60mins Day 4 - 6 PM (2013) by CPI GITEX

Strategic ICT Partner

Technology Partners

60 Mins Show dates: 20-24 October 2013, Dubai World Trade Centre

AT GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK

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Exhibition hours: 11am -6pm

Brocade shifts focus from exhibition to customers

WHAT’S INSIDE

Brocade is using GITEX to meet key customers and clients this year, as opposed to simply proclaiming its presence at the show, the company’s EMEA Vice President, Marcus Jewell, said today. Jewell told 60 Minutes that Brocade made a conscious decision not to exhibit at GITEX on its own this week, and instead opted for exhibiting off the backs of partners such as Mindware. That’s a global decision on all trade shows. Basically, there’s to 4 CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Despec highlights Pantum printers at GITEX 2013 Pantum printers, distributed by Despec in the region, have received a lot of attention from the market at GITEX 2013, being held in Dubai World Trade Center. The distributor had signed up with the brand, along with another called Trust, earlier in the year.

“One is on printer supplies and the other on accessories side. This year has been good for us, Pantum is getting focused at GITEX 2013, and many customers are keen on it. Everyone is looking for 4 CONTINUED ON PAGE 4

Wearable devices part of airport of the future

Kodak Alaris makes its first appearance at GITEX GITEX Interview: SUSE

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Brocade... many confusing messages, we believe, in the market at the minute,” he explained. “There are three things that are confusing people. And looking at how people are presenting themselves, we’re actually quite pleased that we didn’t exhibit, because we think we need another year for the message to settle down.” The three big terms confusing GITEX visitors this year are cloud, software-defined networking (SDN), and network function evolution (NFE), Jewell said. Because of the confused messaging around these buzz terms, Brocade thought it better to simply hold close meetings with key customers, he added. “It’s been really interesting just to focus on meeting with our key clients. We’ve had a lot of good ministry meetings, and we’ve got a lot of large deals and prospects,” Jewell said. From these meetings, Jewell explained that Brocade was able to understand some of the key pain points facing business heads in the region. He said that he’d sensed a lot

of confusion about some emerging technologies, and that Brocade was attempting to bring a clearer message about these trends to the table. “I think the presence of some people has been very good, and all of our competitors have very good products – we respect all of them – but we think the messaging could be a lot clearer,” he added. “I think people have probably left with more things to worry about rather than getting solutions and I think that’s the wrong thing. I think they should come to a show and leave with clarity on what steps they need to make, as opposed to more questions to ask, and that’s what customers have told us they’ve found.” Despite this, Jewell said that Brocade was in no way writing GITEX off – the trade show was simply more about customers than exhibiting this year for Brocade. “We’ll be back next year with a big presence because I think we’ve learnt a lot from how other people have gone,” he said.

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Wearable devices part of airport of the future: SITA Lab report

Smart watches, smart glasses and other wearable computing devices will be part of the airport of the future, according to the latest findings from SITA Lab. The technology research team of the air transport industry’s IT provider SITA has conducted the earliest trials into the use of wearable computing

at airlines and airports and issued its findings in a paper released today. Technology observers are touting wearable computing as the next big thing that could re-define how we use and interact with information. The biggest buzz is around smart 4 CONTINUED ON PAGE 5

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Kodak Alaris makes its first appearance at GITEX

Kodak Alaris is making its first appearance at GITEX since its creation last month – and is marking its debut by unveiling the Capture Pro Software v4.5. Having been acquired by U.K. Kodak Pension Plan on 3rd September, the company have introduced two new versions of the software. V4.5 has flexible mark detection software, meaning documents can be scanned by corresponding index fields, and can scan “300400 pages per minute”. David Whitton, Cluster Manager, Eastern Cluster, Kodak Alaris, said: “The huge advantage of the

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Capture Pro v4.5 system is the ability to index documents with this content management solution. We see massive potential for this product both in a commercial and governmental market.” “In this day and age businesses need electronic as well as paper copies of a plethora of documents. This is a fantastic market to be in, and with our strong heritage we are confident these products will be a success.” Whitton is optimistic that the company can recover following the bankruptcy of former parent firm Eastman Kodak:“Kodak Alaris has always been the hidden gem

of the Kodak organization. Our division had a turnover of over $450million, which was often being spent elsewhere in paying off debt, so now we can really invest in this business, and not be held back by other branches. “I really think there’s a piece of the action here for everyone in the Middle East. We’re currently exploring opportunities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and have developed partners out here such as Emirates MBD and HSBC, and we’re proud to say we’re providing scanning solutions and supporting those solutions for those companies.”

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DESPEC... something new, which they haven’t seen earlier,” said Jaison Korath, CEO, Despec. With 23 brands being showcased at the week-long exhibition, the company has got more organised in terms of regional presence. It has a solid presence in Lebanon and Jordan in the LEVANT region and boasts of a wide reach within these areas. And now the company is also concentrating on Africa, where it has been present for the last four years and has had 50 to 60 percent growth year-on-year. “We are present in five countries in the African region and are in the process of adding new ones. We are growing in phases in this region,” said Korath. “By the end of the current year, we will see the company opening up in Oman and Qatar in the Middle East region.” According to Korath, it is critical to ensure that its shareholders are making profit. “We need to maintain our growth and want to focus on the profitability aspect. Business is there and sales will come but at the end of the day, our shareholders’ profitability is an important factor,” he further commented. This is something the company will focus on in 2014 along with having quality sales rather than quantity. Known for brands such as HP and Wacom, Despec’s theme at GITEX 2013 is to be a one-stop distributor for all product range. “There is business for everyone,” concluded Korath, who also urged the market to compete in a healthy manner that will create better opportunities for all players.

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SITA Lab... watches and smart glasses, helped by launches from high profile consumer giants, Sony, Samsung, and Google. It is estimated that more than 1.2 million smart watches will be shipped in 2013. A less-developed wearable market until very recently has been smart headgear. However, Google grabbed the headlines in early 2013 with the launch of a head-mounted display device called Google Glass to a select group of users. SITA Lab was one of a few selected developers to receive both the Google Glass and Vuzix M100 devices before their public launch, in order to evaluate them. It carried out tests for a variety of uses in airline and airport settings. Jim Peters, Chief Technology Officer, SITA, speaking at the Europe Aviation ICT Forum in Vienna, said:

“Wearable devices like Google Glass offer new opportunities to mobilize staff, keeping their hands free, while keeping them connected to the traditional check-in and reservation systems. Interaction can be via video analysis of what a staff member is looking at, like a boarding pass or bag tag, or voice recognition, or a combination of both.” “It is no major surprise that our research into this developing technology shows that there are issues to address. This is inevitable with any new technology. SITA Lab saw some of the same challenges when testing the first smartphones several years ago.” As part of its testing, SITA Lab developed an application called SWIFT Boarding using the smart headgear’s built-in camera as a

scanner and the heads-up display. The aim was to allow agents in the boarding area to securely scan and verify both a boarding pass and passport simultaneously wearing smart glasses. Both documents are held side by side while the app matches the two to ensure they belong to the same person. As a proof of concept the SWIFT application was a success. Travel documents and loyalty cards can be scanned by smart glasses. However, the devices are not fast enough yet to be able to meet the high speed passenger processing requirements needed at airports. Matching the documents takes longer than the industry’s one second benchmark making it unviable as an alternative to existing systems, until more powerful smart glasses are developed. Peters added: “Specifically, our research at SITA has shown that for any type of use in the air transport industry the technology needs to be

more robust to avoid breakages and the cost will have to come down. The camera quality will also need to be enhanced. Currently it requires near perfect light conditions within the airport for scanning documents to be successful. Other areas to be addressed include bandwidth for widespread use, battery life and of course the cultural and social issues both for passengers and employees.” Many of these same issues were identified by SITA Lab in the early days of the smartphone and the expectation is that they will disappear as new devices are released over the next 12-18 months. When that happens the potential that wearable computing promises may lead to new and innovative uses by the air transport industry. Early experimentation such as this research by SITA Lab is a key process to discover what new technologies can offer to the industry.

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GITEX Interview: SUSE What is the main theme of your presence at GITEX this year? SUSE is exhibiting on SAP’s exhibition stand as one of its key strategic partners, as we work through close collaboration with SAP, customers worldwide benefit from tightly integrated products and services around SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. SUSE leads with SAP on Linux, as 70 percent of all SAP applications running on Linux run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. How is your company presenting itself at GITEX this year to differentiate it from competitors? SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, interoperable Linux and cloud infrastructure solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 20 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed – today and tomorrow. What are the key trends influencing your approach to GITEX 2013 and the offerings you are pushing? The growing market movement toward open source software, cloud computing, Big Data, in-memory computing, and UNIX to Linux migration are important trends in

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our market. SUSE offers software infrastructure solutions optimised for computing environments and industries. SUSE solutions that allow customers to deliver missioncritical performance using physical hardware, virtual systems, cloudbased infrastructure–even integrated systems. Enterprises from a wide variety of industries rely on SUSE solutions to run their business more efficiently and cost effectively. 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? Middle East is on fast track as far as IT development goes and the one of the growing trend globally is Enterprises adopting Linux for their mission critical applications. With more and more IT Enterprises looking to automate & consolidate their enterprise, SAP has grown many folds in last few years. These trends will continue to go on next few years while slowly PaaS and cloud adoption will grow. What are the key offerings you are presenting at GITEX – sum up their key and unique features. Enterprise Linux Servers from SUSE are some of the most versatile, reliable and best supported software infrastructure solutions available to deliver mission-critical IT services efficiently and cost effectively. Designed for mixed IT environments and exclusively recommended by Microsoft, SAP and VMware,

Enterprise Linux Servers helps you save time and money, increase resource utilization, and reduce risk. SUSE cloud computing solutions are practical and easy to deploy, with something for nearly everyone, and nearly every purpose. Whether you’re building your own private cloud infrastructure, or taking advantage of the public cloud, do it faster with Naji Almahmoud, Senior Director, Global Business cloud computing Development, SUSE solutions from SUSE. portfolio, as well as the unique With SUSE Manager, you get partnership with top IT companies the most efficient solution for like SAP. Also, we invest to Interact managing a Linux environment with customers and partners to with improvements for patch and develop business opportunities. update management, compliance and provisioning with support for What are your company’s main PostgreSQL database. recent achievements in the Middle East market? How important is GITEX as We are preferred choice of platform a platform and event to your for SAP in retail, government and organisation? healthcare and recently won some GITEX is the number one ICT projects. The new Saudi Government event in the region with dedicated initiative is on systems running on sectors and industry briefings. It’s SUSE Linux. We recently won an is great platform to promote SUSE important government customer for solutions, do more business, and an important government initiative build connections with industry key in one of the major Gulf countries, players. We are at GITEX to increase which runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise awareness and visibility of SUSE Server.

GITEX highlights

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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