EC-MEA August 2021 by GEC Media Group

SAMI ABI ESBER’S LOOKBACK ON 40 YEARS OF MDS UAE

TOSHIBA’S PUSH TO DOMINATE FLASH MEMORY

PA G E S 6 4 VOLUME O8 | ISSUE 11 AUGUST 2021 WWW.EC-MEA.COM

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FLASH MEMORY GOES 3D

MANAGING DIRECTOR TUSHAR SAHOO TUSHAR@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM EDITOR ARUN SHANKAR ARUN@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM CEO RONAK SAMANTARAY RONAK@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM

ARUN SHANKAR, EDITOR A R U N @ G E C M E D I A G R O U P. C O M

In 1984, Toshiba developed a new type of semiconductor memory called flash memory. In 1987, Toshiba invented the world’s first NAND flash memory and in 1991 began mass production of NAND flash memory. In 2007, Toshiba announced the first three-dimensional flash memory technology and started mass production of BiCS FLASH. Subsequently, the memory business of Toshiba was made into a separate company in 2017 and commenced operations as Toshiba Memory. In October 2019, Toshiba Memory itself was renamed as Kioxia. Kioxia’s BiCS FLASH is a three-dimensional, vertical flash memory cell structure. This structure enables it to surpass the capacity of mainstream two-dimensional, flash memory. Moving to a three-dimensional structure was a necessary evolution from two-dimensional flash, because the memory cell size for two-dimensional flash had shrunk to its limit. Three-dimensional flash technology is expected to drive the next phase of storage for the 5G era. It is important for consumers to know the cutting-edge technology behind it, feels Toshiba’s Santosh Varghese. Worldwide there are only two major players in this fabrication business, Kioxia and Samsung. In the region, Toshiba Gulf will market the Kioxia brand says Varghese. In our lead feature this month, top executives look at the challenges and benefits of artificial intelligence. Says Stephen Gill at Heriot-Watt University Dubai, while many industries were affected with the pandemic, e-commerce was among few markets that experienced accelerated growth. As consumers expect more tailored experiences, hyper-personalisation is crucial for the continued growth of e-commerce. Algorithmic e-commerce or smart, systemic digitisation of business functions, will pave the way for adoption of artificial intelligence in the e-commerce sector. Artificial intelligence-powered natural language will deliver experiences to online shoppers through customised product and category descriptions that turns structured data into a naturalsounding sales pitch. However, artificial intelligence needs a lot of processing power. And many enterprises do not have enough computing power to implement such techniques. Another key challenge faced by enterprises in the implementation of artificial intelligence is algorithm bias, says Gill. Bias can infiltrate algorithms in many ways. The root cause of algorithm bias lies in the training datasets that artificial intelligence systems are exposed to. The training data can include biased human decisions or reflect historical or social inequities. It is important to take a step back and observe the training data. Also, this month, Sami Abi Esber, President Midis System Integration, Board Member Midis Group, talks about the journey of the organization over the last forty years. Founded in 1981, MDS UAE is one of the oldest IT firms in the region. MDS UAE is a holding company that is part of the Midis Group, which represents technology vendors in more than 70 countries. Associated with over 170 affiliates, the Midis Group has been growing at a CAGR of 12%, over the last ten years. As we come out of the summer months and into the remaining hectic business months of the year, the opening of Dubai Expo 2020 and Gitex Technology Week, both in the month of October, appear positively ahead. In-person, face to face business, may become the norm by the end of the year, faster than other parts of the world. Happy business months ahead to all. ë

GLOBAL HEAD, CONTENT AND STRATEGIC ALLIANCES ANUSHREE DIXIT ANUSHREE@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM GROUP SALES HEAD RICHA S RICHA@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM EVENTS EXECUTIVE GURLEEN ROOPRAI GURLEEN@GECMDIAGROUP.COM RONIT GHOSH RONIT@GECMDIAGROUP.COM JENNEFER LORRAINE MENDOZA JENNEFER@GECMDIAGROUP.COM SALES AND ADVERTISING RONAK SAMANTARAY RONAK@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM PH: + 971 555 120 490 PRODUCTION, CIRCULATION, SUBSCRIPTIONS INFO@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM DESIGNER AJAY ARYA ASSISTANT DESIGNER RAHUL ARYA DESIGNED BY

SUBSCRIPTIONS INFO@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM SOCIAL MARKETING & DIGITAL COMMUNICATION YASOBANT MISHRA YASOBANT@GECMEDIAGROUP.COM PRINTED BY Al Ghurair Printing & Publishing LLC. Masafi Compound, Satwa, P.O.Box: 5613, Dubai, UAE # 203 , 2nd Floor G2 Circular Building , Dubai Production City (IMPZ) Phone : +971 4 564 8684 31 FOXTAIL LAN, MONMOUTH JUNCTION, NJ - 08852 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PHONE NO: + 1 732 794 5918 A PUBLICATION LICENSED BY International Media Production Zone, Dubai, UAE @copyright 2013 Accent Infomedia. All rights reserved. while the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracyof all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

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CONTENTS 30-43

COVER STORY Ali Al Shami, Red Hat AI benefits limited by data pipe-line complexities Anas Abdul-Haiy, Proven Consult Top five best practices to make AI work for you Marwan Zeidan, Schneider Electric Top three roadblocks in roll out of artificial intelligence Mike Brooks, Aspen Technology AI detects correlation and not necessarily causation

Ramprakash Ramamoorthy AI is known to overpromise and underdeliver Sameer Basha, Check Point Software Technologies Cyber security solutions built on human-made logic Stephen Gill, Heriot-Watt University Dubai Compute power, algorithm bias, key challenges

Mohammed Alkhotani, Sitecore Using AI for customer and content profiling

Thierry Nicault, Salesforce Investing in AI tools can boost resilience

Raed Hijer, Dell Technologies Legacy systems, architecture of data, restricting AI

Walid Issa, NetApp Building a data fabric to remove AI bottlenecks

45-49

15-17

07-11

51-53

INNOVATION

Global CIO Forum announces launch of The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2021

13-20

54-55

44-45

21-25

56-59

GUEST COLUMN

MDS UAE celebrates 40 years, subsidiary Midis SI unveils future plans

26-29

56-59

46-48

EDITOR’S PAGE VIEWPOINT EVENTS CHANNEL SECURITY

CHANNEL STREET

REAL LIFE

GUEST COLUMN

EVENTS

CHANNEL STREET

CHANNEL STREET Toshiba’s regional push to dominate flash memory

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VIEWPOINT

GETTING DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY TEAMS TO WORK TOGETHER A common misconception is security is about saying no—to any request, another misconception is developers only care about delivering code with security meaning less.

tension between developers and security is often talked about and making the two sides work together might sound fanciful. But shifting left can make a real difference, moving security from the end of the software development lifecycle to an earlier point in the process. By employing security tools as part of the development pipeline, developers can end their nightmare of trying to sort out security flaws at the end of a development process. DevSecOps is the term that sums up the cultural change that needs to happen to end these and other shortcomings. With DevSecOps, teams creating applications should not just be aware of how code is developed and deployed in the cloud and elsewhere but also how it is secured in operations. DevSecOps means embedding security into everything so that all touch points across the software development lifecycle contain a security element. The goal of DevSecOps is to make both DevOps and security processes much more efficient and allow for spotting possible problems much earlier. So, with this in mind, what are the critical elements for success? One obvious one is how to break down the barriers that exist between development and security teams in a positive way. There are several approaches like embedding a security person in a development team or training developers on security best practices. Whatever approach is chosen, a critical step is overcoming communication barriers. A common misconception is that security is only about saying no—to any request—in the name of reducing risk. From a security perspective, there is another misconception that developers only care about delivering code, and security means less to them. Neither viewpoint is fundamentally true. While open lines of communication and mutual understanding are key it is equally important that DevSecOps teams have a toolset that is similarly integrated and capable of tracking and addressing the changes that might be happening in your organisation. Whether we are talking about changes in cloud providers, the deployment stack, or something else, there is a clear need to have a platform that will work where you are—in the cloud or on-premises. Perhaps the greatest difficulty organisations encounter when trying to bake security into development is too often that everyone wants the easy answer. In other words, good enough security but that is never a great idea. Challenging this requires some heavy lifting in how an organisation’s security

ASHLEY WARD,

Technical Director, Office of the CTO, Palo Alto Networks.

DevSecOps means embedding security into everything so that all touch points across the software development lifecycle contain a security element.

mindset makes it clear that there is going to be some work on everybody’s part. There is no easy middle way on this. Shifting left and cultivating DevSecOps will take time. There’s a dual job of investing in tools that enable developers and security teams to work together; and making real effort to erase communication barriers, develop the right culture, and establish processes that enable developers and security professionals to work together for common purpose. ë

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VIEWPOINT

SIX COMMON MISTAKES IN CLOUD MIGRATION PROJECTS Gartner predicts through 2024, 60% infrastructure and operations leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns that negatively impact on-premises budgets.

nfrastructure and operations leaders under pressure to migrate quickly to the public cloud are susceptible to several common cost mistakes. More than 70% of companies have now migrated at least some workloads into the public cloud, according to Gartner research. This momentum will continue as companies plan to increase their cloud adoption in the wake of Covid-19. Yet even as enterprises embrace the many benefits of the cloud, managing the cost of cloud computing is an ongoing challenge. In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2024, 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns that negatively impact their on-premises budgets. Here are the six common mistakes that cause cloud migration costs to go off the rails.

MISTAKE #1 WRONG TEAM The choice of a migration partner is a critical component of a cloud migration strategy. Yet, many I&O leaders select a migration partner based on familiarity or low pricing rather than experience. Others try to save on partnership costs by giving the migration project to an internal team, even if they are not ready for it. Both of these choices often lead to mistakes and rework, increasing costs in the long run.

MISTAKE #2 WRONG EMPHASIS Under pressure to move quickly, leaders often prioritise the lift and shift approach of moving workloads into the cloud without modifying them. The best move may be to rewrite and re-release an application in a cloud-native way, or even to replace it entirely with a SaaS-based alternative. Defaulting too quickly to a rehosting approach and deferring the cost to modernise or replace critical applications can result in higher cloud operating costs after migration.

MISTAKE #3 RUSHED ASSESSMENTS The most critical early phase in a cloud migration project is application assessment, as it helps to determine which cloud migration approach should be used for each application. Failing to fully assess the workloads to be migrated is a common mistake, resulting in incomplete specification of migration requirements and downstream scope creep.

MISTAKE #4 POOR LANDING DESIGN Failing to properly architect and implement underlying cloud landing zone envi-

DAVID WRIGHT,

Research Director in the Infrastructure Strategies team of Gartner for IT Leaders.

ronments into which workloads are migrated can increase the costs of security and compliance. Ensure that the setup of these environments is considered well in advance of the migration and included in the scope of work.

MISTAKE #5 DEPENDENCY BOTTLENECKS Another potential mistake that is often the result of an incomplete application assessment is the discovery of dependency bottlenecks. Failing to discover and account for the interdependencies between on-premises systems being moved can lead to incorrect grouping and ordering of application migrations, network performance issues and cascading delays. This can cause migrations to take more time than initially allotted, increasing costs.

MISTAKE #6 HIDDEN COSTS Leaders often fail to consider indirect project costs, such as those associated with transforming their organisation to operate effectively in the public cloud or the residual costs of vacated data center capacity. Transformation costs to watch for include the cost to reskill existing teams, the cost to raise salaries to match market levels for cloud roles, changes to organisational structure and operating procedures, and the cost to adopt agile DevOps practices across the IT organisation. Common residual costs from a cloud migration include losses in productivity due to vacated facilities and hardware, unused software licenses or unproductive staff. It can also involve the cost to run duplicate versions of the same system during a migration cutover period. ë

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JOIN FUN & THRILL WEEKENDS

BADMINTON CRICKET CYCLING FOOTBALL SWIMMING TENNIS TABLE TENNIS GOLF TEAM BUILDING TASK TUG OF WAR ATHLETIC FITNESS CHALLENGE BOWLING VOLLEY BALL BASKET BALL

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3000+ SPORTS

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MACHES

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VIEWPOINT

BELONGING, A NEW ADDED ELEMENT TO DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION Business leaders need to commit to a new era of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, to usher in prosperity that can result from a welcoming workplace.

ne of the unintended, but positive, side-effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the intensification of the conversation about gender equality. Research now clearly shows us that welcoming corporate cultures outperform their stagnant peers. It is time to stop talking just about diversity and inclusion; we must add the concept of belonging. PwC estimated last year that legal and social barriers to female participation in MENA workforces represent an annual GDP loss of $575 billion. A paltry 56% of women believe they have been assessed on a par with their male colleagues when up for a promotion, and two thirds are in favor of government intervention in the private sector on issues of gender diversity. In a world that suffers from skills gaps and a shortage of entrepreneurship, why do women, who represent half the global population, have such small shares in corporate board membership? Change will not happen on its own. Business leaders need to commit to a new era of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, to usher in the prosperity that can result from the welcoming workplace. Here are some pillars around which such efforts should be organised.

MARK ACKERMAN,

Area VP, Middle East AND Africa, ServiceNow.

PwC estimated legal and social barriers to female participation in workforces represent an annual GDP loss of $575 billion

#1 WORKFORCE TRAINING We must start with our people. If employees are equipped with a shared set of welcoming values that reflect those of the company, the corporate atmosphere will evolve. Learning programs must seek to build inclusive mindsets that celebrate diversity and advocate for it. An open, listening culture that encourages two-way dialogue should be taught as a standard.

#2 EQUITY FOR ALL All of us have a need to feel equal to our colleagues, and that should be reflected in an inclusive environment. Fairness and respect should emanate from programs and create an atmosphere of equity across the entire employment lifecycle, from interviews to onboarding and onward through career progression to offboarding.

#3 GIVING EMPLOYEES A VOICE Everyone needs to be heard. One of the challenges associated with building inclusive cultures is that it only takes one bad experience for an employee to feel that they do not belong, but it takes constant effort on the part of a diverse, focused team to make everyone feel like they do belong.

#4 RECRUITING AND CAREER ADVANCEMENT In the years to come, the region’s top talent will gravitate towards great workplaces. Considering the diverse nature of the region, those that prioritise recruitment, development and retention of talent will also have to prioritise inclusive practices. Inclusive teams will appeal more to the region’s varied demographic.

#5 LOBBYING FOR GOOD Leaders must set examples, inside their organisations and outside. They should be advocates for diversity, inclusion and belonging, so they can explain to others what it means to blur the line between the personal and professional, and what the benefits of such approaches are. Diversity, inclusion, and belonging, is a long road, but a worthy and necessary challenge. Adopting these pillars is one way of keeping the ship on course as we build businesses that add value to communities. ë

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EVENTS

GEC Media announces IT Industry’s first corporate multi-sports championship GEC Media Group announced the inaugural GEC Tech+ Championship 2021 to be held in Dubai. The championship will be held in the months of October and November 2021. The GEC Tech+ Championship is the information technology industry’s first corporate multi sports challenge. It will challenge participating corporates to excel as a team and rise above their competition with skill, collaboration, professionalism, and sportsmanship. GEC Tech+ Championship 2021 announced Dubai Eye and CITY 101.6 as the official Radio Partner, Toshiba and Kioxia as title sponsors, Al Ain Farms as official refreshment partner and Prime Healthcare as healthcare partner. The championship will host over 13 different sports and activities plus loads of food and beverages and entertainment avenues for everyone to have a great time out. GEC Tech+ Championship supports businesses and employees to achieve a better work life balance, boost productivity and company performance, foster health, fitness, and happiness in the workplace, reduce health care and insurance premiums, increase brand engagement and loyalty, raise company morale through team building, promote brands, and network with likeminded professionals. The one-month-long action-packed sports and networking event will witness over 3,000 participants, 13 sports activities, federation accredited officials, live updates of matches and scoring, world class venues, healthy food and beverages, joy village for family and kids, awards and team recognitions, and CSR activities.

GEC Tech+ Championship Award details are as under:

GEC TECH+ CHAMPION

The GEC Tech+ Championship Champion will be the company that accumulates the most points/trophies throughout the event and will win the GEC Tech+ Championship Rolling Trophy.

GEC TECH+ CHAMPIONSHIP HEROES

The GEC Tech+ Championship Heroes Awards will be presented to the company that have the highest number of participants. This is a recognition for the company for its ‘Employee Wellbeing’ initiative.

SPORT AWARDS

Trophies and awards for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners in all the sports.

PLAYER OF THE MATCH AWARD

Award for the best performing player of the respective sport.

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EVENTS

Details of the sports activities are as under: SPORT

MINIMUM NUMBER OF TEAMS NUMBER OF PLAYERS/TEAM

FOOTBALL (MEN)

CRICKET (MEN)

GOLF (MEN AND WOMEN MIXED)

TUG OF WAR (MEN AND WOMEN)

TEAM BUILDING TASKS (MEN AND WOMEN)

ATHLETIC (MEN AND WOMEN)

CYCLING (MEN AND WOMEN)

SWIMMING (MEN AND WOMEN)

BADMINTON (MEN AND WOMEN)

TABLE TENNIS (MEN AND WOMEN)

TENNIS (MEN AND WOMEN)

BOWLING (MEN AND WOMEN)

VOLLEYBALL (MEN AND WOMEN) BASKETBALL (MEN AND WOMEN) The GEC Tech+ Championship Champion will be the company that accumulates the most points and trophies throughout the event and will win the GEC Tech+ Championship Rolling Trophy. The GEC Tech+ Championship Heroes Awards will be presented to the company that have the highest number of participants. This is a recognition for the company for its ‘Employee Wellbeing’ initiative. Open to both IT solution providers and government and private end-customers, The GEC Tech+ Championship is a combination of sports, athletics and team building activities and provides an optimal platform for business networking and relationship building.

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EVENTS

Global CIO Forum announces launch of The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2021 Global CIO Forum announced the launch of the 2021 edition of The World CIO 200 Roadshow with a theme “#ChangeX”. The World CIO 200 Roadshow event will roll out from September to November 2021. In this year, the roadshow will cover 36+ countries and provide a platform for 200+ exhibitors with 300+ engaging sessions. Over 4,000 C-Level executives will be recognised in the 2021 edition. Carrying forward its legacy of the past five years, The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2021 is all set to raise curtains from September 2021. At The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2021, CIOs from 36+ countries will challenge the legacies that were overthrown in the pandemic, charter the policies for a new digital ecosystem and change the policies and governance as the catalyst. ‘Transformation through Change’ is at the heart of the roadshow this year that would gather global information technology decision makers and solution providers in a unique platform this year. The Summit will build roadmaps for strategic decision making and identify yardsticks that are the key drivers of growth in the digital world. While CIOs can pick on sessions to help them fast-track their growth, the solution providers can build their brand, present their solutions, and network with relevant C-level IT decision-makers flown in from 36+ Countries. The top CIOs from respective countries will arrive in United Arab Emirates for the grand finale in all all-expense-paid trip, on 17-18th November 2021. The event will also be part of Dubai Expo 2020.

Schedule of the World CIO 200 Roadshow 2021 TITLE SPONSOR CO-SPONSOR

COUNTRY

DATE

Gulf Cooperation Council

Bahrain

September 7

Gulf Cooperation Council

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

September 9

Gulf Cooperation Council

Kuwait

September 14

Gulf Cooperation Council

Oman

September 16

Gulf Cooperation Council

Qatar

September 22

European Union

Turkey

September 29

European Union

Germany

September 29

European Union

Spain

September 29

European Union

Switzerland

September 29

European Union

Italy

September 29

European Union

Netherlands

September 29

Pakistan

October 6

East Africa

Kenya

October 6

East Africa

Tanzania

October 6

East Africa

Uganda

October 6

Asia

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EVENTS

Schedule of the World CIO 200 Roadshow 2021 TITLE SPONSOR CO-SPONSOR

COUNTRY

DATE

West Africa

Ghana

October 7

West Africa

Nigeria

October 7

West Africa

Ivory Coast

October 7

North Africa

Egypt

October 8

North Africa

Morocco

October 8

North Africa

Tunisia

October 8

North Africa

Algeria

October 8

South Africa

Botswana

October 9

South Africa

Mauritius

October 9

South Africa

October 9

Asia

India

October 20

Asia

Philippines

October 20

Asia

Sri Lanka

October 20

North America

Canada

October 27

North America

United States of America

October 27

Southeast Asia

Singapore

October 21

Southeast Asia

Hong Kong

October 21

Southeast Asia

Indonesia

October 21

Southeast Asia

Malaysia

October 21

Southeast Asia

Thailand

October 21

Southeast Asia

Vietnam

October 21

Southeast Asia

Australia

October 21

United Kingdom

October 26

United Arab Emirates

November 17-18

Gulf Cooperation Council

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World CIO 200 Zones 2021 ZONE

COUNTRIES

TIMELINE

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain Oman, Kuwait

September

Asia

Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong

October

Africa and European Union

South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Italy, Switzerland, Algeria, Tunisia, Uganda, Botswana, Netherlands, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Mauritius, Ivory Coast

September and November

Egypt

October 8

United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada

October 8

Tunisia

October 8

October

October 8

United Arab Emirates

November 17-18

Middle East

United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada

Grand Finale Key highlights of World CIO 200

BOTS- The Annual CIO Handbook. l Grand Finale with 2 days of networking, collaboration, knowledge sharing and CAC. l Tech Talk: The most novel way of making your presentations come alive. l DX Inspire Awards: Global 20 Recognition for the most Transformative Projects and Solutions. l

and supporting current and emerging IT leaders. GCF Virtual Summit CIO Connect is a virtual roundtable exchange of ideas that promotes learning as well as networking. Events The event will be held in-person and all attendees will need to follow safety protocols as announced by the Emirates of Abu Dhabi.

What is new this year

The World CIO 200 Summit

The 2021 edition is ready to build roadmaps for strategic decision making and identify yardsticks that are the key drivers of growth in digital world. While CIOs can pick on sessions to help them fast-track their growth, the solution providers can build their brand, present their solutions and network with 500+ relevant C-level IT decision makers flown in from 14 countries.

Established in 2017, The CIO 200 Summit is a multi-country CIO felicitation ceremony that recognises the achievements of digital leaders. The CIO 200 Awards are not a competition but a celebration of the amazing lives of CIOs and their game-changing careers. 2020 was an extraordinary year for almost every organisation, as it grappled with the fallout from the pandemic. The CIO 200 Summit 2020 toured 26 countries and gathered over 3000+ representatives in few months. Key stakeholders tabled roadmaps for strategic decision making and identified yardsticks that are the key drivers of growth in the digital world. Sponsors of The World CIO 200 Summit 2020 event include Mindware, Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, Juniper Networks, Rubrik, Exclusive Networks, Rittal Company, Finesse Technologies, Malco Technologies, F5 networks, Pulse Secure, TechnePlus, MDS Dubai, C2FO and Lingaro. The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2020 featured exclusive invitations for country specific briefings, celebrated the contributions of local CIOs and offered post-event networking opportunities. Moreover, participants were tapped into the collective wisdom of advisory boards and subject matter experts. During the grand finale of the World CIO 200 Roadshow, the #DXInspire 2020 Awards recognised 20 path-breaking organisations that have redefined digital transformation to its core. However, CIOs from organisations in the UAE, who have been the catalyst in bringing about change in this challenging year, were honoured with this award. The winners also received blockchain certificates.

GCF Recognition and Reward Programme GCF members now can commemorate and celebrate notable events and outstanding achievements with custom awards, badges and certificates with each other. Each badge even includes a printable certificate along with globally redeemable points. Impact Awards Programme The GCF Impact Awards recognise the outstanding contributions of GCF members. Thought Leadership Councils Bringing together global leadership coaches and leaders to do “brain trust” to problem-solve the challenges we all share in our roles every day and prepare ourself for future business leaders. Mentorship Programme The Mentorship Programme, free to all Global CIO Forum members and their direct reports, continues to demonstrate our dedication to growing

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EVENTS

GCF, AGMC – BMW host Reboot Unite CIO Meet at Dubai Autodrome Global CIO Forum in partnership with AGMC – BMW hosted the sixth GCF Unite Reboot Meet on July 28, 2021. The GCF Unite Reboot Meet helps to boost industry engagement, enhance peer-to-peer networking, and create new relationships. The event focuses on striking an equilibrium between four pillars including wellness, fitness, nutrition and engage. The event provided a platform to all the community members to interact with the experts from these four pillars which can help them to learn the benefits of an all-round wellbeing The 6th edition held in partnership with AGMC – BMW was attended by 18 delegates, who arrived at AGMC Motor City Showroom wherein they were taken for a quick tour of the showroom followed by a Racing Simula-

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tor Competition. The delegates then departed to Dubai Autodrome for an enthralling circuit experience Keeping mental wellness of CIOs as a focus for the event, a presentation was given by Global CIO Forum’s wellness partner –Eupepesia that was done by Kurt Micallef, Eupepsia Sports Therapist. Kurt focused on the connection of the brain with exercise and how the brain performs when engaged and put in pattern with certain habits. This was followed by briefing on BMW safety and BMW M Drive Experience. The CIOs participating in this Reboot session drove the BMW vehicles on a limited part of the 5km Dubai Autodrome track. The vehicles that were used for the track driving by CIOs, included the BMW M3 and M4

competition enhanced vehicles. The Dubai Autodrome is a 5.6 km FIA Grade 1 circuit. It provides the ability to operate 6 different combinations and 3 circuits at the same time. Safety cover on the track is run to international standards, with marshal’s posts manned, and safety trucks, ambulance and paramedic services available throughout the event. Additionally, the new track day procedures are designed with the latest government regulations and social distancing guidelines in mind, to allow for a safe and enjoyable on-track experience from the time of arriving at the venue until the end of the track day. The GCF Unite Reboot Meet was organised with all the safety guidelines announced by the Emirates of Dubai.

EVENTS

Microland hosts summit on Modern IT Infrastructure On July 23, Global CIO Forum and GEC Media Group in association with Microland Group successfully hosted a virtual session on “not Square Pegs in Round Holes- Cloud Ops Done Right”. The event focussed on how modern IT Infrastructure comes with its set of unique deployment challenges. Building the right Infrastructure Management model is critical in the journey to digital transformation. The event was moderated by Mark Riddy, Vice-President, Customer success EMEA, Microland. The virtual summit on “Not Square Pegs in Round Holes- Cloud Ops Done Right” highlighted the key aspects such as modern Infrastructure and its management challenges, know how industry leaders are overcoming these challenges, what it takes to build a modern infrastructure management model, mistakes to avoid while using modern management models, and learn how Microland and its customer implemented a modern management model. Speaking at the event, Karthikeyan Krishnan, Senior Vice President - Europe, Middle East and Africa, Microland talked about how to start your journey towards doing CloudOps right. “In our research we have found that it is super critical to the right cloud ops approach before you start moving the workload to cloud. For instance, the way how security is implemented, how cost is controlled, the governance required for cloud is completely different from how legacy infrastructure in your own data sector is managed. Hence, the

approach to how you manage your cloud are called as cloud ops once the workloads are moved to the cloud is super critical,” he mentioned. Yugal Joshi, Vice President, Information Technology Services at Everest Group also shared his opinion on how cloud is integral to serving enterprises’ digital initiatives and said, “The pandemic could not really damp the spirit of almost many enterprises in terms of their willingness to increase speed to market and we saw 58 percent of enterprises that we worked with accelerated their Agile and DevOps adoption.” By taking the event forward, panelist Benil George, Associate Vice President - Microlabs at Microland Limited and Sunil Sarat, SVP, Cloud and Data Center at Microland also talked about how the ongoing Digital transformation has pushed enterprises to adopt modern, cloud native applications which leverage micro services architecture models enabled by cloud native services, containers, and server-less infrastructure, along with virtual machines in a multi-cloud environment. This has led to a sweeping change in the definition, design, deployment, and management of the underlying infrastructure that runs these digital applications. However, traditional management models and tools are not efficient to manage the complexity, scale, and dynamism of these modern environments and this has led to adoption concepts, tooling and practices such as GitOps, IaC and SRE which throw up completely different challenges for IT leaders.

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Global CIO Forum concludes PowerStore and Data Protection summit On July 14, Global CIO Forum in collaboration with Dell Technologies, Computer Data Networks and Mindware network successfully concluded a virtual summit on “Get Ready for what’s Next”. The focus of the event was to make users aware of PowerStore and Data Protection. During the virtual summit, Dell Technologies, Computer Data Networks and Mindware network made users aware of the age of digital era and its challenges. Guest panel also briefed the audience about focused innovation to date, ultimate workload flexibility, anytime upgrade programme option, PowerStore designed for the data era, Dell Technologies Data Protection Solutions, comprehensive application support, and Power Protect DD portfolio. Rajat Bhatia, Senior Systems Engineer, Dell Technologies and Amjed Antari, Infrastructure Architect at Mindware were the speakers at the event. Bhatia started event by briefing the audience on how the Data era is putting pressure on IT sector and their focus on innovation and latest technologies. He underlined that the process of digital transformation is continuous and needs to keep evolving with the business model. Rajat Bhatia also highlighted the Intelligent infrastructure insights with CloudIQ and introduced Anytime Upgrade as the industry’s most flexible prepaid controller upgrade programme. Antari commenced the session by highlighting the Dell Technologies Data Protection Solutions, a comprehensive portfolio is built to protect proven and modern workloads. He also briefed about Backup, Disaster Recovery, Cloud Archives, Cyber Recovery, In Cloud Protection as well as comprehensive application support. PowerStore covered by the Dell EMC Future-Proof Programme provides greater choice, predictability, and investment protection through new Anytime Upgrades to users. This virtual summit concluded with a quick quiz session. On July 13, Global CIO Forum in association with Dell Technologies,

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Mindware and Almoayed ICT network successfully hosted a virtual summit on “Get Ready for what’s Next.” The event focused on how organisations can bring infrastructure modernisation, data protection and business continuity. During the virtual summit, the audience understood connectivity solutions from Dell Technologies, Mindware and Almoayed ICT network delegates, which allows users to understand more about PowerStore and Data Protection. Prominent speakers included Amjed Antari, Infrastructure Architect at Mindware and Dany El Khoury, Senior Partner Sales Specialist, UAE and Gulf who highlighted key features of the PowerStore and Data Protection and also discussed simplicity in an all-in-one solution and introduced new designs for the data era. During his presentation, Amjed Antari highlighted the following: l Dell EMC Integrated Appliances l Replicate to and from DR Site l Cloud Disaster Recovery During his presentation, Dany El Khoury, Senior Partner Sales Specialist, United Arab Emirates and Gulf highlighted the following: l Powerstore l Date-centric l Intelligence l Adaptable Over the last few years, organisations have realised that being an Intelligence-driven Data-Centric business is the only model to thrive and succeed. Data visibility, these days more than ever, is a top IT imperative for most organisations. Organisations have been striving to modernise their data centres and opt for more hybrid cloud models. During the summit, it was also discussed how Dell Technologies, Mindware and Almoayed ICT network helps consumers to save their data from any kind of fraud.

CHANNEL

Value distributor CyberKnight signs on GTB Technologies for data leak solutions using AccuMatch

WAEL JABER, VP Technology and Services, CyberKnight.

The inaccuracy of data breach detection and complexity of traditional tools significantly impact operations in today’s datasaturated business environment. To address customer challenges related to corporate information protection, compliance, and data visibility, CyberKnight has signed a distribution agreement with GTB Technologies, a leading cyber security company that focuses on providing enterprise data protection and data loss prevention solutions. GTB Technologies is the only data protection solution which can prevent the loss of data from malware and trusted insiders by blocking sensitive data in real-time with impeccable accuracy whether it is on premise, off premise, in the cloud or as a managed service. The company created AccuMatch, a proprietary technology with a unique patented fingerprinting feature to ensure the most precise detection, monitoring and control of sensitive data along with its movements. The platform is capable of real-time inspection of all protocols while stopping data loss immediately. “Due to its complexity, nowadays more and more organisations are viewing DLP as a programme that impedes the productivity and effectiveness of their employees,” commented Wael Jaber, VP Technology and Services, CyberKnight.

Crayon winner of Saudi Arabia 2021 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award

ZIAD RIZK, CEO Crayon Middle East and Africa.

Crayon, a global leader in IT services and innovation, announced it has won the Saudi Arabia 2021 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognise Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered outstanding Microsoft-based solutions during the past year. Awards were classified in various categories, with honorees chosen from a set of more than 4,400 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries worldwide. Crayon was recognised for providing outstanding solutions and services in Saudi Arabia.

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CHANNEL

Platinum Equity completes acquisition of largest global distributor Ingram Micro from HNA Technology

ALI BAGHDADI, SVP and Chief Executive, Ingram Micro META.

Platinum Equity announced that it has completed the acquisition of Ingram Micro from HNA Technology, a part of HNA Group, for a total enterprise value of $7.2 billion, in a transaction that includes $5.9 billion of equity value. With $49 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2020, Ingram Micro is the world’s largest provider of technology solutions and mobility, cloud, platform and supply chain solutions. Founded in 1979 and headquartered in Irvine, California, Ingram Micro is an integral part of the technology and ecommerce ecosystems, helping its partners maximise the value of the technology that they make, sell or use.

With more than 35,000 employees and operations in 60 countries, the company serves more than 170,000 customers and partners with over 1,600 vendors, including the world’s best-known technology companies. Through its vast global infrastructure and focus on cloud, mobility, technology lifecycle, supply chain and technology solutions, Ingram Micro enables business partners to operate more efficiently and successfully in the markets they serve. Alain Monié will continue to lead Ingram Micro as Chief Executive Officer supported by his leadership team, and the company will continue to be headquartered in Irvine, California.

Microsoft Inspire 2021 announces partner benefits in Cloud, Dynamics 365, Teams, Lighthouse Microsoft Inspire 2021, the company’s premier partner conference, presented a virtual keynote focusing on the added strength and innovation of the partners ecosystem and its commitment to equipping them with the most powerful technologies, tools, and solutions. The keynote was led by Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, and President, Brad Smith, also featuring Judson Althoff, EVP of Worldwide Commercial Business, Charlotte Yarkoni, COO Cloud + AI, Nick Parker, CVP Global Partner Solutions, and Rodney Clark, CVP Global Channel Sales over a two-day period. Additionally, the Microsoft Global Partner Solutions Leadership Team hosted a talk-show format session called Into Focus, which included a top-tier line-up of executive interviews, 1-on-1 conversations, partner discussions and more. Inspire highlighted a list of upcoming benefits for partners, such as Deschutes taking the operating system to the Microsoft Cloud. This will allow users to stream their applications, tools, data and settings from the cloud to any device. In addition, all Microsoft Teams customers will receive access to Dynamics 365 data in Teams at no extra cost. Continuing the offerings, Microsoft has chosen to reduce fees for transactable offers to three percent, which is less than the market standard of 20%, for every transactable application published in the commercial marketplace. Microsoft 365 Lighthouse and Project Orland will also drive growth and profitability through managed delivered security services, as well as identifying new avenues of growth. This is added upon by the new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and updates on sustainability commitments, which helps customers and organisations reduce their emissions and achieve the carbon negative, zero waste, and water positive vision by 2030.

YVONNE CHEBIB, Global Partner Solutions Lead, Microsoft UAE.

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CHANNEL

Value added distributor CyberKnight processes $13M+ orders in H1 2021 CyberKnight, announced its financial results for H1 2021. In its second year of operation, CyberKnight processed more than $13 Million of orders in the first 6 months of 2021 and saw an increase of 575% versus H1 last year. These notable achievements and exponential growth are the result of substantial investment into high-caliber talent across the region, expanding the channel ecosystem, deep-rooted strategic partner relationships, ongoing technology portfolio enhancement, and extensive marketing activities. “Despite the negative impact from Covid-19 last year, we had an exceptional first half of 2021,” commented Avinash Advani, Founder

Caption (Left to right) Avinash Advani, Founder and CEO at CyberKnight; Vivek Gupta, Co-Founder and COO at CyberKnight.

and CEO at CyberKnight. “Our commitment to hire the best cybersecurity talent, align with the industry’s leading technology vendors, and focus on Zero Trust Security have all been key contributors to overachieving our target. Also, with our unique The Art of Cybersecurity Distribution business model, we have endeavored to add the maximum value to Strategic Partners,” said Vivek Gupta, Co-Founder and COO at CyberKnight.

du, Wipro launch single pane of glass to manage customer multi-cloud environment du, from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, and Wipro, a global information technology, consulting and business process services company, announced the launch of their new multi-cloud platform. The two companies have partnered to deliver market-leading multicloud management and migration capabilities through this platform, which aligns with their aims to simplify and accelerate digital transformation and cloud adoption across the UAE. The partnership will enable organisations to minimise risks and maximise return on investment for migration and management across multi-cloud environments. Through this Multi-Cloud Platform, du and Wipro will help organisations reimagine their infrastructure, create new cost efficiencies, and deliver compliant, trusted, and secure solutions.

It will act as a single pane of glass that will help clients completely manage their cloud estate. du’s digital infrastructure will provide agile, resilient, and scalable solutions on a foundation of hybrid, multi-cloud, data center services, and software-defined enterprise networks. The company’s comprehensive tools and managed services will ensure maximum value, supporting clients’ digital infrastructure and transformation requirements, optimising costs, and boosting organisational efficiency. Guided by du experts and the telco’s methodology, clients will also benefit from an established migration practice and will be supported during every migration stage to help execute cloud and business strategies and deliver on business and technology requirements. In addition, du will consult, design, build, manage, and optimise across multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud environments to uphold its support commitments. du’s unified interface will provide clients with complete cloud resources visibility, management, and reporting, with blueprints leveraged to orchestrate infrastructure and services across every cloud.

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CHANNEL

(Left to right) Toni Azzi, General Manager, Qatar, North Africa and Levant at Mindware; and Chris Ross, SVP Sales, International at Barracuda.

Barracuda extends secure WAN distribution with Mindware into North, West, Central Africa Mindware, a value-added distributor in the Middle East and Africa, announced it has signed an agreement with Barracuda, provider for cloud-enabled security solutions, to offer the entire suite of the vendor’s security products to enterprises across North, West and Central Africa. The new contract builds

on the existing partnership between the two companies that extends to the Gulf and Levant countries, which saw the distributor successfully grow Barracuda’s regional business and market share. Mindware will focus on the entire suite of Barracuda business products, with emphasis

on increasing regional adoption of the company’s email security solutions including Email Security Gateway and Cloud-to-Cloud Backup. The company was recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Email Security, Q2 2021. With the hybrid workplace trend, Mindware sees huge potential for Barracuda CloudGen WAN, the first secure SD-WAN service built natively on Microsoft Azure. It is a single, unified solution that makes it very simple for enterprises to ensure highly secure, seamless connectivity to all their locations and all their cloud-based resources and applications. The distributor will also focus efforts on promoting Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, a solution that goes beyond nextgeneration firewalls and gives companies comprehensive protection for on-premises and multi-cloud deployment. Mindware has attained all the required certifications to offer professional services and training on behalf of Barracuda. Both vendor and distributor will work jointly to roll out tailor-made channel enablement plans that will help partners optimally position different technologies taking into account the particular verticals and customer segments that they specialise in.

StarLink to distribute ABBYY’s intelligent document processing solutions in Middle East, Africa StarLink, announced a new partnership with ABBYY, a Digital Intelligence company, recognised for its leadership in Intelligent Document Processing and Process Discovery and Mining, for distribution in the MEA region. The Digital Intelligence platform offered by ABBYY caters to Content Intelligence and Process Intelligence. Content Intelligence helps to turn unstructured content into actionable information, deriving more value out of content-centric processes using advanced OCR, IDP, AI, Machine Learning and NLP technologies. Process Intelligence provides end-to-end visibility into processes to identify challenges and enhance customer experiences. StarLink, through their two-pronged go-to-market strategy that targets customers directly as well as through their extensive channel network will focus on promoting ABBYY’s Content Intelligence for Enterprises portfolio including the flagship Intelligent Document Processing Platform ABBYY FlexiCapture product suite. This partnership is strategic to both companies as they aim to capitalise on each other’s core capabilities to enhance and grow the market share in the Digital Intelligence domain. Zaidoun Arbad, COO StarLink commented, “Onboarding ABBYY has further strengthened our Intelligent Automation ecosystem. Especially with the robust integration between ABBYY and

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(Left to right) Zaidoun Arbad, COO StarLink; Helen Pospelova, SVP, ABBYY Emerging Markets.

Blue Prism, our customers can assimilate RPA with critical Content Intelligence to improve their customer experience dramatically.” “Today we observe the growing need for intelligent automation solutions that enable business agility and support enterprise strategic digital transformation initiatives in MEA. Especially when the region is adjusting to the New Normal,” said Helen Pospelova, SVP, ABBYY Emerging Markets.

CHANNEL

Microsoft recognises AVEVA as Energy Partner of the year and Sustainability finalist AVEVA, announced it has won the 2021 Microsoft Energy Partner of the Year Award and was also named the finalist of 2021 Microsoft Sustainability Changemaker Partner of the Year Award. The company was honored amongst a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognise Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered outstanding Microsoftbased solutions during the past year. Awards were classified in various of categories, with honorees chosen from a set of more than 4,400 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries worldwide. AVEVA was recognised for providing outstanding solutions and services across the energy sector. The Energy Partner of the Year Award recognises a partner organisation that excels at providing innovative and unique services or solutions based on Microsoft technologies to energy companies – which include oil and gas, power and utilities, mining and renewables

– demonstrating thought leadership in their industry. By collaborating with Microsoft, AVEVA has the power to elevate how the energy industry can operate, by marrying the power of industrial data, AI and human insight with the scale, breadth and latency of cloud. Aligning efforts with Microsoft, AVEVA has templated its best practices and vertical solutions to become repeatable, scalable and adaptable to fit agnostically with other software stacks, thereby enabling rapid implementation and payback. Today, organisations deploying combined AVEVA Energy Management and Performance Solutions can realise reductions in project implementation times of up to 60% when compared to bespoke implementations of intelligent operations – thanks to a real-time, 360-degree view of the value chain, and predictive maintenance and operations. As a finalist for the Sustainability Changemaker Partner of the Year Award, AVEVA was recognised for providing innovative and unique solutions based on Microsoft technologies that help customers solve challenges of

KERRY GRIMES, Head of Global Partners, AVEVA.

sustainable digital transformation. Sustainability changemakers drive purpose-driven digital transformation that powers a more sustainable world. AVEVA provides industrial software that inspires people to shape a sustainable future. The combined solutions span engineering and operations, enabling AVEVA to be well positioned to help increase energy efficiency, minimise noxious emissions and optimise the effective use of valuable natural resources, advancing sustainable development across diverse sectors.

Nutanix expands Elevate Partner Programme to include service providers globally

CHRISTIAN ALVAREZ, SVP Worldwide Channels at Nutanix.

Nutanix announced the launch of the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Programme, further extending the benefits of the Elevate Partner Programme to now include service providers globally. The programme empowers service provider partners – including managed and cloud service providers – to build highly-differentiated hybrid and multicloud services delivering increased profitability and faster time-to-market. As many organisations look for opportunities to simplify their IT operations, IDC forecasts the managed cloud services market to grow to $101.1B by 2024. With this opportunity, comes the challenge of service providers meeting increasingly individualised customer demands while staying profitable. The Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Programme helps service providers improve margins and agility by addressing the lock-in and minimum commitment requirements encountered in traditional service provider

vendor models and programs. This service provider programme adds two partnership levels to Nutanix Elevate: Authorised Service Provider and Professional Service Provider. Authorised Service Providers will include partners new to Nutanix or those delivering Nutanix services to small to midmarket organisations. Professional Service Provider will deliver differentiated services for enterprise organisations. Partners who join the programme will be able to take advantage of all the benefits outlined in the Elevate Service Provider Programme Guide including training, Not for Resale NFR and Nutanix XLAB software licenses, and enablement support. Professional Service Provider partners will be able to take advantage of expanded support from Nutanix including marketing materials, potential market development funds, sales tools, goal-based financial incentives and rebates, and personalised insights in Nutanix’s Partner Portal.

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SECURITY

FireEye Mandiant to provide cyber risk management to Alpine Formula One racing team Alpine F1 Team is pleased to announce a new strategic partnership with FireEye Mandiant, one of the most trusted cybersecurity providers in the world. As an organisation constantly analysing and finding new ways to combat cyber threats, Mandiant will help Alpine F1 Team stay one step ahead of cyber threats, so it can focus on pushing the boundaries of technology and innovation – both on and off-track. The Team will benefit from Mandiant’s profound understanding of planning and

risk management as it relies increasingly on artificial intelligence, connectivity between international locations, digital communication and advanced data capture across multiple platforms including telemetry, driver simulators and, of course, the cars on track. The Mandiant logo will appear on Alpine F1 Team’s garage environment and on the A521 nose at this weekend’s British Grand Prix – the kick-off of this multi-year, multifaceted relationship.

Mimecast launches AI enabled CyberGraph add-on for its Secure Email Gateway

JOSH DOUGLAS, VP, Product Management for Threat Intelligence at Mimecast.

Mimecast announced the Mimecast CyberGraph solution, a new add-on for Mimecast Secure Email Gateway that is engineered to use Artificial Intelligence to help detect sophisticated phishing and impersonation attacks. CyberGraph creates an identity graph which is built to store information about relationships between all senders and recipients. The graph is designed to detect anomalies and leverages machine learning technology to help organisations stay one step ahead of threat actors by alerting employees to potential

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cyber threats. Phishing and impersonation attacks are getting more sophisticated, personalised and harder to stop. If not prevented, these attacks can have devastating results for an enterprise organization. Security controls need to be constantly updated and improved to outsmart threat actors. CyberGraph leverages AI and machine learning technologies to help keep employees one step ahead with real-time warnings, directly at the point of risk. The workplace is always the top target of cybercriminals, but in the remote working era, the problem has intensified. The State of Email Security Report found that email threats rose by 64% and employees are clicking on three times as many malicious emails as they had before the Covid-19 pandemic. Security controls need to evolve to help evade cybercriminals’ relentless and crafty approach. CyberGraph includes three key capabilities engineered to help prevent cyber threats: RENDERS EMBEDDED TRACKERS USELESS

During the reconnaissance phase of an attack, threat actors embed trackers into emails that communicate with an illegitimate remote server, disclosing important information that can be used to create a

targeted social engineering attack. CyberGraph is built to blocks this communication, mask the email recipient’s location, and prevents attempts to understand engagement levels with the email content. USES MACHINE LEARNING TO PROTECT FROM TARGETED EMAIL THREATS

CyberGraph is designed to create an identity graph by learning about relationships and connections between all senders and recipients. This intelligence is combined with the outputs from machine learning models to detect anomalies that could be indicative of a malicious email. ENGAGES USERS WITH CONTEXTUAL, DYNAMIC WARNING BANNERS

CyberGraph is engineered to engage users at the point of risk with color-coded banners that indicate the potential nature of a threat. Users are empowered by seeing whether an email is safe or potentially nefarious. CyberGraph is built to “crowdsources” threat intelligence, which helps to reinforce the machine learning model. As the risk associated with any given delivered email changes, banners embedded in any similar emails are updated with the latest information, providing ongoing engagement and protection for users.

SECURITY

BOBBY GUPTA, Senior Vice President and Managing Director International, Virsec.

Virsec’s application-aware workload protection likely good fit with regional transformation Virsec, the industry vendor in applicationaware workload protection, announced that regional companies emerging out of the pandemic are accelerating their investments into digital transformation. They are increasingly concerned about the everyday announcements of cybersecurity compromises at large and

medium enterprises, global and regional. As organisations face growing sophistication of cyberattacks, the demand for effective solutions is skyrocketing. Advanced attack techniques, that execute at runtime in the memory layer, have become mainstream and companies are struggling to combat them.

Virsec Security Platform delivers a solution for container workload protection with runtime visibility and zero-dwell-time defense throughout running container images, including binaries, libraries, interpreted code, and memory. With more than 50 patents, Virsec provides the first and only application-aware workload protection platform that incorporates System Integrity Assurance, Application Control and Memory Protection into a single solution. Virsec delivers in-depth visibility across the entire workload and detects and blocks known and unknown threats that remain concealed by heuristic and endpoint security solutions. The Virsec solution maps the expected performance of each application on a workload and protects the memory those applications use to execute. Virsec ensures that the components of those applications are correct and unmodified before they are allowed to execute, and any deviation from the norm is treated as a threat. Virsec also reported significant momentum in the first half of 2021 with strong revenue growth, strategic customer validation and testing, and industry acceptance of its nontraditional approach to reducing cyber threats. Virsec’s growth correlates with increasing board-level concerns about the financial, safety, and intellectual property impacts of evolving threat scenarios and the subsequent need to have deeper visibility into application workloads at runtime.

TAG Cyber recognises ThreatQuotient for security operations, curating data for effective automation ThreatQuotient, a security operations platform, announced the company has been recognised as a Distinguished Vendor by TAG Cyber in their Security Quarterly report for Q3 2021. TAG Cyber selected ThreatQuotient as one of only a handful of industry-leading cyber security solution providers to be featured in the report, which offers expert guidance, research and analysis, and education across the entire cyber security ecosystem. In 2021, the frequency and scale of cyberattacks has increased and affected businesses and critical infrastructure ranging from hospitals to

power plants. Amid the growing intensity and risks associated with these threats, enterprises, governments, and individuals are in need of more research and resources to protect against the damage cyberattacks can inflict on vital systems. To address security personnel shortages and an industry need for more curated and data-driven threat intelligence, ThreatQuotient recently announced two new capabilities built into the ThreatQ platform, ThreatQ TDR Orchestrator and ThreatQ Data Exchange.

LEON WARD, VP Product Management, ThreatQuotient.

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SECURITY

LORI MACVITTIE, Principal Technical Evangelist, Office of the CTO at F5.

100% financial services organisations surveyed by F5 Application Report undergoing digital transformation Financial services organisations are the most bullish of all sectors when it comes to digital transformation, according to new research by F5. An industry-specific cut of the 2021 State of Application Strategy Report found that 100% of surveyed financial services organisations are working on digital transformation efforts, up from 84% last year. Furthermore, nearly 75% are also deeply into the automation of operational processes, and most are looking toward AI-assisted business. At the same time, telemetry is growing in importance, as decision-makers seek increasingly rich, actionable data insights. “Covid-19 has vastly accelerated a global digital transformation toward a more

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data-driven future,” said Lori MacVittie, Principal Technical Evangelist, Office of the CTO at F5. “Today, we’re seeing many more decisionmakers from the financial services realm embracing the public cloud and SaaS, rapidly ramping up AI operations, and seeking application security and delivery technologies that are easy to deploy and provide data for decision-making.” F5’s SOAS analysis revealed that financial services organisations stand out as the leaders in digital expansion, with a focus on business process automation, orchestration, and the creation of more seamless digital experiences. A full 70% of financial services organisations are at this level, which is the most of any industry. Although already

in a leadership position, financial services organisations also reported a 13% jump in automation and orchestration efforts, as well as a notable 40% increase in application modernisation, compared to last year. Significantly, more than four of five financial services respondents 83% said that they were modernising applications, particularly those associated with IT service desk and customer service functions, with finance close behind. Nearly three-quarters 71% of respondents are also using API technology to modernise apps, which is s higher proportion than other industries. At the same time, financial services organisations published considerably more APIs than any other vertical, partly driven by the movement toward open

SECURITY

banking. Developments of this nature saw the percentage of financial services respondents reporting volumes of over 10 million API calls per month increase from 10% in 2020 to 48% in 2021. As a result, financial services organisations are more likely to have implemented an API security solution. More than two-thirds of respondents 69% reported having a solution in place or are planning to implement one within the year. 83% - again the highest of any surveyed industry – have, or will soon have, an API gateway in place. In addition, financial services organisations handling more than 10 million API calls per month are more than twice as likely to have deployed an API security solution 82% as those handling fewer than 1 million API calls per month 32%. Deployment momentum is expected to accelerate as modernisation proceeds. According to the SOAS findings, 21% of financial services respondents expect to increase their public cloud deployments, compared to just 15% of other respondents. The vast majority will continue to manage both traditional and modern applications and architectures. 87% of survey respondents say they juggle both, which is an 11-point jump compared to last year. Indeed, most financial services organisations are operating more architectures than ever, with nearly half managing five different architectures – a full 30 points higher than in 2020. The SOAS report also found that 9% of financial services organisations are already hosting application security and delivery technology at the edge. 66% are planning edge deployments within the next year, although the figure for all other industries is slightly higher at 76%. Security and related compliance issues, which can involve assets the organisation doesn’t control, are likely contributors to such hesitancy. SOAS concludes that, as edge programming develops, financial services organisations are more likely to embrace the technology with more purpose. Approximately two-thirds of financial services respondents apply response time, uptime, and service reliability SLAs to the components that modernise applications such as APIs. Service reliability, in particular, aligns with business outcomes, and 95% of financial services organisations believe data from their application delivery and security solutions is “important” to keep IT aligned with business outcomes. Three-quarters of financial services organisations 76% now view protecting customer data as a primary benefit of application security and delivery solutions, which explains a relative reluctance to host those technologies in the cloud. Only 57% currently do so, compared to 70% of all other respondents. The multi-cloud availability of application security and delivery solutions is clearly a top priority in the financial services industry, as 92% report that application security solutions are equally important to deploy in the cloud and in on-premises data centers. While the financial services industry is moving at pace in most areas, only 5% of respondents indicated that their IT employees have all the automation and orchestration skills required. At the time of the report’s publication, 98% said they are missing insights they need, particularly for application issues, performance degradations, and possible attacks. The SOAS report posits that, for most financial services organisations, there is a growing need for more telemetry and the tools needed to put it to use, as well as cultural changes across business units using the insights for strategic decisions. Elsewhere in the report, a full 81% of financial services organisations revealed that they are using AI, or are planning to by the end of 2022. Despite this, and although a majority of organisations feel they have the toolsets they need, nearly 50% see toolset integration and a skills deficit as enduring challenges. Consequently, 48% of financial services organisations say they treat infrastructure as code and, those that do, are twice as likely to deploy it more frequently, even when using automation. They are also four times more likely to have fully automated application pipelines, and twice as likely to use them to deploy half of their application portfolios.

IGNACIO SBAMPATO, Chief Business Officer at ESET.

ESET achieves Champion status in Canalys Global Cyber security Leadership Matrix 2021 ESET, has achieved Champion status for the third year in a row in the latest Global Cybersecurity Leadership Matrix from Canalys, improving upon its 2020 matrix position with a focus on investment in enterprise services and partner training. Canalys is a leading global technology market analyst firm with a distinct channel focus, and strives to guide clients on the future of the technology industry and to think beyond the business models of the past. The 2021 Cybersecurity Leadership Matrix assessed 19 cybersecurity vendors on their global channel and market performance over the last 12 months. The Leadership Matrix combines partner feedback from Canalys’ Vendor Benchmark tool with an independent analysis of each vendor’s momentum in the channel based on their investments, strategy, market performance and execution. ESET MSP Administrator 2 EMA2 is a license management system for managed service providers MSPs that both extends access to ESET’s more advanced portfolio and integrates with third-party tools through an application programming interface. ESET was awarded Champion status with eight other vendors. Champions have the highest scores in the Canalys Vendor Benchmark and exhibit common characteristics, including making improvements to and simplifying channel processes, and demonstrating commitment to growing partner-generated revenue. Champions must also show that they are making sustainable investments in the future of their channel models, including channel programs and initiatives.

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COVER STORY

ANAS ABDUL-HAIY, Proven Consult

MARWAN ZEIDAN, Schneider Electric

MIKE BROOKS, Aspen Technology

RAED HIJER, Dell Technologies

RAMPRAKASH RAMAMOORTHY, ManageEngine

SAMEER BASHA, Check Point Software Technologies

STEPHEN GILL, Heriot-Watt University Dubai

THIERRY NICAULT, Salesforce

WALID ISSA, NetApp

ALI AL SHAMI, Red Hat

MOHAMMED ALKHOTANI, Sitecore

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

MEASURING BENEFITS

MANAGING CHALLENGES Enterprises are struggling to gains benefits, overcoming early challenges and investment shortfalls, into computing, data training, data architectures.

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COVER STORY

NETAPP

BUILDING A DATA FABRIC TO REMOVE AI BOTTLENECKS A data fabric helps remove bottlenecks at edge, core, cloud to enable data collection, artificial intelligence workloads, and smoother cloud integration.

rtificial intelligence is expanding possibilities in business, and in everyday life. With massive compute power, data availability, and expert analytics teams, artificial intelligence is creating a lot of opportunities. The pace of digital innovation is accelerating across all industries in response to the pandemic and artificial intelligence for healthcare played an instrumental role in this regard. Many healthcare institutes used artificial intelligence or specially designed digital platforms to deal with the pandemic by screening people who might be infected, identifying high-risk patients, screening frontline healthcare workers and distinguishing Covid-19 from other respiratory illnesses. Using data, artificial intelligence can help healthcare professionals make more informed, accurate, and proactive assessments and diagnoses. The ability to analyse data in real time enables healthcare professionals to improve the quality of life for patients and ultimately save lives. This will enable proactive diagnoses using smarter healthcare tools, help physicians find the right data faster and keep patients and healthcare organisations safe from cyber criminals and attacks. In finance, artificial intelligence is helping organisation in fraud analysis and investigation by utilizing rule-based learning to identify fraudulent transactions, it is also helping companies to be more efficient in addressing their regulatory compliance. Similarly, in telco, artificial intelligence is enhancing customer satisfaction improving predictive maintenance by helping to fix problems with hardware cell towers, power lines, before they break and detects signals and breakpoints that usually lead to failures. Organisations across nearly every industry are adopting artificial intelligence to stay competitive, drive growth, and decrease expenses. Whether powering self-driving vehicles, pioneering genomic medicine, building chatbots, or leveraging predictive maintenance, success with artificial intelligence is completely dependent on real-time access to large amounts of data. Data is key to identifying patterns, developing predictive insights, and enabling increasingly accurate autonomous systems. However, artificial intelligence is easier said than done. Not only are the volumes of data massive and stored in many different forms, but the data lives

WALID ISSA,

Senior Manager, PreSales and Solutions Engineers, Middle East, and Africa.

everywhere across multiple clouds and in the datacentre. Data silos and technology complexity are major hurdles to getting artificial intelligence projects into production. Taking these challenges into considerations, artificial intelligence experts at NetApp work with customers to address these challenges by building a data fabric that helps remove bottlenecks at the edge, core, and cloud to enable more efficient data collection, accelerated artificial intelligence workloads, and smoother cloud integration. The best practices would be to build a data fabric; a unified data management environment spanning across edge devices, datacentres, and one or more public clouds so artificial intelligence data can be ingested, collected, stored, and protected no matter where it resides. Only then we can optimally train artificial intelligence, drive machine learning machine learning, and empower the deep learning algorithms necessary to bring artificial intelligence projects to life. NetApp artificial intelligence solutions can help customers remove bottlenecks at the edge, core, and cloud to enable more efficient data collection, accelerated artificial intelligence workloads, and smoother cloud integration. Data management solutions support seamless, cost-effective data movement across hybrid multi cloud environment. NetApp ONTAP artificial intelligence is a solution powered by NVIDIA DGX systems and NetApp cloud-connected all-flash storage. NetApp ONTAP artificial intelligence helps by simplifying, accelerating, and integrating the data pipeline with the ONTAP artificial intelligence proven architecture. ë

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COVER STORY

ANAS ABDUL-HAIY,

CEO and Deputy Director.

PROVEN CONSULT

TOP FIVE BEST PRACTICES TO MAKE AI WORK FOR YOU

Exploratory data analysis helps to determine data quality and define reasonable expectations towards the project’s goals in close cooperation with experts.

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COVER STORY

rtificial Intelligence has been recognised as one of the central enablers of digital transformation in several industries. The transformation process seeks to leverage digital technologies to create or modify customer experiences and culture, and business processes, thus meeting customers’ changing needs and the market. And this is where artificial intelligence comes into play. It can help companies become more innovative, more flexible, and more adaptive than ever. The promise of speed, ease, and cost optimisation, while simplifying complex processes and systems, places artificial intelligence as one of the most significant digital transformation drivers. Intelligent process automation refers to tasks that are automated or optimised in part by Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning algorithms, and robotic process automation.

Intelligent process automation is a process by which companies are training robots or computer applications to simulate routine or repetitive responses that would generally be given by employees, resulting in faster time to market and boosted business returns. IPA robots perform tasks by interacting with in house digital resources to carry out a business process just like humans do Intelligent Process Automation has thus been implemented by businesses in modern times to solve various business problems and needs to reduce costs and result in profitability. The main use cases in IPA are Processing Invoices, Payroll Transactions, Customer Support, Recruitment Process, Financial document analysis, and Insurance claims.

BEST PRACTICES

#1 Understand your data and business

AI and ML also greatly help with medical research and drug discovery, as well as medical imaging and robotic surgery Exploratory data analysis helps to determine the data quality and define reasonable expectations towards the project’s goals. Moreover, close cooperation with subject matter experts provides the domain’s insights, which are the key to obtain a complete understanding of the problem. #2 Straightforward approach Running a simple approach may give you more insights regarding the problem than a more complicated one, as simple methods and their results are easier to interpret. Moreover, implementing, training, and evaluating a simple model is way less time consuming than a sophisticated one. #3 Define baseline It is a good practice to have a simple baseline that helps in tracking the gain offered by complex strategies. Sometimes the benefit is minimal, and a simple method might be preferable for a given task for reasons like inference speed or deployment costs.

#4 Plan and track Numerous different variables may influence the performance of artificial intelligence algorithms. Hence, tracking the trials becomes challenging, primarily if many people work together. #5 Common sense The final good practice is not to lose common sense, as blindly applying any rules might bring more harm than good.

HOW TO MEASURE ROI

Key performance indicators Oftentimes, this is mandatory in ML training since there is typically a metric that you’re trying to optimise. However, in the case of segmentation for example, you need to know what the segments are going to be used for and what success criteria will be defined. Benchmark of comparison Once performance metrics are defined, maintaining a valid control group or holdout groups that are key to understanding the true

impact that the ML and artificial intelligence models are contributing. Monitoring overtime Many algorithms are updated on a regular basis as more training data is made available. This can be a blessing and a curse when it comes to implementing a ML model, as the models can change significantly over time and need to be monitored to ensure the targets are being met and the metrics for success are sustaining data changes.

PRIMARY MARKETS SUITED FOR ADOPTION

E-commerce Artificial intelligence is completely transforming the way we shop online. With the help of artificial intelligence-powered software solutions and machine learning, retailers are gaining an insight into their customers’ needs and preferences, so that they can optimise their content and ads and effectively target consumers. Healthcare Healthcare professionals can use artificial intelligence technology to automate data entry and other menial tasks, which not only eliminates the risk of human error, but also saves plenty of time that they can focus on providing their patients with the best possible care. AI and machine learning also greatly help with medical research and drug discovery, as well as medical imaging and robotic surgery. Transportation Transportation is yet another area where artificial intelligence is completely changing the game. Driverless cars are no longer just a distant dream, as companies like Tesla, MercedesBenz, Ford and even Google are investing enormous amounts of money into building both semi-autonomous and completely self-driving vehicles. Financial Services Artificial intelligence is extremely beneficial to banks and other financial institutions. Not only can it save plenty of time on various repetitive tasks, but it can also detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and theft by analysing consumer behavior and potential financial risks. Insurance Artificial intelligence can also be of great help in the insurance vertical, as chatbots can be used to seamlessly manage insurance claims, provide personalised quotes, and manage payments, to name just a few of the use cases. ë

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COVER STORY

RED HAT

AI BENEFITS LIMITED BY DATA PIPE-LINE COMPLEXITIES Data pipeline complexities can occur due to data being spread across different databases, as well need to consolidate data from disconnected systems.

he artificial intelligence and machine learning space is witnessing digital transformation and innovation acceleration as enterprises harness digital capabilities and position themselves for sustained business success in the post-pandemic era. With more artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions being introduced, organisational productivity is being elevated to entirely new levels. Improved use of collected data through these same solutions is empowering enterprises to expand their market reach and presence, enhance their product and service offerings, and create new and innovative business strategies. Together, artificial intelligence and machine learning are also driving growth and profitability, identifying trends and gathering insights, and supporting personalised and automated end-user experiences. Besides the benefits artificial intelligence and machine learning deliver, challenges can also arise. In terms of enterprise challenges, data pipeline complexities can occur due to data being spread across different databases, as well the need to consolidate data from disconnected systems. Access to high-quality data can prove difficult with enterprise data presenting somewhat of a bias problem, while obtaining required computing power and overcoming data privacy and security issues also presents problems. Regarding datacenters, perhaps the most pressing challenge is meeting new performance requirements, with the need to implement the latest solutions into existing environments and predict evolving performance requirements exacerbating rapidly. For organisations implementing solutions, there are several best practices to consider and apply. From the outset, companies should set business goals and share them with stakeholders, gather and prepare required data for their project, and develop artificial intelligence and machine learning models according to their goals. Moreover, they should deploy models during the application development process while monitoring and managing models for accuracy purposes. In terms of measuring returns on investment ROI, businesses can factor in all of their costs, refer to success indicators defined prior

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ALI AL SHAMI,

Country Manager, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. to initial implementation, assess outcomes by collecting data, and establish links between outcomes and analytics. Several vertical markets have already demonstrated their suitability and preparedness for early artificial intelligence and machine learning adoption, as well as ROI. From a Red Hat standpoint, Red Hat OpenShift has been the driving force behind these trends, running containerised workloads while developing related workflows and applications. Already through artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases, healthcare has witnessed increased clinical efficiency and improved patient outcomes, financial services players have improved risk analysis and personalised customer services, and telecommunications providers have optimised 5G network performance while enhancing customer experiences. The automotive, insurance, and energy markets are others well-suited for early artificial intelligence and machine learning adoption. From a Red Hat perspective, Red Hat OpenShift empowers enterprises seeking to build artificial intelligence artificial intelligence and machinelearning machine learning workflows and intelligent applications. Capable of providing agility, flexibility, portability, and scalability across the hybrid cloud simultaneously, OpenShift represents an invaluable gateway for developing and deploying machine learning models and intelligent applications into production quickly and effectively, delivering integrated DevOps capabilities for independent software vendors ISVs via Kubernetes Operators and NVIDIA GPU-powered infrastructure platforms. This combination not only helps enterprises simplify the deployment and lifecycle management of artificial intelligence and machine learning toolchains, but also supports hybrid cloud infrastructure in its entirety. ë

COVER STORY

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

TOP THREE ROADBLOCKS IN ROLL OUT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI can answer business-critical questions on a daily and hourly basis but enterprises must leap over roadblocks like data preparation, lifecycle management.

rtificial intelligence’s value in the industrial space is undeniable. It has the potential to skyrocket rates of profitability in manufacturing by an average of 39% by 2035. This is because artificial intelligence brings a fundamentally different approach to decision making that ultimately will produce better results. It uses data to learn patterns that may not be obvious to the human eye faced with hundreds of parameters and inputs versus just a handful of data points in the pre-digital days. General artificial intelligence and machine learning models are not enough. Instead, models must be applied specially to realistic applications, including energy management, asset performance, and operational productivity, to make artificial intelligence worth the financial and human resource investment — not to mention the time. Bear in mind that artificial intelligence technology is just the foundation. Actionable insights gleaned from continually training and retraining models hold the real key to the data-driven decision-making behind valuable business outcomes. Using artificial intelligence can answer business-critical questions on a daily, even hourly, basis, but companies must leap over three current roadblocks: l Data preparation and operationalisation l Artificial intelligence lifecycle management l Making artificial intelligence meaningful across organisations In the industrial space, that question often is, how can companies constantly improve efficiency while ensuring uptime? Artificial intelligence can answer this question with data-based models made to predict outcomes such as when will this asset fail? Or where and when is energy being wasted? But therein lies the challenge. Critical operations and industries demand accuracy, so investing in experimentation is crucial for building the right models, which always will be as dynamic as the human intelligence they are designed to emulate. Artificial intelligence engineers do not always know what any given artificial intelligence model’s outcome will be, as outcomes depend on how predictive the data are. Artificial intelligence models therefore

MARWAN ZEIDAN,

Real Estate and Healthcare Segment Director, Middle East and Africa. must start with a certain level of accuracy and improve over time and, in turn, be re-trained, re-versioned, and re-deployed within situational context and end user feedback. On the other hand, innovative artificial intelligence technologies now make it possible to manage industrial operations and maintenance from almost any remote location. With the implementation of the industrial internet of things digital twins, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, industrial operations are overcoming supply chain, production, and distribution complexity obstacles by linking core industrial processes into a centralised digital environment. Schneider Electric is invested in developing predictive analytics and condition management tools to enable customers to predict machine failure long before downtime actually occurs. For example, Schneider Electric’s Realift Rod Pump Control leverages Microsoft machine learning capabilities to monitor and configure pump settings and operations remotely. It sends personnel onsite only when necessary for repair or maintenance when Realift indicates an issue. Realift is designed to operate in harsh environments and remote locations and is geared to optimise energy efficiency through improved performance for the region’s oil and gas industry. The company has also announced the impact of a new multi-million dollar investment in machine learning tools and data science. This investment brings artificial intelligence-assisted advising to its energy and sustainability services offering, thus providing its clients access to nextgeneration digital tools. This improves the insights and analysis of a company’s energy and sustainability portfolio, driving more efficient value and bottom-line impact in pursuit of climate change resilience and other resource-saving related targets. ë

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COVER STORY

ASPENTECH

AI DETECTS CORRELATION AND NOT NECESSARILY CAUSATION Domain and first principles causation, superior knowledge features, improving training data sets, deliver better results with fewer false positives.

rtificial intelligence learning provides data-driven approaches, that is data writes the programme and its conclusions instead of human programming. Artificial intelligence-machine learning emulates human capabilities to recognise patterns and from them infer possibilities or probabilities of future events. But artificial intelligence-machine learning detects correlation and not necessarily causation. Massive transformations result from guide rails around artificial intelligence that apply domain and first principles causation, superior knowledge feature selection, improving training data sets which then deliver better deductive results with significantly fewer false positives. Recognising errant mechanical and process conditions is only the start. Deeper artificial intelligence-machine learning investigations are now deducing the root causes of why those conditions recur at all. Some early best practices for artificial intelligence begin with stopping machines from breaking and are well recognized by startups, consulting groups, and large companies in process and maintenance in asset performance management APM solutions. Artificial intelligence leaders have progressed into managing operations, supply-chain optimisation. All such activities aim to improve lifecycle overall equipment effectiveness. The most significant ROI is the total profitability of the operation, Return on Capital Expended. Other ROI measures include reductions in safety and environmental events, improved maintenance performance such as fewer unexpected failures or break-in events, and reduced labor-intensive periodic inspections. At the start of machine learning in manufacturing industries, the most apparent vertical markets are asset intensive, process industries with high throughputs. They can often be dangerous when failures occur. Such verticals include oil and gas, bulk chemicals, utilities, metals, and mining. As the technology and solutions developed with the leaders providing extreme ease-of-use, the democratisation of artificial intelligence, and scalability, it becomes evident that all manufacturing verticals can take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning to improve operations and supply-chain conditions. Consequently, today we

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MIKE BROOKS,

Global Director Asset Performance Management.

The most significant ROI is the total profitability of the operation recognise opportunities in transportation, specialty chemicals, pharmaceuticals, water and wastewater, cement, food, beverage, and others. Some of the products include: Mtell machine learning-based precise pattern recognition detects errant behavior and exact failure signatures allowing corrective actions months before impending failure. ProMV’s artificial intelligence adjusts chemical processes correcting impending quality and yield issues. Artificial intelligence in Event Analytics quickly recognises and enables corrections of NOT OK process behavior, avoiding disruptive or out of control conditions. Artificial intelligence recognises manufacturing data patterns unseen by the human eye to guide superior operating campaigns HYSYS: artificial intelligence-enabled hybrid simulation models first principles enhanced by machine learning provide digital twins for the virtual operation of equipment and processes in the safe digital domain to explore, test alternative operating modes efficiently. ë

COVER STORY

SITECORE

USING AI FOR CUSTOMER AND CONTENT PROFILING AI can answer business-critical questions on a daily and hourly basis but enterprises must leap over roadblocks like data preparation, lifecycle management.

igital transformation has been accelerating across the Middle East, as brands seek to improve customer experiences and develop deeper connections with their customers. In fact, 80% of companies report an uplift after implementing personalisation. As organisations seek to further adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning, 83% of MENA organisations have advanced their marketing technology stack more in the last year than in the previous three years before 2020, according to a recent YouGov survey. In innovations, artificial intelligence scoring models can identify customers that are likely to convert and then improve the efficiency of campaigns by excluding customers that are least likely to convert. Artificial intelligence algorithms can help to uncover new opportunities by identifying segments that a human may never conceive –freeing up marketers to focus on overarching strategy and creative tasks. Worldwide, industry research shows that 9 out of 10 consumers are more likely to engage with brands that provide relevant contents, offers, and recommendations. But in this process, Middle East brands face three key challenges: l Generating customer segments requires analysing large volumes of data — including interactions across numerous websites. l Building personalisation rules once is not enough. They must be adaptable to shifting visitor trends. l Rules and configurations are a complex effort that requires significant team hours, let alone replicating these rules across different variables. Following are some of the best practices:

USEFUL DATA First, data must be unified to be accessible and usable for marketing and IT teams. As data volume increases, organisations need technology to integrate and operationalise customer data to ensure it is usable automatically

PLATFORM FOR SUCCESS Customer Data Platforms can help unify customer data in a single

MOHAMMED ALKHOTANI,

Area Vice President, Middle East, and Africa.

Machine learning is a critical component in scaling personalisation repository, and support segmentation, decisioning, and activation. Organisations can act rapidly on key trends and create a personalised journey for major user segments –delighting customers and securing business.

IMPROVE AUTOMATICALLY Machine learning is a critical component in scaling personalisation. Integrating customer data with artificial intelligence and machine learning scoring and segmentation models enable companies to more efficient marketing campaigns with personalised messages, and can help to transform data into insights, and reach more user segments.

RIGHT CONTENT, RIGHT TIME Once customer data is integrated with artificial intelligence, machine learning, organisations can deliver the right content to audience at the right time, and through right channels – creating experiences that keep them coming back for more. In the Middle East, there is strong potential for continued artificial intelligence adoption by the government and public sector, automotive, banking and finance, manufacturing, retail, and travel sectors. With Sitecore solutions, Mashreq Bank is delivering a modern, intuitive, and user-friendly website that is imperative in its digital transformation. ë

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COVER STORY

RAED HIJER,

Principal Technologist AI, ML DL, MERAT.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES

LEGACY SYSTEMS, ARCHITECTURE OF DATA, RESTRICTING AI A lot of organisations are still running on outdated legacy systems with lack of quality data, making it challenging to implement AI and ML.

ast year, we saw increasing innovation around artificial intelligence-powered autonomous driving technology. The automotive vehicles’ capability to collect complex data from their surroundings and use machine learning to make precise and accurate driving decisions has improved exponentially. A recent IDC report forecasts that the number of vehicles that will be capable of Level 1 autonomy will increase to 54.2 million units in 2024. There has also been tremendous innovation in Natural Language Processing, a subset of artificial intelligence focused on training machines to understand human language. This esca-

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lated as the need for chatbots surged due to the pandemic. Continuous innovation in the field has powered more accurate search results, enhanced applied NLP tasks like translations, question-answering and improved user experience. Another promising innovation area around artificial intelligence and machine learning is the use of quantum computing. In the near future, we can expect quantum computing to significantly increase the capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Quantum computing will give machine learning the capability to create systems that execute multi-state operations simultaneously and tackle complex issues in a split second.

COVER STORY

The key challenge faced by the majority of datacentres today, in regard to the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning, is the lack of adequate technology that meets the performance needs of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Most datacentres today are unable to match the performance required to effectively ingest, analyse, and manipulate data in real-time for artificial intelligence and machine learning operations. Deploying artificial intelligence-ready infrastructure can help solve these issues. Additionally, by introducing graphics processing units into the datacentre, all these steps can be accelerated, which will result in an improved performance that is able to meet the needs of artificial intelligence and machine learning. From an enterprise perspective, the most prominent challenge is the lack of access to

clean, meaningful high-quality data. Enterprises must make sure they have a data architecture that consists of data preparation tools that are designed for data cleansing, formatting, and standardisation before storing their data in data lakes. A lot of organisations today are still running on outdated legacy systems that make it challenging to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefore, before undertaking any artificial intelligence, machine learning project, enterprises must assess their IT infrastructure and make sure they have the proper foundations for the project. Enterprises must also make sure their data is of high quality as this can derail the artificial intelligence, machine learning project. The data type, size and the artificial intelligence, machine learning use case NLP, computer vision, tabular will affect choice of hardware and accelerators.

Gartner estimates that

70%

of white-collar workers will be interacting with chatbots daily by 2022

Having a robust deployment plan is of high priority in any machine learning project as it makes testing and integration at different points smoother. Furthermore, there is also a need to create workflow automation throughout the phase of the project so teams can collaborate easily. Measuring the ROI of an artificial intelligence, machine learning project can be quite tricky if not done from the start. It is usually related to generating new business revenue streams, reducing inefficiencies, or automating mundane and repetitive tasks. Enterprises must implement disciplined tracking, monitoring, and measurement systems at every step of the artificial intelligence, machine learning project to get an accurate understanding of the ROI. Furthermore, it is advisable that enterprises select problems that are easy to measure and make sure their cross-functional teams are trained and educated on all processes and operations.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are highly versatile and can be deployed across a variety of industries. An industry where these technologies are making a huge impact is healthcare. Artificial intelligence has significantly enhanced digital consultation, enabled highly accurate robotic surgery, and has helped medical specialists make better-informed diagnoses of patients. A report by IDC found that 50% of healthcare organisations expect an increase in demand for artificial intelligence-based solutions post the pandemic. Furthermore, artificial intelligence has also enabled hassle-free data maintenance of Electronic Health Records. These were fueled by recent advancements in NLP algorithms and transfer learning which accelerated the adoption of these techniques and shortened the time to develop new use cases and deploy them into production. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have proved to be of high significance in the education sector during the course of the

pandemic. As artificial intelligence takes care of admin jobs and other time-consuming tasks such as grading, teachers have found the time and freedom to develop learning content and mentor students. Along with enabling virtual assistance and improving digital assessment systems, artificial intelligence has also made it possible to provide highly customised learning, while also offering recommendations for how to close gaps in learning. Furthermore, artificial intelligence and machine learning have made a mark in the selfservice industry by enabling advanced chatbot systems. Ever since their inception, backed around artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, chatbots have been able to provide 24 x 7 support to customers, answer complex queries and even provide product recommendations to customers. A study by Gartner estimates that 70% of white-collar workers will be interacting with chatbots daily by 2022. Dell Technologies has solutions for simplifying sourcing, deployment, and management of infrastructure designed for the data era and artificial intelligence use cases, ranging from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. These include the Dell Precision Workstations, Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers, Dell EMC PowerScale Storage, and Dell EMC Data Protection solutions. These artificial intelligence-ready infrastructures provide state-of-the-art capabilities that enable every organisation to have access to the transformative power of artificial intelligence. Furthermore, they provide the processing power, capacity, throughput, and scale to power the most advanced artificial intelligence projects. They are flexible and massively scalable to handle all types of data including structured, unstructured, and semi-structured. Additionally, the Dell Precision Data Science Workstation, a fully integrated artificial intelligence hardware and software solution, delivers the power to deploy and manage cognitive technology platforms, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning; giving data scientists powerful, yet flexible computing resource to extract valuable insights from vast amounts of data. The Dell EMC Ready Solutions for artificial intelligence include everything organisations need to accelerate their artificial intelligence initiatives. Helping make artificial intelligence simpler, these pre-designed and pre-validated solutions are ideal for machine and deep learning so organisations can get faster, deeper insights into their customers and their businesses. ë

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COVER STORY

CHECK POINT SOFTWARE

CYBER SECURITY SOLUTIONS BUILT ON HUMAN-MADE LOGIC

Velocity of malware evolution, increasing number of devices, huge amount of data, makes it challenging to keep human-made models up to date.

igital transformation and technology trends have shaped how we live, communicate, and do business. Organisations have become more agile and are embracing technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning to scale efficiency and profitability, while remaining competitive at the same time. Many high-tech datacentres now employ the use of machine learning and cognitive computing to learn from real-time data and adjust their performance on the fly. The organisations are no longer relying solely on the traditional engines which will leave them exposed to the most damaging attacks. The modern datacentre and network require the flexibility of a hybrid cloud security architecture that uses automation and artificial intelligence to scale threat prevention performance on demand on-premise and in the cloud, with a simplified and unified management system. Modern datacentre architecture has evolved from an on-premises infrastructure to one that connects on-premise systems with cloud infrastructures where networks, applications and workloads are virtualised in multiple private and public clouds. This evolution has influenced how datacentres are architected as all of the components of a datacentre are no longer co-located and may only be accessible to one another over the public Internet. Most solutions are based on one or several detection engines which are built on human-made logic such as signatures or rule-based analysis. Those methods are important as they can deter many known threats and some unknown one, but the velocity of malware evolution, the increasing number of devices and technologies and the huge amount of data make it challenging to keep the human made models comprehensive and up to date. Generic best practices for implementation of AI+ML are as follows: l Define clear scope of implementation l Align the implementation with the business goals l Determine the use cases for AI+ML l Involve the right stake holders for the implementation l Involve human expertise to steer the learning process l Train the machine learning system with rich and lots of data l Track the implementation and define metrics to measure the progress

SAMEER BASHA,

Security Consultant.

ROI measurement for artificial intelligence will be different for different verticals ROI measurement for artificial intelligence will be different for different verticals and scopes. The right metrics has to be selected for calculating the return on investment. Generic metrics of measurement will be increase in quality of the service upgraded by artificial intelligence and reduction in total cost of ownership. The key metrics for cyber will be reduction in threat detection time, accuracy of detection and reduction in human involvement in making the decisions. In CloudGuard Sandblast Mobile, Check Point Software Technologies performs an artificial intelligence-based analysis using various techniques and analyses the reputation of the application, its behavior, metadata and its similarity to malicious applications. The models are based on the data of tens of millions of applications, collected since 2013 which results in an excellent detection rate that allows damage prevention and quick remediation. Half of the applications blocked by Check Point Sandblast Mobile Agent were detected by the Mobile machine learning model and unknown to other antivirus vendors. The Check Point Sandblast Agent Behavioral Guard is a prediction engine which leverages Check Point Cloud Guard Sand Blast Agent forensics to effectively and uniquely identify unknown malware behavior. It combines generic behavioral signatures with artificial intelligence and ensures a low false positives rate and a high detection rate ë

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COVER STORY

HERIOT-WATT UNIVERSITY DUBAI

COMPUTE POWER, ALGORITHM BIAS, KEY CHALLENGES It is obvious AI will contain biases as it a tool developed by humans and most effective way to prevent bias is to carefully examine the data selected.

hile many industries were affected with the onset of the pandemic, e-commerce was one among very few vertical markets that experienced accelerated growth. As consumers increasingly expect more tailored experiences, hyper-personalisation is crucial for the continued growth of e-commerce. Algorithmic e-commerce, that is smart, systemic digitisation of business functions often handled manually will herald the extensive adoption and implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning by enterprises in the e-commerce sector. For instance, artificial intelligence-powered natural language generation technology will deliver bespoke experiences to online shoppers through customised product and category descriptions that turns structured data into a natural-sounding sales pitch. Eventually, this trend will lead to a market shift that offers more value to consumers – where e-commerce retailers adopt a more producttype approach to personalisation and customer experience, compared to a consulting-product approach. Artificial intelligence techniques such as machine learning and deep learning need a lot of processing power. Many enterprises do not have enough power to implement such techniques. Another key challenge faced by enterprises in the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning is algorithm bias. Bias can infiltrate algorithms in many ways. The root cause of algorithm bias lies in the training datasets that machine learning models and artificial intelligence systems are exposed to. The training data can include biased human decisions or reflect historical or social inequities, even if sensitive variables such as gender, race, or sexual orientation are eliminated. Hence, it is important to take a step back and observe the training data. It is obvious that artificial intelligence will likely contain built-in biases as it a tool developed by humans. The most effective way to prevent bias is to carefully examine the data one selects to train their artificial intelligence models. It is helpful to test multiple hypotheses, validate models, and monitor them over time for bias and, when appli-

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STEPHEN GILL,

Academic Head of the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences.

cable, objectivity. By doing so, the resulting models will almost certainly be less biased than human-led decisions. Otherwise, it is possible to face the risk of reinforcing and proliferating bias. Measuring the ROI of artificial intelligence requires the consideration of several factors. For instance, it is important to evaluate if the artificial intelligence initiative can result in savings by reducing operational costs. Before investing in artificial intelligence projects, it is also key to define the goals and KPIs from the outset which helps in measuring the ROI later. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have made their way into many diverse industries, changing the way enterprises manage everything from supply chains to customer relations. However, there are specific vertical markets that can derive exceptional benefits from artificial intelligence. Logistics is one such vertical market that can save time, reduce costs, improve productivity and accuracy with artificial intelligence and machine learning. For instance, artificial intelligence can improve logistics route optimisation, which helps reduce the shipping cost, which in turn increases profitability. Artificial intelligence is a gamechanger for banking and financial services institutions, when it comes to fraud risk management. As BFSIs are inherently prone to risks, they can leverage artificial intelligence to identify patterns over large data sets to detect fraud before it negatively impacts their organisation and customers. This ultimately has a positive impact on reducing the overall cost of frauds. ë

COVER STORY

SALESFORCE

INVESTING IN AI TOOLS CAN BOOST RESILIENCE

With the best AI tools, employees do not have to be a data scientist, they can implement quickly and begin innovating fast using clicks, not code.

he pandemic proved that the Middle East is at an inflection point with artificial intelligence adoption, and many companies have made it clear that artificial intelligence is here to stay. The past year has a catalysing moment for enterprises as the pandemic forced Middle East companies to go digital faster and use artificial intelligence not only to adapt, but to emerge stronger. This shift has accelerated the use of artificial intelligence to help companies sell smarter, drive stronger engagement, scale customer support, and personalise commerce experiences. In 2021, artificial intelligence-powered predictions are more important than ever. Based on historical data and adoption, artificial intelligence and automated machines are learning to provide forwardlooking estimates and answers that map to specific business outcomes. Every day, these technologies are delivering more than 80 billion predictions for customers. This scale of adoption is massive, and particularly benefits those that adopt artificial intelligence as a core business strategy and means to better understand and engage customers. IDC found that global spending on artificial intelligence will double over the next four years – reaching $110 billion in 2024 up from $50 billion in 2020. Working invisibly behind the scenes, artificial intelligence technologies are better equipping companies to predict customer behaviours and preferences at scale, transforming the world of work as we know it. Here are four ways that artificial intelligence-powered predictions are helping businesses to operate and support their customers more effectively.

THIERRY NICAULT,

Area Vice President, Middle East and North Africa.

#2 FORECAST OF CASH FLOW Where industries have experienced growing delays in customer payments and difficulty to forecast short- and long-term cash flow, artificial intelligence technologies have helped keep businesses running while being empathetic to the challenges their customers were facing. With artificial intelligence technologies, organisations have been able to more accurately predict cash flow, faster, as well as respond to customer queries quicker.

#3 KEEPING CUSTOMERS HAPPY In the context of lockdowns and social distancing, meal delivery services have faced huge spikes in customer requests. In this instance, artificial intelligence has assured businesses and customers alike - helping businesses to deal with rising case volumes, and helping customers track their orders or packages, report any issues with delays or damage, and get a credit or refund. As well as keeping customers happy, this has also boosted customer service scores.

#1 PERSONALISED CONVERSATIONS

#4 EMPOWERING SALES TEAMS

As the pandemic hit, many companies needed to drive stronger engagement as a greater percentage of customers began shopping online. For businesses of all sizes, personalised communications had never been more important to meeting their customers’ expectations and sales growth. With predictions, companies have been able to shift their focus on the right customer conversation with targeted email campaigns, increase traffic to their online platforms, and respond many times faster to trends customers are interested in.

The value of a good salesperson, as an informed and empathetic advisor, has only grown during the pandemic, yet the time they’re able to dedicate to gathering helpful insights is decreasing. This explains why more teams are automating repetitive tasks to enable reps to spend more time developing trusting relationships with customers and selling. With predictions, sales teams are becoming more empowered to effectively prioritise leads, determine what action to be taken on accounts, and more rapidly log sales data and customer notes. ë

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ounded in 1981, MDS UAE is one of the oldest IT firms in the region; MDS UAE is a holding company that is part of the Midis Group, which represents technology vendors in more than 70 countries, across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Associated with over 170 affiliates, the Midis Group has built a reputation for managing financial risk, and has been and growing at a CAGR of 14%, over the last ten years. Midis SI Group is the system integration and services arm of MIDIS Group, which has a presence across 13 countries and 20 major cities, and has been acknowledged as one of the top SI’s in the region, by IDC.

[EC] On the occasion of MDS UAE celebrating 40 years of success, and the achievements of the Midis SI Group, do give a list of the various growth milestones that have been achieved over the last four decades.

SAMI ABI ESBER,

President Midis System Integration, Board Member Midis Group.

MDS UAE CELEBRATES 40 YEARS, SUBSIDIARY MIDIS SI UNVEILS FUTURE PLANS With MDS UAE completing four decades of being in business, EC spoke with Sami Abi Esber, President of Midis SI Group; the system integration and services arm of MIDIS Group.

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[Sami Abi Esber] On the 40th anniversary of MDS UAE, the group can look back on several significant milestones in our past; including taking our revenue over AED 2 Billion, building an outstanding team of 900 employees in the UAE, and having in excess of 3000 Customers. We have achieved a three-fold increase in turnover, including 12% compound annual growth from 2008 to 2018. As one of the UAE’s oldest IT companies, which began operations in 1981, it’s gratifying to play a part in this journey. Along the way, we have been acknowledged and celebrated by several respected international and regional entities; including the World Economic Forum, which included the Midis Group among its inaugural list of 100 companies for the Global Growth Companies initiative, in 2006; recognising these organisations for having a track record of leadership and, above all, exemplary corporate global citizenship. More recently the Forum has once again recognised the Midis Group as inaugural members of their New Champions Community. MDS UAE has also been nominated by IDC for more than 15 years as the ‘#1 IT Services Company in the UAE’. For the years ahead, we are focused on being leaders in the key Digital Transformation Pillars of Cloud, Security, Big data, Analytics, and AI.

[EC] Please describe the technology and services core competency within the Midis SI Group that has helped to make it a viable and repeatable business over the last four decades. [Sami Abi Esber] Our success is anchored in the expertise and competence of our highly certified pre-sales team, engineers, support staff and subject matter experts – across Cloud and Datacentre Infrastructure, Managed IT, Managed Security, and Software and Professional Services. We also have an extensive background in End User Computing, Mobility, and Communications. Our Enterprise IT and Technical services are addressing the needs of a large portfolio of clients with Servers, Storage, Data Management, Network, Maintenance, Power Solutions, Containerised Data Centers, Outsourcing and Call Centre Services, and much more. An important part of the Midis SI Group is our Site and Power business, under the Midis Energy brand. Midis Energy is a part

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of the Midis Group providing a wide variety of Data Center, Power/Cooling and Site Preparation solutions across 7 countries in the Middle East; in excess of 1000 employees with several exclusive vendor partnerships. Midis Energy’s Site and Power business which includes Data Center, Power, Cooling, and Site Preparation solutions, have been awarded the largest and most prestigious Mega Data Centre projects across the Gulf and Middle East region. These include implementing projects for Local, Regional and International companies including the Megascalers, Telcos, Govt., Aviation, Education, Aviation and many more high-profile installations across the region.

[EC] As the current President of the Midis SI Group, what is your future vision of the business; What are the key skills and achievements that you have brought into the Group since the nineties; and later into the SI Group? [Sami Abi Esber] Obviously, our experience of four decades – both qualitatively and quantitatively, are a major strength. Our significant size of operations; as reflected in more than 5000 employees, in 170 companies, across 70 countries; is a big plus, which allows us to rapidly scale new innovations and initiatives. Our vendor partnerships now exceed 35, which includes the fact that we are the top regional partners of Microsoft, Dell EMC, Apple, Cisco, and HP along many other global vendors. This is also reinforced by our robust and multi-faceted relationships with various governments, public sector entities, and large enterprises. In essence, our continual efforts, to anticipate and stay ahead of market needs, is the key strategic approach, which has given us such comprehensive capabilities; in providing comprehensive end-to-end IT solutions.

[EC] According to you, as we emerge from the pandemic and experience tangible benefits of digital transformation, what do you see are the future opportunities and challenges for the Midis SI Group? [Sami Abi Esber] The pandemic has accelerated change in the global economy, with a rise in the ‘contact-free economy’; which includes digital commerce, telemedicine, automation, and more. In the context of these changes, the Midis SI Group is focused on contributing to enhancing adaptability, taking into account both the evolving market dynamics, as well as the needs of all stakeholders. We are keeping abreast of changing customer preferences, and innovating rapidly, to address them. The Midis SI Group is actively accelerating investments in Industry Specialisation, and 3rd Platform Pillars; and also shifting from a Capex to Opex model, to facilitate our customers through a consumption-based ‘pay-asyou-go’ model.

Domain of solutions and services delivered by MIDIS SI Group The Midis SI Group is focused on the following technologies and solutions: l

Cloud and Datacentre Infrastructure Services

Managed IT Services

Managed Security Services

Software and Professional Services

End User Computing, Mobility and Communications

Enterprise IT – Servers, Storage and Data Management, Network

Technical services Maintenance, outsourcing and call centre

Site and Power Solutions

ELV and AV

Mobile and containerised datacentres, manufacturing of Telecom Shelters

Moving ahead, we have set up a task-force to: l

Accelerate investments in Industry Specialisation and 3rd Platform Pillars especially Cloud, Big Data, Analytics, AI and Security

Leverage Midis Ecosystem by increasing collaboration with our vendors, and our network of customers and partners

Drive further demand generation and brand awareness, through the efforts of our Marketing team, and

Develop new solutions and services, by leveraging emerging technology

[EC] On a continuous basis, over the last four decades, what are the technologies, solutions, services that were in demand from UAE enterprises, namely the government and public sector? How has the MIDIS Group restructured itself to meet these service and solution expectations? [Sami Abi Esber] The Midis Group has a strong relationship with public sector and other large enterprises. We are well aligned with the latest market trends and technologies - such as IoT, Big Data, Cloud, Security and AI. Our acquisition of eHosting DataFort, a leading managed hosting and cloud services company; and LiveRoute- a Microsoft Azure partner, and one of the leading Microsoft services and cloud partners in the region; has led to significant capabilities in Managed Services, Security and SOC services for the government and other key sectors. We have implemented IoT solutions for the transport and oil sectors; and we are also particularly passionate about Big Data. Our Big Data and Robotics Process Automation portfolio has been enhanced by our acquisition of Magnoos - a value-added reseller and technology implementation company that specialises in Data Management and Analytics, Service Management, and Automation software. So, as a group, we have constantly evolved, and still remain committed to staying a step ahead of emerging opportunities. ë

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SANTOSH VARGHESE,

Vice President, Toshiba Gulf.

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KIOXIA

TOSHIBA’S REGIONAL PUSH TO DOMINATE FLASH MEMORY

Toshiba Gulf has exclusively partnered with Kioxia in the region to sell out, three-dimensional flash memory, through its B2C channels in Middle East and Africa. BY ARUN SHANKAR

n 1984, Toshiba developed a new type of semiconductor memory called flash memory, NOR. In 1987, Toshiba invented the world’s first NAND flash memory and in 1991 began mass production of NAND flash memory. In 2007, Toshiba announced the first three-dimensional flash memory technology and started mass production of 48, 64, 96 layer, BiCS FLASH from 2016 to 2019. The memory business of Toshiba Corporation was made into a separate company in 2017 and commenced operations as Toshiba Memory Corporation in April. In October 2019, Toshiba Memory Corporation was renamed as Kioxia Corporation. According to Wikipedia, flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. NAND flash and NOR flash use the same cell design,

consisting of floating gate MOSFETs. Flash memory, a type of floating-gate memory, was invented at Toshiba in 1980 and is based on EEPROM technology. NAND flash memory, however, may be erased, written, and read in blocks, which generally are much smaller than the entire device. The NAND type is found mainly in memory cards, USB flash drives, solid-state drives produced after 2009, feature phones, smartphones, and similar products. NAND memory is often used to store configuration data in numerous digital products. Flash memory has fast read access time, but it is not as fast as static RAM or ROM. In portable devices, it is preferred to hard disks because of its mechanical shock resistance. Reflects Santosh Varghese, Vice President, Toshiba Gulf, “It was Toshiba who invented this NAND flash memory way back in 1987. Before that, the chips were connected to the board and when the power was shut off, it erases the memory. Toshiba engineers invented this NAND flash where even if the power is shut off, the data stays there.” “Then, in 2007, we came up with something called 3D production of NAND flash. In this, the wafers are stacked vertically, which means we can keep on expanding the capacity. It started out with 16, now 32, now it’s 512,” he continues.

KIOXIA’S BICS ARCHITECTURE

It was Toshiba who invented this NAND flash memory way back in

1987

NAND Flash technology will drive the next phase of storage with memory and SSD solutions for the 5G era. It is important for consumers to know the cutting-edge technology behind it, feels Varghese. “Currently worldwide there are only two major players, Kioxia and Samsung,” he says. This is not a me-too technology and cannot be replicated by reverse engineering and other copy-cat methodologies. Kioxia’s BiCS FLASH is a three-dimensional, vertical flash memory cell structure. This structure enables it to surpass the capacity of mainstream two-dimensional, planar flash memory. Moving to a threedimensional structure was a necessary evolution from two-dimensional floating gate flash, because the memory cell size for two-dimensional flash had shrunk to its limit. Floating gate’s last generation was 15nm, which enabled a density of 128GB per die. Compared to floating gate, BiCS FLASH three-dimensional flash

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memory offers higher density, higher endurance, higher performance and better power efficiency. Single die densities of 512GB and higher are now possible with BiCS FLASH. The future of high-density flash memory lies in three dimensional. Already enabling the enterprise, datacentre, PC and mobile applications of today, BiCS FLASH has paved the way for new application workloads. Storage density needs are continually climbing higher and higher, and BiCS FLASH was designed with this in mind. BiCS FLASH is now the future of high-density flash memory. “NAND is very much required for many of electronic and IT products, especially the smartphones. These are right now in a short supply as the demand keeps growing,” says Varghese.

LATEST INNOVATIONS In August, Kioxia announced sampling of its newest generation of 256 and 512 GB, Universal Flash Storage, embedded flash memory devices. Housed in 0.8 and 1.0mm-high packages, the new products improve performance by approximately 30% for random read and approximately 40% for random write, making them thinner and faster than their predecessors. Kioxia’s new Universal Flash Storage devices utilise the company’s high-performance fifth-generation BiCS FLASH three-dimensional flash memory and are targeted to a variety of mobile applications including leading-edge smartphones. The broad set of power and space conscious applications that utilise embedded flash memory continue to need higher performance and density, and Universal Flash Storage has increasingly been the solution of choice. From a total GB perspective, Universal Flash Storage now accounts for the majority of the demand relative to e-MMC. According to Forward Insights, when combining overall Universal Flash Storage and e-MMC GB demand worldwide, almost 70% of the demand this year is for Universal Flash Storage, and this will continue to grow. In February, Kioxia and Western Digital, announced the companies have developed their sixth-generation, 162-layer three-dimensional flash memory technology. Marking the next milestone in the companies’

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20-year joint-venture partnership, this is the companies’ highest density and most advanced three-dimensional flash memory technology to date. As Moore’s Law reaches its physical limits across the semiconductor industry, there’s one place where Moore’s Law continues its relevancy, that is in flash, according to Dr Siva Sivaram, President of Technology and Strategy, at Western Digital. To continue these advances and meet the world’s growing data demands, a new approach to three-dimensional flash memory scaling is critical. With this new generation, Kioxia and Western Digital are introducing innovations in vertical as well as lateral scaling to achieve greater capacity in a smaller die with fewer layers.

KIOXIA’S REGIONAL GO TO MARKET Today the various products from Kioxia include three-dimensional Flash memory, BiCS FLASH; Managed Flash, Universal Flash Storage; e-MMC; Universal Flash Storage, e-MMC for Automotive; SLC NAND Flash Memory; BENAND; Serial Interface NAND; Enterprise SSD; Data Center SSD; Client SSD; Wide Temperature NVMe SSD; and SSD Security and Encryption, amongst others. “Toshiba Gulf has partnered with Kioxia to market the brand in Middle East and Africa region. It is an exclusive arrangement, and in all other regions business is managed by Kioxia subsidiary. We launched the retail operations here last year in the peak of the pandemic in April,” says Varghese. Toshiba Gulf manages the B2C business for Kioxia in the region, while Kioxia Europe manages the B2B business that includes the hyper scalers and IT OEMs. Kioxia, the inventor of flash memory, has carved out a path where in the future, consumers can carry videos, music and data, wherever they go. ë

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GCG ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS SHAPING UP EDUCATION SECTOR WITH DISTANCE LEARNING AND VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS Data from Statista on e-learning shows 92% of students are interested in personalized support and the use of digital devices during the learning process.

JAMEEL MEERAN,

GCG Product Manager for ViewSonic.

CG Enterprise Solutions has been leading the education sector for the past decade with cutting-edge solutions to not only enhance learning experience but also support educational facilities in their digital journey. With its main partner ViewSonic, a world leader in AV solutions, GCG is offering myViewBoard; a world class solution for distance learning. The latest data from Statista on e-learning and education shows that 92% of students worldwide are interested in personalized support and the use of digital devices during the learning process. This means that virtual classrooms are ideal learning environments for a huge number of learners. “Even though educational systems are trying their best to quickly respond to the growing demand for digital teaching technologies, transitioning from a face-to-face environment to a virtual environment can be intimidating for teachers and students.

Creating an engaging and meaningful virtual teaching experience takes the right tools, patience, and energy,” says Jameel Meeran, GCG Product Manager for ViewSonic. Virtual classrooms are online environments that allow teachers and students to interact during a virtual class using audio, video, text, screen sharing, instant polling, among other features. Great examples of virtual classrooms include Google Classroom and myViewBoard Classroom is These features help simulate real interactions as if teachers and students were faceto-face in a physical classroom. There are several reasons why educational facilities should use virtual classrooms. “The online environment of a virtual class allows teachers and students to update and adapt their schedules anytime and anywhere. It certainly gives flexibility to busy teachers teaching multiple lessons at various institutions and to students

to arrange their schedules at their best convenience. All you need is your laptop or a digital device that can display the virtual content”. Furthermore, with the increasing use of data analytics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, digital skills are getting more and more attention. With the use of virtual classrooms, the educational system prepares teachers and students to be ready to respond to these demands. As the whole system continues to adapt to an online world, skillful teachers and students will be substantial to education. Finally, accessibility to content remotely is becoming more and more crucial. Indeed, virtual classrooms allow easy lesson documentation and cloud storage. “Documenting your lesson plans is the best way to give your students the opportunity to access to the content anytime and enable learning after the class,” says Jameel Meeran. Everyone can easily download and save the lesson content. With the use of virtual classrooms saving your lesson content on the cloud can facilitate content availability also free up space on your local disk! There are also key elements related to virtual classrooms that schools and universities need to take into account. One vital core element of a virtual classroom is interactivity. Active participation creates synergy while teaching the lesson. “Feedback from the students across the screen and shorter periods of self-reflection bring the best results in a virtual class,” says Jameel Meeran. Secondly, develop a sense of community in a virtual classroom is key. Through online tools, students and teachers can create and edit content together; therefore, interaction as a community is important because it helps knowledge sharing and promotes a sense of belonging within the students while they’re physically apart. ë

This content has been sponsored by the vendor.

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2021 ROADSHOW AUGUST-NOVEMBER, 2021 36 COUNTRIES 4000 C-LEVEL EXECS 300+ SESSIONS 200+ EXHIBITORS

#ChangeX

INNOVATION

SECURING CLOUD JOURNEYS FROM PRIVATE TO HYBRID

Having a holistic view on hybrid cloud components including applications, infrastructure, security is essential, as is having an automated environment.

ecurity must be a visible part of hybrid cloud strategy to help avoid introducing new risks. Hybrid cloud environments require you to shift your security approaches. Hybrid cloud and DevOps benefits come with some security concerns that need to be addressed in order to take full advantage of the hybrid cloud strategy. To summarise some of the critical issues and risks associated with hybrid cloud, one must explore and address several areas. For example, securing data movement between your public and private cloud environment is essential for data transmission security, managing your compliance and governance rules across private cloud and public cloud in the same way is essential for adhering to compliance and regulations, and having a container platform that is infrastructure agnostic with container platform capabilities will enables customers to run applications anywhere. At the same time, having a holistic view and full visibility on all the hybrid cloud components including applications, infrastructure, and security rules is essential, as is having fully automated environment to avoid human errors and apply compliance and security rules in the same way on the private and public cloud environments. Furthermore, auditing and access control, network control and segmentation, and runtime analysis and protection are also paramount. Organisations try to design their hybrid cloud strategy or DevOps culture using different products from multiple vendors. Having products from different vendors to build your hybrid cloud strategy is cumbersome and can lead to many security gaps and issues. However, having a single platform that is designed and built to run containers and on

any platform is essential to reduce the security risk. It is important to not only have end-to-end integration starting from the source code management system to the running application on the private cloud or public cloud, but also have the security build in the container platform and application itself. With this in mind, securing containerised applications in hybrid cloud environments requires that one uses trusted container content and an enterprise container registry, controls and automates building containers, integrates security into the application pipeline, implements an API management system. This ensures end-to-end automation and monitoring and integrates a development environment and tool, builds in security measures and rules, and oversees network segmentation and a unified platform. Losing business and gaining unsatisfied customers are very common in environments where security is not a top priority. Many companies have lost the momentum they have built due to spending too much time fixing issues raised by security, rather than innovating new technologies or responding to business needs. Effective security requires a holistic approach that incorporates people, processes, and technology, and simply deploying security-focused products and tools is not enough to protect your infrastructure, cloud, or business. Because they do not have a defined perimeter, traditional, perimeter-based security approaches are not effective and hybrid cloud environments require you to shift your security approaches. Centralised identity management and access control is key for cloud-centric security approaches. Furthermore, hybrid cloud security also requires a layered, defense-in-depth security strategy that uses the capabilities of each layer in your environment, including operating sys-

AYMAN AL SHAIKH,

Director Solutions Architecture, MENA and Pakistan, Red Hat.

Losing business and gaining unsatisfied customers are very common in environments where security is not a priority tems, container platforms, automation tools, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) assets, and cloud services. It is essential to cover the three main components in the security approach: Technical controls are protections designed into IT systems themselves, such as encryption, network authentication, and management software. It also important to note that many of the strongest security tools for hybrid cloud are technical controls. Finally, administrative controls are programmes to help people act in ways that enhance security, such as training and disaster planning. ë

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INNOVATION

IMPLEMENTING AN ENCRYPTION STRATEGY USING HSMS Hardware security modules, are hardened, certified, tamper-resistant devices that protect the most sensitive data and perform cryptographic functions.

HSMs ensure your cryptographic keys are safe and easily managed

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ccording to our recently launched, Middle East Encryption Trends Study, while nearly six-in-ten 59% organisations in the region reported that they have experienced a data breach, just 29% of Middle East companies surveyed indicated that they have a consistently applied encryption plan. While encryption is just one part of an organisation’s cyberdefences, it shows that there is still some work to be done in the region to build a more resilient infrastructure for many. Hardware security modules, HSMs are hardened, certified, tamper-resistant devices that protect your company’s most sensitive data and perform cryptographic functions such as generating, managing, and storing encryption and signing keys, as well as executing sensitive functions within their protected boundaries. A simple analogy is to think of how your house can have the most expensive and secure locks in the world, but if you leave the keys under the mat, it negates all that protection. HSMs ensure your cryptographic keys are safe and easily managed. It is hard to answer broadly, but it would certainly appear to be the case for data protection. As the region continues to have one of the highest HSM adoption rates 68%, this demonstrates to us, a desire for greater control over critical applications and data. Digging into the data a little more, it looks like the organisations we surveyed in the Middle East are certainly looking towards the future, as security and IT professionals are adopting encryption at a higher rate for newer use cases like containers and IoT platforms, as well as for email and private cloud infrastructures. As these organisations increase their use of the cloud, they prefer encryption solutions that support cloud deployments and want to control the keys that are used for data at rest encryption in the cloud. They are also increasingly using HSMs in conjunction with cloud access security brokers and to generate keys that they bring to cloud environments. Additionally, security professionals view HSMs as becoming more important, particularly for use cases like key management

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SIMON TAYLOR,

Channel Manager, Middle East and Africa at Entrust.

root of trust, code signing and for use with privileged access and secrets management solutions. Looking at the research, just over half of respondents 51% rated key management as very painful. The top reasons provided were no clear ownership 67%, systems are isolated and fragmented 62%, key management tools are inadequate 47%, and no clear understanding of requirements 36% vs. 27% globally. Implementing an enterprise-wide encryption strategy, ideally one that incorporates HSMs, can go a long way to addressing a lot of these issues by ensuring there a higher overview of all encryption tools and practices along with more automated and secure encryption key management. It needs to be a multi-layered approach, but from our perspective, implementing a cohesive and holistic enterprise-wide encryption strategy can more effectively protect an organisation’s IT systems and data. This can help limit liability from breaches or inadvertent disclosure and ease the pressure to comply with data privacy regulations while focusing on protecting financial records and payments-related data from the risks of hackers and temporary or contract workers. ë

INNOVATION

KHAZNA DATACENTRE

BUILDING THE MODEL OF WHOLESALE DATACENTRES Khazna is the largest wholesale datacentre providers in the UAE and is one of the largest datacentre infrastructure operators in the region.

T What should be collocated in an enterprise datacentre and what should be migrated to the cloud

he wholesale model Khazna Datacentres adopts addresses enterprise datacentre requirements by presenting highly safe, secure, ultra-modern wholesale datacentres equipped with the latest technologies that may be customised and scaled as customers grow allowing faster time to market. Customers at Khazna have full ownership and control of their own contained IT and office space, offering them a highly reliable and bespoke solution at globally competitive prices without compromising security and efficiency while making sure they are a cross-connect away from hyperscalers and telecommunication networks. This is an alternative to building your own datacentre ultimately speeding the digital transformation journey. Khazna is the largest commercial wholesale datacentre provider in the UAE and is one of the largest datacentre infrastructure operators in the Middle East and North Africa region that is now becoming the ICT hub of the region. Innovations in meeting today’s datacentres demands come in the form of speed, higher density, modularity, energy efficiency, sustainability, and scalability; all while remaining secure and highly available. Khazna works with relevant authorities and partners setting up efficient design in quicker pace, halving the time it takes to get the datacentre operational compared to traditional construction methods. Khazna Datacentres continue to empower customers and partners to accelerate their digital transformation journeys, reimagine new ways of working, and optimise operations. Digital transformation presents the challenge of separating critical infrastructure from less critical infrastructure and deciding what should be collocated in an enterprise datacentre and what should be migrated to the cloud, how, and when. Furthermore, other questions arise on what infrastructure, technology, and solutions are to be implemented in the enterprise datacentre to enable seamless business continuity. Khazna currently hosts some of the key cloud players and can offer enterprises proximity to the cloud within the same collocation space making both of their critical and non-critical

HASSAN AL NAQBI, CEO.

infrastructures co-exist in the same physical space and therefore provide peace of mind. Khazna is maintaining its position as an enabler for enterprise datacentres rather than just an enterprise datacentres solution provider. Khazna is helping build an ecosystem by expanding its footprint independently and via joint ventures to allow organisations to setup their enterprise datacentres in its wholesale facilities closer to their end customers and within small proximity to their main locations whilst providing remote disaster recovery locations to support business continuity. Khazna’s customers are seeing accelerated digital adoption, renewed innovation, fast recovery and economic resilience for themselves and the region at large as Khazna continues to empower its customers and partners to accelerate their digital transformation journeys, re-imagine new ways of working and optimise operations. End users include tenants from across several sectors which include government entities who setup their enterprise datacentres, tenants from the retail colocation sector who support smaller scale enterprise datacentres, and international tenants for whom it is more convenient to use Khazna’s state of the art facilities to roll-out their cloud infrastructure. ë

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REAL LIFE

Canon raises documents security standards at Expo 2020 with accreditations, personal passport

VENKATASUBRAMANIAN HARIHARAN, Managing Director, Canon Middle East and Turkey.

Canon Middle East, a provider of imaging technologies and services, has enhanced the document and data security at Expo 2020 Dubai by deploying state-of-the-art technology and implementing a range of measures to safeguard both partners and participants – primary amongst which is the usage of accreditation passports. Anticipating more than 200 participants, including nations, multilateral organisations, educational establishments and businesses, an estimated 200 to 300 thousand accreditations are to be issued by Expo 2020. All accreditations are being printed on Canon devices and each accreditation will act like a personal passport, determining which areas the holder can and cannot access. Recognising the need to protect the data and documents of all, participants, partners and their staff, Canon has deployed globally recognised protocols and secure data-management software and hardware to ensure maximum data and printing security, and to minimise the risk of any passport being copied, duplicated or unlawfully accessed. Moreover, Canon has implemented safeguards at potential vulnerable touchpoints and partnered with McAfee to ensure added layers of embedded protection across both hardware and software.

Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship in Jordan deploys Nutanix for 53,000 mailboxes Nutanix, a global vendor in private cloud, hybrid, and multicloud computing, announced that the Jordanian government entity Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship MoDEE has successfully deployed Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure HCI and Nutanix Prism Pro management solution. The implementation enables secure, high-performance email services for the entire Jordanian government and provides high-availability for over 53,000 mailboxes with the ability to effortlessly expand capacity as required. The solution has also reduced infrastructure costs, and IT management overheads. MoDEE is responsible for creating the policies that enable the transformation of the country towards a digital economy. The Ministry supports the enabling pillars of this transformation which include Digital Entrepreneurship, Digital Skills, Digital Financial Services, Digital Infrastructure, and Digital Platforms. The Ministry’s email environment comprised of Exchange 2010 built on 4 physical servers configured in mailbox roles connected to Dell SAN Storage, 8 VMs

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configured as client access servers CAS, and a HUB server built on a Hyper-V cluster. With tens of thousands of email accounts running on this infrastructure a number of hardware resources, as well as monitoring and management limitations arose. As a government entity, MoDEE utilises email as its primary means of communication. Email is the most important service our IT team delivers as it is used by every individual within the Jordanian government. All formal and non-formal communications are carried out through this channel and so having 24x7 availability is an absolute imperative. This requirement for the most reliable and high-performance email services was further exacerbated by the need to ensure remote workers could effectively collaborate and communicate. Having most of its cloud services, as well as its entire Disaster Recovery DR environment based on Nutanix, MoDEE was confident that migrating Microsoft Exchange to Nutanix would address these pressing challenges. As a government entity however, the Ministry did its due diligence in thoroughly vetting solutions from other

ABDALLAH FARRAYIH, Head of Operation, Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship.

global leading vendors. Key evaluation criteria included the solution’s ability to reduce or eliminate downtime, ensure compatibility with existing systems, and save the IT team time and effort by simplifying management and administration. At present, the number of mailboxes running in the Nutanix environment stands at a staggering 53,000. Despite this incredible, and ever-growing number, the IT team finds the new environment to be significantly faster and more stable than their previous setup. Erasure coding and compression ensure security and segmentation between mailboxes is maintained, while Nutanix Prism allows the IT team to easily monitor and manage the entire environment from a single, centralised dashboard.

REAL LIFE

HAMZA SOBHI BATTERJEE, President of HSB Holding part of BAB Holding Group.

Megamind IT Solutions revamps hospital information system at Saudi German Health using Nutanix Saudi German Health, a private healthcare provider across the Middle East and North Africa, has successfully deployed Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Nutanix Prism Pro management solution. The implementation has effectively addressed the complexity, reliability, and scalability issues that previously plagued the IT environment and provided a robust platform to continually and cost-effectively introduce innovative digital services such as remote diagnosis, and enterprise mobility. Nutanix has helped the organisation reduce hardware spending by 40%, enabling redirection of budget into IT initiatives that drive business outcomes and enhance patient care. The solution has also helped reduce the backup window by a factor of 4X, and significantly reduced IT management overheads by offering powerful centralised management of the entire environment. In addition to the above, was the risk posed to the availability and smooth operation of the business that was of greatest concern. The project to overhaul and modernise the IT infrastructure was awarded to Megamind IT Solutions – an organisation under the HSB Holding Group. To combat the IT challenges faced by Saudi German Health, Megamind IT Solutions decided to implement Nutanix HCI technology after a rigorous assessment that involved two other vendors. The implementation which spanned five clusters across five geographically dispersed locations was completed in under five days, without any impact to the operations of any Saudi German hospitals and clinics. The deployment has comprehensively eliminated the backup and recovery challenges, with a 4X boost in performance. It has simplified IT management with the IT team no longer having to conduct planned maintenance events.

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GUEST COLUMN

RAHUL BHAGEERADHAN,

Global Director Digital Architecture, Kissflow.

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER LOW CODE AS SOLUTION TO LEGACY Since legacy systems face problems there is a need to migrate them to modernised settings using tools that citizen developers can use to participate.

eliance on outdated systems may enslave businesses, stifle digital innovation, and compound technical debt over time. Its age does not always define a legacy system; it might be that it is no longer supported or that it is no longer capable of serving the demands of a company or organisation. Due to its architecture, underlying technology, or design, such software might be challenging to maintain, support, upgrade, or integrate with new systems.

CHALLENGES IN MIGRATING FROM LEGACY TO LOW-CODE PLATFORM

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#1 Tomorrow’s legacy is created by a lack of flexibility Legacy migrations need the creation of a flexible system that can adjust to changes. The last thing IT wants is for the new system to become a legacy system in the future. Low-code platforms enable companies to use a contemporary app architecture that leverages microservices to improve agility. Look for a platform that makes it simple to create selfcontained applications and services that can be integrated and shared, as well as one that allows for quick, frequent change cycles so the system can adapt to changing business demands. To avoid building an unmaintainable set of applications or heaps

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of machine-generated code, it is important to choose a future-proof framework.

WHY ARE LEGACY SYSTEMS CHALLENGING

#2 Applications that are mission-critical fail to deliver at scale Many fundamental legacy systems are unable to grow and offer the needed performance. Look for a low-code platform that can guarantee the new solution’s robustness and high availability for mission-critical applications. Automatic failover for continuous operation of business-critical applications is enabled by a low-code platform with a cloud-native design, guaranteeing that they do not have the same performance difficulties as legacy systems. #3 Inadequate quality assurance Because most legacy transfer solutions are large and complicated, there is typically insufficient monitoring of the app’s quality. To avoid technological debt and enhance long-term maintainability, it is critical to be able to proactively monitor and resolve application quality. Look for a low-code platform that includes automated testing, quality assurance, and performance monitoring as part of the development process. #4 Usability is a last-minute consideration Usability is frequently an afterthought with this sort of application, lowering ROI. When developing the new solution, employ low-code development to take a user-centric, designthinking strategy. A better knowledge of the users and the business context may assist remove process gaps in the legacy system, resulting in an end-to-end solution that boosts productivity significantly.

HOW TO MIGRATE FROM LEGACY SYSTEM TO LOWCODE PLATFORM Start by moving basic non-business essential applications and work your way up to more sophisticated applications while migrating your legacy systems. It gives you valuable experience, which you can use for more important projects to reduce the chances of costly mistakes. It is also a good idea to start moving sections of your program that do not satisfy your end users’ business requirements. It will allow you to show a quick return on investment and will most likely result in management buy-in, allowing you to proceed on your migration route. Migrating your system to a low-code platform in stages is the best approach to break your legacy applications monolith. The idea of

l Outdated or unsupported pieces of equipment and facilities l talent pool needed to keep applications running is dwindling l system is incapable of supporting evolving business processes l System may have grown unstable or may have performance difficulties due to years of ad-hoc adjustment l Security, patching, and compliance with new rules and regulations

Low-code platforms allow you to keep your legacy system alive for a bit longer by making its functionality available bimodal IT is another important paradigm to consider while migrating your legacy system. The concept of bimodal IT is simple, you divide your software development team into two groups. The old application environment, your legacy system will be maintained by one team, while the new software system will be developed by the other. In a step-by-step migration, the two teams will work closely together to ensure that the old system does not break while the new environment is being built.

BENEFITS OF LOW-CODE PLATFORMS Many organisations want to take advantage of the latest technology while migrating legacy

systems, but sometimes neglect those that can disrupt current systems and services. Low-code platforms allow you to keep your legacy system alive for a bit longer by making its functionality available to many other systems. While your core system may be what you wish to maintain, a low-code platform allows you to develop add-ons or new applications on top of it. Consider developing an Android and iOS mobile application on top of your existing CRM system. The reusability of the existing data model is another major benefit of moving to a lowcode platform. You may simply utilise the data model that is already in place. This allows for a seamless transition since you may begin designing a new user interface while still using the same data model. When migrating legacy systems, businesses must create a solution that is both flexible and adaptable to future needs. IT staff do not want the new system to become a relic in the future. The good news is that moving your legacy system to a low-code platform will ensure a smooth transition. Since legacy systems face several problems there is a clear need to migrate them to modernised settings intended for the future. Lowcode platforms efficiently transform the way by which you build software. Furthermore, because low-code platforms provide easy-touse tools, citizen developers may participate in the migration process. Overall, using a customer-focused, and testand-learn strategy, low code helps you provide better solutions to your users. As with any digital transformation, it is a great idea to consider all of the choices, along with their advantages and drawbacks. ë

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MATT HANCOCKS,

Senior Director Analyst, Gartner.

CIOS NEED TO TAKE THE LEAD IN WORKSPACE RETHINK CIOs must rethink concepts like communication, training, knowledge exchange with digital workplace tools as an integral component of how work is done.

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he future of work will require CIOs to rethink how work is done, reimagine office space and manage new risks. With the onset of Covid-19, workplace technology changed nearly overnight. Office workstations became laptops at the kitchen table, in-person meetings became video chats and wired networks became at-home Wi-Fi connections. Over a year into large-scale remote work, it is become clear that CIOs must rethink IT operating models to prepare for the long-term changes resulting from the pandemic. Even the terminology of remote work, referring to working outside the formal office loca-

tion on an exceptional basis, seems outdated now. This is more than a semantic shift. As enterprises normalise working from home, concepts like distributed workplace, hybrid workforce, flexible work and work from anywhere are much more apt for the current environment. A hybrid workplace is one that includes a blend of remote and on-site workers, as well as employees who spend some time working from home and sometime in the office in any given week. It is the future of work, and will require shifts in IT provisions and operating models. Here are four ways that CIOs can lead their organisations into this new hybrid work world.

In the virtual workplace, getting the balance of connected is not easy — too much contact can leave people drained, too little can leave people disengaged RETHINK HOW WORK IS DONE Many prevailing views on the workplace have been shaped by experiences of open offices. Open offices were designed to aid communication and collaboration. Yet, IT innovations such as email and messaging now provide these benefits in a more scalable way. CIOs must rethink concepts like communication, training and development and knowledge exchange with digital workplace tools in mind as an integral component of how work is done. Identify processes, tasks and activities that require dialogue, discussion or debate, using the in-office experience prior to the pandemic as a baseline. Look at how these processes have changed since working from home, and assess the success of these adjustments. Where there have been successful experiences, amplify them and try to embed them across the organisation. Where practices have been less successful, brainstorm possible alternatives. For example, five-minute conversations that would take place when an employee dropped by a co-worker’s desk were spontaneous, responsive and productive. When working remotely, people may not reach out to coworkers via phone or messenger if their calendar

shows a busy status. Creating a drop-in slot on your calendar when you are available on video, on a firstcome, first-served basis, can help create and recapture some of that spontaneity.

ADDRESS PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS Humans are social creatures who need to stay connected to others, both professionally and socially. In the virtual workplace, getting this balance right is not easy — too much contact can leave people drained, but too little can leave people disengaged. CIOs can address the psychological challenges of a hybrid workplace by identifying how people typically stay connected and then developing a connection strategy with their teams. Be prepared to experiment and offer variety by trying different approaches. For example, this could be different types of meeting agendas, group activities, buddy systems and open video sessions in small groups while working. Review, adapt and change approaches and interventions regularly, so they don’t become stale.

REIMAGINE THE OFFICE SPACE In the hybrid work environment of the future, the workplace — a specific company-owned

location — will shift to a workspace. A workspace can be the home, a co-working space, the field, the office or any other location that can be set up as a space to work. CIOs must consider the different needs of each of these environments. The office should be worth the commute and should be seen as a different and more valuable experience than working elsewhere. The office enables people to connect, enables teams to augment and accelerate interactions and outputs, and enables departments to forge a sense of identity. Reimagine the office as an interactive and engaging space that encourages people to utilise it. CIOs must lobby the C-suite to allow for experimentation within the office space to meet these new demands. For example, look to create a dedicated collaborative space, an event space for both business and social gatherings, or a hot-desk environment supported by a booking system. For the home workspace, CIOs should not presume everyone has the same resources. Identifying each individual’s workspace characteristics, requirements and needs is important for long-term health and well-being. Define specific technology requirements for all employees working outside the office to support identity, productivity and a sense of belonging.

MANAGE INTEGRITY AND RISK Integrity, in all its forms, becomes increasingly important in a hybrid work culture. This involves everything from data integrity and security to the reliability of internet connections. For example, when four professionals share a house, all of whom work for different companies yet share the same spaces and internet connections, clear policies around security and confidentiality become even more important. Work from home also raises new ethical issues. For example, employee monitoring technologies can create privacy and consent concerns. Integrity needs to be a two-way street — it is not just about employees’ actions, but what the organisation does as well. To manage integrity in a hybrid workplace, CIOs should review each employee’s workspace characteristics and needs, and evaluate it from a risk perspective. Reinforce policies around security, confidentiality, credibility and liabilities. Put in place contingency and backup plans to prepare for known eventualities, such as power or internet outages. ë

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EXECUTIVE MOVEMENTS

Sumit Johar moves from MobileIron to join Automation Anywhere as CIO Automation Anywhere, a global vendor in Robotic Process Automation, announced appointment of Sumit Johar as the company’s Chief Information Officer. Prior to joining Automation Anywhere, Johar served as CIO at MobileIron. Previously, he led Enterprise Applications at TIBCO Software and prior to TIBCO, he held various management level positions at Wipro Technologies and Infosys. Johar will be responsible for leading and overseeing the vision, strategy, and operations of Automation Anywhere’s IT department globally. He will provide strategic IT leadership and direction to all business units and functions, while also fostering innovation and streamlining operations by maximising the company’s internal use of its Automation 360 cloudnative RPA platform.

Milestone Systems promotes Barry Norton to Vice President of Research reporting to CTO Milestone Systems promoted Dr Barry Norton to Vice President of Research. Barry Norton joined Milestone Systems in May 2018 as Director of Research. In his new role as VP of Research Barry will, in addition to continue leading Milestone’s growing research department, also be responsible for an increased collaboration with universities to move forward the state-of-the-art in machine learning, especially in application to computer vision. This will be instrumental to help create the next generation of video software technology that will not only be innovative but for greater societal good. Over the years, Milestone Systems has gradually increased investment in research capability and expertise. With the newly created VP role, Milestone Systems will further develop its business and core strategic initiatives to accelerate the company’s ambitious growth journey with more cutting-edge, high-quality product features. The VP of Research will report directly to the Chief Technology Officer at Milestone Systems.

Jacqui Canney moves from WPP, joins ServiceNow as new Chief People Officer

ServiceNow, announced that Jacqui Canney has been named as the company’s new Chief People Officer, leading all aspects of talent strategy, including employee experience, rewards, attraction, retention, development and diversity, inclusion and belonging. In addition to leading the company’s global talent strategies, Canney also will provide strong thought leadership for ServiceNow customers, helping them understand the power of the Now Platform and the company’s employee workflow products to create great employee experiences and keep today’s hybrid workforces engaged and productive. Canney earned a Bachelor of Science in accounting from Boston College and has remained active on campus guest lecturing, collaborating with professors and recruiting. Canney joins ServiceNow from WPP, where she served as Global Chief People Officer overseeing people, talent, rewards, recruiting and leadership development strategies for more than 100,000 employees. Prior to WPP, Canney was Executive Vice President, Chief People Officer, at Walmart. Before joining Walmart, Canney was Senior Executive, Global Human Resources, at Accenture, where she built a 25 year career helping to support rapid growth from 21,000 people to more than 300,000.

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EXECUTIVE MOVEMENTS Saad Toma replaces Takreem El-Tohamy as General Manager, IBM Middle East Africa IBM announced that Saad Toma has been named General Manager of IBM Middle East and Africa. Toma succeeds Takreem El-Tohamy, who has been appointed General Manager, Global Strategic Sales at IBM. Toma brings deep industry, services and technology expertise and over 30 years of experience at IBM working across multiple geographies. He will be responsible for IBM’s overall business operations across Middle East, Africa and Turkey, driving business growth and client satisfaction. Toma previously led IBM’s Global Technology Services business in MEA from 2011 until 2016. Prior to his appointment as General Manager, IBM MEA, Mr. Toma most recently held the position of General Manager, GTS for Asia Pacific, where he was responsible for guiding clients on their digital transformation journeys through Hybrid Cloud, Data and AI. During his tenure at IBM, Toma has held several leadership roles including Global Chief Operating Officer of GTS, in which he was responsible for the management of GTS business operations and adopting a more cognitive business model in support of IBM’s clients’ needs.

Brad Rinklin moves from Carbon Black to Infoblox as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive VP Infoblox, global vendor in cloud-first DDI and DNS security services, announced appointment of cloud and cybersecurity veteran Brad Rinklin as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President. Reporting to CEO Jesper Andersen, Rinklin will lead the global marketing team to grow demand for the company’s products, which enable customers to simplify, scale and secure network connectivity across their hybrid work environments. Rinklin brings nearly 30 years’ experience in building and scaling world-class teams for fastgrowing organisations. He joins from VMware’s security division, Carbon Black, where he served as the global marketing leader. His previous positions include CMO at Eze Software, where he reinvented the fintech market leader’s marketing efforts, and CMO as well as SVP of Global Partner Sales at Akamai.

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