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Contents ISSUE 237 | october 2011
ANALYSIS 6 A congress for clouds
At the recent two day Cloud Congress 2011, end-users and vendors discussed the various elements that are necessary to speed up the adoption of solutions and services in the cloud.
12 Winds of change
Speakers at the IDC IT Managers Forum highlighted a noticeable shift in the priorities of enterprises across the world.
14 Robust outlook
Infrastructure solutions vendor Commscope is looking forward to growth in the region with an integrated office and a stronger economy.
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16 A leader for HP
If Meg Whitman doesn’t work out, Marc Benioff, Steve Mills, Charles Phillips or even Mark Hurd come to mind as candidates.
18 Round-up
We bring you a quick round-up of IT industry news.
Dubai’s Department of Economic Development (DED) has deployed a network that turns almost all capex into opex. Sathya Mithra Ashok writes on how they achieved the feat.
44 Critical connections
KSA’s Jarir Bookstore battles the challenges associated with connecting disparate centres of business to support strategic growth.
FEATURE 50 Sourcing success
Many large organisations have outsourced some or all of their IT functions. Pallavi Sharma finds out what challenges and drives this trend and how the Middle East ITO market is keeping up.
56 Turning a new leaf
CIOs in the Middle East still struggle to give green ICT investments a business language and this is hampering the adoption of environmentally-sane choices in organisations.
62 Back to school
The application of IT is not only transforming the way students learn, but also the way they are being taught. Pallavi Sharma studies how educational institutions in the region are leveraging technology.
INTERVIEW 68 A solutions company
Kuwait’s Viva Telecom implements a data warehouse and business intelligence solution to benefit business operations, Pallavi Sharma reports.
INSIGHT 74 Application virtualisation-the impact
CASE STUDY 38 Challenging the norm
Viva vibe
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell outlines agressive plans to acquire more intellectual property to benefit customers and long time partners.
Server virtualisation gets more buzz, but application virtualisation might provide more significant business benefits in the long run.
78 The big deal
A new group of data mining technologies promises to change forever the way we sift through out vast stores of data, making it faster and cheaper.
HOW TO 82 Build a turnkey private and hybrid cloud
Here’s how you as an enterprise can evaluate and understand the essential elements that constitute a turnkey private or hybrid cloud.
84 Mitigate risk in the outsourcing market
Forrester has some recommendations on how to mitigate risk and achieve value from relationships with global outsource vendors.
88 Improve collaboration between development
and operations
Here are six ways that IT managers can get their DevOps teams to work together.
PRODUCTS 90 CNME gets down in the dirt with the latest gizmos and gadgets, and gives you the verdict.
Last Word 94 A look at what major events await you, what we’re reading, and a
www.cnmeonline.com
sneak peek at the contents of the next issue of CNME. october 2011
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EDITORIAL
Second time around
Sathya Mithra Ashok Senior Editor Talk to us: E-mail: sathya@cpidubai.com Twitter: @computernewsme Facebook: www.facebook.com/ computernewsme
Publisher Dominic De Sousa
Even when the second half of the year starts, it is very difficult not thinking of GITEX. And if it looms at your doorstep (as it does when I write this editorial) then it would seem absolutely criminal to ignore it. But that is exactly what I am going to do. This is not because we have anything against GITEX or in any way believe that the event has become any less of the social-calendar-must-do it has been for years for the IT industry in the Middle East. No, not at all. It is just that at CNME we are currently pre-occupied with our very own second annual ICT Achievement Awards. If you are reading this, chances are you are already at the Awards venue, or the Awards has already come to an end and we have announced our winners on a glorious evening that brought together the who’s-who of the entire industry. The second episode of the region’s premier Awards ceremony is set to imitate the success of the first – only it will be slightly larger in scale and ambition. CNME’s team received a staggering 352 nominations for the Awards this year, making it a truly regional representation of deployments, end-users and vendors. This year we will be honouring a couple of new categories (besides the triedand-tested set of categories, and a ‘surprise’ category that you will hear about only on the evening of the Awards), and we have moved our venue to the prominent Monarch Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road, right across from the GITEX venue of DWTC. As I sit here writing this though, we already know some of the winners, and it looks much like the biggest growth markets in the region will be the ones taking home most of the trophies. In simpler terms, we are talking about enterprises in KSA, UAE and Qatar. There have been some spectacular stories from many other countries in the region as well, especifically Jordan and Egypt, and they will be highlighted during the Awards event as well. And I will stop there, for I certainly want to hold on to the surprise element of announcing the winners on the evening of the Awards ceremony. You will hear (in brief) about each of the projects and the people who won the hard-fought accolade on the 9th of October 2011. For a more detailed story on each of the winners, you will have to wait for the November issue. Now you know why we can’t think of GITEX, and why you should be at CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2011. I mean, would anyone really want to miss the evening where we honour the crème-de-la-crème of the Middle East ICT industry? To attend the Awards evening, please register at www.computernewsme. com/ictachievementawards2011/registration.php. You can also follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/computernewsme) and look for Awards tweets with #CNMEAwds11.)
COO Nadeem Hood Managing Director Richard Judd richard@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409126 Commercial Director Chris Stevenson chris@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409138 Editorial Dave Reeder dave@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409106 Senior Editor Sathya Mithra Ashok sathya@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409111 Sub-Editor Pallavi Sharma pallavi@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409103
Circulation Database and Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409147
Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409146 Art Director Kamil Roxas kamil@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409112 Designer Analou Balbero analou@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409104 Photographer Cris Mejorada cris@cpidubai.com +971 4 4409108
DIGITAL SERVICES Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy P Maagma Web Developers Jerus King Bation Erik Briones Jefferson de Joya Louie Alma online@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by
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© Copyright 2011 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.
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event month in view
A congress for clouds At the recent two day Cloud Congress 2011, organised by CNME, end-users and vendors debated on the relevance of cloud technologies to the region and the various elements that are necessary to speed adoption of solutions and services in the cloud. Sathya Mithra Ashok reports.
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loud computing in the region is still immature, and there are several challenges that exist in the region. Nevertheless, there is constant innovation and improvement that is taking place, and we are likely to see dramatic improvements in the near future. This was the conclusion of the speakers at the first day of Cloud Congress 2011. End-users, industry experts and multiple other stakeholders got together at the ground-breaking event to discuss the state of cloud solutions and services in the region. At the opening keynote, Tibor Loncsar, director of strategy and operations for IT at DWTC, explained the hybrid model used by his organisation and how they have profited from it. “DWTC uses a hybrid cloud for its corporate email and we have been pleasantly surprised by the results. The primary concern was the interoperability and the ability to have it function with internal infrastructure. With everything in place now the hybrid cloud provides continuity, quick recovery, security filtering and archiving,” said Loncsar. Loncsar, an open advocate for cloud computing, advised organisations to go for it as it is easier and better than what could be expected. “The bottom line though – expect the unexpected. It will get more complicated as you grow and you are ready to take the next step,” said Loncsar. The Congress, which was divided into two tracks, brought together exceptional speakers to talk on the various elements surrounding cloud computing. Ali Radhi, head of IT at MBC Group, started the tracks with his session on cloud optimisation focusing on interoperability and standardisation. He drew from his own experiences at MBC to illustrate the points he made during his presentation. “MBC has been deploying cloud solutions for the last three years. We have
moved from private to hybrid to private over the years, and interoperability has been a major issue,” said Radhi. “Risk management is essential before using cloud computing and business decision makers need to be involved. It is very important for every organisation to build its information base for cloud sharing, and understand that integration with multiple platforms is one of the biggest challenges in cloud computing,” he stated. Mohamed Roushdy, CIO of Siraj Finance, discussed the various ROI models that could be used to evaluate cloud providers and solutions, and expanded on the methods in which end-users could
his session. While detailing the main differences between private and public clouds, Tsalidis also gave shape to the company’s cloud strategy and solutions. Talking about linking cloud strategy to IT strategy, Javed Abbasi, director of IT and operations at Gisba Group from Saudi Arabia, said, “Aligning IT strategy to business is very different from integrating IT strategies with business. Without strategy, IT is untamed.” He added, “With relation to the cloud people often forget that the service depends on a physical data centre. Organisations must understand and verify the infrastructure, operations and management processes that the provider has in place.”
Bringing about a cultural change within the organisation is the most difficult element in any cloud computing project.” profit from their cloud investments in the shortest possible time. “Bringing about a cultural change within the organisation is the most difficult element in any cloud computing project. Convincing the CEO, CFO and other business heads that this could potentially help the business, and some of the issues can be handled for the betterment of the company is a huge change management project. Half the success of any cloud computing project simply depends on getting this sign-off from the higher management,” he stressed during his session. Organisations should not be deterred by challenges. They should understand business needs and invest in a model that suits you, he added. Mike Tsalidis, server and tools business group lead for Microsoft MEA, discussed cloud for the greater good, and improving productivity with cloud investments during www.cnmeonline.com
“There is a lot of difference between a local cloud partners and a strategic cloud partner. The maturity of enterprises and partners are not mature enough to move there yet. But enterprises should try to move there, because they are then likely to see more benefits from the partnership,” said Ed Capaldi, divisional director of IT at Al Nisr Publishing. Strategic partners will work in coordination with the IT and the business departments of the organisation for the long-term benefit of the firm. Capaldi outlined ten considerations for enterprises when choosing a strategic cloud partner including openness, outlining KPIs, partner’s understanding of the organisation’s cloud strategy, financial stability and scale of the partner and SLAs (service level agreements). “Good strategy is the result of correct decisions, and half the time it is simply october 2011
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Event month in view
Fayyaz Alam, VP of IT production services at Emirates Group
Mike Tsalidis, server and tools business group lead for Microsoft MEA
Tibor Loncsar, director of strategy and operations for IT at DWTC
Ali Radhi, head of IT at MBC Group
Javed Abbasi, director of IT and operations at Gisba Group from Saudi Arabia
Ed Capaldi, divisional director of IT at Al Nisr Publishing
Trevor Moore, Director of IT and Communications at Abu Dhabi University. Deepak Kalra, group IT director at the Safeer Group
Ramesh Krishna Bhandari, business development specialist – business solutions, central marketing at Etisalat
Dr Hazem Turki El-Khatib, IT director at the Department of Finance in Abu Dhabi
Geethalakshmi R, CEO and managing partner at Associated Business Attorneys
Mohamed Roushdy, CIO of Siraj Finance
Mark Lewis, senior director of marketing and alliances for EMEA at Riverbed
Joseph Aninias, manager of IT and telecommunication services at the University of Wollongong in Dubai
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Nick Black, technical manager for the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa at Trend Micro
www.cnmeonline.com
knowing what not to do. Currently though cloud computing remains unstable and therefore a highly risky proposition for companies,” said Capaldi. He also bemoaned the lack of skilled personnel for IT jobs, calling most of the people who are entering the region as new recruits as “idiots right out of college.” Ramesh Krishna Bhandari, business development specialist – business solutions, central marketing at Etisalat, said, “Cloud spending in 2010 was $37.8 billion and is expected to grow 26% and hit $121 billion by 2015. More than 80% of this is expected to be SaaS-centric cloud spending.” “Data is growing at 6 trillion bytes per second. Considering all this, and the multiple benefits that come with the cloud, over 70% of businesses in the Middle East are either using or will be using cloud in the next 6-12 months,” he said. He was speaking on the subject of growing with the cloud at the Congress. He added that while the cloud gives exponential opportunities for any business to grow, there is no one size fits all with these services and solutions, and that a truly flexible cloud requires team effort. Nick Black, technical manager for the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa at Trend Micro, spoke at length about virtualisation and cloud computing, and the role of security within these implementations. “Deep Security protects virtual machines (VMs) and ensures that the host defends itself against the changing threat landscape. This is the ideal situation. It can even be used to defend public clouds – even those with multi-tenancy,” said Black. Nevertheless, regardless of the security solutions used by a service provider in the public cloud, the end-user should encrypt his data when transferring and storing it with the service provider. The decryption key should remain with the end-user and this is the only way to ensure that critical
organisational information remains protected even when they move from one service provider to another,” said Black. He also stated that an organisation can use Trend Micro’s management console
day was preceded by sessions covering the operation and management of the cloud to back-up and disaster recovery (DR) necessities when working with any chosen cloud model.
Good strategy is the result of correct decisions, and half the time it is simply knowing what not to do. Currently though cloud computing remains unstable and therefore a highly risky proposition for companies.” to keep an idea on security on the public cloud where its information is stored. He also touched briefly upon the controversial subject of who owned the data and who would take responsibility for it when, and if, security failed. “Even well established public cloud service providers have clauses in their agreements whereby they move responsibility for security and data loss over to the person who buys the service. Keeping this in mind, it is always best for the end-user to take a more direct interest in the security of their information when handing it to a service provider,” said Black. The panel at the end of the day that brought together all the speakers of the day discussed the multiple challenges that faced the cloud, and identified areas of growth in specific industries for it as well. An involved debate on SLAs and service providers also ensued between the panellists, with some stating that the dominant service provider should take steps to provide end-to-end SLA provisions that come with penalties attached to them. The second day of Cloud Congress 2011 was all about the legalities involved in working with public and hybrid clouds, and the ways in which contracts can be fashioned better for end-users going forward. The debate and discussion that was the highlight of the panel discussion of the www.cnmeonline.com
The opening keynote of the second day was delivered by Dr Hazem Turki El-Khatib, IT director at the Department of Finance in Abu Dhabi. Dr El-Khatib spoke about the financial shared services that they had implemented across multiple divisions. “There are several advantages to the shared services model and there are several challenges associated with it as well. Moving to a private cloud entirely might come with different challenges, but we do believe that we have achieved most of the efficiencies that the cloud can provide. And the question we are still battling with is whether we should move to a full-scale cloud deployment at all or whether we are happeier with the current shared service provision,” said Dr El-Khatib. Deepak Kalra, group IT director at the Safeer Group, the first speaker on the first track of the second day, discussed escalation procedures with cloud implementations. “Cloud computing has reached escape velocity and is transferring into mainstream computing. Cloud implementations vary across business sectors and these variations need to be supported by the parent provider of the cloud platform and/or servicesCloud computing leads to right sizing and businesses are free to choose the delivery model that suits them best,” said Kalra. He added that every service provider that is investing in the cloud should create a october 2011
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Event month in view
knowledge base or a community to enhance user learning. He advised that the industry should look to organisations like CSA, ENISA and CIF who are trying to maintain a standard surrounding cloud service provision. He concluded that the Safeer Group itself had invested in a private cloud, faced with the lack of SLAs from service providers in the region. In track two, experienced advocate Geethalakshmi R, CEO and managing partner at Associated Business Attorneys, spoke at length about the pitfalls that await customers when they begin to form a contract with a service provider. “The first mistake that most customers make is that they don’t read the entire contract from page to page. This is absolutely essential. They should also have a clear idea of their goals, and make sure that the contract matches their requirements. Enterprises should also keep a keen eye out for certain terms and statements that should be a part of every cloud contract,” stated Geethalakshmi. She also warned customers to be wary of ‘virtual cloud providers’ who did not own datacentres themselves, but simply leased data centre space to provide cloud services. She also encouraged customers to be aware of the jurisdiction under which their contracts would fall, and take an active part in the decision of the laws that would govern the SLA (service level agreement). “In the current scenario, in the current legislative setup especially in the UAE, it is simply a case of buyer beware. They have to be careful, they have to understand that only general laws apply to a cloud contract, and work with their requirements in mind all the time. Loss of data is as good as a loss of business these days,” stated Geethalakshmi. Backup and disaster recovery in the cloud was expanded upon by Mark Lewis, senior director of marketing and alliances for EMEA at Riverbed. Introducing Riverbed’s work in the private cloud arena, 10
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Lewis stated that the company had recently ventured into public clouds as well. Citing examples of customers who have moved archiving to a cloud environment and achieved optimisation of storage requirements by way of the same, Lewis demonstrated the benefits that the cloud could offer. “Archiving in the cloud can prove to be advantageous, especially if you do not need to access this for a certain number
and the advantages it brings to an IT team especially within a collegiate-structure. The final panel discussed at length the things that needed to be in place for the cloud to take off in the Middle East, including a legislative structure and a wellformed cloud ecosystem. “It is essential for partners and distributors, along with vendors to understand the products and the cloud technologies well. They have to be able to fit
Archiving in the cloud can prove to be advantageous, especially if you do not need to access this for a certain number of years. Comparing this to back-up where you might have to deal with duplication, the cloud offers efficient storage options.” of years. Comparing this to back-up where you might have to deal with duplication, the cloud offers efficient storage options,” said Lewis. Despite these advantages though, Lewis said that storage tapes cannot die because people love them and they are a longer lasting backup solution. He also discussed WAN optimisation, its need and implications in a cloud environment. “The right WAN optimisation solution can considerably reduce both the RPO (recovery point objectives) and RTO (recovery time objective), and the time to replicate data. There are multiple case studies from Riverbed alone to reinforce the use of WAN optimisation technologies for cloud environments,” stated Lewis. Joseph Aninias, manager of IT and telecommunication services at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, conducted a session on virtualisation and the private cloud, with specific reference to the work done within his educational institution. He also expanded on working with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) www.cnmeonline.com
these solutions to customer requirements and avoid promising more or overselling. There should also be educated consultants to lead the way. As soon as this cloud ecosystem comes into place and begins to function in tune, we will be able to see more enterprises moving to the cloud with ease,” said Saji Oomen, GM for group IT at Al Batha Group. The panel discussion was followed by in-depth end user workshops on everything from strategising for the cloud to working with hybrid cloud elements and including security in them. These workshops were conducted by Fayyaz Alam, VP of IT production services at Emirates Group, and Trevor Moore, Director of IT and Communications at Abu Dhabi University. Cloud Congress 2011 was conducted on the 19th and the 20th of September in Dubai. The event was organised by CNME, the premier technology magazine of the region and CPI, one of the leading publishing houses of the Middle East. Cloud Congress 2011 was sponsored by Etisalat and Riverbed.
ANALYSIS month in view
Winds of change As the markets of Middle East, Africa and Turkey continue to recover from the effects of a long lasting recession, speakers at the IDC IT Managers Forum this year stated that there was a noticeable shift in the priorities of enterprises across the world.
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aving spent the last 24 months focusing on trimming the fat and building lean, mean technology infrastructures, the region’s IT managers are now gearing up their systems for a period of sustained growth and constantly increasing competition. Consequently today, we are witnessing greater dependency on IT systems to enhance business processes, reduce costs and improve network and data security. This was the general consensus at the Dubai chapter of the IDC IT Managers Forum 2011. According to recent IDC research, improvements to security, supporting innovation and business requirements through IT initiatives and upgrades to business applications are the top three priorities for the region’s IT managers for the next 12 months. “The focus is now on driving the innovative use of technology to spur efficiency gains, improve internal processes, reduce risk and extend customer reach with business imperatives, amid the evolving demands of today’s increasingly mobile, distributed and interconnected workplace. IT
managers are tasked with providing a reliable and agile platform that adapts to rapidly changing business requirements and constantly evolving technology parameters,” said Jyoti Lalchandani, VP and regional MD for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, IDC. Lalchandani added, “An inevitable side effect of the unrelenting cost reductions of the last two years is the considerable increase in the influence of the CFO over technology adoption plans, a trend that is set to continue for the foreseeable future. Considerations such as measurable businessIT alignment, return on investment, risk mitigation and compliance are now firmly ingrained in the purchase decision-making process and we expect more collaboration between technology and finance departments to ensure more value is wrung out of existing systems.” The shifting dynamics from technology for technology sake to technology for business sake was reiterated during the course of the panel discussion at the forum. Abdulsalam Rahma Bastaki, vice president of IT at Dubai Silicon Oasis (DSO) and Shafique R Ibrahim, manager – IT
The focus is now on driving the innovative use of technology to spur efficiency gains, improve internal processes, reduce risk and extend customer reach with business imperatives amid the evolving demands of today’s increasingly mobile, distributed and interconnected workplace.”
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operations, Al Fardan Group agreed that there was increasing pressure from management to invest in technologies that enable strategic business growth. However, tight budgets remain a cause of concern for a majority of the CIOs in the region. Addressing the changing role of CIOs across organisations in the Middle East, Bastaki said, “We have witnessed a significant increase in business dependence on IT. No longer is the IT team considered a bunch of technical geeks, they are now known to understand business processes and in a position to evaluate what technologies will service the enterprise purpose best.” Ibrahim pointed out that the most notable change has been the shift in focus from “good to make investments” to “need to make investments. “Higher management better understand the need to invest in technology to deliver a
significant competitive advantage through reduced business costs and manual errors. Enterprises are heavily investing in business applications and analytics for automation and data governance. Cloud computing is a reality that is here to stay. A roadmap to deploying the cloud is slowly emerging and more IT managers will soon invest in the cloud to enable business savings.” Addressing the general apprehension surrounding the concept of cloud computing, Ibrahim opined, “The hesitation to invest in a cloud environment has to do with the fact that a cloud implementation requires additional resources because applications need to be attuned and customised to integrate with a cloud infrastructure. Without this integration the cloud deployment would not be worthwhile.” Bastaki believes that the major driver for cloud implementations in
the region is the need to create a cost saving infrastructure. He said the DSO is considering investing in the cloud for ERP applications and is experimenting with how the environment and its management is affected if a part of that ERP is moved to a separate environment. Both experts opined that when investing in the cloud the right approach is gradual. “It is important that an organisation understand the driver and the need to implement a cloud, and then align this need with which cloud model would work best for achieving these objectives within a competitive budget. Once the organisation has decided on the type of cloud it wants to deploy, the next step is to communicate the process of implementation to the users. This process of knowledge transfer needs to combine the technical people with the business users to ensure minimal www.cnmeonline.com
resistance to change in the organisation and smooth deployment.” They also said that when selecting a vendor, decision makers need to evaluate the product, service or platform against the business requirement using a scoresheet that compares the different options, their strengths and weakness. “We are all concerned about the lack of legislation but at the end of the day the decision is yours, know what you want, ask around to gather an idea of how well the vendor understands the business need for the investment. If after all that, you’re still not sure about the technology, don’t invest in it,” concluded Ibrahim. The IDC IT Managers Forum 2011 running under the theme “The Smart IT Buyer” opened in Casablanca on March 29 and is visiting 23 of the region’s key business centres before the end of the year. october 2011
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ANALYSIS month in view
Robust outlook Infrastructure solutions vendor Commscope states that despite the slowdown business has remained good in the region and the company is looking forward to further growth with an integrated office and a stronger economy.
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ommscope, the global infrastructure solutions company, has recently consolidated its divisions and established a new headquarters for the Middle East. The company, which has a long history in the region, believes that this step will enable it to address customer requirements in a more focused manner. “The Middle East and African region has been identified as a huge growth area by Commscope globally. There are a whole range of growth opportunities here and this combined office, bringing together our wireless and enterprise teams, will help us address this better,” say Ben Cardwell, senior VP for the wireless division at Commscope. Anne-Marie Kenneally, senior VP for the enterprise division at Commscope adds, “There are quite a few enterprise customers looking for wireless solutions, and a great many operators looking for the expertise that we can offer on the enterprise side, especially within data centres. By bringing the teams together, we are able to consolidate our sales efforts better, and also improve our service levels to both sets of
Ben Cardwell, senior VP for the wireless division at Commscope
Contractors play a huge role in the real world of business. At the end of the day they are the ones that undertake the tasks and implement projects. We are conscious of this community’s importance and always try to deliver a tailored message to them.”
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customers, and enable better co-relation of the product sets.” She says that Commscope had recorded exponential growth in the enterprise division in the recent past. “MEA has become a big part of our global business. We have seen a five fold increase in enterprise revenue over the last five years. The dynamics in the region are very specific in nature. To address this, and to continue our growth, we will continue to hire people as necessary, but this might not be entirely in the UAE. The hiring will take place across the region.” The integrated infrastructure strategies will help to target the biggest customers across geographies in the Middle East, says Ciaran Forde, VP-Sales for Middle East, Pakistan and Africa at Commscope. When asked about the company’s working pattern with contractors, Forde states, “Contractors play a huge role in the real world of business. At the end of the day they are the ones that undertake the tasks and implement projects. We are conscious of this community’s importance and always try to deliver a tailored message to them. Commscope as a company is very good at talking to end-user clients but with the growth rates in the region we are not covering enough of that client base. We are shifting our attention to consultants and contractors so they understand the key elements of the technology. We are carrying the message to them and trying to partner with them to execute projects. The world of technology changes so fast, and it is our responsibility to keep them informed and aligned with what the customer wants, what we can provide, and give them the quality
and bandwidth necessary for the protection of their investment.” Speaking of the recent acquisition of Argus Technologies, Cardwell says, “They have a range of speciality products that are particularly useful in high traffic environments, and for urban areas with high density data traffic and multiple frequency bands. They have already been doing great business with companies in the Middle East, but we will be launching the products to the wider market within the next quarter.” Touching upon the challenges faced by the firm Kenneally states, “They are not specific to emerging markets. They are virtually everywhere. The enterprise and wireless markets are very different in nature. Externally, we deal with very different markets, but we are finding that we can create a common platform through our products and find some common ground. Transferring that knowledge to customers is the key.”
“From a regional perspective, we are looking for more support from telecom service providers. In other markets, where there is a competitive, open market, many property owners are given freedom to deploy their own concept wireless system and just arrange for the service provider to activate these systems. We are still some way off here; but such a vision will help enable more in-building within the wireless space across the region,” said Forde. He add, “We have to understand that upwards of 70% of all calls either start or end within a building, and as we move to higher frequencies coverage within these buildings become key. Working with the property builder for more dynamic in-building of wireless solutions will help enable just that and get the region to be on pace with the rest of the world.” As the divisions come together both Cardwell and Kenneally agree that the
Anne-Marie Kenneally, senior VP for the enterprise division at Commscope
From a regional perspective, we are looking for more support from telecom service providers. In other markets, where there is a competitive, open market, many property owners are given freedom to deploy their own concept wireless system and just arrange for the service provider to activate these systems.”
Ciaran Forde, VP-Sales, Middle East, Pakistan and Africa, Commscope
potential for growth in the region is enormous, and that “hopefully there will be a doubling of growth in the next five years, and more going onwards.” “UAE - despite the downturn and no visible swinging of construction cranes – remains one of our important markets in the region. The economic foundations of the country are sound, and we have enjoyed year-on-year growth here, which surprises a few people. However, the biggest market in the region remains KSA, because of the level of construction in the enterprise space. In fact, KSA not only has the top position in the www.cnmeonline.com
region, it remains among the top five growth countries in the entire EMEA. We have also seen steady business levels from Egypt. A lot people have been speaking about the after-effects of the political turmoil, but with solutions tailored for the professional end of the market, most of our work has continued, and we have a very strong postion in the market. We have developed enough bandwidth now to get business even from emerging regions within the Middle East, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Our outlook, to say the least, is quite robust for the region,” concludes Forde. october 2011
Computer News Middle East
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ANALYSIS month in view
A leader for HP If Meg Whitman doesn’t work out, Marc Benioff, Steve Mills, Charles Phillips or even Mark Hurd come to mind as candidates.
H
aving gone through a rash of CEOs in the past 10 to 15 years, Hewlett-Packard may soon find itself looking for yet another new chief, despite just tapping Meg Whitman for that job this week. HP’s recent announcement of board member Whitman as its insider choice to replace Leo Apotheker after less than a year came under fire from some who believe that the company should have named an interim leader and conducted an executive search. “HP decided against conducting an outside search because it wasn’t necessary,” board Executive Chairman Ray Lane said. But having just conducted the search for Apotheker, HP still had a good idea of who was available and “if we thought there was a better choice on the outside, we would have conducted [a new] search,” Lane said. But if Whitman doesn’t last, here’s a look at some potential outside CEO candidates HP could pursue down the road: 1. Steve Mills, senior VP and group executive, software and systems, IBM. Mills’ name came up regularly as a potential HP CEO after Mark Hurd left the company. In addition, he would bring broad-based experience to HP thanks to his current role, where he oversees IBM’s software and hardware strategy and manages more than 100,000 employees. “Mills was also at IBM in the 1990s, when the company went through a similar transition as HP is going through now,” said Frank Scavo, managing partner of IT strategy consulting firm Strativa. On the minus side, Mills wasn’t CEO at the time, Scavo said. “ In addition, Mills only gained control of IBM’s hardware business last year, giving him less experience in that arena than software. 16
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This aside, “Steve is definitely CEO material,” said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. “He’s actually one of the best managers in the business. He’s managed their mergers and acquisition strategy and has done a good job of aligning those with industries and back end services,” Wang added. However, “I don’t know if it’s likely for him to go to HP,” Wang said. “They’d have to try really hard to bring him aboard, given they’ve been fierce competitors.” 2. Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com The outspoken and flamboyant Benioff “really is a tech visionary,” said Forrester Research analyst Paul Hamerman. “Salesforce.com is one of the most innovative companies from a technical standpoint.” In addition, “he’s a great communicator,” Hamerman said. www.cnmeonline.com
Salesforce.com, known for its array of cloud-based software, has experienced dramatic growth but its profits remain relatively small compared to revenue. That’s not necessarily a knock against Benioff, given that Salesforce.com is still “investing in growth initiatives,” Hamerman pointed-out. Benioff however isn’t likely couldn’t be lured by money given his already substantial net worth,” Hamerman added. Moreover, “he’s had no experience with [HP’s] kind of problem,” Scavo said. “He’s an entrepreneur. HP is the antithesis of a startup. He’s good at a lot of things, but he’s never been through something like this.” “Marc would be a great addition just in terms of vision and morale and the ability to attract talent in the Valley,” Wang said. And money may not be a motivator for Benioff.
“This is about the challenge, making the transformation,” he said. “I don’t know if he would want that challenge, but an acquisition of Salesforce.com would bring him aboard.” 3. Charles Phillips, CEO, Infor, and a former Oracle co-president. Phillips is known for his cool, crisp demeanor and his role in architecting Oracle’s vast array of acquisitions. And as a former financial analyst, he is “highly credible with the investment community,” Scavo said. “HP could certainly use someone credible at the top.” He left Oracle last year under what are understood to be generally agreeable terms, despite a scandal involving billboards around the U.S. that bore romantic photos of Phillips and a woman to whom he was not married. Phillips later confirmed that he and the woman had a “serious relationship,” which he said had ended. Phillips has long since moved on from that episode and spent the past year or so launching a reinvention of Infor’s software portfolio and continuing his yen for acquisitions with the purchase of Lawson Software. While Infor is the third-largest ERP software vendor after SAP and Oracle, it’s no HP in terms of prominence. For an executive like Phillips, whose name was cast about at times as a potential successor to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison , the top job at HP may be a tempting prize.
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Charles Phillips, CEO, Infor, and a former Oracle co-president
But while Phillips may know business software inside and out, he only had a short time to get acquainted with hardware after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in early 2010. That may be a problem for him as CEO of HP, which still derives only a tiny percentage of revenue from software. “He’s a software
Hamerman echoed the notion. “I think he’s a great spokesman for SAP. He projects the kind of communication skills and persona that Leo didn’t have.” “On the other hand he’s not a tech visionary,” Hamerman said. “That’s not what SAP wants him to do. His role is to focus on customer relationships and being an articulate spokesman. Right now HP needs a tech visionary and he’s not the guy.” In addition, McDermott lacks experience in hardware, and actually makes a habit of saying publicly how disinterested SAP is in getting into that business directly. It’s not clear how investors would react to him being chosen to lead the hardware-centric HP. 5. Mark Hurd, co-president of Oracle. Yes, the same Mark Hurd who was ousted as HP CEO after a scandal involving his relationship a with a company contractor, and ended up quickly grabbing a job as co-president of Oracle. On the plus side, “he knows HP inside and out, and from the financial side he
But there are some factors going against Benioff as head of HP, namely the fact that he likely couldn’t be lured by money given his already substantial net worth. Moreover, he’s had no experience with [HP’s] kind of problem. executive, and HP is not a software company,” Hamerman said. But Wang held a different view, saying HP would likely be in solid hands from an operational standpoint with Phillips at the helm. “He is the executor.” 4. Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP. SAP-co CEO Bill McDermott presents in his regular public appearances the type of controlled, smooth confidence that HP could use in a leader right now. He’s also considered by experts to be one of the industry’s top salesmen, focusing on that aspect of SAP’s business while his co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe handles the technology end of things. “If anything, he’d be able to improve the customer relationships,” Wang said. www.cnmeonline.com
already turned it around [as CEO there],” Scavo said. But morale at HP was said to suffer under Hurd’s watch. And obviously, he “doesn’t have the best relationship with HP’s board,” Scavo said. Not to mention that going back to HP would certainly constitute a betrayal of Hurd’s close friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who famously defended Hurd and slammed the HP board after his firing. Truth be told, anybody wanting Hurd back in the fold at HP is probably dreaming, according to Hamerman. “[The HP board] made a big mess out of something they could have kept quiet, and embarrassed themselves in the process,” he said. “They shouldn’t have rocked the boat. But there’s no chance he’ll go back. That bridge is burned.” october 2011
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ROUND-UP month in view
CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards to take place on first day of GITEX CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2011, the premier Awards function for the IT industry in the Middle East that honours trend-setting people and projects across 20 categories, will take place on the 9th of October 2011 (the first day of GITEX Technology Week). The function will bring together more than 400 stakeholders from across the region, and will be held at The Monarch Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai (right across from the GITEX venue at DWTC). “We have received more than 350 nominations this year. This number indicates a phenomenal increase in submissions over last year, and establishes the growing relevance of the ICT Achievement Awards in the Middle East,” said Richard Judd, Managing Director at CPI Technology and Business. “Much like last year, many of these nominations have come in from end-users themselves – across the region – from KSA
to Pakistan. Many of the vendor nominations have also been submitted by enterprise end-users who have worked with them. The judges are currently going through these nominations and the final winners will be announced on the evening of the 9th of October 2011 at Sheikh Rashid Hall in DWTC,” he added. While nominations have poured in across all categories, the most popular ones have remained CIO of the Year and Government Deployment of the Year, both of which brought in nearly 90 nominations between them alone. “CIO of the Year has been one of the most popular categories this year. We have received a whole lot of deserving nominations and it has been a struggle for the judges to decide the one winner. In order to felicitate other equally highprofile CIOs, many of these nominations will be considered for our CIO 50 Awards as well, which will take place in January
next year,” said Sathya Mithra Ashok, Senior Editor of CNME. “We look forward to welcoming the winners, nominees, end-users and vendors from across the region at our annual ICT Achievement Awards 2011. It is definitely going to be the event to be seen at this GITEX,” she added. Register to attend CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2011 at http:// www.computernewsme.com/ ictachievementawards2011/registration.php. Follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/ computernewsme) and look for Awards tweets with #CNMEAwds11.
UAE residents fall victim to cybercrime: Norton Norton by Symantec recently released the Norton Cybercrime Report, detailing research and analysis on the UAE’s digital landscape that shows at least two UAE residents are becoming victims of cybercrime every minute as a result of viruses, online scams and phishing attacks being used by cybercriminals, the company said. According to Tamim Tanfiq, head of consumer sales, MENA, Symantec 84% of cybercrime victims in the UAE found an online attack to be just as frustrating and upsetting as one in the ‘real world. “The solution is simple; users must take their security into their own hands by being smart and safe when they are connected.” Taufiq said. In UAE, the most common – and most preventable – type of cybercrime 18
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falls with computer viruses or malware (51% overall, of which 65% occurred in the past 12 months), Symantec said. Online Scams (19% overall, of which 54% occurred in the last 12 months) and Phishing messages (18% overall, of which 53% occurred in the last 12 months) also rank high in the types of attacks being used by cybercriminals to steal personal data for their own gain, according to the report. Mobile crime appears to be a major threat for the future with 20% of all cybercrime in the UAE occurring on mobile devices, said analysts. ‘Cyber-apathy’ is costing UAE consumers time and money; in the past 12 months UAE residents have spent on average 16 days trying to satisfactorily resolve cybercrime attacks with time www.cnmeonline.com
being cited as the ‘biggest hassle’ faced because of cybercrime by 31% of victims, according to the company. 66% of users in the UAE say that cybercrime is a risk everyone takes when they access the Internet and 65% say that the possibility of cybercrime is something they are always aware of when online. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents agree that more needs to be done to bring cybercriminals to justice. Despite these figures, only 2 in 10 cybercrime victims said they reported the cybercrime to the police while 53% of residents revealed they don’t have up-to-date security software to protect themselves and their personal information and only a marginal 8% of mobile phone users have taken steps to secure their devices.
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ROUND-UP month in view
HP board ousts Apotheker for Whitman
Meg Whitman, new CEO at HP
Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker was ousted from his position last month and replaced by HP director and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, less than a year after he took the job. To successfully execute its strategy, the company requires “additional attributes” in its CEO, traits that Whitman possesses, HP board said. In addition to naming Whitman president and CEO, HP said that Ray Lane has now changed positions, from non-executive chairman of HP’s board to executive chairman. The board “intends to appoint a lead independent director promptly,” HP representatives added. “We are fortunate to have someone of Meg Whitman’s caliber and experience step up to lead HP,” Lane said in a statement.
Whitman is “a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution,” and a “strong communicator,” he added. “Furthermore, as a member of HP’s board of directors for the past eight months, Meg has a solid understanding of our products and markets.” “I am honored and excited to lead HP,” Whitman said. “I believe HP matters – it matters to Silicon Valley, California, the country and the world.” Rumours had swirled in recent days that HP’s board was about to part ways with Apotheker, a former CEO of business software vendor SAP. Only a tiny amount of HP’s business currently comes from software, a fact Apotheker sought to change in a strategy he laid out soon after joining the company in September 2010. Apotheker came to HP at a turbulent time following the departure of its highprofile CEO, Mark Hurd, after a scandal involving his relationship with an HP contractor. Hurd ended up securing a post as co-president of HP rival Oracle. The market did not react well to a number of announcements and moves Apotheker made, including the planned purchase of infrastructure software vendor Autonomy and talk of spinning off HP’s PC division. This last topic sparked a major
downturn in HP’s stock price, which may have quickened Apotheker’s removal. Overall, the HP experience must have had an element of deja vu for Apotheker, given the trouble he experienced as sole CEO of Germany-based SAP. A long-time SAP executive, Apotheker ultimately lasted less than a year in the top post there as well, and was replaced by insiders Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott in February 2010 as SAP returned to the co-CEO format it had used in the past. “I think that Apotheker came into something of a thankless job,” said Charles King, president and principal analyst with Pund-IT. “It’s difficult for any CEO to come into a company that is in turmoil, which HP clearly was after the ouster of Mark Hurd.” Still, moves such as the possible PC business spinoff “may simply have been too radical a surgery for the market to stand,” King added. Other big factors leading to the change in leadership were HP’s missing its financial targets in three recent quarters and paying a lot of money to get deeper into the software business through acquisitions like Automony and Vertica without giving a clear strategy for the future, according to IDC analyst Crawford Del Prete.
AUST deploys Blue Coat Ajman University of Science and Technology (AUST), a private institution of higher education in the United Arab Emirates, has deployed Blue Coat ProxySG and PacketShaper appliances to accelerate the delivery of important content and applications while protecting against Web-based threats. AUST faces constantly growing Internet demand from 8,000 students and staff as well as demands placed by new services, such as a sophisticated e-learning system and an online library, that add to the university’s overall bandwidth requirements, representatives of the university said. 20
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“To operate within the bounds of our network capacity, it became imperative for us to have visibility into Web traffic and then be able to intelligently manage it,” said Mohammed Salman, IT director, AUST. “We found that Blue Coat solutions provided precise, yet flexible controls, a high level of Web security and considerable Internet bandwidth savings while also enhancing the Internet experience.” AUST deployed PacketShaper appliances to discover and categorise applications on the network, measure network application performance, www.cnmeonline.com
guarantee quality of service (QoS) for priority applications and mitigate the network impact of non-business applications and content, AUST said. The university also deployed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances at its Internet gateway to provide comprehensive, real-time protection against Web-based malware and other malicious content without compromising network performance, it was reported. Through the use of industry-leading technology, the ProxySG appliances improve the user’s Web experience by caching frequently accessed content on site, AUST pointed out.
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ROUND-UP month in view
University of Wollongong Dubai selects Dell The University of Wollongong Dubai (UOWD) has selected Dell to implement end-user computing solutions for UOWD, designed to deliver best-in-class services to its students and faculty. Through Dell’s virtual desktop infrastructure solution, academic information, such as e-books, lecture notes, and class schedules, that were once only available on desktops in UOWD’s computer labs are now available to students and faculty anywhere on campus from any device at any time, UOWD representatives said. Plans for secure, remote off-campus access to academic information are already in progress. In addition, Dell’s virtualised desktop solution increases the amount of compute power that faculty and students can utilise, they added. Designed to securely increase productivity, communication and information access for UOWD’s community, while reducing cost and complexity, the virtualised solution allows organisations like UOWD to adapt to changing dynamics in education and technology, while enabling technology resources in a more rapid and
cost-effective manner, Dell said. For example, UOWD is able to provision technology resources to faculty and students working on research projects that require large amounts of compute power more rapidly and economically than previously possible. The Dell desktop virtualisation solution is easily scalable to quickly accommodate changing classes and curricula, as well as increasing UOWD’s ability to more rapidly respond to security threats, install new technologies and upgrade old ones, resulting in an improved technology experience for students and faculty alike, Dell representatives added. The solution also lays the foundation for UOWD to develop its own private cloud, UOWD said. “Through virtualisation, UOWD will be able to maximise the efficiency of its assets and students will get a virtual private lounge that allows access to applications from anywhere. We are delighted to partner with Dell to migrate from a traditional computer environment to a virtualised desktop and the cloud to improve the quality of academic life for the university community. In addition, we are the first UOW campus to implement
this technology, and we are piloting it for the UOW’s Australian campus,” said Joseph Aninias, IT manager, University of Wollongong in Dubai. “Dell listened to the University’s exact requirements and by providing assessment, design, implementation and project management services, as well as tailored solutions, this allowed us to exceed their expectations,” said Dave Brooke, Dell ME commercial GM, Dell ME.
Qtel switches homes in Qatar to high-speed fibre The next stage in the momentous campaign to provide high-speed Internet to homes and businesses across Qatar has begun, as customers begin to make the switch to Fibre, representatives of Qatar’s Qtel said recently. In recent months, Qtel field teams have laid out over 1,200 kilometres of fibre cable throughout Doha, capable of connecting more than 60,000 homes. According to the company, this will provide the potential to offer the fastest-ever Internet experience, as well as high definition television through Qtel Mozaic TV. Starting in August, the Qtel Fibre Teams have been visiting homes to complete the final technical upgrades necessary for customers to receive the state-of-the-art services, the company said. 22
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After initial work in the West Bay Lagoon area, there are now teams working in other areas of Doha, with plans to move into new districts in the coming months, representatives said. Residences which are eligible to be connected to the Qtel Fibre network are being leafleted to ensure they expect a visit from the Fibre Team. The Fibre Team will increase to almost 1,000 installers in the coming months, to enable a high number of homes in the designated areas to migrate to fibre. With fibre laid across Doha and Umm Said, 2,000 customers’ homes are already receiving high-speed Internet and Qtel Mozaic TV, Qtel confirmed. Qtel customer service teams will work with each new customer to enable them to migrate to higher speeds without www.cnmeonline.com
increasing their monthly Internet costs, the company said. In addition, there will also be options for new customers to receive Mozaic TV alongside their improved Internet package. The move into the migration phase is a major step in the long-term development of world-class Internet infrastructure in Qatar, and marks the culmination of months of planning, development and implementation for the new Qtel Fibre network, the company added. The company’s QR600 million investment in fibre technology will have an incredible impact on entertainment, information access and education within homes in Qatar, and contribute to the National Strategy for building a knowledgebased economy, the Qtel said.
ROUND-UP month in view
Carol Bartz out as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been fired from her job as Yahoo CEO and replaced on an interim basis by the company’s CFO, Tim Morse, Yahoo announced recently. Bartz sent out a brief e-mail to employees saying she had been fired by Yahoo’s chairman, according to the Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report her shocking departure. “I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward,” Bartz wrote. The struggling search company has created an “executive leadership council” to help Morse run the company and to conduct a “comprehensive strategic review” aimed at getting Yahoo back on a growth track. The council includes Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. Bartz’s tenure as CEO began in January 2009 after Yang announced plans to step down. She took over following an extensive courtship in which Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo, but which eventually turned into a partnership between the companies.
Carol Bartz, ex-CEO, Yahoo
That partnership hasn’t paid off as well as Yahoo hoped. Revenue at the company continues to fall, and its display advertising business, where it historically was a leader, has begun to suffer too. “It’s not a surprise” to see Bartz go, said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.
Bartz was widely supported in the beginning. “She was kind of a breath of fresh air for a while,” said Sterling. She had a strong track record as CEO of Autodesk and before that as an executive at Sun Microsystems, and had a “no-nonsense” style, Sterling said. “Bartz made a number of organisational changes and for a while had the bad economy to blame for Yahoo’s lacklustre performance,” Sterling said. “But ultimately she failed to retain some top talent who have left the company since she took over. There were just a ton of great people that came out of there that abandoned ship,” he said. “Yahoo needs a dynamic leader who will get people excited and bring a strong product vision,” Sterling said. “Morse would clearly be an interim leader while the company looks to hire a permanent replacement,” he said. Taking on a new leader while the company continues to struggle will be a challenge. “The problem with a new CEO is if you have more of a revolving door,” Sterling said. Often, new leaders want to bring in their trusted advisers and remove some existing executives.
SaaS revenue to reach $12.1bn in 2011: Gartner Worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue is on pace to reach $12.1 billion in 2011, a 20.7% increase from 2010 of $10 billion, according to Gartner. “Increasing familiarity with the model, continued oversight on IT budgets, and the growth of platform as a service (PaaS) developer communities and interest in cloud computing are now driving adoption forward,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner. “Usage varies within markets, regions and countries, and the reasons for adopting SaaS vary by region. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a primary driver in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), while ease and speed of deployment is the key reason for choosing SaaS in Asia/Pacific and North America,” she added. 24
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The top issues encountered when deploying SaaS also vary by region, Gartner said. Limited flexibility of customisation is a top issue in EMEA, while limited integration to existing systems is the primary reason in North America and Asia/Pacific, it added. North America, specifically the U.S., represents the largest opportunity for SaaS, and it is the most mature of the regional markets. North American SaaS revenue is forecast to reach $12.9 billion in 2015. “In North America, ease and speed of deployment are primary reasons for SaaS adoption, followed by lower TCO,” Mertz said. “Limited capital expense is also considered more important in North America than in the other regions. “SaaS penetration and adoption is occurring mostly in Northern Europe, is www.cnmeonline.com
due to a culturally open outlook toward technology adoption, well-established and generally good Internet infrastructure within these countries, and English being the primary business language,” she said. “SaaS adoption is prominent because of their established infrastructure, such as more-stable networks, as well as the availability of vendor sales, marketing and support service structures.” Mertz said. “SaaS demand in Japan will grow for sales force automation solutions to improve reaction to customers, while demand for marketing analysis solutions will also be higher,” Mertz said. “In addition, it is easy to adopt SaaS solutions for B2B call centre services because the workflow of this business is standardised and transaction volume is constant in Japan.”
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ROUND-UP month in view
eHDF shields data for Swiss firm’s UAE customers
eHosting DataFort (eHDF), the managed IT and advisory services provider and a member of TECOM Investments, announced that it has entered into a strategic tie-up with Switzerland’s Security Lab to host its IT infrastructure and protect the confidential data of its customers within the UAE.
Security Lab specialises in providing security audits to banks and multinationals, delivering services that include vulnerability assessment and penetration testing and has a portfolio of global clients from the legal and financial sectors, many of who are setting up base in Dubai, the company said. According to eHDF, regional tie-ups with IT service providers is a core strategy that the security firm adopts around the world to host highly sensitive customer information and communications securely. Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHDF, said, “The UAE is attracting global businesses by providing a business friendly and progressive environment that facilitates the expansion of their operations across the region. For many of these organisations, working with a local managed IT service provider offers a valueadd as critical customer data remains within the country.” “It was essential to work with a local managed IT company, not only to physically
protect their IT infrastructure, but also to ensure secure communications that meet international compliance standards.” eHDF’s clients include both government and large multinational corporations, a sign of the growing confidence that the public sector and corporates have in the company’s secure co-location solutions. Alberto Redi, Partner at Security Lab, also said, “Digital threats pose major challenges to organisations that need to protect sensitive data; communications and IT assets and they want to partner with specialists in the area of security and managed services, such as Security Lab and business partners like eHDF.” “We are extremely satisfied with the services provided by eHDF. Its impressive client base ensures confidence and trust amongst our customers. As a local service provider, we are assured of eHDF’s highest levels of security, prompt response time and superior service account management,” Zeineldin concluded.
“Consumerisation of IT” taking its toll on IT managers: survey “Consumerisation of IT” may be an overused phrase, but it is by no means a fad. Workers all over the world are coming to expect that personal devices will connect to corporate networks. But while the use of personal devices such as smartphones, laptops and tablets is liberating workers, it is handcuffing many IT departments. For every salesperson using his or her personal iPad to access corporate email or CRM, there are IT managers behind the scenes scrambling to manage personal devices, protect data IP, and ensure compliance. And many of these “consumerisation of IT” strategies are haphazard, rattled by security fears and unclear data management policies, according to a survey of 750 front-line IT professionals, managers and executives, conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by Dell KACE. 26
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The survey results shut the door on any doubts that “consumer IT” is just a catchphrase. Of the 750 survey respondents, 87% said their employees use personal devices for work-related purposes ranging from email and calendaring to texting to CRM and ERP. 80% reported that employees use personal smartphones and 69% said personal PCs are brought to work by employees. Those are big numbers, and IT groups are feeling the pressure, according to the Dimensional Research report. With more devices in the workplace, there are more operating systems to manage and connect to corporate networks. Of all the personal devices used for work, the Apple iPhone leads the way (72%), followed by Android-based smartphones (63%), Windows laptops or www.cnmeonline.com
desktops (63%), the iPad tablet (60%) and the BlackBerry smartphone (52%), the research found. Among just PCs, employees are bringing in personal machines running Windows (63%), Mac OS X (37%) and Linux (14%), analysts said. But despite the benefits to workers, the consumerisation of IT is a thorn in the side of most IT departments, according to the survey. Fears and concerns abound. The majority, 82%, reported they are concerned about the use of personal devices for work purposes, with the biggest concern being potential network security breaches (62%), followed by possible loss of customer enterprise data (50%), potential theft of intellectual property (48%) and difficulty meeting compliance requirements (43%).
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ROUND-UP month in view
Bank Alfalah selects SunGard Bank Alfalah Limited, a commercial bank in Pakistan, has upgraded to the latest version of SunGard’s Ambit Card Management solution including the Ambit 3D Secure module, the company announced. According to the company, the solution will help the bank increase revenues and grow its credit card and retail merchant customer base. With the Ambit Card Management solution, the bank will be able to cost efficiently issue MasterCard and Visa (EMV) chip cards, corporate cards and pre-paid cards, SunGard said. Ambit 3D Secure will help the bank securely process credit card transactions over the Internet, helping it increase business via its online channel, it added. Bank Alfalah is a long time user of SunGard’s Ambit Card Management solution and according to Visa is the largest issuer of Visa credit card and merchant acquirers in Pakistan. According to Bank Alfalah, it provides plastic money services to over 675,000
customers and merchant facilities to over 33,000 merchants. Since first installing Ambit Card Management in 2002 as the backbone of its credit card system, more than a million applications have passed through Bank Alfalah’s card issuing and acquiring system, Bank Alfalah said. The introduction of EMV chip cards and 3D secure technology will help Bank Alfalah deploy high levels of security for credit card transactions, representatives said. Upgrading to the latest version of Ambit Card Management will help the bank further grow its credit card customer and merchant base, Sungard said. Adil Rashid, group head of consumer finance at Bank Alfalah Limited, said, “Staying at the forefront of innovation and modern technology has always been a top priority for Bank Alfalah and expanding our credit card business is a part of this aim. Our existing relationship with SunGard gives us confidence that it will continue to provide a high standard of service with
an established presence in Pakistan and a deep understanding of our market and challenges, SunGard is a trusted technology partner and the Ambit Card Management solution will help us provide enhanced security around our card management business and help us grow revenues while lowering operational costs.”
Gmail threatens Microsoft in the enterprise: Gartner Google’s share of the enterprise email market currently “hovers” at around 1%, but will reach 10% within a few years, Gartner recently predicted. Google is gaining ground with enterprises that have 5,000 or more seats, Gartner said, naming several public- and private-sector users with more than 10,000 Gmail seats. Big organisations that use Gmail include Motorola Mobility, with 22,000 users; the U.S. General Services Administration, with 17,000; the Los Angeles city government, with 17,000; automaker Jaguar Land Rover, with 15,000; the InterContinental hotel chain, with 25,000; and the Wyoming state government, with 10,000. “We are at the start of a major escalation in the war of the email clouds,” said Gartner analyst Matthew Cain, in a report on Google’s enterprise progress. 28
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Cloud-based email systems account for about 4% of the overall enterprise email market, according to the research firm. Microsoft released a cloud-based Exchange service in 2010, and ran expansive cloud offering, Office 365, earlier this year. “Google, meanwhile, has been making improvements to its platform at a blistering pace,” said Cain, counting more than two dozen “substantial changes” to the platform in the past 12 months. Those upgrades included improvements in security and manageability, Gartner said. For example, new security features include the ability to reset a user’s sign-on cookies. And enhancements to the system’s manageability include the ability to manage policy by user groups. Microsoft’s answer to Google’s upgrade pace “is that it intends to add www.cnmeonline.com
functionality to Exchange in the cloud before adding it to the on-premises version,” Cain said. “This represents a major shift for Microsoft, and its execution has to be demonstrated.” But Cain said a major reason why enterprises may reject Google is because their needs are too complex for a cloud-based offering. “Their requirements in areas such as internal routing, application integration and compliance may be too much for cloudbased services to handle,” he explained. In addition to which, Cain, in his report, cited a number of things Google has to do to win more enterprise businesses. Among other things, he said the company must deliver new features on schedule. “Another obstacle for Google is a lack of transparency, which is a problem affecting the cloud in general,” he said.
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CASE STUDY Viva
Kuwait’s Viva Telecom implements a data warehouse and business intelligence (DWBI) solution to benefit business operations. Pallavi Sharma reports.
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s part of its ambitious path of strategic growth, Saudi Telecom operator (STC), began expanding its footprint beyond the Kingdom’s borders to international markets, forming a network of businesses and investments in a number of countries across the GCC, Asia and Africa. After an extensive feasibility research ,emphasising the prospects it held for attracting international investments STC ventured into the Kuwait telecommunications space with its subsidiary Viva to deliver new, meaningful value to the market in Kuwait through diversified outstanding services. Launched in December 2008, Viva Telecom became the youngest telecommunications service provider in Kuwait. Key among the many challenges that the new service provider had to face was the task of having to compete with, and claim success over, two veteran players in the Kuwait telecommunications market- Zain and Wataniya. Viva’s objective was simple enough - extend state of the art services to its clients while optimising staff performance. According to Arnold Ali Cender, DWBI (data warehousing/business intelligence) project manager, Viva Telecom, Kuwait the ability to enhance relationships with new customers through the provision of innovative services built on a robust network, meant that first and foremost, the company needed to focus on the way the company was generating, storing and using its information. “Faced with increasing competition in the local telecommunications market, we realised that it was essential to provide different stakeholders with timely, accurate and relevant information about the business and its operations. Sharing and storing information not only enables us to build transparent relationships with our customers and shareholders but also provides us the ability to cope with change and competition through more collaboration
“Another reason for choosing Mahindra Satyam, was what they call iDecisions, a telecommunications BI application framework. It’s a framework for different business sectors with data models and business reports, which we felt gave us a head start in terms of deployment. We had a set of basic guidelines that helped us decide how to begin and proceed with the implementation” between the different business departments,” Cender says. Calling the shots For its launch in 2008, Viva Telecom had only made investments in the technology that was needed first to get the company up and running. To fulfill it’s information needs, Viva had invested in a reporting portal that provided basic operational reports. As the business and demand for Viva’s services began to grow, so did the need to invest in a more elaborate dand efficient data warehousing mechanism. “We needed a solution that generated department specific reports, to cater to the unique information requirements of each business function. For instance, where the marketing department may require information associated with product launches such as cost of product, sales and revenue in comparison to other competitors in the segment, the sales department would require details associated with the performance of a particular customer segment, overall revenue, product or service specific revenue etc,” says Cender. The senior management also felt that a data warehousing solution would serve well the organisation’s need to store and archive huge amounts of information in a more secure and convenient environment, and minimise costs associated with human errors, loss or damage, money and time. www.cnmeonline.com
In February of 2009, having clearly understood the need for a data warehouse solution and outlined the basic functionality that it wanted from the solution, Viva Telecom began looking out for a comprehensive data warehouse and business intelligence solution that would serve the needs of the organisation’s current as well as future information needs. Cender says that when deciding on a vendor to work with, Viva Telecom takes in account not just the technical solution and its ability to integrate with the existing architecture, but also the vendor’s approach and ability to implement the project in the shortest span. “We also try and analyse the vendor’s expertise in the telecom vertical and consider references from other users who have worked with the vendor,” he says. “We looked at various vendors such as Teradata, IBM and even some of the lesser known names. We analysed Gartner reports to study the different vendors. At around the same time, Oracle announced the launch of the Oracle Exadata machine and, although it may seem like a bit of a risk for us to have chosen a wholly new solution, it met our requirements best,” he adds. According to Cender, the Exadata launch was a defining step for Oracle, which prior to the launch of Exadata separated hardware components from software elements. “The Exadata, machine integrated both components and provided a BI tool, data october 2011
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CASE STUDY Viva
mining tool, data integrator and Extract Transform and Load tool (ETL). And these made up the main components of Viva’s data warehouse infrastructure,” he said. Once Viva Telecom made its decision on the right platform to deliver its requirements, it began looking for a company that would act as the solution provider and project manager for the entire implementation. “The search for these partners was done through RFP, where we invited a number of different players based on recommendations from Oracle to bid for a complete solution. We invested time in a detailed process of evaluating how the vendor, systems integrator, the solution and our existing infrastructure all fit together Mahindra Satyam scored the highest points and were chosen for the project,” says Cender. “Another reason for choosing Mahindra Satyam, was what they call iDecisions, a telecommunications BI application framework. It’s a framework for different business sectors with data models and business reports, which we felt gave us a head start in terms of deployment. We had a set of basic guidelines that helped us decide how to begin and proceed with the implementation,” he adds. Initiation Viva began the implementation of the solution with the process of defining the sources of basic data, such as customer usage data, billing and payment data among others. The next step was to analyse the information that could be gained from the different kinds of data and the business areas that this information would relate to. Knowing all too well that a data warehouse implementation can take well over a year before reaping any semblance of benefit from it, the team decided to go ahead and follow the iDecisions framework to help them deploy the solution using a phased approach. “We needed the implementation to be up and running in a span of six months,” says Cender. “The iDecision framework entails 17 different subject areas which we then split 34
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Once Viva Telecom made its decision on the right platform to deliver its requirements, it began looking for a company that would act as the solution provider
into four different phases based on business criticality. The implementation began in November 2009, with phase 1 including the deployment of the Exadata DW machine, BI servers and five key subject areas. This went live by the end of June 2010. Phase 2 went www.cnmeonline.com
live by the end of September 2010, phase 3 by the end of November 2010 and phase 4 by the end December 2010. The entire deployment was expected to take 16 months but was successfully completed in a span of 14 months,” adds Cender.
CASE STUDY Viva
Applications and related data are listed and integrated to the data warehousing solution through this Oracle LTL tool. Each time, we had to do this, we got the owners of the operation systems to make the data available to us in an operational data store on a timely basis that fit into our schedule. The information was then extracted from that data store,” he explains. According to him, the key thing for Viva was identifying the data required, building the operational data store [which skims the application desk to extract the data] and finally, pouring this data into the data warehouse or Oracle data integrator tool. The integration is a one way street from the operational systems into the data through what we call the operations data store warehouse as project manager it was my job to coordinate with the different parties both internal and external. We set up a project steering committee which included representatives from Viva IT, Mahindra Satyam and Oracle. The steering committee met monthly in addition to holding weekly project meetings to keep an eye on the implementation progress.”
Steady Rise 2008 Viva controlled 4.2% of Kuwait’s telecommunication market
2009 Viva’s market share in the Kuwait telecommunications sector increased to 13%
2010 Viva Telecoms announced that it had successfully captured 18% of Kuwait’s telecoms
800, 000 was the number of subscribers Viva Telecom had by the end of 2010
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We are not there yet. While our daily information is sufficient at the moment, in the future, there may be certain areas that would benefit from real time feed, like linking trends to the call centre, so agents have more insights into what kind of products or services customers are investing in.” Reaping rewards Cender says that the implementation did not pose any major challenges. Deployment was fairly straightforward and timely due to time spent planning prior to the implementation actually going live. “The solution deliver on its requirements through the provision of regular KPI reports, management dashboards and drill downs. It has also resulted in significant cost savings through the elimination of old reports and human errors associated with manual report processing,” Cender states. He believes that the business continue to thirst for information to help create a unique user experience and gain a significant competitive advantage, the company continues to feel the need to build on top of the existing DWBI platform. “We have already established an MIS Team to deliver adhoc reports, and are in the process of implementing targeted analytical tools on top of this suite, which will cater to the marketing team’s need for more information,” he says. “We have also begun working on what we call BI fast reports, more analytical and detailed reports associated with the daily operations. This will make the DWBI platform the single version of the truth, where every department get relevant information from one central repository,” he adds. In Cender’s opinion, the most important thing is for a platform of this nature to gain credibility amongst its users. “It is www.cnmeonline.com
natural that where information is concerned, decision makers will check, analyse and reconcile everything to make sure that it is accurate. In that sense, we at Viva have managed to gain the trust of our employees, who are now increasingly comfortable with basing their reports on automatically generated analytics to present their case to a senior manager,” he explains. “Now that we have the platform, we can build on top of it, we can add more areas , add new types of data and extract more intelligence from wider sources of data. We can link with different network elements to provide more detailed analysis of the customer and provide detailed transaction information. This is what we are looking at now,” says Cender. He believes that as IT becomes much more central to business operations different stakeholders are increasingly depending on the ability of technology to accurately derive information of consequence from both structured and unstructured sources of data. The use of social networking platforms for business and marketing, have driven the need to study now different data types are becoming increasingly. “We are not there yet. While our daily information is sufficient at the moment, in the future, there may be certain areas that would benefit from real time feed, like linking trends to the call centre, so agents have more insights into what kind of products or services customers are investing in,” Cender predicts.
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Case study Department of Economic Development, Dubai
Challenging the norm Dubai’s Department of Economic Development (DED) has managed something most IT managers only dream of – implement a network and turn almost all costs into opex. Sathya Mithra Ashok writes on how they achieved the feat.
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he Department of Economic Development (DED) is at the very heart of Dubai’s transformation, organising, regulating, and boosting trade and industry throughout the Emirate. As well as managing traditional activities, such as business registration, licensing, and commercial protection, DED’s mandate is to support the visionary objectives of the Dubai Strategic Plan 2015 by driving economic policy, advocacy, and regulatory reforms. The end goal is to create an environment where small and large businesses, investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers can co-exist and thrive together. eGovernment is central to DED’s vision for the future, enabling services to be automated online and delivered faster and more cost effectively. “DED had three main elements within it – there was the licensing element, the commercial compliance and protection element and then there was the consumer regulations part. Besides that we have our economic studies and research, and that’s another pillar of DED itself, where we do research and draft the policies. And this is how we functioned till around 2008, when there came a decree by which more establishments were moved under the control of DED,” says Abdullah Hassan, IT director at DED. The decree gave DED its current structure, whereby its agencies include Dubai Export Development Corporation, Dubai Events and Promotion Establishment and Foreign Direct Investment in addition to the Mohammed Bin Rashid Establishment for SME Development. According to Hassan, the movement of these agencies to the ambit of DED proved to be a crucial turning point. “With these agencies we realised that we would need to change the concepts with which we had been working in IT till then. Suddenly we had these islands of apps – HR, finance, admin and even IT – right across
DED and these agencies. There was the drive to formulate a shared services concept, where we centralised those departments’ IT requirements. The idea was to provide for some space for specific requirements based on the nature of the agency, but to centralise most of the services within the group headquarters,” says Hassan. The first part of this effort involved IT understanding the services that could be centralised, and the specific services that would need to be within the control of each agency. The timing of this effort happened to coincide with a larger move of premises that the DED had been planning. Rapid expansion, with the creation of several new departments for the development of export, retail, entrepreneurship, and foreign investment, meant that DED had effectively outgrown not
The infrastructure at DED was nearly eight years old, and the IT team decided that the move would be a perfect time to re-invest and update the existing systems. “Initially we had a lot of trouble in deciding whether we would start implementing new systems at the current data centre or put in all new solutions at the new location. We finally decided that we would implement part of the new systems in the current data centre, but leave a majority of the new IT work for the new location,” Hassan explains. Vendor provisioning When it came to investing in the new systems, DED decided to go with partners that they had worked with before, and who had strategically helped them achieve more with technology in the past.
Suddenly we had these islands of apps – HR, finance, admin and even IT – right across DED and these agencies. There was then the drive to formulate a shared services concept, where we centralised those departments’ IT requirements.” only its headquarters building but also the three branch offices in Dubai. In response, the agency decided to co-locate all of its management and services teams within a brand new building situated in Dubai’s Business Village. The move also provided the ideal opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate other strategic priorities. “Although IT worked alongside HR, finance, and facilities management, as part of a shared services organisation, we still had some way to go in terms of centralising IT management,” says Hassan. “The move also gave us a blank canvas for designing a more scalable, energy-efficient infrastructure for the organisation capable of supporting IP telephony, video, and other productivity enhancing solutions.” www.cnmeonline.com
“I don’t believe in testing new vendors for big projects. I believe in going with partners that we have previously worked with for long periods of time; vendors who are trusted and have consistently delivered for us,” says Hassan. This was one of the primary reasons that DED looked to Cisco for the network provisions at its new premises. Over the years, the two organisations had worked closely together to consolidate and refresh the DED’s various networks. After much consultation and discussion between the two entities, DED finally decided on Cisco’s Borderless Network design. Thus DED’s new converged IP network supports mobility (via 48 Cisco Aironet 1100 Series access points) and private branch exchange october 2011
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Case study Department of Economic Development, Dubai
(PBX)-based telephony services, providing employees with a single platform from which they can instantly communicate and access information and tools, anytime, anywhere. The inclusion of 10 Gb Power-overEthernet capabilities, server racks, power and cooling, and firewalls means that in the future the DED can migrate to IP telephony, and additionally, introduce video, quickly and with minimal cost. “For our servers, we decided to continue using Dell, who are again long-term partners. It is a blade environment, though we have not invested in virtualisation yet. We have got brand new EqualLogic storage solutions for our new locations,” says Hassan DED also wanted a risk-sharing model, one that replaced upfront capital expenditure (capex) with predictable monthly operating expense (opex).
Hassan says. “Using a capex to opex solution was important, because it meant we could speed-up implementation and deliver all the benefits to users from day one.” Like many organisations, a large proportion of DED’s IT budget is consumed by maintenance and support, leaving only a small remainder to be spent on innovation and new projects. “Without Cisco Capital, we would have been looking at a much slower, phased deployment. This would have significantly delayed our plans for the delivery of cost savings and customer service improvements,” says Hassan. The Cisco Capital solution has helped to improve lifecycle management and provided a ready-made asset register and inventory checklist, according to Hassan. At the end of the technology lifecycle, Cisco Capital can also help with asset
The DED also wanted a risk-sharing model, one that replaced upfront capital expenditure (capex) with predictable monthly operating expense (opex). A custom finance solution from Cisco Capital allowed project costs to be spread over five years. At the end of the contract term, the DED has a choice of four options: it can buy the equipment (at pre-agreed fair market value), return the equipment (with no financial obligation), continue renting (at reduced rate), or carry out another refresh (either purchasing, or entering into a new agreement). A custom finance solution from Cisco Capital allowed project costs to be spread over five years. At the end of the contract term, DED has a choice of four options: it can buy the equipment (at pre-agreed fair market value), return the equipment (with no financial obligation), continue renting (at reduced rate), or carry out another refresh (either purchasing, or entering into a new agreement with Cisco). “Like everyone, we are always looking for smarter ways to procure our technology,” 40
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recovery, for example, by offering data destruction, recycling, or environmental disposal. In some cases, this approach can reduce total cost of ownership by as much as 5%, as well as providing a much more environmentally friendly solution to placing old equipment in a landfill site. The deal, which is intended to last till 2015, will enable DED to optimise on its costs and gain additional benefits going forward. Hassan states that ideally they would like to have such agreements with www.cnmeonline.com
ABOUT DED
The Department of Economic Development (DED) was established in March 1992, with the objective to organise, regulate and boost trade and industry within the Emirate of Dubai. In October 2008, HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Prime Minister and Vice-President, and Ruler of Dubai, issued Decree no. 25 giving full responsibility to DED to plan and regulate the overall economic performance of Dubai, supervise its functions and support the economic development to ensure the objectives of the Dubai Strategic Plan are achieved. The new mandate brought about a new leadership with a new vision for the DED. DED is still responsible for its traditional activities of business registration, licensing and commercial protection in Dubai however with four new agencies now under the umbrella of DED, the mandate has extended to include export development, retail development, among others. The development of these sectors are the responsibility of DED’s agencies: Dubai Export Development Corporation, Mohammed Bin Rashid Establishment for Young Business Leaders, Dubai Shopping Festival Office and the Foreign Investment Office.
every major vendor that DED is working with but understands that this might take time and will be a possible option only when the budgets demanded for the investment are relatively high. Moving on According to Hassan, the move to the premises and the new data centre should be completed before the end of the year. Meanwhile, DED has already centralised some of the services to be shared among the agencies, while most others (like Exchange, mobility solutions and parts of SharePoint)
Case study Department of Economic Development, Dubai
will become fully operational as shared elements after the move to the new premises. “We are also looking seriously at virtualisation solutions. When we complete the move, we might start working with it in small pockets. After we ensure that it is secure, and that we are getting the right productivity out of it, we will move it to our production environment,” says Hassan. Apart from this, the DED IT team of 26 members have an active application development element, wherein most of the core apps and other necessary software elements are created or maintained within DED itself. “We believe in gathering the expertise that we require within DED’s walls and enabling our IT team to handle it. Most of our apps are created or managed by our IT team. When we do work with third party application providers we insist on on-thejob training from the vendor to ensure that DED’s IT team can handle the app in the future,” Hassen says. Besides this, according to him DED is also looking actively at video conferencing facilities, as well as a wider unified communications (UC) project to provide reliable connectivity options. “We are looking into UC technology quite keenly and considering how it might be of benefit to us. Again, we are considering video conferencing as part of our investments for the future, simply because we are an establishment that deals with external customers on a regular basis, and that involves a lot of travelling. Video conferencing can help us cut costs,” expalins Hassan. The IT team is also working on expanding the online services that it
As DED’s IT team, so is DED; and as is DED, so will be Dubai.
offers its customers, and also ensuring that established services are upgraded, improved and managed effectively. Hassan states that much of the success of the IT team at DED can be directly attributed to the support and conviction of the higher management. In fact, he believes that even the movement of cost for capex to opex with Cisco, while it took time, could not have been
We are not an isolated department, we are a business enabler. What we do is not for IT itself, it is done for the entire business. So all projects are done in discussion with different departments within the business.” 42
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achieved without the extensive involvement of top management teams at both Cisco’s and DED’s ends. “We are not an isolated department, we are a business enabler. What we do is not for IT itself, it is done for the entire business. So all projects are done in discussion with different departments within the business and at every point we do have to convince them about budgets, and connect every project to the benefits it can provide to the larger organisation,” says Hassan. Understanding the critical nature of the work they do has helped the IT team to structure their plans and excel in all their execution scenarios. For as DED’s IT team, so is DED; and as is DED, so will be Dubai.
Case study Jarir Bookstore
Critical connections KSA’s Jarir Bookstore battled the challenges associated with connecting disparate centres of business by deploying SonicWALL’s NSA Series and building secure VPN tunnels to support strategic growth. Pallavi Sharma writes.
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ith 32 years of experience, Jarir Bookstore, has been a notable player in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) office stationery and school supplies market. Having started with a small store located on Jarir Street in Riyadh, the company now boasts over 30 outlets across the GCC countries, mainly in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Established by the Al-Agil brothers who steered the company towards growth and exemplary vision, the company owns one centralised warehouse and three branch offices across KSA alone. At a point in time the orgnaisation realised that the infrastructure it had was not the right set to support its rapid growth. The initial IT infrastructure across the 30 locations of Jarir Bookstore was connected through a single WAN (wide-area-network), in addition to which, Cisco PIX firewalls and Microsoft ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) servers were used at the head offices to control and monitor Internet traffic. Majid Felemban, IT manager, Jarir Bookstore says, “At the time our Internet Service Provider (ISP) set up an MPLS VPN to better manage and speed up its network traffic. This architecture created multiple points of failure, compounded by very low bandwidth of 512 KB and high recurring maintenance costs. We tried experimenting with a variety of different mediums such as fibre optic connectivity and WiMAX to increase bandwidth to no avail.” “Our objective was to create a network that could balance the load and maintain multiple connections. We also wanted to use VPN (Virtual Private Network) tunnels assess total cost of ownership (TCO) and the drain created on the bandwidth,” he adds. On the lookout It was then that Jarir Bookstore began looking for options to help them address this challenge and build an infrastructure that was not only scalable but also cost efficient. NAJTech, Jarir’s network security supplier, suggested that instead of investing in purchasing more bandwidth from their
Majid Felemban, IT manager, Jarir Bookstore
Jarir Bookstore then went ahead with a proof-of-concept (POC) phase, deploying it across a reasonably big showroom with over 40 users and a variety of point-of-sale (POS) machines and personal computers. The IT team then went about connecting both virtual machines, like NEC’s Virtual PC Centre (VPCC), and the non-virtual machines to assess the strength of the connection. After this successful proof-of-concept stage, Jarir Bookstore deployed the NSA series across their network. “In addition to this, we also decided to purchase our bandwidth and internet connection from three separate data service providers (DSP). This internet service provision was monitored by our previous ISP,” he adds.
At the time our Internet Service Provider (ISP) set up an MPLS VPN to better manage and speed up its network traffic. This architecture created multiple points of failure, compounded by very low bandwidth of 512 KB and high recurring maintenance costs. We tried experimenting with a variety of different mediums such as fibre optic connectivity and WiMAX to increase bandwidth to no avail.” ISP they search for alternative solutions that would give them the capability to do their own tunneling. “We looked at different solutions but none of them had the complete functionality we were looking for. Sometimes either the load balancing was not to our liking or other times the power usage and financial costs did not make the investment seem worthy,” he adds. Jarir Bookstore went ahead to invite bids and trials from applications vendors, until they found the best fit in the SonicWALL NSA series. According to Felemban, one key consideration for deciding on the SonicWALL NSA series was that the solution reduced TCO by combining VPN with security capabilities. “The real time visualisation option allows IT managers to control and monitor traffic and even reports threats instanteously,” he adds. www.cnmeonline.com
Success story Felemban points out that switching over from MPLS took quite some time because this needed to be done branch-by-branch, beginning with the head office first, the process took about two weeks. “The entire process required detailed planning before implementation and involved a transition period of one month where the two networks (connectivity) overlapped to avoid any disruptions,” Felemban explains. “The installation was fairly straightforward, very smooth. The solution is working perfectly and delivering on all objectives. The NSA series provides robust performance and application intelligence, in addition to intrusion prevention and anti malware capabilities. Deployed as a nextgeneration firewall, the solution combines multi-core hardware with reassembly-free october 2011
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Case study Jarir Bookstore
deep packet inspection (RFDPI) for added protection and performance,” he adds. Felemban points out that with advanced routing, stateful high-availability and highspeed IPSec and SSL VPN technology, the NSA series delivered security, reliability, functionality and productivity to branch offices, central sites and distributed midenterprise networks, while minimising cost and complexity. “To sustain a VPN, a corporation needs highly redundant and resilient connectivity. The NSA Series served the purpose in terms of increasing the bandwidth and therefore tremendously improving productivity,” he says. Most importantly, Felemban opines that investing in SonicWALL actually helped the company replace fixed firewalls in most locations and get rid of a lot of applications that it earlier needed for internet and network connectivity, controls and monitoring, among others. It helped consolidate the underlying infrastructure and controls, and made managing connectivity a lot easier. Felemban also points out that the deployment of the SonicWALL NSA Series resulted in a 43% decrease in recurring costs per month, and an increase in bandwidth speeds to 15MB, a 3000% jump from the initial bandwidth of 512 KB. “The move stabilised our network and gave us the ability to create hotspots of connectivity in showrooms, a move we couldn’t have even contemplated with the MPLS network,” he says. “The NSA series deployment has given us the ability to expand our operations much faster and more easily than in the past. The solution allows remote access to our network through reliable and secure VPN tunnels, making the process of expansion absolutely
Having successfully deployed SonicWALL at its retail division, Jarir is already working on deploying the NSA Series at each of the eleven branches of Jarir Marketing
hassle free and making the deployment a resounding success,” he says.
Going forward Felemban believes that the decision of the small, yet immensely capabale, IT team of 13 at Jarir Bookstore to work with vendors who not only deliver a state of the art solution, but also have the ability to support the process of knowledge transfer and change management, is a contributing factor to a project’s success. Having successfully deployed SonicWALL at its retail division, Jarir is already working on deploying the NSA Series at each of the eleven branches of Jarir Marketing, the wholesale division, and even has plans to roll out SonicWALL to its investment division, with the intention of connecting all their divisions through their VPN. Felemban believes that seeing the greater bandwidth capabilities that Jarir
To sustain a VPN, a corporation needs highly redundant and resilient connectivity. The NSA Series served the purpose in terms of, increasing the bandwidth and therefore tremendously improving productivity,”
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Bookstore has at its disposal, in additional to the time and cost efficiencies of these latest technologies, it will only be a matter of time before more companies begin investing in building their own VPN tunnels. Addressing the future of Jarir’s IT investments, Felemban says, “First we have focused on the infrastructure; going forward, in the next few years, we will focus on applications. We have already started working on this.” “The idea behind investing in application projects is to enhance business goals. It wasn’t a one track project, we have two directions. One that addresses current issues to stabilise our business operations and the other track focuses on initiatives to benefit the strategic growth of the business. It began with infrastructure because we need a robust back end to make any changes to applications or the network.” he explains. He concludes by pointing to trends like virtualisation and cloud computing as being a long term IT reality, that will not only change the way IT does business but will also enhance business capabilities, the necessity for these investments will vary across organisations and so large scale adoption of cloud computing technology is still a sometime away.
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data centre providers around the world:
33,157
million physical servers in the world today
50
THE HORIZON
EVOLUTION
23,656
VMware Server launched
2001
2,740
Xen Hypervisor introduced
2003
2,660
EMC acquires VMware Microsoft virtual server launched
2005
2,371
2009
Gartner predicts Worldwide revenue for public and private cloud services will reach $241Bn
2020
STATISTICS
Rackspace announce OpenStack Microsoft Windows Azure platform announced Microsoft Office 365 is launched Worldwide spending on public cloud services totals over $89Bn Worldwide spending on private clouds $15.3Bn
2011
IDC predicts that while cloud computing revenue will continue to increase, the way organisations use the technology will also change over the next few years:
IDC says that the world’s information is more than doubling every two years- with an unimaginable 1.8 zettabytes to be created and replicated in 2011
Microsoft Hyper-V introduced VMware vCloud launched Google App engine released Worldwide cloud spending $68Bn
1,730
Amazon EC2 released
2007
THE LOWDOWN ON CLOUD COMPUTING
SILVER LINING
Improved experience 72% Agree experience 12% Disagree 16% Neutral Improved 72% Agree 12% Disagree 16% Neutral Decreased IT performance challenges 63% Agree Disagree 20% Neutral Decreased IT17% performance challenges 63% Agree 17% Disagree 20% Neutral Reduced cost of infrastructure 73% Agreecost 10% 17% Neutral Reduced ofDisagree infrastructure 73% Agree 10% Disagree 17% Neutral Alleviated internal resource pressures 74% Agree 8% Disagree 18% Neutral Alleviated internal resource pressures 74% Agree 8% Disagree 18% Neutral
70% Agree Disagree 20% Neutral Simplified IT10% management process: 70% Agree 10% Disagree 20% Neutral
1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5
Hybrid Private cloud cloud Private cloud
Community Public cloud cloud Public Hybridcloud cloud
Transportation Manufacturing Manufacturing
Financial Services Healthcare Healthcare Transportation
30 30%%
56% 34% 34% 29% 29% 7% 7% 5% 5% 5% 5%
1,000 cloud servers cut 50% of carbon emissions = carbon emissions by planting 5,810 trees toemissions offset carbon footprints 1,000reduced cloud servers cut 50% of carbon = carbon emissions reduced by planting 5,810 trees to offset carbon footprints
reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions by reduction in energy consumption SMBs adopting the cloud and carbon emissions by SMBs adopting the cloud
90 90%%
Pay to store computer filsonline onlinesite Back-up hard drive to an Back-up hard drive to an online site
such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail of Internet users use Webmail services store personal such as Gmail, photos Hotmailonline or Yahoo mail storeonline personal photos online Use applications such as Google Docs or Photoshop Use online applications suchExpress as Google Docs orvideos Photoshop Store personal onlineExpress Store videos online Pay topersonal store computer fils online
INDIVIDUAL USE OF CLOUD COMPUTING INDIVIDUAL USE OF CLOUD COMPUTING 56% of Internet users use Webmail services
63% 59% 59% 41% 41% 62% 62%
INDUSTRY USE OF CLOUD COMPUTING INDUSTRY USE OF CLOUD COMPUTING 63% Financial Services
14% 14% 29% 29% 36% 36% 54% 54%
CLOUD DEPLOYMENT MODELS THAT CLOUD DEPLOYMENT MODELSTOTHAT COMPANIES USE OR INTEND USE COMPANIES USE OR INTEND TO USE Community cloud
INDUSTRY SPEAK INDUSTRY SPEAK
reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions by large reduction in energy consumption companies and carbon adopting emissionsthe bycloud large companies adopting the cloud
Pay only for what you use Easy and faster deployment to users Easy and faster deployment to users Monthly payment plans Monthly payment plans Encourages standard systems Encourages standard systems requires less in house management and staffless in house management requires and staff
GREEN PASTURES GREEN PASTURES
77.9% 77.9% 77.7% 77.7% 75.3% 75.3% 68.5% 68.5% 67% 67%
TOP 5 ADVANTAGES OF CLOUD COMPUTING TOP 5 ADVANTAGES OF CLOUD COMPUTING Pay only for what you use
1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5
USING THE CLOUD HAS USINGSimplified THE CLOUDITHAS management process:
USERS SPEAK USERS SPEAK
THE PLAYERS THE PLAYERS
Gartner forecasts that worldwide public cloud servicesforecasts will continue to grow at public a CAGR of Gartner that worldwide cloud 19% perwill year from 2010 through 2015. services continue to grow at a to CAGR of 19% per year from 2010 through to 2015. Gartner also says that within cloud services, business process services expected to Gartner also says that withinare cloud services, garner the largest spending portion each to year, business process servicesofare expected totalling about $70billion by the end of 2011. garner the largest spending of portion each year, totalling about $70billion by the end of 2011.
8% server 8% server development 9% applications and deployment applications development 9% and deployment 13% storage 13% storage 18% infrastructure software 18% infrastructure software 52% business applications 52% business applications
FEATURE Outsourcing
Sourcing success In today’s global economy, outsourcing has become a very common phenomenon. Many large organisations have outsourced some or all of their IT functions. Pallavi Sharma finds out what challenges and drives this trend, and how the Middle East ITO market is keeping up.
W
e are all aware of the way IT has not only transformed the way businesses operate and interact with their customers but has also become a key enabler for strategic growth. But what happens when organisations grow and the complexities associated with building, managing and improving their existing IT infrastructure to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving market increase exponentially? The answer for many organisations might lie in the practice of outsourcing.
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As most experts point out, the definition of IT outsourcing has yet to be agreed upon. However, outsourcing is often viewed as involving the “contracting out“of a business function - commonly one previously performed in-house - to an external provider. In this sense, two or more organisations may enter into a contractual agreement involving an exchange of services and payment. In recent years, businesses across the world have been spending increasing amounts of money to outsource both critical and non-critical IT operations to meet their individual requirements, be they for reducing cost or achieving greater flexibility.
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Following a recent survey covering 47 ITO (IT outsourcing) providers representing all major geographies and all types of services including infrastructure (data centre, desktop, storage and network), applications and cloud services, Gartner predicted that the ITO services market will reach $313.2 billion in 2011, a growth of 6.9% from 2010. The survey also found that growth is the top strategic goal for ITO providers this year, with aggressive marketing plans and investments in cloud, utility and “as a service” offerings. “Many ITO providers intend to commit serious marketing funds and target new accounts to outgrow the market,” says Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner. “The survey found that at least 50% of outsourcing providers said they’ll be spending 2 to 5% of revenue on marketing in 2011, which is higher than the historical norm for marketing expenditure as a percent of revenue,” he adds. According to Antonio Antonuccio, COO, Injazat, enterprises in the Middle East contribute heavily to the growth of the global ITO market. “Outsourcing industries have already been flourishing in Asia and Africa; and Middle Eastern organisations are looking at this success as they accelerate their adoption of outsourced service provision,” he says. “ITO in the region began with a small base in the UAE that eventually grew to entire establishments like the Dubai Outsource Zone . Now the Emirates’ ITO industry is
clearly amongst the most mature in the region as demonstrated by the incidence of IT Services revenues on UAE total IT spend (more than 50 %),” Antonuccio adds. “In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the region’s largest IT market, the number of organisations opting for third-party IT managed services grew from 6.5% in 2008 to 22.7%in 2009, accounting for 18.4% of corporate spend on IT services. This is indicative of how the region’s enterprises have taken a strong liking to ITO as a means to enhance business. Some trends that are dictating the regional market are the rising legitimacy of offshore outsourcing and demand for service oriented architecture (SOA),” he points out.
Antonio Antonuccio, COO, Injazat
Experts point out that the key drivers for the adoption of IT outsourcing are associated with cost reductions, increased flexibility, reduced time to market, optimal allocation and utilisation of resources, and the ability to allocate key resources to an organisation’s critical business operations. “The cyclical and secular changes that businesses have been facing over the last few years have provided further momentum to outsourcing. Besides searching for cost savings to fund growth and innovation, businesses are required to complement the benefit from labour arbitrage by the improved efficiency and effectiveness that third-party providers can deliver. They need to focus more intensely on operational efficiency. As a result, firms must closely examine what activities are core to their business and what should be done by someone else. They must therefore look at driving more work and corresponding budget to a global delivery model,” explains Stephen Fernandes, country manager, Middle East, Cognizant. Proactive planning As is the case with any technology trend, IT outsourcing in the Middle East is hindered by a number of risks that experts believe can be mitigated with the clever use of communication and planning. Fernandes says, “To mitigate any risks associated with outsourcing, organisations must clearly identify their objectives for outsourcing as these business drivers would determine the nature and efficacy of outsourcing models.”
The cyclical and secular changes that businesses have been facing over the last few years have provided further momentum to outsourcing. Besides searching for cost savings to fund growth and innovation, businesses are required to complement the benefit from labour arbitrage by the improved efficiency and effectiveness that thirdparty providers can deliver.”
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Parag Sule, regional head, GCC, Tech Mahindra
Understanding the underlying need to outsource an operation would help decide what core knowledge an organisation wants to protect to avoid becoming too dependent on the vendors. Such dependence affects the ability to negotiate budgets and outsource contracts. Parag Sule, regional head, GCC, Tech Mahindra adds, “Another risk associated with ITO is security and the ability to trust the vendor with your confidential data and organisation’s integrity. The best way to deal with this is to enquire about the vendor’s security infrastructure and provisions, analysing these policies and parameters to ensure that they meet the organisation’s internal standard of security. This is especially so in the case of offshore contracts, where decision makers should ideally visit the vendor’s site to get a better idea of the infrastructure the outsourcer has in place. Organisation’s can also place access controls to enable granular access to sensitive data.” Antonuccio says, “Governance and communication is critical. The success of an outsource project depends on the ability to clearly assign roles and responsibility and define the scope of accountability october 2011
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FEATURE Outsourcing
for outsourced operations. In addition to which, both parties must clearly outline the expectations and requirements that are ultimately embedded into a set of SLA metrics to ensure that they are being met. Without these basic measures, the relationship could be jeopardized by misunderstandings and possible disappointments associated with not meeting or understanding unsaid expectations.” The success of an ITO project critically depends on the people factor and the organisation’s ability to manage change. “The entire project initiative can take a nose dive, if the people working for the organisation feel threatened by it. The best way to mitigate this risk is to communicate the benefits and the process of implementation with associated employees to keep them informed,” explains Sule. According to Sule, senior management must explain the firm’s strategy to all its employees, and must tie this strategy to the current business environment. He recommends that organisations invest in training their employees to work in an outsourced environment that often involves different technology in addition to involving
Mike Sneesby, VP of IPTV and operations , Intigral
Stephen Fernandes, country manager, Middle East, Cognizant
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them in educational seminars and training programs at regular intervals. Analysts point out that one of the most biggest challenges associated with ITO is the ability to choose the right partner or outsource service provider to work with. Fernandes advices, “Across industries, enterprise decision-makers must look for partners that bring deep domain and industry expertise, strong onsite presence, and well-honed relationship management capabilities, coupled with a seamlessly integrated global delivery network that provides access to the best talent at an appropriate price point.” He opines that organisations must look for service providers that can deliver significant value in re-architecting business models and technology footprints to reduce costs and implement tailored solutions that
Manish Mishra, VP and Middle East head, HCL Technologies.
The service provider should complement a company’s culture and business objectives with the right experience, communication skills and working style. After all, it will become a part of the organisation and so it should fit in as well as an actual employee.” address the changes in their industries and help them become more competitive. “The service provider should complement a company’s culture and business objectives with the right experience, communication skills and working style. After all, it will become a part of the organisation and so it should fit in as well as an actual employee. In addition to which organizations must ensure that they work with a partner who has significant experience working with the vertical in question. This will not only guarantee that they have the right expertise and skill to meet business requirements but that they understanding the underlying business and operational needs,” explains Manish Mishra, VP , Middle East Head, HCL Technologies. www.cnmeonline.com
Settling scores With so many elements challenging the success of an outsourced IT operation, it is only natural that decision makers pay careful attention to the content of an outsource contract to make sure that both parties clearly understand the mutual expectations and eventually gain from a win-win situation. Antonuccio says, “The contract should ensure that the needs and expectations of the client are clearly defined and that stated requirements are equitable, cost-effective and ultimately beneficial for both parties. Second, the Objective Service Levels and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be measurable, realistic and aligned with business needs and priorities.” According to him, this must be followed by a clause covering the right governance
FEATURE Outsourcing
and change management structures. “Fourth, there should be flexibility in adapting and responding to business change over the term of the agreement, in order to avoid lengthy and expensive negotiations that might delay important projects or upgrades. Finally, there should be clearly expressed terms and conditions for change, exits, liabilities, remedies and the likes,” he adds. Mishra largely agrees but adds, “The contract must clearly define the outsourcing model, whether it is managed services, project based outsourcing, built operational transfer or out-tasking. Based
“I think the most basic thing is to generate awareness about IT outsourcing, how it works, how to go about deciding on a model and the benefits. This will help address the fear of loss of control and other apprehensions that organisations may have. Also, outsource partners and the government can work together to build a regional domain focused on outsourcing, to help develop relevant skills and contribute to building a subscriber and supplier base,” he says. Antonuccio believes that although the Middle East ITO is showing great
I think the most basic thing is to generate awareness about IT outsourcing, how it works, how to go about deciding on a model and the benefits. This will help address the fear of loss of control and other apprehensions that organisations may have.” on the model, the contract must then clearly mention the pricing model that both parties have agreed upon this may be a fixed price model or a time and material based initiative. In the case of offshore outsourcing situations, it is recommended that both parties work out price changes that may arise due to fluctuations in forex rates, again this may be a fixed percentage change in price after a decided duration or vary based on forex rates.” Sule believes that ITO adoption in the Middle East region is only just maturing.
growth prospects there is room for more. “Providers must ensure that the ITO proposition has a sound business rationale with clear benefits for the company, ultimately helping it to implement its strategy and successfully compete in the market,” he explains. Most vendors agree that governments can play a huge role in driving both the public and private sector to evaluate and embrace ITO, as this will benefit and encourage the development of knowledgebased digital societies.
BY THE NUMBERS
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Decision makers share an optimistic outlook towards the future of the ITO market the world over. “In this virtualised, globalised environment where new technologies like cloud computing and social networks intersect with the millennial generation, clients are looking for better ways to organise teams, cultivate innovation, allocate resources, and reinvent knowledge processes. The next few years will be characterised by transitions in technology, industry structures, and business and technology architecture. Businesses will continue to look beyond cost optimisation and aim for incremental efficiencies from existing technology investments, and operational excellence,” says Fernandes. Gartner, in its recent survey found that between 60% and 64% of providers nominated cloud investments in the top three ITO investment priorities for 2011. While, the average percentage of deals expected to include cloud services and utility services or “as a service” delivery models is 18% for data centre deals in 2011, growing to 24% in 2012 Gartner analysts said. “There is no going back to business-asusual for ITO providers,” said Allie Young, vice president at Gartner. “Traditional business models are being turned inside out: it has started with the new business models and cloud ecosystem, and these trends will continue to impact the outsourcing business. Providers that ignore those trends could find themselves stuck with yesterday’s delivery models and high cost structures as the market moves on around them,” Young rightly points out. Source: Gartner BPO Estimates, March 2011
6.3%
5%
3.8%
8.9%
17.9%
growth expected in worldwide BPO market in 2011
growth expected in worldwide BPO market in 2012
growth in North American BPO market in 2011
growth in Western Europe BPO market in 2011
growth in AsiaPacific BPO market in 2011
Computer News Middle East
october 2011
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feature Green Computing
Turning a new leaf CIOs in the Middle East still struggle to give green ICT investments a business language, and this is hampering the adoption of environmentally-sane choices in organisations.
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A
lthough the buzz surrounding green tech has quieted significantly over the past couple of years, don’t take that to mean the job is finished. Despite the significant innovations that have helped organisations boost the energy efficiency of their operations while reducing waste, there are still plenty of opportunities to raise the green bar. All those petabytes of Web content generated on a daily basis need to reside somewhere, ready to be pushed at a moment’s notice to the increasing number of smartphones and other mobile devices flooding the market. All of that translates to more storage and processing, which in turn translates to higher capital and operating expenses for companies. The solution: green IT, which allows you to make more efficient use of IT by doing more with less. “There’s a clear global consensus that energy efficiency and emission reductions are critical to sustainable ICT development. International organizations and governments have already enacted policies aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon footprints. The global ICT industry has also undertaken serious efforts to research efficiency standards, with the world’s big-name operators and equipment vendors having mapped out a series of best practices and environmental protection standards,” says Leo Xu, VP of the Middle East region at Huawei.
However, are Middle East enterprises really paying attention to the green story? “In reality, some are and some aren’t. Green IT is on some of the lists we do receive in terms of needs, however it is generally not in the top five or six needs that are documented or expressed to us. The top needs are typically focused on delivering what their business needs as the primary requirement to be addressed,” says George De Bono, GM for the MEA at Red Hat.
a nascent area of interest for managers in the Middle East, and there are multiple reasons for the apparent lack of empathy.
Green consciousness “Sustainable IT management and use has to do with the way a company manages its IT assets. It includes purchasing energyefficient desktops, notebooks, servers and other IT equipment, as well as managing the power consumption of that equipment.
Yes and no. As a drive green IT doesn’t largely exist in Middle East. However, by bringing in cloud computing, virtualisation and server consolidation technologies major businesses today are looking to redesign the way all of IT is setup, managed and services the business. Indeed, this is the core value of green IT.” Adds Mahesh Vaidya, CEO at ISIT, “Yes and no. As a drive, green IT doesn’t largely exist in Middle East. However, by bringing in cloud computing, virtualisation and server consolidation technologies major businesses today are looking to redesign the way all of IT is setup, managed and services the business. Indeed, this is the core value of green IT.” Globally, green ICT has garnered a lot of mind share. However, the topic remains
It also refers to the environmentally safe disposal of that equipment, through recycling or donation at the end of its lifecycle,” points out Vaidya. In other words, the green ideology should permeate every aspect of IT and influence every element of lifecycle management from start to finish. Some others believe that this thought process should stretch to departments outside IT as well; that the mindset of sustainability
BY THE NUMBERS
26.6% is the increase in spend (CAGR) on smart building systems expected from 2010-2015
Source: IDC Energy Insights 2011
$10.2 billion is forecast for sales by 2015
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84%
70%
of respondents incorporate energy efficiency or conservation measures as a component of their operations
of a building’s energy is consumed by HVAC
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feature Green Computing
should touch every aspect of an organisation’s functioning to have a true impact on IT as well as operational efficiency. However, for such far-reaching changes within companies, any green investment would have to tick two very critical boxes – it has to be connected to a business line of thought, and it would have to help cut a lot of costs, if not add directly to the bottomline. “The biggest challenge we face is that a lot of our markets are classified as emerging, and are growing at such a rate, that non green options are the easiest and cheapest to deploy,” points out De Bono. While power remains relatively cheap in the Middle East, and construction remains on a high point across most geogrpahies, companies will tend to invest in established infrastructure solutions that might not carry the green tag, and
Measuring the data centre Hardware vendors still have work to do, though, in creating gear to meet organisations’ green needs. It remains common for Google and Facebook to use their own specially designed servers in their data centers, rather than going with off-the-shelf offerings from the server makers. Those companies have been quite open with their special server designs; for example, they both embrace techniques such as eliminating superfluous components. Facebook has gone so far as to place dual processors side by side on a motherboard, rather than one behind the other, because it improves airflow enough to make a difference. Proponents of green IT point to many challenges that the industry continues to face in boosting energy efficiency in the data centre. For starters, according to the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, organisations are failing to taking full advantage of power-management features in desktop computers and servers. The latter particularly is a challenge, as data centre operators are loathe to power down servers when
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are certainly cheaper (in terms of capex atleast) when compared to their more power-hungry cousins.
Walking the talk Despite these significant challenges, which restricts the amount any vendor can push the message and how much they can sell to an end-user, some organisations in the region are making piece-meal investments in greener technologies. “Every entity is unique in how IT solutions are applied within their existing infrastructure—and the benefits that they can expect from such initiatives. What we see today is a number of organizations that have set up sustainability governance teams that work above IT support groups in order to identify solutions that address overall “green” strategies and goals,” states Xu. they’re not in use for fear that they won’t wake up quickly enough (if at all). Solving that dilemma likely requires software and hardware vendors to better collaborate on reliable solutions while convincing admins that powering down servers isn’t necessarily as risky as they might fear. Further, many companies have yet to take full advantage of virtualisation, which is proving itself time and again a key technology to enable companies not only consolidate their infrastructure but also to boost server utilisation, which is traditionally pathetically low. The tech industry is also working to come up with a better metric than PUE for gauging data center efficiency. PUE compares how much energy a data center consumes as a whole (powering IT equipment as well as for nonproductive tasks such as cooling, lighting, and watts lost to conversions) to how much the facility uses for just powering its IT equipment. A PUE of 2.0 would mean that for every two watts at the meter, only one watt gets to the IT hardware, for example; a PUE of 1.0 -- the lowest possible -- means that every watt a data centre consumes goes toward powering IT equipment. The problem with PUE: It doesn’t always provide a fully accurate picture of a data centre’s
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George De Bono, GM for the MEA at Red Hat.
efficiency or inefficiency. For example, if a data centre’s servers are cooled at the rack level instead of with full-room or aisle-by-aisle CRAC units, the PUE doesn’t penalise the facility for the watts “wasted” on cooling. That’s not to say that PUE is going away anytime soon, as it still has value. A data centre operator could gauge the general progress of various green technologies and practices by measuring PUE on a regular basis. (Google, for example, does just that.) But the ideal metric would allow a data centre operator to measure performance per watt, or performance per watt per dollar, to gauge just how much bang a facility is getting for its buck. The challenge is coming up with a meaningful, universal way to measure data centre (or IT equipment) performance. A data centre for a lightweight search engine, for example, could be just as efficient as one for heavy-duty financial crunching -- but the former would have far more transactions per minute. Think in terms of MPG for vehicles. A hybrid sedan has a higher MPG rating than an SUV, but it’s not an apt comparison if you don’t know how the vehicle is being used: carpooling on the freeway to work or hauling heavy equipment off-road?
feature Green Computing
“I know of a few organisations who are moving to things like solar energy to power their data centres and facilities, moves like this need to be highlighted and the organisations taking these steps need to be congratulated. Let’s face it, we have a very good constant source of alternate power, and the more we use it, the less impact it has on our environment,” says De Bono. Apart from identifying and working with alternate power sources, companies are making choices more consciously from options like power and cooling solutions. As budgets shrink, more CIOs are looking to stop the drain on the opex front and are making capex decisions that will hold them stronger in the long term. IT managers in organisations that are more reticent can do better, by working to increase knowledge on the extended benefits of going green. “As mentioned earlier, the primary concern must be “does the proposed green
Mahesh Vaidya, CEO of ISIT
The biggest challenge we face is that a lot of our markets are classified as emerging, and are growing at such a rate, that non green options are the easiest and cheapest to deploy.” solution meet the business requirement”? Once you get across that, the other considerations are power consumption, efficient use of resources, recyclablity of the components. Constant awareness, and recognition or exposure of organisations that are successfully deploying green solutions are essential weapons for explaining better the benefits that come with green IT,” says De Bono. “There are many IT investments IT managers probably want to make anyway that will also reduce your impact on the environment. Cloud computing, virtualisation technologies, server consolidation, PC power management and 60
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deployment of more efficient equipment when you do a refresh can reduce energy consumption while simultaneously improving IT operations,” says Vaidya. He adds, “Awareness campaigns explaining what green IT really means to business and how to incorporate it into every business aspect with minimal changes to the way things are done would help more companies move towards green IT.” In the perfect data centre world, servers could sit in a shed sans any kind of air conditioning, relying on free outside air to stay sufficiently cooled. That vision may draw closer to reality: ASHRAE not long ago adjusted the recommended www.cnmeonline.com
temperatures for operating servers; Dell recently announced an array of servers, storage and networking equipment capable of peration in temperatures upto 113 degrees F; and vendors like Intel have conducted experiments to determine just how resilient servers can be. “Implementing sustainable ICT solutions takes the collective efforts of an organisation. Senior management is crucial to driving high-level initiatives, with individual employees playing a key role in the maintenance and optimization of these systems. The fact is that energy consumed by network equipments, power systems and data centres take up an increasingly larger proportion of total energy consumption, so in addition to having the right mindset, applying the right technical solutions is equally important,” states Xu. But till we reach that ideal, it is left upto individuals in organisations to lead the way, and it is time that more IT managers pick up the cudgels for the green cause. “It starts with the individual, whether they are top management, or a lower level employee, or a hardware or software engineer. Waiting for others to start environmental friendly approaches is really an attempt to pass the responsibility on to others. If we all do our little piece, we can make a difference, and if that is as simple as feeling better about ourselves as individuals, then that is fine. Remember all we can truly influence is our immediate sphere or space, and if we focus on that, then we have made a start or a move in the right direction,” concludes De Bono.
Sustainable ICT 2011 Join CNME, CPI and Etisalat as we discuss the future of green ICT investments and usage in Middle East enterprises at the Sustainable ICT 2011 event. Log onto www.sustainableictme. com for more information.
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feature Education
The application of IT is not only transforming the way students learn, but also the way they are being taught. Pallavi Sharma studies how educational institutions in the region are leveraging technology.
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he Internet and globalisation have together created an economy that is powered by technology, fuelled by information and driven by knowledge. Faced with rapidly evolving technology and dynamic business environments, one of the challenges that economies around the world continue to face is preparing their societies and governments amidst this Internet revolution. Ashi Sheth, IT director, American University of Sharjah (AUS) explains, “Education is the cornerstone of preparing the current and future generations in fundamental skills and knowledge so that they are not only successful but also active participants of communities across the globe. An educational institution needs to be able to provide access to a world of information utilising technology while at the same time, from an operational perspective, expose students to the potentials of technology in improving students’ life and the lives of those around them.” While rapidly evolving technology has necessitated the need for educational institutions to invest in solutions to hone future citizens, it has also transformed the way these same advancements is used to enhance teaching. Trevor Moore, director of IT and communications at the Abu Dhabi University (ADU) says, “Technology and the need for technology has changed like the rest of the world from accessing information internally, to using the Internet on personal computers to today using multiple kinds of mobile devices to learn and share information. Every student now has a smart phone, tablet, netbook or laptop which they want to use to access educational resources. Therefore, IT has to have this picture in mind when architectinginfrastructure” Experts agree that engaging technology in active learning has also changed the expectations students have from their educational institutions. “They no longer just expect an online presence or a computer lab, but demand full access to their course work, social network integration, and online collaboration tools that a few years ago would have
been considered groundbreaking,” says Hanny Alshazly, senior manager, business development and marketing, ITS educational. AlShazly adds, “The ability to capture lecture content is gaining momentum. Students expect that their schools or universities record lecture sessions and make them accessible from anywhere, from any device and at any time. In addition to this, they want to be able to check their class schedules or any changes that are made via theonline medium. Students also want to be able to interact with their faculty and immediate administration after school hours, this not only enables interactive learning but enables students to engage in school work at their leisure.”
access to it. Universities and schools also have to deal with managing a much larger number of independent devices than any other vertical. Therefore, finding partners willing to invest time in learning this difference is key for the success of any deployment,” he says. Sheth also says that having senior management recognise IT as more than just infrastructure service is extremely critical. “Some universities have this understanding – others don’t and still treat IT as just a support function. This attitude has to be corrected and requires bringing the technology, academic, and administrative leaders all into the same conversation discussing the institution and where it would like to go. IT today can separate
They no longer just expect an online presence or a computer lab, but demand full access to their course work, social network integration, and online collaboration tools that a few years ago would have been considered groundbreaking” Studying the challenges IT professionals in the education sector believe that the challenges associated with deploying the latest technology are no different from any other sector. IT teams are expected to ensure that they engage in detailed cost-benefit analysis, make sure that the implementation is done in time and within budget and most importantly, proactively deal with resistance to change. Sheth points out that one of the most notable challenges for any educational institution is finding and choosing the right vendor or partner to work with. “In education, we have all the needs of a massive multinational, in the locality of a single campus. In addition to this, the security requirements from an educational institution vary greatly from an enterprise environment. For one thing the priority of the education vertical is to enable the sharing of information and not limiting www.cnmeonline.com
one institution from another if given the opportunity and embraced as part of the institution’s vision,” he adds. Moore agree adding, “Universities are unique and it is difficult for IT to understand the educational requirement. To bridge this gap between IT and the academic side today most universities have instructional technologists who are experts in technology and teaching methods and IT works closely with them.” . Undeterred by the many challenges, educational institutions in the Middle East are investing in technology to make learning flexible and a lot more interactive than was previously possible – and examples can be found all over the region Moore and team at ADU are actively working on the idea of engaging smartphones in education. “Our Blackboard Learning management system was only accessible via an internet browser until october 2011
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recently. ADU was the first university in the GCC to allow students to access Blackboard using mobile technologies such as iPad, iPhone and Android based smartphones,” he says. According to him, the university is also in the process of implementing Oracle PeopleSoft ERP for back office and student information systems. “The reasons for implementing ERP are numerous, but one of the key driiving forces was to improve the quality of services to students. With the solution, students can pay their fee online, the registration process are also online and many other functions. ERP has the added advantage of streamlining back office business processes such as procurement, finance and HR,” Moore adds. In the last 18 months, ADU has also replaced all the old computers (over 800 computers) in the classrooms and labs to newer ones with more powerful software (SPSS, AutoCAD, Mathcad etc), and have upgraded to Windows 7 as the preferred OS from the previous Windows XP. In addition to this all projectors in the classrooms have also been replaced. AUS, meanwhile, has been investing in both desktop and data centre virtualisation.
Trevor Moore, director of IT and communications at the Abu Dhabi University
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“Our environment is now 80% virtualised in the data centre as we’ve moved to 15 node VMWare vSphere cluster supporting over 200 virtual production and pre-production services. As part of this conversion, we’ve been able to realise a higher availability rate and faster failover in the event of any problems. This past February, we converted our core Student Information System, Sungard Banner, onto a virtual platform as well and have realised both a cost savings in capital as well as a redundancy that could not have been provided under our old model,” Sheth adds. The School of Research Science, Dubai has also invested in virtualisation based on 125 HP thin client servers to support a robust back end infrastructure that will enable scalability and increased efficiency. Herve Dechoux, CIO of the school says, “It’s been a year since we implemented the HP thin client servers and since then we haven’t had to replace even one.” “Making this investment meant that our core budget is now freed up to invest in more strategic IT initiatives. Earlier, we had to freeze a significant portion of our annual budget to service, manage or replace the desktops. The thin clients have also served as power efficient and helped us reduce the institution’s carbon footprint and energy consumption significantly,” Dechoux adds. The school has also used technology like the Microsoft SQL server and MultiPoint to set up IT clusters in primary grade classrooms, so students don’t need to leave the classroom to have access to computers or the Internet. In this way, the institution and its faculty are encouraging the development of basic IT skills right from the start of a student’s educational lifecycle. Working hard Having successfully deployed a variety of technology solutions across their respective institutions, these decision makers are geared up for more. “AUS is in the early stages of delivering virtual applications and desktops to students to improve their access to information and licensed software. In www.cnmeonline.com
Ashi Sheth, IT director, American University of Sharjah
our first phase, we will be deploying two labs in our College of Engineering with certain key applications deployed via the Web. The students in these classes will be able to access these applications from their dormitories, homes, or even when travelling, since the technology in place opens up a whole new avenue for continuous learning and advancement,” explins Sheth. The School of Research Science is considering investing in mobile thin client technology to enable the use of independent devices such as tablets, smartphones and laptops for interactive learning and information sharing. Dechoux says, “We plan to create more apps to engage independent devices in the learning process in anticipation of a scenario where instead of notebooks students and faculty will both engage in learning over a tablet and use more web based resources and tools.” From a provider of education technology perspective, Alshazly says, “Most new universities’ technology investment are geared towards infrastructure systems and ERP solutions such as Student Information Systems, which are the most important technologies needed to get the university up and running. Established universities,
feature Education
on the other hand, focus their technology investments on offering better services and learning experiences to students by spending more on the implementation of online learning technologies such as learning management systems, lecture capaital solutions, along with portal systems and integration with social networking solutions.” Having interacted with vendors and investing in the latest technology, IT professionals believe that there is yet more room for growth across the provision of services for the education vertical in the Middle East. “The solutions provided in the region are pretty good but tend to be a little behind Europe, US, Canada. For example, technologies like virtualisation and cloud are still quite new to the GCC, although they are fast gaining the market’s attention. The major problem with vendors I find is they can be hit and miss depending on who is assigned to the project. If you get a really good person the project runs smoothly but the opposite can happen too. Vendors need to improve the overall quality of the technical staff, help them garner a greater understanding of what their particular needs are and ensure that the levels of delivery promised are then attained,” says Moore. Dechoux explains, “So far our experience with vendors and partners in the region has been pretty good. The only issue we ever faced was associated with pricing. In western economies, vendors and partners provide special pricing for educational institutions. Although Microsoft has such a provision here none of the other major
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vendors do. So I have had to battle for quite some time on pricing with HP, a vendor who exhibits worldwide commitment to education, but has no provision for special funding or pricing for educational institutions in the region.”
Graduating IT decision makers across the education sector believe that this is only the very beginning of the technology revolution and its effects on this vertical. “Although there has been a lot of buzz surrounding mobile learning for the past five years or so, this trend was not able to really take off until this year. This was mainly because, while the technology was available in the form of true smartphone devices, the cost associated with accessing course material, and collaboration tools using mobile devices was too expensive and too slow,” says AlShazly. “At the beginning of this year however, the situation has shown signs of improvement primarily because of the many new data packages offered by mobile carriers. In addition to this, we have more country-wide agreements being signed and announced with eLearning providers to enable greater accessibility,” he adds. Sheth concludes by adding another dynamic to this conversation, “Education in the region is going to have to come to terms with the hybrid/distance learning model in order to continue to attract both the level of faculty and students that are needed to enable the region to grow. The uncertainty caused by recent events in the region has made it less attractive to those we need
Hanny Alshazly, senior manager, business development and marketing, ITS educational
most. While the student demand for schools in calmer countries has increased, the ability to attract the top talent to support these students hasn’t increased at the same rate in the region. It’s also implausible to expect to fly guest lecturers or discipline experts on as frequent a basis as we would like just on a cost basis.” He believes that videoconferencing, online classrooms, and other technologies can help bridge that gap and introduce both local and international students to reach out support the sharing of knowledge. “This doesn’t mean that there has to be a loss of curricular integrity, but it does require a shift in the methods used to teach to more closely align with the methods used by our students to learn,” he rightly states. Source: Gartner
by
by
30%
2014
2014
By 2014: hardware purchases by school districts will be reduced
CIOs in the education sector will utilise desktop virtualisation and cloud offerings to reach client devices
educational institutions will purchase twice as many tablet-like computing devices as opposed to laptops and notebooks.
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50%
higher education CIOs will lose their jobs for failing to balance customer efficiency with organisational efficiency.
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Q&A Michael Ernesto Dell Baca
A solutions company Michael Dell, CEO of Dell outlines the company’s aggressive plans to grow its portfolio of solutions by acquiring more intellectual property and what that means for customers and long time partners. Excerpts from the interview. 68
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Dell says it has become an enterprise solutions provider. That’s a big shift from being a box seller and a fast adopter of new technology. Why is Dell making this change and what are you trying to accomplish? A: Throughout the latter part of the ‘90s and early 2000s, we started creating more and more powerful enterprise products, and as we sold those products into the data centre, it became clear to us that customers wanted more than products. We started building a bigger business services capability and to verticalise the business. It was most prevalent in the public sector -- because it was a business of verticals, with education and health care and the defence and civilian aspects of the federal government. nd we were doing that, it became clear we needed to go faster. So we bought Perot Systems, and for the last year or so we’ve been pretty aggressively investing both organically and inorganically in accelerating our solutions momentum. The reason is that we found that it works really well. I think the reason it works is that we’re solving the real problem that the customer has -- and getting into the real opportunities in a bigger way. Q: How did you approach customers before? A: Five years ago we would say: Hey, we’ve got shiny boxes. And the customer would sort of say: Well, don’t really care, I’m busy, leave me alone. What do you actually know about my problem? And can you help me solve this problem I have? I’m trying to build a next-generation supply chain. I’m trying to make my sales force more productive. I want to get better outcomes for my students or my patients. If you know something about that in the vertical that I’m in, then I want to talk to you. If you don’t, go away and leave me alone. Building that capability requires new skills, new capabilities, new intellectual property, some of which we can grow organically, some of which we have been acquiring. I think it also changes the frame of reference of the opportunities for Dell, because now we look at the entire $2.7 trillion IT industry and say: That’s actually
the entire space that we’re going after. We’re not confined to this box or that box. If you look at what we’re doing today, certainly you can find some places where we’re highly advanced -- like in health care IT, where we’re number one in the world. We’re doing health information systems and evidencebased medicine systems, electronic medical records and claims adjudication systems, affiliated physician systems, and really entire solutions that help care providers ultimately deliver better outcomes for patients. That’s actually what they want to do. They don’t want shiny boxes, although shiny boxes may be part of the solution. We’ve changed the conversation, and that is producing a steady stream of improving results financially. Our GAAP earnings in the last year have more than
across midsize companies of all kinds. What sorts of solutions are really catching on with those customers right now? A: Among all the solutions, you’d say roughly 80% of them are horizontal and 20% of them are vertical. To the extent you can create the horizontal solutions first, you can sell them to everybody, and there’s more demand. Things like virtualisation -- no great surprise there. What does the next-generation data centre look like? How do I implement cloud computing? What does the mobile client look like? What about IT security, migration to the cloud? There are pretty big horizontal solutions that are highly repeatable activities. You can almost apply factorylike thinking in terms of how you deploy them -- efficiently for customers, with a very high degree of
If you look at what we’re doing today, certainly you can find some places where we’re highly advanced -- like in health care IT, where we’re number one in the world. We’re doing what they want us to do. They don’t want only shiny boxes, although shiny boxes may be part of the solution. doubled. That’s a good thing. We like that. People seem to like that. That success gives us a greater degree of freedom in terms of our ability to expand and grow and invest organically and inorganically. And that requires some new things. It’s not as if we started doing this last quarter, right? So three and a half years ago, we bought a company called EqualLogic up in Nashua, N.H., and that was in a space that we were pretty familiar with. Dell has sold 15 million servers in the last decade -- pretty hard to find a data centre where it’s not Dell. About a third of the servers sold in North America are Dell. So what goes with servers? Well, storage goes with servers, networking goes with servers. Those are pretty obvious places for us to expand. Q: You mentioned vertical solutions; Dell has also talked about a big focus on providing horizontal solutions that go
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predictability that’s going to be successful and implemented on time. It’s just not that hard to do over and over again. We much focus on the midmarket because we see a lot of new solutions being created there -- and moving up. Think about x86 servers. When the x86 server started, it wasn’t the world’s biggest companies. In fact, I remember very well going to some of those big companies and they said go away because we’re doing mainframes, we’re not doing x86 servers. Actually, x86 servers started with the small, nimble, fast companies, worked their way up into medium and large [businesses], from the Web tier to applications and to the database layer. And now it’s finally eating away at the core of the data centre in the world’s largest enterprises across. Q: What’s wrong with targeting big corporate customers? A: It’s not necessarily a bad thing to do. october 2011
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Q&A Michael Dell
We sell to those customers, they sell to those customers. They use channels and distributors and multistep distribution to deal with these customers, although one could argue whether they’ve done a particularly good job at it or not. So we sell to the biggest companies in the world and we sell to the smallest, the consumer. But we also think the SMB market is not only the biggest, but it’s also the fastest-growing. Think about all the new emerging companies around the world. The other thing you find is that the pyramid of companies is like unbelievably wide. Go to LinkedIn and they have advanced search tools that let you look at companies by size. You’ll notice that there’s an enormous number of companies that have 1,000 people or 5,000 people. There aren’t that many companies that have 100,000 people. Q: Obviously, you’re not the only company to lead with services and solutions. Compared with IBM and HP, is the only difference in your target audience, or are there other differences? A: I think [the market segment] is one difference. The other difference is that we don’t have the legacy of an installed base of proprietary stuff, which is why we’ve taken this open approach. If you look at our approach in the data centre to orchestration, to systems management, it’s a very open approach. Dell has always been a leader in standards, and I think customers know and appreciate that. It’s a great position for us to continue to carve out. It’s pretty different than our competitors.
Q: The companies you’ve acquired have expanded your portfolio of IP. Does it change Dell as an open company -- or as a great strategic partner -- if more and more of what you deliver is your own versus pulling together solutions from across the industry? A: I think we’re going to continue to pull together solutions across the industry, but there are clearly areas where we’re investing more heavily in our own technology. What I’d also tell you is if you look at the way we’re 70
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Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Computers
delivering our solutions, we’re still giving customers an enormous amount of choice. With our data centre solutions, yes, you can buy networking from us, and you can buy storage from us, you could buy servers from us, and you could buy orchestration from us. But if you want our orchestration and you don’t want to buy any of our servers or networking or storage, you can do that, too. So we’re much more open than really anyone in the industry. Q: But are your strategic partners as excited about this transition as you are? A: Well, we certainly don’t design our deterministic future to make others in the industry happy. We decided to make customers and shareholders happy and give people at Dell a great opportunity. So “don’t really care” is the simple answer. Q: But you don’t think it changes the customer view of Dell? A: Actually, we’re seeing very positive response from customers as we learn more about their problems. We’re able to bring more definitive solutions, and customers appreciate that we’ve invested heavily in key intellectual property. Now, of course, it www.cnmeonline.com
has to be the right [solution], it has to work well, and I think we’ve chosen quite carefully. Our track record speaks for itself in terms of our ability. I mean, when you acquire something, you don’t create any value. When you successfully integrate it and continue to invest in it, that’s when you create value.
Q: Can you give us a longer-range view of your cloud strategy and compare that with, say, Microsoft, HP, others who are moving into the space? A: Well, I think we see customers increasingly embracing cloud as a way to transform their IT environment. Q: Public and private cloud? A: Public, private, hybrid. And we don’t believe there’s one-size-fits-all in terms of the cloud or most other aspects of IT, but certainly not the cloud. If you look at large companies, they tend to be held hostage by their legacy environments, and they look at cloud and they say -- hey, this is a way for us to break free from some of these old systems and have a more flexible infrastructure, and we really want that. They may want a private cloud. I think no matter what you do you’re going to have a
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Q&A Michael Dell
hybrid cloud, because you’ve got services that are outside of your data centre, you’ve got services that are inside your data centre, you’ve got to connect those things together. Data integration is a big, big deal. That’s why we bought Boomi -- really helping customers link those together.
Q: What are the specific opportunities for Dell to fill in those gaps in the cloud for your customers and in the solutions that you’re providing? A: Well, I think it’s certainly in the infrastructure layer. That’s a natural place to start; we have a lot of experience there -- a big advantage. We’re the leading supplier to the Internet companies. We’re now on, I think, the fourth generation of our modular data centre, really leading in innovating in terms of densely organised modular data centres. I think roughly 60% of the Chinese Internet runs on Dell. We’ve done a great job in serving the most complex users out there. We know how to build the cloud infrastructure layer, whether a company wants to build its own private cloud or they want us to operate it for them in one of our data centres. I think data integration is a big barrier and challenge/opportunity. I have an old XYZ system and I want to go to Workday or I want to go to Salesforce.com or I want to go to SuccessFactors, or whatever it may be, how do I connect that with my old system? That’s what Boomi does. If I have two cloud systems, how do I connect them together? Cloud providers will tell you -- oh no, you don’t want to do that. Because they want all the data to stay in their system and not go anywhere. But that’s really impractical, the bigger the company the more you need data to integrate and talk to each other. So again, Boomi is perfect for that. Q: Can we shift to the old business for a second? The Windows PC market has taken a dip and we’re seeing a lot of other devices surging in the market right now. If it turns out that tablets, smartphones ... Android and iPad devices represent a major shift from the Windows PC into this multiplicity of devices, how does that
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affect your business in the long term? A: Well, it would have affected it a lot more maybe 5 or 10 years ago than it does today, because our business is very different. If you look at our sources of margin and profit, the majority of them are not the stuff you’re talking about. I think there’s definitely an enormous variety of devices out there and usage patterns are changing. I don’t necessarily see that they’re all replacing each other. A lot of the new
You look at these new companies that are popping up all the time with streaming audio, streaming video, and there’s a pretty good chance those are running on Dell servers. Q: You’ve been a small business, a medium business, a large business, a global business. Today it’s a tough environment for medium businesses or small businesses. What would your advice be to someone who is running IT at one of
So we sell to the biggest companies in the world and we sell to the smallest, the consumer. But we also think the SMB market is not only the biggest, but it’s also the fastest-growing. Think about all the new emerging companies around the world. devices are in addition to the devices you already have. So, for example, when you get a smartphone do you get rid of your PC? I don’t think so. Now, the interesting one is the tablet. When you get a tablet do you get rid of your smartphone? No. OK, so now we went from a person who has one device to one who has three devices. Now explain to me why this is a problem. When we’re in the server business and storage business and making data centres? Now, would I love it to be our smartphone and our tablet? Absolutely. But if the total market expands, you know, if the 2.7 trillion becomes 3.7 trillion because people are storing more data... I mean, I look at some of our big customers, the fast-growing customers, and they have nothing to do with PCs. We have a big customer in China called TenCent, and TenCent I think has like 700 million mobile phone customers. Almost everyone in China who has a phone uses one of the TenCent services. So we’re selling them huge data centres and servers and storage and networking -- nothing to do with a PC. When people consume content, video, whatever, on tablets, smartphones, the content has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from? It comes from servers and storage. www.cnmeonline.com
these medium to small businesses? What would you do? A: If you’re running a business, you have to think about surviving. That’s just part of running a business, particularly a small or medium-sized business. I think that there are so many opportunities to get ahead using informationtechnology. I’ll give you a big one that I think is extremely relevant to medium-sized business. We’ve been providing storage systems to midsized companies for a long, long time, and they’ve been storing their data because they had to [due to] regulations, because it was thought to be a good idea. You have to have a database; you have to maintain all the information. But how does the information actually help you make better decisions? People talk about big data. I think: big impact, big decisions, and big insights. And there’s a lot of work going on in our industry. Dell is working on this in a big way to say how do you take all the data companies have stored and then turn that into much better decisions? And smart midsized companies will actually be able to do that in a faster, more nimble way than some of their larger competitors who are kind of stuck in these larger legacy systems.
INSIGHT Virtualisation
Application virtualisation – the impact Server virtualisation gets more buzz, but application virtualisation might provide more significant business benefits in the long run.
S
erver virtualisation gets most of the glory, but it’s application virtualisation that may ultimately have a more significant impact on enterprise IT architectures, supporting new modes of business and smoothing the path to the new services-oriented online structure known as the cloud. Application virtualisation has been around a while, and many IT shops use it in one form or another. In the form of terminal services, application virtualisation is employed in most large organisations to support remote offices. At the individual application level, virtualisation is used 74
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to obviate compatibility issues when installing new apps across a wide network of users. Lately, the ongoing migration to Windows 7 has spurred the use of application virtualisation tools to ensure that older but still critical applications run on the new OS. Application virtualisation is also being used to prep a push into virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). And despite initial skepticism, virtualisation is moving to the most critical applications—those that organisations depend on to run their businesses—such as ERP and database. www.cnmeonline.com
Agility and flexibility Virtualisation, in general, refers to isolating or unbinding computing resources so that they can run without depending on a particular platform or environment. Virtualisation applies to both hardware and software, and can be used in connection with servers, storage and applications. Application virtualisation itself can have multiple meanings. That’s why some experts say application virtualisation is better addressed according to the problem you’re trying to solve. “It’s a business conversation more than just a technology conversation,” says Kevin Strohmeyer, senior product
manager for the enterprise, desktops and applications group at Citrix, which markets both terminal services and application virtualisation technology. Application virtualisation offers business advantages in terms of agility and flexibility. For instance, app virtualisation can be a cost-effective strategy when setting up a temporary office or a limited-run project. Because of virtualisation’s ability to contain and control messy interactions with the operating system, a virtualised application will leave behind very little digital detritus. That allows a server purchased for one project to be re-deployed much more quickly and efficiently when that project is completed. Forced march The biggest impetus these days for employing application virtualisation is the forced march to Windows 7. Even organizations that sat out the upgrade to Windows Vista are moving to Windows 7, and as might be expected, they occasionally run into application conflicts. “Tax software giant Intuit, for example, needs to keep running older versions of its tax software to support customers still operating on those older versions and calling in looking for help,” says Michael Caouette, senior engineer with the company’s employee services IT Group. Then came Windows 7. “We ended up with a lot of application compatibility problems,” he says. His group uses Microsoft’s application virtualisation technology, App-V, as well as that from a third-party vendor, InstallFree. He says they’ve virtualized as many as 30 apps so far, including IE6-based apps, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Firefox and Quickbooks. Virtualisation helps with application compatibility and aids in the installation process because “I only have to stream [the virtualized application] down to the desktop,” Caouette says. Similarly, Autodesk, the CAD/CAM software developer, needed to support
Application virtualisation has been around a while, and many IT shops use it in one form or another. In the form of terminal services, application virtualisation is employed in most large organisations to support remote offices. At the individual application level, virtualisation is used to obviate compatibility issues when installing new apps across a wide network of users. the client side of its Seibel sales force system, which uses the IE 6 browser as its interface, when the IT organization shot-gunned 12,000 nodes of Windows 7 throughout the company. Scott Baker, application programmer or analyst in the desktop support group, says Microsoft’s app virtualisation technology was no help because “App-V did not support the virtualisation of IE6 .” So Baker used InstallFree to keep the legacy-yet-critical Siebel call centre application up and running for the country.
Overcoming limitations There are scenarios that do not lend themselves to application virtualisation. For instance, it can be difficult—if not impossible;to virtualise applications that interact in a significant way with the operating system at the kernel level. From a less technical standpoint, if an organisation standardises enterprise-wide on a specific version of an application or application suite, it probably makes sense to run that software natively. One of the limiting scenarios, however, used to involve virtualising “mission-critical” server-based applications. Conventional wisdom had it that there were too many architectural challenges, too many potential “gotchas,” such as IP hooks and security issues, to make virtualising server applications feasible. But that’s changing. Microsoft is now testing a version of its application www.cnmeonline.com
virtualisation technology for Windows server applications, known as Server App-V. And at least one third-party vendor, AppZero, is touting its virtualisation technology for server apps that run on a variety of operating systems platforms. Server App-V will be part of a new version of Microsoft’s System Center management console, and is intended to be used with Microsoft’s cloud software and service, Azure. AppZero’s virtualisation technology allows applications to migrate to various server platforms, such as moving legacy applications to updated environments. Greg O’Connor, CEO and president of AppZero, says he has two types of customers: ISVs looking to ship server applications for the Windows platform without the help of Microsoft; and end-users looking to migrate critical server-based applications to managed services providers and the cloud. “We can make it so you can pick up an Oracle database and move it from your data center to the Amazon storage cloud and then to RackSpace,” O’Connor says. The opposite is also true, O’Connor points out. Virtualised server apps can be moved back into an organisation’s data center with relative ease, mitigating the risk of “vendor lock-in” to a specific cloud services provider. The mobile imperative The virtual desktop is not the same thing as the virtualised application—but they october 2011
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INSIGHT Virtualisation
Application virtualisation aimed at mobile devices is the next step.
complement each other. The virtual desktop is an “image” of what the user wants and/ or needs on a PC, laptop or thin client (OS, apps, user profile, etc.), streaming over the network from a remote server. Because app virtualisation ensures application compatibility and flexibility, it supports a stable yet easily updateable “single image” virtual desktop environment. “NSK Corp., a global auto parts dealer, employed InstallFree’s application virtualisation technology to support its IE6based applications when it began its move to Windows 7,” says Todd Warner, LAN/WAN supervisor. Now he’s using it to make PC support easier across the organisation. Users can install their applications automatically
from a self-service portal, which “cuts down on desk tickets,” he says. Warner is considering application virtualisation in connection with VDI. NSK is “starting to virtualise desktops for developers,” he says, using VMware’s virtual desktop technology, VMware View. By virtualising applications for developers, those virtual desktops can be updated “automatically,” across the organisation, Warner says. He’s also “playing with [application virtualisation] for tablets—Galaxy, iPad 2 and Zoom,” Warner says. “We have a lot of executives wanting to use iPad 2s.” Application virtualisation aimed at mobile devices is the next step. Not only does
Application virtualisation offers business advantages in terms of agility and flexibility. For instance, app virtualisation can be a cost-effective strategy when setting up a temporary office or a limited-run project. Because of virtualisation’s ability to contain and control messy interactions with the operating system, a virtualised application will leave behind very little digital detritus. 76
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virtualisation make mobile apps easier to migrate across servers and easier to support in a virtual environment, vendors are starting to offer tools to develop virtual apps that run on smartphones and other mobile devices. For example, VMware markets its Mobile Virtualisation Platform, which is designed to enable developers to build mobile apps for multiple environments and to let users have multiple profiles on a single device. A virtual world Virtualisation has been, and continues to be, one of the building blocks of the Web 2.0 corporate infrastructure. For IT managers, hardware virtualisation is having a direct impact in terms of ROI dollars right now. The ramifications of application virtualisation are less direct, longer term, but potentially more significant and meaningful in a highly mobile world. As NSK’s Wartner says, “Once I have it virtualised I can push it anywhere I want.” “In light of the onslaught of virtualisation, and in particular the potential of application virtualisation, the marching orders for IT managers are obvious,” says Alon Yaffe, director of marketing at InstallFree: “IT needs to start managing more things on the back end and less things on the client.”
26 Dubai OCT
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www.datacenterdynamics.com Design, Build, Operate is our longest running conference theme and focuses on every part of the mission-critical facility lifecycle. From site selection and engineering design through to power availability and full data center automation; these are must-attend sessions for any organization embarking on a new data center project or operating existing facilities.
For every decision to build a data center there is one to outsource. From colocation to Platformas-a-Service, from Software-as-a-Service, to building your data center capacity in the cloud, what are the options most appropriate to your organization? This conference theme explores an enterprise’s strategic options for data center outsourcing, weighing up the economic benefits, the risks and the performance characteristics against those of doing it yourself.
The efficiency of the facility is only half the equation – optimizing all the systems that run within it is crucial: from processing to storage, to network to application. The ITO conference stream provides insight on how IT needs drive data center strategy and how that impacts infrastructure requirements.
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INSIGHT Big data
The big deal A new group of data mining technologies promises to change forever the way we sift through our vast stores of data, making it faster and cheaper.
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e’ve all heard the predictions: By 2020, the quantity of electronically stored data will reach 35 trillion gigabytes, a forty-fourfold increase from 2009. We had already reached 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes, by the end of 2010, according to IDC. That’s enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to the moon and back -- about 240,000 miles each way. For alarmists, this is an ominous data storage doomsday forecast. For opportunists, it’s an information gold mine whose riches will be increasingly easy to excavate as technology advances. Enter “big data,” a nascent group of data mining technologies that are making the storage, manipulation and analysis of reams of data cheaper and faster than ever. Once relegated to the supercomputing environment, big data technology is becoming available to the enterprise masses -- and along the way it is changing the way many industries do business. We define big data as the mining of huge sets of structured and unstructured data for useful insights using non-traditional data-sifting tools, including but not limited to Hadoop. Much like “the cloud,” big data has been the subject of much hype and a lot of uncertainty. We asked analysts and big data enthusiasts to explain what it is and isn’t, as well as what big data means to the future of data mining. 78
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Setting the stage for big data “Big data for the enterprises has emerged thanks in part to the lower cost of computing power and the fact that the systems are able to perform multiprocessing. Main memory costs have also dropped, and companies can process more data in memory than ever before. What’s more, it’s easier to link computers together into server clusters. Those three things combined have created big data,” says Carl Olofson, a database management analyst at IDC. “We can not only do those things well, but do them affordably,” he says. “Some of the big supercomputers of the past involved heavy multiprocessing of systems that were linked together into tightly knit clusters, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more because they were specialised hardware. Now we can achieve those kinds of configurations with commodity hardware. That’s what has helped us be able to process more data faster and more cheaply.” Not every company with vast data warehouses can say it’s using big data technology. To qualify as big data, IDC says, the technology must first be affordable, and then meet two out of the three criteria that www.cnmeonline.com
IBM describes as the three V’s: variety, volume and velocity. Variety means data comes in structured and unstructured forms. Volume means the amount of data being gathered and analysed is very large. And velocity refers to the speed at which the data is processed. It “isn’t always hundreds of terabytes,” Olofson says. “Depending on the use case, a few hundred gigabytes could be quite large because of the third dimension, which is speed or time. If I can perform an analytic process against 300GB in a second, and it used to take an hour, that greatly changes what I can do with the results, so it adds value. Big data is the affordable application of at least two out of three of those.”
The open-source connection “A lot of people consider Hadoop and big data to be synonyms. That’s a mistake,” Olofson says. Some implementations of Teradata, MySQL and “clever clustering technologies” that don’t use Hadoop can also be considered big data, he explains. Hadoop, an application environment for big data, has drawn the most attention because
it’s based on MapReduce, an approach common in supercomputing circles but simplified and made elegant by a project largely funded by Google. Hadoop is the predominant implementation of a mix of closely related Apache projects, including the HBase database found in the MapReduce environment. Software developers have responded by coming up with all kinds of techniques to exploit Hadoop and similar advanced technologies -- many of them developed in open-source communities. “They’ve created a dizzying variety of so-called noSQL databases, which are mostly key-value paired databases that optimize either on throughput or variety or size with various techniques,” according to Olofson. The open-source technologies aren’t commercially supported, “so those things are going to have to evolve for a while and will have to shake out, which could take several years. That’s the nascent aspect of big data that won’t come to fruition for a while” in the general marketplace, he adds. In the meantime, IDC expects at least three commercial vendors to offer some type of support services for Hadoop by year’s end. Also, several vendors, such as Datameer, will come out with analytics tools with Hadoop components that let enterprises develop their own applications. Cloudera and Tableau already use Hadoop in their offerings. Upgraded RDBMS Industry-watchers disagree on whether upgraded relational database management systems should also be considered big data technology. “I think it satisfies the criteria of faster, bigger, cheaper,” Olofson says. Teradata, for instance, has made its system more affordable, and it’s a scalable, clustered environment, he adds. But others disagree. “The processing that you ordinarily do using an RDBMS in general, using standard BI tools -- that’s not really big data,” says Marcus Collins, a data management analyst at Gartner. “That processing has been around for a long time.” So, who is really doing big data analytics? A year ago, the primary users of big data technology were large Web companies, such
as Facebook and Yahoo, that wanted to analyze clickstream data. But today, “it’s moving outside the main Web properties into just about any company that you can think of that’s got large volumes of data,” Collins says. Banks, utilities, the intelligence community -- all of them are jumping on the big data bandwagon. Some of the technologies are actively being used by people on the bleeding edge who need the technology now, like those involved in creating Web-based services that are driven by social media. They’re also heavily contributing to these projects.
granular ad-viewing information from DVRs, integrate it with detailed point-of-sale data, and produce customised reports. “Kognitio has an in-memory solution, so a full half of our current entire database can be memory, which means the response time when a customer of ours runs a query literally can be in seconds as opposed to hours and days,” says TRA’s CEO, Mark Lieberman. The database runs on commodity hardware, and TRA uses its own front-end application built in .Net Visual Studio. “We still use a little bit of MySQL, and the user
Big data for the enterprise has emerged thanks in part to the lower cost of computing power and the fact that the systems are able to perform multiprocessing. Main memory costs have also dropped, and companies can process more data “in memory” than ever before. What’s more, it’s easier to link computers together into server clusters. Those three things combined have created big data. In other vertical industries, businesses are realising that much more of their value proposition is information-based than they had previously thought, which will allow big data technologies to gain traction quickly, Olofson says. Couple that with affordable hardware and software, and enterprises find themselves in a perfect storm of business transformation opportunities. New York-based TRA helps organisations measure the value of TV advertising by matching the advertisements received in a given home via TVs and DVRs with buying behavior at the retail checkout counter. The company gathers data from cable company DVRs and grocery store loyalty card programs to make these correlations. TRA’s big data system processes reams of data that represents the second-by-second viewing habits of 1.7 million households -- a feat that would have been impossible without big data technology. It deployed Kognitio’s WX2 database, which allows the company to load, profile and analyse data quickly, collect www.cnmeonline.com
interface was developed with DevExpress,” Lieberman adds. He says that big data has the potential to revolutionise the $70 billion TV ad buying business. Traditional methods of measuring viewership required installing special settop boxes in a sampling of as few as 20,000 households nationwide. Today, data can be analyzed in detail from 2.5 million DVR and cable boxes. “We’re injecting accountability into that $70 billion -- giving advertisers more confidence that TV is a good place to advertise,” Lieberman says. “That’s the big step, and it’s all about big data analytics.” Greg Belkin, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, says the tools used by TRA and others satisfy the velocity, volume and variety requirements to be labeled big data. “This is very poignant in retail because you have a lot of exploding sources of data that haven’t traditionally been mined,” such as social media websites, DVR boxes and grocery store loyalty card data, Belkin says. “It’s data that is so enormous october 2011
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INSIGHT Big data
and complex that it can’t be analysed using traditional database methods, so retailers are turning toward these big data platforms.” Similarly, big data technology has revolutionised business at Catalina Marketing. The company runs a huge customer loyalty database of 2.5 petabytes that has years of purchasing history data for more than 190 million U.S. grocery shoppers. Its largest single database houses a staggering 425 billion rows of data, and the company manages 625 million rows each day in that one database. By analyzing the data, Catalina helps major consumer goods manufacturers and large supermarket chains predict what customers are likely to buy and who will be interested in new products. “We wanted to bring the technology to the data and not the data to the technology,” says Eric Williams, executive vice president and CIO at Catalina. “The technology exists now that allows companies like SAS to move their [analytics] technology into the database. That has exponentially changed the entire corporation. We were doing these things before but had serious limitations that would not allow us to get where we wanted
Three Myths About Big Data There is a good deal of confusion over what big data is and what it can do. Here are three myths about big data: 1. Relational databases can’t scale to very large volumes and therefore can’t be considered big data technologies. (Not true.) 2. Hadoop or, by extension, any MapReduce environment is the best choice for big data regardless of the workload or use case. (Also not true.) 3. The era of schematic database management systems is over. Schema development only gets in the way of big data deployment. (Laughably untrue.) Source: IDC, The Big Deal About Big Data, February 2011
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Big data technology is evolving rapidly.
to go. We had to use homegrown tools, and they were very rudimentary in what they could accomplish. Bringing big data technology to the forefront has changed our entire organisation.” Big data is fundamentally changing the way Bank of America does business, according to Abhishek Mehta, formerly Bank of America’s managing director for big data and analytics, speaking at Hadoop World in October 2010. “I look at Hadoop today as what Linux was 20 years ago. We all have seen what Linux has done in the enterprise software space. It has been massively disruptive. Hadoop will do the same. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when.” Beyond clickstream and transaction analysis, Hadoop allows Bank of America to quickly solve business problems. “Now, as a bank, I can think of eliminating fraud,” Mehta says. “Now I can build a model looking at every incidence of fraud going back five years for every single person, rather than sampling it now, building a model, realising there is an outlier that breaks the model, and then rebuilding the model. Those days are over.” Proceed with caution Big data technology is evolving rapidly. The companies that are using it right now have IT staffs that are exceptionally technically savvy and can adapt with the technology’s www.cnmeonline.com
advancements and their companies’ multiple requirements. “If you’re not in a position to do that, then work with a service provider -- maybe a cloud service -- or wait until these things have reached a point where there’s a number of established software products and services that are supported,” Olofson suggests. “You’ll have something that your business people will understand.” No doubt, data mining has changed forever. But analysts say that big data technology won’t completely replace today’s data warehouse and data mining tools. “Today, data mining is really about building relatively sophisticated models with not very much data,” Gartner’s Collins says. “Now, big data gives you huge volumes of data -- so it could well be that you don’t need as sophisticated a model anymore. “My view is that it will actually augment [the data warehouse market],” Olofson says. “They’ll use a technology like MapReduce, whether Hadoop or some other commercial augmentation, to generate interesting business intelligence data they never could have gotten at before. Then, in order to reuse it and track historical patterns, they will put it in the data warehouse and actually expand its use.” Scale represents another challenge, Collins says, along with “the fact that there are not established architectural patterns on deploying and using this technology. We’re learning as we go.” Some of the technical risks are dissipating with the introduction of prepackaged tools, but the technology is still very much a programming interface -- which is a step backward for business intelligence, he says. For instance, Collins says, “Hadoop is a pretty techie system, and the drive in business intelligence has been to push it down in the enterprise and onto the desktop with a very user-friendly interface. We’ve taken a step back with Hadoop, but new vendors will help put it back into the user community where it needs to be. “[Big data technology] needs to leap out of being in IT, and we have to put tools in the hands of users” in the business units, he adds. “That hasn’t happened yet.”
Strategic ICT Partner
GREEN CHAMPION AWARDS AWARDS CATEGORIES Vendor awards Green Champion – E-waste handling Green Champion – Hardware Green Champion – Management software Green Champion – Product innovation Green Champion – Market education End-user awards Green Champion – Data Centre Green Champion – E-waste Green Champion – Desktop / printing Green Champion – Operational Green Champion – Innovation
Green principles in IT is not just about technology, it is about an organisational mindset. With Sustainable ICT 2011, CNME – the region's premier technology magazine – and CPI, one of the leading publishing houses of the Middle East is bringing together producers and consumers of green technology solutions to discuss and debate the relevance of these solutions to the region, and ways in which adoption can be increased across enterprises in every corner of the Middle East. Sustainable ICT 2011 will play host to more than 100 stakeholders from the ICT industry as they voice concerns and learn from each other on adding value to the bottomline, while being ecologically relevant, with green IT and technology.
To register, visit www.sustainableictme.com
Contacts: Sathya Mithra Ashok Senior Editor, CNME +971 4 440 9111 sathya@cpidubai.com
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how to Turnkey cloud
Build a turnkey private and hybrid cloud Here’s how you as an enterprise can evaluate and understand the essential elements that constitute a turnkey private or hybrid cloud.
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he hype around cloud computing is hard to ignore and as each vendor is trying to put the word “cloud� in front of all its products, enterprises are finding it extremely difficult to sift through the noise and really find which products work best specifically for their data centre. While the ability to utilise the public cloud is extremely appealing due to the 82
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reduced infrastructure management needed in a public rather than private environment, CIOs and data centre managers are hesitant to place important data and applications in the public cloud. With this cautious viewpoint, enterprises are turning to private or hybrid cloud solutions that will enable them to receive the benefits of a public cloud while keeping their infrastructure under their www.cnmeonline.com
control and experience improved agility and infrastructure utilisation-leading to dramatic cost and time savings. Therefore, the popularity in turnkey, ready to go, cloud solutions has skyrocketed over the past year as enterprises are on an active search for the simplest and quickest way to get their private cloud infrastructure up and running. A turnkey cloud promises some appealing benefits like simplicity,
quick roll-out, and cost savings, but many organizations are still perplexed by how to evaluate a turnkey solution-or even what capabilities one should include-and how to integrate it with their existing network, compute and storage infrastructure. To help enterprises evaluate here are the three essential elements that should constitute any turnkey private and/or hybrid cloud solution: 1. Intelligent and reliable automation features: A turnkey cloud solution must be able to automatically provision configurations when needed and decommission devices when not needed. Additionally, it should be able to combine all known devices, discover new devices and compile them into a resource pool. With the introduction of hybrid cloud computing the importance for intelligent automation features significantly increases. Enterprises need to be able to reliably and securely burst into a public cloud when resources are not available in the private cloud. One of the most important elements of ensuring the selection of the correct turnkey solution for an environment is selecting a solution that not only provisions virtualised resources but physical and public cloud resources as well. Today, when organisations think of cloud solutions they seem to jump right to technology that only handles virtualisation. However, this is only a partial solution as enterprises on average have only 50% of their applications virtualised. Therefore, when building a private cloud using a tool that provisions hardware is a necessity to gain the full benefits of a private cloud. The ability to provision and decommission entire hardware and virtualised topologies that include compute, network and storage is a crucial element of a turnkey solution. This feature is crucial to controlling resource sprawl and maximising the utilisation of existing resources. 2. Out-of-the-box adaptors for existing infrastructure: Seamless integration of a cloud management tool into an enterprise’s existing infrastructure is extremely
Seamless integration of a cloud management tool into an enterprise’s existing infrastructure is extremely important as CIOs and data centre managers are trying to get the most out of their existing infrastructure. All environments these days are heterogeneous with equipment from multiple systems, network and storage vendors. important as CIOs and data centre managers are trying to get the most out of their existing infrastructure. All environments these days are heterogeneous with equipment from multiple systems, network and storage vendors. So, when enterprises bring in a private cloud solution it needs to be able to work across these multi-vendor devices. If additional resources need to be added to a workload IT should not have to hesitate because they have a Dell system but would like an HP system. Similar to the frustration that arises if someone gets a flat tire and has a Goodyear right around the corner but all they can use is Michelin, a turnkey solution that is not able to provision a wide variety of devices can cause a lot of headaches for IT. There are thousands of hardware devices and several virtualisation vendors that exist today and writing an adaptor for each of these resources is extremely time consuming which is why enterprises need to look for tools that have pre-built adaptors for most of the popular hardware devices and virtual resources from vendors including Dell, IBM, HP, NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, among others. By creating a private cloud out of existing hardware it not only saves on time, but also creates significant CAPEX savings by re-utilizing existing resources and spare capacity for new workloads instead of purchasing new equipment. 3. Predefined templates for commonly used compute, network and storage configurations: It is important to first www.cnmeonline.com
mention that without predefined templates a cloud solution cannot be turnkey. The initial starting point to ensure this requirement is met is looking for the library of predefined templates. The greatest expense for building a private cloud is in the designing and crafting of the templates for the topologies that will frequently be used. Additionally, with most cloud solutions one can also build custom templates that need to take the existing environment in the data centre into consideration. When the turnkey cloud solution offered a pre-built library of templates for commonly used topologies then enterprises are able to significantly speed up the time it takes to get a private cloud up and running, thus accelerating their time to value. These predefined templates can deliver 50% to 90% percent of the design for an environment and all they require is IT making easy customisations to make the template fit their specific environment perfectly. The purpose for a turnkey solution is to be able to quickly and reliably convert an existing static environment into a self-service dynamic environment. And in order for this environment to be successful the turnkey solution must contain the three elements discussed. These capabilities will be crucial for enterprises looking to deploy a turnkey private or hybrid cloud. Garima Thockchom is VP of Marketing at Gale Technologies, a leading provider of infrastructure automation software solutions that power IT as a Service for labs, enterprises, and service providers. october 2011
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how to Outsourcing
Mitigate risk in the W outsourcing market As global sourcing vendors are being given more responsibility from a technical and business perspective, it is more important than ever to continuously evaluate and monitor vendor performance. Forrester has some recommendations on how to mitigate risk and derive value from your vendor relationships.
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hen it comes to global outsourcing, particular in India, the risks and the stakes are higher than ever. Global sourcing vendors are being given more responsibility from a technical and business perspective, and they are being given greater access to internal systems and customers. At the same time, the increasingly volatile, inconsistent, and expensive labor pool in India makes this increased trust much riskier. Given these realities, it is even more important today to continuously evaluate and monitor vendor performance. Even as many mature sourcing and vendor management (SVM) groups focus on advanced topics like establishing new governance models and driving innovation, conversations with enterprise reveal that it’s all too easy to neglect the seemingly mundane risks related to employee attrition, questionable vendor viability, and the risks associated with the
how to Outsourcing
increasingly popular managed services engagement model. To mitigate risk and maintain value from vendor relationships, Forrester recommends that SVM executives look to:
Ensure quality processes and standards are behind vendor Promises Some companies assume that all vendors in India (whether it is IBM, Infosys, Accenture, or other small vendors) are adhering to the same high- quality standards. This is not true. The top tier Indian vendors (e.g., Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro) ignited this industry by delivering excellence, in large part, by adhering to the highest possible quality coding and delivery standards. Today the most important certification, CMMI Level 5, is the standard that all vendors use, but many vendors, particularly newer or smaller vendors, have either not bothered to get this certification or have not gotten this certification for all parts of their business. SVM executives must audit or demand proof of relevant certification (third-party certification from an auditor such as KPMG) for the teams and facilities that are supporting their business.
Audit staff resource qualifications and certifications Are fresh 21- or 22-year-old graduates given a two-week training course in advanced business application programming (ABAP) before they are set loose on your SAP system? Have they been certified in SAP,
either by SAP or through a rigorous internal, but externally certified, training program? The importance of staff certifications applies to software work, but also to more critical roles. For example, clients often pay a premium for project managers, but many of these project managers are not project management professional (PMP)-certified or today customers see phony CVs with inflated experience levels on a regular basis, and the clients that insist on interviewing project team members are often shocked by the discrepancy between resumes and actual qualifications. The easiest way to solve this problem is to require proof of certification from relevant vendors or standard bodies. Evaluate a vendor’s HR and recruiting capabilities The HR and recruiting functions at your vendor partners have never been more important. Attrition in India is skyrocketing. Your vendors need to have state-of-the-art HR and recruiting capabilities to retain staff, keep them happy, and to employ new staff. SVM executives need to audit these capabilities to ensure that the vendors they are selecting have made the right investments in HR (especially if they are not in the top tier, or if there is unusually high turnover on their accounts).
Even as many mature sourcing and vendor management (SVM) groups focus on advanced topics like establishing new governance models and driving innovation, conversations with enterprises reveal that it’s all too easy to neglect the seemingly mundane risks related to employee attrition, questionable vendor viability, and the risks associated with the increasingly popular managed services engagement model. 86
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Look forinnovation from vendors with deep vertical/industry expertise Vendors that have clients concentrated in specific verticals often claim to have expertise in those same verticals, however, customers can’t take that as an indicator of vertical capability. SVM executives must evaluate the vendors’ vertical experts and the vertical intellectual property in order to confirm vertical capability.
Evaluate pricing and productivity issues in the context of quality While customers are generally less price sensitive they need to be aware of the productivity-price trade-off. An over emphasis on rates and rate cards and a neglect of seniority metrics can result in very low rates, as well as less productive and experienced people on your projects. To gain transparency into developer productivity and code quality, some companies are using tools, such as those from vendors like Cast, to evaluate the quality of externally developed code and ensure that it meets certain coding and productivity standards.
Beware of managed services engagements obfuscating reality While managed services engagements can be extremely beneficial for clients, in this tight labour market; customers must ensure that the managed service model is not just a vehicle for hiding junior resources or short-cutting parts of the software development life cycle (SDLC) in order to save money. Service-level agreements (SLAs) have to be sophisticated enough to prevent this, and SVM executives who are concerned about their vendors’ managed service maturity may still need to evaluate key project team members.
how to Collaboration
Improve collaboration with development and operations IT managers struggle with getting development and operations (DevOps) teams working together more efficiently. Here are six ways infrastructure and operations (I&O) can improve collaboration.
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managers have long bemoaned the tension between “change-thebusiness” (development) and “runthe-business” (operations) IT teams and their activities. In fact, most organisations suffer this curse, and stereotypes that reflect this animosity abound. As IT organisations struggle to deal with the changing IT and business landscapes, the concept of DevOps (i.e. development and operations) has been singled out by many as the way in which infrastructure and operations (I&O) can work more efficiently with other IT silos to benefit the entire business. More specifically, Forrester defines DevOps as: A set of processes, methods, and systems for communication, collaboration, and integration among the IT functions responsible for application development, infrastructure and operations, and quality assurance; with the functions working together to produce fit-for-purpose and timely software products and services. For DevOps to work — and it must — I&O teams must accept that 1) the sibling rivalry between app dev and IT ops ultimately hurts the business and 2) IT is now a business expense rather than a business function. While both parties must transform their behaviors, I&O leaders can begin to build a tighter relationship with dev groups by considering the following six proactive measures: 1. Change your change management As noted, many ops groups have change management in place. Ensure that the process is being executed consistently. Any changes performed outside the process should be identified and rectified immediately. Without
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execution compliance at or very near 100%, changes will continue to be risky and dev discontent with ops will persist.
2. Communicate more often with the app dev group to increase its knowledge of operations IT teams need to get better at communicating successes to the business and to other IT groups. Aim to adapt work practices to ensure greater exposure between IT silos and greater collaboration on new IT initiatives. 3. Educate app dev on the evolution of I&O as a services-centric organisation I&O leaders should extend ITIL and IT service management education and training to app dev and enterprise architecture in the context of why it’s important to them and to the business service life cycle as a whole. The 2007 introduction of ITIL v3 framework is no longer ops-centric, it accounts for all phases of the service life cycle, including those driven and fulfilled by dev. This is an introduction into modern thinking around IT delivery to meet business needs. The right approach will compel dev to desire a role in ITIL and not feel they’re being forced into it. www.cnmeonline.com
4. Consider app dev as “service dev” a subcomponent of the overall IT service. Sitting alongside service design activities, any written code is ultimately part of a more broadly defined IT service that gets delivered to the rightful consumers of that service. I&O execs should therefore build on the aforementioned educational activities to position the somewhat isolated app dev role into a more central service dev role. Instead of isolating dev group members as the narcissistic “them” who look down on “us,” embrace this team as partners in providing relevant services to your joint customers. Key service metric monitoring and liberal use of feedback mechanisms will need to be in place to ensure that mindsets, and resulting behaviours, are actually changing. 5. Understand and manage the diversity of views on IT delivery Senior management needs to ensure that there is a better mix of skills and personality types within IT functional groups. Review people management and development processes and not only frameworks in conjunction with HR. This will identify issues and gaps in IT people but also study their knowledge, skills, and continues development. 6. Integrate I&O’s mission statement with the business Stop repeating the IT-to-business alignment mantra and get on with making IT a crucial business enabler. IT doesn’t align with the business; IT is the business! Start by abandoning the nebulous and ill-conceived alignment and become integrated. There should be no I&O employees, just employees of and contractors to the business that provide technology-enabled capabilities to the business.
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Products Mobility
Stunning and speedy
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he Galaxy S II builds on Samsung’s successful line of Galaxy Android phones with new display technology, a dual-core processor and 4G speeds. The first thing I noticed when I picked up the Galaxy S II was how thin and light it is. It felt pretty good in hand, too--less plasticky than some of the previous-generation Galasxy S phones. Overall, the phone has an attractive, minimalist look. One nice feature is that the face is made of Gorilla Glass, which is the same scratch-resistant glass as that of the Apple iPhone 4. Measuring 4.9 inches tall by 2.6 inches wide by 0.3 inch thick, the Galaxy S II is remarkably svelte.
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The Galaxy S II’s display is gorgeous--one of the best we’ve ever seen. It uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus display technology. According to Samsung, Super AMOLED Plus displays have 50% more subpixels than the first-generation Super AMOLED displays and perform even better that their predecessors in bright light. Finally we got to review a phone with the latest version of Android--version 2.3 (aka Gingerbread). Though the Galaxy S II also runs a Samsung-built overlay, TouchWiz 4.0, most of the new features in Gingerbread remain untouched. The user interface for the cameras differs from the stock Gingerbread version, but you can still switch between the frontwww.cnmeonline.com
facing camera and the back-facing one via a consistent icon at the top of the camera viewer. Google introduced this small but useful feature in Gingerbread in anticipation of an onslaught of smartphones with frontfacing cameras due out this year. The new version of TouchWiz comes with new Music, Game, and Readers Hubs that join the Social and Media Hubs. Like all Galaxy phones, the S II provides the Media Hub for your movie and TVwatching pleasure. Video looked fantastic on the handset’s display and played back smoothly. Even if you don’t like Samsung’s Media Hub, you’re going to want to watch a lot of movies and TV shows on this phone. Like many other recent high-end phones, the Galaxy S II has an 8-megapixel camera plus a front-facing camera for video calls. I was very impressed with the image quality of my photos, both indoor shots and outdoor ones. The shutter speed on the camera was fast enough to capture photos of sports, kids, and other quick-moving subjects. The Galaxy S II is powered by a dual-core processor, and the dual-core power was apparent in just about every aspect of the phone’s performance. Scrolling was fluid in apps and Web pages, video played back smoothly, and I zipped speedily through the phone’s menus. If you’re in the market for a new phone this spring, you’re going to have some tough decisions to make. The decision-making process really comes down to variations in the Android overlays. TouchWiz 4.0 adds some cool features and functions to the platform. Like the Galaxy S II, it’s a 4G dual-core phone, but it runs plain Android 2.2 (which I hope will soon be upgraded to Android 2.3). VERDICT: Aye, definitely
Products Mobility
Thinking different
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he ThinkPad Tablet, like its laptop brethren, has its sights squarely set on business users. And like the ThinkPad laptops, Lenovo largely succeeds in putting together a business-worthy package with its own design, features, and associated bundled software. The ThinkPad Tablet has a starkly different design as compared with its sibling, the IdeaPad. It has four physical buttons on the front, situated along the bottom beneath the screen, and is optimised for use in portrait orientation. The specs of the ThinkPad Tablet ring familiar for an Android 3.1 Honeycomb tablet. It packs a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of memory, and a choice of 16GB ($499), 32GB ($569), or 64GB ($699) for internal storage. The overall photo-viewing experience compares favorably to the Apple iPad 2 Colours were bright but not oversaturated, and skin tones looked warmer and more natural than they have on other Android tablets we’ve tested. The display had an impressive viewing angle, as you’d expect from IPS technology (Lenovo claims it’s a 178 degree angle), and it has Corning Gorilla Glass to prevent against accidental scratches and breakage. Other familiar specs include Wi-Fi and 3G (all models have a SIM card slot, but 3G certification will be complete later this fall), 92
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a slew of sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, assisted GPS, ambient light sensor), as well as dual cameras. As with its IdeaPad K1, Lenovo has made some tweaks to the stock Android Honeycomb interface to improve usability. The three core home screen navigation buttons are redesigned to be more cleanly defined the recently opened apps scroll offers a way to kill apps and a redesigned settings pop-up menu, to provide wider access to frequently changed settings than Android provides by default. The ThinkPad Tablet has some purposeful inclusions that Lenovo counts on holding appeal for business and IT users. Some of these, however, have appeal for consumers, too. For starters, Lenovo is the first to bring a largescreen Android tablet to market with pen input; the company uses N-trig’s digitiser technology. Unlike other tablets that have pen input, the touch sensor grid was not immediately visible or distracting in use. Lenovo also packs the ThinkPad Tablet www.cnmeonline.com
with ports. Along the lower left (portrait), or bottom edge (landscape), sits the full-size USB 2.0 port for use with USB devices like a flash drive or hard drive. Lenovo’s business-friendly tweaks go beyond the hardware. In addition to providing the Lenovo Launch Zone and handy App Wheel—both handy, customisable home screen app widgets first introduced with the IdeaPad K1—the company provides preloaded software applications aimed at business users. For the corporate IT market that Lenovo caters to with its ThinkPad brand, the tablet has a handful of custom features that court this audience. The ThinkPad Tablet looks and feels bulky, but it’s the first tablet to truly target business users with its configuration. The ThinkPad’s pen input is a benefit; its poor built-in speaker a deterrent, especially for presenters who need passable audio. Still, together with the Folio case, this tablet makes a compelling case for business users and even students who want to switch more of their day-to-day tasks to a tablet. VERDICT: Aye (if you are a business user)
Last word
Next issue October 2011
Technology focus:
Business continuity
Technology focus:
Collaboration technologies From web conferencing and chat, to video conferencing and unified communications, from closed-loop enterprise communications to social media, options for collaboration tools abound for the modern organisation. CNME asks how organisations can pick the right tool from the choices that exist, and the elements they need to keep in mind to gain the highest productivity from their investments.
Vertical focus:
Construction and real estate Construction is one of the biggest spenders on IT solutions in the region. While the recession might have affected some geographies, others still continue to build and spend massively on the latest in IT solutions. We ask what specialised solutions this industry requires, and whether it is getting the right support from vendors and partners.
Credibility James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
Higher Ambition Michael Beer, Flemming Norrgren and co-authors Book Want to make the world a better place? Start with your workplace. Beer and Norrgren say that by keeping one eye on the greater good, you can improve your company while producing benefits for society at large. This book synthesises the experience of 36 CEOs, many of whom inherited failing companies, and explains how they ran their companies in socially responsible ways, became more approachable leaders, and still kept shareholders happy. Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value (Harvard Business Review Press)
Computer News Middle East
You can have state-of-the-art infrastructure and the best in software solutions, but if your storage crashes on you or your connectivity goes down, how are you going to get to the information you need to keep your organisation on your feet? CNME reveals the latest in business continuity solutions and strategies.
ICT Achievement Awards 2011 9th October 2011 Sheikh Rashid Hall, Dubai World Trade Centre www. computernewsme.com/ ictachievementawards2011
Infrastructure Strategies 2011 31st October 2011 Dubai (venue to be confirmed) www.infrastructurestrategiesme.com
Sustainable ICT 2011
WHAT WE’RE READING
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Book Getting people—both above and below you on the organisational ladder—to listen to you takes credibility. The authors of The Leadership Challenge have expanded on that book by updating this one. Originally published in 1993, Credibility provides new insights and interviews from leaders who have built trust and used it to acheive great things. Kouzes and Posner don’t just talk to leaders, though, but also their constituents. One hundred thousand people were asked what qualities they look for in those they follow, and Kouzes and Posner came up with some surprising tips. For example: Build hope by acknowledging reality but refusing to accept that bad predictions will inevitably come true. Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It ( Jossey-Bass)
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21st November 2011 Dubai (venue to be confirmed) www.sustainableictme.com
Online
For the latest in news, analysis, features, case studies, and blog articles on trends and issues in the ICT industry across the globe and in the Middle East, please visit www.computernewsme.com
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