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EDITORIAL Publisher Dominic De Sousa

21st century living

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

Group COO Nadeem Hood

At a recent summit focused on discovering the next big thing, the analyst firm Frost & Sullivan outlined a number of mega ICT trends that will drive innovation and growth in the future. On top of the list of global megatrends is urbanisation, where it says “ICT will enable future mega cities to exist with city management systems such as power control, traffic management and security services. ICT will play an integral role in this development, and will help cities grow further and become productive.”

Though I have been hearing the term ‘smart cities’ for a while, especially from vendors such as IBM and Cisco, I haven’t really been able to get my head around what it really entails. What does it take to make a city smart? The latest and greatest in technology?

The definition is still not crystal clear, but the most commonly accepted one denotes improving the quality of urban life using technology advances in transportation, infrastructure, and governance. Forrest Research says being smart is about redefining processes and engaging cities. I tend to agree with this statement as it takes more than IT to make a city smart.

Of course, technology does have a pretty big role to play in this metamorphosis by enabling governments to disseminate information to citizens on devices of their choice and communicate with them using social media. One great example of this is the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, which has created an app that constituents can use to pay their bills. In the far away Canada, a number of cities have garbage and recycling collection reminder services. Wouldn’t it be cool if you get an SMS or a phone call to remind you to take the garbage or recycling out?

In the UK, Glasgow has recently won $36 million government funding to become a test-bed for a range of smart city technologies intended to transform the lives of citizens. This ambitious project will analyse real time data from 200-odd information feeds related to public transport, healthcare and energy to get an insight into how a 21st century city operates.

Back home, Masdar on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi is being built to become the first municipality to be powered entirely by renewable energy sources. Slated to be completed by 2025, Masdar is using the cutting edge energy technologies such as smart home appliances to showcase the future of sustainable architecture and engineering to the world.

With cities competing with each other for economic development and constantly evolving urban technologies, the allure of being ‘smart’ suddenly looks bright. And it may be coming to a city near you sooner than you think.

Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409109 Editor Ben Rossi benr@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409114 Assistant Editor Joe Lipscombe joe@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9136 Online Editor Tom Paye tom@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9103 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar raj@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409131 Sales Manager Michal Zylinski michal@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409159 Country Sales Manager Rami Mikati rami@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409148 Circulation Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409147 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409146 Designer Analou Balbero analou@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409104 DIGITAL SERVICES Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy P Maagma Web Developers Erik Briones Jefferson de Joya Photographer and Social Media Co-ordinator Jay Colina online@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

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EDITORIAL Our events

A rotting Apple?

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

Could it really be that the king of mobile, Apple, is in danger of losing its crown?

Judging by my visit to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February, I would say the world’s most powerful brand should at least be a little concerned.

As always, Apple was not present at the event. Just like it was not present at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, or any other trade show for that matter. It is Apple’s strategy to not participate in any events other than its own.

And until now, it would seem that strategy has served it well. With its brand so powerful that its sheer absence at these massive events left a gaping hole that would serve as marketing in itself, newly launched products would also suffer the torture of being endlessly compared to the distinctly favoured iPhones and iPads.

But as 70,000 people descended on the largest Mobile World Congress to date, most of them making a beeline for Samsung’s huge stands, Apple was far from being at the tip of people’s tongues.

In fact, it appeared that when it was mentioned, it was only to note that this year’s show may have marked the end of Apple’s global mobile dominance.

My opinion is that Apple has not truly innovated since the launch of the first iPad back in 2010. Three years may not seem like a like a large amount of time, but in the world of technology, it’s a lifetime – and more than enough time for competitors to not just catch up, but surpass.

You only have to look at Android’s climb to prominence in the OS market, which in the fourth quarter of 2013 it claimed a 69.7 percent share of, compared to iOS’ s 20.9 percent, which dropped from 23.6 percent a year earlier.

The biggest announcement from Mobile World Congress may further hurt Apple, as Mozilla previewed the first commercial build of its Firefox OS open mobile ecosystem, which could prove the biggest shake-up to mobile since Apple released its first iPhone in 2007.

Such a statement would certainly be seconded by the already 17 operators around the world that have committed to the open Web device initiative, including Etisalat and Qtel (now rebranded as Ooredoo) in the Middle East.

When non-profit Mozilla launched the Firefox browser 10 years ago, it changed Web browsing as we knew it. It now hopes to do the same with its open source mobile operating system, which many will find a refreshing alternative to the notoriously closed and proprietary nature of iOS. It was only a couple of months ago that I mentioned in my editorial that HP’s well-documented downfall can be attributed to its failure to innovate in a position of leadership. Whilst Apple went on to revolutionise both the mobile and personal computing markets, HP was punished severely. If Apple isn’t careful, it could suffer the same fate.

In order for Apple to retain its crown, Tim Cook must prove he can innovate in the same way as his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs. With Apple’s market share continuing to fall in the smartphone and OS markets - and if Samsung gets its way, the tablet market soon also - the time is running out for the king to rise again.

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Contents

Our Strategic Partners Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic IT Transformation and Big Data Partner

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ISSUE 254 | march 2013

ANALYSIS 8

Stepping up to the China plate

12

State of flux

Ericsson’s telecoms dominance just about withstood the rising force of China-based Huawei at Mobile World Congress, whilst Samsung’s supremacy only illuminated Apple’s absence.

The recent IDC CIO Summit made clear that CIOs need to respond to the everchanging demands on their departments.

16 No jeopardy for Watson

Bob Guidotti, GM, WW Software Sales, IBM, tells CNME that IBM’s artificial intelligence technology, Watson, will change the face of IT.

20 Month in view

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

CIO SPOTLIGHT

24 King of ERP

From birth in a remote Indian village and having his lunch box stolen by school bullies to CIO of Emirates Flight Catering, Arun Tewary explains how he became the man everyone wants for their ERP projects.

CASE STUDIES

33 A new burst of energy

Emirates National Oil Company stands as the leading oil and gas group in the region.

And its IT team has set about injecting a new lease of life into the company’s ECM by implementing an impressive Laserfiche solution.

37 Tightening the ship

Topaz Energy and Marine faced a problem when its venerable system left it in danger of losing business critical information. This commenced a long-term collaboration with Dell SonicWall to manage its network requirements.

SOLUTIONS WORLD

43 The big fuss over big data

Despite the technological world being ablaze with talk on the benefits of big data, the Middle East has hardly become a world leader in terms of tooling up. CNME looks at whether the region will see the big fuss.

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28

With flying colours The Emirates Group has made a bold move once more. Collaborating with tech giants HP and Microsoft, the Dubai-based airline has kitted out its crew with the ultimate mobile enterprise tool.

NETWORK WORLD

51 Telepresence of mind for ROI

With questions over measuring ROI when implementing solutions like cloud and big data shooting around regional boardrooms, telepresence technologies have emerged as a simple and sure-fire way to lower TCO.

STORAGE ADVISOR

58 You only live twice

Businesses are facing a tough time in optimising their storage. Most believe that deduplicating redundant copies was the storage saviour. CNME investigates the trend of eliminating cloned data.

SECURITY ADVISOR

64 Eye of the storm

Experts recently pointed toward security as the main obstacle for adoption of all cloud types. But the Middle East has spoken out, and instead of running away, it looks to be chasing the eye of the storm.

INTEGRATION ADVISOR

70 On the dotted line

When an integrations contract is being discussed, every element is absolutely crucial. Companies want to be safe in the knowledge that they’re as legally secure as they can be. We talk contract necessaries. www.cnmeonline.com

TELECOMS WORLD

76 A cloud over telecoms

Cloud has given operators the chance to jump on the bandwagon and expand their portfolios, but are they more attractive than other service providers in the market?

CAREERS ADVISOR

82 Dubai down under

The University of Wollongong in Dubai may not be a home-grown school of higher education, but it has made its Australian-influenced IT programme a popular and permanent fixture in the UAE since its inception in 1995.

INTERVIEW

86 ‘People are buying dumb storage’

Storage thought leader Hu Yoshida sets the record straight on cloud and big data.

PRODUCT WATCH

88 CNME breaks down the top products that featured at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

THE WORD ON THE STREET

90 Dead tweet

CNME’s man about town, Joe Lipscombe, gives his spin on the latest IT news and trends. This month, he’s tweeting from the grave.

Analysis Mobile World Congress

Hans Vestberg, CEO, Ericsson

Stepping up to the China plate Ericsson’s telecoms dominance just about withstood the rising force of China-based Huawei at Mobile World Congress, but the Koreans took the grand prize as Samsung’s supremacy only illuminated Apple’s absence.

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O

ver the last few years, Swedish telecoms juggernaut Ericsson has increasingly had to experience a rather disconcerting and unfamiliar feeling. That feeling is competition.

The undisputed market leader of equipment for wireless telecom networks has sold the biggest share to mobile phone operators around the world for a long time.

But “undisputed” is a word it is seeing less of every day.

That is because, like many markets in the world, a Chinese company has decided to join, or rather ruin, the party. Huawei was founded in 1987 to initially resell telephone switches

in rural China, but its meteoric rise has seen it match Ericsson’s $35 billion of total sales.

It should be remembered that the two companies have very different balances.

Whilst Ericsson makes 43 percent of its sales by managing wireless networks, Huawei takes a large chunk through its sale of smartphones and corporate communications grids.

Ericsson will also remain safe in the knowledge that it sold 29 percent more equipment to operators last year and remains the biggest seller of key components like data and voice.

But there is no room from complacency, especially when momentum continues to side with the growing Chinese giant. Whilst Huawei’s profit rose 33 percent last year to $2.5 billion, Ericsson’s fell 53 percent to $919 million, as its network equipment sales dropped 11 percent.

Hans Vestberg, who took the Ericsson CEO mantel in January 2010, has helped the company tremendously in offsetting its equipment rivalry with Huawei by leading the company’s diversification into network management.

Furthermore, for now at least, Ericsson continued to show it is the number one player with its large presence and impressive display of its leading products at Mobile World Congress.

It also further proved its resilience and eagerness to identify new revenue streams by signing an agreement with SAP to jointly market and sell cloud-based M2M solutions and services to enterprises via operators around the globe.

The solutions will be based on a combined software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. According to Vestberg, the power of Ericsson’s services, solutions, technology and network operator infrastructure, along with SAP-powered enterprise business solutions, will allow businesses to find better and more innovative ways to respond to customer needs quicker than they could before.

However, both Ericsson’s and Huawei’s large presences were thwarted by a company that has taken the mobile world by storm. Everywhere you looked at event, you saw Samsung.

The South Korean conglomerate attracted swarming crowds as it unveiled

Vestberg’s telecoms predictions As per Mobile World

continued desire from consumers for superior

Congress tradition,

network quality and performance, he said.

Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg delivered his

The regional slant

customary telecoms

Ericsson’s Head of

predictions for the

RMEA, Anders Lindblad, offered CNME a Middle

coming year.

1) By the end of 2013, more than 50%

East slant to Vestberg’s

of phone shipments will be smartphones,

global predictions.

driven by more affordable models. “The

1) The Middle

cross-communication between machines,

East still has room

people, and content is changing the way

for penetration growth in general. “There

we as humans behave, and the way service

are still some consumers that do not have

providers do business,” Vestberg said.

a mobile phone at all, but there is a young

2) By the end of 2013, there will be

up-and-coming generation in the Middle

more mobile Internet users than fixed

East that will just jump straight into the

Internet users. “As we have the Internet in

networked society,” Lindblad said.

our pockets, our virtual and real worlds are coming together,” he said.

3) 2013 will be the year LTE

2) Smartphone penetration in the Middle East will rocked from eight percent to beyond 50 percent in the next couple of

subscriptions exceed 100 million. Vestberg

years. “This trend is extremely important,”

emphasised LTE’s ability to deliver high-

he said. “Some of the markets are already

quality content, especially video, without

there – the GCC countries in general – but

buffering.

others will soon follow.”

4) The industry will see more pricing

3) Middle East operators will move

models – tiered, shared, and bundled, as well

toward having a completely flexible

as further expansion into digital services to

platform geared up to creating a full

find new revenues.

portfolio of services. “This means that telcos

5) The main trends of 2013 will be

practically have to change their ERP systems

increased intelligence in devices, the drive

in their operations to a completely different

to transform networks and processes, and

setup,” he said. “That’s a trend that we’re all

OSS and BSS systems. At the foundation is a

underestimating the challenge of.”

the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet as a competitor to the iPad Mini. Samsung has already taken over the smartphone market, with its 64.5 million sales in the fourth quarter of 2012 beating Apple by over 20 million, and it has now set its sights on releasing Apple’s strong stranglehold on the lucrative tablet market. To do so, it will double tablet sales from a year ago, it claimed at MWC. While Apple’s absence was nothing new, due to its preference of only sponsoring

its own events, Samsung’s commanding presence did lend the perception to the 70,000 attendees that it is now the big player in town. Despite Apple having never participated in the show, there was a strong feeling that this year’s MWC marked the end of its mobile dominance.

With its stock shares plummeting, and in a world where presence is key, it may have to reconsider its strategy of attending such events before Samsung’s success becomes too powerful to compete with.

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Computer News Middle East

9

Analysis Mobile World Congress

Middle East shines With the likes of Etisalat, Qtel (now rebranded Ooredoo) and Zain staking large presences at MWC, along with several large announcements, the Middle East didn’t fail to steal thunder from the rest of the telecoms world.

Batelco Bahrain CEO Rashid Abdulla and Ericsson ME Head Anders Lindblad sign a service support agreement, but that wasn’t the only Middle East news at MWC

W

hen Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco) signed a three-year network service support agreement with Ericsson, making Bahrain one of the first in the region to announce a nationwide LTE deployment, it was a major coup for both parties.

Under the agreement, Ericsson will provide support services to Batelco’s network aiming to ensure optimal network performance by offering round-the-clock support to prevent and solve any network disturbance that might impact in-service performance.

It also signalled a theme that became apparent at Mobile World Congress, which is that Middle East telcos continue to make huge leaps forward, and the vendors they partner with are all too keen to boast their involvement to the watching world.

Elsewhere, Etisalat and Alcatel-Lucent signed a joint agreement to extend Etisalat’s LTE coverage across its footprint, including a new partnership in Sri Lanka.

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By deploying Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio solution for this extension, Etisalat will deliver 4G LTE-FDD (frequency-division duplexing) network and high speed mobile broadband to its subscribers, who will have the opportunity to experience mobile broadband that can accommodate multimedia applications such as video conferencing, high definition content transmission and high speed video downloads from social networks.

In preparation for the forthcoming award of LTE licenses in Sri Lanka, Etisalat signed an agreement with Alcatel Lucent to ensure the operator’s service roll out is as fast as the speeds promised by LTE technologies.

But perhaps the most significant announcement came from Alcatel-Lucent and Regional Telecom, a communications service provider in Northern Iraq, to launch the nation’s first 4G LTE network.

The deal provides the region, which is bypassing even 3G, with lightning-fast wireless broadband services including high-definition www.cnmeonline.com

video streaming, high-speed Internet access and a range of business services.

The new network will be the first in Iraq to offer large-scale wireless broadband services, helping in the restoration of the nation’s communication infrastructure impacted by the tough times of political unrest.

The network will provide significant support to ongoing efforts to revive the Iraqi economy, bringing levels of connectivity needed for business, public sector and consumer applications.

“Broadband services are the lifeblood of the modern digital economy” said Kawa Junad, Chairman, Regional Telecom. ”But Iraq has been without widely available broadband for more than a decade, in effect cutting off the country, our businesses and our citizens from the rest of the world.

“The introduction of 4G LTE services in Northern Iraq promises to change that, making a significant contribution to the country’s efforts to rejoin the global community.”

For the project, Alcatel-Lucent is providing its end-to-end 4G LTE solution , including base stations, IP mobile backhaul for 4G LTE and existing 3G CDMA traffic, Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and elements of its platforms, which will allow Regional Telecom to introduce a rich portfolio of advanced IP-based services.

Finally, Zain Kuwait wasn’t to be outdone as it announced plans with Huawei to launch a first-of-its-kind joint innovation centre, which will serve as a research hub for the advancement of LTE technologies for Zain’s mobile customers in Kuwait and across the region.

The new centre will ultimately support Zain in enhancing its service offerings while realising additional revenue streams through the advancement of its LTE network capabilities.

Both Zain and Huawei will be investing capital in the construction of the centre with the two companies also bringing together a team of global experts, engineers and other human resources to lead the centre’s work.

Amongst the goals for the new joint innovation centre will be the testing of new LTE-compatible services and applications, as well as the development of sophisticated processes that can be used to measure subscribers’ quality of service and perform more robust customer-experience analysis.

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Analysis IDC CIO Summit

State of flux If the recent IDC Middle East CIO Summit had anything to say, it was that CIOs need to respond to the ever-changing nature of the demands made of their IT departments.

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T

he sixth edition of IDC’s Middle East CIO Summit had a strong sense of urgency to it. From the nature of the speeches on the evolving roles of the CIO to the densely packed exhibit hall – full to the brim with vendors clamouring for the attention of visiting IT executives – the summit made clear that things are changing quickly. And what was even clearer was that CIOs needed to respond, and respond fast.

In his summit-opening speech, Jyoti Lalchandani, Vice President and Regional Managing Director, IDC Middle East, looked back to the first edition of the show, back in 2008. “Key discussions we were having were in areas of seeing increasing influence from business managers,” he recalled. “Closer to home, we were looking at markets like Saudi Arabia, which we saw as key. We were also seeing the rise of the SMB sector.

“We were seeing the increasing influence of the consumer market, we’d seen the launch of a huge number of Web gadgets. But more importantly, we were seeing the start of something called ‘everything online’.”

Fast-forwarding to the present day, Lalchandani explained that these trends were now in full swing, adding that CIOs need to take note of them. The predictions that were made in 2008, he said, have come to pass, yet they’ve affected the landscape in more ways than anyone could have imagined back then.

The sum of these trends has resulted in the so-called “third platform”, which, Lalchandani said, is made up of four forces that are transforming the industry. IDC touched upon the third platform at last year’s summit, but it was a big focus this year. The forces, made up of social media in business, mobility, big data and the cloud, are changing the ways in which companies operate, and, therefore, changing the demands that business managers make of their IT departments.

“Today, third-platform tech represents just about a quarter of overall spending, but what’s fascinating is that the third platform is already here,” Lalchandani said.

“Unstructured data has already crossed the structured data mark, and if you look at cloud services, it’s skyrocketing. And in 2013, mobile data will surpass fixed-line data.”

IDC predicts that 90 percent of IT industry growth will be driven by thirdplatform technology from 2013 through to 2020, and that 80 percent of competitive energy should be focused on strengthening third-platform offerings.

These four forces are already causing big concerns for CIOs in the Middle East. In a report created for the summit, IDC spoke to 111 CIOs from across the region – with an average IT team of 127. It showed that 45 percent are looking at investing in big data analytics over the next two years, while 40 percent will be looking at bring-yourown-device policies in the same time frame.

Private cloud investment will be a part of 36 per cent of CIOs budgets over the next two years, and 34 per cent of CIOs highlight the mobilisation of enterprise applications as a key concern over the next two years.

These four forces, then, are changing the influences around ICT departments, Lalchandani said. The stakeholders are changing, and the people influencing IT budgets are certainly being impacted. Already, IDC says, CIOs find that line-of-business managers are beginning to influence their spending decisions, based on these four forces.

As their employees demand the change, Lalchandani said, the CEOs and CFOs demand their IT departments to accommodate it.

Indeed, line-of-business managers are set to play an even more important role in regards to the IT department as time goes on, IDC predicts.

Over 48 percent of CIOs believe that CEOs play an important role in driving ICT investments, the report noted. This is having profound effects on the way in which CIOs operate, not least because they now have to justify their budgets.

“With economic woes, accountants get involved,” said Mark Walker, Programme Director for Insights and Vertical Industry Practice, IDC. “CFOs start asking difficult questions. In 75 percent of firms that CIO Magazine spoke to, the CFO plays a vital role in determining IT investment.

“If the CFO says the CIO is not making a contribution, you’re going to have a hard time. We don’t like to hear this; we like to call our own tune. But recently, it’s been difficult because we’ve been focusing too much on the technology aspects. Last year, 20 percent

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Computer News Middle East

13

Analysis IDC CIO Summit

of IT budget approvals required line-ofbusiness approvals. By 2016, that’s going to increase to 80 percent.”

To the old-fashioned CIO, this may sound like a nightmare, but much of the IDC conference was dedicated to how CIOs could forge relationships with their line-of-business colleagues and justify their spending. On hand to explain how was Jarkko Huhtaniitty, Regional Manager, HP Financial Services Middle East.

“When you are building a business case, you need to look at the total cost of the IT investment,” he said. “Only 30 percent of the total lifecycle cost is to do with the acquisition. You need to be looking at the total cycle from acquiring all the way up to retirement. If you can present a business case in this frame, and demonstrate to the CFO that you understand costs, your chances for getting the investment are much higher.”

Huhtaniitty explained that areas such as big data and cloud deployment should be the easiest to get budgets for, as it is easy to make business cases for them. With big data, for example, any CFO would jump at the chance to efficiently mine large swathes of data for information that will help him make better decisions. Cloud deployments, meanwhile, will allow his workforce to work efficiently wherever they are.

Perhaps typically for a vendor representative, Huhtaniitty also explained that more frequent technology upgrades would be better for the company. However, he was at pains to point out that he wasn’t simply trying to sell more products and services – there was real evidence to suggest that regular tech refreshes could save companies money.

“The buying and holding of assets is not the way to go,” he said, referring to a

white paper on asset lifecycles. “You should be shortening your lifecycles. This paper clearly shows that a well-defined strategy where you are shortening lifecycles gives you the best results in terms of cost. It also increases your flexibility. With new technology, you use less physical servers, less energy, less space in data centres, and software costs go down.”

Another area in which CFOs are willing sign off investment is security.

Indeed, security seemed to be a large part of the IDC CIO Summit. Rashmi Knowles, Chief Security Architect, RSA, gave an illuminating speech on the security challenges facing CIOs over the next few years. She provided insight into how businesses can stay flexible enough to accommodate trends such as BYOD but still guarantee security for their IT systems.

“You’re still going to have to offer that flexibility – in fact it’s going to get worse,” she told CNME after her speech. “When the next generation of people come in, that’s where your big risk is going to be, and so you’ve got to use more relevant tools. It’s about making security invisible, and about offering the flexibility and control, but, as a user, you’re not aware of having to go through these stages.”

That said, Knowles did admit that it was difficult to stay one step ahead of hackers looking to invade company’s IT systems: “We see collaboration between hackers now.

We’ve seen hackers using the cloud to work together to create malware.”

She then described a graph - which she had omitted from her presentation - that displayed a curve illustrating the sophistication of attacks. “And then there’s another curve,” she said, “which shows how

If the CFO says the CIO is not making a contribution, you’re going to have a hard time. We don’t like to hear this; we like to call our own tune. But recently, it’s been difficult because we’ve been focusing too much on the technology aspects.”

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Rashmi Knowles, Chief Security Architect, RSA

security technology is progressing. And there’s a gap – there’ll always be a gap.”

However, Knowles echoed other vendors’ claims that security is not always to do with technology, but includes people and processes. With a solid security system, and proper education among employees, CIOs stand a much better chance of fending off attacks, the consensus seemed to be.

There was plenty more for the CIOs to sink their teeth into over the course of the one-and-a-half-day event, though it would be impossible to detail it all within these column inches. But perhaps the main thought that the visiting delegates could take away was that, with their roles in such a state of flux, CIOs should focus on innovation – making the impossible possible, and enabling their businesses to harness the latest technologies.

“The third platform is already here,” Lalchandani concluded. “We believe it’s already transforming the industry. Clearly, expect to see major changes over the next few years in terms of decision-making on the part of line-of-business executives and CEOs. But this is an important opportunity to focus on innovation. Your role is going to change significantly over the next few years.”

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Analysis IBM Software Day

No jeopardy for Watson Following IBM’s February announcement that Watson - its groundbreaking artificial intelligence computer system - will carry out its first commercial application at a New York cancer centre, Bob Guidotti, GM, WW Software Sales, IBM, tells CNME the technology will change the face of IT.

Y

ou wouldn’t think that something developed to answer questions on famous American quiz show Jeopardy! would be the next big innovation ready to take the enterprise by storm.

But that’s exactly what the folk at IBM have been saying, and the claim gained a barrage of credibility last month when the corporation announced the system will be used for utilisation management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Centre in New York City.

Watson first hit headlines in 2011, when it competed against former winners on Jeopardy!.

The system, which is able to answer questions posed in natural language, had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage, including the full text of Wikipedia. It was not connected to the Internet during the game, but consistently outperformed its human opponents and took victory.

Two years on, IBM has shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to a pizza boxsized server that can fit in any data centre, and improved its processing speed by 240 percent.

Its first commercial application is a clear sign it is ready to become a real business for IBM. And not just in the healthcare industry, according to Guidotti, who was at Yas Island last month for IBM Software Day 2013.

16

Computer News Middle East

march 2013

“Another area we are focusing the technology on is in help desks,” he said. “If we can improve the customers’ experience by understanding why they’re calling in and looking at data behind as to what caused the problem, we can start making recommendations as to how to improve the overall customer experience of calling in.

“If we can avoid the call from coming in the first place then that really improves customer satisfaction.”

IBM sees Watson as the “end game” of where enterprise technology is moving to over the next five years. Until then, CIOs should be doing a range of things to prepare, which is where big data comes in.

“A lot of it has to do with how they are doing the data collections and pulling together the information about their business,” Guidotti said. “We’ve found with big data strategies that they shouldn’t just be a matter of having a data warehouse - there should also be data about historical impact on things.

“We think this whole big data concept will give us major information to transform into Watson. We need to combine two things; we need all the data information, but then we also need the how-to information. Each individual business is slightly different. We cannot put that into the computer because it is something the customer has to add in. www.cnmeonline.com

“So the CIOs responsibility is to get the data in place. The business side has to start understanding how they’re going to document and run the business into Watson so that we can combine those two. One without the other is worthless.”

With this in mind, and in consideration for moving into the next level of computing, Guidotti believes big data should be the number-one priority for CIOs in the Middle East.

Before that can happen, the region needs to get over the awareness barrier that is preventing CIOs from fully understanding both what big data is and what it can do, he said.

“Today we have people in the industry saying they can deliver big data, but all they’re talking about is data warehousing. So we need to be able to picture for people what all of the components of big data are and then start making sure people understand they have decisions to make.

“Then, on top of big data is the analytics.

People are thinking just because they have collected the data that they can do something with it. You need to have the smarter analytics in the different formats that are required to move to the next step.

“We’re talking about a new era of computing – a real ‘holy smokes moment’ in what technology will mean over the next five years,” Guidotti insisted.

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of moblie workers soon will be carrying a tablet.3

80%

87 2

%

44

of mobile workers own a tablet today.2

Tablets are in.

of companies provide mobile workers with devices and cover costs.

% 1

of mobile workers still use their own mobile devices for work.

7% watch video content

receive emails

35% send and

BYOD is big.

Most frequent use for 1 tablets.

12% read

web

35% surf the

THANKS TO SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS, WORKING ON THE GO HAS BECOME BUSINESS AS USUAL. IN FACT, THREE OUT OF FIVE WORKERS NOW SAY THEY NO LONGER NEED TO BE IN THE OFFICE TO BE PRODUCTIVE. BUT WHEN IT COMES TO MAXIMISING PRODUCTIVITY, WORKERS ARE INCREASINGLY LOOKING TO THEIR OWN TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE WORK SIMPLER.

How mobility is changing the way we work

FROM ANYWHERE TO ANYWHERE BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE

60

2016

50

App downloads will increase from 30.1 billion to 300 billion by 2016.4

in

15

mobile workers are actually able to print from their mobile devices.

only

25% of companies are investigating mobile print solutions

$

5

% of companies have actually deployed mobile printing

only

Admins and managers are trying to get ahead of the mobile printing trend

of companies indicate that printing is very important to their business.

1 http://mashable.com/2011/08/09/mobile-workers-infographic/ 2 Quocirca, “The Mobile Print Enterprise,” January 2012 3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/05/11/average-mobile-worker-carries-3-5-devices-heres-the-downside/ 4 IDC, “Mobile Printing Landscape,” July 2012

Source: Xerox

2012

of mobile workers would like to print from their mobile devices.

% %

Workers want to print on the go.

ROUND-UP Month in view

Alcatel-Lucent appoints new CEO Alcatel-Lucent in February announced that its board of directors had appointed Michael Combes as the firm’s new CEO, following Ben Verwaayen’s resignation from the top job earlier in the month. Combes’ appointment will be effective from April 1. He will also join the firm’s board of directors, subject to shareholders’ approval at the Alcatel-Lucent annual general meeting in May, the announcement said.

Combes, 51, has more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. He was CEO of Vodafone Europe and a board member for Vodafone PLC. He has also held the positions of Chairman and CEO of TDF, as well as CFO and Senior Executive Vice President of France Telecom.

BMI Bank to transform its infrastructure MWC

Huawei used February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to unveil what it says is the world’s fastest smartphone. The device is called the P2, and it features a 1.5GHz quadcore processor.

The GSMA published its first in-depth assessment on the impact of the mobile industry on the Arab States, highlighting the explosive growth of mobile services in the region. Based on research from Deloitte, the report attributes a 32 percent average annual growth in connections between 2002 and 2012 – when 19 million connections grew to 391 million – to strong regional market competition and falling handset prices.

Despite Cisco declaring war on Microsoft’s unified communications offerings on the eve of its 2013 Lync Conference, Microsoft has garnered plenty of positive responses to its next-gen UC products. The Lync conference saw the launch of a new platform that included clients for Android devices, Windows Phone devices, iPhones and iPads.

Bahraini retail and commercial banking institution, BMI Bank, will use EMC technologies to transform its IT infrastructure.

The agreement was signed by Eyad Sater, General Manager Support Services, BMI Bank, and Habib Mahakian, Regional General Manager Gulf and Pakistan, EMC, in the presence of senior officials from both parties at the bank’s headquarters at Bahrain World Trade Centre.

“As a progressive and dynamic local retail bank, we believe it is imperative to constantly review our IT strategy and bank-wide service levels to enable us to better serve our customers,” Sater said.

BMI Bank aims to improve storage performance, simplify system management and reduce OPEX costs with its new EMC infrastructure technologies, which include VNX unified storage, EMC Data Domain deduplication back-up, and EMC SourceOne Email Management for Microsoft Exchange.

Microsoft Yahoo has had to defend itself after a leaked memo showed that it was reeling in employees who work from home. As of June, the memo said, all Yahoo employees must work in the company’s offices. The news caused a global stir inside and outside the tech sector, with the likes of Virgin mogul Richard Branson, among others, attacking Yahoo’s decision.

Yahoo

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer need not have worried about Cisco’s criticisms of Lync, as excitement was high at the recent Lync Conference 2013.

Computer News Middle East

Defying conventional Chromebook wisdom, which says that laptops need not be expensive to be functional, Google this month unveiled the Chromebook pixel, a $1,299 touchscreen notebook. While the initial response to the device saw disbelief at the huge price tag, reviewers have since praised the top-notch build quality, the looks, and the device’s ability to out-cool even the latest MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Google

Mobile drives huge growth in Arab world

20

WHAT’S HOT?

march 2013

www.cnmeonline.com

Dell may have recently celebrated a provisional agreement for a buyout led by its eponymous CEO, but a number of shareholders have said that the $24.4 billion asking price is too low. What’s more, rivals such as HP have jumped at the opportunity to criticise the vendor over the buyout furore, saying that such managerial instability will lead to a slump in quality.

Dell

WHAT’S NOT?

RSA launches Security Analytics in UAE

MWC

Gemalto launched a new Mobile Wallet application at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new suite includes services such as NFC, mobile banking, mobile payment and loyalty programmes.

Qtel rebrands as Ooredoo MEA IT infrastructure Qtel Group announced that all of its operating companies in emerging markets across MENA and South-East Asia will now adopt the brand Ooredoo.

These companies, in which Ooredoo already has a controlling interest, include brands such as Qtel in Qatar, Indosat in Indonesia, Wataniya in Kuwait, Nawras in Oman, Tunisiana in Tunisia, and Nedjma in Algeria.

“With Ooredoo we have chosen an Arabic word that means “I want” to reflect the aspirations of our customers and our core belief that we can enrich people’s lives and stimulate human growth in the communities where we operate,” said His Excellency Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohammed Bin Saud Al-Thani, Chairman, Ooredoo, who made the announcement at a special launch event at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

spending to reach $3.9bn by 2013

According to Gartner, the MEA IT infrastructure market is set to reach $3.9 billion in 2013 - a four percent increase from 2012. The market is up made up of servers, storage and networking equipment, Gartner said.

“IT leaders in the Gulf are focused on business solutions and improving workforce productivity,” said Mary Mesaglio, Research Vice President, Gartner. “As the Nexus of Forces – mobility, social, information and cloud– start becoming reality in the Middle East, this region will see a fundamental shift in the way IT service is created, delivered and managed.”

IT infrastructure growth in the region will be driven by data centre consolidation coupled with new data centre build-outs, Gartner said.

Zain Kuwait and Huawei to launch joint innovation centre Zain Kuwait and Huawei have announced plans to launch a first-of-its-kind joint innovation centre, which will serve as a research hub for the advancement of long-term evolution (LTE) technologies for Zain’s mobile customers in Kuwait and across the region.

The new centre will ultimately support Zain in enhancing its service offerings while realising additional revenue streams through the advancement of its LTE network capabilities.

Both Zain and Huawei will be investing capital in the construction of the centre with the two companies also bringing together a team of global experts, engineers and other human resources to lead the centre’s work.

The two companies signed an MoU outlining their ambitions for the joint innovation centre during a ceremony at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

www.cnmeonline.com

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has defended her company’s decision to end telecommuting and force employees to physically come into work.

RSA launched its Security Analytics solution in the UAE, promising to leverage big data in order to provide the visibility and context required to help defend against advanced security threats. It fuses SIEM, network forensics and big data analytics into a security platform that will “become the cornerstone of next-generation security operations centres,” RSA said.

Stuxnet ‘dates back to 2005’ Researchers from Symantec have found and analysed a version of the Stuxnet cyber sabotage malware that predates previously discovered versions by at least two years.

What’s more, the malware used a different method of disrupting uranium enrichment processes at Iran‘s nuclear facility at Natanz. Stuxnet was discovered in 2010 and was considered to be the most sophisticated malware ever seen until that time. It used multiple exploits to spread, most of them previously unknown, march 2013

and was the first piece of malware to target industrial control systems. Based on time stamps found in the collected Stuxnet samples, security researchers believed that it was originally created in 2009 – until now.

The version discovered

by Symantec researchers – dubbed Stuxnet 0.5 – was actively used in 2007 and there is evidence to suggest that it might date back to 2005, when the domain names used for its command and control (C&C) servers were first registered.

Computer News Middle East

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The death of text language

Disabling Java on your Mac

Tom Paye, Online Editor, CPI Technology

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www.secureway.ae/fortinet For more information please call us at +971 4 375 7612 or email at fortinet@secureway.ae

CIO Spotlight Arun Tewary

King of ERP From birth in a remote Indian village and having his lunch box stolen by school bullies to CIO of one of the Middle East’s largest conglomerates.

Now CIO of Emirates Flight Catering, Arun Tewary explains how he became the man everybody wants to head their ERP project.

24

Computer News Middle East

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www.cnmeonline.com

I

f you work in the IT field in the Middle East, it’s likely you’ve heard of Arun Tewary.

The current CIO of Emirates Flight Catering is one of the most well-known IT leaders in the region, a regular speaking figure at technology events across the Middle East.

He is particularly famed for his ERP implementations, leading large-scale projects in both the UAE and his home nation of India.

It is there where his story began, born in a remote village in Bihar in the eastern part of India.

He didn’t stay there long, as his father’s insurance job left the family travelling from place to place, but he later returned to his birthplace to complete a mechanical engineering degree.

“I specialised in automobiles because I was very fascinated by that,” Tewary says. “But I became very disappointed because once I really examined the inside of a car in our labs, I didn’t find it as exciting.”

Whilst he may not have been studying a subject he wished to pursue a career in, Tewary found more value in his university experience as a time when his personality evolved.

“During my childhood, I was a very quiet student, to the extent that bullies would snatch my lunch box and I would not even react,” Tewary recalls. “But at college, I became a very different type of student.

“That’s when I really started to grow as a person.

I wouldn’t say that I converted into a bully myself, but I became more confident. Each one of us comes with a specific DNA and it’s just a matter of time before it starts to show its natural and true colours and you cannot hide that. I think it had a lot to do with my change of environment and moving out from my old house, where I used to stay with my parents and five siblings. Going from that to being alone at university gave me an independence I had never had before.”

Tewary left university in 1981, joining the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC)’s management scheme, which prepares its trainees to later form the core layer of India’s power sector.

Despite the prospect of eventually becoming an advisor to the prime minister, Tewary quit the job after only five days. “It just wasn’t for me,” he says.

Instead, Tewary took a job as a computer programmer at Tata Steel, which is where he says his career really began.

However, at a time when IT was at a very early stage, Tewary believes he missed an opportunity to be part of something huge.

“I continued with what I was doing with a very narrow focus,” he says. “I wasn’t looking around as to what was happening elsewhere in the world.

“Others in the industry in my same age group – Bill Gates also become a computer programmer around the same time – were moving in the profession with a different type of focus.”

Whilst Bill Gates went on to form the world’s largest software company, Tewary didn’t do too badly, either.

During 14 years at Tata, he rose from programmer to systems analyst to assistant IT manager and then eventually IT manager of various different divisions within the company.

But despite his success at Tata, Tewary soon realised that he didn’t want to be stuck in the same place for the rest of his life.

“Suddenly, one morning, I realised there was nobody left – everybody was in the USA. I was the only patriotic Indian left!”

Tewary remained patriotic and stayed in India, but in 1995, he moved to Mumbai to work for another steel plant, Essar Steel, which recruited him as joint general manager of IT. “Mumbai was vibrant and quite glamorous, which was a change of scenario for me - I enjoyed it,” he says.

Following one year of planning out ERP implementations in Mumbai, Tewary was relocated to Essar’s steel plant in Gujarat to complete the first rollout of SAP R/3 in a steel plant in India.

But Tewary did not have time to settle before another big opportunity came knocking, this time overseas.

In 1997, a recruitment company was engaged

by Al Futtaim Group, one of the Middle East’s largest conglomerates, to find eight project managers from around the globe who could carry out ERP. After Tewary was selected from India, he left his country for the first time and headed to Dubai to project manage the human resources model of SAP within the Group.

Despite the excitement of moving to a new country, Tewary initially found being away from home difficult.

“Every night or alternate night for my first six to 12 months in Dubai, I thought about going back to India.

I was a very homesick type of person and in the initial days of any project, you are not really on the battlefield, where the war has begun. By nature, I’m not the guy who would feel very comfortable not being involved in the war - I have to be in the midst of the action.

“All through my career until then, it was always a lot of action when developing an application or programme. Then suddenly, it was a change of place and culture. Plus I had left India for the first time, so I continued to think for quite some time about going home. It took me a lot of time to really settle in.”

However, all thoughts of being homesick soon vanished when, around a year into the SAP www.cnmeonline.com

march 2013

Computer News Middle East

25

CIO Spotlight Arun Tewary

implementation, Tewary’s boss, the general manager of IT at Al Futtaim, suddenly left the group.

Early the next morning, with immediate effect, Tewary was given the high-profile job.

“For a few minutes, I was just dumbfounded,” he recalls. “But I realised it was a big opportunity – the biggest ERP implementation in this part of the world.

“Al Futtaim Group is huge – it was a rollout across 35 companies – and I was heading a team of over 100 people. I had one of the biggest and impressive offices in Al Futtaim and a large team – you would not have found a bigger CIO job in the country then.”

Come 2005, after the mammoth ERP rollout was completed across the Group, Tewary found himself reevaluating his options.

“There was nothing new I could see. I wasn’t finding much excitement,” he says. “That was at the time the property boom had started in Dubai and Emaar Group was coming up in a big way.”

As such, Tewary decided to move to Emaar to work for Sahm Technologies, a fully owned subsidiary which was formed to handle the IT duties of all the properties being rapidly built.

Once again, ERP was on the cards as Tewary joined as manager of IT solutions to lead the rollout of Oracle’s eBusiness suite across the group.

In 2007, Sahm got an engagement to do a programme management for the ERP implementation at Emirates Flight Catering.

Like any other programme management, Tewary found himself making presentations to management as to how the organisational structure would be and how easy it would be to implement the ERP. Only this time, the management team at Emirates Flight Catering were so impressed by Tewary that they wanted him to join them and head up the implementation in-house.

“For me, it was not possible because I was coming from another company,” Tewary says. “But the thenCEO at Emirates Flight Catering knew the management at Emaar and convinced them to release me.

“By that time, Sahm Technologies was also closing down, which made the transition a lot easier.”

Subsequently, Tewary joined Emirates Flight Catering as CIO and ended up staying beyond the conclusion of the ERP implementation.

“As it is, Emirates is growing so I still have a lot of opportunities here,” he says. “Last year, we did a consulting exercise where we identified around 30 opportunities which we need to do, so I have a whole host of opportunities here.”

While acknowledging that the nature of leading IT projects means different opportunities often come up 26

Computer News Middle East

march 2013

as and when particular implementations end, Tewary is adamant that the Middle East will remain a home for him and his family.

“Dubai and the UAE has been a wonderful place,” he says. “Many people say that, with my profile now, I should go back to India, but my thought is clear – as long as I’m able to continue, I will not leave this country. I love this place.”

TIMELINE 1981

Graduated university in Bihar, India, with a degree in mechanical engineering.

1981 Became a computer programmer at Tata Steel, where he stayed for 14 years and rose to IT manager.

1995 Moved to Mumbai and Gujarat to lead the first roll-out of SAP R/3 ERP in an Indian steel plant at Essar Steel.

1997 Moved to Dubai to project manage the human resources model of SAP ERP at Al Futtaim Group.

1998 Promoted to general manager of IT at Al Futtaim, leading the biggest ERP implementation in this part of the world.

2005 Joined Sahm Technologies to lead the rollout of Oracle ERP across Emaar Group.

2007 Became CIO at Emirates Flight Catering to lead another ERP implementation.

www.cnmeonline.com

case study Emirates

Andre Wyss, Manager Production Technologies; Patrick Naef, CIO; Kevin Griffiths, SVP Cabin Crew, Emirates Group

With flying colours The Emirates Group is seen as an innovative leader in the aviation industry, and the pioneer of the skies has made a bold move once more.

Collaborating with tech giants HP and Microsoft, the Dubai-based airline has kitted out its crew with the ultimate mobile enterprise tool.

28

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www.cnmeonline.com

tasks onto one simple platform, improving work productivity and overall service. Therefore, it didn’t spend too much effort marketing its application.

Aviation isn’t the most modest of verticals by a long stretch, but Emirates managed to keep its cuttingedge, star work tool relatively quiet throughout its early years of service.

However, one day, during the early adoption period of the first iPad back in 2010, Emirates’ IT team, along with its in-flight services team, showed their director the Apple tablet, which was immediately seen as the ultimate product with which to carry the KIS application. A light, attractive, stylish and modern device – the smart tablet was recognised as the bornto-be host for the airline’s in-house-built technology.

With this in mind, it wasn’t long before plans and production had begun to update the application.

The addition of new tasks, a new user interface, new demands, and new services were being brought to the forefront for Emirates and it seemed as though the migration to iPad was just around the corner.

“We were the first airline to realise the potential of putting technology into the hands of our cabin crew.

When the iPad came along, we knew that was the format we wanted KIS to be on,” says Kevin Griffiths, Senior Vice President, Cabin Crew, Emirates Group.

However, despite the fact that the iPad was available, Emirates decided to hold back and wait for something else.

“The iPad is a fantastic device, however our application was built on .NET. It’s a classic Windows application and we knew that Microsoft was on the verge of releasing something into the same market as iPad that would be so much more appropriate for what we were working with,” says Patrick Naef, CIO, Emirates Group.

“The iPad is a consumer product. We wanted an enterprise-ready, durable, and professionally developed product which could tick all the boxes for us as well as support our legacy application.”

Emirates was right. Microsoft was on the verge of releasing that software, and it came in the shape of Windows 8. The new Windows operating system had the ability to support the entire KIS legacy application whilst updating and developing the new application simultaneously.

“We all knew Microsoft was going to get there, and when it did, we were ready. We now have the best of both worlds - the legacy application which was built on .NET is fully supported, whilst the new userinterface and applications just run on top,” says Naef.

Emirates claims the richness and functionality of the application makes the simple migration toward

W

hen Patrick Naef, Emirates Group’s CIO, joined seven years ago, the team had just begun rolling out its Knowledge Driven In-Flight Service (KIS), a tablet based application run on a classic .NET Windows platform designed to be the ultimate work tool for its cabin crew. The KIS tool aimed to merge all in-flight tasks onto one user-friendly device. The application involved all team and crew information, customer information, meal information, and everything in between.

Emirates claims that this technology was a huge competitive advantage in the industry, pooling all www.cnmeonline.com

march 2013

Computer News Middle East

29

case study Emirates

the new devices quite complex, but the simplicity of Microsoft’s software meant that the team could complete this task in an extremely short space of time, according to Andre Wyss, Manager, Production Technologies, Emirates Group.

“It’s a legacy application and this makes these types of projects difficult. But we were able to complete it in a very short time thanks to the ease of the Windows platform,” he says.

Griffiths adds: “The legacy and background apps coexist with the new model so the migration was seamless.

It was all developed and built in-house by us because we wanted to be in control and know that we wouldn’t need extra support going forward. The intuitive nature of the Windows system made this even easier.”

Updated automation To begin with, Emirates had asked HP for

1,000 devices in the first three months.

Introducing the host

But with the list of specific requirements constructed

by Emirates being fairly long, the device options were few and far between. It was far from just the technical side of the device that the team was searching for, so finding the right hardware vendor was a completely separate task.

“We pride ourselves on our image. We’re at the edge of technology. We wanted something that looked good. We can’t claim to be the leaders of innovation and style and then stroll through the cabin holding an old laptop – we needed something stylish,” says Griffiths.

Naef continues: “We needed something durable and sturdy, too. You’re working in a very busy environment, a restaurant environment, so the amount of devices we could choose from was limited.”

Besides the tablet itself, Emirates was also looking for a partner.

“We needed a partner to risk share, know the importance of success, and be modern and stylish. We needed someone who would be there for us at 1am and help us out. We really got this from HP and Microsoft.

Had you entered one of our meetings during the project, it would have been hard to tell who was from which company – we were that close,” Griffiths recalls.

“With HP, we got access to its technical teams and manufacturing teams. If ever there was an issue, we had direct access to its teams so we could solve problems before they developed. That was very important to us.”

The device which Emirates finally landed on was the unreleased HP ElitePad 900.

Test flight

We were the first airline to realise the potential of putting technology into the hands of our cabin crew.”

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The newly updated application, hosted by a tablet that still isn’t available to buy in shops, has completely changed the way in which the cabin crew aboard Emirates flights work.

Not only are the tasks onboard made far easier, but all tasks surrounding the flight are synchronised from any of the devices used and sent back to a central database. The application distributes data from anywhere around the world in real-time and maintains up-to-date records for each customer and each task.

This technology adds the complication of connectivity. Emirates flies to every continent around the world, bar Antarctica, meaning that wherever a plane touches down, its system needs to be connected to a main base so that all data can be recorded, received and distributed in real-time.

“Say there’s a gentleman flying on a connecting flight and on the first leg of his journey, he has coffee spilt on his suit. This data can be recorded midflight and synchronised to the central system before he even lands. The database shows who, what and when, so that when he boards the second leg of his flight, the crew can automatically approach him and ask if he would like his coffee in a cup this time, as opposed to on his lap,” laughs Naef.

www.cnmeonline.com

Although the immediate reaction of the devices has been good, Naef claims that the team wanted to have rolled out over 1,000 devices within the first three months of the announcement. But due to the fact that the operating system is new, Emirates hasn’t been able to fully stretch its tablet legs.

“We told HP what we wanted, we gave them some very demanding requirements, and this was for a product which wasn’t even completed,” says Naef.

“So there have been some teething problems with the hardware but we’re getting there.”

Asides from these minor issues, Emirates claims to be very happy with the product, and the strength of the three-way partnership stands as a tribute to that.

“The crew loves the new devices,” says Griffiths.

“They’re proud to walk around with it, some want to swap it with their personal device. It’s so important for us to make moves like this. It’s a leap of faith, really. We can never truly know how this kind of move is going to pan out, but when you’ve got a fleet like ours, you know this information and data is going to be crucial to providing a top service.”

Emirates, which prides itself on being a cut above the rest, has again made a technological move that keeps it at the forefront of aviation.

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case study Enoc

A new burst of energy Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) stands as the leading integrated oil and gas group in the region, with aspirations of serving the growing energy needs of Dubai. With that in mind, the IT team set about injecting a new lease of life into the company’s ECM by implementing an impressive Laserfiche solution.

E

NOC, a subsidiary of EPPCO (Emirates Petroleum Products Company), is a major player in the oil and gas sector. With a wide birth of customers and employees, its emphasis on speed, organisation, innovation, and quality is vital to its performance and reputation throughout the region.

With this in mind, the company found itself struggling with content workflow and manual tasking, and decided to set about implementing a new software system, which aims to simplify its information sharing and automated operations. It was at this point that ENOC turned towards Laserfiche.

“The major challenges we were facing were difficulties in storing customer request documents in filing cabinets and that we were using SharePoint as our content management system, which is a purely www.cnmeonline.com

Web-based system and doesn’t contain a scanning solution, so we couldn’t store electronic image documents,” says Ram Mohan Narayanan, Manager, Planning and Performance Management, ENOC. “We came to know about Laserfiche through Global Technology Services, which is one of the subsidiary companies of ENOC and also an authorised reseller and IT solution provider of Laserfiche.”

The major issues that the solution had to address, as well as the simplification of workflow processes, were cost saving and time saving – a genuine problem for the oil and gas giant. The Laserfiche Rio system appears to have done that, according to Narayanan.

“One of the many departments that use Laserfiche Rio is the internal audit department, which automates the submission of Employee Acknowledgement and Conflict of Interest forms. march 2013

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case study Enoc

This saves the company at least 6,000 hours of staff time a year, which translates to US $240,000,” he says.

A friendly referral Prior to implementing Rio, ENOC had to go through the daunting task of discovering the appropriate solution for its needs. The company held several meetings with different vendors before deciding to work with Laserfiche.

“We did an extensive study of different EDMS tools in the market before finally deciding that Laserfiche will be the best solution to fit our requirements,” Narayanan recalls.

“Also, we did an on-site study of an organisation, which had already implemented Laserfiche to archive its customer billing documents. The success of the solution helped us to make the decision to go with Laserfiche.”

The internal audit department saves

6,000 hours of staff time per year.

Global support The implementation took a short six months, Narayanan says, during which time ENOC called upon Global Technology Services to support the integration.

“The integration was a slightly tricky one. We had to layer the solution on top of our current ERP system. Global Technology Services helped us with that. Starting around 2011 and finishing inside six months, it was a fairly seamless integration.”

However, once the implementation had been completed, the solution got straight to work and began to attract attention from other departments within the company. Now, a total of five individual departments are using Laserfiche Rio. Rio has since been fulfilling requirements and Narayanan claims the solution is keeping ENOC staff and customers very happy.

“We’re very happy with the solution,” Narayanan says. He gives an example of some of the content management issues which Rio has solved.

“There are around 1,500 employees available across the ENOC group and the group internal audit department faces difficulties sending each employee a soft copy of Employee Acknowledgement and Conflict of Interest forms. These forms need to be signed and returned back to HR as a hard copy. Thus the usage

The integration was a slightly tricky one. We had to layer the solution on top of our current ERP system. Global Technology Services helped us with that. Starting around 2011 and finishing inside six months, it was a fairly seamless integration.”

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of paper becomes heavy. By implementing Laserfiche record management system integrated with SharePoint, every employee can now submit both the forms online in the SharePoint portal, which will then be converted to a PDF electronic file and get saved in the Laserfiche HR employee folder repository. Thus we can save at least 3,000 papers per year,” he says.

As well as this, Laserfiche has helped to speed up the card marketing department’s customer service through the Laserfiche DMS and workflow automation process. By integrating Laserfiche with interactive voice response (IVR) software, fuel card customers can now request to fax their invoices through this system.

Moreover, HR now has one single central location from which to access all employee documents. Group finance now has a central location from which to validate and store all supplier invoices and, using the workflow routing option, the supplier-submitted invoices are sent as an email to the respective company owner for payment.

The group chief executive and general manager office secretary uses Laserfiche as its tracking system in order to store all incoming and outgoing correspondences. And the group internal audit department uses the record management system for every employee who wishes to submit online forms, which are now saved as PDF files and stored in the Laserfiche HR repository.

Narayanan claims that the payback on the product has taken less than two years. The employees can now spend far more time on important tasks instead of wasting man hours on file locating, organising and distributing paper documents, etc.

An energetic forecast ENOC isn’t resting on the laurels of the updated ECM solution. In fact, much change lies ahead as the company moves toward a complete re-engineering of its IT systems, including the complex upgrade of Oracle’s ERP solution.

“As well as this, we’re looking to concentrate more on document management, unifying all these document processes and more. There are some major projects to come this year and the Rio project is just the beginning of that,” Narayanan says.

Moreover, despite plans to re-engineer the entire ERP system, and the fact that the Rio solution has been consistently fulfilling requirements, ENOC has said that it plans to upgrade that very system to the 8.2 version sometime in 2013.

“It’s a good tool. It’s cost efficient, user friendly, it’s easy to configure, and it has a lot of available features.”

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Copyright 2013 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell SonicWALL is a trademark of Dell Inc. and all other Dell SonicWALL product and service names and slogans are trademarks of Dell Inc.

case study Topaz

Tightening the ship Topaz Energy and Marine faced a problem familiar to many organisations when its vulnerable system left it in danger of losing business critical information. This commenced a long-term collaboration with Dell SonicWall to manage its network and connectivity requirements.

T

opaz is a Dubai-based oil field services company that provides marine and engineering solutions to the global energy industry.

After realising the company’s work flow and employee access to critical data was not running smoothly, the 15-strong IT team identified an inconsistent bandwidth as the culprit.

It soon realised that its previous deployment of disparate firewall and VPN connectivity solutions was complex, difficult to manage and costly to scale. www.cnmeonline.com

This left its network vulnerable to viruses and spam attacks that caused periods of downtime and hours spent troubleshooting and fixing problems.

Loss of business critical information also became an issue.

“There was the constant struggle with managing network bandwidth and security had to be addressed quickly, as the company was in a growth phase and needed to extend its network services across its growing footprint,” says Sanjay Kumar, IT Manager, Topaz Energy and Marine. march 2013

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37

case study Topaz

Subsequently, Kumar and his team deployed and experimented with a number of solutions on the market.

After deploying Dell SonicWall appliances as a trial in 2004, Kumar was impressed with the results and decided to engage with the vendor on a broader scale.

“Dell SonicWall had tailor-made solutions for us,” Kumar says. “It was an obvious choice because the solutions implemented would specifically address all the network problems we were facing at the time.

“Implementing the solutions would mean that our systems would always be up to date and robust. Other than helping us save the bandwidth cost and protecting us from Internet threats, other strengths included ease of use and comprehensive central management of multi-location deployments like ours. This helps us manage multiple location policies and troubleshooting by maintaining minimal downtime.”

Topaz initially deployed SonicWall’s firewall solutions in two locations, before rolling it out to all of its offices worldwide within a year. Topaz’s IT team delivers technology services to 16 office locations around the globe, including the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Nigeria and Brazil, all of which are connected through VPN tunnels.

Following those deployments, Topaz then upgraded to Dell SonicWall E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA) E5500, and NSA 4500, 3500 and 2400 Next-Generation Firewalls, all of which are centrally managed at its headquarters in Dubai. It also expanded its portfolio to include Dell SonicWall ESA Email Security with 1,000 mailbox licences at its Dubai office and at its Qatar office as a back-up.

“We were especially happy with how Dell SonicWall firmware was upgraded automatically when it was released. We deployed Dell SonicWall Network Security, Email Security, and Backup and Recovery solutions, resulting in greater performance, reliability, and manageability,” Kumar says.

“Over the years, we developed a system where each office had two Internet connections - one lease line for VPN and a second line for Internet access. The lease lines piped 12 Mbps at each site, while the ADSL lines were between 40 and 100 Mbps based on local connectivity and capacity. Social media sites were

15 people make up the IT team that delivers tech services to Topaz’s 16 offices around the world.

There was the constant struggle with managing network bandwidth and security had to be addressed quickly, as the company was in a growth phase and needed to extend its network services across its growing footprint.”

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blocked and rules were set based on management requirements and decisions.”

In 2008, Topaz deployed Dell SonicWall’s backup and recovery appliance Continuous Data Protection CDP 6080. Its most recent SonicWall deployment was the 2010 upgrade of its legacy firewalls to the new Dell SonicWall E-Class NSA and NSA series and E-Class Email Security Appliance 6000.

According to Kumar, the original implementation was fast and easy, and all deployments have run smoothly since.

“It took a mere few hours to be up and running the time surpassed our expectations,” he says. “The scalable architecture of the central management system made us do the investments as and when we expanded and added more products ensuring that we only paid when the need arose and was done on the same platform without having to change any network design or interface type that we got used to.”

It was that scalable architecture and those central management solutions that allowed Topaz to keep TCO low and encouraged it to expand to experience the highest possible ROI. Kumar is indeed happy to endorse Dell SonicWall’s claims that the complexity of its products is taken out at the engineering level, which makes the products easy to deploy and manage.

“We did not face any implementation delays and challenges as the product deployment was straightforward and simple, as long as you have chosen the right product model for the right purpose,” he says.

The relationship between Topaz and Dell SonicWall does not end there. As with any global business, employees often work on the move at Topaz, connecting to their business-critical data through laptops, smartphones and tablets. As such, secure access and data dissemination has become paramount for Topaz’s IT executives to prevent malicious attacks and manage bandwidth.

Dell SonicWall is therefore currently working on securing the Topaz network to include mobile devices. Plans are also underway for Topaz to install Dell SonicWALL Aventail E-Class SSL VPN, which provides users of Windows, Macintosh, Linux, iOS, Android and Windows Mobile devices an “in-office” experience. This provides easier and more secure access to executives who regularly travel.

“No business is too small to neglect proper network security. The amount of data being transmitted across company networks has grown exponentially in recent years and we needed a solution to protect our rapidly growing network across the MENA region,” Kumar says.

Virtualization is as easy as 1.

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For more information, please contact MDS – PACC on Tel: +971 4 3370070 or email: shantanu@mdspacc.ae

Š 2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

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Solutions world

INSIDE

The big fuss over big data

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solutions world Big data

The BIG FUSS over BIG DATA Despite the technological world being ablaze with talk on the benefits of big data, the Middle East has hardly become a world leader in terms of tooling up. With cost concerns and a lack of interest causing a lacklustre uptake, CNME looks into what it will take for the region to see what the big fuss is over big data.

T

here is no denying the hype that has surrounded big data over the past few years.

Big data is set to revolutionise the industry, we have been told; big data will change the way in which companies do business; big data can provide organisations with superior insight into their customers’ demands and the industries in which they operate. Talk about big data has reached almost hysterical levels, and businesses are feeling more pressured than ever to involve themselves in this colossal movement.

But for all the fanfare surrounding big data, the reality is that many businesses are either unable or unwilling to invest in the technology that will help them harness it. Worldwide, only a small portion of the world’s top businesses have active big data analytics processes in play. Yes, research firms such as IDC predict a significant rise in big data analytics expenditure over the next few years, but at present, many organisations simply haven’t cottoned onto why big data is supposedly so important. www.cnmeonline.com

The numbers show a distinct lack of interest in big data at present, according to Aaron White, General Manager for the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, Hitachi Data Systems. “Globally, businesses are only now starting to deploy big data to positive ends and actually using it for business insights and advantages,” he says.

“According to an IDC study that we commissioned last year, only 10 percent of senior-level IT professionals have started this process. Some 20 percent have the good intention of starting in the next 24 months. Another 10 percent flatly reject the need to do so. But the majority, nearly 60 percent, simply have no current plans.”

In the Middle East, the idea of big data has gained even less traction. But why is this? According to some, it’s because not enough has been done to really explain the benefits that big data can bring to businesses.

“As in every case, the initial doubts about big data as a strategy and concept were stemming from the fact that it was suspected as another ‘concept selling’ by IT vendors without tangible benefits to enterprises,” says Mohan Sundaram, Manager, Enterprise Infrastucture. march 2013

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solutions world Big data

“Added to this, a lack of unbiased research information in the public domain, a lack of clarity on what big data is, and confusion and clarity on its benefits have held back big data adoption. The most cited reason in holding back big data adoption is the cost factor.”

What’s more, Sundaram says, the IT expertise to handle big data is in short supply, not just in the Middle East, but all around the world. So-called data scientists are being snapped up by the world’s leading organisations, leaving little talent for everyone else.

That said, there is some evidence to suggest that regional attitudes to big data are changing, the experts say. What’s more, they say that the hype surrounding big data is not unfounded. The consensus seems to be that, with the exponential growth in the amount of data being created – IDC predicts that the digital universe will reach 40 zettabytes by 2020 – companies need to find ways of harnessing this data in order to stay ahead of the game. And some organisations are leading the way in developing solutions to do this.

The New York Stock Exchange, for example, is using IBM big data technology to store and analyse seven years of historical trading data systems, which helps to identify and investigate trading anomalies more quickly, according to Ahmed Auda, Business Unit Executive, IBM Middle East. “As a result, the company has been able to improve simplicity and performance, in turn cutting data analysis time by eight hours,” he says.

Arun Chandrasekaran, Research Director, Data Centre Infrastructure and Operations, Gartner, says that these kinds of operations are beginning to give companies an edge: “Leading-edge organisations compete by extracting insight from data. Businesses

40 zettabytes of data will make up the digital universe by 2020.

Boby Joseph, CEO, StorIT

are moving from historical analysis (hindsight) to real-time analytics (insight) with increasing need for predictive analytics (foresight). Business analytics, with actionable predictive analysis, can offer a sustainable competitive advantage for businesses in today’s digital economy.”

Den Sullivan, Head of Architectures and Enterprise, Emerging Markets, Cisco, concurs: “Just as oil once fired dreams a century or more ago, data is today driving a vision of economic and technical innovation. If ‘crude’ data can be extracted, refined, and piped to where it can impact decisions in real time, its value will soar. When key insights can be mined from it through analytics—revealing complex behaviours, patterns, and events as they happen, if not before—then data will realise its inherent power.”

However, Habib Mahakian, Regional General Manager for the Gulf and Pakistan, EMC, says that businesses’ interests in big data will depend on the types of industries that they are operating in. “Industries where the business evolves around data, such as Telecom, FSI and public sectors, have clear interest in addressing big data, whether from data analytics or from data management perspectives,” he says.

“The interest arises from the benefits they can achieve from the insights they get through data analytics, whether it is measuring customer satisfaction, maintaining customer loyalty, providing a much better customer experience, or introducing new products or services.”

If a company feels that it could benefit from harnessing big data, then, how should it go about it?

According to Boby Joseph, CEO, StorIT, acquiring the right tools can be an expensive proposition for little to no return, if things aren’t done properly.

Mohan Sundaram, Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure

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solutions world Big data

“All analytics should make business sense and should be in line with the total goal a company would want to pursue,” he says. “The purpose of all analytics software programmes is to provide the tools necessary to review programming or transaction details in a structured way. Enterprises need to consider a number of processes when selecting the best analytics software.

The organisation needs to document its requirements, make a list of all the features that the programme must have and a list of the features that would be good to have. They also need to check future plans, operating systems and budgets before choosing the right analytics software.”

In terms of vendors, Joseph highlights Hadoop, EMC, Greenplum, Microsoft Polybase and Oracle ExData as some of the most popular data analytics tools in the Middle East. Of course, though, the products should hardly be bought on the basis of the brands behind them; they should be acquired based on how much value the results will bring to the organisation.

What’s more, tooling up for big data need not be as costly as many CIOs may think. Many believe that being able to harness big data will require a completely new approach to the design of enterprise storage.

But vendors are now offering solutions that can be integrated into existing systems, so that companies can decide how they want to use big data before investing in more advanced technologies.

“We at EMC believe the right approach is an evolution of existing enterprise storage infrastructure to allow it to cope while gradually building up the ability to deal more efficiently with big and bigger data,” says Mahakian. “As a starting point, it’s key to have a hybrid storage system, which can efficiently

Habib Mahakian, Regional General Manager, Gulf & Pakistan, EMC

The global big data market will grow by

40%

this year, according to IDC.

Arun Chandrasekaran, Research Director, Data Centre Infrastructure and Operations, Gartner

www.cnmeonline.com

house a mix of Flash (aka SSD) drives and multiterrabyte SATA drives. Next comes data de-duplication, which significantly reduces the consumed physical storage capacity by 10, 20 or even 30-fold compared to the logical data size.”

Of course, huge steps need to be taken in order to set up the most advanced data analytics systems, but the fact that organisations can get started with more simplistic options is encouraging. Indeed, as firms realise how much useful information they can glean from big data, they should certainly begin investing more in big data technologies.

“Companies in the region are fast realising the need to fully leverage their data,” says Seyed Golkar, Director, Business Solutions, Gulf Business Machines. “Although I would steer clear of making any predictions for 2013, it is safe to say that the immediate future holds plenty of potential for big data in the Middle East.”

Stephen Fernandes, Assistant Vice-President and Head of the Middle East, Cognizant, agrees that big data’s potential is only set to grow in the Middle East this year: “The process of realising the importance of a big data strategy and learning big data technology has already begun. Some of the technologically advanced organisations are already on the path of piloting big data technology platforms and use cases and defining a strategy for big data. The potential is very good and 2013 looks promising for big data in the Middle East.”

According to the figures, the experts are right on the money. IDC says that the global big data market will grow by 40 per cent this year – around seven times as quickly as the rest of the IT industry. Whether such growth will be seen in the Middle East is anyone’s guess, but plenty of people seem to be banking on it. march 2013

Computer News Middle East

47

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Telepresence of mind for ROI

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

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You don’t buy communications products for your own benefit. You buy those products so you can better service your customers. Our products and cloud-based services are developed to help you deliver the best possible experience to your customers – turning that superior experience into a competitive advantage for your business. Give your customers choices in the media types they use to contact you. Give your employees immediate access to information and documents so they can respond more quickly to your customers. Provide automated self-service that allow your customers to complete transactions without frustration. Each customer is unique. The service you deliver should be unique as well. Now you can deliver more.

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network world Telepresence

Telepresence of mind for ROI With questions over measuring RIO when implementing solutions like cloud and big data shooting around regional boardrooms, telepresence technologies have emerged as a simple and sure-fire way to lower TCO.

T

he most important question on the mind of every CIO when pitching a project to senior management revolves entirely around ROI. Technology has grown to possess endless opportunities, but if a CIO is unable to specifically break down exactly how and where a particular implementation is going to provide benefits to the bottom line, it is not going to fly.

That is ultimately why trends like cloud and big data – whilst demanding the most hype and column inches – are still lagging in adoption. Because if they are so early in maturity that CIOs have barely fully understood how to precisely measure the ROI themselves, they cannot present the investment convincingly to management.

Fortunately for telepresence technologies, things are different. ROI is a lot simpler to measure, the benefits are crystal clear to see and that is why adoption continues to vastly gain traction.

Furthermore, with travel costs continuing to rocket and more enterprises experiencing globalisation, this collaboration through technology is becoming less a luxury and more a necessity.

One organisation that recognised this in the Middle East is General Electric (GE). With 300,000

employees worldwide - 4,500 in MENA and Turkey alone - collaboration was naturally at the top of its IT priorities.

“GE is very big on collaboration at the moment. It’s a big theme – connecting our employers, customers and suppliers,” says Fady Sleiman, CIO, GE MEA. As such, the company implemented a Cisco 3012, a large unit made up of three 62-inch screens that provide a realistic face-to-face experience. With GE already boasting between 500 and 600 of these units globally, the Dubai headquarters can now interact with any of these around the world.

“This type of technology is so sophisticated that they don’t even have to press a button. They walk into a room and as soon as the meeting is scheduled to start, it will just prop up on a screen and get going,” Sleiman says.

As long as GE keeps utilising between 60 and 70 percent – any higher and it becomes too busy – it is reducing travel considerably, Sleiman adds.

“I’m talking about the long-haul travel and even with shorter travel, we’re only keeping it to mustmeetings that they have to attend and that’s why now the regional CFO has supported the initiative of rolling out the TP strategy across the region.” www.cnmeonline.com

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network world Telepresence

An evolving technology The two leading operators in the UAE, Etisalat and du, are of course very familiar with telepresence technologies.

“There is a high level of demand in the UAE market as customers’ needs go beyond audio services and prefer collaboration through video communications.

We are now in the era of video communications,” says Raied Ariqat, Manager, ICT Product House, Etisalat.

Farid Faraidooni, CCO, du, adds, “Telepresence technologies help with productivity, in terms of increased communication and collaboration; provide access to remote locations; and offer time savings and costs in terms of travel, especially for our executive teams. The ROI can come within nine to 12 months, depending on the organisation.”

As well as vastly reducing travel costs, other benefits include increases in productivity and efficiency, better communications, faster decision making, and improved employee quality of life, according to Daniel Schmierer, Area Sales VP for MEA and Turkey, Polycom, which, along with Cisco and LifeSize, is a leading provider of video conferencing solutions in the region.

“From a quality perspective, one of the things that a lot of people get caught up with when talking about video collaboration is the bandwidth requirement and infrastructure. Yet the reality is, if all those things do not work to deliver great quality, people do not use the technology.

“This then leads to low adoption and utilisation of your own solution. So what businesses should do is pick the solutions that can deliver and guarantee levels of quality so to encourage high adoption and utilisation.

When utilisation goes up, you monetise faster.”

According to Pradeep Angeveetil, Regional Manager MEA, LifeSize Communications, the ROI can actually be quantified even before the implementation.

“A lot of enterprises do this exercise prior to initiating a video conferencing proposal,” he says.

“Things like travel costs and efficiency can be jotted down, and gestation will depend on the frequency of travel. Telepresence would be deemed luxury if a client chooses to overlook ROI. Of late, million dollar

200% The ROI that India’s leading fertiliser industry player achieved in six months from video collaboration.

Fady Sleiman, CIO, General Electric MEA

What’s great about video is that it not only drives down costs, it also drives better services. When you allow people a flexible working environment, you actually reduce the requirement that you have for your physical facilities.”

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telepresence rooms are diminishing and enterprises see video conferencing as more of a necessity.”

Wael El Kabbany, Managing Director, BT MENA, believes enterprises will start recuperating the investment from the moment the service becomes operational.

“Total ROI is dependent on the level of savings in travel budget versus the utilisation of the telepresence solution, and also motivation of employees to use the service,” he says.

Schmierer adds that ROI is heavily reliant on adoption and therefore the more employees who utilise the telepresence solutions, the quicker and greater the ROI. “Basically, the faster and broader the adoption, the lower the TCO and the higher the ROI driven by a combination of lower costs, higher productivity and the unleashed creative power of unimpeded global collaboration,” he says.

He refers to Polycom’s video collaboration customer IFFCO as a key example. The leading player in India’s fertiliser industry saved $200,000 in travel costs and achieved a 200 percent ROI in less than six months.

Another example, provided by El Kabbany, is BT customer Tommy Hilfiger, which implemented a made-to-measure HD video conferencing facility – called the Virtual Fitting Room – to connect locations in Amsterdam, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

“People simply step into virtual meeting rooms and effortlessly work with colleagues on the other side of the world,” El Kabbany says.

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network world Telepresence

“They can even call in from home with a laptop and webcam, enabling the design teams in Amsterdam and New York to collaborate faster and more effectively with each other and with the manufacturing team in Hong Kong, meaning they hardly ever have to take a flight.”

Beyond business However, whilst many people think that video solutions are only used for business video collaboration, vertical sectors are also using them for more innovative ways outside the meeting room.

A case in point in this region is the American University of Kuwait, which provides its faculty and students with the audio and video conferencing tools that are necessary to facilitate learning with universities abroad.

This enables them to hold classes in more than one classroom simultaneously, and have speakers, guest lecturers and authors speak to classes from anywhere in the world.

However, whilst many organisations in the Middle East are embracing the solutions, El Kabbany believes there are both technological and cultural factors that need to be taken into account when measuring deployment of telepresence, as well as wider Unified Communications and Collaborations (UCC) technology.

He alludes to a recent mini-survey of executives attending a seminar on UCC in the UAE, which found that instant messaging and audio conferencing are amongst the most popular tools, whilst immersive video solutions, desktop sharing and cloud-based services are still in early adoption stages compared to the rest of the world.

“Local executives consider better team work and time saving amongst the most important benefits gained from UCC adoption, whilst for executives in other countries, getting faster decisions is the major driver,” El Kabbany says.

“Another key reason for using [desktop] video conferencing services is the ability to communicate across countries and cultures, whilst the main reason for non-adoption of UCC services is the

Daniel Schmierer, Area Sales VP for MEA and Turkey, Polycom

70% of EMEA decisionmakers say video is critical to a flexible working environment.

The ongoing global economic downturn will also mean that more companies will be forced to examine their costs, and will potentially see telepresence as a solution to reduce travel costs.”

www.cnmeonline.com

preferences of local executives to speak face-to-face with their counterparts.”

According to Faraidooni, the awareness is definitely increasing and du is working aggressively to increase awareness amongst its customers in UAE market. “We are working on new initiatives and are very positive about a higher uptake in 2013,” he says.

As companies from the region become increasingly international in their approach, there will be more investment into video conferencing technology, El Kabbany adds.

“The ongoing global economic downturn will also mean that more companies will be forced to examine their costs and will potentially see telepresence as a solution to reduce travel costs and thus lower the cost of doing business globally.”

To support this, a recent survey of over 400 business decision-makers across EMEA found that 70 percent of companies said that they felt video was critical to a flexible working environment to achieve high levels of productivity.

“What’s great about video is that, like in the health industry, it not only drives down costs, it also drives better services,” Schmierer says. “When you allow people a flexible working environment, you actually reduce the requirement that you have for your physical facilities. Not only do you increase your productivity, giving access to employees and expertise around the world and in a highly collaborative way, but you also significantly cut down on your infrastructural company requirements.” march 2013

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Strategic IT Storage Partner

storage advisor

INSIDE

Data deduplication: You only live twice

storage advisor Data deduplication

You only live twice With an ever-increasing data volume but by no means an ever-increasing IT budget, businesses are facing a tough task in optimising their storage. Most believe that deduplicating redundant copies was the storage saviour.

CNME investigates the trend of eliminating cloned data.

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Technology moves fast and traditional deduplication solutions have had their capabilities pushed by the advent of mobility and big data in recent years. So, how can companies take advantage of the big data trend while maximising storage capabilities and keeping critical data secure? What about deduplication?

“Data deduplication works by replacing multiple copies of identical files or file system blocks by pointers to a single version. If you’re backing up several Windows 2012 servers, for example, the core operating system files on each server are identical.

In theory, data deduplication can lower the amount of data stored and transferred, which can reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth needed for backups, at the cost of increased processing overhead,” says Mike Robinson, Senior Solution Marketing Manager, NetIQ Arun Chandrasekaran, Research Director, Data Centre Infrastructure and Operations, Gartner, adds, “The additional benefits of deduplication include its positive impact on disaster recovery (DR), because less network connectivity is required, since each input/output (I/O) operation carries a larger data payload. Or data may be copied over the network more frequently, as the traffic impact may be minimised due to the reduction in data.”

With mobility being one of the major trends in IT over the past few years, and cloud storage beginning to really take off in the Middle East, companies are shifting and sending data more frequently due to the availability of connectivity and options for transferring it. As Allen Mitchell, Senior Technical Account Manager, MENA, CommVault Systems, explains, it’s adding a challenging new dimension to dealing with data storage.

“With the variety of devices available, this can prove challenging. With BYOD growing in popularity, IT departments need to react and provide effective data management solutions while at the same time ensure that the loss of any device does not compromise or pose any security threat. As this market space grows, enterprise software providers

According to a survey on storage budgets, around

30% of storage

professionals are looking at a budget decrease.

Aamir Saleem, Pre-Sales Manager of Back-up Recovery Systems, EMC Middle East.

Deduplication is all about retention and space optimisation. If you’re dealing with back-up data, you can retain far more data than before on disk. This can have considerable benefits when you need to recover critical data.” www.cnmeonline.com

are developing interfaces to improve access to, and the recovery of, data to mobile devices.”

Deduplication can also assist with disaster recovery, as the experts say, by reducing the storage footprint relative to the actual amount of data. This sizeable reduction in data considerably reduces the bandwidth required for replicating the data.

Existing networks can be used for making the data available at the disaster recovery site without delay.

“Thus eliminating the need for transferring data on a physical medium, like tape, and making disaster recovery practical and affordable,” says Aamir Saleem, Pre-Sales Manager of Backup Recovery Systems, EMC Middle East.

Savitha Bhaskar, General Manager, Condo Protego adds, “Deduplication is all about retention and space optimisation. If you’re dealing with back-up data, you can retain far more data than before on disk. This can have considerable benefits when you need to recover critical data.”

Deduplication ultimately makes it easier to move and store critical information, which is essential to a disaster recovery strategy. Data deduplication solutions are often integrated with a disk-based back-up system. This, is turn, provides a method of automating back-up operations, which reduces human error and frees up IT resources during disaster recovery scenarios.

“However, designing such policies requires a mix of not just technological solutions but also business sense. Knowing where to implement deduplication at the network layer, and when it is cost-effective to do so, is paramount for march 2013

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storage advisor Data deduplication

enterprises in assisting with disaster recovery.

Data deduplication is only part of the solution as it still needs to fit within an overall data protection approach that covers all aspects of storage risk and recovery,” states Aad Dekkers, Marketing Director EMEA, EVault, A Seagate Company.

This may be a trend worth getting on board with, then, when we consider what the major consequences of network downtime are. IT has never before found itself in a position of such high priority within its business, and so these technologies become increasingly important.

As Praveen U., Senior Systems Engineer, Emitac, explains, the consequences of disaster and downtime go beyond productivity.

“Today’s businesses are extremely dependent on IT. While the direct impact of downtime is loss of business, reduced productivity and damaged credibility, there are also indirect losses like lost customers and lost opportunities.”

As well as this, you’re at a risk of loss of valuable personnel, information and infrastructure, risk of business loss and employee productivity.

And Robinson adds, “There are obviously hard costs to downtime; if you’re an online retailer and you’re down for a day, you probably lose that day’s sales. Your customers aren’t likely to wait around until you’re back up and running and hold their orders until then. But that’s often just the tip of the iceberg. Any lost data comes with its own set of costs.”

So, with what appears to be a cost effective and desirable solution, what are businesses here in the Middle East thinking? Many organisations believe it’s a difficult statistic to estimate.

“Adoption of dedupliation continues to grow in the region as organisations look for effective methods of managing data growth, while controlling costs. The technology has matured and, with proven business benefits, deduplication is fast becoming the accepted standard for all disk-based back-ups,” claims Mitchell.

Hussam Ahmad Al Ghouj, Data Protection Sales Leader, Systems and Technology Group, GBM, says, “The Middle East has shown remarkable growth in the storage market in the last decade, and it has strong demand for data storage products in the last couple of years. This growing demand on data storage in the growing IT market in the Middle East made companies look for storage TCO for the long term, and this results in more focus on the technologies of data compression and deduplication to maximise the benefit of the data storage products.”

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Aad Dekkers, Marketing Director EMEA, EVault

46%

of global IT professionals use data deduplication.

www.cnmeonline.com

Deduplication has, for many years, been seen as a technology that is available only for larger enterprises. But experts and vendors alike believe that now is the time for smaller and medium-sized businesses to have their day in the sun and begin to benefit from this technology.

Praveen U. explains, “There are a wide variety of deduplication methods available now, which the customers can choose from, depending on their environment. Even smaller companies realise the importance of data deduplication now and hence the rate of implementation is picking up faster.”

Bhaskar adds, “Depublication is definitely more available and prominent than ever before, and rightly so. Data is expanding at such a rapid space that businesses of all sizes must consider their preparedness and the consequences of taking their eye off the ball.”

Dekkers concludes by saying that many enterpriselevel organisations are actually deploying smaller solutions for an even higher cost-effective benefit.

“If you talk to most technology manufacturers or OEMs, you will find solutions for Small Business, SMBs, and so forth. Historically most large companies deploy enterprise-class solutions, and most small businesses deploy entry-level or multipurpose solutions.

However, in today’s market, the lines are blurring and that is especially true in the deduplication market.

We actually see many large companies choosing to go with SMB solutions from a cost perspective, and many SMBs are put off by technology marketed to them that is merely a scaled back enterprise solution.”

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Mohamed Raafat Atia Technical Services Manager Digital Solutions Provider

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

Strategic IT BYOD Partner

security advisor

INSIDE

Eye of the storm

security advisor Protecting the cloud

Eye of the storm Experts recently pointed toward security as the main obstacle for adoption of all cloud types and claimed that cloud security will be the main disruptive technology for 2013. But the Middle East has spoken out, and instead of running away, it looks to be chasing the eye of the storm.

W

e’ve seen an outrageous eruption in regards to cloud discussion over the past year in the Middle East, both public and private.

Which solution is the safest, most costeffective and best value-added is still a major debate, but at least the debate has moved from whether companies are actually going to adopt altogether.

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Experts have spoken out and believe that the major talking point for 2013 is going to be tackling the object of protecting data within the cloud. As Florien Malecki, Head of Product Marketing, Dell SonicWALL, says, the reasons for adopting cloud solutions can no longer be ignored, but a level of understanding needs to be reached, and measures have to be taken to ensure that corporate data is safely stored. www.cnmeonline.com

“Consuming resources over the cloud can decidedly provide competitive advantages that businesses can no longer ignore.

However, when leveraging the cloud, you also need to leverage the latest available technologies, such as application-intelligent Next-Generation Firewalls, to keep your cloud consumption secure, efficient and productive,� he states.

Benoit Verbaere, Senior Portfolio Manager, Air Transport Industry Cloud, SaaS, SITA, adds, “Cloud is a volume game and so cloud providers can and must focus more on potential risks and put resources into avoidance because of the potential huge business impact threats and defects could have.”

Chasing the storm So what moves can businesses make to ensure that all data is fully secured before an attack is made?

Mikael Hansson, Head of Delivery Management Middle East, Ericsson, believes that selection of the right provider is key and that the company must be aware of a few critical pieces of information.

“Where the data is going to be stored and the local data protection laws in that area. How often does the provider have an independent security audit, and how well did it perform in the previous audit? And how accommodating will the provider be on your security policies?” he asks.

Cognizant’s Mahesh Venkateswaran, Managing Director of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud, believes that the early security measures come down to three points – robust security, trust and assurance, and monitoring and governance.

“Providing robust security means moving beyond a traditional perimeter-based approach to a layered model that ensures the proper isolation of data, even in a shared, multitenant cloud.

Providing trust and assurance - the company needs to have confidence in the integrity of the complete cloud environment.

And monitoring and governance - having utilities that allow customers to monitor the environment for security, as well as ensure compliance with other KPIs, such as performance and reliability. Using these utilities, customers should be able to perform these activities almost as well as they could in their own data centres.”

Mikael Hansson, Head of Delivery Management Middle East, Ericsson

The global cloud market will reach

$270bn by 2020, analysts have predicted.

The attack type Brennan O’Hara, Security Solutions Manager, NetIQ, tells us that many of the attack strategies are the same as they have been over the last five or six years. Many security experts may argue with this point.

“The reality is that most successful attacks continue to use the same approaches that have been in use for several years. While concerns certainly exist among security professionals that cloud computing may introduce new vulnerabilities (and attacks that exploit them) we have yet to see specific examples of these. Rather, attacks still centre on the basics of

exploiting poorly configured systems, tricking users into introducing malware into the network through things like targeted email attacks, and simply being opportunistic in taking advantages of unpatched systems and weak passwords,” he says.

Nicolai Solling, Director of Information Services, help AG, seems to agree with this point, suggesting that the strategies and concerns are not what are changing, just the addition of some new concerns have been brought to life with the introduction of cloud.

“First of all, a cloud environment is a shared environment, which means that your ‘next-door neighbour’ in the cloud provider’s environment could impact your data. If, for example, your neighbour is a politically active entity that uses the cloud service for news-casting of radical opinions, they may upset other people with different views and they may be the target of DDOS attacks. This attack may impact your services,” he suggests.

Looking out for number one Another key argument in the cloud sector is focused on who is actually responsible for the protection of the data. Traditionally, the company housing its own data centre would be responsible for protecting all the information inside but with third-party providers offering their space in the cloud up for adoption, are they then the key minder for what’s inside?

Vladimir Udalov, Senior Product Manager, Kaspersky Lab, believes it’s not that simple.

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security advisor Protecting the cloud

In many countries, the law says that

100% of the liability of lost or stolen data lies with the customer.

Vladimir Udalov, Senior Product Manager, Kaspersky Lab

“Technically, the cloud service provider is responsible for protecting data in the cloud, but from a legal point of view, it depends on legislation of the country where the customer of the cloud service resides. In many countries, all liability lies completely on the customers, and in case data is lost or stolen, the customer will have to take legal responsibility for that,” he says.

And Noman Qadir, Acting Country Manager, Citrix MEA, also supports this view.

“Service providers are responsible for the protection of data in a public cloud,” he says. “They should be able to provide security in a multi-tenant environment which makes sure tenants are not able to access the data of another tenant. In a public cloud environment, where there are multiple users across multiple organisations, encryption is a critical safeguard to ensuring data is safe and accessible only to the right users.”

However, Miguel Braojos, Vice President of Sales for Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, SafeNet, disagrees, arguing that the full responsibility should rest on the shoulders of those who own the data.

“Companies themselves should be responsible to protect their data in a public cloud. Companies need to make sure they control and own their data completely; the adoption of strong security solutions is and will continue to be key for them. In cloud environment, companies need to regain ownership, control and governance of their digital assets.”

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providers and also see more IT budgets going down this route. The contract agreements become crucial in this area, where the discussion of lost or harmed data is concerned.

Srinivas Mamidala, Team Leader, Wintel and Storage Support, Emitac, says that one of the main consequences of data breaches may be the confusion over where the responsibility lies, saying, “Apart from the service level agreements and other important attributes of the cloud, customers should be aware of the legal terms in case of information theft. It is an important question to ask before signing a cloud computing contract.”

However, Alexander Zarovsky, Director of International Sales and Business Development, InfoWatch, makes the point that, despite all the concern over the risks of this technology, larger vendors should in fact have the means to provide more security than ever before. He feels that with substantial investment, cloud solutions are far more secure than traditional solutions.

“Ideally, cloud services should be even more secure than traditional data centres. But this requires larger investments into information security. Thus everything depends on the service provider. If the provider has many clients then it has enough funds to invest into infrastructure and security. Therefore its cloud services can be even more secure than traditional company infrastructure.”

But Khalid Muasher, Business Development Manager, Bitdefender, Middle East, claims that, again, it’s not that simple, and that some companies can be found to be very underprepared and very unsecure.

“There are private data centres that are extremely secure, while there are, unfortunately, others that are shockingly unsecure. It is likely that an organisation with a well-secured private data centre that also uses public cloud will do so securely. Security is ingrained in the people, processes, and technology choices. An already unsecure organisation that also uses public cloud is likewise likely to end up with a poorly secured public cloud implementation.”

Experts, it seems, are urging companies to manually seek out the most secure providers as well as to prepare themselves for any data attacks prior to the cloud deployment itself. Cloud adoption will continue to grow in the Middle East and worldwide, regardless of security concerns, but the consensus is that organisations must be aware that they’re moving toward the eye of a storm.

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integration advisor

INSIDE

Contract necessaries

integration advisor Contract necessaries

When an integrations contract is being discussed, every element is absolutely crucial. The finer details of an agreement play a heavy role if the partnership suddenly goes south, and therefore, companies will want to be safe in the knowledge that they’re as legally secure as they can be. We talk contract necessaries.

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“M

aybe I’m old-school, but I always thought you honoured a contract,” an interesting quote from Brett Favre, a former American Football star, who was more than likely talking about American football. However, its relevance can be translated into any industry that requires the use of a contractual agreement between two parties before business can be done.

Contracts are made to be honoured, yes. But contracts can also be a point of reference for when an agreement isn’t fulfilled. In successful systems integrations, contracts will appear as a total waste of time and paper. However, when these integrations are not so successful, you can bet your bottom dollar that both parties will hope the contact is as official and straight-laced as possible.

“The consequences of a breach are usually clearly defined in the contract. So if you sign it, you accept it and you have to face it. This might entail penalties for delays caused by the vendor going to cancellation of the contract, up to being black-listed for any future engagements,” says Stephan Berner, Managing Director, help AG. The loss of reputation in a market such as the Middle East is a business disaster. A very competitive and fierce market, one would be wise to go to great lengths to ensure that contract requirements are met – but that’s easier said than done.

“Contract is a binding document outlining the services provided, duration of the project, cost, resources involved, agreed assumptions and approach.

A contract is formed on a particular service and does not emphasise on the overall business objective. It does not look into the various metrics and performance objectives. It is basically a long-term or a scheduled commitment from either party to avoid pitfalls of adhocism and also to provide predictability in budgeting exercise,” says Padma Balaji, Manager of Contracts, Enterprise Infrastructure, Emitac.

“In general, the consequences of breaking an element of a contract have to be the same for either party involved. However in reality, the region has

Stephan Berner, Managing Director, help AG

practices which are heavily biased against the partner and loaded in favour of the customers.”

I have seen companies signing any kind of contract just to get the business. This is wrong and causes a big risk for the vendor as well to the end-customer.” www.cnmeonline.com

Any questions?

Prior to the actual agreement being signed, experts say that many important factors need to be checked in order to ensure the most educated and formally judged decision is made in regards to which systems integrator is chosen.

“Important factors should be looked into like the availability of resources; value, cost and margin and the start and end date of the project. These key points allow a buyer to check and confirm if a vendor is both financially and technically capable of performing the job. Also, it is a good move if you can do a reference check on the vendor’s previous clients,” says Rasuljon Halilov, Procurement and Contracts Manager, Smartworld.

Berner adds, “The success of a project depends on clearly defining the scope of work from the onset. This is the most important part to protect the interests of both the customer and the vendor.

“Does it make sense to sign a one-sided contract?

Certainly not. Payment terms, performance bond, penalties, all of these need to be fair. I have seen companies signing any kind of contract just to get the business. This is wrong and causes a big risk for the vendor as well to the end-customer. If a customer wants to award a project to a vendor, he should ensure the technical and business evaluation was done properly.” march 2013

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integration advisor Contract necessaries

Balaji believes that the completion time frame and other penalty-defined points should be a priority.

“In case of an implementation project, the time line agreed with the customer to complete the project is very crucial as this commitment may be tied to some penalties. This may prove very costly to the partner if there is any delay in completion of the project. Goals, objectives and deliverables are clearly defined, agreed and documented. Other clauses like ‘indemnity clause’ with open liability or without any ceiling on the value of such a liability for covering the loss customers may face in case the project is delayed and, of course, the payment terms need to be verified.”

The success of a project depends on clearly defining the scope of work from the onset.”

Top tips The experts teamed up with CNME and have provided the ultimate contract necessaries.

Halilov says that when entering into contracts, it’s important to know the availability of knowledge,

experience, and the vendor’s financial and technical capablilities.

Balaji states that a clear, well-defined contractual agreement will bind both parties to mutually derive benefits on pre-defined parameters - this can be achieved by incorporating the proper scope and purpose of the project, the creation of communication channels, and ensuring the goals mentioned in the agreement are understood and agreed by both parties.

Following these steps may put you in a far more confident position before signing along the dotted line, ensuring for a far more secure, professional and organised project.

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strategic telecom partner

Telecoms World

INSIDE

A cloud over telecoms

telecoms World Cloud

A cloud over telecoms Cloud has been a major topic in IT circles for a while now and its influence seems to know no bounds. In the telecoms world, it has given operators the chance to jump on the bandwagon and expand their portfolios by offering cloud services to their customers. But are these offerings more attractive than other service providers on the market?

T

he last thing anybody needs is another story highlighting the benefits and challenges of implementing a cloud-based solution for their enterprise.

Most CIOs of enterprises now understand that the cloud is where IT is going. Maybe not the public cloud – yet, anyway – but private clouds and managed services are gathering more and more momentum every day.

Various estimates from the likes of Gartner and IDC estimate the cloud market to expand to a value of $72.9 billion this year, with the market for public cloud computing services in the Middle East and North Africa reaching $378.5 million.

What does warrant more discussion is who an organisation should turn to when selecting a reliable cloud service.

Yes, there are the large multinational organisations throwing their services into the fray – the EMCs, the Oracles and the SAPs, for example.

Then there are also the small start-ups that have made a name for themselves by becoming globally successful cloud services.

But how about the telecoms operators?

Unsurprisingly, they’re also getting involved in search of new revenue streams by partnering with technology companies that act as cloud enablers. And it would seem that perhaps they have a better platform for cloud services than anyone else does.

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A new direction Take the UAE’s two leading operators as a key example.

Etisalat and du have both invested heavily in their B2B cloud offerings of late and many organisations would be keen to use a vendor they already use and trust, and who actually owns the network.

“We already have an existing market – virtually 100 percent of the market is already our customer in one way or another,” says Ramesh Krishna Bhandari, Manager, Cloud Computing, Etisalat. “And we own the data centres. We’ve got about eight data centres with more in the making, so we already have the baseline infrastructure needed for cloud services.

“It becomes easier for us to provide customers with end-to-end SLAs with cloud services coming into play. 99 percent of the UAE is covered with our links.

Then we also have LTE as another flavour, which supports the exponential growth of cloud and managed services. So since we already have the right underlying mix for a project, we will add more value than any other cloud service provider in this market.”

Farid Faraidooni, CCO, du, concurs. “Telcos, with their large customer base, plus their ability to build large data centre infrastructures and connectivity, are ideally placed to offer cloud solutions,” he says.

EMC also recognises the benefits of telcos entering the market, says the Senior Director of its global services organisation in EMEA and Turkey, Wael El Nadi. www.cnmeonline.com

“Cloud is enabling telcos to re-engage with their customers to drive new service offerings, address the data mobility challenges laid down by smart devices, and become more relevant to their customers,” he says.

“Large-scale data centre and dedicated storage consolidation to mutualised platforms via refreshing legacy services offers the potential to deliver greater margins to their business whilst enhancing the enduser experience, driving improved SLAs and giving an all-round increase in performance and functionality.”

According to a report from Ericsson, there are three major roles through which telecom operators can align themselves as providers in the cloud value chain – managing cloud activity, delivering cloud-based capabilities, and leveraging network assets to enhance cloud offerings.

Cloud-based resources that can be provisioned at speed and turned off, or released when not needed, offer big advantages with quantifiable capex benefits.

They can be available at any scale and with a lower cost footprint than on-premise options.

“Telcos that take on the role of a provider of cloud services can manage connectivity, deliver cloud capabilities and leverage network assets to enhance cloud offerings,” Faraidooni says. “Managing cloud connectivity is a natural value-add activity when bearing in mind the core competencies of telcos.

“They can also deliver on-demand applications and computing capacity through partnerships, or on their own infrastructure.”

Andreas Krenn, Strategic Marketing Director, RMEA, Ericsson, believes telecom operators in the Middle East can add value in two ways.

“First, it’s the understanding of the regional specifics in terms of consumer demands, culture as well as language,” he says. “These are areas global cloud providers have difficulties with.

“Second, it is about the existing relationship operators have with their customers and the high amount of trust people have in their operator. Would you prefer

Farid Faraidooni, CCO, du

$72.9bn The projected size of the global cloud market by the end of 2013.

Users will be happy to try their operators’ cloud services when they become available.

But as soon as customer experience doesn’t meet expectations, users will leave and not return to the service for a long time. Customer satisfaction as a whole could be threatened.” www.cnmeonline.com

to store your data and photos with your trusted mobile operator or with some company on the Internet?”

Living up to expectations However, with consumer trust in their operators high, it leaves their expectations high, too.

This means operators cannot afford to sacrifice any quality in their cloud services in comparison to what is available from independent providers today.

“Users will be happy to try their operators’ cloud services when they become available,” Krenn says.

“But as soon as customer experience doesn’t meet expectations, users will leave and not return to the service for a long time. Customer satisfaction as a whole could be threatened.”

El Nadi adds: “Cloud means telcos will need to continually evaluate their differentiated service offering, revisit commercial models, and leverage their core skills and assets, coupled with the mutualised cloud infrastructures to establish new revenue streams.”

The other aspect is the need for the telcos to have a more collaborative approach with other B2E segments that can help them provide complimentary product offerings while leveraging the vast arsenal of assets they have, such as network bandwidth and customer proximity, says Stephen Fernandes, Assistant Vice President and Head of the Middle East, Cognizant.

Furthermore, many globally successful cloud services that arose from small start-ups have a lean organisational structure that allows for quick decision making, short development cycles, and fast time-to-market. march 2013

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telecoms World Cloud

“The breadth of service all of us experience and the speed of how they appear and also disappear are directly related to how start-ups operate,” Krenn says.

“Telecom operators typically struggle with heavy processes, which stretch TTM to periods of a year or more for launching new services.”

But Faraidooni is adamant that this is not a threat to telcos, but rather an opportunity where the operator is providing value across the entire product chain of services.

“Telcos already provide services such as email, managed hosting and storage solutions to their enterprise customers,” he says. “The evolution to cloud computing is expected to be a natural progression for them, as cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand resources such as software, application platforms and IT infrastructure services, through a shared network, enabling remote access to hosted software, applications and so on via the Internet.”

With traditional hard-wired carrier telcos often possessing deep-rooted cultures and legacy systems that are challenged by the requirement of agility that cloud demands, many are now attempting to establish nimble business units, which are specifically set up to drive cloud innovation.

“Mobile providers are also looking at how to drive new data-orientated services, and tertiary revenue streams as voice connective revenues come under pressure,” El Nadi adds.

Looking forward, it is safe to bet that telcos will continue to be a force to be reckoned with in the arena of cloud service providers.

While expectations may be high, and certain challenges must be overcome, with an existing and

The Middle East’s cloud market will be worth

$378.5m by the end of 2013, according to anaylsts.

Andreas Krenn, Strategic Marketing Director, RMEA, Ericsson

loyal base of customers, and relevant infrastructure in place, they are in place to stake claim to a sizeable portion of the cloud market share.

Cloud services will continue to contribute to operators positively by creating new consumer demands on connectivity, El Nadi concludes.

“Regional telcos are ideally positioned to deliver new cloud services and applications in a trusted way that drives adoption and enables new use cases that we never thought possible from disruption created by cloud and big data,” he says.

March 27, 2013

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careers advisor

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careers advisor University profile

Dubai down under The University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD) may not be a home-grown school of higher education, but it has made its Australian-influenced IT programme a popular and permanent fixture in the UAE since its inception in 1995.

T

here are few other cities in the world that can boast as many international influences as Dubai, a city that has developed into a global hub of business, workers, entertainment, sport, tourism and travel.

You can also add education to that list.

While it does have plenty of locally established, high-quality universities, it also has many internationally branded establishments.

However, despite originating in New South Wales in Australia, the University of Wollongong – which became an independent university in

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1975 and now has around 30,000 students – can safely count Dubai as a home away from home. While the university is also present in China, Malaysia and Singapore, Dubai is the only pure operation it runs, with the others run in partnership with other institutions.

Furthermore, in 1999, UOWD became the first international university in the UAE to be licensed by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. Full accreditation of all its programmes then came in 2003, making all graduating students eligible to work for the public sector. www.cnmeonline.com

The Dubai branch officially opened in 1993 as the Institute for Australian Studies before gradually becoming UOWD. It only took two years before the IT programme was born as a bachelor of computer science and another bachelor of Internet science and technology, with the demand then on Internet sciencerelated issues. “The computer science bachelor was the traditional programme and the Internet science and technology bachelor was a joint programme developed among the faculties of engineering, computer science and

business in response to the demand for specialists in eCommerce,” says Dr Mohamed Salem, Acting President and Dean of Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, UOWD. “At that time, we also had a bachelor of commerce and a bachelor of business administration, but our IT programmes were among the first degrees at UOWD.” Since its inception, the faculty has grown from a couple of full-time lecturers to what is now 15 members all holding a PHD degree.

But it is not just academic excellence Dr Salem seeks when hiring new faculty members, with a large emphasise on hands-on experience at the heart of the programme.

“I came from IBM. We have another faculty member who came from Ericsson, one who used to be an engineer, and we have other faculty members who are more into the IT management part, teaching things like IT strategy and system analysis,” Dr Salem says.

“We look for colleagues who are research active, meaning academics who are really involved with industry. We do also try to have around 10 percent of the key subjects delivered by industry-successful people. For example, we got someone who was successful in creating two start-up companies in Silicon Valley and contracted him to deliver a subject. The idea is to connect students with the latest things happening in the industry.”

It is this hands-on approach that Dr. Salem believes puts UOWD’s IT programme at an advantage to others in the region.

“If you look at areas where we have computer programming, databases or software engineering, every subject has an average of three hours in the class in between lecture and tutorial, and two to three hours in the lab,” Dr Salem says.

15 The number of facilty members, all of whom hold a PHD degree.

Dr. Mohamed Salem, Acting President and Dean of Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering.

However, it is the final-year project that the university thinks is the real jewel in its crown in preparing its students for industry.

Students are put into groups to complete a ninemonth project to come up with a new idea or technology.

“They have to go through all the lifecycle of the software through building the requirements to doing the design, implementing it and testing it,” Dr Salem says. “We also always ask them as part of the exercise to look at the business viability and how that idea could be converted to some business idea.

“Our experience is that this project basically puts together everything they have learnt over their years on the programme, and by completing that project, they just mature all of a sudden. We have interesting statistics that show those who do extremely well in that project tend to get a job within the first three months of graduating.”

Our experience is that this project basically puts together everything they have learnt over their years on the programme, and by completing that project, they just mature all of a sudden. We have interesting statistics that show those who do extremely well in that project tend to get a job within the first three months of graduating.” www.cnmeonline.com

An Aussie feel In a region where the IT market brings a lot of experience from abroad, having that strong correlation between success in that project and employability is a strong indicator for the university.

Dr Salem refers to this educational approach as the programme’s “Australian flavour of delivering content”, which is highly focused on practical aspects and communication skills.

“Through the four years, students are highly exposed to presentation and debate,” he says. “We have an advisory board for the faculty and a few months march 2013

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careers advisor University profile

“The way projects were delivered eight years ago is very different to today,” he says. “Back then, we taught software engineering, whereas today, it’s about tools, rapid prototyping and building applications in a spiral model where you do everything to manage the risk.

“We have in the curriculum a few subjects that we know are key areas for employability. For example, we have a module on server models and server technologies.

When you look at the enrolment within that subject, it’s so popular even though it’s only an elective subject. The reason is, if you’ve done that subject and you go to an interview, you know you’re at an advantage.”

Dr Salem and his team are always looking to improve the programme to keep up with evolving IT trends and, as such, do an improvement report every year on top of the major review it conducts every five years for accreditation.

“For example, this month, I’m looking at creating a subject on open-source computing because of the demand for that. That’s the kind of thing we continue to do,” Dr Salem says.

ago, one of its key members was the CEO of Cisco.

He said the industry needs people who are able to communicate and do technical work - not people who can just do technical work.

“Our mode of education here, where students have two hours of lectures and an hour of tutorial in small groups, teaches students communication skills and that, in real life, they may have to work with people they may not like.”

The final piece of the hands-on training puzzle at UOWD’s IT programme is its students’ requirement to complete a minimum of six weeks’, or 12 for its engineering programme, full-time internship.

Asides from the practicality of the course, the other important factor in keeping the degree relevant is regularly reviewing, updating and angling it to suit current IT trends.

With technology regularly changing at a rapid pace, this is no easy feat and is a constant challenge.

Dr Salem believes the key is to still deliver the background that is needed but to adapt the teaching methodology.

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interview Hu Yoshida

‘People are buying dumb storage’ At Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hu Yoshida is the CTO responsible for defining the company’s technical direction. For everybody else, he is regarded as one of the most influential thought leaders in the storage industry today. Speaking to CNME, Yoshida sets the record straight on cloud and big data.

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www.cnmeonline.com

W

hile the Middle East storage industry was booming in 2012, globally, it appeared to suffer.

How are you looking back at HDS? Generally, 2012 was kind of a tough year for the storage industry – I think there was a lot of consolidation going on. However, for us, it was record quarters one after another. I think we’ve had 12 record quarters in a row now and the last quarter we closed out at 3 percent year-on-year increase. The Middle East speaks another story, where we’ve seen tremendous, triple-digit growth. This is because of the currency problems in Europe, and the US is still coming out of that deep recession we had back in 2009. The economies here are much more robust than they are in developed regions right now and I think the Middle East is looking to diversify more to not be so dependent on oil.

One of the biggest storage trends of the moment is cloud, but why are enterprises not really embracing the public cloud so much?

One of the biggest concerns is about security, and the availability is still in question.

You still hear at times about these cloud companies like Amazon and Google being offline for a while and that is a major consequence. The responsibility for a company still resides with the company - you can’t outsource responsibility. So maybe some of the infrastructure that is not as critical to the business can be outsourced to the cloud. There was also the thought that the smaller, mid-range customers may be outsourcing more because then they don’t have to set up their own infrastructure, but as we start to see this new trend toward the virtualisation of servers and more of the

unified computing platforms, customers are finding that it’s easy to start to use more of this IT equipment in house.

Big data appears to be even further behind cloud – not just in adoption, but awareness too. Why is that?

There are several aspects of big data that people are confused of. One is this explosion of data. To address that, there are three parts to it. Today, we have customers approaching exabytes, so volumes are going to be so large that you can’t back it up, and you can’t extract, translate and load it into a data warehouse, so you’re going to have to bring the applications to that data. The second thing is velocity – how fast you can ingest the data, how fast you can search, and then how fast you can provision the infrastructure for that. That’s why you’re seeing more people looking toward these unified computing platforms, where you roll in a rack that’s already got the integrated servers, storage and network preconfigured and precertified.

The third thing is variety of data – different types of data and how you see across. A lot of the value will be in the inner sections of different data and right now data is in silos.

So those things are important and that’s what we’re building the infrastructure for.

What big data really is about is how you get the value from all this variety of information, so it’s more about the analytics and deep expertise within the verticals.

Does this skyrocketing data warrant a new approach to an organisation’s enterprise storage, or is there a more affordable way to prepare for this?

Many people try to take the easy way. They say this means we need to have cheap commodity storage – dumb storage – and

Many people try to take the easy way. They say this means we need to have cheap commodity storage – dumb storage – and do everything with software.

But I have a different view of that because, when you have cheap, dumb things, you have to find intelligence somewhere else.” www.cnmeonline.com

do everything with software. But I have a different view of that because, when you have cheap, dumb things, you have to find intelligence somewhere else, and that means it’s in the application or the server.

That takes cycles, cycles take software, and software takes maintenance. So my feeling is to move more of that function down into the infrastructure and let the infrastructure take care of that automatically.

Do you find that CIOs have big budgets for these sorts of solutions and that this is high on their priorities?

Most of them right now don’t know what they need big data for. There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation around that.

For us, we believe you need to build the infrastructure first, which heavily depends on virtualisation. So you can separate the changes in the infrastructure from impacting the application of the data. That’s why, at HDS, we are focused on virtualisation – not only as storage and a hypervisor, but also the server platforms themselves. You need to buy the infrastructure first then scale. If you buy cheap point solutions, you’re just setting yourself up for more problems in the future.

What one technology will have the biggest influence on the storage industry this year?

Flash storage is going to become more and more important. Up to now, flash has had three things wrong with it. One, it was very expensive compared to hard disk – normally 10 times the price – and SSD has a limited capacity of only about 400GB. The second thing is durability because they wore out very quickly. The third thing is that the performance varied because the SSDs were built with a single core processor because they were built for PCs and servers, not the enterprise storage market. So they have not invested a lot in the controller. What we are doing is building our own controllers.

By doing that, we could put multi-core processors in there, do multi threading through there, increase the capacity to terabytes rather than gigabytes, and also reduce the cost relative to hard disk. So I think that will be big this year. march 2013

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PRODUCTS Launches and releases

Mobile World Congress special

PRODUCT WATCH The world’s biggest mobile show – Mobile World Congress – got so big this year that it had to move venue to cater for its growth. It was still in Barcelona though, and it was still busting with new smartphone and tablet releases. CNME rounds up the best.

Product: Lumia 520 Vendor: Nokia What it does: The Lumia 520 is Nokia’s most affordable Windows Phone 8 smartphone, whilst still delivering experiences normally only found in high-end smartphones, such as the same digital camera lenses found on the flagship Nokia Lumia 920. A four-inch “super sensitive” touchscreen makes for a more responsive and immersive content experience than can usually be found at this price, Nokia said.

What you need to know: MWC was all about affordability for Nokia. As well as launching the Lumia 520, the handset manufacturer also unveiled the Lumia 720, which “delivers a high end camera performance at a mid-range price”; the Nokia 301, which is the most affordable Nokia device to offer video streaming; and the Nokia 105, which at just $20 is the phone maker’s most affordable phone to date.

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www.cnmeonline.com

Product: Galaxy Note 8 Vendor: Samsung What it does: The Galaxy Note 8 tablet, with its 8-inch display, adds a new screen size to Samsung’s expanding lineup of Note products. It can display images at 1280-by-800 pixel resolution, and comes with optional 3G connectivity for making calls and using mobile broadband networks. It runs the Android 4.1 Jellybean operating system and has a 1.6GHz quad-core processor.

What you need to know: Samsung continued at MWC in its mission to release Apple’s stranglehold on the tablet market by unveiling the Galaxy Note 8.0. In an apparent attempt to compete with the iPad Mini, the Galaxy Note 8 is 25 percent lighter and thinner than the company’s Galaxy Tab 2 tablets.

Product: Xperia Tablet 7 Vendor: Sony What it does: The Xperia Tablet 7 is the world’s thinnest 10.1-inch tablet and, according to Sony, the most premium and high performance 10.1-inch Android tablet available today. Featuring the same ‘OmniBalance’ design as the Xperia Z smartphone, the tablet is only 6.9mm thick and weighs just 495 grams.

What you need to know: It is the first tablet to run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro asynchronous quad core processor and has the highest levels of water resistance (IP55 and IP57) ever seen in a tablet, making it immersible in up to three feet of water for up to 30 minutes. It will launch globally in the second quarter of 2013.

Product: Ascend P2 Vendor: Huawei What it does: Huawei has claimed this smartphone is the world’s fastest. It features a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor and LTE Cat 4, providing an ultrafast Web experience with download speeds of up to 150 Mbps. The Chinese company said the phone’s proprietary ‘swift sharing’ supports uploads and downloads two to three times faster than other smartphones in a Wi-Fi environment.

What you need to know: The Ascend P2 is only 8.4mm thick with an infinity edge 4.7-inch IPS HD in-cell touch display with secondgeneration Corning Gorilla Glass. It runs on the Android 4.1 operating system with Huawei’s own Emotion 1.5 user interface, and is powered by a 2420 mAh. Huawei’s unique Quick Power Control (QPC) and Automated Discontinuous Reception (ADRX) power-saving technologies reduce power consumption by 30% and charging time by more than 25% compared to other smartphones, the company said.

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Column The word on the street

Joe Lipscombe CNME’s man about town gives his spin on the latest IT news and trends.

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Dead tweet

I

’ve spent the majority of this month in the USA covering several events. This has involved flying across the country at highly anti-social hours, and switching hotels every couple of days, which has resulted, for the most part, in me being out of communication with my team, as well as my friends and family.

The simple conclusion I have made, other than how desperately frustrating it is trying to pack mini shampoos into those tiny clear plastic bags at airport security (if they didn’t expect you to take them then they wouldn’t be that small), is that I would be lost without my mobile devices.

Without being able to tweet about my job, Facebook my family and send messages and emails to my team whilst on the road, I wouldn’t be able to function.

Moreover, we’ve come to expect this constant connectivity so often that if I don’t happen to tweet, message or email some people within a 24-hour period, I receive a message, hopefully in a sarcastic tone, simply asking if I’ve died. The first thought that always popped into my mind when asked this question was, how would I answer this if I were dead?

But then I stumbled across a gem of a story about a company which has developed an app that actually continues to tweet from your account after you’re dead. So, in actual fact, you may one day receive a reply from me via Twitter answering that question without me having been involved at all.

The LiveOn project is being developed by a company in London, England, and is an artificial intelligence experiment that aims to continue to tweet, retweet and favourite tweets from your account after you’ve died.

The cracking slogan the company announced

march 2013

this with was, ‘When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting’, which won a slight chuckle from me.

The app will use algorithms to analyse your writing style to ensure that the account gives an accurate representation of the person it’s mimicking – clever.

But then I started to think about the ethics around such a thing. We know that technology is becoming so advanced in terms of its relationship with us, but is keeping someone alive through the means of technology a little too far? And if not, where does this kind of experiment stop?

I did a little digging, and, of course, the major issue was around the ethics of the idea.

The company, it seems, had already considered this. It said in an interview: “It divides people on a gut level, before you even get to the philosophical and ethical arguments.”

The interesting thing is that the more content and data we create online as we go, the more of an online legacy we will leave behind when we pass. Dealing with this legacy is the issue the company is trying to confront, and this is where the story really lies. On the surface, it appears a little more morbid than that, but after a deeper view, it doesn’t appear to be. So don’t concern yourselves too much - I’m not sure the first tweet from your artificial twin will be, “Not sure I’ll be making it into work today. #Awkward”.

So, I don’t think I will be signing up any time soon, but I certainly think the argument of virtual legacies will become a much more heated debate in the coming years as technology advances to the point where it can translate all your online data into a virtual You. How companies deal with this sensitive information remains to be seen.

However, one plus point is that at least you’ll be able to thank all the people who attended your funeral.

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