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ISSUE 230 | march 2011 | www.computernewsme.com

Geared for battle

Ducab safeguards data and device with a mix of security solutions

Raihan Aamir, IT and systems manager at Ducab

INSIDE:

CIO roundtable | SAAS | business intelligence | outsourcing | cloud computing

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ISSUE

230

Geared for battle

Ducab protects data and device by choosing smart 6 Virtualise this >> IT managers in the UAE and elsewhere gathered last month at CPI’s CIO roundtable to discuss the challenges they faced with virtualisation and consolidation. 8 A year later >> Has Oracle ruined or saved Sun? Company irks open source advocates but is steadfast in upgrading Sun technologies. 10 Nokia, Microsoft – can success be that easy? >> Long term, if treated right, the new partnership between Microsoft and Nokia could prove beneficial for both firms. Early success though remains elusive, say analysts. 16 Round-up >> A quick round-up of IT industry news in the MENA region. FEATURE 26 In search of the truth >> Obtaining a single version of the truth, and doing away with the creation and distribution of multiple documents with potentially incorrect information are the primary reasons driving the need for business intelligence (BI). Nancy Sudheer finds out if it is any different in the Middle East. 32 Service model >> The increasing popularity of softwareas-a-service (SaaS), as part of a cloudbased model, is providing new business opportunities to local and regional service providers. However, Nancy Sudheer discovers that accessibility and security of data remain top concerns for end-user IT departments.

March

2011

38 Forming clouds >> IT groups creating a cloud strategy in 2011 should have seven key infrastructure considerations. From standards to reporting, check out our advice. INTERVIEW 43 Up, up and away >> On the occasion of RSA’s security conference, which took place in San Francisco last month, Valeria Camerino spoke to Eric Baize, senior director in the RSA’s office of strategy and technology, on the changing nature of cloud security. 46 Gunning for more control >> F5 Networks has managed to garner nearly 50% of the market share in the growing Layer 4-7 switching market. John McAdam, F5's CEO, attributes the company's success to having won ownership of certain strategic control points in today's consolidated enterprise data centres. INSIGHT 48 Eleven outsourcing decisions >> Outsourcing customers play a huge role in the success or failure of any project. Here are eleven expert tips to get more from your deals in 2011 with less stress. HOW TO 52 Gain inf luence >> Enterprise architects (EAs) and CIOs don't always communicate well, which can spell trouble at budget time. Applying business architecture tools can really pay off, helping EAs structure the conversation around the CIO's strategic vision, Forrester Research says. 54 WHAT WE’RE READING >> We select the best international technology blogs and books and bring them to you.

Publisher Dominic De Sousa COO Nadeem Hood

A word of advice

Sathya Mithra Ashok Senior Editor

Commercial Director Richard Judd richard@cpidubai.com +971 4 4490126

In the last month, separate CIO events were conducted in Dubai by two of the largest IT analyst groups in the world – IDC and Gartner. In truth, despite outward similarities, the two events were very different in nature. IDC claims that its event was restricted to the top IT spenders in the region – 100 CIOs who among them hold nearly $2b of spend. The agenda of presentations included vendors and end-users from the region talking about everything from cloud and virtualisation to BI and CIO challenges. Gartner’s event on the other hand was more a collection of CIOs in the forefront of technology adoption for business goals, brought together to share insights from each other. Consequently, the agenda remained a mix of Gartner analysts and regional end-users going on stage to talk strategy, business and technology alignment and the roadmap that CIOs in the region should consider. I applaud both approaches and hope both firms continue to enable such CIO gatherings in the region. More often would be good, too. At both events, there was a fair share of international speakers taking the stage. In many respects, they are invited to give regional CIOs an idea of the path that others have traversed and to help them learn from the mistakes that have already been made. The best practice argument, in other words. Yet, my personal experience suggests that, at times, such sessions prove doubtful at best and disastrous at worst. Why? Because the speakers address the audience too much from the standpoint of the developed market, and they assume too much - the regional use of a particular technology or the availability of support and service or the existence of multiple redundancy options and so on. The result? A disconnect with the audience. From jokes that fall f lat on a mixed regional audience to high-level breaking technology, they seriously miss the target. By no means is this a blanket criticism of the international perspective. No, all I'm suggesting is that international speakers need to gain a better understanding of regional market conditions in order to better connect with regional audiences. By doing so, the speakers can go a long way in helping the regional CIO understand a lot more from the person on stage and make him/her much more approachable for a further conversation off it. Blowing our own trumpet just a little, I believe CNME’s CIO roundtables illustrate an advance in this thought process, since their aim is to encourage regional CIOs themselves to share their thoughts and grievances, rather than leave them just listening to one man’s thoughts on what they should feel. More of such interaction from other events in the region would be great! For information on CNME’s CIO roundtables or to comment on trends and issues, in the regional ICT sector, please feel free to reach me at sathya@cpidubai.com

ISSUE 230 | march 2011 | www.computernewsme.com

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Geared for battle Ducab safeguards data and device with a mix of security solutions

Raihan Aamir, IT and systems manager at Ducab

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analysis | month in view > Virtualise this IT managers in the UAE gathered last month at CPI’s CIO roundtable to discuss the challenges they faced with virtualisation and consolidation in their organisations. Hardware that is not yet ready

for virtual platforms, licensing issues with software and the persistent problem of skilled staff are some of the barriers that IT managers in the UAE are facing when it comes to virtualisation and consolidation. According to the IT managers who had gathered at the recent CPI-Riverbed roundtable to discuss the next phase of virtualisation, these constraints prevented them from fully taking advantage of the options that the new technologies can bring to the table. “There is no doubt that virtualisation can add to the capability of service delivery in an organisation. However, it does present challenges when you are trying to virtualise commonly used software and applications. Then there is also the issue regarding people.

Mark Lewis, senior director of marketing and alliances for the EMEA at Riverbed

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

UAE’s IT decision makers gather at CPI’s CIO roundtable to discuss virtualisation and consolidation

Virtualisation demands completely different skill sets and this market still lacks in people who come with that knowledge,” stated Mohammad Aboali, group ICT manager of the Mattex group. The CIOs who talked at length about consolidation within the data centre, and the challenges they face when trying to move infrastructure back into central locations. “We have done a fair bit of virtualisation in our organisation and we are looking to consolidate operations. One of the main barriers that I find here is the fact that we have to achieve business continuity, while managing a changing data centre. Of course, virtualisation helps to reduce the number of servers you are running – and we have achieved this – but it brings other management concerns and also the element of third

March 2011

party applications that do not operate or have enough support in a virtual environment. There is also the element of bandwidth cost and optimisation,” stated Santosh Shetty, operations and IT services manager at Al Futtaim Group. Dr Jassim Haji Hussain, head of IT infrastructure at Gulf Air, added that while vendors involved in virtualisation and consolidation often did not present the entire TCO involved in solutions, it is often up to the end-users to do research and conduct POC (proof-of-concepts) and decide on an individual basis whether these technologies work for that particular organisation. IT managers gathered in the room talked about the falling rates of bandwidth in the UAE, which enabled increased consolidation efforts in their organisations. The IT managers also

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The importance of network reliability and the need to have increased visibility into networks, especially with consolidation efforts, reared its head often during the two hour roundtable. The managers also bemoaned the lack of a single comprehensive management solution to give them visibility and analysis.

Mohammad Aboali, group ICT manager of the Mattex group

discussed the impact of virtualisation and consolidation efforts on wide-area network (WAN) optimisation, and how benefiting from these efforts is inevitably linked to the continued reliability of networks. “We have been using Riverbed’s WAN optimisation boxes for a long time and when we initially installed them, they provided us ROI within seven months. This was especially welcome since that time the bandwidth costs in the country were really high. However, with lowering bandwidth costs we have found it an increasing problem to extract continuous ROI from the boxes,” said Ashraful Islam, group IT manager for networks and security at Iffco. Mark Lewis, senior director of marketing and alliances for the EMEA at Riverbed, who was part of the roundtable, stated that the nature of WAN optimisation and appliances had changed over the years and become less about reducing bandwidth costs and more about speeding applications and ensuring delivery. The importance of network reliability and the need to have increased visibility into networks, especially with consolidation efforts, reared its head often during the two hour roundtable. The managers bemoaned the lack of a single comprehensive management solution to give them visibility and analysis and encouraged vendors like Riverbed to

March 2011

build more functionality into their solutions to rectify the lack. Lewis, while stating that Riverbed already owned and encouraged use of the free WireShark software, added that future appliances will include more features and functionality keeping the needs of IT managers in mind. Lewis added, “In the near future, you will see more solutions being launched by Riverbed. We are focusing on elements that will enable private clouds, as well as support cloud technologies in the public cloud. You will also see more products focused towards enabling better networks and higher packet visibility.” The group encouraged vendors and providers to create software that was more tuned to virtualised environments and also urged them to consider better licensing policies for the same in order to make them more cost effective and to encourage further adoption of the technologies.

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COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

analysis | month in view > A year later

usage provision of Solaris 10, limiting it to 90 days. Sun had been offering the operating system free of charge in hopes of selling support subscriptions. Oracle also put a dent in the OpenSolaris open source version of Solaris, with leaked plans revealing intentions to stop developing it. In August last year, the OpenSolaris Governing Board voted to dissolve itself.

Has Oracle ruined or saved Sun? Company irks open source advocates but is steadfast in upgrading Sunderived technologies Oracle formally took over Sun

in late January 2010. Since then, the company has had to pursue a goal that had escaped Sun in the later years of Sun's existence: profitability. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in September 2009 said Sun was losing $100 million a month while waiting for the $7.4 billion Sun acquisition to be completed. Ellison since then has criticised Sun management for bad business practices and noted Sun did not make a lot of money from Java, whereas Oracle did. So it should be no surprise that Oracle in the past year has pursued whatever opportunities it can find to make money when Sun did not. This push for profits has forced Sun's engineering-driven culture to take a backseat to the bottom line. Oracle has made some commonsense moves with Sun's technology, such as pairing Sun hardware with Oracle middleware in the Exalogic Elastic Cloud system. Oracle, however, has taken a public relations beating in the open source realm, where projects such as the Hudson continuous integration server and Java itself have been the subjects of controversy. But a review of Oracle's moves during the past year reveals advances for former Sun product lines, soothing the concerns of IT pros who had committed to Sun's technology. (A notable exception has been the Sun Cloud, the cloud computing platform that never got off the ground after Oracle took charge.)

Java Oracle's stewardship of Java, perhaps the most critical technology gained in the Sun acquisition, has been a mixed bag. The company in November submitted

COMPUTER NEWSâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;MIDDLEâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;EAST

Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle

specifications for the Java Standard Editions 7 and 8, with accommodations for multicore processors and modularity, that the Java Community Process ( JCP) approved in December. In September, Oracle also detailed plans to bolster the JavaFX rich Internet application platform. JavaFX 2.0 is due later this year, supporting hardware-accelerated graphics and updated UI controls. Oracle, however, has had to deal with high-profile conf lict. For example, after initially siding with Apache against Sun's proposed field-of-use restrictions for the Apache Harmony version of Java, Oracle switched sides after it bought Sun and supported the restrictions that Apache disliked. The restrictions, according to Apache, would prohibit Harmony's use on mobile platforms. The dispute, which goes back half a decade, finally led to Apache quitting the JCP Java SE/EE executive committee in December, with Apache protesting Oracle's control over Java.

Solaris Oracle's jurisdiction over Solaris is a bit ironic since Oracle certainly did not help the platform when Sun began promoting commodity Linux in the days Sun was still independent. Nonetheless, Oracle has been moving forward with Solaris. In November, Oracle shipped Solaris 11 Express, which is geared to developers and serves as a preview of Solaris 11, due in 2011. Another Oracle move, however, could prompt Solaris users to look at Linux. The company last year changed the free

March 2011

Open source projects Besides Java, which became an open source venture in late 2007, Oracle has taken on other open source projects from Sun, including the NetBeans IDE, OpenOffice.org productivity suite, and Project Hudson. Backers of Hudson have been sniping at Oracle over independence and trademark issues, prompting a move to change the project name to Jenkins. "The underlying problem was that since I left Oracle, there was virtually zero contribution from Oracle to the project in terms of the development resources, marketing, etc," says project leader Kohsuke Kawaguchi, one of many highprofile technologists to leave Oracle since the Sun acquisition. "So over the past year, people doing the work started to feel that it's a truly community-driven project like Linux kernel, not a vendor-driven [open source] project like JBoss." Hudson supporters were thus rudely surprised when "last November, our project hosting infrastructure at Java. net was suddenly locked down. So the developers decided to move the code to better hosting infrastructure, and that's when Oracle [senior vice president] Ted Farrell showed up and told us that we can't do that because they own the name Hudson," Kawaguchi recalls. With OpenOffice.org, Oracle raised eyebrows when it released the Oracle ODF Plug-In for Microsoft, for sharing files between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, charging $90 and requiring a minimum order of 100. Supporters of the project ended up forming an independent group, the Document Foundation, and released the LibreOffice fork of

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Openoffice, calling it "the next evolution of the world's leading office suite." But Oracle continues to update OpenOffice: OpenOffice 3.3 was released in January, with enhancements for usability, productivity, and internationalisation.

MySQL database Oracle's ownership of the open source MySQL database had been a bone of contention for many. But Oracle delivered MySQL 5.5 in December, featuring scaleability for Web application on multiple operating environments. MySQL Enterprise, featuring the database with production tools, was refreshed in May, with enhanced query monitoring and security capabilities. The MySQL Cluster 7.1 database was released in April, with automated management. Oracle also raised the price of low-end MySQL support, with the annual cost jumping to $2,000 per server, up from $599 per server.

Sparc Oracle enhanced the Sparc Enterprise M-Series server product line in

December with a new processor, the Sparc64 VII+. In September, Oracle introduced a 16-core Sparc processor, the Sparc T3. But a follow-up T4 chip will have just eight cores on each chip, with the company looking to improve singlethread performance, which is important for running large databases and back-end applications. Among Oracle's Sparc-based hardware rollouts was the Sparc Supercluster, based on Sparc T3 and M5000 servers, that Oracle introduced in December. It has been positioned as a platform for the Oracle database and RAC (Real Application Clusters).

Oracle continues to invest in Sun hardware On the client side, Sun introduced the Sun Ray 3 and Sun Ray 3i clients. The 3i device features a high-definition display, while the Sun Ray 3 is billed as the company's lowest-cost thin client. In the storage space, Oracle unveiled in January the StorageTek T10000C tape drive, with 5TB of native capacity. The company's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance

product line, revealed in September, features integration with Oracle's database and applications as well as with Oracle Fusion middleware and Solaris.

The verdict A year after the Sun acquisition by a database and middleware company with no experience in hardware or Unix OS development, it's clear that Oracle is driving the Sun technology mantle forward, where Sun could not survive on its own. Although Oracle had product redundancies with Sun such as in the application server and IDE spaces, Oracle had no such overlap in the chip set, hardware, and Unix operating system it was acquiring - unlike IBM, the other candidate interested in Sun. Less of Sun may have survived in that scenario. Oracle was large enough to take on Sun and experienced enough with mergers to integrate what Sun had to offer, given its experience in added wares from large companies such as PeopleSoft and BEA Systems. That augurs well for the core Sun technologies. But Oracle is not a company worried about alienating its competitors or partners. The whole organisation - not just Ellison - has a penchant to publicly bash whomever it disagrees with. It should be no surprise that Oracle has continued to upset some people with its New World Order for Sun technologies. Although this modus operandi is sure to continue angering some technology purists and old-school Sun fans, it should provide reassurance to users that they have a powerhouse behind them with every intention to carry forward those technologies - and make them profitable.

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Oracle has made some common-sense moves with Sun's technology, such as pairing Sun hardware with Oracle middleware in the Exalogic Elastic Cloud system.

March 2011

COMPUTER NEWSâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;MIDDLEâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;EAST

analysis | month in view Microsoft > Nokia, - can success be that easy?

While long term, if treated right, the partnership could prove beneficial, early success seems elusive for both, analysts say. The broad Nokia-Microsoft partnership announced in which the Windows Phone operating system would run on Nokia smartphones sounds like good news for both companies because of their struggles in the smartphone arena. But many analysts wonder what the companies will make of the relationship in the coming year. Can Nokia come up with smartphones, tablets and related services and applications that outdistance Google 's Android, Apple 's iPhone and others? Two wrongs don't make a right, several cynical bloggers quipped when the partnership was rumoured. And even after the news was announced, more charitable analysts were guarded or even skeptical of the partnership's success. "The Nokia/ Microsoft alliance ... is far from a natural fit, and it's going to take some serious re-engineering and a lot of time to make it work," noted Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group. For one, Windows Phone has a "very high hardware requirement," Howe said, arguing that it will only fit in expensive Nokia smartphone hardware. That means that at least 70% of Nokia buyers won't see any Microsoft software "for years to come."

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research wrote in his blog: "It's way too early to tell if this partnership will be successful or if anybody ... will care about Nokia smartphones or tablets running Windows Phone 7." Schadler listed a number of things that need to happen for the alliance to succeed, among them creating a tablet computer on a Windows Phone OS. Nokia also has to sign up carriers willing to sell the new WP7 smartphones and tablets, he said, and the partnership must ensure porting of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint Workspace to those devices. After ticking off that list of requirements, Schadler added, "If they execute brilliantly, then they could be relevant."

“What has held Nokia back was a good OS and an investment in an OS. Windows Phone could be a pretty good investment and give them wind in their sails. Short term, there's a question of what happens.”

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

March 2011

Phillip Redman, an analyst at Gartner, said the entire ecosystem for selling smartphones requires retailers, carriers, application developers and others, which might or might not be in place for the Nokia smartphones running Windows Phone 7 or a future Windows Phone OS. "I don't see how this [partnership] changes their opportunity much," he added. "Tight integration between the OS and hardware could improve functionality," he added. "However, Microsoft has never been able to take advantage of its core developer group for mobile, so I don't see why this would help much. Android would be better for Nokia smartphones." Will Stofega, an analyst at IDC, attended the London partnership announcement where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop spoke, saying he was impressed by Elop, a former Microsoft executive, and his rationale for moving to Windows Phone. Given the need for Microsoft to put WP7 and its future generations of mobile OSes in more devices and Nokia's fall-off in smartphone market share, "they both had to do something," Stofega said in an

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analysis | month in view interview. "Elop made a logical, well thought-out decision. He laid out the case for why they did this and where they're going, and he certainly has the Microsoft experience to get things moving." Elop's general argument for partnering was whether Nokia could find an OS internally that would do well in the market, "and the answer was no," Stofega said. Why not use the Android OS instead of Windows Phone as many argued? "The argument against Nokia going with Android was that Nokia already had great assets to leverage against Google," Stofega said. One example is Nokia's NavTeq navigation software, which would go up against Google's own Maps Navigation software, Stofega said, meaning Nokia's investment in NavTeq would probably lose. "For both companies, it's pretty important that the partnership succeeds," Stofega added. Long term, the partnership "has a very good chance of succeeding given the capabilities of the two companies," he added. "What has held Nokia back was a good OS and an investment in an OS. Windows Phone could be a pretty good

In the near term, Microsoft stands to gain more from the partnership than Nokia, since the software maker finished with 3.4% of smartphone sales to customers in the fourth quarter of 2010. investment and give them wind in their sails. Short term, there's a question of what happens." But Stofega sounded like a optimist compared with other analysts who follow the smartphone market. Said Carolina Milanesi at Gartner: "I think [Nokia and Microsoft] have a better chance together than alone, but their main issue will remain brand perception in the eyes of the consumer in the high end of the market. Nokia didn't really have a choice [other than to pick Windows Phone] as Android would have been a much harder play for them." She explained that with Microsoft, Nokia can become the "preferred partner" for Windows Phone OS, or possibly the only partner. "With Android, that would not have been

Stephen Elop, CEO, Nokia

COMPUTER NEWSâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;MIDDLEâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;EAST

March 2011

the case," she said, noting that manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC and LG "can walk away from Microsoft, but they cannot walk away from Android." In the near term, Microsoft stands to gain more from the partnership than Nokia, since the software maker finished with 3.4% of smartphone sales to customers in the fourth quarter of 2010, ranking fifth, Gartner said. By contrast, Gartner said Nokia's Symbian OS had 32.6% of the smartphone market in the fourth quarter, a number down from 50% four years earlier when the iPhone and Android phones were emerging. In the fourth quarter, Android had 30.8% of the smartphone market globally, Gartner said, while Apple's iOS was 16% and Research in Motion's BlackBerry was 13.7%. Slightly more than 100 million smartphones were sold in the quarter. Some analysts were unwilling to wager how well the partnership will do. "Perhaps combining the two companies can create one strong competitor, or perhaps they will both continue to limp along," said Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst. "I wish them much success, but remain concerned until I see some kind of positive activity This is difficult for them both." Ballmer and Elop seemed undeterred by skeptics in an open letter posted on both the Nokia and Microsoft Web sites: "There are other mobile ecosystems. We will disrupt them. There will be challenges. We will overcome them. Success requires speed. We will be swift."

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round-up | month in view College > Australian of Kuwait selects

admissions, registration, managing student records and processing billing, to the ability to extract and manage critical report capabilities. PowerCAMPUS will also help increase self-service functionality and provide communication and collaboration tools for faculty, staff, students and alumni, thereby helping improve constituent service while reducing the demands on staff time. “Technology is crucial to our vision of creating one of the world’s best vocational institutions in Kuwait, and we have spared no effort to secure the best technology products and vendors to support our

strategy,” said Abdullah Abdul Mohsen Al Sharhan, chairman, ACK. “SunGard Higher Education was selected because of its global leadership in delivering innovative education solutions and its strong local installed customer base in Kuwait and across the Gulf.” ACK is the first private vocational education college in Kuwait. The institution offers the Australian vocational curriculum which is one of the best in the world. With highly qualified Australian and international staff, students are imparted with the quality of knowledge, skills and attitudes that build lifelong achievements. Mathew Boice, vice president EMEA and India, SunGard Higher Education, said: “As a vocational institute, ACK has a key mandate to provide Kuwaiti graduates with the vocational skills and theoretical knowledge required to help them become valuable contributors from the day they graduate. SunGard Higher Education is pleased to support ACK’s mission and remains committed to providing a platform for long-term and sustainable change within the vocational education sector in Kuwait and across the region.”

SDG can also deliver critical IP functions such as Carrier Grade NAT, Firewall, Video Optimisation , Dynamic Application Awareness for traffic classification, and Server Load Balancing all running on a single Junos platform. This consolidation of services delivers up to 30% total cost savings over current deployments. Juniper’s SRX 5800 Services Gateway, next generation security platform, provides comprehensive security to protect STC’s mobile infrastructure. The SRX Series is a flexible platform that supports industry-leading scalability with each additional services processing card enabling a fully equipped SRX 5800 to support more than 120 Gbps firewall throughput. “As a converged operator, we differentiate ourselves by providing superior customer experience regardless of the access method. In the last two

years, we have seen an exponential growth in mobile data traffic,” said Sami Hamad Alzomaia, director of data and BB services, network services solutions, Saudi Telecom Company. “To continue to remain the leader in the market, we needed to build innovative business models while harnessing all our networking assets. The Juniper solution gives us the flexibility and scalability to respond to the changes in the industry and protects our investment.” “Customers are demanding high quality mobile broadband services, which require enhanced network architecture combined with optimum security and simplicity,” said Mike Marcellin, vice president of product marketing and strategy, Juniper Networks. “STC’s deployment of Juniper’s Service Delivery Gateway solution gives them a competitive edge, and a flexible platform to rapidly deploy personalised services to their customers.”

SunGard

The Australian College of Kuwait (ACK) has selected SunGard Higher Education to help realise its vision for a new generation of job-ready graduates with world class vocational skills and theoretical knowledge. With the help of Information Management Solutions (IMS), an experienced implementer of software solutions, the PowerCAMPUS Digital Campus from SunGard Higher Education will be deployed to support ACK in the provision of internationally recognised and accredited vocational education in Kuwait. The PowerCAMPUS Digital Campus is a complete enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for Higher Education built on Microsoft technologies and designed to help small and mid-sized schools meet growing demands for improved accountability, performance and productivity. When implemented, the solution will provide a structured and scaleable means for ACK to support the administration process – from recruitment,

Telecom > Saudi chooses Juniper Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the leading national provider of telecommunication services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has deployed Juniper’s MX 3D Universal Edge Router and SRX 5800 Services Gateway to provide best-in-class IP services in their mobile network. The solution, part of Juniper’s New Mobile Network vision, enables STC to evolve their networks for an all-IP world and deliver rich media services to their smartphone users. Juniper Networks MX Series 3D provides the foundation for the Service Delivery Gateway (SDG) which delivers Traffic Direct and MPLS VPN support in the STC network. Traffic Direct is a feature that Juniper announced at Mobile World Congress 2010 to steer Internet traffic around the mobile operator’s service complex. In addition,

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

Mathew Boice, vice president EMEA and India, SunGard Higher Education

March 2011

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round up | month in view completes > DSOA storage deployment with STME

Dubai Silicon Oasis (DSO), the

integrated free zone technology park, along with STME, an enterprise IT solutions integrator serving the Middle Eastern markets, has successfully deployed comprehensive ICT solutions – a project that incorporated solutions from major STME partners including Hitachi Data Systems, Symantec and NetApp. The scope of work involved setting up a centralised storage array at the main site as well as a disaster recovery (DR) site linked to a redundant fibre channel fabric, by using Symantec Storage Foundation, solutions such as high availability for critical servers with remote failover, archiving and enhanced backup were also offered. The new solutions have successfully eliminated a single point of failure, simplified IT administration, reduced operational costs, and accelerated vital IT processes such as the recovery of files on network-attached storage after user-initiated file deletions. Abdulsalam Bastaki, VP of IT at DSOA, said: “It is essential for us at Dubai Silicon Oasis to make sure that our systems are in line with all ICT developments, especially at a time when

Du selects TCS as > managed services partner

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an IT services, consulting and business solutions firm has signed a five year contract with du. As an IT managed services partner, TCS will support du in its efforts to enhance customer excellence and service delivery levels. This agreement supplements du’s aggressive growth strategy and its continuous focus on enhancing the company’s capabilities in service delivery, enriching customer experiences, offering a

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

(L to R) Abdulsalam Bastaki, VP of IT at DSOA and Ahmed Galal, sales and marketing director, STME

the technology sector is witnessing an unprecedented evolution. We have chosen STME to implement and update our systems with the most efficient technology and solutions because of their sound understanding of the integrated free zone park.” DSO’s partnership with STME ref lects its commitment to ensuring an optimum return on its IT investments such as a fiber optic network and a Tier III data centre to cater to the diverse needs of its resident companies, 66% of which are technology companies, ranging from IT and electronics to telecommunications, semiconductor and energy companies “STME has created a high-

performance, high-throughput, scalable solution that delivers optimum value to the IT investments of DSO. Data security is paramount for DSO considering the nature of its business, which is why we have deployed a best-of-breed integrated solution for storage, backup, disaster recovery, and archiving of their e-mail and file server,” added Ahmed Galal, sales and marketing director, STME. Dubai Silicon Oasis is a wholly-owned entity of the Government of Dubai and operates as a free zone technology park for the semiconductor, microelectronic and other high technology-based companies looking to set up their regional headquarters and R&D facilities in the Middle East and Africa region.

better scope in developing and managing customer-centric products and services, besides creating more value for shareholders. The agreement was signed in a ceremony attended by Fahad Al Hassawi, chief human resources and shared services officer, du, and Girish Ramachandran, VP and head – Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean, TCS, in the presence of Saleem M . Al- Balooshi, senior VP – technology and wholesale operations, du, and Manoj Agarwal, regional director- TCS Middle East and North Africa. Fahad Al Hassawi, chief HR and shared services officer, du, said: “In a dynamic business sector such as telecom, we are

constantly looking at enhancing customer experience – made possible by further enhancing our IT operations. With TCS’ capabilities we expect to further streamline our efficiencies in service delivery quality of service, as well as bringing best practice in IT operations.” Girish Ramachandran, VP and headMiddle East, Africa and Mediterranean, TCS, said: “We are delighted to be chosen as a strategic partner to du. With our strong global telecom expertise we are committed to delivering service improvement, flexibility and predictability to du’s IT, which will support du’s progressive strategy to enhance customer experience.”

March 2011

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round up | month in view Exchange > Qatar chooses Red Hat’s

Satellite and Red Hat clustering technologies. “Qatar Exchange currently executes around 4,000 exchange transactions per day and 12,000 orders per day, making the trading platform a truly mission-critical application that needs to perform reliably under pressure,” said Jassim Bukashisha, IT director at Qatar Exchange. “Unplanned downtime is not an option, so we need to be confident that we have the right technology partner behind us. Red Hat provided us with an enterprise-class solution that is high

in performance, incredibly robust and proven to be secure, all at an affordable price without any compromise on performance.” The migration of Qatar Exchange’s mission-critical trading applications and databases from IBM AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has since offered improved levels of operational f lexibility. Red Hat’s open source strategy has also offered Qatar Exchange a longterm infrastructure roadmap based on open source technologies, which offer robust security and ease of management. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a logical fit as it not only met these criteria but is also the technology platform at NYSE Euronext, which helped to ease integration and enabled homogeneity across the exchanges’ IT architectures. Qatar Exchange selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run its trading applications, while utilising Red Hat Network Satellite for system updates and Red Hat clustering for maximising uptime for this vital transaction platform. In addition to Red Hat, the trading platform ecosystem integrates Oracle to run the trading databases and Tomcat for web user interfaces. The system runs on HP – DL 380 rack-mounted servers running Intel x86 CPUs, while providing storage by HP – EVA 4400 and SAN switches by Brocade. In addition, trading applications were provided by NYSE Euronext technologies and the system is equipped to run in-house developed applications.

These e-commerce users spent an estimated $3b buying products and paying for services through e-commerce transactions in 2010. The survey also showed that out of the respondents who have a fixed broadband connection (WiMAX or ADSL) at home, 18.6% share it with their neighbours. And the survey revealed that WiMAX operators had a 9.3% share of residential broadband Internet accounts in the country.

According to Mohammed Al Shawwa, Arab Advisors Group Research Analyst, “Due to the practice of broadband account sharing by households, the Arab Advisors Group estimates the number of households with broadband connections in Saudi Arabia to be around 1.97 million by the end of 2010 – an effective broadband penetration rate of 7.68% and an effective households’ broadband penetration rate of 43.76%.”

Enterprise Linux

Red Hat today announced that the

Qatar Exchange, the principal stock market of Qatar and one of the leading stock markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council region (GCC region), has migrated from IBM AIX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide a high-performance trading platform for investors in the Qatari market. Qatar Exchange was established through a strategic partnership between Qatar Holding and NYSE Euronext on June 2009. Qatar Exchange offers investors the benefits of a worldclass securities market and exchange, operating sophisticated and state-ofthe-art technology systems where speed and accuracy of transactions are key. To deliver this level of service to local and international investors in Qatar, companies and markets demanded a stable, scaleable and high-performance, yet cost-effective, IT infrastructure to underpin mission-critical backoffice applications and the core trading platform. With reliable performance and security criteria in mind, Qatar Exchange’s team selected Red Hat as its trusted technology partner, building its mission-critical trading platform and back-office systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network

> Net users peak in KSA A new major survey of Net users

in Saudi Arabia was concluded by the Arab Advisors Group in January 2011. It revealed that around 39% of adult Internet users in Saudi Arabia buy products and pay for services on-line. The Arab Advisors Group conservatively estimates the number of these users to be around 3.1 million – around 12% of the total population.

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

Anuj Kumar, GM, Red Hat Middle East

March 2011

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CASE study: ducab

Geared for battle

Ducab uses a wise mix of security solutions to safeguard device and data.

Raihan Aamir, IT and systems manager at Ducab

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

March 2011

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Dubai Cable Company (Pvt) Ltd

(Ducab) is a technologically advanced cable manufacturing company that was established in 1979 by the Government of Dubai as a joint venture with BICC Cables. Today, the company is equally owned by the governments of Abu Dhabi and Dubai supplying a range of high quality power cables and accessories to customers across the world in 40 countries. “We don’t disclose our numbers, but we have an annual turnover of close to a billion dollars. We have around 1000 employees and three manufacturing facilities in as many locations. We recently have formed a joint venture with ADWEA and DEWA to manufacture extra high voltage cables and a plant for this is coming up right next to our headquarters here,” says Raihan Aamir, IT and systems manager at Ducab. To support all the new initiatives, Ducab has put together a robust IT infrastructure over the years. “We were one of the first in the manufacturing environment to implement ERP. We did that way back in 1998. Since then we have implemented several add-ons like plant maintenance, warehouse management, quality software, HRMS, risk management and other standard apps. On the infrastructure side, even if we don’t have the latest, we have fairly mature technologies. We use handhelds, bar codes and tracking elements on the shop f loor,” says Aamir.

He adds, “We have one primary data centre and a disaster recovery facility in the same campus. At the backend we have a mixed environment of both Unix and Windows. Totally our servers would number around 30.”

Need for security According to Aamir, Ducab saw exponential growth over the last six years, and the IT infrastructure had to grow accordingly from just about 6 servers to the strength that it is currently. The company also changed its previous ATM network to an IPVPN one to prevent linkup dropages, and to reduce management and operational cost. As growth occurred and Ducab grew in prominence, the 12-member IT team had to pay more attention to the requirements of security. “We used to be a McAfee house. However, a few years back there was a virus outbreak and the vendor was unable to get through a solution immediately. At that point, we migrated to a competitor who was offering a solution and this was Sophos. Two years into our Sophos implementation, the company that was supporting us with the solution said that they were no longer in partnership with the vendor and we would have to look for a different agency for procuring support,” says Aamir. Uncomfortable with this change, the company decided to look for another solution that fit its needs. After considering the major vendors,

“For our laptops and other mobile devices – including smartphones and PDAs – we implemented a Kaspersky solution just less than a year ago. We made the decision to pick another vendor because this will ensure that we are not left vulnerable if there is an outbreak.” March 2011

30 1000 400+

years is how long Ducab has been around is the number of employees at Ducab is the number of end-user devices at

the company

personnel are part of Ducab's IT team

Ducab zeroed down on a Trend Micro solution, largely due to its usability and ease of management. “We implemented the Trend Micro NeatSuite Advanced solution. This comes along with web security services, messaging, server components, Windows client components and then there is the anti-spam and anti-malware components as well among others. We got the whole suite,” says Aamir. Trend Micro’s solution was implemented across the organisation, covering all of its 400+ PCs and mobile devices. While the solution gave it everything they required – protection, manageability and ease of use – the company made a conscious decision about a year back to use a different security vendor for its growing number of mobile devices. “For our laptops and other mobile devices – including smartphones and PDAs – we implemented a Kaspersky solution just less than a year ago. We made the decision to pick another vendor because this will ensure that we are not left vulnerable if there is an outbreak and if a vendor is slow to come out with a patch,” adds Aamir. He states that while both security solutions do not talk to each other, they manage to co-exist in Ducab's systems. According to him, this was one of the major reasons that they are able to have this particular mix of vendors in security, since many of the other major vendors are unable to provide this capacity to function together.

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

CASE study: ducab

Raihan Aamir, IT and systems manager at Ducab

Up ahead While 2010 was a slow year in terms of investments, 2011 will see Ducab put in place a brand new IP telephony solution. It will also continue to invest in virtualising its servers to gain more productivity and utilisation out of them. “We are looking at virtualisation to simplify and consolidate our systems. The number of servers we hold has grown over the years and we have seen a proliferation of systems, for either business solutions or custom solutions that were built inhouse. Maintaining servers thus becomes a problem. We ran an audit on these servers sometime back and realised that they weren’t running at good capacity utilisation.

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

This is the reason we are looking at virtualisation,” says Aamir. Ducab has chosen Microsoft's HyperV as its virtualisation platform for two reasons – one, their virtualistion workload will remain limited in the short term and two, the cost effectiveness of the solution. The company also did a POC (proof-ofconcept) to ensure that the solution is the right choice for them. When asked about the challenges that virtualisation could bring to the table, Aamir says, “We are handling virtualisation in a phased manner. We are moving non-critical, largely Windows based apps to the virtualised servers, such that we minimise initial

March 2011

issues. We will virtualise just about six to eight servers to begin with and each of them will have no more than four virtual machines. Our core ERP will still stay in a Unix environment and we are not looking to get everything virtual in a short time frame. This will minimise the troubles we could face and also give us time to get used to and manage the changing environment better.” With a budget-planning process that works like a well-oiled machine – from the business need, to the evaluation and costing, to the relevant approvals and the implementation process – Ducab will continue to grow and invest wisely in a field that grows more competitive the world over.

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feature: Business Intelligence

In search of the truth Obtaining a single version of the truth, and doing away with the creation and distribution of multiple documents with potentially incorrect information are the primary reasons driving the need for business intelligence (BI) globally. Nancy Sudheer finds out if it is any different in the Middle East. Gone are the days where money

was no object, profits were guaranteed, markets were stable and ever growing, property prices were constantly on the rise. During those times, BI was not seen as a necessity by most organisations in the region. However, the recent economic crisis, and the political and subsequent economic changes that are occurring in

the Middle East, has brought into sharp focus the need to get a real handle on the exact position of an organisation’s health and wellbeing. “Within the public sector, the requirement to make the connection between the strategic direction of the ministry or department and the available budget is critical; within the leisure and tourism sector, it is critical to be able to react quickly to fast changing events, such as the political changes happening in North Africa, which will have an impact on the Middle East in general,” says Denzil Murray-Lee, channels manager, performance management for EMEA at Infor. He adds, “It is not a case of whether organisations are ready to adopt BI going forward, it is more a case of, if they don’t then they face the real prospect of not being around for much longer. Markets, industries and territories are changing and consolidating faster and faster, and being agile and willing to change is a necessity not a luxury. BI gives organisations that option.”

Growing relevance of BI Ajay Priyadarshi, BI sales manager (Information management software) at Gulf Business Machines

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

Today as BI has gained relevance over other applications and solutions, CIOs no longer have to seek financial

March 2011

justification for their BI investments. Over the long term, BI solutions will continue to be applied to optimise a wide array of processes in an effort to reduce cost, while realising greater operational efficiencies. This is mainly because it is a set of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing, and providing access to data to help business users make informed decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing, statistical analysis and forecasting. N. Veeraraghavan, senior vice president and global head of data warehousing (DW), BI and performance management practice at Cognizant points out that organisations are essentially looking for tools that facilitate effective acquisition, processing and analysis of of data that come from disparate sources.

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Denzil Murray-Lee, channels manager, performance management EMEA at Infor

“Organisations have used data warehousing and BI tools to equip business users with unprecedented customer and operational intelligence. This has made BI the top priority of

CIOs for a long time now. In spite of the gradual improvement in the global economy, organisations continue to seek greater financial justification for their BI investments. However, over the

Organisations have used data warehousing and BI tools to equip business users with unprecedented customer and operational intelligence. This has made BI the top priority of CIOs for a long time now. In spite of the gradual improvement in the global economy, organisations continue to seek greater financial justification for their BI investments. March 2011

long term, BI solutions will continue to be applied to optimise a wide array of processes in an effort to reduce cost, while realising greater operational efficiencies,” says Veeraraghavan. Organisations big and small use information to make intelligent decisions on a continuous basis. This information is often stored in cash registers, or inventory count in the small shop-owner’s mind. In other cases, data such as financial, sales revenue, inventory and customer information are sometimes stored in just a single system. These silos of information assets have to be brought together and leveraged for cost cutting, planning, taking actions on new orders or aging loans etc. This helps helping rectify some poor, delayed or insufficient decisions that people make purely on the basis of gut-feel. According to experts, organisations should invest in BI to overcome their inability to collect information from various sources in an automated fashion, and to be able to use this information in an easy manner, on a powerful interface to respond to business analysis and reporting requirements. Many studies in the past have proved that 95% of

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

feature: Business Intelligence

spreadsheet-based applications contain errors in calculations, which lead to bad decision-making by organisational managers and executives. “Spreadsheets have issues of up to date data, prone to human errors, serious security issues, being isolated in its analysis, i.e. not in a proper workf low or connected with systems and people in a collaborative way. So while spreadsheets are great, BI is the next step for medium and large organisations towards being more competitive with its smaller, faster, and BI enabled competitors; or for cutting costs, or for identifying revenue opportunities and profitable customer sets,” states Ajay Priyadarshi, BI sales manager (information management software) at Gulf Business Machines. Increasingly bottom line profits are also related to analytical decision process. “This analytical decision process will support organisations beyond just the historical reporting to understanding exactly why something is happening in your organisation and more importantly what action should be taken to remedy a situation or increase the bottom line profit,” explains Carel Badenhorst, head of technology practice, SAS-Middle East.

N. Veeraraghavan, senior vice president and global head of data warehousing (DW),BI and performance management practice at Cognizant

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

Operational intelligence that deals with crowd surges, just in time provisioning, cloud services, security and cost control are another critical area in BI. Organisations are able to remain agile and ready to adapt to business demands of the market. With eCommerce gaining relevance in modern enterprises BI will help to adapt to market pressures, remain inf lexible and insecure.

BI adoption in the region Globally, BI has now become commoditised with adoption rates increasing steadily. While implementations have reached maturity in the North American region, it is still in its infancy in Asia Pacific and Europe. The Middle East, meanwhile, is gradually moving to the next level of BI maturity. The growth of BI is driven by a diverse range of factors including expanding data volumes, stringent compliance and regulatory reporting requirements, as well as a growing demand for solutions with predictive capabilities in order to make businesses much more competitive. Veeraraghavan explains that the BI adoption in the region is more marked in the financial services, manufacturing and logistics industries, where organisations have invested in advanced ERP solutions and other applications in the past. “Management and regulatory requirements are increasingly driving businesses to opt for data asset consolidation services. Enterprise data clarity and data governance initiatives are other areas of primary focus. We see high demand for BI upgrades, migration and rationalisation initiatives, followed by new subject-based data marts or data warehouses.” In recent years, the adoption of BI has started to pick up. Rhe onset of the credit crisis, the issues surrounding the regional debt crisis, postponing or cancelling of many construction projects, has sharply thrown into focus the need for accurate, timely and up to date financial and cost information. Murray-Lee highlights the fact that many companies are swimming in data,

March 2011

Carel Badenhorst, head of technology practice, SAS-Middle East

but very few have timely information necessary to control and direct their companies. The introduction and understanding of the capabilities and benefits of BI are now fast becoming a necessity with these organisations. The banking sector has been the most active in implementing and adopting analytical decision making since 2002 globally. In tough economic climates, they are making business decisions that take the changing environment into consideration thereby increasing the bottom-line more than ever. “The private sector is starting to buy into the analytical decision making message while the public sector is being more cautious and slightly behind in their data collection, data gathering and data centralisation strategies. However, specifically in the region, the focus and the intention is there to get this right. Now it is simply a matter of education and a string of successful implementations to prove the concept and adoption,” says Badenhorst. Experts are of the opinion that the Middle East is a mixed bag of adoption rates. Some pockets across the region such as banking and financial services are doing good with BI adoption. Countries

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feature: Business Intelligence

with better IT infrastructure and where the industry contributes more to the GDP also do better with adoption. According to Priyadarshi some of the reasons of slower adoptions in the past can be attributed to monopolistic practices in many industries. In general, there is consensus that the Middle East is still a green field and future holds lot of promise across sectors.

Challenges ahead An organisation can only benefit from BI by planning for the future. A project may start small but must have a longterm vision. It is also important to note that BI can never drive a business forward as this unless it is properly supported by analytical decision making. “Once the vision includes analytical decision making, the planning and execution becomes easier and smoother, because the vision is for value delivery not historic MIS reporting,” says Badenhorst. In BI projects, there have been a number of documented failures as

Getting BI in place Building BI systems requires organisations to ensure that the following aspects are properly understood: • Current and probable informational needs of the organisation. • Cooperation of all the users involved (key decision makers and operations personnel) with the organisation’s IT departments and knowledge centre. • A definitive information sharing policy with a robust governance structure. • The ability to interpret analyse and use data to bring about enterprisewide improvements. • For implementation, the aspects of functionality, complexity and

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

they were not able to address business requirements and needs. If a project takes too long to implement, is not f lexible in its design and does not embrace the everchanging business environment that we all face, then it will not deliver business benefit to the organisation. However, an agile and f lexible solution that tackles immediate ‘pain points’ in a company will give quick ROI. “The solution should be able to adapt and enhance additional application areas of business. A key factor for success for a BI project is that it should be implemented, run and enhanced by business users, not the IT department,” says Murray-Lee. Other important factors which pose as major challenges are overall acceptance of BI, lack of domain-specific BI solutions, shortage of sponsors within the organisation to support BI initiatives, inadequate skills and IT resources to implement enterprise-wide BI. Taking a long-term view of the success of BI implementations and making the necessary investments in

•

compatibility need to be taken into consideration. Don’t believe the hype of the market. Every solution does not fit every organisation. Don’t be afraid to keep on searching and trying and exploring until you find the organisation that can service your specific requirement. If they are interested in helping you make analytical decisions, they will not get tired of helping you through this investigative period. Make sure you get end to end analytical decision making and not a reporting tool. Make sure you get a pre-integrated solution. The more pre-integrated components a solution has for analytical decision making means less work during implementation. It is all about quality. Make sure that a robust data quality process and methodology supports the solution

March 2011

terms of training and infrastructure can address these challenges. It is essential to note here that BI is a journey and is best delivered in small packets, while managing users’ expectations. Additionally, it is important to stay in line with an enterprise’s vision. It is not uncommon to find silos of data warehousing or BI. These have to be avoided since they create the same problems that they set out to solve in the first place. Some of these challenges can be countered by securing a senior executive as an advocate from a business perspective. BI is a business tool and will directly benefit the business and it is in their best interest to see it succeed. In the region, there is growth potential for BI, as there is a conscious effort to grow outside of the oil sector by the government, opening of other sectors for competition and impending regulatory changes. All of these factors augur well for BI’s growth in the region for the foreseeable future.

adequately. Like they say, garbage in, garbage out. • Security and profile-based views are essential to building enterprise solutions. • BI must have the ability to support a ‘single version of the truth’ or a ‘golden standard’ of decision making, this gives repeatable, reliable answers irrespective of who and where it is being used. • Reporting is not as difficult as they make it. Your reporting effort and considerations should be less than 5% of the entire project or capability consideration. It is like a new car, if you buy a Bentley with a Fiat engine, all you will ever have is a Fiat. The engine that drives the 5% reporting (analytics) is what should be considered 95% of the time with any solution to ensure pure analytical decision making throughout the organisation.

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feature: SAAs

Service model Increasing popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS), as part of a cloud-based model, is providing new business opportunities to local and regional service providers in the region. However, Nancy Sudheer discovers that accessibility and security of data remains top concerns for end-user IT departments.

SAAS is fast becoming an easily

adopted element of cloud services, with an increasing number of lage enterprises and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) buying and utilising these solutions. Along with this, there are growing concerns about data utilisation and protection, as well as the storage of data within certain jurisdictions concerns that services providers are working hard to address. “The global definition of cloud is that data could be anywhere in the world. An organisation doesn’t have to know where information physically sits. All it needs to have is an SLA (service level agreement)

COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

in place for having access and protection. While theoretically sound, this element remains a significant barrier to adoption for many people in the region, so local providers are stepping in to guarantee local storage of data and services,” says Anthony Harrison, senior principal solution specialist – storage and server management, Symantec. SaaS describes a way of providing software on demand, which is ready to use and accessible online from anywhere. According to Raj Bala, CTO (chief technology officer) at Cognizant Technologies, SaaS will be a real game changer. “Next-generation solutions

March 2011

require next-generation service providers. Top technology solution firms offer a broad portfolio of services aligned to business process solutions, SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Increasingly, service providers will have to become integrators and aggregators of cloud-enabled delivery engines for end-users.” “As these services continue to expand overall, enterprise decision makers are asking service providers to assume the role of orchestrators across a wider set of service delivery provisions. We think there is tremendous value to be unlocked for customers who work with them to

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leverage these new delivery models. Cognizant is actively indentifying common business challenges across domains and creating solutions for customers that could be hosted on multitenant, in-house platforms, maintained and monitored by us.”

SaaS and cloud provisioningcomplimenting each other Cloud computing or software in the cloud are often used as a combination in the industry. Cloud computing is a very broad term that refers to building and running applications on the internet. However, just because an application is hosted in the cloud does not necessarily make it SaaS. “If the application is not truly multitenant, then a consumer or customer will not get the great benefits of SaaS which has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the day; it is elastic – a user can have as much or as little of the service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider. The SaaS delivery model creates new application usage patterns, in which users may add applications and services on the f ly, new SaaS consumers may join or leave on a daily basis and customers are billed per usage,” said Zouheir Eid, Salesforce. com practice manager at Gulf Business Machines. Salesforce.com is one of the first companies to sell software solutions on an online platform. To address the requirements of these usage scenarios, a framework should be put in place which enables dynamic cloud provisioning of applications and rapid on-boarding of tenants. Thus cloud provisioning is simply a mechanism that manages the relationships between applications, tenants and users; and measures utilisation of billable entities. Organisations also like to treat software much as they do electricity, pointed out Shaheen Haque, territory manager, MEA at Interactive Intelligence. “A service that they plug into and pay on a monthly basis, has

To address the requirements of these usage scenarios, a framework should be put in place which enables dynamic cloud provisioning of applications and rapid on-boarding of tenants, thus cloud provisioning is simply a mechanism that manages the relationships between applications, tenants and users; and measures utilisation of billable entities. made SaaS popular. The model has been applied to all sorts of software-CRM, HR applications, sales force automation, etc. With the advent of VOIP, this same delivery model can be applied to various communication services including contact centre automation.”

Economies of scale During the economic meltdown, global and local organisations were moving IT budget from capital expenses to operations. Many of these enterprises opted to take up the pay-as-you-go model, which comes with SaaS enabling predictability of expenses as a business grows or shrinks. “There are costs associated with deployment of the latest technology like security issues, downtime and administrative processes, which SaaS and the cloud absorb into the service model. The cost realisations of cloud come over time as the initial migration to the cloud for existing infrastructure can prove to have an upfront investment. Two or three years is a typical timeframe to start seeing returns from such an investment,” says Yasir Khokar- information worker business group lead, Microsoft Gulf. With on premise solutions IT departments are often challenged by setting security standards, providing regular training to staff and improving total cost of ownership in the long run. This is not the case with SaaS

March 2011

based solutions. Kevin Scott, country manager, MENA growth markets at SAP explains, “Latest software is provided by a reliable partner who ensures highest security standards within the network. Investments are also less for IT infrastructure and resources than they would be with on-premise solutions. As SaaS is easy to use, customers also save their staff long and expensive training.” With SaaS, end-users do not have to worry about adding, upgrading and maintaing their hardware infrastructure and software applications. Since they are using an application hosted elsewhere, the savings prove of significant financial benefit, while addressing existing challenges for an IT manager and team. “This is directly co-related to pricing based on usage as opposed to a f lat licensing fee. Pay-per-use model is attractive to many organisations due to this reason,” highlights Anuj Kumar, general manager, Red Hat MEA. Other important factors that allow customers and enterprise end-users in the region to achieve economies of scale with SaaS-based solutions include elasticity of service provision, scalability, time to market and conversion of fixed capital to rotating capital. Service providers like Mahindra Satyam observe that many users take up infrastructure and platform services in the cloud to cut costs related to IT administration and maintenance. From a

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feature: SAAs

functional perspective, SaaS solutions are usually developed based on best practices within that domain or function since it caters to a large cross-section of users. “Customers also benefit from upgrades and improvements to the SaaS solution based on user feedback or provider enhancements. The centralised solution and minimal customisation ensures better capabilities than on premise solutions,” adds Bobby Gupta, business head for the Gulf, Levant and North Africa region at Mahindra Satyam. Despite the obvious advantages that SaaS may provide, one has to recall that most large enterprises in the region have already made significant investments into conventional software. Therefore, acceptance and spend on SaaS can prove to be gradual in a lot of cases. Dhiraj Daryani, analyst at research firm IDC believes that enterprises are moving to a hybrid model where both conventional software and SaaS co-exist. According to him, SaaS continues to be an attractive option, especially to SMEs due to the pricing models and the option to pay according to usage. This provides f lexibility in payments and aligns costs with usage. Harrison points out another attraction, which is speed of adoption with SaaS, since the customer does not have to have

Zouheir Eid, salesforce.com practice manager at Gulf Business Machines

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Anthony Harrison, senior principal solution specialist – storage and server management, Symantec

Raj Bala, CTO (chief technology officer) at Cognizant Technologies

trained staff on-site, and the ability SaaS provides to change in line with ybusiness requirements, both up and down.

Eid explains that the market now seems to be more open to explore the SaaS model, especially since all the major IT players in the market have either started or are in the process of starting to offer specific cloud based solutions. “The cloud seems to be the new trend for IT and a whole new way of doing business. Organisations will have no choice but to adopt either fully or, at the minimum, some partial applications in that space. This opens up a big market for SaaS in the region.” The popularity of this model has encouraged CIOs to plan and budget for cloud based solutions, especially SaaS. “It has moved from just being a concept to where enterprise CIOs are seriously discussing about viability of this model,” added Gupta. “The recent model of global data centres operated by principal vendors has been gaining momentum. Concerns about privacy, security, regulation and relatively higher prices of broadband (as compared to the west) are some of the reasons customers are today concerned about moving to the service provision model. Furthermore, most current vendors of cloud services don’t have a strong local presence which doesn’t help in customer confidence,” says Khokar.

Evolution of SaaS The growing hype and discussion around cloud computing has encouraged customers globally and locally to explore the SaaS model. This has helped the market evolve around the world and in this region as well.

Shaheen Haque, territory manager, MEA at Interactive Intelligence

March 2011

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feature: SAAs

Today inspite of these solutions gaining relevance in the region it is still not core to an organisations’s business. SaaS is used for relatively standardised applications that are needed by a wide range of enterprises. Payroll was one of the first applications to be widely outsourced and is a good example of the type of function that is most appropriate to SaaS. Customer relationship management is another leading edge SaaS application. “We’re seeing many organisations moving from internally-hosted email and collaboration solutions to a SaaS application,” adds Kumar. Security also remains a concern to SaaS adoption. Business and IT users want to ensure that their critical company data is protected and kept private at all points in time. They also want to be certain that they can regain control of their data if they become dissatisfied with the solution, or their supplier ceases operations or otherwise interrupts their service provision. As the market gets competitive, service providers have to increasingly take into consideration the security aspects of data storage, safeguarding customer data and ensuring that customers can retrieve their data on-demand. Keeping this in mind, suppliers are making for greater

Bobby Gupta, business head for the Gulf, Levant and North Africa Region at Mahindra Satyam

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Anuj Kumar, general manager, Red Hat MEA

Thomas Luquet, product marketing cloud computing and datacenter solutions, NEC

investments in information security technologies, staffing and certifications than most businesses can or choose to get themselves.

As more companies seek to deliver their solutions as a service, the market for SaaS will expand dramatically. Smaller service providers will arise as the main driver will be cost reductions. This will lead to the end of the market share dominance displayed by some of the larger providers today. Lewis Honour, security director at Intergence Systems points out three key selling points for all SaaS offerings, which are interoperability, integration and pay as you go pricing forcing larger operators to make their solutions more modular, open and integration friendly. With such offerings coming in the market, regional customers can now have multiple options and have their networks running in the most economical manner. Moving forward, regional and localised service providers will have to gain enterprise customers' trust and confidence to manage all on premise solutions and meet evolving challenges in the long run. To achieve this level of commitment, they are continiously adapting their offerings to intercept and offer new technologies. Embracing SaaS concepts is a natural evolution in the region and, as it grows, we are likely to see more investments made in skills and offerings on selected solutions and technologies.

SaaS and the future For SaaS to aggressively pick up in the region, it has to replace existing conventional software investments. Eventually, a hybrid model will develop and evolve within IT frameworks with both SaaS and conventional software. Investments in messaging, collaboration, CRM and email archiving is taking place but will not be quick to replace existing conventional software investments. “If vendors continue to bring SaaS services to the region, and they are able to alleviate the data security related concerns of customers, this model of software usage stands to gain a lot of traction as it provides application functionality without the necessity to own the expensive infrastructure within an organisation,” says Daryani. Thomas Luquet, product marketing cloud computing and data centre solutions at NEC agrees, and adds that cloud computing when fully adopted or partially with hybrid cloud models, will help customers focus on their core business and help them have better control of their IT budgets.

March 2011

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strategy focus: Cloud

Forming clouds IT groups creating a cloud strategy in 2011 should have seven key infrastructure considerations. From standards to reporting, check out our advice.

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March 2011

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Today, service providers and

enterprises interested in implementing clouds face the challenge of integrating complex software and hardware components from multiple vendors. The resulting system can end up being expensive to build and hard to operate, minimising the original motives and benefits of moving to cloud computing. Cloud computing platforms are attractive because they let businesses quickly access hosted private and public resources on-demand without the complexities and time associated with the purchase, installation, configuration and deployment of traditional physical infrastructure. While 2010 was the year for talking about the cloud, 2011 will be the year for implementation. It is for this reason that it is important for service providers and enterprises to gain a better understanding of exactly what they need to build their cloud infrastructure. For both enterprises and service providers, the successful creation and deployment of cloud services will become the foundation for their IT operations for years to come making it essential to get it right from the start. For the architect employed with building out a cloud infrastructure, there are seven key requirements that need to be addressed when building their cloud strategy. These requirements include:

1. Heterogeneous systems support Not only should cloud management solutions leverage the latest hardware, virtualisation and software solutions, but they should also support a data center's existing infrastructure. While many of the early movers based their solutions on commodity and open source solutions like general x86 systems running open source Xen and distributions like CentOS, larger service providers and enterprises have requirements around both commodity and proprietary systems when building out their clouds. Additionally, cloud management providers must integrate with traditional IT systems in order to truly meet the requirements of the data

March 2011

center. Companies that don't support technologies from the likes of Cisco, Red Hat, NetApp, EMC, VMware and Microsoft will fall short in delivering a true cloud product that fits the needs of the data centre.

2. Service management To productise the functionality of cloud computing, it is important that administrators have a simple tool for defining and metering service offerings. A service offering is a quantified set of services and applications that end users can consume through the provider â&#x20AC;&#x201D; whether the cloud is private or public. Service offerings should include resource guarantees, metering rules, resource management and billing cycles. The service management functionality should tie into the broader offering repository such that defined services can be quickly and easily deployed and managed by the end user.

3. Dynamic workload and resource management In order for a cloud to be truly on-demand and elastic while consistently able to meet consumer service level agreements (SLAs), the cloud must be workload- and resource- aware. Cloud computing raises the level of abstraction to make all components of the data center virtualised, not just compute and memory. Once abstracted and deployed, it is critical that management solutions have the ability to create policies around workload and data management to ensure that maximum efficiency and performance is delivered to the system running in the cloud. This becomes even more critical as systems hit peak demand. The system must be able to dynamically prioritise systems and resources on-thef ly based on business priorities of the various workloads to ensure that SLAs are met.

4. Reliability, availability and security While the model and infrastructure for how IT services are delivered and consumed may have changed with cloud

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strategy focus: Cloud

computing, it is still critical for these new solutions to support the same elements that have always been important for end users. Whether the cloud serves as a test bed for developers prototyping new services and applications or it is running the latest version of a popular social gaming application, users expect it to be functioning every minute of every day. To be fully reliable and available, the cloud needs to be able to continue to operate while data remains intact in the virtual data center regardless if a failure occurs in one or more components. Additionally, since most cloud architectures deal with shared resource pools across multiple groups both internal and external, security and multi-tenancy must be integrated into every aspect of an operational architecture and process. Services need to be able to provide access to only authorised users and in this shared resource pool model the users need to be able to trust that their data and applications are secure.

5. Integration with data centre management tools Many components of traditional data center management still require some level of integration with new cloud management solutions even though the cloud is a new way of consuming IT. Within most data centres, a variety of tools are used for provisioning, customer care, billing, systems management, directory, security and much more. Cloud computing management solutions do not replace these tools and it is important that there are open application programming interfaces

(APIs) that integrate into existing operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning systems (OAM&P) out of the box. These include both current virtualisation tools from VMware and Citrix, but also the larger data centre management tools from companies like IBM and HP.

6. Visibility and reporting The need to manage cloud services from a performance, service level, and reporting perspective becomes paramount to the success of the deployment of the service. Without strong visibility and reporting mechanisms the management of customer service levels, system performance, compliance and billing becomes increasingly difficult. Data center operations have the requirement of having real-time visibility and reporting capabilities within the cloud environment to ensure compliance, security, billing and chargebacks as well as other instruments, which require high levels of granular visibility and reporting.

While 2010 was the year for talking about the cloud, 2011 will be the year for implementation. It is for this reason that it is important for service providers and enterprises to gain a better understanding of exactly what they need to build their cloud infrastructure.

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March 2011

7. Administrator, developer and end user interfaces One of the primary attributes and successes of existing cloud-based services on the market comes from the fact that selfservice portals and deployment models shield the complexity of the cloud service from the end user. This helps by driving adoption and by decreasing operating costs as the majority of the management is off loaded to the end user. Within the self-service portal, the consumer of the service should be able to manage their own virtual data centre, create and launch templates, manage their virtual storage, compute and network resources and access image libraries to get their services up and running quickly. Similarly, administrator interfaces must provide a single pane view into all of the physical resources, virtual machine instances, templates, service offerings, and multiple cloud users. On top of core interfaces, all of these features need to be interchangeable to developers and third parties through common APIs. Cloud computing is a paradigm shift in how data centres and service providers are architecting and delivering highly reliable, highly scaleable services to their users in a manner that is significantly more agile and cost effective than previous models. This new model offers early adopters the ability to quickly realise the benefits of improved business agility, faster time to market and an overall reduction in capital expenditures. However, enterprises and service providers need to understand what elements their cloud must contain in order to build a truly successful cloud.

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q&a with Eric Baize

UP, UP and away On the occasion of RSA's security conference, which took place in San Francisco from last month, Valeria Camerino spoke to Eric Baize, RSA Senior Director in the RSA’s office of Strategy and Technology, on the changing nature of cloud security. Q. RSA 2011 marked the 20th anniversary of the show. How has the event evolved over the years since its beginnings? A. It evolved along with the security industry. Over the past few years for example, the main focus has shifted towards virtualisation and cloud computing.

Q. Indeed, everybody here at the conference has been talking about cloud security. Don’t you think that this is more of a vendor’s hype rather than a reality? A. No, I don’t think so. In the last few years, companies have increasingly moved towards virtualisation because of the cost savings that using virtualised servers entails. However, they have also expressed some concerns about the lack of visibility and control over identities, information flow and infrastructure. With the launch of RSA Cloud Trust Authority in partnership with VMware we have managed to address these issues.

Participating cloud service providers and their customers will only need to integrate with the Cloud Trust Authority to establish a variety of security integrations with each other rather than establish separate pointto-point integrations. Further, the Cloud Trust Authority will shield both sides from the complexities of their infrastructures and instead enable easy ways to establish trust relationships. This unified platform complies with the Cloud Security Alliance GRC [Governance, Risk Management and Compliance] stack, a tool to assess both private and public clouds against industry established best practices, standards and critical compliance requirements.

Q. What impact will the Cloud Security Trust have on the security industry? Do you think that CSOs have the right skills to drive this transition towards cloud computing and adjust to the change? A. I think that we will witness a shift

In the last few years, companies have increasingly moved towards virtualisation because of the cost savings that using virtualised servers entails. However, they have also expressed some concerns about the lack of visibility and control over identities, information flow and infrastructure. March 2011

from a security focus towards a risk management focus. I expect that over the next few years the CSO title will gradually disappear and will be replaced by other roles like risk managers, compliance officers and so on. What we have started to see is an increase in CSOs less specialised in security, but with a broader set of managerial skills, with a particular focus on risk assessment.

Q. How can security professionals get the buy-in from the CIO and raise awareness of the importance of a solid security strategy across all the levels of the enterprise? A. Within an organisation there are three main security layers, from firewalls and encryption up to governance. The CSO needs to make the CIO aware of the risks

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q&a with Eric Baize

that a security breach can cause so that the top management pass this awareness onto the other layers. It is important the CSO focuses on the risks rather than security as such. If you talk about the benefits of a certain security product or solution, most CIOs will not be interested. But if you tell them that not using a certain security technology will cause serious risks to their organisation and can potentially make them lose thousands of dollars, they will definitely listen!

Q. Do you think that in less mature markets like the Middle

Cybercrime and incident management Over investing in technology and failing to have a plan are among the most common mistakes that companies make when they try avoiding data breaches, security experts at RSA’s 2011 Conference session on cybercrime revealed. “Many organisations overinvest in technology instead of talent,” PricewaterhouseCoopers Director of Advisory Forensic Services Kimberly Peretti explained. “This is wrong because talent is really important and it’s hard to find now.” In her opinion, it is fundamental to have solid processes and procedures in place to make technologies like DLP (Data Loss Prevention) successful. Another common pitfall is assuming that your system is impenetrable. Recognising the risks of data breaches and ensuring that there is dialogue within an organisation are key steps to remain vigilant against potential threats, the expert panel said.

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East, the transition process towards virtualisation will take longer to materialise? A. What we saw is that emerging markets tend to leapfrog some of the processes that consolidated markets have gone through over a long period time. Paradoxically, in markets like Europe, virtualisation uptake has been slower, because these countries have a larger legacy. Therefore, it will probably take longer for the main framework to disappear.

Q. To what extent has the global recession impacted companies’ security practices and budgets?

Asking the CSO to report to the CIO is also wrong, according to the experts. “It works better if the CSO has some independence from the CIO,” Peretti argued. For Keith Mularski, Supervisory Special Agent, Cyber Division, US Federal Bureau of Investigation, hanging up on the FBI is another typical misstep. Indeed, working together makes it easier for international secret services and law enforcement agencies to imprison cybercriminals. Therefore, companies should listen and cooperate with government bodies to facilitate internal investigations, engaging in a dialogue with them and reporting any suspicious activity that might occur within their organisation. “Information is being pushed out, but companies need to be willing to listen to it,” Mularski said. Not having a written plan, such as a data breach preparedness plan, was also mentioned among the common mistakes. “Companies need to have a strategy in place, should a data breach occur. It has to be on paper, a document that you have to adhere to,” Kim Getgen, Principal at risk management consultancy Trust Catalyst concluded. The company also announced the launch of an end-to-end solution for

March 2011

A. It has certainly had an impact. Companies are now looking at optimising costs. They have a more focused approach. In a way, the crisis has also contributed to an increase in the use of virtualisation and cloud computing technology.

Q. What will be the key security trends over the next six to twelve months? A. As I mentioned earlier, there will be a shift from security management to risk management. It will be fundamental to strike the right balance between managing information and identity, as well as monitoring compliance and risk.

security incident management, the industry’s first automated solution that helps CISOs visualise and prioritise the growing number of security threats while minimising the time-consuming manual investigation processes. The new solution is designed to enable security analysts to focus on the security risks most likely to impact business objectives with more complete information to manage the resolution of those incidents. Available this quarter, the RSA solution for Security Incident Management is engineered to automate the identification, prioritization and resolution of enterprise security incidents. A plug-and-play integration framework streams incidents in realtime from RSA enVision platform to the RSA Archer eGRC platform. Identified incidents are then prioritised against data loss, identity, vulnerability, configuration and forensics feeds from RSA and other vendor platforms, providing complete context of events and their impact to the organization. This first integration of real-time SIEM feeds into a f lexible GRC business workf low provides templates, f lexible workf lows, alerts and role-based dashboards to efficiently manage the remediation of security incidents.

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q&a with John McAdam

Gunning for more control F5 Networks has managed to garner nearly 50% of the market share in the growing Layer 4-7 switching market, while Cisco's share has actually declined. John McAdam, F5's CEO, attributes the company's success to having won ownership of certain strategic control points in today's consolidated data centres. Excerpts from a recent interview with McAdam.

Q: F5 covers everything from application acceleration, widearea network (WAN) optimisation, security, policy and more. Can you crystallise F5's mission and what sets it apart from other infrastructure companies? A: We see our products as occupying the strategic control points within data centres. We see all the traffic that's going between applications and between servers. Because of these strategic control points, we can do simple things like, historically, load balancing or encrypting the traffic. But then it gets much more sophisticated where we can basically provision applications and servers, we can look at the performance of specific applications. Our customers can use our products to change or add functionality without having to change thousands of pieces of software and different programs. We've got this opportunity because of the way data centres have been architected and are being architected, which is this whole concept of consolidated data centres, typically using virtualisation technology without a product sitting in a data centre effectively controlling traffic between the apps and between the servers and between the network.

Q: I want to talk about how you compete against companies like Cisco. When you win, why do you win? And when you lose, why do you lose? A: I'll do the 'lose' first because it's an easy one, it's a very small proportion of the time we lose. We've actually been publishing our win rate against the competition. It's typically in the low- to mid-90% win rate. Typically when we lose against Cisco it will be because of politics, to use the phrase used by our sales force. Cisco is a great company that's got a lot of loyalty within the customer base, and some customers basically decide they want to do one-stop shopping. When we win is when customers are looking at functionality and performance. For example, I've talked about application

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templates. Nobody else has got that capability right now. I mentioned the example of SharePoint. We have the capability of increasing the performance of that by as much as ten times. The short answer is that we win at a technology level. We have faster technology and much more feature-rich technology. I mentioned the full proxy architecture, there's nobody that's really got anything comparable to that in the marketplace. Also, we've got a tremendous service organisation. I can say that our customer [satisfaction] levels are world class. We poll our customers on a quarterly basis and we typically see scores of 9.2 to 9.6 out of ten. That's very high. We've developed a world-class sales distribution channel and service channel while having the technology leadership.

Q: How are you building on your strengths? What capabilities and functions do you need to add? A: We continue to build more and more into our TMOS (Traffic Management Operating System) platform. In the last release, for example, we added access policy management, which allows you to do things like single sign-on. In Version 10 of TMOS we added about 130 new functions. So we see every sale as increasing our presence at the strategic control points because that's the way the architecture of the data centres is shaping up. The servers are more and more commodity and more and more intelligence is done at that application layer of the network. We want to own that infrastructure part of the data centre.

Q: Can you give me a couple of examples of key capabilities that you need to add or that you're working to add? A: Probably the biggest area for us is that we're adding a sophisticated cluster, multi-approach processing. We call it Virtual Cluster Multi-Processing. Along with very sophisticated management, which allows customers to basically look upon a whole data centre as one virtual IP

address, our products can work together in clusters. It gives you the ability to control traffic from one single point in the data centre and across data centres globally. Imagine the scenario where your applications are maybe slowing up or it's a time of day that people aren't using specific servers, say on the East Coast vs. the west. You can just move these applications. You can move all the power. You can do security all from a single point. In other words, we're effectively taking the vast strategic control and putting it in one place and it's absolutely global. It's a big effort to do that. The initial phase of that is coming in Version 11 of our product which will be out soon.

Q: What is the Dynamic Services Model (DSM)? A: Dynamic Services Model is this concept of being able to dynamically see what's happening in the network at the application level. And I always emphasise that because that's very hard to do. It's really the whole concept of the strategic control point. We know what's happening in the solution and we know what's happening in the application. That allows you to provision things on-line, it allows you to move users from one data centre to the other based on policies. It allows you to have a policy for access and policies for security as well. It's very dynamic in nature, and not just within a single data centre and not just within a pool of servers, but across multiple data centres.

Q: How does DSM make cloud better or more possible? A: First of all we view the whole cloud concept as really an extension of the larger concept of data centre consolidation - companies taking as many as 100 data centres and reducing them down to, say, 10. They do that using virtualisation technology to optimize the number of servers, reduce the number of actual servers but increase the number of virtual servers, effectively commoditising the server world. You can also build your solutions in the cloud. And the solutions

March 2011

may be as simple as, say, pools of servers, or infrastructure as a service or Software as-a-Service. You don't have to have them within the data centre, you can have them in the cloud. What we're seeing is definitely that the first move is typically infrastructure as a service. For your whole organisation globally, you have a private cloud of infrastructure that might be more servers, more disk capability. Let's say that you have all these files that you've been storing in your data centre and you're storing them on pretty expensive storage devices, typically the NAS storage devices from companies like EMC. The chances of you accessing that data are pretty small but you can't delete it for compliance reasons. Or you've built some policies that say if we haven't accessed these files for the last eight months, there's less likelihood of accessing them so we want to put them in much less expensive storage in the cloud. And that can be private or public. Our products have policies that allow you to do that, totally transparently so you don't need to change any software, the user doesn't need to know that the files are not sitting near them, that they may be within the private cloud rather than on your storage within the data centre. This is very, very significant for public clouds where you can basically have software versions of our solution within the public cloud that can be spun up as needed. You can have hardware functions that work in concert with a software function as a hybrid. That goes back to this Virtual Cluster Multiprocessing I was talking about. We have the ability to be almost an arms dealer in the public cloud with products that do what we do in the data centre. Let's say you're a business. You don't want to buy servers, you don't want to buy the application and you want to use the public cloud. Our products sit within the public cloud and as you add more users or you ask for more performance, our products actually do a lot of the provisioning from the cloud to do that for you.

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INSIGHT

Eleven outsourcing decisions Outsourcing customers play a huge role in the success or failure of any project. Here are eleven expert tips to get more from your deals in 2011 with less stress. The start of the year is a time

for assessment, and that goes for outsourcing, too. While it's easy to point fingers at IT service providers for problems that have arisen over the past twelve months, customers play a significant role in the success or failure of any outsourcing deal. Here are eleven resolutions for the striving outsourcing customer, sure to set things on a better course this year, whether your deal is in the ditch or just a little disappointing.

Resolution #1: I will be realistic "I hear clients constantly complaining about the amount of time they spend dealing with IT problems related to their vendor," says Adam Strichman, founder of outsourcing consultancy Sanda Partners. "The fact is, managing technology and data centers is hard. You must recognize that if you were doing it yourself, all these same everyday problems would be happening and probably to a greater degree."

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IT leaders will ink a host of new IT services deals in Q1, hoping that outsourcing will fix all of IT's issues, the transition will be problem-free, and the provider will deliver better service at a lower cost. They may be disappointed on all three fronts. "Lower those expectations and understand what you are really getting into," advises Strichman. "You'll likely still want to outsource, but be realistic and honest with yourself, your team, and your partner."

Resolution #2: I will follow the golden rule Treat thy supplier as thou wouldst treat thyself, advises Atul Vashistha, CEO of

March 2011

offshore outsourcing consultancy Neo Advisory. That means not just being respectful, but engaging your suppliers in your planning processes. "Everybody likes to talk about outsourcing relationships being partnerships," says Bob Mathers, principal consultant for Compass Management Consulting. "However, when push comes to shove, clients often put the onus on service providers to deliver savings or quality improvement." To get off on a better foot in 2011, take a look in the mirror, Mathers says. Ask what your internal organisation can do to improve internal processes, clarify roles or responsibilities, or otherwise make it easier for your provider to succeed. "Often performance issues are just as

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and resources to support it. Don't just go with the f low. "Push the contractual envelope with your vendors," says Scott Staples, president and CEO of knowledge services for outsourcer MindTree. "Whether it is SaaS, outcome-based pricing, or some other model, new models should be explored everywhere in your organisation."

Resolution #4: I will keep it simple "In our view, the top-of-the-list 2011 resolution for client organisations is standardisation," says Mathers of Compass. Consider your typical global enterprise: each business unit, geographic region, each function often does things its own way. And service providers accommodate such specialised requirements. After all, the customer is always right. "This results in operational constraints that drive high costs and inefficiency," says Mathers. Resolve to implement standard definitions for IT service delivery across the enterprise and reward their use. They should address 90% or more of your requirements, Mathers promises.

much the fault of buyers as it is of the supplier," says Lee Ayling, managing director of U.K. information technology for outsourcing consultancy EquaTerra. "Focusing only on one of the two parties often leads to tactical fixes that aren't sustainable." You don't, however, always have to go along to get along. Just because you say no to a service provider doesn't mean you're not collaborating, says Dave Brown, managing director of Equaterra's information technology advisory.

Resolution #3: I will dream big While it's important to keep expectations in check, take time to think about

the big picture. "After year one, most deals' lofty aspirations devolve into the everyday reality of putting out fires and dealing with short term decisions," says Strichman of Sanda Partners. "Strategic issues, such as innovation and strategic planning, get short shrift." Schedule an executive meeting early in the year to draw attention to larger goals. Exclude everyday account personnel for now, advises Strichman: "This ensures that the hot problem du jour does not dominate the conversation." Ask vendor executives to share strategic changes that have made a big impact with other customers. Another option is to create an innovation roadmap, says Phil Fersht, founder of outsourcing analyst firm HfS Research, and ask your provider for input

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Resolution #5: I will say what I mean If you're not partnering to implement, paradigm shift, you're thinking outside the box to implement mission critical processes. Put down the buzzword bingo card. There's nothing like exactitude and candor in getting what you want from a vendor. In keeping with keeping it simple, start by eliminating just a couple of imprecise and overused terms for now. "Stop using the word 'innovation' and use the word that is really meant," suggests Joseph King, CMO for outsourcer Mindtree, "whether it's cost savings, productivity improvement, outcome-based pricing, et cetera." And consider eliminating the word

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INSIGHT

"cloud" for your vocabulary, says Lee Ann Moore, EquaTerra's CMO, unless you're talking about the weather. Instead of resorting to the c-word, says Bob Cecil, executive director of EquaTerra's business and financial advisory. "Describe the offering for what it really is—SaaS, platform SaaS, business process as a Service, or private network."

Resolution #6: I won't believe the hype

says Sanda Partners' Strichman. It shouldn't be that way. "Force your vendor to consolidate it, rework it, and provide something that makes sense given your current situation," Strichman says. You'll be surprised how many charges were misunderstood, out of date, or inaccurate and the exercise

Approach new cloud-based services the way you would any other IT service option. Resist the urge to jump if you don't know what you're getting into, advises Edward J Hansen, partner for Baker & McKenzie. "It is an interesting new service not a silver bullet," says independent sourcing consultant Mark Ruckman. Repeat this for every hot new emerging technology, process, or service you're vendor is hawking next year.

Resolution #7: I will create rules and live by them Make it a point not only to conduct regular governance reviews of your outsourcing deals, but actually attend the meetings, advises Vashistha of Neo Advisory. If you're paying a third party to do this work for you, consider letting them go. You'll save money and be more involved. "Stop blowing large chunks of your budget on expensive consultants to do work your own team can do," says Fersht of HfS Research.

could beget a long overdue conversation about brewing problems.

Resolution #8: I will pay attention to my bills

Resolution #9: I will measure what matters

When's the last time you read—and completely understood—your outsourcing invoice? "By year three, invoices degenerate into a fifteen-page laundry list of indecipherable statements of work, metrics and charges which only one person on your team really understands,"

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Make 2011 the year that you define metrics that are meaningful to the business, says Ruckman, and start tracking and reporting on them regularly. If your WAN is only up 98% of the time, and you're still clinging to that 99.99% service uptime metric, it's time

March 2011

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to rethink your benchmarks. "Stop including imaginary service levels your consultant dreamt up," says Fersht.

Resolution #10: I will seek out the best partner for me Simply going with a three-letter brand name outsourcer or advisor isn't always the best move. In fact, it can be a costly mistake. "There is lots of competition in the outsourcing market today," says EquaTerra's Ayling. "You will always find a supplier who has the right capabilities for you, and, where what you spend with them will make you important to them." Take an unsparing look at your vendors and advisors, says Baker & McKenzie's Hansen. If they don't share your core values, show them the door.

Make 2011 the year that you define metrics that are meaningful to the business and start tracking and reporting on them regularly. If your WAN is only up 98% of the time, and you're still clinging to that 99.99% service uptime metric, it's time to rethink your benchmarks. Resolution #11: I will have fun The economy remains grim. IT and outsourcing are hard. And you haven't seen your budget inch up in three years.

"But technology has never been more exciting with mobile apps, social media, and so forth," says Staples of Mindtree. "Use the new technology to bring fun back into your organisation and energise your business for growth."

How To

Gain influence Enterprise architects and CIOs don't always communicate well, which can spell trouble at budget time. Applying business architecture tools can really pay off, helping enterprise architects (EAs) structure the conversation around the CIO's strategic vision, Forrester Research says. The relationship between the

CIO and the architects that work for them often lacks a clear line of communication, which can result in a major gap between what the CIO really wants in a well-architected environment and what the architecture team ultimately delivers. Why? Although the CIO might have a high-level understanding of EA's value to the company, he is less likely to provide a clear problem set for enterprise architects to attack, resulting in too much emphasis on architecture design and too little on solving specific problems. Over time, it is primarily this lack of defined goals that leads EA teams into trouble when budgets get tight. Getting a clear set of CIO aligned EA goals positions EA to become a more valued member of the IT organisation. To close this gap, EAs should take accountability for the disconnect and put EA-CIO alignment at the top of their initiatives list. The first challenge here is to accept that the CIO wants EA to solve problems — not create elegant architecture. He doesn't mind if the architecture structure is a little messy if his issues are being resolved. EA's will

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gain much more CIO support if they embrace the product design axiom "form follows function". The second challenge is keeping the CIO focused on the strategic elements of EA's charter. This is where applying business architecture tools to IT can really pay off by helping structure the conversation around the CIO's strategic vision and goals and avoiding being saddled with more tactical problems. The business architect's toolbox contains a number of tools that BAs can apply to IT as well as to the business. And while a major focus for business architects is to foster business-IT alignment, they can also apply the same tools and techniques to improving EA's alignment with CIO concerns. EAs aiming to develop tight alignment with CIO concerns should consider:

• Using an IT capability map to identify focus areas. Forrester is finding capability maps to be a powerful tool that fosters strategic conversations between business and IT executives. Architects can use capability maps specifically created for IT as the foundation for strategic conversations with their CIOs.

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The first challenge here is to accept that the CIO wants EA to solve problems — not create elegant architecture. He doesn't mind if the architecture structure is a little messy if his issues are being resolved. EA's will gain much more CIO support if they embrace the product design axiom "form follows function". Step one: Engage in a series of conversations with the CIO to create and validate an IT capability map that resonates with the CIO's viewpoint on what's important for IT's success. Step two: Create a heat map view to identify capabilities that need development or remedial action.

• Execute a SWOT analysis to target improvement areas. By focusing only on the high-priority capabilities identified in the heatmapping exercise, architects can perform a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis to uncover opportunities for improvement. Once these improvement opportunities are identified, EAs can select the highpriority targets by comparing the value of a solution with its fit within EA's mission and abilities. Of course not all solutions will be in the EA domain and should be passed on to other groups.

• Illuminate EA's contribution with a value chain. Enterprise architecture initiatives most often come to fruition from the actions of others. For example, a number of subject-matter experts may contribute to solution design, while others contribute to its execution. By using a value chain, EAs can demonstrate how their actions contribute to resolving capability shortcomings and addressing the CIO's concerns.

Road maps are often used by architects to demonstrate technology evolution, or other high-level views of progress toward a goal. EAs can also apply road maps to show capability development progress which provides the CIO with a more meaningful view than attained by examining individual projects and efforts. While these tools and techniques will prove to add significant value to the CIO-EA relationship, roadmaps and analysis alone often won't be enough. The most successful enterprise architects will be proactive in their alignments efforts, understanding what drives their CIO by examining his key stakeholders, and what they expect from him. And perhaps most importantly, these enterprise architects appreciate the value of keeping things simple. Unless asked for, there's no reason to drop spreadsheets of data on the CIO's desk. Like most senior executives, CIOs have a penchant for the bottom-line message. Business architecture tools are perfect for high-level information sharing.

More at e.com uternewsm p m o www.c

• Demonstrate results with a capability evolution road map.

March 2011

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What we’re reading.. Technology at the margins

Overconnected

Sailesh Chutani, Jessica Rothenberg Aalami and Akhtar Badshah

William H. Davidow

Book It might seem like the last thing that billions of people living on less than $2 a day need is a smartphone, but actually, it could hugely improve their standard of living, argue the authors. Offering inexpensive information and communications technology of all kinds to poor people is a win-win—it can help them get access to medical care and start their own businesses, for example, while the companies that make the products earn a profit from an essentially untapped market.

Book Some risks created by the Internet are obvious—anything on the Web can be attacked from anywhere in the world, for example. But it poses subtler threats too, says Davidow: It can create positive-feedback loops that drive irrational behavior, like the dotcom bubble and bust, and it’s what made the subprime mortgage crisis and Iceland’s banking crash possible. The book explains how such disasters happen, and argues that to prevent them, we have to start prioritising preventing harm over creating opportunity.

Technology at the margins: How IT meets the needs of emerging markets (Wiley)

Overconnected: the promise and threat of the internet (Delphinium Books)

Business in the cloud

Michael Hugos and Derek Hulitzky

Book The authors of this book have studied IT inside and out: Hugos is a former CIO and author of the “Doing Business in Real Time” blog on CIO.com, and Hulitzky, a VP for CIO’s parent company, IDG Enterprise, helps put together events like SaaScon. The pair argues that it’s impossible to know where the economy is headed or what demand will arise next, so the most important thing companies can do to prepare for the future is become adaptable. Cloud computing, and the agility it provides, is a critical part of meeting that goal. The book covers the economics, technology, security and reliability of the cloud, and the changes to business models and the CIO role that technology as a service will bring.

Business in the cloud: what every business needs to know about cloud computing (Wiley)

Around the corner

Casey Coleman

Blog Coleman, CIO of the General Services Administration, the agency that handles office space and transportation for US federal employees, posts updates only about once a month, but they’re worth waiting for. She has a valuable perspective as both the tech leader of an enormous operation and as a government insider who offers a peek into the effects of federal policy.

http://innovation.gsa.gov/

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March 2011

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