CXO Insight ME - Issue 11 - August 2019

ISSUE 11 \ AUGUST 2019

SHAPING THE FUTURE VISIONTECH’S CEO ON HOW SYSTEM INTEGRATORS CAN HELP TO TURN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INTO A REALITY

CONTENTS

45

PRODUCTS

NEXANS LANMARK PATCH PANELS

SHAPING THE FUTURE

BOSCH FLEXIDOME IP STARLIGHT 8000I

VISIONTECH’S CEO ON HOW SYSTEM INTEGRATORS CAN HELP TO TURN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INTO A REALITY

R&M CAT 8.1 CABLING SYSTEM

14 VIEWPOINT

34 FEATURE

THE RETAIL RENAISSANCE HOW TO PREPARE FOR 14 22 IoT IN RETAIL NURTURING THE NEXT-GEN TECH 20 24 TOUSING HUMAN TOUCH FIGHT BACK 4 KEY COMPONENTS OF 28 CLOUD DATA MANAGEMENT INTERVIEW TALE OF 32 SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE 26 ATRANSFORMATION BENEFITS OF WEARABLE 38 NINE 30 WIRED FOR SUCCESS TECH IN INDUSTRY

PUBLISHED BY INSIGHT MEDIA & PUBLISHING LLC

6

NEWS

AWS LAUNCHES MIDDLE EAST DATA CENTRES MANAGEENGINE DEBUTS NEW AI ASSISTANT BAHRAIN FINTECH BAY TO INTRODUCE ON-DEMAND BLOCKCHAIN COURSES IBM TRANSITIONS SOFTWARE PORTFOLIO TO BE CLOUD-NATIVE BAHRAIN’S AL JAZIRA SELECTS INFOR WMS SOLUTION

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

3

EDITORIAL

BELLING THE CAT

I

f you flip through this month’s edition, you will find many guest articles on artificial intelligence. How it is impacting the future of work, ERP and transforming the customer experience for telcos, among other things. AI has become pervasive in a short span of time.

The UAE, which is leading this space along with Singapore and Shanghai, is all set to open the world’s first AI-powered café this month, where robots will replace humans. It is a sign of things to come. No doubt, AI can solve some of the world’s pressing problems, and change the way we live and work. Some of the key industries such as healthcare, transport, manufacturing, retail, and banking are already reaping massive benefits from AI capabilities. What is AI? At the very basic level, it can be defined as creating machines which reflect human intelligence and do a task that we can do. Humanity has been using technology to better our lives for a very long time now, and every technology has

Published by

Publication licensed by Sharjah Media City @Copyright 2019 Insight Media and Publishing

Managing Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevant@insightmediame.com +97156 - 4156425

its pros and cons. How about AI? Is there a downside to all of this? I think the current state of AI is very poorly understood and it’s time to broaden the conversation. We still don’t have reliable standards and governance models for AI, and it sure needs a reality check. Recently, Singapore has announced an AI governance framework to ensure ethical and responsible use of the technology. The EU is also working on similar guidelines related to AI governance.

Who is ultimately responsible for AI and its related technologies? Some of the prominent tech leaders have already warned us of the downside, and Elon Musk has famously remarked that machines with super AI could become ‘an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.’ I think governments and policymakers will have to address this urgently given the far-reaching social and economic impact of the technology. Could we be opening a Pandora’s Box? Time will tell.

Sales Director Merle Carrasco merlec@insightmediame.com +97155 - 1181730

Production Head James Tharian jamest@insightmediame.com +97156 - 4945966

Operations Director Rajeesh Nair rajeeshm@insightmediame.com +97155 - 9383094

Administration Manager Fahida Afaf Bangod fahidaa@insightmediame.com +97156 - 5741456

While the publisher has made all efforts to ensure the accuracy of information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

5

NEWS

AWS LAUNCHES MIDDLE EAST DATA CENTRES

A

mazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company has announced the opening of its Middle East data centre in Bahrain.

With the launch of AWS Middle East, the company now spans 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic regions around the world. The company has also announced plans for nine more Availability Zones across three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, and South Africa.

“The cloud has the chance to unlock digital transformation in the Middle East,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services. “Today, we are launching advanced and secure technology infrastructure that matches the scale of our other AWS Regions around the world and are already seeing strong demand in the Middle East for AWS technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, IoT, and much more. We are excited to see how our cloud technology will provide new ways for governments to better engage with citizens, for enterprises

to innovate for their next phase of growth, and for entrepreneurs to build businesses and compete on a global scale.”

The new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region offers three Availability Zones at launch.

AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones, which each comprise at least one data center and are located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity,

yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault-tolerance. AWS infrastructure Regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection.

SALESFORCE ADDS CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM TO CRM

Salesforce has unveiled its Customer Data Platform (CDP) with the next generation of Customer 360.

According to the company, the new platform services will enable companies 6

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

to unify disparate customer data throughout their entire organisation and then personalise every engagement based on a single view of the customer.

“Customers today will not settle for fragmented experiences, and companies recognise that creating a single view of the customer is imperative to earning their loyalty,” said Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer, Salesforce. “With Customer 360, we continue to extend our platform in new ways, empowering brands to unify data and personalise customer engagement at scale.”

The challenge for companies is that they are swimming in a deluge of customer data. Many are trying to unify data from legacy systems, disconnected channels, multi-channel attribution and elsewhere. They also need to adhere

to regulations like GDPR and adapt to new channels like voice and chatbots. In this reality, delivering personalised and integrated engagement is difficult, and customers often pay the price. A retailer is unlikely to know that the customer who just contacted customer service for a broken product is the same one that also just received a promotional email for that same product.

At Dreamforce 2018, Salesforce introduced Customer 360, which allows companies to connect Salesforce apps and create a unified customer ID to build a single view of the customer.

Salesforce highlighted that by extending the power of Customer 360 with MuleSoft, companies can connect any app, data source or device across any cloud and on-premise.

MANAGEENGINE DEBUTS NEW AI ASSISTANT ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho Corporation, has announced the general availability of Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, in its IT analytics solution, Analytics Plus.

Zia interprets questions posed in plain English via text or voice to generate visualizations instantly, and offers smart suggestions based on keywords used in search. Users can also train Zia to understand organization-specific terms to get better results.

According to ManageEngine, with a conversational AI assistant built into their IT analytics tool, anyone in an organization—from CTOs and network operations center (NOC) teams to help desk managers, technicians, and support engineers—can quickly access the IT data they need, regardless of technical expertise.

AUTOMATION ANYWHERE SETS UP REGIONAL HQ IN DUBAI

“IT managers need access to instant insights that they can continue to refine and drill down into, without relying on database administrators.

Zia makes it possible for nontechnical users to analyze data without having to write SQL queries or programs, saving precious time that can be used to focus on improving the quality of IT services offered,” said Rakesh Jayaprakash, product manager at ManageEngine. “In the future, we look forward to expanding the analytical capabilities of Zia to perform seamless data blending and provide automated insights.”

SOFTWARE AG TEAMS UP WITH MICROSOFT Software AG and Microsoft have announced a powerful new solution with Microsoft that enables enterprises to accelerate and simplify migration to Microsoft Azure while ensuring business continuity.

The new Cloud Migration Accelerator – based on the company’s webMethods.io Integration platform – allows enterprises to connect to applications, cloud services and data faster and more easily than ever before, providing a seamless path to a truly connected ecosystem, the company said.

“We recently embarked on a cloud migration journey which put 70% of our current IT footprint on Microsoft Azure while 30% of our IT remains on-premise,” said Anthony Roberts, CIO, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “We use Software AG’s webMethods to remain connected to existing integrated solutions and business

processes while some IT components moved to the cloud and others remained on-premise. webMethods safeguards our most important IT assets during the complex migration process.”

Enterprises eager to migrate to Microsoft Azure benefit from technology that serves as the critical connective tissue that allows easy and fast access to applications, cloud services and data during the migration process, according to Software AG CEO Sanjay Brahmawar.

“Our solution with Microsoft enables enterprises to have a truly connected ecosystem,” said Brahmawar. “Customers will not only accelerate migration but can also spark innovation and turn data into real value as they safeguard their most important IT assets.”

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) firm, Automation Anywhere, has announced its expansion into the Middle East with the opening of regional headquarters in Dubai.

The company’s Middle East dedicated office now serves a growing customer in the region and will play a key role in helping organisations overcome the barriers to adopting RPA. Digital transformation continues to gain traction in the region, backed by several government mandates. These include the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (AI) that aims to make UAE the top region in artificial intelligence (AI) investments in key sectors, as well as Saudi Arabia Vision 2030, with an objective of expanding digital services to reduce delays and cut redundancies.

“We have seen exponential growth in customer demand for automation in the Middle East as organisations continue their journey to become a Digital Enterprise by automating business processes to improve productivity and improve customer experiences,” said Ankur Kothari, co-founder and chief revenue officer, Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere aims to ease enterprise workforce pain points by implementing RPA technology across the region with an increased focus on industries, such as finance, oil and gas, manufacturing and supply chain organisations. Some of the company’s valued customers in the region already include Emirates NBD and Dubai Asset Management.

“This is one of our fastest growing geographies globally and we are thrilled that this new investment in people, premise and partnerships in this region will accelerate our momentum further.” said Milan Sheth, executive vice president, India Middle East and Africa, Automation Anywhere. “Over the next year, we will invest in driving localised solutions to meet unique customer needs in this region, appoint new leadership and develop new engagement models with our partners and customers.”

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

7

NEWS

BAHRAIN FINTECH BAY TO INTRODUCE ON-DEMAND BLOCKCHAIN COURSES

F

intech Consortium and Bahrain Fintech Bay have announced their partnership with BetaBlocks, a US-based blockchain innovation and learning platform.

Through this partnership Bahrain Fintech Bay will introduce on demand courses focused on themes in digital transformation, including blockchain for business, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity.

Maissan Almaskati, Chairman of Fintech Consortium Middle East, said, “We believe that the most relevant education and training in finance today is in the key themes and tools of digital transformation, and that skilled human capital is the essence

behind fintech, and innovation across industries generally. We are excited about our partnership with BetaBlocks which provides insight and experience into digital learning, as well as blockchain solutions for a range of end uses, and look forward to working together to jointly develop this offering in Bahrain and the Middle East region” The BetaBlocks “Digital Transformation Program” is an ondemand programme allowing learning to take place at anytime and at the pace of the student. Each of the courses is thorough, but not overly technical, and delivered through a

AVEVA LAUNCHES UNIFIED OPERATIONS CENTER SOLUTION AVEVA has launched Unified Operations Center, its command-and-control solution for infrastructure operators such as smart cities and facilities management, and for industries like oil & gas and mining.

Working side-by-side with leading companies in these verticals, AVEVA has turned best practices into templated solutions that are repeatable, scalable and adaptable, enabling fast implementation and return on investment. Organisations such as the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Assmang Proprietary Ltd and the city of Atal Nagar in India have 8

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

pioneered early versions of this tailored approach and have realised reductions in project implementation times by as much as 60% over the more time-intensive process of integrating bespoke solutions.

The Unified Operations Center is a central hub that transforms the control

series of videos and other interactive features. The program is designed to offer the most benefit to business professionals who want to understand the basics of how transformative technologies work, the benefits they offer, and how they can be applied.

Roberto Machado, CEO of Betablocks, said, “There is huge global interest in learning about blockchain and other emerging technologies. This strategic partnership with Fintech Consortium will allow us to share our knowledge and experience with different regions of the world, helping foster innovation and a skilled workforce”.

room into a collaborative workspace.

Functional silos are broken down by contextualizing operational and business data to enable teams to make better decisions based on accurate, real-time information. AVEVA is the first to provide a single solution that integrates IT and OT (Operational Technology) applications in a central hub, enhanced by industry-specific customisations.

AVEVA’s Unified Operations Center, built on AVEVA System Platform, offers faster time-to-value through solution templates, reports, dashboards and operational KPIs that unify all available data from operations, process, engineering, maintenance and finance, enabling teams to improve their situational awareness of real-time operations and make better decisions.

IBM TRANSITIONS SOFTWARE PORTFOLIO TO BE CLOUD-NATIVE IBM has transformed its software portfolio to be cloud-native and optimised it to run on Red Hat OpenShift.

According to IBM, enterprises can now build mission-critical applications once and run them on all leading public clouds, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and IBM Cloud and on private clouds.

The new cloud-native capabilities will be delivered as pre-integrated solutions called IBM Cloud Paks. The IBMcertified and containerised software will provide a common operating model and common set of services – including identity management, security, monitoring and logging – and are designed to improve visibility and control across clouds together with a unified and intuitive dashboard.

“IBM is unleashing its software from the data center to fuel the enterprise workload race to the cloud. This will further position IBM the industry leader in the more than

$1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM. “We are providing the essential tools enterprises need to make their multiyear journey to cloud on common, open standards that can reach across clouds, across applications and across vendors with Red Hat.” The software and services announced, which include more than 100 products from across IBM’s expansive software portfolio optimised to run on Red Hat OpenShift, will be delivered on IBM’s hybrid multi-cloud platform. It is built on open source technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift, a comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, an enterprise Linux platform. As a result, clients can select the best architecture and approach to address the most critical application, data and workload requirements for their business.

TENABLE EASES VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT WITH DATA SCIENCE Tenable today announced new Predictive Prioritisation capabilities within Tenable.io and Tenable.sc, for vulnerability management in the cloud and on-premises, that accelerate the discovery, prioritisation and remediation of vulnerabilities before they are published in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

Depending on the issuing software vendor, a significant lag may exist between when a vulnerability is publicly announced and when it appears in the NVD. Furthermore, organisations often rely on NVD’s severity rating to prioritise remediation efforts. This delay creates a Cyber Exposure gap where

security teams are unable to accurately identify which new vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk to the business.

Tenable’s Cyber Exposure platform now addresses this problem by automatically prioritising vulnerabilities prior to publication in the NVD, ultimately reducing lag and accelerating remediation time.

“The lag time between when a vulnerability is first disclosed and when it’s published in the NVD inhibits an organisation’s ability to manage its exposure with risk-based metrics,” said Renaud Deraison, CTO, Tenable.

“The latest functionality in Predictive Prioritisation gives security teams a head start in reducing their organisation’s cyber exposure, providing them with the actionable insight needed to focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most.”

MEA IoT SPENDING SET FOR DOUBLE DIGIT GROWTH: IDC Organisations in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) are expected to invest over $8.47 billion on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies this year, according to the latest forecast from global technology research and consulting firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

A recent update to the firm’s Worldwide Semiannual Internet of Things Spending Guide shows that IoT spending in the MEA region will grow 15.9 percent year on year in 2019 and reach $17.63 billion by 2023 as governments and businesses ramp up their investments in digital transformation projects.

“IoT adoption in the MEA region is expected to accelerate over the coming years as organisations from both the public and private sectors look to improve their provision of customer services, expedite decision making, improve the quality of products and services, accelerate their time to market, reduce costs, and increase productivity,” said Krishna, program manager for telecommunications and IoT at IDC MEA. “And as organisations continue to reap the value generated by IoT, we can expect to see further development of innovative industry-specific solutions.”

According to IDC, the big four countries in the region, namely South Africa ($1.9 billion), Saudi Arabia ($1.49 billion), Turkey ($1.24 billion), and the UAE ($0.65 billion), are expected to account for 62 percent of total IoT expenditure in the MEA region in 2019.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

9

NEWS

BAHRAIN’S AL JAZIRA SELECTS INFOR WMS SOLUTION

I

nfor has announced that Al Jazira, a Bahraini retailer and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) distributor, is automating its warehouse with Infor CloudSuite WMS (Warehouse Management System) to help boost operational efficiency and gain visibility of its inventory.

Al Jazira is expanding rapidly.

It currently has eight stores and is the exclusive distributor for top FMCG brands including Heinz, L’Oreal, MCvities, Pinar, Hero, Mazola and Volvic in Bahrain.

The company also has a fast-growing food services business, adding to the demands placed on the firm’s warehouse.

To facilitate growth across its businesses, Al Jazira’s senior management team realized that the company needed to automate its warehouse and gain full visibility of its inventory to achieve greater operational efficiency and oversight, and to improve inventory management.

To achieve these aims, Al Jazira decided to deploy an Infor WMS solution. With the help of Infor CloudSuite WMS, Al Jazira will gain greater visibility into inventory, orders, equipment, and staff. This will increase the company’s ability to manage stock more efficiently while providing greater insights into the performance of individual products and offerings, and helping the company to develop strategic plans more effectively.

Jonathan Wood, general manager, for the Middle East and Africa at Infor, said: “With Al Jazira keen to accelerate its retail, distribution and foodservice businesses in Bahrain, Infor CloudSuite WMS is ideally suited to helping Al Jazira achieve its aims. We’re confident that with a fully automated warehouse, Al Jazira will be ideally placed to scale up its operations, improve its operational efficiency and deliver superior quality of service to its customers.”

MIMECAST LAUNCHES CYBER ALLIANCE PROGRAMME Mimecast has announced the launch of the Cyber Alliance Program, a new programme designed to align security vendors into an extensive cyber resilience ecosystem.

According to the email and data security firm, the Cyber Alliance Programme is focused on bringing complimentary cyber software vendors together for the greater good of the customer.

Driven by customer demand, the Cyber Alliance Programme is based on the premise that sharing data about threats, malicious code and attack vectors among cyber vendors helps strengthen products and creates additional protection for the customer – helping each product become more effective and allowing for customers to be more cyber resilient.

The programme is open to select technology companies offering security and cyber resilience products that meet the programme criteria and that are interested in integrating their technology into Mimecast’s platform using open APIs.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES TO ACCELERATE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN RUSSIA Dell Technologies has announced that its Middle East, Turkey, Africa (META) region is now being expanded to include Russia, with the change coming into effect immediately.

According to the company, the remapping of the CIS markets follows its view that these countries have similar needs and customer requirements, leading to Russia joining the digitally advanced markets in the META region.

The region will be led by Mohammed Amin, senior vice president, Middle 10

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

East Russia, Africa & Turkey (MERAT) and Boris Shcherbakov, vice president, Russia will continue to lead the local Russian business operations for Dell Technologies, reporting to Amin.

Combined with the need to stay

ahead of the digital maturity curve and compete in a new world, companies in Russia are also making a concerted push to transform their business with technologies such as multi-cloud; Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Security – segments in which Dell Technologies has the broadest, industryleading portfolio of end-to-end solutions.

“Russia is a market with significant potential and is poised to dramatically accelerate its adoption of disruptive technologies in the coming years. This is closely linked with trends we are seeing within the META region as well, so this change will allow us to extend our growth strategy and business roadmap to Russia,” said Amin.

GO WHERE THE GAME TAKES YOU.

Dell G3 15 Gaming Bring every raid to life on the Dell G3 gaming laptop, featuring Intel® Core™ i7-8750H processor, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 4GB NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti Graphics, 15.6” FHD IPS Anti-Glare Display, Ubuntu Linux.

Intel® Core™ i7 Processor.

www.mitsumidistribution.com Office: +971 4 370 6058

Ultrabook, Celeron, Celeron Inside, Core Inside, Intel, Intel Logo, Intel Atom, Intel Atom Inside, Intel Core, Intel Inside, Intel Inside Logo, Intel vPro, Itanium, Itanium Inside, Pentium, Pentium Inside, vPro Inside, Xeon, Xeon Phi, Xeon Inside, and Intel Optane are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

COVER STORY

SHAPING THE FUTURE ALIASGAR DOHADWALA, CEO AND FOUNDER OF VISIONTECH, ON WHY DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CAN’T HAPPEN WITHOUT SYSTEM INTEGRATION.

D

igital transformation means different things to different people. How do you define it?

For me, digital transformation is all about change. The first wave of change was the Internet, which was revolutionary. The next significant change was mobile, and today, 70 percent of users capable of driving digital transformation are those who use handheld devices. It’s not about just making some process paperless, but about bringing a specific change in the business strategy. It is not just limited to the role of a CIO, and the entire business leadership and employees have to accept this change. Some people assume it’s about replacing jobs or changing some technology; it is all about restructuring the whole business process.

There are a lot of processes and teams involved in digital transformation, and no one can do it alone. It’s not like you want to change something tomorrow and you will go about doing it; it doesn’t happen like that. You have to put in place a strategic action plan to make digital transformation journey and must involve everyone in the organisation.

How do you see the maturity of digital transformation initiatives in our region?

Digital transformation is not a one-time project. It is a journey, and it has started only now. Those who associate digital transformation with cryptocurrency or blockchain don’t even understand what it really means. Blockchain is just an instance of digital transformation, and it is not all about adopting digital

12

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

technologies; it is much bigger in scope and ambition. To transform into digital businesses, you must put in place the right building blocks and create a roadmap for tackling massive organisational change with KPIs set all levels of business. The long and short of it is we are at a very nascent stage and if you look at the region, the UAE is doing much better because the decision making is more faster as compared to some other large countries. However, there is still a long way to go for us because as I mentioned earlier it is not about a product or service; rather, it is about developing new capabilities and business models, and it varies from company to company.

IT IS ESSENTIAL FOR YOU TO REVIEW HOW A PROCESS IS CURRENTLY WORKING BEFORE CHANGING IT. FINALLY, IT REQUIRES THE EFFORTS FROM THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM OF VENDORS AND SYSTEM INTEGRATORS BECAUSE EVERYTHING NEEDS A PINCH OF TECHNOLOGY.

Doesn’t digital transformation warrant a change in the business models of system integrators as well?

System integrators don’t have to change their business models but add this as an element. If you look at a typical IT system integrator a few years back, we are talking about infrastructure and making organisations technology-ready. Now, that role stays, and I don’t think it would change anytime soon. Let’s take the example of a customer who has an existing technology, which needs to change. Is that change relevant from a technology point of view or delivery point of view? I think system integrators need to change the way they look at their customers’ business needs. It is not about delivering a product or project anymore but more about what comes after that.

You are talking about analytics and making information available to the right channels at the right time. Today, people are collaborating more, and the role of a system integrator is vital. We help our customers to transform their processes and handhold them through every step of the journey.

Hasn’t it become imperative for SIs to move beyond just tech and look at the bigger picture in terms of business impact?

This is something we already do.

We don’t talk to only IT or CIOs; we talk to CFOs, CMOs and the whole C-suite to understand what kind of business change are they looking for. If you take a bank, for example, you are talking about technology in terms of the data centre, which powers all areas of business and that is being looked after by IT. But

then, how is the customer delivery experience happening? Digital transformation is about driving customer experience. Why should I choose bank A over bank B? It is because of the service and the ability to conduct all of my transactions faster and more efficiently, which is where digital transformation comes in. And this is where we fit in, and we have to engage CXOs. At the last couple of events that we organised for customers, we had people from finance, management, and marketing on the panel because they are the ones facing customers more than IT. Is there more pressure on SIs to deliver more value at a lower cost?

Immensely because the purchase patterns of customers have changed.

Eight years ago, when customers came to us for laptops and desktops, we used to tell them to go to Sharaf DG or Carrefour. Not only do these retailers offer a better price, but they also have a service support mechanism in place. Customers look at us for services rather than products, and from that point onwards, we realised that if we have to evolve, we must understand the change our customers wants and act as a catalyst. It is not just about delivery anymore but about planning and understanding how our customers’ change would have an impact on their customers and increase the value they deliver. The game has changed, and systems integrators who are still reselling products will have to look at it in a very different way.

assume digital transformation is a standard process that everyone can adopt.

It has to be tested in your premises, and you have to fail before you reach the right level of acceptance, Third and this is more important: team engagement. It should be guided by a broader business strategy with involvement from everyone in the company. It is essential for you to review how a process is currently working before changing it. Finally, it requires efforts from the whole ecosystem of vendors and system integrators because everything needs a pinch of technology.

What are some of the common pitfalls users must avoid when it comes to digitising business processes?

Where can the customer go wrong while embarking digital transformation journey? One is if they wait too long and expect their competitors to create that process. They can’t afford to be a follower, and they have to move faster with business agility. Second is to

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

13

FEATURE

THE RETAIL RENAISSANCE RETAIL IT IS ENABLING A SEAMLESS SHOPPING EXPERIENCE FOR CUSTOMERS. EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON SOME OF THE TOP TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES FOR RETAILERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

14

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

B

e it a brick-and-mortar store or online, technology has permeated every aspect of the retail processes.

With tech-savvy customers demanding seamless and personalised experiences, more and more retailers are starting to tap emerging technologies to provide more value to their customers.

To meet the ever-growing demands and expectations of customers in this digital era, retailers are left with no choice but to embark on an overall technology transformation strategy by turning to new tools and processes.

“In today’s intensely competitive retail environment, every sale counts, and the customer is king. Customer expectations are growing and changing – and often outpacing retailers’ ability to satisfy them. Technology is transforming the entire retail ecosystem and being deployed to capture sales in-store and online, help deliver a more personalised shopping experience, manage the supply chain and warehouse environment,” says Hozefa Saylawala, Middle East director at Zebra Technologies.

In a data-driven world, he says, retailers are transforming into intelligent enterprises but they face an array of challenges and there is a gap between shopper expectations and reality that technology can help fill, in meeting the challenges of the ondemand economy.

According to Jake Callaway, managing director, MENA at 4C, increasing competition from eCommerce platforms, and the growing influence of digital media are two of the most disruptive trends in retail today. Addressing both these areas requires retailers to know their customers like never before. “Today, it is all about personalisation – not only at the initial stages but right through the customer journey.”

In the Middle East, online shopping is growing, and some of the major players are taking notice and moving into the region. However, the physical store and shopping mall continue to play a major role, with malls positioned as lifestyle destinations for the family, including shopping – although habits are changing. In-store and online, retailers have to compete aggressively for footfall and sales.

“At around 3%, online retail in the Middle East makes up a much smaller percentage of retail than in developed western economies where it is around 15-20%. The growth of Amazon and other online players in the region combined the demographics of young people wanting to adopt new technology, and high smartphone penetration means that online,

Hozefa Saylawala, Middle East director at Zebra Technologies

Jake Callaway, managing director, MENA at 4C

ecommerce and use of marketplaces is likely to grow very quickly,” says Oliver Guy, senior director of industry solutions at Software AG. For retailers this is both a threat and an opportunity – key to success will be tapping into these ecosystems in order to access customers will rely on careful coordination and real-time sharing of data inside and outside the organisation.

Zebra Technologies’ 11th annual Global Shopper Study 2019 (which included the Middle East and covered shoppers, retail associates and retail decision-makers) illustrates the challenges of delivering personalised shopping experiences, with the support of personal shopping solutions, and the clear gap between retailers’ perspectives of shopper satisfaction and the reality of the shoppers’ experience – in-store and online.

The four main satisfaction gaps identified in the study occur in delivery fulfilment expectations, in-store technology, personal data security, and returns/exchanges, all of which are deeply impacted by technology.

In-store, 51% of shoppers believe they are better connected with their smartphones than in-store associates (and 56% of associates agree with them). Most surveyed retail decision makers (83%) and store associates (74%) agreed that shoppers can enjoy

better customer service and an improved shopping experience, with technologyequipped (tablets) sales associates.

The most innovative retailers are going far beyond simple cross-channel integration, using the latest technology to give customers a more personalised and friction-free experience, says Aaron White, regional director of Middle East at Nutanix.

He cites the example of a major cosmetics retailer headquartered in Silicon Valley, which has a mobile app that lets customers use augmented reality (AR) to try different shades of virtual lipstick and eyeliner using their smartphones.

Other retailers are working to provide accurate and detailed location information for everything in a store, an important advantage in stores where inventories are large and product locations change often. “The ability to manage and deliver data based on location or visitor behavior to digitally enhance the customer experience can become a competitive advantage, but you can’t deliver that experience from applications that only run in your corporate datacenter or in the cloud due to latency and scale challenges. The necessary processing power has to be deployed in the store, and it needs to have the flexibility to address evolving needs as well as be easy to deploy and manage,” says White.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

15

FEATURE

Oliver Guy, senior director of industry solutions at Software AG

IoT in retail Among the new crop of digital technologies, IoT is rapidly taking hold in the retail sector with a myriad of applications.

“The largest impact of IoT will likely be focused on operational efficiency.

Operations will benefit through improved visibility across the supply chain – from supplier to on-shelf.

This will drive efficiency by improving availability while minimising inventory.

In-store operations will also likely benefit – projections suggest it has the potential of doubling store profitability,” says Guy from Software AG. Callaway from 4C adds the host of new internet-connected devices has the potential to open up entirely new customer touchpoints, and generate a wealth of data on their behaviors and preferences. This means that retailers could gain an unparalleled understanding of when and where customers engage with their brand.

These new data streams, in combination with real-time analytics, have the potential to drive a retail revolution enhancing the relationship between retailers and customers.

Saylawala from Zebra says retailers are increasingly turning to IoT technologies for three reasons – to simplify and enhance the store 16

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

Aaron White, regional director of Middle East at Nutanix

IN THE MIDDLE EAST, ONLINE SHOPPING IS GROWING, AND SOME OF THE MAJOR PLAYERS ARE TAKING NOTICE AND MOVING INTO THE REGION. HOWEVER, THE PHYSICAL STORE AND SHOPPING MALL CONTINUE TO PLAY A MAJOR ROLE, WITH MALLS POSITIONED AS LIFESTYLE DESTINATIONS FOR THE FAMILY, INCLUDING SHOPPING – ALTHOUGH HABITS ARE CHANGING. experience; reduce operating costs; and create new revenue streams.

The implications of IoT include automating manual processes, such as implementing sensors on shelves to reduce out-of-stock inventory, a major source of shopper frustration.

The Zebra Retail Vision Study revealed that retailers are investing in

IoT technologies — from beacons that send shoppers customised coupons to radio frequency identification (RIFD) tags that track inventory — to simplify, enliven and customise the shopping experience, generate revenue, and reduce costs. Mobility is a driver for most surveyed retailers who plan to invest in mobile barcode or thermal printers, handheld barcode scanners, and mobile computers within the next three years.

The Zebra study also revealed that nearly 70% of retail decision makers surveyed are ready to make changes to adopt the Internet of Things (IoT), and 65% plan to invest in automation technologies for inventory management and planogram compliance by 2021.

While retails are trying to keep pace with the landing technology landscape and stay ahead of customer, the bigger question is one related to the so-called retail apocalypse – will the rise of online shopping kill brick-and-mortar business entirely?

“Based on what has happened in other markets as online retail has grown rapidly, bricks and mortar retail has suffered reduced sales. To minimise the impact, it is critical that retailers seek to not only provide an omnichannel offering but also ensure that their stores do something that cannot be replicated online,” says Guy. Callaway believes the future of retail is one in which customer journeys are hybrid in nature. There is no doubt that online shopping stores will chip away at the revenues of their brick and mortar counterparts. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the decline of traditional retailers. Rather, if they act upon the knowledge that today’s customer journey is hybrid in nature, they will be able to structure their presence – both online and in-store – in such a manner that each compliments the other. Such synergies between physical and digital channels will result in a more fluid and personalized experience for shoppers, no matter where and how they chose to engage with the brand, he says.

Sage Middle East

www.sage.com/en-ae Office: +971 4 3900180 or 800 SAGE

INTERVIEW

MAXIMISING VALUE

UGRESH KUMAR, DIRECTOR OF MANAGED SERVICES AT RAQMIYAT, ON WHAT IS CREATING THE HEIGHTENED DEMAND FOR EXTERNALLY SOURCED IT SERVICES IN THE REGION.

and now governments are also warming up to the idea. Most of our managed services customers are government entities in the UAE, and now we are bidding for projects in Saudi Arabia.

H

ow is Raqmiyat positioned as a managed services provider?

We started our managed services practice three years ago. We are still in the process of developing it, which requires a lot of investment, time, and a different mindset. I have been selling managed services for the last ten years, and earlier there was a significant resistance to it. However, things started to change around the economic slowdown in 2008, when companies began looking for a costeffective IT model and realised the benefits of employing a managed services model. It is very important to remember that hiring a managed services provider doesn’t mean that you have to fire your IT team – rather, it compliments internal IT. I will give you the example of a bank, where the focus of IT should be on core banking applications and improving customer experience. Working with an MSP can free up the bank’s IT team from doing day-to-day support activities. In fact, various studies show that IT teams spend 70 percent of their time on non-productive tasks, and I tell CIOs that we can help them to elevate their IT staff and focus on strategic projects. Earlier, corporates were the early adopters of managed services,

18

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

Why are companies going for a managed services model?

There many other advantages to customers when they outsource their IT functions to an MSP. One, they can stay within budgets because it is very difficult to cap it when you do this internally as you would need to cater to the demands of LOB managers. So, if you are a CFO, you’d know what is going to cost you in terms of IT management at the beginning of the year as we work on a fixed cost model for the services offered.

Second is enhanced security – as an IT company, we have invested a great deal in meeting compliance requirements and bolstering security environments around our services, which wouldn’t always be economically feasible for end-users.

Another major advantage of managed services is the proactive approach: IT is reactive and works on break-fix model but when you work with a MS provider like Raqmiyat we can identify and fix issues early on.

How do you bring innovation to the managed services market?

We have productised our offerings in a certain format because customers may not need everything if you offer it as a complete suite. So what we have done is to divide it into small packages. For example, we offer help desk as a service where our engineers work with certain tools and augment the capabilities of in-house teams of our customers. That is just the basic level, and scaling the value chain, we offer complete data centre management and disaster recovery services. We take care

of the whole infrastructure, applications and also do vendor management, which is very important in a heterogeneous IT environment.

Another important offering is CIO as a service, which is a new concept in this region. We have realised that most of the organisations in the region are not big enough to warrant a full-fledged CIO role.

What we are offering is a consultant, who is supported by all other departments at Raqmiyat such as application and security teams, to chart out the technology roadmap for our clients.

We also offer project management as a service, which plays a crucial role in transforming business. Typically, project management is required by large organisations, but it has now become a necessity for businesses of every size.

However, smaller organisations can’t afford a PMO, and this is where we step in with a proven methodology based on best practices to save our clients time and budget.

Do you offer the full spectrum of IT services?

Yes, we do and have recently tied up with Oracle to offer the entire stack of application management on the cloud and on-prem. We offer our services in onsite, offshore, and nearshore options and have partnerships with NOC and SOC providers in the UAE and India.

How can users get the most out of a managed services provider?

It is very important for customers to choose a partner that understands their business and help them achieve strategic goals.

There are a few important characteristics they must look for while evaluating an MSP– industry knowledge and technical expertise along with a proven track record for one. It’s also important to look at the breadth and depth of service offerings of your MSP and how cost-effective it is. An important caveat here: it is not advisable to go for the lowest cost provider because you have to look at the overall productivity improvements and their ability to craft contracts customized to your business needs. It is also important to look at how responsive your MSP partner is in terms of 24/7 support and whether they are available in geographies where you have a presence.

INTERVIEW

GET READY FOR SELF-DRIVING TECH STEVE DAHEB, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR ORACLE CLOUD, ON HOW HIS COMPANY’S AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY WILL CHANGE THE FUTURE OF IT.

O

racle is pitching its autonomous capabilities with the launch of self-driving database in the public cloud. Conceptually, is it very similar to autonomous vehicles?

That is where a lot of the inspiration came from though it is something we have been working on for a while.

Finally, there are technologies out there today that enable us to deliver it. Even the analysts have said that we have a decade’s lead on this. What we have done is 30 years worth of database optimisation, including the hardware that runs in the cloud in addition to custom machine learning-based policy algorithms. And underneath of all that is our cloud infrastructure, which is purpose-built to do that.

The old paradigm is ‘let me buy some hardware, install it, rack and stack it, set up a database instance, provision it, and six months later I will let the marketing department know that it is ready’. Today, you can do that in two minutes, and it is incredible. And then the things you have to do around tuning, provisioning, and patching - all these things are done for you so that you can focus on being more productive. So, for our customers, it gives them back time to focus on innovation and invest in other pieces that they can’t today.

Does it eliminate human labour?

There is still a role for humans, and I hope I don’t get replaced by a robot.

Though it does automate 80 percent of tasks, someone still needs to set up the parameters, sizing, and you still need developers to build on top of it. So it’s not self-creating from that perspective.

What is interesting is that DBAs are evolving into data analysts and are more focused on engaging with lines

Are you making it easy for your existing customers to move to autonomous database cloud?

It is actually simple, and we have made it possible with just an upgrade.

We have also made it easy for customers who have bought database licence for on-prem but didn’t use it to shift to an autonomous cloud license. Not only you can move workloads back and forth from onprem to autonomous cloud, we have also put in place businesses practices to make it simple.

of business. Ok, now that I have the data, what can I do with it? What are the insights? How can I partner with lines of business to think ahead about the types of application we want? Recently, a DBA told me, ‘hey man, I got my weekends back.’ If you think about it, an average DBA is tuning 50 of these, and there is other work that has to get done. If anything, people are embracing it.

You have been offering Adaptive Intelligence Apps since 2016.

Doesn’t ML power that as well?

Yes, they leverage ML. This is something we are doing that other vendors aren’t. With others, you need 10 data scientists in a lab, sandboxing ML algorithms. We have built that into our applications, so it has become a feature of HCM, ERP, etc. The same ML algorithms are embedded into our database.

You launched 9i in 2002 with machine learning techniques.

Was that the beginning of your autonomous journey?

I would think so because we have built-in lot of stuff to help with the automation. Now, with cloud and other emerging technologies, you can take it to the next level in terms of what you offer. There are so many components to it like machine learning training which relies on data. The more data I get, the smarter it is. Before what you had to do was to wrap more storage into something. If I want to connect IoT gathered data to an autonomous database based on some applications I create, it is possible today. It wasn’t the case a few years ago.

How does Oracle’s offering compare with Amazon’s Redshift?

Redshift is not autonomous, and I don’t think they ever said it was. It is an open-source fork that might have been good for departments or developers. I don’t know of any major airline or bank that sort of moved to it. The fact is Amazon still runs on Oracle. They have built a great infrastructure business, but for us, our core business is database and applications. We are seeing many people migrate from AWS to Oracle. This is because they want performance, governance, and security controls that we offer, and they need the same set of SLAs on the cloud as they did on on-prem.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

19

FEATURE

NURTURING THE HUMAN TOUCH WHY THE DIGITAL WORKSPACE IS AN ATTRACTIVE PROPOSITION FOR ORGANISATIONS LOOKING TO IMPROVE EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY.

W

ith digital transformation well underway in many organisations, it has become imperative for CIOs to empower employees with the right tools to focus on higher-value activities that will drive customer experience. This has given rise to the concept of digital workspaces, which is touted as the future of workplace by industry experts.

To make the digital workplace a reality, it is essential for IT leaders to understand what it entails, and use cases and benefits.

“Digital workplace is a combination of emerging technologies and support services that enable an organisation’s

20

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

workforce to work from anywhere, anytime in a secured environment.

With digital workplace services, an organisation can optimise the potential of its workplace by improving both employee experiences and business performance. Its key benefits include elevating employee experiences for a multi-generation workforce and breaking down communication barriers to improve collaboration, productivity, and efficiency. It also helps attract and retain top talent, and reduce costs by adopting optimal technologies and support models,” says Manish Bahl, Assistant Vice President, Centre for the Future of Work – APAC, Cognizant.

Savio Tovar Dias, Senior Director Sales Engineering, Avaya International,

says digital workspace can be defined as the collection of digital systems, tools and processes, used by today’s employees to successfully carry out their job functions. While the digital workplace has the potential to dramatically enhance employee productivity and job satisfaction, this isn’t a given.

“All too often, in the drive to digitally transform, organisations force new tools upon their employees, thereby adding complexity rather than crafting simpler and more intuitive workflows.

Furthermore, many miss another key characteristic of an effective digital workplace - customisation.

Personalisation is a must! After all, the tools and processes that a sales

professional needs will be significantly different from those required by someone in HR,” he says.

How to get there Creating a high-quality digital workplace requires leadership commitment, investment, and effort. According to a digital workspace playbook by VMware, one of the critical requirements is putting employee experience first. Building a strong design culture around the employee experience is critical to meet the demands of the business, as well as the ability to secure corporate data. If lines of business, teams, and individuals believe that IT gets in the way and slows them down, employees will avoid adopting the tools and services designed to protect them.

VMware advises CIOs to put themselves in a position to design and deliver the productivity experiences employees will use. This takes into account the devices and form factors employees use throughout the day, the locations from which they need to work, as well as providing a level of flexibility and choice that will keep up with the demands of employees and departments.

In many cases, this takes a shift in skills and culture, but it represents growth opportunities across IT. Bahl from Cognizant says CIOs must identify work that machines do better than people. Identify the rote tasks, computation, and other work across the organisation that is best performed through intelligent automation, freeing up the workforce to focus on what really matters to customers. In particular, IT teams will need to create a task planning and allocation system to deconstruct jobs and identify which tasks are best performed by humans versus intelligent machines to achieve an optimal balance of human-machine collaboration.

“For instance, workers waste hours scheduling meetings, looking for open conference rooms and peering into “unbooked” rooms only to find them occupied. Through various combinations of technology such as voice UX, natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU), machine learning and robotic process

Manish Bahl, Assistant Vice President, Centre for the Future of Work – APAC, Cognizant

VMWARE ADVISES CIOS TO PUT THEMSELVES IN A POSITION TO DESIGN AND DELIVER THE PRODUCTIVITY EXPERIENCES EMPLOYEES WILL USE. THIS TAKES INTO ACCOUNT THE DEVICES AND FORM FACTORS EMPLOYEES USE THROUGHOUT THE DAY, THE LOCATIONS FROM WHICH THEY NEED TO WORK, AS WELL AS PROVIDING A LEVEL OF FLEXIBILITY AND CHOICE THAT WILL KEEP UP WITH THE DEMANDS OF EMPLOYEES AND DEPARTMENTS. automation, tasks such as arranging meetings, retrieving information and creating reports could all potentially be automated,” he says.

Dias from Avaya adds automation, intelligence, and insight will also be key characteristics of a high-quality digital workplace. Virtual assistants can extend the luxury of a personal assistant to every employee in your workforce, while automation can free them of the burden of mundane tasks. Add to this AI and machine learning, and you can provide a platform that learns employee behaviors

Savio Tovar Dias, Senior Director Sales Engineering, Avaya International

and helps prioritise tasks and organize their workday for utmost productivity.

“At Avaya, our vision for the digital workplace is built on these concepts.

It is one wherein employees have the most convenient, intuitive, and intelligent access to the tools they need – whether these are for communication, collaboration, organisation, knowledge management or more,” he says.

What will be the impact of AI and robotics?

The future of the digital workplace will be shaped by two inevitable and powerful forces: the growing adoption of AI and robotics, and the future partnership between humans and machines.

“Striking a balance between the two will be the biggest opportunity and challenge for organisations in creating a digital workplace. We believe every worker in the future will need to familiarise with AI systems by learning basic technical constructions, and tweaking machine capabilities to exploit the full value of the system. When human-led tasks and skills are complemented with machine intelligence, there is a multiplier impact on workforce productivity and business value creation. AI and robotics will be at the centre of digital workplace, enabling workers to become smarter, efficient and more productive, while creating new performance thresholds for organisations,” sums up Bahl.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

21

VIEWPOINT

HOW TO PREPARE FOR IoT IN RETAIL

MANISH BHARDWAJ, SNR. MARKETING MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST AND TURKEY AT ARUBA, A HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE COMPANY, WRITES ABOUT THE POTENTIAL OF IOT IN THE RETAIL SECTOR.

C

ustomers are getting smarter about their shopping choices and their expectations of the retail experience are accelerating quickly. It’s true that online retail businesses are booming, meaning high streets are taking the hit, and it’s going to take something special to get shoppers back into stores.

Technology can certainly help in enticing customers into stores and plugging the growth gaps retailers are suffering. One technology that is touted to disrupt retail is the Internet of Things (IoT), which, if it is used in the right way, can build a competitive differentiation. According to Aruba research, early adopters of IoT are already reaping benefits that include improved customer experience (81%); improved visibility across organizations (78%); and increased profitability (74%).

This is particularly true for those businesses that are aiming to digitise the bricks and mortar stores with innovations like IoT. Amazon has taken the first step into the unknown with its Amazon Go stores that are totally checkout-less and function with a network of cameras and sensors that detect what has been bagged by shoppers to purchase.

Here’s a few practical steps that high street retailers could be taking to increase in-store footfall and subsequent profits: Increasing footfall with locationbased services An in-store digital experience is crucial for retailers to compete with online retailers, but the first obstacle to overcome is to get customers to step inside. It’s clear 22

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

that most customers often have their smartphone in hand that typically has data and location information switched on, so why not use that to the store’s advantage by sending them personalised, live offers to tempt them? This is achieved through enticing customers to sign on to the shop’s Wi-Fi network, downloading the app and sending subsequent push notification whenever they are within range of the beacons that recognise their location.

IoT technology keeps the in-store experience interesting, immersive and allows retailers to consistently innovate their in-store offering. Innovation brings various outcomes and is replicable across big and small brick and mortar stores. The Home Depot, notorious for its large stores, are deploying location-based services to help customers navigate vast estates.

By proposing that customers access the app, it is possible for them to use their phones to inquire about the location of certain products, leaving sales associates to focus on selling goods. Specially built applications and beacon technology can

then use the in-store connectivity to direct customers to the exact location of the products they are after.

Deepening in store engagement by going digital Brick and mortar stores can also compete with their online and high street rivals by proposing exclusive partnerships, offers and experiences to customers.

Once consumers are in-store, the advantage is with the retailers in grabbing their attention with new, exciting offers.

Another method is arming employees with tablets to help them assist customers with finding out whether the right sizes are in stock, or the goods they are after are available. For larger stores, this could also help employees restock more efficiently.

Using these devices as point-of-sales could also free up employees from the tether of wired registers, allowing them to be with customers through their purchasing journey.

Gathering customer insight to innovate Learning the behaviour of customers instore is key to improving the effectiveness of offers and store layouts. One way to get to know the customer is to capture the data they create if they are accessing the retailer’s application in-store, or use touch screens for information. Once this data is analysed, a picture of the customer and their interests can be built, enabling sales assistants to better cater to individual needs.

Gathered data can also be used to improve the physical layouts of stores by using the contextual information customers provide through their app usage. High-traffic areas can be used to issue information and communications of sales offers and new goods available.

Real-time Information about how busy the stores get – especially during the festive season – can also enable stores to better plan the staffing rotas to ensure it’s at optimal staffing capacity, saving stores money in the long run.

The retail industry has the opportunity of being disruptive and offering consumers a unique in-store experience. This has been touted for years but the technology available now can make this a reality.

Synergising the Mind & Technology Economy The biggest tech show in the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia

#GITEX2019

gitex.com

#gitexfuturestars

futurestarsSales@dwtc.com

VIEWPOINT

USING NEXT-GEN TECH TO FIGHT BACK MATTHEW LONG, DIRECTOR, FINANCIAL CRIME & COMPLIANCE SOLUTION CONSULTING, ORACLE FINANCIAL SERVICES, DISCUSSES WHY ORGANISATIONS IN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES SECTOR CAN NO LONGER RELY ON OUTDATED COMPLIANCE SYSTEMS AND HOW THEY CAN OPTIMISE NEXT-GENERATION TECHNOLOGIES TO BUILD THE BEST CYBER DEFENCE.

A

n increasing number of European banks and their supervisory authorities are being drawn into money laundering allegations.

According to the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) the latest allegations on ‘Troika Laundromat’ involved the use of a complex network of 75 shell companies moving billions of US dollars belonging to wealthy Russians – including politicians and prominent business heads – into major Western banks. The funds were allegedly used to purchase properties in Spain and Austria as well as highend luxury goods including yachts and chartered jets. This has ultimately resulted in criticism for failing to prevent potentially criminal Russian funds moving through their branches across the world.

The allegations of Standard Chartered and Danske Bank processing suspicious transactions has already exposed serious and potentially fatal shortcomings in risk and compliance processes among some of the most established financial

24

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

institutions in the world. At the time of writing, Danske Bank is facing EUR 1 billion of damages filed by up to 70 investors, following allegations that EUR 200 billion of suspicious transactions had filtered through its Estonia branch between 2007 and 2015. The Danish bank revealed 1% (around 28,000) of its retail customers had left the bank, while its chief executive and chairman have both been recently ousted.

Denmark was previously viewed as the bastion for well-managed and tightly-regulated banks, but the Danske Bank scandal is causing ramifications far beyond plummeting share prices.

It’s eroding trust among the Danish people, with the percentage of Danes who find the bank credible sinking to a meagre 46%, the lowest since credibility recordings began in 2008. There’s a tangible erosion of brand value becoming a clear cost to business if these issues are not addressed.

Clearly, the stakes have never been higher, yet many banks persist in using outdated, time-consuming rules-

based processes for their anti-money laundering, KYC and due diligence that can easily be circumvented by money launderers and other nefarious opportunists. As more high-profile cases of financial crime come to light, the question is: why aren’t financial institutions able to catch them earlier, and how can they better police their own practices?

Hiding in plain sight – how are criminals getting away with it?

As the ongoing ‘laundromat’ exposure suggests, criminals rely on a sophisticated variety of techniques and mechanisms to obscure their ownership and control of illicitly obtained assets.

The most pervasive vehicles for financial crime are shell companies.

These organisations will essentially ‘hide in plain sight’ by using global trade and commerce infrastructures to appear legitimate. Ironically though, prosecutors are often left chasing shadows when attempting to bring this sub-breed of financial criminals to justice.

Due to the anonymity of their ownership, shell companies represent the perfect conduit for money launderers, fraudsters, and other financial criminals seeking to hide their assets and evade taxes and launder criminal funds.

It’s becoming far too difficult for law enforcement to pin down the true beneficial owners of these shell entities.

A number of European countries, including the UK, have introduced legislation for public beneficial ownership registers in an attempt to crack down on shell companies. The registers would require owners of overseas companies investing in property to be named on a public register, making it more difficult for them to hide.

However, in a recent report on economic crime made to the UK Treasury committee, one of the main concerns highlighted is that the agency that registers UK firms, Companies House, is not required to carry out anti-money laundering checks. The committee claimed this is weakening the UK’s system for preventing economic crime and that the UK government should urgently consider giving the agency powers to verify information given by those forming new companies.

Technology essential to outsmart criminals As the headlines and enforcement figures consistently show, the financial services sector can no longer rely on outdated compliance systems and armies of analysts and investigators to help tackle this challenge.

Given the high volume and complex nature of today’s transactions, combined with opaque and disparate relationships and connections between customers and entities, financial services companies are turning to technology that can better identify and process all the hidden and known connections between legitimate customers, businesses, criminals, PEPs, sanctioned entities and shell companies.

AI and machine learning can then create accurate risk profiles or risk scores to determine whether or not banks should enter into a potential client or

customer relationship – with anomalies or suspicious activity flagged for further investigation by analysts.

Financial institutions can also start using machine learning algorithms to query and question the links between entities with more speed and efficiency than a pair of human eyes. Systems can also be trained to present case recommendations to analysts based on topology analysis of the case in question against the history of similar investigations and decisions, similarly on the most effective, suspicious behaviour detection scenarios to use, to help reduce the noise of false positives and ensure resources are more effectively focused on the highest risk areas.

But for this to work, all that data needs be organised in a much more effective manner. Currently, when screening individuals against internal and commercially available watch lists, firms typically look at customer name, address and date of birth. For corporate accounts or transactions, this extends to company registration details, along with information regarding key executives, stakeholders, and beneficial owners.

However, anomalies and inconsistencies will often crop up, influencing the accuracy of the screening process and its subsequent results. Many organisations also hold their data in international language scripts, which makes it difficult to compare this data against commercial watch lists and sanctions.

Data holds the key – preparation is the best form of defence When screening individuals against internal and commercially available watch lists, firms typically look to the customers’ names, addresses and dates of birth. For corporate accounts or transactions, this extends to company registration details, along with information regarding key executives, stakeholders, and beneficial owners.

However, anomalies and inconsistencies will often crop up, influencing the accuracy of the

screening process and its subsequent results. Many organisations hold their data in international language scripts, which makes it difficult to compare this data against commercial watch lists and sanctions.

It’s clear that simple data cleansing isn’t going to make the grade in our increasingly-sophisticated threat landscape. More extensive profiling and auditing of data ahead of screening is paramount. Financial institutions must start collecting data concerning nationality, country of residence, membership in certain regimes or political parties, close associates (otherwise known as secondary identifiers), and writing system used.

Often this level of detail will allow for the removal of those pesky anomalies or inconsistencies, such as white spaces, questionable characters, or fields requiring only one entry that suspiciously contain multiple values, such as a company name or job title. Data can then be optimised to adhere to the original rules that were set.

Effective screening will differentiate between individuals and entities with common names but will have discrete match rules available that can be activated. With the correct definition and application of rules to customer and list data sources plus the use of secondary identifiers as part of the screening process, false positives can be reduced to a minimum without increasing risk.

This approach empowers organisations to more accurately deploy the risk-based approach demanded by regulators and allows compliance teams to focus their time and investment on higher-risk, higher-probability and higher-complexity issues. This is where the human touch truly adds value.

There will always be nefarious activities, but increasingly, forwardthinking organisations are bolstering their defences with machine learning, AI and more fastidious data preparation.

So, if your business is exposing itself to these risks without the proper consideration, you may be part of the problem, not the solution.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

25

INTERVIEW

A TALE OF TRANSFORMATION SHEKAR AYYAR, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY AND CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, TELCO NFV GROUP, AT VMWARE, ON HOW HIS COMPANY PLANS TO TRANSFORM TELECOM NETWORKS AROUND THE WORLD.

W

hat is VMware’s telecom strategy?

The easiest way to understand our telecom strategy is two words – telco cloud. If I step back and look at the world at large in terms of infrastructure, we think there are four cloud waves in progress. One is the private cloud, which essentially means that enterprises and business owners are looking at their corporate data centres and making them selfprovisioning mechanisms. Second is the public cloud, which is largely associated with hyperscale providers such as Microsoft Azure and also a long tail of small cloud providers that are either regional or vertical. Third is telco cloud where we are focused on and the fourth one is edge cloud, which is the formation of interest from the public, private, and telco clouds.

If I take the third one and break it open, from a business standpoint, every telecom carriers is under pressure because their margins are depleting and they have to invest a great deal in 5G, which is the nextgen technology. They are also facing competition from two other big sources other than from each other – OTTs and public cloud providers such as AWS and Azure. Are they going to become the next comms guys? Are they going to provide network connectivity to the enterprise? So, this is the environment 26

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

A CASE IN POINT IS VODAFONE, WHICH IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF ENDTO-END NETWORK VIRTUALISAITON, AND THEY HAVE MORE THAN 15 COUNTRIES COMPLETELY VIRTUALISED IN VMWARE INFRASTRUCTURE. THEY ARE RUNNING MORE THAN 300 NETWORK FUNCTIONS ON AN OPERATIONAL BASIS IN THIS, WHICH IS VERY EXPANSIVE FOR A CARRIER. carriers are facing, and if you look at inside, they have three areas of infrastructure that we are focused on.

One is IT, which is telcos operating their IT like any other enterprise.

Second is the business-to-enterprise side of a telco, and increasingly, this is becoming an important part of

their revenue generation mechanism because customer ARPU is declining.

So, they are looking at new services they can build for these enterprise customers and the third area is core network, which is effectively all of their core functions as well as access functions. From carriers’ perspective, they write the biggest cheques in this area; investments in spectrum, cell towers, base stations, central offices and the gear that goes into all of these is the biggest spend for them. If they can create both efficiency in this spend as well as create new service deployment agility on top it, it is going to be phenomenally valuable for them.

Furthermore, if they can take that architecture and have it also applied to the first two areas – IT and B2B enterprise – that is even better because rather than having siloed environments, you will have one common infrastructure. The telecom vision of VMware is simple - the world has these four cloud pools, and you the telco are pool number three. And inside your own enterprise, you have three different environments. Today, you do IT one way, and you are thinking about business transformation in a different way. And then you have a hardwaredriven architecture for this third bucket. None of this is connected to either the public cloud or the enterprise private cloud or edge transformation.

Whereas what we advocate is to take

that of a hyperscaler. We believe that either one of them trying to be the other one is a failed strategy. We don’t think telecom carriers are going to set up hyperscale cloud infrastructure or it is the right strategy for an Amazon or Google to set up fibre infrastructure and purchase spectrum. Our vision is that this is going to be a multi-cloud world. The telcos need to operate their network infrastructure like a cloud, and customers ultimate will need both sets of resources, not one or the other.

The multi-cloud infrastructure needs to be equally accessible to all, which is not the case today. Hyperscale public cloud is more easily accessible, and telco network is pretty closed. We are showing these carriers how they can be leaders in the next- generation cloud, not by repeating what the public cloud guys have done but by making their infrastructure an important element of next-gen cloud applications.

your own infrastructure and create a common foundation across all these areas. It is effectively a softwaredefined layer that allows you to drop applications, network functions, VMs, and containers on top of it. This will give you visibility into providing services to the enterprise as well as extend your capacity into hyperscale public clouds when you need to; it also extends automatically to the edge.

That is our telco cloud vision at a higher level.

Is cloudification finally happening in the telecom space?

Pool number one has been a 25-year journey, and around 60-70 percent of private enterprises are virtualized overall. Pool number two started in 2005 in terms of the notion of the public cloud, and it is quite mature now. Pool number three, we are just beginning to scratch the surface. We don’t have the real data on this, but I’d

say no more than five percent of telco architecture in the core network and access is virtualised today. We started this journey three years ago and went from no footprint to 70 plus operators that are vitualising their core network either to a small or large extent with us.

A case in point is Vodafone, which is the biggest example of end-to-end network virtualisaiton, and they have more than 15 countries completely virtualised in VMware infrastructure. They are running more than 300 network functions on an operational basis in this, which is very expansive for a carrier. On the other hand, we have many carriers who are talking about virtualizing one function or starting in one country and testing it out.

How are you helping regional telcos compete against mega cloud providers?

I would say the infrastructure of a telecom carrier is very different from

Has cloud become another silo?

Not really. Cloud is a very generically used term, and you have to be careful about what you mean when you say cloud. When I say cloud, I mean a pool of resources that is easily accessible, almost self-provisioning and is mobile.

In that sense, it’s completely opposite of being siloed. However, if you talk to Microsoft or Google, often their view of the cloud is different from what I am describing. They may say their cloud is the real cloud. If you take that interpretation, then yes, you could be pretty siloed. What it means is that you are building an application to my cloud and I will give you the best tooling, but that is the only cloud you can live on.

We look at the cloud as a multi-cloud world, and in fact, all the investments we are making is to go exactly in that direction. We have bought this company called CloudHealth, which gives you visibility across any cloud that you are on and Heptio, which offers Kubernetes-based orchestrations across clouds. The idea behind is that you can use a common orchestration platform across all these clouds.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

27

VIEWPOINT

4 KEY COMPONENTS OF CLOUD DATA MANAGEMENT

BY CLAUDE SCHUCK, REGIONAL MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST AT VEEAM

L

ast year, cloud computing entered the Slope of Enlightenment on Gartner’s infamous Hype Cycle for the first time in its history.

This marked the inflection point at which cloud stopped being something CIOs and IT managers talked about, but didn’t necessarily implement, and became a must-have for any digital business.

At the same time, if you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle for data management, there are a raft of technologies all with different levels of understanding, relevance and importance. From DataOps and Machine Learning-Enabled Data Management at the entry stage of Innovation Trigger to Data Integration and Information Archiving approaching the Plateau of Productivity. While cloud is fastbecoming recognised as an industrystandard for modern IT infrastructure, data management is growing rapidly in its importance to businesses.

Moreover, businesses are beginning to understand their data much better.

Being able to access the right data at the right time, and recover it when it’s lost or damaged, can determine the success of a business.

Enter Cloud Data Management With Cloud Data Management: an inherent part of Intelligent Data Management, data is available across the business, centrally managed, controlled and located where it will deliver the most value for the organisation. In today’s digital and

28

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

AS WELL AS INVESTING IN ROBUST, SCALABLE AND FLEXIBLE SOLUTIONS TO MISSION-CRITICAL ISSUES SUCH AS BACKUP, DISASTER RECOVERY AND DATA PROTECTION, ORGANIZATIONS NEED THE RIGHT SKILLS AND CAPABILITIES TO MANAGE THEIR DATA ESTATES. THAT’S WHY BUSINESS LEADERS SAID THAT THEY WILL SPEND AN AVERAGE OF $41 MILLION ON DEPLOYING TECHNOLOGIES TO BUILD A MORE INTELLIGENT BUSINESS WITHIN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS.

data-driven economy, organizations of all types and sizes require the ability to manage data across multi-cloud environments and ensure it is protected no matter where it resides. Maintaining data availability at all times is key to enabling teams to respond instantly and appropriately to what matters anywhere across the enterprise’s infrastructure.

Veeam’s 2019 Cloud Data Management report, which surveyed over 1,500 business leaders globally, found that almost half (44%) see data management as critical to their businesses’ success in the next two years. Amongst the businesses making the most intelligent use of data management, there were four common components: cloud, confidence, capabilities and culture.

Scaling with the cloud European Commission statistics show that over half of EU enterprises are now using advanced cloud services relating to financial and accounting software applications, customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise applications. This percentage is only rising as hyperscalers continue to layer value-add services onto their stacks – enabling customers to leverage AI and machine learning, big data analytics, and voice and image searching to deliver greater business value from their data.

This notion is backed up by the fact that nearly three-quarters (72%) of companies are looking to Cloud Data Management to enable more intelligent use of data across the business.

Business leaders are looking to data management to deliver benefits through increasing productivity, maintaining corporate stability and improving their ability to forecast and make better informed decisions. The majority stated that they are using Software as a Service (77%), citing reliability, flexibility and data security as their top three reasons for doing so.

Investing with confidence Given the emphasis the needs of the digital business place on its IT infrastructure, CIOs need to have confidence in its ability to help their organisation stay responsive, available and on the front foot.

Incidents such as outages can sap this confidence, stunt future innovation, and damage customer confidence. Almost three-quarters (73%) of organisations are unable to meet users’ demands for uninterrupted access to applications and data. This may partly explain why only 25% of business leaders reported total confidence in their capability to meet their digital challenges.

As well as investing in robust, scalable and flexible solutions to mission-critical issues such as backup, disaster recovery and data protection, organizations need the right skills and capabilities to manage their data estates. That’s why business leaders said that they will spend an average of $41 million on deploying technologies to build a more intelligent business within the next 12 months.

Combining technological and human capabilities Clearly, the expectations of what data management can deliver for the business are high and the appetite for return on technology investment is insatiable. Once new technologies are deployed, business leaders expect to see financial benefits in nine months, with operational benefits in seven months.

For effective results to be realised within a short space of time, businesses must ensure that they have the necessary skills to on-board employees with new systems. In fact, the vast majority (91%) of organizations view upskilling employees’ digital skills as vital to their success. This sometimes requires an element of cultural transformation, particularly when an organisation is looking to establish more data-driven decision-making processes.

Establishing a data-driven culture The cloud is a great equaliser for businesses – levelling the playing field in terms of the technological haves and have nots. Most businesses are now producing data at a rate of knots, so it’s more about how that data is managed, analysed and used to inform faster and more effective decision making. A business can produce huge amounts of data but if it doesn’t adopt a data-driven culture at the C-level, it can be a burden rather than an advantage.

More than two-thirds (69%) of business leaders agree that company culture needs to become more open and accepting as they digitally transform, while 93% agree that leadership styles will also need to change. Cloud Data Management is an opportunity for every business and something which must be implemented at the most senior level of the business and executed right across the pyramid.

In summary, building strong digital foundations that centre on data availability will be vital to the future of every organisation.

Within this context, technology has never been so important to a business’ success.

Organisations around the world rely on a whole host of digital platforms

for everything from keeping the lights on to creating ground-breaking, new offerings for customers. This, combined with implementing a datadriven culture which maximizes the value of the data available to the business, will enable the nextgeneration of industry disruptors and innovators to scale securely.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

29

INTERVIEW

WIRED FOR SUCCESS VALERIE MAGUIRE, DIRECTOR OF STANDARDS & TECHNOLOGY AT SIEMON, TALKS ABOUT THE EMERGENCE OF SINGLE-PAIR ETHERNET AND THE IMPACT OF IOT ON NETWORK CABLING.

H

ow critical is structured cabling to IoT? Many people focus on the devices at the end of the channel. But, the bottom line is 75 percent of the data centre traffic will be machine-generated, and these IoT devices will generate it. Going by even the most conservative estimate, by 2020 we are going to have 30 billion new devices, and Michael Dell says by 2025 we will have 200 billion new devices! So, the impact on structured cabling is I need to find a way to move the data from the device to the user, and then store that information, which is where the data centre comes in.

30

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

The infrastructure is extremely important because as we look towards smart cities, smart applications, and more automation, latency becomes a concern.

We are looking at data transmission being accurate and fast, and bandwidth that doesn’t necessarily support individual devices with fast feeds but a very large number of devices. Another statistics that I found so compelling is from Broadcom, where they recently said that a typical family of four people would have 50 wireless devices. This means it is more critical than ever that your structured cabling link from these access points to the server is a minimum 10GBase-T.

Is single-pair Ethernet mainly targeted at industrial applications?

Single pair cabling traditionally has been meant for automation and non-networking applications. These are the least complex devices with low-speed data, and the most costeffective way to support them is one twisted pair, which is usually shielded.

But, the language has varied from manufacturer to manufacturer with different communication protocols such as BACnet, LonWorks and Modbus.

The problem is that it inherently makes these low-speed devices not be interoperable and challenging to be integrated into networks. So by adopting a common communication language of Ethernet, suddenly it becomes one step closer to being genuinely networking devices. The second advantage is that many of these devices, especially actuators, benefit from a small amount of power. In our RS45 implementation, for example, I can’t run my power at the same time as data, so a simple one pair system becomes two pair and that is not so desirable. Ethernet can take the technology behind PoE and apply it to single pair, leading to an innovation called power over data lines (PoDL), which will help to reduce the amount of cable by 50 percent and half as many conductors. It allows you to transmit data and power over the same pair of cabling, and it is an opportunity for us to improve networking and interoperability between vendors.

When do you expect single-pair Ethernet standard to be ratified?

The name of the Ethernet amendment for single pair Ethernet is IEEE P802.3cg.

I know this because I am the chief editor of this project and this is the first time we had a female expert from the cabling side of things take the lead. We are on track for publication in October this year.

The support from switch and cabling manufacturers is very high and what we have here is a entirely new innovation– a new media type nobody has seen before – coming to the market.

What is the reach of 10GBase-T1?

There are two flavours of 10Base-T1.

First one is 10Base-T1S (short reach), which is 15 meters targeted at automotive and some automation.

Then we have 10Base-TL (long reach), which uses 18 gauge conductor cable and gets me to up to 1 KM with up to 10 connectors. However, we believe the sweet sport for single-pair Ethernet is 24-gauge cable, which is a single pair, shielded and going to operate up to 100 meters using up to four connectors.

So there is a balance between the cost of the copper gauge vs. performance, which in this case is distance.

But it doesn’t support RJ45. Does this mean RJ45 will disappear?

No, they are going to have to co-exist.

RJ45 is for Base-T applications – 100, 1000, 10G. Base-T1 single pair applications are not plug and play with Base-T. So RJ45 as an interface for single pair doesn’t make sense because it is not robust enough, is not shielded and is too large.

With the advent of hyperscale data centres, are we going to see a change in network topology?

We have the Ethernet Alliance that tells us for majority of users in the next 5-10 years, 400Gbits/s will be the sweet spot. Hyperscale data centres

actually on that same roadmap have a pin at the speed point of 1Tbps, which is very impressive. Hyperscale data centres don’t typically occupy one floor and some of these facilities are so large that people use pedal bikes to get from one end to the another. We are looking at a change in topology where 100 meters is not good enough anymore, and now we are looking for now solutions that fill the gap between multi-mode at 100 meters and singlemode at 10 km. It looks like there is an opportunity for single-mode fibre with less powerful laser light source that supports 500 meter applications.

The thinking here is that instead of wavelength division multiplexing, we will do serial transmission. I think what we are going to see is 8-fibre single-mode applications that go up to 500 meters and we have already published two standards– 200GbaseDR4 and 400Gbase-DR4. The letter D was selected because it is the Roman numeral for 500 and some people like to think that it stands for the data centre.

We are going to see more single-mode fibre and the focus will be on balancing the trade-off between cost and distance. I believe most of the end-users are not concerned about more fibre.

Cost and distance. How do we make the most cost-effective equipment and get it up to some reasonable rate for a hyperscale data centre?

Will it be OM4 or OM5?

With single-mode, if I want to get beyond 100 meters today with 200G, it is not an option. Both OM4 and OM5 support 100 meters maximum for 200G and length benefit for OM5 doesn’t come into play until you start to look at 400G applications and those aren’t commercially available yet. If you deploy OM4 at greater than 100 meters the fibre has to be dark because there is no 400G equipment. I believe multifibre serial transmission single mode is a much more compelling case study.

If I ran a data centre, I would like that flexibility of added length with lowercost equipment.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

31

VIEWPOINT

SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE ANTHONY PERRIDGE, VP OF INTERNATIONAL AT THREATQUOTIENT, ON WHY CYBER THREAT INTELLIGENCE IS KEY TO TRUST AND SECURITY FOR THE DIGITAL FINANCE WORLD

I

n 2017, the value per Bitcoin reached over €20,000 (£17,324) – a climax in the hype surrounding the cryptocurrency. However, confidence has been lacking for the price to remain stable. To date, online currencies are more speculation than real means of payment as concerns around security are being raised. An establishment is only possible if users believe in the value’s sustainability, and this applies to every means of payment.

In no industry is the subjective perception of security as important as in the field of finance. Both private users and large customers are increasingly handling transactions online, so the fear of digital innovation isn’t what stops them from adopting this type of currency. It’s security they really care about, or rather their data’s security. The financial sector has acknowledged this and, must above all focus on security to appease the apprehensions some might have.

Blockchain is considered safe to this day, yet speculation is causing such great uncertainty that cryptocurrencies have not yet developed into serious competition for established currencies.

IT decision-makers should therefore always keep in mind the importance of the users’ sense of security in their industry. As part of their digital transformation, many financial organisations have implemented several security tools and also have their own security teams.

32

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

THE CHALLENGING FINAL STEP IS BUILDING A CROSS-PLATFORM. THE SANS SPEAKS OF A COLLECTION MANAGEMENT PLATFORM (CMF), WHICH IS CHARACTERISED MAINLY BY BUILDING A LOCAL THREAT DATABASE, IN WHICH ALL DATA FROM EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL SOURCES ARE STORED IN A CENTRAL LOCATION. These are necessary to comply with legal requirements. After all, almost all other sectors depend on the financial sector. Of course, it is also about the security of customers and partners’ data. Therefore, it is not surprising that this industry has taken a pioneering role over the years. While some organisations already have their own Security Operations Centres (SOCs) to respond to potential threats and

identify Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), they should think about other ways to optimise their organisation’s cybersecurity.

From information to intelligence The SANS Institute recently investigated the latest developments in security and revealed that companies are increasingly taking advantage of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). The findings show a development that goes beyond the expertise of IOC and gives a new perspective of Threat Intelligence.

It is well known that public sources such as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), security vendors and open source communities publish reports and threat feeds on current threats. At the same time, security tools such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) or firewalls also collect information that can be used to combat threats and create a situational picture. In addition, there are industry-specific Information Sharing and Analysis Centres (ISACs) that organisations can participate in. The number and quality of both information sources and IoCs continues to grow and is currently the most important resource for an effective cyber-defence.

However, the trend is moving towards Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs), meaning a better understanding of how the attackers want to penetrate victims’ networks. Instead of focusing only on the evidence of attacks, IT

teams should work to stay one step ahead of the criminals by anticipating their next steps: leveraging cyber threat intelligence.

Thus, it is necessary to step away from the manual evaluation of individual fragments to the building of strategic knowledge about the danger landscape and the extent of the threats for their own systems. Without support, the analysis of IoCs is extremely timeconsuming. Indeed, IT teams in the financial sector can sometimes find themselves having to compare and check data from different sources manually. In this situation, there’s no agreement on the activities between the individual teams, the work becomes inefficient and information silos start to emerge. At the same time, the number of attacks continues to increase, and the growing networking infrastructures are also more complex.

When IT departments do not have an overview of their own security situation, there is no basis for creating trust – the basic but crucial quality that we mentioned earlier. CTI works at this point: SANS notes that after deploying an appropriate platform, 81 percent see their defence and detection capabilities as improved. It involves partial or complete automation to turn the available information into actionable intelligence and use it in your own organisation.

Building your own Threat Library in practice It takes a variety of tools and processes to set up your own cyber threat intelligence platform. However, most financial companies already have the most important components for implementation. Often internal data sources already exist: SIEM solutions or threat information from security providers whose solution is used (IDS, Firewall, End Point Security).

As mentioned, government agencies and open source offerings (such as www.malwaredomainlist.com) also have reports and analysis. In addition, information from industry associations and their own analyses of network traffic can be incorporated.

The challenging final step is building a cross-platform. The SANS speaks of a collection management platform (CMF), which is characterised mainly by building a local threat database, in which all data from external and internal sources are stored in a central location. In addition, the information should then be automatically aggregated, normalised and deduplicated, as well as relevance and priority for the own company be checked by means of a scoring system.

The Threat Library serves as a “single source of truth” for all teams and systems within a company.

In terms of personnel, there are many departments that should be considered: in addition to SOCs and incident response teams, IT operations and security teams can also coordinate their actions with one another via a CTI platform. Of course, the departments are very differently positioned, especially in the financial area. This is why there are also own teams for compliance and audits, but also for the management of vulnerabilities. Moreover, service providers also took on such tasks.

Depending on the size and budget of an organisation, service providers play an important role. However, SANS experts are increasingly recommending partnerships and cooperation rather than considering outsourcing altogether. Proper management of the threat situation is essential, since the cyber threats are already an integral part of everyday life in the area of finance, and organisations must prepare themselves for further attacks. The question then arises as to whether and how strongly your own company is affected.

Conclusion The Threat Intelligence Platform figures speak for themselves: survey respondents recognise the greatest benefits in improving their security operations, threat detection, and attacks, and blocking. Coordinating the use of CTI proved to be of particular value to 90 percent of users stating that it has improved the visibility of threats in their own network environment. Additionally, in almost all cases, the accuracy and speed of eliminating noise improved.

These are all areas that directly affect the user experience. Banking and payment in the digital world are particularly dependent on customers’ trust and subjective sense of security.

Therefore, players in the industry need to have a clear understanding of the overall threat situation and their individual threat situation in order to respond properly at all times.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

33

VIEWPOINT

THE FUTURE OF WORK CHRIS POPE, VP INNOVATION, SERVICENOW, DISCUSSES HOW AI WILL IMPACT THE WORKFORCE

T

he Artificial Intelligence (AI) renaissance that has so markedly affected the way technology platforms and devices of all kinds have developed this decade was at first met with skepticism.

Thankfully, we’re mostly past the initial misperceptions and we’re now busy applying AI to the coalface of business workflows in every vertical. We now realise that AI isn’t going to make us all redundant overnight, but it is going to channel us towards some new roles in work.

The robots are taking some aspects of our jobs over, but these are the repetitive tasks that we humans regard as part of the monotony of life. Fortunately, these are the definable, containable, 34

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

measurable and essentially repeatable tasks that robots ‘enjoy’ doing.

The big AI work questions The questions we must now face to understand the impact of AI in the workplace are: • whose job is going to change and how; • which types of professions will be impacted the most; • where will AI change male and female roles in different ways; and • how will these trends manifest themselves in developed versus developing countries?

Let’s address that last point first.

McKinsey & Company’s report on The Future of Women at Work: Transitions in the Age of Automation says that men

and women tend to cluster in different occupations in different ways across mature and emerging economies: “This [clustering] shapes the jobs lost and gained due to automation for each. In the mature economies studied, women account for 15% on average of machine operators, but over 70% on average of clerical support workers. In the emerging economies [in the study sample], women make up less than 25% of machine operators on average, but over 40% of clerical support workers.”

It starts to become clear that roles in developed economies, which might typically be filled by highly specialised knowledge workers, will initially be less impacted by AI and automation than those that require comparatively simple physical machine operation.

This is not a binary division set in stone though. Over time, digital workflows and the application of data intelligence mean that even lawyers, doctors and actuaries, for example, will also see an increasing degree of their role handled by AI. The difference is, an unskilled or semi-skilled machine operator might see their job displaced in entirety. A skilled worker on the other hand can use the extra time they’re given to focus on value-added actions.

What humans are good at We know that machines are good at cold, hard repetitive tasks. So that makes them really good at actions performed by rotation and even by conditioning – which is pretty much what Machine Learning is anyway. But it makes them comparatively bad at intuitive empathy on a human level.

If you were diagnosed with some challenging medical symptom, would you be happy hearing about it from a computer-generated readout as opposed to a human being? Even though we are making strides towards affective computing – or Artificial Emotional Intelligence as it is sometimes known – we are a long way off from any technology that can genuinely recognize human emotions and respond to them appropriately.

Primary care physicians, caregivers, and

AI CAN BE USED TO MAKE MUSIC BASED UPON IDENTIFIED BEATS AND PATTERNS. WE KNOW THAT IT CAN EVEN BE USED TO CREATE ‘ART’ OR AT LEAST SOME FORM OF IMAGE BASED UPON A DEFINED REQUEST. BUT THERE ARE LIMITS. AI ENGINES DIRECTED AT COOKING HAVE COME UP WITH ABOMINATIONS SUCH AS CHOCOLATE PICKLE SAUCE, SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY FAIL TO GRASP THE NUANCES OF HUMAN TASTE. therapists are unlikely to be outsourced to technology any time soon.

Part of this discussion highlights the need to understand the difference between Artificial Intelligence that makes decisions and Artificial Intelligence that advises on decisions. AI will change the nature of some work, but it won’t change the fact that people have to rely on ‘gut instinct’ in areas of critical thinking.

Let’s remember that, at a basic level, computers only know what we tell them based upon which datasets they are exposed to. Law firms are employing AI to help identify relevant documents in legal cases, but we still need a human judge to adjudicate a decision.

Chocolate pickle sauce AI can be used to make music based upon identified beats and patterns.

We know that it can even be used to create ‘art’ or at least some form of image based upon a defined request.

But there are limits. AI engines directed at cooking have come up with abominations such as chocolate pickle sauce, simply because they fail to grasp the nuances of human taste.

Because of this gap between computer brains and human realities, I would assert that any job group that requires true creativity, such as writers, engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians et cetera, is probably not going to be automated for a long while, for the most part at least.

Also remember, computers can perform jobs, but they can’t necessarily think. A computer can be programmed to Tweet, post to Facebook and even to create a suggested program of social media activities broken down by platform, time schedule and types of content. But that same computer can’t come up with a communications strategy from scratch for products and services that don’t necessarily even exist yet. True original ‘makers’ and ‘creators’ will find that their jobs are more robot-proof than others, for now at least.

The human-robot future workforce Until the robots have robots (can we call them robot robots?) of their own to install and maintain them, humans are going to be needed to design, plan, install, manage and maintain any robotics, technology, or AI systems. This takes us back to my point about understanding what technology is capable of – the more familiar you are with the technology, the more valuable you will be in helping implement and maintai it.

For the immediate future – and long before ‘robot robots’ exist – it’s a human-robot future with both of us working in unison. What matters now to us as human beings is that we must realisze that change is afoot – and that it is positive change. It is important for us to develop and champion all the creative skills that computer-driven AI and ML may never replace.

If you haven’t thought about your empathy, creativity, ability to develop strategic thinking and be a problemsolving human communicator, then now is your time to shine.

Don’t just sit there like a robot, or a robot might come and sit in your place.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

35

VIEWPOINT

REIMAGINING ERP WITH AI ALI HYDER, GROUP CEO OF FOCUS SOFTNET, EXPLORES THE IMPACT AI WILL HAVE ON ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SYSTEMS.

A

rtificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are the new phenomena that have the potential to bring a paradigm shift in the way industries function. The rise of AI technology is being welcomed by every sector and recently this shift is seen to be extended to ERP software.

With ERP applications joining the bandwagon of AI-enabled systems, would result in a profound impact on the technological capabilities of these business management tools. The influence would be widely felt through the optimisation in operating models and superior governance structures that these systems ever had.

Adding AI in ERP Imagine a scenario where all business operations are managed with optimum efficiency. Every task is fulfilled on time and a virtual assistant continually keeps the management updated with work-inprogress reports.

Integrating AI in ERP software transforms this scenario into reality. This powerful combination is successful in achieving fame and status to convince the business leaders to adopt and rely on technological advancement. Machines are made smarter and trained to work as a human to solve problems, thus phasing out manual intervention from routine jobs and even tasks that are dangerous.

Merging AI with ERP software enables the system to read, learn, speak, predict, and act in the most appropriate way while performing several tasks at a single time and with perfection.

Benefits of AI-Enabled ERP Impact of AI cannot be overlooked by businesses if they are willing to thrive in the competitive climate of the future. AIenabled ERP systems optimise business operations and reduce their operational

36

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

transfers, credits balance, or any other data, these solutions voice out as well as displays the search results to every business queries immediately after receiving commands from the user.

costs, boost employees’ productivity and companies’ profitability. This AI and ERP combination bring along a host of other benefits explained below: Reimagine decision-making capabilities One of the core capabilities of an ERP system is to streamline workflow and improve decision makings.

AI’s augmented predictive analysis capabilities further improves the speed and quality of decision making. From production to strategy, the system analyses the huge volume of datasets, determine market behavioral patterns, learn from them, and predict more accurately than it was previously possible.

Through the in-depth insights, it becomes easier for businesses to anticipate and overcome potential problems that are likely to arise in the future.

Work on voice-based commands ERP software experiences technology augmentation with the inclusion of AI. Going beyond generic touch or typing, the systems are ready to be controlled with voice commands. These applications capture voice streams, translate them into system readable inputs, retrieve information, and execute the associated results. Be it financial reports, fund

Automated data input method Manual data input methods increase resource costs and in addition, are prone to duplicate or incorrect entry errors. AI in ERP provides a solution to this issue.

It can automatically collect data from multiple integrated applications, thus eliminating the need for any dedicated staff to work on mundane data entry task as well as remove human errors. This way, businesses can reduce the load time along with resource costs while maintaining information accuracy and relativity.

Improving workflow monitoring When paired with ERP, AI can retrieve historical data and analyse them to propose the most effective workflow method that can improve internal business operations. The machine learning technology enables the ERP systems to read the already established workflow and accordingly guide the users to carry out tasks effortlessly and without any mistakes.

Intelligent issue resolution Artificial intelligence technology includes advanced algorithms that can learn the ways each user interacts with their ERP systems. With the help of this information, AI-enabled ERP systems execute an extensively personalized approach to improve user experience, tailored to resolve their specific problems.

An end-to-end AI-run ERP solution includes many complicated technologies. However, implementing it results in creating an intelligently interconnected business that has the highest competitive advantage.

VIEWPOINT

7 BEST PRACTICES FOR SECURING THE PUBLIC CLOUD HARISH CHIB, VICE PRESIDENT – MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA OF SOPHOS EXPLAINS THE SEVEN MOST IMPORTANT STEPS IN SECURING THE PUBLIC CLOUD THAT EVERY ORGANISATION CAN FOLLOW.

for the security of the cloud (the physical datacenters, and the separation of customer environments and data).

However, the responsibility for securing the workloads and data placed in the cloud lies firmly with the customer.

Just as organisations need to secure the data stored in their on-premises networks, so they need to secure their cloud environment. Misunderstandings around this distribution of ownership is widespread and the resulting security gaps have made cloud-based workloads the new pot of gold for today’s savvy hackers.

T

he simplicity and costeffectiveness of the public cloud have lead more and more organisations to take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

You can spin up a new instance in minutes, scale resources up and down whenever you need while only paying for what you use, and avoid high upfront hardware costs.

While the public cloud solves many traditional IT resourcing challenges, it does introduce new headaches.

The rapid growth of cloud usage has resulted in a fractured distribution of data, with workloads spread across disparate instances and, for some organisations, platforms. As a result, keeping track of the data, workloads, and architecture changes in those environments to keep everything secure is often a highly challenging task.

Public cloud providers are responsible

Seven steps to securing the public cloud The secret to effective cybersecurity in the cloud is improving your overall security posture: ensuring your architecture is secure and configured correctly, that you have the necessary visibility into your architecture, and importantly, into who is accessing it.

Step 1: Learn your responsibilities This may sound obvious, but security is handled a little differently in the cloud.

Public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform run a shared responsibility model – meaning they ensure the security of the cloud, while you are responsible for anything you place in the cloud.

Step 2: Plan for multi-cloud Multi-cloud is no longer a nice-to-have strategy. Rather, it’s become a must have strategy. There are many reasons why you may want to use multiple clouds,

such as availability, improved agility, or functionality. When planning your security strategy start with the assumption that you’ll run multi-cloud – if not now, at some point in the future. In this way you can future-proof your approach.

Step 3: See everything If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it. That’s why one of the biggest requirements to getting your security posture right is getting accurate visibility of all your cloud-based infrastructure, configuration settings, API calls, and user access.

Step 4: Integrate compliance into daily processes The dynamic nature of the public cloud means that continuous monitoring is the only way to ensure compliance with many regulations. The best way to achieve this is to integrate compliance into daily activities, with real-time snapshots of your network topology and real-time alerts to any changes.

Step 5: Automate your security controls Cybercriminals increasingly take advantage of automation in their attacks.

Stay ahead of the hackers by automating your defenses, including remediation of vulnerabilities and anomaly reporting.

Step 6: Secure ALL your environments (including dev and QA) You need a solution that can secure your all environments (production, development, and QA) both reactively and proactively Step 7: Apply your on-premises security learnings On-premises security is the result of decades of experience and research.

Use firewalls and server protection to secure your cloud assets against infection and data loss, and keep your endpoint and email security up to date on your devices to prevent unauthorized access to cloud accounts.

Moving from traditional to cloud-based workloads offers huge opportunities for organisations of all sizes. Yet securing the public cloud is imperative if you are to protect your infrastructure and organisation from cyberattacks.

By following the seven steps you can maximise the security of your public clouds, while also simplifying management and compliance reporting.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

37

VIEWPOINT

NINE BENEFITS OF WEARABLE TECH IN INDUSTRY

BY JONATHAN WOOD, GENERAL MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA AT INFOR

M

anufacturers are increasingly turning to mobile solutions and wearable technology to give workers access to the data they need — whenever and wherever the job takes them.

Adoption is increasing at a phenomenal rate. MarketWatch projects the industrial wearable segment will grow from $1.5 billion in 2017 to $2.6 billion in 2023, a 73% jump, and that may be a conservative estimate.

Innovations are being seen in the devices used, such as glasses with dropdown mini display panels and hardhats equipped with screens. Software developers now are creating responsive designs that can scale and be viewed in small formats.

Here are nine examples of when and where these technologies provide major benefits: 1. Role-based Workbenches and Dashboards. Modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions often contain role-based workbenches and dashboards to help personnel manage their own Key Performance Indicators and ongoing responsibilities, such as maintaining safety stock levels.

Remote access through mobile or handheld devices is essential.

2. Empowering Always-alert Executives. Top managers of business units want to stay connected 24/7 to real-time status alerts, especially when the plant runs three shifts or has global operations in different time zones.

Portals for remote access for personnel and partners are increasingly important.

38

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

3. IoT Data Where it Counts.

Manufacturers are increasingly embedding sensors in machinery and capturing performance and maintenance-related data points through Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

As the user approaches the piece of equipment, a real-time diagnostic view of the machinery and its components can appear on a hand-held device.

4. Training and onboarding.

Augmented Reality can be used for training, giving users the chance to visualise machine issues and “practice” engaging with the high-tech tools and repair tactics. This gives new recruits valuable experience.

5. Supervising Remote Workers.

Video cameras mounted on hard-hats can also be used to support junior-level technicians in the field. The video can be streamed to a central locale, where a

veteran technician provides advice and supervises activities remotely.

6. Faster Resolution Rates. Whether field service technicians are dispatched to customer sites or in-plant to perform maintenance or service, the timely access to asset details -- like service history, inventory of replacement parts, status of warranties or service agreements, and previous resolutions -will help technicians make well-informed decisions about repair vs. replace.

7. Upsell and Replacement Opportunities. Field technicians with access to account information and inventory details will be able to make in-field recommendations to customers and sell replacement or upsell equipment on the spot — when the purchase decision is critical.

8. Tracking and Monitoring Personnel.

Some plants can be massive, covering many buildings, yards and warehouses.

Personnel can be scattered over a wide vicinity. Some locations may also pose dangers. Wearables, like vests equipped with GPS tracking, can be used to help monitor location of employees, supporting safety and security, as well as encouraging productivity.

9. Speed Pick-and-Pack in the Warehouse. Warehouse functions are some of the most relevant and valuable applications of wearable devices. Wristmounted, glasses-view, or dashboarddisplayed screens help forklift drivers to find and fulfill orders quickly.

Final take-aways As manufacturers strive to optimise resources and boost productivity, remote access to data is an important issue to be considered. Some tools are simple, such as equipping field technicians with mobile devices. Other applications, like Augmented Reality for training, will provide more commitment of resources. Each specific use-case should be evaluated not only for the gains in productivity, but also the improved speed of service, enhanced customer experience, and improved quality control. Keeping pace with trends is important in today’s fast-changing manufacturing landscape.

VIEWPOINT

THE TOP 3 CHALLENGES OF DEVOPS ADOPTION

BY TABREZ SURVE, REGIONAL DIRECTOR – GULF, LEVANT & TURKEY, F5 NETWORKS

C

ustomer expectations continue to relentlessly rise as new technological opportunities emerge.

Today, organisations demand that products and application features are delivered and implemented wherever and whenever needed. Everywhere you look, execution is at risk of falling behind imaginations and business imperatives.

That is, of course, unless DevOps is starting to wield a strategic and philosophic influence.

DevOps has been one of the hottest enterprise trends for some time now, and a crucial concept in helping companies satisfy customer demands by bringing teams together to fuel better collaboration and innovation.

According to Deloitte, organisations adopting DevOps see an 18% to 21% reduction in time to market.

By removing the waste that impedes software development, operations are streamlined, and businesses can react faster to market demands. At the same time, automation enables companies to align business objectives with processes to immediately recover from IT failures.

Deloitte also reports that the speedy, DevOps-influenced, customer-friendly release of new products and services led to a 20% revenue increase.

While that is all well and good, DevOps is still a new topic many. Large scale adoption is generally slow. It is important to note that DevOps is not simply the implementation of new tools. It is all about rebooting deep-rooted cultural habits, transforming old processes, and ensuring all changes are made for the right reasons. Don’t embrace DevOps for the sake of it. Only proceed if you have clarity and purpose.

1

Breaking of the deep-rooted, cultural habits DevOps is not a team. It is a culture of collaboration that yields a set of best practices and operational cultures. Sometimes companies wanting to adopt a DevOps approach are met with resistance from employees uncomfortable with change. Leadership needs to come from the top. Executives must support employees in dismantling the status quo and breaking down silos hindering successful implementation.

Motivation rises when results are positive, concrete and observable. There is no magic formula but, if you get the right leadership and culture in place, the chances are DevOps will land with resonance. Gartner reports that 88% of businesses believe team culture is one of the top impacts on an organisation’s ability to scale DevOps.

2

Changing well defined processes to more efficient ones The best way to identify inefficiencies is to map processes and

recognise what is and isn’t working.

Start by looking for waste – areas where resources are being exhausted without delivering real value. A siloinfluenced lack of communication can significantly slow down businesses and there is a risk that each department will think DevOps is not their responsibility. Some may be resistant to implementing change, which will cause unnecessary lags within the business. It is vital to understand that it is not just the responsibility of software developers to ensure the processes work for them. DevOps is a process that brings development teams and other IT stakeholders together to achieve one common goal: delivering faster, higher quality work to market.

3

Beware of DevOps for DevOps sake With DevOps, companies can streamline and automate every task. That doesn’t mean that it’s right for every element of every business. Often companies will pick a couple of departments to trial a DevOps approach with – usually the development team. The temptation is then to continue scaling across the organisation as soon as positive results are apparent. The issue here is that different departments all have different needs and challenges and, as we’ve already said, effective DevOps rollout requires an overhaul of processes and ways of working. Organisations need to be careful that they think about specific business needs and not are not just engaged in a rudderless trend chase. Know your objectives before engaging in sweeping overhauls. Keep learning and, above all, stay tuned to customer needs.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

39

VIEWPOINT

OWNING THE EXPERIENCE SANTERI JUSSILA, HEAD OF ANALYTICS PRODUCT LINE MANAGEMENT, NOKIA, AND HENRIQUE VALE, HEAD OF NOKIA SOFTWARE FOR MEA AT NOKIA, ON HOW DATA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN TRANSFORM CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE FOR TELCOS.

40

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

T

elcos are most successful when customers feel as though their operator truly understands them. Data is the key to building that trust because it can reveal insights that lead to effective problem resolution, and identify customers’ needs, wants, and opportunities. To take things a step further, CSPs can also invest in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to support proactive customer engagement by automating business processes and solving issues on-the-fly.

Data analysis can be the differentiator, because it provides the insight telcos need to create a better customer experience overall. With this in mind, CSPs may be even better positioned to tap into the data’s value than digital players, because they have the resources to invest in a long-term change, deep knowledge of both their business and the industry, plus — most importantly — many years of customer behavior data such as call and SMS history or location-based data, which is a manifestation of customers’ specific needs. CSPs know to go beyond network data in order to get a 360 view of the customer and can factor in the NPS (net promoter score), service tickets that users have opened with customer service, rate and subscription plans and more, in order to get the full picture.

Customer experience is the new competitive frontier for telcos, and it would appear traditional operators are losing the battle to best-in-class digital players such as Google, Amazon and Apple. As a result, customer expectations for digital experiences are being set in other industries, and those expectations are trickling into the telco space; so CSPs must be ready in order to stay relevant.

Although telcos are sick of hearing about how their net promoter score compares to digital champions, the reality is that CSPs rank far worse than the digital-only heavyweights in terms of customer satisfaction. Ultimately, it’s all about creating a toolkit of capabilities and technologies that support perfectly timed customer engagements.

ALTHOUGH TELCOS ARE SICK OF HEARING ABOUT HOW THEIR NET PROMOTER SCORE COMPARES TO DIGITAL CHAMPIONS, THE REALITY IS THAT CSPS RANK FAR WORSE THAN THE DIGITAL-ONLY HEAVYWEIGHTS IN TERMS OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION. ULTIMATELY, IT’S ALL ABOUT CREATING A TOOLKIT OF CAPABILITIES AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT SUPPORT PERFECTLY TIMED CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENTS. Data supports effective decision-making Recently, the CEO of a CSP wanted to find out what was causing customer churn. Though he had an idea, he wanted to see proof in the data. The analysis showed that his intuition was correct: The customers who spent the most money were leaving in search of a better deal elsewhere.

However, he hadn’t known about a second group of customers who were also leaving — customers who paid too little. Those customers weren’t engaged and didn’t get enough value from the service.

The insights gleaned through data analysis enabled the telco to design several marketing campaigns to address these two potential problems. First, if a customer called and indicated that they were paying too much, the telco gave them the option to lower their rate.

Second, the telco reached out via email to customers who were paying too little and

offered a better deal expand their services and get them engaged enough to stay.

Intuition is almost always right, but it is not a holistic view of the situation. Data analysis helps to complete the picture and find trends that you might not otherwise see.

AI enables digital time At the same time, data analysis can do more than reveal opportunities based on past information. When it’s supported

by AI, real-time data analysis empowers CSPs to analyse usage and customer behaviour in-the-moment — driving contextually relevant engagements in this era of instant gratification.

For example, imagine a specific mobile customer uses Netflix more than any other video-streaming application, but is also dangerously close to reaching the monthly data cap. By analysing the IP address’ traffic patterns, a telco can uncover the perfect moment to offer this customer a data package that includes unlimited Netflix streaming.

Now, imagine if this entire process was automated — from AI-driven analysis to automated offer generation to immediate fulfillment and accurate billing. In this scenario, it’s possible for the customer to hear about a perfectly tailored service package at the peak moment of interest (e.g. right at the data limit).

This is how customer perceptions toward CSPs start to change, when they view offers not as an annoying or unwelcome intrusion, but as a relevant and perfectly timed solution to an immediate problem. And it’s already possible, especially as AI continues to make its way into the CSP technology stack. If CSPs are to remain competitive with encroaching digital service providers, it’s time they start viewing certain aspects of their business as assets and not liabilities. Telcos may be the “legacy” player in the game, but that legacy includes decades of customer data, plus the resources to invest and maximise emerging technologies like AI. The opportunity is ripe for personalised customer engagement, and AI-powered data analysis can enable it.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

41

VIEWPOINT

USING AI TO IMPROVE GOVERNMENT SERVICES GOVERNMENTS ACROSS THE REGION ARE BEING CHALLENGED TO DELIVER DIGITAL SERVICES AND MEET CITIZEN EXPECTATIONS, OFTEN EVEN BEFORE THE CITIZENRY REALISE THE NEED. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN BE THE KEY, SAYS SHUKRI DABAGHI, VICE PRESIDENT FOR THE MIDDLE EAST & EASTERN EUROPE, SAS.

O

ne of the maxims of governments all over the world has long been ‘doing more with less’.

To strengthen their competitiveness, nations today are under pressure to adopt the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation more effectively. Why do Governments need to be competitive? They compete to attract investment, as well as to consistently deliver on an ever-widening range of services to an increasingly tech-savvy population.

There is one key resource, however, that governments definitely don’t lack; and that is data.

According to projections by Seagate in its recent research, the Europe, Middle East and Africa datasphere will increase to 48.3 Zettabyte in 2025. To visualise the vastness of this number, think of it as greater than the estimated number of grains of sand in the entire Arabian Desert! That the region will generate this much data from everyday citizen actions should not be surprising – the Middle East is one of the most digitally connected regions in the world, with smartphone penetration above 100% in some GCC states, and some of the world’s highest social media usage rates.

Governments in the region have plenty of big data to work with, and doing more with it requires the power of advanced 42

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

THE OPPORTUNITY IS IN UNIFYING DATA SILOS SO THAT GOVERNMENT LEADERS CAN PINPOINT THE INTELLIGENCE IN THEIR DATA. THE AI CAPABILITIES THAT ARE NOW ENABLED ON BIG DATA – THE BIGPICTURE VIEW OF WHAT IS HAPPENING, WHY IT HAPPENED, AND WHAT IS LIKELY TO HAPPEN NEXT – ENABLES AUTHORITIES TO BUILD CONNECTIONS ACROSS AGENCIES THAT HELP TO BETTER SERVE CITIZENS. data analytics. Put simply, big data analytics enables governments to examine large amounts of data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and other insights, and effectively convert the swathe of data into a

platform for AI. Governments must be able to separate the relevant from the insignificant and the public from the confidential to ensure effectiveness and excellent stewardship. Analytics is the key to unlocking the true AI value hidden in this ever-growing data.

While governments have been collecting data for years, they have been slow to realise the benefits they could realise from it. The opportunity is in unifying data silos so that government leaders can pinpoint the intelligence in their data. The AI capabilities that are now enabled on big data – the big-picture view of what is happening, why it happened, and what is likely to happen next – enables authorities to build connections across agencies that help to better serve citizens.

A recent example is how the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department (ADJD) applied AI-based analytics solutions to make the most of its data and deliver value by enabling quicker and better decision-making. The department implemented machine learning capabilities to easily identify and segment customers, process their requests in a timely manner, enable more informed decision-making using analytics, improve access to data, enhance the quality and consistency of its judgements, and prepare customised, real-time reports for the management and customers.

By using tools such as AI and machine learning, administrators can gain deeper insights across a wide spectrum, and go as specific as individual sectors and even organisations. For instance, healthcare authorities are using AI on data gathered from hospitals, research institutes and other bodies to nip epidemics early, by detecting patterns in reported illnesses, determining the best response and care, and enforcing preventive measures.

The amount of data available to governments is only going to increase.

Interconnectivity and interoperability between smart devices is growing and producing even more data, helping to drive the Internet of Things (IoT).

We are moving from smart devices to smart cities, with Dubai and other cities in the region focusing on digitizing their services. The young, tech-savvy population in the region increasingly expect government services to provide the same level of service they receive from the private sector. Governments’ investment in infrastructure must include smart technology to promote AI-enabled

efficiency, to deliver quality, digitallypowered citizen experiences.

One of the big fears around a growing reliance on AI is the potential impact on jobs, with the very mention of automation immediately throwing up fears that long-held jobs may be eliminated. While this may be true in certain instances, it is by no means at the scale that many fear. According to Gartner, AI will stimulate 2.3 million new jobs by 2020, while HSBC Bank has identified a number of new job titles – including algorithm mechanic, conversational interface designer and digital process engineer – that could become commonplace in the future.

Whether spurring the Government to take action in preparation for the labour market of the future, or actually preparing employees for tomorrow’s work environment, we once again turn to analytics to understand the best tasks to automate, the processes to digitise, and the roles to modernise.

A recent EMEA survey commissioned by SAS states that nearly three-quarters of organizations (72%) claim that analytics helps them generate valuable insight and 60%

WHETHER SPURRING THE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE ACTION IN PREPARATION FOR THE LABOUR MARKET OF THE FUTURE, OR ACTUALLY PREPARING EMPLOYEES FOR TOMORROW’S WORK ENVIRONMENT, WE ONCE AGAIN TURN TO ANALYTICS TO UNDERSTAND THE BEST TASKS TO AUTOMATE, THE PROCESSES TO DIGITISE, AND THE ROLES TO MODERNISE. state their analytics resources have made them more innovative. Greater use of analytics-powered intelligence in workforce planning will enable government employees to serve the public more effectively.

Across sectors and focus areas, AI is slated to be a tremendous disruption to the public sector. Whether tackling national health issues, responding to a local disaster, protecting against the loss of sensitive information or intellectual property, or simply making government more efficient, the analytical insights you can gain from your stores of big data can improve outcomes that have a direct impact on citizens.

The data revolution has transformed the world as we know it. It’s disruptive, exciting, and, let’s face it, a bit overwhelming! It is, however, a significant opportunity for governments to become more datadriven and forever change the way they serve their citizens.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

43

APPOINTMENTS Sammy Zoghlami appointed as senior VO of sales at Nutanix Nutanix has appointed Sammy Zoghlami as Senior Vice President of Sales for the region of Europe, Middle East & Africa.

Having previously held the role of sales lead for the company’s operations in Southern Europe, Zoghlami will take responsibility for all aspects of Nutanix sales in a region stretching from Scandinavia to South Africa, and from Ireland to Russia. In this capacity, Zoghlami will be responsible for leading sales and customer support, strategic business development and strategy, management of Nutanix’s offices and operational teams in each EMEA country, as well as the company’s partnerships, alliances and channel activities in region.

Zoghlami joined Nutanix in April 2013 as country manager in France, taking on responsibility for southern Europe in 2015. Prior to joining the company, he held sales and business development roles at Cisco and Computacenter in the U.K. and France. He holds a B.A. in Business Administration from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.

“Over the last six years I’ve been at Nutanix, I’ve seen the company evolve dramatically, and nowhere more so than in the European, Middle East and African theaters,” said Zoghlami, commenting on his appointment. “I am absolutely thrilled to be given the opportunity to build on my experience overseeing markets as diverse as France, Iberia, Italy, Switzerland and North and West Africa and add territories of both proven viability and exciting new potential for Nutanix. We have such a unique value proposition at this company, accelerating digital transformation and business initiatives at customers. I can’t wait to get started in supporting our customers, partners and employees in their development, as we consolidate our clear leadership in providing for the emerging multi-cloud world.”

DarkMatter names two new key executives DarkMatter Group has announced the appointment of two global leaders to bolster the organisation’s journey in providing smart and safe digital solutions to its clients.

Effective immediately, Nilesh Patel will serve as EVP of Secure Solutions and Joshua Knight will serve as EVP of Cyber Defense.

Nilesh Patel will lead the Secure Solutions practice to deliver the strategic vision for DarkMatter’ secure solutions portfolio. Patel most recently served in product and business leadership roles at Palo Alto Networks in San Francisco Bay Area and has previous experience with leading technology companies such as NetApp and Intel. He brings deep domain expertise in software and systems, SaaS, cloud services, cyber security, data-centric platforms and services, managed services, IoT and 5G network security.

Meanwhile, Joshua Knight will lead the Cyber Defense practice to deliver the strategic vision for enabling organisations to achieve their goal of cyber secure resilient posture. Knight most recently held leadership roles at Cognizant in Texas and has previous experience with leading technology companies such as IBM and AT&T. He brings deep domain expertise in cyber security, governance risk and compliance, identity management, and next generation services including mobile, cloud and analytics.

Dell Technologies appoints new regional channel head Dell Technologies today announced that Vangelis Lagousakos has been appointed as the Senior Director, Channel for the Middle East, Russia, Africa and Turkey region.

In his new role, Vangelis will be responsible for strengthening relationships with channel partners, with a view to developing and enabling a robust partner community.

As the new regional channel lead, Vangelis will continue to develop a cohesive ecosystem to better serve partners in their effort to accelerate their customers’ digital transformation, helping them take advantage of all the capabilities that Dell Technologies’ family of businesses offers, while also reskilling their staff for the future.

Moving from his role as the Senior Director for Sales Planning and Operations Channel Business for EMEA, and with over 30 years of experience Vangelis brings a wealth of experience and expertise to his new role. He has worked with Dell Technologies for 17 years in leadership roles across EMEA, including a stint as the Regional Sales Director for the UAE and Gulf region from 2015 to 2017. He replaces Havier Haddad, who takes on the role of General Manager for the Gulf region at Dell Technologies.

44

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

PRODUCTS

NEXANS LANMARK PATCH PANELS

BOSCH FLEXIDOME IP STARLIGHT 8000I

Nexans has launched two modular 24 port LANmark patch panels suited for all snap-in connectors. Both panels combine the benefits of straight and angled panels.

Compared to its angled equivalents, these straight panels save space inside the cabinet, require no recessed mounting positions for the cabinet door to close and eliminate the need for patch guides.

Both panels come with a straight front shape, and 30° mounted twin ports that allow for connectors to be placed at an angled position. It also features 6 twin ports are oriented towards the left side, 6 others towards the right side in addition to 24 blue coloured keystone clips are included in each panel. Additional cable ties are supplied for the panel with cable support (N5213681BK).

The new FLEXIDOME IP starlight 8000i fixed dome cameras are the latest innovations from Bosch to deliver clear advantages to building security and facilities management.

The cameras also enable detailed image capture in challenging light conditions, and data analysis for improved security and delivering business insights.

The FLEXIDOME’s product concept enables set-up in only three convenient steps: installing the mounting bracket, connecting the cables, and attaching the camera module. The innovative remote wireless configuration and commissioning functionality enables installers to work even smarter. Currently when commissioning, installers have to repeatedly climb up and down ladders, or hire lift equipment to reach cameras at high levels. With this camera, commissioning can be done completely wirelessly.

A wireless contactable tablet or smartphone with the Bosch Project Assistant app can be used to adjust the pan, tilt, roll and zoom (PTRZ) in order to set the required field of view without touching the camera or lens. Should any adjustments be required post-installation, e.g. for new store layouts or altered high-risk zones, these can also be carried out remotely after a secure release process to save time, effort and resources.

R&M CAT 8.1 CABLING SYSTEM R&M has launched its universal Cat. 8.1 cabling system in the Middle East.

The company’s new Cat. 8.1 connection module is based on the design of its Cat. 6A module.This solution for data centers and office LANs supports up to 40 Gigabit/s Ethernet (GbE) – the fastest data transmission rate that local networks with structured copper cabling can achieve today.

This backward-compatible of the Cat. 8.1 cabling system is possible because of the use of the standard RJ45 plugin format. That means that Cat. 6A patch cords, which are still widely used, can be deployed, and networks built on the new Cat. 8.1 solution can still be operated with 10GbE which is standard today. R&M has ensured

that data centers and LAN operators do not need any additional adapters, transmission cables or fiber optic interfaces if they are soon migrating to the faster 25 and 40GbE generations.

After the installation of a basic Cat. 8.1 infrastructure, faster switches and servers can be integrated seamlessly.

The solution is also ideally suited to buildings which require extremely fast local data networks. Here the Cat. 8.1 system from R&M supports the new performance level of 25 GbE (25GBASE-T). The proposed 50m distance in the draft technical report ISO/IEC TR11801-9909 for this bandwidth covers roughly two-thirds of all typical link lengths in office buildings. Furthermore, the Cat. 8.1 cabling system is suitable for fourpair Power over Ethernet (4PPoE) and features R&M’s PowerSafe quality seal.

R&M PowerSafe products exclusively feature IDC terminations and are specifically designed and tested to ensure they can continuously transmit high currents in local data networks.

AUGUST 2019

CXO INSIGHT ME

45

BLOG

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4.0?

SUNIL PAUL, COO AND CO-FOUNDER OF FINESSE, ON HOW THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION WILL TRANSFORM REGIONAL BUSINESSES.

I

n January 2016, World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman, Klaus Schwab, published a book titled ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ Since then, the term has been used to analyse the impact of emerging technologies on industrial, market and to an extent, societal transformation 4IR, in the words of Klaus Schwab, is “characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

Technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things and 3D printing are not only finding their way into business and production processes but also daily life.

For example, machine learning and artificial intelligence are closing the gap between humans and machines; 3D printing is collapsing the production value chain from concept to market; robots are no longer a factory phenomenon; they are now found in banks, restaurants and homes.

The benefits of 4IR are several and could be the subject of another article.

Communities based in less developed regions can access services via digital networks, and leapfrog development cycles.

Improvements in productivity through flexible production systems allow for goods and services to be delivered cheaper and faster; 4IR also promises to spur new services and new forms of employment via digital platforms and level the playing field for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), bypassing expensive investments in infrastructure and marketing.

The big question is whether countries in the Middle East are ready to be disrupted by 4IR? Will companies and organisations be able to adapt to the rapid transformation?

46

CXO INSIGHT ME

AUGUST 2019

What will be the impact on jobs and on people? How to tackle security challenges triggered by digitisation?

McKinsey Global Institute, in a study in 2017, noted that almost half the activities people are paid almost $16 trillion in wages to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated. A growing youth population is putting pressure on regional economies to create jobs and on education systems to prepare future workers.

However, the governments are also dealing with a young and well-educated population, who in turn, can be equipped with the creativity and skills needed to for knowledge-based, sustainable economy. For the oil rich economies of the region, the new imperative of economic diversification to reducedependency on hydrocarbon exports dovetail nicely into the 4IR framework.

To get fit for the 4IR, the region’s first priority should be to strengthen the innovation capacity. R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP is 0.9% in the UAE, 0.8% in Saudi Arabia and 0.7% in the Egypt. Missing the bus here would mean the region continues to remain a market for innovations developed elsewhere. For example, China is aiming to become the world’s number-one AI hub by 2030 with a one trillion renminbi AI core industry.

The pace of transformation driven by 4IR is so fast that future skilling is a must, and countries should update their educational policies and allocate resources for this.

Repetitive tasks have a higher likelihood of being automated while new digital economy would create a demand for higher skills.

Moreover, higher education systems must also be adaptable to life-long learning to allow people to re-skill quickly.

The private sector - industrialists, technologists and business people - must

invest innovation and skill or risk their region getting excluded from the new value chains of goods and services.

Governments worldwide are stepping up policy efforts to address 4IR’s technological disruption. In May 2019, more than 40 came together to adopt the first-of-their-kind ever set of intergovernmental rules on the use of AI. In the region, UAE has been at the forefront of 4IR adoption, launching a national strategy for AI in 2017, the first Arab country to do so. The strategy, among other things, is focused on making the country the first in the field of AI investments in sectors that include transport; health; space; renewable energy; water; technology; education; environment and traffic.

In April 2019, the UAE inaugurated the Centre for Fourth Industrial Revolution, the first in the region and fifth globally with one of its aims being to works towards developing mechanisms, applications and uses for 4IR in the UAE. In March, Saudi Aramco had unveiled its 4IR centre aimed at uplifting the technical skills of its workforce and helping the company’s operational performance to enable greater efficiencies.

In Bahrain, state-backed business support services provider Tamkeen and the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) has launched several 4IR pilot projects.

But the bulk of the region’s private and public sectors have a plenty of ground to cover before they get to the 4IR. In many cases, they are, as in other regions, pacing themselves through the second and third industrial revolutions while embracing 4IR technologies. The better the region prepares for the eventualities of 4IR, the better the position they will be in to reap its rewards.

The New AWS Middle East Region Is Now Open Amazon Web Services is expanding its global footprint with the opening of the AWS Middle East Region.

The new infrastructure brings advanced cloud technologies that open up limitless opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship, and digital transformation.

Developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations can start using the new AWS Middle East Region to run applications, and serve end-users across the Middle East.

To learn more, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/local/middle_east/bahrain/

YO U R WO RL D O N O N E S C RE E N.

INSPIRON 15 5000

Introducing the Inspiron 15 5000 laptop with Dell Mobile Connect. Now you can use your phone and your PC on the same screen. Intel® Core™ i5-8265U processor, 8GB RAM, 1TB Hard Drive, 2GB AMD Radeon 520 Graphics, 15.6” FHD Anti-Glare Display, Ubuntu Linux.

Intel® Core™ i5 Processor.

www.mitsumidistribution.com Office: +971 4 370 6058

Ultrabook, Celeron, Celeron Inside, Core Inside, Intel, Intel Logo, Intel Atom, Intel Atom Inside, Intel Core, Intel Inside, Intel Inside Logo, Intel vPro, Itanium, Itanium Inside, Pentium, Pentium Inside, vPro Inside, Xeon, Xeon Phi, Xeon Inside, and Intel Optane are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.