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WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS

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EDITORIAL Publisher Dominic De Sousa

Currents of change

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

Group COO Nadeem Hood

Is the PC market dead? As preposterous as it may sound, no one can ignore the worrisome signs, as such a prolonged slump in PC sales is something truly unprecedented. Gartner estimates the PC market slipped by more than 6.4 percent last year, signalling a tectonic shift in buyer tastes. Now that the much anticipated Windows 8 has failed to ignite any revival in the market, one can safely assume that smartphones and tablets will continue to cannibalise the PC market in the future.

Though experts might argue that tablets will not replace PCs and continue to flourish in parallel, the role of the traditional desktop or laptop as we know it today in the personal computing market is surely on the decline. And this shift might have already claimed its first casualty, following the confirmation that Dell has gone private in a Michael Dell led buy-out deal valued at $24.4 billion. Though Dell asserts that it is not a PC company, the truth of the matter is that it still accounts for a major chunk of the revenues for this technology behemoth. If you actually skim the surface, you might see the method in Dell’s madness – it can take risks without having to please stakeholders and prop up its enterprise business in terms of software and services.

While the jury is still out on whether Dell can shore up its sagging fortunes, all the eyes are now on the beleaguered phone maker BlackBerry. Research in Motion, which rebranded itself as BlackBerry, took the wraps off the much-delayed line of smartphones last month, sporting a new OS. Can BlackBerry 10 really stem the decline, which saw the company’s market share in smartphones slip from an obscene 85 percent to an abysmal 3.4 percent? With around 79 million customers, BlackBerry is still a force to be reckoned with and its new OS has received positive reviews from the industry for some of its innovative features.

But, in an industry ruled by the likes of Apple and Samsung, BlackBerry will have to keep innovating to stay alive and woo back its enterprise customer base.

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 Online Editor Tom Paye tom@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9103 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar raj@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409131 Sales Manager Michal 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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© Copyright 2013 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

EDITORIAL Our events

Onto a winner

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

On January 30th, CNME once again showed why it is the leading IT publication in the Middle East after hosting the annual CIO 50 Awards and Forum for the fifth time – and what a success it was.

The event gathered the truly elite players of the Middle East’s IT industry and honoured the top 50 organisations – and the people within them – that delivered business value through innovation in the last 12 months.

After several years of recession, IT in the Middle East finally began to transition in the last year from a cost saver enabler, as organisations tried to cut back wherever possible, to a real business enabler, able to completely change the way an enterprise operates for the better. We reveal on page 35 exactly who the individuals are that brought that innovation to life and who walked away with the coveted awards.

The Forum part of the day was just as exciting and highlighted exactly what is missing in the Middle East – something that regularly brings together the region’s CIOs and IT managers into an easy and accessible common space, and simply allows them to communicate with each other.

As the audience engaged itself in a series of insightful presentations from the CIOs of Atlantis hotel, Emirates Aluminium, Emirates Flight Catering, Saudi Arabian Airlines and Emirates NBD, it became clear that facilitating discussion between these people is vital to prospering in the ever changing and challenging world of technology.

When it comes to learning new technologies and understanding how they can be relevant to an organisation, we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of CIOs with regards to what sources of knowledge they have available to them. Yes, they can read magazines like CNME, they can read articles on the Internet and they can attend various events we hold throughout the year to try and gain that knowledge.

Then there is of course all the vendors out there who would love to chew their ears off at any time about why these technologies are so fantastic and why they have the best solution for them.

But actually, what we realised - and what was confirmed with the great response to the Forum - is that the greatest insights CIOs can gather are from their industry peers, the people going through exactly what they are going through.

That is why we have launched the CIO Council – an exclusive online portal that brings CIOs and IT mangers together to discuss, with no agendas, the real issues and challenges affecting them today.

We introduced the CIO Council at the Awards and Forum and have already received a fantastic response from our audience of leading CIOs, who have been waiting for something like this for a long time.

CIO Council has now officially gone live with its soft launch. It is free for CIOs to sign up and you can head to ciocouncilme.com to do just that and become a part of this exciting new project.

As well as delivering insightful information to our audience through our print and online portals, we at CNME will continue to do our best to further enhance the flourishing Middle East IT industry through initiatives like this – and we hope you join us along the way.

Big Data

Symposium

Our online platforms

Our social media

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twitter.com/computernewsme

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Contents

Our Strategic Partners Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic IT Transformation and Big Data Partner

Strategic IT NetworkingPartner

Strategic IT Storage Partner

STRATEGIC IT INNOVATION PARTNER

ISSUE 253 | february 2013

ANALYSIS 8

Unstoppable force Cisco looked a force to be reckoned with as it showcased a host of new enterprisebusiness solutions during its annual Cisco Live conference in London.

35

12 Pick of the bunch

Oracle chose Dubai as the place to kick off its global CloudWorld tour as it rolled up at the Madinat Ballroom.

Innovation to celebration

14 The stars of CCTV

As Dubai played host to the biggest ever Intersec trade show, CNME stopped by to spy on the technologies influencing the region’s security landscape.

The wait was over as CNME hosted its annual CIO 50 Awards and Forum in Dubai, an event which recognises the top CIOs in the region.

20 Month in view

We round up the top stories that took our eye in the last month.

CIO SPOTLIGHT

24 Successful momentum

It was the rapid deployment of the Middle East’s first private cloud which grabbed the headlines for Terence Sathyanarayan.

But the Drake & Scull man says the journey is far from over.

CASE STUDIES

28 By royal appointment

King Hamad University Hospital celebrated its official opening almost one year ago, and as with any new establishment, a magnitude of innovative projects have been in full flow since the beginning.

32 A loyal servant

Mednet has shown unquestioned loyalty to its security provider, but in an ever more dangerous virtual landscape, that loyalty is being put to the test.

NETWORK WORLD

44 Preventing a BYODisaster

In today’s interconnected and extremely mobile world, employees want to be able to work on their own device, and not necessarily the ones provided by their organisation. This opens up a plethora of network challenges.

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STORAGE ADVISOR

50 The virtual legacy

Virtualisation was the big challenge of 2012. However, hurdles still exist around business-critical and legacy applications.

Who will be the heroes taking enterprise forward?

SECURITY ADVISOR

56 Are 8 Windows more shatterproof than 7?

Antivirus vendors are lining up to criticise Microsoft’s efforts to secure its new operating system. We examine whether these security issues are a real concern.

INTEGRATION ADVISOR

62 Avoiding the partnership from hell

Successful relationships can be a game changer. However, danger looms for those who stumble upon rocky grounds. CNME teams up with the experts to deliver the ultimate guide to avoiding the partnership from hell.

TELECOMS WORLD

68 4Gone conclusion

The roll-out of 4G may be well underway, but there is still some way to go.

www.cnmeonline.com

CAREERS ADVISOR

74 The next big name

Business depends on IT, and IT depends on certain individuals who carry the industry into the next era of technology and intelligence. How do Middle East enterprises uncover the best available resources?

INSIGHT

78 They’re Back Berry. But do they mean business, or personal?

BlackBerry is back with a bang. Following the unveiling of its new operating system and two new smartphones, it’s make or break for the once dominant mobile company. Which it will be will depend solely on whether it can reach out to the audience it has previously neglected – the personal consumer.

PRODUCT WATCH

80 CNME breaks down the the top tablets to feature at CES 2013 in Las Vegas.

THE WORD ON THE STREET

82 Where’s my Wi-Fi?

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

Analysis Cisco Live

Unstoppable force While Cisco has pulled out of the home networking market for good, its enterprise-level business is seemingly unstoppable. Having previewed a host of new solutions at its annual Cisco Live conference in London, the vendor looks to be way ahead of the competition.

W

hen Cisco sold its home networking arm, Linksys, to rival Belkin in January, the firm said that it wanted to commit to its enterprise and service provider businesses. Having all but dominated the world of home networking for more than a decade, it was time for Cisco to step back and get its priorities straight.

It was a move that could have gone either way, but by the look of things at the Cisco Live conference in London, the firm has got the right idea. Given the scale and scope of the vendor’s current enterprise, service provider and data centre portfolio, the home networking business seems a little trivial for such a company to be troubling itself with.

The word of the day seemed simple: Cisco has a lot more to offer the world than

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a decent Wi-Fi router. And, in the enterprise segment at least, the firm is becoming something of an unstoppable force, as shown by its products that seem, at first glance, way ahead of the competition.

A certain change is in the air at Cisco, then, but as its CTO Padmasree Warrior noted in her keynote speech, change is happening all around the technological world. “I was reading an article in Forbes last week, and it talked about jobs that are in high demand. There were things like data scientist, user experience designer and social media manager. None of these were even heard of 20 years ago,” she said.

“But perhaps the most significant change that amazes me is the growth in the number of devices that we use. In 1984, when Cisco was being created, there were 1,000 devices www.cnmeonline.com

connected to the Internet. By 1992, that number became 1 million. By 2020, we expect 50 billion devices to be connected to the Internet.”

The message that IT managers and CIOs had to get into their heads, she implied, was that they need to find ways to accommodate all of these devices on their networks. Indeed, much of Cisco Live was spent discussing how to better manage this exponential growth in the number of devices connecting to the Internet.

The problem, Cisco’s representatives said, comes with the fact that employees now want to access networks from their tablets, smartphones and personal computers. And while CEOs and CIOs are only too happy to subscribe to policies such as BYOD and cloud integration, a hastily sketched plan could

place incredible strain on a network that is not ready to accommodate it.

Of course, Cisco had its own solutions to this problem, and was keen to show them off at the London conference. The mantra of Unified Access is at the core of the company’s plans going forward, Cisco said. This means being able to manage multiple networks through one unit and allowing any wired or wireless device safe access onto enterprise networks.

“We believe that networks need to be simpler, more secure and easier to operate,” said Rob Soderbery, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Networking, Cisco, in his keynote speech.

“But in terms of new users, new types of devices and all the things that come onto your network, these things are actually working against that idea. Our idea is to keep

all of those devices, and the network, safe.”

To this end, Soderbery previewed a new set of products that would help companies upgrade their networks so that they are easier to manage. At the core of the new product line-up, he said, is the new Unified Access Data Plane ASIC, which allows for a new architecture that converges the processing of wired and wireless traffic into a single data plane.

Soderbery said that wireless networks have previously been built as overlays to a wired network, resulting in having two logical networks to manage. With the new Unifed Access products, though, everything can be managed through one unit.

“We’re going to converge that wired and wireless network,” explained Soderbery. “The Unified Access Data Plane ASIC is at the core of our new converged wired and wireless platforms, giving you all of your wired features and, at the same time, all of your wireless services as well.”

Part of the new line-up included the new Catalyst 3850 Unified Access Switch, which delivers one physical infrastructure for wired and wireless networks, and the new 5760 Unified Access WLAN Controller, which offers 60Gbps performance. The 5760 can be managed through Cisco’s IOS-based software, which provides information on what kinds of devices are connected to the network, how much bandwidth they use and who they belong to.

The new products were certainly impressive enough for an IT manager to get excited over. Following a demonstration of the line-up, Soderbery enthusiastically asked the keynote audience to applaud the engineers that created the technology – but only if they agreed that it was “awesome”.

It goes without saying that the thousandsstrong crowd erupted into cheer.

But the ability to converge wired and wireless networks was not the only trick that Cisco had up its sleeve in London. On the second day of the conference, security was the order of the day, with the vendor releasing its annual security report and its new solutions to address the changes in security needs. www.cnmeonline.com

Padmashree Warrior, CTO, Cisco

The report showed that security threats are now much more far reaching on legitimate sites than they once were. Cisco said that search engines are now 27 times as likely to deliver malicious content than counterfeit software sites, while online advertisements provide an even bigger risk. With the rise in employees wishing to take their own personal devices into work, Cisco said, this creates a real problem for businesses looking to protect their networks.

“Today, we live a blended work-personal life,” said John N. Stewart, Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer of Global Government and Corporate Security, Cisco.

“The hackers know this, and the security threats that we encounter online - such as embedded Web malware while visiting popular destinations like search engines, retailers, social media sites and smartphone or tablet apps - no longer threaten only the individual; they threaten our organisations by default.”

Of course, Cisco had yet another solution to showcase. Its idea was to converge all of the security capabilities that are currently available into one simple and easy-tomanage platform. The firm said that firewall management, application management and february 2013

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Analysis Cisco Live

security analytics should all be brought into one architecture to protect effectively.

One way to do this would be through the new Identity Services Engine (ISE) 1.2, which Cisco has already made available with the likes of SAP, Citrix and Zenprize, to name a few. It is essentially a series of APIs that will integrate with mobile device management, giving customers the ability to integrate networkenforced policy to device-enfored policy.

“As devices start to proliferate, ISE can become a platform for customers to manage devices and bring policy to those devices,” said Christopher Young, Senior Vice

President of Security and Government, Cisco.

Young also said that the ability to identify devices is now becoming increasingly important, so ISE now offers a feed for device profiles, which is constantly updated with information from device manufacturers bringing out new products.

Young also announced the acquisition of Czech security firm Cognative Security, which has developed analytics technology that will help to identify threats inside and outside the network. Cisco believes that this kind of technology will go a long way toward protecting against advanced cyber threats,

In 1984, when Cisco was being created, there were 1,000 devices connected to the Internet. By 1992, that number became 1 million. By 2020, we expect 50 billion devices to be connected to the Internet.”

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and plans to roll it out with its global security products once the acquisition is finalised later this year.

Adding new functionalities to its products has been a source of great focus for Cisco over the past year. The firm has invested massively into new software capabilities that will ultimately improve user experience. In her first keynote speech, Warrior said that Cisco has closed eight acquisitions over the past six months, all of them in the software space. It is no longer enough that Cisco makes good hardware, the message seemed to be. Instead, the firm has to provide a comprehensive service.

But with its new range of products, vastly expanding partner ecosystem and keen eye for interesting acquisitions, Cisco looks set to offer such things. And judging by the professional response to its announcements at Cisco Live in London, it seems as if the vendor should get on just fine without its home networking business.

Analysis Oracle CloudWorld

Pick of the bunch Oracle chose Dubai as the place to kick off its global CloudWorld tour in January, as IT specialists and stakeholders from around the region met at the Madinat Jumeirah to discuss the latest developments in cloud computing.

Mark Hurd, President, Oracle

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W

hen somebody decides to host a global tour, one of the things they have to decide is in which city to host the first event. They can then be expected to be asked a million times when the event comes around about why that decision was made.

Oracle’s CloudWorld event was no different.

Perhaps the company would have been slightly more interested in answering why they chose to host an event entirely focused on the cloud, but members of the press and IT industry had far too many times listened to why cloud is so important to want to listen to that answer again.

Instead, they wanted to hear that Oracle’s decision to host in the Middle East first really meant something significant. They wanted to hear that it was an indication of the region’s active role in leading cloud implementations around the world. That hosting it there was a bold statement of Oracle’s big expectations for the region in the evolvement of cloud technologies.

including its move to a new building in Dubai Internet City, which will help accommodate its continued growth of operations and the increasing number of employees.

“We’ve got a decent-sized organisation that we’re growing in Abu Dhabi, as well, so we’re investing heavily in the Emirates,” he added.

Another regional investment Oracle is making in the region is its development initiative, which hits at around 500,000 students.

“This is very much trying to get Oracle technologies in the hands of students,” Hurd said. “We think this is a benefit to us in multiple fashions. One, these students can come out and join Oracle. Second, they can join partners. Third, they become customers.”

Oracle also has about 70 user groups in the region that it uses to communicate with. “They come together as a group, we have events for them and we use them as listening posts to talk about our technology and portfolio. There are roughly 125,000

We chose to come here because of the incredible support from our team here, the excitement of our team here, the amount of growth we are getting out of this region and how much energy we’re putting into the region.”

However, perhaps the underwhelming truth was in fact that it was simply the most logistically sound location to begin the tour. Either way, the company’s star player at the event, President Mark Hurd, didn’t waste the opportunity to push the former, slightly more glamorous, theory.

“This region is a place we’re growing,” Hurd said. “So we chose to come here because of the incredible support from our team here, the excitement of our team here, the amount of growth we are getting out of this region and how much energy we’re putting into the region.”

“I have spent time with our partners and customers here and there is tremendous excitement about the cloud. I think the opportunity is there for the Middle East to lead cloud adoption and we certainly come with a strong portfolio, strong customer base and strong network of partners who are capable of assisting a growing team.”

He further referred to Oracle’s commitment to the region by highlighting recent initiatives,

members in these 70 user groups so that’s a big investment for us,” Hurd added.

Unfounded concerns Despite all of the hype of cloud, the reality remains that adoption remains low, in this region or otherwise.

With concerns regarding security and loss of data normally taking account for this, Hurd was at pains to dismiss these, instead focusing on the supposed lack of cloud products in the region.

“When you go and look at where most of the SaaS providers are, most of them are small companies and most of the them start their work in the United States, and most of them have a hard time moving outside of the US for one reason or another,” he said.

“We are really the only scaled company that has got a very broad serviced ecosystem, partner ecosystem, sales ecosystem and a full suite of cloud SaaS products that we’ve brought to the www.cnmeonline.com

region. Who else has brought their portfolio to the region? You might find somebody with one silo product, but not much. So I think the adoption of cloud has been low in the Middle East because there really just hasn’t been a position in the market where someone has come with the offers that we are now. It’s a new day.”

The CloudWorld roadshow will also be hosted in other major cities around the world including Frankfurt, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York City, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.

Participants of the event were introduced to the latest developments in Oracle cloud technology and its benefits to business and public and private sector industries.

Oracle also used the event to officially announce its delivery of infrastructure-as-aservice (IaaS) on-premise with capacity on demand, a project the company announced at its OpenWorld event in September.

The company said it is not pitching the IaaS offers as an alternative to commodity cloud services, such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS), but rather as an alternative to purchasing Oracle systems for on-premise deployment.

It claimed that using its IaaS eliminates the upfront capital costs of buying new equipment and could quickly provide additional capacity, at a price, when needed.

According to Hurd, it is Oracle’s “very aggressive approach” to the cloud that makes it a clear leader in the field.

“We haven’t just released one application for the cloud, we’ve announced all three – platformas-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service,” he said.

“On top of it – inside the SaaS offerings – we have a complete suite of applications, which are available on-premise, off-premise, in a private cloud or in a public cloud. All of our applications are built on Fusion middleware so we have a tremendous amount of ability to extend those applications and integrate those applications unlike anything that has been around before.

“The great news about our portfolio in the cloud is it gives the customers ultimate flexibility.

They can mix and match – they can use the cloud to engage with some applications and do others on-premise, and they can do some on the private and some on the public cloud. All of these options are available to them. We felt it important, because of the breadth of our offering, to really get this in front of customers directly.” february 2013

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Analysis Intersec

The stars of CCTV Last month Dubai played host to 990 exhibitors from 54 countries inside the World Trade Centre during the biggest ever Intersec trade show. CNME stopped by to spy on the latest technologies influencing the security landscape in the Middle East.

M

ajor players from the world over rolled up at Dubai World Trade Centre in January to witness an Intersec event recorded at an astonishing 10% larger than the previous year.

The main themes of Intersec are security, safety and protection, and mega brands such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Schneider turned out to exhibit and showcase their product portfolios as well as meeting with consultants, partners and customers from all over the world.

One keen topic at the event revolved around the evolution of technology intelligence in the security sector, a major market sector here in the Middle East, especially in government entities.

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In the past half of a decade IP camera technology has replaced the traditional analogue technology, increasing security capabilities for many companies. The Middle East is a very large market for new technologies in the integrated security sector due to the volume of new projects starting in the region. Specifically in the UAE and KSA, major projects are being undertaken from scratch with large budgets and, following the ‘smart city’ trend, are embracing expensive technology solutions, including security and CCTV, in order to produce high quality infrastructure for the area.

MBR City, currently under construction, is an example of the scale of some of the www.cnmeonline.com

projects currently in development which will invest heavily into cutting edge technologies to layer their infrastructures with. This market is being tapped into by global technology solutions giants – many of which were present at the event.

“This is a massive market for us,” said Hidenori Taguchi, Head of Marketing, B2B Products and Solutions, Sony Professional Solutions MEA. “This emerging market is investing heavily in big projects, which is making it a high priority for us.”

Sony used the event to announce the release of its regional heat resistant cameras which can withstand temperatures of up to 60 degrees –

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Research specific to the Middle East Sessions will cover these key IT and business focus areas of this region: • Workforce Management • Leadership Development • Business Intelligence • Mobility

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Analysis Intersec

making them perfect for the summer conditions here in the Middle East.

“This is a totally unique product.

The evolution of technology allowed our developers to complete this and now we’re bringing it to market. We’re happy because we’ve seen a great deal of interest for the product.”

Another major player showcasing at the event was Fortune 500 company Schneider.

Schneider Electric is a unique company in the respect that its product portfolio covers a fully completed base of solutions in multiple industry sectors, including software, engineering and construction.

Schneider was running its 10th Intersec show and believes the interest and possibilities in the region are only increasing.

“We’re very satisfied with this type of event. The Middle East is a booming market for us in all sectors and technology continues to evolve giving us the opportunity to be successful here,” said Anant Berde, VP Buildings Business, Schneider Electric.

“Security is a target gross market for many companies here. Our partners and systems integrators, combined with our physical presence here, give us a great advantage.”

Schneider believes its exclusive range of products, added to its well respected after-sales commitment, put it in a good position for the upcoming surge of fresh projects here in the Middle East. New projects and continued projects have begun to grow significantly over the past six months and the opportunity lies for major technology vendors to get in on the action. Schneider believes it can be one of those companies.

“We’re a globally successful company, we have a great product range and we

have a good presence here in the region.

The security game is one which doesn’t sit still - it’s always evolving and it always needs updating, customers expect that. We strive to provide that.”

A major competitor for both Sony and Schneider was the presence of Panasonic, showcasing its intelligent security systems.

Panasonic has developed a number of products which are all run from one central IT system. Using sensor imaging, its camera range doesn’t even require monitoring.

We’re very satisfied with this type of event. The Middle East is a booming market for us in all sectors and technology continues to evolve giving us the opportunity to be successful here.”

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“You can digitally input boundaries now. If anything oversteps the boundary then you’re notified via the alarm system,” said Youssef Maroun, Senior Marketing Manager, System Solutions Department.

“The evolution of technology over the past 10 years has changed this sector completely. Our products aren’t about security and monitoring areas anymore – they’re about intelligence tracking a grid.”

In an area which is filled with possibilities when it comes to deploying major technologies, companies all over the globe are investing heavily in the Middle East.

Intersec, among others, is a major trade show which has raised the attention and profile of Dubai and the UAE in the technology, construction and manufacturing sector.

The average time spent on TV each day has remained stagnant at 168 minutes.

The average time spent Web browsing each day has fallen 2.4% to 70 minutes.

Mobile apps consume 2X the audio and video compared to websites

The popularity of mobile devices has caused a major increase in mobile app usage in the past year. The influx of lightweight, sophisticated, handheld devices, combined with tablet and mobile focused operating systems, has played into the hands of app developers and providers. Here are the facts...

2008

2016

57 Mbps upstream – 90 Mbps downstream

iPad Mini/4

46 Mbps upstream – 46 Mbps downstream

iPad 3

35 Mbps upstream – 40 Mbps downstream

iPad 2

26Mbps upstream – 35 Mbps downstream

iPad

How fast is your iPad?

Mobile devices per user

2012 of enterprises are not limiting bandwidth or access in any way.

50%

YouTube 500 Kbps

WebEx high quality video 1.5 Mbps

Skype 0.5 Mbps

Source: Aruba Networks, ZK Research

increase in WAN bandwidth consumption due to mobile devices.

50%

80%

WebEx iPad desktop share 250 Kbps

are seeing a

Citrix Internet and Office 150 Kbps

Enterprise apps:

NetFlix 1.5 Mbps

70% of enterprises are planning to add Wi-Fi capacity to address increased usage.

The need for speed Personal apps:

Lync desktop sharing 1.5 Mbps

FaceTime 400 Kbps

of business apps have already moved to the cloud.

49%

ROUND-UP Month in view

du converges services with Alcatel Lucent du has partnered with Alcatel Lucent to deploy the latest IP-routing technology as it looks to converge its telecoms services.

The move will eliminate the need for du to manage multiple networks and thus simplify network operations, the firm said.

Under the terms of the agreement, Alcatel

WHAT’S HOT?

has begun to deploy the IP/MPLS solution – based on its 7750 Service Router, 7705 Service Aggregation Router and 5620 Service Aware Manager – as well as provided du with a set of services including project management, network design, installation and commissioning, integration and operations.

Etisalat, Pacific Controls commence M2M collaboration

LTE

The UAE’s two mobile operators - Etisalat and du - have confirmed that the iPhone 5 can now connect to their speedy long-term evolution (LTE) networks, otherwise known as 4G.

BlackBerry

IT spending to hit $3.7 trillion Worldwide IT spending is set to total $3.7 trillion in 2013, marking a 4.2 percent increase over 2012, according to a new report from Gartner. It also predicted that worldwide devices spending, including PCs, tablets, mobile phones and printers, will reach $666 billion in 2013, up 6.3 percent from 2012.

Google’s fourth quarter revenue was up 36 percent from the previous year, thanks to continued growth in its advertising business.

Revenue for the quarter, which ended Dec. 31, was $14.42 billion, up from $10.6 billion a year earlier. CEO Larry Page referred to Google’s full-year revenue topping $50 billion for the first time as “not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half.”

Etisalat signed a partnership agreement with Pacific Controls in Dubai to mark the beginning of a collaboration which will see them tackle connectivity challenges in the developing world.

The two companies - which are both based in the UAE - have committed to pursuing machine to machine (M2M) solutions and innovating smart cities in order to significantly reduce energy consumption and the carbon footprint.

Khalifa Al Shamsi, Chief Digital Services Officer, Etisalat, described the joint venture as a way of creating great end user products that will serve a consumerdriven demand for smart technologies.

GSMA was also present at the announcement. The company pools together the world’s telecoms companies in order to increase speed and widen the reach of connectivity to poorer areas.

Google Two former Anonymous members were jailed in the UK for their roles in a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks launched against financial and music industry organisations in 2010.

Christopher Weatherhead, 22, and Ashley Rhodes, 28, received prison sentences of 18 and seven months respectively for conspiracy to impair the operation of computers.

Anonymous AMD’s financial struggles continued in the fourth quarter, with revenue sinking 32 percent due to slow chip sales and charges tied to restructuring and inventory adjustments. AMD reported revenue of $1.16 billion for the quarter, down from $1.69 billion a year earlier.

Its woes are tied to the slowdown in the PC industry, which declined last year for the first time in more than a decade.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said he expects China to overtake the US as the company’s largest market.

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Following two years of decline, BlackBerry has bounced back with a vengeance after unveiling its much anticipated new operating system, BlackBerry 10, to the world, along with two new smartphone devices, the Z10 and Q10. The company has even abolished its former name, RIM, in favour of the far more recognisable “BlackBerry” brand that was previously only attached to its devices.

february 2013

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Advanced Micro Devices

WHAT’S NOT?

LTE

UNB upgrades to Windows 8 Union National Bank will be the first organisation in the UAE’s financial sector to upgrade parts of its IT infrastructure to Windows 8, it announced with Microsoft Gulf.

The implementation phase of the project began in November 2012, with Microsoft Gulf upgrading UNB’s IT environment. The two firms claimed that, once they are operational, the new solutions will provide flexible work environments, faster delivery and greater reliability.

Microsoft also said that the solution is modular, meaning it can be scaled to meet UNB’s future technology requirements.

“This partnership will serve as an important vehicle for business growth by giving UNB the opportunity to be the first in implementing and exploring the business benefits of Windows 8, and I am very pleased that UNB is a partner in this landmark agreement with Microsoft,” said Zuhair Sulaiman, Senior VP and CIO, UNB.

The number of 4G LTE users will at least double by the end of 2013, growing by 115 percent from 92.3 million to 198.1 million people worldwide, according to IHS iSuppli.

Cloud World Forum attracts top speakers The third annual Cloud World Forum MENA, which will take place from March 19 to 20, will attract over 40 keynote speakers from the region’s top organisations, including Google, Gulf Air and Emirates Flight Catering.

The speakers will join hundreds of delegates to share the latest trends, products and concepts related to cloud computing.

Some of the speakers at this year’s Cloud World Forum include Girad Moussa, Head of Enterprise MENA, Google, Jassim Haji, Director of IT, Gulf Air, Ahmed M. Almulla, Vice President of IT, Dubai Aluminium, and Arun Tewary, CIO, Emirates Flight Catering.

The event will be held at Dubai’s JW Marriott Marquis, hosting more than 35 exhibitors and 500 senior IT professionals, as well as the highprofile speakers.

Orange, Baidu introduce mobile browser for MEA

Mobile operator Orange and Chinese Internet giant Baidu have developed a cobranded mobile browser for Android-based smartphones in the Middle East and Africa.

The browser is the result of an exclusive deal between the two companies that aims to increase data usage in emerging markets. The partnership is the first time Baidu has signed such a deal with a global operator, according to Orange.

The browser will come pre-installed on Android-based smartphones and also be available as a download. Orange called this decision “a natural one”, since demand for smartphones based on Google’s operating system doubled in Egypt during the second half of last year.

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said she was “proud” after the company’s revenue climbed 2 percent in the fourth quarter.

Smart energy IT growing fast Revenue in the IT segment of the world’s smart electricity delivery industry is likely to have grown by 23 percent to US$9.4 billion in 2012, in support of smart grid deployments, according to a new study for trade group Advanced Energy Economy (AEE) by Pike Research.

Infor opens Middle East support centre Infor has opened a customer support centre in Dubai Internet City to support the firm’s 650-plus customers in the Middle East. The support team will be able to serve both English and Arabic speakers.

The company said it has seen strong growth in the Middle East, having increased the number of its regional partners by 36 percent over the past year, and the new team will now february 2013

provide support to that base.

Infor has concentrated its Middle Eastern sales efforts on existing key growth areas, it added. These areas include hospitals and complex, project-based manufacturing industries such as refrigeration, air conditioning and water systems. The firm has also targeted utilities, the public sector and government organisations.

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CIO Spotlight Terence Sathyanarayan

Successful momentum As a self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie, Drake & Scull’s Corporate IT Director, Terence Sathyanarayan, is used to living life at a faster pace. It was his rapid deployment of the Middle East’s first private cloud that grabbed the headlines, but for him, the journey is far from over.

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I

TIMELINE 1981 Joined his mother in Abu Dhabi, where he grew up and went to school.

1992 Moved to Bangalore, India to complete degrees in computer science and aircraft maintenance engineering.

1997 Involved in a near-death experience following an accident involving his motorcycle.

1998 Moved back to Abu Dhabi and took a job as an aircraft engineer for Abu Dhabi Search and Rescue.

1999 Became a projects manager for Japanese company Newlong FZE.

2005 Migrated to Toronto, Canada and set up an IT security company with his father-in-law.

2006 Moved back to the UAE to become Group ICT Manager of Emirates’ security arm, Transguard Group.

2008 Took the opportunity to become a CIO at the Khalifa Juma Al Nabooda Group of Companies.

2011 STRATEGIC ICT PARTNER

WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS

WWW.CNMEONLINE.COM DECEMBER 2012

Joined EFS to lead the implementation of the Middle East’s first private cloud project. onwards

and upwards

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

INSIDE

E M C M o M E n t u M | S A P S A P P h i r E n o w | d E l l S to r A g E f o r u M | 2 0 1 3 P r E d i C t i o n S

2012 Went to replicate the same project but on a grander scale at Drake & Scull PJSC.

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t is rare to meet a person in any industry, let alone IT, to reach such a corporate level at an age as young as Terence Sathyanarayan.

As somebody who admits to “staying under the radar” for much of his career, it was only once he led the Middle East’s first private cloud implementation last year that he was no longer able to escape the limelight.

Despite being born in India, Sathyanarayan considers the UAE as home. His grandfather went to the UAE from Aden in 1954 and then his mother in 1980. After his father left when he was just two years old, his mother was left to be the breadwinner for the family. That meant taking a job at Abu Dhabi National Company (ADNOC), leaving her son at boarding school in Bangalore, India, aged four. However, a couple years later, Terence was able to join his mother in the UAE capital, beginning a 30-year love affair with the region.

“Growing up in Abu Dhabi was quiet but inspirational. It has been one of my key advantages because I understand the UAE culture, love the people and blend into the community,” Sathyanarayan says.

“I have learnt over the years how to see things from other perspectives. An MBA degree from Harvard may not give you success in the Middle East if you understand little about the Arab culture.”

After completing his CBSE aged 16 in Abu Dhabi, Sathyanarayan headed back to India, where he completed a computer science degree followed by a degree in Aircraft maintenance engineering with the civil Indian Air Force division in Bangalore.

“It was tough going back to Bangalore because the education was quite advanced in those years compared to the Middle East, so it was a challenge catching up to those high standards,” Sathyanarayan says. “The dynamic, fast-paced life was a culture shock for me, but I learnt to adapt quickly and enjoyed my six years at university.”

It wasn’t just university which he loved about India. It was also during this time that he discovered his love for speed.

However, it was a near-death experience at 21 that put life into perspective for Sathyanarayan and made him realise where he wanted to be.

“I’ve had a lot of bikes and bikes have had a lot of me,” he says. “I was in a very bad accident. I cracked my skull and had part of my brain scraped off. I had stopped breathing and was jolted back to life by CPR. After that, I actually started thinking about home and mum and decided to get my act together.”

Specialising on the Boeing 737, Sathyanarayan worked with HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) and Jet Airways as an aircraft engineer before taking a job back in Abu Dhabi as an aircraft mechanic for Abu Dhabi Aviation’s Police Search and Rescue Helicopter wing, which is the primary aerial recovery team for the Civil Defence and oil field activities in Abu Dhabi. It was aviation, not IT, that was his real passion.

In spite of this, Sathyanarayan realised the emerging field of aircraft engineering was just february 2013

Computer News Middle East

25

CIO Spotlight Terence Sathyanarayan

developing in the region, and pursuing such a career would be bleak.

Instead, he found himself accepting a projects manager job with Japanese company Newlong Machine Works, based out of Jebel Ali Free Zone.

“The Japanese take technology coupled with robotic automation to another extreme and it was during this seven-year honeymoon period that I discovered something as challenging as aircraft engineering – information technology, Japanese-style.

“I travelled 70 percent of the year, implementing large projects all over East Africa, the Far East, Europe and the Subcontinent for an extended time. Being exposed to different cultures and languages contributed towards me being able to adapt quickly and contextualise cultural barriers when dealing with personalities.”

One thing engineering does not teach is business acumen, but Sathyanarayan’s time at Newlong had a major bearing on his approach to both technology and business.

Seeing himself as a “business professional”, rather than a “technology professional”, gives him an edge over others in the industry, he says, because he understands what he calls the “critical path in a business process” from start to finish.

“I would attribute that to my work at the Japanese company because there were no different positions handling separate business streams. The Japanese think very differently – you do everything. For seven years, it was design to draft, engineer to build, ship to invoice, implement to commission and financial presentation to collections – the entire lifecycle.”

After his work with the Japanese company, Sathyanarayan and his wife decided to migrate to Toronto, Canada. This commenced Sathyanarayan’s business relationship and friendship with Carl Cagliarini, who he refers to as one of the most respected commercial wireless technologists in the IT industry.

With the concept of laser-based optical communication, they went into partnership with Sathyanarayan’s family and set up a Canadian technology business. The company – named Rhema Communications – specialised in designing sensitive networking encapsulated with unbreakable solutions for government and defence organisations.

With the UAE still being home for Sathyanarayan, he decided to set up a branch in Dubai Airport Freezone, which allowed him to travel between the two locations throughout the year.

But his passion for aviation was still alive. Following two years running the company, he left it with his fatherin-law to become Group ICT Manager for Emirates Airlines’ security arm, Transguard Group Security.

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“Emirates started a highly classified project involving one of Rhema’s engineered solutions and they wanted me to propel it forward. We implemented a wireless laser network, which cannot be intercepted – it cannot be detected even by night vision due to its frequency.

“So I came on board to implement it and roll it out. I started getting very deep into the 10 domains of IT security there and realised there is a lot more to technology in aviation.”

Come 2008, Sathyanarayan was given the opportunity to become a fully fledged CIO at the Khalifa Juma Al Nabooda Group of Companies.

While giving him a flavour of working across many industries, it also gave him the job of handling the technology for the royal family in the region, working on many palace projects.

It also gave him the opportunity to build something from scratch, which is the kind of project he often finds himself gravitating towards.

“I always find myself at ground zero – when there is nothing in place other than the vision of a CEO. I embrace the opportunity to align technology with their vision and take organisations to the next level,” he says.

Therefore, when the opportunity came up to lead the implementation of a first-of-its-kind cloud project at Emcor Facilities Services (EFS), it didn’t take long for Sathyanarayan to say yes.

“They came along in 2011 and the Group Managing Director’s vision to transform the business in rapid time and lean budget couldn’t be achievable without diving into the concept of grid computing and cloud-based architecture. So I embarked as CTO on the Middle East’s first private cloud project that was supposed to take about three years. But we implemented it in just under six months.”

It is easy to see that Sathyanarayan’s love for speed spreads beyond cars and motorcycles, and into the thick of his life and career.

“I’ve got to keep moving. That’s what drives me – I need opportunities to be constantly creative. You plan it, you plot it, you achieve it,” he says.

It’s that drive that has led Sathyanarayan to where he is now, replicating principles and experiences with his past companies but this time on a much grander scale at Drake & Scull PJSC, the largest engineering, procurement and construction management company in the Middle East.

“The EFS project was big enough - it’s a huge group of about 16 companies - but the Drake & Scull project is about seven times larger and more complex.

“Drake & Scull PJSC’s business transformation is by far the most prestigious and challenging assignment I have encountered.” www.cnmeonline.com

“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.

case study King Hamad University Hospital

By royal appointment It’s been an exciting year for King Hamad University Hospital (KHUH). Situated in the Kingdom of Bahrain, the state-of-the-art hospital celebrated its official opening almost one year ago, and as with any new establishment, a magnitude of innovative projects have been in full flow since the beginning.

W

ith a capacity of 311 beds and 1731 employees, KHUH was established as part of a strategy to develop a centre for organ transplant surgeries and trauma care.

From the very outset, there was a desire to use not only state-of-the-art medical technology, but also the most sophisticated information systems to eliminate bureaucracy and support rapid, robust diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making.

This led to 18 months of intense effort to examine and re-engineer almost every system ahead of the

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hospital opening in 2012. The IT implementation at KHUH was validated when it was voted the unanimous winner of the ‘Healthcare Deployment of the Year award’ at CNME’s awards last year.

“The critical point for us was that the hospital was brand new, in which case we had to reach our desired standards from the very start,” says Sheikh Khalid Bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, IT Director, King Hamad University Hospital.

“What we were specifically focusing on at that point, prior to the opening last year, was the medical

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equipment area; response times for problems with medical equipment, lack of engineers, rapid response times to any difficulties, etc.”

Al-Khalifa took on the role as IT director at the hospital from the very start back in May 2010 and heads a team made up of 25 members dealing with the implementation projects and constructing the entire infrastructure for the hospital.

After the first year warranty ran out on the previous asset management system, he says the technology became unreliable and slow to use which caused major concern at a highly critical time for the institution. Therefore, the hospital set about looking for a new system and a complete IT makeover, ready in time for the official opening.

The jewel in the crown for the project came in the form of a fully integrated asset management, biomedical engineering, real time location and passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) solution built around Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM).

The unique combination of systems delivered an easy to use, integrated system to monitor and track staff, patients and hospital assets, analyse personnel data to continually improve work procedures and reduce waste and operational cost.

The solution combined the Infor EAM platform; Ekahau’s real time location system; Impinj’s and Active Identity’s passive RFID solutions; Unitech medical PDAs; and RFID tags from Omni-ID. Bringing all of these systems together, Symphony from Azimuth, the Bahrain based systems integrator, along with their offshore partner MCT India, delivered a state of the art, fully integrated solution for the hospital.

“The implementation took little over a year. The main point of focus was the training early on. We had Infor with us training the key users for a short period, and once this had been completed we then trained the remaining staff internally on the new system,” Khalifa says.

Information is delivered via desktop and mobile applications that not only monitor the location of staff, equipment and patients, but also apply business rules for alerting staff in the event of equipment

Sheikh Khalid Bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, IT Director, King Hamad University Hospital

The redesign of the system was completed in

18

months.

The critical point for us was that the hospital was brand new, in which case we had to reach our desired standards from the very start. ”

www.cnmeonline.com

failure, staff or patient assistance requests, infant security and more.

Integration between asset management, resource management and clinical information systems provides a truly holistic view of the hospital. Adding real time to this equation presents a huge opportunity to truly understand day-to-day operations and effect clinical outcomes and patient experience in ways that could never be imagined in the past with paper driven processes.

The operational perspective

The Infor application aims to provide a full platform to manage day to day maintenance and housekeeping activities, spanning general and preventative maintenance, resource planning, contractor management and spares management.

“As time has gone on we have begun to understand the product more and in actual fact there is far more to it than we originally thought. The system has streamlined processes which we set out to change from the very beginning, which is great, but as a bonus we’re still taking more and more from it,” Khalifa explains.

The call centre function is used to address all faults, requests or issues within the hospital. The bulletin board supports the call centre engineers to perform first line diagnostics and also provide information on specific equipment.

“Infor EAM has delivered an ability to focus management attention on those areas that will keep KHUH at the very forefront of medicine in the Middle East.”

The system ensures that the hospital complies with all statutory requirements by scheduling and february 2013

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case study King Hamad University Hospital

generated and on-demand.

The solution will also soon be tightly integrated with the hospital’s building management system, Wonderware, which will again utilise Infor EAM to automate the production of work orders for facilities management engineers. This will, in turn, assist the management in improving the reliability of all systems supporting the clinical staff in their primary role.

controlling maintenance, cleaning, replacement and inspection tasks required for medical equipment.

Furthermore, the reports within Infor EAM help hospital managers analyse performance and develop continual improvement programmes.

This continual improvement begins with active monitoring. By integrating Ekahau Wi-Fi tags, the Ekahau Real Time Location System Controller (ERC) and the Symphony user interface, the redesigned 802.11 Wi-Fi network is optimised to locate people and assets in real time and provides room level separation across the entire facility.

The primary purpose of this is to monitor the movement of controlled assets and pharmaceuticals, capturing their details and passing them to Symphony where business rules can be applied, generating alerts to relevant staff when these rules are broken. The system now alerts staff, managers and security as the keys leave their designated area of the hospital to ensure that this simple mistake can be avoided.

Elsewhere, nurses no longer search for equipment room by room. Individual staff tags provide the ability for them to rapidly search for commonly needed items. Here the integration with Infor EAM means that the ‘nearest’ item found is also the ‘nearest working’. Should a fault be found, nurses can simply press a button on the item of equipment and a work order is raised and passed directly to an available biomedical engineer.

From a management perspective, tedious and time consuming processes have been reduced or removed. For example, refrigerator temperature monitoring previously involved staff taking temperature readings frequently. This process has now been completely removed as the system automatically takes readings every 15 minutes from 50 refrigerators, alerting engineering and management personnel should the required operating limits be exceeded.

Equally, for biomedical engineers, paper-driven activities have been replaced by a tightly integrated solution that enables the online management of breakdown and preventive maintenance tasks. This is based on mobile enabled asset capture, work order management and inspections, but still provides the look and feel of original reports, albeit now system

Calculating the costs

By integrating into the ERP system within KHUH, Infor EAM provides management with a clear overview of maintenance costs and the effectiveness of activities undertaken. The application enables an understanding of overall efficiency and where savings can be made or augmentation is required.

The finance department also benefits from an automated, auditable method of asset inventory management and improvements in asset security to help reduce both loss and over-provision.

Such extensive integration has enabled Infor EAM to go beyond being a platform for clinical staff to know what equipment is available for use and where it is, reducing the time spent looking for it in the first place. KHUH now has a single planning platform for equipment maintenance, cleaning and preparation that enables clinical management to plan capacity and patient intake, reducing unnecessary patient admission waiting times.

Alongside the single call centre function, a unique set of reports has been developed to assist the staff to analyse performance and implement continual improvement with regards to patient waiting times, room turn-around time, issue resolution and patient complaints.

“We have delivered a holistic solution that remains focused on improving client care and delivering the very best clinical outcomes, despite taking in data from a wide range of sources. This will be the benchmark by which medical care is judged throughout the region and indeed, the world.”

Building on success

Infor EAM has delivered an ability to focus management attention on those areas that will keep KHUH at the very forefront of medicine in the Middle East.”

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With the EAM running smoothly and the hospital making waves in the medical sector, Khalifa and his team might be forgiven for taking a holiday. However, he says that 2013 is set to be another big year for KHUH with plenty of big initiatives lined up.

“We’re really looking into patient care in the new year - proper bed management, environmental control, things like this. We have a few really big initiatives coming up and this is a very exciting time for us,” he says.

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case study Mednet

A loyal servant In an industry that demands the latest solutions, constant upgrades and best-of-breed products, it’s unlikely you’ll find many companies that have shown a lasting, unquestioned loyalty to a specific vendor. Mednet is one of those companies. But in an ever more dangerous virtual landscape, its vendor loyalty is being put to the test.

Einstein Johnson Rozario, IT Manager, Mednet

I

t’s been five years since the implementation of ESET’s NOD32 Antivirus Business Edition solution into Mednet’s infrastructure, yet the managed care service provider hasn’t seen one day go by where the product hasn’t fulfilled each and every demand it’s faced since it was originally acquired half a decade ago.

Mednet is a well known and well trusted healthcare solutions company dedicated to the United Arab Emirates. The sense of safety and expertise which is demanded from the customers day in, day out, reflects

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on the IT department, which in turn faces its own daily demands to keep the company safe and secure.

IT Manager Einstein Johnson Rozario has run a three-person team since 2006, controlling the company’s infrastructure. It was this team which set about improving the overall security of the company five years ago, when Rozario deemed the previous antivirus software a liability moving forward.

“The old antivirus and security software used to pretty much half our system in terms of speed and performance,” recalls Rozario.

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“We needed something new, a new system. So we set about looking at reviews online and listening to consultants discussing certain products, and that’s when we stumbled upon ESET.” Rozario claims that the support towards the ESET product was overwhelming and so Mednet decided to give the solution a trial. The trial was so successful, he says, that they purchased the full product almost immediately.

The main objective that the product needed to fulfil for Rozario’s team was that it was, as he describes it, “light”. He says that the product needed to slip into the company’s infrastructure without causing any complications or downtime. On top of this, it needed to be simple and user-friendly while allowing all other processes to run without slowing the system, one of the key issues with the previous product.

“If we tried to run a client application, it would almost totally stop our system – it was just so slow.

The engine was old and it was difficult. This product didn’t slow down our system at all. A quick and solid system was vital for us.”

“There was one particular site trying to infiltrate our network. The new product caught it, deleted it, it was gone. The previous product didn’t identify it.

This is just one example of why we needed to make the change,” Rozario says.

Laying the ground work

Adding to the already impressive pros list, the initial stages of implementation were so simple that Rozario was able to do them internally. Once all that could be completed in-house had been, Mednet looked to ESET for expert assistance in the completion of the project and basic initial support.

“When ESET finally had to step in, everything ran so smoothly. We were pleased to be able to take care of the initial implementation, but once ESET arrived, they really took care of us.”

Overall, the implementation and integration took next to no time at all. Within a week, the product was up and running and ESET had finalised

There was one particular site trying to infiltrate our network. The new product caught it, deleted it, it was gone. The previous product didn’t identify it. This is just one example of why we needed to make the change.” www.cnmeonline.com

the central system, leaving Mednet to continue business as usual.

“The product is working superbly, not a day has gone by that it hasn’t fulfilled its requirements,” claims Rozario.

However, in an industry where technology evolves as quickly as threats, Mednet need to keep a constant eye on the IT landscape and ensure it’s safe and secure as we move into a very virtual platform.

“Companies constantly offer us new products, to which we respond with a defiant no,” Rozario says.

“In the future, yes, we may have to re-evaluate our security, but that’s not something we want to think about now, and we certainly don’t want to consider changing from an ESET product.”

Loyal customers

The IT security market is a large one, and Mednet certainly wasn’t short of choice when it decided to implement ESET’s product. However, ESET was chosen with confidence and Mednet claims that only loyal customers know why.

“ESET isn’t the biggest security company; there are many large names in that field. However, if you’ve been with ESET and actually witnessed what its product can do for you, you’d say no to any other offer.

It’s one of those companies where you have to actually witness the strength of the portfolio before being able to really understand what it’s about. That’s how we feel and that’s why we refuse to change our provider.”

The security of the IT department has never been more important, nor has the department itself. The shift in how dominant information technology has become has laid a large emphasis on Rozario’s team and that means a few things.

“IT has become a great business enabler. Therefore, the pressure and responsibility on us has increased,” he says.

“We now have the right to endorse or recommend any new technology coming in. That means larger budgets and bigger decisions than ever before for us.

It also means far more work.”

In 2013, the projects don’t stop for Mednet – it will be upgrading its core business applications as well as beginning to roll out its cloud solutions. In any case, Rozario knows that the time may be on the horizon when Mednet must take a good long look at its ageing ESET product and make the decision on whether to update and upgrade to something newer and stronger, or to carry on as normal with its trusted protection as it moves further and further into the ever evolving IT environment. february 2013

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STRATEGIC IT INNOVATION PARTNER

Solutions world Last month saw CNME host its annual CIO 50 Awards and Forum in Dubai, an event which recognises the top CIOs in the region. The award ceremony, a regional version of the prestigious IDG CIO 100, honours the head IT decision maker of 50 organisations that have shown innovation, intelligence and intuition over the past 12 months. This year’s winners are revealed over the next four pages.

Aliasgar Bohari Zulekha Hospitals

Ali Nimer IRENA

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cover story CIO 50 Awards and Forum

Mohammed Saeed Al Shehhi General Civil Aviation Authority

Saeed Ali Muaili Emarat

Esam Alfalasi Ministry of Economy, UAE

Mohammed Abdulla AlZaffin Dubai Municipality

Saeed Al Dashti Jumeirah Group

Patrick Naef Emirates Airlines

Ali Mohamed Al Ali Health Authority - Abu Dhabi

Madhusudhan Sarangi Port of Fujairah

Ronald D’Sa OSN

Joe Tesfai Atlantis, The Palm

Suresh Rajagopalan Qatar Islamic Bank

Razi Amin First Energy Bank

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Nadeem Busheri Dubai Islamic Bank

Sabri Ali Yahya Etisalat

Ali Sajwani Emirates NBD

Ghazi Qarout Al Hilal Bank

Dr. Hazem Turki El Khatib Abu Dhabi Department of Finance

Alok Srivastava Masdar

Khalid bin Hamad Al Khalifa King Hamad University Hospital

Nasser Almojel Princess Nora bint Abdulrahman University

Muhammad Ali Albakri Saudi Arabian Airlines

V Suresh Jumbo Electronics

Ahmad AlHaddad DP World

Robert Pickton Abu Dhabi Health Services Company

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cover story CIO 50 Awards and Forum

Osama Abushaban Al Fahim Group

Terence Sathyanarayan Drake & Scull

Madhav Rao EMKE Group

Arun Tewary Emirates Flight Catering

Imad Taha Belhasa International Group

Wael Abdel-Qader Al Rostamani Group

Ali Almazrooei Emal

Khalid Tariq Higher Colleges of Technology

Amin Al-Zarouni Bee’ah

Leo de Sousa American University of Sharjah

Maisam Zaidi Al Jaber Engineering & Contracting

Samir Alamari Alshamel Travel

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Younis Othman Dubai Customs

Arnab Debroy Metito Overseas

Dr. Jassim Haji Gulf Air

Faud Al-Ansari Takreer

Matar Al Qamzi TDIC

Amer Kazim Dubai Airports

Mahmoud Kamal Habtoor Hotels

Samir Abi Frem Rotana Hotels Management

Joseph Aninias UOWD

Einstein Johnson Rozario MedNet UAE

Fady Sleiman General Electric

Jay Daga Topaz

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analysis CIO 50 Awards and Forum

Innovation to celebration It’s been a year of sheer brilliance from the IT sector. In response to the strongly recovering economy, CIOs all over the region have transformed IT from a simple enterprise necessity into a critical, value-adding business enabler. Fifty of them were recognised as the outstanding performers in 2012 by industry.

A

t most IT forums and presentations, we tend to focus on the challenges facing the industry, and although these challenges were addressed at the CIO 50 Awards and Forum last month in Dubai, the major players from the Middle East IT industry also had the chance to revel in the glory of a highly successful 12 months.

12 months that saw companies embrace social media, tap into big data, strategically deploy BYOD policies and seamlessly migrate to multiple mobile platforms. 2012 was a storming year for the Middle East – strong collaborations, fully virtualised legacies, and cloud adoptions were among the highlights for many IT teams that have strived to prove the business value of IT to their companies.

“We saw a demand from customers who are embracing technology,” said Joe Tasfai, CIO, Atlantis, The Palm.

“These customers wanted to use their smart devices everywhere, so IT had to deliver.

We did that, through increasing bandwidth, providing mobile app solutions, and more.

Customers would come to us and say we can’t upload photos at Sandance (Atlantis’ beach-located music festival), so we worked to provide a stronger service to cover that area.

Now everyone is connected, all the time, and during the day, that’s just a regular beach. It’s brilliant.”

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Tesfai, one of the winning CIOs, centred his keynote speech on the consumerisation of IT in hospitality, a booming market in the UAE. The consumerisation of IT has been another major trend over the past year and IT teams all over the region have been finding innovative ways of embracing it and translating it into value.

Ali Almazrooei, CIO at Emal, a homegrown aluminium company based in the UAE, also believes that IT has enabled stronger business. During his presentation at the show, he provided strong examples of how IT can help organisations to overcome business challenges.

“Today, IT faces many challenges, but every challenge is an opportunity to innovate,” he said. “But for all new information technologies, we see new business challenges, things like cloud computing, in-memory computing, pervasive mobility. These bring challenges like cost efficiency, security, new skills, and health and safety.”

Almazrooei explained that Emal has supported the IT team, with the company recording an impressive past 12 months.

Major vendors have been supplying businesses with key solutions for dealing with and embracing new technologies, but it’s been the CIOs and their respected teams that have recognised the needs, built the strategies and applied the solutions.

Many of the CIOs present at the awards have been responsible for massive www.cnmeonline.com

implementations over the last 12 months, and many of them travelled from all over the region to network with their industry peers and be honoured by CNME. But challenges still remain, and one which Emirates Flight Catering CIO Arun Tewary believes needs to be looked at is how IT teams convince their respected organisations that they’re entitled to healthier budgets.

“In the Gartner S&P 500 companies list, all IT-related costs amount to only 3 percent of revenue,” he said.

Pointing toward Almazrooei, Tewary then pointed out that metals was the worst off, with a predicted spend allowance of only 1.2 percent of a company’s revenue.

But when these challenges are overcome, powerful IT collaborations can result in great things, as Ali Sajwani, CIO of Emirates NBD, well knows. Sajwani discussed the processes undertaken by the bank during the acquisition of Dubai Bank back in 2011.

Sajwani has swooped numerous awards during his time as CIO at the bank and continued to do so as he, along with all the other speakers, took home an award.

Despite the humble buzz surrounding the region, many IT teams will be facing new challenges over the next year, and the CIOs who show intuition, innovation and key decision making will no doubt be back again at next year’s CIO 50 Awards.

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F

luke Networks has officially launched Visual TruView, the first truly unified, singlebox network and application performance monitoring and troubleshooting solution.

TruView represents a breakthrough advancement that sets a new bar in the way IT organisations will be able to quickly and effectively monitor and troubleshoot network and application performance problems.

It’s a patented highly optimised custom built appliance that leverages key data sets such as streamto-disk packet storage, application response time, transactional decode, IPFIX (NetFlow), and SNMP to present analytics through a single reporting interface.

As TruView processes analytics from these data sets, it time correlates the results providing crossfunctional IT teams such as network engineering, application, and server teams with a new found ability to work more collaboratively and solve problems fast.

Visual TruView’s integrated approach fills an important need in the market. A recent survey of network professionals conducted by Fluke indicated that more than half do not have the tools they need

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Furthermore, it offers automatic identification and configuration of applications and networks, so set up takes just 15 minutes or less.

An increased need for visibility into network performance and the true cause of issues is clearly a driver for today’s IT pros worldwide.

“The consequence of this evolution is that the network is placed in a highly visible position in the context of IT operations,” according to Gartner.

“When an application fails, it is a natural assumption to blame the network, justifiably or not. To redress this perception, the network operations staff needs to recognise the strategic value in real user experience monitoring on a constant basis, identifying underutilised resources and optimising their infrastructures where possible.”

Daryle DeBalski, Vice President and General Manager of the Fluke Networks’ Visual business unit, said: “TruView was built from the ground up to provide this visibility.

“We’ve reinvented the way engineers can see and manage issues with today’s complex networks so they can move to immediate resolution. TruView changes the game on speed and collaboration for our customers.”

Fluke Networks President, Arif Kareem adds, “Fluke Networks is built on a 20-year legacy of providing innovative solutions that speed the deployment and analysis, and ease the monitoring of networks and applications. TruView is a clear demonstration of our customer commitment to continuing this legacy.”

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strategic it networking partner

network world

INSIDE

Preventing a BYODisaster

network world BYOD

Preventing a BYODisaster In today’s interconnected and extremely mobile world, employees want to be able to work on their own device, and not necessarily rely on the one their organisation provides to them. This opens up a plethora of network challenges.

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T

he use of smartphones has become almost ubiquitous, with tablets not far behind. It is estimated there are two billion smartphones already in use, and that number is set to skyrocket in the coming years.

The simple reason for this is that these devices are quite brilliant. They adapt to the routines and activities in your life, making it difficult to imagine a time when you didn’t have one.

They also adapt to the routines and activities of your work life and, as such, employees are keen to use these devices at work.

Fantastic, you might say. The device the employee is working on is no extra expense to the company, and they are happier, more productive and working longer.

However, it is, unfortunately, not as simple as that.

In a time when data is the most valuable asset to an organisation, the old computers may not be as fancy as a shiny new iPad, but they are tightly set up to the company network and suitably secure. When an employee is trying to access company data with a device that is not supported by the network, the same cannot be said.

Subsequently, the network is suddenly vulnerable to all kinds of security threats.

So a CIO has two choices. They either ban employees from accessing work data on personal devices, or they embrace the trend and reap the rewards by setting up the network to support BYOD. According to IBM, the second option should be taken by any enterprise looking to progress into the age of mobility.

“The age of mobility requires optimised networks – networks that support both employee devices and employees’ need to work any time, from anywhere, with anyone,” says Ahmed Marouf, Global Technology Services Leader, IBM Middle East, Saudi and Levant.

“Three key elements of any intelligent mobile collaboration or BYOD solution are the mobile devices themselves, mobile applications, and the network that underpins them both. With so much emphasis placed on mobile devices and applications, IBM has found that the role of the network and its capabilities often becomes a secondary or tertiary concern. In IBM’s view, this can be a mistake.”

However, while BYOD has seen a wider adoption in mature countries with more sophisticated infrastructures, the Middle East is slightly behind, says Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner.

“Developing countries have not seen very high adoption for the simple reason that not as many people buy these devices and infrastructures are not as sophisticated, so they are therefore not as willing to invest. The Middle East is somewhere in between these two. People are buying these devices – that’s not an issue

What the security vendors say The benefits of BYOD are undisputed, but what are the experts’ tips on how to secure the network to support it?

Miguel Braojos, VP of Sales Southern Europe and MEA, SafeNet: Make the data useless to hackers Organisations need to consider how they can tighten the security of the data through the comprehensive and strategic application of encryption technology.

Once they accept that breaches are likely to happen, they can concentrate on securing the sensitive data itself - with technologies such as encryption - rendering it useless should it fall into the wrong hands. By shredding the digital key that unlocks the data, the data is killed, thus making it completely worthless to the hacker.

Florian Malecki, Product Marketing Manager EMEA, Dell SonicWALL: Start with an SSL VPN gateway By doing this, one is able to identify the user and the user profile as well as identifying the device and setting up a profile for the device. By deploying new security technologies that provide 360-degree insight into who and what is accessing a network – on a massive, real-time scale – IT managers can avoid data and access anarchy.

Instead, the smart network administrators can allow their businesses to assess threats, react immediately and make access decisions based on vulnerability.

Barbara Hudson, Mobile Product Specialist, Sophos: Manage the apps Mobile devices bring apps with them which may be malicious, particularly on Android devices.

Antivirus and security apps are available to protect against such threats but as the user is the administrator, they can also be removed.

It is well worth looking into the possibilities of managing such apps and controlling their settings from within the business IT. Such management should be part of the MDM solution to minimise the effort for administrators and put all mobile protection in one place.

Maher Jadallah, Regional Manager, MEA, Sourcefire: Achieve information superiority In order to do this in a mobile world, IT security professionals must be able to see everything in their environment. We recommend that smartphone users only install and purchase mobile apps from authorised application stores, apply proper passwords, use encryption and maintain the latest security patches on their devices. It is important for organisations to employ the latest defences to protect against mobile threats and put an effective security policy in place.

– because they like the swanky stuff over there, but some of the infrastructures are not as sophisticated.”

In demand While the adoption numbers might not be as high as other regions, there is no doubt it is a networking project high on the agenda of the Middle East’s CIOs. Samer Ismair, MENA Systems Engineer, Brocade Communications, says it is vital.

“Today’s enterprise, education and healthcare campus networks must provide anytime, anywhere mobile BYOD access and scale to meet rising user www.cnmeonline.com

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network world BYOD

expectations. These networks are also expected to deliver services thought impossible just a few years ago,” he says.

“More than ever, campus networks need to quickly and efficiently evolve with the ever-changing environment.”

To support the network accordingly, organisations need to have a robust and scalable infrastructure, says Sowri S. Krishnan, VP, Mobility, Cognizant.

“Additionally, they require support staff, especially IT expertise, to acquire the appropriate skills to manage this new environment and infrastructure. A platform and OS-agnostic BYOD infrastructure will provide controls to limit security breaches, as well as minimise organisational support and management of employee-owned devices,” he says.

“By deploying the right combination of MDM (mobile device management), MAM (mobile application management) and MADP (mobile application development platform) solutions, organisations can securely and quickly update business apps on employee devices, as well as perform compliance reporting.”

70% of organisations have, or are planning in 2013 to have, BYOD policies in place.

Sowri S. Krishnan, VP, Mobility, Cognizant

applications to support things like performance monitoring and security tools,” he says.

Venkat Raghavan, General Manager, Al Futtaim Technologies, adds: “The initial investments are unlikely to be high, but there is a recurring cost in maintaining the licenses for the MDM applications. However, these costs are likely to get more than offset by the savings in the cost of provision of the device hardware itself.”

The investments The costs involved in setting up a BYOD-supported network can vary depending on whether the organisation already has a pervasive wireless network in place.

Most companies that are embracing BYOD will deploy a solution that provides device detection, profiling of the device and self-registration of the device and user onto the network, says Chris Kozup, Senior Director, EMEA Marketing, Aruba Networks.

“This takes the responsibility for device onboarding away from the IT department by automating the process.

An average enterprise should be able to handle BYOD with an investment of around $10,000.”

Mathivanan Venkatachalam, Director of Product Management, ManageEngine, adds that organisations should invest on both LAN and WAN bandwidth, NAC (which performs with antivirus to perform the necessary checks), and an MDM solution to enforce policies and manage the BYOD. In the short term, organisations will inevitably need to invest time into the process of integration and budget to acquire the ICT infrastructure needed to support the new BYOD trend, according to Asfar Zaidi, Principal Consultant, Huawei Enterprise ME. “Moreover, the training of both the end user and system administrators will be a requirement,” he adds.

Farhan Mirza, Principal, A.T. Kearney ME, says the investment tends to be client and market specific.

“As well as the greater bandwidth provision costs, there’s also the upskilling and scaling of support personnel and network engineers, plus spend on 46

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The returns There are further considerations to take in terms of analysising ROI. Some of them, including technology investment or consultancy services, are easily measurable.

Others are not, explains Vittorio Brini, Regional Technical Consultants Manager, GBM. “Things like user satisfaction, additional cost in IT support (in case the customer decides to provide IT help desk services for the BYOD users) or the user providing the device can only be measured when a clear BYOD strategy is in place,” he says.

Three years ago, Citrix launched its internal bringyour-own (BYO) programme, which has already achieved its anticipated 20 percent cost saving.

However, Noman Qadir, Regional Channels Manager, MENA and Turkey, Citrix, says ROI is not the main driver for a BYOD programme.

“BYOD simplifies IT and reduces the costs and time spent on procuring devices and configuring them, working through app compatibility, and responding to a cascade of service requests. It allows IT teams to focus on more strategic imperatives,” he says.

“All these intrinsic benefits cannot be translated into a ROI but can be seen in a reduction in the labour turnover as BYOD helps in making employees feel like an asset to the company.” www.cnmeonline.com

P.O. Box-5866, Dubai, UAE +971 4 7063111 aftech@alfuttaim.ae

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© 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.

Strategic IT Storage Partner

storage advisor

INSIDE

The virtual legacy

storage advisor The heroes of virtualisation

T he v ir tua l

legacy

The re-architecture of applications for the cloud has been a task taken seriously by enterprises all over the world.

Virtualisation was the big challenge of 2012. However, hurdles still exist in terms of business-critical and legacy applications.

Who will be the heroes taking enterprise forward?

I

t took a long time for companies to come around to the idea of virtualising their environments. Virtualisation is a crucial step on the road toward the cloud, so they say. The benefits of this are well known. 2012 was seen as the year the Middle East finally begun to act upon the task of virtualising its industries – saving power, costs, time and effort in an attempt to progress into the future of IT environments.

Feras Al Jabi, General Manager, ITQAN, highlights the key reasons why the Middle East has embraced virtualisation.

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“A virtualised environment is a highly efficient and optimised environment allowing the business to do more within the confines of the available resources – server, storage, power, etc.”

Virtualising existing applications for enterprises has, without a doubt, changed the way they operate.

“The key benefit of a virtualised environment is resource pool management - by consolidating and forming many IT core services into one flexible infrastructure with potentially no ceiling for infrastructure www.cnmeonline.com

management,” says Joseph Aninias, IT Manager, University of Wollongong Dubai.

Noman Qadir, Regional Channels Manager, MENA and Turkey, Citrix, adds, “Virtualisation is profoundly changing data centre dynamics, enabling the delivery of IT services and applications as ‘on-demand’ services to the end user. Many organisations are struggling with the cost and complexity of hosting multiple physical servers in their data centres, so server virtualisation offers a proven technology for simplifying that structure, making it more cost effective, agile and manageable.”

The explosion of big data over the past 12 months has forced companies to increase the speed with which they deploy virtualised applications, especially in the storage sector.

“The era of information being dumped and dispersed across multiple servers and mainframes is long gone, and business leaders are rightly looking for solutions that are faster, more efficient and, above all, safer,” says Andrew Calthorpe, CEO, Condo Protego.

“A strong storage strategy is key to a successful virtualisation strategy. We have consistently seen our customer storage requirements grow as they proceed with their virtualisation plans.”

Most organisations have only virtualised

40%

of their company.

The legacy challenge

Feras Al Jabi, General Manager, ITQAN

However receptive the industry has been in regards to this process, it appears as though the job isn’t fully complete. The job of virtualising beyond simple applications has been seen as a tough task by many.

Legacy applications, mission-critical applications and their like are potentially the next big step in the journey for fully virtual environments.

“There are a few enterprises who have managed to virtualise more than half of their infrastructure due to the resource-hungry, mission-critical applications which demand more processing power of the entire physical servers. There is, however, some skepticism about moving their legacy applications into virtual environments,” says Rajesh Abraham Chacko, Head of Product Development, eHosting DataFort.

“Most major vendors of legacy software applications are on board with virtualisation licensing and migration. However, legacy applications that are developed in house or customised may not be an automatic fit for application virtualisation. Technologies like processor emulation are serving an interim need as a ‘bridge technology’ for legacy applications,” adds Sid Deshpande , Senior Research Analyst, Gartner.

Boby Joseph, CEO, StorIT, says, “One of the most challenging issues facing the IT department is virtualising legacy systems and applications. No matter how well planned the IT strategy is or how efficient the operations and IT processes are, there will be some

In general, legacy applications can be the most difficult to virtualise and some may not be able to be virtualised at all. It depends on the specific legacy application that one is trying to virtualise.” www.cnmeonline.com

legacy systems that cannot be replaced, even though they do not meet the current standards.”

Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President of Product Management, ManageEngine, agrees with the complexity of some legacy conversions, however, he isn’t convinced that virtualising every aspect of the infrastructure is totally necessary.

“In general, legacy applications can be the most difficult to virtualise and some may not be able to be virtualised at all. It depends on the specific legacy application that one is trying to virtualise. Advanced virtualisation concepts, such as workload movement, cannot be performed on legacy applications, so in some cases, there may not be much value in virtualising the legacy application.

The important thing to keep in mind is to assess whether there is a real benefit in virtualising the legacy application. One should not virtualise just for the sake of virtualisation.”

Aninias says, “In some cases, legacy systems such as CRM, SAP, RMS and other systems developed by ERP providers may face come incompatibility issues, which impedes IT decision makers to implement a fully virtualised delivery of their business applications.”

The hurdle that legacy applications have presented the industry may be one that can be overcome with the right expertise. What’s the necessary ammo?

“The key to virtualising the environment is to completely understand all modules involved and understand technology tradeoffs and business benefits. For all this, the system architect has to know the type of storage and database used, storage and database I/O february 2013

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storage advisor The heroes of virtualisation

characteristics, typical system usage behaviour and patterns, how to provision LUNs and appropriate raid levels for the best read and write performance on the SAN, and how the data flows between the application, database and the storage layers. Such deep expertise is not very common to find and that is a challenge for most organisations,” explains Iyengar.

Qadir agrees: “The technology has evolved to sustain high storage and network IOPS in virtualised environments over the last couple of years. Most of the expertise resides in the ability to architect and design the solution to meet the performance requirements.”

“The process would have to follow the best practices for building the system, installation and configuration of the system for the maximum performance and the application of the latest patches. “ says Rajesh Abraham Chacko.

73%

of workloads will be virtualised by 2015.

Joseph Aninias, IT Manager, University of Wollongong Dubai

The next step to cloud?

problem of data centre obsolescence and reduce IT costs overall. To lay a sound foundation for cloud computing, organisations must first consolidate and virtualise their server environments,” says Bashar Kilani, Territory Manager, IBM Middle East.

However, Deshpande believes the region isn’t completely ready to embrace cloud services.

“While the awareness of these technologies is very high and there have been a few large private cloud deployments in the region, widespread adoption of cloud computing will only happen once established vendors and regional providers start actively pursuing these opportunities.”

The move toward cloud computing is driven by the industry’s understanding that it can lower capital costs and deliver more responsive and timely IT services to its businesses. The real heroes in this process will be the ones who recognise the importance of developed skills in new areas. System architects, analysts and network professionals will all be in high demand for this new era of IT. “In virtualisation technology, the heroes are creative, open-minded people who can adapt and envision ways of delivering IT services to its end user regardless of the device,” says Aninias.

Joseph concludes with the view that the challenge at hand requires teams full of expertise with the skill sets able to take virtualised environments to the next level.

“When virtualising an IT environment, several teams need to work together and I would say all these people are heroes when it comes to virtualisation expertise.”

Is all this virtualisation a way to take the Middle East toward the cloud? CNME reported at the end of the year on the first company to deploy a private cloud, and other businesses may be on their way, too.

The education on this procedure in the region is relatively high now, according to the experts. However, the uptake is somewhat slower than it has been in the west. Migrating from virtual environments to a cloud is a simple step, it’s been said, but when can the Middle East begin embracing cloud services, and how?

“Virtualisation is a key pre-requisite for organisations looking to embrace cloud. The benefits of cloud computing include helping accommodate end user expectations for technology, overcome the

Andrew Calthorpe, CEO, Condo Protego

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www.cnmeonline.com

BIG DATA

TRANSFORMS BUSINESS 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.

security advisor

INSIDE

Are 8 Windows more shatterproof than 7?

security advisor Windows 8

Are 8 Windows more shatterproof than 7?

The knives are out for Windows 8. Figures have shown that early adoption rates are way down on Windows 7 and, to top it off, antivirus vendors are lining up to criticise Microsoft’s efforts to secure the new operating system.

We examine whether these security issues are a real concern.

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S

o far, the evidence suggests Windows 8 has hardly been the gleaming success that Microsoft no doubt hoped it would be.

Microsoft might argue that Windows 8 has met sales expectations by selling over 60 million licences since it began shipping in October, but industry analysts such as NPD Group insist that the touch-optimised operating system has gotten off to a “slow start”.

Indeed, the uptake has been so slow that the likes of research firm IDC has apportioned a significant amount of blame to Windows 8 for a worse-than-expected dip in PC sales during the last quarter of 2012. The firm argued that the new OS failed to spark a surge in PC buying, because Microsoft failed to make the benefits of its new software clear to prospective customers.

To top it all off, Windows 8’s security features, which now come in the form of Windows Defender, have also been called into question, with antivirus vendors only too keen to show the new software’s shortcomings.

In December 2012, independent antivirus research lab AV-Test performed a comparative review of Kasperksy Internet Security and Windows 8’s built-in security components. The findings suggested that Microsoft’s built-in solution missed 11.9% of attacks in Real World testing, and detected only 90% of malicious samples during an on-demand scan. Kasperksy’s solution, on the other hand, detected 99% of the malware samples.

Windows Defender might be better than having no antivirus software at all, then, but for some users, particularly those who may adopt Windows 8 as an enterprise OS, not being able to detect 10% of malicious samples is too big of a risk to take. What’s more, detecting threats is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to providing proper security, according to a number of experts.

“While Windows Defender has been making progress in detection and achieving some solid results, it doesn’t provide the full range of capabilities that businesses need and expect to fend off cyber criminals,” says James Lyne, Director of Technology Strategy, Sophos. “Effective security today requires an approach of ‘defence in depth’ – that is putting in place a range of different controls layered together to achieve effective protection.

“Depending on one single type of control such as antivirus is no longer a viable strategy for any business.

Equally, reporting and audit of security controls across the estate is a critical requirement – a job that is still done significantly better by third-party security providers.”

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, help AG, agrees that there is much more to providing comprehensive security than simply being able to

Windows 8 detected only

90%

of malicious samples during an on-demand scan.

James Lyne, Director of Technology Strategy, Sophos

check for viruses in files. “Advanced-level endpoint security addresses user behaviour control, device management, corporate policy and network access control, which are all areas where Windows Defender has some progress yet to make,” he says.

That said, both men argue that Windows Defender, as a concept, is a good thing, because it means that Microsoft has invested in a baseline security system that comes bundled with the operating system.

“Some of the new features help significantly, such as making it way harder for malware to load as a rootkit,” says Lyne. “In Windows 8, providing you have a computer with the required hardware, the operating system boot loader is signed with a certificate that allows the device to identify whether the code being loaded is genuine Microsoft or a nasty piece of malicious code. As with anything, such capabilities aren’t entirely bulletproof but they raise the bar for attackers.”

Solling concurs, explaining, “If you look under the hood, a lot of very nice features have been done, such as dynamic memory allocation randomisation, rootkit detection and trying to simplify the security interface for users.”

It would seem, then, that contrary to what many security vendors would have customers believe, Microsoft really has stepped up its security game with Windows 8, and the experts claim that it is difficult to blame these features on the lukewarm uptake of the new software. The fact that many companies only recently finished deploying Windows 7 is perhaps a bigger reason for the apparent lack of interest in Windows 8. www.cnmeonline.com

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security advisor Windows 8

The new OS shows less than

1.5%

user base penetration one month after its launch.

Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, help AG

“Many organisations I am talking to have only just finished their deployment of Windows 7, a project which took them between six and 18 months, depending on the scale of the project,” says Lyne. “For that reason, many organisations are not yet ready for an upgrade cycle to Windows 8 and plan to stick on Windows 7 for a little longer.”

Solling confirms that Windows 8 adoption is significantly slower than Windows 7 adoption was.

He says that Windows 7 had a user base penetration of approximately 5% one month after launch, and that the figure for Windows 8 stands at less than 1.5%. However, he also points out that new hardware requirements and the fact that updating to a new OS is never high on a company’s agenda have contributed to a slow start for Microsoft’s new operating system.

Security, it seems, is not the issue.

However, a number of companies have already upgraded to Windows 8. In the Middle East, Microsoft Gulf made a reasonably big announcement about the fact that Union National Bank (UNB) was upgrading parts of its IT infrastructure to the new operating system.

Commenting on the agreement Zuhair Sulaiman, SVP and CIO, UNB, said: “This partnership will serve as an important vehicle for business growth by giving UNB the opportunity to be the first in implementing and exploring the business benefits of Windows 8.”

But should the bank – and its customers – have any extra security concerns as a result of the switch?

According to Lyne, there shouldn’t be an issue.

“Upgrading to Windows 8 isn’t a bad decision for businesses from a security perspective as it builds in new capabilities and improves on security from prior 58

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versions,” he says, going one better than Solling, who simply says that Windows 8 is not any less vulnerable than Windows 7.

However, most security experts are at pains to point out that Windows 8 is certainly not secure enough without the help of a third-party antivirus product. “It’s important that businesses recognise that security built into the operating system isn’t a panacea and it is still critical to practice defence in depth to provide effective protection,” says Lyne.

Ensuring the proper protection shouldn’t be a problem when it comes to Windows 8, says Solling, who points out that Microsoft has enjoyed long relationships with many of the top antivirus vendors over the decades. “The security on a Windows platform has always been closely linked to the products being offered by these vendors. At help AG, we looked into the issue of third-party antivirus and security solutions, and based on our initial analysis, third-party solutions will operate as good as the native Windows Defender from a performance perspective,” he says.

Perhaps, then, as security becomes less of a concern, and firms ready themselves for the next round of system upgrades, Windows 8 should see a more energetic rate of uptake. Indeed, Solling predicts that customers will eventually have to shift to the new platform, if only to keep up with new applications and technologies.

“Windows 8 is a paradigm shift in how Microsoft develops programmes and applications, and how it handles the software ecosystem around Windows,” he says. “This means that, even if customers do not directly adopt Windows 8, they will, at some point, need to adopt at least aspects of the system.”

Lyne, meanwhile, predicts that, alongside the need to adopt new systems, hardware upgrades will push up the demand for Windows 8. “Tablets such as the surface are likely to drive adoption as [the platform] offers a very tablet-optimised experience.”

He also warns that security may still be a concern as Windows 8 uptake increases, particularly as new hardware, such as tablets, is taken on board. Whether security will play a dominant role in companies’ decisions to upgrade still remains to be seen. What seems clear, though, is that Windows 8 provides a better standalone platform for protecting against malware than Windows 7 does, and that security issues have had little to do with the slow uptake of the new operating system.

Unfortunately, Windows Defender in no way provides the all-encompassing protection that businesses need, meaning that antivirus vendors will still be able to cash in, no matter what OS the customer is running on.

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INSIDE

Avoiding the partnership from hell

integration advisor Partnerships

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F

orty for you, sixty for me and equal partners we shall be. A witty quote to be taken with caution from Gerald Barzan. Partnerships formed for integrations are a necessary procedure in order to achieve success. As the saying goes; no partnership is successful unless all parties stand to benefit.

However, sometimes things don’t pan out the way they were planned. Perhaps sometimes they weren’t planned properly at all, and perhaps even sometimes someone just completely discarded an extremely good plan. Either way, a partnership and, critically, a project stands to suffer when a breakdown occurs.

Finding the fault In any situation, when things go bad, the first thing you can do is finish wallowing in self-pity and begin to identify where the hinges began to become unstuck.

“An absence of loyalty, a lack of clarity, a change in customer requirements, all these things can cause major issues,” says Khaled Kamel, Regional Channel Manager, Brocade.

“The inability to positively confront someone has always been a problem in my experience. It’s a soft skill, but if you can confront each other in a deal, when things aren’t going to plan, then you can set about trying to get things sorted. In any case, if people don’t speak up, then both parties suffer in silence.”

What’s more worrying, Klaus Middeler, Director, Marketing Development, Ericsson, believes, is that systems integrations can turn sour even after the project has finished.

“The main reasons are false expectations, unclear responsibilities and a lack of communication. Too often partners assume their view of a situation is the right one, instead of making the effort to exactly specify what is the expected behaviour.”

Klaus Middeler, Director, Marketing Development, Ericsson

experience. These decisions can be a make or break business move – you don’t want to be anyone’s guinea pig.”

Kamel explains, “We’ve signed partners who wanted to get out of a partnership with our rivals.

“This is just because they didn’t deliver on their commitment. I’ve seen partners sign an exclusive deal, meaning that only our solution would be quoted, but then we’ve found out that they’ve quoted us plus two other solutions as well. This is a betrayal of trust. One, they weren’t honest. Two, they lied whilst putting the competition against us without us knowing. How could we trust them after this? This kind of thing results in a cancelled partnership on the dot.”

Though perhaps to some, the challenge of overcoming hurdles is the key to proving one’s worth.

“There are always challenges on each project.

It’s how the partner deals with the challenge that matters,” Ciaran Forde, Vice President, Enterprise, MEA, CommScope says.

“The best companies will seize the opportunity to show their ability to solve tough problems. This is when strong collaboration between manufacturer, partner and customer comes to the fore.”

Learning from mistakes Every company can reel off a number of personal examples of failed partnerships, whether it’s through experience or word of mouth. In any case, the examples stand as a reference point for each business going into a systems integration, whether that be the end user, the reseller or the vendor.

“You see some horribly failed partnerships in the press from time to time, here and internationally,” says George DeBono, General Manager, MENA, Red Hat. “This is why you need to do the proper research.

You need domain experience, relative experience for the sector with which you’re dealing. If it’s a financial entity you’re working with – you need someone with financial

Facing the consequences “The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way,” said American writer Dale Carnegie. However, when it comes to business, these wise words may mean a lot less when a hefty sum of money is at stake.

Marc Jessiman, Solutions Director, Dimension Data, highlights the key project complications which result from failed partnerships. www.cnmeonline.com

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integration advisor Partnerships

“If we’re being given a reference for a project and we don’t pull through then our reputation is going to really suffer, and in the Middle East, reputation is so important, it’s critical. If someone is looking towards us to fulfil requirements agreed on, and we don’t deliver then we’re going to face major consequences,” he says.

“When the partnership fails during a project delivery, the first priority is to protect the interest of the client,” believes Middeler.

“There might be an impact on cost or delivery time, but the client should not be affected in case a planned partnership runs into problems during a delivery.”

Hani Khanfer, Channel and Pre-Sales Coordinator, Smartworld

“The end result is that projects are consistently completed late, over budget, or fail to meet agreed upon requirements. Companies also have little chance of completing their project on time, on budget or with the required functionality,” he says.

Forde elaborates: “Not only does a customer lose out financially when a project goes wrong, but they also lose valuable time invested in that partner relationship. Individual organisations have specific requirements and specific ways of doing business, and working closely with a partner to understand each other takes time.”

DeBono warns of the legal implications of struggling relationships which are bound by contract.

“The worst case scenario is a long, drawn-out legal battle - nobody wants to go through that. This is why the initial contract discussions take so long. When everything is going swimmingly, the contract is a waste of time and paper, but when it all turns sour, it becomes more important than ever,” he says.

However, IT a is competitive industry and there is far more at stake than just people’s pocket weight.

“Reputation is majorly important,” explains Hani Khanfer, Channel and Pre-Sales Coordinator, Smartworld.

You see some horribly failed partnerships in the press from time to time, here and internationally.”

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Laying the right roots No company can ever be 100 percent certain that the partner of its choice is going to work out. Trouble can brew at any time during a business transaction and with multiple teams and elements of a project coming together, some issues are unavoidable. However, IT experts believe that multiple steps can be taken in order to lower the risk of an unsuccessful project.

Bhavish Sood, Research Director, Gartner, says that a 12-point evaluation must be taken into account before any partnership is considered.

“A 12-point parameter is set in place which looks at vision and execution, geographic coverage, availability of experienced and on-site consultants, resources from service providers meeting client expectation of organisation’s corporate culture, price and pricing model, track record and reference, process depth, scalability, methodology, experience, strategic partnership, industry experience, RFP response, communication and presentation skills, contract length, terms and conditions and, finally, cultural and language compatibility.”

However, above all, keeping strong communication links between all players involved as well as being clear on client requirements and needs can be the difference.

“The expectations need to be crystal clear. Roles and responsibilities need to be defined in a way that every stakeholder during the delivery knows who does what. It needs to be clear who bears which risk,” says Middeler.

“A successful partnership must have an appropriate project management methodology as it is critical to adopt a standard approach to managing projects,” adds Jessiman.

“The most important thing is trust, above all. You need to maintain an element of trust, otherwise you could end up leading a client astray and that’s when problems really start to arise,” concludes Khanfer.

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Telecoms World

INSIDE

4Gone conclusion

telecoms World Year of 4G

4Gone conclusion The roll-out of the fourth generation of mobile communications standards may be well underway in the Middle East, but there is still some way to go. CNME asks whether 2013 will be the year of 4G.

T

he UAE and KSA may have been behind 10 European operators when they became the first Middle East countries to launch LTE in November 2011, but they also got in before 15 other European operators.

This is clearly not a technology where the region is lagging behind.

Furthermore, within the last year operators in Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE have launched LTE networks, with Saudi leading the way with three. There are also seven additional committed LTE deployments, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon and Oman.

According to Booz & Company, around 7.5 million Middle East subscribers will be on LTE by the end of 2015 – with 5.4 million of those in Saudi – representing a CAGR of 197 percent.

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Ihab Ghattas, Assistant President, Huawei ME, says the 4G ecosystem in the Middle East matured greatly during 2012 with stakeholders overcoming many of the initial hurdles faced in the early days of network planning.

“Greater dialogue between local regulators, private sector entities and service providers were perhaps the most significant facet of that development, allowing the industry to capitalise on a greater number of technology innovations and turn them into sector-wide opportunities for service advancement,” Ghattas says.

“The 4G networks launched in the Middle East over the past one to two years are also now starting to reveal many valuable insights about what works and what doesn’t. I think that many operators were fortunate to have www.cnmeonline.com

established solid quality-of-service (QoS) metrics at the onset of local 4G projects - particularly for LTE mobile broadband deployments - which have in turn provided them with a tangible business rationale for how to optimise those investments in 2013.”

Young in age The figures and story so far are impressive, but it is important to note that LTE is still in its early stages of maturity and several roadblocks remain, particularly for the enterprise.

“The spectrum fragmentation and scarcity, lack of devices and limited geographical coverage are limiting factors for the adoption of 4G wireless broadband by enterprises,” says Dany Sammour, Principal, Booz & Company.

“Enterprises usually prefer to rely on stable and established technologies, for they have too much at stake and they are risk averse. A faster connectivity alone would not be an attractive value proposition to them. The lack of innovative, compelling and mature services running on top of LTE networks – and that would allow enterprises to save costs and be more agile – have also been a limiting factor to the adoption of LTE.” The principal advantages of 4G are higher bandwidth capacity and better coverage.

Both result in improved delivery of more advanced services - like video and real-time data - and are possible thanks to LTE’s intelligent coordination between towers and frequencies, says Mervyn Kelly, EMEA Marketing Director, Ciena.

“This function allows for better infrastructure sharing among more subscribers, and fewer ‘dead zones’ in large metropolitan areas. Among more advanced applications, lower latency is also a key benefit, allowing faster response times for things like online gaming and other real time applications.”

Ala Jarrar, Engagement Manager, Ericsson, adds: “4G supports a full IP-based network and harmonisation with other radio access technologies, and it is the natural evolution choice for GSM/HSPA, as well as CDMA or WiMax operators, thereby enabling a single unifying global standard for even higher scale economies — and simpler roaming.”

Cloud, M2M and verticals have been highlighted as growth areas that operators can move towards to increase the enterprise penetration of 4G. However, whilst many organisations are evaluating options, actual revenue contribution remains to be proven, Jarrar says.

“The most targeted industries by 4G operators are automotive, metering and grid, POS terminals, retail and e-health because of the high capacity potentials and performance capabilities that meet their requirements. Such segments did not until this point in time get full advantage of 4G deployments, as operators are focusing on mass market where typical MBB end users belong,” Jarrar says.

“Other operators are studying how 4G can offer fixed-like services toward enterprise customers, swapping their current access technologies. 4G also has immediate potential in providing fixed broadband replacement in rural areas where fiber layout is challenging. It can also be used as an initial broadband offering for small markets where HSPA has not taken hold.”

7.5m

Middle East subscribers will be on LTE by the end of 2015.

Ihab Ghattas, Assistant President, Huawei ME

Future is bright Looking forward over the next 12 months, there is no doubt the Middle East will witness further LTE network developments and uptake, with operators pushing actively forward with go-to-market LTE strategies.

With more and more 4G-enabled devices becoming available and strong collaborations forming between the manufacturers and network vendors, the adoption is set to become widespread.

Furthermore, Kelly anticipates that higher data rates will enable a variety of innovative applications such as teleconferencing, distance learning and entertainment.

“All of which use significant video content. Higher reliability will also enable enterprises to confidently roll out applications that rely on dependable coverage throughout their operating areas,” he says.

However, Ghattas believes the transition to 4G throughout 2013 will depend upon the ability of the telecommunications field to increase ease-of-access to broadband experiences for more people in more locations.

“On the mobile front, that will first and foremost require introducing more LTE-compatible products to the region not just at the premium level but along a diversity of price points. A focus on the customer experience will also be crucial for both fixed-line and mobile broadband networks,” he says.

“Rather than deploying new technology for the sake of novelty, we need to remain mindful of how that access is relevant to specific subscriber groups, and whether services are packaged and structured in a way where uptake is likely to be maximised. With more operators now confirming plans for 4G investments www.cnmeonline.com

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telecoms World Year of 4G

- including those in Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait - the broadband landscape will continue to be area of great activity looking ahead to 2013.”

Not this year According to Sammour, LTE will “definitely” play a key role in the digitisation space, but this will not happen in 2013. Until then, enterprises need to start building the “required capabilities” to prepare themselves accordingly.

“There is no doubt around the impact that 4G will have on enterprises, especially in the Middle East. However, 2013 might be a bit too early to see any significant change. One of the major advantages of 4G would be to serve as substitute in those cases where the fixed telecom infrastructure is poor or absent, connecting more households and small businesses in remote areas,” he says.

“This will definitely expand the reach of different enterprises. Yet this would require availability of low frequencies (digital dividend), which is not yet the case in the region today. LTE will also definitely accelerate digitisation and promote innovative ways of

Ala Jarrar, Engagement Manager, Ericsson

The 4G mobile wireless penetration in the Middle East and Africa by 2020 will be

6%

Mervyn Kelly, EMEA Marketing Director, Ciena

communicating and working together, but this impact will take several years to appear.”

Faster connectivity and having livelier online presence is likely to increase productivity and even reduce operational costs for those enterprises that embrace it.

With LTE, some enterprises will also start witnessing faster interactions between their remote agents and their backup systems via real-time mobile applications and cloud services, resulting in more accurate and up-to-date records,” Sammour says.

“Enterprises are expected to witness innovation in automating specific processes by making use of the speeds and coverage offered by LTE. All these changes will be shy in 2013 but will definitely have a tremendous impact two to three years from now.”

So 2013 may not be the year of 4G, but it certainly won’t be a quiet time for the technology either as the Middle East continues to complete the shift from 3G.

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careers advisor

INSIDE

strategic it networking Strategic IT partner Storage Partner The next big name

careers advisor Identifying the talent

Business depends on IT, and IT depends on certain individuals who carry the industry into the next era of technology and intelligence. But the Middle East is renowned for its quick turnaround when it comes to employment. How do enterprises look past this to uncover the best available resources?

T

he talent pool is a large one, and swimmers appear to be getting stronger and stronger. The Middle East is a place filled with experts battling it out to make ground in a quickly emerging market. IT has always been in favour with the upcoming generation. However, now is one of those times when everyone wants to be the next Bill Gates. The question is – how do enterprises recognise true talent?

There seems to be no question that this talent exists here locally, and perhaps the

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phrase, “looking in your own backyard”, may be the first turn of action for companies looking to capitalise on local talent. However, is that talent ready for industry, and can businesses be confident that local graduates will perform to the required standard?

“As businesses in the Middle East are being transformed through persistent IT developments, driven by legitimate competition and revenue targets, the level of education in the Middle East is promising but still needs to catch up with market requirement,” says www.cnmeonline.com

Reyadh Ayesh, CEO, Smartworld.

“It has to be above par to meet the expectation and requirements to successfully meet and tackle the booming IT industry. Apparently, some countries in the Middle East are taking serious steps to improve the education systems while others are still stagnant.”

Mohan Sundaram, Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure, Emitac Enterprise Solutions, adds, “The quality of education is definitely improving in the region, due to the presence

of many world-renowned institutions. However when it comes to preparing to break into the IT industry, there is a lot to be done. More interactions between the organisations and the educational institutions are necessary to prepare the students to understand work ethics, culture within an organisation and hierarchical functions.”

Penetrating the market As all graduates will know, it’s highly irregular for the perfect job to come looking for you. Working your way into the market is one of the critical and most difficult chapters in the book. How easy is it for graduates to muscle their way in?

“The IT industry is one of the easiest industries to enter, especially with free, open-source technology being so widely available on the Internet, as well as learning resources and tutorials. It is also easy to work from home and deal with clients all over the world in many job roles in the IT industry, meaning that there are more job opportunities and access to a much larger market,” says Omar Tahboub, Vice President of Product, Bayt.com.

Tamer Zikry, RMEA SME Talent Management, Ericsson, agrees with this point, saying, “It is easy for local graduates who have an understanding of new technologies, business acumen and the soft skills needed to perform well in a multinational environment.

The market is hungry for local talent that is capable of succeeding in today’s increasingly difficult competitive environment.”

It’s no secret that the Middle East is one of the top emerging markets and the increase in complex infrastructure over the past decade has been telling.

24.3% of IT employers look for professional success above all when hiring.

Wael El Nadi, Senior Director, EMC Global Services Organisation, EMC

International organisations continue to invest here and build a local presence in order to establish themselves in this part of the world. All these elements add to the level of opportunity for young graduates making their way into the field.

Future stars These companies play a huge role in influencing the next wave of employees. But could large companies do more to help develop capable protégés?

“IT companies do a lot of academic initiatives with different schools and universities - in doing so, students get updated insights on the latest technologies being implemented and used in the field during their academic course. Some other companies provide opportunities for summer internships and that helps the students get prepared for entering the job market as soon as they get their degree,” explains Wael El Nadi, Senior Director, EMC Global Services Organisation, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Middle East, EMC Corporation.

Diane Morello, Managing VP and Fellow Emeritus, CIO and Executive Leadership Research, Gartner, supports the point El Nadi makes.

“Dubai’s capacity to prepare Emirati people to understand business is inextricably linked to advanced education, higher literacy and higher employment and involvement in the private sector. Every company should offer up its most valuable and insightful people as guest speakers and occasionally instructors at universities so they can explain to younger people what their businesses really do and what makes them work.”

Diane Morello, Managing VP and Fellow Emeritus, CIO & Executive Leadership Research, Gartner

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careers advisor Identifying the talent

The advent of social media, mobile devices, smart apps and next-generation working platforms stands as a testament to the developers of the past decade. The technology not only says much about these people, but also a lot about how the next generation will shape up.

How does industry see the next wave of IT leaders in comparison to the last?

“It is very clear that the current generation has been much more ambitious in our sector, especially towards the Web and mobile applications. Because of all the success stories our region has seen in the IT industry over the past several years, this generation is more aware of the potential and they are more likely to invest in start-ups even when they’re still in university,” says Tahboub.

“Even on a technical level, when you look at the websites, games and applications that have been coming out recently, the quality is much more sophisticated than it used to be. We are starting to catch up with the rest of the world, and we are starting to create new and innovative products and services that are not clones.”

When all is said and done, individual companies

still have individual needs. So what are the common trends that they look for in fresh-faced graduates?

“The primary aspects I look for in an employee are integrity, commitment and passion. These three key ingredients can catapult the employee in a high-growth trajectory,” says Sundaram.

According to Tahboub, a survey from Bayt revealed that 24.3 percent of managers in the region look for professional success above all else. Team-playing, the poll suggests, was the second most important attribute when hiring.

22.1 percent of managers will apparently choose a candidate who knows how to work in a team over someone with character, general success, technical skills, communications skills, leadership, and academic success. All the resources are available for the next generation to move into market and begin to develop IT, taking technology into new areas.

Based on the last decade or so, IT is an exciting field, not only for computer science and IT graduates, but also businesses looking to take advantage of the latest technologies being developed by the best minds in our region.

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insight BlackBerry

They’re BackBerry. But do they mean business, or personal?

Following countless delays and months of anticipation, BlackBerry is back with a bang. It has abolished its former name, created an operating system from scratch and launched its first smartphones in 18 months. It’s make or break for the once dominant mobile company, and which it will be will depend solely on whether it can reach out to the audience it has previously neglected – the personal consumer.

Thorsten Heins, CEO, BlackBerry

W

ith its future in the balance, the newly rechristened BlackBerry has delivered on its promise to breathe new life into its aging, iconic product line for its loyal fan base, but faces an uphill battle against the iPhone and Android-based devices.

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CEO Thorsten Heins unveiled the new BlackBerry brand, the BlackBerry 10 operating system and the new devices to a live audience in New York, as well as satellite audiences in Dubai, Johannesburg, London, Paris and Toronto.

The two new smartphones – the Z10 and Q10 – were designed essentially from www.cnmeonline.com

scratch around a new platform based on QNX, a real-time operating system the company acquired in 2010.

Key to both devices is the ‘hub’ - a messaging centre that integrates email with messages from social networks and BlackBerry’s core messaging platform,

BBM – and the ‘flow’ user interface, designed to allow users to easily switch between apps without losing tasks that are already running.

The hub is accessible from anywhere within the phone with a rightward swipe of a finger and goes beyond a notification centre by providing direct access to incoming messages without launching external applications. Users can also respond to messages from within the hub.

Clearly intended as a time saver, it serves as proof that BlackBerry continues to see fast and efficient messaging as a key concern of its target users.

As well as revolutionising mobile messaging in its heyday, BlackBerry was just as loved by users for its physical QWERTY keyboard. Whilst vehemently sticking by this formula in the Q10, it will hope its innovative virtual keyboard interface on the Z10 will give just as much to shout about. As words are spelled out, the system predicts likely words that users can flick up toward the text being typed.

Because the predicted words appear above keys, users don’t have to move their thumbs to a separate area of the keyboard and can type quicker.

A fallen giant While BlackBerry was the undisputed leader in the smartphone market for years, the advent of the iPhone and then rise of Android-based devices have stolen loyal users away from the company.

Despite its decline, it still claimed 79 million users going into the launch, and most analysts agreed that the new devices offer more than enough to keep current fans in the fold.

However, whilst users have waited to see what’s next from BlackBerry, its market share has plummeted, leaving it to battle for third-place scraps with Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Cause for further concern was the fact that the company’s share price dropped more than 6% immediately following the launch.

Perhaps the reason for this was the doubt in investors’ minds over whether BlackBerry can do what it has often neglected to do – reach out to the personal

The BlackBerry Z10

consumer. It was always the clear choice for businesses and happy to leave others to pick up the general consumers.

However, with the lines now blurred between business and personal, it finds itself in an awkward situation of enterprise customers only making up 25% of its subscriber base, with the other 75% made up largely of loyal fans whose companies have moved on to other devices.

Getting personal BlackBerry clearly thought long and hard about these factors when developing the new smartphones and is pushing heavily to bridge those two audiences. It is particularly pushing the new ‘Balance’ feature – which allows users to separate apps into business and personal – along with a ‘Remember’ tool that allows users to set up folders to hold specific emails and voice messages for later review.

One of its most impressive features is the ability for users to easily screen share power point slides, graphs, charts and any other files whilst video chatting in BBM. However, like Skype and FaceTime, this feature will not work in the Middle East.

This won’t cause too much concern to BlackBerry in a region that Heins called “extremely important for us.” No wonder, considering the company still maintains around 60% of the smartphone market here, verses less than 5% worldwide. www.cnmeonline.com

In the UAE, the BlackBerry Z10 will be available on February 10th. Pricing will vary by carrier partner, but unsubsidised it will retail for AED 2,599.

In terms of specifications, both devices run a dual-core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Both have 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage with a microSD slot for up to 32 GB for the Z10 and 64 GB for the Q10.

Also, both devices have an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 2 megapixel front facing camera. Both have NFC capabilities for mobile payments and file sharing, and will support Wi-Fi and 4G LTE or HSPA+.

BlackBerry didn’t specify battery life for the Q10, but said the talk time on the Z10 is 10 hours on a 3G network. Heins said both devices have removable batteries so a power user can carry a second battery to insert once the first is drained.

There is no denying that the new platform and devices pack some impressive features, but only time will tell if they will be enough to pull in the whole new audience it requires to regain its former glory. february 2013

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PRODUCTS Launches and releases

PRODUCT WATCH The touch screen tablet and hybrid has well and truly arrived as the new and improved standard of personal computing. This was nowhere more evident than at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which overflowed with new touch-enabled devices. Here are some of the best that were launched and displayed at the event.

Product: 11.6 inch Windows 8 tablet Vendor: Vizio What it does: Using AMD’s powerful new Z60 mobile processor and boasting a gorgeous 1080p display, Vizio’s new tablet offers great performance and specs in a slim, fanless aluminium enclosure. It comes with 11.6 inch, 1080p HD display, and buyers will also be treated to 64GB of flash storage, 2GB of RAM, a micro-HDMI port and microUSB port, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video calling.

What you need to know: While Vizio made headlines at last year’s CES for its computers that, according to some, took design cues from Apple, this time around it has expanded into the Windows 8 tablet market in stylish fashion. The tablet runs Windows 8 Pro, rather than RT, meaning users can set up their usual Windows apps without having to wait for them to come out in tablet format. And given Vizio’s long-standing reputation for offering aggressively priced hardware, it’s certain to be one of the more affordable tablets on the market.

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CES 2013 TABLET SPECIAL

Product: ThinkPad Helix Vendor:: Lenovo What it does: With its “rip and flip” design, Lenovo’s ThinkPad Helix improves on the Yoga by boasting a detachable keyboard dock. The 11.6 inch display can then be removed and used as a standalone tablet with a 1920x1080 resolution. The dock interface also allows the Helix to enter “Stand Mode” and collapse all the way down on top of the keyboard — covering it, which was what the IdeaPad Yoga lacked.

What you need to know: Aside from its versatility, the Helix has plenty going for it in the specs department. It has mini DisplayPort and mini-HDMI out to satisfy both business users and home consumers. It will ship with 3rd generation Intel Core i3, i5, or i7 processors and up to a 256GB SSD. Connectivity seems guaranteed with 3G, 4G, or 4G LTE SIM card slots. It even includes NFC and a digitiser pen that supports Windows 8 gestures and converts handwritten notes into digital text.

Product: 20-inch 4k tablet Vendor: Panasonic What it does: With its enormous 20-inch screen, this tablet runs on Windows 8 and is powered by a 1.8GHz Intel Core i5 processor, meaning it will run any number of applications with ease. Its 3840x2560 display resolution and 15:10 aspect ratio make it a stunning screen to both watch and operate on. The large screen makes for a heavier-than-most tablet, but at 2.5kg Panasonic claims it is the lightest and thinnest 20-inch tablet on the market.

Product: Transformer P1801 Vendor: Asus What it does: Joining the next-generation all-in-one desktop pack at CES was the Asus Transformer P1801, an 18.5 inch unit that runs both Windows 8 and Android. Like every other all-in-one in the market, this device lets users disconnect from the keyboard and carry the screen around in tablet form.

What you need to know: If CES 2013 could be summed up with one term, it would be 4k. But whilst the likes of Samsung and LG showed off their 4K Ultra HD TVs at CES, Panasonic took another approach by presenting the world’s first 4K tablet. All of its impressive specs are housed in a brushed metal and glass exterior that measures just 0.4-inches thick.

What you need to know: Though the battery life isn’t hugely impressive, it is the ability to switch between two operating systems what makes this device interesting. For general computing, the main OS is Windows 8, which can be operated via touch, mouse or keyboard. The device will even allow users to run both Windows 8 and Android 4.1 side-byside, so that they can take advantage of every app on both systems.

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Column The word on the street

Joe Lipscombe

Where’s my Wi-Fi?

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

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obility, innovation, and travel are generally the most common themes found on this back page, and this month is no different. However, it’s been writing about these subjects which has brought this issue’s topic to light.

As mentioned in last month’s column, I was travelling through America before the Christmas break, seven flights in six days to be exact. As expected, I spent a vast amount of my time in and out of airports waiting for connections, vast amounts of time which could have been spent working.

However, it’s incredibly difficult to work effectively in airports when connectivity and mobile information is staggeringly unavailable.

Through an article I found results of a survey from FlightView, a day-of-travel information service for flyers. The survey, in short, showed that mobile demand is at an all time high from business and pleasure flyers but airports just are not taking advantage of the available services, plain and simple. This is dreadfully frustrating. I’d tweet about it, if I had Wi-Fi. Such a high amount of travellers will carry a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop into an airport, which will instantly render it utterly useless. What’s worse is that these devices are designed to assist us in these situations.

More and more people are demanding travel information to their personal devices; gate numbers, boarding passes, arrival times, etc.

Yet, with such a limited range of connectivity, not to mention many dead zones in these large airports, the customers are helplessly not getting what they’ve paid for.

The CIO of the Emirates Group, Patrick Naef, told me that he is in a constant battle with Dubai Airports over the quality of connectivity.

february 2013

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“It’s our number one complaint, they just are not on top of it,” he said.

He added that he believes - due to the monopolistic competition they have airports can slack easier when it comes to customer service and quality.

“If we provide a bad service, we lose a customer. If the airport provides a bad service, where are you going to go? It’s your only option.

Therefore their quality is not a high priority.”

More than 2600 people were surveyed by FlightView and 58% said they were ‘not satisfied’ with Wi-Fi availability in airports. Add me to that.

When I was travelling from Paris to Dubai I was subject to a six hour wait between flights.

Within this time I was granted 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi via a third-party provider, which was extremely slow and not in the least bit user friendly. Once these 15 minutes were up, in which time the service hadn’t even managed to receive my emails, I was prompted to purchase the same Wi-Fi for a rather chunky fee in 60 minute slots. No thank you.

Fortunately for me, it just so happened that the gods were on my side and I found James Bond, Quantum of Solace lurking in my DVD drive, so I was able to pass another two hours of my life in the departure gate. However, when the movie was over I still had a pile of work to complete, I still didn’t have access to my emails and, worst of all, James Bond was over.

I think it’s about time that airports concentrated on survey results like these and get to work to increase mobile connectivity and services in their buildings (I’m aware there are exceptions).

“The time should already be upon us where we are just instantly connected,” Naef told me.

“It’s so critical but airports are very far behind. The cost of better services shouldn’t outweigh the cost of negative feedback from customers.”

The time of innovation is upon us, but in the base of exotic travel, technology stands still.