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EDITORIAL Publisher Dominic De Sousa

And the winner is…

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

Group COO Nadeem Hood

If you haven’t put together an Awards programme like the ICT Achievement Awards, I should tell you what really goes on behind the scenes. We solicited entries for the Awards through ads and electronic mailings to our subscribers at the beginning of June this year. We received more than 280 nominations across 20 different categories , and although most nominations came from companies in Saudi Arabia and UAE, the pool included applications from almost all countries in the region. The initial round of scrutiny was done by the CNME editorial team, and applications that received a score of more than 15 or higher out of 20 were shortlisted for judging by our panel, which included CIOs and independent consultants. Each user nomination was judged based on two key criteria – business value and innovation. Vendors were evaluated based on their product road map, install base and overall commitment to the region. The winners were honoured at a glittering ceremony that rallied together an almost who’s who of the industry, and this year’s finalists are a heartening reminder of the great things that can be accomplished when determined people put their mind to a task and harness the full potential of technology. We will feature the success stories of some of the tech trailblazers in the forthcoming issues of CNME. On a different note, the 32nd GITEX Technology Week was a busy affair, attracting a record number of exhibitors and attendees. While trade shows around the world are losing their lustre, GITEX seems to be growing strength to strength, bearing testimonial to the fact that the Middle East is indeed a burgeoning market for every technology vendor worth its salt. My colleagues Ben Rossi and Joe Lipscombe were at the show floor, gauging the vibrant pulse of the regional tech industry. Flip the page to get a lowdown from Ben about what exactly happened at this premier show that we are all proud of.

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Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409109 Editor Ben Rossi benr@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409114 Sub Editor Joe Lipscombe joe@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9136 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar raj@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409131 Sales Manager Michal A. 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

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© Copyright 2012 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

EDITORIAL

A worthy hangover

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

Phew, I think we’re all glad we’ve got October out of the way. The Middle East’s IT industry is still reeling from the hangover of GITEX Technology Week 2012, and what a week it was. With 130,000 industry professionals and over 3,500 suppliers from 144 countries pouring into Dubai World Trade Centre, the 32nd GITEX was the biggest yet. And if our conversations with many of the world’s leading IT figures are anything to go by, the most fruitful too. The CPI technology team had a mammoth task on its hands – producing the immensely popular ‘60 Minutes’ newsletter which, as the name suggests, was put together and distributed every hour throughout the event. This essentially involved us tirelessly racing across the show floor to interview everyone who’s anyone at one of the world’s largest technology events. Whilst this wasn’t particularly good for our health, it was great to speak to so many of the industry’s top players. The main feedback was that this GITEX was the best ever in terms of providing return on investment, with many reporting a marked increase in the volume and quality of buyers. This is not so much a reflection of the event itself, but merely of how vibrant the Middle East IT industry has become. Barely a year ago everybody was talking about reduced budgets from the wake of recession, but we’ve all come to know that people don’t wait around for long in this part of the world. When you take a field such as technology, which is defined by its rapid rate of change, and combine it with a region such as the Middle East, which is pretty much defined by the same thing, you get a very exciting industry to be a part of. Add to that the significant number of green field environments that these lands possess, and you’ve got a technology vendor’s playground. The legacy systems that hold back so many of the world’s enterprises from embracing new technologies are just not a concern in this region. As much of the world is still suffering the depressing echoes of cutbacks, we in the Middle East are increasingly getting the pleasure of hearing about a far more harmonious word being gloriously traded between senior management and their CIOs – investment, investment, investment. So as we repair our swollen feet and bring our heart rates back down to a normal level, we may be glad that October 2012 is over, but we will remember it for the GITEX that showed the world that the Middle East is at the forefront of innovation.

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ISSUE 250 | november 2012

ANALYSIS 8

Battle of the giants Oracle is planning to roll out a new IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offering that will compete directly with Amazon Web Services, along with a service called Oracle Public Cloud that runs inside customers’ facilities.

10 Driving transformation

As the Formula One World Championship makes its return to the Middle East, the Lotus team highlights the supreme importance of IT in the success of a race by claiming its new partnership with Microsoft Dynamics will drive it to victory in 2014.

11 Linking the region

Professional network LinkedIn has joined Facebook on the list of global social media websites that have launched offices in the Middle East. It believes this development can help Middle East enterprises connect with target audiences.

12 Month in view

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

SECURITY ADVISOR

CAREERS ADVISOR

56 The moving target

74 Striking the balance

STORAGE ADVISOR

42 The back-up plan

48 Virtually misguided

CNME investigates to what extent the assumption that organisations should be implementing desktop virtualisation across their entire IT environment is misguided and why many Middle East organisations are refraining from VDI. Computer News Middle East

The advent of mobility and its infiltration on enterprise has birthed a whole new type of security risk. With so many Middle East companies employing BYOD and mobile strategies, mobile security is high on the agenda for the entire industry.

TELECOMS WORLD

Deduplication is as an important strategy for data recovery, with the idea being if data is reduced, not only does it improve storage utilisation, it also makes it faster and easier to get to the core of the problem after a disruptive incident. CNME finds out more about the solution.

NETWORK WORLD

CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2012 honoured technology leaders who demonstrated excellence in the creation, deployment and management of technology, and vendors that provided products and services for tangible business benefits.

NOVEMBER 2012

62 Spectrum strategies

The growing demand for mobile data is chewing through the spectrum at disposal of the telecom operators. Fortunately, there are ways for service providers to make better use of existing spectrum to stave off the crunch.

INTEGRATION ADVISOR 68 Sharing success

In such a competitive market, choosing the right integrator partners and extracting maximum benefit from them can be a difficult game. The consequences of getting this wrong will be costly, both financially and time wise. www.cnmeonline.com

The IT industry is renowned for its pace of change. In such an environment, being a prospective graduate can be a daunting title. However, Murdoch University has made its sole purpose to equip its students with every available piece of knowledge necessary to be able to tackle the industry.

INTERVIEW

78 ‘Analytics is far more than just BI’

One of the world’s great business leaders, SAS Institute co-founder Jim Goodnight, talks SAS, analytics and big data.

PRODUCT WATCH

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

THE WORD ON THE STREET 82 Back to the future

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

“We thought we’d need Dell’s help, but after the demonstration we saw how simple EqualLogic is to use and we set up our storage environment within days.” Mohamed Raafat Atia Technical Services Manager Digital Solutions Provider

Do more with Dell networking and storage Solutions See how Dell helped Saudi services and consulting company, DSP, build a highly-scalable, reduced server-footprint environment. Enabling support surveillance solutions for three of Saudi Arabia’s largest hotels using Dell PowerEdge servers and EqualLogic storage. Read the full case study at YourDellSolution.com/me/servers

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

Analysis Oracle OpenWorld

Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle

s is the case with most technology events these days, cloud was the main talking point of an action-packed week at Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. While CEO Larry Ellison had already revealed the company’s general plans in recent public remarks, he went into further detail during his keynote on the opening day of OpenWorld. In addition, a slide displayed during his presentation stated that the new IaaS’ “primary competitor” is Amazon. One big question Ellison didn’t address is how competitive either IaaS option will be with AWS on cost. Nor did he provide an availability date for Oracle’s service.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

Oracle had previously rolled out its Fusion Applications and a PaaS (platformas-a-service) from its cloud, but found that customers wanted the IaaS layer, which provides raw compute power and storage, as well, Ellison said. “The infrastructure that we’re offering isn’t conventional,” he added. “It’s not plain old commodity infrastructure.” Oracle’s IaaS will include its operating system and virtualisation technologies, and is powered by the company’s Exadata, Exalogic and SuperCluster machines. Although the offering will apparently aim directly for AWS customers, Ellison didn’t make any direct criticisms of the company. www.cnmeonline.com

Instead, he spent some time giving audience members a primer on the cloud computing concept as well as the curve of Oracle’s thinking on the matter. “The fundamental architecture of cloud computing is really a utility model that has been with us for 100 years or more,” he said. “It looks exactly like the architecture of an electric utility. All of this is enormous, capital intensive stuff but it’s managed by the electric utility and provided to the consumer as a service. The user simply plugs in to get it. All the capital costs are borne by the utility.” “We decided to get into cloud computing back in 2004, when we started our Fusion Applications project,” he added. “It took

us a long time to build a suite of cloud applications and the underlying suite for those applications. We had to build the platform first before we could really build the CRM applications that run in the cloud, and the HCM applications that run in the cloud.” Ellison’s mostly understated delivery of these comments stood in contrast to his past mockery of cloud computing as older technologies renamed and laden with fresh hype. Overall, his keynote seemed to cement Oracle’s commitment to the cloud computing market in all its flavours, or at least a recognition that it needs to have a viable offering at every level and to meet all customers’ tastes. To the latter end, Oracle announced the Oracle Private Cloud. It’s the identical infrastructure [of the public IaaS] on our floor or your floor,” he said. “You can’t tell the difference. The software is identical in both places.” Oracle will own and manage the infrastructure as it’s installed on the customer’s site, behind their firewall, with fees paid as a monthly charge according to usage. Extra capacity could be added flexibly, and Oracle’s public IaaS could also provide excess headroom, Ellison said. Ellison also stressed that the Oracle Private Cloud is able to run other Oracle software besides Fusion Applications, such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and Siebel. This ability to have workloads span public and private clouds could give Oracle a selling edge against AWS. It’s not clear what will become of the many AWS Amazon Machine Images for

Oracle software that have been available for some time, now that Oracle is set to roll out a competing service.

12c database and Exadata x3 Also at OpenWorld, Oracle announced and gave attendees a deeper look at its new 12c database and Exadata X3 machine. The key feature of 12c, which is set for release sometime next year, is multitenancy, which enables users, if they desire, to create multiple “pluggable” databases that reside within a single database container, Senior Vice President Andy Mendelsohn said during a keynote address. This constitutes “a fundamental rearchitecture of the database,” Mendelsohn added. “Now if I’m an administrator, I have one database overall to administer.” The pluggable database concept is “sort of like a Swiss Army knife,” giving DBAs a flexible tool to run their environments, he said. Prior to Mendelsohn’s appearance, Oracle Senior Vice President Juan Loaiza took the stage to provide more details of the nextgeneration Exadata X3 database machine, which Ellison also announced Sunday. The X3 systems contain large amounts of DRAM and flash cache, allowing data to be held in-memory versus read off disks, increasing performance dramatically, according to Oracle. Loaiza also provided a sense of the market uptake for Exadata, which was first introduced in 2008. There are now “thousands of deployed systems,” ranging from petabyte-scale data warehouses to ones running transactional

The fundamental architecture of cloud computing is really a utility model that has been with us for 100 years or more. It looks exactly like the architecture of an electric utility. All of this is enormous, capital intensive stuff but it’s managed by the electric utility and provided to the consumer as a service. The user simply plugs in to get it.” www.cnmeonline.com

Andy Mendelsohn, Senior VP, Oracle

business applications from Oracle and SAP, he said. About half of the Exadata installed base to date is using it for data warehousing, with the other half running OLTP (online transaction processing) workloads, according to Loaiza. He also sought to show audience members that Exadata is relatively easy to deploy, bringing on an executive from PayPal who described how the company took its Exadata from a pilot project to a “business decision platform” in just 60 days. X3 systems are available now for use with any application certified for Oracle Database 11g R2 and Real Application Clusters, according to a statement. They are also “fully compatible” with previous Exadata versions, allowing customers to upgrade to X3, Oracle said. Hardware pricing is the same as the previous generation but that doesn’t account for the large amounts of separately licensed Oracle software the systems run. They are available in full, half, quarter and eighth-rack configurations, with the last being a new option aimed at smaller companies. Loaiza’s remarks avoided competitive trash talk of the kind Ellison dished out on Sunday when unveiling X3. In particular, Ellison singled out rival SAP’s HANA inmemory database platform, calling its capacity “very small” in contrast to Exadata X3. november 2012

Computer News Middle East

Analysis Lotus F1

Driving transformation As the Formula One World Championship makes its return to the Middle East, the Lotus team highlights the supreme importance of IT in the success of a race by claiming its new partnership with Microsoft Dynamics will drive it to victory in 2014.

he Lotus F1 team has set its sights on winning the 2014 Formula One World Championship driven by a complete business transformation with Microsoft Dynamics. The team’s Kimi Raikkonen goes into this month’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - the third from last race of the 2012 Championship - in third place, but Lotus believes its strategic partnership with Microsoft will drive it the extra mile come 2014. “We want to be in a position to win,” says Graeme Hackland, CIO, Lotus F1 Team. “We’re investing in people and technology, and we need to improve our processes. I really think Microsoft Dynamics AX is going to help the team in this challenge for 201 4 and end-toend business transformation is required to do that.” Lotus will use Dynamics to manage the entire F1 car lifecycle from initial concept to design, procurement, manufacturing and racing, as well as testing the 20,000-plus parts on each car and analysing real-time data from the racetrack. The team evaluated 13 enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions before selecting Microsoft Dynamics. “We have to keep innovating, we have to keep changing, and that’s where we see the advantage with Microsoft,” Hackland says. Lotus will utilise the Dynamics technology to track all of that data from design to deployment, helping boost productivity and giving it an edge on the track.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

“We have very good people, but often they work on intuition and experience, not necessarily the information at hand,” Hackland says. “They need the management information to decide whether they should make a particular part use a particular material, and estimate the impact on the budget and its effect later in the season. Microsoft Dynamics AX will give us that information so we are then able to make the car quicker.”

Shaving those milliseconds Accuracy, agility, timely information and speed of execution are not just essential to Lotus, but any formula one team Shaving off those milliseconds depends on a process of design, procurement, manufacturing, testing and deployment. “The complexity starts at the drawing board,” Hackland says. More than 13,000 drawings make up each Lotus F1 Team car, and even the smallest parts go through constant tweaks in design, aerodynamic optimisation and structural strengthening. Throughout the racing season, Lotus engineers - with backgrounds that include astrophysics, aeronautics and wind design - will modify the drawings based on huge amounts of data from supercomputers, wind tunnels and the car’s 200 sensors that deliver real-time analytics from the track. From the production schedule of the creation of an engine to the amount of time it takes to unscrew a lug nut and replace a tyre, www.cnmeonline.com

Lotus F1 aims to save time in every process leading up to the race, Hackland says. “An integrated solution can optimise business processes, improve quality and enable a performance-driven approach to Lotus F1’s racing operations,” he adds. According to Hackland, on a race weekend the focus from a technology perspective is to ensure 100% availability on all information systems - be it the on and off car software, data logging, capture and manipulation tools, ERP and back office services or just general file, email, print and Internet services. “Quite simply, everything is so intrinsically related to IT that a failure of any kind, hardware or software, cannot be a reason to delay or stop the running of the car,” he says. Once the chequered flag falls and the race is over the IT challenge is then to ensure all of the weekends logged data (both structured and unstructured) is transferred back to the Lotus team’s base in Enstone, England, so that the engineers arriving on Monday morning can continue their analysis of the weekend. Fred Studer, General Manager, Microsoft Dynamics, says the relationship with Lotus F1 enables Microsoft to drive exposure and awareness of the software applications. “It will allows us to constantly optimise the value, flexibility and simplicity of our enterprise offerings through the direct and ongoing collaboration with our R&D team, as well as giving us a prestigious live showcase and executive briefing centre at the Lotus F1 Team facilities in Enstone,” he says.

analysis LinkedIn

Linking the region Professional network LinkedIn has joined Facebook on the list of global social media websites that have launched offices in the Middle East. It believes this development can help Middle East enterprises connect with target audiences.

inkedIn has become the latest big social media name to set up a presence in the Middle East, choosing Dubai as the location of its first office in the MENA region. Located in Dubai’s Internet City, the office will serve as regional headquarters to support the five million members in the region, a million of which are based in the UAE. “We are very excited to be opening an office here in Dubai – a city recognised by the world as a crossroads for global business exchange,” says Farhan Syed, Director, Global Sales Strategy, LinkedIn, who came to Dubai for the launch. “Members are already networking in over 2,000 LinkedIn groups in the region, exchanging strategic business insights and exploring opportunities together. Having a strong local presence will help serve our members better here, ultimately making them more productive and successful.” To address its growing customer base in the region, LinkedIn has appointed Ali Matar as Head of Hiring Solutions, MENA. “The Middle East is a vibrant and growing region which is home to a mix of high growth local businesses and multinational corporations across industries, attracting professionals from all over the

Farhan Syed, Director, Global Sales Strategy, LinkedIn

world. With over 77 million Internet users in the region, social media adoption has been growing consistently here,” Matar says. “Given our growth across the region we believed the time was right for us to establish a local presence so that we may better serve and support our growing membership base and establish our commercial operations. In particular, this will enable local clients and customers to take better advantage of LinkedIn’s hiring solutions, which have been positively disrupting the recruitment industry around the world, helping companies identify and hire top talent in the most effective way possible,” he adds. The Middle East expansion follows the opening of LinkedIn’s Spanish office in March. It brings the number of LinkedIn offices in EMEA to nine, including Paris, Stockholm, London, Munich, Milan, Dublin, Amsterdam and Madrid. Matar says the presence in Dubai will increase the regional awareness of the opportunities that LinkedIn holds for enterprises, including for lead generation, talent management and recruitment, and build brand awareness with critical audiences. “With tools like ‘Groups’, ‘Polls’ and ‘Answers’, enterprises have a tremendous opportunity to identify audiences who understand their business and engage with them on a massive scale. Our new ‘Company Pages’ also allow businesses to build their brand identity in a meaningful and compelling way. By giving enterprises better tools to reach the right audiences, we want to increase their opportunities for growth,” he says. He adds that LinkedIn is a particularly powerful tool for business startups, and points to examples. “Whether it is new leads, contacts or simply building your brand, your presence on LinkedIn can help you kick start your dream business. A user in the Netherlands was unhappy with the battery life of his iPhone www.cnmeonline.com

Ali Matar as Head of Hiring Solutions, MENA, LinkedIn

and through LinkedIn he found a supplier of a longer life battery in China. He has now set up a business selling these batteries. “A small company in the UK that designs cycling helmets was having trouble finding commercial contacts. Through LinkedIn it connected with the right people at British Olympic cycling which led to a contract to supply British Cycling – and we saw these on their athletes during the Olympics.” A key barrier in the enterprises embrace of social media is questions over its ability to provide clear ROI. However, Matar claims the benefits are clear and plentiful. Enterprises can use LinkedIn for marketing needs with its marketing solutions or for recruitment purposes with its hiring solutions. Its suite of marketing solutions includes display ads and social ads to help generate awareness, LinkedIn ‘Groups’ and ‘Polls’ to help strengthen relationships, and partner messages and company pages to help brands drive leads. “These tools provide enterprises with highly targeted advertising that reaches affluent and influential professionals. Brands can tailor their engagement and target specific audiences based on their profile data. Furthermore, they can measure member engagement with advertisements and easily evaluate their ROI,” Matar says. “Recruiters looking to tap into LinkedIn’s member base have access to high-quality active and passive candidates. Through LinkedIn’s recruitment tools, HR professionals can search and target specific candidates based on a number of parameters including skills and languages known. This helps reduce the time spent in the recruitment process and drives cost effectiveness for businesses.” november 2012

Computer News Middle East

ROUND-UP Month in view Canon opens showroom in Qatar Canon Middle East has opened the doors of its first business solutions demo centre and showroom in Qatar. The opening comes in partnership with Salam Technology and represents a move by Canon to consolidate market share of the Qatar print industry, which is estimated to be worth around USD 100 million. Designed to meet the

growing needs of B2B and industrial sectors in Qatar, Canon claims the new showroom will be a central hub for all commercial digital printing requirements. It will display end-to-end business solutions such as large format printers (LFP) and document and imaging management systems (DIMS), as well as Canon’s range of office and professional printers.

The amount of mobile Android malware has surged this year, from a count of 30,000 malware specimens in June to almost 175,000 last month, according to Trend Micro’s Security Roundup report.

80% of BYOD unmanaged Almost 80 percent of today’s BYOD activity remains inadequately managed by IT departments, according to research by Ovum. In the analyst firm’s BYOD Survey (September 2012) the firm found “a concerning level of ignorance by IT professionals about the BYOD trend.”

GITEX Lenovo has taken the crown from HP to become the world’s top seller of PCs, Gartner research revealed. Of the top four PC vendors, only Lenovo was able to grow its shipments. Its PC sales increased by almost 10 percent, giving it 15.7 percent of the market.

The eyes of the technology world were on the Middle East in October during the 32nd edition of GITEX Technology Week. Presence of international companies grew once again and represented more than half of the total exhibitors, with Algeria, Denmark, Malaysia and New Zealand among the countries exhibiting for the first time. With over 80% of leading global ICT brands present, featuring C-level executives in attendance representing ICT budgets of over $50 billion, the exhibitors and speakers list was packed with industry heavyweights such as Cisco, Dell, du, Etisalat, Facebook, Google, HP, Huawei, Kaspersky, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, RIM, Samsung, SAP and Symantec. Notable new exhibitors included Chinese telecommunications equipment company ZTE, Saudi Telecom Company, Sage, Vocalcom and African IT distributors Mitsumi. The event had new technology giants, over 130,000 industry professionals and more than 3,500 suppliers attending from 144 countries across five continents.

Lenovo Google’s shares took a beating after its third quarter financial results showed it missed revenue and net income expectations. Revenue was $11.33 billion, below the consensus expectation of $11.86 billion. Net income was $2.18 billion, down from $2.73 billion in 2011’s Q3.

Google

Marissa Mayer vowed improvements across the board at the earnings call of her first complete quarter as Yahoo CEO.

Computer News Middle East

Leading figures from the technology world descended into Dubai World Trade Centre throughout for what was deemed the biggest ever edition of GITEX Technology Week. Now in its 32nd year, GITEX is widely regarded as one of the world’s top three international ICT events.

GITEX 2012 shines on world stage

Malware

WHAT’S HOT?

november 2012

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Nokia continues to struggle after its third-quarter smartphone unit sales dropped by 63 percent compared to last year. To add to its woes, industry insiders warn that expectations for the arrival of its first phones based on Windows Phone 8 should not be too high.

Nokia

WHAT’S NOT?

Cloud

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has ratified the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), a set of protocols defining how companies can safely move data between private and public clouds.

EFS implements UAE’s ‘first private cloud’

Data security is top concern delaying cloud adoption Concerns over data security is the top factor delaying the widespread adoption of cloud-based services, according to a new survey of IT professionals conducted by GBM. According to the survey, which coincides with the launch of GBM’s Intelligent Network Solutions (INS) division, concerns over service reliability and availability, as well as the cost of cloud-based solutions, are often cited reasons for the slow adoption of outsourced enterprise cloud services. While two-thirds (62 percent) of the regional IT professionals polled stated that data security was a concern and 40.5 percent identified cost as a barrier, 43 percent cited service reliability concerns. In comparison, a lack of support from non-IT decision makers was mentioned by less than a quarter (22 percent) of the respondents. “These findings should come as a serious concern for the industry since perceptions, as opposed to facts, appear to play a significant role in decisions to defer the adoption of cloud services in an enterprise environment,” said Hani Nofal, Director of Intelligent Network Solutions (INS), GBM.

eHosting DataFort (eHDF) has implemented what it claims to be the first private cloud in the UAE for Emcor Facilities Services (EFS). EFS invested in high-end computing hardware and security, including servers and firewalls, while the data centre infrastructure, core switching, perimeter

security, load balancers and storage area networks were leased from eHDF. “We were looking to migrate to a model where investment was required only in core infrastructure, while the rest was shifted to a lease model,” said Terence Sathyanarayan, Head of Group Technology, EFS.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff predicted that competition sparked by the release of Windows 8 will mark the end of the Microsoft operating system.

Half of IT managers choose Microsoft OS Almost half of IT managers plan to standardise their company’s mobile platform on devices running Microsoft operating systems, according to a study by ThinkEquity. 48 percent said they would choose Microsoft, up from 44 percent three months before. Google’s Android OS dropped to 8 percent from 11 percent, while Apple’s iOS grew from 10 percent to 14 percent.

Saudi leaps up spam list Saudi Arabia is the number one spam-relaying country in the Middle East and number four in the world, according to a third quarter report by security firm Sophos. Since the previous quarter, India has grown its global lead at the top of the hall of shame, and now relays 16.1% of all spam captured in SophosLabs’s global network of spam traps. Saudi was the top new entry in the third quarter, relaying a significant 5.1% of spam for the period. This is likely caused by the Festi botnet which successfully infected many computers there in August and then used the computers to swamp the rest of the world with large quantities of spam.

www.cnmeonline.com

NFC mobile payments to rocket The total value spend of Near Field Cummunication (NFC) mobile payments will rise from $4 billion in 2012 to $191 billion in 2017, breaking the $100 billion mark in 2016, according to ABI Research. Despite Apple rejecting NFC for its latest smartphone, the iPhone 5, or its mobile operating system, iOS 6, ABI has forecast a huge rise in such payments. november 2012

Mobile payments, and more importantly the convergence between payment types (proximity, P2P and online), stored on a single NFC handset will be the initial trigger, driving market convergence across a host of other markets, including ticketing, retail, loyalty, and access control, the forecast said.

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High priests of IT CNMEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ICT Achievement Awards 2012 honoured technology leaders who demonstrated excellence in the creation, deployment and management of technology, and vendors that provided products and services for tangible business benefits. It was held at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers in Dubai on October 14th. The glittering awards ceremony, which brought together more than 300 prominent industry stakeholders from the region, recognised the feats of end-users and IT vendors across 20 different categories. If the last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s awards were all about cost-savings in the wake of recession, this year it was all about innovation and generating business value through the cutting-edge use of technology. These days, successful technology leadership means not just deployment, but using technology to make a real business impact, whether in the private, government, education or non-profit sector. Many of this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s winners exemplify organisations that know how to succeed in business, even in a challenging economic climate, by experimenting and blazing new trails. All of our winners were selected after a rigorous application and review process by a panel of judges, comprising some of the prominent CIOs and independent consultants. The ICT Achievement Awards 2012 was sponsored by Etisalat, EMC, Avaya, and Dell (strategic partners); Wipro, Kaspersky, Cognizant and EMW (gold partners).

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november 2012

Computer News Middle East

CIO of the year Ahmed Ebrahim Al Ahmad, Nakheel It is make-or-break transformation time for CIOs. They have to speak the language of business, and step out of the proverbial back office to the front lines of customer service. These IT pros work in a very dynamic environment and the pressures they go through are compounded by economic challenges and organisation politics. Al Ahmad, who heads the IT organisation at one of the world’s largest real estate firms, bagged this coveted trophy for playing a key role in realising his company’s vision. He defined a new IT strategy for Nakheel that underpinned the company’s recent restructuring that enabled it to boost the profits in a short time beating all the odds. He was instrumental in setting the transformation agenda which focused on two goals – delivering value beyond technology while saving costs and bridging IT gaps. Al Ahmad devised the IT improvement programme with the support of the board and defined a road map for three to five years with a detailed budget. The programme comprised multiple projects that varied between core and vertical business requirements where it successfully dovetailed the IT team, business units and vendors. The crowning glory of the plan he set in motion was the significant reduction in operating expenditure, saving the company more than AED 9 million as a result of the consolidation of systems and restructuring of the licenses with major vendors. While Al Ahmad’s ability to experiment and think about business in new ways has paid rich dividends, what probably really stands out among his many achievements is something that is an imperative for all CIOs today – aligning business goals with the strategic IT road map.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

Shortlisted candidates Ahmad Almulla, DUBAL Ali Sajwani, Emirates NBD Group Ali Nimer, IRENA Ali Mohammed Al Ali, Health Authority Abu Dhabi Dr Sabri Al Azai, Abu Dhabi Municipality Dr Saif Al Ketbi, Abu Dhabi Ports Company Ghazi N Qarout, Al Hilal Bank Imad Taha, Belhasa Holding Mohammed Saeed Al Shehhi, GCAA

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NS r IO i ou UT ba at OL E r Du us R S NC be el, sit E RE m ot Vi NT NF ove h H CE CO 0 N eac TA -2 B DA 19 irah e m Ju

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Future CIO of the year Alok Srivastava, Acting Head of ICT and Senior Manager, Enterprise Applications, Masdar Being prepared to rapidly replace people in critical leadership positions is also a business imperative. This award category makes the case for the CIO job to the IT and business professionals who can climb up the ladder and step into the shoes of IT leaders. We believe a promotion to CIO should not be a rite of passage or an entitlement. The people who really want CIO jobs are the ones who are focused on making a difference in how IT contributes to the success of the business, and the winner of this category is a potential CIO who knows what the job entails and has honed his skills in IT planning, business process analysis and communication of IT value. As the Acting Head of ICT, Srivastava spearheaded Masdarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s IT initiatives to enhance its services, reduce costs and deliver multiple projects within budget and on time. Equipped with analytical skills and financial acumen, he oversees information resource management and operations for the business while successfully tying corporate strategy to IT investment at Masdar.

Shortlisted candidates Amin Al Zarouni, Beeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ah Deepu Thomas Philip, Kuwait International Bank Einstein Johnson Rozario, MedNet UAE Lora Abu Rashed, Dubai Petroleum Meshal Abdulla Binhussain, aeCERT

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

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IT team of the year aeCERT, UAE IT teams are often compared to football teams – each has an objective and needs to be coordinated with common goals. Communication and collaboration are the most important factors in leading an IT team to achieve the desired results. And that’s exactly what the team at aeCERT, the UAE’s computer response arm has achieved in the last 18 months. During this period, the aeCERT team executed more than 26 projects that fall under four different categories of services, the most notable being the establishment of a threat intelligence operations centre that responds to its entire constituency base which included government, private sector and academia. Shortlisted candidates Abu Dhabi Municipality Abu Dhabi Ports Company Emirates Group Kuwait International Bank Masdar MedNet UAE RTA Saudi Arabian Airlines TECOM investments

The winning team was developed bearing in mind the different skill sets and experience required, and comprises 20 engineers with 16 of them holding a masters degree in their respective fields, serving more than 102 constituents from different sectors with 30 distinct services.

Editor’s choice of the year University of Sharjah The CNME editorial team took into account the overall team effort, integration with management objective, deployment success and, most importantly, return on investment to bestow this award upon UoS. The award winning project was the implementation of a campus-wide wireless LAN, which was designed in a unique way to provide ease of operations, management, maintenance and scalability to the future needs.

Shortlisted candidates AW Rostamani Gulf Air

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november 2012

Computer News Middle East

Government deployment of the year Abu Dhabi Department of Finance The Abu Dhabi Department of Finance (DoF) plays a key role in providing Abu Dhabi government entities with the bestin-class financial services and specialised solutions as well as managing available resources efficiently. The winning project is a shared government enterprise resource and planning applications rolled out by the DoF’s IT organisation across various Abu Dhabi Government entities. The solution provides shared services based on a common platform with centralised reporting and transaction processing. The solution is deployed to over 30 Abu Dhabi Government entities with more than 8000 users using DoF ERP applications. The idea behind this solution is to provide these entities of all sizes and functions with a single and shared computer-based application across all functional areas. This solution has helped the entities to optimise visibility, operate efficiency, control of information and decision making process, in addition to leveraging economies of scale.

Shortlisted candidates Abu Dhabi Ports Company Department of Economic Development, Dubai Dubai Customs Dubai Metro Dubai MunicipalityExecutive Affairs Authority General Civil Aviation Authority Nedaa Professional Communication Corporation Telecommunication Regulation Authority The Emirates Identity Authority

BFSI deployment of the year Emirates NBD Group Emirates NBD Group IT manages one of the largest banking groups in the region, comprising more than 8,500 IT users and 160 plus branches spread across multiple group companies both locally and internationally. The winning project – BANKNET – transformed its online banking from a purely transaction service to a one-stopshop for intuitive financial management. The bank has implemented customer centric systems and process infrastructure which cuts across the organisation. The project, which took 11 months to complete, was done in-house, right from the entire architecture to design to development. Given the size of ENBD’s customer base and its future growth ambitions, BANKNET was designed with intuitiveness, rich customer experience, security, performance and long term scalability as its five core design principles. Today, BANKNET is regarded as one of the most cost-effective solutions in the region, delivering differentiated value to the bank’s customers.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

Shortlisted candidates Barwa Bank Dubai Islamic Bank Kuwait Finance House- Bahrain Kuwait International Bank Warba Bank

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Healthcare deployment of the year King Hamad University Hospital, Bahrain The winner of this category was chosen unanimously by our judges for being one of the most technologically advanced healthcare facilities in the region. King Hamad University Hospital was established as part of a medical strategy to develop a centre for organ transplant surgeries and trauma in the Kingdom of Bahrain, using sophisticated medical technologies and information systems. KHUH has deployed a fully integrated asset management and automated biomedical engineering systems that assist in the operations of a vast array of equipment in the hospital. KHUH also uses RFID and real time location systems, integrated with its patient administration and ERP, to monitor and track their staff, patients and assets, and while effectively improving workflows and reducing operational costs.

Shortlisted candidates King Faisal Specialist Hospitals MedNet UAE Sheikh Khalifa Medical City The Health Regulation Department, Dubai

Telecommunication deployment of the year Mobily The focus of telecom operators in the region is now shifting to improving the customer experience. Social media has emerged as one of the sources of data for analytics related to customer service, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exactly what the winner of this award has done. Mobily is one of the first telecom operators in the region to realise the importance of social media platforms as a new channel of communication with the customers. It has created customer support channels in social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and designated a team from customer care to respond to customer issues, significantly enhancing the customer experience. The whole process is automated as Mobily has integrated its CRM systems with social network channels, mainly Twitter.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

Shortlisted candidates DIDxchange Du Viva Telecom

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Hospitality and tourism deployment of the year Atlantis The hospitality sector might be a laggard when it comes to technology adoption, but not in the case of Atlantis Hotel in Dubai, where it plays a crucial role in the internal operations to drive revenues and customer satisfaction. Being a hotel at the end of a manmade island may be an appealing prospect for tourists, but not for those running the hotel’s IT infrastructure. The Atlantis Hotel in Dubai beats the odds with a disaster recovery site. Due to Atlantis’ location on the Palm and its close proximity to the water, the IT team identified a risk of having its servers affected by a natural calamity that could take place by the sea. The solution was to outsource the disaster recovery site to eHDF.

Shortlisted candidates Habtoor Hotels Jumeirah Group Tourism Development Investment Company

Retail deployment of the year Bindawood Group Mobility – or more specifically enterprise mobility – is the name of the game today, and this Saudibased retailer has deployed an innovative mobile point of sales solutions to bust queues at its outlets, drastically transforming the customer experience. Bindawood branches are located next to the holy mosques and main areas of Hajj. During the peak season of Hajj, the regular PoS machines were not able to handle the high volume of customers. The retailer rolled out the mobile PoS solution on Wi-Fi enabled handheld devices to reduce queues and improve the overall in-store experience for customers.

Shortlisted candidates EMKE Group Landmark Group Pan Emirates

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november 2012

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Education deployment of the year Ministry of Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia The winner administers a vast network of more than 33,000 publicly funded schools for elementary and secondary school education with more than five million students enrolled. The ministry replaced its legacy ERP system with an advanced Financial and Administrative Resources Information System (FARIS) to more efficiently and cost effectively manage its business processes across the Kingdom. FARIS represents the first phase in the Kingdom’s Educational and Electronic Transformational Program (EETP), a key project with the goal of automating the Ministry’s operations and delivering electronic services to Saudi Arabia’s citizens.

Shortlisted candidates Abu Dhabi Education Council American University of Sharjah Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE Indian High School, Dubai Technical and vocational training corporation, KSA

Construction and real estate deployment of the year Sorouh Real Estate This award winning real estate developer has implemented an excellent IT infrastructure to provide a robust foundation for its advanced applications. The investments included two mid-tier data centres, a large number of servers, disaster recovery, email archiving systems, and other security and systems related tools and applications. In addition, Souroh has also implemented a virtualisation project that helped the company to eliminate nearly 60 physical servers, reduce the power consumption by 70% and cut the maintenance costs by 80%. The runner up in this category was EFS Facilities Services for its hybrid cloud implementation. Shortlisted candidates Aldar Arkan Building Materials Economic Zones World EFS Facilities Services

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

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Energy deployment of the year Petrofac Energy companies rely on IT more than ever, and the recent malware attacks have brought home the dangers energy companies face in the digital age. The winner of this category has beefed up its security architecture to keep threats at bay and ensured that its critical business processes are uninterrupted even in the case of a failure. The winning project of Petrofac involved the implementation a core network firewall, which helped the company to protect the traffic on WAN in addition to enhancing business continuity and disaster recovery mechanisms. The Awards jury has made a special mention of Qatar Petroleum, which has worked closely with RAF foundation, to combat digital illiteracy in the country. Shortlisted candidates Adnoc Enoc Qatar Petroleum

Consultant of the year PMK International Consultants can either make or break projects, and the winner of this category impressed judges with its range of strategy and design services, and the knowledge it brought to a range of projects. Among the projects executed by PMK, the most notable was Burj Khalifa, the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tallest building and highest man-made structure with over 160 floors containing ICT infrastructure and networking connectivity.

Shortlisted candidates Du professional services PA Consulting

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

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Storage solutions provider of the year EMC This particular vendor has cashed in on the unprecedented boom in the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s storage market with an impressive product roadmap, size of install base and its vision for cloud computing and virtualisation. EMC cemented its position in the market with the launch of a slew of new products and solutions, which included the new VMAX family offering unified pool of storage resources and VNX unified storage enhancements that transformed the midrange storage market. In addition, it also rolled out new Data Domain and Avamar systems for backup and recovery, giving its customers the choice in how they address the most pressing data protection challenges. Another notable achievement was the new suits of enhancement to EMCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Atmos cloud platform that helps service providers and enterprises manage big data. Some of its high-profile customer wins in the region included Mashreq Bank, Abu Dhabi Education Council and Masdar, among others.

Shortlisted candidates Commvault Dell Symantec

Security solutions provider of the year Blue Coat The threat landscape is constantly evolving, forcing companies to realise the importance of security and invest accordingly. As security concerns expand, so does the role of a security solution provider. The winner of this category was chosen based on its ability to track malware delivery networks and provide protection to users from security breaches. Blue Coat uses its cloud-based WebPulse service to specifically identify, track and block malnets, providing high levels of protection to its customers. Delivered via Blue Coat ProxySG appliances and the Blue Coat Cloud Service, WebPulse receives one billion Web requests each day from 75 million globally diverse users, and blocks 3.3 million threats per day. Shortlisted candidates Fortinet Gemalto Kaspersky McAfee Sonicwall Symantec

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

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Managed services provider of the year Injazat Data Systems Injazat Data Systems, which leverages on HP and Mubadala as shareholders, offers a comprehensive portfolio of managed services from its tier IV design certified data centre. The MSPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s engagement model offers services ranging from SLA based managed services spanning storage, network, data protection and security. To complement its managed services portfolio, Injazat also offers value-added services including IT strategy and advisory services, information security audits and virtualisation assessments, in addition to systems integration. Injazat, which has many Abu Dhabi government entities on its client roster, has launched many services over the last 12 months including storage, backup and disaster recovery, and enterprise management as-a-service models coupled with cloud enterprise services to key government entities.

Shortlisted candidates eHosting DataFort Ericsson Huawei Wipro

Systems integrator of the year EMW EMW, which specialises in smart convergence and applications, was chosen as the winner for its ability to build and offer tailor-made solutions to its customers. The SI, which is certified in many of the industry heavy weights including Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Blue Coat and Microsoft, boasts technical staff that makes up 80% of its work force and has executed very challenging and complex projects in the region. Some of the big customer wins for EMC over the last 12 months included companies such as Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Emirates Identity Authority, Dubai Municipality, Adnoc, UAE University and Petrofac, among an extensive customer list.

Shortlisted candidates Almoayyed EMW GBM Help AG Itqan Intertec Teksala Wipro

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november 2012

Computer News Middle East

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Vendor of the year – software SAP SAP was chosen by the jury for underlining its commitment to the Middle East and North Africa region, placing it at the heart of a long-term global growth strategy. During this period, SAP MENA has quadrupled its employee base since establishing a direct presence in the region, hiring 100 employees in 2011. By the end of 2012, a further 150 is expected to join the fold. As a part of the company’s growth there are a series of new offices planned, including locations in Oman and Kuwait. Today, SAP boasts over 1,000 customers across MENA and the past 12 months have been packed with high-profile wins, including Emirates Aluminium Company, Etihad Rail, RAK Ceramics, EMKE Group, Oman Oil Refineries & Petroleum Company, to name a few. The most notable development in SAP’s upsurge in MENA activity came in March 2012 with CFO Werner Brandt’s announcement in Dubai of a four-year, $450 million additional spend plan.

Shortlisted candidates Oracle Red Hat

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Vendor of the year â&#x20AC;&#x201C; hardware Brocade Brocade, one of the first vendors to get on board for Ethernet fabric technology, has introduced several networking innovations across the globe and the Middle East. During this period, the company unveiled its â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;effortless networkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; vision for the campus LAN network and debuted cloud optimised application delivery switches that allow the customers to create new services. Brocade has also introduced an innovative subscription-based pricing for network infrastructure that allows companies to align network capacity with fluctuating business demands. Brocade has also led a fundamental transformation of the networking industry by introducing the fabricbased, end-to-end networking solutions based on 16 gigabits per second Fibre Channel technologies. These technologies help customers migrate data centre architectures into flexible private clouds. In the Middle East in particular, the vendor has been able to increase its end user engagement by 40% and added new resources in the region to grow its business in addition to enhancing its partner network.

Shortlisted candidates Avaya Brocade Cisco Dell Huawei

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november 2012

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Judges ICT Achievement Awards 2012 was judged by a panel comprising CIOs and independent consultants. Mohammed Shah, Indranil Guha VP Technology Head, IT Infrastructure, Infrastructure & Commercial Bank of Dubai Services, Madinah Knowledge Economic City Indranil Guha has more than 20 years of experience in managing IT A recognised IT executive with over 15 years infrastructure in large enterprises and is one of the CIO experience in leading edge IT and change Top 20 awardees from CNME. He has held IT implementation in the Middle East in areas of IT management positions in a number of organisations strategy, smart city IT, ERP, DSS, IT outsourcing and including HSBC Bank, Dubai Municipality and Roads & transforming IT into a profit centre. Acclaimed as Transports Authority of Dubai. an agent of change with a track-record of Ivan Kraemer successfully implementing complex IT and change Senior Consultant, Potential projects to a reference site standard and meeting challenging deadlines on time and in budget. With over 25 years of business Twice awarded as one of the top 10 IT managers of experience, Ivan has been the Middle East and featured in numerous professionally supporting published articles in IT and project management in businesses and entrepreneurs to enhance their the region’s IT publications. Currently architecting performance during the past four years in which he a smart city IT infrastructure for the region’s new has been a consultant with Potential. Knowledge Based Industries Hub.

Ian Cochrane Consultant Graduating in Electronic Engineering, Cochrane started his IT career in computer systems engineering, then moved into sales, partnering, services and market development roles. During his extensive 30+ years in this industry, he has worked for a number of leading organisations, covering hardware, software, services, networking and security. He has been working in the Middle East for 12 years. He is passionate about IT and the MENA region and has regularly spoken at related events throughout the region. As an independent consultant he helps IT organisations develop their business in the Middle East.

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INSIDE

The back-up plan

storage advisor Data deduplication

The back-up plan Deduplication is seen as an important strategy for data recovery, with the idea being if data is reduced, not only does it improve storage utilisation, it also makes it faster and easier to get to the core of the problem after a disruptive incident. CNME finds out more about the solution and how significant it should be in an organisation’s list of IT priorities.

he last thing CIOs need is to be told there is another solution in the data arena that they must be implementing in their organisation. Business intelligence, business continuity, business analytics, disaster recovery, data loss prevention. The list goes on and on of things CIOs should supposedly be doing to both make the most out of data, whilst protecting it at the same time. Data deduplication is designed to eliminate duplicate copies of repeated data. It uses a specialised data compression technique where unique chunks of data are identified and stored during a process of analysis. As the analysis continues other chunks are

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

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compared to the stored copy and whenever a match occurs, the redundant chunk is replaced with a small reference that points to the stored chunk. “Deduplication can shrink bloated back-up windows and speed restore times without disrupting current back-up procedures,” says Stephen Day, Systems and Technology Storage Sales Leader, GBM. “Deduplication technologies have evolved considerable over the last few years and have delivered on the promise of improving back-up and recovery operations. “The new technologies in data deduplication consume less storage and utilise infrastructure, such as network bandwidth, more efficiently. Deduplication

significantly reduces TCO and provides opportunities to save money, while accomplishing back-up and recovery goals more efficiently. It can save a significant amount of money and is something all business should explore.” According to EMC, all companies need to adopt a purpose built back-up appliance with deduplication to transform their back-up operations. “Back-up windows aren’t getting any smaller - without deduplication, recovery performance is jeopardised because there may not be enough time to properly and consistently back-up applications and systems. Also, recovery time expectations are getting shorter. It is no longer acceptable to hunt through back-up tapes to find the right one with the file or the application that needs to be recovered. Business users are demanding fast recovery,” says Kelly Brown, Director, Product Marketing, EMEA, EMC Back-up Recovery Systems Division. However, Frost & Sullivan believes that, whilst data deduplication solutions are important, they are not as critical as data recovery or security. “The importance of this solution depends on the type of data and whether the data is stored multiple times by multiple users across the enterprise’s network. CIOs are advised to identify and decide if a data deduplication solution would bring clear ROI,” says Jonas Zelba, Sr. Research Analyst, Information and Communication Technologies Practice, MENA, Frost & Sullivan.

The downsides of deduplication

Stephen Day, Systems and Technology Storage Sales Leader, GBM

33% of IT decision makers in the Middle East would like to use deduplication

Kelly Brown, Director, Product Marketing, EMEA, EMC Back-up Recovery Systems Division

Zelba also points to the downsides of deduplication, namely potential data loss and delays in recovering data from a data recovery solution. “A simple example is when someone saves a Word file with the same name that already exists on the desktop and overwrites it to then realise that data in those two files was different. However, the technology has matured with time and there are many preventive solutions to avoid this, but data loss error is still possible,” he says. Luai Bahder, Technical Director, Smartworld, adds: “Most challenges are with source deduplication methods, where additional components are required at the client side. Also, another challenge would be with the multiple storage systems deployments.” Expanding on the challenges, Allen Mitchell, Senior Technical Account Manager, MENA, CommVault, says most are related to performance, increased complexity of management and island of deduplication. “Customers must consider the implications of deduplication within the context of their entire data management and storage strategy,” he adds. Day agrees, claiming that multiple challenges will come up without adequate planning, size and a supported environment. “Challenges include a lack of adequate resources for optimal deduplication, insufficient capacity to cater for growth and insufficient performance to meet an organisation’s back-up and recovery SLA,” he says. However, Zelba says the technologies of www.cnmeonline.com

november 2012

30% of organisations in the UAE use deduplication

Computer News Middle East

storage advisor Data deduplication

deduplication are now mature enough to know the ratios and key performance indicators. “These can be monitored and adjusted. But you do need to understand the performance metrics and your targets for DD, before your deploy, as you deploy and afterwards,” he says. Asides from the aforementioned challenges, the usual obstacle of proving ROI is something CIOs must be sure they will be able to do before taking the proposal to management. Mitchell says return comes simply through being able to store more data on the same amount of disk capacity. “The benefits for organisations are clear in terms of increased efficiencies and cost savings achievable via deduplication,” he says. Day adds that ROI can be measured by looking at the value-add from implementing a high performance tier, disk-based back-up to the strategy. Working with IDC, EMC quantified the ROI from back-up transformation that included implementation of deduplication and purpose-built back-up appliances. IDC found that ROI can be measured in terms of hard cost saving, end user time saving and IT staff productivity.

25% of organisations in the Middle East use deduplication

Jonas Zelba, Sr. Research Analyst, Information and Communication Technologies Practice, MENA, Frost & Sullivan

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,” he says. EMC ran a survey of 1,000 IT decision makers in the region and found that 25% of organisations use deduplication today and another 33% would like to. Day believes it is becoming a mandatory requirement by businesses in the Middle East that are implementing disk-based solutions into their back-up environment. For those organisations that haven’t implementing it, and don’t yet plan to, Bahder reiterates that the solutions are highly recommended on visualisation environments or for the organisations that have large volumes of data storage requirements, whilst Mitchell says data deduplication can have a direct impact on data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity. “Data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity have been consistent priorities for all organisations. For these reasons, coupled with the ROI and TCO benefits, deduplication should be viewed as an essential part of any data management solution,” he says. Zelba agrees that deduplication is an incremental system to existing IT setups. “The priorities must be to ensure disaster recovery, high speed transmission and efficient servers etc. However, if you have these systems in place, then deduplication is a high priority as it would help maximise the investment in the current IT setup.”

A growing demand

When it comes to demand, Bahder says the Middle East region remains a very large market for data deduplication products. Mitchell adds that this adoption continues to grow in the region as organisations look for effective methods

Luai Bahder, Technical Director, Smartworld

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

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Virtually misguided

network world Desktop virtualisation

Virtually misguided Vendors and industry leaders appear to have led the formation of an almost ubiquitous assumption that desktop virtualisation is something all organisations should be implementing across their entire IT environment. CNME investigates to what extent this assumption is misguided and why many Middle East organisations are refraining from VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).

he world is going virtual, or so we are told. We’re told in particular that the enterprise is going virtual – but certainly in the Middle East, that doesn’t seem to be completely true. Desktop virtualisation discards the traditional computing method of a desktop environment operating entirely and autonomously on a single physical machine. Instead, it opts for the client-server model, which acts as a distributed application to divide workloads between servers and clients. The result is that, rather than the desktop being stored locally on a remote client, a virtualised version of the desktop is stored on a remote central server, allowing users to run an operating system and applications from a thin client, tablet or smartphone. “The perceived value of VDI is to make enduser computing environments more secure, reliable and easier to support,” says Muhammad Ali Albakri, VP of IT, Saudi Arabian Airlines. “VDI

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

25% of mid-sized organisations in mature markets will virtualise one-third of their PCs by 2015. www.cnmeonline.com

promises to lower TCO due to the fact that several virtual desktops reside on one physical machine and the costs of IT PC support are dropped drastically because batches and upgrades are done centrally. It also increases device usage flexibility since the user can access their virtual desktop from their home PC, tablet or smartphone.” According to Dr. Hazem Turki El Khatib, IT Director, Department of Finance (Abu Dhabi), desktop virtualisation can be a valuable technology and solve several business problems. “Properly architected VDI can result in a significant reduction in desktop support costs, whilst further benefits include lengthened desktop hardware refresh cycles, reduced desktop hardware maintenance costs and streamlined desktop software maintenance. It also provides self-service desktop fault resolution, improved desktop and data security, and reduced desktop power consumption,” Dr. El Khatib says.

Gartner research in mature markets indicates that 40 percent of mid-sized organisations were testing or deploying desktop virtualisation by the end of the third quarter this year, and predicts that 25 percent will virtualise one-third of their PCs by 2015. A Forrester survey of senior-level IT decision makers in April 2012 found that 70 percent have embarked on a virtualisation or VDI program or plan to do so in order to provide users with access to applications and content from company-owned devices. Furthermore, 61 percent said they have VDI plans that will enable a mobility or multiple-device strategy, and 30 percent intend the strategy to enable new business processes. Only one percent said their companies had no virtualisation plans.

70% of senior-level IT decision makers in mature markets have embarked on a virtualisation or VDI programme, or plan to do so.

Low ME adoption However, whilst there are no readily available statistics for companies in the Middle East, Albakri estimates it to be a very low percentage in comparison. “A lot of small and mid-sized organisations are testing or deploying desktop virtualisation. We believe companies in the Middle East are aware of the virtues of VDI but fear the serious challenges that accompany a wide scale implementation,” Albakri says. Dr. El Khatib agrees. He believes VDI technology has matured in recent years, but there still remains

Muhammad Ali Albakri, VP of IT, Saudi Arabian Airlines

key challenges and a serious commitment is needed at various levels in the organisation to ensure success. “VDI is an infrastructure technology that can involve a substantial financial investment and a long-term commitment in order to realise ROI. Server virtualisation reduces the amount of equipment in the data centre, but with server-hosted virtual desktops, physical hardware must be added to the data centre,” he says. Expanding on initial investment, Tamer Samir Aly, Sales Manager, GBM, says it will be 10-25% more than going for a usual refresh cycle for an existing desktop that has reached the end of its planned lifecycle, which is three to five years. However, he adds that the ROI recovers over the first three years to reduce around 10-20% of the whole traditional desktop environment cost. “The reduction in cost can reach up to 60%, with savings coming in from desktop administration, application administration and desktop power and cooling. ROI is even better for the subsequent refresh cycle, and may reach a 40-50% reduction in cost over the traditional desktop environment,” Aly says. “The bulk of the initial investment is split mainly into servers, storage, thin clients (which has a lifecycle of six to seven years, much longer than PCs) and SW licenses for desktop virtualisation product and

Dr. Hazem Turki El Khatib, IT Director, Department of Finance (Abu Dhabi)

www.cnmeonline.com

november 2012

Computer News Middle East

network world Desktop virtualisation

Microsoft operating system subscription licenses. However some vendors have solutions that are flexible in addressing customer needs and challenges, and can address those needs in a unique way to reduce the above costs even further,” he adds.

Prerequisite for cloud Virtualisation as a whole is generally seen as a prerequisite for cloud. However, Albakri actually points to cloud computing as a reason against deploying desktop virtualisation. “Major software companies are investing in cloud based computing more than VDI. For example, SAP has invested $7.7 billion in cloud based applications,” Albakri says. “Also, major software firms including SAP, Microsoft and Oracle are investing heavily to deliver mobile applications directly to iPads and smartphones, maximising the benefits of the underlying mobile platform through dedicated app stores. Simply put, VDI is not the native way to provide corporate apps on mobile devices.” He adds that assuming VDI is a solution for every company could lead to “severe consequences” and claims it not suitable for Saudi Arabian Airlines’ entire environment. “VDI is an option among other options that aim at lowering end-user computing costs and provide corporate apps in the emerging mobile platforms. For a company the size of Saudi Arabian Airlines with thousands of users having PCs equipped with Microsoft Office and other premium productivity tools, and distributed in different geographical locations, replacing all PCs with virtual desktops is not a viable solution.” Despite this, Saudi Arabian Airlines is currently conducting a POC with a major supplier to assess which areas and user segments can be best served through VDI initiatives. Indeed, whilst desktop virtualisation does have its challenges and is not a universal solution, if implemented in the correct way and right areas, it is the way forward for many organisations. However, there are some areas to consider carefully before implementation. “Robust profiles, ID and access management are required to manage the layered and controlled allocation of resources and working environment centrally. Stable data centres are required as all desktops are hosted centrally, and a solid network is key for success. A 24/7 service, in the form of a global helpdesk, is also needed to support users across the globe, and VDI storage requirements must 50

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

1% of senior-level IT decision makers in mature markets said their companies had no virtualisation plans.

Case study: The world’s largest desktop cloud It would be sceptical for any company to consider itself more of an expert on desktop virtualisation than Huawei, which stakes claim to the world’s largest desktop cloud. The Chinese telecoms company’s Andrew Childs, Senior Principal Consultant, traditional desktop Huawei Enterprise, Middle East system was fragile and vulnerable to attack by virus and Trojan horses, according to Andrew Childs, Senior Principal Consultant, Huawei Enterprise, Middle East. Huawei had to spend substantial sums on addressing these information security issues. It bought a large amount of information security management software every year, installed a special security lock on each PC, and appointed full-time employees to manage and maintain security locks. Each person maintained an average of 1200 PCs, which cost Huawei around $764,000 per year. In addition, the labour costs wasted in waiting for unlocking reached around $903,000 per year. As well as the risk to information security, Huawei’s traditional desktop system entailed high management and maintenance costs, Childs says. “The traditional desktop system had a high failure rate and its operating system and application software had to be frequently upgraded. Maintenance personnel spent most of their time in installing and configuring desktop software and hardware and locating faults, which resulted in low maintenance efficiency and high costs. According to statistics, an average of 100 PCs require a full-time IT employee to manage and maintain. “Each new employee needed to apply for a new computer and on average spent a whole day to install and configure the office desktop. This incurred the waste of labour costs of more continue on page 52 >>

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NS r IO i ou UT ba at OL E r Du us R S NC be el, sit E RE m ot Vi NT NF ove h H CE O 0 N eac C TA -2 B DA 19 irah e m Ju

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network world Desktop virtualisation

be clearly understood and assessed at the onset,” Dr. El Khatib says. He also delivers his general advice and points to four pillars that must be controlled as the implementation progresses. “The pillar is strategy - what are the organisation challenges and priorities and how will the virtual desktop contribute? The second is architecture - what virtual desktop architecture (i.e. logical and physical) is relevant for the organisation? The third is governance, i.e. how to manage rollout, adoption, transition, training, uptake, ROI and sponsorship. And the final pillar is to have a roadmap to pace the initiative and ensure solid foundations are gradually established.” Aly concedes that desktop virtualisation is yet to become mainstream, but with the costs and risks of the traditional desktop growing every day, he envisions more CIOs moving VDI up their priorities list. “A combination of changes in costs, the rise in popularity of BYOD schemes and the increasing use of public and private clouds, means that now could be the time that the virtual desktop does become mainstream. The big advantage of desktop virtualisation is that it allows organisations to build easily scalable models while adding much more value than the existing traditional desktop, which is loaded with an operating system, applications and data files.”

22M is the electricity consumption in Huawei’s cloud data centre, compared to 78MW in its traditional data centre

continue from page 50 >>

than $751,000 per year. Some employees needed frequent changes in office locations and even entire department relocation because of organisational changes, office location changes and project changes, etc. Huawei spent more than $2,158,000 per year in traditional desktop relocation.” Huawei began using desktop virtualisation in 2009, starting the roll-out at its research and development centre in Shanghai. However, its successful implementation and positive feedback from users led it to turn the initial deployment into an entire programme, called the Huawei Desktop Cloud. Now, over 100,000 of Huawei’s users across 30 countries can access the desktop cloud, 45,000 of its own engineers use the technology, and IT department employees can manage up to 1,000 virtual desktops, compared to just 100 PCs in the previous environment. “Our own benefits from the Huawei Desktop Cloud project have been significant. Huawei made considerable savings by moving to a virtualised environment,” Childs says. Electricity consumption in Huawei’s cloud data centre is 22MW, compared to 78MW in its traditional data centre, whilst CPU usage is more than 60%, compared to less than 5% previously, as computing and network resources are now being used more. Whilst benefits are significant and clear, Childs admits the implementation did not come without its challenges. “Building the world’s largest desktop cloud platform was challenging because of the scale required because of the extent to which it transformed the way we worked traditionally,” he says. “As well as the technical requirements of building the virtual machines and the intelligent network topology that allows users to connect networks from anywhere at any time, and allows network administrators to dynamically adjust network resources, we have faced broader business challenges from deployment on such a large scale. These include giving IT employees the tools to manage the new platform, and deciding where and with whom (both geographically speaking and from the point of view of the organisation’s internal structure) access to, and responsibility for, the

Tamer Samir Aly, Sales Manager, GBM

Computer News Middle East

platform should reside.”

november 2012

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security advisor

INSIDE

The moving target

security advisor

g n i t v ar o m The advent of mobility and its infiltration on enterprise has birthed a whole new type of security risk, and as a result presented businesses with a whole new challenge for protecting themselves. With so many Middle East companies employing BYOD and mobile strategies, mobile security is high on the agenda for the entire industry.

YOD is currently one of the top IT trends and employing strategies which incorporate this can leave a business very unsecure. IT departments are forced to reconsider the simple security measures previously taken to keep their company’s data and information safe. As technology grows, so too does the sophistication of attacks. Before, businesses believed that putting up a large wall around their information and data centre would protect it from any outside intrusion. However, with data growth ballooning, sensitive information being stored on multiple platforms, devices spread out across the globe and sensitive data being accessed day and night, the simple firewall has become inadequate.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

Now businesses not only need to account for security breaches, but also new elements of risk which have developed from this trend. Loss or theft of device, weakness or lack of passwords, and connectivity onto unsecured networks are just a few of the newer risks which have become industry priority now that the enterprise has gone mobile. There is no question that mobile strategies can add to productivity, employee satisfaction and work rate, and offsite access. But weighing up these advantages with the negatives can be a headache for businesses. Taking your company’s data away from a secured network or accessing it from the outside is the first major concern for IT departments. This decreases the level of control which a company has, as Ray www.cnmeonline.com

t ge

The

Mobile security

Wizbowski, VP Strategic Marketing, Online Authentication Division, Gemalto, highlights. “Mobile presents an interesting challenge for corporations. For years the security industry has worked on tools to identify and mitigate threats, but these technologies were either network or desktop/laptop based. As mobile devices have become more powerful, there is a growing trend of these devices accessing corporate networks to do everyday functions like email and document review. A desktop or laptop computer is typically owned by the company and has a standard set of security protocols in place,” he says. Malware, data loss, unauthorised access and unencrypted communication are some of the main threats, according to Nirmal Kumar Manoharan, Business Head, Emerging Markets, ManageEngine.

Maher Jadallah, Regional Manager, MEA, Sourcefire, supports this point, and also highlights the issue of mobile connectivity to third-party cloud services. “Mobile devices introduce security risks when used to access company resources as they easily connect with third-party cloud services and computers whose security posture is potentially unknown and outside of the enterprise’s control,” he says. “In addition, mobile malware is growing rapidly which can further increase risk. Research indicates malware targeting Android-based devices have increased by nearly 500% since last summer.”

500% increase on malware targeting Android-based devices since last year

Identify and protect It might take security breaches, attacks and data theft to make a company realise the importance of mobile protection, but once the realisation has been made, what should the crucial next few steps be? InfoWatch’s International Business Chief, Alexander Zarovsky, says that the priority is to create strategies and policies which allow personal devices to be used in a professional environment so long as the data usage can be monitored. “The first logical step is to develop and enforce the policies of mobile devices usage in the corporate environment. After identifying the strategically important devices, the company should start monitoring them in terms of corporate data usage. In addition, companies need corporate mail server control as well as applying limitations on private mail usage in the corporate perimeter.” Being on top of what devices are accessing corporate networks is vitally important, says Wizbowski. “There are some options from the network side that can identify the difference between a mobile device and a company laptop. By identifying these resources and being able to segment the network you can ensure these devices only have access to nonsensitive information. There are several companies providing network access control that can perform this function. Another technology that is being developed is providing strong authentication on the mobile handset.”

Alexander Zarovsky, International Business Chief, InfoWatch

Jadallah adds that an emphasis should be made on the employees side to act accordingly to corporate policies. “With many enterprises adopting a BYOD model, it is important for organisations to put an effective security policy in place that leverages the latest defences to protect against mobile threats. And in addition, end-users can help by adhering to their company’s security policies when using their mobile devices and following the identity and access management procedures set up by the company to ensure the security and integrity of the organisation is not compromised,” he says.

Mobile malware is growing rapidly which can further increase risk. Research indicates malware targeting Android-based devices has increased by nearly 500% since last summer.” www.cnmeonline.com

Popular or practical? The BYOD trend is driven largely by employees as opposed to the IT department. Therefore, this can cause issues which the employee may not consider when choosing their desired device. Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Service, help AG, says users will typically buy a device which suits their specific needs without much thought for what that would mean to the organisation. He outlines the issues which can arise: “The device type is one. Typically devices used for BYOD are based on popular operating systems like Android and iOS – both excellent operating systems for personal use, but unfortunately there are inherited risks associated with them, like the ability to jailbreak devices and the weak encryption capabilities. Then there is the usage of the device. When a user brings their own device into work they will not accept companies trying to dictate how november 2012

Computer News Middle East

security advisor Mobile security

8016 mobile devices left in seven surveyed American airports last year

the device can be used. Therefore, it is very difficult for an employer to tell a user what they can and can’t do – especially since the user paid for the device. “Finally, there is the very real possibility of mobile theft or loss of device. In such a scenario, it becomes absolutely essential that the organisation has the ability to remotely wipe all data from the device.” Manoharan believes there are far simpler things that can put devices at risk. “Downloading free apps from an untrustworthy source, handing the device to children, taking the device abroad, or simply misplacing it, all add to the risks of personal devices.” Having a personal mobile device also introduces a human element of risk into the equation which wasn’t there previously. As Manoharan mentioned, the chances of simply misplacing or losing a device, which has weak security and full access to sensitive data, are very high. Zarovsky proves that human mistakes donate greatly to the vulnerability of corporate data. “Credant Technologies conducted research in the airports of seven USA cities - Chicago, San Francisco, Douglas, Miami, Orlando, Minneapolis and Denver. The summarised information was oppressive. Between June 2011 and June 2012, passengers left 8016 mobile devices in city airports, among them were smartphones, tablets, laptops and flash storages. The company also reported that the owners of the vast majority of devices had access to corporate networks, data and email correspondence. At the same time, 62% of devices were not even protected by a password.” It almost goes without saying what the consequences of mobile attacks are. On a corporate level, documents, files, revenue, identity, and product theft are just some of the areas which can be targeted. On a personal level, credit card numbers, phone numbers and identity issues can all be targeted. The recent Facebook phone number issue provides evidence of that. Massive corporations are targeted by ever more sophisticated groups of cyber criminals.

Taking measures With the trend effortlessly steam rolling its way through industry, the only thing organisations can do is

There is the very real possibility of mobile theft or loss of device. In such a scenario, it becomes absolutely essential that the organisation has the ability to remotely wipe all data from the device.” 58

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Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Service, help AG

attempt to strategise and find ways of benefitting from BYOD and mobility whilst keeping security in deep consideration. Solling points out that the benefits are there, and at the right costs, organisations can enjoy the trend. “Mobile endpoints are highly convenient and the ease of access means that employees are available for round the clock connectivity. This high availability translates to quicker turn-around times on issues and results in better co-ordination between staff. Also, given that the devices are not subject to slow upgrade cycles and infrastructure upgrade policies, they tend to be more cutting-edge allowing the enterprise to benefit from the latest features and capabilities,” he says. “Clearly there are plenty of benefits for the organisation that chooses to adopt this trend and it is up to the IT department to define a roadmap that ensures that this is done in the best possible manner,” he adds Wizbowski explains: “This is and will be one of the most critical items on IT’s agenda going forward. Mobility is here to stay and there will be increased use of these devices by corporate workers at all levels. The goal will be to balance the convenience and user experience that is present today with the security that is needed to protect the network.” Whilst enterprise turns its head towards an ever mobile and accessible future, IT departments will have to back-up the ambition with smart and adequate security services. With mobility, it appears that the moving target is now to the benefit of the criminals.

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Spectrum strategies

telecoms World Spectrum

Spectrum strategies The growing demand for mobile data is chewing through the spectrum at disposal of the telecom operators. Fortunately, there are ways for service providers to make better use of existing spectrum to stave off the crunch.

pectrum has always been an important resource for wireless carriers, but with the dawn of true 4G mobile broadband, carriers’ need for large spectrum portfolios have grown even larger. To get a sense of just how much additional bandwidth carriers will need, consider that Ericsson’s most recent Traffic and Market Data report predicted that global mobile data traffic will grow by 10 times between now and 2016. Mobile operators, technology vendors and governments have been sounding alarms about mobile networks nearing capacity for 62

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years, and those alarms are getting louder. A study released last year by investment bank Credit Suisse said mobile networks worldwide were filled to 65 percent of capacity on average. If the predictions about traffic growth come true, there won’t be enough new spectrum available to keep up with it. Supply and demand are on different orders of magnitude and an overloaded spectrum band can slow down users’ mobile experience. Are the telecom operators in the region facing a spectrum crunch with skyrocketing use of mobile data? “The short answer is not www.cnmeonline.com

yet, but they will soon. Video content, which is performing increasingly well on today’s smartphones and tablets, is driving the dramatic lift we’re seeing in the use of mobile data,” says Jeremy Foster, Head of Marketing, Government and Industrial Relations, Ericsson Middle East. He adds that as a rule of thumb, a smartphone that uses data services consumes around 10 times the data of a ‘feature’ phone that also uses data services. A laptop uses around 100 times the data of a feature phone. Tablets fall somewhere in between, using around 40 times the data of a

feature phone. Mervyn Kelly, EMEA Marketing Director, Ciena, says the rise of high-bandwidth devices and services has been something of a two-edged sword for operators in the region. “While they welcome the additional traffic such devices and services bring to their networks, the 3G infrastructure put in place to handle such traffic is beginning to crack under the strain and additional investments are unlikely to generate growing profits.” The key to spectral efficiency Foster from Ericsson says there are mainly two strategies to drive spectral efficiency. The first is continuously striving to implement the latest technologies, such as 4G, which was designed to utilise available spectrum more efficiently. The second strategy is to optimise network planning and build additional infrastructure in order to deliver more with the same spectrum and technology. Eamon Holley, Senior Legal Consultant- Intellectual Property and Technology, DLA Piper, agrees: “4G or LTE bands, including the “digital dividend” of spectrum that is released as a result of analogue TV switch off, are seen as a solution to meeting the increasing demand for mobile data usage. LTE is more spectrally efficient than its 2G or 3G predecessors, allowing more data through a network for the same radio bandwidth, and combines with end to end IP capabilities, allowing different forms of services in one pipe.” He adds that mobile operators in some regional jurisdictions have been complaining of shortage of spectrum for some time, and regulators are easy targets for blame. “In reality regulators can be limited in what they can do quickly, particularly if large blocks of spectrum have been already granted to an incumbent, or if some spectrum is assigned to other users, such as government agencies, who may be reluctant to give up their assigned frequencies.” In such situations regulators and governments need to strike a balance between the competing interests of mobile operators who want spectrum at an economical price, government entities that might be reluctant to give up their spectrum, and indeed the regulator’s or government’s own objectives, which might also be torn between making room for new entrants, giving more spectrum to existing operators, in which case they may wish to find ways of assigning spectrum cheaply, or perhaps raising revenue for themselves, through an auction or high license fees. Though LTE is known to use spectrum more efficiently compared to 3G technologies, industry experts caution that the lack of spectrum could also hamper the roll out of the new 4G technology in the region.

65% of capacity is already filled on mobile networks globally

Jeremy Foster, Head of Marketing, Government and Industrial Relations, Ericsson Middle East

Spectrum re-farming to the rescue As carriers adopt LTE, which uses spectrum much more efficiently than earlier technologies, they plan to gradually migrate users off of their oldest networks and reuse those frequencies. Those moves ultimately will make a significant amount of additional spectrum available for high-speed data services, but it’s not an overnight solution. “We do believe that re-farming of existing spectrum will drive efficiency. As R&D drives better performance in terms of bits / Hz, the only reason that we keep old technologies is because there is still an abundance of mobile handsets that rely on older networks such as GSM in order to be connected at all. The industry shift from voice to data leads to a shift of terminals from 2G to 3G and in the future to 4G networks. The consequence of this trend is the increased demand on spectrum for 3G and 4G, which requires operators to re-farm existing GSM spectrum to data-driven technologies,” says Foster. Fortunately though, as multi band (frequency) and multi technology (GSM/3G/LTE) devices come into the market, operators can free up previously used spectrum and launch new technologies with new capabilities, such as LTE, he adds. To fill the gap between those growth rates, governments and industry agree that what’s needed is at least a two-pronged approach, with more spectrum as well as strategies to make better use of the spectrum that’s already available. Carriers also are www.cnmeonline.com

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global mobile data traffic will grow by

10x between now and 2016

Computer News Middle East

telecoms World Spectrum

taking steps that should help to dampen the growth in demand. Holley from DLA Piper recommends an auction process as the award mechanism for the spectrum. “Auctions might be used to raise revenue for the regulator which could be used for a universal services fund, whereas beauty parades might be used to select the operator that the regulator thinks will best achieve its policy objectives. The hybrid could do both, selecting qualified bidders through a form of beauty parade and then allowing them to bid in the auction. Licenses for new spectrum or networks often contain network rollout obligations anyway. A bidder that knows this in advance may still be willing to make large bids in an auction to enter the market if they think entry will be economically feasible even with a network rollout or universal service obligation.” Some experts say it’s time to throw out the whole notion of allocating certain frequencies exclusively to commercial mobile services, or to any exclusive use. Instead, they advocate mobile

4G is said to be more spectrally efficient than 3G

operators sharing spectrum with current users, such as government agencies. Advances in technology, including small cells and radio performance improvements, help make it possible for mobile networks to use the same frequencies as other services, as long as potentially interfering signals don’t rise above a certain level. Sharing could multiply the effective capacity of spectrum by a factor of 1,000. Finally, technical and regulatory solutions are only part of the picture. The most powerful tool to prevent spectrum becoming overloaded may be regulating mobile traffic through service plans. Most carriers are well along in phasing out unlimited data plans, if they ever had them. Now that monthly usage caps are in place, the service providers can modify them as needed to discourage subscribers from using too much network capacity. They can also fine-tune subscriber behaviour by encouraging time-shifting or charging more for plans where the subscriber’s packets get priority over other traffic.

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integration advisor

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Sharing success

integration advisor Strategising with partners

Sharing success In such a competitive market, choosing the right integrator partners and extracting maximum benefit from them can be a difficult game. The consequences of getting this wrong will be costly, both financially and time wise.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

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ustomers have always demanded the latest and greatest in IT solutions and technology, but the competition has never been greater between providers. Integrating with partners that have expertise, knowledge, resources and large client bases can be the winning touch in business. The Middle East is a strong, emerging market and many global companies are beginning to set up shop in the region. Integrating with larger partners can be critical for their success - success which is built upon common goals, interests and trust. But how do the benefits of such a partnership weigh up against the pitfalls of the operation? Graham Owen, Regional Sales Director, MEA&Turkey, Cambium Networks, believes that the benefits of integration partnerships are relevant for the entire industry. “All businesses look to build strategic partnerships to strengthen their regional presence or their market position, and if you do not focus on certain market verticals with specialised/strategic partners it becomes challenging to enter certain market areas and grow your business,” he says. As Reyadh Ayesh, Managing Director and CEO, Smartworld, says, the merging of skills and strengths from each party can lead to a wide array of opportunity for both, so long as the goals are mutual. “Each party will be utilising the strengths of the other party to help in achieving the main targets and goals,” he says. It’s clear that if the interests between both parties are the same, then integration partnerships can be immediately successful. The customer base for the provider will increase, the maintenance of solutions can be guaranteed and the security of additional support when needed will install confidence. However, in all situations, when you’re building upwards on unsteady foundations, you’re likely to topple. This is no different in business and if the integration partnership isn’t compatible from the start, issues may surface. Niranj Sangal, CEO, OMA Emirates, points out the importance of making the correct decisions when choosing partners. “End users are spoilt for choice of integration partners. It is critical for them to not just focus on the provision of right solutions that can be tailor made for individual needs, but more importantly to be able to continuously maintain it for successful day to day operations,” he says. He goes on to outline the consequences of making errors in this area.

Reyadh Ayesh, Managing Director and CEO, Smartworld

“Strategic partnerships are based on trust and working towards achieving a common goal. If either party deviates from this goal, the success of the alliance is greatly endangered. Huge projects undertaken on the basis of successful strategic partnerships may be delayed or fall apart if one party does not give 100 percent in the partnership. Some of the common yet major pitfalls include disagreements on goals and management of finances between strategic alliance partners. It is essential for concerned parties to work alongside each other and ensure a successful partnership.” However, Mansura Ebrahim, Head of Indirect Channel Sales, Ericsson, warns that problems can arise after the partnership has begun. “A major pitfall can be a change in vendor strategy, or a vendor re-focusing their product portfolio. A change in upper management at the partner side, who may have a different agenda, and a drop in partner performance can also cause major issues.” Owen agrees that the companies not seeing eye-toeye from start to finish can create problems which may not be solvable. “You can end up locking yourself into an agreement with a company that does not want to change its business direction in line with the way your company may want to and this can cause conflict,” he says. Steady on approach With all these elements in mind, it is a critical time for businesses when it comes to approaching integrators for partnership talks. All concerns aside, the benefits www.cnmeonline.com

november 2012

Computer News Middle East

integration advisor Strategising with partners

and skills that are supplied by providers, and you have alliances that understand these requirements, they are bound to be highly successful,” says Sangal. Owen has enjoyed much success in the Middle East. “I can think of many success stories where strategic partnerships have worked and continue to work. The Middle East is no exception to this. Every business must look at the merits of a partnership and this would be true wherever you are in the world. In terms of the Middle East specifically, I have personally built many strategic partnerships in the region and these still continue to flourish today,” he says. The Middle East, a region of high activity and fast moving trends, relies on innovation, forward thinking and reactive decision making in order to stay relevant. “The success rate is quite high in this region, as integrators can target accounts that vendors at times don’t have the bandwidth to do so. In the Middle East relationships play a crucial role in business, which adds to the success factor of strategic partnerships here.” Above all, integrator partnerships need to be built upon trust and common interest. If these factors aren’t taken into consideration or if they falter, it can lead to termination of agreement. “In a perfect world partnerships are built on the success rate of implementation and profitability. However, in the real world sometimes there is a mismatch or lack of mutual interests this can lead to jeopardising the project and subsequently may end with a termination of the relationship,” says Sangal. “It is important that the start of any partnership must have clearly defined goals, objectives, roles and responsibilities and financials that serve as a guideline for working together.” Owen believes that honing in on any specific reason for partnership failure is near impossible. “Many things can affect partnerships but if both parties can be open and honest sometimes you just have to agree to disagree and change direction. I believe signing a partnership agreement is like getting married - we meet many times, we go out for dinner, we work together and then finally we agree on a direction forward. However, in some cases either party can decide it’s not for them, for many reasons. So it is very difficult to say what can cause a termination, they just seem to happen at times.” The success rate of integrator partnerships can come down to many factors. However, the importance of trust and communication cannot be ignored if a collaboration is going to be long-lasting. Like any element of business, success weighs on the components functioning correctly – integrators therefore need to be selected with education and thought.

Graham Owen, Regional Sales Director, MEA&Turkey, Cambium Networks

of a successful partnership can be huge for companies of any size. What are the best ways to approach the project? “Strategic alliances are formed after careful research and consideration. The world today is one global market and both parties may be continents apart,” says Sangal. “The company looking forward to making an alliance researches the party under question, and analyses its productivity and market leadership in its area of expertise. Common goals are underlined and the feasibility of the partnership is studied.” However, Ebrahim underlines the importance of accommodating the integrators properly. “When considering approaching an integrator for a partnership, having a proper partner strategy and partner model in place is a key first step.” With these steps in place, the partnership can have a high success rate, according to Ayesh. “The percentage of success in the region is high due to the fact that most projects happening now require these types of partnerships in order for both parties to be successful,” he says. Calculating success The success rate of partnerships will differ from region to region and understanding the area can pay dividends. “The Middle East is a growing business hub and has seen a surge in many international companies entering the market. For the success of strategic integration, it is critical for partnering companies to understand the ethos and specific requirements of the region. If companies factor in the on-ground knowledge 70

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strategic it networking Strategic IT partner Storage Partner Striking the balance

careers advisor University profile

Striking the balance The IT and computer sciences industry is renowned for its pace of change and evolution. In such an environment, being a prospective graduate can be a daunting title. However, Murdoch University, Dubai has made its sole purpose to equip its students with every available piece of knowledge and skill necessary to be able to independently tackle the industry. 74

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ituated on the outskirts of Dubai, Murdoch University boasts a healthy set of computer sciences programmes. With over 500 students on the books and potentially more to follow, Associate Dean Daniel Adkins believes that covering every available inch of industry is key to ensuring that they are in the best possible position when it comes to being propelled into the real world. As well as a strong emphasis on one-to-one tutoring, Murdoch takes a strong stance on encouraging students to actively gain industry experience and independently learn new skills. “We can’t teach the students what they’re going to need to know for technology 10 years from now. These things haven’t been invented yet - some of our students here may be the ones who invent them. When I was studying there certainly wasn’t any Java, HTML or iPhones,” he says. “So we just encourage the students to work on their own, keep up with local trends, read websites and listen to broadcasts. Once they have the basics of how to think like a programmer and how to develop new technologies, it’s just about keeping up with the industry so they’re fully prepared once they graduate.” Wayne Muller, Programme Coordinator of Information Technology, believes that spreading out the curriculum across many areas is an important factor. “Our programmes are very balanced, so our students get a taste of all things - developing, networking, and programming. This is one of the most beneficial elements,” he says. However, having a wide range of transferrable skills is only half of the story for the team. The courses also include enterprise related modules which require students to actively participate and engage with reallive industry projects. These modules aid the university in remaining relevant in an extremely fast moving industry. The IT business landscape is renowned for being a fast mover, and education must adapt and change its colours often in order to maintain the highest level of relevant training. Muller believes that the affiliated courses help to do just that. “We link up with the industry and do network courses with firms such as Cisco and EMC, so if their direction changes, so does ours. These are highly beneficial for our students as it gives them a real-time insight into what’s happening in the industry.” he says. “Therefore, when it comes to the time when these students have to move into work, they will be prepared and people will know about them.”

Daniel Adkins, Associate Dean of Murdoch University, Dubai

The finer details Pointing the focus of the curriculum in the right direction is very important to Murdoch. Adkins explains that the teaching staff tries its best to deter away from training in areas where job demand is low. “I tend to stress that programming, for example, is easily outsourced, so we try to keep students away from it. We prepare them for roles which aren’t easily outsourced so they can compete better locally. Roles such as analysis, design, programme project management, cyber security and cyber forensics, these specialist areas will be in high demand in the coming years in industry,” he says. Murdoch is obviously doing something right with its students, as it recently set plans in place to acquire an additional floor in Dubai International Academic City (DIAC). This would double its current size of around 500 students. Adkins explains how the current curriculum is littered with touches of expertise in order to provide advantages for its students. “There are a number of things that are important to how we run. We have frontline researchers developing the curriculum to keep it current. Then, we have specialists; people who have integrated their text books into our curriculum. So this gives us a distinct advantage over other institutions.” Adkins goes on to explain how the university manages to acquire the necessary personnel needed to maintain the level of quality in training. “The academics are based in Perth, in our home campus, doing the research and bringing in the knowledge, then incorporating it into our programme. www.cnmeonline.com

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150 Students so far have graduated into industry

Computer News Middle East

careers advisor University profile

Therefore, we don’t have to worry about that element, we can concentrate on brining in local, industry knowledgeable personnel,” he says. “We look not for teachers, but for industry professionals who can translate knowledge in a classroom. I came with 20 years of industry experience. I was a COO, a CEO, then I retired and now I’m the Dean here so I brought with me plenty of current knowledge. This is what we hope to instil into our students.” Winning relationships The student/teacher relationships at Murdoch appear to play a big part in each student’s development. However, other elements also assist in this. The IT programmes at Murdoch have full access to the media department and all of its facilities. This includes a TV studio with full programme editing software, giving the course a very digital and hands on element. They also have access to a live radio station situated onsite, where they can produce radio content. The students are very dynamic when it comes to engaging in

500+ students are currently enrolled at the university, with the hope of doubling that number

broadcast and discussion. They have already taken part in four debates, sponsored by The Khaleej Times. Each debate was constructed of a panel of eight to 10 students, half for and half against, and a moderator. The summarised arguments were then published as full page editorials, further supporting the programme’s involvement with local industry. Adkins cuts a confident figure who takes pride in the accomplishments of his students and their lust for industry experience. “The thing that makes the Murdoch Dubai IT programme so beneficial to the students is the way that they are taught to learn new technologies independently so that they know how to keep current while working in industry,” he says. But Adkins and his staff certainly aren’t resting on their laurels. “As Murdoch expands its campus, it will also be expanding its programmes to take in more leading edge IT courses in areas of high future employment demand,” he concludes.

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interview Jim Goodnight

‘Analytics is far more than just BI’ Jim Goodnight is one of the world’s great business leaders, not to mention the wealthiest man in the state of North Carolina. After co-founding SAS Institute in 1976, he built it into the largest private software company in the world and by 2004 98% of Fortune 500 companies were using SAS programmes. Still passionate at 69, Goodnight told CNME that analytics is now far more than just BI.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

www.cnmeonline.com

ow significant is the Middle East region to SAS? This is actually my first trip to Dubai and I’m most impressed with it - I think I’ll certainly be coming again. We have a pretty good presence here already – around 100 to 150 people, I think. We’ve had offices here for 22 years and last year we saw 50% yearon-year growth here. We are really seeing the Middle East becoming more interested in analytics and the ability to analyse the large amounts of data that are now available. As such, we are certainly planning on increasing our investments and expanding in the region. We’re looking to open some new offices in the New Year.

People are saying data is a new oil. Do you agree with that statement? It’s an interesting statement. I think what they’re really trying to say is the data that corporations have generated from customers can really be a strategic asset if used properly. Analysing data can provide an enormous amount of valuable information. You can use it to decide which customers you want to loan money to and which you want to deny, what you want to include in your next marketing campaign, or whether somebody’s credit card is being fraudulently used, just to name a few examples. What are the true opportunities that data analytics provides to enterprises in the Middle East? It can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We’ve seen many examples where the amount of fraud we can detect can be very, very large. For a lot of the oil rigs, we’re doing things like predictive asset payments where we can predict when parts are going to fail. That means that when you have to shut down on the process you have, we can predict several other things that are probably going to fail in the next few months and you can prepare for that. SAS is the biggest pure-play vendor in the analytics field, but many of the software mega-vendors have tried to steal market share with their own

offerings. How do you keep an advantage over these vendors? First of all, we know what analytics is. Some of these other vendors that talk about analytics think of it as BI (business intelligence) – just the basic query and reporting. You can do all the querying and reporting you want to, but you’re not going to find out what the probability of default a particular loan has. It’s just not there. You need to have advanced analytics and SAS is the leader in advanced analytics with a 35% market share. Our next largest competitor is at 15% and that’s IBM. So there is confusion

We’re taking problems that used to run in 18-20 hours and running them now in 10 or 12 minutes by going through this process of running things as parallel with commodity type hardware. So high performance is one of our really big pushes right now and moving forward. As I said before, there’s always other vendors that talk about BI as analytics, so we’re going to give them more of a challenge in that space with our in-memory high performance server that we’ve developed for visual analytics. You’re able to take a billion records and do visual analytics on that in a matter of seconds.

We know what analytics is. Some of these other vendors that talk about analytics think of it as BI – just the basic query and reporting. You can do all the querying and reporting you want to, but you’re not going to find out what the probability of default a particular loan has. It’s just not there.” amongst some of these other companies about what analytics is. They think just BI is analytics, but you really need to separate the two. BI is about making charts and tabulations about the past history, whilst advanced analytics is about trying to forecast future behaviours and directions, and trying to optimise processes. BI doesn’t do that.

How do you find that Middle East organisations respond to SAS technologies compared to other regions? I would say the Middle East is in the upper 25% of regions when it comes to adopting new technologies. We see lots of interest out here in organisations making sure they’re using IT in correct ways. There are a lot of green fields out here which means that, without a lot of the legacy systems that lag other regions, Middle East enterprises are able to adopt new technologies much faster. As we approach the end of the year, what does 2013 have in store for SAS Institute? Right now we are still doing more and more development in the area of high performance. www.cnmeonline.com

Is big data going to continue to be as big a force in the IT world as it has been in 2012? Yes, because a lot of organisations are still missing out by not analysing all the data out there. Most organisations are still doing sampling on a small subset of data and then trying to build a model on that subset. Before, that was the only way to handle big data, but now we find that it’s actually faster and more accurate to analyse all the data. Even if it is a billion records, we can now do that faster than we used to be able to do a 100,000 on a single processor. I think most organisations in the Middle East have some kind of BI tool that they’re using already. We’re certainly going to try to convince them to move to our new laser in-memory technology, but it’s the actual use of predictive analytics that we see more interest in. The ability to detect fraud or predict which customer should be in the next marketing campaign. These kinds of things are what real analytics can be used for. The real return of investment is going to come from this side, not BI. november 2012

Computer News Middle East

PRODUCTS Launches and releases

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

Product: Microsoft Surface Vendor: Microsoft What it does: The unique VaporMg casing delivers a high-quality fit and finish thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ultra-light and durable. The integrated kickstand enables hands-free entertainment, whilst flipping it closed disappears it into the casing and turns the Surface into a sole tablet. The touch cover clicks in to Surface and offers a slim, spill-resistant keyboard for typing, or users can opt for type cover, which combines the classic keyboard with a superthin, lightweight design for extended usage. Eight hours of battery life is nothing to grunt at, and whilst Surface with Windows RT is incredibly thin, it still features a full-size USB port, microSD card slot and HD video out port. What you need to know: Microsoftâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s widely anticipated introduction into the tablet market has finally arrived. The original computing pioneers are proving they are ready to innovate again and will hope the Surface is the first product in the market to provide a full-proof mobile replacement for the notebook. Is this the redefinition of personal computing? Time will tell.

Computer News Middle East

november 2012

www.cnmeonline.com

Product: TeamWox SaaS Vendor: MetaQuotes Software What it does: TeamWox SaaS keeps all of an organisation’s data in a single ‘DataStore’, allowing everything to be shared between each and every module of the system. Furthermore, system wide reporting provides an up to the minute snapshot of everything that is happening within the organisation.

Product: iPad Mini Vendor: Apple What it does: The screen measures 7.9 inches diagonally, is 7.2mm thick and weighs 0.68 pounds, which is half the weight of the previous iPad. It uses Apple’s dual-core A5 chip and gets the same LTE capabilities as the fourthgeneration iPad with LTE, which was launched on the same day. The iPad mini offers 10 hours of battery life and uses the largest and thinnest battery Apple has ever made. What you need to know: Just six months after unveiling the thirdgeneration iPad, Apple has now unveiled the long-rumoured iPad mini. Like the iPad 2, the iPad mini employs a 1024-by-768 resolution, meaning all existing iPad apps work with the iPad mini, too.

What you need to know: MetaQuotes has thrown its hat into the Middle East cloud market with the regional launch of the 2.0 version of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. TeamWox SaaS 2.0 allows an unlimited number of an organisation’s employees to use the solution, and the subscription price includes all customer support and system updates. MetaQuotes offers a fully functional two month free trial.

GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 5 technology, digital power delivery and other exclusive features to allow users to get the most from AMD’s new ‘Trinity’ technology.

Product: GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 Vendor: Golden Systems Middle East What it does: The GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4, the flagship of the GIGABYTE FM2 series, incorporates

What you need to know: The motherboard is designed to push AMD A-Series APUs to the limit with GIGBAYTE Ultra Durable 5 technology. Digital power controllers ensure high capacity and high current power delivery which, when coupled with high speed memory support, combine to push the onboard AMD 7000 series graphics processor to the maximum. www.cnmeonline.com

november 2012

Computer News Middle East

Column The word on the street

Joe Lipscombe CNME’s man about town gives his spin on the latest IT issues affecting Middle East enterprises. 82

Computer News Middle East

Back to the future B oy, am I glad to reach the end of this month. GITEX has engulfed CNME since September and we’re still feeling the effects of it now. It’s like some kind of natural disaster has struck and we’re left picking up the pieces. The office is a mess, our schedule is a mess and my hair is a mess... It’s been tough. Following GITEX I thought it might be a good idea to make a speedy getaway and hideout for a few days. As a result, I’m writing this column from my hotel room in the French capital – beautiful Paris. In actual fact, I’m here for a technology conference - there really is no rest for the wicked. Paris is a funny place to host a conference which is based on innovation and future technologies. Stepping into Paris is like stepping back in time. There is no rush to be up-todate and not much lust for gadgetry. No, Paris is all about the past. Historic art, culture, style and romance (you can cross one of those out if you’re by yourself, on a business trip). I have spent a lot of time in France and I enjoy moseying around the local areas to try and gain a feel of the general atmosphere. My flight arrived with enough time left for me to take an evening stroll through the streets of Paris and I was eager to watch how people were. It’s really everything you imagine

october 2012

www.cnmeonline.com

it to be. The Parisians stroll down the long streets aimless and relaxed, peering into every boutique window as if they have a hunch that they’re on the verge of finding a true bargain, whilst a wide array of tiny dogs skip about their feet. You cannot turn a corner in Paris without seeing something truly brilliant. Innovation of architecture and art is evident here, and a tasteful desire to learn more about it is all you need to get by (that, and knowledge of the phrase une jambon et sandwich au fromage, s’il vous plaît – one ham and cheese sandwich, please). This isn’t a place that looks desperate for big data storage solutions, or a place with mobile security concerns. I did begin to wonder why I, a technology reporter, was here at all. After the most charming evening, I awoke the next morning with an overwhelming affection for one of the culture capitals of the world, prepared for the conference ahead. My brief stop off in the careless and timeless past was over - it was back to the future. When I arrived at the conference centre, it suddenly struck me; technology is mobile, it’s virtual, it’s the backbone to every society, it’s the platform which brings the world together. It really doesn’t matter what the surface appears to look like, beneath the charm and beauty was a bustling hub of innovation and excitement. I shared interviews with technology journalists from Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic, England and more, to find out about the progression and success of a major IT company. After all my curious concern, it turns out that in actual fact this was the perfect place to host an event like this. Technology is brilliant, beautiful, slick, chic and classy these days, and that’s precisely what Paris is too.

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