PRODUCTS

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay Portal

Bang & Olufsen today launched a new edition of the award-winning wireless gaming headphones, Beoplay Portal. This edition of Beoplay Portal is now fully compatible with PC and PlayStation consoles, alongside mobile device gaming, which marks a substantial expansion in connectivity across world-leading platforms. The unique offering a dual excellence in gaming and everyday usage which brought Beoplay Portal to market originally still stands strong, whilst the addition of increased connectivity, a new wireless dongle, and improved battery life of up to 42 hours ensures that Portal is the ultimate one-product audio solution, designed for life.

Whether gaming on PlayStation, PC or mobile, the new edition of Beoplay Portal now caters to all personal preferences with a rich audio experience and stylish design to match. The array of beamforming microphones isolates and amplifies the user’s voice while cancelling out background noise – creating a Virtual Boom Arm experience that eliminates the need for a physical one. This in turn means that whilst Portal’s gaming uses are unlimited, the headphones can also be worn for everyday listening and activities. This edition of Beoplay Portal offers a significant increase in battery life, providing up to 42 hours of continuous playtime using Bluetooth and Active Noise Cancellation (+18 hours); or 19 hours of wireless playtime with Active Noise Cancellation (+7 hours).

Logitech RightSight 2

Logitech has announced the availability of AI-powered software RightSight 2 that now simultaneously presents both a close-up view of the individual speaker and a view of the entire meeting room during video calls.

With RightSight 2 auto-framing technology, farend participants can follow the active speaker while also getting situational context from the group, such as one person gesturing to another or writing on a whiteboard.

RightSight 2 combines audio and video intelligence to detect people’s placement in the room and the location of their voices. Speaker View is a new mode that uses the two-camera system in Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini to render a picture-in-picture view* of the active speaker and the whole group. The active speaker is framed using the main camera that pans and zooms smoothly as the speaker changes, while the wide-angle AI Viewfinder frames the room, ensuring remote participants can see and hear all meeting exchanges clearly. IT admins have the flexibility to toggle between Speaker View and Group View (RightSight’s original implementation of autoframing) to best suit their teams.

Fortinet FortiGate 3000F

Fortinet has announced the FortiGate 3000F, the latest Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) powered by Fortinet’s purpose-built NP7 and CP9 security processing units (SPU) to support organisations in building hybrid IT architectures that accelerate digital innovation and fuel business growth. With built-in network and security convergence, dynamic network segmentation, automation, and natively integrated Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) capabilities, FortiGate 3000F enables ultra-scalable, security-driven networks that seamlessly converge networking and security without compromising security performance. FortiGate 3000F also offers the highest performance figures in the industry with Security Compute Ratings of up to 6x greater connections per second than competitive offerings.

FortiGate 3000F helps secure the datacenter and hybrid IT architectures in the following ways: • Scalability: FortiGate 3000F continues to deliver the most scalability in the industry via purpose-built

Fortinet SPUs, including the NP7 and CP9. These are engineered to radically increase the speed, scale, performance, efficiency, and value of Fortinet solutions while greatly improving user experience, reducing footprint, and lowering power requirements.

FortiGate 3000F also offers 22x the Security Compute

Rating for concurrent firewall sessions when compared to competitive offerings.

• Advanced Networking and Explicit Application

Control: FortiGate NGFWs come with natively integrated ZTNA access proxy to allow users to access applications and resources from anywhere, at any time, with constant authentication while building and maintaining effective compliance and security controls. FortiGate NGFWs seamlessly converge and accelerate networking and security and offers industry leading routing capabilities to peer with multiple providers on the WAN (Wide Area Network) side, and interconnect with a wide array of vendors on the LAN (Local Area

Network) side. Many Fortinet networks have simplified their operations by replacing routers with a single

FortiGate device that offers both networking and security. • Enterprise-Grade Security: With over 565,000 customers, industry-leading Fortinet solutions seamlessly weave networking, security, and essential

AI/ML-powered FortiGuard services into a single platform, enabling IT teams to effectively manage internal and external threats, prevent lateral spread and ransomware, and avoid business disruptions and brand damage. FortiGate is the only NGFW in the industry that offers advanced content policies like video filtering to mainstream services like YouTube, Vimeo, and

Dailymotion. Enterprises can build flexible policies to allow one or many categories as well as stringent network security controls that can allow or block up to the channel level. With unprecedented SSL inspection (including

TLS 1.3) performance, the FortiGate NGFW is the only platform that detects threats hidden in encrypted paths and offers automated threat protection with the least performance degradation. • Automate and Simplify: The Fortinet Fabric Management

Center provides single-pane-of-glass management, automation, and orchestration across the Security Fabric, including support for over 470 ecosystem partners, to simplify enterprise-wide workflows. Its open API approach and cross-environment connectors also help simplify and ensure consistent security posture and enforcement across multi-cloud environments.

SHAPING THE POSTPANDEMIC ERA

SUNIL PAUL, MD OF FINESSE, ON HOW WILL THE END OF THE PANDEMIC AFFECT THE TECH SECTOR

The COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be one of the biggest disruptors of all time. It’s ravaged some of the traditional business models that seemed unshakable and accelerated others that looked like light-years away.

At the heart of humanity’s fight against the virus is digital acceleration. The crisis has been a catalyst as people have been forced to act. With terms like lockdown, social distancing, and zero physical contact becoming part of our daily lexicon, companies that set digital goals over three to five years had to scale these down to timeframes of three to six months.

A Deloitte study sums this all up aptly: “Through COVID-19, it becomes visible what being digital truly means. It is not just about cool apps but about having a deep solution chain across processes, people, and technology. It’s a fundamental change in the way we work, live and do business.” The Middle East wasn’t immune to the tectonic shifts happening across the globe and has undergone massive changes since the time it went into the initial lockdown in March 2020. The alacrity with which the government and the private sector embraced digitalisation has helped the region tackle the pandemic better than most other countries.

Connectivity and internet speed are critical to any digital strategy, and the Middle East telcos ensured blazing speeds during the pandemic. The UAE has consistently been No1 in Speedtest global index for mobile internet speed, with Qatar at No5 and Saudi Arabia at No7. The UAE also ranks 13th globally in fixed broadband speed.

This robust infrastructure has paved the way for efficient remote working – one of the biggest changes faced by organisations in the last couple of years. But this has also led to companies being increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats.

Cybersecurity is one of the industries that has soared in these unprecedented times. A recent research projected the Middle East market size to grow from $15.6 billion in 2020 to $29.9 billion by the end of 2025, at a CAGR of 13.8%.

Another industry that has taken wings with the COVID-19 is FinTech, and related branches like payments. An Acquity research showed that the number of FinTech startups in the EMEA region was 3,581 in 2018, and it nearly tripled in the last three years to 9,311 in February 2021.

The UAE has also accelerated towards its goal of becoming a cashless society. It has ramifications in several sectors like retail and tourism, with most companies having to adopt secure payment systems.

COVID-19 has also hastened the adoption of cloud, artificial intelligence and the use of big data – starting from the world’s fight against the virus – to almost every other facet of life and business. A PWC global survey showed 52% of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the COVID-19 crisis and 86% said that AI is becoming a “mainstream technology” for them.

All these developments indicate that the pandemic has resulted in a huge technology boom over the past two years. Today as the world looks ahead, hopefully towards it being classified as an endemic, will this surge in tech investments begin to decline? The short answer is no.

With Gartner predicting that global IT spending will grow 5.1% in 2022 – the end of the pandemic does not mean the end of the technology boom. Many of the changes brought on by the pandemic is likely to last for years to come. Having witnessed a glimpse of how comprehensive digital transformation can power the future and swiftly and confidently grow their operations, organisations will now look at boosting and streamlining the capabilities of their hurried IT investments.

This gives an indisputable opportunity to tech solution providers to assist customers in their evolving digital transformation strategies. Customers are no longer looking at surviving the pandemic; they are now seeking counsel on how to deliver better ROIs from their current IT architecture. The future is bright and filled with new opportunities for tech providers, as long as they understand what customers are looking for in the post pandemic world.