

Chris Pope, vice president, innovation, ServiceNow

he renaissance we are currently experiencing in artificial intelligence and all forms of machine learning has given rise to widespread discussion on how businesses will run in the immediate future. We will inevitably need to get used to some new terminology. One of the technology industry’s new favourites is the notion of the ‘cobot’, short for collaborative-robot. Cobots come in many forms. Some will be purely software-

APRIL 2019

SERVICENOW’S VICE PRESIDENT OF INNOVATION CHRIS POPE BELIEVES COLLABORATIVE ROBOTS WILL TRANSFORM THE WORKPLACE, AND THAT THEY SHOULD EMBRACED SOONER RATHER THAN LATER BY IT.

based helper robots that we might think of as sophisticated extensions of chatbots or virtual assistants. Some will more physically manifest themselves as robot arms, exoskeletons or some other forms of intelligently programmed machinery. Some will be a supersmart mix of both. YOUR INTELLIGENT NEW OFFICE BUDDY You can think of cobots as your new office buddies and people.

All of us are going to have to get used to working alongside intelligent machines in close proximity very soon. Cobot brains are composed of software-based virtual services that form the synapses of ‘thought’ — processing and data analytics ― that they run on. Like a Tamagotchi, they do need feeding and watering, but only in the form of software updates, exposure to new datasets and patches for security provisioning and so on. www.tahawultech.com

People who find the notion of cobots unnerving should perhaps stand back and consider the fact that machines have already been looking after us in close proximity for years. Your desktop machine, tablet and smartphone are all using AI to power the spam filter algorithms that assess every email you get for its potential threat value. If it helps you warm up to the idea, think of cobots as just one step further than a spam filter. But instead of just protecting you from a potential virus, cobots will be able to intuitively manage your work schedule, actions and business decisions, to create a better employee experience all round. BEHAVIOURAL RESPONSIBILITY As shiny and fabulous as all this sounds, there is a responsibility factor to bear in mind here. As we start to feed data into cobot brains, we need to be able to reflect a consciousness of and appreciation for society’s acceptable behavioural norms. This means that cobots will need to be able to assess the risk factor in terms of the judgements they give to any individual worker based on that person’s skills, background and other competencies. To do this effectively, we will need to be able to assess and measure individual workers’ skills in an even more granular and mathematical way before we start to engineer more automation of this kind into our lives. Cobots will also need to appreciate cultural, ethical and behavioral norms for the global culture that they are applied in depending on location — and this is of course a subject in and of itself. www.tahawultech.com

COBOTS AND GLOBAL DIGITAL WORKFLOWS As the cobots start to take over the mundane tasks in our world, we must consider how people will now coexist in the new world of automated controls that drive digital workflows and how we actually implement these devices ― whether they are software-based, hardware-based or both — in the workplace. Some argue that we will now need to be able to measure an individual’s rank or score in terms of workplace competency. If we accept this methodology, then it could arguably help us find the engineering point at which we can apply cobot technology to an individual’s role. Smart cobots that run on fine-tuned ML models will be able to bring a new level of workplace personalisation to our daily routines and discover where we could be doing better. Intelligent agents will be capable of interpreting emails for us to automatically schedule meetings, flag important tasks and even unsubscribe us from newsfeeds that we never open, and more. With a cobot as your new office buddy, we can start to think about the workplace from a different perspective. We’re all used to open plan office seating layouts these days, but with cobots in the workplace, the software itself will

be able to straddle cross-team functionality matrices that far outstrip the boundaries of the physical office itself. For example, team member actions in the UAE can be automatically reflected in plans for the UK or US offices in near real-time. The cobot doesn’t sleep, so a new global digital workflow starts to become possible. A TOAST TO COBOT IPA With cobot technology now developing fast, we will more clearly be able to understand our transition from RPA to IPA or IRPA. If robotic process automation allows us to programme home heating controls, for example, based on defined patterns, then intelligent robotic process automation is one step further, where home heating controls start to programme themselves for optimum usage and efficiency based upon observed patterns of use. Cobots have IRPA in their DNA from the get-go.

All of us will have to get used to working with intelligent machines very soon.”

We’re on the cusp of many technologies ― perceived today as almost ‘toy-like’, such as self-driving cars — becoming quite natural. We will think that cobots and intelligent assistants are quite standard in half a decade’s time. We inevitably reach a point where we just expect a new technology to be there, and cobots will be no different. APRIL 2019

COLUMN Glesni Holland

ast food giant McDonald’s has announced plans to acquire Dynamic Yield, an AI company that produces “decision logic” technology to retailers around the globe. The tech startup was recently valued at over $300 million, making the acquisition McDonalds’ largest purchase since it bought Boston Market back in the nineties. The 36,000-store chain is hoping the adoption of Dynamic Yield’s AI services will “redefine the ordering process” to create a drive-thru menu that factor in the weather (think McFlurries on warmer days), popular menu items and current restaurant traffic – meaning it will only suggest quick-to-prepare add-ons during peak times. Number-plate recognition technology could be on the cards to allow it to offer customers their usual order at drive-thrus. The ultimate goal? To provide a “much more personalised experience” to its 69 million daily customers, according to McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook. Beyond that, flexing its financial muscle in this

APRIL 2019

way could give McDonald’s the edge in the ultra-competitive fast-food world. The demand for a highlypersonalised, premium experience is now the norm in retail and service industries, and the emergence of our two-part existence (virtual and physical selves) is a reality that all businesses must now come to appreciate and utilise for success. This acquisition won’t mark the start of the fast-food chain’s digital transformation. Despite being slow off the mark in creating its longawaited mobile ordering app, it seems the company is now betting big on its digital efforts – with plans to implement the new technology across its entire digital infrastructure, from its drive-thrus and kiosks, right through to its mobile app. There’s no indication as to when we can expect this advancement here in the Middle East, but it goes without saying that such an initiative would be well received in the region. According to the latest Global Consumer Insights Survey from PwC, consumers in the Middle East are ahead of global

percentages in terms of online shopping and digital payments. On paper, the Dynamic Yield acquisition looks to be a smart move for McDonald’s. A fast food chain acquiring a tech company represents a move off the beaten track, and personalised services will make them stand out from their competitors. However, it also puts into context just how the goalposts have shifted for MNCs. Although undoubtedly one of the world’s most renowned and loved brands, McDonald’s isn’t in the same league as the world’s best innovators. Amazon’s AI efforts are touted as a key pillar in its competitive advantage, and its success in product recommendation is undoubtedly a feat that McDonald’s will strive to emulate. With nearly a quarter of Middle East consumers using Amazon exclusively for online products compared to 12 percent globally, it certainly suggests that regional consumers would be “lovin’ it” if an algorithm of the same calibre was applied to their next burger order. www.tahawultech.com

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Footnotes: 1- Based on a comparison of the SPECvirt_sc2013 results for the HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 with 1 AMD EPYC 7551P. SPEC and the benchmark name SPECvirt_2013 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). The stated results are published as of 06-05-18; see spec.org 2- The stated leadership results are published as of 8-15-2018 to SPEC; see spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/res2018q2/power_ssj2008-20180410-00808.html

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