Computer News Middle East

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EDITORIAL

A satisfying job

Sathya Mithra Ashok Senior Editor Talk to us: E-mail: sathya@cpidubai.com Twitter: @computernewsme Facebook: www.facebook.com/ computernewsme

Sometime in July-August 2011, CareerBliss, an online resource that measures job satisfaction on multiple factors brought out a list labelled the ten most hated jobs of the year.

The list was created based on a survey conducted among hundreds of thousands of employees in 2011, where satisfaction was rated on a scale from one to ten, and included elements such as workplace culture, co-workers, and the boss. Most job dissatisfaction, CareerBliss found, was associated with limited growth opportunity and lack of rewards.

An astounding five of the total 10 of the most hated jobs in that list are related to IT and technical careers. This includes technical support analysts (who help people with computer issues, including communicating advice over the phone) at number eight, electronics technicians (who maintain, troubleshoot and collect monthly measurement data for electronic systems) at number six, technical specialists ( who lead the analysis, definition, design, construction, testing, installation, and modification of medium to large infrastructure) at number five, and senior web developers (who design, maintain, and develop applications for the Internet) at number four.

Reasons for the high misery among these jobs ranged from inflexible work schedule, lack of accomplishment, lack of growth opportunities, low motivation, perceived lack of control over tasks, hostility from peers to inadequate communication from the upper management and the feeling that their inputs were not taken seriously.

And guess the topper?

Director of information technology was named as the most hated job of the year by the survey. Despite the high pay, and despite holding almost as much sway as the CEO in larger, more established enterprises, IT directors remained an unhappy lot due to the long hours, the unrelenting pressure, and disrespect from workers.

Surprising, and scary. Remember though, that this mood of unhappiness is restricted to more mature markets, where IT is considered an integral part of the business without the whisper of a doubt.

In the Middle East, there is yet a feeling of well-being surrounding senior IT heads, especially as they see in front of them a growth chart that points in the direction of the boardroom, parallel powers with the CFO and CEO, and increased understanding of the relevance of technology to organisations.

This high satisfaction level is also shown in constantly innovative projects in companies across sectors in the region. Many of these projects, and the people behind them, will be highlighted and honoured in CNME’s CIO 50 Forum and Awards event. The event, which will be conducted in the last week of January , will see 50 prominent CIOs from the region being rewarded for their efforts in adding to the bottomline of their organisations. (Details on the event, the nomination procedure, and the agenda can be found on www. cio50me.com).

Even as we celebrate the success of regional CIOs, one can’t help but wonder if unhappiness is an inevitable result of increasing maturity among enterprises and the regional market. Or is there a way to handle the stress and duress that comes with a higher management job?

And what would CIOs like to see from vendors and solutions in 2012 and beyond to make their jobs easier?

I promise to ask the questions at the CIO 50 Awards and Forum. If you wish to know the answer, don’t forget to register and attend the event. (You can register at www.cio50me.com).

See you there.

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EDITORIAL Our events

A positive outlook

Jeevan Thanpakkan Senior Editor Talk to us: E-mail: jeevan@cpidubai.com Twitter: @computernewsme Facebook: www.facebook.com/ computernewsme

As we usher in 2012, it is important to reflect on the year gone by. I am sure most IT decision makers would look back at 2011 with mixed feelings. It was a year when the going got tough and tough didn’t really get going. It will probably be written in the annals of IT history as a year when most of them had to deal with harsh economic realities and at the same time spur innovation and business growth on flat or contracted budgets. Doing more with less became a true Zen habit for CIOs and made the difference between survival and going belly up. Will this new year be a tight rope walk again? I am inclined to think we will reap what we have sown, and the signs are indeed promising. The worse is probably over and the only way is up. So what is going to make 2012 tick?

Honouring the venerable new year tradition of crystal-ball gazing, I am going to stick my neck out and spell out my prophecies, in no particular order.

Cloud: Whether you like it or not, this is going to be the year of the cloud.

Having reached a crescendo in terms of hype, the dust is finally settling in and we have a more realistic view from the trenches now. We are going to see a major surge in private cloud build-out and the momentum is already phenomenal behind the OpenStack, a vibrant and fast-growing open source project for creating private cloud.

Will public cloud really take off in the Middle East? The jury is still out on that, thanks to issues ranging from regulatory to cultural in the region. However, it’s a rising tide and I do think most companies will ride the crest of that wave, because the payback is too big to ignore. But, will it be a promised panacea for all your IT ills? Not likely, if you expect all your IT complexity to disappear magically just because you moved your data centre into a public cloud.

Virtualisation: Server virtualisation is already pretty pervasive in the Middle East and that trend is going to accelerate further, while this could be the year of virtual desktops. The technology had many false starts, and never really took off because it was cost-prohibitive and vendors failed to demonstrate the underlying value-proposition. As the cost of implementing VDI has started to drop, most businesses will seriously consider desktop virtualisation and Citrix has made a bold claim that it will make it deploying desktop virtualisation cheaper than of a traditional desktop. That might just trigger serious adoption.

Mobility: Experts have already earmarked 2012 as the year of mobility. With smartphones, tablets selling like hotcakes, it would be fairly safe to assume the trend of mobile computing is going to continue unabated. You already have tabled armed with quad-core processors, which will show up in smartphones this year.

With vendors trying to outdo each other in the hardware department, and operating systems getting better and more robust, very soon smartphone might emerge as your primary computing device sooner than later.

Stage is set for some interesting times ahead and while you brace for the ride, I am going to sign off, leaving you with CNME in its new avatar and hope you’d like our new direction. Let us know what you think.

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Contents ISSUE 240 | january 2012

ANALYSIS 8 Open source lion

10

Red Hat expects fast growth this year as it strengthens old solutions and enters the new area of data storage.

CIO=supply chain manager

Soon even large companies will have very little inhouse IT to manage.

CIOs can prepare by adopting a supply-chain mentality to IT.

14 Size matters

18

From more affordable virtualisation to cloud-everything, to gigabit wireless to NAS appliances, SMEs have a lot to watch for in 2012.

Round-up

We bring you a quick round-up of IT industry news.

CASE STUDY 34 Open regulation

38

Learning innovation

The Paris Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi is making the right investments to offer a competitive learning experience.

SOLUTIONS WORLD 46 Steady start

Global enterprises are leveraging social networking to encourage cocreation. CNME finds how regional firms are using these platforms.

NETWORK WORLD 54 Cloud – ready WAN optimisation

56

6

30

The .ae Domain Authority has a focus on open source, and a desire to run a lean IT staff. It founds its best partner in Red Hat solutions.

WAN optimisation is going to be critical in guaranteeing application performance in cloud environments.

Heading to the cloud

Paul Sherry, regional director of Riverbed, lists five key reasons for WAN optimisation in the cloud.

Computer News Middle East

january 2012

Brick-by-brick Abu-Dhabi based Arkan Building Materials is challenging the way organisations deal with the recession through its technology investments.

STORAGE ADVISOR 62 Big and growing

Collating big data and gleaning intelligence from it is becoming critical. As early adopters invest in it, 2012 will likely be the year of big data.

SECURITY ADVISOR 70 March to megapixel

New standards, better capabilities and the flexibility of IP drive adoption of surveillance solutions.

Here’s what to consider.

www.cnmeonline.com

72

Are cyber spies looking at you?

Security experts believe that companies should prepare themselves for increasingly sophisticated cyber-espionage attacks.

TELECOMS ADVISOR 78 Carrier Ethernet grows up

80

How different WiMAX products are being used to monitor oil pipelines, run smart grids and why its good for a lot more.

INTEGRATION ADVISOR 86 Do and re-do

Service providers are launching new services for 2012, and are working to ramp up their support services in the region.

CAREERS ADVISOR 94 Jobs of 2012

Vendors believe that 2012 will bring with it immense opportunities in the IT professional scene.

100 The good news

What WiMAX means for the enterprise

INTERVIEW 102 The right message

Carrier capital spending may be down during the current economic downturn, but Carrier Ethernet is changing the game.

Entry-level jobs will be plentiful in 2012, experts redict.

EMC has been growing from strength-to-strength in the region.

However, William (Bill) Teuber, vice chairman of the company, says there’s more that can be done.

106 Aiming high

Oscar Rodriguez, CEO of Extreme Networks, talks about how his company is a force to be reckoned with in the new era of cloud.

HOW TO 110 Use Dropbox to edit text on mobile devices

Thankfully, there are a number of free apps that let you edit files that are stored in Dropbox on the go.

112 Avoid the death of a hard drive

Think your hard drive is about to give up on you? We give you a few tips and tricks on how to avoid just such a predicament.

PRODUCTS 114 CNME gets down in the dirt

with the latest gadgets and productivity tools, and brings you the verdict.

LAST WORD 118 A look at what major events

await you, what we’re reading, and a sneak peek at the contents of the next issue of CNME.

www.cnmeonline.com

january 2012

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ANALYSIS Month in view

Open source lion Red Hat has been enjoyed growth in the EMEA region in 2011. The company expects nothing less than the same in the new year, as it strengthen its platform, middleware and virtualisation offerings, while stepping into the new area of data storage.

A

s economies around the world go through a tough time, and cost pressures increase on enterprises, they will look to either migrate from their existing proprietary solutions, or search for vendors who can offer true value when it comes to new projects.

And this is where Red Hat, as the leading solutions provider around the open source arena, can stand to offer options and help enterprises, says Werner Knoblich, VP and GM for the EMEA region at Red Hat. Cost is an a critical element for customers in a tough environment.

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Customers through experience with mega players, who hsvr locked and squeezed them, understand that in the future they should not be locked in. They want a model that has a true value based business base.

What we’re doing is exactly that - we provide value. We add value to the free technology and functionality - its very important that customers understand that.

Customers are looking for greater value in a standardised structure with cost-sensitive environment,” says Knoblich.

According to him, enterprises are not necessarily looking for an open source solution, but open source addresses www.cnmeonline.com

these key points in an effecient manner by definition open source is standards based, more cost-efficient because of the economics of a pay roll development model where not every one of them is on our payroll (IBM, HP, Google, Oracle)- model itself is a better economic model for developing software.

Red Hat has been experiencing remarkable growth, especially in emerging markets, reporting a 28% global growth in the second quarter of the financial year (which ends in February). Knoblich believes that this growth can be attributed to the significant number of migrations that the company witnessed in 2011, which is similar to the one that they benefitted from during the recession in 2008.

The company, which historically was seen as a single-product firm, capitalised on the economic changes not only with its Linux platform but also with its middleware solutions, powered by its acquisition of JBoss in 2006.

“We have also been expanding our strength in the area of virtualisation.

In 2008, we made a bigger investment in keeping with the cloud movement when we acquired Qumranet, inventors of KVM technology. We are now focused on building an ecosystem, and in 2011 founded the Open Virtualisation Alliance, along with several key partners. We already have over 200 companies as part of the alliance, and you can see there is a whole industry behind a counterwave against the incumbent player. This is a superstrategy for us – building true elasticity, management and orchestration into enterprise clouds – whether private or public,” says Knoblich.

While all these internal moves have helped the company grow, there are certain external factors that have helped as well.

“Since the Sun acquisition we have seen an accelerated migration from Solaris over to Linux, and also good traction in the middleware side as well. Due to its continuous acquisitions, Oracle can be felt in more areas within an enterprise.

And a customer does not always like to be

too dependent on a single provider. The stickiness of their apps are high, especially on the database side. However, it is easier to migrate on the middleware, and hardware/ OS side, and this falls into the area that we cover,” says Knoblich.

Red Hat wants to continue to take advantage of the changing economic models, and external factors. However, the company will achieve this growth in a controlled, monitored manner, especially with new areas and acquisitions like Gluster.

“We have performed this acquisition only around eight weeks back. With this we are stepping into the storage space, which we have not addressed so far. When you think about clouds and moving apps from on-premise to off-premise, there is no easy way to take your data with you, its kind of a problem. That’s where Gluster is helping – it creates a single name space of all your storage resources, wherever they are, and then you can move your apps around and have access to all the data,” says Knoblich.

He adds, “This is a softwareonly solution which enables usage of commoditised hardware. When you look at the explosion of data and especially

We have also been growing our strength in the area of virtualisation. In 2008, we made a bigger investment in keeping with the cloud movement when we acquired KumbaNet, inventors of KVM technology. We are now focused on building an ecosystem, and in 2011 founded the Open Virtualisation Alliance, along with several key partners. We already have over 200 companies as part of the alliance, and you can see there is a whole industry behind a counterwave against the incumbent player.” unstructured data, it is mind-blowing. This is all unstructured data. The volume is enormous. With Gluster we are hooking into Hadoop to replace the file system, and this helps us in taking a step closer to address the problem of big data. We don’t have a solution from the analytic perspective, but we are providing the base on which other tools can be built.”

In 2012, the company will continue to work on the elements that has been its strength. It will launch CloudForms, which Knoblich expects will be out in the first part of the year. The company is also working on other areas, such as skills training and

Werner Knoblich, VP and GM for the EMEA region at Red Hat www.cnmeonline.com

specialisation for partners, in order to make it a stronger choice for potential customers.

“It is important for customers to know that they can recruit the right skills for their open source solutions or count on partners that know the solutions. This is key to providing the right and consistent support.

There are two ways to deal with this. The first is initiating training programmes for Red Hat related open source solutions in universities.

We are working with various regional universities for this. It is definitely one of our focus areas, since you cannot underestimate its importance in the long run,” says Knoblich.

The company will also be rolling out specialisation programmes for partners, wherein they will be encouraged and provided incentives to be specialised in middleware or the virtualisation platform, or one of the other solutions.

The company opened a new office in Russia in 2011, and has grown from 600 people 8 years back to 1200 in the EMEA region. Knoblich expects the company to grow from strength to strength in the new year as well.

“We might not open new offices in countries in 2012. But certainly by 2013 we expect to have a review of our status in the region, and consider seriously setting up local offices in certain countries or even areas within the region. As an evolutionary process, we want to provide choice to the customer, deliver open source in a different manner. We want to take the lion’s share of the migration that is coming, especially with middleware, where the cost advantage is dramatic,” concludes Knoblich. january 2012

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ANALYSIS Month in view

CIO = supply chain manager There will come a day, soon, when even large companies will have very little technology in-house to manage. CIOs can prepare by adopting a supply-chain mentality and approach to IT.

A

few years back, only a large company could afford sophisticated back-office and front-office automation. Whether it was SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft or Oracle, a company needed to invest millions of dollars in order to buy the software, hire hordes of expensive consultants, buy expensive hardware to run it and maintain a large staff to support it.

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Today, however, it is an entirely different ball game. Companies of any size now have the ability to run all or almost all of their IT operations from the cloud, through outside providers such as Salesforce, NetSuite, Gmail and many others. This is delivering untold flexibility, scale and speed to organisations -not to mention in many cases, cost savings.

With a services-based infrastructure, the CIO and team are increasingly moving www.cnmeonline.com

from building and integrating technology to managing a vast supply chain of technology partners. IT is now in the business of inspecting, reviewing, and monitoring technology and vendor contracts, ensuring security across all these partners, overseeing integration strategies and above all, managing costs. The jobs of the in-house IT software developer, ERP consultants and system administrator are dying on the vine.

managing and maintaining your data and applications. There may be dozens of these partners working for you and many of them will depend on each other. Who’s going to make sure all the parts are working well, and working together? The CIO, aka Supply Chain Director.

Take for example a simple e-commerce site that has one provider hosting its DNS services, a second provider hosting

suppliers. If the supplier changes its infrastructure or its security policies, and you don’t know about it, that’s a problem.

Therefore, CIOs have to understand the inner workings of key suppliers at the same level as if they were managing the technology internally. Without that transparency, it will be harder and more expensive to troubleshoot and resolve performance or quality problems later.

With a services-based infrastructure, the CIO and team are increasingly moving from building and integrating technology to managing a vast supply chain of technology partners. IT is now in the business of inspecting, reviewing, and monitoring technology and vendor contracts, ensuring security across all these partners, overseeing integration strategies and above all, managing costs.

CIOs need to prepare for this coming shift by learning the tactics of advanced supply chain management -- perfected by large retailers and major auto companies over the past 100 years. This entails not just managing and overseeing vendor relationships, but ensuring tight control over every facet of the supply chain when it comes to product quality, security, service, content, reliability, performance and a number of other parameters. CIOs and their staff members will need to create business-aligned supply chain processes and metrics, as their infrastructure is increasingly managed and delivered by vendors and partners.

The perfect storm So, how is the advent of cloud computing different from managing outsourcers and hosting firms of the past? One day soon, you may not own or manage a single piece of hardware or software. Companies and people in far-flung places will be storing,

the site content and product catalogue, a third provider handling the checkout and payment process, and a fourth serving up ads. When suddenly the website slows down or a process stops working, which of these providers is at fault? Perhaps the problem is related to an unexpected surge in traffic, maybe it’s the fault of the web hosting company that isn’t meeting its service-level agreements, or there could be a capacity limit that does not allow for spikes in demand.

The supply-chain process It doesn’t matter who is to blame. The CIO must have a system, processes and the right team to stay on top of pending issues and investigate and resolve them swiftly before they affect customers. The ad hoc monitoring systems and tools of the past, when everything was managed internally, won’t likely do in today’s world. Now, with so many moving parts outside company walls, CIOs need to set strict parameters for service. This entails defining capacity and service levels, regular monitoring, and strong lines of communications with www.cnmeonline.com

A basic framework for managing services in your supply-chain could look like this: 1. Define services a.k.a. compute capacity, storage, network bandwidth, network infrastructure, content delivery network, DNS services, security, application platform, back-office system for orders, front-office apps, affiliate networks.

2. Track each of those services against a core set of metrics, such as performance, responsiveness, capacity, security, cost per unit and volume cost. An individual service, such as network could require additional sub-metrics, such as spike capacity and overage fees.

3. Score each supplier or partner and deliver them a monthly report that you can then use as a discussion tool and a negotiating platform for discounted fees or add-on services.

Déjà vous?

But wait. Isn’t this supply chain model just a new name to good old outsourcing that IBM, Accenture, and others have been doing all these years? No: this is a new game. january 2012

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ANALYSIS Month in view

The old IT outsourcing school relied on massive financial engineering deals that focused on capping operational costs for customers, while the outsourcers ran operations using, guess what, their own equipment and consulting services and placed the customer’s IT staff on their own payroll. The outsourcer and customer both had to handle a lot of infrastructure building, system integration and portfolio management. But this world is over. Thanks to cloud platforms and standard Web services, the need for the middleman is diminishing. Large deployments that used to take years, millions of dollars, and hundreds of people can be done today in weeks, thousands of dollars, and a few analysts.

The bean-counter mentality CIOs will have less of the technology burden on their shoulders. Instead, they will have to act like a CFO and quality control manager combined. Consider a large retailer like Macy’s. A manufacturer needs to go through a strict process before it is allowed to put a single pair of pants on the shelves. The process includes rigid review and approvals from the design phase through supplier review and quality control tests for each component and the final product. Moreover, even a replacement of a single button supplier requires the manufacturer to go through quality control lab again, before they can make the change to their own supply chain. Retailers have sophisticated information systems to analyse and report 12

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The old IT outsourcing school relied on massive financial engineering deals that focused on capping operational costs for customers, while the outsourcers ran operations using, guess what, their own equipment and consulting services and placed the customer’s IT staff on their own payroll. The outsourcer and customer both had to handle a lot of infrastructure building, system integration and portfolio management. But this world is over.

on sales, profits, returns, customer service, supply chain processes, product quality, vendors and so on. IT departments will need something similar. Fortunately, cloud providers make IT costs highly transparent so that organisations can see the unit cost of every single IT service consumed.

What’s not so transparent is what levers IT can use to change cost/capacity parameters within the application platform.

CIOs should understand and track exactly what the business is spending daily or weekly on each activity -- such as e-mail -- and keep a tight rein on those costs. IT managers can help by ensuring that vendors are maintaining contractual commitments for quality, security, performance and functionality. Hiring staff with accounting and analytics backgrounds will become a top priority. IT employees with excellent communications and negotiations skills will also be valued, since so much of the work will be interfacing with vendors. www.cnmeonline.com

What about innovation?

In this metrics-driven, buttoned-up world of IT, does the CIO have much of a role in business innovation any longer? On the one hand, CIOs have to maintain operational discipline. Like a building inspector, they must intrinsically understand the building codes, regulations and constraints of contractors working on the site.

Yet they now have a crystal-clear view of where IT dollars are going, presumably, and can make faster decisions about new technologies. Since IT knows exactly how much it’ll cost to roll-out a new app on the cloud and can test it in a few hours, they can respond exponentially faster to a new, urgent business opportunity. The advent of the cloud could make the CIO’s job that much more meaningful to the business.

Adopting a supply-chain IT approach will be imperative for any midsize to large company on the planet and CIOs will be the ones to make it work.

MON

TUE

WED

THUR

Five cities in five days?

FRI

ANALYSIS Month in view

W

hat can small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) expect to see in the year year? The 10 technological trends listed below will affect businesses of all sizes in the coming 12 months, but they promise to have a particular impact on SMBs in 2012.

Size matters From more affordable virtualisation to cloud everything, to gigabit wireless to NAS appliances, small businesses have a lot to watch for in 2012. To help you plan for the year ahead, check our picks for top tech trends of 2012 -- all cast with the needs of small businesses in mind.

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1 Microsoft Hyper-V3 means cheaper, more powerful virtualisation Microsoft looks set to single-handedly up the ante on the virtualisation front with the release of Windows Server 8, which will incorporate a seriously beefed-up hypervisor. Hyper-V3 will come with substantial improvements in the areas of network, storage, scalability and live migration capability. Its significance for SMBs that have yet to deploy virtualisation is substantial, allowing them to create a full-fledged virtualisation setup with minimum capital outlay with regards to software licensing fees.

Hyper-V3 will exert significant pressure on market leader VMware by delivering “good enough” virtualisation at a fraction of the cost of a full vSphere implementation. More importantly, Hyper-V3 will recast the capabilities that businesses expect in a free virtualisation product. Expect cheaper, more powerful virtualisation to materialise as virtualisation vendors react with price cuts and more advanced capabilities at lower (or free) price points. No date has been announced for Windows Server 8 at the time of writing, though it’s anticipated to debut in 2012.

2 More network attached storage appliances in 2012 Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances have been growing progressively more powerful over the years, narrowing the gap with entrylevel SANs. Indeed, many new NAS products released today are certified for virtualisation platforms such as VMware, Hyper-V and Citrix, with more advanced models capable of replication between

NAS or even supporting cloud storage such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service as an additional tier of data backup.

Expect this trend of powerful NAS to continue and even accelerate in 2012. For SMBs, mid- to high-end NAS models have attained a sufficient level of performance and features to effectively serve as the primary storage for smaller businesses, or in branch offices of larger organisations.

As such, small business and enterprise will deploy more NAS in 2012, and possibly even using them as SAN-replacements in certain cases.

3 USB 3.0 devices abound You’ve heard this before, but USB 3.0 should finally make itself felt in 2012. One key change is Intel’s official commitment to “SuperSpeed” USB, evidenced by the integration of USB 3.0 support in upcoming chipsets. This is expected to drive USB 3.0 adoption next year as they become available, which in turn will increase overall appeal for manufacturers to make USB 3.0 devices.

With a data transfer rate of up to 5Gbps, the widespread availability of USB 3.0 will have wide-ranging effects.

For one, portable storage devices such as flash drives and portable HDDs will be even more popular than before. Moreover, SMBs are likely to be presented with more options in terms of easy-to-deploy USB 3.0-based Direct Attached Storage (DAS) devices. Instead of having to struggle with eSATA or fiddling with special interface cards, new USB 3.0 storage appliances or tape drives could be easily deployed for the purpose of data backup and restoration for key workstations and servers.

4 Thinner, lighter ultrabooks challenge MacBook Air Despite the criticism that Intel has attracted over its execution strategy for the company’s Ultrabooks, the chip maker is serious about taking on Apple’s increasingly popular MacBook Air with a new generation of thin and lightweight laptops. More than 60 models of

Ultrabooks will be available in 2012, while rival chip maker AMD has also recently indicated that it is working on its own ultra-thin laptops.

Ultimately, it is clear that a fundamental shift is taking place to the laptop’s form factor. By stripping out the venerable optical disc drive and moving towards more advanced materials, computer makers are shifting from thick and bulky laptops to a computing future that is both thin and light.

With a longer battery life and lower prices than conventional laptops, we suspect that many SMBs will buy into Ultrabooks for use in the office.

5 SSD prices fall, HDDs get faster Another trend you can count on in 2012 will be the availability of faster local storage at more affordable prices. Prices of Solid State Disks (SSDs) have been

of tablets this year, wait till the next generation of tablets lands in 2012. Tablets of the next year would include the iPad 3, tablets based on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Windows 8 tablets and v2.0 of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS. The onslaught of tablets goes both ways. For one, agile SMBs that successfully leverage tablets can bolster their competitive advantage and achieve greater work efficiencies. The obvious challenges though, would be the associated headache of trying to manage so many disparate platforms and the risks inherent in developing appreciation for such rapidly evolving devices.

7 BYOD goes to smaller businesses BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device,” is a term used to describe the use of personal devices in the office. BYOD will become

Microsoft looks set to single-handedly up the ante on the virtualisation front with the release of Windows Server 8, which will incorporate a seriously beefed-up hypervisor. Hyper-V 3 will come with substantial improvements in the areas of network, storage, scalability and live migration capability. declining steadily and are also increasingly being offered as options on laptops.

Moreover, Seagate in says the Momentus XT — a standard hard disk drive paired with built-in SLC-based flash memory for heightened performance — can achieve a boot up time comparable to SSDs after a brief “learning” period.

The availability of faster local storage will benefit small business in the form of workstations and laptops that just perform faster. Alternatively, businesses may also opt to prolong the lifespan of existing workstations or laptops with a strategic upgrade to an SSD or HHD. 6 Tablets, tablets everywhere If you’ve thought that you’ve seen enough www.cnmeonline.com

an accepted business practice in 2012 for small businesses, even as the arrival of more powerful smartphones, tablets and ultra-thin laptops trigger an avalanche of such devices into the workplace.

This is a mixed blessing for SMBs as employees start using their favourite duo (or trio) of Wi-Fi gadgets at work. While an IT-savvy workforce is certainly better than a tech-illiterate one, one downside may be the potential overloading of wireless networks as the density of wireless devices increase beyond what the network was originally designed for. Moreover, administrators may find themselves badgered with support requests that may not necessarily be work-related. january 2012

Computer News Middle East

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ANALYSIS Month in view

8 Small business finds applications on the cloud It is entirely possible for businesses to set up an online presence without having to purchase a single hardware server today. After all, services such as online storage, B2B services, web hosting, email, collaboration, even productivity suites (Google Apps, Office 365) can be purchased online with nothing more than a credit card.

Moving forward, we expect startups and SMBs to ride hard on this trend as a means to circumvent traditional infrastructure and hardware barriers, making use of online services so that they can concentrate on their primary focus of doing business. We would have used the word “cloud computing” too, except that these businesses won’t care what it’s called by then.

9 Gigabit wireless starts replacing Ethernet more widely Two organisations are known to be working towards gigabit wireless at the moment, with limited product shipments expected to arrive in 2012. The Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) operates on the 60GHz band and supports bus protocols such as PCI Express and USB; the IEEE 802.11ac operates on 5GHz and can provide throughputs of more than 1Gbps and backwards compatibility with 802.11n.

For now, research by ABI Research predicts that IEEE 802.11ac will emerge as the dominant Wi-Fi protocol by 2014.

While the effect of gigabit wireless on large enterprises or established businesses is debatable, expect SMBs to prefer

wireless as their primary connectivity option due to the convenience and the comparatively modest needs of smaller businesses. Given the prospect of future upgradability, the arrival of 802.11ac may also prompt organisations currently adopting a “wait and see” posture to finally deploy 802.11n. Analysts say that gigabit wireless may well result in businesses replacing wired Ethernet with wireless in the new year.

10 Windows 8 triggers big changes

Despite being a singular product, there is no doubt that this hotly anticipated

Despite the criticism that Intel has attracted over its execution strategy for the company’s Ultrabooks, the chip maker is serious about taking on Apple’s increasingly popular MacBook Air with a new generation of thin and lightweight laptops. More than 60 models of Ultrabooks will be available in 2012, while rival chip maker AMD has also recently indicated that it is working on its own ultra-thin laptops.

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operating system will trigger a wave of change across the entire PC industry.

Expected to be released in the second half of 2012, Microsoft has given the assurance that Windows 8 will not require new hardware. Indeed, the use of advanced memory management techniques and memory deduplication could well see Windows 8 running on slightly older hardware—a boon to SMBs looking to keep their IT budgets down.

Windows 8 will work with both traditional desktops as well as tablet devices, and will be available in x86 and ARM versions to facilitate the use of devices based on power-efficient ARM-based processors. Though it is too early at this point to tell the effect that Windows 8 desktop will have on SMBs, it is evident that Microsoft has incorporated its business-management smarts into Windows 8. Specifically, administrators will be able to make use of group policy and PowerShell to manage Metro-style apps on Windows 8— allowing for a level of fine-grained control not available on competing platforms.

ROUND-UP month in view

Makkah Municipality selects Oracle’s solution

Makkah Municipality has completed and is ready to launch the first set of e-services based on an Oracle integrated e-Platform solution.

According to Oracle, with this deployment Makkah Municipality is aiming to automate its business processes and maximise overall service quality.

The company said that Makkah Municipality needed an integrated e-service platform from a single vendor that could

implement various e-services such as building permits, shops permits and excavation permits; and automate processes to better control all operations and maximise the services of the field inspection divisions and contact centre. In addition to which, the municipality was also looking for a solution that would integrate with geographical information systems (GIS), have robust middleware for their various integration needs, and provide business intelligence to

enable them to steer operations from within easy to use integrated dashboards.

Dr. Ibrahim Abdulla, CIO of Makkah Municipality, said, “As a holy shrine, Makkah is one of the most visited cities in the world and is constantly growing. Hence, the Municipality was looking for an optimal IT solution that can serve the current and future requirements of the city’s growth. After implementing a rigid scrutiny process, the Oracle solution presented to us proved to be the strongest and the most responding to our needs and objectives.”

As part of the solution, Makkah Municipality implemented a communication management system for collaboration with the other public sector agencies based on Oracle Enterprise Content Management, it was reported. Oracle said that the end to end integrated solution that the company provided Makkah Municipality included Oracle Siebel eService Portal and Case Management, Oracle Autovue, Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture, Oracle Weblogic Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and Oracle GIS Integration.

As a result of this deployment, Oracle representatives said that Makkah Municipality will now be able to introduce any new e-services required, implement integrated field inspection services and implement trouble-free upgrades to accommodate future needs.

Blue Coat sold for $1.3 billion WAN optimisation and web security vendor Blue Coat is set to be acquired by a group led by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, for $1.3 billion (£830 million).

The Blue Coat board has accepted the offer and recommended it to shareholders.

The Thoma Bravo group also includes investment company the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which is currently suing IT services firm CSC over allegations of misreported prospects on the NHS National Programme for IT. 18

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Under the terms of the agreement, Blue Coat shareholders will receive $25.81 in cash for each share of Blue Coat common stock they hold, representing a premium of approximately 48% over Blue Coat’s closing price on 8 December.

David Hanna, chairman at Blue Coat, said, “Over the last six months, our Board of Directors engaged in a comprehensive review of all strategic options available to Blue Coat. After an extensive evaluation of strategic alternatives with our independent advisors, the Board has determined that www.cnmeonline.com

the definitive agreement with Thoma Bravo provides an attractive all-cash valuation to our shareholders.”

Orlando Bravo, managing partner at Thoma Bravo, added, “As a private company, Blue Coat will be better positioned to innovate at an accelerated rate and achieve a higher level of growth.”

The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals as well as the approval of Blue Coat shareholders. Blue Coat expects the transaction to close in the first calendar quarter of 2012.

ROUND-UP month in view

Paltel selects EMC for critical infrastructure Palestine Telecommunications Company (Paltel Group), the telecommunications leader in Palestine, has selected EMC to complete a new mission-critical IT infrastructure. Paltel Group, which contributes to about 12% to the GDP of Palestine and is the number one employer in the private sector, will benefit from enhanced IT Infrastructure performance and availability by utilising EMC VMAX and Data Domain deduplication storage systems, all with a multi layer security solution from RSA. ““Paltel selected EMC because we believe in its cutting edge technologies and expertise. We are committed to offering first class services to our customers as well as upgrading the level of technical knowhow of the ICT sector in Palestine through bringing such renowned vendors to our market,” said Ammar Aker, CEO of Paltel Group.

The new EMC storage infrastructure is designed to reduce the total cost of ownership both from initial capital expenditure and ongoing operational costs by utilising the latest EMC technologies such as FAST VP (fully automated storage tiering

for virtual pools). FAST is EMC’s market leading implementation of automated dynamic tiering functionality, which allows achieving higher performance and lower costs using an optimised mix of Flash (SSD) and SATA drives by intelligently managing data placement at sub-LUN level. Virtual Provisioning is EMC’s implementation of thin provisioning functionality, which allows achieving better storage utilisation efficiency by reserving physical storage only when it is required by the application and at the same time reclaiming physical storage when it is no longer in effective use.

The smart combination of these leading

technologies makes the EMC storage infrastructure based on the flag-ship VMAX storage system extremely efficient with reduced physical footprint in the data centre in addition to minimised power consumption and heat dissipation.

The end-to-end storage infrastructure is fully secured with leading technologies from RSA, making it a trusted infrastructure suitable for the most critical business environments. It combines multiple technologies at multiple layers from strong encryption at the disk-level, to advanced authentication mechanisms both at the admin and user levels, to policy-based security associated with VM’s, to an over-arching GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) framework.

“Our work with EMC has proven successful over the years. Paltel Group is continuously growing, that is why we are always after the latest technological developments and technical trends, so that we can provide secure and continuous services to our customers across all core networks, mobile, fixed and data,” said Mustafa Hasan, GM of Hulul, the IT arm of Paltel Group.

AUD deploys Cisco Telepresence The American University in Dubai (AUD) today inaugurated a virtual lecture hall, comprising the Cisco TelePresence 3210 technology, for students of the university’s Mohammed Bin Rashid School for Communication (MBRSC).

The launch of this new lecture facility dubbed the Global Classroom is aligned with the visionary ideas of H.H Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai to transform education in Dubai by providing students in access to programmes and courses offered at international universities and educational institutions.

“We are particularly proud to announce that our collaboration with Cisco as resulted in the development of the first 20

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TelePresence classroom of its kind in the Arab world. The Global Classroom represents an opportunity for students who lack the means to acquire an international education to enjoy access to content and lectures from faculty and courses spanning some of the best universities across the globe. Work on developing a while masters program on the Global Classroom is already underway, students already have access to lectures by professors based at universities in Los Angeles, America,” said Ali Jaber, dean MBRSC. The Global Classroom at MBRSC is connected to Ankabut the UAE National Research and Education Network (NREN) offering regional educational insitutions a chance to collaborate and communicate with global education netoworks. www.cnmeonline.com

In addition to which, Jaber said that MBRSC also has access to the US based national research network National Lamba Rail (NLR), a not for profit advanced networking consortium which owns and operates a national Cisco TelePresence Exchange providing TelePresence connectivity across different academic institutions on a high speed Internet network.

“Our collaboration with leading universities and schools like the MBRSC at AUD is a key milestone in creating 21st century learning environments that use the latest technology to extend academic expertise and share resources with students and facutly around the world that will change the way the world learns,” Wayne Hull, Director and GM, Cisco UAE said.

ROUND-UP month in view

DEWA chooses GBM to augment server infrastructure Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has selected Gulf Business Machines (GBM) to augment the utility company’s server infrastructure. As part of the project, GBM installed state-ofthe-art servers using IBM Power Systems in preparation for the launch of DEWA’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

DEWA is implementing SAP, which aims to measure, integrate and automate all the processes taking place within DEWA. This program will allow DEWA to provide better services to its customers, employees and partners. The new server infrastructure, which is built using UNIX servers, the latest from POWER7 processor-based systems, will assist DEWA in process automation while reducing energy consumption, downtime and operational costs.

H.E. Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO, DEWA said, “As we move towards our vision of becoming a recognised world class utility company, the robustness of our IT infrastructure will play an important role

in our ability to be customer-focused. We have been taking initiatives to introduce and develop an environment in order to achieve our vision. One of these initiatives is the implementation of SAP through which we aim to establish a model for outstanding services in public facilities. The upgrade will also enable us to be in line with the best global practices and significantly raise the efficiency and productivity of our staff.”

Eng. Marwan Bin Haider, VP and CIO in DEWA also said, “We believe that this infrastructure upgrade will enable greater efficiencies while boosting reliability and scalability of our systems. Our decision of working with GBM is based on its track record and ability to provide world-class low cost solutions and services.

“We are proud to have been selected by DEWA to work on this prestigious project.

DEWA has long been a pioneer in using technology to boost its ability to be more customer focused and this project will go a long way in helping them achieve their goals,” said Ashok Bhola, GM of the United Computer

and Management Consultancy (UCMC), a Gulf Business Machines company. “With a combination of IBM’s latest technologies and GBM’s knowledge and expertise, we are confident of our ability to deliver results.”

IBM Power Systems provide technologies that form the foundation for enterprise infrastructure. With the servers and software, DEWA can manage rapid change, reduce business risk, and meet higher service levels – all in the most cost-effective manner.

Significantly, the project will also see the Middle East’s first deployment of the IBM XIV Storage System running SAP environment, which was selected with a backup solution due to its high availability and its ability to provide flawless continuity of services.

Etisalat, Pacific Controls launch Emirates Energy Star program In commemoration of the UAE’s 40th national day celebrations, leading telecom service provider Etisalat in conjunction with Pacific Controls recently launched the Emirates Energy Star (EES) Program at a glittering ceremony at the Emirates Palace Hotel.

“The launch of the Emirates Energy Star program is a testament to the government’s commitment to creating a sustainable future through creating awareness of environmental conservation and sustainable practices across both the public and private sector to combat the effects of global warming and pollution,” said Abdulla Ebrahim Al Ahmed, senior vice president, Business Solutions at Etisalat during his welcome note.

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Buildings contribute to approximately 60% of the nation’s carbon emissions and the EES Program will focus on delivering managed energy services to business owners. In its efforts the Program will look to drive the adoption of ICT to reduce energy and electricity consumption, green house gas emissions and depletion of natural resources.

The EES Program was officially launched by HE Dr.Rashid Ahmad bin Fahad, minister of environment and water, UAE. David A Gottfried, founder and first staff president of the U.S Green Building Council (USGBC) said, “The idea is to use ICT to enable global efficiency through www.cnmeonline.com

intelligent power savings. These efforts will be supplemented by benchmarking standards and guidelines that taken into account global best sustainable practices.”

According to Al Ahmed, EES, which is open to all building owners in the UAE, will also enable massive savings in costs associated with energy consumption.

The EES Program will initially focus on 200,000 buildings occupied by corporate and government enterprises and focus on five core areas beginning with energy analysis, carbon emission analysis, measurement and verification, fault detection and diagnostics and continuous commissioning of building systems, according to Etisalat.

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ROUND-UP month in view

Etihad Rail to be powered by SAP Etihad Rail will support the development of its monumental 1,200 km railway across the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with cutting-edge business software solutions from SAP, it was announced recently.

SAP said that it is collaborating with HCL Technologies to implement the solutions.

One of the most important and ambitious transport projects in Middle Eastern history, the Dh40 billion (US$11 billion) development will connect the UAE to Saudi Arabia via Ghweifat in the West and Oman via Al Ain in the East.

“Etihad Rail intends to become not only a source of national pride but also the most trusted mode of transport across the Emirates: a safe, efficient and sustainable transport system forming a new logistics network,” said Graeme Overall, business development director, Etihad Rail.

“We have the right ERP system partners in SAP and HCL Technologies. SAP’s software solutions are proven in our industrybringing us integrated business processes and effective use of complex data. HCL brings global experience in implementation of similar projects and local knowledge and

expertise,providing us with the right partner for implementation,” he added.

Sam Alkharrat, Managing Director, SAP MENA, said, “We are delighted to support Etihad Rail on this hugely important and influential project. With an innovative development blueprint and admirable sustainability credentials, it is a perfect fit for both SAP’s business solution offerings and overarching business philosophy.”

Etihad Rail is set to yield considerable economic benefits across the region, offering competitive transportation costs for cargo

– whether intermodal, bulk or break – and fuelling development in rural areas though better connections with urban centres.

The project is also expected to have a hugely positive socio-economic impact; a single train can remove up to 300 trucks from the road, improving safety, alleviating congestion and markedly reducing the UAE transport sector’s carbon footprint (one fully loaded train produces 70-80% less CO2 than a truck carrying equivalent tonnage.

“This win further consolidates our leadership position in large, transformational projects for which we are well known globally,” said Virender Aggarwal, president HCL Technologies, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Turkey.

“In this engagement, we have the winning combination of local knowledge, our global expertise in Railways and logistics sector, and the right partners. At HCL, we believe in combining best-in-class global practices with execution excellence to create value for our clients and we are committed to make this strategic initiative a landmark success in the region,” Aggarwal concluded.

Alghanim Industries deploys Symantec’s Altiris solution Alghanim Industries, one of the largest privately-owned companies in the Gulf, has implemented Symantec’s Altiris Management Suite to streamline deployment and management of over 4,000 of its endpoints in Kuwait and across the Gulf region.

With these management capabilities in place, Alghanim is able to adopt a more intelligent approach to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks and minimise the efforts and costs associated with deployment, patching and overall management of Alghanim’s systems and software ― all from a single, integrated console, the company said.

“Symantec’s Altiris Client Management Suite has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the IT department, enhancing the speed and quality of incident response, reducing endpoint deployment time and overall streamlining our productivity,” said Abbas 24

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Hussain, head of service delivery and operations, Alghanim Industries. “We’ve managed to lower the volume of service desk calls by 70% and reduce the client management team by 40% from 23 staff.”.

According to Hussain, before deploying Symantec’s Altiris Client Management Suite, all of Alghanim Industries endpoints were managed manually by a team of IT experts.. The lack of remote troubleshooting capabilities meant that once notified of a problem, a member of the IT team would be dispatched to the troubled computer to rectify the problem.

“This had a significant impact and hindered operations at the Alghanim subsidiary,” he said. For example, an advertising client might have to wait longer for their important creative idea to arrive, an engineering production line may run slowly, or one of Alghanim’s recruitment agencies would postpone a client’s talent www.cnmeonline.com

acquisition campaign.

Naturally, this manual approach was incredibly time-consuming. Abbas explained, “On average it took us between two and six hours to deploy a PC―and that didn’t include the journey time to travel to and from the site. Nothing was standardised and everything was slow and expensive.”

Working closely with its systems integration partner Future Technology Systems Company, Alghanim is using the robust Symantec management infrastructure to take control of its endpoint environment . “Imaging and deployment that used to take a day, for example, can now be completed in about forty minutes. The solution is steadily driving repeatable standards and ensuring consistent configurations across large numbers of computers in our organisation,” Hussain said.

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ROUND-UP month in view

Kuwait’s Petroleum Corporation chooses Commvault software Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) has selected CommVault Simpana 9 to meet expanding business, compliance and data management requirements.

According to KPC, Simpana Backup and Recovery software delivers the performance, reliability and manageability to better protect critical data, which they expect will double within a year, while accommodating an evershrinking backup window.

With Simpana software, KPC reported being able to safeguard vital applications, including Microsoft Exchange and Oracle ERP, along with an expanding VMware environment, and enabling data recoveries in minutes.

KPC’s IT team also relies on Simpana Archive software to streamline management of 15,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and has reported a 30% decrease in storage consumption, the company said and this significant decrease in storage consumption is in part due to CommVault’s embedded deduplication software which has reduced redundant data by 60%.

“Prior to CommVault software, we faced

a lot of difficulties managing our backups and restoring data was a nightmare, so we had a poor RPO and RTO window. Not any more, though, as Simpana software’s intuitive GUI makes backup and recovery as easy as a click of a button”, said Qais AlDoub, senior IT systems analyst, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. “So many of the applications we protect with CommVault technology are crucial to day-to-day operations, and we could risk millions of dollars if we lost any of this data. Thankfully, we’re fully confident in Simpana software, so backing up and recovering data is worry free.”

According to him, Simpana software delivers data management improvements across the company’s entire data centre comprising both physical and virtual servers.

This has proved to be highly beneficial given the fact that KPC has virtualised nearly 70% of its environment, it was reported.

The company also credits CommVault’s centralised, unified management platform with increasing operational efficiencies through simpler, faster daily backups and restores. Meanwhile, integrated reporting has

streamlined compliance audits in keeping with KPC’s evolving information governance requirements, the company.

Khaled Al-Faili, senior IT systems analyst, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said, “CommVault Simpana software suits our data management needs perfectly.

“We expect to double our storage capacity in the near future and are totally confident that Simpana software will scale to meet our growth objectives while continuing to help us increase operational efficiencies”, Al-Faili concluded.

HP and Microsoft team up for the cloud HP and Microsoft have announced a new four-year partnership to deliver public, private and hybrid cloud solutions built around Microsoft Office 365 and its onpremise equivalents.

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will offer software including Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Lync Server 2010 using HP’s cloud data centres, whilst HP will become an Office 365 reseller.

For private clouds, HP’s Enterprise Cloud Services (including Messaging, Collaboration and Real-Time Collaboration) will deliver Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Lync Server productivity applications as a service from HP data centres around the world, the company said.

Microsoft will continue to deliver its Office 365 suite over the public cloud and 26

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HP will use Enterprise Cloud Services and resell Office 365 alongside it for hybrid cloud environments, it was reported.

The offerings will eventually be available globally, but with initial availability this month in the UK, US, Australia and Canada.

“Large organisations, particularly those in regulated industries like financial services and public sector, have demanding functionality and service level requirements,” said Brandt Faatz, VP of Workplace Services at HP Enterprise Services.

“This alliance with HP not only broadens Microsoft’s geographic reach, it gives customers maximum flexibility to choose a cloud computing solution that meets their organisation’s specialised messaging and collaboration needs,” he said.

Microsoft launched Office 365 earlier this year, after more than eight months of hype. www.cnmeonline.com

The company hopes the new service will propel its popular Office software into the cloud computing era, and help it to challenge Google Apps in the cloud productivity space.

Office 365 has been broadly welcomed as a solid cloud offering for small and medium businesses, but the service got off to a shaky start, with millions of Office 365 users left stranded by a global outage caused by DNS problems in September.

Despite this, Microsoft claims that Office 365 is on track to become one of the company’s fastest-growing products ever.

However, the claims were met with skepticism from several analysts, including Gartner’s Matthew Cain and IDC’s Melissa Webster. Cain said that the figures were less an organic consequence of early sales success and more a competitive response to product improvements and customer wins for Apps.

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Blogs:

Analysis: Oracle’s internal IT

Welcome change

Lenovo H330

Oracle’s CIO and senior VP, Mark Sunday, has revealed how the company’s strategy to simplify its processes has enabled it to acquire and assimilate businesses.

Pallavi Sharma, Sub-Editor, CNME

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http://bit.ly/urmBO1

Reviews:

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A ‘fen do’ CNME

Insight:

Sathya Mithra Ashok, Senior Editor, CNME

Big battles in 2012: IDC Researchers at IDC, say some big battles will be brewing in 2012 in the cloud, mobile and Big Data arenas.

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http://bit.ly/vSfqFG

CNME Poll: What are your gadget plans for the new year?

Read more online

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Photo Gallery: Flashback

29%

Buy a tablet

17%

Buy a smartphone

12%

Buy a PC/desktop

5%

Buy a camera

2%

Buy an iPod/music player/ MP3 device

7%

Buy any other gadget not included in the above

28%

No thank you, pretty happy with the gadgets I currently have

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My, how far Budget desktops have come. While Lenovo’s orange-accented H330 is definitely “budget”–it starts at just $650–it packs some impressive specs, including an i5 processor, a Blu-ray disc drive, and a 1TB hard drive. Plus, it performs like a lower-end nonbudget desktop.

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OptiPlex™ 390, 790, 990

Desktops that mean serious business To give you even more choice, we’ve added three exciting new models to the OptiPlex range. Powered by 2nd generation Intel® Core™ Processors, there’s now an OptiPlex fit for any business.

For more info contact: Dell_sales@mindware.ae Riyadh Office: +966 1215 3126, Jeddah Office: +966 2650 3236 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.

Case Study Arkan Building Materials

BRICK-BY-BRICK Abu Dhabi based Arkan Building Materials is challenging the way organisations deal with recession through its technology investments Pallavi Sharma discovers.

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E

very once in a while, there comes an organisation that challenges the way other organisations have been dealing with strapped economies, increasing competition and shrinking revenue margins. Arkan Building Materials is definitely one of them.

Meet Dmitri Stephanou,VP Information Systems, at Arkan Building Materials who says that the support extended towards IT from the senior management at the organisation rivals that of any he has seen in his career.

As the construction industry in the region suffered the effects of a drawn out recession, the senior management at Arkan Building Materials, an integrated building materials manufacturer, decided to review the company’s operations. As the management reviewed processes associated with sales and engineering, they decided that investing in a technology refresh would not only help the organisation become leaner but it would also make processes more efficient.

“Typically, when everything is going well, sales are healthy and profits reeling in, most companies do not see the need to optimise and enhance existing IT systems.

So when the revenue fell and competition continued to increase, we realised we needed to do a better job of understanding costs and making quicker decisions on sales prices to implement robust competitive strategies,” says Stephanou.

According to him, while the recession serves an opportunity for an organisation to enhance and better existing work flows, it also frees up investments that would previously be used for expansion and marketing to be invested in strategic technology deployments.

Basic blueprint And that is how Arkan Building Materials, an organisation owned by the General Holding Corporation (an entity wholly owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi to promote sustainable industrial activity in the Emirates), decided to invest in a complete technology refresh.

The primary business imperative, according to Stephanou, was to use

When everything is going well, sales are healthy and profits reeling in, most companies do not see the need to optimise and enhance existing IT systems.

So when the prices went down and competition continued to increase, we realised we needed to do a better job of understanding these costs and making quicker decisions on prices and implement robust competitive strategies”. technology to enable real time decision making capabilities, based on visibility into material acquisitions and cost structures.

“Previously, it took several weeks or months to present the necessary reports.

By that time, markets dynamics would have changed, meaning that the reports didn’t aid strategic decision making. The driving need for real time visibility and action was not very urgent when the business and global economy was doing well, and nobody felt the need to change a thing, things change when its economic climate changed” he says.

Besides real-time reports, the business also wanted to provide centralised access to services and applications efficiently.

There was also the need to reduce costs associated with storage and cooling of servers on the agenda.

Naturally, a complete technology refresh required a detailed and prolonged planning phase, during which the company identified elements that could aid robust deployment.

Stephanou explains, “The key requirement from my end was the scheduling of weekly steering committee meetings, and I am proud to say that our CEO was involved and present across 99% of these meetings.

This meant that any escalations points were dealt with on-the-spot, making the turnaround cycle extremely efficient.”

Stephanou and his team also spent considerable amount of time deciding on the vendors and the partners that they wanted to work with to help meet the requirements they had identified. The team at Arkan chose to work with partners that not only had experience with large www.cnmeonline.com

scale implementations across the industry vertical, but could leverage best practices and deliver what the company calls a “templatised” solution.

“We made it very clear that whatever solution we chose would not be changed.

Instead, we would change our requirements and processes to meet the best practises of the vendor or partner. Organisations need to understand that they are not smarter than the companies that invest mammoth amounts of money and time to develop these solutions, and that they would be better off embracing those solutions rather than tweaking or altering them,” he adds.

When choosing the partners to help them with the implementation, Arkan considered the partner organisation’s ability to manage the entire implementation as one single vendor. “We wanted a single point of contact- they manage the project, any problems or any other vendors involved with multiple components of the delivery,” he says.

According to Stephanou, the success of implementation depends on the ability to identify what an organisation wants to achieve right from the beginning and its ability to communicate these goals to the vendors and partners. Most importantly, these goals must be included in the contract to make them binding.

Starting from scratch “We started with deploying an energy efficient blade platform, and VMWare as the foundation on which all our centralised applications were subsequently implemented. These included a highly january 2012

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Case Study Arkan Building Materials

scalable and redundant MS Exchange solution, a SharePoint farm, SAP Business Intelligence and a number of integration points between SAP and the production control systems, as well as time attendance and truck yard management. Last but not least, we implemented Citrix as the remote connectivity solution allowing all our business units to access our centralised application offerings,” explains Stephanou.

He adds that part of the reason the company chose SAP, as opposed to Microsoft or Oracle which also scored well on the applications front, was the ability to provision this integration element.. “We wanted to deploy the ERP applications, integrated with the production line, control systems and business intelligence tools, all at the same time. We felt we needed to do this for maximum ROI. We communicated the need for a one shot end-to-end deployment to the vendors, and found that only SAP could effectively satisfy this need,” says Stephanou.

Anticipating the need for clear change management processes, Stephanou and his team adopted a two pronged approach to team training.

“On one end, we contractually requested our implementation partner to include an Arabic speaking trainer, who we carefully selected from a number of candidates to ensure a good culture fit with our organisation. This trainer participated in the entire project life cycle, guiding the users throughout the project ensuring maximum knowledge transfer, acceptance and adoption of the new SAP system,” he says.

The other end of this two pronged approach focused on clear top down messaging that no changes would be made to the solution or deployment, unless they were absolutely necessary or were seen to enhance the implementation further.

Dmitri Stephanou, VP Information Systems, Arkan Building Materials

“Out of the 70 requests that were submitted to the steering committee only six were approved. The approved changes are now part of the ‘templatised’ solution, which is an SAP certified solution. This brings me back to the process of deciding on SAP, and the fact that we wanted to implement not only an industry specific solution, but one that could be certified by the vendor to reduce any post deployment management issues when it makes changes to code, does regular updates or creates new releases. We consciously worked with both Fujitsu, our infrastructure partner for this implementation, and SAP to ensure that the certification process was complete before we went live,” says Stephanou.

On the other hand, the challenge with both the VMware and Citrix implementations was that the company had recruited a lot of new people, none of who had prior experience with these technologies and did not know how to put them together with the SAP implementation.

Organisations need to understand that they are not smarter than the companies that invest mammoth amounts of money and time to develop these solutions and that they would be better of embracing those solutions rather than tweaking or altering them”.

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“The key to addressing this was to work with vendors who could support career development, who could be good team players- not only have know how and knowledge but could also sit shoulder to shoulder with our employees and school them on the systems and their underlying technology to help them build the expertise to support and maintain a robust infrastructure even after the vendors finished their task and left. This is the primary reason behind our decision to work with both VMware and Citrix ,” he explains.

The continuous process of knowledge transfer also gave the organisation and its many stakeholders the peace of mind that in the future any recurring problems could be handled competently by the organisation’s own employees.

Step forward After the implementation , which was conducted over a span of a little over five months, (two months on VMware and Citrix and little over three months on SAP) Stephanou says that the organisation is now ready for the future.

“We are working on adding more modules to the ERP environment and integrating it with new business units. These will include the assimilation of three new plants that were not earlier part of the Arkan family. We are also internally working, studying and developing a proof of concept on using Citrix platforms on BlackBerry devices to access some of our key applications such as the ERP one. On the same front, we are also involved in a dialogue with Fujitsu, who were our implementation partners for the SAP project they have already developed a real application on BlackBerry to access the ERP apps. We currently, are studying the solution,” he says.

Stephanou concludes by attributing the organisation’s ability to plan and execute the implementation of a robust infrastructure and industry standard ERP solution in record winning time to the 20 member IT team at the organisation.

With an IT team whose capability speaks for itself, senior management that is headed by a former IBM executive and now a state of the art infrastructure, Arkan Building Materials has it all.

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Case Study .ae Domain Authority

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www.cnmeonline.com

Open regulation The .ae Domain Authority has a focus on open source, and a desire to run a lean IT staff. It found its best partner, that enables easy management and high stability, in Red Hat solutions.

A

s the regulatory body and registry operator for the .ae domain name, the .ae Domain Authority (.aeDA) naturally takes its duties and responsibilities very seriously.

“The department within TRA which is responsible for managing and regulating the .ae country code domain registry systems.

What we mean by that is all the registrations that take place within the .ae namespace are actually going through our systems for vertification, registration and activation on the Internet,” says Mohammad Al Zarooni, Director, .aeDA. “In terms of IT infrastructure we are talking about a service that must be available 24/7, with zero possibility of downtime, we have actually deployed a backend that is stable. When we designed it, we took into consideration that it would have to cater to high traffic, high availability, and provide redundancy and fortitude to our customers,” he adds.

To keep the promise of constant availability, the .aeDA has multiple data centre sites across emriates, as well as a point of presence outside the country just to make sure that its services are reachable all

around the world. The eight-member IT team works to ensure not just availability but a fast and reliable response time.

“We are a small team – we are depend on creativity and innovation in deploying IT systems. When we think about deploying or designing any IT systems we think about how much effort we need to put once we deploy in teams of maintenance and operation. That is why we are trying to automate as much as – in terms of monitoring – infrastructure and the engineers simply have to monitor it from a single unified system,” explains Zarooni.

Zarooni also encourages his small team to tread training secrets, such that a systems engineer can act as a back-up for a network engineer when required. The culture also encourages the team members to constantly educate themselves and in order to be abreast of and adopt market trends as they happen and at the earliest.

He continues, “The other aspect is that we are an open source oriented team – most of our infrastructure, monitoring and deployment tool is based on open source software. We believe that open source can eliver a lot of things to us in terms of customisation, collaboration with other communities.”

In terms of IT infrastructure since we are talking about a service that should be available all the time, 24/7, no one can accept having downtime for his website and domain name, we have actually deployed a backend that is stable. When we designed it, we took into consideration that it would have to cater to high traffic, high availability, and provide redundancy and fortitude to our customers.” www.cnmeonline.com

An open source OS Demanding the best from the internal team extends to getting the highest quality of work from vendors and service providers.

“For any project we identify detailed requirements. Whenever we are trying to float RFP or tender, we see how much that solution is actually compliant with our solution. This is the basic way of choosing which IT vendor. Of course, cost also matters. After sale services like contractual agreements for maintenance and support are very important as well,” says Zarooni.

Keeping its high-level requirements, its passion for open source and its demands for the best from vendors, it was only natural for the .aeDA to consider Red Hat seriously when they required a stable operating system for their infrastructure.

“Red Hat was chosen based on their active presence in open source industry along with providing commercial support with timely updates. The fixed schedule of major OS releases was an excellent match as stability being a crucial factor for the .ae registry. Red Hat Satellite, the centralised systems management software is a vital product allowing near instantaneous deployment of OS, configuration and custom services. RedHat is renowned in the enterprise server operating system market, for being stable and is well supported by the open source community,” says Zarooni.

The .aeDA registry infrastructure based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 allows real-time processing of transactions so that registrants can easily acquire their desired ‘.ae’ domain names on-the-spot. Acquiring an online presence under ‘.ae’ is now fast and straightforward with the comfort of purchasing via an entirely online process provided by most of the accredited registrars.

By enabling businesses and individuals to obtain their .ae domain more easily, they are now able to launch themselves on the Internet faster and make changes real-time to match their product or service requirements.

With the increasing penetration of the Internet, compelling opportunities exist to reach out to users.

The .ae registry is spread across three interconnected sites which comprises around january 2012

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Case Study .ae Domain Authority

50 physical systems, Storage Area Network and a backup library. With Red Hat Network Satellite, a powerful centralised systems management platform, the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, along with custom configurations and applications, was completed in a few hours. Once the system was implemented, training was imparted by the Red Hat solutions and services team.

“The Red Hat training acquired was valuable for our technical team to deploy and manage the solution. We now have a Red Hat certified team in place. With the quality training, detailed product documentation and global support from Red Hat, the .ae Domain Administration’s technical arm performs operations and maintenance activities in-house. Their activities include deployment, configuration, monitoring, capacity and availability planning and scaling,” says Zarooni. .aeDA has both the Red Hat OS as well as Red Hat Satellite solutions, along with ARI Registry Services for the actual portal.

The entire deployment of the solution to enable the registry portal took eight months including the hardware, software and registry systems. Currently, the registry handles approximately 92,000 domain names.

No stopping According to Zarooni, the Red Hat implementation has proved to be the wise choice for the .aeDA and the right platform

for them to move onto the next stage and further deployments.

“The .ae Domain Administration keeps up with the leading edge technology. We are currently working on launching “‫تاراما‬.” (dotEmarat), the first registry to acquire a non-latin top level domain. We envision managing and operating other top level domains (TLDs) in the future,” says Zarooni.

As the first registry service in the Middle East to launch an entirely Arabic domain name registry, Zarooni feels very proud and believes that this is key to enabling nonEnglish speaking people to feel confident while using the Internet.

“One of the reasons was to understand the woes of the people who can’t use the Internet in the proper ways because of

Red Hat was chosen based on their active presence in open source industry along with providing commercial support with timely updates. The fixed schedule of major OS releases was an excellent match as stability being a crucial factor for the .ae registry. Red Hat Satellite, the centralised systems management software is a vital product allowing near instantaneous deployment of OS, configuration and custom services. RedHat is renowned in the enterprise server operating system market, being stable and well supported by the open source community contributions made us choose RedHat over other OS providers.”

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their language problem. This is the main obnjective that drives us to go Arabic and to upgrade our systems to support the Arabic domain name,” says Zarooni.

All current projects, and future ones, continue to be supported by the management.

“They are very supportive. When we send any IT budget allocation or requirement, we actually identify it very well. When it goes to the senior management of the TRA they understand the exact need for the allocation projects or improvements within the department. From that perspective, as I have been working with TRA for the last four years I have not found any issues of the senior management questioning the IT budget allocation,” he says.

The team is also constantly working on improving its IT budget utilisation in terms of reducing cost and using existing resources to cater to additional services and new projects wherever possible.

“The IT budget is usually decided through an escalation letter, which is rule defined by the TRA. However, as a department we identify the requirements, beacause a part of the IT budgets are fixed since it involves maintenance contracts, support contracts etc. For the new projects, the software and hardware requirements are identified and assessed.

“Choice of ventdors is made based on suitability to the project. Once the basics are in place, a normal budgeting allocation process,” explains Zarooni.

Case Study Paris Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi

Learning innovation Although young to the UAE, the Paris Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi is making the right investments to offer a competitive learning and campus experience. Pallavi Sharma reports.

O

pening the doors of the renowned Paris Sorbonne University in Abu Dhabi (PSUAD) to the nation’s rapidly expanding student community in October 2006, was a step towards achieving the UAE government’s vision to becoming one of the top five education destinations of the world.

Since its modest beginning in 2006, PSUAD has continued to grow and even moved to a new campus on Abu Dhabi’s Reem Island. The university today schools

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over 700 students representing 60 nationalities. This exponential growth is what led the the government of Abu Dhabi, together with the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) and the university’s senior management, to undertake a series of projects to streamline operations and provision the institution’s expanding academic and administrative responsibilities, according to CIO, Mohammed Javeed.

“We at the PSUAD have made all the necessary efforts to provide our students the www.cnmeonline.com

same learning and living environment that he or she would experience at our parent campus in France,” he says.

All under-graduate programmes are taught in French, and faculty members are flown in from the parent campus in France, based on their scheduled lectures and tutorial sessions.

“Being able to maintain this environment is one of the key considerations when making technology or vendor choices. The Paris-Sorbonne University has a rich history

and reputation that cannot be compromised, irrespective of location,” explains Javeed.

Javeed boasts of an extensive experience in managing and servicing IT infrastructure at a number of prominent higher education institutions including Qatar University and the UAE University.

“Over the last 18 years, I have had the privilege of working with almost every vendor with a significant presence and notable solution. The education vertical is quite niche with only a few reputed players in the region (compared to the more developed markets of the world). So while we do consider a vendor’s previous track record, we also look for ones that I have previously worked with. The familiarity with the vendor helps us reduce the amount of time spent investigating their ability to meet our specific requirements, and provisions a degree of trust between the university and the solution provider that would normally take years to build,” he says.

He also adds that the university’s tech investments and vendor choices are often based on recently developed strategic alliances between vendors like Oracle, Cisco and ADEC and the Abu Dhabi government.

This falls in line with the fact that the university is funded by ADEC and the Abu Dhabi government.

Since joining the university in October last year, Javeed says that the university’s IT budget has increased at least five fold.

Fresh start “Until a year ago, the requirements from IT were very basic, everything was paper based or done manually, and there were no administrative systems or hardware in

Mohammed Javeed, CIO, Paris Sorbonne University –Abu Dhabi (PSUAD)

place, meaning that IT budgets were very small. Today, I am in charge of establishing an infrastructure and developing a complete unified digital campus. This requires a significant increase in IT expenditure and resources,” he says.

“The first step following the approval in the budgets was expanding the existing IT team of four people. Over the last one year, we have brought innew experienced members to our team making us a team of 12 people that are committed to achieving the university’s goals and capable of servicing the expanding infrastructure,” Javeed adds.

According to Javeed, over the last one year the university has invested in three

Being able to maintain this environment is one the key considerations when making technology or vendor choices because the Paris-Sorbonne University has a rich history and reputation that cannot be compromised, irrespective of location” www.cnmeonline.com

key implementations, beginning with the deployment of Oracle ERP to automate and connect the disparate processes associated with HR, finance, payroll and other administrative functions. The university then went on roll out Cisco IP TV across the student dorms and other recreation areas to provide an economical and practical way for students to stay connected to their families and keep up to date with developments across the world. Finally, PSUAD embarked on what they call the Talaki Digital Campus Project built on SunGard Higher Education’s Banner Digital Campus to improve services, promote student success, manage enrolment growth and enhance decision making through greater access to information.

The Oracle ERP systems was an initiative taken by ADEC in 2010, whereby the authority deployed the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite of applications including ERP and Identity Management across a number of prominent national institutions.

These included PSUAD, Emirates College for Advanced Education (ECAE) Abu Dhabi Vocational and Training Institute, and University of Mohammad 5 -Abu Dhabi (UM5A).

“The sole aim of this project was to effectively consolidate different systems such as HR, procurement and finance, within the university. The tool was implemented to save time and encourage the seamless exchange of information by centralising key processes on a common platform. The centralised platform was based in a unified data centre that met ADEC’s needs. We also invested in a new blade server environment comprising a combination of hardware from Dell and HP,” says Javeed.

“The challenge with this project was that our users were accustomed to manual processes, and therefore we needed to consciously invest time and efforts towards changing the culture. This involved empowering the users with the knowledge necessary to efficiently leverage the tools provided by the system to not only better operations but make their roles significantly january 2012

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Case Study Paris Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi

easier. To address this challenge, we invested in long training sessions and hired two consultants, one for HRMS processes and another for financial units, to help users go through the process of knowledge transfer,” he adds.

“The process of change management also included the execution of a strict code of conduct. We made it very clear to all the departments that no claims or policies could be submitted on paper or excel, even request for benefits needed to submitted online and this encouraged them to continue using the system until they were well acquainted with it. Today, the staff is capable of managing and operating the system with minimum reliance on the vendor or a third party,” Javeed says.

Tech for the best PSUAD essentially provides a combination of programmes from two French universities - the Paris-Sorbonne University, dedicated to Arts and Humanities, and Paris-Descartes University, specialising in law, political science and economics. According to Javeed, the parent universities have independent databases that resulted in making the role of administrative staff at PSUAD quite complex.

“We need to register student records and information across the relevant parent data bases in Paris based on their course major in order for them to be eligible for their degrees. Because we had no physical systems in place and student information and data was manually collected and documented on paper, this task was time consuming and prone to significant human error,” he says.

The first phase of the Talaki Digital Campus project, which went live in early October 2011, saw PSUAD deploying SunGard Higher Education’s Banner Student solution as a foundation for the digital campus environment.

“In order to achieve this, we deployed a system that provides students, faculty and administration with a 360 view using Single Source of Truth (SSOT), a practice of structuring information models and associated schemata such that every data element is stored exactly once. This system 40

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was hosted on SunGard’s servers- till we bought our hardware and configured it. As a result of this deployment we have achieved consolidation of student accounts and records, identified outstanding receivables.

The system has enabled more coordination between the administration and finance departments to improve debt management by upto 99%,” says Javeed.

Javeed says that students can access details associated with fee assessment, examination and course schedules online.

In addition to this, the university has also implemented a campus commerce system from TouchNet [a partner of SunGard Higher Education], enabling both students and their parents to make their payments to the university online using their credit cards.

Just the beginning The university is already midway through the second phase in the project, which involves leveraging the Banner Document Management Suite, Luminis Platform, and Banner Operational Data Store. The deployment of these systems is aimed at avoiding duplication of data entry and doing www.cnmeonline.com

away with small silos of student information, according to Javeed.

The university has also begun rolling out a BlackBoard e-learning environment, integrated with the Echo 360 lecture capture system to further enhance the learning experience for students. Javeed and his team are also working on a print and copy management or a pay-forprint project, wherein an identity management solution would be used to monitor print and paper costs.

“Following this we plan on working out a digital system to monitor our library resources and management. We are also working on a process by which students will be able to use their personal mobile devices to access all the services that make for the Talaki Digital Campus,” he adds.

PSUAD also plans to increase their IT team’s strength to 25 trained members and eventually move onto a virtualised platform.

There is no doubt that with a crystal clear vision and the commitment to deliver, the team at PSUAD is all set to innovate educational institutions in the region both from an administrative and academic point of view.

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Volatile economic environment Increasing competition Stringent regulations and compliance standards Rapidly changing consumer preferences Increasingly complex supply chains Rise of emerging markets

9%

Therefore 33% of organisations feel that investing in BI systems would enhance an organisation’s ability to respond to change.

11%

50 32

12%

say it takes years to make a decision critical to performance while 40% says it takes a few months.

Source: Bloor Group from June to October 2011 Respondents: 318 Subject: enterprise BI architecture adoption and plans

BI APPLICATIONS CURRENTLY BEING DEPLOYED AND PLANS

14%

of decision makers feel that the current business challenges have significantly reduced the amount of time businesses have to make critical decisions.

ACCORDING TO THE ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE UNIT:

• • • • • •

CHALLENGES BUSINESSES FACE TODAY:

TIMELY

Business Intelligence, or simply BI, was for many years the sole territory of corporate CEOs and CMOs, but times are changing, the younger generation of decision makers who have grown up with the Internet, mobile technologies and social media are demanding BI data that is:

RAISING AWARENESS

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

21% DASHBOARDS

18% SEARCH AND NAVIGATION

18% BPM

17% DATA VISUALISATION/ DATA MASH UPS

17% DATA MINING/ANALYTICS

OLAP

IDENTITY ANALYSIS

COMPLEX EVENT PROCESSING/ EVENT STREAM PROCESSING

10% PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS REPORTING

• Improved Mobile productivity- mobile employees connected 24/7, work an average of 240 hours more a year • Increased employee engagement- employee usage of BI systems doubled among 277 companies that took part in an Aberdeen Group survey • Ease-of-use is the new number one consideration when purchasing a BI platform. This aspect surpassed “functionality” for the first time in 2011.

SEARCH AND NAVIGATION

Icon predictions: Techies believe as more organisations adopt a mobile BI solution the old user interfaces (UI) will be replaced with new ones, allowing for the kind of diverse functionality already familiar to users of non-BI mobile applications

will be spent by US businesses on mobile app development

PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS

of the workforce will be made up by enterprise mobile workers

DATA MINING/ DATA ANALYTICS

of organisations will provide data exclusively on servers for mobile devices

EVENT PROCESSING/ 27% COMPLEX EVENT STREAM PROCESSING

of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices

DATA VISUALISATION/ DATA MASH UPS

Billion

30%

73%

BPM

• Companies with mobile BI can make critical decisions six times faster than organisations without a mobile platform for reporting and analytics

IDENTITY ANALYSIS

6x

DASHBOARDS

40%

30%

OLAP

33%

29%

$11+

23%

WHAT MOBILE BI PROVIDES:

19%

BY THE BEGINNING OF 2013

15%

48% of companies will have a mobile BI solution

27%

Only 9% of companies currently have a mobile BI solution

2011 2012

38%

20% of companies were delivering BI data to mobile devices 80% of companies had intentions to do so

2008

Source: Domo Technologies, December 8, 2011

THE POWER OF MOBILE BI

BI ADOPTION PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

11% REPORTING

SolutionsWorld

Solutions world Social Media

Steady start Enterprises across the globe are capitalising on social networking platforms to breed collaboration and cocreation. Pallavi Sharma speaks to regional enterprises to find how they are leveraging these For platformspast, the second part of the interview, please present and future. read the September 2011 issue of CNME.

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I

n the beginning, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter were primarily used by consumers to exchange thoughts and information.

Today, these networks are being leveraged by enterprises across the globe as an extension of the traditional marketing mix.

According to Bobby Gupta, Vice President and head, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey at Mahindra Satyam, the popular use of social media platforms during the recent Arab Spring has had a powerful impact on enterprises.

“These events unlocked the potential of social networking where platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were used to share the voice of the masses with the international community. In the UAE, these tools were leveraged by Federal National Council (FNC) election candidates to communicate with voters. As a result, organisations have realised that social media channels can no longer be ignored, and that in order to stay competitive and survive, businesses need to begin optimising the use of social networks,” says Gupta.

With consumers using social media platforms to share all kinds of information, from news and developments right down to their choice of brands and companies, the word of mouth phenomenon has never been stronger and enterprises are not about to be left out just yet.

Telecommunications providers Etisalat and du use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to respond

Social media has played a significant role in Middle East to bring change in civic society.

The Arab Spring unlocked the potential of social networking where platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were used to share the common experience and voice of the masses with the international community” to customer queries and complaints to provision always - on connectivity.

“Through social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and blogging, we listen to our customers, monitor customer requirements and engage with them by sharing our latest promotions and announcements. We also use these channels to effectively handle customer queries,” says Jaber Al Janahi, VP of corporate communications at Etisalat. .He continues, “Our social media department works closely with corresponding sections in the customer care department. Our monitoring tools help us notify teams in order to enable action and to provide our customers with an enhanced experience with Etisalat, both online and offline.”

Another active user, group buying siteCobone.com has engaged social networks in what they call a ‘social consumer trending’ project that builds on the power of these mediums to help the company gain a better understanding of i ts customers’ interests and likes.

“The project uses the core of Facebook to grant Cobone.com access to user information as defined within their own security settings. This user information is integrated with analytical dashboards and widgets together with the purchasing and preference data from our own deal application layer. We can then target messages based on feeds, comments and likes (pre and post sale) and even rank users on these metrics including their purchasing activity. We can see who has engaged, converted and interacted with our brand and the value of the transactions across generations of social activity,” explains Greg Hucker, chief operations and technology officer at Cobone.com Yet other organisations are using instant messaging and video conferencing tools to encourage pervasive creativity and borderless communication within organisations. “Social media is integrated into our internal communication strategy from supporting employee and leadership blogs, to using collaboration tools such as Chatter and SharePoint - we use multiple Source: DLA Piper (year of research)

BY THE NUMBERS

41%

16%

26%

15%

of businesses in the UAE have a social media presence

of businesses in the UAE use social media to communicate with employees

of companies active on social media channels in the UAE do not have a social media policy

of companies with a social media presence have a standalone policy

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Solutions world Social Media

mediums to improve the communication and work flow across the organisation,” says Olivia Bellingham, director of communication at CA Technologies.

The adoption of ‘bring-your-own-device’ methodologies at workplaces is leading to next generation innovation. Research firm Gartner recently released a report titled Predicts 2012: the rising force of social networking and collaboration services, in which analysts say that the next year will see mobility and collaboration go hand-in-hand.

“Social networking and collaboration applications will ultimately be developed to be deployed first on mobile devices, making the desktop device secondary to its mobile brethren giving rise to alwayson and always-connected enterprise,” the report reads.

Far from easy Enterprise users of social networks warn

Roch Muraine, director, strategic solutions for Middle East and Africa for Alcatel-Lucent, Enterprise

that these platforms add a considerable degree of pressure across all levels of the organisation.

“Social media adds pressure not only to the IT teams, but also to the legal, marketing, customer service and corporate communications departments. We’ve all heard the stories about employees who post inappropriate videos, and about customers rising up against companies in the most public manner to share an unpleasant experience with the brand or company in question. With employees, it’s important to have a social media policy and the relevant training in place so that the employees know the rules, and it’s important to educate them about the do’s and don’ts.

From an external perspective, companies have to recognise that social media is a twoway street. Once they start using Twitter for outbound marketing, they must also recognise and expect that customers can and will communicate back to them using that same channel of communication,” says CA Technologies’ Bellingham.

Farid Faraidooni, CCO, du agrees, “This two way communication is perhaps the most complex element of an enterprise social media presence. Consumers today have become a lot more demanding of the companies that they do business with.

Today, they expect an instant answer to their queries and response to their problems and social networking gives them an opportunity to voice their opinion and have it heard by a much larger audience than was earlier possible. Failure to respond in time or not maintaining a consistent flow of content and information via these channels can often hinder a company or brand’s reputation and

Social media has just started to find its way into the enterprise. While large MNCs have been using social media for a few months now, we are about to see more small and medium sized businesses adopt these platforms” 48

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Farid Fariadooni, CCO, du

therefore requires a degree of serious commitment from the teams that are managing these platforms.”

According to users, the best way to mitigate these risks is by implementing and executing a practical social media strategy.

This strategy should then be reinforced by the use of social monitoring tools that can help organisations assess how these platforms are being viewed and assessed by multiple external stakeholders.

“On a corporate level, our social media strategy is based on how we can best leverage the platform to engage with our customers. On a micro level, it is a dedicated team effort to handle queries and connect with every customer through the social channels. We are committed to customer satisfaction and meeting their expectations in a timely and effective manner. We have a dedicated social media monitoring tool that is used by our Monitoring and Analysis team to gather data and conversations. Information gathered is analysed and reports generated are forwarded to respective departments for appropriate action,” says Al Janahi.

“Monitoring is extremely important.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure or monitor. You can’t respond if you don’t listen first. Based on the KPIs that an enterprise sets for its social networks, it

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Solutions world Social Media

can then use a whole host of monitoring tools and services available such as Scoutlans, Radian6, Buzzmetrics etc. In addition to which, decision makers within enterprises can leverage their own social networks to monitor how the company is being perceived on social media,” says Faraidooni.

MSAT’s Gupta believes that social monitoring provides enterprises with access to tools that derive intelligent information from the multiple conversations across an organisation’s host of social media platforms. “Today we have social media tools that provision, sentiment analysis, identify key influencers and opinion leaders, map trends and competition as well as mark out and interpret positive and negative comments on social network feeds,” he adds.

Roch Muraine, director, strategic solutions for Middle East and Africa, Alcatel-Lucent, Enterprise recommends that enterprises clearly separate personal engagement on social networks from enterprise engagement. “The effective communication of a social media strategy must come from the senior management, who must be personally involved by setting the right rules and executing these so as to ensure that these networks are used with careful care as is the case with any medium of interaction with the customer.

They can even set targets for each network to monitor the growth of the platform and provide the necessary assistance to achieve these targets, this will only motivate the teams that handle these channels use them effectively,” he says.

usage to suit the region of operation and must do so regularly as the company’s profile on social networks continues to grow.

Jaber Al Janahi, VP of corporate communications at Etisalat

“Having the right people lead the social media strategy is perhaps the most important element. The organisation must be careful to communicate exactly what kind of information can and cannot be shared on social media platforms and be accountable for the results achieved from interaction with customers via these channels. They must be given the right resources and information to maintain a consistent flow of information on the networks while ensuring that they don’t clutter the platforms with unnecessary content. Most importantly, enterprises must always be honest and respectful of the customers, they must be ready to respond to complaints in the most appropriate manner so as not to hinder the company’s image,” advises Faraidooni.

Muraine adds that organisations must reassess the social media strategy and its

On a corporate level, our social media strategy is based on how we can best leverage the platform to engage with our customers. On a micro level, it is a dedicated team effort to handle queries and connect with every customer through the social channels 50

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www.cnmeonline.com

Growing forward Middle East enterprise users believe that the year ahead will no doubt see more organisations leverage social media tools and platforms to encourage a healthy flow of communication across both internal and external stakeholders of an organisation.

According to a recent Forbes article by practicing manager Peter Neely, 2012 will be marked by the Millenials or “generation c” enterprises that he describes as being connected, computerised and community oriented.

Neely wrote, “The new generation of ‘Millennials’ will have fully adopted the collaborative mindset as their own. They have grown up using social networks as a tool for brainstorming and problem solving. This reflects a broad shift in generational thinking that is taking place. The broadcast generation from the industrial age is being met by a collaborative generation from the new knowledge age. The old ways of staying within the four walls to solve problems, guarding company information and developing products, services and solutions in isolation are gone.”

Not isolated in his thinking, regional enterprise users agree with Neely and believe that organisations that embrace the collaborative nature of social networks will enjoy a significant competitive advantage. I for one believe, that as enterprise adoption of these platforms continues to grow, human instinct to change and innovate will see these enterprises use social networking channels for more than just communication.

One can’t help but agree with Nelly’s conclusion, “So stop thinking of social networks as just another venue for your marketing. Their next evolution is already underway and holds much promise for the business world.”

NetworkWorld

network world WAN

WAN optimisation gets cloud-ready WAN optimisation is going to be critical in guaranteeing application performance in cloud environments

Diego Arrabal, sales director, F5 Middle East

W

AN optimisation has been typically deployed in enterprises to recoup precious bandwidth and speed up sluggish applications. But, now with the growing list of applications, platforms and versions of applications, the problem has become boarder; it is no longer about optimising only a handful of specific application at branch or remote offices.

The advent of cloud and virtualisation has further exacerbated the problem, making it an imperative to deploy a solution that cost-effectively optimises the entire application environment now and in the future, and do it without increasing network infrastructure complexities.

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The primary function of the technology – making response times faster over WAN links – now available through software that runs on virtual machines, is becoming practical for use in public and private clouds where virtual environments are the norm.

The number of applications that can’t run in a virtualised environment is rapidly dropping and WAN optimisation vendors are delivering virtualised support for their applications, further reducing the need for stand-alone appliances. Running WAN optimisation on virtualised servers enables IT to use the same servers that it uses for other essential branch services (DNS, DHCP, print services, etc.). This eliminates the need for a separate box in each location, www.cnmeonline.com

if there is already adequate hardware in a typical branch, and thereby reduces administrative costs and reduces the weight of the deployment. Virtual appliances are easier and faster to deploy, and to move, and they offer greater options for resilience and disaster recovery.

Virtualised versions of the old hardware appliances make it possible to deploy optimisation within public cloud provider networks, meaning cloudbased applications respond better. It also means data can be sent in less time to cloud storage facilities where it occupies less disk space (and so costs less) and is secure because it is encrypted.

So how does WAN optimisation fit in the cloud space?

“As applications and storage move out to the cloud, performance of the corporate communications link between the data centre and the cloud will become more important. Optimising transfers to the cloud with symmetric WAN optimisation technology improves WAN communications performance and helps contain costly bandwidth upgrades,” says Diego Arrabal, sales director, F5 Middle East.

Florian Malecki, senior product marketing manager at SonicWALL, echoes a similar opinion: “WAN optimisation is definitively playing an important role with cloud computing, as repetitive data are exchanged and internet bandwidth

becoming saturated can be expensive.

Organisations can leverage and optimise their existing connectivity with solutions.”

Cloudy network There are several aspects to the decisionmaking process surrounding optimising application delivery in the cloud. One involves whether to apply a symmetric or asymmetric solution. Asymmetric solutions are those that require hardware on one end of a connection, while symmetric solutions require gear on both sides of the connection.

For many Web-based apps, asymmetric offerings are the best approach to accelerate applications from within the data centre.

Both asymmetric and symmetric approaches are available as hardware, software and services, and vendors says asymmetric may not be the best option for cloud environments. “This would only work if the data and apps held in the cloud were static. If you want to make the cloud a true extension of the data centre with business policy applied at both the data centre and the cloud, then you need the means to apply this policy and that means having application delivery controllers, either physical or virtual, at both ends,” says Arrabal.

Dr Steven Turner, Optimisation Consultant, Intergence Systems, agrees,“ Typically, acceleration should be symmetric

Florian Malecki, Senior Product Marketing Manager at SonicWALL

to enable a user to transfer data to the cloud as well as receive data from the cloud.

Looking at cloud based applications such as Sharepoint there is a definite need for two-way acceleration to support both the transmission and receiving of documents and other media.”

Hardware vs. services The two best things about WAN optimisation are that it practically guarantees better response times for applications, while at the same time either reducing the need for WAN bandwidth or at least staving off for a while the need to boost it.

Dr Steven Turner, Optimisation Consultant, Intergence Systems

This would only work if the data and apps held in the cloud were static. If you want to make the cloud a true extension of the data centre with business policy applied at both the data centre and the cloud, then you need the means to apply this policy and that means having application delivery controllers, either physical or virtual, at both ends.”

Initially the technology was deployed via appliances placed at both ends of WAN connections that perform a variety of optimisations that reduce the number of bits that have to cross the wire in order to complete transactions. But over the years, providers have stepped up to offer WAN optimisation as a service.

Choosing right Some providers offer optimisation services based on installing appliances made by somebody else at customer sites and managing them. Other providers offer optimized networks over which customers run their traffic with no need for devices at customer sites.

Arrabal from F5 says there is also potential to offer WAN optimisation as a service over the cloud. “It could potentially make up part of an SLA or service offering to cloud clients – the benefits of bolting on www.cnmeonline.com

such a service could include better network access to applications, reduced bandwidth costs etc. But ideally you’d like to see this kind of service being offered as a way of delivering apps better and optimising the WAN as a matter of course,” he says.

WAN optimisation appliances constitute a growing market now, but the writing is on the wall: A few years from now “WAN Optimisation Controller” may barely exist as a separate category of physical network appliance. As WAN refresh cycles play out over the next seven years or so, the research firm Nemertes expects a majority of companies to migrate to one of the other optimisation models now available: carrier/ cloud services (optimisation as a service), point solutions and virtualised optimisation appliances (optimisation as a workload), or integrated router-switch/optimiser or security/optimiser appliances (optimisation as a feature). january 2012

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opinion Paul Sherry

C

Heading to the cloud Paul Sherry, regional director of Riverbed, lists out five reasons for WAN optimisation in the cloud.

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www.cnmeonline.com

loud computing is either a revolutionary trend sweeping through the IT world, or an evolutionary development growing out of longtime trends. Or maybe it’s both.

In terms of buzzwords, cloud computing carries echoes of many previous technology and marketing phenomena, including network computing, utility computing, distributed computing, and virtualisation.

With cloud computing, software and more basic computing services like storage or backup are provided “as a service,” meaning that they are available on demand, as needed.

The complexities don’t actually go away, but they’re hidden in the “cloud” of network services, meaning that most of the time we don’t have to worry any more about the mechanisms for provisioning applications than we do about the inner workings of a network router or an email server.

When an IT department consumes cloud resources for its own purposes, or makes cloud services available to the users on the enterprise network, the service provider is expected to provide a clean interface and keep all the behind-the-scenes technical challenges to itself. But providing access to cloud services presents many of the same challenges as deploying applications on a corporate wide area network (WAN). If anything, assuring adequate performance for cloud services is more challenging for cloud services accessed over the public Internet. Network bandwidth is limited, and the transmission of signals is delayed when they have to be relayed over long distances.

Many enterprises are also constructing private clouds – virtualised pools of storage and processing resources and on-demand resources operated within the firewall that mimic the architectural style of public clouds. And just as more corporate users are accessing cloud resources over the Internet, more branch office employees are accessing private cloud resources over the WAN. Fortunately, the challenges of cloud performance can be addressed with many of the same strategies IT organisations have employed to improve the delivery of applications and network services to branch offices, telecommuters, and mobile workers.

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opinion Paul Sherry

WAN optimisation technologies have evolved to address the issues of long-distance computing, and they work equally well over public and private networks.

Here are five reasons why WAN optimisation will be even more important in this new era: Cloud architectures, public and private, have a lot in common with delivery of applications over corporate WANs. The fundamental obstacles to performance on a corporate WAN include distance and the limited available bandwidth, which often clash with the demand for network access from applications designed to function on a local area network. Some of the limits of performance on a WAN are absolute, because of constants like the speed of light. Yet dramatic improvements are possible with the

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increasingly depend on WAN optimisation.

Public cloud services rely on the open Internet to function as their WAN, as opposed to a more controlled network based on private telecommunications links. That makes achieving reliable high performance even more challenging, given that individual organisations must compete for bandwidth on the public Internet.

With a public cloud service, headquarters users are in the same position as those remote office workers who have traditionally benefitted from WAN optimisation. In other words, all employees will be remote from a data centre operated by an external organisation. So how well the resulting performance issues are managed will be just as apparent to the CEO as to the most lowly branch office worker.

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WAN optimisation can accelerate both the public and private portions of a hybrid cloud architecture.

These models are likely to prove the most attractive for many enterprises.

WAN optimisation appliances and software, which compress the data to be transmitted over any network link and streamline unnecessarily chatty application protocols.

These techniques work just as well over a public Internet connection.

In a research report, “Increase IT Performance from the Enterprise to the Cloud with WAN Optimisation,” analysts from the Taneja Group depict current enterprise computing trends toward consolidation and mobility. The report states, this leads to “the emerging ‘cloud decade’ in which IT performance will be constrained, more than ever by network performance.”

Private clouds essentially continue the long-term trend started by server consolidation and virtualisation. As these initiatives extend out beyond headquarters, more and more of the application services that were previously delivered by servers in each branch office are being centralised in corporate data centres. Delivering acceptable performance to these field offices will

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Public cloud services are often secured with SSL encryption, which introduces additional overhead. WAN optimisation appliances can prevent this from being a barrier by applying specialised processors to the encryption and decryption of traffic, analysts say. Security can be assured, without sacrificing performance.

Some public cloud services will seek to differentiate themselves by offering WAN optimisation technology, either as a standard component of their services or as an upgrade option. To make the best use of that feature, their customers will need to have compatible optimisation technology installed on their own networks. And they will seek out cloud service providers that can offer WAN optimisation technology that is consistent with their networks.

The optimisation technology can also be delivered in software-only form, making it possible to deploy traffic acceleration as just another application running on a virtual container in the cloud www.cnmeonline.com

infrastructure. While an appliance can take advantage of some hardware-specific functionality such as SSL acceleration coprocessors, the same basic functionality can be delivered as software.

WAN optimisation can accelerate both the public and private portions of a hybrid cloud architecture. These models are likely to prove the most attractive for many enterprises. Some data and applications will be kept within the firewall, for reasons of security and control, while other data and applications will be sent into the public cloud to save money and reduce complexity. In other cases, public cloud services will be used to provide overflow capacity or disaster recovery capabilities.

But even where cloud services are applied to background functions like data backup, WAN optimisation will be important to minimising contention with other applications on the network.

The economic and architectural virtues of cloud computing have to be balanced with usability. Any interactive application that relies on cloud computing infrastructure needs to meet user expectations of reliability and performance. Those expectations will be formed partly by their experience with LAN-based applications (compared with which performance should not be noticeably worse) and with consumer Internet applications from companies like Google and Amazon.com, which invest heavily in maximising the performance they deliver.

WAN optimisation allows an enterprise to maximise the potential benefits of cloud computing, while minimising a key tradeoff – concern over the performance of applications accessed at a distance. In the absence of a workable answer to this concern, organisations may not have the confidence to exploit the promise of cloud computing. Or they may go forward, but fail to deliver the performance required to prove the case for cloud computing within their companies.

Either way, failing to pair cloud computing with WAN optimisation is a mistake. Only by making high performance part of the foundation of cloud computing can a company realise both the evolutionary and revolutionary benefits of this technology.

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StorageAdvisor

In Association with

STORAGE ADVISOR Big Data

Big and growing Collating big data and gleaning intelligence from it is becoming important among Middle East enterprises, as it is the worldover.

As early adopters invest in the new technology, we are likely to hear a lot more of big data in 2012. Sathya Mithra Ashok writes.

T

here is no easy way to say this.

Ask a few people about what big data stands for, and you are likely to get as many definitions out of them.

“Like any relatively new topic, the industry definition hasn’t really settled down yet to a clear consensus. Some view it as a problem; most view it as an opportunity. The core idea is relatively simple: new ways to capitalise on the enormous amount of information we’re 62

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collectively generating. The “big” part of the term refers to the difficulty involved: new approaches are required to address these newer opportunities,” says Chuck Hollis, VP CTO for global marketing at EMC. What they all do agree on is the fact that big data is here already in most organisations, and it is time that enterprises began to take an active interest in understanding and getting the most out of it. www.cnmeonline.com

“Knowledge is where the value is being created in business today. Big data is of strategic importance to organisations and usually the second most valuable asset after their people. The sooner an organisation realises its value, the better they are positioned to take advantage of today’s data driven business world,” says Marwan Mousfi, VP of business solutions at Technology Partners.

“Ninety percent of the data in the world today was created within the past two years and therefore big data can be defined in a number of ways, starting from datasets that become so large over time that they are difficult to work with and use to extremely large files.

This includes being able to create, store, search, share, analyse, visualise, manage, report on or even gain meaningful intelligence on. By working with larger and larger datasets, organisations can turn a meaningful event to a revenue generating opportunity. The trend of big data will not stop as the cost of capturing, processing, storing and sharing data keeps falling, mobile devices, electronic transactions and social media consistently increase,” says Marco Gerazounis, senior VP for Middle East, North Africa and Turkey at Software AG. “Enterprises must pay attention to big data due to the simple reason that if they don’t, their competition will, and the “first mover” advantage will give them that significant competitive edge. I say this because we see a lot of interest across industries and geographies where enterprises want to create innovative new business models using big data, gain market and customer insights, or bring in business process optimization and operational efficiencies they were unable to bring before,” adds N Veeraraghavan, senior VP and global head of enterprise information management and analytics at Cognizant.

Steve Bailey, regional operations director at Commvault says, “Big data is something that can creep-up on you and before you realise it, it can be causing huge expense and present new types of risk. What often starts as a project can become business critical and the bigger it is, the harder it is to keep it available or recover in an emergency.”

Harnesssing big data Vendors believe that organisations across the globe need to take the rising importance of big data more seriously and should work towards encompassing it in organisational functioning for long-term benefits. However, most Middle East organisations continue to struggle even with the most basic of data management practices.

“Most companies are currently using traditional tools to store data, such as NAS and SAN technology. This leads to islands of data which is difficult to bridge without a big data solution. Businesses that want to gain insights into their customer and partner sentiment need to not only focus on their internal sources of data but throw a wider net and start investigating external sources of data.

Data from social media sites, macro-economic analyst, supplier stock availability, and customer buying habits can help companies gain invaluable insights and fine tune their product development to better address changing market needs,” says Basil Ayass, enterprise product manager at Dell Middle East’s Commercial Business.

David Rajan, director of technology at Oracle says, “Big data is the other half of the data coin. The dense structured data we’ve been managing for the last 20-30 years has now been enhanced by the other half of that coin which allows business to complete a 360

Chuck Hollis, VP CTO for global marketing at EMC

being operational to being analytical. IT predominantly takes decisions on data management to fulfill immediate business needs to answer the question of “what happened” rather than “what will happen”.

Obviously, we see a gap here as compared to geographies such as the US and Europe. Big data management provides the opportunity to bridge this gap. ME enterprises can now move up the value chain and position business needs, business analytics, and customer experience as the driver for data management,” says Veeraraghavan.

According to EMC’s Hollis, big data are solutions in the region finding their way among

Ninety percent of the data in the world today was created within the past two years and therefore big data can be defined in a number of ways, starting from datasets that become so large over time that they are difficult to work with and use to extremely large files. This includes being able to create, store, search, share, analyse, visualise, manage, report on or even gain meaningful intelligence on.” degree view that until recently was outside of both our comprehension and grasp. Seeing both sides of the ‘data coin’ allows both the hindsight of the transactional relationships and events that we have captured but also the new capability to enhance our perspective by analysing the unstructured activities, events and relationships that provide insight into future events, wants, aspirations, desires and emerging trends.”

“Data management in the Middle East market is currently maturing from

certain sectors, including telecoms, finance, public sector and energy production. The second wave though, which would cover retail, manufacturing or pure information-based business models, is still in the coming.

He adds, “We see one group of organisations that are going down a path of “analytically enabling” their workforce – making analytical tools and data sources available in a self-service easy-to-consume environment.

We also see a smaller (and more aggressive) set of organisations investing heavily in the Source: McKinsey Global Institute Report, May 2011

BY THE NUMBERS

60% is the increase in operating margin that retailers are likely to see with the right use of big data

1.5 million

140,000 to 190,000 is the shortage in people with deep analytical skills that the US-alone is likely to face by 2018

is the shortage in managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions that the USalone is likely to face by 2018

www.cnmeonline.com

january 2012

$600 billion in economic surplus can be captured by consumers by enabling personal-location data

Computer News Middle East

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STORAGE ADVISOR Big Data

new breed of data scientists, and build very large and purpose-built environments around their unique needs. We also see a few more progressive IT organisations investing the time to inventory and catalogue their information assets, and aggressively market these assets back to the business in an effort to encourage increased consumption and utilisation in the organisation.”

The current situation being as it is, vendors state that enterprises in the region can start moving towards collating and obtaining intelligence out of big data by implementing simple solutions and processes as a starting step.

“At best, very large organisations use data warehouses. However, very few have an information governance framework that encourages the establishment of a structure for the creation, manipulation, storage, use, re-use and retirement of data. Most of them either don’t sufficiently understand the strategic implications, can’t find a way forward or don’t have the organisational willingness. A good start is to have an information governance framework that will help enable a data

Steve Bailey, regional operations director at Commvault

landscape based on content rather than data silos. Then comes the necessity to deploy enough useful big data capabilities into the hands of the largest number of employees,” says Mousfi.

Bailey states, “Using storage resource management (SRM) software is a good start.

Agent-less SRM makes rollout a non-issue and it can really help you to organise data for the best access/cost compromise. Not only will the trending warn you that you’re heading down the Big data path it can help drive archive policies for effective long term storage and keep costs under control. Big data needs expert handling and getting the right help early can make a big difference, so while it’s not easy to spot a problem before it becomes acute doing so can save you a lot of pain and expense. The other point to make is that choosing the right technology is critical – and remember, getting it wrong can be catastrophic.”

Oracle’s Rajan points out there is a lifecycle to big data, which includes acquiring it, organising it and analysing it in order to make decisions, and organisations have to create a framework for every element of the same.

Apart from that, he emphasises the need for putting in place ‘behavioural changes’ that can prepare and familiarise an organisation to take full advantage of big data.

“They have to be collaborative. Big data is very much a joint activity between the business and IT. It’s important to ensure that the team encompasses both elements. Be focused on value – find the use case for your organisation.

Once you have that in place, be experimental.

And finally, be strategic – consider how big data fits into your existing data and IT strategies,” says Rajan.

Managing change Many believe that these same behavioural changes, and the change management that it

Data management in the Middle East market is currently maturing from being operational to being analytical. IT predominantly takes decisions on data management to fulfill immediate business needs to answer the question of “what happened” rather than “what will happen”

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Marwan Mousfi, VP of business solutions at Technology Partners

entails, is one of the biggest challenges facing Middle East enterprises in these early days of adopting and working with big data.

“Change management is the single biggest challenge that enterprises face in a big data initiative. A retail client of ours has created a big data crowd sourcing team with business and IT leaders, data analysts, and academicians to help foster a data-driven mindset within their organisation and bring about this change in an incremental manner rather than letting it be disruptive,” states Cognizant’s Veeraraghavan.

There are other challenges that enterprises are likely to encounter as they start out with their big data investments and changes.

Management buy-in and the willingness to change their legacy business processes are key success criteria, says Ayass.

“The inherent challenge with recommendations for big data in the enterprise is that there is not a lot of published research on best practices for deploying and running a Big data solution in an enterprise environment.

We therefore recommend that customer follow a time-proven systematic approach to implementation a success IT project. Dell leverages the WADI concept of Workshop, Assess, Design, and then Implement to tackle such complex projects and ensure the key success criteria are met,” adds Ayass.

Commvault’s Bailey points out, “Protection and disaster recovery can be staggeringly expensive. To mirror 1TB these days is relatively inexpensive, to mirror 500TB on

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STORAGE ADVISOR Big Data

high-end disk for scientific analysis is cost prohibitive for all but those with very big purses. Even backup to relatively cheap media like tape can be expensive due to the sheer volume. The other issue is time – while everything is faster today than it used to be, moving even modest amounts of terabytes around can take a while, let alone petabytes.”

“On a practical level, there could be a serious shortage of talent that is necessary for organisations to take advantage of big data.

Also, several issues will have to be addressed to capture the full potential of big data such as policies related to privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability,” says Mousfi.

Hype to productivity This year Gartner added big data to its technology hype cycle. Gartner uses hype cycle to assess where technologies lie through an entire lifecycle beginning from a technology trigger, to a peak of inflated expectations and then on to a plateau of productivity. According to the hype cycle for emerging technologies in 2011, big data is past the technology trigger and is on the rise to the peak of inflated expectations. This is also a time that is characterised by first generation products, high prices and lots of necessary customization, with early adopters investigating the technology.

What that means in real terms is that we are likely to hear a lot more of big data in 2012.

“Five years ago, it was virtualisation. Two years ago, cloud became the new big thing. I predict that 2012 will be the year for Big data in the Middle East,” says Ayass.

“In the Middle East and across the globe, we see industry segments such as manufacturing, ecommerce, high tech, energy and utilities, banks, transportation and public administration showing a lot of interest in big data solutions. Early indications are that a good number of clients are willing to take a proof-ofconcept approach to understanding the value of big data solutions,” says Veeraraghavan.

Being vendors who sell solutions, they remain positive that adoption is set to increase in 2012. As early adopters move to big data solutions, this is likely to happen, since big data itself is growing from a relatively small number.

Hollis explains the model for enterprise adoption of big data thus.

“I use a three part model to describe enterprise adoption. The first group is already quite proficient at big data. They know what they need and want from technology vendors such as EMC, and we simply have to give them the tools to do more with their resources.

But that isn’t a large group, especially in the Middle East.

“The second group really doesn’t have an appreciation for advanced analytics, or rich content models, or large-scale social, or any of the hallmarks of a big data-oriented enterprise.

N Veeraraghavan, senior VP and global head of enterprise information management and analytics at Cognizant

They’re just not interested in those topics, very often with very valid reasons,” Hollis says.

He adds, “The third group is much more interesting – they have some of the pieces, but they could be doing a lot more with what they already have. More importantly, we meet many forward-looking leaders who are considering taking the next step. These leaders want to learn – what are other people doing, what results are being seen, how does one go about organising for success, how to get an initiative off the ground, and so on. We’re doing what we can with these people to bring our experiences and insights to them to help them along their over journey.”

Enterprises should remember that these big data trends are not unique to the Middle East, and that they are in rather good company when they stay cautious about these technologies. The entire world is getting used to the idea of big data, and adoption is prone to be similar across continents for the new set of technologies.

As Hollis points out, “This isn’t just true in the Middle East – it’s largely true around the globe. Because when it comes to making new ideas real, it really is a global economy.”

We could’nt include it here, but you can visit. www.cnmeonline.com to view all the big data definitions we heard.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies in 2011

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SECURITY ADVISOR IP Surveillance

March to megapixel New standards, better capabilities and the flexibility of IP drive adoption. Here’s what to consider.

D

espite the global economic downturn the market for IP video surveillance cameras and other associated equipments seem to have remained intact worldwide and as the technology continues to evolve, the emergence of high-definition (HD) video and megapixel resolution stand out as the more prominent trends affecting video surveillance technology.

The transition of many large enterprises to IP–based systems together with the increasing price competition and commodisation in the middle and low tiers of the analogue surveillance market are contributing to the decline of the analogue market, analysts say.

Meanwhile, the growth in network video surveillance continues to be bolstered by stimulus-funded projects and by the increasing penetration of higher-value network video surveillance products, such as HD cameras according to IMS. The company predicts that the growth of the IP market and the decline of the analogue market will eventually lead to a transition by 2014, with network video overtaking analogue in sales.

Anant Berde, VP, Gulf Buildings Business at Schneider Electric, agrees with this estimate saying that while IP surveillance solutions are fast gaining ground on their analogue contemporaries, the company’s own analogue business continues to hold its own. However, in time, Berde believes that as price gap between IP and analogue surveillance systems continues to narrow and vendors focus on developing user friendly networked solutions, customers will eventually make large scale transition to the IP based systems to avail the many benefits they have to offer.

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Baraa Al Akkad, regional sales manager, Middle East for Axis Communications

Moving to IP Although traditional providers of video surveillance equipment were slow to embrace and promote IP products in the past, these companies have now begun to quickly develop their portfolios of IP surveillance products and are gaining market share and analysts believe the move to IP will continue over the next three to five years.

Industry analysts and experts believe that the emergence of open standards for IP cameras created by two industry groups is definitely pushing buyers towards network surveillance. These open standards were created by two industry groups- Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF) and the Physical Security Interoperability Alliance (PSIA), in 2008.

ONVIF includes vendors such as Axis, Bosch, Canon, Sony, Cisco and Panasonic.

Late last year, the group announced its ONVIF Core Specification 2.0, which covers video storage devices, video analytics engines, cameras and encoders. PSIA’s members include Honeywell, IBM, Stanley Security www.cnmeonline.com

Solutions, Samsung and Texas Instruments.

In March, PSIA unveiled the final pieces of its security suite of specifications, and several vendors’ demonstrated products that use PSIA specifications.

“Open standards create a level of interoperability making it easier for more manufacturers to access the video surveillance market. It also allows room for open collaboration whereby developers can create IP surveillance systems for industrial usage that can be integrated with other systems like building management systems, fire and safety systems etc,” says Baraa Al Akkad, regional sales manager, Middle East at Axis communications.

Not entirely convinced of the benefits of open standards, Schneider Electric’s Berde says that while these standards are generating a degree of interest they aren’t necessarily driving buyer adoption. “The lack of clarity as to what standards such as ONVIF and PSIA mean inhibits measurable shifts in buying behaviour. In our opinion, we are still in the hype era for open standards. People are buying it because it makes sense and the technology is just much better. What we need to understand is that so long as vendors continue to develop and innovate existing products and services to differentiate them from competitors, standards will always trail behind the leading edge of technology breakthroughs and as such will always define the least common denominator that exists across the industry,” he adds.

In keeping with this, Berde says that the primary driver for the adoption for IP based systems is that the technology helps bolster security through improved image resolution. .“The primary driver here is the need for better detail in security video. Customers, who have experienced the transition from Standard Definition HD (720p) and Full HD (1080p) video in entertainment video and witnessed the many benefits, have come to expect the same from security video,” he says.

McEntyre says, “Not only is the quality of the images way better than what we saw with analogue but because the cameras operate on a network we can conduct detailed searches of archival video and manage the network remotely.”

Megapixel gains ground Industry professionals point to the increasing adoption of HD and megapixel resolution technology as the major ongoing trend in the IP surveillance market. This is only natural given that manufacturers are beginning to transition their IP camera product lineups from standard definition to HD and megapixel resolution cameras.”

For organisations that deploy IP surveillance cameras, the higher definition and megapixel resolution will mean even better image quality. “It provides end users with a more compelling reason to switch from traditional analogue video to IP video,” Berde says.

Chitresh Markanda, principal technical consultant, Tech Mahindra says, “Increased penetration of high-bandwidth access technology including LTE and 3G rollouts and broadband technologies are also driving the adoption of HD and megapixel resolution cameras especially across governments and the SME Segment.”

Anant Berde, VP, Gulf Buildings Business at Schneider Electric

“The move to megapixel not only provides greater detail for identification, it opens the door for security cameras to enter nonsecurity markets requiring observation and even automatic control,” says Al Akkad.

Industry professionals also point to another technology development in the industry- video compression algorithms.

H.264 is used for technologies such as Blu-ray discs, streaming Internet video and popular Web software such as the Adobe Flash Player in addition to cable and direct-broadcast satellite TV, and real-time videoconferencing.

Berde says, “The move towards H.264 is already in full sway. The vastly better compression rates, without sacrificing image quality delivers great benefit in containing infrastructure and system costs that go with bandwidth and storage. This also places higher resolution camera well within the reach of many security budgets. One of the other reasons H.264 has been widely adopted, is that the costs of this technology have benefited greatly from the scale of their use in entertainment video solutions like Blu-ray disk as well as the fact there are widely accepted standards in place for its use in security video.”

Markanda adds a different element saying, “Media encoding technologies such as H.26 and H.264 SVC are facing increased competition from codecs, VP8, Theora etc.

This will only divide the market for any specific encoding standard further.”

As is the case with any technology, industry experts expect to see more innovation in the near future, in terms of new software features on IP video cameras that increase their functionality.

In addition to this, industry experts believe that cloud computing will also

What we need to understand is that so long as vendors continue to develop and innovate existing products and services to differentiate them from competitors, standards will always trail behind the leading edge of technology breakthroughs and as such will always define the least common denominator that exists across the industry” www.cnmeonline.com

Chitresh Markanda, principal technical consultant, Tech Mahindra

transform IP surveillance technology. For one, analysts believe that it will in many ways obviate the need for old DVRs and NVRs [network video recorders.]

Companies have already begun rolling out cloud-based services. For example, Axis has a hosted video-surveillance-as-a-service (VSaaS) offering that is enabled by cloud computing. Organisations with an Axis camera and Internet access can use the service on an on-demand basis, according to Al Akkad.

According to Markand, cloud based storage solutions will especially enhance user adoption of IP surveillance systems. “For instance, users would like to watch camera feed as a Mosaic on a PC or as single feed on their mobile devices. They may even need on-the-fly transcoding solutions to enable these services on recorded streams and this is where cloud based solutions would really come into play,” he predicts.

Experts say that faced with so much innovation, organisations must be careful when making decisions about their choice of surveillance technology. “In addition to weighing the costs and determining how the equipment will be used, it’s a good idea to keep tabs on what others are doing.

They could benefit from meeting with local companies that use other systems so they can compare notes. In the end, every user is looking for the most functional and reliable equipment,” says the analyst. january 2012

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Security advisor Cyber Spies

T

Are cyber spies looking at you?

Security experts believe that companies and governments should prepare themselves for increasingly sophisticated cyber-espionage attacks

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he security industry expects the number of cyber-espionage attacks to increase in 2012 and the malware used for this purpose to become increasingly sophisticated.

In the past two years there has been a surge in the number of malware-based attacks that resulted in sensitive data being stolen from government agencies, defense contractors, Fortune 500 companies, human rights organisations and other institutions.

“I absolutely expect this trend to continue through 2012 and beyond,” said Rik Ferguson, director of security research and communication at security firm Trend Micro. “Espionage activities have, for hundreds of years, taken advantage of cutting-edge technologies to carry out covert operations; 2011 was not the beginning of Internet-facilitated espionage, nor will it be the end,” he added.

Threats like Stuxnet, which is credited with setting back Iran’s nuclear program by several years, or its successor, Duqu, have shocked the security industry with their level of sophistication. Experts believe that they are only the beginning and that more highly advanced malware will be launched in 2012.

“It is quite possible that we will see more of these threats in the near future,” said Gerry Egan, director of security response at Symantec. “Duqu was used to gather design documents from companies that manufacture industrial control systems and could very will be a precursor to future Stuxnet-like industrial sabotage attacks,” Egan explained.

“It is likely that new Duqu variations will cause mayhem in early 2012,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi, a provider of enterprise key and certificate management solutions. “We have to be on a new state of alert to safeguard our assets and be better prepared to respond when the threat strikes.”

However, despite the emergence of Stuxnet and Duqu, security experts don’t believe that the world is actually watching a cyberwar in progress.

Security advisor Cyber Spies

“To have any opposing action earn the title of ‘War’, there must be a declared state of conflict, and to my recollection, this has never happened in the case of CyberWar,” said professor John Walker, a member of the Security Advisory Group at ISACA, an organisation that certifies IT professionals, via email.

“However, if we were to frame the question relating to ‘CyberConflict’, then I would consider this to be a very different case, where regular aggressive deployment of such capabilities occurs in one form or another in support of either a political or military purpose,” he added.

Countries like the U.S., U.K., Germany, China and India have established specialised teams and centres to defend government assets against cyberattacks and to even retaliate, if necessary. However, determining who is behind Internetbased hostile operations with certainty is impossible most of the time and that’s just one of the many problems.

“All countries are wrestling with the question of retaliation,” Egan said. “If a blatant act of cyber war has occurred, how does one country retaliate and to what extent? What is a proportionate response?”

The currency of cybercrime Firms don’t take the threat of cyber espionage seriously enough, says Ovum.

A report by the research firm urged businesses to address the issue as it’s “as relevant to them as it is to national security organisations”.

“Cyber criminals are graduating from stealing credit cards and banking credentials to targeting corporate plans and proprietary information. They want valuable information such as product and technology blueprints, customer lists, or information that can be used

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Threats like Stuxnet and Duqu could no doubt lead to major international cyber-conflicts in the future, but for now companies and governments should be more worried about cyber-espionage attacks that use simpler data exfiltration tools.

Threats like Stuxnet and Duqu could no doubt lead to major international cyber-conflicts in the future, but for now companies and governments should be more worried about cyber-espionage attacks that use simpler data exfiltration tools.

These unsophisticated, yet effective, pieces of malware are known in the security industry as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and are usually distributed via social engineering. Operation Aurora, Shady RAT, GhostNet, Night Dragon and Nitro, are all examples of APT attacks reported during the last couple of years that have affected hundreds of organisations worldwide.

The number of APT attacks is likely to escalate in 2012 and defending against them requires frequent employee to embarrass or disadvantage a victim,” said Graham Titterington, Ovum’s principal analyst.

“Almost every organisation has sensitive information that would damage it if it were to be leaked out; however, many have overlooked cyber espionage in their preoccupation with preventing the theft of financial data. This needs to change, and enterprises need to wake up to the danger posed or risk losing valuable information and having to deal with the consequences.”

Titterington said employees that work from home are the weakest link in corporate security defences. He urged firms to restrict the number of staff that have access to sensitive data, as well as conducting a risk analysis of all devices that access the network including removeable media.

www.cnmeonline.com

training and more aggressive protection technologies like those based on whitelisting, file reputation and application behavior.

“People still represent the weakest link in security for a large amount of enterprises and that is the reason they are targeted,” Ferguson said. “Training still has an important place in an organisation’s security planning but it needs to be ongoing training, not a one-time only event.”

“So far we have been doing a much better job patching software than patching people,” said Amichai Shulman, CTO at security firm Imperva. “I spent time in the military trying to educate people about information security. It didn’t work there and it won’t work anywhere else.”

There should be a shift in protection paradigms and more control should be put around the data source. Restricting which applications can read certain information and detecting anomalous behaviour, like sensitive data being accessed at strange hours of the day or being transferred in large quantity, is part of a proactive solution, Shulman believes.

Technologies that can check a file’s reputation, age and regional popularity, before allowing it to be executed on a system can also be used to block APTs that were designed to evade traditional antimalware detection methods.

“There is no doubt that major organisations need to be far more aware of the potential effects of malware,” said Hudson. “If this issue isn’t on the agenda of your board right now then the board is negligent,” he concluded.

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TELECOMS WORLD Carrier Ethernet

Carrier Ethernet grows up Carrier capital spending may be down during the current economic downturn but Carrier Ethernet is still finding favour among telecom operators.

I

n today’s uncertain economic climate it takes courage to predict good news in any sector, but industry analysts such as Infonetics and Ovum are sticking to their predictions for strong growth in Carrier Ethernet services and equipment - a $20 billion market set to grow to between $40 billion to $50 billion by 2014. Impressive - but still just a ripple on the greater global economy.

The real significance of this growth lies in its effect on world business. If ever a tonic was needed, it is now, and Carrier Ethernet services are providing business with that tonic - in terms of lower cost, more flexible and yet more powerful communications, and expanding business opportunities across nations, continents and the world.

From a business user’s perspective, the Metro Ethernet Forum’s most

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Leo Xu, Vice President of Solutions & Marketing, Middle East, Huawei

significant step was to launch a certification programme, firstly for Carrier Ethernet equipment in 2005 and then for Carrier Ethernet services in 2006. Now users could www.cnmeonline.com

be confident that the services would meet well-defined global standards, and sales began to soar. 2008 saw a severe economic downturn, but Carrier Ethernet remained resilient, offering just the sort of cost savings, business flexibility and new growth opportunities that were most needed in difficult times.

From a carrier’s perspective, the biggest early driver of Carrier Ethernet was carriers moving to an IP network. But in the last year, if not the last three, what has pushed it more dramatically has been video and mobile broadband.

There are some key service and infrastructure drivers generating momentum for Carrier Ethernet among the carriers. “Ethernet services represent a packet-friendly infrastructure with potential to be the transport of choice for business,

residential, and mobile market segments. As packet traffic dominates the network, with data overtaking voice in recent times, there is an urgent need to transport packet traffic in native IP mode to avoid costly conversion to TDM networks,” says Paulo Pereira, System Engineering Manager, Cisco.

He adds that Ethernet services solve the service provider’s need for a compromise between competitive pressures on revenue and cost savings. Operators face increased pressure for control of OpEx and differentiated services to protect margins.

Much of the advantage of Ethernet services lies in its operational flexibility through ease of automation, service deployment, operations, administration, maintenance, and network management, plus plug-and-play operations support system (OSS) options.

Mashood Ahmad, Director of Divisional Sales, Ciena, points out early adopters of Carrier Ethernet also made the shift so that they could offer Ethernet services to their business customers. “Carrier Ethernet allows these operators to better monetise their customer relationships through tools such as SLA monitoring, customer web portals, or service tiers based on quality of service – and the emergence of cloud-based applications looks set to solidify this trend.”

With Carrier Ethernet services now a major part of a provider’s portfolio, industry uptake is accelerating. Among the biggest adopters are the mobile phone providers an industry hit by intense price competition combined with a huge increase in data traffic driven by the rise in smartphones.

Until recently backhaul from the cell tower to the core network used leased lines - an expensive solution and one where increased traffic could only be handled by installing another leased line. Once Carrier Ethernet backhaul is installed, however, not only do you have the simplicity of an all-IP network but also throughput can be rapidly altered as needed in small increments.

“Carrier Ethernet backhaul is attractive for a number of reasons. With many subscribers already using Ethernet services,

Carrier Ethernet backhaul can deliver costeffective network management, exceptional network flexibility, and an enhanced user experience,” says Leo Xu, VP of solutions and marketing, for the ME at Huawei.

As traffic volumes for mobile and fixed services increase rapidly, we have seen operators turning to Carrier Ethernet technology as a solution for handling new traffic in a way that is generally cost effective. These networks can be scaled quickly in order to achieve the lowest cost per bit, with the interface itself relatively inexpensive in terms of capex and opex, he adds.

Paulo Pereira, System Engineering Manager, Cisco

With Carrier Ethernet services now a major part of a provider’s portfolio, industry uptake is accelerating. Among the biggest adopters are the mobile phone providers.

Another advantage of Carrier Ethernet is that it can be accessed over a range of media - copper, fiber or wirelessly.

Consequently, the biggest success has been Carrier Ethernet microwave backhaul, with unexpected 40% annual growth rate for the next five years.

Carrier Ethernet can be deployed in the core as well the access networks,

Samer Ismair, MENA-Systems Engineer, Brocade Communications www.cnmeonline.com

though it’s typically deployed in the latter.

Samer Ismair, MENA-systems engineer, Brocade Communications, says providers planning Carrier Ethernet service delivery should look for product lines, which are certified for both MEF 9 and MEF 14. They can then deploy these platforms with the assurance that the service will be in full compliance with the corresponding MEF specifications. “In addition, these platforms should be built with a capacity of 100 Gbps of full-duplex bandwidth per full slot, based on a distributed, high-performance, ultra-low latency, network-processor-based architecture,” he says.

2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the MEF and the launch of Carrier Ethernet services. They have something to celebrate now, with nearly 200 worldwide members including telecommunications service providers, cable MSOs, network equipment, software manufacturers, semiconductors vendors and testing organisations. But it is global business that should be celebrating the rise of Carrier Ethernet - it is proving a real tonic. january 2012

Computer News Middle East

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TELECOMS WORLD WiMax

What WiMax means for the enterprise How different WiMax products are being used to monitor oil pipelines, run smart grids and why it’s good for a lot more than just consumer handsets

W

hile WiMax has lost the battle to be the 4G technology of choice for consumer handsets, it’s still alive and kicking in the enterprise market. That’s because companies have found that WiMax can be an effective wireless data technology for a wide variety of uses besides downloading Angry Birds onto your iPad.

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WiMax Forum Vice President Mohammad Shakouri says that although major wireless carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have chosen to deploy LTE over 700MHz spectrum, WiMax will still find a home delivering data for a wide variety of industries including airports, oil and gas companies and the burgeoning smart grid industry. www.cnmeonline.com

“The difference between the WiMax industry and LTE is that WiMax is also going more after complementary solutions,” he explains. “You will see WiMax providing communications needs in terms of building things such as the smart grid.”

Smart grid technology is typically defined as any information technology that helps power companies more efficiently monitor demand and allocate capacity.

Australian power company SP AusNet is helping its customers install roughly 700,000 WiMax-based smart meters into their homes that will deliver data on power usage to the company over a two-hour window every day to give them better insight on how and when their customers are using energy. The company is about one-third of the way through its smart meter deployment and expects to be finished by 2013.

John Theunissen, the director of smart networks at SP AusNet, says that WiMax delivers significantly more bandwidth than needed to run daily power readings, thus making it an ideal wireless technology for monitoring power usage. He also says that the added bandwidth makes it much easier to get real-time updates to quickly figure out where failures in the network are occurring.

“The thing that was tantalizing for us was ... the degree of latency and real-time support we found we could get out of 4G,” he says. “It’s allowed us to expand the range of our protection systems, so that devices out on network can now isolate faults within the network in just milliseconds.”

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In the United States, power companies aren’t just using WiMax as a wireless technology for smart grids but are deploying it to monitor other critical functions as well. Fuel transportation company Explorer Pipeline is one of the early adopters of Sprint’s WiMax-based 4G Enterprise WAN and has rolled out the network at its storage facility in Houston. Greg Wagnon, a senior network engineer at Explorer Pipeline, says that Explorer uses the new WiMax-based WAN primarily to handle supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) traffic that is used to operate the pipeline and control pressure valves to ensure safety, among other things.

Wagnon says that the addition of WiMax has made it possible for him to give the pipeline’s operations both dedicated 4G bandwidth and satellite-based backup in case of network failure. Previously he had to fit both pipeline operations data and administrative traffic onto a 3G CDMA network with satellite backup, whereas now he uses Sprint’s 3G CDMA network to back up administrative traffic alone.

While Wagnon has installed the 4G WAN onto just one site so far, he plans to bring it to two more and cites major benefits in terms of total added bandwidth and latency, which he says is around half of what he experienced on Sprint’s 3G network. He also says that Sprint has been a big help in both installing and offering performance guarantees for the 4G Enterprise WAN, thus saving him a lot of headaches when it comes to restoring connectivity when it goes offline.

“Before, if it went down, I could usually come up with a good solution but I was pretty much on my own,” he says. “Now if it goes down they will work to restore it.

Before they were only responsible just for their own network and towers but now they

are responsible all the way down to the 4G modem. So now they’re handling all the modem-level stuff that I had to do before.”

Of course, not every organization needs to rely on a carrier such as Sprint to get the benefits of WiMax. Northern Michigan University, for one, has employed Intel and Motorola to build a WiMax network that serves its 9,600 students and is operated by the university’s own IT department. The network consists of 14 different base stations and covers a radius of more than 30 miles to

WiMax will still find a home delivering data for a wide variety of industries including airports, oil and gas companies and the burgeoning smart grid industry.

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accommodate the 6,000 or so students who live off-campus. NMU CTO Dave Maki says that the university decided to build a private network because it proved to be cheaper to run than purchasing network access from a carrier.

“We tried basically partnering with carriers in the past and it always works out that no matter how you do a deal, you’re paying the full subscriber rate for the students,” he says. “So we looked at the different technologies available and WiMax was the only one readily available that fit our needs.”

The university began asking Intel about ways to provide off-campus wireless connectivity to its students and the company set up a meet-and-greet with Motorola, which subsequently signed a deal to provide network gear to the school. Intel, which has been closely partnering with NMU for years and runs wireless tests at the school’s validation lab, helped the school set up the network.

The school has had a laptop program for its students since 2000 and for years got by with a patchwork of Wi-Fi hotspots, moving all the way from 802.11a to 802.11n standards before taking the WiMax plunge.

While the school does still use Wi-Fi as its primary way of connecting students when on campus, Maki says that WiMax’s long-range and seamless handoffs made it an easy choice to use as NMU’s off-campus wireless technology.

“Before deploying WiMax we probably had four different hotspots in town,” he explains. “We decided to put one on top of our provost’s house because he had a high house up on a hill. The problem was he’d wind up with lots of people parked outside his house.”

Needless to say, with the installation of WiMax throughout a 30-mile radius, the provost no longer suffers from traffic congestion in his driveway.

“You can drive six to seven miles throughout the city and never lose a connection,” says Maki. “People just expect it to work.”

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INTEGRATION ADVISOR Managed Services

Do and re-do Service providers are launching new services for 2012, and are working to ramp up their support services. All-in-all, they look forward to a future of growth in the Middle East.

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anaged services are not exactly new in the region. Over the years they have grown to become reliable options for many organisations as they aim to increase efficiency or cut costs in IT usage. And over time, Middle East enterprises have chosen certain services over others from these service providers.

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“The most popular managed services among Middle East enterprises that we have seen is the fully managed hosting services model which includes management of the entire IT infrastructure including data centre, network, servers, storage, backup, security etc. Technologies such as virtualisation and software-as-a-service (SaaS) saw increased www.cnmeonline.com

deployment in 2011,� says Sachin Bhardwaj, head of marketing and business development for eHosting DataFort(eHDF). “There are three categories of managed service that are more appealing to the customer. There are complete IT operations outsourcing, which is a step towards business transformation; full-fledged managed services, which refers to the fusion of hosting services and managed services since it includes full IT operations management and full hosting services.

This service could be introduced as a form of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or software-as-a-service (SaaS) and could span from single application to cover whole IT environment. Then there is business process outsourcing (BPO), which covers

the outsourcing of business applications including operations, support, engineering, development etc.,” says Mohamed Wahb, manager of managed services presales and transition at ITS (International Turnkey Systems Group).

“The service delivery models in the Middle East region have evolved from staff augmentation, committed volume, and technology shared services, to managed services. As the region further evolves, we are likely to witness outsourcing based on business level agreements, in addition to service level agreements. CIOs want their delivery, technology and automated systems to be efficient and effective. Flexible sourcing is the foundation of a managed services strategy and framework, along with a standard output-based pricing model,” says Stephen Fernandes, assistant VP and country manager for at Cognizant, ME. He adds, “Some of the popular managed services in the region have been enterprise computing management, enduser computing, remote infrastructure management, application value management, application maintenance and managed test services. The rate of adoption of these services varies depending on the outsourcing maturity index of the organisation.”

Like most inhouse solutions in the market, service providers tend to refresh their offerings to customers on a regular basis. And more often than not, this constant refreshing is built on the services that they already offer.

“In 2011, eHDF launched a number of services including Microsoft Lync

Some of the popular managed services in the region have been enterprise computing management, end-user computing, remote infrastructure management, application value management, application maintenance and managed test services. The rate of adoption of these services varies depending on the outsourcing maturity index of the organisation.” integrated with managed exchange services, remote managed security services and cloud infrastructure services. The new security offering launched in 2011 provides enterprises an ideal security solution at a fraction of the cost compared to internal IT staff attempting to manage an organisation’s complex security issues. eHDF and Radix Technologies have built a turn-key cloud computing platform that enables users to compose and deploy complex, online applications in minutes. The key goal of eHDF-Radix cloud platform is to provide a consistent and simple way to provide infrastructure and software-as-a-service to business and its users,” says Bhardwaj.

“Dell launched the IT advisory service, which is a complete overhaul of our highest level of support to our enterprise wide customers in the region. This service gives our customers a service delivery manager (SDM) dedicated to providing value-added services to the IT landscape by providing reviews and reporting face-to-face about the performance and trending of his entire

Dell estate,” states Basil Ayass, enterprise product manager at Dell Middle East.

He adds that other Dell managed services in the region include virtual desktop-as-a-service, cloud and virtualisation assessments, security assessments, high-performance computing assessments and digital forensics design and architecture, among others.

Besides bew service offerings, providers have also worked during 2011 to either extend their support line or make it stronger for customers.

“ITS extended and capitalised on the ITO (IT operations outsourcing) model providing impressive features in 2011.

We capitalised on our global delivery centre (GDC) to provide 80% of operations and support activities; leaving 20% for onsite teams as physical intervention, and managing the contract SLA and liabilities with the customer. This has made one operations more effective and has optimised one resources. On top of hybrid model, ITS provided shared off-shoring services, which

BY THE NUMBERS

$8 billion

$14.8 billion

$11.9 billion

$14.4 billion

is the spend on managed security services today

is the spend it is expected to reach by 2015

is the projected spend in security services from Western Europe next year

is the projected spend from Western Europe on security services by 2015

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dramatically decreased the cost without sacrificing the quality and operational effectiveness. We have also added IT service management as SaaS on top of managed service, in order to monitor the customer environment,” says Wahb.

In 2012 As with any other year, the refreshment cycle for services will continue in 2012, and there are some new ones hitting the block that would have enterprises interested.

Ayass says, “One of the key services we plan to launch in 2012 is Multi Vendor Support (MVS), which will enable our customers to add Dell’s award winning ProSupport to their heterogeneous IT environments. This will provide an open environment, meaning Dell will support products from other vendors just as we support Dell product. We will also provide network assessments - this is where Dell

Mohamed Wahb, manager of managed services presales and transition at ITS (International Turnkey Systems Group)

consultants review a business’ technology objectives and inventory of the existing hardware. Based on that information, we will draft a network solution proposal that details required hardware and software and includes a deployment price. Other services planned include Education Institutional Architecture services and Unix – Linux migration services.”

“ITS intends to provide more attractive modular managed services offerings as a part of our strategy in fiscal year 2012. This is besides the current managed services portfolio, which will enable our clients to mix and match the required services they acquire from ITS according to their business planning. This will include service desk services management operations management supervision and automation.

There will also be an SMB offering - ITS is going to offer competitive pricing on managed services during weekends, public holidays, summer vacations, etc. We will also expand on our consultancy services. We already offer services such as assessment of the customer’s environment in terms of infrastructure systems, organisational structure and operational processes in order to develop the best model that the customer should adopt. This service provides neutrality, and will benefit the customer whether he chooses ITS or another provider,” says Wahb.

“We are seeing a logical shift in the direction of cloud computing and are ourselves in the process of charting a cloud roadmap. We already have a cloud ready infrastructure in our data centre with Radix Technologies. We will be launching our own managed private cloud solutions for medium to large enterprises, looking at

Managed services in the Middle East has a very bright future, as it enables businesses to have their IT systematically managed, so they can focus on their core business, while simultaneity refocus employees on higher –value activity.”

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Sachin Bhardwaj, head of marketing and business development for eHDF

enhanced and dynamic utilisation of existing infrastructure and applications across scalability, elasticity and faster time to market, by the end of the year. Also we have plans to launch a Lite Public cloud version for companies operating in the SMB space. We plan to launch this in the first quarter 2012,” says Bhardwaj.

Service providers are also working on strengthening their own internal systems, and managing them in a secure manner in order to ensure the highest level of quality provision to customers.

Fernandes states, “Our investments in a Security Operations Center (SOC) provides state-of-the-art facilities, tools and knowhow to address customer security requirements on a 24x7x365 basis to provide real-time security event monitoring.

Cognizant has various Centers of Excellence (CoEs). To provide the best available solutions to customers, we leverage our various specialised groups for additional support and expert advice or opinion as and when needed. Cognizant uses Cognizant 2.0, a company-wide, Web 2.0-based program management and knowledge sharing platform to enable real-time collaboration.”

“ITS strongly believes in building management capabilities and processes according to best practice frameworks. ITS

INTEGRATION ADVISOR Managed Services

has a centralised delivery arm established in 2008 in Egypt, and since then our target has been to build capabilities management, processes, resources and tools. We bealieve this will encourage our clients to go ahead and acquire the service from ITS. All security practices, awareness, policies, procedures and controls comply with the International Security Standard (ISO 27001). GDC provides Security Management levels to provide maximum protection to the customers’ assets,” says Wahb.

For a better partnership Regional managed service providers are working hard constantly to improve their services and offer customers the best of choices. However, the success of any working partnership depends as much on the customer as it does on the service provider.

Bhardwaj points out, “Some tips that customers should keep in mind when getting involved in a service partnership include evaluating the credibility of the service provider, checking for good customer references, ensuring high-end SLAs that guarantee level of services, conducting site visits and due diligence of provider’s infrastructure, ensuring that the provider meets specific needs of the company and that they offer 24/7/365 days

Basil Ayass, enterprise product manager at Dell Middle East

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Stephen Fernandes, assistant VP and country manager for the Middle East at Cognizant

support, along with the ability to reach them during non-working hours.”

Fernandes says, “Customers should ensure that their key objectives of adopting a managed services model are met. Customers should look for a vendor to provide flexibility – a shared services group can act as a catalyst especially when dealing with acquisitions and integration of business units, scalability – the ability to scale rapidly on short notice is crucial to improving the overall productivity and volume of work performed in a given period, and time-to-market. Customers should also pay attention to costs – consolidated functions and processes eliminate redundancies and minimize the cost of processing these activities, efficiency – leveraging economies of scale with other groups and business units that have similar needs in terms of the resources and type of skills needed, and reusability of compontents is important to a shared services model.”

Ayass adds, “Customers should look for partnerships with organisations that demonstrate from the beginning a consultative approach to providing solutions and services that best meet the business’ needs. They should be engaged www.cnmeonline.com

and have a relationship that can sustain both organisations for successful experience.

Also, they should look at partners who have a variety of vendor certifications.”

As vendors increase their service offerings and improve their service levels, and as customers grow to understand service providers and begin to demand more from them, the entire Middle East is likely to witness a strong growth in the adoption of managed services.

Ayass says, “Managed services in the Middle East has a very bright future, as it enables businesses to have their IT systematically managed, so they can focus on their core business, while simultaneously refocus employees on higher–value activity.”

“We expect enterprises to continue investing in data centre technologies and services but not on building their own infrastructure. There is a tangible and growing desire to increase efficiencies by looking at the lease option. This is because the immediate noticeable trend in the region is the greater need for companies to cut down on capital expenses, makedo with existing resources and optimise on operational expenses. Hence, more businesses especially in the current economic climate, are reassessing their business models and shifting from investing in upfront capital expenditure (CAPEX) to an operational expenditure (OPEX) model that allows companies to ‘pay as you go’ and reduce overall risks and scale when necessary,” says Bhardwaj.

“The future is quite promising. We see substantial demand across all verticals and strong demand is taking shape in business formulation and direction. The Middle East and the Gulf are potential fields for managed service investments, since they have surplus fund and stable growth across financial and infrastructure elements. The bottom line is that the Middle East region will enjoy a noticeable surge in sales and a new wave of different managed services business demands in the next two years,” concludes Wahb.

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CareerAdvisor

CAREERS ADVISOR Jobs of 2012

On the lookout It might be just another year in the technology evolution chain, but vendors believe that 2012 will bring with it immense opportunities and innovation in the IT professional scene. Pallavi Sharma explores what’s new and how vendors are helping address the growing skills gap in the region.

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rom the looks of it, 2012 promises to be a year that will be marked by innovation and co-creation.

As enterprises across the globe look to innovative uses of the latest technology to deal with harsh business realities, vendors will invest in developing solutions that are aimed at helping organisations trim costs and stay competitive in the long run. Together, vendors and end-users will create and drive the demand for the next generation of skilled IT professionals.

Industry experts and analysts believe that rapidly changing technology and turbulent market conditions will together alter the 94

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IT recruitment and education landscape.

According to BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, while deep technical knowledge will continue to generate interest, IT professionals with hybrid skills will be in higher demand in 2012. Analysts say that these hybrid skills will constitute a combination of technical skills and so called ‘soft’ skills in roughly equal proportions, and will be valuable in helping organisations differentiate itself from the competitors.

Jaco Van Zyl, education director, SAP MENA believes that the demand for IT professionals will be stronger across the financial services, public sector and oil and www.cnmeonline.com

gas verticals. “Picking up from 2011 where the industry witnessed a lot of demand for IT roles in security, granular computing, business intelligence and analytics, 2012 will be dictated by roles that span the arenas of big data, high speed computing, government, risk and compliance as well as business intelligence on mobile devices,” Van Zyl says.

“Whilst we see overall IT market growing at about 5%, there will be increased growth in certain sectors including telecommunications, energy, health and education. The demand for IT personnel across these verticals will be driven by increasing government focus and investment,” says Toneya Sarwar, HR operations manager at Cisco Middle East.

Sarwar adds, “Today more organisations are using social content platforms like Facebook, Twitter and video conferencing, to provision collaboration. The talent required to develop and maintain these platforms falls into both the hardware and software space, and will influence the verticals mentioned above. In addition to this, IT skills that cover the cloud, mobility, business analytics and cyber security, will be most demanded.”

She adds that with increased demand for smartphone applications, professionals with experience in mobile networks, particularly 4G, will generate keen interest in 2012.

According to Bayt.com, a regional job site, a recent Job Index survey revealed that 65% of employers in the Middle East were looking to hire in 2012. Of these, 12% stated that they were looking to hire across the IT arena.

Representatives of the company also said that based on Bayt.com’s Career Watch tool, more employers were looking for IT professionals trained and experienced with Microsoft and Oracle technology in comparison to Cisco or IBM technology.

The company’s VP of products, Omar Tahboub says, “IT jobs in the Middle East primarily fall under three categories- software development, systems administration and implementation. From the jobs listed on our site in 2011, we figure that IT jobs associated with technical support and software development were particularly needed. This year we expect more demand for software development skills across the mobile

applications areas, in addition to ERP and security job roles.”

Joachim Worf, EMEA training manager, EMC Education Services, believes that while cloud computing, IT security and data centre operations will influence the job markets, skills associated with data analytics and business intelligence will perhaps be the most talked about in the year to come. “An IDC Whitepaper from June 2011 forecasted that the sharp increase in data creation and the heightened importance of storing, protecting, and managing information has elevated information storage as a central function of the IT infrastructure. The study also highlighted that although data growth will be around 44 times by the end of the decade, IT staff will grow by less than 50%. This is in line with the findings of the EMC data science study that questioned 500 business intelligence professionals at firms across the US, the UK, France, Germany, India and China.

The survey found that the demand for the skills necessary to fully make use of business data generated by mobile sensors, social media, surveillance, medical imaging, smart grids and other areas will outpace supply within five years,” he adds.

The great divide On the regional front, senior executives believe that rapid technology and business transformations will only widen the existing gap between the supply and demand of local IT skills- a situation that can only be

Omar Tahboub, VP of product, Bayt.com

Toneya Sarwar, HR operations manager, Cisco Middle East

programmes to provision the right skill sets.

Regional universities can also help play a role by including curriculum in their IT courses that equip students with practical IT skills that enterprises currently need such as ERP development and maintenance, IT security, mobile application development etc,” he adds.

Tahboub says that the shortcomings of regional universities are primarily to blame for the shortage of ICT skills in the region.

“The main problem with IT graduates in the Arab world is that their university education does not prepare them to make real-life decisions or equip them with the skills for specialisations in IT. Without the necessary

An IDC Whitepaper from June 2011 forecasted that the sharp increase in data creation and the heightened importance of storing, protecting, and managing information has elevated Information Storage as a central function of the IT infrastructure. The study also highlighted that although data growth will be around 44 times by the end of the decade, IT staff will grow by less than 50%” addressed through the joint efforts of regional vendors and universities.

Ahmad AlMulla, VP for IT at Dubai Alumunium (DUBAL) says, “Finding the right skill sets in the region that can help develop and support the latest technology platforms to improve workflows and provision decision making has been a real challenge for the organisation so far. To address this challenge, many organisations like us have to resort to either recruiting qualified international candidates or invest additional resources in training locally hired graduates to familiarise them with the technology platform and their usage across the different segments.”

AlMulla believes a primary reason for the shortage of local IT human resources in the region is the lack of vendor initiatives aimed at developing local talent pools. “Very few vendors in the region have an R&D base in the region. Most vendors are only concerned about regional sales volume and don’t contribute to the growth of the local ICT sector. Vendors and service providers need to do more through internships and training www.cnmeonline.com

training and internship programs to prepare fresh graduates for the real world, both graduates and the companies that hire them are forced to expend additional time and money to train and familiarise them with the systems that they are to maintain and enhance in the long run,” he explains.

SAP’s Van Zyl agrees, although he shares a slightly different perspective. “The issue today is the ICT savvy youths don’t have an environment that is entirely favourable to the development of their professional aspirations.

There is a real need to create an ecosystem of ICT entrepreneurship including, but not limited to, adequate legislation, awareness campaigns and various funding mechanisms ranging from ICT-specialised venture capital and private equity to government-backed loans. The problem can be addressed early on through a variety of methods, including K-12 education promoting technical fluency, university and vocational training in specialised, in-demand ICT fields such as ERP, business intelligence and software development. Investing in R&D at selected january 2012

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universities, worldwide research centres and companies, and internships with private and public sector organisations can have a powerful and positive impact on the development of the local ICT sector,” he says.

In addition to this, he believes that providing entrepreneurs with easy access to local and regional markets by carefully assessing and remedying existing inefficiencies in ICT job creation, services flow and the goods movement value chain is a critical factor that governments and organisations in the region need to consider.

Breaking even “I don’t think there is a lack of ICT talent; rather I believe it is a case where the supply of IT skills does not meet the demand for these skills. The IT industry had boomed in the region in the last few years and the focus on ICT education had not risen with the same speed with which the demand for these technology platforms has increased. Today, the stakeholders are all working towards providing the right resources within universities and schools to create the next generation of local ICT personnel,” EMC’s Worf points out.

10 hot IT jobs in 2012

Analysts believe that the job market for CIOs, managers, directors and VPs in charge of various IT functions is neither going to be brimming with or bereft of opportunity. The consensus among executive recruiters who hire IT executives and their direct reports is that the job market for these folks in 2012 is going to be marginally better than 2011.

Here is a look at some IT management positions that will be in greater demand than others in the new year: Head of technology infrastructure.

Whether this is a manager, director or VP-level role depends on the size of the company that is seeking it.

The bottom line: IT organisations are hiring heads of IT infrastructure because many of those who’ve held those roles are retiring

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Jaco Van Zyl, education director, SAP MENA

Sarwar agrees saying that although the region has so far lacked in its pools of IT talent, there is no doubt that in the next few years the demand and supply for regional IT talent will break even. “As enterprises continue to demand the latest technology to help them sustain business growth in the long run, vendors are beginning to realise the need to support this demand by providing the right set of personnel to help them deploy and manage these systems in the long run. and because so many of today’s technology trends (cloud, virtualisation, consumerisation of IT and mobility) are infrastructure and hardwarerelated and companies are seeking IT leaders who have experience moving elements of the IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Director of outsourced services or vendor management. As companies “outsource” more functions to traditional IT services providers, SaaS companies and cloud service providers, they’re increasingly looking for an individual who can manage all of these relationships- a director of outsourced services.

Some companies will seek a director of vendor management who oversees all vendor partnerships. IT vendor managers who have experience with cloud computing will again be in demand as cloud computing presents new licensing agreements, contracts, terms, security and service-level agreements that are different from traditional IT outsourcing.

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Both Worf and Sarwar cite EMC and Cisco’s individual efforts at developing educational alliances to help address this skills gap as a testament to growing vendor commitment to help organisations address this challenge and contribute to an IT knowledge base in the region.

According to Worf, the EMC Academic Alliance has educated more than 80,000 students since its inception in 2006 and is active within 750 colleges and universities across 50 participating countries. “Specific to the region, the first implementation of the EMC curriculum within universities in the UAE and Egypt took place this year. Less than two weeks ago, EMC signed an MOU with TECOM to extend this alliance to cover eight prominent universities representing 11 countries. Our aim is to reach out to as many universities as possible to develop a much bigger pool of talent that will then be available to EMC and all the companies in the local ICT market,” he says.

“Cisco contributes to the building of human capital in a country through a number of initiatives such as the Network Academy Programme which covers 60 Manager/head of unified communications. CIOs are starting to look for IT managers who can set a strategy for unified communications and break down the barriers between different devices, email servers, networks and telephony tools inside their organisations.

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Manager of master data management/director of data architecture. These are two different roles, but their ultimate goals are the same- to help companies get a handle on big data by establishing and implementing data integration and management strategies. The director of data architecture may also be charged with creating the technical architecture that will support the company’s data management strategies.

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Managers/directors in charge of mobility. With the proliferation of mobile Continued on page 98 4

CAREERS ADVISOR Jobs of 2012

academies in the UAE, representing 4500 Emirati students and 1000 graduates and the Global Talent Acceleration Programme, whereby Cisco works with its partners to train Network Consulting Engineers.

As part of the initiative, graduates are recruited in the region and then sent to Cisco campuses for training and education.

Both these examples are symbolic of Cisco’s commitment to invest in the local ICT market,” says Sarwar.

Like other vendors, SAP MENA also provides the SAP Education services in the region both through direct engagement and partnerships.

“We offer segmented courses as per our go-to-market software for small, medium and large enterprises. All courses have been developed taking into account our customers’ ability to roll out SAP training across their organisations. The small enterprise training is delivered through e-based coaching, whereas for medium and for large enterprises training is provided through a blended learning approach,

10 hot IT jobs in 2012 4 Continued from page 96

devices inside enterprises and among consumers, companies are looking for IT managers who can address the challenges and business opportunities that mobile computing presents.

On the infrastructure side, they need IT managers and directors who can set usage policies for the company and maintain and secure the infrastructure needed to support those devices, along with the devices themselves. On the applications side, employers need people to determine which enterprise and/or customerfacing applications should be adapted or developed specifically for mobile devices.

Business relationship managers. For several years, CIOs have sought business relationship managers who report into the IT organization, but who work for specific business units or functions inside the company to ensure they have the IT resources they need.

What’s different today is the rate at which companies need these people. Because of

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Joachim Worf, EMEA training manager, EMC Education Services

consisting of e-based and classroom-based learning,” says Van Zyl. In addition to the efforts regional vendors are making to help even the skills gap, the region is also witnessing increased focus and contribution from many a local authority and agency to addressed the shortage in skilled personnel. The UAE ICT Fund for instance, provides funding services to companies, cloud and consumerisation, in some companies the business can work directly with the service provider and get an app for their business without even talking to the CIO. CIOs need business relationship managers to maintain some degree of control and understanding of everything that’s happening across the business.

Another difference between today’s business relationship managers and those of yesteryearssome CIOs are hiring them directly from the lines of business, rather than appointing someone from IT to serve as, say, the business relationship manager for the finance department.

CTO/SVP of engineering. Analysts say that CTOs and senior VPs in charge of engineering are in great demand inside technology companies. They’re seeking visionary leaders who can run technical operations, ensure products will scale to meet user demand, get products to market on time, manage geographically dispersed development teams, and motivate developers. Because this is no small task, analysts warn that compensation packages for these executives can run into seven figures.

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and individuals to develop the innovation and knowledge capital of the UAE ICT sector through applied research, education, and entrepreneurship. Another such example is BCS-ME, the Middle East leg of The Chartered Institute for IT that brings together industry, academia, practitioners and government to share knowledge, promote new thinking and inform the design of new IT curricula to shape the creation of self reliant regional talent pools.

The pace of change of technology alone will drive the need to hone and develop the skills required to innovate and develop the platforms that are imperative for an organisation’s ability to cope with the business conditions of tomorrow.

Regional vendors are quickly realising that in order to stay competitive, they need to go beyond aggressive selling and delve into the development of comprehensive and competent local IT tool, so as to be able to support their customers and partners in the long run. It is only a matter of time before one can tell if these efforts are paying off in the Middle East.

CIO. Chuck Pappalardo, managing director of Trilogy Search Non+Profit, expects CIO searches to continue to be a significant source of his firm’s business in 2012. “There will be plenty of opportunity for people to move into traditional CIO roles,” he says.

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CISO/IT security consultant. The frequency and rising costs of data breaches are forcing companies to take IT security much more seriously. Interest in cloud computing is also renewing interest in information security. Those two trends are driving demand for chief information security officers and IT security consultants.

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IT consulting firm partners. Good news for IT consultants who can sell and deliver,they’re in great demand.

The bad news, they may have to move to the Arabian Peninsula. Leadership Capital Group notes that the job market for IT consultants with ‘Big Five’ firms is hottest in emerging markets such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iraq and South Africa.

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CAREERS ADVISOR Analysis

The good news Entry-level IT jobs will be plentiful in 2012, experts predict

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If you’re in IT, you couldn’t be coming out of college at a better time,” says Matt McGee, VP of technical staffing services for Pomeroy. McGee pointed out that the unemployment rate for the U.S. IT industry was 2.7% in November. “You can get a job somewhere, but you need to choose wisely. ... You need to get someplace where you can see a growth path and where you’re going to learn a lot over the next year or two.”

“We’ve seen falling entry-level salaries for the last few years, but that’s boding for a turnaround,” said Alice Hill, managing director of Dice.com. “It was $47,000 in 2010. ... My advice to new college grads is to negotiate hard. Don’t just take a job. Really try to get a good salary as you start your career in tech.”

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Traditionally, entry-level IT positions have involved customer service, such as help desk or desktop support. Job openings in these areas appear to be holding steady.

“Most of the entry-level work is going to be some form of interacting with other people, such as a desktop support technician,” McGee said. “If you have some good interpersonal skills and the ability to learn from a technical standpoint, you’re desired in a service desk. With a college education, you can be a team leader or a process analyst.”

College seniors interested in pursuing desktop support or field support positions should consider getting an entry-level certification from CompTIA, such as A+, Network + or Security +, experts said.

“Entry-level workers don’t need previous experience because they’ll be www.cnmeonline.com

trained on-the-job in the first few weeks,” said Elizabeth Sias, recruiting manager for Randstad Technologies, a Boston IT staffing company. “Some companies will pay for employees to get the CompTIA certifications before they start working.

Those certifications are very thorough and very well rounded and not too expensive compared to some of the other certifications in the IT industry.”

But tech support roles aren’t the only option for college seniors to pursue. There is also strong demand for application developers in such emerging areas as smartphones and social media, analysts pointed out. “Because these technologies are new, employers are willing to consider recent college grads who are hobbyists,” experts said.

You don’t have to have years and years of experience developing apps for

smartphones or social media, because they’ve only been out and really popular for a few years,” Sias said. “I use Facebook as an example. It’s developed with a language called PHP. If you can get the basics of that language down, there are entry-level positions for companies like Facebook to develop Web pages.”

Sias said she would hire a recent graduate with a computer science degree who has developed an application for a smartphone that is available at an app store. “That’s definitely something of interest whether the person is just getting into IT or has a lifetime of programming experience,” she added.

Gartner anticipates entry-level opportunities for techies with service providers, particularly those providing cloud-based applications. “The purely technical roles will not necessarily be in IT but more in technology providers and vendors, including traditional outsourcing or cloud companies,” said Lily Mok, VP at Gartner for CIO Research.

CIOs will be looking for entry-level workers with communications and business skills who can manage IT service providers and who can bridge the gap between the IT department and lines of business, Gartner analysts said.

The purely technical roles will not necessarily be in IT but more in technology providers and vendors, including traditional outsourcing or cloud companies.

CIOs will be looking for entry-level workers with communications and business skills who can manage IT service providers and who can bridge the gap between the IT department and lines of business. We’re also seeing different kinds of jobs that are not pure IT. We see organisations not just hiring computer science majors, but hiring people who have a business or even arts background who can work in these roles and can be trained in the tech aspects of the jobs.”

“We’re also seeing different kinds of jobs that are not pure IT,” Mok said. “We see organisations not just hiring computer science majors, but hiring people who have a business or even arts background who can work in these roles and can be trained in the tech aspects of the jobs.”

“People who are looking to get into a particular industry will see a lot of IT-related opportunities,” Sias said “We see a lot of IT related to healthcare such as electronic medical records analysts.

In retail, we see entry-level positions for

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installing point-of-sale systems and troubleshooting those systems. There are IT opportunities in marketing around search engine optimisation.”

Another area that’s ripe for newly minted college grads is business analytics, which is being taught in more colleges such as Northwestern University, which recently inked a partnership with IBM. “No longer are analytics skills limited to those studying computer science.

Regardless of their area of study, students need a solid understanding of how analytics technology can transform their industry by unlocking critical insights hidden in data,” saidIBM’s Deepak Advani, VP of predictive analytics. “Students with a combination of industry expertise and an understanding of analytics will be well positioned for jobs of the future.”

Sias recommends that CIOs look to recent college grads to find IT workers who might replace baby boomers retiring in the next few years. They also may be more loyal and less likely to leave in one or two years compared to those in their late 20s and early 30s.

“If you start bringing on college grads now and start developing them by putting them in programs to educate them, you can let the baby boomer generation do the handholding for them,” Sias said. january 2012

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interview Willian (Bill) Teuber

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hat is the reason for your visit in the UAE now?

A: EMC from the top down understand the opportunity for us internationally. To grow internationally is not just a sales execution issue, it is a complete company-wide issue. This week we have brought together a group of our executives from around the world, who represent different functions, whether it is manufacturing, engineering, HR, sales to see the opportunity here. You can talk about it back in the headquarters, but to be here and to actually see it – to see customers and partners – is so much more important and effective..

We came here as an executive team to understand the opportunity in real time, real life and to assist both from corporate and field standpoint to devise additional growth strategies.

the right message EMC is not a company you can miss in the Middle East. One of the most established worldwide names in IT, the company has been growing from strength-to-strength in the region.

However, there is more that can be done, says William (Bill) Teuber, vice chairman of EMC. On the sidelines of an highlevel executive meeting in the UAE recently, Sathya Mithra Ashok probed Teuber on EMC’s strategy in the region, private clouds, big data and long-term messaging for the company.

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Q: What is the relevance of the time for this meeting in the UAE? A: We have been looking at EMC’s international growth for quite some time. We have created internally a group of people called our Rapid Growth Markets Board that is responsible for this. We look at the products that are relevant, what are the go to market strategies that are relevant, we look at our partners and customers and ways to get closer to them. The board meets quarterly – two times via phone meetings, and two times a year in the field. Earlier this year we were in Brazil, this was the next geography.

This is part of our global focus on growing internationally, especially in emerging markets.

Q: How is EMC different in an emerging region when compared to more established markets?

A: EMC started in the US, so we have scale in the US that we don’t have in many emerging markets. So our job is to make sure that we have the right product fit, right resources in the field; the right strategy for the vertical markets that are important to the region. At a very macro basis, we have created clusters of countries, because we think you can’t look at the world as a one size fits all geography. So what we want to do for emerging markets will be different from what we want to do with more mature markets.

Clearly we see growth rates in the emerging markets that are higher. Last quarter our BRIC countries revenue grew some 26% versus our overall revenue of 18%.

So understanding where the growth is going to come from you want to focus on or invest in higher growth countries.

In our go to market, what we try to achieve is sort of 80-20 balance. 80% of what we want to do is very consistent. It is consistent around the world and it is how EMC wants to do it. But 20% of it is localised for the markets that we operate in.

We have to understand the solutions that are relevant to the customers in the markets that we are in.

But we don’t want to be 80 different companies in 80 different countries. We want to be one company and then we want people to understand that we are dealing with one EMC, but at the same time we recognise that the world is not cookie-cutter so that we have to have a local flavour, a local way of doing business.

Q: Do you see maturity in understanding private clouds among emerging markets or is there a huge consultative, educational role that EMC has to play?

A: Well – both. And I would not say that it is emerging market specific. It is much more traditional, early-adopter specific. So it is the forward-thinkers in technology are sort of saying that we have to go this way. It is a trend that is coming. Whether or not you are an early adopter or you are a laggard, people all along the way are adopting cloud computing, private cloud computing in their infrastructure. The next step out of that is how can we use public cloud – so that I don’t have to have every aspect of my infrastructure built for my own usage everyday.

You will end up with having a private cloud. You end up with maybe using the public cloud. We call a combination of the two a hybrid cloud.

It is not geo-specific. I don’t think people in the Middle East are further beyond and somewhere else. In fact we had some

My tag line is we are happy but we are not satisfied.

We are doing well but we can always do better.

Q: In these emerging areas, what solutions and trends do you see on the growth path?

A: Two trends that we are seeing in emerging and more mature markets are cloud computing and big data. In cloud computing we see helping our customers create private clouds within their infrastructure. That trend is extremely strong out there. This is a move towards addressing the first pain point of IT – making internal functioning more efficient and dramatically alter the budgetary amounts that are spent on keeping the lights on and the systems running.

The second pain point that customers face is associated with the growth of data in their own infrastructure. The third is the security of that data. By helping them understand how to take their current infra and make it more cloud-like – as in private cloud – we can help them drastically alter the efficiency of their infrastructure.

conversations with some customers last night who were extremely advanced this way.

Historically, the infrastructure was more mature in North America. Since the cloud there are so many customers here that find the cloud to be an opportunity to jump two steps instead of getting the infrastructure maturity. We call it leapfrogging.

Q: After this meeting, are we likely to see any changes in EMC’s regional strategy?

A: Our strategy here has been pretty good because it has been an extension of EMC’s strategy and the results are quite robust here.

So we are quite pleased with the progress to date. Now I have got teams working on what we can do better. How can we support the strategy because that is the EMC strategy that we are promulgating, we don’t want to create a new strategy. It is about cloud computing and big data, about all this information www.cnmeonline.com

coming at us and how do we help people make real-time decisions, with the advent of this kind of information.

Whether trading platforms, healthcare, energy, seismic data – there is huge amounts of data coming to companies in today’s world, where the winners of those companies want to be able to ingest it and make business decisions with it. That is where we want to be going with big data – take our capabilities, put it into right solutions for the market and being able to articulate the value of those to our customers.

We are in that process in the region. The teams talking about how to improve what we are doing. We are a company of continuous improvement.

Q: What are the ideas for improvement that has come out of the meeting?

A:Teams are still talking. One of the ideas that we will do much better than what we are already doing.

The goal is to increase market share.

The partners are very important to us.

Improving what we do here is very improtnat.

Understanding what is important for our customers as IT changes for them is also very important.

You can’t do everything everywhere – that is one thing we have learned as you get outside the domestic market. You can’t do everything everywhere – so where do you place your bets? Certainly we want to place our bets on financial services because that is a very strong segment for EMC. We want to place our bets in telco – that industry has been a strong one for use. We want to place our bets on healthcare – we believe there is a huge opportunity there. We also want to be in the defence sector, with the rise in surveillance, CCTV apps and associated requirements.

We have a lot of capability as an organisation but let us focus, because the secret to success in life is focus.

What do we want to focus on in this area of the world? One of the interesting things that came up, one of the areas that we can prove is that we do a lot in community. One of the things that we have to get better at is telling the story about EMC and what we do for the communities that we live and work in. january 2012

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We recognise that we can do a lot better on the marketing side. We have to do more EMC Forums. If you have been to EMC World, we bring that to countries around the world, we don’t bring that enough to the Middle East. We have to do more of that. That is an investment decision.

Tthe messaging is something that we continue to work on as a company. That is one thing that I am focused on. Making sure that the communities in which we operate know EMC and our full capability.

One of the things that differentiates EMC is that one executives travel. We have what I will call one of the best executivesponsor programmes. So every one of our big customers has an executive sponsor, who is not just a sales rep or a country manager.

Even better than that, a few years back we created a role for a country sponsor. And so Mohammed Amin has our CIO – Sanjay Mirchandani. He spends a fair amount of time, visiting the territory, connecting with customers and partners here, so we have a real flavour back in corporate of what is happening in many of the emerging areas around the world. It is a very successful programme.

Q: When it comes to big data, often regional CIOs are still working on segmenting and storing their data, as opposed to getting intelligence from it. How does EMC help with that basic step and how does it fit into the big data strategy?

A: I think the challenges around big data are relatively the same, whether in emerging regions or mature markets. I think the segmentation of the data is an application issue, so it is what is the app or what is the data that you are looking at. How do you classify it and then what do you do with it? It is very different from app to app and organisation to organisation.

How you use big data depends on the application and then what you do with it.

Generally from customers I see they know the application, they know the segmentation – it is how quickly can I get this information into my infrastructure, how quickly can I ingest it.

Those are the issues that we are very focused on with our Greenplum technology.

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In our go to market, what we try to achieve is sort of 80-20 balance. 80% of what we want to do is very consistent. But 20% of it is localised for the markets that we operate in. But we don’t want to be 80 different companies in 80 different countries. We want to be one company, one EMC, but at the same time we recognise that the world is not cookie-cutter so that we have to have a local flavour, a local way of doing business.”

Q: How is your strategy going to take on the fact that it is going to be a tougher year in 2012, before economies pick up again?

A: We had a conference call last week and there were a lot of questions about 2012 and what is going to happen there. We talk about 2012 in 90 days but let me say this – when i look at the marketshare charts EMC has huge opportunity outside the US. So our strategy is to go after the marketshare that exists in markets where IT spend will grow. I am confident that this will grow, I am confident that there continues to be new opportunities for EMC and there continues to be opportunities in existing regions out there. That is what we are focused on as a company. My number one metric is market share – how we are doing against our competitors. We can grow double digits but if your competitor grew double digits plus, then you didn’t do a good job. So we are very very focused internally on how we are doing in the markets that we are focused on and whats happeing to our competitors.

Q: Of course you, will target regions with high IT spend, but getting that money into EMC is a different story. How are you going to ensure that?

A: We will continue to focus on solutions. So we talked about verticals, we will get very focused on the industries that we think we have game-changing solutions for. We are not going to try to be all things to all people, although we have great horizontal solutions for companies around the world.

We are going to continue to extend our breadth through spending 12% of our revenues on R&D to develop new products www.cnmeonline.com

and we are also going to continue to acquire, to expand what we are going to do for our customers. I think what we have been doing has worked very well, so we don’t need to change our strategy dramatically. We just need to refine our execution.

My tag line is we are happy but we are not satisfied. We are doing well but we can always do better.

Q: What is your global revenue from emerging regions and how might that change in 2012?

A: Last quarter 46% of revenues came from outside the US. Our goal is to get that to 50% pretty quick. We keep buying companies – we are growing well internationally – we grew 15% in EMEA in the last quarter. But we keep buying these companies that are largely domestic, so they add to the denominator not to the numerator. That means I have to keep travelling more.

We are 52,000 plus people – a $20b company - we are a pretty big company. We have lots of resources, lots of opportunities and we still have a flat chain of command.

Keeping EMC very nimble and dynamic is something we are focused on.

We are very pleased with the growth rates internationally, but there continues to be large markets in which we can take more share.

The above are excerpts from the original interview. For the entire interview. Please visit us online at www. cnmeonline.com.

interview Oscar Rodriguez

Aiming high Oscar Rodrigues, CEO of Extreme Networks, who visited the region recently, talks about why his company is a force to be reckoned with in the new era of cloud and mobility.

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I

s the Middle East a strategic market for you?

Very much so. The Middle East market represents one of the fastest growing and forward looking in the world.

There is always new innovation going on here. The growth of the Middle East in general, with Emirates as the centre point, really has been amazing and this is a place where there is lot of evolution that still needs to happen in terms of efficiency of communications. You have this nexus of things happening in one place here.

Your market share in Ethernet has been around two percent consistently. How do you plan to grow now that you have realigned your sales and marketing activities?

First thing, we need to put this in context.

The way Ethernet market share is measured is taking into account all things Ethernet that are sold everywhere, count them and see how much you have. It’s kind of saying what kind of market share does NASA have in all transportation including automobiles and bicycles? It is very small, right? But they have a very big market share in a very specific area, which is getting into the moon.

We have very small market share when you measure us against all levels of Ethernet but if you look at us in terms of our share in very specific areas such as highperformance computing, mobility and cloud services we are actually not just one or two percent and that market is just starting to be measured.

In terms of data centre, we are one of the top five players, clearly separating us from some of the more common Ethernet vendors. If you look at the recent report from Gartner on data centres, we along with Brocade and Juniper, are listed as the Ethernet fabric vendors, who are network specialists. The marketplace is changing

The marketplace is changing rapidly. What’s happened in the last ten years is not really an indicator of what will happen in the next ten years. rapidly. What’s happened in the last ten years is not really an indicator of what will happen in the next ten years. As the marketplace changes, we are now taking position to be a network specialist for data centre, cloud and mobility. Thanks to our channel partners, we got a significant share in mobility, and we are in 19 of the 20 top mobile operators who have deployed Ethernet.

You have been in this industry for about 25 years. What do you think is going to happen over the next ten years.

I have been in communications, and I am really going to date myself here when I say I have worked on paging and paging systems. I have seen a lot of changes and in 1990 I was lucky enough to have worked for Motorola, where we worked on wireless devices including pagers.

And in 1992 I left to be part of a start up company where we built chassis that had Token Ring, if you remember that, Ethernet of course and FDDI. Some of these technologies were successful and some were not, but Ethernet has lasted all these years. Here I am, 22 years later, still talking about Ethernet. The technology has a basic fundamental economic advantage over other technologies, and over the next decade, Ethernet is going to continue to reinvent itself, as it has done along the way, and enable cloud services. The cloud is really going to take off because people are no longer tied to a certain location and they need to be mobile and access information no matter where they are; , it’s a lot more www.cnmeonline.com

productive if information is centralised and I think eventually cloud services and mobility will work together. Mobility will get better as LTE is rolled out everywhere in the world and large amounts of broadband are made available. The next wave of people will come online, not using laptops or even tablets. They will come online with mobile phones and you got to serve private information to them quickly and in a secure manner. Over the next ten years, communications is going to shape itself in such a way where the concepts of cloud and data centres are going to be very real. Ten years now, we wouldn’t even remember how each one of us kept our information on individual devices because cloud will be available everywhere and it will be secure.

How do you plan to take your customers from legacy data centre environments to the cloud?

The customers have to make very specific choices when they move to the cloud computing. First, they have to organise their data, which we cannot do because we are not database or applications creators.

We provide the plumbing that enables all this to happen. Virtualisation is key as it enables applications to sit on any servers, and once it can move from one server to another, it can also move from a private data centre to a cloud environment. Users shouldn’t be able to see any difference in application performance or service because it’s a private data centre or the cloud, so it should be able to move back and forth without anyone noticing. To do january 2012

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interview Oscar Rodriguez

that, we need policy management, which hasn’t been done well in enterprises.

It is important to manage the policies because If I connect to the cloud I may have different needs than you have. What policies get applied to you are different that mine. And that capability requires an infrastructure that is designed to ease the movement of VMs, and when a VM moves from one place to another, the network should be able follow automatically.

Ethernet vendors, including you, have been talking about flattening the data centre architecture. How do you plan to go about it?

Flattening the network requires lot of density, and we were the first vendor to come out with the largest switch that is available, which plugs in many 10G ports into one box. When you have more ports, the network becomes smaller because of fewer boxes. So first, it’s about flattening the number of switches you need to interconnect with each other.

There is a lot of discussion about modular DCs, that is almost like Lego blocks - be able to have very specific sets of equipment that will run together and could be added to data centres to increase the scale. By having modular components of a data centre which includes networking, storage, servers and even UPS, you can grow you data centre piece by piece and you can scale it incrementally along with you revenue.

Do the new switches that have rolled out recently support your Open Fabric architecture, which is said to be the key to flattening networks?

Yes these switches support Open Fabric, which is designed to be an architecture that it doesn’t matter who you connect with or what other piece of equipment you connect with, you can openly interoperate.

We support TRILL and lot of different types of protocols, and Extreme stands for open standards and we believe strongly in software defined networks.

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There is a lot of discussion about modular DCs, that is almost like Lego blocks - be able to have very specific sets of equipment that will run together and could be added to data centres to increase the scale.

You have chosen M-LAG (Multi-System Link Aggregation) as opposed to the traditional spanning tree architecture. Is there any reason why?

M-LAG is really a standard version multilink trunking, which Nortel introduced at stock exchange networks. So anytime you have a network that shouldn’t go down and self-heal , that’s where multi-link trunking was introduced. Now we are making that available to all cloud operator no matter who they are.

Very often, people don’t really talk about network when they talk about the cloud.

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Isn’t network the basic building block?

It’s very interesting, when u talk about a building you seldom talk about plumbing and I think it’s the same thing. I think they want the network to be small, quiet and out of the way because in a data centre where you do all the work is really about servers and storage, because that’s where the money is made if you are a cloud operator in terms of VM access, storage, etc. If the network is big and intrusive, you have less room for servers and storage. So what we really are working on is to make networks that are quiet and automated so that you don’t need many people to run it.

How to Dropbox

PlainText allows you to create one from within the app.

Once the app is linked up with your Dropbox account, it should be a simple matter to grab a text file from it. The home screen should now look exactly like your Dropbox folder, so you can just navigate to a text file within your Dropbox folder and tap to open it. You’ll then be able to edit the file within PlainText. When you’re done editing, you can select “Sync all folders now” from the dropdown menu in the document’s title, or just wait for PlainText to sync automatically with your Dropbox account.

Use

to edit text on mobile devices Thankfully, there are a number of free apps that let you edit files on the go that are stored in Dropbox.

W

ith clients for every mobile and desktop operating system and tons of great functionality, Dropbox makes it easy to share files from basically any device.

However, there is one major gap with using Dropbox as a mobile collaboration tool: Since it’s just meant as a way to store your files, there’s no way to edit text within a file uploaded to Dropbox when using your mobile phone. Luckily, there are a number of apps that work within Dropbox that let you edit on the go, and then return the file to Dropbox so the rest of your colleagues accessing that folder can use it.

We’ll take a look at two great text editors for mobile that will sync with your Dropbox account: PlainText for iOS and Epistle for Android. There are any number of mobile apps that can be used with Dropbox to replicate this kind of functionality, but Epistle and PlainText are both simple and easy to use--and, even better, they’re both free (though PlainText does have ads that you can remove for $1.99).

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PlainText Once you’ve downloaded PlainText from the iTunes store and opened it up, you should see a screen similar to the one on the right.

Tap on the gear icon located in the lower left corner to open up your preferences, and then tap Dropbox to set up your Dropbox account. You should get to a screen that lets you set your Dropbox preferences.

By default, PlainText syncs only with a folder it creates called PlainText within your Dropbox account. But you can access your entire Dropbox by changing the /Plaintext on this screen to a simple slash, or /, to set access to your home directory in Dropbox.

Once you’ve made that change, you’ll want to select Link to Dropbox Account, which will open up a dialog box for you to enter your Dropbox login information. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, don’t worry; www.cnmeonline.com

Epistle You’ll find the process of setting up Epistle to be strikingly similar to setting up SimpleText, since Epistle’s creator, Matteo, admits that he modeled the app off of SimpleText but since SimpleText isn’t available for Android, Epistle is your best bet. It may share a lot of DNA with PlainText but it’s still a solid app that made our list of the best Android apps in the first half of the year.

First, open up the preferences for Epistle (located in the lower right), and then log into your Dropbox account.

Just like with PlainText, Epistle will set up an Epistle folder within your Dropbox folder, unless you set it to have access to your entire Dropbox folder by selecting the slash,/, as the filepath--and just like PlainText you’ll be able to check out, edit, and resync any text files.

What Can’t They Do Both PlainText and Epistle support .txt, .doc, .xml, .css, and .html but are otherwise fairly limited in their functionality. While you can edit the actual text of these files, any sort of formatting changes will require a more robust app. If you do a lot of editing on the go, you might want to consider some more robust text editors like QuickOffice that will actually cost you some cash, but for most users anything more complex than some quick proofreading and corrections or jotting down some notes will probably require opening up their laptop or desktop anyway.

How to Hard Drive

Avoid the death of a hard drive Think your hard drive is about to give up on you? We give you a few tips and tricks on how to avoid just that predicament.

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F

irst, backup that hard drive. And I mean now! That drive could die any minute, and when it does, it will cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to retrieve your files--if the files can be retrieved.

Do a full image backup of the entire drive, including all partitions. EASEUS Todo Backup and Macrium Reflect Free are both free and either one will do the job just fine.

You’ll need an external hard drive to back the images onto.

Both programs also have an option for creating a bootable CD from which you can restore the backup. Create that CD. Backed up? Good. Now you need to determine if it’s the hard drive making the noise, or just a fan.

If the PC is a desktop, open it up, turn it on, and try to locate the location of the noise.

If you can’t, find yourself a hollow tube--the cardboard one from a used-up paper towel roll works. Holding one end of tube to your ear, point the other end to various locations in the PC, especially towards the hard drive and fans. You’ll easily pinpoint the source of the grinding.

Laptops aren’t that easy. If you feel comfortable opening yours, use the desktop instructions above. Otherwise, try to determine the location of the fan and the hard drive from the outside. The fan is probably near a vent. Most laptops are designed to make hard drives easy to remove and replace. If you can’t find where the drive is located, check your model’s online manual.

Once you know where everything is, use the cardboard tube method described above.

If the noise is coming from a fan, and the PC is open, look for something obstructing the fan. Remove it if you find it. If the fan is loose; tighten it. Otherwise, replace it.

But if a fan is making the noise, and you’re not comfortable opening the laptop, don’t take it to a professional and explain the problem.

And if it really is the hard drive making the noise? Buy a new hard drive, install it, and restore Windows and your files from that image backup.

Nominations close 15th February 2012

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Rajashree R Kumar, Commercial Director Tel: +971 55 1053782 Email: raj@cpidubai.com

Jeevan Thankappan, Senior Editor Tel: +971 55 1053774 Email: jeevan@cpidubai.com

Karl Hougaard, Commercial Director Tel: +971 50 8818577 Email: karl@cpidubai.com

Sathya Mithra Ashok, Senior Editor Tel: +971 55 1053783 Email: sathya@cpidubai.com

Products Mobility

Sony Tablet S

T

he electronics giant Sony has finally decided to join the tablet club. A little late maybe but it made us hopeful that Sony would bring us a tablet with little more edge to it.

The Sony Tablet S is a 9.4 inch Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) tablet powered by a dual core 1000 MHz processor. It has an NVIDIA Tagra 2 graphics chip and is packed with 16 or 32 Gigabytes of internal storage with support for external SD Cards. Sony has released only a WiFi version of the tablet, but another 3G version is expected later in 2012.

The first thing we noticed about the S is the unique body shape with a nice curve on the top side to simulate a folded magazine.

Sony claims that this ergonomically corrected shape makes the tablet easier to carry around and we have to agree. However, the S cannot be shipped into standard protective sleeves or covers as the thickness of the tablet varies from 10.1mm on one side (bottom) to 20.6 mm on the other(top), making it thicker than any other tablet on the market.

The screen is a beautiful-800 x 1280 pixels and 9.4 inches of vibrant colours that gave us beautifully sharp images even in broad daylight, thanks to Sony’s True Black technology contrast.

The S comes with a 5 MP camera on the back with no flash, and a 1.3 MP camera

on the front. Both cameras are slightly disappointing as they don’t have any of the CyberShot features, as you would expect, and the photo quality isn’t that great. Sony could have used the thickness of the tablet to fit better cameras.

Sony is marketing the S as the ultimate entertainment tablet, and ships it with software and hardware features to support this purpose.

The tablet is PlayStation certified, which we thought would mean that we could download our favourite games from the PS Store. Unfortunately though the store has only has a few PlayStation games for this tablet so far. (You’ll need a PlayStation Network ID). You can still download more interesting 3D titles from the Android market; we tried playing Asphalt 6 and this is where the Tagra graphics chip really paid off.

Being PlayStation certified, we were told that you can connect your PlayStation Sixaxis or DualShock controllers as input devices, but we weren’t able to connect any of those neither by cable nor Bluetooth without having to root the device.

The stereo speakers on the tablet were clear and passable. We really liked the fact that you can connect the tablet via WiFi to any DLNA-enabled TV to view movies or pictures, and even play games on the big screen. The built in programmable remote

control can be used to control any Infrared enabled device. It comes pre-programmed with the controls for many devices from different manufacturers, but you can still add other new devices and the software will learn the commands directly from the original remote control - process that is time consuming but pretty straightforward. Big plus there!

Sony has included a few other software features with the tablet. But we felt they hardly worth the wait, Apart from that, there’s your standard were Honeycomb software capabilities, with a customised (slightly faster) browser, and a customised gallery with a Picasa-like interface.

The Li-Ion battery gave a pretty good performance compared to other tablets on the market, with up to 300 hours of standby, which is great considering the size of the charger unit they’ve included with the tablet.

The charger is bigger than any other mobile device charger we’ve seen and has a weirdly shaped charging/docking plug. This is a big letdown for us considering that the device already has a micro-usb connector that could have easily been used to charge the tablet using any of the units you probably have lying around your house.

VERDICT: Aye. If you want a tablet on your coffee table, with the convenience of controlling your devices, playing movies and classic PlayStation titles on, this tablet is for you. If you are a corporate user or someone constantly on the move, we suggest you look elsewhere.

This review was done by Fahed Sabbagh – proud geek and passionate blogger. You can catch him wax poetic on all things geeky at www.nerdyface.com.

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Lenovo U300s

L

enovo, the world’s second largest PC maker has released its first UltraBook.

Overview The first concept of an UltraBook was introduced by Intel in 2011 to urge manufacturers to make lightweight laptops with higher levels of performance, by using Intel’s Core processors and Solid State Drives (SSDs).

The Lenovo IdeaPad U300s rides this wave as a strikingly beautiful, 13.3 inch UltraBook that comes with an Intel Core i5 1.6 GHz processor, 4 Gigabytes of DDR3 SDRAM and a 128 Gigabyte SSD hard drive.

The higher version of the Ultrabook with a 1.8 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, and a 256 GB SSD Hard drive, is the model that we teated.

Design This laptop comes with a 13.3 inch (1366x768) HD LED backlit screen that displays good colours, but slightly less brightness than other similar screens, probably to save a bit on the battery life.

Much like any other laptop, the keyboard on the U300s takes a little bit of getting used to, but it’s still one of the easiest to adapt to on a device of this size. The laptop also comes with an oversized multitouch touchpad that is very comfortable to use.

Performance One of the key features of an Ultrabook is the really short boot or wake up time, and you can really notice that with the U300s running Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit). The performance was smooth with a windows experience index rating of 4.5 for the graphics, 6.9 for the processor, and a big 7.1 for the hard drive (out of 7.9). It’s great for your everyday tasks, browsing, Microsoft Office, and other similar applications. You can even run “heavier” software on it such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Keep it one at a time though.

We even tried running a few games with minimal 3D settings (World of Warcraft on minimum graphics) and it ran smoothly., However, with an Intel Integrated Graphics 3000 (within the processor), this laptop is not designed to be used as a gaming station; therefore it won’t run any of the higher graphics games smoothly.

During the gaming session, when we were pushing the performance limit of the U300s, we did experience some excessive heat from the processor, even though Ultrabooks come with a “breathable keyboard”, the Intel Cooling Technology that cools your PC by letting air flow through the keyboard.

The battery proformance is great and promises up to 8 hours of moderate use, the U300s also comes with a slim charger that fits easily into any carrying sleeve. www.cnmeonline.com

Multimedia Audio performance was pretty decent; the SRS surround speakers are loud and provide a good sound quality, and the video playback was clear and smooth. Even though it might be obvious, we have to mention that this computer does not come with a DVD player, so you might want to purchase an external one if you want to play DVDs on the move.

Connectivity The U300s has the main connectivity options that you would need from a computer this size - 2 USB ports (1 USB2 and 1 USB3) and one full-sized HDMI external monitor port, and a headphone/ microphone combo jack.

VERDICT: Aye. Although the concept of an ultrabook hasn’t been properly put into perspective yet, Lenovo’s U300s promises a great future for this new genre of divices, and leads the way by being one of the first few UltraBooks in the market.

This review was done by Fahed Sabbagh – proud geek and passionate blogger. You can catch him wax poetic on all things geeky at www. nerdyface.com.

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Products Mobility

Trend Micro mobile security personal edition for Android

Y

our smartphone can be a treasure trove of private data, with everything from your bank-account information to your email and socialnetworking passwords stored inside. To keep that info from being nabbed by a malicious app or a sticky-fingered thief, Trend Micro’s Mobile Security App keeps your personal data under control in a number of ways.

The app is a free download from the Android Market, and it includes a basic malware scanner that checks if your phone or SD card are infected with any malicious software. You can upgrade to the premium version of the app by buying a one-year license (for $30) to gain access to features such as parental controls, the ability to remotely locate your device in case it gets lost, and a fraudulent-website blocker.

The malware scanner updates its definitions either daily, weekly, or monthly (based on the update schedule you select), and it scans each app as it’s installed onto your device. You can also manually scan all the files on your phone, though this can take anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes depending on the number of apps and files you’ve stored on your phone’s internal memory or SD card.

On our relatively empty Droid Bionic, We completed a scan in less than 2 minutes, while one Droid Incredible (which is bursting at the seams with apps) took closer to 19 minutes for a complete scan. Unfortunately, unlike other mobile security suites, Trend Micro’s app has no option to automate the process: whereas on Lookout you can set the app to scan your phone every day, Trend Micro forces you to manually run the app any time you want to check the status of your 116

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january 2012

phone. The process is simple enough, but We hope an update brings automation to the scanning soon.

If you decide to upgrade to the premium version, I think the extra features are well worth the price.

Our favorite premium feature in Trend Micro Mobile Security is the option to block annoying calls and text messages. This option lets you filter calls and texts based on the number, or (in the case of text messages) on certain keywords. If you are someone who suffers from constant calls from unknown numbers, you can create a filter that allows only people in your Address Book or text/call history to contact you. It’s really handy for stopping those irritating telemarketing calls or spam texts.

While the free scanner protects your phone from dangerous apps, the safe-surfing feature in the premium version protects you from dangerous websites. You have three levels of protection to choose from (Low, Normal, High), and you can change the level at any time. I would recommend that users stay on the Normal or High settings, as the Low setting may leave you open to certain phishing attacks.

If you have kids (or employees that you don’t want going to certain sites), you can enable Parental Controls and limit the websites that they can access. In order to enable or remove the parental locks, you’ll need your Trend Micro password (the same one you used to register the app when you first installed it).

If you’re always losing your phone, Trend Micro’s ability to remotely locate your smartphone will be a godsend. As with Webroot and Lookout, you use a Web portal www.cnmeonline.com

to activate the tracking functions of the app.

From there, you can locate your phone, have it display a custom message on the screen, make it scream, lock the device, or wipe all the information off of it. You can manage multiple devices from within the portal, but unfortunately you’re going to need to buy a separate licence for each one.

In our tests, the locate function was inconsistent. One second, it was able to locate with no problem, but when we tried locating the phone a second time, the app reported the phone three miles away from its actual location.

Overall, the app gets the job done and will give you the peace of mind that your phone is being protected, even if you don’t think you need it. While the cost of a oneyear Trend Micro licence may put some people off, the extra security options are worth the $30. At the very least, you should give the free malware scanner a try--it’s better to set up precautions and not have to use them than to be caught without them when you need them most.

Verdict: Aye ( go out and get it)

Register FREE* with promo code: D13M12

Dubai – March 2012

The Datacenter Technologies Academy brings together leading suppliers and industry groups to deliver a series of educational presentations that examine how to store and protect information, how it is moved, and how/where it is processed, three main cornerstones of your IT infrastructure.

Topics will include: £ Data protection/restoration trends and solutions £ Storage management best practices £ Desktop, Server and Storage Virtualization £ Converged data center networking £ Cloud storage standards and security £ Solid State Storage & Tiered Storage Architectures

Ensure your 2012 IT infrastructure decisions are informed and balanced by booking your place today.

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Last word

Next issue

Telecoms World Four G (4G)

February 2012

Solutions World

CIO Talk: Winners of CIO 50 Awards discuss solutions CNME talks to the winners of the prestigious CIO 50 Awards and gets them to reveal all on their perceptions surrounding solutions and services in the region.

Storage Advisor

Business continuity and disaster recovery The twin concerns of business continuity and disaster recovery haunt the CIO every day.

The idea of losing data is a strict no-no for the modern, connected organisation. This is why it is necessary to keep abreast of the latest developments and most recent buzz-words in the market.

Security Advisor

Identity and access management One of the technology areas where physical and digital security come together in close linkage, identity and access management is a

major concern for most large organisations, and is growing in relevance to smaller players as well. CNME investigates.

Integration Advisor

Service providers – picking the best among the lot We ask CIOs and IT heads to vote for the best service providers in the region, and CNME presents you their verdict, along with insights on what they would like to see from these service providers going forward.

University profile: CNME explores a university or IT programme within the region, and understands what makes it unique and relevant for students and the industry.

Data centre – the untold future We explore the technologies and the delivery options that enterprises will be picking up more readily in the budget-crunched months of 2012.

Events CIO 50 Forum and Awards 2012

The Progress Principle

Managing the Millennials

By Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

By Chip Espinoza, Mick Ukleja and Craig Rusch

Book By drawing on 12,000 diary entries by 200 employees, the authors gather that the best way to motivate employees isn’t to give them free lunches and pats on the back, but rather to help them develop a satisfying inner work life.

Achieving that great inner life starts with consistent support from managers, but it is anchored by raising the meaning of the work employees are doing.

The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work ( Harvard Business Review Press)

Book As baby boomers are cruising their way through the ranks of upper management, the millennials are pouring into entry-level positions.

The gap between the two generations has posed challenges for managers, but it’s also an opportunity to create new strengths in the workplace.

This guide teaches veterans how to align the values, skill sets and behaviour of the two generations to create greater productivity and success instead of gridlock and disagreement.

Managing the Millennials: Discover the Core Competencies for Managing Today’s Workforce ( Wiley)

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Careers

Network World

What we’re reading

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4G and LTE is counted as the future of telecoms. CNME speaks to telecom service providers in the region to understand if they are investing in the technology and what services we are likely to see on a refreshed backbone in the near future.

january 2012

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24th January 2012, Dubai www.cio50me.com

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For the latest in news, analysis, features, case studies, and blog articles on trends and issues in the ICT industry across the globe and in the Middle East, please visit www. computernewsme.com

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WORLD Let’s hear it for the one man multinational. The information and communications technology we create is making the global business landscape more democratic.

Because making the little guy’s voice as loud as the big guy begins with giving him the same tools to work with.