Strategic ICT Partner
Technology Partners
60 Mins Show dates: 20-24 October 2013, Dubai World Trade Centre
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AT GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK
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Exhibition hours: 11am -6pm
Regional cloud leaders celebrated
Cloud computing took centre stage at GITEX Technology Week yesterday, with a series of cutting-edge projects and innovations recognised at the inaugural Cloud Awards. A highlight of today’s Cloud Confex, the region’s largest integrated cloud exhibition and conference, the Cloud Awards celebrated winners in five distinct categories based on innovation, integration, functionality, value, usability and scalability credentials. The winners were selected from a strong field of over 100 entries by an expert panel comprising Todd Thibodeaux, President and Chief Executive Officer of IT Industry Association COMPTIA; Daniele Catteddu, Managing Director EMEA, Cloud Security Alliance; and Kuldeep Bhatnagar, IT Advisor, Environment Agency, Gover nment of Abu Dhabi. W inners from across the Middle East spanned a wide range of industries, including 4 CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
WHAT’S INSIDE
Meru launches ‘industry’s fastest’ 802.11ac access point at GITEX Meru Networks this week used GITEX as a platform to regionally launch the new AP832, which it says the market’s fastest 802.11ac access point.
The AP832 delivers up to three times the performance of competing 802.11n access points, Meru said in a 4 CONTINUED ON PAGE 3
Fluke Networks turns spotlight on product innovation
Alcatel-Lucent takes BYOD by the horns
GITEX preview: ManageEngine
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Meru... statement. “We have put two 11ac radios into the product, whereas most of our competitors just put one 11ac in. It’s future-proofing our customers because, today, most of the devices are 11n but, three years from now, everything will be 11ac,” Manish Rai, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Meru Networks, told 60 Minutes. Adoptions of the 802.11ac standard is being driven by the quickly growing number of mobile devices, the BYOD trend and high-bandwidth applications such as HD video, video conferencing and cloudbased services and storage. Consumer devices such as
smartphones and tablets are already available with 802.11ac support. The speed of the device can also be attributable to the vendor’s Virtual Cell, a singlechannel option provided by the MobileFlex architecture, Rai said. This also makes the device far more useful in largeevent environments, such as GITEX, he added. “Generally, each client looks at the access points near it, and it makes the decision on which one to connect to. It’s a sticky-client problem – your device will keep dropping signal bars until it’s really far away, and then it’ll latch onto the next access point. It affects
“We have put two 11ac radios into the product, whereas most of our competitors just put one 11ac in. It’s future-proofing our customers because, today, most of the devices are 11n but, three years from now, everything will be 11ac”
Manish Rai, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Meru Networks
your performance. But since we advertise the same mac address on every access point by virtualising the RF layer, the client sees it as one giant access point,” he explained. Rai also said that Meru believes the new AP832 to be one of the “greenest” 11ac access points to have hit the market in recent years due to the fact that it runs on standard power over Ethernet (PoE). While most competitors require the more power-hungry PoE-plus for full functionality, Meru’s AP832 runs squarely on standard PoE, he said. The Meru AP832 is available now with a list price of US$1,295.
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4 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Gulf Air for Best Big Data Solution Project. Other winners include Mubadala Development Company for Best Cloud Security Implementation, National Bank of Abu Dhabi for Best Data Center Infrastructure Project, Abu Dhabi Police’s GIS Center for Security for Best Gover nment Implementation of Cloud Solution, and the UAE General Civil Authority for Best V irutalization Solution Implementation. Bahrain’s Gulf Air triumphed
in the Big Data Solutions Project category, with Qatar First Bank and Qatar’s Supreme Education Council
claiming the runners up spots. Kuldeep Bhatnagar, IT Advisor, Environment Agency, Gover nment of Abu
Fluke Networks turns spotlight on product innovation Fluke Networks, established around 20 years ago, is specially focused on IT networking and troubleshooting as a business in the region. At GITEX 2013, the ICT event being held at Dubai World Trade Center, the company is showcasing a host of products from its portfolio. One of the products that the company announced earlier in the year was TruView. This is an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution. “It allows an enterprise customer to monitor proactively their applications across the complex network and diagnose when there are issues and what they are in a more proactive fashion. This is a segment which is growing by
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15 percent per year,” says Gary W Staley, Vice President, Sales, Fluke Networks. There is also a sub segment in
which the company is competing called—Application Network Performance Monitoring, which is from a network perspective. Both these products along with others such as version 11 of Optiview xg, which is under Portable Network Analysis and Troubleshooting section of products, are on display at the 5 day-long event. Last several years, Fluke Networks has seen a shift in business driven by BYOD, cloud and virtualisation. “Our customers’ networks are transformed by these technologies. Networks while it may simplify their lives, it becomes more complex to manage. And this is a good thing for us because our tools specifically are built to simplify
Dhabi, praised Gulf Air’s achievement. “It is incredible that Gulf Air implemented Big Data technology so effectively, embracing opensource software with an in-house team, building rich competency and saving considerable expenditure,” he said. Best Cloud Security Implementation was won by the UAE’s Mubadala Development Company, with runners up from Axa Insurance and Etihad Etisalat (Mobily).
that complexity from an operations perspective,” explains Staley. In the last year based on these trends, the company has rolled out new and more advanced solutions that help manage those challenges that customers deal with. One of the major highlights in the last one year for the company has been product innovation. “We have a KPI called, product vitality. It is a measurement done internally that gauges in the past three years, how much innovation have we driven? The way we measure that is how much of our sales are from new products that we developed in the last three years? We call it a vitality index. Over 50 percent of our sales today are from solutions that didn’t exist three years ago. It is a robust product vitality approach,” says Staley. From a channel perspective, the company will “continue to build out its channel capabilities.”
Alcatel-Lucent takes BYOD by the horns Alcatel-Lucent this week took BYOD by the horns with the launch of its Unified Access approach to wired and wireless networks. The vendor claimed that its Unified Access solution is the first converged, wired and wireless, solution to address networking challenges such as the rapid proliferation of mobile devices and multimedia services among enterprise employees. Unified Access – an extension to the vendor’s Converged Campus Network solution - offers a selection of secure BYOD services that enable employees and customers to use corporate or personal wired or wireless devices on enterprise networks, Alcatel-Lucent said. This is key to enabling more productive employees and, by extension, more productive organisations, Jan Zuurbier, Vice President, Global
Sales and Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, told 60 Minutes. “What we see in the market right now is a big transformation, and underneath that transformation, there’s a bigger demand on CIOs,” he said. “From our perspective, you need to focus on the user, rather
than taking a device-centric or an infrastructure-centric approach.” Indeed, recalling conversations that he had been having with customers throughout the first two days of GITEX, Zuurbier said that these points are resonating with many regional IT managers and
CIOs. “To give an example, many people think that the device is the most important thing. From our perspective, you don’t have to look at the device – you have to look at the user that is behind it, and understand the way that they’re using the technology. This means that he can use and have access to anything he likes – the device is just a portal,” he explained. To really push this thinking forward, Alcatel-Lucent has been working with its long-time technology partner, Aruba Networks, to offer a full suite of BYOD services. Alcatel-Lucent claimed that the partnership provided a best-of-breed approach and eliminated vendor lock-in. Unified Access can be implemented via software upgrades without replacing existing equipment, the vendor added.
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GITEX preview: ManageEngine What is the main theme of your presence at GITEX this year? ManageEngine offers real-time IT management solutions for the new speed of business. Real-time IT management calls for IT to make the most of today’s game-changing technologies and deliver immediate services to organizations that are operating at an ever-increasing pace. It compels IT to operate at the speed of business, leveraging technologies to support new business models and applications. Are you releasing/launching anything new at GITEX 2013? If so, what? 2013 has seen several new versions and upgrades of some of our existing products and we will be highlighting these at GITEX. How is your company presenting itself at GITEX this year to differentiate it from competitors? ManageEngine challenges the status quo of complex, expensive IT management products delivered by high-overhead sales organizations with highmargin product portfolios. We are spearheading the move to IT efficiency with a full suite of realtime IT management solutions for real-world business challenges. What are the key trends influencing your approach to GITEX 2013 and the offerings you are pushing?
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could improve productivity, reduce costs, bolster security, ensure reliability and eventually offer better service to their clientele. ManageEngine precisely brings in these benefits.
Nirmal Kumar Manoharan, Regional Director (Sales-Middle East) at ManageEngine
Since our participation in GITEX last year, we have seen an increased interest from organizations in the Middle East for our strong portfolio of IT Security, Help Desk and Integrated IT Management Solutions. We have solutions that help manage and monitor the security posture of the users and the network, to make sure they are in compliance with the established policies and practices. This has been in our focus over the last few years . Mobility / BYOD/ Mobile apps with powerful cloud computing, IT Management smart integration,
Enhanced workflows that works across products are some of the trends influencing our approach to GITEX 2013. How have you seen the Middle East respond to those trends in question, and how did you think that will change over the next year? The IT divisions of enterprises, banks, financial institutions, construction firms, oil companies, telecom houses and educational institutions in the UAE and other countries in the Middle-East are looking for software solutions that
How do you think GITEX 2013 will be different to previous editions? This will be our seventh year at this showcase ICT event and will be ManageEngine’s biggest event yet in 2013. Middle East is a very important region for us and GITEX is the perfect platform for ManageEngine to reach out to organisations looking for reliable solutions to secure, control and manage their IT infrastructure. What are the key offerings you will be presenting at GITEX – sum up their key and unique features. At GITEX 2013, ManageEngine will be showcasing over 25 software products covering the entire spectrum of IT Infrastructure Management. Key products include solutions for Network Performance Management, Server & Application Management, IT Help Desk, Active Directory Management, Log Management & SIEM, Privileged Password Management, Network Security Management, Desktop and Mobile Device Management and Unified IT Management. How important is GITEX as a platform and event to your organisation? Very important. Being the biggest
ICT event in the Middle East, GITEX is the perfect platform for ManageEngine to reach out to the organizations looking for reliable solutions to secure, control and manage their IT ecosystems.
Highlights
What is the top reason you invest in GITEX — do you see a healthy return on your investment, or is it more about presence/visibility? GITEX has been a very promising platform, both in terms of ROI and visibility. The response that we have had over the years has been very overwhelming and we believe it would be fair to say GITEX has been a perfect launch pad for several of our products. What does your company hope to achieve by appearing at GITEX 2013? We look forward to meeting a lot of prospective customers as well as forging potential partnerships. We plan to exhibit a full spectrum of enterprise IT management and IT security products at GITEX 2013. Our product managers and technology experts will be at the event (Booth #A7-10 Hall 7) to hold product demonstrations and address customer queries. What are your company’s main recent achievements in the Middle East market? ManageEngine’s strong portfolio of IT Security Solutions have attracted the attention of the organizations from the Middle East in a big way this year.
Publisher Dominic De Sousa, COO Nadeem Hood, Commercial Director Rajashree R Kumar, Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan Editors Ben Rossi, Tom Paye, Janees Reghelini, James Dartnell Circulation Manager Rajeesh M, Production Manager James Tharian, Senior Designers Analou Balbero, Glenn Roxas, Digital Services Manager Tristan Troy Magma Web Coordinator Jarris Pedroso Photographers Jay Colina, Abdul Kader
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