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onwards

and upwards

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EDITORIAL Publisher Dominic De Sousa

To store or not to store

Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor Talk to us: E-mail: jeevan@cpidubai.com

Group COO Nadeem Hood

If my memory serves me right, I think it was Sun’s Scott McNealy who once famously remarked that storage will always remain a peripheral. And no one could have foreseen the way things turned out. Today, storage has moved from just periphery to the centre stage and it’s a segment of the IT market that has defied all economic woes and logic. A reliable storage infrastructure is absolutely critical to any enterprise that wants to have timely access to information to make sound business decisions. The unprecedented growth in data has pushed both external storage and related software markets to new highs and shows no sign of abating in the near future. The cost of storage per GB has come down drastically over the last decade, making it affordable to organisations of all sizes. Even SMBs, which typically have tight budgets, loosen their purse strings when it comes to storage to accommodate growth and data retention regulations.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said storage today accounts for a major chunk of overall IT expenditure. But there is a flip side to this. Studies indicate that the average storage utilisation levels in most enterprises hover around an abysmal 30 percent. Why do people keep buying more storage when they don’t use what they already have? Business managers point fingers at storage managers for this excess, who in turn, blame the application users for their insatiable appetite for storage. I guess the only way out of this seemingly Catch-22 situation is to be scientific about the way you procure storage. Most organisations in the region tend to refresh technology infrastructure every two to three years, and buy storage in bulk without giving any thought to the complexity and long-term costs. The ideal storage utilisation level should be around 60 percent, so that you don’t run out of capacity. The only way to go about this is to analyse the application environment and accurately predict when you will need more storage. Data along with people are the most important assets of an organisation, and storage capacity planning can be both science and a fine art.

Managing Director Richard Judd richard@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409126 Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409109 Editor Ben Rossi benr@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409114 Sub Editor Joe Lipscombe joe@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9136 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar raj@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409131 Sales Manager Michal A. Zylinski michal@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409159 Country Sales Manager Rami Mikati rami@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409148 Circulation Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409147 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409146 Designer Analou Balbero analou@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409104 DIGITAL SERVICES Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy P Maagma Web Developers Erik Briones Jefferson de Joya Photographer and Social Media Co-ordinator Jay Colina online@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

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onwards and upwards

EFS implements the Middle East’s first private cloud PUBLICATION LICENSED BY IMPZ

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EDITORIAL Our events

Global perspectives

Ben Rossi Editor Talk to us: E-mail: benr@cpidubai.com

We’re an international bunch here at CNME and believe it is important to cover global technology events, as well as the ones here in the Middle East.

Last month was very European and the air miles were ticking in full flow as we ventured to EMC Momentum in Vienna, SAP Sapphire Now in Madrid and the Dell Storage Forum in Paris.

You can read full analyses of these events in this month’s issue of CNME along with some major announcements from the respective companies.

However, the most interesting grain of insight I came across, whilst in Paris, is not covered in the analysis of the Dell Storage Forum, as it didn’t come from the event itself.

The moment actually came when I was being driven back to the airport.

And it didn’t come from an article or interview or discussion with an IT expert, but from the rambling conversation I had with my driver as I cried goodbye to the beautiful French capital.

I was interested to discover that earlier that morning the same driver had also taken to the airport the GM of Dell’s storage division, Darren Thomas, who had given the keynote address at the Forum.

The interesting part was not that Dell had gifted me the same luxury transfer as the head of its multi-billion dollar enterprise storage and networking business. Although I admit that was a pleasant surprise.

The true insight came after the driver said Mr. Thomas turned out to not only be quite a talker, but had also spoke of his views on the IT industry.

Immediately the intuitive journalist in me – or as you may call it, the nosy soand-so – began quizzing him on what was said.

You see, it’s great as the editor of a leading IT magazine to be given regular opportunities to speak to some of the most influential players in the tech world, but it can often be difficult to fathom whether what you are being told is exactly what they believe, or just what they want you to write.

So here was my window into a simple conversation between two men in a car with no hidden agendas.

According to the driver, Thomas was cursing the developed markets – particularly Europe and the States – confirming that Dell had not escaped the effects of recession and branding it a dark time for the IT industry in those vital demographics.

However, it wasn’t all bad news – particularly for us over here in the sunny Gulf. Apparently Thomas was very enthusiastic towards emerging regions like the Middle East – and pointed to it as an area of significant growth in the coming years.

So there you have it - you’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth. Well, sort of anyway. Whilst “Future of Middle East IT is bright, says Darren Thomas’ French driver” may not be the catchiest headline, we can at least obtain that there are exciting times ahead in this region - and as we tick over our 250th issue, we’ll be sure to continue giving you the running commentary as it happens for another 250 and beyond.

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Contents

Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic IT Transformation and Big Data Partner

Strategic IT NetworkingPartner

Strategic IT Storage Partner

ISSUE 251 | december 2012

ANALYSIS 8

An American in Paris

Dell used its Storage Forum to unveil end-to-end storage portfolio updates.

10 Gaining momentum

At its Momentum 2012 conference in Vienna, EMC highlighted its rise as an innovator in consumer business.

12 Celebrating innovation

SAP Sapphire Now in Madrid saw the company revel in the glory of HANA, its in-memory database analytics tool.

14 Evolving infrastructure

Cloud, virtualisation and disaster recovery dominated discussion in an insightful day at Infrastructure Strategies 2012.

26

18 Month in view

We round up the top stories to have taken our eye in the last month.

CIO SPOTLIGHT

22 Sun, sand and CIO

This month the spotlight is on the ICT Achievement Awards 2012’s CIO of the year, Nakheel’s Ahmed Al Ahmed.

CASE STUDIES

30 A cutting-edge retreat

Rotana Group has implemented a cutting edge technology communication solution to enhance the hotel experience for its customers.

34 Keeping compliance

When Emarat’s IT security team could no longer manually keep up with what was occurring on the network, it implement a NAC solution.

SOLUTIONS WORLD 38 A mobile future

It has been an eventful year in the solutions world, but what does 2013 hold for the Middle East?

NETWORK WORLD

44 The transforming network

6

Networking looks to be back on the up as enterprises look to embrace new technologies in network management.

Computer News Middle East

december 2012

Unchartered shores A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Emcor Facilities Services (EFS) says this snippet of wisdom was its driving inspiration when it ventured into the unknown with the Middle East’s first private cloud implementation.

STORAGE ADVISOR

CAREERS ADVISOR

50 More fireworks

74 Work hard, play hard

With cloud and analytics solutions only continuing to draw more demand, the growth in the storage industry looks set to continue in 2013.

SECURITY ADVISOR

56 Keeping secure? Virtually impossible

Virtualiation was one of 2012’s key trends and it continues to gather pace. However, a virtual environment presents an array of virtual threats.

INTERVIEW

78 ‘We’re the disruptive alternative’

Bashar Bashaireh, Regional Director, Fortinet, talks about his company’s leadership in network security.

62 Evolving integration

Technology trends continue to grow and develop IT infrastructure and so too does the need for expert support. What will happen in 2013?

Telecoms World

68 HSPA+ vs. LTE

4G often means LTE for many carriers, but HSPA+ is evolving in parallel. We pit the two technologies against each other to see which will prevail in 2013. www.cnmeonline.com

Charles Phillips joined Infor as CEO two years ago with a brand new team and a lifetime of experience. Now, he is revelling in Infor’s recent success.

79 Maximum protection

INTEGRATION ADVISOR

The Middle East is a region of growth, activity, energy and excitement. But what’s in store for the IT jobs market?

PRODUCT WATCH

80 CNME breaks down the top product launches and releases in the last month.

THE WORD ON THE STREET 82 Spain sailing

CNME’s man about town Joe Lipscombe gives his spin on the latest IT issues affecting Middle East enterprises.

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See how Dell’s mobility solutions can benefit your business at YourDellSolution.com/me/mobility

© 2012 Dell Products. Dell, the logo, XPS, Latitude and Vostro are registered or unregistered trademarks of Dell Inc. in the United States and other countries. Ultrabook, Celeron, Celeron Inside, Core Inside, Intel, Intel Logo, Intel Atom, Intel Atom Inside, Intel Core, Intel Inside, Intel Inside Logo, Intel vPro, Itanium, Itanium Inside, Pentium, Pentium Inside, vPro Inside, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks or trade names may be used in this document to refer to third-party products (such as operating systems and software) included with the products offered by Dell and the entities claiming the marks and names of those products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Dell Corporation Ltd, Dell House, The Boulevard, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1LF.

Analysis Dell Storage Forum

An American in Paris The Dell Storage Forum in Paris provided the platform for the American tech company’s unveiling of end-to-end storage portfolio updates, which it claims will further optimise enterprise data at every point of its lifecycle. enhanced scalability and performance for Dell Compellent arrays.

With this release, Dell become the first storage provider to announce endto-end 16GB fibre channel capabilities, which Thomas said doubles bandwidth and speeding access to business critical applications and data.

Next on Thomas’ list of announcements was Quest NetVault Backup 9.0 - the new Quest data protection software integrated with NetVault Extended Architecture (NetVault XA).

This release features a new graphical user interface and a set of shared services to unite multiple Quest data protection technologies for simpler management.

The penultimate release of the day was the latest result of Dell’s partnership with CommVault. Dell PowerVault DL2300 is a new enterprise-class data protection appliance that combines Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers with CommVault Simpana 9 modern data protection software to provide

Darren Thomas, VP and GM, Dell Storage

P

aris may be a city synonymous with style, but for Dell this forum was all about substance, making five significant announcements on portfolio updates.

The new products were revealed by Darren Thomas, VP and GM, Dell Storage, at what was the company’s second EMEA Dell Storage Forum.

“This is very unique technology and the kind of technology you need if you’re going to do big data, data insights, clouds and those kinds of things,” Thomas said. “These are some very significant announcements that demonstrate us bringing the promise of the fluid data architecture fast forward to now.”

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The first to take the spotlight was the new PowerVault MD3 software, which offers enhanced data protection, performance, capacity and virtualisation capabilities, and is designed to maintain up to 99.99 percent availability.

The data protection enhancements include dynamic disk pools that simplify disk management and improve rebuild performance by distributing data across all drives, decreasing significant recovery time of drive failures, Thomas said.

The next update revealed was the Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3 array software, which is designed for mid-to-large enterprises and cloud computing, and offers www.cnmeonline.com

Thomas on big data “Big data is about scaling with access.

Anybody can do big data. You know what they used to call data? Data. The real question of big data is how can I use it to make my company better and for better insights. What company can you think of that has a backup system that can stand every backup as a workload when they back it up? I can only think of one and I work for it. If you’re going to have large storage systems and scale them you better have the ability to make them accessible and to actually read them data wherever it is.”

Thomas on cloud “Cloud is not just about the storage – there’s the server system there and there’s a networking system. They’re massive in scale and they need a lot of automation to be able to manage those Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3

large clouds. What talks about massive scale? Scale-out. What talks about being able to deal with all this technology?

Better together and our cloud infrastructure. We’ve got that built in.”

Thomas on converged infrastructure “We’ve designed storage solutions that go inside the server. When you go to do a snapshot and replicate you want to include that data, so the only way to do that is to use something like data tiering – dynamic tiering, if you’re smart - and what that means is the automated part of it. We do it for you and if you’re not going to do dynamic tiering then you’re going to have a lot of content trapped up in the server somewhere. We saw converged infrastructure coming and our fluid data architecture is built upon that.”

large enterprises with data backup, recovery, replication, archiving and deduplication for both physical and virtual servers.

Dell’s fifth and final product unveiling of the Forum came in the form of PowerVault DL4000, which is optimised for SMEs and remote offices and is the first backup

appliance based on software by AppAssure, following its acquisition in February.

With 5.5 terabytes of internal storage capacity, the 1U turnkey appliance offers established snapshot, replication, deduplication and compression software for efficient use of backup capacity. Users can benefit from hosting two virtual standby machines that protect critical applications for up to two servers, offering quick disaster recovery.

Fluid data Thomas repeatedly referred to Dell’s theme of “fluid data” throughout his keynote address.

“What’s next for the fluid data is what’s next for your business,” he said. “What happens in your data centre is happening in your business, so if you’re data centre is slow, clogged, poorly operating and failing a lot, that’s probably what is happening in your business. If you’re data centre is smooth, efficient and automated, that’s what is happening in your company.”

He added that Dell will continue to move closer to the server and invest in innovations that bring new capabilities.

“Data is getting so fast and customers want to deal with it so fast that we’re going to put data in the server. That’s not a challenge for us because Dell owns a server company.

It’s also not a challenge for us because we have the best tiering technology in the industry and we can move that data out of the server as fast as it needs to be moved out so that you don’t have to spend a fortune on flash memory,” he said.

“We’re also working on clouds because Dell has a large networking and services organisation. We’re going to be building clouds – and we’ve already built some – that will do all these functions, including the functions of AppAssure and the functions of large scale. We’ll run your data centre for you. We’ve got a bright future ahead of us integrating what’s in the primary system to what you think of as backup or archive or long range data retention.”

Thomas on mobility “Mobility is about being able to bring into the back office all of the dynamics and dynamic tiering, and the ability to do something like our EqualLogic device does where we can move data to a tier and as soon as we see a problem that might be being caused by a mobility experience we can automatically promote that data back to an SSD layer.

We have the software imbedded to do that and we’ve had it for years.”

Dell PowerVault DL4000

www.cnmeonline.com

december 2012

Computer News Middle East

9

Analysis EMC Momentum

Gaining momentum The IT landscape is ever evolving as the divide between traditional business and personal consumption continues to narrow. At its Momentum 2012 conference in Vienna, EMC highlighted its rise as an innovator in consumer business and the significant influence it will have on the enterprise.

“Consumerisation is the future of IT,” said Rick Devenuti, President, EMC IIG. “Business is changing, it’s transforming, and we need to transform with it. The needs are greater and the demand is higher.

“Customers are experiencing shifts in the way their business works, our solutions aren’t adequate anymore. We’ve developed a range of products which the industry is going to love. They’re simplified, unified solutions which effectively address the current needs of our customers.”

Rick Devenuti, President, EMC IIG

T

ransforming IT and business has been a familiar sound bite from EMC over the past year as it has frequently promised to assist enterprises in the transition from traditional to social IT with its solutions, support and industry knowledge.

EMC delivered on those promises during its Momentum 2012 conference in Vienna, where it presented the largest simultaneous product launch of its kind, signifying its step into secure, rapid and social business transactions.

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The storage-turned-general IT company used the event to make a statement on the next generation user of business applications, which it believes will demand modern, beautiful and socially-based programmes that are available on any device and accessible from any location.

According to EMC, users will demand the types of products that they’ve experienced during their training and development. As such, its mission is to assist in the integration of business and new user, focusing on cloud computing, mobility and big data. www.cnmeonline.com

In sync The new Documentum product range includes a host of file based solutions, including document security, file sharing and slideshow capabilities. EMC also presented the latest version of the cloud-based sync and share service Syncplicity, following its acquisition of the company in May. “This is another thing I’m excited about – syncing all my folders from my desktop into a secure environment and having access to them whenever and wherever I like. That’s the future of business. I don’t even need to carry my laptop around with me anymore,” Devenuti said.

Syncplicity allows users to access, share, and update any file, online or offline.

Moreover, if an employee leaves the company, Syncplicity has the ability to hone in on specific enterprise owned data and wipe it from each device.

Jeetu Patel, General Manager, Syncplicity, said: “The enterprise is witnessing a lack of control. The employee wants to work on their chosen device and they want to access their desktop virtually.

“With Syncplicity, IT teams have full control of their data regardless to when

or where it’s being accessed – that is hugely positive. This gives you full back-up protection whilst aiding productivity. The mission is to change the way people work without changing what they do and this is the perfect example of that.”

According to Patel, IT has a harder job now than ever before in terms of access and security. With the consumerisation of business, he said employees can go out and begin to use any device of their choice without even consulting with their IT management.

“Users are making life hard for IT by simply bypassing them and saying ‘I’m going to use this consumer based application, and by the way, there isn’t any security on it.’ It opens huge amounts of exposure,” he said.

“IT then has two options; they can lock down the user – causing them to be unproductive - or they can provide tools to the users which are compliant but also easy to use. Thousands of people will go into this space - we’re pioneers in this I believe.”

The two major reasons for this consumer shift are cloud and mobile. The accessibility for users has increased and the simplicity of gaining applications and tools has evolved greatly, Patel added.

“Before, if a user wanted the Microsoft Office package, there was a $300 odd price tag and they had to go to the store, pick it up and then install it – they’re not going to do that today. Now they’re looking at a two minute download, even with a slow connection,” he said.

“With this freedom for the user, the risks increase. We think this is completely mitigated by solutions like ours. We do one thing really well – files. We eliminate friction from files.”

The major concern for businesses in the consumerisation of IT and BYOD (bring your own device) is maintaining security without taking away any productivity from employees. Patel said he believes that EMC

Jeetu Patel, General Manager, Syncplicity

and Syncplicity offer the only solution on the market that provides the freedom that employees need to access and share files whilst giving IT peace of mind.

“With these devices, businesses don’t own the data. They don’t know where the data is, what it’s doing or where it’s going - they’re very out of control. With us, the company can access the data, control the data and monitor the data at all times. Moreover, if an employee loses their device, the sensitive data can be located and wiped instantly.”

Business is changing, it’s transforming, and we need to transform with it. The needs are greater and the demand is higher.” www.cnmeonline.com

Mitigating costs A further benefit of consumerising IT, according to EMC, is the cost saving through the use of personal devices.

As pointed out by Patel, only a fraction of tablets used in business are bought by the company, and users who bring in cutting edge technology that supports the use of business applications is a winning formula for the company.

The advent of mobility and, as EMC announced in Vienna, a secure and protected environment with which to use it, is helping businesses move into the next phase of IT. The key message of the event was that IT transformation is gaining momentum and it’s only a matter of time before the entire industry is on board. december 2012

Computer News Middle East

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Analysis SAP SAPPHIRE NOW

Celebrating innovation SAP is a big company, so it goes without saying that it should present itself in a big way. Sapphire Now, its annual European event was hosted in Madrid last month, where the company revelled in the glory of HANA, its in-memory database analytics tool, and insisted that further innovation and growth is on the horizon.

D

espite Madrid being the location of political protests during the same week, SAP managed to successfully gather 11,000 customers, partners, journalists and analysts into the Spanish capital, and like many conferences this year, the main theme was the innovation and growth of the mobile and social markets.

Although ending in triumph, SAP’s conference began on a sad note, as its keynote speaker and co-CEO, Bill McDermott, had to address the audience via satellite link following a tragic family event which prohibited him from travelling. The commitment to the event was appreciated however, and the warm reception helped McDermott to deliver a positive and personal speech.

“I started out as deli owner in New York and I learnt that the customer determines whether we have a job or not, I’ll never forget that,” he said.

“The world used to be business to business, now it’s business to business to consumer. The customer demands digital and mobile - it’s critical. In Kenya they skip meals to pay mobile bills - that says it all.”

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McDermott was quick to speak of the success of SAP’s customers since adopting mobile business capabilities, as well as newly designed, socially based application interfaces and products. The rise of mobile platforms, virtual desktops, BYOD and big data has made dealing with these a necessity. And McDermott said: “Necessity is the mother of invention – we needed to transform ourselves.”

“Customers are 40% more likely to buy if something is marketed on a social platform.

This is already proved, so now we just need to build upon it.”

Taming big data Statistics on big data have continued to stun in the past 12 months, and ways of controlling it and benefiting from it are a high priority for businesses everywhere. Two years ago, SAP developed the first version of HANA, the inmemory database analytics tool. Now, it’s just entered its fifth stage of development and SAP believes that the rest of the industry is starting to realise the importance of its capabilities.

Even Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was critical of the idea at first, according to Ingo Brenckmann, Product Manager, SAP. www.cnmeonline.com

“He called us complete lunatics and asked where we were getting our drugs from. So now that companies like Microsoft are moving into this type of analytic, we’re proud,” Brenckmann said.

“The fifth version has incorporated text analysis. This is a brilliant feature because it now gives people the chance not just to view data and sort it, but to analyse it in context. For example, you can now use HANA to not only see how many people are tweeting about SAP, but what they’re actually saying - is the response negative or positive, what are the main issues, what are the thoughts and numbers and what do they represent? The power of this instantaneous data is crucial to companies working in this digital era,” he added.

Brenckmann said he believes that the big data issue is a snowballing effect. He said that the speed of business and the growth of data is causing companies to take great measures to consolidate it, which creates more data. This cycle has demanded a response from companies like SAP, which strongly feels that HANA is the answer.

“People used to take a sample of data to analyse situations in business. Now, with the pace of change so great, businesses want to keep complete data, needed or unneeded, refer to complete data and then make discoveries and decisions based upon this data. HANA provides this service,” Brenckmann added.

The reason SAP is putting so much emphasis onto HANA is that it isn’t just an in-memory database. HANA is now a complete software package that supports applications and runs servers through it, on top of the analytics and data control element. It’s truly one of a kind according to SAP. With HANA, businesses can implement entire applications from scratch. It stops them needing a Web server or an application server – everything is connected through one server.

“We’re trying to provide a completely new user experience, keeping our customers mobile and free all the while,” Brenckmann said.

“No other company is providing what we are at the moment - they’re behind and are just starting to realise this isn’t such a dumb idea after all.”

The simplicity of products hasn’t been abandoned on any front by SAP. Deploying or hiring HANA couldn’t be easier.

Businesses can fully benefit from HANA on a month by month cloud based purchase.

Alternatively, they can acquire HANA and have an engineer fit the software with each element fully set-up, attach it to the network and begin using it.

Bill McDermott concluded in his keynote that HANA is the ultimate collaboration of mobility, data and tapping the value chain.

“This is true innovation,” he said. “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone - that’s a fact.”

Bill McDermott, co-CEO, SAP

Focusing on the future SAP also used the event to pour a huge amount of emphasis into its commitment to the next generation of IT leaders, announcing a new e-learning platform which aims to train and educated 100,000 youths and help cut unemployment figures.

Assisting new users, improving customer experience and setting plans in motion for

Customers are 40% more likely to buy if something is marketed on a social platform. This is already proved, so now we just need to build upon it.” www.cnmeonline.com

the future of technology were the key themes from a successful Sapphire Now, and SAP were quick to thank everyone who attended the event.

SAP wants to provide total management of a new consumer lifestyle for these customers, and the announcement of 360 Customer, run through HANA, was the logical way to conclude. 360 Customer aims to provide real-time analytics, allowing businesses to transform insight into intelligence and engage with customers oneto-one and in context.

The new application uses HANA to accelerate transaction processing, leading to faster response times, McDermott said. december 2012

Computer News Middle East

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Analysis Infrastructure Strategies

Evolving infrastructure Cloud, virtualisation and disaster recovery dominated discussion in an insightful day at Infrastructure Strategies 2012.

M

ajor players from the IT world gathered in Dubai Marina on November 21 for the 2012 Infrastructure Strategies event, hosted by Computer News Middle East.

A list of high profile speakers discussed with an energetic crowd, in detail, the latest IT trends affecting and influencing infrastructure management.

The traditional data centre, virtualisation, disaster recovery and cloud were all hot topics, as they have been throughout the last year.

Speakers took to the stage to offer insight and raise questions concerning the subjects, before taking part in a panel discussion on quantifying the benefits of infrastructure investment.

The keynote was presented by Deepak Satya, Head of Transformation Services, IT IS Practice, Cognizant, who travelled in from India to be present.

Satya spoke about the importance of flexibility in an infrastructure service model, saying that it isn’t an easy task but everybody is responsible for injecting a level of flexibility into infrastructure.

“IT is such a rapidly changing environment that the services must be 14

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flexible and open to change to adapt to this model. The technology that worked well for us previously will not take us to the future and the future is today, so there needs to be a swift change in flexibility,” he said.

Next to speak was Dell’s Enterprise Product Manager, Basil Ayass. He discussed the upcoming trends in the building of future data centres by referring to ‘millennial’ users, which are those born in the Internet generation and subsequently have high expectations of technology in the workplace.

Ayass made a clear point that these millennial users aren’t receiving the technology they demand and that businesses are outdated, which is affecting performance and productivity.

“The millennial generation users expect choice of device, access anywhere, unlimited email and fast Internet. They get it at home but they don’t get it at work,” he said.

Always-on infrastructure Savio Tovar Dias, Head of Technical Operations, Avaya, then delivered his presentation on building an ‘always-on’, flexible infrastructure for business. Dias argued that the future of strategy was influenced by a few major trends – namely, www.cnmeonline.com

mobility, BYOD, cloud and video (i.e. collaboration, surveillance etc.).

“The old network needs to evolve to support the way people will collaborate,” he said.

Following the break, the topic shifted towards disaster recovery (DR), with which Ahmad Amayri, Support Consultant at Novell, and Sebastian Samuel, IT Group Manager at AW Rostamani, discussed the consequences on downtime and gave examples of real DR plan deployments.

Amayri pointed out that the total economic damage from disaster in 2009 was $41.3BN, whilst Samuel stated that despite most failures and disruptions being power, hardware, network or software related, disaster recovery is still vital to an enterprise.

“The key questions to ask in a business impact analysis are how much data can I afford to lose and what’s the total cost of downtime? Companies should decide the right approach for disaster recovery – IT should not be an overdose to the business,” he said.

The presentations concluded with Etisalat Product Marketing and Management, Data Centre Hosting and Cloud IaaS, Jitendra Kapoor, who put forward many points surrounding the move to a virtualised environment.

“There’s a radical shift in computing patterns today to renting IT resources – in other words, cloud computing,” he said.

“Today’s IT manager now needs more than just cost benefits – it’s also about manageability, agility and productivity.”

Once all speakers had finished with their presentations, they returned to the stage to discuss reasons behind the lack of cloud adoption in the region and IT infrastructure predictions for the year ahead.

“There are too many options to pick the major trends of 2013 – virtualisation and cloud are up there but also security is critical, especially in regards to these topics we’ve discussed today,” Amayri said.

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said it can markedly enhance trust levels among the enterprise

78%

said it inspires innovation

85%

connect with customers

85% welcomed its ability to

of respondents noted increased intra-agency collaboration

86%

The survey also showed off the influence of social media in the workplace...

media is beneficial in forming job-yielding partnerships and opportunities

76% claimed social

Nearly of the respondents said that technology could help provide access to critical job market data.

80%

conduit for a new ‘virtual job market’

75% saw it as a

The results reveal that social media can have a dramatic impact on job creation and employment opportunities...

86%

mentioned substantial customer engagement options

said a capacity to tap into wider markets

cited multifaceted marketing potential

91% 86% 85%

THE REASON

agreeing it contributed to their business success

The report hailed social media as a critical tool for start-ups across the Arab world, with

The findings of a first-of-its-kind survey by the Dubai School of Government (DSG) revealed that the majority of enterprises in the Middle East see social media as a way of increasing collaboration, connecting with customers, inspiring innovation and enhancing workforce trust. The survey – which DSG conducted in partnership with SAP – collated data from close to 5,000 respondents in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, Oman, Egypt and Jordan.

As the basis for developing new products

To raise awareness/change the mind set

For customer support/quality assurance and..

As an educational tool.

I don’t use social media in my enterprise

As a tool to support/promote enterprises

0.00

55%

To provide access to broader martkets

55%

Mistrust of Social Media: e.g. investors may not be comfortable with the new financing model of ‘crowdsourcing’ through social networks, not enough trust in social media-based business models, etc.

64%

Reputational Damage: e.g. negative customer feedback/interaction can spread just a wisely as good PR

Legal infrastructure: e.g. there is no legal infrastructure to protect business models based on intellectual property right/strict privacy laws can be introduced

5.00

10.00

15.00

(percentage of resondents)

20.00

The primary use of social media within your enterprise is:

63%

Government regulations: e.g there in unvertainty in internet restrictions, and especially related to social media in the Arab region, because of the ‘Arab spring’ (censorship, monitoring, blocking social media)

(percentage of resondents)

Social media can have the following drawbacks for business:

25.00

84%

costs/overhead (associated with creating a 72% Lowering business) real-time view of personal behavior of 73% Proving stakeholders Reducing mismatch between planning and implementaion 74% by enabling better research on market rends a more ‘entrepreneurial’ generation by integrating collaborate and innovative networking tools 75% Creating the cost/time for reaching out to a large customer base 79% Reducing

October 2012

Produced by the Dubai School of Government’s Governance and Innovation Program in partnership with SAP

Social Media, Employment and Entrepreneurship: New frontiers for the Economic Empowerment of Arab Youth?

(percentage of resondents)

Social media can reduce risk associated with entrepreneurship through:

pointed to its overall potential to raise awareness and instil entrepreneurial mindsets

ROUND-UP Month in view

du, Equinix to create ME’s first carrier-neutral data hub

du has entered into an alliance to deliver data centre and interconnection services to customers in the Middle East.

The alliance, with global interconnection and data centre

company Equinix, will establish a carrier-neutral hub where carriers, content providers, cloud providers, and financial service and enterprise customers can store critical data infrastructure.

Similar hubs are located around the world, but this is the first of its kind in the Middle East region.

To underpin the alliance’s initial business offering, Equinix has acquired and will operate a

newly built international business exchange (IBX) data centre facility in Dubai, which has a capacity of 44,000 square feet and approximately 650 cabinets.

The first phase of the data centre is expected to be completed and open for business by January 1 2013. Equinix expects to invest approximately $40 million for the acquisition, upgrade and future expansion of the site.

Wynyard Group opens Dubai office

Acquisition

Cisco revealed it intends to acquire Meraki, a vendor of technology for cloud based management of wireless LAN, security appliances and mobile devices, for $1.2bn.

PaaS market to see sharp growth The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market will grow to $1.2bn this year, up from last year’s $900m take, as vendors and customers seek easier ways to create new applications and customise existing ones, according to Gartner. PaaS spending will rise to $1.5bn in 2013, whilst reaching $2.9bn by 2016, Gartner said.

Computer News Middle East

Risk management software company Wynyard Group has opened an office in Dubai to serve its growing customer base in the Middle East.

Wynyard Group provides advanced software solutions for operational risk management, intelligence and investigations, helping companies and countries better assess threats, manage risk and disrupt criminal activities.

The company already has significant customers in the Middle East, including providing Dubai Airports with the advanced risk managed platform, Methodware Kairos.

It said its increased demand from other Middle East organisations, including financial services and critical infrastructure providers, led to its decision to form a base in the region.

december 2012

www.cnmeonline.com

Net profit at Cisco jumped 18% to $2.1bn in the three months to 27 October 2012 following increased sales and cost cutting measures. Its share subsequently rose nearly 7% in after-hours trading in the US.

Cisco

Samsung’s wildly successful Galaxy S III smartphone hit the 30 million sales mark in its five months on the market. The smartphone has moved much faster than the Galaxy S II, which sold 10 million in the same time last year.

Galaxy S III A twist in the tale at Microsoft as Steven Sinofsky, the executive in charge and driving force behind Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, left the company only two weeks after the launch of the new OS.

Steven Sinofsky

Steve Wozniak said he is worried that Microsoft is becoming more creative and innovative than Apple, the company he co-founded.

18

WHAT’S HOT?

Dell reported a sharp drop in revenue and profits as the weak PC market continued to weigh on its results. Dell’s net income for the third quarter was $475m, down from $893m a year earlier – a steep 47% slide.

Dell

WHAT’S NOT?

Acquisition

Brocade announced that it will acquire privately held software-based networking company Vyatta in an all-cash transaction. It expects to close the acquisition by the end of the calendar year.

Autonomy RIM to launch misled about BlackBerry 10 on finances, HP says Jan 30 HP is taking an $8.8 billion charge as a result of what it called serious accounting improprieties that occurred at UK software company Autonomy before it acquired the firm in 2011.

Taking the charge into account, HP suffered a $6.9 billion loss in its fourth fiscal quarter. HP CEO Meg Whitman said Autonomy misled HP about the state of its business before the acquisition. HP has notified authorities and will help criminal investigations, she said.

The majority of the impairment charge resulting from the Autonomy acquisition was “linked to serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy Corporation plc that occurred prior to HP’s acquisition of Autonomy,” Whitman said.

Whitman later revealed that HP remains “100 percent committed” to Autonomy and will continue to invest in and support its products.

Research In Motion will launch BlackBerry 10 and the two first smartphones based on the operating system on Jan 30, the company revealed.

The event will happen simultaneously in multiple countries around the world, according to RIM. The operating system

was originally due sometime before the end of the year.

By starting from the ground up with a touch-based user interface, the company thinks it can once again become competitive with Apple’s iPhones and the Android camp led by Samsung on device sales.

EMEA IT spending to grow in 2013 IT spending in the EMEA region will reach $1.154 trillion in 2013, a 1.4 percent increase from 2012’s projected spending of $1.138 trillion, according to Gartner.

In the MEA region, mobile phone shipments will dominate the market, with tablet adoption increasing through to 2016, Gartner said.

“The EMEA region will return to growth in 2013 and continue to grow through 2016 when spending will reach $1.247 trillion,” said Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP, Gartner.

www.cnmeonline.com

Intel CEO Paul Otellini will retire as an officer and director of the company in May, ending a fourdecade career with the corporation.

New UAE cyberlaw punishes political dissidents A new cyberlaw issued

by UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan provides for the imprisonment of persons who use the Internet to “deride or to damage the reputation or the stature” of the state or any of its institutions, including officials of the government and the monarchy.

Emirates to use HP ElitePad 900 for new in-flight service Emirates Airlines staff will use the HP ElitePad 900 tablet as the primary interface for its new ‘Knowledge-driven Inflight Services’ (KIS), making the airline the first global customer of the tablet.

KIS on the HP ElitePad 900 is an innovative inflight communication and customer relationship management (CRM) system that enables Emirates’ pursers to work more efficiently with cabin crew to deliver personalised service and attention to detail.

“Emirates constantly seeks ways to enhance our december 2012

customers’ experience,” said Kevin Griffiths, Senior VP, Cabin Crew, Emirates Airlines.

“We selected the HP ElitePad 900 to power KIS because of its sleek design and light weight, which allows our staff to provide the highest levels of service to our customers, whilst maintaining the ruggedness and security measures needed from an enterprise class device.”

Announced in October 2012, the HP ElitePad 900 is a tablet for the enterprise that is tailor-made for Emirates’ KIS application, the company said.

Computer News Middle East

19

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ComputerNewsME We’re in Paris and Madrid simultaneously today! In Madrid we’ve just had the latest #HANA in-memory update. New text analysis features.

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Candidates emerge to succeed Intel CEO Otellini

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CIO Spotlight Ahmed Al Ahmed

Sun, sand and CIO Born and bred in the UAE, Nakheel’s Ahmed Ebrahim Al Ahmed has gone from decoding cassette tapes as a child to working on one of the first successful mobile telecommunication satellite launches to winning CNME’s CIO of the year award, and he’s not nearly finished.

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december 2012

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A

TIMELINE 1988 Develops first computer programme at a first-of-kind extra-curriculum class in his junior school.

1993 Enrols at the University of UAE, the region’s first university, as a major in Computer Science.

1999 Oversees the Earth Station at Thuraya during one of the first ever mobile telecommunications satellite launches.

2000 Becomes engineer of TestBed at Thuraya, a unique research platform.

2002 Takes on role as Senior Engineer Network Developer at Thuraya.

2006 Undertakes a self-funded Masters Degree at the University of Wollongong, Dubai in Quality Management.

2010 Becomes Executive Manager of IT at Thuraya.

2011 Moves to Nakheel as CIO.

2012

Wins CNME’s CIO of the year award.

www.cnmeonline.com

hmed Ebrahim Al Ahmed has come a long way since dismantling computers for fun behind the scenes of his family run computer retail business. The now CIO of Nakheel Real Estates began his career in IT at the early age of 13 when he enrolled himself at his school’s first after-class computer basics course.

“I was dismantling and installing computers, working on DOS and Windows 3.1, really old stuff. So by the time I’d started learning basic computer language, it was a piece of cake for me. I used a TV which plugged into the computer, we didn’t even have monitors,” he says.

“This prompted my affection for IT and computers.

It was around grade 7 and I didn’t look back. I remember building my first programme, simply for the fun of it. I built a question and anaswer game.”

With Ahmed’s love for computers taking a stronghold so early in his life, he explains how he has had the privilege to witness the entire history and growth of telecommunications and IT, especially in the Middle East. When the time came for him to move into higher education, there was no deliberation. Ahmed enrolled as a student of the University of UAE as a major in computer science.

“It was 1993 when I enrolled into university – the first institute in the country. I really enjoyed my time there.

In fact I was recently invited back. I have a really good relationship with them. It was the first major step in my career really,” he says.

Building from blueprints Following graduation from the university with full bachelor honours, Ahmed took a job at Thuraya, a satellite based telecommunications company based out in the desert near Sharjah. The company covers 145 countries, with Etisalat being the major shareholder.

After his first role as an engineer of technical IT support, Ahmed took to overseeing the entire earth station during one of the first ever telecommunication satellite launches.

The earth station covered all ground based elements of the project and Ahmed was responsible for checking the general development of the technology during its construction.

During this time, Thuraya was a paper based project and everything was in the planning phase, which Ahmed claims was the most exciting part.

“When you work on a project which is just an idea, it’s very exciting. The satellite was built by Boeing and was one of the first three satellites to be launched. It was a totally new technology so we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. It was a nervous time for everybody.

“Just a few months before we had the satellite taken out into the centre of the Pacific Ocean and launched. The Sea Launch project attempted to launch december 2012

Computer News Middle East

23

CIO Spotlight Ahmed Al Ahmed

the first ICO mobile telecoms satellite, but it failed and crashed into the ocean. This sent the entire company into panic.”

Ahmed recalls exactly what the news report from the event read: “The Sea Launch venture experienced the agony of defeat on Sunday when its Zenit rocket veered off course and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, destroying the first ICO mobile communications satellite.”

Thankfully for Ahmed and Thuraya, their satellite launched in October 2000 without issue, and Ahmed then moved on to manage a new segment named TestBed. This initiative was designed as a research centre for testing new patches and ideas. It incorporated a small part of every element of the earth station and was used as a type of simulator for testing and developing purposes.

“It was my decision to move over to TestBed,” Ahmed says. “They liked my style and the opportunity came up, so I took it. Even though I was working in telecoms, I was gaining my knowledge of IT because it was the same thing really.”

Ahmed was asked to go on a two-month training course in Ireland the very next day.

“I’d travelled a few times but never for two months, - it was nerve wracking,” he says. “I got there on the third day and had missed one and a half days of training.

“I walked into the class and sat with one of my colleagues. The teacher was speaking English but to me it could have been Chinese. He was talking, talking, talking. I had been rushed, I hadn’t slept, I didn’t know what telecoms was and I still couldn’t understand a word he was saying - it was very difficult. But they told me I would catch up, and thankfully I did. It’s a logic and once you understand that it’s relatively easy. Then luckily for me, the technology moved really quickly into IT. We had value added services and IT based systems,

so at that time I considered myself to have made a pretty good decision.”

Back to school Ahmed continued to work his way up through the ranks at Thuraya and in 2006 his passion for learning and gaining knowledge led him to enrol himself, self-funded, at the University of Wollongong in Dubai as a master of quality management.

It was during this time that Ahmed really proved his commitment to IT and his career. After each full working day at Thuraya. he would drive 110km to class and study from six to 10.

“I always wanted to keep learning. It’s not just about computers for me, but also about learning new life skills. I took so much from that course and other courses that I’ve done since. I’m an accredited auditor now as well and I’ll continue to keep learning at my own expense for as long as I can,” he states.

Ahmed eventually left Thuraya in 2011 after 13 successful years, going out as the executive manager of IT. The opportunity to take on the role as CIO of Nakheel, the company responsible for the world famous Palm Islands, had arisen and considering the recent market crash, Ahmed sensed an opportunity for a project with which he could leave his mark.

“I left Thuraya because after 13 years things had become routine for me. The earth station was complete and I felt I needed to challenge myself again. Nakheel impressed me because even though they had recently suffered the real estate crash, they had a vision to become stable again and start recording solid growth. I sensed an opportunity as well as a challenge.”

When you work on a project which is just an idea, it’s very exciting. The satellite was built by Boeing and was one of the first three satellites to be launched. It was a totally new technology so we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. It was a nervous time for everybody.”

24

Computer News Middle East

december 2012

www.cnmeonline.com

Award winning progress Ahmed has been CIO of Nakheel for just over one year and has already succeeded in that challenge. He claims that the vision set by him and his team has enabled the company to operate easily and efficiently.

His dedication to a family environment, and his initiatives and flair, at Nakheel bagged him the ellusive CIO of the year honour at CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2012.

However, the recognition hasn’t caused him to rest on his laurels. Ahmed claims that one day he may want to move on again.

“I could see myself doing another big project. I’m very happy here at Nakheel and we’re doing very well, but I don’t know what the future holds. I’m certainly confident that I can head another project some day,” he concludes.

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case study Emcor Facilities Services

Unchartered shores A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Emcor Facilities Services (EFS) says this snippet of wisdom was its driving inspiration when it ventured into the unknown with the Middle East’s first private cloud implementation.

M

ost organisations can be separated into two areas when it comes to IT – those that wait for new technologies to prove successful before jumping on the bandwagon, and those that risk failure in order to lead and pioneer.

There are of course positives and negatives to both.

Those that play it safe are reducing on potential challenges, but are probably not going to get the same benefits as those that reap the first rewards of that new technology.

The latter, on the other hand, are rolling the dice.

They’re delving into the unknown and as such can win big or lose badly.

The latter are also a rarer species, but it would certainly be safe to say EFS falls into that category. The

total integrated facilities management (FM) provider decided to implement something that hadn’t been done in the Middle East before – a private cloud.

EFS, which operates 15 companies across the MENASA region, offers large service infrastructure and FM professionals with specific expertise, currently managing 100 projects valued in excess of AED1 billion and employing over 1,000 FM professionals.

It manages its clients’ assets by optimising the lifecycle of their facilities. Assets are maintained by recording and analysing their service data history.

“Our key clients’ facilities are over three million square meters in area, which indicates they are large government establishments spread geographically with enormous data to be analysed,” says Terence Sathyanarayan, Head of Group Technology, EFS. In such an environment, high availability computing that is on-time and with anytime access is demanded, so EFS embarked on a large and ambitious project to consolidate infrastructure, integrate all disparate systems and create a centralised infrastructure from its head office in Dubai.

“This model embraces service-oriented architecture, along with governance and industry best practices, and encapsulates these factors into a new high availability data centre to ensure business and IT continuity,” Sathyanarayan says.

A necessary move

If EFS hadn’t upgraded, updated, consolidated and standardised its technology portfolio, Sathyanarayan says it would have struggled to streamline backend processes to reflect industry best practices.

“Our approach was to deliver infrastructure-asa-service (IaaS) by rapidly deploying a hybrid-private cloud and at the same time ensuring this does not affect the bottom line of depleting project budgets,” he adds.

A key reason for EFS moving to the cloud was to relieve the IT burden on existing budgets as with the hardware no longer on-premise, each operating company only has to pay for connectivity.

26

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december 2012

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However, Sathyanarayan adds that another key reason was in order to use Oracle JD Enterprise One as its business application system.

“Being a Tier 1 application, it required a competent technology delivery platform. Delivering a full technology stack within quick turnaround, lower CAPEX and ensured compliance can only come with the costs that cloud computing permits,” he says.

EFS carried out an in-depth cost benefit analysis of hosted verses in-house data centre environments, and also got a validation by an external feasibility audit from CapGemini, before deciding on hosting its infrastructure and applications.

“This then led to the initiative to construct a ‘hybrid-private’ cloud. Our experience in maintaining one of the largest data centres in the region led us to the decision to focus on our core business, which is FM. In our opinion, building and operating data centres should be left to IT organisations,” Sathyanarayan says.

“The idea in this project was to migrate to a model where we would invest only in core infrastructure and move the rest to a lease model that would allow us to focus our future investments in people, process and applications, instead of capital expenditure,” he adds.

Its strategy was to migrate its systems to a hybrid model, which involves investing in high-end computing hardware and security like servers and firewalls, and where the data centre infrastructure – including core switching, perimeter security, load balancers and storage area networks – would all be leased.

Sathyanarayan says this concept of reducing overheads by outsourcing IT was welcomed by the board at EFS. “The objective was to undertake initiatives and invest in technologies that would help us boost the bottom line for the company and, although the cloud model itself continues to be smoky for many in this region, we leveraged the mature components to deliver a solution with agility,” he says.

EFS like to keep its IT team lean – it currently stands at around seven – because of its preference of outsourcing IT. It handled strategy changes on-premise, but leaves the day-to-day processes to the service provider.

“The idea is that because our business is facilities management we didn’t want to focus on IT,” Sathyanarayan says. “When it comes to server and security management, you need a plethora of IT services on site, and we didn’t want that to hit our bottom line.

We didn’t want to block our CAPEX in resources and IT we wanted to outsource that and pay as we go.

“Here at EFS we are business managers, not IT managers. We want to make sure human resource, which is normally 60% of a company’s budget, is not hitting the

Terence Sathyanarayan, Head of Group Technology, EFS

bottom line. So we outsourced it and that came in as an OPEX - a running cost - so it doesn’t hit the PNL.”

Unique concept

The project involved a unique hybrid build-out of a private cloud - set up for production, staging and business continuity management, along with a disaster recovery environment - that all leveraged eHosting DataFort’s (eHDF) data centres in Dubai Outsource Zone (DOZ) and Dubai Internet City (DIC).

A key reason why eHDF was chosen, Sathyanarayan says, is because EFS’ selection process of reviewing five competent vendors identified it as the only fully managed service provider (MSP) on the telecom provider’s backbone at the time of the selection exercise.

“We also must not forget the most important element in any technology delivery success story, which is people. Therefore, the incumbent MSP we chose had to have a pool of highly qualified resources that doubled up as our outsourced IT department, which is what eHDF had,” Sathyanarayan says.

Another of the key considerations of the project was strong local support, and Sathyanarayan says this was one of the major advantages of working with eHDF. “Although we were working with market leaders from outside the region (we currently use JD Edwards Oracle on demand from the UK), for this particular project we wanted to ensure our hardware and data were within national boundaries,” he says. “eHDF was also the only MSP with three production and disaster recovery data centres in the vicinity of Dubai. Both data centres were in different seismic zones. Furthermore, in an economic climate as we are in today, price was of course the ultimate www.cnmeonline.com

december 2012

EFS currently manages 100 projects valued in excess of

$1bn

Computer News Middle East

27

case study Emcor Facilities Services

30% of the work was already done due to eHDF’s data centres being ISO compliant.

deciding factor and eHDF managed to meet our expectations,” he adds.

With eHDF’s data centres ISO compliant, it meant that 30% of the work was already done.

The other 70% was internal processes and EFS appointed external auditor ITB (IT Butler e-Services FZ-LLC) to come in and perform vulnerability assessments and penetration testing to assure the systems were watertight from a security perspective.

“Before doing that we checked the background of IT Butler. We signed an SLA with them and they do all of our security testing. We needed someone independent from eHDF because they advised us on what SLAs we needed between us and eHDF,” says Trilok Mohnani, Senior IT Infrastructure Officer, EFS. Furthermore, Mohnani dispels the myth that switching to the cloud involves more security concerns than an on-premise data centre.

“Whenever you deploy any new IT project, you have to think about security, but when you move into the private cloud the security concerns are the same as implementing your own data centre,” he says.

The only real difference, he adds, is the need for “extremely stringent and tight” SLAs with the service provider due to their access to EFS’ data.

“There is a completely different mechanism rule book when it comes to forming an SLA with a cloud service provider. We had to define what access they had and if there is a termination of contract, how we get all of those things back. We spent a good amount of time on that,” he says.

However, the project was not completely smooth, Sathyanarayan admits.

“If there’s one way to describe a smooth project – it’s a pipe dream. Any experienced project directors will admit that building the region’s first-of-its-kind private cloud is not without its challenges, especially when the technology used is unchartered territory for many,” he says.

The key challenges for EFS was using specifically selected hardware and integrating it into the data centre infrastructure, as opposed to public cloud where the service provider leases its own choice of hardware.

EFS expressed a desire to use the Oracle Spark T4 servers on a Solaris 11 platform and wouldn’t compromise for anything less, and as such the hybrid setup was necessary.

Big success

The project went live in July following a six-month implementation and, despite the challenges, Sathyanarayan calls it a big success.

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Trilok Mohnani, Senior IT Infrastructure Officer, EFS

“All credit has to go to the project management team from EFS, Oracle and eHDF and the experienced steering committee that all together delivered the project successfully. It was a massive challenge, but with professionalism and a strong working relationship, we succeeded and made the idea a reality,” he says.

The secret to this success, he believes, was EFS’ decision to get its IT systems ISO 27001-certified during the implementation process. It remains the only FM company in the Middle East to have that certification.

“This ensured the IT systems were installed as per industry best practices and it meant that security standards and bench marks were set high to ensure confidentiality, integrity and authority of our data,” he says.

The project has enabled EFS to standardise its business processes and reduce CAPEX, while data loss prevention was also enabled across the organisation.

“This was a very critical aspect as we have a very unique method of working. The project also gave us security across the organisation and the ability to be proactive to client requirements and provide agile solutions. We don’t have to re-deploy ERP anymore for other regions and locations and, being on the cloud, our users can access the system anytime and anywhere, so long as they have an Internet connection,” Sathyanarayan says.

“We could leverage the high performing infrastructure of eHDF on the network and storage areas at a fraction of the cost as compared to purchasing dedicated solutions and implementing them ourselves.”

case study Rotana

A cutting-edge retreat Some argue that digital communication is reducing the human element of customer service. However, Rotana Group believes differently, and has implemented a cutting edge technology communication solution to enhance the hotel experience for its customers.

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T

he Rotana Group may own a wide selection of hotels that pride themselves on their historic and cultural elements, but it doesn’t think about the past when it comes to innovation.

In this fashion, the hotel chain has been working hard to improve customer experience by introducing technical solutions that increase communication between customers and staff, improve speed of service, and save time on tasks such as check out and booking.

The answer to these questions came in the form of a next generation mobile app which boasts a healthy set of innovative features, bringing the hotel experience up to date.

The app was designed as a way of connecting pre-existing customers and potential customers by using different methods of communication. It includes features related to room service, checking out, and booking taxis, as well as sending guests a notification prior to their arrival allowing them to pre-book services such as spa treatments and hotel led tours.

“We didn’t take long to get the app up and running,” says Samir Abi Frem, Corporate Vice President, Rotana Group. “We planned and designed it over about 18 months and then it went live in around three or four months. We designed the app ourselves; the requirements and features. We then outsourced it to a French company which created it for us.”

On top of this, the hotel chain wanted to include an innovative way of bringing customers and staff closer together that went past a click of a button. It subsequently became the first group in the Middle East to pilot a video-enabled customer service, as well as a next generation communications option which can enhance the customers travel, delivering a more personal and experimental level of interaction.

With the help of Avaya, it implemented a video call centre based in Abu Dhabi, which is capable of dealing with thousands of calls.

Calling the vendor

The integration of the call centre for video and audio calling began once the mobile app was built.

According to Frem, Avaya was chosen for its proven ability in the hospitality sector, and it delivered the technology via systems integrator LB Consulting.

We work on a standard platform; we use different vendors with different products.

In this case, the implementation of new technology can complicate things. But we anticipated this early and it was included in our plans - there wasn’t any surprises for us in that sense.”

“We made a shortlist of vendors and then decided to go with Avaya. It’s a complicated system for us; their team from the States helped design it and made things very simple for us. The voice recognition system, however, was completed by another company as they don’t provide that feature,” Frem says.

The call centre allows guests to contact a real person at any time to discuss room bookings, loyalty rewards and services. However, the video service has not yet gone live due to a number of hurdles involved with the deployment.

“We haven’t been able to complete the video service yet because we want to make sure all the issues are cleared up before we do,” Frem says. “We have to build specific areas into the call centres where the cameras can go, train the staff situated on the calls, and get all the equipment to the locations, which has been an issue at customs in some areas, so there are a lot of things we need to settle before we complete it.”

Despite the hurdles with the video service, the implementation of audio call centre went ahead successfully and the next stage was to make sure that the Rotana employees were adequately trained for the service.

“Avaya stayed with us throughout the training period. Our staff needed to be trained on elements like analysing the traffic and working the voice control. The implementers stayed with us for two weeks and Avaya are available for us at any time if we require additional assistance,” Frem explains.

“Our IT teams vary in numbers depending on the hotel size. We are a smart chain and we maintain a high standard of service within our hotels.

Therefore, making sure we’re fully trained to be able to deal with new deployments is very critical to us. Everything is becoming about IT, everything www.cnmeonline.com

december 2012

18 months of planning and design prior to project going live.

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case study Rotana

100% increase in investments over the last decade for Rotana.

is based on servers. The importance of our role as a team is constantly evolving.”

Integrating infrastructure

Frem says that one of the more complicated elements of the deployment was integrating the new technology into the existing infrastructure.

“We work on a standard platform; we use different vendors with different products. In this case, the implementation of new technology can complicate things. But we anticipated this early and it was included in our plans - there wasn’t any surprises for us in that sense.”

The mobile app includes a feature named ‘click to call’ which is associated with the call centre.

Enabling this option will connect the customer with the call centre instantly, offering the option of voice recognition or a live conversation.

The increased technology being used may cause an argument focused around a loss of the human touch in an industry powered by customer care. However, Frem is convinced that the implementation of this technology just offers more options for customers who aren’t always able to speak to someone directly. Moreover, it also assists those who actually wish to talk directly to hotel staff.

“The IT business is breaking more distance between client and hotel, but in everything we do we consider this. It’s a challenging point for many hotel services. We trusted Avaya to find the right solution for our mobile users who wish to speak to operators.

Yes, you can surf through the app, but now you’re also just one simple click away if you wish to connect with a personalised service. With this implementation, you can talk instantly to anyone, and very soon you’ll be able to see that person too. It doesn’t kill the personalised element at all.”

A key reason for the delay in the launch of the live video calling is that Rotana has had to build the dedicated video calling areas from scratch. The designers have been developing special rooms with sound proof settings and neutral surroundings, all adding to the experience.

Everything is becoming about IT, everything is based on servers. The importance of our role as a team is constantly evolving.”

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Samir Abi Frem, Corporate Vice President, IT, Rotana Group

Such a large project requires a healthy budget, which Frem says has been approved by an understanding management team.

“Our budget has obviously increased with the evolution of IT and the importance of our department as a result. Over the last decade our investments have risen 100%. We would complete deployments of around AED4 million in the past, now it could be up to AED200/300 million, but that’s dependent on the hotel size of course,” he says.

But as Frem explains, after the design, implementation and deployment phases comes the best part for Rotana and Avaya - seeing the rewards.

“We’re not the final user, so the best part is yet to come. We now get to see what the reaction is towards the innovations and then we can judge its success – it’s an exciting period.”

The exciting times won’t end there for Rotana as the hotel brand is constantly looking to evolve its services and has even begun doing so, he adds.

“We’re still innovating new services with Avaya.

We’re working a new telephony system and network solutions. After this deployment we started working on a new deployment for our London hotels. Also, we now have the knowledge and partnerships to be able to create any app we want. Effectively, we could design, create and implement a new app - perhaps a staff app. We want to continue to improve our service and that doesn’t necessarily mean implementing new solutions for our customers, but also for our staff, so in turn they can better do their jobs.”

case study Emarat

Keeping compliance When Emarat’s IT security team could no longer manually keep up with what was occurring on the network, it decided to implement a network access control (NAC) solution.

Wahib M. Yusuf, IT Security Administrator, Emarat

E

marat is the UAE’s leading national petroleum brand and, as such, implementing the right security solutions to keep on top of its network is vital.

From a security perspective, Emarat uses antivirus, different kinds of firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, different monitoring solutions and SIEM, which gives it an intelligence to see what’s happening on the network.

“We’re vendor-agnostic, which I think works best because we’re not stuck with one vendor and different vendors have particular solutions that are best fit,” says Wahib M. Yusuf, IT Security Administrator, Emarat.

Its main security solution is log management, which Yusuf says is vital to Emarat’s system.

“Without log management we would have to every day check firewall logs, server logs and different network device logs. You cannot do it 34

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because one device can have thousands of logs per day, so having this system where these logs have intelligence to see if there are any issues with that device is vital,” he says.

With an IT team very small compared to the size of its operations, it made managing its large amount of security products very difficult.

“Before we turned to a solution we basically had just normal day to day administration for network access control,” Yusuf says. “We had to physically check to see if our computers were updated. It was just manual processing – there was nothing automated.”

When it reached a stage where the IT team could not keep up with doing these manual checks every day, Yusuf decided a NAC solution was required.

“The NAC is a hardware appliance that sits on the network and then it checks to make sure that

A week after the deployment, Emarat went from around 70% to

85%

in overall compliance

you have compliance on your network. Basically, it’s a security guard on your network to make sure that everything is in compliance. It monitors everything and gives you a dashboard view,” he says.

“The main reason we needed it was to make sure we know what is happening on the network because before we had no idea. With this solution we are able to find out.”

Following an analysis of three well known solutions in the NAC market, Emarat opted for Nanjgel and its ForeScout solution.

“Nanjgel has been with us for the last three and a half years and we had already used them for two previous projects, which was its log management solution and Web application firewall,” Yusuf says.

“So we had this history with them and they’re very good in terms of supporting the products that they’re positioning. After our analysis we found that ForeScout is very easy to set up, where as the others required complicated setups where we would have to do infrastructure upgrading for them to work.”

Like most IT projects, the implementation didn’t come without its challenges, especially when it came to operations.

“The main challenges came in operations because we’re dealing with over 700 clients, so deploying this into different areas was the main challenge,” Yusuf says. “To overcome that we had to work closely with the operations team, which handled the client side.

We had to work with them on a schedule.”

Increasing compliance

Following an on-time two-and-a-half month implementation, in which time the necessary training and knowledge transfer also took place, the NAC solution went live on Emarat’s system on November 1.

The first benefit Emarat saw was that the operations team has actually been on there because they know that there is now something monitoring whether updates are in place. However, the main benefits have come in compliance.

“Before the deployment we were at around 70 to 75 percent in terms of overall compliance,” Yusuf says. “A week after the deployment we were at about 85 percent and now two and a half weeks after deployment we’re at about 89 percent. We’re looking at 100 percent but I don’t think that’s feasible – 95 percent will be good enough and we expect to be there by the end of 2012.” www.cnmeonline.com

With the NAC solution now in place, the next priority for Yusuf and his team is ensuring the virtualisation projects Emarat is embarking upon are properly secured.

“We are currently virtualising our systems and that brings with it its own security challenges because in a physical world everything is locked up in your data centre, but in a virtual world many servers are running on one physical device,” he says.

“So we’re looking at some security solutions where we can have auditing on this virtual infrastructure. We also want to see what is going on in our databases because our critical information is sitting in there and there is no monitoring right now.”

He adds that the IT team is fortunate to have management that are completely supportive in the projects it proposes.

“They trust us in our choices and they don’t interfere in technical decisions,” he says. “In terms of choosing the vendors and technology they’re very open and trust our decision. With every project we do we tell them exactly why it’s needed so they know we have a very well structured security programme.”

Asides from keeping up with the latest trends and solutions, Yusuf believes following the news every day to keep up with the current threat landscape is just as important for an IT security administrator.

He refers to an example towards the end of last year when a threat was reported to start targeting enterprises at the beginning of 2012.

To combat this, the security team decided to cut off the Internet from December 1 to ensure there was no access coming from outside.

“So we can do those kinds of things,” Yusuf says. “We also have our logs to check to make sure dangerous malware isn’t coming in.”

Also as important is keeping Emarat’s employees educated on security threats and how they can carried out, he adds.

“Security awareness is the corner of security and given the size of the team we have at Emarat we educate the users by sending emails telling them things like not to open attachments or links in suspicious emails. It’s not a really big comprehensive security awareness programme but we do send emails and newsletters every month.”

Furthermore, next year Yusuf is keen to implement a complete awareness programme and is currently looking at vendors to collaborate with to give Emarat’s users the relevant security training. december 2012

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CLOUD TRANSFORMS I.T. Learn more at www.EMC.com.

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Solutions world

INSIDE

A mobile future

solutions world Solutions in 2013

A mobile future It has been an eventful year in the solutions world as enterprises witnessed the rise of managed services, mobility and IT as a true enabler of business transformation. But what does 2013 have in store for the Middle East?

N

ot that long ago IT was seen simply as a support service driven by the requirements of a business. Those days are gone.

These days IT is doing the driving, with the business in the passenger seat. Utilising technology enables the business to be efficient, agile and innovative. If an enterprise is not keeping up with IT, it is not keeping up with its competitors.

One of the biggest influencers on enterprise IT in 2012 has been mobility – in fact, it has changed the whole landscape of business. With the penetration of smartphones and tablets skyrocketing, people increasingly want that user experience matched in the enterprise, and businesses are realising that by embracing mobility with things like apps, they have a more direct route to their audience.

The effect of mobility has also reached the IT infrastructure of a business. People want to be able to work from anywhere, at any time and on any device. The benefits of this are obvious, but when employees start accessing work data on their own devices, it creates challenges for the IT environment.

These are all things that have been priority considerations for CIOs in 2012.

According to Cisco’s recent visual networking index forecast, mobile data traffic will grow 34-fold between 2011 and 2016 with a compound annual growth rate of 102%, whilst business mobile traffic

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will grow 12-fold with a compound annual growth rate of 65%.

Furthermore, Gartner predicts mobile devices to pass PCs to be the most common Web access tools in 2013.

This means that the significant mobility trend enterprises have witnessed this year is certain to continue in 2013.

“Enterprise mobility is set to become the main driver of enterprise transformation over the next decade,” says Sachin Bhardwaj, Head of Marketing and Business Development, eHosting DataFort.

“Key strategic trends in enterprise mobility will shape business over the next five years, including the consumerisation of IT, mobile applications, mobile enterprise security and management, and machineto-machine solutions. It provides actionable insight into local and unique adoption, supply, and emerging technology trends in EMEA’s mobile B2B market, including strategic guidance on CIO and end-user trends, vendor and service provider go-to-market strategies, channels, and market forecasting.”

Ahmed Muammar, Technology Consultant Lead, KSA, EMC, predicts a large percentage of eBusiness and eGovernment to become ‘mBusiness’ and ‘mGovernment’.

“We will see more professional smart devices applications and BYOD will bring a lot of hope after a big hype. We will see enterprise ‘drop-boxes’ and other

www.cnmeonline.com

Enterprise mobility is set to become the main driver of enterprise transformation over the next decade. Key strategic trends in enterprise mobility will shape business over the next five years, including the consumerisation of IT, mobile applications, mobile enterprise security and management, and machine-to-machine solutions.” collaboration tools become common place. Middle East social changes are too big to be ignored and mobility was a main driver for this change. Enterprises cannot simply go without adopting some solution for both its employees and customers,” he says.

Saed Sakran, GM and Acting Sales Director, Scope ME, agrees, saying any company today will now include mobility and related solutions in its budget for 2013.

“It is something that simply cannot be avoided because it is difficult to conduct business without this. As enterprises see an influx of data on their networks due to these mobile devices, they will have to consider things like network upgrades, virtualisation and managed services. Growth in data always translates to growth in ICT spending, and this spending should be across all areas of IT and not only focused on one single aspect,” he says.

King disruptor Whilst mobility has succeeded in shaking up the IT industry this year, it is impossible to take the crown of king market-disruptor away from cloud.

Cloud has been a source of major hype for several years now,

www.cnmeonline.com

Sachin Bhardwaj, Head of Marketing and Business Development, eHosting DataFort

but 2012 was really the year where early adopters first began to toy with the technology. Gartner predicts that by 2015 low-cost cloud services will cannibalise up to 15 percent of top service players’ revenue. But will 2013 be the year where we begin to see wider adoption?

“Industry players will need to drive business value as these services drive change to IT organisations. New technologies like cloud computing will enable many organisations to exploit internal capabilities to establish new business service revenue streams. Businesses are increasingly moving their computing and collaboration applications to the cloud, and their shift in IT spending reflects that change in behaviour,” Bhardwaj says.

The market is “clearly moving” towards further cloud services and the Middle East is “quite hungry”

DECEMBER 2012

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solutions world Solutions in 2013

for new cloud services, according to Fady Younes, Client Director, Cisco UAE. “We can see huge room for growth in this space. Furthermore we expect the market to have a large appetite for new consumption models for managed services and cloud services that meet the businesses financial expectations and fast growing demands within manageable budgets. Therefore a new approach is needed to free individuals and organisations from the constraints of traditional IT. We believe that cloud is part of the answer and will play a central role in the next era of ICT and managed services solutions,” he says.

While private clouds fall under the spotlight, public cloud adoption will not take off until regulations and compliance of the telecom authorities in the Middle East are formalised, says Savio Tovar Dias, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, MEA and Turkey, Avaya.

“In the meantime, several enterprises will look to build their own private cloud solutions for their enterprises, with some point public cloud solutions from the likes of Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors,” he says.

“The managed services market is trending in an upward manner moving into 2013, as more enterprises begin to understand the model and the significant commercial benefits that come along with

Fady Younes, Client Director, Cisco UAE

15% of top service players’ revenue will be cannibalised by low-cost cloud services by 2015.

Savio Tovar Dias, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, MEA & Turkey, Avaya

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this new model. We will also see more and more managed services offerings come about from various local and global vendors in the market, along with the regional service providers playing a significant role in this space.”

Despite this, Muammar believes that going forward most enterprises are looking to convert to a digital business model where the focus is shifting to data.

However, Bhardwaj maintains that mobility will be the key word in 2013 as mobile experiences move to the cloud.

“Consumerisation drives tablets into the enterprise. Cloud and mobile are mutually reinforcing trends. The bring your own device trend will accelerate in the region,” he says.

Younes concludes that the Middle East continue to be one of the most exciting and dynamic regions in the world and an important and strategic market for Cisco.

“Gulf markets are leapfrogging developed economies by embracing new business models and technologies to achieve their social and economic goals. Given the explosive growth of information and the ability to access it through Internet applications anywhere anytime, the Middle East has developed into an emerging hotspot for new technologies.”

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strategic it networking partner

network world

INSIDE

The transforming network

network world Network management

The transforming network Many have accused the networking world of overlooking and under-spending in recent years.

However, it looks set to be back on the up in 2013 as enterprises look to cut costs and embrace new technologies in network management systems.

T

he definition of IT is rapidly changing and so too is the definition of network management. It isn’t just monitoring the network devices now - mobility, security, asset management and needs for cost cutting are all affecting traditional network management.

Employees are demanding faster response times from their data centres, access from wherever they are, and secure file and data sharing – all of which put a company’s network under the spotlight. How has enterprise network coped with this these demands over the past 12 months, and how will it adapt in the coming year?

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A number of key trends will impact enterprise networks; software defined networking for a start, virtualisation, scale-out application and infrastructure models, and the increasing threat from targeted cyber attacks, to name a few. Travers Nicholas, Specialist TC Manager, EMC, explains how these trends are impacting the networks.

“These trends are driving huge growth and additional complexity in enterprise networks. As the number of nodes on any given network increases, along with the complexity of each node, we also see an increase in the volume of important information about these nodes,” he says. www.cnmeonline.com

Adding a further point on a key trend which has become such a major talking point over the past 12 months, Nicholas says some enterprise networks generate millions of events per hour.

“This is far too many events for any human to analyse with traditional rule-based tools. Network management has indeed become a ‘big data’ problem.

This means network management tools must apply analytical algorithms to vast amounts of information to learn about an environment and report back on the environment’s health. Instead of asking our network management platform if the networked-node is up or down, we will ask if the networked-node is behaving normally. Instead of asking if my network has the required capacity, we will ask when will my network run out of capacity. Our next-generation tools will provide us with these answers.”

Osama Al-Zoubi, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, Cisco Saudi, believes that to reasonably analyse network management trends, we need to discuss some of the forces of change in today’s networks.

“There are multi-dimension forces of change that are affecting service provider and enterprise networks, including mobility, personal device adaption, security challenges, accurate and timely services fulfilment, and higher demands from the network along reduction of cost,” he says.

“The first and foremost force of change is network convergence, unification and consolidation. Most service providers and enterprise CTOs and IT managers are moving towards ‘one network for all’ services. The end user’s expectation is increasing accordingly. Voice, video, integrated data, and social media are some of the basic expectations of all users, and for organisations this as a source of higher productivity and more efficiency.”

Steven Huang, Director of Solutions and Marketing, Huawei Enterprise, Middle East, turns his focus to the smaller companies, and how they will move forward in the network management space.

“A trend Huawei expects to see in the network management space is SMBs looking for more automated and leading edge network management solutions to manage the increasingly complex IT applications in use in their organisation. Information technology and applications are growing fast, and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are deploying various types of network equipment to support their key IT applications,” he says.

Travers Nicholas, Specialist TC Manager, EMC

to cloud networks in the future as new cloud computing technologies develop and become more widely used.

It appears that CIOs are becoming more and more concerned with what they should do to adequately prepare a traditional network in order to migrate to a cloud network.

What are the key impacts that virtualisation and cloud computing will have on the industry in the coming months?

“The main impact virtualisation and cloud will have on network management systems centre around new architectures that are dynamic in nature,” Nicholas says.

“The new architectures of virtualisation and cloud networks mean that the tools must be aware of the new layers, and the capabilities of the services provided at each of the new layers. The fact that they are dynamic in nature means that our network management tools must have a great deal of automation in order to be relevant. The simple fact is that it is no longer good enough to modify a network management tool so that it is virtualisation aware.

Rather, the tools need to be built from the ground up with virtualisation in mind.”

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Service, help AG, adds: “We have already seen how network management solutions have come to combine performance metrics from different solutions.

As virtualisation and cloud computing gain momentum it is certain that application performance metrics will also be a part of any serious network management solution.

Clouds in the distance It is widely accepted that enterprise services will move

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network world Network management

“This is specifically needed as cloud services are utilising a network segment - the Internet - which the organisation will have limited or no control over, therefore it is the application performance and availability that will be important for these types of services.”

Embracing mobility BOYD is a major game changer for IT. In terms of managed network services, it will have a significant impact on devices and user management, and a significant impact on the overall network management.

“IT managers are looking for ways to improve network security and better manage their organisation’s network traffic load, which becomes more of a challenge as more mobile devices are connected to the network,” Huang explains.

“Smart devices and tablets can enable better collaboration and information sharing between employees. Increased use of mobile devices is a sign that the thin-client model is workable, replacing desktop PCs and traditional networked servers which are costly and time consuming to manage. If the company’s workforce is connected to a cloud-based network, accessing it using their mobile devices and thin clients, then the cost savings can be immense.”

The obvious challenges related to the point that Huang makes is the security surrounding the network perimeter. How can you keep a network secure if an entire staff base is piercing it with data and information from the outside, at all times? On top of this problem comes the problem of managing all the additional devices which are connecting to the network.

Traditional IT would suggest that the network could adequately deal with the amount of machines connected to the servers. What BYOD does is introduce an entire new layer of management for the network.

Solling gives an example.

“Recently one of our customers had a single network requirement for 15,000 people to bring their own tablets. Seemingly a simple requirement, but network services and management of those services simply become massive when the requirements are massive, which means you cannot achieve your requirements without doing things smart,” he says.

Osama Al-Zoubi, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, Cisco Saudi

and important trends in the industry. Educating enterprises and providing the Middle East with the appropriate knowledge required in order to adapt and react to these trends is critical in the progression of the region.

A major trend that spent years surrounded in mystery is virtualisation. Such a trend will impact your network significantly, as previously mentioned. But how much of this trend does the region understand now and what is the general consensus in terms of deploying strategies?

“Many service providers and enterprises in the Middle East are considering deploying clouds-based or virtual networks, in one form or another,” Al-Zoubi says. “Some companies are ahead in their cloud plans than others, but overall there is a reasonable understanding of the power of the cloud in the region, as well as the challenges and complexities associated.”

Huang agrees with Al-Zoubi that virtualisation and cloud is being healthily embraced in the region.

“The Middle East has shown readiness for virtualisation. This is a foundation for cloud computing that enables adaptability and allows technology to do more with less, ultimately allowing for a cost reduction,” he says.

“Virtualisation is, however, only the first chapter in the potential that cloud brings to organisations all over the region. Working with our close-knit community of channel partners, we are making efforts to educate customers on the ability that cloud has to open up their business horizons.”

Education is key A key point which is raised in the majority of IT forums, conferences and roundtables you will attend will be the level of understanding towards new 46

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“We thought we’d need Dell’s help, but after the demonstration we saw how simple EqualLogic is to use and we set up our storage environment within days.”

Mohamed Raafat Atia Technical Services Manager Digital Solutions Provider

Do more with Dell networking and storage Solutions See how Dell helped Saudi services and consulting company, DSP, build a highly-scalable, reduced server-footprint environment. Enabling support surveillance solutions for three of Saudi Arabia’s largest hotels using Dell PowerEdge servers and EqualLogic storage.

Read the full case study at YourDellSolution.com/me/servers

©2012 Dell Products. Dell, the Dell logo, EqualLogic and PowerEdge are registered or unregistered trade marks of Dell Inc. in the United States and other countries. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks or trade names may be used in this document to refer to third-party products (such as operating systems and software) included with the products offered by Dell and the entities claiming the marks and names of those products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Dell Corporation Ltd, Dell House, The Boulevard, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1LF.

Strategic IT Storage Partner

storage advisor

INSIDE

More fireworks

storage advisor Storage in 2013

More fireworks It’s not just data that’s exploding as storage vendors set off fireworks to celebrate a lucrative year in the Middle East. With cloud and analytics solutions only continuing to draw more demand, the growth looks set to continue in 2013.

A

ll of the most influential IT trends in 2012, mainly cloud, big data and mobility, share one common consideration – storage.

The simple facts are that IT has become a business enabler and data has exploded. The question is where does all that data go?

That is the question Middle East CIOs have been asking and as a result disk revenue in the MEA region was up 11% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2012 to total $2.53 billion, whilst terabyte capacity increased 48% over the same period (IDC).

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“The storage market in the Middle East continued to show strong growth, which has become a characteristic of this high-growth emerging economy,” says Zaher Haydar, Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey Emerging Africa and Middle East, EMC. Haydar attributes much of this growth to the prominence of private clouds and related technologies on most CIO agendas.

“This included geographically spread storage with virtualisation and federation protocols on top. We’ve also seen increased virtualisation rates in most organisations, www.cnmeonline.com

with the more sophisticated ones already planning to implement some chargeback mechanisms,” he says.

Furthermore, unified storage has grown driven mainly by a growing preference among users to deploy NAH where suitable, and video surveillance and media solutions like IPTV have also created a big demand in storage, Haydar adds.

According to Basil Ayass, Enterprise Product Manager, Dell, customers are now thinking a lot longer when they’re buying storage.

“They’re looking a lot more at virtualised storage as the intelligent storage that can

simplify the task and procure automatically, making it easier to manage virtualised environments. They have budget for storage but they’re spending it a lot more carefully and are looking for smarter solutions,” he says.

Sid Deshpande, Senior Analyst, Technology and Service Provider Research, Gartner, adds that single hardware vendor deals that cater to both servers and storage are very popular in the Middle East.

“Multi-vendor sourcing is not as strong as it is in some of the mature markets. Gartner believes that the storage hardware market is still underpenetrated in the MEA region overall, with many organisations not having the insight or education required to assess the correct storage infrastructure for their application and service requirements,” he says.

$2.53bn was the disk revenue in the MEA region in 2012, up 11% year-on-year.

Storage shakers

When it comes to hype, there is no doubt that cloud and big data were the big shakers in the storage market this year, but despite them often being spoken in the same breath, big data remains behind in both awareness and adoption.

“I don’t like to club them together,” Ayass says.

“We’ve been talking about cloud for the last four years and it is now beyond the trend stage. We are seeing a lot of private cloud deployments within enterprises in the region, and some public cloud adoption within SMBs for very specific niche applications.

“Big data is very different, it’s very new. Business analytics and business intelligence have been around for a long time, but it was sort of hijacked by the telco and finance verticals. They can afford it and they’ve done it for a while. The way I see it, big data is making business analytics affordable and accessible by a large audience. People are starting to research and enquire about big data when they come from a manufacturing, retail or scientific perspective, but it’s not a mainstream solution that’s being implemented like cloud. Big data is where cloud was two or three years ago.”

Deshpande agrees that most organisations are not aware of what big data is and how it can help them be more competitive.

“But awareness is increasing,” he says. “It is important to note that early use cases leveraging existing ‘dark data’ are emerging in the Middle East.

The service provider segment is not as active in spreading big data technologies as mature markets.”

Besides the usual suspects in the storage space, flash has also had a significant influence on the market this year.

Flash media plugs the performance and latency gaps that existed between processor and traditional magnetic disk media.

Zaher Haydar, Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey Emerging Africa and Middle East, EMC

“A few years ago, flash disk cost was 15-20 times that of magnetic disk, which resulted in a limited use of flash within the data centre,” Haydar says. “By 2012, the cost of flash dropped significantly making it a key building block within any modern storage infrastructure. Analyst reports show that flash adoption at the enterprise level is growing at a high rate.”

Going forward Ayass predicits a rise in the demand for data deduplication.

“Deduplication has been around for a while but has also been very expensive and very complex. Now we’ve seen deduplication technology become a lot easier to use and a lot more affordable for SMEs. It used to be only certain verticals and guys with budgets in the past who were able to afford deduplication, but now I think it is becoming a lot easier,” he says.

Data growth acceleration

Meanwhile, it is very safe to bet that a further acceleration of data growth will continue to significantly influence the Middle East storage market in 2013.

This will require a new approach to the design and deployment of storage that is cost efficient to address capacity needs, self-optimised to address application performance and cloud agile to empower users and lower costs, according to Andreas Weiss, Director, IBM Systems and Technology Brands, GBM. “Secondly, the storage market will be strongly influenced by an increased level of security and data protection required to undertake a cloud delivery model. Regulation on data security and www.cnmeonline.com

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storage advisor Storage in 2013

protection enforces these areas in our customer estates,” he says.

The growing realisation of the value companies have in the data they hold and how to make use of it is sure to continue, which is likely to see more demand in business analytics.

“Business analytics requires business continuity to guarantee convenient access anytime and anywhere.

Ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery is a must for everyone,” Weiss says.

The MEA region is yet to have a strong inclination towards evaluating cloud service due to connectivity issues, regulatory concerns and the current low maturity of offerings.

As such, Deshpande says the time is ripe for storage hardware vendors to showcase their value proposition for the SMB segment, particularly for business continuity initiatives.

Furthermore, given the emerging nature of the Middle East and the slowdown seen in European economics, Haydar anticipates more investments to pour into the region, which would translate into maintaining the high growth rate in 2013.

He says organisations in the Middle East tend to pioneer when it comes to adopting new technologies.

“While it is true that there is one to two years of phase lag in the Middle East compared to the US market, especially when it comes to large IT waves, this in general has a positive impact. That inherent phase lag gives more time to capture the major technological trends and only adopt them once they are more mature.

Sid Deshpande, Senior Analyst, Technology and Service Provider Research, Gartner

Terabyte capacity increased

48%

between Q2 2011 and Q2 2012.

Andreas Weiss, Director, IBM Systems and Technology Brands, GBM

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This allows the region to be on the leading edge but not on the bleeding edge.”

Ayass attributes the Middle East’s innovation and willingness to invest on the lack of legacy and high number of organisations that have been set up in the last five years in the Middle East.

“Therefore their IT infrastructure is still maturing and young and it’s a lot easier for them to adopt the latest technologies. It’s that leapfrog philosophy that drives it, like in Africa where you have a much high mobile penetration than Western Europe because when mobile telephony was invented Africa did not have the landline technology so they went straight to mobile. It’s happening the same here,” he says.

“A lot of companies did not invest in the legacy solutions that were available five years ago. Today when it comes to buying their first storage solution, they can adopt the latest because they don’t have anything that they need to be compatible with. A lot of times when we acquire new companies, the first sales we see are in the Middle East and we share them with our European colleagues and then they start seeing the adoption there.”

According to Weiss, the finance, oil and gas, retail, public and transports sectors in the Middle East are delivering world-class service to their customers and will therefore adopt new technologies quickly.

Gartner has observed that some enterprise organisations in the Middle East are not as compelled to reduce costs as their counterparts in Western European countries.

“Middle East enterprises assign a lot of importance to long-term value, total cost of ownership and ROI analysis, rather than just focusing on reducing short-term capital expenditures,” Deshpande concludes.

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security advisor

INSIDE

Keeping secure? Virtually impossible

security advisor Virtual Security

Keeping secure?

Virtually impossible The last 12 months have seen an incredible transformation from traditional IT towards a new digitalised world, which has begun to redefine the industry entirely. One of the key trends was the virtualisation of services which continues to gather pace.

However, a virtual environment presents an array of virtual threats.

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E

very month we talk about how fast changing the industry is, and it’s true - IT moves at an incredible pace. Technology is like a game of poker, it’s very challenging to know when to stick or twist when it comes to market moves. Missing one key trend can be very damaging for a company, which can be left behind in an instance. Therefore, making bold decisions is critical to success, as history suggests.

However, making quick decisions and adjusting strategies in a quickly changing environment can make a business very vulnerable to new threats which are becoming increasingly sophisticated and advanced, tapping into many different avenues of enterprise.

One of the key challenges is managing to protect your assets in a virtual environment. Virtualising servers, storage and hardware is highly beneficial to businesses by increasing productivity, reducing cooling costs and simplifying management. However, making the bold move to change an environment that is fully protected, understood and managed is going to open up avenues for new attacks and threats which the company will be responsible to react to.

Perhaps the logical first step is to identify the major differences between traditional and virtual environments.

“In virtual environments we do not always know the exact location of our data and the server where it is stored. Data and applications can travel from one server to another, go to the cloud and come back to the server,” says Alexander Zarovsky, Head of Business Development, InfoWatch.

“In these circumstances, the traditional corporate perimeters become fuzzy and unsteady. That’s why the old model where we have a fixed perimeter with all-round external protection doesn’t work in a virtual environment. The latter needs an “inside out” security approach where you need to build security perimeters around each virtual machine and travel with it from one location to another.”

Zarovsky makes the point that the switch up between hosting data internally in a data centre that can monitored by the company, and, essentially, giving that data up to a third party owner in a virtual data centre, creates a gap between owner and protector. Therefore, the control of the company is significantly reduced.

However, Miguel Braojos, Vice President of Sales, SEMEA, SafeNet, believes that, although the concerns are justified, measures are already in place to counter the fears and allow businesses to be more confident when making the switch.

$5.5m was the average cost of a data breach in 2011.

Miguel Braojos, Vice President of Sales, SEMEA, SafeNet

“It is true that there is still by default some reluctance by Middle East organisations to host their sensitive data in a public cloud base as they fear loss of control and ownership of their data,” he says.

“While some of these concerns are understandable, as the exposure to the cloud service provider’s administrators is real, there are now advanced data centric security solutions such as encryption and strong authentication, which can truly help organisations feel reassured and retain control, protection and ownership of their data.”

Increasing the challenge It’s no secret that with a new type of data environment, a new type of challenge will arise. Identifying ways that cyber criminals can attack virtual servers is a critical step towards eliminating the threat.

“Protecting a virtual environment is more challenging than protecting physical machines. In the initial days, the virtual factor of the virtual environment itself made the environment secure and when the popularity increased for the technology, the number of deployments increased and hence the threat and risk related to the environment increased,” says Walid Kamal, Senior VP, Technology, du.

“The virtualisation engine or hypervisor in the entire solution is the key component which is exposed to access and security related issues more internally than externally. An attacker can gain access to a host in a virtual environment and gain access to other hosts through the hypervisor or directly through processes shared between the virtual and physical resources within the same virtual environment, which earlier was well segregated with firewalls,” he adds. www.cnmeonline.com

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security advisor Virtual Security

Tarek Kuzbari, Managing Director, ME, Kaspersky Lab, also highlights issues led by virtualising environments - adding that the issues brought by physical servers aren’t necessarily redundant with virtual servers.

“All viruses designed for physical servers are just as dangerous for virtual machines. That is why any claim that virtual machines are less vulnerable than physical ones is just a myth,” he claims.

“Moreover, one infected machine can threaten the operation of other virtual machines running on the same host server.”

Making sure you’re secure Mitigating these new types of threats can be done in many ways; either tried and tested methods can be applied to the new risks, or specially developed methods can be implemented.

Kuzbari of Kaspersky and Kamal of du have separate opinions on this subject. Kamal believes that traditional security is still key to protecting a virtual environment. However, Kuzbari votes against this principle, suggesting that specialised solutions are better.

“In my opinion, specialised solutions are the best choice,” he says.

Of course one of the major talking points which businesses will want to bring up, when told to secure their virtual environments, is cost. How do the prices of securing virtualised servers weigh up against the traditional, physical servers?

“The cost of protection is insignificant, compared to the cost of not protecting an asset in the current IT security landscape,” says Braojos.

“The higher the value of the data assets, the higher the risk of a successful breach.”

The next step when it comes to virtual security may be making sure that these complications, concerns and issues are addressed so that seamless, confident deployment of virtual environments can take place.

The consensus is that these steps have been put in place by major security companies, but the policies which integrate virtual servers with traditional and virtual security couldn’t come fast enough.

However, how much time and investment can go into a service which may only be a trend?

Tarek Kuzbari, Managing Director, ME, Kaspersky Lab

All viruses designed for physical servers are just as dangerous for virtual machines. That is why any claim that virtual machines are less vulnerable than physical ones is just a myth.”

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www.cnmeonline.com

“It’s difficult to do any forecasts now because virtualisation may be a transitional period between workstations and tablets,” says Zarovsky.

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology, help AG, says that from his perspective, these policies and solutions are on their way.

“In help AG we monitor this area a lot, and I can only say that we do not have a single partner that is not currently thinking about or bringing out solutions on how to secure the virtual environment. So there will absolutely be a lot of new enhancements coming out.”

Kamal looks forward to the coming years and the changes we can expect from virtualising IT environments.

“Today the challenge is that although virtualisation solutions are drastically deployed in data centres, very few servers might be virtualised in reality,” he says.

“The coming years will see a lot of application, hardware virtualisation which will be a driver for security organisations to develop more and more virtualisation related security solutions like virtual firewall. On the other hand the technological hardening efforts and security compliance policies will affect some of the prime features of VM mobility.”

Virtualisation appears to have been welcomed with open arms in the IT world, certainly in the Middle East.

Of course, any new technology will attract its fair share of cyber criminals and hackers who sense opportunity.

Security vendors are always hard pressed to stay one step ahead of the game. It seems keeping tabs on all current and upcoming threats is virtually impossible.

FOUNDATION OF

IT TRUST Learn more at www.EMC.com.

EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, and where information lives are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. Š Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

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integration advisor

INSIDE

Evolving integration

integration advisor Systems integration in 2013

It’s been a year of big investments, strong partnerships and innovative deployments for the IT industry. The Middle East is no stranger to big projects, testing solutions or expensive implementations. It’s for that reason alone that integration partners are a critical part of the infrastructure.

IT trends continue to grow and develop and so too does the need for expert support. What’s in store for 2013?

T

he trends which have been at the heart of many deployments this year haven’t been short of coverage. Virtualisation, mobility, cloud, big data, etc, have all been at the top of the priority list for companies big and small. Implementing solutions to deal with controlling big data, supporting cloud computing, gaining the most from mobility, and virtualising your servers will take time, cost money and be risky. However, the enterprise hasn’t been shy, and the industry has been changing.

“After the global financial crisis in 2008, there has been a significant change in customer mindset.

Customers have become much more demanding and they expect a solid return on investment from their IT solutions,” explains Saed Sakran, GM and acting Sales Director, Scope Middle East.

“Because of this we have witnessed a dramatic change in how systems integrators conduct their business. The strategies and approaches that used to work even 5 years ago are no longer relevant. At SCOPE, we have been quick to adapt to this change in mindset. We now place more emphasis on adding

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value and bundling all our offerings with supporting services. Without proposing value-add services or really convincing the customer about the value of the product, it is impossible to win a contract.”

George DeBono, General Manager, MENA, Red Hat, describes the role which integrators play in these new trends and technologies.

“The System Integrators play a central role,” he says.

“Firstly, because clients are looking for consultancy on alternative and flexible ways to renew their IT environment in a business friendly and cost effective way, secondly, System Integrators are well placed to integrate complex commercial processes and technical systems to deliver more business value. Thirdly, System Integrators are utilising the latest technology in their own data centres to offer better, more agile and usage based (cloud) services to attract and/or interact with clients.”

Looking ahead These trends do not appear to be nearing the end of their lifecycle. However, shifts in patterns are predicted for the upcoming year, and Deepak Nambittiyath, www.cnmeonline.com

Senior Systems Engineer, Emitac Enterprise Solutions, is confident on what these changes may be.

“Some of the major trends I think we can expect in 2013 are, firstly, communication; customers looking for the latest features, and looking to implement a collaborative system where all enterprise users can communicate online cost effectively. Secondly, smartphones and mobile devices; the desktop will be eclipsed by mobile devices at the current rate of evolution and competition. Consumerisation definitely catalyses tablets into the enterprise. According to Gartner, by 2015, in mature markets, 80% of handsets will be smartphones,” he says.

With all this and more happening, the business ecosystem is changing at a fast pace, Nambittiyath adds.

With specific trends being such a high priority for businesses and customers, there has never been more of a need for specialised integrators. A wide skills set and proven ability to provide specialised support and integration is highly valuable worldwide, but especially in the Middle East, according to Sakran.

“Skilled integration is something that is in great demand in the region. Wider adoption of virtualisation and cloud-based services will only further this demand. And any systems integrator would be wise to begin investing in building up a skill-set to address this demand. A successful systems integrator will be one that offers implementation, consultancy and even commissioning.”

Of course, for any IT company to remain competitive in such a busy market, it’s important to continuously build skills, stay ahead on latest IT trends and technology practices, and listen to what their clients need.

80% of handsets in mature markets will be smartphones by 2015.

George DeBono, General Manager, MENA, Red Hat

“Well positioned System Integrators possess the right balance of business insight and technological knowledge translating into the appropriate solution for a client. Virtualisation and Cloud technologies are simply new ways of improving and evolving existing IT data centres, introducing pay-per-use models and possibly multiple (service) partners to meet the client’s needs on or off premise,” says DeBono.

Answering the call One of the interesting aspects of the industry is the change in demand from customers and end users.

Making good predictions and looking forward to what customers may require in the coming months is a critical skill. What will end users be looking for from their integrators in the 2013?

“Most customers are going for multi-vendor products. Also, typically business models of non–IT companies have required vendors to innovatively develop and deploy advanced IT solutions and systems with no technology restrictions. These unique solutions and systems have become compelling business propositions in their own right,” Nambittiyath explains.

“Henceforth, the need for specialised systems integrators who can manage the complete implementation from design to implementation, support and maintenance is in demand. Many leading vendors have launched their advanced version of their products in demand forcing the customers to migrate and upgrade to the latest technologies.”

Sakran adds to this point, claiming that end users will demand far more specialised services as time goes on.

“I think the real change for systems integrators will be that customers will begin to demand more and

Deepak Nambittiyath, Senior Systems Engineer, Emitac Enterprise Solutions

www.cnmeonline.com

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integration advisor Systems integration in 2013

more services. This may be infrastructure as a service, security as a service etc.,” he says.

“The fact of the matter is that customers would much rather focus on aspects relating to their core business. They would much rather leave the headache of managing their IT infrastructure in the hands of a competent professional. So systems integrators need to prepare themselves for a situation wherein there will be a greater demand for services rather than for products.”

30% of customers will move to cloud services in 2013.

Regional integration The integrations market is globally large, and as previously mentioned, the Middle East is not shy when it comes to making investments and reacting to radical shifts in IT trends. The combination of the two should suggest that the region is the perfect platform for market growth in the coming years, and the experts tend to agree.

“The integrations market will grow next year, especially as the system integrators should be able to bring to our market some skills and deployments that we have as yet not really begun to implement,” DeBono says.

“I expect things like Cloud deployments, Middleware refreshment and proper exploitation of Social Media networks are all areas which will begin to become more prominent in the shorter term, and I expect the system integrators to be key players in helping companies deploy these new capabilities within their environments.”

Nambittiyath supports this statement; he claims that the demand of services will provide growth in the region.

“With the increase in demand of setting up disaster recovery sites and virtual Infrastructure, enterprise customers are forced to protect their data. Fuelled by cloud, infrastructure improvement, virtualisation and consolidation of data centres, applications and data, the systems integration market is said to grow steadily.”

2013 appears promising for systems integration and for end users who are ready to spend big to improve their IT infrastructure, adopt new technologies and take advantage of current trends.

With the Middle East being such an energetic hub of activity in the IT industry, we can only speculate what the situation might be in 12 months time.

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Telecoms World

INSIDE

HSPA+ vs. LTE

telecoms World 4G

VS

HSPA+

LTE

4G often means LTE for many carriers, but HSPA+ is continuing to evolve in parallel providing comparable experience to LTE. Whether or not HSPA+ is a true 4G technology has sparked debate within the wireless industry. Ben Rossi chronicles the evolution and opportunities around this technology from service providers in the region.

L

ittle else can be attributed as the most defining technology enhancements of this generation than that of mobile communications.

In a world where a mobile phone is an individual’s most precious asset, and the trend only continuing to evolve into the enterprise, strong connectivity is of paramount importance.

The latest craze is the fourth generation mobile communications standards, making it even easier for users to be constantly connected. But with two prominent technologies staking claim to 4G capabilities, the future of the market is left divided between HSPA+, which is an extension of HSPA (High Speed Packet Access), and the newer technology in town, LTE (Long Term Evolution), which is a complete redesign of 3G network architecture.

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The fundamental difference between the technologies is HSPA’s use of W-CDMA (wideband code division multiple access), compared to LTE’s use of OFDN (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing). The big question is whether this means one is stronger than the other when it comes to performance.

OFDN is an ‘access technology’, which allows several terminals or handsets connected to the same multi-point transmission medium to transmit over it and share its capacity. du believes the use of OFDM allows LTE to deliver higher speed, better latency and higher capacity.

“Even though, theoretically, the HSPA+ roadmap promises speeds similar to the current LTE, it is very important to note that there is no real commercial plans to have those speeds available using HSPA+,” www.cnmeonline.com

says Hatem Bamatraf, Senior VP of Network Development, du.

“While most HSPA+ networks around the world boast a peak theoretical 21Mbps download speed, du’s network features 42Mbps peak throughout with dual carrier HSPA+. LTE provides ultra-low end-to-end latency, less than half of that of the HSPA+, which enhances the user experience. One of the most important benefits of the OFDM is that it can handle high loads with minimal impact on the system capacity, where as W-CDMA becomes affected under high load and generally has a lower capacity.”

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Chief Marketing Officer, Ericsson, agrees that LTE allows a lot more flexibility in scalability and spectrum, but besides that believes the technologies are very similar in the eyes of an end user.

“Carrier aggregation is something that was conceived for LTE and LTE advanced is now

also being deployed in some sense for HSPA+, where you can get dual carrier so on and so forth. So while there are some differences in underlying technologies, I think from an end user perspective they start to look very similar in terms of performance,” he says.

Complementary technologies Whilst acknowledging the network spectrum efficiency and flat network architecture or LTE - which enhance network latency, provide better capacity and can support low latency and more bandwidth-intensive applications - Huawei believes the two technologies actually complement each other.

“Each one helps operators to improve their customer experience, differentiate their services and evolve to new business models which cater to the growing demands on mobile broadband and M2M markets,” says Leo Xu, VP, Solutions Sales and Marketing, Huawei ME. And though LTE may have the edge when it comes to performance, HSPA+ is the most cost-effective technology for providing mobile broadband to users – in the short-term, at least.

“Cost comparisons between HSPA+ and LTE really depend a lot on the incumbent network,” Xu says. “It is true that when upgrading from a 3G network, HSPA+ is primarily done through a software upgrade and can utilise the same spectrum frequencies as the traditional 3G network. As such, the short-term investment is often less than pursuing an LTE network where you are looking at a long-term equipment and spectrum overhaul.”

There are still many 2G/3G base stations in the Middle East and operators often find that HSPA+ is a cost-effective way to evolve to new technologies whilst leveraging these earlier investments.

“With that said, operators still recognise that LTE offers larger network capacity and greater speeds than what HSPA+ can accommodate. In that sense we do prefer to view LTE as a complementary technology to HSPA+,” Xu says.

Bhikshesvaran supports that view, stating that Ericsson builds its products to be able to run HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE all in a mixed mode configuration on the same base station and able to work across multiple frequency bands.

“It really doesn’t make a big difference whether you run two technologies today across three different frequency bands and eventually you can migrate all of them into one technology,” he says. “I think what we will see happening over the next three to four years is really a peaceful co-existence between LTE and HSPA+.

LTE is a complete redesign of

3G

network architecture

Hatem Bamatraf, Senior VP of Network Development, du

“You’ve got LTE working on different bands across the world, but those issues have been solved in a nicer way already for HSPA+. So I think from a broad device ecosystem perspective that momentum will continue to be there and people will take advantage of it.”

LTE will start to get introduced in pockets in certain frequencies, Bhikshesvaran adds, and the market will respond by creating devices for those markets.

“It will take a little bit of time to figure out what the real common global LTE band is that we can put into one device and that will go across a vast majority of the world. Today with HSPA+, those frequency combinations are already available,” he says.

However, by holding perhaps the most weight in the world of mobile telecommunications, it is spectral efficiency that is the most important comparison to highlight.

“We have to distinguish here between available technology roadmaps and actual commercial deployments and handset availability plans,” Bamatraf says. “By just looking at the number of handset manufacturers who have announced the rollout or plans to rollout LTE-enabled handsets, one can deduce that the LTE eco-system is growing a lot faster compared to the 3G several years back.

“In the meantime, the plans to have handsets supporting HSPA+ beyond the DC-HSPA+ 42Mbps flavor is at a much lower priority to handset manufacturers at this point of time.” www.cnmeonline.com

december 2012

2G

base stations still exist in the Middle East

Computer News Middle East

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telecoms World 4G

Blurring the lines But with the spectral efficiency of HSPA+ noticeably enhanced in 3GPP’s Release 10 and 11 - following the aggregation of more carriers’ technology and the introduction of MIMO (multiple input, multiple output Xu believes the lines of comparison with LTE have been subsequently blurred.

“This was done by aggregation of more carriers’ technology and by the introduction of MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) antenna technology. It is true that the latest HSPA+ Release 11 will start approaching earlier levels of LTE spectrum efficiency, although at the same time LTE has also advanced, so the comparisons are difficult to make,” he says.

Bhikshesvaran believes the spectral efficiency of HSPA+ and LTE are in fact fairly close to each other.

“Where LTE stands out in some sense is the use of larger bandwidth carriers. They can use a 10MHz or 20MHz carrier because that natural addition of more frequencies starts to become higher – that is where the difference is. We’ve had latency properties out of the gate with LTE that are very attractive.

The same improvements are being made on HSPA+ as well, so they start to come fairly close in terms of performance and capabilities from an end user perspective,” he says.

Another critical underpinning of an operator’s network is in-building coverage. Better coverage means a better consumer experience, and better capacity means more subscriptions in hotspot or hightraffic zones.

20MHz carriers can be used with LTE because that natural addition of more frequencies pushes it higher

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Chief Marketing Officer, Ericsson

“This is especially true in the Middle East region where high temperatures most of the year tend to motivate people to stay indoors a substantial amount of time,” Xu says.

It is in this area where HSPA+ scores points because it already has the device ecosystem to support it.

“HSPA+ will get rolled out and the newer phones are starting to support the dual carrier technology. All that will continue to fuel the ecosystem for HSPA+,” Bhikshesvaran says.

The jury is still out in the battle between HSPA+ and LTE, but in the mean time it appears the general conclusion is for them to continue to be used hand in hand in the overall progression towards faster and more efficient telecom networks.

Xu says the choice is largely driven by the individual operator’s business model as well as their local market ecosystem.

However, Bamatraf of du believes LTE is the most advanced telecommunications currently available and defines a clear path toward future developments, making it the most attractive choice for carriers. This contrasts with HSPA+’s current lead in eco-system positioning.

“The forecast is that HSPA+ networks will still be catering voice and data for most operators for many years to come while the LTE eco-system is growing and maturing. We think that commercial deployments utilising HSPA+ upgrades beyond the DC-HSPA+ 42M will be very rare,” Bamatraf says.

“It is also our view that the concentration on rolling out LTE networks to relieve any existing data traffic congestion on the HSPA/HSPA+ networks will continue to grow.”

Leo Xu, VP, Solutions Sales and Marketing, Huawei ME

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careers advisor

INSIDE

strategic it networking Strategic IT partner Storage Partner Work hard, play hard

careers advisor Careers in 2013

Work hard, play hard The Middle East is a region of growth, activity, energy and excitement.

Each year, international professionals flock to the region to enjoy the booming economy, the attractive salaries, and the winter sun. So, what’s in store for the IT jobs market in 2013?

T

he Middle East is an expatriate breeding ground - an international cocktail comprised of ethnicities and nationalities from all over the globe. Unlike Europe and America, the Middle East is currently full of career prospects.

The relationship between the giants of industry is a compromise of healthy competition and mutual respect. And this emerging market, which oozes opportunity, continues to attract a diverse and mature work force to carry its economy.

2012 was a year of investment, industry change and disruptive technologies. Years like this can often shake up the job market, but the Middle East is still seeing growth in opportunities - particularly specialised positions where specific skills are becoming highly sought after.

“There are several high growth areas including

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cyber security, cyber forensics, bio-informatics, Internet, telecoms, cloud computing enablement, and super-computing,” says Daniel Adkins, Associate Dean, University of Murdoch Dubai.

With the advent of mobility, BYOD, cloud and big data, you might be forgiven for thinking that the next generation of workers may be the only ones with the appropriate skills to successfully and productively produce quality work. Stephan Berner, Managing Director, help AG, would disagree with you. He believes that there is still room for the more experienced and older generation of IT personnel, regardless to the fact that most business platforms are now based on a social, next generation design.

“Sure, the future of IT depends on the youth coming out of schools with the skills to manage and work across these areas. But can the enterprise be fully run by the younger generation? No, I don’t think so,” he says.

www.cnmeonline.com

“Enterprise is still looking for a mixture of the two. They want people who have experience in virtualistation, cloud computing and of course managing resources. These technologies are gaining traction, yes, but they’re not new.”

Berner creates the image of a divide between experience and youth, whilst Shaheen Haque, Territory Manager, ME, Interactive Intelligence, believes that in the Middle East alone, the two go hand in hand.

“It’s not an ageist environment here. It’s a young environment but the people are still well seasoned.

We have younger personnel who are already senior managers with lots of experience,” he says.

“Therefore, age isn’t a limiting factor here, it’s about ability. People have energy here, which is lacking in Europe and the UK. However, it’s tougher here. You have to work harder and excel yourself. You work hard and play hard, but you get rewarded for that with attractive salaries.”

Seeking the opportunity The Middle East is very well known for being proactive in its approach to recruitment. Seminars, courses and training days will be held in order to make sure the correct candidate is selected. The trends of the industry obviously have a large affect on the amount of opportunities available. However, IT a is fast paced sector and prospects are opening up all the time.

“Architects in general will be highly sought after,” says George DoBono, General Manager, MENA, Red Hat. “Enterprise architects in particular as we see new technologies such as cloud, for example, gaining traction. Also, existing technologies which are being utilised more heavily, such as virtualisation, will also provide additional job opportunities. People with these specific skills will be needed in 2013.”

Adkins agrees with the idea that opportunity will arise for those with specialised skills, specifically in the

Daniel Adkins, Associate Dean, University of Murdoch Dubai.

sectors of data, analytics, storage and cloud. However, he does feel that the Middle East in itself, although attracting some of the brightest young minds around, isn’t a leading technology area as of yet.

“Data is growing at an exponential rate and is driving cloud-computing and super computing. This rate of growth is likely to continue for decades and people who specialise in scalability and efficiency in data storage, search, retrieval, and data-mining will be in high demand.

As more data is stored, the security concerns continue to grow. Data security and cyber forensics will be huge opportunities for the foreseeable future,” he says.

Though, there isn’t any reason why the Middle East won’t become a leading area in technology. The investment is here, the resources are here, all the major players in the industry have bases here and most importantly, the younger, brighter minds of the next generation are being attracted to the region for reasons already mentioned.

careers advisor Careers in 2013

“The Middle East has not yet developed itself into a field of technology leadership. The vast majority of companies in the Middle East are looking for those who can implement and manage what has already been done elsewhere. I look forward to that changing as a new, highly knowledgeable and creative group of young technologist graduates from universities located in the Middle East,” Adkins says.

Haque adds to this point: “There is such a good opportunity now for graduates coming into industry this year who have developed specific skills. They’re not restricted like when I was in school. Now, they can study cloud computing, network management, etc. These are critical roles in industry right now.”

The economy isn’t what it once was, but the market is growing in the Middle East and it continues to attract expats with hard working mentalities. The IT industry has reaped the rewards of this and continues to grow, expand and challenge other regions around the globe as one of the leading technology hubs in the world.

If the trend keeps up, who knows where the jobs market will stand in 12 months time?

Shaheen Haque, Territory Manager, ME, Interactive Intelligence

iPad

interview Charles Phillips

‘we’re The disruptive alternative’ Charles Phillips joined Infor as CEO two years ago with a brand new team and a lifetime of experience, which he claimed were critical to breaking the stronghold of its competitors. Now, he is revelling in Infor’s recent success. Having just moved offices into the heart of New York and kick started the next generation of application integration, the Arkansas man is on a roll.

70% share of all hospitals in the US. The healthcare system in the Middle East is going through radical change, more so than anywhere else. There are world class hospitals being built, and for us it’s an amazing opportunity. This hard work was rewarded when we won the Healthcare Deployment of the Year at CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2012.

Charles Phillips, CEO, Infor

H

ow have your first two years been at Infor?

We’ve had a blast. I brought with me a tightly linked team which works well together. Having the guys I chose personally has been really beneficial. I’ve worked at Oracle, which is a fantastic company, and I’ve worked in plenty of other sectors too.

I’ve seen the industry from lots of different angles so I brought with me a huge amount of experience.

How do you see Infor’s presence in the Middle East?

We’re doing very well in the Middle East right now. We’re seeing a particular success in healthcare. We already have about a

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What is your strategy here, do you work directly on the ground or mainly with partners?

In any given year, about a third of our business goes to our partners. However, we want more feet on the street. One way to do that is to keep up good relationships with partners locally. It’s critical - no matter how many people we hire we can never hire enough to cover all the opportunity. Partners have unique relationships with customers which we can benefit from. We’re always looking for more partners.

How do you see the market at the moment?

It’s a great time to push in this region. The partners we’re signing now don’t want to go through legacy and training on older product bases such as Oracle or SAP. Our new products are easy to use and learn and quick to implement so it’s a good time to be active in a fast moving region such as the Middle East. It’s a little easier for us because we’re relatively new - we didn’t have the old middleware and didn’t have to carry that with us so for a new partner they can skip those generations. Those sorts of details have helped us here and generally all over. www.cnmeonline.com

Can you elaborate on the next-gen integration technology?

We recently built a next generation integration platform. We took an internet based approach to integration. It’s exponentially simpler than traditional middleware, which works for our purposes. The problem with application integrations is that when you change one thing, 500 other things break. We’ve solved that with this.

How should the next generation of business applications be delivered?

The next generation user will demand beautiful products. They will want to work on platforms and applications which are similar to those which they use in their personal time. Creating socially inspired working applications will promote easier tasking, better productivity and happier employees.

We have developed our unique social business platform - reinventing our applications to look beautiful, integrating social media with business for the future users.

People are used to consumer products.

We’re making the step of pushing it now and moving that chapter forward.

If you look at Twitter or Facebook, this is how our applications will look soon enough. We’re about three to five years ahead of our competitors so we will drive this move and others will have to react.

Unfortunately for them, they have big architectures so they won’t be able to change anything quickly. This is the time for disruptive technology and we want to be the disruptive alternative.

interview Bashar Bashaireh

Maximum protection The network security vendor Fortinet provides a flexible platform for enterprises and service providers of all sizes to consolidate critical security technology and services to protect against advanced threats. Bashar Bashaireh, Regional Director of the company, outlines the company’s growth plans.

Bashar Bashaireh, Regional Director, Fortinet

I

s the regional IT security market showing healthy growth?

The security market is indeed growing in the region in double digits, and we hope it continues like this. But I must add that though people are budgeting for security, the decision making process is still very slow.

Will the next-generation firewall be an area of focus for you?

There is a growing demand for NGF. However, if you look at the different components of NGF you’d see that it has its origins in UTM, which we have been offering from the day we started shipping our FortiGate appliances. It’s a new way of packaging but having said that, this is an important market segment for us and if you look at the different components of an NGF we lead in every aspect. For example, in the IPS part we have done very well and NSS Labs has positioned FortiGate 3240C as the leader in its category with 6.25Gbps throughput and highest catch rate. In the firewalling space, we offer the highest throughput with 500Gbps, and our application control that is integrated with IPS supports more than 3200 applications, providing you with the visibility, drill-downs and visual reporting.

Does NGF throughput dip when advanced security features are turned on?

No, there is a no trade-off between speed

and security with our fully loaded NGFs, and we deliver higher performance than some other vendors can offer. We use the same approach as our UTM offerings, which means we use dedicated ASIC architecture for each functionality. However, users have to to do proper sizing of the box to avoid any degradation in performance.

You have recently released the latest version of FortiOS. What is new?

The new FortOS 5.0 is an advanced security operating system that is the foundation for all our security platforms. The new release provides more security, intelligence and controls to help enterprises to be protected against today’s advanced threats and enable more secure BYOD environments.

We have added more than 150 features and enhancements to the new version.

Fortinet is perceived a mid-size market player. Do you have plans to tap the enterprise market?

It’s true that we are perceived as a mid-market player but the truth is more than 50 percent of our revenues come from the enterprise market. When UTM first came out it was positioned for the SMB market but Fortinet was the first vendor to scale it up to meet enterprise needs. We have a portfolio that caters to 10 to 20 users up to environments with 1000s of users. What really differentiates as is that we have a broad portfolio of appliances, and apart from UTM we offer solutions such as FortiMail for messaging www.cnmeonline.com

security and FortiWeb for Web application security. What is unique about Fortinet is that even our entry-level devices offer the same functionalities as our carrier grade devices. The only difference is in scalability and performance.

What will be the impact of Dell buying SonicWALL on the security market?

It is an opportunity for us. You need to remember security is a specialised industry where the relationships between solutions providers and vendors are very crucial.

It all depends on what Dell is going to do with this acquisition. Will they keep the same product lines and maintain the same spending on R&D? Now, there are fears about this among customers and channel partners, akin to the one when McAfee was bought out by Intel. We have been successful in migrating some of the McAfee customers into our fold and we are planning to do the same by targeting SonicWALL customers.

What are your plans for 2013?

We have growth plans by investing in more resources and get people on the ground in regions where we don’t have a strong presence. The UAE continues to be our biggest market and we are continuously investing in Saudi. Now, we are looking at the opportunities in markets such as Iraq and Pakistan. Our revenues this year have grown at a rate of close to 30 percent and we will sustain the growth momentum going forward. december 2012

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PRODUCTS Launches and releases

PRODUCT WATCH A breakdown of the top products and solutions to launch and release in the last month.

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Product: Windows 8 Vendor: Microsoft What it does: Microsoft has completely overhauled the previous operating system in favour of a new tiled-based start screen. Each tile on the start screen is connected to an app, person, website, playlist or whatever else the user wishes to link to. Built-in apps include essentials such as ‘People’, ‘Mail’, ‘Photos’ and ‘Messaging’, whilst a plethora of new apps await in the Windows Store.

What you need to know: Microsoft concluded its global release tour of Windows 8 in Dubai on November 19. With Windows 8 and prior versions of the operation system used by more than a billion people, Windows 8 begins a new era for Microsoft that it hopes will redefine a personal computing market changed by the rise of tablets and mobility. Over 1,000 tablets and PCs featuring a wide variety of screen sizes, configurations, form factors and designs have already been certified for the new OS, with the cheapest falling under $300.

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www.cnmeonline.com

Product: The ThinkServer TD330 Vendor: Lenovo What it does: The ThinkServer TD330 is a tower server based on Intel’s Xeon E5-2400 processors. The server will support up to 16 processor cores and provide up to 192GB memory and 24TB of storage. Users can choose from up to four direct-connect or up to eight hotswap HDD bays in either low-cost SATA or high-performance SAS. What you need to know: Looking beyond PCs and tablets, Lenovo has announced the first server from its newly formed Enterprise Product Group, which deals in servers, storage, networking and software. Lenovo already offers low-end servers and workstations for homes and small businesses, but the new division will target small, medium-size and large enterprises.

Product: FirePOWER Vendor: Sourcefire

Product: 60-core Xeon Phi processor Vendor: Intel What it does: Chips in the Xeon Phi range, also called ‘Knights Corner’, work with server CPUs to speed up scientific, math and graphics tasks. Targeted at servers and supercomputers, the first Phi chips have 60 or more cores, with the fastest chips delivering more than a

teraflop of performance per second.

What you need to know: Intel hopes to deliver performance and power-efficiency breakthroughs to servers with the new Xeon Phi family of processors, the first model of which is now shipping to customers. The Phi chips are the stepping stones toward Intel’s goal of reaching an exaflop (about 1,000 petaflops) supercomputer by 2018.

www.cnmeonline.com

What it does: One of Sourcefire’s latest innovations in FirePOWER is the introduction of advanced malware protection, which provides visibility and control of modern threats on the network from point of entry, through propagation, to postinfection remediation.

What you need to know: Sourcefire has strengthened and expanded its FirePOWER appliance family, providing users with the unmatched ability to protect against sophisticated malware, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and targeted attacks. december 2012

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Column The word on the street

Joe Lipscombe CNME’s man about town gives his spin on the latest IT issues affecting Middle East enterprises.

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Spain sailing I

f there’s one thing I’ve learned in this industry, and I hope there is at least one thing, it’s that you shouldn’t get over excited about seeing a busy month come to an end. The reason being is that the following month is sure to be just as occupied with meetings, events, launches, lunches, late night dinners and of course, overseas conferences.

Last month I was invited to SAP’s rather large and impressive Sapphire Now conference in Madrid. History will tell you that I’m prone to causing chaos, or more fairly, prone to being surrounded by chaos, and with this in mind I was determined to see this trip out with fewer hiccups than a sleeping baby.

I arrived for my flight on time, which was only 20% full. I had two seats to myself, which is an absolute victory for me, seeing as I’m unofficially labelled as ‘freakishly tall’ and walk somewhat octopus-like (according to a few of my colleagues), though I never understood this reference, I’ve as many limbs as anyone else in the office and I don’t really like water, but that’s fine.

Once I’d arrived in Madrid, I enjoyed the metro before arriving in my wonderfully modern hotel, which greeted me in voice (more than I get at home, which is a usually a lifeless grunt upon my arrival), I was happy. My trip thus far had been plain sailing.

However, sometimes some things are just out of your control. No matter how hard you try to keep each plate spinning, one is bound to topple and smash – and I have smashed a lot of plates in my time. My toppling plate last month just so happened to be in the form of anti-austerity protests in the city centre, halting public transport and waking herds of yobs – brilliant.

Computer News Middle East

december 2012

www.cnmeonline.com

I don’t like crowds, I don’t like loud noises, and, though I’ve not given it much thought, I don’t lust after gang violence and being struck by solid objects either – all in all, I’m pretty docile. Protests aren’t docile.

Fortunately, we live in the age of social media - something I am an advocate of - where instant updates can be delivered directly to your personal device. I set up tweet updates from a number of European journalists, meaning I would receive a notification every time one of them tweeted during the day, and Facebook notifications for any status mentioning Madrid protests. I was prepared, and my mother always said: “It’s being unprepared which isn’t cool.”

On the day of the protest, I woke up and made my first check – things had started badly. A Wall Street Journal columnist had tweeted “General protest means no breakfast in Madrid airport, not even coffee *tries to stay calm*”. “Heck!” I gasped. “This is worse than I thought.” If an event so fierce could halt Europeans from serving coffee, I didn’t want to be a part of it.

I left the hotel and took to the streets, cautious and hesitant all the while. I checked my phone updates nothing, not a peep. “Perfect,” I thought. My intuition and instinct had led me across this wonderful city whilst avoiding all conflict, minus a momentary spat with a begger who had eyes for my chorizo.

My mood had turned, I was loving Madrid. I was having flashbacks of my childhood holidays here, eating tapas with my family and shouting ‘te amo’ to everyone I saw because it was all I knew. I was at peace. But then things changed.

All of a sudden I exited a quiet street and was surrounded by screaming people. Utter chaos had just sprung itself upon me. Flags, spray paint, hoodies, foreign chanting, and it wasn’t ‘te amo’. I grabbed my phone. “Why have you let me down like this?” I declared.

The volume of anger grew, the air became warm and my memory ended there.

Weeks later, here I am - home, safe and recovered, but utterly penniless. How could I blame technology for this betrayal when I hadn’t considered the one obvious flaw in my plan - international roaming.

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