ISSUE 297 | OCTOBER 2016 WWW.CNMEONLINE.COM STRATEGIC ICT PARTNER
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DARE TO DREAM JEDDAH MUNICIPALITY CIO DR ARWA YOUSUF AL-AAMA RAISES THE BAR
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EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9129
The show goes on
Editor James Dartnell james.dartnell@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9153
In the last two decades or so, I have seen many mega IT trade shows fail and disappear. A case in point is Comdex or Super Comm. These massive, product-oriented shows failed primarily because they stopped being the platform for users to meet vendors, glean market intelligence and learn about new trends. In other words, these events failed to attract their target audience. Now, this is what GITEX Technology Week makes refreshingly different, as the biggest tech trade show in the region that offers CXOs more industry insights and intimate understanding of the best technology strategies and solutions to meet their business objectives. The bane of For me personally, this is going to be traditional my 11th year of GITEX, and I have seen this trade shows show constantly evolve and reinvent to keep is that they its relevance for technology buyers in the GCC. The bane of traditional trade shows is often boil that they often boil down to size, number of down to size. people, and bigger booths, where vendors are vying with each other to grab attention rather than promote the business benefits of their products on display. GITEX, over time, has steered away from this pitfall by developing educational conferences about the latest trending topics and connecting pre-qualified buyers with sellers in a more meaningful way. CPI Media Group, publisher of CNME, is going to have a big presence at the show this year, and we are going to bring out our hourly newsletter, 60 Minutes, which will mirror the trends in our industry and pinpoint the technologies and wares that will interest IT decision-makers.
Talk to us: E-mail: jeevan.thankappan@ cpimediagroup.com
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DARE TO DREAM JEDDAH MUNICIPALITY CIO DR ARWA YOUSUF AL-AAMA DEFIES SAUDI ARABIA’S NORMS
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EDITORIAL
Our events
Eye on the horizon I’m delighted to say that this month’s issue of CNME is – as is every issue, indeed – filled with dozens of truly forward-thinking, ambitious technology leaders who have followed through with their long-term ambitions. Our cover star, Dr Arwa Yousuf Al Aama, is an exceptional, inspirational figure, who has overcome years of prejudice to reach an extremely high position in the industry. Just 11 years ago, Dr Al-Aama was the only female employee at Jeddah Municipality, and – after years of hard graft – today sits as the organisation’s CIO/vice mayor for IT, as well as holding professor status at King Abdulaziz University. Turn Just 11 years to page 18 for the in-depth interview. ago, Dr Arwa On page 24 you can read about how one of the UAE’s most important critical Yousuf Al-Aama infrastructure providers, the Abu Dhabi was the only Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA), female employee is focusing its efforts on IT governance and at Jeddah strategy as it strives to fill the emirate’s sustainability targets of Vision 2030. Municipality. We also spoke with Bank Dhofar CIO Dr Tariq Taha, who shares the story of his prosperous IT career across a range of verticals and geographies, and how he is using his experience to satisfy the bank’s demand for agility. Catch Tariq on page 30. What’s more, as this month’s issue coincides with the 36th edition of GITEX Technology Week, we took the opportunity to ask a selection of esteemed CIOs who have been featured in CNME to write about the topics they feel are most pressing in the industry. May their insight and zeal affect us all. Talk to us:
E-mail: james.dartnell@ cpimediagroup.com
CONFERENCE
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Contents
Our Strategic Partners Strategic ICT Partner
Strategic Technology Partner
Strategic Innovation Partner
ISSUE 297 | OCTOBER 2016
18
30
IN DEPTH: DR ARWA YOUSUF AL-AAMA
CIO SPOTLIGHT: Dr Tariq Taha
24
20 Connecting the digital dots
56 Money talks
42 GITEX previews
80 On the move
48 Partnering for progress
84 Quick wins
52 Acing the test
92 Intelligent business
CASE STUDY: ADWEA
36
CASE STUDY: GULFTAINER
Etisalat recently hosted a conference to dicuss how ‘transformative solutions’ can humanise customer experiences.
CNME gives a low-down of the big players to watch out for at the 36th annual GITEX Technology Week.
Facing pressures to develop new services and cut operational costs, telecommunication companies are increasingly outsourcing their dayto-day network operations.
Blending development and operations processes into a DevOps culture can hasten time to market and eradicate errors in software deployment.
In a 13-page feature special, CNME and a selection of regional finance CIOs analyse the impact of digital banking in the UAE.
AW Rostamani Group CIO Sebastian Samuel gives his take on why the automotive industry is on the verge of widespread disruption.
Gartner's Managing Vice President, Lee Weldon, discusses how CIOs can hit the ground running in their first 100 days in a new role.
Andreas Simon and Markus Brinsa, Jedox, summarise the numerous business advantages of analytics.
Powering the New Industrial Revolution with Cloud The business landscape is changing, and new innovations are coming into the enterprise. Organisations moving to the cloud have a blank canvas to build the ideal cloud model.
INDUSTRY 4.0 IS NOT JUST A CONCEPT FUTURE INNOVATIONS CAN ONLY BE REALISED IN THE CLOUD
60 %
of lightweight development takes place on compute services
61 %
of businesses plan to adopt microservices operated by compute services
63 %
plan to deploy cloud-based machine-learning, using compute services' scalability on demand
COMPANIES INTEGRATING CLOUD PLATFORMS WITH COMPUTE SERVICES WILL LEAD THE WAY BRING NEXT GENERATION INNOVATIONS TO LIFE
60 %
believe an integrated cloud infrastructure is essential for Industry 4.0
92 %
are still to deploy an integrated cloud model
40 %
plan to have an integrated cloud in place for legacy and new apps by 2017
THE MAJORITY OF BUSINESSES RISK BEING STUCK IN THE INNOVATION SLOW LANE NOT SET UP FOR SUCCESS
SECURITY STRUGGLES
DON'T BE OVERTAKEN
40 %
41 %
5%
feel their current IT infrastructure can support Industry 4.0
say innovation is stifled by mission critical app security in public cloud
risk being left behind with no plans for cloud
INTEGRATED CLOUD: THE FOUNDATION FOR NEXT GENERATION INNOVATION
56 %
62 %
60 %
see integrated cloud as an opportunity to capitalise on AI
say robotics technology is on the business agenda and are planning implementations
plan to adopt AI in their IT operations
Source: oracle.com/uk/cloud/paas/yourcloudyourway
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COLUMN
Adelle Geronimo Online Editor, CNME
REALITY CHECK G
ITEX Technology Week, back for its 36th edition, will be held under the theme ‘re-imagining realities,’ and will feature a new segment focused on augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). By now most of us have experienced this tech in some form or another. Frost & Sullivan is one of many research firms to declare that that the next 10 years will see an unprecedented increase in the developments of VR and AR technologies in the Middle East. By the same token, IDC highlighted that AR and VR hardware revenue will surpass $2 billion globally for the first time this year. Deloitte have also predicted rapid growth in the region’s VR revenues, which will continue to be driven by the gaming industry. However, these trends are making their mark in the enterprise. Today, industries like healthcare and education are making big strides in VR. Organisations like the Miami Children’s Health System in the US, which uses VR tools for patient education and providing training to other medical practitioners, and the Royal London Hospital, where a www.cnmeonline.com
surgeons used a Medical Realities application to create VR of a live stream a surgical procedure. In the Middle East, a number of companies in sectors like retail and entertainment are already incorporating VR solutions into their strategies to help sell their products and services. The UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have seen an increase in consumer acceptance of a variety of products for VR gaming and enterprise applications. However, despite all this, industry experts noted that the use of the technology in the enterprise is still in its infancy, and mainstream adoption is still a long way down the road. Nevertheless, the prospects created by both VR and AR make the digital future incredibly exciting. They will open up new avenues for creative collaboration and immersive experiences, suggesting that these technologies will be much more than a flash in the pan. There’s currently very little business imperative to invest time and resources in VR for most organisations in the Middle East. However, IT leaders should be aware of what their competition is doing on this front, and be on the lookout for ways on how they can leverage AR and VR to further their success. OCTOBER 2016
11
SHORT TAKES
Month in view
APPLE, DELOITTE INTRODUCE ‘ENTERPRISE NEXT’ SERVICE
Apple has signed a corporate IT agreement with Deloitte to accelerate its efforts to secure larger enterprise customers. Joining under the banner of a service called Enterprise Next, the partnership sees Deloitte create a new Apple practice, which involves over 5,000 strategic advisors consulting businesses on iOS device usage across a range of industries. “As the leader in digital transformation strategy, Deloitte is an ideal partner that brings a team of Apple-dedicated strategic advisors to help clients truly revolutionise how they work using iOS, iPhone and iPad,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said. “iPhone and iPad are transforming how people everywhere get work done. And through this partnership, we’re able to help even more businesses tap into the incredible capabilities that only the Apple ecosystem can deliver.” Enterprise Next from Deloitte Consulting will provide businesses with expertise spanning more than 20 industries, and offers customers capabilities around prioritising digital resources and maximising new mobile opportunities. Through partnershipswith IBM, Cisco, SAP and now Deloitte, Apple is advancing at a rapid rate in enterprise, bolstered by the vendor’s increased credibility within the space.
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DELL EMC DISCUSSES REGIONAL PLANS Senior executives from Dell EMC recently met with customers and channel partners to discuss their roadmaps to "transform the UAE’s business and economic landscapes." Dell EMC – part of Dell Technologies, the newly combined entity of Dell and EMC - highlighted how the company is built to help customers "thrive" in the digital era and resolve the region’s most pressing business challenges. These include cloud, converged infrastructure, security, and mobility in the public, financial services, energy, education, and SME sectors. Aongus Hegarty, President, Dell EMC, EMEA, outlined the insights he had earlier shared with some of the company’s enterprise clients in the UAE. “This region, and the UAE specifically, has the opportunity to make a leap in using technology solutions to resolve pressing business issues – the lack of outdated
BY 2020, THE BIG DATA AND BUSINESS ANALYTICS MARKET IS PREDICTED TO HIT Source: IDC
infrastructure combined with the public and private sectors’ focus on creating employment opportunities and forging a digital transformation in education, financial services, government and other key sectors providing tremendous opportunity for collaborative problemsolving with Dell Technologies.” Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa and Middle East, EMC Corporation, said, “As the UAE prepares to stand at the forefront of emerging markets powered on Vision 2021, there is a growing interest to facilitate innovation across every aspect of industry and human life. With Dell and EMC coming together, our customers and partners can now leverage a trusted advisor who has a rich understanding of this region, extends an unmatched portfolio of solutions to meet diverse needs and offers best-in-class expertise.”
$203
BN
www.cnmeonline.com
FOLLOWING HEAVY LOSSES, BLACKBERRY HAS ANNOUNCED THAT IT WILL SOON END ALL HARDWARE DEVELOPMENT, AND WILL OUTSOURCE ITS PHONE PRODUCTION TO THIRD PARTIES.
YAHOO CONFIRMS MASSIVE DATA BREACH Yahoo has recently confirmed that it had been subject of a massive hacking attack that exposed the data of over 500 million users. The company noted that this does not involve credit card information. According to previous reports, a hacker may have stolen as many as 200 million user accounts, possibly many more, and is selling them online with passwords and dates of birth. In early August, Yahoo launched an investigation into the breach after someone offered to sell a data dump of over 200 million Yahoo accounts on an underground market, including
CISCO NAMES NEW MD FOR WEST REGION OPERATIONS Cisco Middle East has announced the appointment of Ziad Salameh as Managing Director of its West Region. In his new position, Salameh will be responsible for leading Cisco’s business and operations in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Levant and Iraq. A Cisco veteran in the region, Salameh will extend efforts to secure engagements across various industry sectors, while working closely with channel partners to provide Cisco’s solutions to the public and private sectors. Leading a team in the West region, Salameh is tasked with developing "stronger partner associations with strategic initiatives for skillset development," and build on Cisco’s public and private sector engagements to attain the company's strategic goals and elevate business performance. “It is a truly exciting time to be a part of Cisco’s vision," Salameh said. "Digitisation is making dramatic changes in the way organisations approach their business operations. I am honoured to lead the way into new digital business transformation initiatives with Cisco’s leading solutions portfolio to help our customers and partners reap the benefits of a digital ecosystem that delivers tangible and sustainable growth, and which helps them become more competitive." www.cnmeonline.com
usernames, easy-to-crack password hashes, dates of birth and backup email addresses. The company has since determined that the breach is real and that it’s even worse than initially believed, news website Recode reported recently, citing unnamed sources familiar with the investigation. Yahoo is blaming the breach on an unnamed “state-sponsored actor.” Although it’s still unclear how the hack was pulled off, the stolen data includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers and hashed passwords. The confirmation came at a critical time for the Internet company, especially with the ongoing $4.8 billion sale of its core internet operations to Verizon. The deal has yet to be approved by regulators.
BANK SOHAR IMPLEMENTS IBM CLOUD IIBM has announced that Bank Sohar selected its cloud and mobile solution to “accelerate its digital transformation.” According to the vendor, the cloud solution will allow the bank to enhance its information technology infrastructure, boost its client service capabilities and elevate the overall customer experience. “By choosing this platform on IBM Cloud, Bank Sohar was able to streamline its IT environment and gain flexibility in using its infrastructure to become an engine of innovation,” said Amr Refaat, General Manager, IBM Middle East and Pakistan. “IBM’s solution has fast-tracked the integration development process, improved the developer experience and enhanced functional capabilities around APIs, mobile and the cloud.” Mujahid Said Al Zadjali, Deputy General Manager, IT and Alternate Channels, Bank Sohar, said, “The IBM solution will streamline the Bank’s IT infrastructure and significantly improve efficiency and timeto-market when launching new products, particularly for mobile-applications. This will also result in the reduction of time and effort to integrate new core banking applications.”
OCTOBER 2016
13
Intel 4004
G
enerally regarded as the first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004 – released in 1971 – was a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU), which began retailing at a price
of $60. The chip design began in April 1970 under Federico Faggin, who originally developed the silicon gate technology (SGT) in 1968 at Fairchild Semiconductor. As SGT was his own invention, Faggin was able to use it alongside his methodology for a design that made it possible to implement a single-chip CPU with speed and power dissipation. Designed as part of the MCS-4 family, the 4004 processor worked alongside a supporting read-only memory (ROM) chip for the custom applications programmes, a random-access memory (RAM) chip for
14
OCTOBER 2016
processing data, and a shift-register chip for the input/output (I/O) port. This revolutionary microprocessor, just the size of a fingernail, delivered the same computing power as the first electronic computer built in 1946, which filled an entire room. The 4004 held 2,300 transistors, and had a circuit line width of 10,000 nanometres; by comparison, a human hair on average is 100,000 nanometres wide. The 4004 was originally custom-built for Busicom; a Japanese firm which enjoyed the first commercial sale of the fully operational chip in March 1971. Three other CPU chip designs were developed at about the same time: the FourPhase System AL1, done in 1969; the MP944, completed in 1970 and used in the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet; and the Texas Instruments TMS0100 chip, announced in September 1971.
www.cnmeonline.com
LEADING NEW ICT
BUILDING A BETTER CONNECTED WORLD
GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK 2016 I OCT 16 - 20 , DUBAI, UAE Visit us at Z-D20 in Za’abeel Hall, Dubai World Trade Center
@Huawei_ME
GITEX Mini-site
Email: enterpriseME@huawei.com
EVENT
Etisalat
CONNECTING THE DIGITAL DOTS
Last month, Etisalat hosted a thought-provoking conference, where a number of company decision-makers presented ways in which their ‘transformative solutions’ can humanise customer experiences.
O
n September 27th, a room full of IT professionals gathered at Jumeriah Beach Hotel for the presentation of Etisalat’s latest initiative: ‘connecting the digital dots.’ Kicking things off was the event’s MC and editor of CNME, James Dartnell, who said, “Today, we understand that creating a digital experience starts with transformative solutions that will humanise customer experiences.” Etisalat representatives Mahmoud Mihdawi, Director of Strategic Corporate Sales, and Mutasem Ahmed, Senior Director of Growth Accounts, were then welcomed on stage. The pair discussed how 16
OCTOBER 2016
Etisalat has been trusted as the digital transformation partner for Expo 2020 – one of the biggest events in UAE history. Building on this prospect, they explained how the aim of the conference was to demonstrate how in an era of consistently trying to meet a high volume of customer demands, ‘connecting the digital dots’ in businesses can massively benefit CIOs across the region. The first keynote speaker of the day was Jose Sanchez, Senior Vice President, Pre-Sales and Customer Service Delivery. He began by describing the changes which Etisalat had undertaken in order to compete
to become this country’s “preferred enterprise IT provider.” He said, “We began challenging and reviewing every step involved in our customer’s experience. We have evolved our strategies in dealing with customers and transformed our support model in every aspect, from pre-sales to delivery to customer care.” In the past, Sanchez said, Etisalat have faced issues with billing inquiries, so in order to tackle this, the company has installed a set of new processes.. “We have implemented proper segmentation within our customer care teams, and we have assigned care teams to handle orders and billing inquiries respectively," Sanchez said. www.cnmeonline.com
He added, “Our goal by the end of November this year is to have 85 percent of all billing disputes resolved within 4 days.” Following on from Sanchez’s presentation was Miguel Villalonga, Etisalat's Vice President of Cloud and Data Centre. He introduced the idea of a “six-step journey” in connecting the digital dots. He said, “Digital transformation is no longer a marketing message, it’s happening right now.” The “six-step journey,” which dictated the rest of the conference, consists of: go connected, go mobile, go agile, go trusted, go phygital, and go intelligent. Next on stage was Oscar Gomez, Senior Vice President of Business Marketing. He discussed step one of the journey: go connected. “If you want to remain competitive in the 21st century, you need to go connected and go mobile.” He discussed Etisalat’s ‘Mobile Hub’ – a corporate price plan which allows companies to allocate usages and allowances amongst employees. “The modern workforce need to be productive while on the move, and we can help you achieve this through the Mobile Hub,” he said. The next step of the journey was explained by Saif Al Salman, Senior Director of Global Services. He outlined that Etisalat initially had three goals: to first establish a presence in the GCC, then in the continent, and then in destinations across the world. Part of this revolution has involved establishing hubs in London, Dubai and Singapore. He then went on to discuss the global solutions which Etisalat provide. “To be competitive, you need an ecosystem that can provide SLA’s, online portals, MPLs, VOIP and VAS,” said Al Salman, and Etisalat’s global www.cnmeonline.com
Digital transformation is no longer a marketing message, it’s happening right now. - Miguel Angel Villalonga, Vice President of Cloud and Data Centre.
solutions portfolio covers all of these aspects respectively. “Go agile” was next, led by Oman Mansour, Senior Manager of Cloud and Data Centre. He evaluated the drivers behind companies migrating to the cloud, stating: “It’s faster, easier, cheaper, more flexible and more sealable.” He concluded that there was a common denominator between the drivers and inhibitors behind cloud adoption, which was that a trusted cloud solution was needed in order to help the speed of business. Mansour discussed Etisalat’s ‘One Cloud’ solution, claiming that Etisalat can help companies to create a plan that can increase business resiliency by 50 percent. Senior Director of Security Solutions, Kamran Ahsan, then took to the stage to discuss the “go trusted” step of the journey. “The demand for security is more than ever before,” he said. “There were three main vectors that constituted 90 percent of security breaches in 2015: denial of service, web app attacks, and DPOS intrusions. Hackers are now taking less time to infiltrate a system and extract data, so organisations now need to have endto-end, continuous security measures in place.” He described Etisalat as a ‘one-stop-shop’, in that they are able
to design, install and monitor this technology for organisations. To conclude the six-step journey, Haider Khan, Senior Director of Digital Channels Payment, explained that “go phygital” is about connecting the physical and online worlds through an omni-channel experience, and that “go intelligent” is about equipping customers with the capabilities to adopt IoT technologies. Omar Al Sharif, Director of Vertical Marketing Communications, followed up the six-step plan by reflecting on how much technology had evolved. “Globalisation and technology are changing the face of the business world,” he said. “By 2025, we expect 2 trillion devices to be connected to the Internet.” He also outlined the importance of trust in successfully utilising the latest technologies, by breaking down the following formula: T=R+D+E3, meaning trust cannot be attained without a combination of reliability, delight, engagement, empowerment and experience. To conclude, Ragy Magdy, Vice President of Enterprise Sales, summarised the presentations before challenging the audience to recap the six-step journey for the chance to win an iPhone 7 – just 11 days after the models had been released in the UAE. OCTOBER 2016
17
IN-DEPTH
DR ARWA YOUSUF AL-AAMA
Dr Arwa Yousuf Al-Aama
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OCTOBER 2016
www.cnmeonline.com
AGAINST ALL ODDS
Overcoming fierce opposition from the world's most patriarchal government, dismissive colleagues and Saudi Arabia's formidable religious police, Dr Arwa Yousuf Al-Aama now sits as a King Abdulaziz University computer science professor, CIO for Jeddah Municipality and a shining example for defying expectation.
n most walks of life, feigning illness to secure a meeting with your boss is not the conventional way to get things done. Dr Arwa Yousuf Al-Aama's route to success has been far from conventional, however. The American-educated Master of computer science had arranged a meeting with her employer, the president of King Abdulaziz University (KAU), who was also a physician. “I had applied for a scholarship at KAU, to go to George Washington University (GWU) in the US to pursue my graduate education, but needed his approval in order to get it,” she says. “He told me ‘I don’t meet women’. There seemed one obvious way I could get his time.” Al-Aama's intentions were immediately transparent. Luckily
I
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for her, her determination shone through. “I think he recognised my eagerness, and reluctantly agreed to endorse my pursuit, granting me unpaid leave instead,” she says. “It may seem like an extreme course of action, but I knew it was the only way he would listen to me.” This was one of many battles for education and equal opportunity that have been the norm for AlAama (now Professor Al-Aama, holding a doctorate of science and position at KAU) throughout her journey in establishing herself as one of the most respected technology professionals in the Middle East, and a shining example of a successful female in the world’s most patriarchal society. In many respects, her career has been defined by diversity, with a formidable CV that spans academia, technology and business.
Dr Al-Aama’s initial interest in technology was stoked by her father buying computer games for her as gifts from his travels. She was fascinated by their mechanics. “I wanted to create computer games of my own; games in Arabic,” she says. “My upbringing was out of the ordinary for Saudi Arabia.” Fast-forward to 1985, and she left the country, quitting KAU's College of Medicine to join California’s Northrop University to begin a computer science course. Things did not go to plan, however. “Northrop went bankrupt,” she recalls. She returned home, and completed her BSc. degree from KAU. Upon graduating, Dr Al-Aama assumed an unpaid position at the university, and after two years working there, we return to the start of our story. OCTOBER 2016
19
IN-DEPTH
DR ARWA YOUSUF AL-AAMA
Recognising the opportunity she had been given, Dr Al-Aama strove to go beyond the demands of the course, and further her knowledge as much as she possibly could. “My course advisor was absolutely marvellous,” she recalls. “It was against GWU’s policy to allow students to study more than four modules per semester on a Master’s course, but she saw that I was extremely keen and allowed me to study five. I was desperate to be ahead of the game.” Al-Aama completed the course in under a year, and returned to Saudi Arabia with a Master’s degree. A pleasant surprise awaited her. KAU now had a new president, who was much more receptive to the idea of women bettering themselves in higher education. He approved Dr Al-Aama’s application to complete a doctorate, and she returned to GWU in 1997 to obtain the qualification. While Stateside, she went on to partake in a medical research project at Georgetown University. Returning to Jeddah in 2003, Al-Aama assumed an assistant professor role at KAU, and by 2004 was named head of computer science. A year down the line, Dr Al-Aama’s field really began to gather steam at the institution. “King Abdullah agreed for the department of computer science to be transformed into the College of Computing and IT, with three departments dedicated to teaching women – IT, computer science and information systems,” she says. “We had to build everything from scratch. There were no staff or buildings.” Within two years, the college was fully accredited. Whilst undertaking her teaching work at KAU, and establishing the women’s technology college, Dr Al20
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“If we had failed – or underperformed in their eyes – there was every chance that women may not be given such an opportunity for years. I had to make sure I took my chance.” Aama displayed the breadth of her strengths by concurrently working as an IT consultant for Saudi holding investment company Savola Group. Her work at the company would lay the foundations for a long and fruitful career in the public sector. As well as working on valueadding technology initiatives, she also cultivated a strong working relationship with company CEO Adel bin Muhammad Fakeih, who was appointed mayor of Jeddah in 2005. Fakeih acted quickly to recruit Dr AlAama as CIO of Jeddah Municipality the following year. Her appointment as the only woman in the organisation instantly raised eyebrows with her new peers. “I knew at that stage that bringing women into a government environment would bring intense scrutiny,” she says. “If we had failed – or underperformed in their eyes – there was every chance that women may not be given such an opportunity for years. I had to make sure I took my chance.” Dr Al-Aama’s decision to grab the opportunity with both hands was sage. “Laws have since been introduced that mean women have had to be employed by the government, but that would’ve made my employment forced, which I didn’t want,” she says. “In truth, I was more concerned with political influences stifling my own progress.” The Mutaween – Saudi Arabia’s
religious police, employed by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – were a presence that lingered in the back of Dr Al-Aama’s mind. If they had caught wind that her work was not up to scratch in the early days of her tenure, she risked being deprived of opportunities that were rightfully hers. “They demanded very conservative practices,” she says. “They were raising flags if women were working in municipality departments, and that affected their ability to find jobs.” In spite of this potential adversary, Dr Al-Aama held her own and established herself in the role. Her success encouraged Fakeih that more had to be done to increase the number of women in the organisation. “He asked me to help recruit more women, and to empower them in their IT careers,” she says. Huge progress has since been made in the department. Dr AlAama now has a team of 300 people - split across the sexes - working beneath her, and is free to give equal opportunities to women. In her role as both CIO and vice mayor of IT, Dr Al-Aama reports directly to the city’s mayor, Dr Hani Mohammad Aburas. She is fully responsible for the city’s IT initiatives, both internally and externally. “Just over 10 years ago, we only had 50 PCs connected to a www.cnmeonline.com
Saudi Arabian Airlines adopts Laserfiche as ECM platform As one of the top major airline carriers in the Middle East, Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) flies to 57 global destinations, operating a fleet of 120 aircraft, with domestic flights reaching 27 destinations. With offices in four continents, Saudia has recently adopted Laserfiche as its enterprise content management (ECM) platform, facilitating collaboration across all of these locations. Given the competitive landscape of the airline industry, it was crucial for Saudia’s IT team to move beyond traditional ECM solutions, which do not provide any additional value other than just simple indexing and retrieval capabilities. Since its implementation, the solution has had a significant impact on both endusers and Saudia’s management.
“With the massive number of transactions and documents we deal with, Laserfiche has helped to improve work efficiency and expedite documentation follow up.” - Abdulmonem Fallata, Manager of Integration and Web Competency at Saudia Read more at www.cnmeonline.com/case-studies
IN-DEPTH
DR ARWA YOUSUF AL-AAMA
mainframe,” she says. “We have now deployed a range of exciting initiatives in the city. Things like Jeddah Cloud, our disaster recovery site and EURODIESEL – a backup system for the city’s IT infrastructure electricity supply – as well as our e-services and apps, are playing their part in the city’s developing economy.” Her efforts in driving Jeddah to becoming a technologicallyempowered smart city have already gained recognition from the Saudi government. In Jeddah Municipality’s sixth annual e-Government appraisal, the organisation scored 97 percent for its completion of e-services. This was the highest score for a municipality in the Kingdom, and among the top five for all of the country’s government organisations. A key factor in the Municipality’s high score was the strategy for Smart City initiatives that Dr Al-Aama has developed, the benefits of which will be realised in the coming years. “Jeddah has huge potential, and is of great strategic importance to Saudi Arabia,” Dr Al-Aama says. “Not only is it on the coast of the Red Sea, but it’s also an important gateway to our holy cities for pilgrims.” Although Dr Al-Aama does not endorse the sexist policies that she fought hard to overcome, she nonetheless believes that the culture they create can actually benefit women working in IT. It may seem a bizarre assertion, to believe that women working in isolation can contribute to good technology skills, but Dr Al-Aama is firm in her belief. “In 1998, the US was faced with a shortage of IT professionals, and realised that men couldn’t meet their demand alone,” she says. “Women were not going into computing or science professions. Research has 22
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“There are more women than men studying computing in Saudi Arabia. They excel in things like system development and analysis, programming and web development, because they can do these things on their own, from anywhere. This fits with Saudi culture.” shown that peer pressure dictates how men and women perform in class – men being in the lab 24/7, and women going home earlier. Women are expected to meet gender roles. Even President Clinton recognised this, and moved his daughter to an all-girls school.” Linking this back to Saudi culture, it becomes clear how Dr Al-Aama believes isolation can cultivate bright programming minds. “There are more women than men studying computing in Saudi Arabia,” she says. “They excel in things like system development and analysis, programming and web development, because they can do these things on
their own, from anywhere. This, to a certain extent, fits with Saudi culture.” An “entrepreneur” prior to her graduation, Dr Al-Aama had interests in launching maternity and arts and crafts products, but those plans were soon shelved after realising her passion for IT. She has, however, since established her own consulting firm, Smart Solutions. Fakeih, now Saudi Arabia’s minister for economy and planning, remains one of her most influential clients. At her core, Dr Al-Aama is a firm believer in having passion for her work. She does everything she can to show her three children - Alaa, a media and communication specialist; Abdulrahman, an engineering student at KAU; and Jana, a student at Ibn Sinaa Medical College - that they should spend their time wisely. “I absolutely love my job, and think those who don’t should leave if they can,” she says. “Ultimately, you spend most of your time at work, and if you are forcing yourself to do something for too long then you will get frustrated, and that will affect your life around you.” She is also a believer in thinking outside the box. “My father taught us that if you could study something that not many others know about, and can become an expert, you’re at a huge advantage,” she says. “One of my brothers is our country’s vice minister of health – who specialises in geriatrics – the other is an electrical engineer with three MBAs, working as an advisor to the minister of energy, industry and mineral resources, and my sister is a genetic physician. I wanted to study computer science and people thought that was wrong, but I don’t believe you’ll be truly successful if you just do whatever anyone else does.” www.cnmeonline.com
CASE STUDY
ADWEA
Staying current
Striving to satisfy the ambitious goals of the emirate's Vision 2030, Abu Dhabi Water & Electricity Authority has defined a comprehensive five-year IT roadmap to ensure it remains one of the UAE's top critical infrastructure providers. asked with delivering water and electricity to over 500,000 Abu Dhabi residents, Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA) is responsible for every stage of the supply chain for the production, transmission and distribution of Abu Dhabi’s water and power. The Authority wholly owns Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Company (ADWEC), Abu Dhabi Transmission Company (TRANSCO) and Al Ain and Abu Dhabi Distribution
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Companies (AADC and ADDC), as well as having controlling stakes in a selection of production companies. The IT function in the ADWEA Group of companies is compelled to align with the business, and implement its strategy. The Authority is also providing a selection of advanced e-services to commercial and domestic customers in the emirate, using a complex IT infrastructure. The ADWEA IT strategy has also been developed over time, in line with the aims of the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030. www.cnmeonline.com
Hamda Al Ameri, IT projects manager, ADWEA.
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OCTOBER 2016
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ADWEA
Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030 is a comprehensive roadmap for the emirate’s economic progress. By 2030, Abu Dhabi intends to build a sustainable and diversified, "high value-added" economy that is not only well integrated into the global economy, but also provides more accessible opportunities for all its citizens and residents. “We are a critical organisation in Abu Dhabi, and an enabler to the Economic Vision 2030 as the sole provider of power and water,” Hamda Al Ameri, IT projects manager, ADWEA, says. “ADWEA has an important part to play to ensure that Abu Dhabi is a sustainable, diversified economy 26
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“We are aiming to be among the top quartile of performers in the world for water and electricity utilities by 2020. ”
that encourages enterprises and entrepreneurship. We are aiming to be among the top quartile of performers in the world for water and electricity utilities by 2020. Our mission is to ensure their sustainable supply via teamwork, stakeholder focus, integrity and corporate citizenship. We want to stay at the forefront of technology to enable better customer service for the people of Abu Dhabi.” ADWEA’s IT strategy operates under five-year roadmaps, and is currently one year into the 20152020 cycle. “We have developed a comprehensive IT strategy for ADWEA group of companies for 2015-2019, that features prioritised, www.cnmeonline.com
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CASE STUDY
ADWEA
strategic IT initiatives that are linked to the long-term business strategies of the group,” Al Ameri says. Crucial to ADWEA’s IT strategy is its redefined set of IT governance policies. ADWEA’s vision of aligning itself to world class utilities called for a formal review of how technology could help it reach this goal. This had implications in many areas of IT including the vision, strategy, roadmap and the delivery IT service provision model.
– water and electricity – network systems.. “We want to provide datacentric computing that enables us to make necessary adjustments to our enterprise and industrial operations,” Al Almeri says. “IT/OT convergence will enable more direct control and more complete monitoring, with easier analysis of data from our complex enterprise systems and lead to real time decissions.” ADWEA has embarked on a new IT strategy formulation in which
“ADWEA has an important part to play to ensure that Abu Dhabi is a sustainable, diversified economy that encourages enterprises and entrepreneurship. ” “We have implemented three layers of IT governance,” Al Ameri says. “Our executive layer comprises the IT steering committee which features key decision makers, and is the topmost layer. Second is the operating layer, which features the group IT managers for day-today IT operations decisions and management. This is followed by the Portfolio layer, which features the monitoring and health of the various programs and projects undertaken by the ADWEA group IT function .” The link between digital and physical assets is of critical importance in the utilities industry. With that in mind, one of the most important aspects of ADWEA’s strategy is integrating its IT systems with its operational technology (OT) 28
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a current state assessment was performed to understand existing and future business priorities, applications coverage, infrastructure adequacy and the overall IT operating model maturity. During this activity, all relevant business personnel were interviewed and business strategy documentation was reviewed in order to capture the short and mid-term business needs and desires. ADWEA’s IT leadership team has also worked extensively to define an extensive list of SLAs to ensure that its operations and business applications availability, application development, and security layers meet the industry best practices and standards. ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)
is the framework deployed for service management, with ADWEA’s complex IT Infrastructure monitored electronically by a set of advanced tools that automatically detects and polls every addressable component attached to the IT environment. This reports potential incidents to IT staff via SMS and email, before problems cause service interruptions. “This model ensures best practices for service management,” Al Ameri says. “Incidents are categorised into three levels, and the highest category incidents are attended immediately .” One critical aspect that ADWEA takes very seriously is its IT security. ADWEA has undertaken comprehensive work to comply with NESA (National Electronic Security Authority) and Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Centre (ADSIC) information security standards “The basic building block of our IT governance framework is a comprehensive electronic library of IT policies ranging from security policy designed to protect all aspects of IT, to an acceptable use policy that includes guidelines regarding the protocol of electronic communications,” Al Ameri says. “IT policies dictate the rules that ADWEA IT has put in place to manage, monitor, operate and protect the IT environment.” Looking forward, Al Ameri is excited about the prospects and progress of the current five-year plan. “We are well on target to achieve our aims of sustainability, customer focus and operational excellence,” she says. “The underlying infrastructure is primed to support our environment.” www.cnmeonline.com
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CIO
Spotlight
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FAST MOVER With a strong CV spanning a range of industries and geographies, Dr Tariq Taha now finds himself at the core of Bank Dhofar's agility drive, and has already received national recognition for his work.
orn and raised in Muscat, Taha developed an interest in technology at a young age, and went on to study at the College of Banking and Financial Studies in the Omani capital, graduating in 1999 with a diploma in IT. In the midst of his studies, he also began work at the Central Bank of Oman, where he got his career off to a flying start by quickly progressing through the ranks of the IT department. “I started off as an IT technician, and quickly progressed to being a senior IT administrator,” he says. “By the end of my four-year tenure, I was in
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charge of IT operations, which gave me really good insight into the workings of both a business and IT department. Working across roles was also a great grounding in different aspects of IT.” Taha followed his burning ambition to further his education, and was granted a period of leave in 2001 to undertake a Master’s course at the University of Ballarat in Melbourne. He emerged in 2003 with a Master’s degree in IT management, setting the stage for a succession of roles in technology leadership. His impressive work at the country’s Central Bank caught the OCTOBER 2016
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Spotlight
eye of Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), a major oil exploration and production company based in the Sultanate. PDO accounts for more than 70 percent of the country’s crude oil production and nearly all of its natural gas supply, and Taha played a crucial role in driving the company’s technology strategy, joining as an IT consultant in 2002. At a relatively early age in his career, it was already clear that Taha was beginning to amass some vast experience across industries and countries. In 2004,
technical director for Friendly Mobile – since acquired by Virgin Mobile – across the Middle East, North Africa and South East Asian markets. Based mainly at the company’s regional HQ in Dubai, Taha spent much of his five-year tenure “living out of a suitcase” in his travel across the vast geography. This meant that in a short space of time, he not only had to work efficiently and pragmatically, but was also tasked with residing across a number of countries. “I was based in Oman for the first seven or eight months, then had to
“
Being part of a launch team was really a great experience; I couldn’t have asked for a better start to my career.”
he was headhunted by Qatari telecoms firm Qtel Group – now part of Ooredoo – and he would be tasked with an important transformational project for the company. “I was responsible for establishing a team and rolling out the technology launchplan in Oman,” he says. “Being part of a launch team was really a great experience; I couldn’t have asked for a better start to my career in the telecoms industry.” Taha spent three years at Qtel, and successfully saw the launch of their services across a range of markets. In 2007, Taha landed a role that would play well to his broad experience, becoming group 32
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work towards establishing services in Jordan, and then Saudi Arabia, and was based in both for a period,” he says. Taha worked on a number of projects in South Africa. “It was definitely a major adjustment, but I had such a great time living there,” he says. “I met some great people, and the lifestyle was fantastic.” Catering to the requirements of all these markets proved to be a fantastic learning curve for Taha, particularly in terms of delivering the best possible customer service. One of the biggest challenges he faced was understanding the nuances of a selection of countries. “I learned the
TIMELINE
1999
Completes Master's course at Melbourne's University of Ballarat
2004
Lands international role at Friendly Mobile
2012
Graduates with IT diploma
2003
Headhunted by Qatari firm Qtel
2007
Named Bank Dhofar CIO
www.cnmeonline.com
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CIO
Spotlight
importance of building relationships with important stakeholders, and understanding the challenges that each market faced,” he says. “Coping with all these demands was certainly testing, especially working with a number of new partners.” Taha was highly enamoured with the way of working at the company, describing it as a laid back and friendly environment. “The culture was very open – it didn’t feel like you were going into the office to work,” Taha says. “That in itself gets the best out of people. Everyone comes to the office with a smile, and discussions become quicker and easier because people are happier.” With his thirst for knowledge unquenched, Taha sought another course in further education, and began studying for a four-year Ph.D. course at Abdelmalek Essaâdi University in Morocco. The transition to an increased difficulty of study proved to be one of the biggest challenges he would face. “I was exposed to a range of different cultures at an early time in my life, so I never found that aspect difficult,” he says. “However, moving from a Master’s level of education to a Ph.D. was a huge hurdle that required a lot of hard work to overcome.” Taha prevailed, and in 2011 completed his diploma in management. The following year, he was offered a role back on home soil, as chief information officer of Oman’s Bank Dhofar. Returning to the banking industry would require him to rethink his outlook on how technology could transform the business, and, more importantly, the customer experience. Taha forced himself to 34
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alter his approach to IT projects. “The telecoms industry is much more likely to take risks in terms of its IT, whereas banks, understandably, have a lower appetite for risk,” he says. “That being said, there are things that obviously translate, like speed to market.” He believes that banking is one of the most competitive industries to deliver truly impactful technology, but that it should not be deployed for the sake of it. “Consumers today are very tech-
“
The telecoms industry is much more likely to take risks in terms of its IT, whereas banks have a lower appetite for risk.”
oriented,” Taha says. “But I believe that technology alone should not be the driver of banking. It has to fit into the overall strategy of the bank, while banks themselves have to cope with what the industry needs.” Taha’s strong strategical outlook has been augmented through
collaborating with other senior management figures at Bank Dhofar who realise the business impacts of technology. “Our CEO expects a CIO to deliver flexibility and agility for the business,” he says. “Our IT team was previously working on annual timelines, but we have done all that we can to establish a quarterly-based mindset.” The shift in mentality has yielded results for Bank Dhofar. “In one quarter, we now deliver what we used to achieve in a year,” Taha says. The progress led by Taha also earned national recognition for Bank Dhofar and its IT team, as they scooped The Sultan Qaboos Award for Excellence in e-Government for Best Mobile Service 2014. “I was extremely proud to be recognised by His Majesty,” he says. “It proves that we are now being considered as a leading technology bank within this region and within Oman.” As well as proving his worth in terms of technology deployments, Taha has also shown himself to be an adept negotiator and decisionmaker. He currently sits on a range of diverse panels within the company, including Bank Dhofar’s executive management committee, management risk committee, business continuity management committee and information technology committee. Unsurprisingly, working under British entrepreneur Richard Branson has left its mark on Taha. “I’m a huge admirer of his management style,” he says. “So much of his success comes from being close with his employees, and being involved in details that other leaders may choose to wash their hands of.” www.cnmeonline.com
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CASE STUDY
GULFTAINER
DATA DOCK
Aligning with the business’s digital transformation vision, Gulftainer's IT department has recently rolled out SAP S4/ HANA to provide 'real-time' insights into key business decisions. As one of the first Middle East customers to go live with the solution in September, Group IT Head Vinay Sharma reflects on the benefits that are expected to come.
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nternational shipping and logistics is a heavy industry, and operating 13 terminals worldwide is no light task for UAEbased port management company, Gulftainer. Established in 1976, following the opening of Sharjah Container Terminal (SCT), the company now manages approximately "40 percent" of all major container terminal facilities in the Middle East. Vinay Sharma was appointed as head of Group IT in 2012, and has since pushed the company through a series of beneficial technological developments. The attention of
I
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CASE STUDY
GULFTAINER
Gulftainer staff celebrate the launch of S4/HANA
Gulftainer turned to global expansion from 2010 onwards, when terminal operations began in Iraq, and later in Russia and South America. “IT becomes critical when you start to become a global operation,” explains Sharma. “It’s crucial if you are to minimise turnaround time and meet business requirements across various locations.” Despite enduring a “good experience” with Gulftainer’s existing infrastructure, Sharma admits that it was nonetheless outdated. “We had added so many bolt-on solutions and isolated systems that, prior to this implementation, we were looking to replace over 30 applications,” he says. “We previously had an application for cheque printing, one for procurement, one application for storage. It’s very difficult to find a single source to consolidate all of these services. Business was growing, and with so many systems, it was very difficult to control such a high volume of information, which is what triggered us to make a change.” 38
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With so many systems, it was very difficult to control such a high volume of information. Known as ‘Project Globe’ – because of the belief that a better integrated system would consolidate and reinforce Gulftainer’s ability to position itself at a global level – the company took the decision to roll out SAP across the UAE port. The implementation of S/4 HANA – an in-memory database which can offer a query processing environment for relational databases as well as less structured data – is a particular success for the company, as Gulftainer are one of the first customers to go live with the solution in the Middle East region.
“It is a great milestone for us,” says Sharma. “We took around 10 months to evaluate SAP, along with other providers. We did more than 50 workshops before we made our decision.” Sharma describes this selection process as one of the biggest challenges in the implementation, because finding a partner who was flexible, yet one whose technology was easy to adapt to, was of the upmost importance for Gulftainer. “For many years, we had very much been an in-house software company, and we knew that by taking on SAP that a lot of process redesigning was going to have to happen,” says Sharma. The project implementation took 16 months, beginning in June 2015 and finally going live on 1st September this year. “It was a very bumpy ride,” admits Sharma. “Our first challenge was engaging key stakeholders in the business from the beginning of the project, which I believe we did very nicely. This was a business project, not an IT project.” www.cnmeonline.com
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CASE STUDY
GULFTAINER
Another major challenge for Sharma and his team was to ensure that the solution’s end-users fully understood this new ‘one-source’ concept. “No one was looking end-to-end, because they were used to looking at one application per service. An integrated system meant that we now had one single source of information, and that not only impacted the procurement, but also the finance department and the management team,” says Sharma. “SAP is an end-to-end process, so it was quite a challenge for the team to understand that. It also meant that people’s roles were changing, so we took a lot of time to educate them on this.” There is currently a lack of quantitative data to support the benefits of this implementation - due to the solution having only gone live one month ago – but after a smooth execution of the first month’s payroll under the solution, Sharma is already expecting big things. “The whole idea of HANA is the speed; we are expecting to get real-time analytics for our key business decisions. This is likely to happen gradually over a sixmonth period, because we don’t have enough data at the moment to optimise the system or establish a baseline,” he says. “Within this time, our consolidation and budget planning will be in place, which we can then use to compare and establish some results.” Already very enthusiastic about the prospective long-term positives of the solution, Sharma has expressed the practical benefits which S4/HANA can assist the company with. “We have taken the executive decision that S4/HANA will be 40
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our engine, and will handle all of our assumed data, from a management perspective as well as from a procurement maintenance management perspective. The data that we receive from our dashboards, highlighting any issues that there may be with the maintenance of our operations, will be very helpful,” says Sharma. “Let’s say a crane is down for a few hours;
In six months, our consolidation and budget planning will be in place, which we can then use to compare and establish some results. this is a big issue for us, and it’s important that we get that real-time data so that we can act quickly.” The solution has also enabled Gulftainer to implement SAP SYCLO; a middleware application that typically utilises field service management processes with significantly valued hard assets to protect. “Setting up an entire port facility with Wi-Fi, and equipping our workers on the ground with IP-67 devices has been a huge benefit following the implementation,” says
Sharma. It allows workers to process orders and material reservations from the port itself, and gives them access to the real-time data concerning issues with assets whilst on-site. Reflecting on the implementation journey, Sharma remains impressed with Gulftainer’s experience with SAP, as well as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – a GCC-based consulting organisation that Gulftainer used to implement the solution. “The journey was never going to be easy with such a project,” says Sharma. “There were challenges in implementing S4/HANA because there was a lack of trained resources, which meant it was also difficult for TCS. I would like to highlight that there was a great amount of support from SAP; they acted as a sound advisory board throughout the project.” Looking ahead to 2017, Gulftainer is hoping to extend their S4/HANA services by implementing SAP's port management system on to the solution, in order to gain predictive analysis data. There are plans to roll out the same solution across Gulftainer’s gloal offices, and a disaster recover site for SAP is also going live at the end of November 2016. “Now that we have this solid base foundation, we can build on it and look at implementing more real-time operations,” says Sharma. He adds, “We have now gone live, and the IT journey starts from here. I’m very much focused on business, but in terms of IT, we now have to scale up the system from here. Our users – who have been using outdated systems for more than 20 years – just need ‘handholding’ if they are to come up to this next level.” www.cnmeonline.com
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PREVIEW GITEX 2016
RE-IMAGINING REALITIES GITEX Technology Week - the largest tech trade show in the Middle East - returns to Dubai World Trade Centre for its 36th year on Sunday 16th October. The event will feature a host of new sections dedicated to augmented and virtual reality, wearable tech and robotics to name but a few. We give you a lowdown of some of the big enterprise players you should look out for at the show.
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PREVIEW GITEX 2016 ARUBA, AN HPE COMPANY
Ammar Enaya, Regional Director, Middle East and Turkey
Visit them at: Hall 7, Stand CLD-6 Key highlights: Aruba will exhibit its integrated wired and wireless access layer portfolio, secure IoT support, and advancements in network management and security solutions, which will "enable customers to get ready for the mobile-cloud world." We have been consistently participating at GITEX for many years due to the importance of this regional event, where many of our customers and partners attend. Aruba’s senior leadership from the US and Europe will be at the show, together with the company’s regional leadership, in order to drive key discussions, close business deals and announce major business initiatives. Our objective is also to reach out to new potential clients and grow our regional business across key verticals such as education, hospitality, healthcare, government, retail and oil and gas. What you should know: Aruba’s participation at GITEX will also see the launch of its ‘MobileFirst Platform,’ a software layer that uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide thirdparty developers and business leaders network insights to improve applications and services. www.cnmeonline.com
AVAYA
CISCO
Mohammed Areff, VP, META
Mike Weston, Vice President, Middle East
Visit them at: Za’abeel Hall, Stand Z-C20
Visit them at: Zabeel Hall, Stand Z-B40 and Hall 1, Stand B1-1
Key highlights: Avaya will showcase its solutions designed to enable companies to "meet customer and employee expectations with true multi-touch communication capabilities." Along with customers and partners, the company will demonstrate real-world use cases for its latest solutions.
Key highlights: Inviting GITEX visitors to “reimagine a digital reality,” Cisco will showcase Smart City scenarios and demonstrate its digital solutions and technology that "enable digital transformation," including security, cloud, data centre and analytics, mobility, application centric infrastructure and collaboration.
Avaya is committed to helping organisations achieve their digital transformation goals, and enabling them to respond to changing customer demand. Speed is the new currency for business transformation – businesses need to understand, predict and map the customer journey in real time. GITEX Technology Week 2016 is the perfect platform for us to demonstrate Avaya’s ability to collect information and unleash its full potential, so we are very excited to participate yet again in this important event.
As the region’s premier ICT exhibition, GITEX offers an ideal platform for Cisco to demonstrate how digitisation has the potential to create sustainable and positive impact for every area of society. Through demos at our stand, we plan to highlight real-life, industry relevant scenarios that demonstrate how our technology solutions can help accelerate our clients’ digital transformation journey, help them re-imagine their businesses and identify what’s possible when technology and business strategies come together.
What you should know: Avaya will highlight Breeze, which "simplifies" application development while delivering built-in capabilities for mobile, customer-facing and hybrid/cloud requirements; Oceana, a software based solution for true multi-touch customer engagement; and Zang, a cloud communications platform.
What you should know: Cisco executives will be present at the Security and Network Hall, where the company plans to put focus on its ‘Threat–centric Security’ approach. Cisco will demonstrate how an integrated threat defence architecture can help businesses see all of their extended networks and defend them faster. OCTOBER 2016
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PREVIEW GITEX 2016 DELL EMC
FORTINET
Shams Hasan, Enterprise Product Manager
Visit them at: Hall 2, Stand G2-1
HUAWEI
Alain Penel, Regional Vice President
Visit them at: Hall 1 E1-10
Key highlights: Dell EMC will use GITEX as a platform to speak to it customers, and showcase its "strong" capabilities in hybrid cloud, software-defined data centres, converged infrastructure, platform-as-a-service, data analytics, mobility and cybersecurity.
Key highlights: This year, Fortinet’s participation at GITEX will focus on the Fortinet Security Fabric. The company will demonstrate how enterprises can protect themselves from the most sophisticated cybersecurity threats with its Security Fabric architecture.
GITEX provides one of the strongest avenues for us to reach out to a broad range of META customers and partners. It’s also an excellent annual platform to showcase the complete solutions portfolio of Dell EMC. We want to demonstrate our strategy and capabilities, and how the Dell Technologies family of businesses can help customers meet their IT challenges in an evolving business environment.
GITEX brings together technologies and vendors from across the ICT world on a single platform. From networking, to security, software, cloud, and new technological innovations, all have a common platform to connect with each other. The show has been an important avenue for us to showcase our latest solutions and demonstrate why we are the leaders in what we do. No technology exhibition can be complete without the critical component of network security, which has become the centre of an organisation’s IT infrastructure today.”
What you should know: Subject matter experts and solution leaders from Dell EMC will showcase a variety of solutions in three key areas crucial to business’ digital transformation strategies: IT transformation, workforce transformation, and security transformation.
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What you should know: Fortinet will flaunt a number of its recently launched products and solutions. The vendor aims to educate visitors that having a wellcoordinated security solution is key to successfully competing in the new digital economy.
Charles Yang, President, Middle East Visit them at: Sheikh Rashid Hall, Stand SR D-1; Zabeel Hall, Stands Z-B12 and Z-B20 Key highlights: Huawei will showcase its host of ‘new ICT’ solutions that are aimed at enabling organisations across the Middle East to succeed in their digital transformation. The need of the hour is for infrastructure networks in the Middle East to connect cities – creating information-sharing platforms that carry smart applications for happier and safer communities. We will bring the latest technologies, innovations and best practices that redefine the way organisations operate in a Smart City environment.” We will highlight a variety of our offerings during the event, including various solutions we have developed together with our technology partners, that are designed specifically for government, education, hospitality, real estate, banking and transportation sectors in the Middle East. What you should know: The company will also host ‘Huawei Innovation Day,’ which will take centre stage on the first day of the show at the Sheikh Maktoum Hall. Huawei will also take part in various segments of GITEX Technology Week, including GSMA Mobile 360 Series, Vertical Conferences and Tech Talk series. www.cnmeonline.com
PREVIEW GITEX 2016 INFOBLOX
INFOR
Cherif Sleiman, GM, MEA
Visit them at: Hall 1, Stand F1-15 Key highlights: Infoblox will conduct the Middle East launch of its ‘Actionable Network Intelligence Platform,’ which uses network intelligence to provide enterprise with actionable control points, visibility, and context. We will demonstrate our DNS Firewall-as-a-service solution that extends the company’s DNS protection to roaming devices off-premise. Today, many organisations are mired in confusion when it comes to securing their networks and broader IT infrastructure. Threat intelligence services give warnings, but don’t provide a path for translating that information into action. GITEX offers a great platform for our company to expose our brand and showcase our latest innovations in DNS security and automated network control to many IT decision makers from various segments of the market that attend the event. What you should know: Executives from the company will also be available at the show to demonstrate the Infoblox Threat Insight solution, which detects and automatically blocks attempts to steal sensitive data. www.cnmeonline.com
JUNIPER NETWORKS
Tarik Taman, General Manager, India, Middle East and Africa (IMEA)
Visit them at: Hall 7, Stand B7-22
Samer Kudsi, Enterprise Sales Director MENA
Visit them at: Hall 6 CLD-8
Key highlights: Infor will put the spotlight on its CloudSuite offering, which according to the company, is a focused set of cloudenabled and industry-specific applications.
Key highlights: In line with GITEX’s theme ‘re-imagining realities,’ Juniper Networks will demonstrate how it can help organisations in the region to transform their network infrastructure.
Infor sees tremendous opportunities in the Middle East, a region striving for substantial reform and transformation. Infor is committed to supporting fundamental changes out here with technology that drives inclusion and enablement, with a focus on educating and empowering millennials, as well as delivering technology that inspires the millennial workforce. At GITEX, we will showcase CloudSuite, a solution that continues to redefine cloud for the enterprise, delivering solutions purpose-built by industry that help businesses transform in the digital age.
The Middle East has increasingly become information-driven and connected, resulting in even more demanding and immediate user expectations. There is an urgent need for businesses to transform their network infrastructure to remain competitive. At GITEX, Juniper will showcase its latest innovations designed to help our customers along their transformation journey, by delivering simple, open and smart foundations aligning the network to business objectives now. Among our security offerings that will be on show are the Juniper Sky Advanced Threat Prevention, SRX Series Firewalls, Security Director and QFX Series.
What you should know: CloudSuite solutions that will be showcased include human capital management (HCM), enterprise asset management (EAM), human resources (HR), learning management (LN), supply chain management (SCM), warehouse management system (WMS) and customer relationship management (CRM).
What you should know: The company will showcase its joint solutions with partners Beta IT and Fireware, exhibiting data centre and security products, respectively. Live presentations will be taking place every three to four hours in Juniper’s booth. OCTOBER 2016
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PREVIEW GITEX 2016 ORACLE
PALO ALTO NETWORKS
Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice President, Turkey, Middle East and Africa
Visit them at: Hall 5 Key highlights: The company will conduct over 100 interactive demonstrations spread across the Digital Business Zone, where visitors can witness how businesses can digitise the enterprise, human resources, the customer experience and the supply chain. At GITEX 2016 we’ll showcase how businesses, small and large, across all industries, can make digital business a reality with our ability to deliver proven solutions at every layer of the cloud stack (Saas, Iaas, PaaS and DbaaS) allowing them to tackle digital disruption head on. What you should know: Visitors at Oracle’s stand will also be able to participate in personalised digital business tours and get first-hand knowledge on cloud solutions (SaaS) for all lines of businesses. After the tour, the company will also conduct demonstrations of its PaaS, IaaS, and DbaaS offerings. Oracle will also showcase its range of cloud products and solutions and discuss how business and IT leaders can take advantage of the economics of data and "unlock unprecedented digital business value."
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Saeed Agha, General Manager, Middle East
RIVERBED
Taj Elkhayat, Regional VP, Middle East and Africa
Visit them at: Hall 2, Stand G2-40
Visit them at: Hall 4, Stand CLD-16 and Hall 7, Stand B7-10
Key highlights: Palo Alto Networks will put the spotlight on how its security platform can help businesses in the region prevent cyber breaches. Participating with the theme ‘Prevent and Empower’, the company will showcase its threat prevention, end-point, and nextgeneration firewall offerings – all key components of the platform.
Key highlights: Taking part under the theme ‘Experience the future of networking,’ Riverbed plans to introduce its latest SteelConnect and SteelCentral, and SteelFusion solutions.
In order to thrive in a rapidly changing digital environment, companies in the Middle East need to have a robust cybersecurity and risk management strategy in place. Before that can happen, there needs to be a change in mindset where cybersecurity is viewed as a business enabler rather than another cost consideration. What you should know: Visitors will also get a chance to have a first-hand experience of how cyber threats are prevented through product demonstrations from Unit 42, the company’s threat and intelligence research team. The team will also offer consultation to help companies enhance their security postures.
Riverbed is at the forefront of this technology revolution, and we will use GITEX as a platform to educate attendees on how this approach can solve the complexity in hybrid clouds and networks, improve efficiency and flexibility, and enable them to easily shift workloads and deploy new applications and services. GITEX is by far the biggest trade show of its kind in the region and we will make every effort to foster fruitful engagements with customers and partners that lead to mutually beneficial partnerships through the rest of the year. What you should know: Apart from its own stand at GITEX, Riverbed will also have a presence at Microsoft’s booth as a platinum level sponsor, where it will showcase its solutions for optimisation and visibility for Office 365, SharePoint and Azure platforms. www.cnmeonline.com
PREVIEW GITEX 2016 SAP
SOPHOS
Tayfun Topkoc, Managing Director, UAE
Visit them at: Hall 6
VMWARE
Harish Chib, Vice President, Middle East and Africa
Visit them at: Hall 1, Stand D1-10
Key highlights: SAP will be exhibiting under the theme “Run Simple, Run Live,” aligned to the GITEX theme of “Re-Imagining Realities” and with the UAE’s government-led digital transformation initiatives.
Key highlights: Sophos will highlight its vision of ‘Synchronised Security’, showcase its extensive portfolio of endpoint, network and encryption security solutions, and hold product demonstrations.
Visitors to the SAP stand can experience how real-time analytics can further enhance 'mega-event' experiences, which is aligned with the UAE’s events in culture and sports. We will conduct demos for a number of our solutions, which will cover mobile tourism apps, digital signage, augmented reality for visitors, connected construction, a digital boardroom command centre, and situational awareness for organisers. GITEX continues to be one of the most important events in our MENA calendar for getting closer to our customers, driving new business leads, and demonstrating to a global audience the power of digital transformation through our roster of regional and global speakers.
With the increase in sophisticated attacks across the region, companies are looking for smarter and simpler IT security solutions. GITEX, being the region’s largest ICT exhibition, is a perfect platform for Sophos to reach out to these companies and communicate our vision of ‘Synchronised Security’ with them.
What you should know: At the GITEX Startup Movement, SAP will demonstrate its support for millennial entrepreneurs together with the Startup Focus programme, a Dubai-based startup incubator and accelerator. www.cnmeonline.com
What you should know: As part of its GITEX 2016 plans, Sophos put the spotlight on its broad portfolio of security solutions including Sophos Intercept – its next-generation endpoint technology to boost protection against unknown exploits, the most updated versions of Sophos Clean and SG UTM. The company will also highlight its Security Heartbeat, a solution that enables endpoint and network security to actively and continuously share threat intelligence to “effectively protect against sophisticated threats in a manageable way.”
Ahmed Auda, Managing Director, VMware, MENA
Visit them at: Hall XX, Stand CLD-20 Key highlights: VMware will showcase its end-to-end solutions for the digital workspace, whilst also using the event as an opportunity to showcase Workspace ONE, an enterprise platform that delivers and manages any application on any device, by integrating identity, application and enterprise mobility management. It will also highlight other solutions like the NSX network virtualisation platform for data centres. Every year, our participation at GITEX increases, as we continue to see the value in being part of the region’s largest trade show, where we connect with our partners and existing customers, as well as distributors. It’s a great platform for VMware to showcase its leadership in business mobility and how we are addressing organisations’ digital transformation imperatives with the digital workspace. What you should know: VMware will also be supported by key partners, including Palo Alto Networks, and distributors such as Aptec, Redington Gulf, Juniper Networks and Solutions Middle East. OCTOBER 2016
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TELECOMS WORLD
Network Outsourcing
PARTNERING FOR PROGRESS Facing pressure to develop new services quickly and to cut operational expenditures, telecommunications service providers are increasingly outsourcing their day-to-day network operations.
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elecom operators in the Middle East are increasingly considering outsourcing the management of their networks to companies in order to lower costs, increase capabilities and focus on other strategic imperatives. Telecom operators that consider a network outsourcing strategy are mostly driven by the desire to save OPEX, and to compensate for the lack of internal capabilities in specific technology domains. According to a recent study by the consulting firm Strategy&, telecom operators entering into outsourcing deals expect to reduce OPEX by 20 to 30 percent. However, cost is not the only factor driving this trend, as the planning and operation of next-gen networks have made operators consider outsourcing. "The margin pressure continues to increase for operators amidst the explosion of data traffic and decline of revenues from voice and messaging," says Christian Bartosch, Associate Director at The Boston Consulting Group Middle East. "In addition, capital intensity is increasingly scrutinised and moving OPEX to CAPEX to show higher EBITDA has become a less attractive option. Consequently, outsourcing strategies which increase EBITDA and reduce capital intensity, are highly sought-after." A second consideration is the increasing skills shortage due to rapidly accelerating technology shifts. Most operators are seriously overwhelmed with the speed of progress in technology. The proof of this is that the transition from 3G to 4G took about half as long as the transition from 2G to 3G. In parallel, to complete 4G modernisation, 5G trials are already ongoing and some operators predict their first commercial use by 2018. Since the introduction of ISDN and DSL, core and fixed access networks are seeing the greatest change through software defined virtualised networks (SVN which combines SDN and
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"The margin pressure continues to increase for operators amidst the explosion of data traffic and decline of revenues from voice and messaging.” Christian Bartosch, Associate Director, Boston Consulting Group Middle East
NFV). When it comes to mobile access, cloud RAN is around the corner. “Operators are increasingly shifting their emphasis from the engineering-centric stuff like running networks to customer-centric stuff like marketing, segmentation and customer service,” says Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research. “They see networks as a necessary asset that allow them to do what they do, but running those networks is not necessarily a core competency anymore.” Mohammed Samir, market services head for Middle East and Africa, Nokia, offers another perspective, “When operators are doing network maintenance themselves, the delivery framework does not keep pace with market developments, resulting in inefficiencies which accumulate over a period of time. Outsourcing is an effective way of getting efficiencies as well as synergy benefits by exploiting economies of scale. “Enhancing and updating the competences of resources on fast-evolving technologies is a big challenge for telcos as opposed to managed services partners, where competence management goes in parallel with technology evolution, which is fundamental for efficient service delivery.” Telecom network outsourcing is a fairly new trend in the region, and operators considering managed network services from outsourcing companies should carefully assess how these services will be delivered. SEPTEMBER 2016
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Network Outsourcing
"A telecom operator has to be very crisp in defining its alliance and partner strategy," Bartosch says. "Adopting a well-thoughtout approach to network outsourcing is key to ensuring that the partnership isn’t opportunistically driven. While some outsourcing will remain transactional, the big ‘winning’ outsourcing relationship will be strategic. In a way, vendor relationships in these deals will closely resemble those pertaining to the auto industry’s OEM-supplier ecosystem. Major cost-saving initiatives built via network outsourcing must include core elements such as trust, flexibility, strategic alignment and financial clout. Network quality has also become a key success factor when it comes to edging out the competition." It is also important for telecom operators to understand the pitfalls of outsourcing. “Network operations outsourcing has matured over the years in terms of contract lifecycle management and operational governance," Samir says. "However, telcos need to ensure the transition of a full operations setup towards the managed services partner, and ensure that it is rightly governed to avoid any impact to end user services. Telcos being brand conscious will need to engage with the regulatory and government authorities to ensure employee transfer is managed with utmost care and diligence." Traditionally, in the past, the plan-buildrun of a network was treated as an isolated activity with clearly defined interfaces. Outsourcing activities commonly followed this segmentation of activities. Often, network operators outsourced the ‘run’ part as managed operations and the ‘plan-build’ part as full turnkey deployment to vendors. This siloed approach in three groups has proven to be suboptimal for the agile development of enterprise IT solutions. Teams did not work well together, and when issues arose, blame was circulated between the three groups, and fault management was lengthy and complex. Now, the DevOps model is commonly used where the silos between plan-build-run are 50
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“When operators are doing network maintenance themselves, the delivery framework does not keep pace with market developments, resulting in inefficiencies which accumulate over a period of time.” Mohammed Samir, Market Services Head for Middle East and Africa, Nokia broken down and the teams cooperate in an agile way across the whole system lifecycle. As functionalities in telecom networks are increasingly implemented - like IT enterprise solutions - operators have started to face similar challenges in networks. Therefore, network outsourcing deals will have to accommodate the DevOps operating model. “In many network outsourcing deals, the expectations of both sides become misaligned. From the operator perspective, the cost savings are not as big as expected and the network quality is worse than feared," Bartosch says. "From the vendor side, the potential for cost savings is smaller and the volume of the pull-through high margin equipment business lower. This will generally result in a slowdown in the required technology transformation and bickering about network quality." According to PA Consulting, there are many steps operators can take to avoid these pitfalls. This includes understanding what you hope to achieve through outsourcing, and decide whether the programme is about cost savings or getting close to customers. Think of this relationship as a strategic and trusted partnership, rather than a transactional contract. The supplier you chose should have a close cultural and strategic fit, and both parties should take a collaborative approach throughout the process. Choose KPIs that allow the supplier to take responsibility and risk for the service. www.cnmeonline.com
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NETWORK WORLD
DevOps
FRICTIONFREE? A relatively new school of thought in IT, DevOps is accelerating the pace of software development through cultural and technological changes. How can DevOps benefit the quality of networks, and which aspects of networking are most suited to the change?
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hatever your industry, a degree of conflict between product development teams and those who take the product to market is inevitable. However, in few fields is this more applicable than in software development. As the name suggests, DevOps aims to fuse the development of products and services, and the work of operations teams. The main benefit of combining these two aspects is the ability to reduce the number of disagreements between teams, as well as eliminating silos among the IT department. Its ultimate goal is to deliver better software to customers, with smoother development cycles and fewer patches needed down the line. With less downtime en route to market, the whole development cycle is sped up with morale less likely to suffer, in theory. This is all easier said than done, though. Transitioning to a DevOps model is a gradual process. ‘The DevOps Report’ from Puppet Labs found that 63 percent of organisations that implementing the change are looking for better quality of deployment, with a similar percentage looking for more frequent delivery, with 61 percent focused on obtaining better process quality. Samer Kudsi, enterprise sales director, MENA, Juniper Networks, believes that DevOps has the potential to drastically increase the speed of provisioning new services. “DevOps can be successfully used to solve complex network automation challenges,” he says. “It effectively reduces downtime by allowing for unavoidable upgrades to be made while the device is online. In today’s digital world, where scalability and speed are key to customer satisfaction, and continuous innovation is mandatory to sustain ever-increasing customer expectations, DevOps allows new services to be created and offered in days, perhaps even minutes, rather than months and years.” With an increasing number of companies’ business hinging on the quality of online platforms and in-house software, provisioning services that are less prone to error can be
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“DevOps allows new services to be created and offered in days, perhaps even minutes, rather than months and years.” Samer Kudsi, enterprise sales director, MENA, Juniper Networks
crucial in fending off competition. Duncan Bradford, chief technology officer, EMEA, CA Technologies, believes that the explosion of apps makes a shift in culture imperative. “DevOps provides a cultural way of working, and a technology focus that allows a business to be able to better sense and respond to the opportunity presented to us in the application economy,” he says. “In this economy, where your software is your brand, being able to continuously innovate and release better quality apps, faster than your competitors is key to survival in today’s digital world.” World-renowned payment firm PayPal is one well-documented case of a successful transition to DevOps. In 2012, PayPal built a private cloud based on OpenStack, and the infrastructure has gone on to service thousands of internal developers working on internal applications and payment processing and analytics. Although the company faced a range of challenges in terms of deploying new tools and processes, it was able to reduce its time to market from eight weeks to just one day. “PayPal reportedly processes $300,000 in payments every minute, in 25 different currencies, for 128 million active registered customers in 193 markets,” Kudsi says. “After implementing DevOps, PayPal was able to dramatically reduce its average node provisioning time.” There are a number of aspects of IT infrastructure that may seem like prime suspects for introducing a DevOps culture – ones that are generally more software-based – but networking may not seem the most natural fit. However, in the coming years, as softwareOCTOBER 2016
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DevOps
defined networking gains traction, networks are sure to be the recipient of many DevOps initiatives. “DevOps forms part of the natural extension of major IT trends,” Gordon Haff, technology evangelist, Red Hat, says. “It aims to provide flexible and upgradable IT infrastructures via the cloud, or the appearance of even more recent technologies such as containerisation, which define new application architectures.” Anthony Butler, cloud chief technology officer, IBM Middle East and Africa, believes that networks can be granted impressive levels of automation via the use of integrated processes. “The key point of intersection comes with software-defined networks where, as part of a DevOps process, it becomes necessary to think of the network as code in similar fashion as how infrastructure is seen as code,” he says. “For example, as part of releasing new application-level functions, DevOps processes and tools may configure the network to support these functions or enable better testing of network functions as part of the application release process.” Red Hat’s Haff, meanwhile, believes that new flexibility demands across IT infrastructures mean that DevOps will need to be applied to networking. “DevOps can be thought of as representing a shift away from the rigid technology silos that grew up around shared storage hardware, networking gear, and so forth,” he says. “In this respect, DevOps is part of a broader shift away from proprietary function-specific hardware, toward softwaredefined infrastructure based on general-purpose servers. In the case of networking specifically,
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“The key point of intersection comes with software-defined networks where, as part of a DevOps process, it becomes necessary to think of the network as code in similar fashion as how infrastructure is seen as code.” Anthony Butler, cloud chief technology officer, IBM Middle East and Africa
software-defined networks and network function virtualisation are the key trends.” However, while a DevOps culture may not necessarily demand huge shifts in terms of technology, it certainly requires a change in attitudes and, most importantly, working culture. Depending on existing practices, this can be a much more daunting task that uprooting hardware or applications, with employees often resilient to new practices, and existing discord being hurdles that must be overcome. Breaking down traditional barriers between teams is an essential building block, according to Haff. “A culture of collaboration that values openness and transparency is an essential ingredient,” he says. “The path to a DevOps culture is a journey involving many stages of maturity for an organisation. One of the key transformational elements is developing trust among developers, operations, IT management, and business owners through openness and accountability.” Kudsi believes that many stakeholders are needed to realise the introduction of a DevOps strategy. “For many, the journey to DevOps will and must be an incremental one,” he says. “That’s why it is vital to work with partners and customers to create a roadmap that will help them get the most of what they have in place today, but also, over time, enable them to incorporate new technologies easily for continuous development.” www.cnmeonline.com
DIGITAL BANKING & FINANCE
Feature
MONEY TALKS
How are attitudes towards digital banking in the GCC region changing, and what strategies are needed to ensure maximum customer satisfaction? CNME takes a look at the technologies impacting the industry, and over the coming pages, we ask a number of top regional banking and finance CIOs what they believe are the top issues that need to be addressed.
igital and mobile technologies have disrupted traditional ways of doing business across a variety of industries, and the banking sector has arguably been of those most affected by the change. The increasing adoption of digital banking globally, along with a recent boom in mobile payments and e-wallets, is transforming the way in which we perceive traditional methods of banking. A recent survey by ArabNet found that 74 percent
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of 2500 respondents in the UAE have already adopted digital banking in the form of online, mobile or both – but what does this mean for branches in the region? “The way banking is transforming today, with the digitisation of all processes, introduction of mobile apps, and with ‘anytime, anywhere banking’, visits to branches are diminishing,” says Arti Sogani, manager, business development and pre-sales, Finesse. She adds, “This also means that the human interaction www.cnmeonline.com
gets compromised to a large extent.” Having the opportunity to deal with a physical human being whilst discussing financial affairs is one of the main drivers that keeps branches in operation, and deterring people from completely switching to online banking. If banks are to encapsulate full-digitalisation, and adopt the concept of ‘virtual banks’ online, they need to ensure that personal customer service is not compromised through using this outlet. Naveed Minhas, banking industry leader, Global Business Services, IBM MEA, believes that personalisation is key. “Cookie cutter banking services will not survive in the next decade,” he says. “To design a great mobile user experience, the bank should create personas that truly represent its customers. A persona is a vivid, narrative description of a named fictitious person representing a segment of the customers that the bank creates to guide its mobile user experience design.” In order to enhance user experience to its full potential, banks should be looking to adopt the omni-channel method of operation, rather than the more outdated, simplified multi-channel method. “Real-time technology and Big Data analytics are essential for Middle East banks to boost profit margins, meet compliance, and have a 360-degree view of omni-channel customer services,” says Yasar Yilmaz, industry director, Financial Services, SAP MENA. Omnichannel provides consistent interaction between customers and their financial institutions across multiple touch points; every time customers use a computer, search for a product on their devices or call a customer service department, they are providing an information trail, which leads to more intimate, nuanced customer understanding for banks. While multichannel is focused on transactions, omnichannel focuses on interactions, meaning the user experience is
“Cookie cutter banking services will not survive in the next decade.” - Naveed Minhas, banking industry leader, Global Business Services, IBM MEA
www.cnmeonline.com
tailored to someone’s specific preferences. Building on this need to fulfil customer satisfaction, banks have to keep ease of transactions and security at the forefront when designing online and mobile strategies. It is also crucial that applications are cross-compatible and responsive across all devices. “More banks are introducing analytics along with their apps, and some of them have introduced valueadded functionalities such as a personal finance manager (PFM),” says Sogani. A PFM creates a virtual financial manager and advisory centre within an app, and is just one of many innovations that banks should be looking to implement in this era of digital transformation, she says. “The key metrics that matter to financial services are customer satisfaction, profitability, business efficiency, and security,” says Yu Ting Huang, director, Finance Integrated Product Marketing, Citrix. “The type of technologies deployed should allow the finance IT to quickly respond to the business in order to perform on these key metrics.” However, within this era of digital transformation, security is still of the upmost importance to customers. 33 percent of UAE respondents in ArabNet’s survey said that the main deterrence in opting for digital banking was the worry of security. This is of prime concern to banking CIO’s looking to implement online and mobile strategies. “CIOs should take the lead in securing mobile apps, and transition from two-step authentication to multi-factor authentication with one-time passwords and hardware and software tokens,” says Yilmaz. This concept of ‘multi-factor authentication’ queries the future existence of the PIN. Banks nowadays tend to rely on a combination of methods; knowledge – a PIN or password, possession – a card or token, and inherence – a form of biometric identification. “PIN usage will be drastically reduced in the coming years, but it will not go away completely,” believes Sogani. “Biometrics play a key role in authentication methods with finger print, voice, iris and face recognition. Most banks in the region are already using a combination of these to provide the most secure environment for their customers.” The introduction of e-wallets and concepts such as ‘Apple Pay’ may also threaten the OCTOBER 2016
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future of physical money, but the proof is in the pudding, ArabNet’s survey showing that 52 percent of UAE respondents still use cash as their primary payment method – demonstrating that cash is here to stay, for the time being at least. Some of this is down to human instinct, according to Sogani. “In this day and age, most people are earning and spending money without ever touching it. But when it comes to privacy and freedom, cash can’t be beaten,” she says. “As humans, we tend to protect our civil liberties by preserving some untraceable payment method.” Ensuring compliance with regulatory standards is also of great concern to banks implementing digital strategies. The introduction of Basel III in the UAE has had a significant impact on the way in which banks operate. Basel III is a set of global banking regulations designed to improve risk management in the industry, alongside forcibly encouraging banks to hold an increased level of capital. Essentially, this means that after implementing Basel III, banks should be better protected during periods of economic stability, as they will have extra capital to fall back on.
Feature
“When it comes to privacy and freedom, cash can’t be beaten. As humans, we tend to protect our civil liberties by preserving some untraceable payment method.” Arti Sogani, manager, Business Development and Pre-Sales, Finesse
“The more stringent capital requirements derived from Basel III regulations have put more pressure on operations efficiency in banks, making digital banking a key lever in the achievement of a substantial improvement of overall profitability,” says Minhas. A range of companies are reaping the rewards of the regulations, as the demand for solutions to assist with the risk assessment process of a business increases. “We are seeing strong demand for our data management and business intelligence solutions catered to Basel III, which allow for reports on market, credit, operational, and liquidity risk; capital definition; and riskadjusted return on capital,” says Yilmaz.
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DIGITAL BANKING & FINANCE
Dr Joseph George, head of IT, National Bank of Fujairah
THE BRAINS OF DIGITAL BANKING National Bank of Fujairah’s head of IT, Dr. Joseph George, relates effective digital banking strategy to the effects of the human body and brain.
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he human brain learns and stores information by the minute, which translates to people becoming brighter by the day. As a result, the best conventional banks will need to use technology to ‘go digital’, giving customers real-time convenience. If they fail to follow this model, they face the imminent threat of being left behind by younger, better banks which, through their rational approach to customer convenience and technology focus, will supersede conventional banks in the near future. The concept of right-brain and left-brain thinking was documented in the late 1960s by the American 60
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psychobiologist Roger W Sperry. He discovered that the human brain has two very different ways of thinking, and won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his work. The right side is visual-based, and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture and then drilling down into details. The left side of the brain is verbal, and processes information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces, then putting them together to get the whole picture. Although, the right side of the brain – non-verbal thinking – is often regarded as more ‘creative’, there is no right or wrong here; it is merely two different ways of thinking. One is not better than
the other, just as being right-handed is not ‘superior’ to being left-handed. Currently, banking customer behaviour is driven by the right side of the human brain. Just as the right side focuses on visual and holistic aspects, customer experiences are dictated by their experience through front end digital channels. Digital banks, however, will need to rapidly focus on back end processes to mimic the left side of the human brain, processing information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole picture. This ensures that in any given scenario processes aren’t thwarted, which www.cnmeonline.com
DIGITAL BANKING & FINANCE
can lead to an inconvenient customer experience and journey. It is important to be aware that your customers are learning more every second, and they will always value convenience, which explains why their dependence on conventional banking is diminishing by the day. By understanding customers’ natural preferences, banks can pay more attention to satisfying the brain’s naturally less dominant right side. To fully understand these diverse changes in customer behaviour, realtime analytics remains the command centre for the digital banking nervous system. Analytics receive input from different channels and sends output to the front end with a reflex reaction. If you are building a digital bank and it does not encompass a reflex action, the end results are destined to fail, as your processes are less dependent on learning, and will tend not to be responding back to the customer’s need. The human brain’s learning pattern is similar to the way that children grow. They learn constantly, and their reflex action gets adapted to the situation to succeed in the challenges that are put in front of them. However, children who tend to be less adaptive to their reflex will lean toward being less able. Likewise, if your bank is not adaptive to reflex actions based on real-time analytics, it will eventually only be partially-abled. Anatomy of IQ in digital banking Like all vertebrate brains, the human brain develops from three sections known as the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Likewise, conventional banks have a front office, middle office and back office. As the progression to becoming digital gathers momentum, a conventional bank moving towards a digital footprint should transform the front office into digital channels using the concept of reflex action. 62
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Dr Joseph George, head of IT, National Bank of Fujairah
However, to build the best customer experience and journey, it has to be dynamically linked with the middle and back offices. Optimising and automating middle and back office processes becomes hugely important. A streamlined process is the backbone of your digital bank, and state-of-the-art core banking supported with business intelligence will be its heart. The brainstem (analytics) connects to the backbone (straight through process), and the primary functions of the brainstem include relaying information between the brain and the body. This, in a digital banking perspective, can be equated to front end channels, and middle and back offices: supplying critical information to the GUI (graphical User Interface) to take care of the aesthetic and emotional needs of the customer, and performing critical functions in controlling the activities of a customer with clear and distinct engagement models.
On the other hand, if real-time analytics flag information stating that the customer is finding it difficult to conduct the transaction or any particular process, the use of intelligent BOTS support should be auto-enabled to help complete the transaction or process. Leveraging analytics to study customer behaviour can significantly improve top line impact and the ability to achieve a faster time-to-market of marketing initiatives. With the increasing trend within banks to digitise more and more of their services, it remains essential to accept that customers are not bits and bytes, but human beings, with minds of their own. An approach to digitisation devoid of this acceptance and the human factor is lost. Building a bank’s future on the idea that digital banking will solve everything sets you in the wrong direction. Instead, the obvious approach should be to ask how your bank can be relevant to the everyday life of your customers. www.cnmeonline.com
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DIGITAL BANKING & FINANCE
Tariq Al Usaimi, chief digital officer, National Bank of Kuwait
BANKING ON DIGITAL NATIVES National Bank of Kuwait CDO Tariq Al Osaimi takes a look at the history books, and explains why the GCC’s exploding youth population demands a rethinking of the relationship between branches and technology in the region.
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I know what I’m talking about. I have thirty years in this industry.” A character in a wellrenowned Dilbert cartoon stakes his claim to understand the latest tech on the market. “How does that help you understand technology that is six-months-old in a youth-oriented culture?” His colleague gingerly replies. I couldn’t find a better way to describe the current state of retail banking in the Middle East. Over 70 years ago, banks in this region began their operations with one branch per bank as there was no means of sharing account information between two or more locations in a timely manner. 64
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www.cnmeonline.com
TIME Paper spread all over Europe
17th Century
Passbook
Mainframe
TECHNOLOGY
Vending machine
Digital phones
1970s
Core banking system
Automated teller machine (ATM)
1980s Call centre
World Wide Web
1990s
Online banking
Smartphones
2000s Virtual identity
www.cnmeonline.com
2020s
Mobile banking
Digital signature
BANK USAGE
19501960
In those days, the ledger that has the client account balance was kept in the bank, and the client had no access to it unless they visited the bank in person or had an excellent memory. The first attempt to improve customer service in banking came in the 17th Century, with the invention of the passbook. This empowered clients with a record of their account balances and transactions. From the 17th Century to the late 1950s, passbooks were the only customer service that banks offered to empower their customers with data. In the late 1960s, mainframe computing was the most powerful technology on the market. Banks used the mainframe to digitalise the accounts ledger, and make it accessible by multiple members of staff and across multiple locations. That made it possible for one bank to equate to multiple branches. Customers were able to visit their nearest branch for their banking needs. By the late 1960s, vending machines were the flavour of the month. John Shepherd-Barron invented a vending machine that could dispense cash, and in 1967, Barclays launch the first cash vending machine in London. Customers simply used a piece of hardened paper with magnetic ink detailing the amount they wanted to withdraw. It wasn’t until the late 1970s when cash vending machines were connected to the mainframe, and banks found a way to verify the identity of the customer by using PIN numbers and plastic cards. Vending machines were renamed to Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). OCTOBER 2016
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After digitalising the ledger, banks found a way to verify the identity of customers in a digital domain. Banks started to find more ways to better serve their customers. In the 1980s, after phone companies digitised phone systems by replacing rotary phones with touchtone phones, banks adapted the call centre to service their customers over the phone 24/7. In the 1990s, the World Wide Web boomed. Connecting computers around the globe prompted banks to invent online banking, and by the 2000s, the boom of smartphones has ushered in mobile banking. All of those technologies exist in a map of service where the branch is central to the customer, where layers are built after it to serve customers at their convenience. That is changing, however. This was the status quo, until the GCC’s youth population began to explode. In some countries in this region, young people account for as much as 70 percent of the population. Whether we call them youths, millennials, or digital natives, in certain respects, their lives are very different from previous generations’. Their banking needs are so different, and they expect their bank to be more than just a custodian of their money. Asking them to visit a bank branch to start their banking journey is verging on being a foreign concept. As their lives exist mainly in the digital world, they have a diminishing need for the physical world. So, how do they live? When it comes to entertainment, they have at their disposal every movie on record, which can be viewed whenever and wherever they want. In some 66
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Tariq Al Usaimi, chief digital officer, National Bank of Kuwait
cases, they value their digital friends more than their physical friends; in restaurants and malls across this region, young people are occupied by their smartphone. For their shopping needs, they go online, where they have access to every brand, whose products can be dropped to their door steps in under a week. The list goes on. If they are hungry, instead of rustling
In some countries in this region, young people account for as much as 70 percent of the population. something up in the kitchen, they open a food delivery app and can order any cuisine delivered to their door in 30 minutes. The way they live and interact is so different from any generation before them. They – and their smart devices – are central, where all their needs are catered for in the virtual world, with fewer needs in the physical world. Banks have recognised the needs of the digital native, and are shifting from delivering ‘customer service’ to being ‘customer-centric’.
A customer-centric approach can be achieved by having the customer at the centre of their operations, and then making the most of what is closest to the customer – mobile banking. If that doesn’t serve the customer, they can the contact a call centre. Some banks have invested in virtual call centres and branches, which are located in malls and high traffic locations. They redesign the branches to make them look and feel like coffee shops and lounges, and have tasked them with being advisory organs. As banks across the GCC started to implement the customer-centric model, they found themselves chained to branches, as they didn’t have the technology or the means to verify the identity of the digital native customer. Digital natives cannot comprehend why they have to go to the branch to fulfill their banking needs, when they should be able to get anything they want in their virtual domain. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Each country in the GCC relies on national identity cards. In each card there is a chip that has all the person’s information in a digital format. What’s more, there is a digital signature in the chip that can be used to verify the identity of the card holder in the digital domain. All of the GCC governments have passed laws to govern the use of the digital signature, where they gave the digital signature the same weight as written signature in the eyes of the law. So now, banks have the last piece of the jigsaw to build a full digital bank for the digital native, where digital natives can have their banking needs satisfied as easily as shopping online, or ordering food. www.cnmeonline.com
DIGITAL BANKING & FINANCE
Anshul Srivastav, CIO, Union Insurance
DISRUPT AND DISTURB Union Insurance CIO Anshul Srivastav paints a picture of how drastically different many industries could be after they have adopted digital technology in the coming four years.
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n January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released the peerto-peer electronic cash system Bitcoin as an experimental and obscure disruptive digital currency. Seven years down the line, and financial institutions – including central banks – are putting serious efforts to make it a reality. Investments worth $1 billion have already been invested in Blockchainbased startups. Blockchain is a Bitcoin technology. Blockchain has disrupted industries like music streaming, real estate records, physical currency, blogging, social media, video production and voting to name a few in the last couple of years. This is a disruption that will impact every human on earth, and disturb every industry in terms of the way they transact. The world is transitioning away from cash. Disruption disturbs current industries but also creates new ones. 68
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Banking is in a transition phase of massive disruption. With mobile wallets and bitcoin, banking will see a shift in cashless economies in the next 5-10 years. Wallets like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Alipay, Paytm and MobiKwik to name a few, are virtualising cash to virtual wallets. This will have an impact on the operations of banks in terms of setting up ATM’s, branches and technology. Wallets will be virtual banks in themselves, and will offer interest on wallet money – and potentially work in the same way as credit cards – and this will change the entire landscape of retail and commercial banking. The incumbents have to transform towards different business models in terms of operations. Education is now in a phase of major disruption, with massive open online courses (MOOC) changing the communication landscape. The best possible education will be accessible to almost every human on earth by 2020 through 4G, 5G, Hi speed Wi-Fi or Li-Fi (now in the testing phase, and will hopefully be available by 2020). With smartphones and smart devices in every hand by 2020, universities and education institutions have to start working out models which will support sustenance and reachability to a larger audience. Automation is impacting skills, and should be a serious concern for academic institutions, students, and employers. Automation Artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation is already making headway, and now humans have to start another evolution race to manage skills and employment. www.cnmeonline.com
‘Disrupt’ and ‘disturb’ essentially mean the same thing. Disruption impacts the masses and touches lives, while disturbance impacts the situation as it is.
The information of everything is disrupting decision sciences. Structured, semi-structured, unstructured data is now getting transformed for a 360-degree view of decision-making. Data in all forms is now used to predict and prescribe. Data will be part of each and every disruption and will continuously disturb the evolution and design of services and products. 3D printing has completely disrupted product development and prototyping, especially in industrial design. There is expected to be more than 300% growth, and almost $50 billion of investment in 3D printing in the next decade. 3D disruption will disturb the entire product development and roll out to the markets. Virtual agents – or virtual personal assistants – have disturbed the
markets with more sophisticated technology through advanced machine-based learning. Virtual personal assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google Now are now offering much better voice-based experiences to customers, and will soon be able to provide information to humans dynamically, and disturb human support activity. Call and support centres have to evolve business models to utilise these machine-based learning models. IoT The Internet of things has disrupted the way the world connects with devices. This will have an impact in all industries. Smart homes and digital health services are already making an impact through connected devices, such as fitness bands connected to smart devices, and smart TVs making decisions on behalf of their users. Governments across the globe are in the adoption and transition phase of these disruption. E-Governance and e-services to name just two, are now accessible and available almost everywhere. Governments are promoting incubations on innovation and disruption to improve the lives of its citizens. Automation will consume repetitive, low-skill jobs in manual labour, eliminating errors. Disrupt and disturb ‘Disrupt’ and ‘disturb’ essentially mean the same thing. Disruption impacts the masses and touches lives, while disturbance impacts the situation as it is. Disruption creates disturbance. On the flip side, if incumbents are not disrupting, then others around them will disrupt and will continuously disturb the ecosystem. OCTOBER 2016
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INSIGHT
Mario Foster, Group CIO, Al Naboodah Group Enterprises
SWEEPING CHANGE
Mario Foster, Group CIO at Al Naboodah Group Enterprises, tells CNME how he has helped put IT “at the centre of the business” through the delivery of strong compliance standards and a game-changing data centre.
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T governance is not a new term in the Middle East. However, there are very few companies which have embraced the best practices of IT governance in delivering transparent and business aligned IT services. UAE based Al Naboodah Group Enterprises (ANGE) is a 55-year-old large and diversified business group with interests in construction and trading. The Group IT department at ANGE is a centralised shared services department, which has been in existence since the formative years of the company. However, historically, IT investment was not properly directed into the key pain points, which resulted in the creation of a reactive IT function with old systems and technologies. Not having proper IT governance in place resulted in having IT staff and technologies that were out of date, and the Group’s IT team ended up spending most of their time in daily support operations and repairs. With little IT management structure in place, different IT teams were often working in isolation, accepting change requests to live environments from almost everyone. This resulted in over-customised systems, which had become too slow and complex to serve the needs of the business. Together, all of this resulted into a large technology debt which needed to be fixed. Traditionally, change in family businesses is slow, however, the visionary family board at Al Naboodah Group Enterprises, has been very supportive in approving all the IT changes and new initiatives that needed to take place, including the IT organisation www.cnmeonline.com
With little IT management structure in place, different IT teams were often working in isolation, and accepting change requests to live environments from almost everyone.
restructure and the recruitment of a new IT management team including a new position for IT governance. The group leadership also created an IT steering Committee (ITSC) directly under the supervision of a new Group CEO to oversee IT’s performance, prioritise projects and review planned IT investments. I initially met business stakeholders to understand their unmet needs or causes of frustration from IT. Subsequently, I restructured the IT department around specialisations and created strong KPIs for each member of the IT team, especially the IT management team. My goal was always around having high quality IT services, and to achieve this, I had to build specialisation rather than generalisation within the IT team. I would rather have expert
team members each on a specific product or technology and always have backups for them. The structure I put in place was as follows: IT governance and planning – As part of the CIO Office, the IT governance and planning team was tasked with examining IT spending in detail, evaluating technology standards, helping me prepareIT policies, defining IT charge-back model and assisting me in building Group IT strategy and a roadmap to address the gaps identified during my meetings with business heads. This team was also made responsible for budgeting and controlling of all IT spending, including purchase of all new software and hardware.
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IT Applications & Development – The IT applications team was restructured around processes such as finance, HCM, supply chain, service management, with the core KPI of delivering business solutions based on best practices in the relevant industry with heavy emphasis on the quality of work. The team was further advised to document all the requirements and prepare joint test cases with business users before starting any development. To ensure only approved changes go on to production environment, we established a formal governance process with Change Request Form (CRF) and Impact Statement Form (ISF), where both forms must be approved by the application owners from Business, Applications and Development Manager and Group CIO. OCTOBER 2016
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INSIGHT
Mario Foster, Group CIO, Al Naboodah Group Enterprises
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IT Infrastructure –The IT infrastructure team is the backbone of any IT department. Their biggest KPI is to provide a secure, reliable and scalable IT infrastructure on which all IT services are provisioned. Since no major investment was made in IT infrastructure for several years, I tasked this team to review the Group wide network, connectivity, systems, storage, disaster recovery and telephony needs and advise on all the investment needed to support the Group’s IT needs for next 5-7 years. While the different business cases for the new IT investments were underway, the infrastructure team was requested to harden the current infrastructure by deploying the latest patches, make minor network design changes, introduce tighter policies, perform security updates and bring whatever innovations were possible to extend the life of the legacy servers, storage and network equipment.
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IT Service Desk – Service desk teams are the face of IT to most users; their KPIs were enhanced to deliver their services based on ITIL based SLAs. Along with a change of KPIs, the service desk teams were encouraged to proactively identify user issues and focus on root cause analysis while improving productivity and automation of common IT tasks, such as password reset and others. To have a customer oriented service desk team has been our ultimate goal in this area. With the realignment efforts in place to work as a one larger 72
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team, strong IT governance and a supportive IT steering committee, group IT embarked on its transformation journey. While in the early days, the major IT investments had a very long approval cycle. The support of the new Group CEO, who is part of the
IT now has a chair on the group’s executive committee, and is a business partner that works proactively with different business leaders.
ITSC team, ensured that the right IT investments were not delayed. One such investment was the introduction of a software asset management and hardware asset management tool that is currently in use within ANGE. This tool gave the IT governance team a complete view of our IT infrastructure, especially when it comes to software utilisation and compliance. We now have a tool that does software analysis for us, and is able to find financial
savings opportunities, having better licensing utilisation rates and avoiding license non-compliance issues. Another big investment underway is our first ever data centre, with the best international standards. The project started two months ago, and is on-track for completion by the end of 2016. We are building a Tier III facility, with the latest technology in design and construction, including hyperconverged technology. The setup will give ANGE companies a 99.9 percent data centre uptime and will, in turn, improve business performance. It will have highavailability across the board, including power, systems, network and Internet connectivity. Having transformed from a weak IT governance and loose IT management, to a combination of strong IT governance and a solid IT management team, the biggest benefit has been the positive change in the way users and business leaders now approach IT. IT now has a chair on the group’s executive committee and is a business partner that works proactively with different business leaders in jointly addressing new business opportunities and challenges. The start of this IT transformation journey has been a result of a committed, disciplined and restless IT team and also due to the confidence given to me by the ANGE leadership team. I am grateful that with the limitless support of a wonderful IT team, I was able to lead an ongoing positive change journey to our IT environment within a relatively short period, and this journey is continuing. www.cnmeonline.com
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INSIGHT
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Muhammad Ali Albakri, EVP strategic projects and airline transformation, Saudi Arabian Airlines
OCTOBER 2016
www.cnmeonline.com
THE SKY'S THE LIMIT Formerly CIO and CFO of Saudi Arabian Airlines, Muhammad Ali Albakri now combines technology and finance acumen in his role as the company’s executive vice president for strategic projects and airline transformation. He explores the technologies and trends that he believes are defining the aviation industry.
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he airline industry posted record profits of $39.4 billion for 2015, according to the Airlines Industry Financial Health Report published in August by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). IATA industry financial analysts have continued to report solid financial results for Q1 and Q2 2016, which provides great opportunities for airlines to address a wide spectrum of issues that would normally receive much lower priority in less profitable times. In spite of lower fuel costs, which have directly benefited airlines across the world to post these profits, airlines continue to upgrades their fleets – both wide and narrow bodies – in search of further fuel efficiencies and lower maintenance costs. Investments are also focused on improving airline products, passenger services, and upgrades of facilities and infrastructures to handle the growing number of travellers across the world. It is estimated that 1 percent of the world’s GDP – $740 billion – will be spent on transport in 2016, with the number of passengers steadily increasing (by 6.2 percent) in spite of the economic slowdown. The average return ticket fare (before surcharges www.cnmeonline.com
and taxes) is $366 – 62 percent lower than 21 years ago after adjusting for inflation, according to the IATA. Research shows that investments by airlines and airport operators will continue to grow in efforts to adapt new technology trends to improve airport services, and that they will introduce more revenue streams services, instead of mere ‘informational’ services to passengers.
Digital wallets will obliterate every process built around current payment methods, and will introduce more direct, simpler and fraud-free processes.
Advanced mobile and self-service for things like reservations, ticketing and payments; check-in; baggage drop off and self-boarding are some of the areas still receiving major attention by airlines and airports operators. Wearable and airport sensors are also areas that seem to be gaining support both by consumers and airlines alike. Airlines are also devoting budgets to investing in applying BI technologies to move beyond flight disruption management functions of ‘communications’ and ‘situational awareness’ into more complex areas of predictive analysis to anticipate and avert costly operations disruptions and avoid disastrous PR situations with passengers. BI and predictive analysis will attain actionable data, which could potentially help airlines and airports avoid embarrassing situations and avoid untold financial losses. Such investments will eventually yield more benefits to airlines, airport operators and passengers by avoiding irregular operations and major disruptions, which can do significant financial and reputational damage to airlines’ and airport operators’. OCTOBER 2016
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INSIGHT
Muhammad Ali Albakri, EVP strategic projects and airline transformation, Saudi Arabian Airlines
New Distribution Capacity It is my belief that the two most important aspects that will reshape the travel industry are the IATA NDC (new distribution capacity) initiative and digital wallets. Both of these game changers will have far-reaching impacts on all travel industry providers as well as consumers, where the impact will be huge as it will uproot current prevailing business models. NDC will reverse some of the market share lost by travel agencies, who used global distribution systems (GDS), to airlines’ direct sales channels, by allowing travel agencies to manage rich content in similar ways to those rendered by the airlines’ direct channels. This will provide further information and content to shoppers to select the product they most desire, based not on availability and fare alone, but by comparing full features of competing airlines’ products. NDC will also enable airlines to sell more ancillaries through GDS, which is a strategic revenue stream for the airlines. Through the standardised IATA certified XML interface, airlines can distribute their offers to requesting travel agencies based on the intended traveller’s profile and preferences. Airlines will package the offer and personalise it to the traveller’s taste, taking advantage of their internal data warehouse, which hosts a huge amount of customer data to improve their chances of making a sale. Using Bitcoins to conduct business transactions, meanwhile, both on personal and B2B levels, will eventually supersede all the currently popular payment methods of credit and debit cards, and will disrupt all the existing costly and fraud-prone underlying infrastructures to process such payments. 76
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For decades, payment for airlines services was initially restricted to cash payments at the ticket office, but this grew to become dominated by the credit card industry. Such payment methods did make transacting between travellers and airlines (or travel agencies) easier. However, it also created yet another set of
Airlines will package offers and personalise them to the traveller’s taste, taking advantage of their internal data warehouse.
challenges, and introduced extra costs that the airlines and travellers didn’t necessary need. Moreover, these traditional payment methods are prone to fraud, misuse and lengthy settlement periods, which in reality add more complexity to the process and prolong the cash-flow cycle, thereby hurting the airline industry, which needs cash-flow. Digital wallets Digital wallets will obliterate every process built around current payment methods, and will introduce more direct, simpler and fraud-free processes and, most importantly, will cut out all intermediaries between the travellers and the airlines industry. Payments will be instantaneous, secure, simple and without the huge
amount of applications systems built over many years to process payments and settle deposits between parties. Travellers will not be limited to a choice based merely on fare and seat availability. They will be able to fully compare the product and linked services by seeing first-hand the actual features, dimensions, shape and colour of whatever they are purchasing. This includes aspects such as the shape and feature of the airlines seats, meals and beverages, entertainment systems and cabin ambiance. The introduction of the NDC is considered a driver in changing the underlying technology which was built in the 1960’s, which 70 percent of all airlines’ products are currently distributed through. NDC will drive GDS providers to upgrade and develop their platforms to truly present airlines’ products and services as they really are, and not as seen through a very narrow perspective of ticket fare and seat availability. Security Lastly, cybersecurity and physical airport security will continue to occupy the attention of airlines, airport operators and travellers, and investments to advance preventive solutions will continue to receive top management support of all related parties. Recent unfortunate events at airports across the world have encouraged authorities, airport operators and airlines to invest in smart and advanced technology to share data, utilise AI technology for early detection, and to prevent awful attacks that can lose customers' confidence, result in huge financial losses, and, worst of all, cause human causalities. www.cnmeonline.com
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INTERVIEW
Chris Johnson, Vice President MEMA, HPE
THE POWER OF ONE Following its historic split from HP Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise is now playing its part in in delivering Dubai’s Smart City ambitions. Vice president for the Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa region Chris Johnson is bullish about HPE’s prospects as an independent infrastructure partner for the GCC.
H
ow will the split from HP Inc. benefit your customers? With HP, we had a very broad, $130 billion business. I think Meg Whitman has taken a long look at the business to try and figure out what the markets of the future will be, and how HPE will be best prepared to address them. HP Inc.’s results have been good. They recently announced the acquisition of Samsung Printers, which suits them well but may not have been a priority for the previous company. The spin merger transaction with CSC will develop the largest services business in industry, while we felt that our software development tracks for security, Big Data and analytics assets would perform better by being in a pure play software company. Micro Focus, is the world’s largest independent Software company and can offer this pure play. Has HPE become nimbler since the split? Every vertical market is being affected by digitalisation and the process of being disrupted. This is also true of the IT industry. I think as we see the digital economy unfolding, the IT industry will change to support that. IT companies are becoming more focused through a fear of being disrupted by smaller, nimbler companies. I don’t think there is room for a ‘one stop shop’ – that implies being a jack of all trades and master of none. 78
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What are the biggest opportunities that you see in the Middle East? The declining oil price could be considered either as a challenge or an opportunity. I believe in the glass being half-full, and that there are opportunities to help our customers build the next generation of IT. We’re involved in building the platform for Dubai’s Smart City, and are here to save our customers money as well as building better infrastructures. We can build infrastructures that are specifically designed for a customer’s application workloads, so that they are optimally designed for that organisation. The concept of how customers consume IT is also important. Traditionally in this region, customers will buy technology, with a capital expense budget, and keep the technology on the books for years. That’s an incredibly expensive way to operate, and means they overspend to make sure they don’t ‘run out’ of technology. We have a new consumption model, called Flexible Capacity, which bolts on the ability for customers to pay for the technology they’re using. They may be busier during the week and quieter at weekends, and can pay for that usage while they’re busy. This also provides extra capacity to grow for when they need it. This combination of next-generation composable infrastructure, plus flexible capacity, is the way we see customers in this region saving significant money to operate their IT. We’re doubling down on partnerships in the region. We’re
Microsoft and VMware’s number one partner worldwide, and provide 50 percent of SAP’s HANA infrastructure worldwide. HPE is very partnerecosystem-centric. We want to have really strong alignments with our partners here to deliver amazing value. We’re also very excited by the Saudi 2030 Vision, and have done some good work there over the last 20 years. Our position in the market is crucial to supporting that, and we’ll be key to some of their projects that can make that a reality. With users in the Middle East moving from legacy to cloud and digital systems, how can you help with this transition? We will be offering our customers a service to do application assessment and we will engage and assess their application landscape, including legacy applications, DevOps and agile new apps, and apps that can be procured from the cloud. This assessment will help us to help the customer. Synergy will manage those workloads. Legacy, new or hybrid, Synergy manages legacy infrastructure, supporting everything that exists in the market. What is your cloud strategy? Is it focused more around private and hybrid cloud management? Customers benefit from specialisation, and in order to remain relevant this is important. The biggest profit pools in the market now exist in building hybrid cloud solutions. By that, I mean it’s the www.cnmeonline.com
combination of private cloud and selfbuilt enterprise data centres, combined with the migration of some applications and data to public cloud. We believe that private clouds, due to increasing issues around security, will continue to constitute the largest part of the market, with that agent of public cloud availability for certain things. This is the sweet spot of the market that HPE has led for years. Our core asset is building, delivering and supporting engineering solutions. What do you think differentiates HPE? Why is HPE a better partner for customers than Dell Technologies or Cisco, for instance? Over the last five years, we’ve developed an exceptional portfolio across servers, storage and networking. We’re the market leader for servers for the broadest range of compute types, from edge-based servers through to specialist low-cost service provider computer platforms. We’re second to none in terms of the breadth of our portfolio and in helping customers build out their IT infrastructures. We ship more storage than any other IT vendor on the planet today; 3PAR has just become the market leading all-flash storage platform in the EMEA market. Cisco doesn’t have a storage play. With networking, and our acquisitions of 3Com and Aruba, we’re the only contender for their networking leadership. We’re by far the biggest second place in that space and we are taking market share. Dell and EMC are very credible companies coming together, but they have a huge scale challenge in terms of aligning people and portfolios which will be distracting for them. I don’t see a great portfolio in networking technology from them. distracting for them. I don’t see a great portfolio in networking technology from them. www.cnmeonline.com
Can you tell us about your hyperconverged infrastructure strategy? Why do you call it Composable Infrastructure? We’ve launched a concept called Synergy, or Composable Infrastructure, which is moving away from companies buying servers, storage and networks, and shifting towards software-defined infrastructure, where we can manage customer application workloads in an automated way. Hewlett Packard invented Blade servers back in the day, and we are now inventing the compute/ storage/networking market for the data centre, with huge advances in power consumption and cost. We’re designing the data centre of the future, and are pushing innovation for the next generation of infrastructure. Composable infrastructure is pushing the boundaries. We are also pushing towards what we call memory-driven computing with fiber photonics and specialized application processor cores in a complete paradigm shift in terms of infrastructure beyond composable and converged.
pillars with our infrastructure. We also have Aruba showcasing our offerings for the retail, education and hospitality industries, which are really relevant to Dubai The star of the show is our Dubai Smart City section, which will form a big part of our stand.
What are your plans for this year’s GITEX Technology Week? We’ll have a fantastic stand with many of our partners there. We will be showcasing our transformation areas for mobility, Big Data and Security, and how we support those OCTOBER 2016
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OPINION
Sebastian Samuel, CIO, AW Rostamani Group
ON THE MOVE
AW Rostamani Group CIO Sebastian Samuel tells CNME why connected cars, and varying levels of autonomy in vehicles are transforming the automotive industry.
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he automotive industry is at a crossroads. The revolutionary changes happening in technology, connectivity and the shift from traditional internal combustion engines to electric and hybrid vehicles are going to be a game-changer. Recent changes in the technology landscape are transforming the automotive industry into a whole new paradigm. The pervasive connectivity, autonomous vehicles, introductions of vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) technologies will play a major role in transforming not only the automotive industry but the entire transportation and mobility services spectrum as whole. And these technologies will fundamentally change the way cars are being built, how they are being used and serviced, and how they integrate with the environment.
Connected car The connected car is not a concept anymore. It is already a reality, and according to an Accenture study on the digital transformation of the automotive sector, 90 percent of cars sold will be connected by 2020. In order for various stakeholders like dealerships, third party service providers and their customers to take advantage of this connected car ecosystem more collaborative effort is needed from OEMs, dealerships, insurances companies, Telco’s and app developers. According to Cisco, there four key capabilities within a connected car. 80
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Connect within the car. Currently, a multitude of proprietary and largely independent networks create mounting complexity, and challenges regarding reliability and integration. A converged, in-vehicle network will reduce the physical complexity by managing the network intelligently, while at the same time creating new sources of value. An intelligent gateway would be the centrepiece, running not only communication and security applications, but also vehicle-specific and third-party applications. Connect to personal devices. This includes laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other nomadic devices. Like cars, mobile devices have become an integral part of our lives, but they don’t integrate well - yet. Users want applications on their personal devices, including , email solutions like Gmail, Outlook , social networking applications like WhatsApp, Facebook and collaboration software such as WebEx, Zoom, Skype and GoToMeeting to run in their cars, too. Connect “around” the car. This includes interacting with the up-and-coming intelligent traffic infrastructure and other cars to enable collision avoidance, or with the smart grid for automated and optimised charging of electric vehicles. This will require multiconnectivity like multiple cellular, Wi-Fi, 802.11p, dedicated short range communications (DSRC) as well as advanced connectivity and mobility management to ensure uninterrupted sessions at high speed
to meet latency requirements for critical applications, and to satisfy network and computing security imperatives. Connect to the Cloud. This means the car will be seamlessly connected to one of many cloud services. Ultimately, this connected ecosystem may create a new vehicle cloud environment, which will be the basis for a host of seamless services. These will include touchless payments for parking or fuel, congestionbased road pricing, payas-you-drive schemes from insurers, tollgate payments, integration with intelligent
www.cnmeonline.com
Middle East & Africa HQs now in Dubai
INTERVIEW
Sebastian Samuel, CIO, AW Rostamani Group
traffic systems, seamless entry and exit authentication to parking facilities and so on.. The introduction of infotainment, digital capabilities and geo-fencing will also provide opportunities for marketers to target their customers based on their locations. Connected dealership Connected cars will also transform the way the dealership operates today. Real-time access to driver behaviour, driving patterns, access to real-time odometer readings of the car and ability to read the trouble codes will enable dealerships to provide proactive customer care services. The ability to share driving behaviour data with insurance companies will introduce pay-as-you-go insurance policies, and better service contract packages from dealerships. Combining the connected car ecosystem and adaptive intelligence technology-based applications will help dealerships to increase customer retention by improving their services and digitally acquire new customers and prospects. Connected Traveler Pervasive connectivity is going to enable the connected transportation in future through the connectivity between passengers, vehicles, traffic systems and various modes of transport systems. As per the paper published by the Centre for Automotive Research (CAR), the connected car ecosystem is enabling the introduction of new mobility services (NMS). New mobility services are transportation solutions enabled by emerging technologies and wireless connectivity that allow for more convenient, efficient, and flexible travel. Car-sharing, ride-hailing, ridesharing, Microtransit, bikesharing, and mobility-as-a-service are among the most noteworthy new mobility services currently being developed. Each has 82
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Real-time access to driver behaviour, driving patterns and odometer readings will enable dealerships to provide proactive customer care services.
its own business model and underlying service characteristics. Autonomous Vehicles Autonomous (also called self-driving, driverless, or robotic) vehicles have long been predicted in science fiction and discussed in popular media. Recently, major corporations have announced plans to begin selling such vehicles in a few years, and some jurisdictions have passed legislation to allow such vehicles to operate legally on public roads. In the U.S., national Highway Traffics Safety Administration (NHTSA) has already released policy on automated vehicle development. According to NHTSA, there are four levels of automation in autonomous vehicles. LEVEL 1 – Function-specific automation: The automation of specific control functions, such as cruise control, lane guidance and automated parallel parking. Drivers are fully engaged and responsible for overall vehicle control (hands on the steering wheel and foot on the pedal at all times). LEVEL 2 - Combined function automation: The automation of multiple
and integrated control functions, such as adaptive cruise control with lane centring. Drivers are responsible for monitoring the roadway and are expected to be available for control at all times, but under certain conditions can disengage from vehicle operation (hands off the steering wheel and foot off pedal simultaneously). LEVEL 3 - Limited self-driving automation: Drivers can cede all safety-critical functions under certain conditions, and rely on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions that will require a transition back to driver control. Drivers are not expected to constantly monitor the roadway. LEVEL 4 - Full self-driving automation: Vehicles can perform all driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip, and so may operate with occupants who cannot drive and without human occupants. Car-as-a-Service The connected car’s capability, with powerful mobile applications and strong collaborative partnerships between automotive manufacturers, dealerships and insurance companies will result in a new automotive service delivery model called Car-as-aService (CaaS). As a result of this service, future automotive customers, especially the ’digital natives’ of tomorrow will be able to get his/her required car as a service across cities or countries depending on their needs, without owning a car. They may also be able to get various models of cars like sedans or SUVs in a single service, depending on his or her usage pattern and requirements. Mostly, such fleets of cars will be owned by OEMs or third party service providers rather than individual customers. This shared approach may increase utilisation of car by its users and may reduce the demand for number of cars produced globally www.cnmeonline.com
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ANALYST CORNER
Lee Weldon, managing vice president, Gartner
QUICK WINS Lee Weldon, managing vice president, Gartner, analyses how CIOs can hit the ground running in their first 100 days in a new role.
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o tackle issues of digital business leadership, CIOs are increasingly setting up offices that will support them. CIOs are often overloaded with operational IT issues, which leaves them with little time to work with business stakeholders or address new capabilities in support of digital business initiatives. As a result, more CIOs are setting up an ‘office of the CIO’ (OCIO) for support. An OCIO should comprise a 84
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small team that looks after how IT is managed across an organisation. The team, which should report to the CIO, should ensure that IT operations are well run, and should contribute to business growth through IT-enabled business innovation. This will give the CIO more time to focus on enterprisewide IT leadership. Whether you’re starting a new OCIO or reinvigorating an existing one, accurate preparation, assessment, planning, execution, measurement and,
first and foremost, communication are paramount for success. Choosing the right team leader is vital, as this person needs to have credibility with both business and IT leaders, and be someone the CIO trusts. Each team member should be similarly business-minded, analytical, influential and proactive. Days 1 to 30: Analyse, analyse, analyse. Initially, the CIO’s goal is to analyse and understand the issues that the www.cnmeonline.com
OCIO team needs to address, and to establish a clear set of priorities. The team should ask questions such as the following: “What impact are we having on business outcomes or customer experiences, and what skills are core to our ability to differentiate as a business?” The team should also assess, for example, IT strategy, IT metrics and IT spending, to obtain as much insight as possible. The insight provided by this analysis phase will help the team achieve ‘quick wins’ to show its value, and to help identify the IT organisation’s long-term priorities. Days 31 to 100: Focus on priorities, while achieving quick wins. The OCIO team needs to start this phase by ensuring the IT organisation is doing the right things, which include creating a strategy to identify priorities and refreshing the strategy process. Second, the OCIO needs to ensure the governance model is ‘fit www.cnmeonline.com
Each team member should be similarly businessminded, analytical, influential and proactive.
for purpose’, that the IT organisation knows who the decision-makers are, and that the right people are engaged in the right decision-making forums. Next, ensure that the IT organisation is doing things right by focusing on managing and measuring its performance. The OCIO should ensure clear links to business outcomes and business value. It also needs to assess whether the IT organisation is set up optimally to deliver the desired business outcomes. Throughout this phase, identify and secure quick wins. Quick wins not only show how the OCIO can contribute to business outcomes, but also generate support and buy-in. For example, assuming a stronger role in facilitating governance, taking on a task from the CIO’s personal agenda, or preparing a monthly status report that gives the CIO and other IT leaders clear insight into the IT organisation’s opportunities and problems. OCTOBER 2016
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INSIGHT
Hesham El Komy, senior director, Epicor Software
WILL CLOUD BE YOUR ORGANISATION’S DOWNFALL? Hesham El Komy, senior director, Epicor Software, discusses the need to carefully plan an ERP migration to the cloud for maximum results.
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he reality today is that most enterprise applications are well on their way to being cloud-based. We’ve seen it with simple workloads such as HR and payroll, travel and expense management, and in the last decade we’ve seen the cloud as the new normal for customer relationship management (CRM) deployments. A July 2016 Gartner report predicted that the public cloud services market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will grow by 18.3 percent in 2016 to $879.3 million. More specifically, the cloud application services (SaaS) market is forecasted to grow by a staggering 207 percent from $166.1 million in 2015, to $509.8 million in 2020. So what are the benefits of cloudbased ERP solutions? Below are eight reasons why moving your ERP system to the cloud will benefit your business and support business growth. 86
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1. Freedom of choice Put quite simply, not all cloud ERP systems are created equal. Specifically, very few ERP vendors respect your right to choose the deployment model that is most appropriate for you, and revise that decision down the road as your business grows or technical needs change. Your right to transition between on-premise, multi-tenant, and single tenant is an important one. It recognises that the ‘best’ deployment model for you today might not be the best model in a few years, or even a few months. By providing the choice of multi-tenant (with its compelling economics and seamless upgrades) or single tenant (allowing more administrative control and administrative ownership), you can choose the model that works best for you. 2. Compelling cloud economics Despite the cloud having proven
its value beyond just good financial sense, there is no doubt that for companies of all sizes, the economics of cloud deployment are undeniably compelling, moving from capital to operational expenditure. Some of the more hidden economic benefits of the cloud include: Not being as capital-intensive as an on-premise deployment because of the subscription-based pricing model. Better and more instant scalability, allowing clients to add (and sometimes remove) users to their system on demand and saving them from having to invest in hardware and software at the ‘high water mark’. The direct and indirect costs of your infrastructure, from server to database systems, to the actual hardware and replacement cycle cost. The hidden costs of maintaining the servers yourself. www.cnmeonline.com
The benefit of reduced deployment times (and corresponding improved ROI) that are typical for cloud deployments, as the necessary infrastructure is in place already. 3. Better IT resource utilisation At the end of the day, most IT departments are stretched pretty thin, and find themselves spending too much time on low-value (but admittedly critical) activities such as verifying backups, applying security updates, and upgrading the infrastructure upon which your critical systems run. There is tremendous business benefit to assigning those tasks back to your ERP vendor as part of a cloud deployment, freeing up your IT department’s time to work on more strategic business projects such as creating executive dashboards, deploying mobile devices, and crafting helpful management reports. 4. The cloud is more secure Today, it’s hard to imagine a client who could possibly create a more secure operating environment than leading cloud providers. Indeed, Gartner reports that “Multi-tenant services are not only highly resistant to attack, but are also a more secure starting point than most traditional in-house implementations.” Security today is a comprehensive, end-to-end mindset that has to be built across every layer of the ERP environment from the physical network interface cards to the user passwords. It means a holistic approach to anticipating and minimising possible natural, human, and technical disruptions to your system to ensure uptime and peace of mind. www.cnmeonline.com
Very few ERP vendors respect your right to choose the deployment model that is appropriate for you, and revise that decision down the road
5. Upgrades Cloud deployment redefines the experience by designing upgrades— big and small—to be deployed by the ERP cloud operations staff as part of standard support services, without imposing software installations on your staff. Minor updates are transparently deployed in a non-disruptive fashion, and major upgrades are announced well in advance, and include a sandbox training environment and end-user training. These major upgrades are designed to require little to no project management on your part, short of double checking that everything is working the way you expect it to, and ensuring that your internal users are prepared to take advantage of the new version. 6. Mobile and collaborative Moving to a cloud-based system gives everyone the real-time system access they require as a routine part of their jobs while driving out the inefficiency
of paper-based processes and the burden and security risk of figuring out how to deliver this yourself. Opening up your ERP system by virtue of cloud deployment allows you to retire the poorly defined ad-hoc ‘integration by Excel file’ workflows that might have cropped up across your organisation. In their place, you can deploy real-time integration processes that link your employees, suppliers, partners, and customers. Cloud deployment brings the opportunity to redefine many of your legacy business processes and workflows in a way that leverages these more open, connected, instantaneous integration paths. 7. Reduced risk, greater visibility, better value Many clients choose a cloud-based system (ERP and other workflows) because it allows them to deploy a much more complete solution than they could otherwise manage or financially justify under legacy deployment models. Not having to make a massive upfront investment in the ERP system and its supporting infrastructure is critical in allowing smaller companies to perform beyond same-sized competitors from an enterprise application quality and completeness perspective. ERP solutions aren’t just software. They are tools that can be used to help grow your business profitably, offering flexible solutions that provide more accurate information in realtime, driving smarter, faster decisionmaking, and enabling customers to quickly meet changing market demands to stay ahead of their competition. The cloud increases the business benefits that ERP offers and can accompany your business on the road to successful growth. OCTOBER 2016
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ADOPTION IN THE ENTERPRISE
VR & AR VIRTUAL REALITY
AUGMENTED REALITY
Respondents familiar with VR:
39% “very familiar“ 50% “somewhat familiar“
Respondents familiar with AR:
77%
“very familiar“ 39% “somewhat familiar“ 50%
RESPONDENTS WITH HANDS-ON VR/AR EXPERIENCE
37%
Respondents whose companies are currently using VR
Respondents whose companies are currently using AR
68%
71%
39%
Respondents who started cost as an “important“ or “very important“ factor in their decision to use VR/AR. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
OF RESPONDENTS N O T CURRENTLY USING VR/AR...
48%
are considering adopting VR
23% within the next 3 years
are considering adopting AR
67%
30% within the next 3 years
Top 3 areas of interest for using VR:
Top 3 areas of interest for using AR:
simulation exercises
simulation exercises
employee testing and training
computer modelling
SOURCE: CBS INTERACTIVE INC.
employee testing and training
for use in products
10 More Enterprise Customers chose DataTAAG Technologies for their IT Projects in the first half of 2016.
Data TAAG Technologies Middle East LLC PO Box: 121862, Dubai, United Arab Emirates Tel: +971 4 2778252 | Email: info@datataag.com | Website: www.datataag.com
ISO 9001:2008 | ISO 14001:2004 | OHSAS 18001:2007 Certified Company
ADVERTORIAL
Redefining IT monitoring 1. PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR PRODUCT AND THE SOLUTION(S) IT OFFERS? WhatsUp Gold 2017 is IT monitoring – reimagined. It represents a whole new way visualize, troubleshoot and monitor your IT environment. WhatsUp Gold 2017 is getting rave reviews from users over features such as its: Entirely new interactive network map that displays their entire IT environment from end-to-end, quickly showing the status of every device while providing the context of how everything is connected to provide the fastest time-to-value; Intuitive workflows that can be launched directly from the map so they can initiate management tasks or quickly view a rich set of details such as device monitoring settings or performance data; ‘TotalView’ licensing that gives them the freedom to configure the exact mix of monitored technologies they need, with minimal if any unused licenses, and the ability to change that mix dynamically without any additional purchases. 2. WHAT IS THE PRIMARY REASON YOUR CUSTOMERS COME TO YOU FOR A SOLUTION? Today’s hard-working IT teams are relied upon to manage increasing complexity and deliver near-zero downtime. Ipswitch IT and network management software helps them succeed by enabling secure control of business transactions, applications and infrastructure. Ipswitch software is powerful, flexible and easy to try, buy and use. The company’s software helps teams shine by delivering 24/7 performance and security across cloud, virtual and network environments. Ipswitch Unified Infrastructure and Applications Monitoring software provides end-to-end insight, is extremely flexible and simple to deploy. Ipswitch powers more than 150,000 networks spanning 168 countries. 3. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE FUTURE OF NETWORK MONITORING AND FILE ACCESS TECHNOLOGY? Network Monitoring is going to become more and more 90
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critical as networks become more complex and SLAs become more demanding. The IT teams of the future will need intelligent monitoring tools that are not only comprehensive in scope, but also capable of simplifying the job of troubleshooting. These tools will not only need to be able to provide detailed information on issues, but also alerts and warnings that help IT teams proactively resolve problems before they impact their end-users. Scalability and interactivity with every available network infrastructure technology will become a must. 4. HOW DOES YOUR SOLUTION SUPPORT WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY AND BYOD? WhatsUp Gold is optimized for mobile devices and can be accessed from anywhere by any smartphone or tablet. At this point there are no features designed specifically to support wearable technology. 5. HOW DOES THE SOLUTION SUPPORT NETWORK SECURITY MEASURES FOR AN ORGANIZATION? WhatsUp Gold provides real-time monitoring of firewalls, server logs and other network security infrastructure. 6. HOW DOES YOUR SOLUTION OFFER SUPPORT TO MANAGED SERVICE PROVIDERS? Yes, WhatsUp Gold is available in an MSP Edition developed specifically to support the needs of MSPs. This solution includes a number of features that optimize performance and responsiveness for widely distributed and multi-tenant networks. 7. DOES YOUR SOLUTION SCALE WITH LARGER CUSTOMER NETWORKS? HOW ? Current versions of WhatsUp Gold can scale to support up to 2000 devices in the dynamic map view and over 10000 devices in total. Scalability pollers are available that can reduce latency by gathering network/device www.cnmeonline.com
Rob Farmer, Senior Director EU and MEA | Ipswitch Inc.
information at multiple points throughout large or widelydistributed networks. 8. WHAT IS YOUR PRODUCT’S VISION FOR THE FUTURE? ANY UPCOMING FEATURES/INNOVATIONS YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE? Ipswitch recognizes that infrastructure monitoring in the 21st century is not confined to the four walls of a traditional data center. Today’s IT infrastructure spans beyond the on-premises data center to resources hosted in the public cloud as well as applications hosted as SaaS. Further, the data flow from the end users to resources they utilize is not just limited to the network owned by an organization. Hence, monitoring this hybrid and diverse infrastructure and the many paths that the data flows on, requires IT monitoring solutions to evolve. In fact, in addition to monitoring just the availability and performance of the infrastructure, the hybrid nature requires monitoring its security as well. Ipswitch envisions that these trends will shape its current and next generation products in the following ways: 1. Our products will continue to provide a unified view of the entire IT infrastructure, whether it lives on-premises, in the cloud, or on SaaS 2. In addition to real-time and historical visibility, we will enable users to gain insights that are predictive and prescriptive so they can plan their IT infrastructure for optimal performance and capacity 3. We will facilitate the on-premises to cloud migration in a seamless manner, as an extension of the existing infrastructure 4. Our solution will monitor the security of the hybrid infrastructure, from tracking malicious activity to identifying blind spots for proactive security visibility Visualization is the defining characteristic of our products. As IT complexity increases with cloud based components, software defined networking, and IoT devices, Ipswitch recognizes that intuitive visualization and dynamic mapping is going to be the key enabler for IT administrators to manage their environments efficiently. 9. WHAT SETS YOU APART FROM COMPETITION? Our unique dynamic interface that provides comprehensive, end-to-end infrastructure visibility and makes troubleshooting fast, easy and intuitive. www.cnmeonline.com
Whether or not the UC infrastructure itself resides in the cloud is only one part of a complex equation. UC environments are comprised of highly interdependent systems that rely on the availability and stability of multiple technologies.
More Thorough, Intelligent and Friendly Discovery that provides more accuracy, detail and speed while eliminating the possibility of duplicate devices with multiple interfaces. Our flexible ‘TotalView’ licensing structure that simplifies purchasing, licensing and renewals. Our solid reputation for service and support that has delighted our customers for decades. 10. WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR BIGGEST SUCCESS IN THE REGION? WHAT DO YOU ATTRIBUTE IT TO? Our biggest success in the Middle East has been enabling a large number of end users to see Ipswitch not just as a monitoring tool but also an essential product that supports their network’s management. We have been able to build the brand such that some of the biggest end users and partners in the region utilize it as their daily network management advisor. We have many happy customers in Oil & Gas, Hospitality, Government and Education. We have managed to train and support our network of great partners in the region who support customers on our behalf. OCTOBER 2016
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INTERVIEW
Jedox
FAST-PACED FACTS Andreas Simon, Regional Channel Director, EMEA and Markus Brinsa, Vice President, International Business Development and Alliances, Jedox, discuss the numerous business advantages analytics can bring, and shares how the technology has evolved over the years.
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an you give us a brief background of Jedox’s operations? Andreas Simon (AS): Jedox is a German software vendor that was founded in 2002. We provide analytic solutions like business intelligence , corporate performance management and enterprise resource planning. We focus on a variety of verticals that are known to be big generators of data such as oil and gas, banking and finance and retail among others. Markus Brinsa (MB): EMEA is a very important market for Jedox. We classify it as one of the tier one markets we have a presence in. That is because a lot of businesses in this region, especially in the Middle East, are becoming more mature in terms of their demand for analytics. What’s driving the demand for BI and analytics in this region? AS: Organisations today are implementing more and more IT systems. Data is streaming from the Internet and various other channels. What’s driving this demand is that businesses are increasingly recognising the business value of this data; they want to understand it and harness its value. In addition, a lot of companies from markets like South East Asia, America 92
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and Europe are coming to this part of the world to invest and do business. So, companies in this region are also recognising that their competitors are coming from both local and global markets. Especially here in Dubai, with Expo 2020 nearing, the city will be flooded with investments and businesses will want to find out how they can best utilise the data they have to bring them business growth. How do you see the evolution of selfservice intelligence and analytics going here in this region? MB: In the past, you had to go to your IT department and ask them to give you the reports. However, this process takes time, and by the time you get the reports, the data is already outdated. Then, as time has gone on, the process has slowly improved, and analysts started working closer with IT, allowing us to reduce the time spent on analysing data. Today, the trend is leaning toward self-service analytics where we can get the data and reports in real-time, if not, in the shortest time possible. Do you think the Internet of Things will open the doors to real-time analytics? AS: Definitely, in fact, it is already happening in other parts of the world.
In Germany, we have been involved in some projects that focus on harnessing and analysing data in realtime. We have one that’s specifically focused on the automotive industry where we test cars, ensure that their parts are top quality, and then take video footage of the process and analyse data in real time. We have been working on these initiatives with the Ministry of Research and Development in Germany and various other R&D institutes. We are now speaking to a number of big network providers about doing similar R&D projects as well. So, this is definitely possible and it is already happening. MB: At the moment, there’s still the hardware issue, because not a lot of the hardware technologies available can perform as fast as they should do to support real-time analytics. But as we were saying, IoT and real-time analytics are already here. We think that companies here in the Middle East region are far more ready than those in the US and Europe to do real-time analytics. Organisations in this region are producing massive amounts of data and they only need the technology that can help them analyse and consume it, and we can provide them with that. That’s why this market is very important for us. www.cnmeonline.com
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OPINION
Brad Maltz, senior director, converged infrastructure, EMC
WHY CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE? EMC’s senior director of converged infrastructure, Brad Maltz, explains why enterprises are opting for converged infrastructure solutions.
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IOs in the region are steadily adopting converged infrastructure – fully integrated systems with compute, storage and network – for simplicity, speed and agility. According to Gartner, the global spending on these systems will increase at 19 percent year-on-year, to reach $20.4 billion by 2019, representing nearly a quarter of data centre investments by that time. The following are six factors that facilitate wide-scale convergence: The information generation: As the penetration of communication channels grows, it has become extremely difficult for businesses and IT teams to keep pace with the expectations of the mobile consumer. The automation and simplicity offered by converged and hyperconverged infrastructure enables faster application delivery, as a major proportion of the manual process associated with allocating computer/ storage/network resource will have to be managed automatically. Increasing the ability to scale and cut down costs: This is probably the most common, business-centric catalyst for converged infrastructure deployment. Many IT teams spend up to 80 percent of their time simply running core ‘operational’ functions; 94
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delivering IT services, updating and restoring one type of infrastructure or another. With data needs rising 40-50% per year, automating and simplifying this element is key to unlocking a new wave of productivity. Cloud reduces risks in operational infrastructure: Public cloud services tend to introduce complexity around certain control elements that help in determining service levels for new applications. For example, data protection adds an additional layer of complexity and overhead cost. On the other hand, converged infrastructure includes new elastic-cloud converged systems that can provide an extensive platform to enable private cloud computing, giving CIOs complete control of the risk profile of any given application or data set. Flexible infrastructure that allows small-scale testing beforehand: Maximising scalability is another key paradigm for infrastructure upgrade. Converged Infrastructure investments don’t often refer to deployment of fully built-out blocks with dozens of nodes and hundreds of terabytes of available storage. Usually, they commence with a humble 4U deployment which allows easy transition of an application to production mode on the same
infrastructure after completion of the test phase. Not having to move an application between multiple testing and production platforms can shorten the application roll-out period. Upgrading an app or managing outgoing infrastructure: Mediumsized businesses often choose to deploy converged infrastructure when a major application is due for an upgrade. This has become a common practice in midmarket companies wherein syncing software and hardware enhancement cycles is a norm. For example, when sales automation or ERP is due for a major upgrade and the supporting infrastructure is close to end-of-life, many organisations will lump the two challenges into a single project. Extending support to new types of application or service that requires scale: Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has gained immense popularity in addressing primary IT challenges. However, its performance and scale requirements are so high that organisations cannot afford to lose time and resources to solely manage operations, or it ceases to be costeffective. Converged infrastructure is key to eliminate overhead costs needed to make VDI not only viable, but extremely effective at supporting new models for employee productivity. www.cnmeonline.com
press
THE FRENCH TECH PAVILION @ GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK 16-20 OCTOBER 2016
Come and meet the most promising software & hardware French companies in Hall 4 & New Zabeel Hall For more information, contact : Fayssal MAJID Project Manager fayssal.majid@businessfrance.fr Christelle PEYRAN Trade advisor christelle.peyran@businessfrance.fr Miryem OUKAS-MESSIDI Communication Manager miryem.oukasmessidi@businessfrance.fr
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31/08/2016 12:00:42
OPINION
Chris Gale, EMEA partner director, A10 Networks
10 QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ASK YOUR ADC PROVIDER Chris Gale, EMEA partner director, A10 Networks, suggests an array of questions centred around ensuring you pick the best application delivery controller (ADC) to suit your needs.
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s it time to refresh your application delivery controller? Maybe your current box is at the end of its life or you’re looking for more functionality or better price-per-performance? Or perhaps your application landscape has evolved and you’re examining ADC providers to help optimise app delivery, or to bridge your cloud and traditional onpremises application environments? Here are the 10 most important questions to ask an ADC provider before you buy: Can I run all ADC features simultaneously? You wouldn’t buy a car if you couldn’t use every feature when you drive it. Imagine having to shut down the steering wheel to use the stereo, or having to stop using the gas pedal in order to turn on the air conditioner. You wouldn’t feel like you got your money’s worth, and it’d be grossly inefficient. What is the TCO? You deserve to know how much your ADC is going to cost you in the long run. You don’t need sneaky licensing fees and upgrades popping up at every turn. How do you support multi-tenancy? When it comes to ADCs, app delivery has to be optimised and secure, with few headaches. Often, companies 96
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run hundreds of apps, each of which requires a specific set of policies that can provide better levels of service to certain customers. Businesses need the granularity to provide app-specific ADC policies to the majority of their applications and user groups. These policies must be tailored to each individual application, but having one ADC per app is not always feasible. Is the ADC easy to use? Ease of use and integration are huge factors in the purchasing decision. ADC products must be completely programmable and interoperate with other complementary infrastructure gear. Difficult-to-use APIs, or a CLI that is not intuitive and doesn’t adhere to industry norms, make operation all the more challenging and cumbersome, which can delay getting boxes up and running and require extra training for IT staff. What’s your cloud strategy? Your ADC vendor should have a finelytuned cloud strategy that will help you bridge the physical and cloud-native worlds. This is especially true for service providers. If your ADC vendor lacks solutions for cloud-native applications, multi-cloud environments and ADC-asa-Service, are they the right partner to invest in for your business’s future?
What sets your operating system apart? If your box is running a legacy operating system or one that hasn’t been updated or optimised in a few years, your apps may feel like they perform as if they’re running over dial-up. How do your ADCs scale? There’s nothing more frustrating than a box that doesn’t scale. Don’t get burned by limited scaling, or by a forced upgrades or additional purchases to achieve the scalability your applications require. What do your customers say? Before you take the plunge and side with an ADC vendor, learn about what their customer base thinks about them and their service. Due diligence requires close examination of case studies, reviews, and references. How stable is the executive leadership team? Turmoil and turnover in the executive ranks can directly impact customers. It impacts productivity, decisions, and product direction and availability. What’s in your trophy case? Finally, tech awards are a great validation of the product. www.cnmeonline.com
INSIGHT
Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHosting Datafort
The road to DRaaS
Against a backdrop of geo-political situations and changing climates, the need for business continuity and disaster recovery solutions is becoming increasingly important. Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHosting Datafort, discusses the 'logical next step' after SaaS and IaaS: disaster recovery as a service.
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nce regarded as prohibitive in terms of costs, the arrival of cloud-based solutions and regional hosting service providers is making top management executives and IT administrators revisit their approach to business continuity solutions. While they may shy away from using hosting service providers to manage their critical IT infrastructure and business-critical applications, the enormous savings in costs and the gains in deploying a cloud-based business continuity solution has meant that such services are being increasingly considered and tested. This is especially true for those fast-growing organisations that are competing in the marketplace, and yet lack the funds and knowledge of how to deploy IT departments on a large enough scale to sustain traditional yet expensive - disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. Whether caused by technical failures, natural phenomena, or regional political disturbances, unplanned downtime must always be addressed by IT organisations in order to maintain a fully operational state of business. In the past, organisations have implemented disaster recovery solutions by selecting the most critical of their operations, and using a combination of 98
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data replication, mirroring, snapshots and backups. Industry surveys also indicate that global businesses with growing 24x7 digital consumers can no longer accept business interruption of more than three hours and loss of business data of more than one hour. IT organisations are therefore under pressure to accept these recovery time objectives that specify the maximum losses in interruption that business managers are ready to accept. The availability of cloud and virtualisation solutions, and cloud service providers, is making it possible to now extend the protection of continuity to wider areas of the business at much lower costs and complexity. To synchronise between a live site and an offline recovery site, three typical stages have traditionally been adopted, and the same are carried forward into cloud-based solutions including cold, warm and hot recovery sites. A cold recovery site is typically a disconnected replica of the live site and is not usually a routinely tested and standby site. A hot recovery site on the other hand maintains near immediate application and data availability through a high speed network connection, server clustering, and synchronous replication. A hot site also goes through regular maintenance
and upgrades, and is usually a complex and expensive solution. Cloud-based solutions offer key advantages over traditional disaster recovery solutions. An integral part of a cloud solution is the virtualisation of IT asset resources, thereby reducing the cost of replicating IT assets for the recovery site. Moreover, cloud service providers tend to be hosted across multiple data centres, regionally or globally, and therefore, by default, deliver from a remote site to wherever the end user locates their disaster recovery site. Despite these obvious benefits of reduced costs and availability of best practices, end users are still reluctant to allow a cloud-based, third party supplier to manage a critical function like business continuity and disaster recovery. Their stated concerns revolve around loss of control, reduced investment in infrastructure, and security. However, if end users start looking at SaaS solutions for applications and IaaS solutions for compute requirements, their inhibitions in cloud-based services may be reduced. Considering the growing trend of digital transformation and always onbusiness, the coming years are likely to see disaster-recovery-as-a-service also grow into a standard cloud offering. www.cnmeonline.com
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE ENTERPRISE 2016 AI is nothing new. It has been around for decades, but its technologies are now making headway due to the proliferation of data and the investment being made in storage, tracking and analytics technologies. Based on a survey of 235 business executives, Narrative Science discovered:
AI ADOPTION IS IMMINENT 38% Of organisations currently use AI technologies in the workplace 62% Of organisations do not
88% Paradoxically
of those claiming to not be users of AI cited using specific solutions that rely on AI technologies
Between 2014 and 2015 alone, the number of organisations either deploying or implementing
DATA-DRIVEN PROJECTS INCREASED BY 125 PERCENT
Companies are benefiting from AI-powered solutions without realising it.
There is confusion in the marketplace
62 PERCENT
of organisations will be using
AI TECHNOLOGIES BY 2018
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS IS DOMINATING THE ENTERPRISE
58% $
2019
of respondents utilise predictive analytics - which means using data mining, statistics, modelling, and machine learning to analyse current data to make predictions about the future
2020
2021
Gartner anticipates that by 2020, predictive analytics will attract 40% of enterprises’ net new investment in business intelligence and analytics. Healthcare It’s being used to anticipate and prevent costly and unnecessary hospital readmissions.
One of the reasons for the popularity of predictive analytics may be the tremendous potential that it can offer across an array of industires.
Manufacturing It’s allowing for more efficient supply chain management by adjusting for potential delays.
A SHORTAGE IN DATA SCIENCE TALENT CONTINUES TO AFFECT ORGANISATIONS 59% of survey respondents cited a LACK OF DATA SCIENCE TALENT to help them analyse their data and communicate insights as one of the most common challenges they face in trying to generate value from their data.
$
Global demand for data scientists will exceed supply by more than 50% BY 2018. Without individuals trained at analysing complex data, companes can easily miss out on a valuable asset.
96 PERCENT of respondents who indicated that they are skilled at using big data to solve business problems or generate insights ALSO USE AI TECHNOLOGIES
SOURCE: NARRATIVE SCIENCE
INSIGHT
Mohsin Shah, Channel Sales Manager, Aruba
GO MOBILE
The explosion of smartphones and tablets is transforming the way we communicate, work and manage our personal lives. Mohsin Shah, Channel Sales Manager at Aruba, discusses how adopting mobile technologies can hugely benefit SMBs in staying connected everywhere.
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he combination of mobile devices and cloud-based applications is changing the way small and mediumsized businesses (SMBs) operate and how their employees engage with customers and interact with business processes. Forbes reported that SMBs who adopt mobile technologies are seeing double the revenue growth – and are creating up to eight times as many jobs as their less mobileready peers. Empowering your employees to interact seamlessly with customers and partners can help build a competitive advantage and also greatly improve productivity. Today, we live and work in a world that has become dependent on our mobile devices for access to both personal and business applications in a safe and productive manner, wherever we are. This connectivity requirement crosses boundaries of business size. So whether you are a large multi-national enterprise, a branch office or an SMB, the need to connect is evident. A recent IDC study shows that 67 percent of SMBs are using tablets for business purposes, and 93 percent are using smartphones that are often owned and managed by the employee but used for business purposes. Given their sheer number, properly securing access for these BYOD devices and on-boarding them to the network without significantly increasing IT operations costs need to be an 102
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integral part of the conversation when preparing the foundation for your mobile-first business apps. It’s clear in this new business environment, the mode of choice for employees is mobile. Your business must have an affordable, high-performance and secure Wi-Fi infrastructure that can support this growing number of mobile devices and cloud-based applications. It also needs to deliver the quality experience that users expect, along with the level of security controls that your business processes will demand. Mobile unified communication (UC) solutions such as Office 365 now extend enterprise-grade voice, conferencing and collaboration to mobile devices, and are more widely available. A strong network infrastructure allows you to prioritise and optimise businesscritical applications, so you can respond faster to customers and make smart decisions quickly. You need an integrated solution that can handle issues like network reliability, security and intelligent application management. Here are important considerations when choosing a mobile-first solution: • Screaming fast connections - While wireless is the primary means by which employees will access the network, you need an end-toend integrated wireless and wired infrastructure that is easy to deploy, offers built-in security and high
connection speeds, along with the tools to collect and analyse network performance data. • Security With the arrival of digital workplaces comes added security threats. You will need integrated and automated security controls to help protect your business data from malware and unauthorised users. Wireless intrusion detection and prevention can safeguard your infrastructure from wireless threats, rogue access points and clients. • Network and application visibility - With the increasing number of devices connecting to the network, you may need more insight into users, devices, and applications running on the network as well as ensuring that the network is running smoothly. You need a flexible and easy-to-use network management solution that can grow with your business – from free built-in network management to full-feature enterprise management. • Room to grow - You need a solution that can grow as you grow. It should provide you with the flexibility to build out your network to suit your business needs. Whether you start with a controller-less Wi-Fi solution, and then add a controller to scale – or use built-in management interfaces, then add cloud-based or software-based options later – your network should evolve with your business and allow you to protect your existing investments. www.cnmeonline.com
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INSIGHT
Eddie Fox, vice president, Network Services, MetTel
BREAKING TRADITIONS
Described as a cost-effective, high-quality and unified network solution, Eddie Fox, vice president, Network Services, MetTel, summarises the main reasons why businesses need to move away from traditional, WAN and consider adopting SD-WAN solutions.
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oftware-defined aide Area networking is red hot. Secure, affordable and easy-to-use; those three magic words are enough to turn any CEO’s head. In addition, the benefits go well beyond that, with IDC recently releasing a report predicting SD-WAN revenue will reach $6 billion in 2020. SD-WANs address a confluence of issues that multi-location businesses are facing right now. Here are the top five reasons businesses need to consider an SD-WAN solution: 1. Bandwidth. As more businesses move towards public and private cloud models, bandwidth needs are increasing. SD-WANs allow businesses to support their cloud deployments across multiple locations without being gouged for the required bandwidth. The additional bandwidth also allows network managers to say “Yes” to more applications that are competing for access to the WAN. 2. Price flexibility. Businesses can deploy high bandwidth access at a fraction of the cost of legacy circuits and count on the service levels they’re used to on traditional networks. In most cases, multiple higher bandwidth links can be deployed at a cost savings. 104
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3. Disaster recovery. Using the savings, multiple unique circuits can be installed and SD-WAN technology offers true disaster recovery solutions over varied diverse infrastructure (copper, coax, wireless, fibre, etc.). 4. Secure networks. At the base level, an SD-WAN is a point to point communication environment where VPN tunnels are built to transport payloads from a centralised orchestration platform. Those VPNs are encrypted and can overlay private networking and IP address schemes, adding additional security to the WAN over public internet access circuits. 5. Analytics and management. SD-WANs are managed via a central orchestrator that enables quick and easy management across thousands of devices. This orchestrator can be accessed via APIs for northbound integration with other management, reporting, provisioning and network aware applications. The layer 7 application awareness gathers amazing amounts of data, providing real-time and historical reporting at your fingertips, giving priority across the network to any application as a point and click process. Gone are the days of struggling with NetFlow and other massive, time consuming traffic monitors.
Once the technology has been deployed, it’s easy to extend the SD-WAN to cloud providers and grant secure traffic offload, as well as endto-end quality of experience for those cloud applications. The softwaredefined nature of the technology makes the connection easy, offering organisations some unexpected benefits, including the ability to audit a cloud provider’s bandwidth usage invoice, managing remote access to cloud applications and allowing the CISO to sign off on moving an application to the cloud. All of these added business benefits are driving SD-WAN deployments forward, but it’s important to look at the big picture. There is a significant leap coming as SD-WAN, SDN, NFV and vCPE all move quickly towards a unified management and deployment scheme. SD-WAN is the beginning of the movement as there are the most obvious gains available (bandwidth, price, business continuity, security and application layer management). SD-WAN is a game-changing technology in the network services world, and is the first step towards fully unified cloud, WAN, LAN and remote access solutions. www.cnmeonline.com
ADVERTORIAL
IT Analytics to Enhance the Learning Experience By Ghassan Alkahlout, Regional Director, Nexthink
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T is dramatically transforming how educational institutions function and interact with students. Gone are the days when professors just sit in classrooms to give lectures in a traditional “conference style� to students. Today, students are now able to access educational content from anywhere, leveraging a range of different devices, educational platforms and services available that provide access to rich content and a wide variety of subjects. The Internet is becoming the new classroom where students can access all the educational material they need including course lessons, video tutorials, exercises and even exams from any location.
ITIL technologies. This is important in order to make sure students receive the right quality of service and a good end-user experience when accessing educational materials. Secondly, educational institutions are increasingly leveraging cloud-based educational platforms. Students are using mobile devices and connecting to cloud-based platforms to access educational materials from any device at time and place. Both of these investments focus on delivering the best educational experience to students who access the platform from any location, in a secure and fast way. However, educational institutions also need to have real-time visibility on the entire IT infrastructure to ensure the availability and quality of educational services delivered and to lower the cost of operation and support.
To achieve this, two things are important. First, the IT environment needs to be secure and second, IT departments need real-time and up-to-date information about the utilization of these thousands of end-users. Educational institutions need KPIs to be able to address the following questions: what applications are they using, where are they connecting from, how long do they connect, what is working/not working, are they connecting to the platform in a secure manner or not?
How are technology providers helping to solve these challenges? Educational institutions are rapidly adopting cloudbased learning platforms and equipping students with tablets. However, it is not easy for educational Latest IT trends in education institutions to understand the end-user usage and There are many initiatives around delivering quality quality of service. Educational institutions need an IT education through IT platforms. The Middle East Technology improving the learning experience analytics solution to be able to monitor and measure is taking advantage of IT platforms to facilitate The impact of the latest technologies is clearly both the adoption and success of their eLearning the learning process by embracing the latest a digital transformation, delivering new learning initiatives and services. Vendors are providing technologies. experiences to students that show a major shift from educational institutions with real-time IT analytics For example, The Supreme Education Council traditional classroom style learning in schools and solutions that will give them the right information of Qatar has been an innovator with its initiative universities. and KPIs about their IT infrastructure and endpoints. in building a fantastic education platform and With a Web-based learning experience, students In the Middle East, we are seeing huge providing over 100,000 tablets to students, instead are no longer only passive consumers of education; investments in providing students of all ages with of textbooks. Students connect to the eLearning they are becoming active consumers of interactive devices to connect to fantastic educational platforms platforms to access rich educational media that learning materials of their choice. anytime, anywhere, that enrich their learning complements what is being done in schools. experience. However, it is important to be able to Students can use their tablets to access interactive IT challenges in the education sector measure the adoption and the impact of these educational materials including courses, an electronic A major challenge faced by the education sector investments. Educational institutions need to find library and videos, from anywhere. faces is not about the cost of support, but instead, it’s out whether students are spending time using their We are seeing huge investments in enhancing the complexity of supporting hundreds of thousands devices to connect to educational platforms or are the quality of IT services delivered to students. of end-users that are geographically dispersed. they just using the devices for recreational purposes In terms of IT management, firstly, we are seeing To encourage the adoption of eLearning like social media networks or online entertainment. a focus on traditional investments to monitor, platforms, need to get students excited about this An IT analytics solution can automatically deliver this modernize and scale the IT infrastructure, and new way of learning and bring them the best endinformation in real-time and provide factual KPIs on the implementing a layer of service management with user experience. adoption and usage of the IT infrastructure and devices.
ADVERTORIAL
BUILT FOR SPEED 1. PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR PRODUCT AND THE SOLUTION(S) IT OFFERS? Simonetta Mercieca, Director of Sales, Parallels: Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is a high performance application and desktop delivery solution that improves business agility and performance by allowing employees to work from wherever they are. Parallels RAS allows Windows applications, desktops, and computing resources to be centrally managed from a secure data centre, which it then distributes to user devices, allowing them to work securely from anywhere and from any device, including non-Windows clients such as Linux and Mac computers, iOS and Android devices such as iPads, iPhones and Android phones, Windows Phones and even Chromebooks. Parallels RAS is compatible with all major hypervisors, including VMware®’s ESXi™, Microsoft’s Hyper-V®, and Citrix XenServer®, allowing users to extend Microsoft Remote Desktop Services to provide a high quality, high visual fidelity experience that allows users to work in a Windows Aero desktop environment, watch videos, and run 3-D applications. Parallels RAS is also compatible with all versions of Windows Server, from version 2003 SP1 to 2012 R2. We are already developing support for Windows Server 2016, which will be released later this year. All this makes Parallels RAS one of the most flexible and dynamic application and desktop delivery solutions around, focused on offering a great user experience. Parallels RAS is a solution that functions by brokering a connection between RDSH & VDI applications and desktops, to provide remote display capabilities, multimedia redirection, USB redirection, universal printing and scanning (TWAIN, WIA) and a variety of other device specific utilities. It is a solution that offers high capacity resource-based load balancing, and management features that simplify IT administration duties massively, allowing administrators to focus on more critical tasks. In short, Parallels RAS provides a cost effective and easy-to-use foothold into application publishing, VDI, and data centralization. 2. WHAT IS THE PRIMARY REASON YOUR CUSTOMERS COME TO YOU FOR A SOLUTION? Usually, people are attracted to Parallels RAS by its extremely cost effective nature, which offers savings of up to 60% when compared to other application and desktop delivery server solutions. We also attract many businesses who are interested in securing their data and simplifying the jobs of their network administrators. One of the main reasons for this, is RAS’s great flexibility, which adapts well to most 106
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major server configurations, meaning that businesses do not have to break the bank buying servers or hypervisors to support the solution. This has long been the basis for Parallels RAS’s success, however, with the latest release of Parallels RAS and the investment we made in mobile delivery and improving our end user experience, many customers are approaching us for our mobile delivery. By bringing Parallels proprietary technology to RAS, we have created a way for mobile devices to experience Windows applications as if they were designed for them – users can swipe, tap and pinch their screens to select, lock, drag and magnify, offering an unmatched user experience on all mobile devices. Parallels RAS can also be used to increase the efficiency of a business, allowing printers, scanners, smart cards, USBs, and headphones connected locally to the workstation to work on published applications. Certain people approach us for Parallels RAS’s incredible ability to extend the lifecycle of their dated hardware, which RAS can transform into pseudo thin clients, allowing them to run applications designed for more modern solutions. This helps organizations keep their costs down, and keep old hardware deployed and in production. 3. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE FUTURE OF DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION AND REMOTE APPLICATION ACCESS? Desktop virtualization and remote application access have always been about flexibility. With the proliferation of mobile devices, the future of these solutions will probably revolve around turning these mobile platforms into workstations. In recent times, there has been greater focus on data security, and as a cloud server solutions, desktop and application delivery solutions such as Parallels RAS may be used to secure data and prevent data from falling into unwanted third party hands. 4. HOW DOES YOUR SOLUTION SUPPORT WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY AND BYOD? Parallels has always developed solutions that are relevant to users and will continue to do so with Parallels RAS. RAS embodies the flexibility and mobility Parallels has developed a reputation for, and so it supports Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)/ Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) trends within enterprises and businesses through its suite of clients developed for all major devices. Moreover, Parallels RAS’s easy to use and configure nature, makes these policies very easy to implement and support. www.cnmeonline.com
5. HOW DOES THE SOLUTION SUPPORT NETWORK SECURITY MEASURES FOR AN ORGANIZATION? Parallels RAS centralizes an organization’s data, keeping it secure and out of vulnerable devices’ drives. This prevents the number one threat to data – physical theft of the device. Instead, Parallels RAS securely distributes resources from a centralized server that supports two-factor authorization that can be used together with technologies such as DeepNet, SafeNet and smart cards to always ensure that the data never falls into unwanted hands. This, alongside Parallels’ RAS’s network monitoring tools, make Parallels RAS one of the most secure remote solutions around. 6. HOW DOES YOUR SOLUTION OFFER SUPPORT TO MANAGED SERVICE PROVIDERS? Managed Service Providers love Parallels RAS because it gives them a way to offer several services through an easy-to-use and configure solution. With Parallels RAS, offering organizations a way to establish a BYOD or CYOD policy becomes easy. MSPs are also drawn to Parallels RAS for its ability to support Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings – services which are hugely popular, and which are expected to keep on growing over the coming years. Parallels RAS’s configurability, and the ease with which granularity is achieved, helps MSPs attract businesses from many different market verticals. We also support MSPs by simplifying their billing processes through an automated Parallels SPLA billing engine, which charges clients based on actual usage. This makes sure that no parties are exploited, and that customer satisfaction remains high. In order to support our MSPs, we are launching a SPLA distribution program where distributors will help recruit, train and enable MSPs to scale an SPLA model footprint globally. 7. DOES YOUR SOLUTION SCALE WITH LARGER CUSTOMER NETWORKS? HOW? Parallels RAS offers automated installation and configuration wizards, which greatly reduce the amount of work administrators need to put in to best configure the solution. It also supports organizations’ growth by allowing growing companies to add additional hypervisors, RDS servers, and gateways at any time, supporting computing power requests to deliver seamless applications and desktops. Parallels RAS also features automated load balancing and a system built to keep the server system up and running even should a terminal server in the server farm fail. The bottom line: Parallels RAS is a solution that offers effortless, easy scalability that always provides a rich user experience to its users. www.cnmeonline.com
8. WHAT IS YOUR PRODUCT’S VISION FOR THE FUTURE? ANY UPCOMING FEATURES/INNOVATIONS YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE? The future of Parallels RAS lies with innovative office solutions such as Workspace as a Service. This revolutionary idea is the natural evolution of BYOD/CYOD, and will help businesses grow by allowing their employees to use the devices of their choice to work from anywhere at any given time. To enable this solution, Parallels will continue working towards offering a superior experience on all devices, especially mobile devices, where we plan to take our industry leading technology to the next level. We also plan to improve our product through several technological streams, mainly by focusing on scalability and performance improvements, VDI and multi-tenancy, application containers and streaming and also User profile management. Short term, this means complete integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which is sure to boost granularity and the quality of cloud computing services offered. 9. WHAT SETS YOU APART FROM COMPETITION? Parallels RAS is the most cost efficient server solution to purchase and maintain. Unlike other solutions, it comes with no strings attached – there is only one license, and this gives you a comprehensive product that can deliver applications and desktops without the need for other tools such as load balancing software and manually configured backup systems to prop it up. Its guided wizards make RAS the most easy to use product of its kind, and the native experience on mobile devices, which makes delivered applications and desktops feel as if they were designed for that particular platform, make RAS a top of the line product for businesses looking for a modern, easy to use server delivery solution. 10. WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR BIGGEST SUCCESS IN THE REGION? WHAT DO YOU ATTRIBUTE IT TO? Parallels RAS has found great success in the Middle East and NEMA, and we already have hundreds of customers in the area. We also receive around a dozen new partner affiliation requests daily, so our future in this region seems particularly bright. We attribute most of this success to our free training and certification program, which has appealed to many potential users and technical staff. This year alone, we have certified more than 300 new partners through this training scheme, and we are happy to say that many of these partners have gone on to find success through Parallels RAS. Making things even better is the fact that Parallels RAS more than maintains its customers, who renew their subscription for Parallels RAS almost always, often adding licenses every year as their company grows. OCTOBER 2016
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INSIGHT
Bob Selfridge, CEO and Founder, TMMData
BREADTH AND DEPTH The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to produce troves of valuable and real-time data, However, without careful, holistic forethought about how to manage a variety of data sources and types, businesses will not only miss out on critical insights, but fall behind the status quo.
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ata gathered from the impending IoT is expected to bring insights that can change the way we engage with everyday objects and technologies, amplify our business acumen, and improve the efficiencies of the machines that run our world. Here’s how to get prepared to wrangle and extract meaning from all of the data that’s heading your way: Automate the data gathering process: IoT technologies, like smart monitors, cameras and sensors, often deliver a steady stream of time-stamped and geospatial data that enables us to keep a constant pulse on anything and everything – from our heart rate to the chemical compositions of soil on a farm. To take advantage of the real-time nature of IoT data, automation will be key to data collection. The sheer volume and speed of IoT data is overwhelming enough, but the varying types of data that companies strive to gather at once – a mix of structured and unstructured, real-time and historical – will require tools that can ingest, process, mash-up and re-deliver data automatically and without manual efforts. Often, this means running simple automated analysis on real-time data before feeding it into a main database in an effort to manage data volume. Add context to IoT data with a diverse data ecosystem: With nearly every machine and object nearing some form of digital connectivity and tracking in the IoT universe, we are 108
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guaranteed plenty of new information to analyse and inform business decisions. However, IoT data shouldn’t work alone. Traditional data you’ve been gathering for years, like sales, campaign, marketing and social media data can contextualise information coming from devices and sensors. When mapping your data framework, plan for data to come from a variety of sources, including relational database systems, raw text files, Excel spreadsheets, emerging IoT data sources and those that have not yet been developed. True IoT value comes from the integration of all of these sources, so look to tools that are strong in marrying a range of data types. Make connectivity your default: IoT data achieves its highest value when it connects with a range of data sources. When a factory’s machinery sensors connect with maintenance services, for example, essential repairs and upkeep can be completed proactively in real-time, requiring minimal production interruption. Accessing and unlocking the multiple external data sources you need to really move the needle when it comes to optimising operations or increasing sales, however, can be a challenge. Be sure that the tools on your side can pull all relevant information in. For example, research software that offers a broad spectrum of available and effective connectivity options, such as pre-built connectors, APIs and other outside tools. Knowing the cost, quantity and readiness of these options can also
speed up implementation of their offerings and, in the long run, reduce overheads. Give your entire team access to the data of things: IoT data can inform a range of business functions. A ride-share company can use time and geospatial data to implement peak activity pricing models, locationbased marketing efforts and driver recruitment. Find data integration tools that marketing, sales and finance teams can access as easily as your engineers to ensure that you are getting the most value from the framework that you’ve worked so thoughtfully to create. Look for features like drag-and-drop interfaces that offer intuitive means of functionality for non-technical users. Prioritise flexibility: As the world around us becomes increasingly connected, the volume and types of data will evolve rapidly. We can’t predict what the future brings, but we can select tools that show a flexible ability to manage custom, unique and technical challenges. Prioritise options that give you further options of creating and managing custom connectors, using specialised coding and accessing a database layer. The insights available through IoT data will remain obscured in so many data tables unless businesses take a thoughtful approach to their data architecture. Now is the time to invest in finding data integration tools that are prepared, powerful and flexible enough to tackle the challenges that the IoT is sure to bring. www.cnmeonline.com
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OPINION
Thornton May, Contributing Editor, Computerworld
THE DIGITAL DISSIDENTS How can organisations cope when a digitally empowered employee carries out activities that can negatively disrupt their businesses?
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ost businesses today are thinking about digital disruption. Either they are trying to unleash it, or they are seeking ways to avoid being victims of it. Some are involved in both activities. Most employees are on board with all of this. Call them the digital dissidents. In today’s workplace, the dissidents can carry a disproportionate amount of power - and, ironically, it is to a large extent the digital revolution that has empowered them. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman talks about this issue in his soon-to-be-released book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. We have to come to terms with what he calls the “Power of One.” If you think that is an exaggeration, read up on what Edward Snowden accomplished at the National Security Agency. Not long ago, it would have taken at the very least the director of the NSA to cause an equal amount of disruption. For businesses, the important question is what they can do to 110
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blunt the power of their digital dissidents. Remarkably, many employers would probably want to find ways to control them, perhaps with threats or negative incentives. I think this is remarkable, because we have amassed enough economic history over the past couple of centuries to show that this is ultimately a futile strategy. John W. Merriman, a professor of history at Yale University, sees the Industrial Revolution as an era when industrialists were able to induce workers to work the way they wanted them to work. Fine-china maker Josiah Wedgwood was an early pioneer in exerting industrial discipline over an extended workforce. Just before 1800, he thought long and hard about how to get all his workers to work the way he wanted all the time. He and his fellow industrialists were very concerned with preventing workers from wandering off and spending time enjoying themselves. Wedgwood’s ultimate objective was having a pool of workers who would respond “as fingers on two hands” to his commands.
Today, we might be tempted to congratulate ourselves that the methods of old have been left behind. And indeed, in much of the world, the conditions of the workplace are stringently regulated. Employees work in clean, safe environments. But coercion is still a favoured response for a lot of people. We live in a world of non-disclosure agreements, where a politician can rise to the top with talk of banning all Muslims from the country. Think about this, though: firing all of your digital dissenters won’t advertise your company as a great place to work. Is there a better way? Surely. The approach that seems to display the most humanity, and to offer the best counterweight to alienation and possibly the greatest likelihood of working, is simply this: in an age of super-empowerment, management needs to be asking, “What are my digital dissidents trying to tell me?” In other words, communicate. This goes beyond having regularly posted office hours. It is part of creating a culture that says to everyone, “How you feel is important. If something is bothering you, we can talk about it.” www.cnmeonline.com
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WHAT IT DOES: iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are Apple’s hotly-anticipated smartphones, and have 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays. Both devices are equipped with the Apple A10 Fusion chip, which has four cores – two highperformance cores that run up to “two times faster” than the iPhone 6 and two high-efficiency cores that are capable of running at just one-fifth of the power of the high-performance cores. Both phones include support for up to 25 LTE bands and LTE Advanced. The devices have 12-megapixel cameras, which features optical image stabilisation, a larger ƒ/1.8 aperture and six-element lens. iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus comes in black and jet-black (matte and glossy, respectively) in addition to silver, gold, and rose gold.
The mechanical Home button has been removed from the devices and is replaced by a solidstate Force Touch button, with a Taptic Engine. Both devices are waterproof. The smartphones are available in 32GB, 128GB and 256GB configurations. WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: Both devices are water resistant. Apple has taken the controversial decision to remove the device’s headphone jack, the device now coming with EarPod headphones and Lightning connector in the box, as well as a Lightning-to3.5mm dongle to connect traditional headphones. The iPhone 7 Plus’ rear camera has two lenses – an f/1.8 28mm wide-angle lens and an f/2.8 56mm telephoto lens, which operate simultaneously.
Brand: Bose Product: QuietControl 30 for work, to taking a call from home in a crowded cafe – the QC30 lets users have a customised and personalised listening experience. WHAT IT DOES: The QC30 headphones feature tiny earbuds that integrate a total of six microphones, and a neckband that houses an advanced electronics system for portable performance. The device, according to Bose, flaunts a controllable noise cancellation feature, which lets users stay in charge of how much outside noise they want to shut out. From spatial awareness on a busy sidewalk, to complete isolation
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: The QC30 has up to 10 hours of battery life from a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, lasting as long as a fully-charged phone or tablet. Simple buttons are on an inline remote: music volume, play/pause, answer/end calls, and noise control. The QC30 features StayHear+ tips, which eliminates the pressure and aches of conventional ear tips for hours and hours of wear. www.cnmeonline.com
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9F BACKLOG
9 TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL CLOUD PLAN Foundational best practices for starting up an IaaS deployment
or some organisations, cloud usage has already been initiated by someone in the company - whether they know it or not. But to have a successful cloud deployment, you need a plan. Alignment workshops After a making a decision to use IaaS cloud computing services, it’s helpful to have a meeting with important stakeholders in the company to get everyone on the same page. Typically, a senior IT manager or CIO leads the process. It’s important to have a clear message to this group of why the cloud is being explored.
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Know your economics One of the first considerations that will inevitably come up is cost. A variety of variables mean there is no simple calculation for determining if the cloud will be more or less expensive than on-premise infrastructure. Keep in mind that knowing different architectural designs will help determine costs. The way you deploy the cloud depends on your short- and long-term goals, and will ultimately determine whether it makes sense, financially, for you.
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Establish a cloud business office After establishing an agreement to move forward, create a cloud business office (CBO). Some call it a cloud council or a centre of excellence. It’s basically a group that will be the point
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people for the deployment. Typically, the team will be made up of cloud engineers, compliance/risk officers, application owners, IT, finance and third-party representatives. Discovery With a CBO in place, more detailed planning can begin. Discovering the full landscape of your environment and mapping the dependencies and relationships of applications and processes is a good first step. Take an inventory of what you have and begin to target what will move to the cloud.
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Security assessment 5 Before you migrate anything to the cloud, determine what your security profile will be. What standards do you want to set your cloud usage to (PCI? ISO 27001?). Create a minimum viable cloud Once you have a couple or a handful of applications that have been targeted as low-hanging fruit for moving to the cloud, begin the process of the migration. The idea is to get some early successful wins that will become the basis for repeatable processes for further migrations. Consider a hub-and-spoke model. Core services that apply to the entire cloud environment are in the 'hub', including monitoring, logging and security and encryption policies. The 'spokes' are applications that adhere to the policies defined in the central hub. This creates an automated, repeatable way to deploy services.
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Governance Controlling usage of your cloud is critical. It’s important to have someone constantly keeping tabs on what is going on in the cloud environment, be alerted to unusual activity and enforce policy rules. Which workers have access to which services in the cloud (a developer can only spin up a certain number of virtual machines, whereas a manager has more freedom). Limit access to administrative settings and use twofactor authentication.
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Automation and Validation You don't want to be building snowflake designs for each new app deployed to the cloud. Manual processes lead to errors and security vulnerabilities at scale. Automate wherever possible. Create a standard architectural pattern for applications. Then, use tools to automate their provisioning and monitor their deployment. Validate deployments to ensure they meet your standards.
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Prepare for migration at scale Determine which apps can be moved and which cannot. This process can be broken down into four categories: Re-host (only light changes needed), replatform (just change the infrastructure host), refactor (some code changes are needed to the app), replace (app needs to be rewritten), retire (get rid of the app). Using your automation processes, begin migrating the low-hanging fruit and develop a plan with the CBO on how other apps can move in the future.
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