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EDITORIAL Publisher Dominic De Sousa

The best is yet to come

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

Group COO Nadeem Hood

As we usher in 2013, I think most of us in the industry would look back at the year gone by with mixed feelings. So what is going to make 2013 tick? Honouring the venerable new year tradition of crystal-ball gazing, I am going to stick my out and spell out my predictions, in no particular order.

The mobility juggernaut rolls on: Whether you like it or not, mobility has become pervasive now with the influx of smartphones and tablets on enterprise networks. However, the hard truth of the matter is most IT organisations haven’t been able to get a handle on mobility. I can’t think of many companies that have a well-defined mobile computing management in place and many are still struggling to deliver apps and data in a secure manner to the employee devices. Mobility is indeed a double-edged sword and those who can’t adapt to this new reality are doomed to fail.

Lingering security threats: There has been a rude awakening thanks to some of the highly-publicised security breaches that we witnessed in the region, especially in the oil and gas sector. The regional organisations that were complacent with a false sense of security are now scurrying around all over the place to fortify their business and it’s heartening to see that security is actually getting a meaty chunk of IT budgets.

The year of 4G:LTE is here and all major service providers in the region are ready with their 4G networks. With speeds up to 100Mbps, the lure of mobile broadband is hard to ignore and widespread of availability of 4G devices this year would be manna from heaven for SMBs looking to replace their fixed broadband connections with wireless.

Big data is big business – Big data is slowly moving out of the hype cycle and there is a greater clarity around what the technology promises.

Organisations, especially in the banking and telecom sectors, are tipped to adopt big data along with analytics to glean useful business information out of their data assets. Mark your calendar now as CNME will bring the region’s first big data symposium in May to burn the fog off this exciting trend.

With the benefit of hindsight, I am going to look back at the list of prophecies I made for the last year and I am glad to report most of those predictions came true, with the exception of cloud. Cloud computing might be taking the world by storm, but unfortunately in this part of the world it still means the visible mass of liquid droplets suspended in the atmosphere.

And I dare say it’s not going to change much this year as well.

We at CNME wish you a happy new year.

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EDITORIAL

Uneasy lies the head...

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

4

You’d think the CEO job at the world’s highest earning technology company would be one of the most sought after jobs in the industry.

Not so. In fact, it’s become a bit of a poisoned chalice in recent years.

Meg Whitman took the stage at HP Discover in Frankfurt last month as the fourth CEO of HP in seven years, and only the second female CEO in HP’s history.

The first was Carly Fiorina, who was ousted in 2005 after the value of HP halved during her tenure and she failed to integrate the Compaq acquisition.

But perhaps it was in the hands of Fiorina’s successor Mark Hurd where things went really wrong for HP. Financially, Hurd seemed a great success. His harsh approach on cost-cutting and short-term results appeared to be doing the trick.

However, HP was always famous for its culture of creativity and, most importantly, innovation – it’s what its founders called the “HP Way”. This philosophy was tragically neglected under Herd.

Financial focus may get you quick results, but innovation will always be the long-term winner in this industry. And that rung true in 2010 when Apple launched the iPad, which set the foundations to change the PC industry as we knew it.

Subsequently, companies relying on sales of desktops and laptops (HP is a case in point) were left on a sinking ship. It was HP’s failure to innovate from a position of leadership that got it into the troubled waters it has found itself in.

Hurd’s replacement, Leo Apotheker, lasted only 11 months after HP stocks dropped by 40%, and in September 2011 the cursed torch was passed to Whitman.

It was a seemingly odd choice. The former eBay CEO appeared to clearly lack in enterprise IT experience. On the other side of the coin, for 10 years she headed a dot-com that redefined retail shopping. Was this appointment a statement on innovation?

Perhaps so. 2012 saw HP take a lead in the software defined networking market, which is taking the networking industry by storm. As you’ll read in our analysis of HP Discover on page 8, it has also made its biggest storage announcements in 10 years and is setting out to revolutionise data storage.

The innovation here is clear to see, but the latter is born from HP’s acquisition of 3PAR. I believe it is HP’s reliance on buying in innovation which is its final hurdle. Take the Autonomy debacle for example.

HP has taken an $8.8bn writedown on the value of Autonomy Corporation, which it acquired in 2011, after supposedly finding it misrepresented its finances.

You can’t doubt Autonomy’s innovation, which has largely contributed to some great products for HP in information optimisation and data analytics.

However, I can’t help but think it was HP’s desperation to buy in innovation to capitalise on the big data boom that led to this gross overbuy. Michael Dell recently said he also looked into buying Autonomy and found it obviously overpriced.

I think the foundations are in place for HP to regain its former glory, but to do so Whitman needs to bring back that philosophy of innovation and creativity that led to HP’s success in the first place.

“Despite what you may have heard, innovation is alive and well at HP,” Whitman said at Discover. “It’s not that we don’t have enough innovation at HP, it’s that we need to work harder on commercialising that innovation and getting those ideas to market faster.”

I disagree with Whitman. The problem is not the commercialisation of the innovation – it’s where it’s coming from.

HP must stop relying on acquiring innovation and start reinvesting in inhouse innovation driven by strong R&D. It’s time to bring back the “HP Way”.

Computer News Middle East

january 2013

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Our Strategic Partners

Contents

Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic IT Transformation and Big Data Partner

Strategic IT NetworkingPartner

Strategic IT Storage Partner

ISSUE 252 | january 2013

ANALYSIS 8

Turnaround time At its Discover 2012 conference in Frankfurt, HP made its biggest storage announcements in over a decade.

12 Out of this world

Michael Dell walked out at Dell World in Austin, Texas almost 20 years after founding the IT giant in that very city.

18 Month in view

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

CIO SPOTLIGHT

22 Master of the trade

From front of house to IT, Mahmoud Kamal knows the hospitality industry inside out. Habtoor Hotel’s Jordanian Group IT Manager tells his story.

26

CASE STUDIES

30 A pre-emptive strike

OSN has made the move to secure its networks by implementing a next generation NAC solution.

32 Formula for success

Lotus F1 teamed up with Symantec and Microsoft to implement a set of solutions it believes will make it faster.

SOLUTIONS WORLD

38 The social universe

It was a long time coming, but finally business and social have come together to conceive the new social enterprise.

NETWORK WORLD

SECURITY ADVISOR

56 Losing the battle

If 2013 is the year of cloud adoption pick-up, where does that leave the traditional onpremise model of storing enterprise data and the network that supports it?

6

Ditching restrictions File sharing is a critical, sensitive and valuable task for companies in all verticals. It’s costly, involves patching and management, and brings complications to international transactions. Is ditching VPNs and file servers and adopting SaaS the answer for all?

Computer News Middle East

As high-profile and damaging breaches continue to bight even the most secure enterprises, CNME asks whether it is time for IT teams to re-evaluate their infrastructure?

62 Serving up 2013

STORAGE ADVISOR 50

Dubai Municipality is renowned as one of the government’s most innovative entities, particularly in its work transforming standard city services into e-services through its Web portal. However, when it deemed its previously heterogeneous environment as too complex and costly, it set out to consolidate its infrastructure.

INTEGRATION ADVISOR

44 A new world

Better together

january 2013

With cloud still gaining momentum, big data getting bigger and companies searching for better run managed services, what impact will they have on the integration market?

Telecoms World

68 Vital connections

The technology behind mobile communications continues to wow consumers and enterprises alike, but the pressure is on the telecoms industry.

CNME examines how it will fare in 2013. www.cnmeonline.com

CAREERS ADVISOR

74 The generation game

2013 is the year of next-generation technologies, but where does that leave the IT veterans?

INTERVIEW

78 Veteran of the board

Having served 17 years for EMC, Vice Chairman Bill Teuber bleeds blue and white. He may have passed the 60 mark but his energy remains high, as does his hopes for EMC and the Middle East.

PRODUCT WATCH

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

THE WORD ON THE STREET

82 The end of the world as we know it

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

Analysis HP Discover

Turnaround time Following a year of tribulations, HP finished 2012 on a high at its Discover 2012 conference in Frankfurt with what it referred to as its biggest storage announcements in over a decade.

Meg Whitman, CEO, HP

L

ast year was an interesting time for HP. With revenues over $120bn, it remained the highest earning technology company in the world. But other figures weren’t quite as complementary.

With profits continuing to drastically slide following the general global drop in PC sales, and mass job cuts, it was generally a year of negative news headlines for the IT giant.

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The lead up to HP Discover in December was no different as the company took an $8.8 billion charge as a result of what it called serious accounting improprieties that occurred at UK software company Autonomy before it acquired the firm in 2011. Taking the charge into account, HP suffered a $6.9 billion loss in its fourth fiscal quarter.

Meg Whitman, who was named CEO of HP in September 2011, alluded to the www.cnmeonline.com

company’s dramatic year with sarcasm during her keynote address at the conference. “It’s been a quiet year,” she said.

“Not much going on really at all.”

She added with more seriousness: “It has been an incredible year for this company.

There have been a lot of challenges but there have also been a lot of victories.

“Despite what you may have heard, innovation is alive and well at HP. Our culture of great engineering and innovation is a

tremendous asset and it’s not that we don’t have enough innovation at HP, it’s that we need to work harder on commercialising that innovation and getting those ideas to market faster. That’s one of the things we’re focusing on in the next 12 months.”

Whitman also emphasised that HP remains the number one or two provider in “virtually every market” it competes in.

“We are very proud of our products, software, services and solutions that we now offer. In fact, I think we have the very best product, service and solutions offering that we’ve had in many years at this company.

“HP is the only company that brings customers devices, hardware, software and services from the enterprise to the consumer.

We will help customers build on a platform in an agnostic way providing them with the choice and flexibility that they demand and need.”

Leading a revolution Thankfully for Whitman and HP, the biggest talking point at the conference was a positive one. Namely, HP revealing the most significant updates to its storage portfolio in over 10 years, which it boldly claimed will lead a revolution in data storage.

It attributed this revolution to the use of a modern single storage architecture to provide ‘polymorphic simplicity’, which is a new concept that enables a single-system architecture to exist in several forms whilst retaining common data services for block, object and file applications. The concept also calls for optimisation for both hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state disks (SSD).

The first announcement centred on the latest result of HP’s acquisition of 3PAR. The new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 range, which HP dubbed the industry’s only midrange quadcontroller platform offering tier one storage availability and quality-of-service features at an easy entry price point for organisations.

Supporting both block and file data services, the system is available with HDD and SSD or as an all-SSD configuration capable of performing more than 320,000 input/output operations per section, a number HP claimed was 2.4 times that of a similarly priced competitive array.

The second portfolio expansion to be revealed was HP StoreOnce 2000 and 4000 Backup with support for HP StoreOnce Catalyst software.

These new models provide efficient data movement and high-performance deduplication to reduce data protection costs in remote sites and data centres, and perform backup operations up to three times faster at a 35 percent lower cost than the closest competitive system, HP said.

The final product to be unveiled was HP StoreAll Storage, a highly scalable platform for object and file data access, providing a simplified environment for big data retention and cloud storage that reduces the need for additional administrators or hardware.

HP StoreAll Express Query was created

by HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, and is a metadata database that HP claims will allow clients to conduct search queries 100,000 times faster than previous file system search methods.

Whilst HP and Autonomy may be at war in the financial and governance

It has been an incredible year for this company. There have been a lot of challenges but there have also been a lot of victories. Despite what you may have heard, innovation is alive and well at HP.” www.cnmeonline.com

departments, it was clear at the event that HP remains enthusiastic when it comes to Autonomy’s technologies. Integration with HP Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) offloads processing tasks to HP StoreAll so that analytics can be performed with more current data whilst using less compute hardware.

“If you look at what has happened [with Autonomy], there’s really some financial accounting that needs to take place,” said David Scott, SVP and GM, HP Storage.

“Very importantly, we have tremendous belief in the Autonomy technologies which really are far ahead in terms of meaning and context-based analysis than anything else in the industry today.”

According to Scott, the “data revolution” that HP cited is bringing full tier one functionality down into the midrange price points.

“For 25 years there has been no architectural change in the midrange from a dual controller strategy. It is a revolution because before, if somebody wanted to have tier one solutions, capability, mission critical support and the ability to maintain application service levels if a controller failed, they had to buy expensive tier one storage,” he said.

“Now it’s available for the masses, including small and medium sized businesses, and for deployment throughout enterprises. You don’t have to compromise – you can have midrange affordability with full tier one mission critical capability.”

Information optimisation HP also used the conference to announce new and enhanced information optimisation solutions to help enterprises manage, January 2013

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9

Analysis HP Discover

understand and act upon the variety, velocity and volume of organisational data.

The company referred to “return on information” as the value that organisations generate from their investments in information solutions, services and resources by gaining insight from their data to make better and quicker decisions.

It referred to new research conducted on its own behalf which found that nearly 60 percent of business executives report that their organisations are not equipped with the right solutions to gain insight from big data, and only 10 percent of executives said their organisations currently incorporate unstructured data into their enterprise insights, processes and strategy.

“Over the next several years, return on information will become the single most important measure of success for organisations,” said George Kadifa, Executive VP, Software, HP. “HP will continue to invest in and develop solutions and services that harness the volume, diversity and unpredictability of information to deliver real value to our clients.”

HP expanded its HP AppSystems portfolio to offer improved customer choice and expanded capabilities of HP Converged Infrastructure with Apache Hadoop, HP Vertica Analytics Platform and Autonomy eDiscovery environments.

The newly enhanced HP Converged Storage portfolio eliminates administrative complexity, reduces costs and accelerates information insight in virtualised, cloud and big data environments, HP said.

Growth on the cards Speaking of the storage industry in general, Scott was optimistic of growth in 2013 following a dip in 2012.

David Scott, SVP and GM, HP Storage

“We detected some slowing of the growth rates of storage that have been reflected in the latest IDC projections for growth rates that came down fairly dramatically. EMEA remains weak because of some of the economic conditions and the US is also in uncertain territory right now.

China may be started to recovery but it’s not clear,” he said.

“So there’s a lot of macro-economic uncertainty that is impacting the storage business. But on the whole, what I think you tend to see in data storage is that this continual explosion in information will mean that it is a short cyclical period of time when the growth rate is depressed and you’ll start

For 25 years there has been no architectural change in the midrange from a dual controller strategy. It is a revolution because before, if somebody wanted to have tier one solutions, capability, mission critical support and the ability to maintain application service levels if a controller failed, they had to buy expensive tier one storage.”

10

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to see a reacceleration of growth, possible towards the second half of 2013.”

With the Discover 2012 conference further highlighting HP’s clear intent to focus on the storage market going forward and 70% of HP’s revenue attributed to infrastructure, along with the general continuation of decline in the PC market, the case for HP’s investment in the latter continues to be questionable.

Despite these factors, however, it remained adamant at the conference that HP’s future still includes the manufacturing of personal computers.

“We as a company believe that we are in fast growth markets in areas like storage and networking and some areas of the server market that we can take advantage of. However, HP will continue to be a strong PC company because we generate massive cash flow and we are a big company and can continue to take market share in those spaces,” Scott said.

“The company is balanced and I think a lot of customers value HP as a complete IT infrastructure company from desktop all the way through to data storage.”

This communication has been created for you by a company reselling Dell products.

manageability without the complexity.

Presenting the new generation of Dell Latitude™ and OptiPlex™ business-class solutions.

Latitude laptops and OptiPlex desktops enable new levels of control and seamless data protection, no matter how big your team becomes.

• 3rd generation Intel® Core™ processors and efficient manageability with Intel® vPro™ technology • Dell’s unique extensions for remote out-of-band BIOS or battery management • Effective and efficient IT management with Dell KACE™ • Long, stable lifecycles and managed transition periods for effective planning • Safeguard data and mett compliance regulations with Trusted Platform Module (TPM), Dell Data Protection | Encryption and encrypted hard drive options • Space-saving 9010 All-in-One desktop includes integrated power supply, VESA mounting and wireless keyboard/mouse options

Mindware FZ LLC I Tecom – Cayan Business Center I Dubai, UAE P.O. Box: 55609 I T.: 04 450 0600 I E: dell@mindware.ae I W: www.mindware.ae © 2012 Dell Products. Dell, the Dell logo and Latitude are registered or unregistered trade marks of Dell Inc. in the United States and other countries. Intel, the Intel Logo, Intel Inside, Intel Core, and Core Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Windows and the Windows logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other trademarks or trade names may be used in this document to refer to third-party products (such as operating systems and software) included with the products offered by Dell and the entities claiming the marks and names of those products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. [Dell Corporation Ltd, Dell House, The Boulevard, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1LF.

Analysis Dell World

Out of this world Back in the city where it all began, Michael Dell walked out at the Austin Convention Centre in Texas last month almost 20 years after he founded the company which has become one of the most well-known names in technology.

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D

ell is a name that is recognised the world over for its PC products and office solutions. In 1984 it all began when Michael Dell said “technology is about enabling human potential” – and he certainly enabled his own potential.

Dell was just 19 years of age when he founded his company in Texas. He went on to become the youngest CEO ever to make the Fortune 500 list, and Dell now employs nearly 100,000 people.

He has made some powerful friends during his journey to the top of the IT world, notably 42nd President of the United States of America, Bill Clinton, who joined him at Dell World to discuss the collaborations which have seen Clinton’s charity foundation begin to change the world for many people.

However, regardless of the fact that Dell is a $60bn company, with 40 million products and over two billion customers worldwide, Clinton and Dell didn’t take to the stage to revel in the glory of their partnership. Instead, the two prolific personalities took the opportunity to discuss the major issues affecting the world and how technology, collaboration and hard work can help to transform the lives of so many people.

It goes without saying that Clinton is very passionate, a great speaker and well respected in his field. The man oozes confidence and class, and speaks with integrity and dignity, regardless to your political views. With the power of Dell standing behind him, his vision of moving

Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell

We’re not worrying about the past - we’re investing in the future. Over the last several years, innovations in cloud, big data, social media and security have changed the model for how technology is being consumed and delivered, and we’re working to democratise and simplify these innovations.” www.cnmeonline.com

into “the tomorrow world” and helping children in poverty and inequality around the world has a major boost. However, Dell has visions of his own.

“We’re on the cusp of total technology transformation,” Dell said.

“We’re not worrying about the past - we’re investing in the future. Over the last several years, innovations in cloud, big data, social media and security have January 2013

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13

Analysis Dell World

changed the model for how technology is being consumed and delivered, and we’re working to democratise and simplify these innovations.”

Clinton also highlighted the innovative progress made over the past decade.

“There were only 50 live websites when I was in office, there’s probably been more than that since I started this speech,” he said.

“I sent only a total of two emails during my tenure in the White House.”

The wider picture Dell has its fingers in many pies, and maybe most notably the Clinton Global Initiative.

Clinton personally thanked everyone at Dell during his keynote speech at Dell World.

The Clinton foundation was set up to tackle many issues, including obesity in schools, which thanks to Dell, it has begun to do.

“We were setting our children up to have diabetes by the age of 20,” Clinton said.

“When we collaborated with Dell, we used data and analysis to do research and make changes and in the five years since we started we’ve seen a 90% reduction in the calories served in schools, that’s fantastic.”

Dell and Clinton have supported each other over the past few years and aim to continue doing so in the future. A future which they claim can become more sustainable, more supportive and more productive, if technology is harvested in the correct ways and entrepreneurship and industry ambition are supported.

In which case, Dell launched a new site, Dell Centre for Entrepreneurs, to dovetail into a previously announced $US100 million Innovators Credit Fund. This site aims to provide networking and funding opportunities for new and growing small businesses across industry sectors.

This doesn’t mean an end to the spending spree of acquisitions either.

Dell says that the push to become a fully fledged solutions company shows no end at the moment.

Signal of intent Sceptics may note recent rumours of buyouts and struggling times for Dell, but the tone could not have been more positive in Austin following the keynotes and announcements of the latest endeavours.

However, Dell voiced concerns over re-branding issues which it said have made the progression of the company into the software and services division quite difficult. Dell has a goal of providing full end-to-end managed services as well as software and hardware products which will help to take the company closer towards its goal of being a trillion figure name.

“25% of profits coming from Dell software is a pretty good goal I’d say,” said John Swainson, President, Dell Software.

“Sure, we’ve had some branding issues.

It’s a similar situation to what IBM went through a couple of decades ago. People see us a computer manufacturer and shaking that off is definitely a challenge which our marketing team face, but I think we’re doing a pretty good job. We’ve built up our software division, services division and security division aggressively over the past few years, whether that be in-house or through acquisitions.”

Dell has gained a lot of acquisitions over the past 12 months and the next 12 is set to bring more, Swainson claimed.

As well as these divisions being heavily emphasised by Dell, Swainson said that the company is looking into in-memory technology. However it hasn’t yet quite

There were only 50 live websites when I was in office, there’s probably been more than that since I started this speech.”

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John Swainson, President, Dell Software

seen the value add for such a move. The company currently ships SAP’s HANA technology, so this may well be an area which won’t see much movement over the next couple of years.

It’s been an interesting tenure so far for Swainson, he worked at IBM for 26 years prior to Dell, where he started in March, heading the software division. Swainson, who reports directly to Michael Dell, says that one of the reasons he took the post at Dell was because he saw it as a worthy challenge and an opportunity that excited him.

“I’ve certainly been around the block a few times. But I’m a sucker for punishment,” he said.

“Dell needs to be re-branded, and this is a very attractive challenge for me. I love a good challenge.”

And a good challenge it has been for him so far. The future is looking bright for Dell and any company which has the backing of a former US president certainly has the potential to do great things. A signal of which was certainly very prominent in Texas last month.

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BIG DATA

In our connected world, there is an increasing amount of “digital exhaust” (data resulting from all kinds of activities,) being created every moment. Take a look at how this data may impact us in the future.

The Future of

Big data is generated in a number of ways, including...

Internet browsing

What’s Generating Data?

Sensors in soils

Moving around with your smartphone

Sensors in pet collars

Sensors in gambling casino chips

Sensors in palettes of products

Sensors in oceans

Scientists

Health officials

Corporate leaders

Education specialists What they can buy

• Open access to tools and data “transparency” are necessary for people to provide information checks and balances. Are they enough?

• Humans, rather than machines, will still be the most capable of extracting insight and making judgements using big data.

Statistics can still lie.

• In the end, humans just won’t be able to keep up.

agree with this scenario.

39%

Big data could cause more problems than it solves between now and 2020.

agree with this scenario.

53%

SOURCE: pewinternet.org Information provided by: http://www.onlinebusinessdegree.org

• Big data has the potential or significant negative impacts that may be impossible to avoid.

• The rich will profit from big data and the poor will not.

• Respondents are concered about the motives of governments and corporations, the entities that have the most data and the incentive to analyse it.

NEGATIVES

What’s the future of Big Data?

THE LIMITATIONS

How they might respond to products, services and programmes

MILLION

It creates innovative business models, products and services

It can replace and support human decision making with automated algorithms

It allows for better analysis of employee and system performance

It creates transparency that can be used to increase efficiency

How is it useful?

How people behave

200 Big data will be drawn together in ways that will improve social, political and economic intelligence.

• By 2020, the use of big data will improve our understanding of ourselves and the world.

• User innovation could lead the way with ‘do-it-ourself analytics’.

• Nowcasting, real-time data analysis and pattern recognition will surely get better.

POSITIVES

Government leaders

Are interested to see if analysing this data can help reveal...

In March 2012, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that six U.S. government agencies would spend $200 million to help the government organise and analyse data.

Why is big data important?

ROUND-UP Month in view

Huawei invests $90M in smartphone R&D Huawei Technologies will invest $90.6 million over a five-year period to establish a research and development centre in Helsinki, Finland. Its first task will be to build software for smartphones and tablets based on Android and Windows Phone 8.

Huawei is currently the world’s fifth largest smartphone vendor in terms of unit sales, but wants to enter the top three and is hoping to take advantage of Nokia’s continuing struggles to make that happen.

At first, Huawei plans to recruit 30 employees for the centre, with the goal of hiring more than 100 people over five years, the company said.

The company has yet to announce its first smartphone based on the latest version of Microsoft’s OS, but is expected to do so soon.

The Helsinki R&D centre will join an already established modem and technology design centre in Sweden and a user interface research centre in the UK.

STME brings WaySecure to MENA

Acquisition

IBM closed its $1.3 billion acquisition of Kenexa, intended to boost IBM’s enterprise social collaboration offerings with Kenexa’s cloudbased human resources applications and IT services.

5,200 GB of data per person by 2020 During the next eight years, the amount of digital data produced will exceed 40 zettabytes, which is the equivalent of 5,200 GB of data for every man, woman and child on Earth, according to an updated Digital Universe study. To hit that figure, all data is expected to double every two years through 2020.

Computer News Middle East

IT services industry veteran Michael Gregoire was appointed CEO of CA Technologies, effective January 7, 2013. Gregoire succeeds William McCracken, who has held the reins since January 2010 and, at the age of 70, is retiring.

Middle East solutions provider and systems integrator STME signed an exclusivity deal with American security firm WaySecure Consulting.

WaySecure is a ‘boutique information security consulting company’ specialised in information security, operational security, computer forensics and TSCM. The deal increases STME’s security portfolio and brings one of the key players in the US field to the MENA market.

“Security is always the key for our customers and we want to ensure they get the best service throughout.

WaySecure is one of the best in the world in this sector and we are extremely pleased to be working with them,” said Raymond Chabab, Sales Director, STME. WaySecure President Steven Lutz added: “Combining STME’s comprehensive IT services and WaySecure’s highly focused security expertise creates a strong offering designed to benefit STME customers throughout the MENA market.”

january 2013

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The freedom of the Internet appears to remain intact after the final treaty of the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai included a provision that it does not address content-related aspects of telecommunications.

Several proposals during the controversial summit, including some Arab countries, had alluded to multinational control over the Internet.

Internet freedom?

Michael Gregoire Antivirus pioneer John McAfee was expelled from Guatemala where he illegally entered the country in an attempt to escape Belize authorities, who want to question him in connection with the murder of his neighbour.

John McAfee Google faced uproar after it was discovered to have avoided around $2 billion in worldwide income taxes last year by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues from its non-US subsidiaries into a Bermuda shell company. Eric Schmidt dismissed it as “capitalism”.

HP promoted former EMEA GM, Mike Nefkens, to Executive Vice President of HP Enterprise Services.

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WHAT’S HOT?

Google

WHAT’S NOT?

Acquisition

Juniper Networks acquired Contrail Systems, a startup that makes controllers for software defined networks, for $176 million. Contrail was founded by officials from Google, Cisco, Juniper and Aruba.

Windows 8 UAE survey shows tablets won’t be YouTube popularity YouTube that 46% of the major player until UAE users respond respondents use 2016: IDC well to video YouTube on a daily

Windows 8 tablets won’t be a major factor in the market until at least 2016, according to IDC. Slates running Microsoft’s operating system were expected to account for just 2.9 percent of the worldwide tablet market by the end of 2012, rising to 10.3 percent in 2016, IDC said.

The research firm recently increased its overall tablet market forecast, predicting worldwide shipments to hit 122.3 million units, up from the previous forecast of 117.1 million devices shipped. By 2016, it expects tablet shipments to reach 282.7 million units, up from the previous forecast of 261.4 million.

advertisements, according to the first UAE focused YouTube study.

62% of users stated that they clicked on the ad to go to the advertisers’ website for more information, whilst just under half said they find video advertisements interesting and a “great addition” to YouTube content.

The research also revealed

Pope Benedict XVI joined Twitter and blessed his followers in his first tweet, posted from an iPad.

Over half of UAE looking to virtualise 54% of UAE IT decision makers named server virtualisation as a priority spend in a survey conducted by Riverbed Technologies. Furthermore, 46% of the UAE enterprises surveyed said they see wide area network (WAN) optimisation as a spending priority and are likely to increase spending on related tools moving into 2013.

basis and 77% of them use it several times a day, once a day or several times a week.

Furthermore, 61% of YouTube of respondents said they use their smartphone to access the Internet, with almost 60% of them using their smartphone to access YouTube mobile. UAE nationals exhibit the highest degree of multi screen usage.

Mark Hurd to kick off Oracle CloudWorld tour in Dubai

Oracle President Mark Hurd will kick off the company’s global tour of CloudWorld in Dubai on January 15.

Oracle CloudWorld is an event series where senior Oracle executives, customers, partners and industry thought leaders will share how they drive business transformation using the cloud.

Following the Dubai event, CloudWorld will travel around the world, including London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Munich, New York, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.

Keynote sessions will highlight Oracle’s strategy and roadmap for cloud and social.

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Telecoms industry among most satisfied in MENA The telecoms industry is one of the most satisfying to work in the MENA region, according to a survey by Bayt.com and YouGov. Telecommunication professionals are among the most satisfied with their salary packages, with respondents from Kuwait, Oman, Jordan, and Syria topping that list.

A cumulative 38% of employees in the telecoms January 2013

industry rated their salary satisfaction as being ‘somewhat’ (30%) or ‘totally’ (8%) satisfying, whilst 11% were ‘totally dissatisfied’ and 29% ‘somewhat dissatisfied’.

Respondents from the telecoms industry also came third in terms of satisfaction with work-life balance, right after the industries of hospitality and oil, gas, and petrochemicals.

Computer News Middle East

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Dell’s acquisitions not yet paying dividends

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Dell recommends Windows® 7 Professional.

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

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

CIO Spotlight Mahmoud Kamal

Master of the trade From front of house to IT, Mahmoud Kamal knows the hospitality industry inside out and has shown resilience, heart and determination to make his way to the top. Habtoor Hotel’s Jordanian Group IT Manager tells his story.

Mahmoud Kamal, Group IT Manager, Habtoor Hotels

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S

TIMELINE 1976 Leaves school and undertook Diploma in Hospitality Management in Jordan.

1979 Joined the air force under mandatory service, worked front of house in onsite hotel.

1981 Leaves air force and obtains first front of house roll in Marriot Hotels.

1984 Becomes PC supervisor at Intercontinental Group.

1993 Completes the first Middle East installation of Fidelio OS.

1995 Leaves Jordan for Beirut following offer to become Director at Fidelio.

2007 Forced out of Lebanon by war and settles at Banyan Tree Resorts in Dubai.

2009 Becomes Group IT Manager at Habtoor Hotels.

www.cnmeonline.com

ome people would curse an upbringing of stricts laws and tough living areas, but not Jordanian born Mahmoud Kamal.

In fact, he says it was these environments that spurred his dreams to work in hospitality. ”Inside a hotel you could mix with different cultures and experience different people,” he says.

Recalling his childhood, he adds: “It was a tough place to grow up; you can say this but you can’t say that, you can go here but you can’t go there. Hospitality was a release from this situation.”

For Kamal, the game plan was set out nice and early. Finishing school in 1976, he undertook a course on hospitality management at a hotel college, which is now Amoun University.

After completing this diploma, he began his two years mandatory service in the Jordanian army.

Following advice, he served his time with the air force because it presented a unique opportunity for him.

“The air force had an onsite five star hotel for the top officers and pilots. I was given the opportunity to work at the front of house in this resort during my time. It was perfect,” he says.

“It had everything that a top hotel has but it was just onsite. I loved that more than my actual position because I was making a difference. It was fantastic, I was helping and people were appreciative of me. That was the element I loved the most - being known.”

Following his time serving his country, Kamal took his first official hospitality job doing front-of-house for a Marriot hotel. He spent three years working there before he joined the InterContinental Group, a company he stayed with for over a decade and where he took on his first IT role.

Making history “The job here was very strange,” he says. “I was in control of the only computer which controlled the entire hotel. I just supervised it. My title was PC supervisor I suppose, it was my first experience in IT. Previously, IT had only been a hobby really.”

It was a highly important job for Kamal as he was forced to master spreadsheets before Excel even existed.

All payroll and budgets went through this one computer and so he was sent away to enrol in a six month course at IBM in order to be able to master the difficult technology.

“This was high risk for me. I was allowed to go on one condition; if I passed, they would pay the total cost of the course, but if I failed, I would have to pay in full.

This was over $1500 and I was making around $250 at the time, so this was nearly half a year’s wages.”

January 2013

Computer News Middle East

23

CIO Spotlight Mahmoud Kamal

Fortunately for Kamal he passed the course and took all this experience back to InterContinental.

“This was when I realised I wanted to be in IT and not front of house. I just loved being able to do what others could not. It was like being a magician. I was respected - I would sit in on executive meetings and get called the expert, it was amazing. However, my 17-year-old son now knows twice as much as I did back then.”

During this time, Kamal recalls every hotel was running on IBM 36, a complicated and expensive solution. He decided to make a change, and having knowledge of personal computers, he was well placed to do so. At this point in his career, Kamal made a little bit of history.

“I saw an advert for a Fidelio product, version 1.0.

It was a PC product, it was brilliant, and I thought this could happen. So I asked my regional director about it.

I got absolute hell. I was threatened with termination of contract, it really didn’t go down well,” he says.

“So I used unconventional methods and eventually I managed to acquire the solution. It was a tenth of the cost of what we were previously using but because it was a personal computer it was still a looming technology – people didn’t want to convert. I spent 20 hours a day implementing the product and training people to use it.”

Physically, the product was beautiful, Kamal says.

It gave an immediate ROI and added value to the company. This was his first big IT triumph. It also got him recognised by the vendor, which set the wheels in motion for the next chapter in his life.

stars hotels and the company was making more than $1.7 million.”

Forced out After the assassination of the former prime minister and increasing conflict in Lebanon, Kamal was forced to take his family and leave the country. It was a time he describes as difficult and worrying, and one that he doesn’t like to look back on.

“I threw the family into the jeep and made my way to the border. I wouldn’t say I was running for my life, but I was running for my family.”

Things were about to take a turn for the better for Kamal and his family however. His wife told him to search the Web for jobs back in hospitality, and within days he was offered a job in Dubai at Banyan Tree Resorts.

This was when I realised I wanted to be in IT and not front of house. I just loved being able to do what others could not. It was like being a magician. I was respected - I would sit in on executive meetings and get called the expert, it was amazing. However, my 17-year-old son now knows twice as much as I did back then.”

But after moving and settling in, it was only another two years before a former CFO Kamal had worked with at Beirut Habtoor Hotels recognised his CV online and offered him a job for the group in Dubai.

“It wasn’t until I made my way over there and asked what the actual job was that they turned around and said “group IT manager” – then it just fell into place,” he says.

“I’m so proud and happy to be here at Habtoor Group now - it’s doing very well.”

However, looking forward there may be more change for Kamal. After spending some of his life tutoring students on hospitality systems, a time he described as one of his best, Kamal is keen to go back into some form of tutoring.

“You will have a million teachers in your life but only one will truly stand out and be remembered.

Being that one is a fantastic feeling. When you plant a thousand trees and see four or five start to blossom, it’s truly fantastic.”

Wheels of change Kamal was offered a directional role at Fidelio itself, based in Beirut and on a much healthier wage. Kamal took the job and moved into Lebanon, where he would stay for 12 years.

“My previous boss who never wanted me to buy Fidelio in the first place became a major shareholder for Fidelio. He offered me the job. But I was doing well, so I wanted to be tough with him,” he says.

“When I walked into this office, I had calculated everything and wanted three times what I was making. The guy didn’t even want to interview me, he said put it down on paper and hand it over. So I did, I was nervous now. He looked with half an eye, slammed the paper back on the desk and just said “done”. I felt like such a jackass. He didn’t even care, I should have asked for five times the amount. That was the start of a strong 12 year relationship. When I left the company, we had installed in more than 60 five 24

Computer News Middle East

january 2013

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case study Dubai Municipality

Better together Dubai Municipality is renowned as one of the government’s most innovative entities, particularly in its work transforming standard city services into e-services through its Web portal. However, when it deemed its previously heterogeneous environment as too complex and costly, it set out to consolidate its infrastructure.

Khalid Abdulrahman Al Awadhi, Head of IT Infrastructure, Dubai Municipality

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The solution has increased capacity by

60%

D

ubai Municipality provides municipal services to the diverse population of Dubai, including urban planning, supervision of construction, environmental protection, conservation of public parks and professional services in laboratory certification.

Given its wide array of public services, the government entity naturally generates large amounts of data, whether it’s related to projects or materials or the population of Dubai.

One of the biggest contributors to this information growth in recent years is e-services.

The Dubai Municipality IT team, which is close to 180 employees strong, runs 350 e-services covering over 130 remote sites.

To support all the e-services and data, Dubai Municipality requires a strong infrastructure. Its IT infrastructure team is subsequently made up of close to 50 employees.

However, a few years back the entity had a completely heterogeneous environment for storage and data. Khalid Abdulrahman Al Awadhi, Head of IT Infrastructure, Dubai Municipality, explains.

“We had different solutions from different storage vendors,” he says. “So almost all of the flavours of the market used to be there.”

When it came to operating this infrastructure, it was complex and costly, he adds.

“You have to maintain multiple contracts and different experiences and skillsets with your staff.

Also, in terms of managing the data and flow of the data in terms of archiving and back up, these things used to be quite complex.”

Necessary move

Consequently, Awadhi and his team decided to consolidate the infrastructure.

In the beginning, a midrange storage system was thought to be the right fit for their requirements, but when they recognised the

From the idea of not keeping all the eggs in one basket and just making sure we were keeping a reliable and secure infrastructure, we went through a different evaluation.” www.cnmeonline.com

continued growth of data and the criticality to keep it all together, they conceded that a bigger and more enterprise level system was required.

“So from the idea of not keeping all the eggs in one basket and just making sure we were keeping a reliable and secure infrastructure, we went through a different evaluation,” Awadhi says.

Following the organisation’s standard process of evaluating different solutions and vendors based on both technical and financial metrics, it opted for EMC’s Symmetrix VMAX Storage System.

“We shortlisted EMC as a good company to provide technical requirements with more advantages than others and financially they also provided a good offer where we were able to easily prove return on investment and TCO to the higher management to make this decision,” Awadhi says.

The implementation also enabled Dubai Municipality to become the first government entity in the UAE to deploy an RPO = 0 solution which can also handle data corruption and human error with the same SLA. “This is one of the unique things that we feel EMC are pioneering compared to the other vendors,” Awadhi says. “Most of the vendors served most of our business requirements with their solutions, but when it came to the continuous protection for the data, this was one of the unique things EMC offered.”

Following an on-time six month implementation, the solution went live in June 2012. “One of the things that we appreciate with EMC is that they are very good at planning. When it comes to data migration planning is the most important thing and this was distinguished with EMC,” Awadhi adds.

A rocky road

It turned out to be the reason for the project in the first place that provided the most roadblocks in the ease of the deployment – namely, the heterogeneous environment.

“Basically, the things that we are concerned were that we couldn’t have an easy migration and the compatibility between the existing systems and the new storage system,” Awadhi says.

January 2013

Computer News Middle East

27

case study Dubai Municipality

“Overall we had 580 servers and not all of them were connected to the storage but whatever needed to be connected had to go to this. We are talking about different levels of platforms, operating systems and technologies – old and new. So this was our main concern and I think EMC addressed it very well.

“There are now only some minor issues left but they are easily addressed between my team and the excellent support we have from EMC. They are also proactively monitoring our infrastructure and analysing in case of any operational problems.”

EMC was also at hand to provide the relevant training for knowledge transfer.

“In Dubai Municipality our team had experience with almost all the big names like HP, NetApp, Hitachi, but no one in our team had worked with EMC technology,” Awadhi says.

EMC provided the organisation with a strategy for the planning and also its ‘EMC Passport’ tool where the customer has credit it can assign to its team and can have access to unlimited numbers of training for a period of time.

“So our team had the luxury to attend all the required training to manage this infrastructure and all of our people were also certified so that they can use this technology confidently,” Awadhi adds.

Big benefits Since implementation, the solution has provided a wealth of benefits for Dubai Municipality and its IT team.

As well as increasing capacity by 60%, it has also increased utilisation of resource with thin provisioning increasing space utilisation by 30% Furthermore, after its previous storage did not support new technologies, Dubai

We have contracted with EMC in this project for five years so we are able to basically transform all of our OPEX costs which we used to pay before and CAPEX in a new solution which provides more capacity, more integrity for the data and higher availability.”

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Municipality now has supportability with newer technology like VMware, Windows 2008 and Solaris.

However, the biggest difference has been the reduction in costs with the total investment with five year support less than the upgrade and maintenance costs of the previous storage.

“We have contracted with EMC in this project for five years so we are able to basically transform all of our OPEX costs which we used to pay before to CAPEX in a new solution which provides more capacity, more integrity for the data and higher availability,” Awadhi says.

“We also have an enterprise system hosted in our main data centre and an exact replica in our disaster recovery data centre where the data is being replicated two-way over there.”

With its infrastructure now simplified and cost-effective, Dubai Municipality is looking forward to another major project in 2013 – becoming the first government in the region to implement a tier III data centre.

“There are service providers with this level of data centre but we will be the first government entity in the whole Middle East region to have one,” Awadhi says. “So our main focus next year will be on this and also the data migration because we have existing data centres where all the systems need to be migrated from there. This is an investment for a minimum of 10 years from now.”

According to Awadhi, there is healthy competition between the IT teams of all the entities that form the Dubai Government, which he believes Dubai Municipality scores major points in.

“Dubai Municipality always used to be one of the leaders,” he says. “You will often hear that it is deemed as a school for most of the IT leaders in the market. Most of the IT directors who are working and managing IT departments in the government of Dubai were part of Dubai Municipality.”

Considering its success in digitalising traditional public services, consolidating its infrastructure and plans for the government’s first tier III data centre, there is little doubt Dubai Municipality will continue to lead that competition for years to come.

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

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

case study OSN

A pre-emptive strike Although yet to fully embrace BYOD and mobility, the Middle East’s biggest pay TV operator, OSN, refuses to get caught out and has already made the move to secure its networks by implementing a next generation NAC solution.

W

ith over 900 employees spread across the Middle East and North Africa, OSN is a big player in its sector, and recently it launched OSN Play, an on demand, web based service which allows customers to access its content online at any time, which CNME covered in its October issue.

The service has helped to support the notion that business and IT are merging into one and IT now plays a vital role in value add and productivity. However, as every business knows - nobody is exempt from modern day IT security threats.

With this in mind, the company acted early and deployed a network access control (NAC) solution in order to effortlessly

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maintain control of the entire network and provide visibility on all external devices trying to connect to the network.

“We needed a product that gave us control of guest devices and contractors’ devices, and full visibility of employee end devices whilst allowing the contractors and employees to remain productive,” says Ronald D’sa, IT Manager, OSN. “We haven’t fully embraced BYOD yet, however we do have plans to do so in the near future and this platform will contribute greatly towards these plans. This is a way of thinking ahead.”

OSN set out a very detailed list of business needs for the solution in question.

Among others, it focused on automation of www.cnmeonline.com

Ronald D’sa, IT Manager, OSN

network access control, controlling visitors’ devices, accommodating wireless and mobile users, identifying and controlling rogue devices, protecting itself from malware and botnets, and automatically enforcing network access policies.

Seeking automation

Prior to the implementation of the NAC solution, OSN was controlling its network manually which was time consuming and unproductive. The plan put in place was in order to automate this process and therefore cut down on the man hours.

“Last year we were spending a lot of man hours identifying non-compliant devices and guest devices – it was a challenging task. This

The implementation was fully completed within

35

days.

product requires far less resources to manage, in fact one person can manage all devices across the entire region,” D’sa explains.

The product itself is CounterACT by ForeScout, which was chosen by OSN following a rigorous selection process in which it evaluated a high amount of industry leading products before making its decision.

It took OSN three months to conclude that the right solution was ForeScout’s CounterACT NAC product.

“We studied the NAC solution market intently. We looked at industry leading products but none of them met all of our objectives. We set out a very specific objective list early on, so it was highly important for us to tick all of those boxes,” D’sa claims.

“The issue was, we have a very large mixture of infrastructure technologies, and one of the reasons why ForeScout was so good for us was because it offered a seamless integration which didn’t affect our live setup. It’s an out of band product, so it runs alongside the main infrastructure.”

Implementing at speed

D’sa claims that the ForeScout product is achieving all the objectives already since the deployment happened back in January, a deployment which was impressively fast and smooth.

OSN acquired the services of Dubai based solutions company Nanjgel to implement the solution which took only 35 days from start to finish, an extremely short amount of time as D’sa stresses.

“It was a seamless and efficient implementation, the sort of which would usually take months, however, we began on the 15th of December and were live in January,” says D’sa.

Nanjgel demonstrated the powerful capabilities of the CounterACT NAC solution, D’sa says. It carried out a successful proof-of-concept NAC solution across OSN’s heterogeneous complex environment, and understood and analysed the company’s requirements very quickly.

“We’re very happy with this product; it’s very easy to manage. We didn’t require any hand holding following the deployment either; the solution is extremely user friendly. The solution gives us so much

Last year we were spending a lot of man hours identifying non-compliant devices and guest devices – it was a challenging task.

This product requires far less resources to manage, in fact one person can manage all devices across the entire region.”

www.cnmeonline.com

more than we asked for. Not only did it meet all of our objectives on the surface, but it also presented us with active response, zero-day attack protection, and ultimate visibility of the 900+ devices we have attempting to connect to our network.”

D’sa says that prior to the solution going live, OSN didn’t have clear visibility on the endpoint devices that were connected to the corporate network, such as PCs, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Knowing the security posture and compliance status of endpoint devices was very tricky. There was no automated, dynamic control over the contractors, systems integrators, guests or employees’ owned endpoint devices.

The product, as D’sa says himself, is providing far more services than the company itself expected.

CounterACT is currently providing mobile security; identifying and controlling all mobile devices accessing the networks, guest networking; automating the process for allowing guests to access the network, visibility; classifying all devices on the network and discovering rogue devices, blocking USB memory sticks, blocking malware attacks on the network, audit reporting, and automated remediation.

“The NAC solution has been so effective for us.

ForeScout added a lot of value as an additional layer of security control,” D’sa says.

“We want to be at the forefront of technology, and this BYOD-ready technology deployment secures our information whilst providing a stable platform for our customers.”

The NAC solution deployment highlights the seamless merging of IT and business and a single entity. Broadcast and IT are very similar now; most broadcast devices are IP based, such as IT devices, so the technologies are merging into one. D’sa recognises this, and says OSN did well to act pre-emptively.

“This evolution is about making the most of the IP enabled IT solutions,” he says.

“We’re in control now of many of the broadcast elements, and some of that includes value add.

We’re hosting services now, our role as a team has completely changed over recent years and we’re redefining the part we play.”

D’sa says that management has been very supportive of the IT team at OSN and that its budget has increased a huge amount in recent times. OSN invests in a lot of technology and security products in order to maintain stability for its customers, D’sa says.

“And in the future we want to extend on this. We want to extend our security layers to the next level.

We need to embrace BYOD as and when the business is ready, but that’s certainly the next big step for OSN,” he concludes.

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case study Lotus F1

Formula for success The most fundamental element of a formula one team’s arsenal is speed. It doesn’t take a genius to work that out, but it can take one to provide it. A mixture of collaboration, skill, technique and attention to detail can mean the difference between poll position and a crash. Abu Dhabi Grand Prix victors Lotus teamed up with Symantec and Microsoft to implement a set of solutions it believes will help it win the World Championship.

Patrick Louis, CEO, Lotus F1 Team

O

n the eve of the 2012 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Lotus F1 Team CEO, Patrick Louis, told CNME that his team was ready to end its hoodoo of over 20 years and take the top spot on the podium in the UAE capital – he was right.

When Kimi Raikkonen crossed the line on that day, he announced to the world of racing that Lotus was once again a force to be reckoned with. The Fin crossed the line just +0.852 seconds ahead of Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, who took second place.

Formula one is a sport of milliseconds.

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An extra millisecond and you walk away with the prize, and Lotus F1 Team knows that. That’s why the 40 strong members of the IT team decided to implement some leading solutions to help the company in its mission to reach the pinnacle of one of the greatest sports on earth.

In order to guarantee data backup and excellent recovery response times, Lotus deployed two NetBackup 5220 appliances in its headquarters in Enstone, UK, whilst the

Backup Exec 3600 appliance is used to protect its trackside virtual environment.

“With all the news, racing and excitement associated with F1 racing, backup inevitably takes a back seat,” says Graeme Hackland, CIO, Lotus F1 Team.

“An imperative and important process, it can nonetheless look a little dull against the glamour and gloss of the racing. With Symantec’s appliances, the Lotus F1 Team is capitalising from fast, scalable, integrated backup and deduplication, and virtual machine protection. The appliances introduced integrated data deduplication, granular recovery and virtual machine protection in one unified, easy-touse solution.”

As well as this, Lotus also partnered with Microsoft Dynamics to deploy its ERP solution to replace its previous platform, which was underperforming and lacked data security and processes.

“We did a study of about 13 different ERPs and we had 300 different points of evaluating the software. After the study, the clear number one was Dynamics,” Louis says.

“In the mean time I had touched based with SAP, which was willing to do a project with us, but SAP ranked number seven in our study. Then via Gartner we got a contact at Dynamics and it went from there.”

Driving performance with IT

Graeme Hackland, CIO, Lotus F1 Team

Louis and Hackland both stress the importance of the IT set up in terms of the overall team. The importance of IT teams has increased greatly over the last 12 months, but as Louis says, in formula one the IT has always been totally critical to the success.

“If I had no IT and data network I couldn’t even start the engines. You have to introduce two codes just to start the engine – so no IT, no race.”

Hackland adds that the challenges from a technology perspective begin long before the team arrives at the race track.

What impressed me the most about Dynamics was the flexibility, the cost implication, the speed of implementation and the after-sales service. We made a phone call in January and 40 days afterwards we made a deal.” www.cnmeonline.com

“The meticulous packing and travelling of two full cars and 30 tons of equipment whilst maintaining a full inventory, the logistical challenge of flying, transporting and hoteling over 100 engineers, mechanics, support staff and VIPs, and the hours of simulation, baseline configuration and detailed planning.

Executing the perfect weekend relies heavily on technology in one form or another.”

The Symantec appliance solution plays a huge role in keeping the team afloat in regards to backup. And since speed is such a sought after attribute in the industry, Lotus would have been extremely happy when it realised that the delivery, installation and configuration of the appliances took less than one hour before it went live.

Lotus has a huge amount of complicated tasks to fulfil each race week, and every team member is crucial. Therefore, Symantec offered the team January 2013

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case study Lotus F1

with full support during the first period of use with its solution.

“The Symantec Business Critical Services team, which is already engaged to provide firstclass expertise and responsiveness across the extensive Symantec technology estate, has also been of help to the team. They reviewed the upfront design and mirroring configuration, offering best practice guidance, advice, and knowledge,” Hackland says.

“One of the vital benefits of the appliance solution is the V-Ray technology that restores the team’s virtual servers in minutes if needed. During each race, the team relies on more than 50 virtual servers (HP DL385) running Microsoft Windows 2008. The servers underpin application services (including race telemetry and race strategy, for example), the track ActiveDirectory, DNS and print servers. The Backup Exec Appliance even supports a 20-clients strong virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) on the pitwall, where the team principal and race strategists monitor the second-by-second movements of the race.”

A changing dynamic

The Microsoft Dynamics implementation, a fully transformed ERP solution, obviously took a longer time to deploy. However, relatively speaking, Microsoft completed the implementation of the solution in very quick time, enabling Lotus to continue to focus on the season. The implementation went live the day after Raikkonen won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

“What impressed me the most about Dynamics was the f lexibility, the cost implication, the speed of implementation, and the after-sales service. We made a phone call in January and 40 days afterwards we made a deal. For me, the critical path was to get the full support of Dynamics itself. The first stage of the process was extremely fast. So between reviewing the processes and implementing, we are talking five months,” Louis says.

Both solutions have already begun showing ROI to Lotus, mostly Symantec’s Backup Exec and NetBackup solutions, due to speed or deployment.

They have saved time on subsequent deployments, reduced virtual server VMDB file size by 68%, 34

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We did a study of about 13 different ERPs and we had 300 different points of evaluating the software. After the study, the clear number one was Dynamics.” dramatically minimised downtime and data loss through rapid recovery, provided unique visibility into backing up its virtual Windows environment, and lowered costs across the board.

“Despite the fact that space and resources are limited during the race weekend, Lotus F1 Team’s overriding priority is to protect the trackside virtual servers that support our telemetry, race preparation, and other data,” Hackland explains.

“If we lost data before the race started, we wouldn’t be on the grid. If we lost data during the race, we can forget about a podium finish. The Backup Exec Appliance dramatically minimises downtime and data loss by rapidly recovering what we need, when we need it.”

Although Dynamics ERP hasn’t been able to provide such a full set of results yet, Lotus is very confident about its importance moving forward.

“As this is the first year that Microsoft Dynamics’ ERP solutions are being implemented into Lotus F1’s processes, tangible results to highlight the efficacy of the partnership will only be available further down the line. However, we expect to improve manufacturing productivity, avoid wasted resources, and deliver information safely and quickly to remote employees.”

Mission statement

Lotus F1 Team is hoping to continue revelling in the success of its recent implementations and will also be excited to take these new solutions into the 2013 season and beyond. Since taking the top prize in Abu Dhabi, the team has come out fighting and vowed to be the number one team in the world by 2014. Microsoft Dynamics and Symantec will play a pivotal role in that quest.

“In 2014 we have to hit for number one,” Louis boldly states.

“We have to go for the Championship.” www.cnmeonline.com

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Solutions world

INSIDE

The social universe

solutions world Social enterprise

The social universe It’s the biggest technology collaboration in history - one that will shape the future of IT for the next generation and possibly generations after that. It was a long time coming, but finally business and social have come together to conceive the new social enterprise - Joe Lipscombe reports.

T

he traditional IT landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade, and the way we interact, work, play and live has changed along with it. We are the online generation. Conversation, interaction, engagement and socialising have evolved into a new definition, and technology is now the critical platform on which we do those things.

It may have started by being just a personal tool which was used to keep in touch with friends, share pictures, share thoughts and meet others.

However, enterprise has now done what it does best and adopted a trend which is steam rolling its way through society and used it as the ultimate instrument.

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Analysing trends, reaching the broadest markets, connecting with customers, partners and colleagues at all times, working on multiple projects from multiple devices, and all with great ease and simplicity. These are only some of the great advantages to having a social strategy in today’s working environment. How has the social invasion on business changed the enterprise?

“Social media gives a far-reaching voice on a scale unseen before, to customers and employees who ought to be advocates of the companies that they work for,” says Fadi Salloum, Digital Marketing Program Manager, Cisco, Middle East, Africa, South Africa.

Jamil Ezzo, General Director, ICDL GCC Foundation adds: “Having a social media strategy is being the effective component and a key pillar for each small, medium or large organisation to strengthen its presence in the market and leverage its business by using one of the key tools in marketing.”

And Ian Jacobs, Social Guru, Genesys says, “Your company can become part of your customers’ social web and interact with them on their terms, not yours. This leads to greater levels of engagement and provides a better customer experience.”

A new lifestyle Social networking is a simple and accessible tool thanks to the advent of mobility and the sophistication of smart devices. On average, each person owns three smart devices currently, but by 2016 it’s predicted that there will be seven separate devices per person. The simplicity of connecting, interacting, checking in, updating, posting and viewing anything on this broad spectrum of platforms is astonishing.

Enterprise incorporated this ease with the BYOD trend, which began to allow employees to take advantage of their own devices by accessing corporate data and network servers from any device or their choice, opening files using new, sleek applications, sharing images and notes via trusted social sites and collaborating and communicating on the go via apps like Skype and FaceTime.

How have these devices changed the way employees work on a day to day basis, and is it for better or worse?

“Although some companies block social media, I believe that this is overkill. There are many benefits to social media that companies cannot ignore in areas such as customer relationships, collaboration and market research. For business-to-business providers, employees and executives are the customer making social media interaction a necessity,” says Abeer Safa, Marketing Manager, Xerox Emirates.

Sakkeer Hussain, Sales and Marketing Manager, D-Link adds: “Employees are staying up to date when connected to their company via social media and are taking better pride in the achievements of their organisation. They can share these achievements individually with their friends or followers.”

“There is no such thing as traditional IT anymore,” says Mita Srinivasan, Director, Market Buzz.

7 devices will be owned per person by 2016.

Abeer Safa, Marketing Manager, Xerox Emirates

“Smartphones and similar devices have made social media even more accessible and easy to use, giving enterprise users the opportunity to share resources easily with customers and partners.

Customers have found that 24/7 support has a new meaning - business development has a new fillip in terms of lead generation opportunities.”

Your company can become part of your customers’ social web and interact with them on their terms, not yours. This leads to greater levels of engagement and provides a better customer experience.” www.cnmeonline.com

Slow uptake Social networking certainly isn’t new in the consumer space, but it did take a while before enterprise took it seriously and began to see it as a critical tool for business. Now, the industry isn’t just using current social media avenues to assist in business, but also major vendors are beginning to develop apps and products which are heavily influenced by social platforms. This comes in the shape of simple work apps, like cloud based file sharing or video communication apps, or fully built in ERP solutions which are being totally remodelled to look exactly like networking sites, designed to allow employees to work as productively and easily as they would navigating Facebook or LinkedIn. Putting a finger on why it may have taken so long for this to happen is a tricky task. Social media certainly isn’t new.

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solutions world Social enterprise

“A lot of factors contributed to the delay in making social media a reality for the enterprise; in the beginning, social media was seen as more of a personal interaction tool. With time, and due to the high consumer demand, enterprises realised that social media is becoming a powerful tool for communication and collaboration, not only for their employees but most importantly for their consumers,” says Hassan Al Redha, Head of Marketing Communications, Ericsson, Middle East.

“The trend seen is the evolution of social media channels towards serving brands as community members. However, the domino effect is very obvious now, as the success stories of brands, or even brands developing entirely on social media, are causing a lot of the traditional enterprises to take that leap they’ve held back on.”

Salloum suggests that perhaps enterprise wasn’t convinced about the longevity of social media.

“Executives and decision makers failed to see a mapping of a ROI from forging long-term relationships on social media,” he says.

“This persuaded them that social media was just a temporary trend with no value to their business, choosing to execute the same strategies that worked decades ago. For business-to-business in particular, transactions are more complex and less prone to emotions and to interactions on social media.”

Gartner has projected a

45%

per year average growth rate for social media, social network analysis and content analysis from 2011 to 2016.

Sakkeer Hussain, Sales and Marketing Manager, D-Link

Out with the old The increase in sophistication of devices and apps does open up plenty of new avenues of opportunity for enterprise. However, somebody has to control it. Can the older generation of the company adapt to using such modern, next generation applications and technologies?

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying goes, but does that apply to industry?

“From an age perspective, companies will continue to recruit the best candidates on merit and as long as the applicant possesses the right skills, then that is what counts,” says Ezzo.

“Bearing in mind that social media is a relatively new phenomenon, there will be a tendency that the

Employees are staying up to date when connected to their company via social media and are taking better pride in the achievements of their organisation.”

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young generation will be very comfortable with it but enterprises normally require a set of skills and experience to fill a position, not just social media,” he adds.

Hussain rejects the idea that the older generation may be forced out by the younger technologies.

“I don’t necessarily think that due to social media younger people would be preferred in enterprises.

Each organisation would benefit most from having very experienced employees to young generations who are at par with new technologies,” he says.

On the one hand, embracing social media is a sure step to the future of business, in terms of analysing your coverage, exposure and results, your market feedback and your general communication.

On the other hand, businesses could still see it as just another type of value add strategy, run by the more socially savvy employees. Either way, it’s an infectious trend which has swept through enterprise and 2013 is sure to see an increase in socially based products, apps, interfaces and strategies.

The world wants to be connected, as Safa concludes.

“A well planned social media strategy allows businesses to tailor their campaigns, communications and messaging to serve them and others in the most advantageous way.”

strategic it networking partner

network world

INSIDE

A new world

network world Data centres

A new world The rise of virtualisation and cloud has revolutionised the data centre. With many touting 2013 as the year of cloud adoption pick-up, where does that leave the traditional on-premise model of storing enterprise data and the network that supports it?

T

he prolific uptake of server virtualisation is changing the traditional data centre and network by making it much easier to shift workloads from in-house servers to servers located in the cloud.

VMware estimates that between 50 and 60% of today’s enterprise workloads are now virtualised and that by 2015, 75% of x86 server workloads will be too.

The simple yet significant conclusion from this is that organisations have moved from just using server virtualisation on non-critical applications, to using it on mission-critical applications as well.

But where does that leave the traditional data centre?

“The data centre is impacted as we no longer have to size in-house data centres for peak capacity workloads, because now they can be shifted easily to the cloud. The network impact means we now need a better network to the cloud to handle these mission critical workloads,” says Mervyn Kelly, EMEA Marketing Director, Ciena.

As such, virtualisation and cloud computing have changed the way data is received and processed.

The concept is based on shared resources and the centralisation of network servers, applications and content. So any application being utilised will be delivered over the network instead of being locally processed.

“Virtualisation has increased dramatically the volume of data moving within the data centre,” says Ciaran Forde, VP, Enterprise, MEA, CommScope.

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Ciaran Forde, VP, Enterprise, MEA, CommScope

“As the number of virtual machines on a single physical device increases, so too does the amount of data moving in and out of that physical device. This increased demand is in turn driving the demand for 10, 40 and 100G connectivity, either to top-of-rack switches or in some cases directly to the servers. Data centre designs need to be able to satisfy these needs and provide a cost effective growth path to support faster speeds in the future.”

For years before this virtualisation, networking was static in architecture and basically standardised.

VMware estimates that between 50 and

60% of today’s enterprise workloads are now virtualised.

Mervyn Kelly, EMEA Marketing Director, Ciena

“What’s needed is a lean packet approach converging packet and optical technologies to provide the required scalability and deterministic performance. The next step is making this network more agile and dynamic through software defined networking (SDN) approaches for a fully programmable network.”

According to Sachin Bhardwaj, Head of Marketing and Business Development, eHDF, it’s all about managing resources in the right manner.

“Therefore, cloud may not be the solution applicable to everyone. There are a number of factors to be considered, like the nature of the organisation, time to market, scalability, flexibility and time to deploy required by the organisation. You don’t need cloud for all applications. It is good for certain scenarios which provide more value to businesses. For example, SMEs can avail of advantages from cloud services for particular business requirements,” he says.

Whilst cloud may not be for everyone and all data, the benefits of moving away from on-premise remain clear.

“One of the major benefits is that energy consumption is reduced by 40 per cent as compared to other traditional data centre set-ups,” Bahder says.

“The approach complements CFO-set objectives like lowered operational costs and a greener operation, which gives greater competitive advantage. Other benefits include improvements across bandwidth, commodity server market, grid computing and database and network storage systems.”

Ismair adds: “Today there is a massive shift in how people consume information at the very edges of the network. Fueled by the promise of cloud, mobility and today’s data-rich applications, the network itself

However, recent developments have shown that innovation and shifting market forces have made networking one of the most dynamic technology sectors to follow, says Luai Bahder, Technical Director, Smartworld.

“Enterprises are reinventing their campus and data centre networks while veteran networking professionals are scrambling to keep on top of all the volatility,” he says.

Whilst the hype of cloud computing was undoubtedly very high in 2012, the actual adoption rates remain low.

Despite this, many analyst predict that 2013 may well be the year where CIOs stop talking about it and start implementing it.

“One of the most compelling reasons for migrating to the cloud is greater agility in an increasingly dynamic business environment,” says Samer Ismair, MENA Systems Engineer, Brocade Communications.

Necessary networking But to achieve this objective, a network is required that reduces complexity, supports distributed applications and increases overall performance.

Kelly agrees. He says more organisations will start to realise their cloud strategy is only as good as their cloud network.

“As cloud workloads expand from SaaS (software-asa-service) to data heavy IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), network limitations of an Internet or IP centric network begin affecting the quality of the cloud experience,” he says. www.cnmeonline.com

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network world Data centres

is undergoing a transformation. The Ethernet fabrics represent a new class of data networking technology that is purpose-built for highly virtualised data centres and designed to help organisations migrate to clouds.”

Bhardwaj refers to the widely expected growth in the managed services market as enterprises continue to invest in data centre technologies but not building their own infrastructure.

“There is a tangible and growing desire to increase efficiencies by looking at the lease option,” he says.

“Managed services have increasingly gained popularity in the region and we have seen further investments in data centre services and managed services in 2012.”

Despite the benefits, making the transition to the cloud involves a lot of decision making and the success of the deployment very much depends on the readiness of the infrastructure.

“Decision makers must be careful not to opt for a data centre that fails to deliver the required performance,” says Zaher Haydar, Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East, EMC. “Another tricky aspect of moving to the cloud is associated with the service level agreements and lack of regulations to monitor performance against these agreements.”

Cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services state they want

100% of the data centre business.

Samer Ismair, MENA Systems Engineer, Brocade Communications

“This is the most likely scenario for many organisations in the region,” says Yannick Kunegel, Systems Engineering Manager at Citrix Systems EEMEA. “Confidential data remain secure in the data centre while non-confidential data is stored on the cloud. It enables the concept of ‘follow me data’ for internal users, as well as easy data sharing with business partners or customers for non-confidential data.”

Kunegel also makes the argument for maintaining 100% on-premise data, especially in regions like the Middle East with data regulations that make it hard to utilise the cloud.

“Some organisations still have to comply with strict regulation laws that make it difficult for them to leverage public cloud services.”

But he adds that the requirement for success is to ensure that the organisation can adapt to and capture value from any situation it may encounter.

On the other hand, Kelly offers the business case for having no information in an on-premise data centre.

“Cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services state they want 100 percent of the data centre business and that might make sense for some organisations, especially those without substantial investments in their own facilities. The cloud providers are setting tough service cost benchmarks for inhouse data centre managers to match or exceed,” he says.

“As a result, organisations need to consolidate and maximise the efficiency of their on-premise data centre resources. New network capabilities are helping to blur the distinction between on-premise and cloud resources.

Intelligent cloud networked environments are here today and will become stronger in the future.”

Old school With this in mind, drivers for an in-house data centre do remain strong – namely, control, security and the non reliance on the WAN connection.

“Companies are still nervous about storing and processing their critical and confidential data within a facility owned by somebody else and indeed shared with other companies, possibly competitors,” Forde says.

“There is still a comfort factor associated with knowing where the data is and who has access. WAN connectivity is another issue. When you move to a hosted service, connectivity to the facility is critical any failure of the WAN connection can bring the business to a halt.”

However, Haydar says these perceptions about control and security in the cloud are wrong.

“Most enterprises feel more secure about an on premise data centre as they have the perception of being more in control of their data and do not have to worry about data falling into the wrong hands. This is commonly misunderstood, for often cloud service providers can offer more security and better protection than internal IT teams.”

Right or wrong, the fact remains that the reservations do remain. As a result, hybrid clouds – where non-critical data can be stored in the cloud whilst mission-critical information remains on premise – are emerging as the most popular implementations.

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

Strategic IT Storage Partner

storage advisor

INSIDE

Ditching restrictions

storage advisor File sharing in the cloud

Ditching restrictions File sharing is a critical, sensitive and valuable task for companies in all verticals.

It’s costly, involves patching, management, and brings complications to international transactions. Is ditching VPNs and file servers and adopting SaaS the answer for all?

I

t’s been a long time since employees shared files by lobbing floppy disks around the office. File servers were the ultimate tool for storing sensitive data, allowing the right people in and the right material out. But there’s a new cat in town.

Virtualising servers and data centres might be changing the role of the ever comfortable IT buff in the corner, however, that might not be such a bad thing.

Rolling with the punches

Technology is an industry that moves 50

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very quickly and as a result certain areas are forced to adjust and adapt to remain relevant, safe, and, importantly, at a high enough standard for its patrons. Technology very much has to roll with the punches.

This type of industry will stack up the body count of casualties and this particular topic is no different.

However, IT managers won’t be weeping at the wake of VPNs and file servers when they weigh up the alternatives. The BYOD trend has increased the challenges of server management, www.cnmeonline.com

with a high number of endpoint devices accessing servers from anywhere around the world and at anytime, some of which may be very difficult to identify. In which case, storage of sensitive data and sharing files needs to be safer, clearer, more accessible and of course more manageable.

“Today’s mobility era stimulates the usage of corporate mail accounts and webmail on mobile devices, which is one of the main trends in the corporate sphere.

Mobile messaging applications such as BBM and Whatsapp are also being used

increasingly for file sharing. These changes are therefore viewed as the main trends in file sending and receiving in today’s business world,” Alex Zarovsky, International Business Chief, InfoWatch, puts it plainly.

Florian Malecki, Product Marketing Manager, EMEA, Dell SonicWALL, stresses the point of how vital the influx of mobile devices has been on the change in file management.

“This has changed drastically from traditional methods. Businesses were once comfortable knowing that information was shared in a safe environment,” he says.

“But with the advent of smartphones and tablets users can access information anywhere and anytime which may present challenges for organisations.”

Yannick Kunegel, Systems Engineering Manager, Citrix Systems, EEMEA, looks forward to how the changes will evolve over time, now that cloud has fully announced itself in Middle East business, it’s easier to track the trends.

“In the PC era, data was typically stored on a single personal computer, accessed from a physical office and shared via flash drives or email. As the industry transitions to the cloud era, an increasingly mobile workforce is demanding easy access to data that is untethered from offices and devices, and easy to share and collaborate securely with others. These trends are giving rise to the concept of a ‘personal cloud’ – the aggregation of apps, data, preferences and friends that are unique to each individual employee, and move seamlessly across any device or location.”

In 2012, worldwide SaaS revenue was forecast to reach

$14.5bn

Yannick Kunegel, Systems Engineering Manager, Citrix Systems, EEMEA

Wandering data

As with any hallelujah trend which makes its way into enterprise, there is always a dark side. The difficulties of cloud data and file sharing must be known, however, mitigating these risks will be the major talking point for IT managers and SaaS vendors worldwide.

The traditional data centre would hold all files and data and be able to simply identify which outside

As the industry transitions to the cloud era, an increasingly mobile workforce is demanding easy access to data that is untethered from offices and devices, and easy to share and collaborate securely with others.

These trends are giving rise to the concept of a ‘personal cloud’.” www.cnmeonline.com

sources were attempting to access the information.

Keeping tabs on the material was one of the tasks for IT teams, but now that task has evolved. Employees want to have their information on a number of devices and they want to access that data from any location.

Mobility and BYOD is all about limiting restrictions and this is the crux of the problem for management.

Once files are lifted from traditional file servers and placed into the cloud, they can become the responsibility of third party hosts, which limits the control of the IT team. However, the more important point to make is that once those files are shared across a number of devices and locations, they become the responsibility of someone who might not be fully prepped on the seriousness of information security – the employee/customer.

“The reality however is that users are using cloud based storage in their personal life, and as they realise its value, they’re bringing it to work, hence exposing corporate data to risk. IT is left with two options; either blocking the use of these insecure services and reducing business productivity, or allowing their use.

This justifies the need for a secure, managed service that allows IT to determine how sensitive data is stored, accessed and shared,” Kunegel says.

Malecki adds to this point: “If you don’t control the data that is downloaded onto your device and you lose that device, all of that data is at risk, which exposes your company. If IT didn’t have any protections for the data on these devices, the problems would be very clear.”

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storage advisor File sharing in the cloud

Cloud providers do have answers however. Kunegel promptly adds that a number of precautions have been taken in order to stop these events from having any further consequences.

“Advanced security features including remote wipe, device lock and data expiration policies are required for a complete control of enterprise data.

Robust reporting and auditing features are needed for IT to track and log user activity in real time and create custom reports to meet corporate data policies and compliance requirements,” he says.

Zarovsky highlights the importance of the product when considering cloud options for data storage and sharing.

“As the data stored in the cloud is managed by cloud services providers, it is very important to choose the right vendor. A reliable provider must not only undertake technical measures for data protection but also strictly follow data security compliance. In other words, the provider should be responsible for the confidentiality of a client’s sensitive data.”

By 2015, worldwide SaaS revenue is projected to reach

$22.1bn

Alex Zarovsky, International Business Chief, InfoWatch

convenient and reliable e-channel for selling goods and commodities or offering different services. Cloud based sharing is one of the most convenient, costeffective and logical services for these verticals,” Zarovsky says.

Kunegel hones in on ways in which these high value verticals can benefit from this technology.

“Any vertical can potentially benefit from cloud based storage solutions. On one hand, it increases productivity of mobile workers. On the other hand, as organisations move towards a paperless environment, it simplifies data sharing with business partners and customers,” he explains.

“In the manufacturing sector for instance, there is usually a need for sharing large documents between all parties involved in a project. Email is not appropriate and FTP services are not very user friendly, not to mention lack of security during transfers. In HealthCare, x-ray or MRI images could be easily shared not only with patients, but also with specialists working from different locations in order to leverage their expertise and help in the diagnostic process.”

The future of technology is always geared towards extending safety, increasing speed and performance, and enhancing user experience. The cloud based file and data sharing option appears to be a no-brainer for businesses in all sectors that wish to easily collaborate, transfer, connect and receive between each other internally and externally.

The limitations of the past have been answered with such technology, now it’s just up to users to ditch the restrictions and move to the cloud.

An offer you can’t refuse

The top software and storage providing vendors all offer extremely strong file sharing solutions, a lot of which aren’t brand new. Products like these are a surefire benefit for all businesses, but which businesses would benefit the most from products that ensure quick, seamless and safe document management?

“The main function of IT in healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing and banking channels is providing a

Florian Malecki, Product Marketing Manager, EMEA, Dell SonicWALL

52

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security advisor

INSIDE

Losing the battle

security advisor Re-evaluating infrastructure

Losing the battle In the war between IT security and hackers, few would disagree that the latter were victorious in 2012. As highprofile and damaging breaches continue to bight even the most secure enterprises, CNME asks whether it is time for IT teams to re-evaluate their infrastructure?

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S

ecurity shot up the priority list of not just CIOs but also higher management in 2012 as the world witnessed the effects of countless breaches on top organisations.

As a fresh year presents itself, several questions are keeping them awake at night. Namely, are we next? And, is our infrastructure strong enough?

It seems that investing in the top security solutions available are not enough. Technology is constantly evolving, and so is the IT threat landscape. Subsequently, it is all extremely difficult to keep up with.

“If we look back over the last year, it’s clear that attackers have been able to breach the security defences of many enterprises,” says David Emm, Senior Regional Researcher, Global Research and Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab. Despite this, Emm is reluctant to admit that hackers are ‘winning the war’ against security solutions.

“For one thing, it’s important to remember that security breaches make headlines, not ‘malware fails to penetrate enterprises across the globe’,” he says.

“For another, security is not like a TV – i.e. either on or off. Rather, it’s a process, and one that takes in many different aspects – including security software, strategy, staff awareness and more.”

Robert Lipovsky, Malware Researcher, ESET, emphasises the human element as a key factor in the victories hackers have accumulated in the last year.

“We’re seeing a shift in terms of infection vectors from the machine to the human side so there is lots of sophisticated malware that is exploding and some software vulnerabilities, but it’s much easier for them to exploit human vulnerabilities through things like social engineering. It can be easy to trick humans to open or download things. I would hope that businesses have policies set up about software patching and updates, but where they often lack is employee education.”

Whilst the human element is undeniably a significant factor, and it is of course true that big breaches garner more attention than failed attacks, the fact remains that security has evidently failed on numerous occasions.

This is simply down to the fact that data is now born to be free and shared and as such a significant re-evaluation is required, according to Miguel Braojos, VP of Sales Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa (SEMEA), SafeNet. “Successive data breaches, big and small, are highlighting how breach prevention that focuses on protecting the network simply isn’t working. While the determination of hackers is a great part of the problem, a prime reason 20 years of breach prevention is unravelling is down to our changing relationship with the data itself.

“Traditional perimeter defences are failing because they are so out of step with how much we need to share

By 2016, worldwide security spend is forecasted to reach

$86bn Alaa Abdulnabi, Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey Emerging Africa and Middle East, RSA.

data about ourselves to live our digital lives. Indeed the compulsion to share and exchange our data is what hackers exploit. So a fundamental change of security posture needs to take place.”

The big question Once an organisation has accepted that this fundamental change is necessary, the next big question is, how?

According to Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services, help AG, the process of re-evaluation should be centred on solid planning.

“Once all of the base security in an organisation has been addressed, the more in-depth enhancements of security should then take place where each and every identified risk is mitigated with the correct policies, processes and, ultimately, technical solutions,” he says.

Enterprises and decision makers need to understand that there is no single product, system, policy or practice which can deliver 100% certainty or protection, says Alaa Abdulnabi, Regional Pre-Sales Manager, Turkey Emerging Africa and Middle East, RSA. “Organisations must be ready to revise their strategies based on the proactive measures, they must anticipate unpredictable attacks. This way they are armed with the right tools and measures to minimise the damage associated with an unexpected breach without wasting any time. The new approach should be based on the fact that breaches are part of everyday life and it is only a matter of time. The aim today is to be ready when the breach happens,” he says.

Jamil Ezzo, General Director, ICDL GCC Foundation, adds that enterprises should look from the ground up by reviewing the policies, procedures, systems and skills.

“IT is an integral part of business today so it needs to be on the business agenda, not only the IT agenda. www.cnmeonline.com

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security advisor Re-evaluating infrastructure

Senior management needs to take overall responsibility as it requires a holistic approach. Also, sufficient time and resources need to be allocated to the evaluation process.”

When it comes to making those changes, the first and most significant thing that needs to change is the general outlook of security.

The goal of security must shift from primarily protecting the perimeter to continuously monitoring both the external and internal environment to detect threats early and minimise damage, Abdulnabi says.

“Security can no longer be lumped up with compliance regulations or procedures as the slow, structured nature of compliance activities do little to protect IT environments. Today, enterprises require a security analytics system that can collect, manage and study a much wider scope of security data.”

Everyday, there are more than

1.5m cybercrime victims around the world.

Knowing your enemies Braojos says by knowing exactly who the enemies are and what they are after, enterprises can stay one step ahead.

“You don’t protect yourself against these kinds of sophisticated organisations by building a bigger wall around your house - they will simply build a bigger ladder.

You protect yourself by making it so difficult to access what they crave - which is always your data - that they give up and move on to someone else,” he says.

“In business terms, you create a very poor return on their investment in trying to steal your data. How do you do this? You put yourself in the mindset of your adversary and understand what they want to steal from you. From there, you’ll quickly realise that protection must be moved

Jamil Ezzo, General Director of ICDL GCC Foundation.

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closer to what really matters - the data itself. Encryption is an ROI killer for any would-be attacker.”

Security infrastructure is shifting from point products to an enterprise-integrated approach based on key foundation elements that allow proactive alerting, real time monitoring, analytical correlation, predictive threat management and simple management.

Subsequently, most security solutions can be solved by taking a look at people, their data, the apps they use and the infrastructure they cross, according to Niraj Mathur, BDM-INS Services Practice, GBM. “Security is always about in-depth defence with a layered approach to mitigate risks. Organisations must evaluate and deploy technology, keeping in mind their business needs and the threat landscape. Processes must be implemented to mitigate risks, as well as reviewed and updated regularly to keep up with today’s threat landscape,” Mathur says.

Solling says an enterprise needs to have the right information security strategy in place with organisational and technical requirements suitably aligned.

“Security roadmaps needs to have a phased approach where visibility is a cornerstone. You can only control what you can see and apply the policies accordingly.

Simple things like privileged password management, two factor authentication and patch management need to be in place and need ongoing maintenance.”

The strategy should be one that’s specifically tailored to the needs of that business, Emm adds. “Not one based solely on a generic best practices template or centred around ‘guestimates’ of the overall cost of cybercrime.

“What’s important is gauging how malware has impacted the business historically and how it might do so in the future. It’s also important to measure the effectiveness of the security tools the business uses and to have a process for updating the strategy to meet new threats as they arise.”

The need for a chief security officer or dedicated security team has been debated in IT circles for a while.

If an enterprise decides a re-evaluation of infrastructure is required to suit modern security threats, the time for a CSO has arrived.

“It is no longer possible for the IT team to ensure security and best practices implementation across all systems at all times. It is always burdened with time pressures and limited resources,” Mathur says. “it is very important that an internal, independent and dedicated team be formed to work in tandem with the IT teams. The CSO in such organisations would report to top management and ensure appropriate attention is given to security threats. With most organisations wanting to adopt best practices, it is more important than ever to form a dedicated risk and compliance team.”

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integration advisor

INSIDE

Serving up 2013

integration advisor New services

Serving up 2013 The experts have spoken and predictions for the most influential technology trends of 2013 have been laid out. With cloud still gaining momentum, big data getting bigger and companies searching for better run managed solutions, what locker of services can be expected in the next 12 months.

T

he IT market has witnessed a change in direction recently and the increased need for systems integrators to sweep in and smoothly oversee complex transitions for businesses big and small has become more and more vital – their services keep the emerging market rising.

These days, businesses are looking for not only an integrator to help implement solutions which they may be on the lookout for, but also to provide support and management in the time that follows. With many companies opting for best of breed and best of suite solutions, the race is on for vendors to be as competitive as ever with their products and services.

Key services that businesses have shown most interest in over the past year have been; disaster recovery, due to the ever increasing threat landscape; LTE deployment, for moving towards 4G networks; cloud projects, whether hybrid solutions or publically managed SaaS; and outsourcing projects.

What kind of businesses are looking for these services and what will the demand be like in the coming year?

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“We are seeing an increased demand for our services from large scale government led projects like airport expansions and eTransformation projects,” says Mohannad Jabateh, Sales Manager, Smartworld.

“Mobile operators will focus their investments around three main topics - understanding and managing the customer experience, monetising investments in the mobile data infrastructure, and increasing the efficiencies of their operations,” says Klaus Middeler, Head of Strategy and Market Development, Operations and Business Support Systems, Ericsson ME. “Vendors will need to proactively think of ideas, solutions and best practices to address these issues. SI players need to be trusted advisers as well as integration partners.”

Dominic Docherty, Managing Director, BIOS ME, sees another kind of theme making ground.

“Managed services will become a big growth area during 2013, especially as companies begin to realise the scale of economies that service providers can offer. www.cnmeonline.com

Anywhere that has a branch office and currently has a full time IT manager or administrator can benefit,” he says.

A major area of focus, at any time in business, is cost cutting and reducing outgoings. Using best of breed solutions can help with total cost of ownership. This trend is highly adopted, as well as more recently, best of suite. How do these types of transactions affect the SI market?

“Ongoing consolidations are shaping the market for telecommunication vendors. Room for small, niche players has decreased and SI partners are required to deliver end-to-end,” says Middeler.

“The trend from best of breed to best of suite is favouring software companies like Ericsson, which are able to design their roadmaps to deliver pre-integrated solutions more efficiently.”

Jabateh believes that the want of multivendor solutions has played its part in the growing health of the SI market.

“Companies and organisations in the region are now making use of multi-vendors

as a main driver in enhancing the total cost of ownership and the quality of services, which has in turn given customers more options to choose from.”

And as Docherty says, this collaboration and commitment to providing the best overall solution for the customers isn’t just a passing phase.

“Multi-vendor solutions are nothing new and they aren’t going to be going away any time soon. If you want to really meet the needs of your customer, you have to choose the solution that is right for their unique goals and objectives,” he says.

“Sometimes a single vendor solution will be right for them, but often it won’t be. If you take virtualisation for example, you often require two to three vendors’ solutions to be able to offer a comprehensive product that addresses a customer’s needs. In addition, there are certain vendors that don’t offer a full set of solutions. For example, there are pure storage vendors that don’t offer compute or networking solutions and vice versa. In these situations, reference architectures such as Flexpod or vSpecs, and at the upper level converged solutions from the likes of VMware, Cisco and EMC, can act as single vendor solutions. We partner all three of these for just this reason.”

Partnering up With the added complexity of recent technologies such as cloud services, sophisticated security measures, BYOD strategies and mobility applications, partnering up for successful deployments and seamless integrations is still a crucial step in ensuring professional, fast and high quality services.

“The need for partners is vital. Even in accounts that are handled directly by the vendors, they still require a partner to install and configure and support a solution,” says Docherty.

Ericsson’s Middeler also maintains that the partnering of companies will continue to be a vital piece in the puzzle.

“Today’s system integrators must be able to manage a complex supply chain composed of various players,” he says.

“Local competence, off-shore delivery, business process consultants and vendor-specific SIs need to play together to deliver an integrated solution. Isolated engagements are rare and the capability to work with partners for cost efficiency or to complement skill sets is paramount.”

Jabateh adds to this, stressing the point that due to the increase of sophistication throughout IT services in recent years, partner excellence remains a must.

“Consequently, there will always be strong need to find the right partners in implementing new services.

This is especially true in addressing IT needs as

Dominic Docherty, Managing Director, BIOS Middle East

Market consolidation will displace up to

20%

of the top 100 IT services providers.

www.cnmeonline.com

demands have become more sophisticated and also more specific.”

Emerging needs The Middle East continues to grow and expand, and the emerging market owes much to the skill and pace of major vendors and their increasing dedication to the region. It looks like it’s going to be a very exciting year for the Middle East and systems integrators will continue to play their part in the buzz. How will the upcoming trends and services impact the current set up?

“At the end of the day, all efforts will result in a better and more diverse product offering towards the consumer. In the background, we will see further consolidations of product and services vendors and streamlined operations of networks,” says Middeler.

“The emergence of these new services will have a clear impact on the operational aspects of today’s companies, enterprises and organisations. In addition, these new services will also impact on the skills set needed in implementing and operating these services resulting in an increased demand for ICT products and services in the Middle East,” adds Jabateh.

Docherty, at local company BIOS, extends this point, personally demonstrating how such services help companies.

“These services can help companies reduce their overheads, while gaining scalability and business agility. Companies invest in technology for two main reasons, either to save money or to make money with new services and offerings – technology for the sake of technology is not part of our message.”

We have seen many big trends come and go in IT. However, never has IT in itself been used so much as January 2013

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integration advisor New services

By 2016, the integration of data on mobile devices will represent

20%

of integration spending.

Klaus Middeler, Head of Strategy and Market Development, Operations and Business Support Systems, Ericsson ME

a service. Therefore, SaaS and IaaS have completely changed the way that systems integrators operate.

The Middle East will continue to seek out the best services and attempt to improve its standing as a region

across the globe. How effective have recent services been to Middle East companies?

“Recent studies have shown that the most effective services are IT managed services and consolidation efforts to improve overall IT service levels and quality to a business. Also identified as effective are initiatives to utilise IT to reduce corporate running costs and reducing the cost of IT itself, which positions IT infrastructure as energy efficient tools,” says Jabateh.

Middeler makes the case for another service: “Where cloud is the most bespoken service, outsourcing is the most successful,” he says.

“Some operators believe managing their customer is more important to them than managing a network.”

2013 is shaping up to be another year of big investments for Middle East companies as they attempt to build on a very successful 2012. The economy continues to improve and businesses continue to splash out on high calibre products and solutions in order to keep one step ahead of the competition – competition which presumably will also continue to grow.

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In Association with

Telecoms World

INSIDE

Vital connections

telecoms World Telecoms in 2013

Vital connections

The technology behind mobile communications continues to wow consumers and enterprises alike, but with the latter demanding more and more connectivity to be able to embrace mobility and the consumerisation of IT, the pressure is on the telecoms industry. CNME examines how it will fare in 2013.

W

ith technology continuing to develop at a rapid pace, 2012 was an eventful year for the Middle East telecoms industry.

As mobility has taken and continues to take the enterprise world by storm, strong connectivity has become a priority business requirement.

Furthermore, as companies continue to become more global, collaboration has become a hot topic to maintain effective communication.

According to Nader Baghdadi, ME Regional Sales Director, Ruckus, the major telecoms trends of 2012 were the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon, data offload and cloud, which all linked to the significance of Wi-Fi. “All of these topics reinforced Wi-Fi as the solution for being connected and on the move with your data,” he says.

Much of the attention in the telecoms industry in 2012 focused on the emerging trend of software defined networking (SDN).

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However, this was because 2012 was a major planning and redefinition cycle, which generated a lot of publicity, according to Eric Sele, VP of Sales, Southern and Central Europe, MEA, Ciena.

“The real stories of 2012 were the mass market deployments of 100G, the general acceptance of optical transport network (OTN) switching and transport across the globe, the steady march of carrier Ethernet into enterprises of all sizes, and the realisation that LTE small cells will be the next big backhaul problem to be solved,” he says.

Speaking specifically of the Middle East market, there was a heightened competition which encouraged a lot of innovation on both the services and infrastructure layer, says Shi Yaohong, President, Huawei ME. “Mobile broadband offerings in particular have matured rapidly over the past year, with many consumers now able to enjoy new HSPA+ and LTE telecom experiences at speeds far surpassing traditional levels. This www.cnmeonline.com

evolution has required service providers, regulators and even vendors to revamp many of their core operations and standards so as to fully leverage the extraordinary capacity of these technologies.”

In alignment with more extensive fibre rollouts in countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman, telecom networks have also supported the growth of many e-government initiatives in 2012 within the fields of healthcare, education and transportation, Yaohong adds.

“We feel that managed services are also playing a more significant role in the regional telecom industry. Outsourcing ICT infrastructure is no new phenomenon, but more than ever managed services models are being used by operators as a prime differentiator to simplify network management and swiftly respond to customer needs tapping a wide pool of third-party global experts and industry leading tools to optimise their network potential.”

Hive of activity Despite the Middle East being a varied region with many different circumstances, Sele says there was a huge amount of telecoms activity across the region in 2012.

“Major network modernisation projects are taking place, featuring resilient mesh architectures and 100G transport. Several locations in the Middle East are at the crossroads between the East and the West, and this represents a huge opportunity for service providers, which many are taking advantage of,” he says.

Baghdadi adds the experience of Middle East telecoms companies has been in line with other key telecoms companies across the globe.

He refers to the impending shift between 3G and 4G as one of the common trends.

“EMEA telecoms companies have been pushing 3G offers and services to their customers. They are getting ready to launch 4G in 2013 and are working on 3/4G offload. Major developments in public hotspots to help 3G and 4G networks have been taking place across the region. Several locations in EMEA straddle both the East and the West, and this represents a huge opportunity for service providers.”

Yaohong agrees that the expansion of 4G networks in the Middle East is certain to gain momentum over the course of 2013.

“This will include greater network penetration in markets already equipped with 4G technologies, as well as opening up 4G channels in new markets.”

However, from a TCO perspective he points to a challenge in the often high initial investment required in undertaking 4G networks such as LTE and fibre.

“This in turn requires having a long-term vision for the network, locally-relevant 4G applications and service content, as well as extending third-party partnerships based on mutual interest that can propel the ecosystem forward,” he says.

He also alludes to the general potential of the Middle East with many operators and governments continuing to take bold steps to advance their telecom infrastructure in line with the latest global technologies available.

“This is reinforced perhaps by the huge diversity seen between the different countries of the region. Some are very wealthy and mature technologically, while others are still developing their economies and their infrastructure.

If we look at this spectrum, one might suppose that telecom services would be more robust in the wealthy markets, yet this is not necessarily the case,” he says.

Moving into 2013, it is predicted that the rise of enterprise mobility and increase in smartphone and

Nader Baghdadi, ME Regional Sales Director, Ruckus

tablet penetration in the workplace will continue to influence the telecoms industry.

“Mobility is everywhere,” Baghdadi says. “This will of course increase public hotspots, the need for reliable connections and high density support. It signifies more bandwidth and network capacity, meaning HetNets (heterogeneous networks) and mixing 3/4G and Wi-Fi. New mobile apps will appear for both business and leisure putting even more pressure on networks.”

Heavier demand This rise of enterprise mobility coupled with greater device penetration is sure to lead to a heavier demand on mobile networks for fast, rich multimedia content.

Operators will need to continue acting swiftly and efficiently to corral this data, understanding and responding to their customer needs through intelligent network solutions that can facilitate instant, on-demand access for individuals as well as enterprises, Yaohong says.

“By extending the use of technology such as cloud computing and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, operators can combat anticipated revenue stagnation in traditional service sectors by focusing on the workplace in 2013.”

Sele adds that M2M and video will drive the need for video transport to distant edge caching servers, driving inter data traffic in bulk transfers sizes not previously seen.

Furthermore, enterprise mobility will cause potential bottlenecks at the existing cell towers, forcing upgrades in backhaul capacity, he says.

“It will also stimulate the growth of small cells in between the macro cells, which will relieve the congestion www.cnmeonline.com

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telecoms World Telecoms in 2013

and simultaneously force new backhaul paths to be built, and small cells will drive expansion of millimetre wave and microwave fixed radios as Ethernet backhaul paths.”

On the topic of network visibility, which was a key demand for organisations in 2012, its criticality is set to continue in 2013.

“The migration from centralised to distributed visibility will continue, giving enterprises and wholesale users a clear view of what traffic they are using, and ideas to support decisions on how to optimise,” Sele says.

Being aware of what’s happening on a network and planning solutions for any disruptions are now crucial, Baghdadi adds.

“More and more companies rely on their Wi-Fi network to increase business and encourage employees to bring their own devices. Network is back on the high priorities list of working services, like CRM or security.”

However, Sele sees the most major trend in 2012 as service providers finding new ways to monetise their networks by offering services with various granularities not previously seen.

Shi Yaohong, President of Huawei ME

The worldwide forecast of spend on telecom services in 2012 was projected to hit

$1.66tn

Eric Sele, VP of Sales, Southern and Central Europe, MEA, Ciena

“This will be largely driven by the traffic demands of inter data centre traffic,” he says.

Yaohong rounds up his conclusion of 2013 by emphasising the fact the telecoms industry is only on the edge of discovering broadband’s full potential – particularly in the mobile space.

“In order to achieve continued success in the Middle East, we foresee some of the major development trends including greater interoperability of mobile networks, the proliferation of 4G-compatible devices and the establishment of new business models that allow operators to sufficiently monetise and grow their portfolios in the data realm,” he says.

“A key element to this transformation will be the adoption of new operation and business support systems.

Rapid advancements have been made in this field over the past year, with today’s tools able to more effectively support network configuration and inventory on the operation side, as well as back more efficient customer care, and process collections on the business front.”

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careers advisor

INSIDE

strategic it networking Strategic IT partner Storage Partner The generation game

careers advisor Battle of generations

The generation game 2013 is the year of next-generation technologies; socially friendly applications, attractive new interfaces and tech savvy devices – perfect for the new user. But where does that leave the IT veterans?

Joe Lipscombe investigates the IT landscape for the upcoming year.

I

T has gone through a very rigorous transformation from traditional products and services to a completely fresh, virtual and futuristic environment. ERP and CRM interfaces are becoming more socially based – taking their design from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. As we know, these sites are targeted at all ages, but certainly a large emphasis is focused towards the younger generation. This would suggest that the resulting products which are making their way aggressively into market would be targeted towards the next generation of user. The newly graduated potentials and younger developers and designers.

The Middle East is known for being a place where the young can progress quickly if they apply themselves.

This certainly adds to the competition in the region and makes the IT industry a very healthy and energetic sector.

In which case, product developers, vendors and resellers are battling it out in stiff competition to accommodate this generation and provide the tools which can maximise productivity and help increase revenue.

Never before has a generation had as many individual devices, been as mobile in its working environment or demanded such speed and accessibility as the one that is making its way into industry now. But with all this attention and market reaction to this upcoming wave of IT professionals, one might be forgiven for slightly neglecting the veterans who shaped the industry into what it is today.

Where does each generation fit in regards to the transitional period that we’re moving into?

Toneya Sarwar, HR Operations Manager, Cisco, takes the stance that in the Middle East the younger generation isn’t actually ready to take the helm.

“The economic downturn we witnessed in recent years is giving the ICT sector tremendous opportunity to transform our global community for generations to come,” she says.

“Today, we are witnessing the next wave of innovation and productivity growth fuelled by the

Internet and centred around a combination of networked technologies, video and social networking, and have the potential to transform the global standard of living with a speed and efficiency far greater than what we thought was possible. Until the youth population is better educated in the new technologies and becomes more integrated into the world economy, we will need to continue to rely on the older, better trained generation.”

Perhaps this issue is a result of less interest in the industry, or a more relaxed attitude to education?

Industry is certainly making more of an effort to approach the youth than ever before by developing working tools which coincide with the way they live and socialise on a daily basis. How does the educational outlook appear in the Middle East?

“Today’s youth are attaining higher levels of education as school enrolment has risen markedly.

Yet, MENA countries still urgently need to improve the quality of education to prepare the young labour force for today’s job market and help them become productive members of their society,” says Sarwar.

However, Wael El Nadi, Senior Director, EMC Global Services Organisation, has a different opinion, claiming the learning process perhaps isn’t the issue after all, but instead is based more around the human elements of the job. Something which may be a result of a less personally engaging upbringing born from the advent of social media.

“The majority of the students come to the market ready for work from a technical viewpoint. However, some of them lack the interpersonal skills required for the job, but they do gain the necessary skills on the job as they integrate into their organisations over real-time scenarios,” El Nadi says.

But opportunity beckons for all in this emerging market, so the competition will continue to be fierce and lively.

“The Middle East market is an emerging market with high growth in the IT industry compared to

17% of CIOs plan to expand their IT departments in Q1 2013, up from 9% in the prior quarter.

careers advisor Battle of generations

mature markets in other parts of the world. As a result, many organisations are growing their current IT infrastructure and systems which in turn leads to many job vacancies within the market,” El Nadi highlights.

Rewarding loyalty And Sarwar agrees that, for this reason, companies are still keen to keep a hold onto their senior staff members and are prepared to reward them for their loyalty in this market.

“Employees who excel in their fields are still in high demand by most of the large companies who continuously try to retain their key employees by offering premium salaries and benefits,” she says.

At Cisco, it’s certainly more than just youth and ripe enthusiasm which is desired when building the team.

“We are typically on the lookout for individuals with a background in the software, hardware and systems engineering fields. Depending on the position, the desired skills and experience may include security, routing and switching, network platform design, technical consulting, digital high-speed design, logic simulation, or hardware testing and certification. The ability to travel is also

sometimes listed as a requirement.”

Of course, perhaps the new trends in industry do not appeal to the older generation as much as before.

Certainly if you’re used to working in a nine to five environment, the way that the industry is going is totally different. We no longer work a regular day, instead we are equipped with the tools to be as productive as possible and many of the younger workers coming through may find themselves being more productive at different times of the day. This may be a result of using computers and technology in the evenings, which would be certainly less frequent 10 or 20 years before.

“Collaboration tools and video conferencing, simple investments in higher bandwidth, and things like this, have dramatically improved connectivity. And customer demands have changed in the last 10 years.

There’s never been a better time to be a consumer in technology,” says Kirk Schell, VP of Software, Dell.

“This requires a new type of employee than before.

Some people can crack down in the evening and others can’t. Some people will need to be available at all times, certainly in regards to connecting with people all around the world in different time zones.”

interview Bill Teuber

Veteran of the board Bill Teuber bleeds blue and white. Having served 17 years for EMC, the Vice Chairman took on further responsibilities in 2013, namely strategy and business development in emerging markets. He may have passed the 60 mark but his energy remains high, as does his hopes for EMC and the Middle East.

J

ust how significant is the Middle East to EMC’s overall plans?

It’s certainly significant. It has a lot of opportunities and it continues to expand in some of the verticals that we’re best at so we think it’s quite important. It’s not the only emerging markets that are important, that should be noted, but we see a high value here.

You’ve recently taken on new responsibilities at EMC - what have you learned about this region in that time?

I’ve been at EMC for a very long time, I was the CFO for a very long time, and so emerging markets are nothing new to me. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of the office and I’ve spent a lot of time in places like Dubai, China and Russia. It’s not new to me per se. I’m quite positive on the opportunities for EMC here, I think we’re going to change more reactively in the countries that are already large but have a keen emphasis on growth. The Middle East is one of those areas, we’re aware of that.

In a lot of these countries, such as the UAE, there’s a lot of old data centre technology, so the amount of forced change in their infrastructures is quite dramatic. This is something worth tapping into.

What is your forecast for EMC’s growth in the Middle East?

We recently gathered our reports and I can say we want to grow faster and we want to take market share. If you look at any market share externally, you’ll see we continue to grow and take our competitors’ market share. You have to use a range of metrics to look through your data and see where you’re doing well or where you’re losing ground.

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In terms of growth and definition, what will people be saying about EMC in five years?

Technology trends will continue to grow and evolve, and so will we. EMC was of course known as a storage company before, and in 2006 we bought RSA, a security company, which we knew would be important for our customers going forward.

I think the cloud is inevitable. Some smaller countries may have privacy issues because of government regulations, but that won’t stop the majority of business enterprises moving into the cloud. People say security is one area that worries people, but in a lot of cloud environments the security is greater than the traditional data centre.

There’s a huge amount of change in the industry.

You can’t stay still and say “I’m not adopting cloud” - you’ve got to be there or you won’t take any of the benefits. If you stay with your legacy hardware, you can’t move into the future, and this is the future.”

We invest 11.5% of revenue in R&D each year, so we’re focused and committed on many areas now. About a year and a half ago we bought Green Plum which opened up data areas for us. This whole focus on big data is the future. In five years from now we’ll all be on the big data wagon. It’s growing every day and a lot is unstructured.

Now, as we look forward, the next big thing is software defined data centres. We believe that’s the next big pick. We will continue to be strategic leaders and this is thanks to the major transformation we’ve gone through over the last 10 years. In less than 10 years we’ve gone from a storage provider to one of the leading strategic innovators.

The hype of cloud far outweighs the adoption right now and many have voiced concerns on security and loss of data control. To what extent do you agree with these concerns?

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One area of concern may be the public cloud, but there’s no doubt that companies are adopting private cloud. You can control yourself in private clouds quite easily. Moving to the cloud is a journey, virtualising your servers is the first step in that. Even EMC is only about 90% done on that journey towards the private cloud. There’s a lot of work to do before we operate fully in the private cloud.

We see a lot of the growth in cloud environments actually coming from start-ups and SMBs because they don’t have to worry about building an infrastructure - they’re just letting someone else do it. Then we have companies like us who will form a private cloud but will use a public cloud application.

So everyone will be using elements of public cloud, that’s what we call hybrid cloud. These trends are here to stay. I don’t think the security issue will be one that will put a stop on it - I don’t see it being an impediment.

So will 2013 be the year of cloud adoption?

I think so. If you go to a shop and say “Have you begun to virtualise?” and they say no, I’d be really shocked. The reasons for doing it now are so strong. You have all the economical savings of your infrastructure and now all the big companies are providing the ability to have applications working in these environments. Merging that with IT, you’re giving companies the ability to save costs and use business applications - it’s ideal.

Now we’re talking about a new type of skills set coming through as well, this technology brings a whole new role. Everywhere you go you get data centre science interest. There’s a huge amount of change in the industry.

You can’t stay still and say “I’m not adopting cloud” - you’ve got to be there or you won’t take any of the benefits. If you stay with your legacy hardware, you can’t move into the future, and this is the future.

What does 2013 have in store for EMC? Growth, investment and opportunity. We have invested a lot in R&D and we will continue to invest, look through the market place, expand what we do for our customers and make sure we understand what’s important to them. In terms of the IT spend for 2013, it depends who you talk to - but EMC should continue to build.

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PRODUCTS Launches and releases

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

PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

Product: NX Integrated Services Platform Vendor: Motorola Solutions What it does: The new platform, which includes the NX 4500 and NX 6500, simplifies deployment and management of branch office networking and communications.

It allows enterprises to elevate their customer experiences while reducing the burden for IT staff, and allows company associates to have mobile access to voice, data and advanced applications, all delivered by a single platform.

What you need to know: Motorola Solutions is a clear leader in the WLAN market and December saw the Middle East and Africa launch of this new platform, which is designed as an open, virtualised system that allows easy network and application extensibility depending upon the needs of the enterprise. The NX 4500 will suit SME branch offices, whilst medium and large enterprises should opt for the NX 6500.

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Product: Ultrabook convertible range

Product: Opteron 4300 and 3300 x86 server chips

Vendor: Lenovo What it does: Lenovo has announced the regional launch of its latest Ultrabook convertible devices. Designed for Windows 8 and RT, these devices are the latest to join the mobile computer bandwagon based around touchoptimised devices that the consumer can flip, fold, twist or rotate to suit their on-the-move needs.

What you need to know: The Yoga 13 is a blend of play and productivity, whilst the Yoga 11 is marked as an all day mobile companion. For professionals, the ThinkPad Twist is a business-ready device that puts a new spin on the traditional convertible tablet. The feather-light IdeaTab Lynx is one of the first Windows 8-based tablets with the latest dual core Intel Atom processor, whilst the multi-use ThinkPad Tablet 2 is powered by Intel’s next generation CPU technology.

Vendor: Advanced Micro Devices What it does: AMD has introduced low-power Opteron processors, which are targeted for use in cloud servers that process Web transactions. The new Opteron 4300 and 3300 x86 server chips have up to eight cores and are targeted at entry-level and midrange servers.

What you need to know: To break its slump in the server market, AMD is embarking on an aggressive strategy that calls for ARM and x86 chips by 2014 and continued improvements to its Opteron line in the meantime. The nine new chips could be used in the company’s SeaMicro dense servers, which already employ the older 4200 and 3200 server chips.

The previous chips were introduced late last year, and the new chips provide performance and power consumption upgrades.

Product: EliteBook Resolve Vendor: HP What it does: The HP EliteBook Revolve is designed for business and government customers that require both an ultrathin notebook and a touch-enabled tablet. Driven by the latest, third-generation Intel Core processors and optimised for Windows 8, the HP EliteBook Revolve combines the performance and visuals of a full-power notebook with the flexibility of a tablet.

What you need to know: HP has extended its business tablet portfolio with the announcement of its next-generation convertible tablet - a touch-enabled notebook that pivots to let users share their work and folds to go mobile as a tablet. An 11.6-inch diagonal HD display packed into a 3.04 lb/1.4 kg design allows for mobile freedom without sacrificing performance.

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Column The word on the street

Joe Lipscombe

The end of the world as we know it

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

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S

o, it’s January and the Mayan’s long count came to an end without as much as a firework, leaving many feeling a little red cheeked. We carry on into 2013 and beyond just as we have been – or do we?

If we look back over the scale of humanity, it really does seem as though the world has changed overnight. Last month I was in Austin, Texas, at Dell’s annual conference, Dell World. One of the main themes, as with most of the technology conferences over the past 12 months, was big data.

Big data appears to be just another one of those phrases that gets passed around the IT industry and doesn’t really mean a lot to too many people outside of the fray – that’s what I thought anyway.

As I popped myself down onto a couch in the press room and filled my face with coffee and doughnuts (when in Rome), I grabbed a copy of USA Today. I took a glance over the front page to see what was making the news and to my amazement the cover story was a tech focused story on the impact of big data. The biggest story of the day in one of the most powerful countries in the world was that little trend which IT experts have been banging on about for the past 12 months.

The story centred around a Sunday school teacher who was invited to a concert by a friend the night before he was due to give a lecture and used big data to help complete the work whilst he was on the move. However, the bulk of the article talked about how big data has changed the way we live our everyday lives.

It was said that last year the first 200-yearold person was born and this child has already generated more data than the entire human race

january 2013

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had up until 2003. Moreover, it said that we generate more than that every two days. The scale of data explosion is overwhelming.

The use of big data now shapes how we live, work and socialise. Companies hone in on us using big data by looking at where we’ve been and what we’ve done in order to work out where we’re going and what we’re going to do, and adjust their strategies accordingly. Markets will never be the same again. The last decade of innovation has generated a giant cloud of steam around it which is filling our physical servers. In which case, the world had to go virtual – tell me that’s not the future, tell me that’s not a new world.

As REM once said, it’s the end of the world as we know it – and it certainly feels that way.

Children born in the last decade will never experience a traditional world of the likes which we have grown up with. Their entire lives will be online, circulating the globe, passing from person to person and group to group. Every move they make will be used as research, analysis and statistics. Simply put, an alternative version of your life exists in a virtual world and it will never disappear.

Fascinatingly enough, big data is changing the world for the better. Technology has never been more critical in society. Polio inoculation workers are using GPS-enabled phones to map areas of Nigeria they have visited to make sure that no place is overlooked – it’s brilliant.

To sum up, the world has changed. We walk around living our daily lives as we have for thousands of years, yet above us is a world we all exist in, humming and expanding at an inexplicable rate, a world that engulfs our physical world by an unimaginable margin – the new world, now recognised by all.

Having said all of that, the story in the second page of the newspaper read ‘Texting, using phones put distracted pedestrians at risk’, so I guess you have to take the rough with the smooth when it comes to technology. Happy 2013.