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UAE FA SCORES A PENALTY WITH EMITAC When the game is football, the focus better be on the game. /32

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AHMAD BHADIR, I.T DIRECTOR, UAE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

EDITORIAL

IoT: a Big Game Changer

S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M

US$2 billion IoT revenue from hardware and services perspective in this region in 2015 is just incredible but to me it is a very conservative number. This number only projects the contribution from the government sector, which is by the way the biggest by far. However, the private sectors’ number will certainly add another x to it. From the vertical market statistics point of view,according to the International Monetary Fund,the non-oil sector will grow by 6 percent in 2015. But the point is that the Middle East market has to be ready with the right infrastructure to absorb the analytics based solutions’ pressure and address the challenges. What I can see is that all the vendors are bringing out their solutions to catch up with the business growth in the region however I am not seeing is the preparedness of the partners to match the requirements, although there are some organizations that have started moving in that direction. We can see that the IoT market will be much larger than the traditional IT market; because IoT not about connecting the devices only, but about connecting securely and without encroaching upon the privacy. There is obviously a big threat that if so many devices will be connected with each other, if one device remains unprotected, that will open the floodgate for viruses to enter into the network. So the architecture in every step of the infrastructure will have to be revisited by the vendors and the customers. Along with these challenges there will be one more challenge from the partners’ perspective. Very quickly the partners will have to enhance their investment on the certification. This phenomenon will certainly not be unique to this region as the entire global market can see the burst of connected products. There is a global number of course as far as IoT or connected devices are concerned, which is at least 50 billion having the potential to generate US$ 14.4 trillion-US$ 19 trillion in value by 2020. This number is just a calculation without having actually connected the devices but for sure this number will have a different share as the years pass by and devices get connected with each other. Remember any electronic and electrical devices you see around you or any equipment you see starting from bulbs to refrigerators from the cars to big machines, from the single houses to the entire township, everything will have some sort of sensor mechanism now, which will be installed, managed and monitored by the partner ecosystem. Be ready for this. ë

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2015 CONTENTS

VOLUME 02 ISSUE 11 JUNE 2015 W W W. E N T E R P R I S E C H A N N E L S M E A . C O M

COVER STORY

RE-IMAGINING BUSINESSES ON THE PLATFORM OF INNOVATION

The latest market research reports indicate that the Middle East cloud applications market is expected to grow from $887.5 Million in 2015 to $2404.5 Million by 2020,... /24

COVER FEATURE /32

UAE FA Scores a Penalty with Emitac AHMAD BHADIR, I.T DIRECTOR, UAE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

PARTNER STREET /36

The Managed Services Odyssey MUHAMMAD SALMAN, BUSINESS UNIT HEAD, MANAGED SERVICES AT EMITAC

INNOVATIONS /61

EMERSON NEXTGENERATION STATIC UPS

FEATURE STORY ‘ITaaS’-THE ROAD LESS TAKEN /38

Emerson Network Power’s nextgeneration UPS, the Trinergy Cube, is designed to meet the needs of enterpriseclass data centres offering unparalleled flexibility and.... EDITORIAL::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 04 CHANNEL STREET:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 06

GUEST TALK /42

Using the Cloud to Empower Channel Partners MEERA KAUL CEO OF OPTIMUS

MY VIEWS :::::::::::::::::::::: 31, 45, 56, 57, 59,60 COVER FEATURE (EMITAC):::::::::::::::::::::: 32 CIO SPEAK::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 58 GUEST TALK : ::::::::::::::::::: 30, 42, 44, 46, 61 INNOVATIONS : ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 61

ADVERTISER INDEX: HELPAG 02, EMITAC 03, HID 07, ESET 09, RITTAL11, COMGUARD 13, OXYGEN15, FINESSE 17, EMT19, NEXANS 21, BULWARK 23, IN HOUSE RAMADAN 35, OXYGEN 43, IOTX 51, UNIFY 63, DELL 64

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CHANNEL

STREET TECH PROCUREMENT ROLES EVOLVE AS 3RD PLATFORM ADOPTION SURGES

Over 60% of Gulf-based CIOs now believe their IT functions are well aligned with the aims of the broader business. However, an interesting shift is underway in the procurement of transformative 3rd Platform technologies including cloud, mobile, social media, and big data analytics, with lineof-business heads increasingly becoming involved in the final decision. This is according to the findings from IDC’s latest annual CIO Summit Survey. This year, the summit focused on the investment priorities of IT leaders in the Gulf and sought their views on the challenges they face in relation to 3rd Platform adoption. The 2015 edition of the consulting company’s flagship Middle East CIO Summit ran under the theme “When IT Meets Business”.

AMAL AL REDHA, SENIOR FUNDRAISING MANAGER AT DUBAI CARES WITH SENIOR EXECUTIVES OF EMW, PINNACLE SMART SYSTEMS, SPUSHT AND STORIT DISTRIBUTION

UAE WORKFORCE STRESSED BY PRESSURE OF BUSINESS DECISIONS

StorIT Unveils The Humanside Of Technology (THOT)

Research by ICM on behalf of Epicor has revealed that the pressure to make blind business decisions at work is leaving many office workers in the UAE stressed and worried that they are unable to do what is asked of them, according to new research. Over three quarters of office workers from the UAE have had to make un-informed decisions at some point in their career.Yet, the need to make these decisions could be inadvertently putting employees’ health and wellbeing at risk, with 36% of office workers suggesting that making decisions without sufficient information leads to higher than necessary stress levels. A data-driven approach could provide a simple solution to the problem. The majority believe that if organizations could put better systems in place, it will help to combat these issues .

After pioneering in introducing several emerging technologies to the Middle East channel, StorIT Distribution has once again taken an excellent initiative by looking beyond business profitability solely. The VAD recently unveiled its unique social initiative, THOT (The Human-side Of Technology), at its annual technology summit, ‘CONVERGE’, held at The Atlantis Hotel, Dubai. Amal Al Redha, Senior Fundraising Manager at Dubai Cares, the program partner of THOT, introduced the ‘Adopt a School” initiative, the first cause undertaken by THOT, and honoured the support partners EMW, Pinnacle Smart Systems and Spusht for their contribution towards the cause. Speaking about the initiative, Suren Vedantham, Group MD, StorIT Distribution, explained, “While we strive hard by challenging ourselves at all times to raise the bar in everything that we do, we realize

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that we can actually work towards adding more meaning and purpose to our enterprise by sharing the privileges we take for granted with those who are deprived of them, though they equally deserve them. Out of this thought evolved the idea to start a social initiative called THOT, which stands for ‘The Human-side of Technology’. THOT is a platform to get the regional IT fraternity together in reaching out in any way possible to make a difference in the lives of people and communities lacking basic needs such as access to clean water or education.” “We plan to get together each year with all partners who intend to be part of the initiative to sponsor a social program which may not demand much of our time or resources but could certainly touch the lives of underprivileged people around the world. We believe that the cumulative effect of a collective effort is always much greater than disparate individual actions.”

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PSILOG to Distribute ESET Security Solutions against all existing and emergThis growing need for ing cyber threats. PSILOG enhanced IT security has will ensure that our partners resulted in accelerated regional remain up-to-date with all growth for ESET in both these product enhancements the business and home user so that our customers can segments and the vendor has leverage our products to their entered into a new partnership full potential,” said Pradeesh with PSILOG International VS, General Manager at ESET for the distribution of its range Middle East. of IT security solutions for PRADEESH VS, GENERAL MANAGER, ESET PSILOG will serve ESET’s businesses across the GCC. MIDDLE EAST channel community in UAE, The broad line distributor Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Yemen, will also be responsible for Kuwait and KSA. As one of ESET’s key training managing ESET’s retail distribution business in partners in the region, PSILOG will play a pivSaudi Arabia. otal role in implementation of the ESET Partner “PSILOG will add not only to our distribuProgram which offers free sales and technical tion capabilities, but will also play a lead role trainings, pre-sales and post-sales support and in the training and support of our channel attractive discounts and rebates for registered partners. At ESET, we continuously upgrade our channel partners.” solutions to ensure they are capable of protecting

XEROX PROPELS INKJET ACCESSIBILITY Xerox’s newest press will make inkjet technology a reality for more print service providers by breaking down barriers such as high print volumes, largefootprint and cost. The Xerox Rialto 900 Inkjet Press offers first-of-its kind features and carves out a new space within the booming production color inkjet segment. “We are creating a new, disruptive inkjet market segment with the Rialto 900 and there’s room for everyone,” said Paul Morgavi, COO, Inkjet Division, Xerox, and GM, Impika. “The Rialto900changes the playing field by merging the cut sheet, inkjet and offset worlds – an important convergence for providers looking for a competitive edge and for print’s longterm survival.”

FINESSE TO SHOWCASE BESTOF-BREED SOLUTIONS AT BIG DATA SHOW Finesse has buckled up to showcase their cutting edge big data and analytics solutions at the Big Data show— to be held at the Dubai World Trade Center on June 8-9, 2015— to the enterprises participating from the global banking, telco, retail and enterprise community. These best of breed solutions backed by process centric deliveries and managed services enable organizations to gain insights into the extensive data collected from all business operations. Finesse delivers Big Data systems with unprecedented speed, scale and flexibility to enterprise organizations. It can be deployed on hybrid, private, virtual private and/or public cloud environments. Finesse helps enterprises focus on solving business problems, Big Data applications to achieve their objectives. Finesse’s Big Data solutions offer real-time processing and streaming, for actionable analytics. Finesse believes that technology plays a critical role in making the banking, telecom and retail industry more customer oriented, go digital across all channels and be able to deliver enhanced customer satisfaction. Such solutions and services help organizations stay competitive and place ahead of the curve in today’s technology driven business environment.

NEXTHINK PARTNERS WITH EXCEED GULF Nexthink has entered into a new partnership with Exceed Gulf. Through this strategic partnership, Nexthink will be able to extend its customer reach to address concerns of today’s large enterprises such as security, Big Data, and mobility. In addition, Exceed Gulf will be able to extend consultancy services, support, training and implement Nexthink’s IT operations analytics

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solutions for customers in key industries in the region including Government, Telecom, Energy and Finance. Abdul Rahim Al Moustapha, Regional Alliance Manager, Exceed Gulf said, “The synergies between the work culture and vision of both Exceed Gulf and Nexthink are very strong, and will play a major role in helping our customers realize the

potential of their existing IT solutions. We will enable our customers to utilize IT analytics to achieve their IT strategy.” According to Maged Eid, Regional Director, Nexthink, “We are glad to have partnered with Exceed Gulf, as they have such a strong presence in the Middle East and beyond. We look forward to leveraging their expertise

and reputation with prominent organizations, in order to expand our reach and develop closer relationships with customers. In turn, the partnership broadens Exceed Gulf ’s portfolio to deliver a unique competitive solution in the region. Nexthink IT analytics can help IT departments connect, communicate and collaborate to significantly achieve their business objectives.

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IN PUBLIC

“Few fields have greater IoT opportunities than healthcare” NINO GIGUASHVILI, IDC HEALTH INSIGHTS’ LEAD RESEARCH ANALYST FOR CEMA

SECONDS

TECOM INVESTMENTS EMBRACE ARUBA NETWORKS SOLUTIONS

Gulf Air Boosts IT Security with HP Gulf Air has recently implemented HP’s latest IPS to bolster its IT security and network data protection. Mr. Maher Salman AlMusallam, Gulf Air CEO, said: “Gulf Air is committed to partnering with technology leaders to ensure the highest level of IT security for its passengers and workforce. This agreement will ensure that Gulf Air customers’ information is secure while maintaining an efficient and easy-to-use service that facilitates all their travel requirements.”

Dr. Jassim Haji, Gulf Air Director of IT, said: “With HP TippingPoint NextGeneration IPS, Gulf Air is proactively securing and blocking malicious inbound and outbound traffic. We value HP’s role as an IT security industry leader and trust their commitment to always remaining abreast of industry developments in order to better help us adapt the most current and effective security measures – thereby securing our internal data and that of our passengers.”

TECOM Investments has implemented Aruba’s state-of-the-art wireless network infrastructure, using Aruba Wireless APs and Mobility Controllers. According to Mr. Mohamed Sabah, CIO at TECOM Investments, “Aruba’s system performs authentication, access control and encryption for users and devices, delivering state-of-the-art wireless security.” Working with EMITAC, Aruba’s Silver level VAR in the UAE, TECOM executed the implementation in two phases. INTUIT MICRO TIES UP WITH EHDF “It was imperative for us to look for best-in-class facilities to ensure that we have adequate data storage facilities available locally with large bandwidth critical for our healthcare clients” said Giri Rajan, MD, INTUIT Micro. Commenting on the solution, Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHosting DataFort, said, “. Our flexible and scalable solutions support the dynamic needs of INTUIT Micro’s clients’ and live up to the high expectations of a highly secure environment that maintain complete confidentiality of patient information.

SOLUTIONS MIDDLE EAST ACHIEVES ELITE STATUS Solutions Middle East has been awarded the Citrix Specialist status after successful completion of the Citrix Solutions Advisor Specialization program. Solutions ME is the first in the region to be awarded platinum specialization by Citrix. The company has also achieved the Platinum Partner status for the region by Citrix in 2014 “We are proud to be the first and only Citrix Specialist covering Virtualization, Mobility and Networking. This is part of our overall target to deliver quality valuable projects in the MEA region,” said Asad Siddiq, Executive VP at Solutions Middle East. “We work very closely with our partners in order to deliver the best products and services to our customers. Having a Platinum specialist status is the epitome of an organisation that meets the highest levels of commitment, technical expertise and customer focus.”

We were also able to cater to the large bandwidth requirements” PALO ALTO NETWORKS ACQUIRES CIRROSECURE Palo Alto Networks has acquired CirroSecure, a Silicon Valley-based company with a highly differentiated approach to securing SaaS applications. Saeed Agha, GM Palo Alto Networks Middle East said: “The Palo Alto Networks Enterprise Security Platform provides the industry’s leading ability to safely enable applications and prevent cyber threats from compromising an organization’s data and infrastructure.” The addition of the CirroSecure technology to the Palo Alto Networks

INGRAM MICRO - NEW MEA TRAINING PARTNER OF INTEL SECURITY

platform expands this functionality by providing

Ingram Micro Middle East has partnered on training solutions across MEA with Intel Security. As one of Intel Security’s distributors, Ingram Micro delivers a set of Intel Security’s most popular courses across MEA including Endpoint Protection, Network Security, Security Information and Event Management Administration, and Data Protection products. “Adding Intel Security to our portfolio of vendor-authorized training is a significant step marking the increased demand for cyber security solutions across the region”, said Zornitza S. Hadjitodorova, Head of Ingram Micro Education Services for MEA. “Considering MEA is emerging market, IT training is essential for our partners to have the right level of knowledge to both sell and install, configure, manage and troubleshoot Intel Security products”, Hadjitodorova added. Intel Security emphasizes the essential hands-on classroom instruction to give a holistic picture of network security implemented in a variety of environments.

‘COUNTERFEITS… NO MORE’

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additional security for SaaS applications.

HID Global has introduced ‘vanGO’— a visual security solution that enables universities, enterprises and state and county government agencies to create and issue personalized, secure IDs with higher levels of protection. vanGO sets a new standard in One-2-One personalized security that is cost-effective, counterfeit resistant and can be issued on-the-spot via an easy desktop solution

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Cisco All set to Digitize the ‘Tomorrow’ Cisco leaders have pulled up their socks to address the Internet of Things Expo 2015 (IoTX), which will be held from June 8–9 2015 at DWTC. As a lead sponsor of the event, Cisco will showcase its world-class technology solutions designed to help the region’s public and private sector organizations leverage digital transformation in order to embrace the Internet of Everything (IoE) that will help transform their business models. Cisco will use IoTX as a platform to highlight the contribution of IoE to Dubai’s Smart City transformation in the build-up to the World Expo 2020 and beyond. As a keynote speaker, Rabih Dabboussi, GM, Cisco UAE will speak on ‘Dubai And The Internet Of Everything: Opportunity At The Crossroads’ and Shukri Eid,

Director Cisco Consulting Services, MEA and Russia, CIS will speak at the Idea Swap on the topic ‘Digitising A Nation, Opportunities And Implications’ “Becoming a digital business requires an agile IT model, and the ability to rethink core processes for the digital era. Embracing new security, cloud, mobile, social and analytics technologies required to fully digitize takes imagination, investment and expertise,” commented Rabih Dabboussi. “Imagine no more traffic jams, never having to search for a parking space, no more flight delays, having intelligent transportation for emergency services, and ensuring a better environment for our next generation of leaders – that’s what a Smart City will deliver,” Dabboussi concluded on a high note.

WHO’S THE BOSS? PAPER OR YOU? According to “Winning the Paper Wars,” a study published by AIIM, “On average, respondents feel that driving paper out of the process would improve speed of response to customers, citizens, or staff by a factor of 4x.” To help realize this potential, Kodak Alaris is releasing an updated line of document scanners that reverse the build-up of paper and make businesses more productive. The new KODAK i2420, i2620 and i2820 Scanners build on i2000 Series Scanner platform, adding new features and enhancements that address the challenges faced by users with heavy-duty desktop scanning needs.

DIGITAL BUSINESS IS DISRUPTING BUSINESS EVERYWHERE The Digital Business Platform is the critical technology driver and enabler for enterprises pursuing digital transformation. Software AG has achieved significant progress in customer traction and partner expansion with its Digital Business Platform. CTO Dr. Wolfram Jost, Software AG said: “Digital applications are adaptable by design and ‘built to change’. Differentiating applications for the digital transformation cannot be bought off-the-shelf, they have to be built on an advanced development platform. And, most importantly, these platforms are the future of enterprise computing, for cloud, hybrid cloud and on premise deployments.”

BROCADE CIO SURVEY UNTANGLES THE CLOUD CONCERNS A new survey conducted by Brocade of 200 global CIOs highlight a clear need to understand that legacy networking infrastructures need to evolve to the ‘New IP’ – an architecture reimagined for a modern world and designed to meet the needs of Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Big Data. On the topic of cloud, the survey found that 90% of respondents have some form of cloud within their organization but control of cloud acquisition is proving to be a challenge. Shadow IT is a major concern to many CIOs and yet, despite the risks, it’s an approach to gaining access to resource by business that continues to grow. “The issue is not cloud but the business attitude and approach to its adoption. The ‘right’ cloud can greatly assist an organization or business unit achieve its goals. The ‘wrong’ cloud can accelerate and intensify the very issues its adoption was designed to address. CIOs need to address cloud demands with business unit leaders and become their ally in cloud. Ensuring the organization can successfully connect to cloud is a key driver of success,” says Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade. The survey also brings into focus the need for ‘business led networking’ that is optimized for applications. “Simply adding new solutions to an overburdened, under-utilized, and fundamentally flawed system won’t provide the organization with what it needs. A new approach to the old network is needed. One that encompasses financing and transitional technology, while reducing complexity and cost.”

EMC UNLEASHES THE “BEAST” - XTREMIO 4.0 XtremIO has risen to become the fastest-selling product in EMC. To add yet another feather to the cap, EMC has unveiled XtremIO version 4.0, a non-disruptive free software upgrade to XtremIO v3.X arrays. Nicknamed “The Beast” by customers, XtremIO 4.0 leverages XtremIO’s breakthrough scale-out architecture, more than doubling previous density with 40TBs per X-Brick and by offering configura-

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tions of up to eight 40TB X-Bricks, with non-disruptive performance and capacity expansions that automatically rebalances data to maintain consistent and predictable sub-millisecond performance. “The data center of the future has to be agile, built around IT infrastructure technology that supports the speed at which enterprises need to adapt and respond to dynamic business conditions. ” says

Eric Burgener, Research Director, IDC. “EMC XtremIO meets these requirements – key factors in its #1 market share position (by IDC’s reckoning) by revenue in the high growth All Flash Array market – and has improved upon them with this latest release.” Guy Churchward, President, EMC Core Technologies says, “When we launched XtremIO we explained that ‘architecture matters,’

and in the past year this has been validated by the market as XtremIO became the #1 all-flash array in record time. With XtremIO 4.0, we’ve boosted that solid foundation with scale and data services that truly transform not just the speed at which applications run, but the entire way in which they’re deployed. XtremIO is the strategic asset in the data center that simply redefines what’s possible.”

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Guardian of Mobile Security Unveiled by Fortinet Fortinet has unveiled a new FortiGuard Mobile Security subscription service to help enterprises protect mobile devices from cyber threats, particularly in business environments where a “bring your own device” (BYOD) policy has been adopted. The new FortiGuard Mobile Security subscription service includes mobile application control and mobile malware protection across both Apple IOS and Android environments. Fortinet recently announced an agreement to acquire Meru Networks, a leader in intelligent Wi-Fi networking. The combination of the Meru acquisition with today’s FortiGuard Mobile

Security services launch strengthens Fortinet’s solutions platform and reinforces its commitment to helping enterprises of all sizes deploy, manage and secure wireless networks in a mobile era. “Our new mobile application control and mobile malware protection service integrated into the network, and particularly WLAN, provide enterprises globally with the visibility and control they need over mobile devices to protect their corporate assets, especially in BYOD environments.” said John Maddison, VP marketing products at Fortinet. The new FortiGuard Mobile Security Service will be available in Q3 2015.

WEB CLIPS RUCKUS UNVEILS SMARTZONE Ruckus Wireless has introduced its new SmartZone software platform, a carrier-grade solution developed for and deployed by service providers now extended to demanding enterprise customers. This future-ready solution addresses the growing challenges that enterprises and service providers face in delivering high-performance, reliable WiFi, while also providing them with a clear path to meet constantly increasing network infrastructure performance and service requirements. The new WiFi software offers ‘WiFi-as-you-grow’—the capability.

AMD UNVEILS 6TH GEN APU AMD has unveiled its 6th Generation A-Series Processor, the world’s first high-performance

CYBEROAM EXPANDS IN THE MIDDLE EAST Cyberoam has appointed Genx as its Platinum Partner for UAE. Based in the Bur Dubai, Genx is a leading player in the region, also having business alliances in various parts of the world. The appointment is part of Cyberoam’s expansion plan in Middle East - a cybersecurity market growing at a CAGR of 13% and which is expected to be worth $10 bn by 2020. Talking about this collaboration Mr Ravinder Janotra, Regional Manager Middle East, Cyberoam said “We are upbeat about this collaboration bringing benefits to all stakeholders. Genx is a major player in the market and we will benefit from their presence and market understanding. Partner collaborations are crucial for our business growth. We are also committed towards strengthening them as they have a better grasp of customer issues and often form the first point of contact for them. It is this approach that has allowed us to achieve success in a short time and gain a strong foothold in the security market. With more hands joining in, we are confident of achieving major milestones in the very near future.”

Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) in a Systemon-Chip (SoC) design. Previously codenamed “Carrizo”, the 6th Generation AMD A-Series Processor marks a number of technology firsts: the world’s first High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) hardware decode support for notebooks, the first Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) 1.0-compliant design, and the first ARM TrustZone -capable high-performance APU.

‘BIMODAL ORG REQUIRES ADAPTIVE SOURCING’ Gartner has said that a bimodal organization

MOVEMENTS ANDREW ELDER is the New President EMEA operations for Intel Security.

TP-LINK has appointed FAZAL KHAN as the new Business Development Manager for its KSA operations.

Fujitsu subsidiary PFU has appointed TAREK AKL as the Partner Manager for Middle East and Turkey.

Digital Guardian has appointed LUKE BROWN as its new VP & GM of EMEA and India.

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NUMBER GAME

percent

Gartner says through 2017, 50% of organizations will not have an information strategy that addresses the emerging role of information citizen

needs to adopt an adaptive approach to sourcing, where the distinct needs of both modes of IT are recognized. A bimodal organization has two modes of IT. Mode 1 is traditional, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is non-sequential, emphasizing agility and speed. Both are necessary and must work in tandem.

PROTECT YOUR SERVER WITH ‘ONE-CLICK’ Sophos Cloud Server Protection Advanced integrates server application whitelisting with anti-malware to deliver single-click server lockdown, using the simple, intuitive Sophos Cloud management console that makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain. John Shaw, vice president product management at Sophos said, “With this level of integration, IT administrators at small to mid-sized organizations can now easily upgrade protection of their critical Windows servers – whether on-premise or in the cloud – and prevent attacks without spending weeks or months to configure, test and deploy white-listing applications.”

CHANNEL STREET

Dell IoT Gateways will Speed Up Industry Transformation Dell is all set to form a division focused on bringing together end-to-end IoT solutions that span hardware, software and services. Its first product release is a gateway designed to help customers kick-start their solution development and begin realizing the value of IoT immediately. The gateway is robust enough for the rigors of current projects and can also be leveraged as a proof-of-concept for use with future specialized Dell gateways. As organizations come to terms with the new IoT landscape, they encounter a difference in approach between operational technology and information technology. To help bridge

this divide, Dell has partnered with leading OT organizations, such as KMC Controls, to develop solutions that are specialized enough for OT yet seamlessly manageable in an IT environment. Through this and other key relationships, Dell is poised to be a trusted partner for developing innovative solutions. Gateways are small, wireless or connected devices that collect, help secure and process sensor data at the edge of a network. Dell’s new gateways are a solid foundation for an IoT edge solution that conserves valuable network bandwidth by relaying only meaningful data back to the cloud.

ERDAL OZKAYA ADDRESSES MICROSOFT AZURE ROADSHOW emt Distribution CISO Erdal Ozkaya was among the key speakers at Microsoft Azure roadshow held recently at Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. Expressing his delight about his participation at the roadshow, Ozkaya, stated, “It is a confluence of like-minded who have come together share their experiences and learn from each other. Roadshows like these help the whole eco system- enthusiasts, developers, partners, and customers all stand to gain.” In his presentation, Ozkaya discussed enterprise mobility, BYOD, SaaS, besides talking about cloud security and shared the best practices to stay secure in a computing world.

DELOITTE CHOOSES DIMENSION DATA TO TRANSFORM BUSINESS Deloitte Consulting has chosen Dimension Data as the cloud SP to deliver Enterprise Application and Analytic workloads for business transformation and the Dimension Data Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), as the IaaS. “The combination of the Dimension Data MCP and Deloitte business transformation solutions enables the client to align IT to business outcomes,” said Shelley Perry, senior vice-president, research and development, for Dimension Data’s ITaaS Business Unit. “We’re investing in new, advanced technology from companies like the EMC Federation and Cisco to enable a hybrid cloud strategy. By surrounding enterprise applications, moving to the cloud, with all the services and capabilities they require, we’re simplifying IT transformation.”

DSG ON A WINNING SPREE

H.E. AHMAD BIN HUMAIDAN, DSG DIRECTOR GENERAL

Dubai Smart Government Department (DSG) won two prestigious awards at the Smart Card & Payment Awards Middle East 2015 held last week at the Conrad Hotel, Dubai. The first award was for best smart government payment initiative for its ePay gateway and the second was for the innovation of its mobile payment app called mPay. Commenting on the awards, H.E. Ahmad Bin Humaidan, DSG Director General, said: “Great importance is attached to ePayment channels and in developing these services.” DSG was keen on realizing the concept of smart and connected government by co-operating with a large number of government entities for providing a selected bouquet of services for customers as per their desires and implementing the initiative of HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, for providing easy access to all government transactions from one place and through one device.” The ePay gateway has 30 government entities who use it to accept payment of corporate and individual customers for over 250 government services.

SECURITY, SPEED AND CONVENIENCE WITH OMA EMIRATES OMA Emirates-Solution Gulf has geared up for the supply of instant issuance across branches of Alizz Islamic Bank, Oman’s latest entrant into the banking industry. The solution will enhance customer support by facilitating branch offices to instantly issue customer cards and allow them to key in their own PINs for debit cards and hand them over

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instantly. The turnkey solution will integrate data from the bank’s Card Management System (CMS), apply strict EMV security procedures by using the latest Hardware Security Module (HSM) supplied by OMA Emirates and enable quick and safer cards to customers. “The Instant Card Issuance solution being provided to Alizz Islamic Bank

is an indication of our capability to deploy a complete solution by providing our Ingenico PIN devices, EMV software solutions that are developed in-house, and the ability to offer strong after sales service.” said Niranj Sangal, Group CEO, OMA Emirates – Solution Gulf. Jamal Al Khusaibi, Head of Infrastructure & IT Operations,

Alizz Islamic Bank said, “Speed, data security, safe distribution is important for costumers, and we also look forward to the impact it will have on our profitability by eliminating pre-printing of cards before personalization, non-existent PIN mailer distribution and flexibility of card stock inventory.” he added.

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CHANNEL STREET

‘Business Intelligence for Everyone’ Qlik has unveiled its latest Qlik Sense Enterprise 2.0. It is the latest addition to the platformbased approach to business intelligence. Qlik Sense Enterprise spans use cases across the organizations ranging from self-service data visualization, to reporting and dashboards, to guided analytics. Built on Associative Data Indexing engine, the second generation off Qlik sense allows people to explore data relationships across many sources that would otherwise be hidden in hierarchical or query based approaches. Qlik Sense 2.0 boasts of some unique modules like intuitive exploration and discovery, smart visualization, user driven creation, collaboration and communication, anytime and anywhere mobility, etc. Smart

visualization, which is one of the key aspects of Qlik sense, offers innovative techniques for conveying meaning in data with features advanced summarization of information, intelligent use of color gradients and responsive design that adapts information based on the screen size. “With Qlik Sense, our vision is to provide business intelligence to everyone and empower fast decision-making across the business hierarchy.” Said Kerry Koutsikos, Regional Director- MEA & Turkey, Qlik. Groups and teams can easily collaborate in Qlik sense to make better decisions with Interactive Data Storytelling that allows people to use analytics to create and present guided stories rich with narrative and graphics.

TRANSFORMING DNS FROM A VULNERABILITY TO A STRENGTH WITH INFOBLOX Infoblox Internal DNS Security is a hardened DNS appliance that turns the internal DNS server from a vulnerability into a strength by providing protection against exploitation of DNS for infrastructure attacks, malware, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and data exfiltration via DNS. Building on Infoblox’s established leadership in DNS protection, Infoblox Internal DNS Security improves defense against multiple types of attacks by detecting and blocking DNS infrastructure attacks, disrupting APTs and malware and preventing data exfiltration.

VEEAM REDEFINES BACKUP AND STORAGE The new Veeam Availability Suite v9 will integrate with EMC VNX and VNXe hybrid storage arrays. As a result of Veeam’s ability to integrate with EMC, enterprise IT will be able to use Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots to rapidly create backups from EMC VNX or VNXe storage snapshots up to 20 times faster than competing products. “Veeam is committed to providing Availability for the Modern Data Center, said Ratmir Timashev, CEO at Veeam. “Veeam is taking full advantage of modern data center technologies such as virtualization, cloud and advanced storage technologies like EMC’s VNX and VNXe hybrid flash storage arrays. This helps us to further strengthen our enterprise presence, enabling users to create backups from storage snapshots every 5 minutes and recover any application and data much faster to enable the Always-On Business.

WIRELESS SECURITY - A STEP FURTHER Cyberoam, has launched CR10wiNG, the “fastest and most affordable UTM appliance” with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities for the SOHO/ROBO markets. The CR10wiNG wireless appliance delivers UTM security features over WLAN to offer enterprise-level security and meet the requirement of mobility in this segment. The wireless networks in organizations face huge risk of information theft due to their inability to trace users, especially guest users, within the network. Also, organizations with distributed networks, remote and branch offices, especially in sectors like retail stores, logistics and transportation, and Utility distribution centers, demand mobility within the network and need network security, secure remote access, and secure Wi-Fi for walk-in customers. CR10wiNG, based on Cyberoam’s patented Layer 8 technology, allows administrators to apply User identitybased security policies to gain visibility over user activity and also manage Guest Internet access in the network. “CR10wiNG is designed for small and branch offices to offer secure Wi-Fi at par with wired security. It enables a leaner Wi-Fi security infrastructure to organizations by replacing both Wi-Fi router and firewall with a single appliance. For remote offices with limited connectivity options, CR10wiNG also offers 3G/4G USB support,” said Abhilash Sonwane, Sr. Vice PresidentTechnology & Products, Cyberoam.

SECURITY GETS SMARTER WITH SOPHOS Sophos has unveiled the first and only UTM appliances with 802.11ac integrated wireless. The new SG Series SG 125w and SG 135w models tightly integrate wireless access with firewall protection to allow small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) to achieve the performance gains offered by 802.11ac wireless, including smarter

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performance and better hotspot management. Available immediately, both the integrated wireless and separate access points can be managed directly from the Sophos SG Series appliances. Bryan Barney, senior vice president & general manager of Network Security at Sophos says “With this

new UTM, we enable network managers to offer a better Wi-Fi experience to their users, and at the same time eliminate drama from Wi-Fi configuration and security.” “Now that Sophos has added integrated 802.11ac to the SG Series, we will be able to provide our customers highly secure Wi-Fi and the best available throughput. We

look forward to offering this level of protection to our clients.” says, Sam Heard, President, Data Integrity Services. Sophos APmodels can be managed directly from the SG Series appliances, we believe this is the next logical step for our customers to integrate their security,” confirms Todd O’Bert, President & CEO, Productive Corporation.

CHANNEL STREET

INNOVATE BUSINESS WITH BIG DATA: SAP SAP proclaimed that the Middle East organizations need to innovate with the power of Big Data as the regional Internet of Things revenue is all set to reach USD 2 billion in 2015. With the Middle East’s IoT market growth outpacing the global average, the region’s IoT hardware and services revenues will reach nearly USD 2 billion in 2015, according to Deloitte. As the GCC diversifies its economy, the non-oil sector will grow by 6 percent in 2015, according to the International Monetary Fund. As Deloitte predicts that global IoT analytics revenues will grow by 500 percent over the next four years, SAP is seeing strong take-up in the Middle East for the recently-released SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA (SAP S/4 HANA), which connects people, devices, and business networks in real time. Frank Forndron, SAP Head of Customer Office, SAP MENA, and Head of Quality Management for SAP MENA and EMEA Emerging Markets said “We’re seeing strong demand for our SAP S4/HANA real-time in-memory business suite, which reduces complexity and cost, and delivers customer value and boosts the region’s economy.. SAP is now introducing the cloud edition of SAP S/4HANA to help customers drive their digital business transformation with the simplicity of the cloud. With hybrid on-premise and cloud solutions for IT flexibility and accelerated business innovation, customers can run their entire enterprise in the cloud.

Long-Range Planning is the Ultimate Advantage Ninety-five percent of organizations that conduct long-range planning (5 to 15 years) are more likely to outperform organizations that don’t plan ahead, according to Gartner’s 2015 survey of CEOs and senior business executives.“Long-term strategic planning can lead to benefits,” said Steve Prentice, VP and Gartner Fellow. “More than 50 percent of organizations that underperformed did not engage in very long-term planning. In the case of the outperforming companies, over 80 percent carried out planning that was very long term, and they looked even further ahead ”

The survey revealed that the CFO is the primary choice of partner by far for the CEO. “For CIOs to be seen as key contributors and advisors regarding the changes and disruptions that technology brings, they must seriously assess their position internally,” said Mr. Prentice. “They should position themselves as informed and objective innovators who understand the disruptive role technology will play in business over the next 10 to 20 years, and who can make an essential contribution to long-term and very long-term planning activities within their organization.

TRANSFORMING WORKSPACES INTO COLLABORATION HUBS The emergence of huddle rooms—which Frost & Sullivan predicts will reach into the tens of millions by 2020 due to greater emphasis on open office spaces—has created demand for high-quality voice, video and content collaboration solutions specifically designed for these kinds of ad hoc meeting environments. Polycom has launched two new Polycom Real Presence Group Series video collaboration solutions that transform small workspaces into high-powered collaboration hubs. “The modern workspace is evolving, giving way to more open and more shared workspaces,” said Ashan Willy, Polycom Senior Vice President, Worldwide Systems Engineering and Product Management. “Organisations are looking for voice, video and content collaboration solutions that can change with their workplace and meet the needs of employees today, tomorrow and well into the future.”

NETAPP CHALLENGES THE STATUS QUO To meet the instant recovery and minimal data loss demands, NetApp has introduced NetApp AltaVault, previously SteelStore, cloud-integrated storage solutions and services, which will provide customers with the ability to quickly backup data to any cloud at up to 90 percent less cost than on-premises solutions. “A hybrid cloud backup strategy incorporating NetApp AltaVault solutions delivers compelling economics, speed and security so organizations can meet their backup and recovery service levels,” said Phil Brotherton, VP, Cloud Solutions Group, NetApp. Jason Buffington, senior analyst for data protection at ESG says, “Customers of all sizes that are looking to easily add cloud-storage to their existing (or new) data protection topology would be well served to look at cloud-gateways that are specifically designed for data protection scenarios – like NetApp’s AltaVault.”

NUTANIX REDEFINES HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE Nutanix has unveiled the public beta of its new Community Edition software, enabling broad access to the industry’s leading hyperconverged technology without the need for incremental hardware investment. Community Edition is a limited-scale version of the full Nutanix software stack that

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powers the datacenters of leading enterprises in more than 70 countries. Nutanix Community Edition breaks down both economic and organizational barriers to adopting the industry’s most advanced enterprise computing platform. As a 100% software-based solution, Community Edition runs on

standard x86-based servers from nearly any vendor, including Dell, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, Supermicro and others. “Installation and set-up was very simple, just like other Nutanix platforms. I had a co-worker who had rarely worked in storage complete the deployment in

just minutes!” said Joep Piscaer, CTO of OGD ict-diensten. “As a Nutanix Technology Champion, I was invited to participate in early trials of Community Edition. I think that the Community Edition is a great idea and hope it’s a big success’’ – said Brian Suhr. Senior Solutions Architect,at AHEAD.

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IDENTITY AND ACCESS CONTROL

HID GLOBAL

Securing the Assets and Information in the Region With security solutions that claim ‘Counterfeits cannot Trespass’, HID Global talks about how it has been best positioning itself in the security solutions market and catering to the demands of the various markets. n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT<ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

t a time when security landscape in the region especially in the banking, finance and government sectors is experiencing rapid changes, Nat Pisupati, Regional Sales Director, Identity and Access Management, MEA HID Global explains why HID Global stands a class apart in providing secure solutions to the region and how it is catering to the overriding breaches with its unique products and solutions. HID as a company exploits all the potential markets for security solutions. It starts with banking and enterprises though but they cater to almost all the verticals in the region. Apart from many bank authentication solutions and card management systems, the recently launched solution -ActivID Tap Authentication for Microsoft services - is very important and one of the turnkey solutions for the banks and enterprises. It enables the users to access Office365, networks and other apps & web-based services through laptops, tablets, phones and other NFC-enabled devices securely. Elaborating on it, Nat says, “ActivID Tap Authentication is basically a Tap and Go solution, for accessing your devices or even a door. ActivID appliances protect financial organizations with risk-appropriate and cost-effective user authentication that goes beyond passwords.” Government sector is where HID is also focusing heavily. Nat maintains, “Security landscape as a scenario is really crucial here due to the regional conflicts. Governments across GCC countries are focusing a lot on security applications for ID

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NAT PISUPATI,

REGIONAL SALES DIRECTOR, IDENTITY & ACCESS MANAGEMENT, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA.

“ActivID appliances protect financial organizations with risk-appropriate and cost-effective user authentication that goes beyond passwords.” cards including national IDs, Driving License, Visa, Passport and a lot more. Looking at the sensitivity of these documents, the governments are willing to pay the price.” Education is one more vertical market where HID is riveting its eye on. He adds, “We are working with schools in the countries on the secured ID projects. A huge demand is seen from parents and students for secured ID cards”. HID Global is also venturing into the mobile app space where the company is providing people card less access to any premise.People often lose cards, but losing a mobile phone is seldom, so the company is providing security app in the mobile. Once logged into the app, it gives access to the employees to enter the buildings and premises

without having to use a card. HID is also working with major Oil companies in the region and providing them access control systems and hi-tech ID cards and the company is merging the access control and ID cards onto a single platform. The card are also provided to the labourers as well due to the high-level of security in the Oil and Gas sectors.

FINALLY… Nat summarizes, “HID Global has been securing the most confidential information and assets of the world with its cutting-edge solutions and has been also security this region by catering to the demands of the local markets.” ë

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ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS

Re-imagining businesses on the platform of innovation

The latest market research reports indicate that the Middle East cloud applications market is expected to grow from $887.5 Million in 2015 to $2404.5 Million by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.1% from 2015 to 2020. In a world where mobility is the trend, security is at risk, it would be worth checking out how well placed the enterprise applications are to take on the markets and transform businesses of the future. n B Y: S O U M YA < S O U M YA @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M > n P H O T O : S H U T T E R S T O C K

ver the last one year, there has been a paradigm shift in IT adoption trends across the globe. From a focus on consumer–led technologies, the impetus for IT is coming from the enterprise market once again. “‘Re-enterprisation’ as it’s called, will be big in the Middle East over the next few years, driven largely by the scale of development and expenditure by the Government sector”, says Nehul Goradia, VP – Channel and Alliances, Optimus. Huge investment by local governments in infrastructure, healthcare and education projects have boosted the consumerization of IT, creating

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a steady demand for enterprise application software (EAS) in the region. A major part of this investment comes from the GCC region’s current transition to ‘smart’ cities as well as e-Governance. In today’s era, the region demands highly specialized systems which are mobility enabled, and available on both enterprise and cloud platforms. As Rohan Tejura, Asst. Vice President, Focus Softnet beautifully puts it across, “the portability of data across platforms and devices with up-to-theminute accurate information is the key demand while painting a canvas of an evolved market with clear visions of digital governance”.

THE MIDDLE EAST

SCENARIO Within the MENA region, enterprises are increasingly becoming mobility savvy. “These are very exciting times in the Middle East region as we re-imagine how our businesses run better in hyper-sensitive markets, deliver real-time value to our customers, and improve the lives of our Spending on Enterprise Applications has been rising steadily over the last 2 years. Saudi Arabia has been the largest market in terms of volume. But the rate of growth has been higher in the other GCC states. UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain have all posted accelerated growth in the last year.

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NEHUL GORADIA, VP – CHANNEL AND ALLIANCES, OPTIMUS

ROHAN TEJURA, ASST. VICE PRESIDENT, FOCUS SOFTNET

“Optimus’ complementary range of products and solutions enables the Enterprise Application Suite to be customized to suit specific business and IT needs of enterprises.”

“Our range of products, over 14 so far, are all encompassing solutions built and deployable as modular silos allowing for complete flexibility based on the end-client requirement.”

Middle East currently holds nearly 3% of the global enterprise IoT market, with a potential to rise significantly. Over the next one year, the market for IoT services alone will be nearly $1 billion for the Middle East.

employees and citizens alike. Our people are on the move – demanding information and services anytime, anywhere – to improve their lives. This demand is driving innovation in the enterprise application market with the likes of mobility, the Internet of Things, and real-time computing” comments Chris Dorrow, Customer Innovation Principal, SAP.We really are embarking on a new industrial transformation…and we are just getting started Overall, large organizations and enterprises still hold the majority chunk of spending on enterprise applications. But the uptake by the small and medium businesses segment has been rising significantly and should catch up in the coming four to five years. SMB’s and Governments are increasingly

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looking to get mobile enabled. So the opportunity lies in providing mobility solutions that are cloud-ready. Additionally, Enterprise solutions focused on industry-verticals, like government and banking & finance, are also expected to create further opportunities over the few years. IoT is a massive space that is relatively untapped in the Middle East. But the steady rate of growth of some enterprise applications is indicative of a much larger expected surge in EAS uptake and spending. “Another industry trend we are seeing is an adapted mobility model, built around mobile middleware and a cloud you can subscribe mobile back end as a service, or “MBaaS”, Nehul tells us.

SOLUTIONS- SPOILT FOR CHOICE? Chris tells us the story behind the concept of SAP HANA. Over the last 10 years, through constant interactions with customers, it was clear that people “need to be able to make quick, on the

fly decision with complete visibility into their business processes” and “everything should be simple…easy to use”. And SAP HANA was the answer to that demand. As Chris says, “This is our game changing platform that enables companies to simplify their landscape, accelerate their business processes and transform their business by simplifying complex IT systems down into to one single platform. SAP HANA also provides the ability to run real-time analytics – without batch – with one single version of data, drastically reducing the total cost of ownership for the entire IT landscape.” Focus delivers a plethora of solutions on the mobility platforms as well as traditional platforms through both enterprise application and cloud mediums. “Our range of ERP solutions, CRM, Point of Sale, MRP, Warehouse Management, Healthcare Management, Hospitality Management and Real Estate and Facilities Management Solutions, all fit the bill with the demands of the region”, says Rohan from Focus. “Moreover, our latest ERP solution, Focus 8, with its advance Business Intelligence, workflows, authorizations, and multiple role-based dashboards, available on enterprise, cloud and mobile platforms has been built with this specific need of the hour, and comes feature rich with vertical specific capabilities for a large variety of industries as well”, he adds. Within the Middle East, Epicor offers two of its flagship ERP products: Epicor ERP and iScala ERP. “We have recently released the latest version of Epicor ERP, - Epicor ERP 10, which gives companies a technology platform that can inspire them as they conduct business. The highlights of Epicor ERP 10 are collaboration, choice, responsiveness, simplicity and mobility”, remarks Anish Kanaran, Channel Director for Epicor in the Middle East, Africa & India. He adds that iScala 3.0 is the most recent and technically advanced release of iScala ERP. “iScala combines country-specific localizations and multi-language capabilities with powerful functionalities that support global, multi-company, or multi-site business models that need to collaborate with customers, suppliers, sister organizations, or other partners to achieve operational and business excellence.” “Optimus offers a comprehensive suite of solutions for Enterprises including our own enterprise mobility development services with integration to product stack”, says Nehul from Optimus. “The enterprise application (cloud) focuses on Healthcare, Education, Smart Cities, Banking, Hospitality, Retail, Government and Oil and Gas. The application development is tailored to the needs of the channel and focuses

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on Mobility, Retail, Big Data, Analytics, Internet of Everything enablement and IoT infrastructure creation of these vertical stacks. We are also launching our own big data practice for the channel”, he adds.

BUZZ AROUND ENTERPRISE APPLICATION SUITES “Enterprise Application Suites is honestly just terminology used by CIO’s and IT managers to try and encompass a wide variety of business critical applications”, says Nehul from Optimus. He goes on to add, “terminology apart, Enterprise Suites go hand in hand with all enterprise legacy applications, and broadly form the backbone of an enterprises technology infrastructure, spanning implementations across multiple departments. Irrespective of the vertical of an enterprise, every corporation has application dependency”. At Optimus, they do provide a comprehensive Suite of Enterprise Applications that creates one set of interconnected modules that help integrate a variety of business functions, like order management, purchasing, and finance, as well as vertical specific solutions, all integrated together with the human resource, customer management and marketing process. “Optimus’ complementary range of products and solutions enables the Suite to be customized to suit specific business and IT needs of enterprises” says Nehul. For Smart City focused requirements of Governments, the suite of applications required is massive. Nehul says, “We carry a portfolio that covers everything from property management of smart homes & buildings, to convergence solutions for information, communication and security, basically addressing the need for automation and e-services across the spectrum of intelligent buildings and smart homes.. For Big data, our Enterprise suite includes modules for predictive modeling and data science, as well as

web mining and data engineering applications”. “Both Epicor ERP and iScala ERP are comprehensive enterprise suites that offer endto-end functionality. Epicor ERP software offers a modular approach with robust capabilities focused on reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving customer responsiveness across the enterprise –these are top priorities for businesses that want to achieve continued growth and profitability” comments Anish. Fully released this year, the Business Suite for HANA (S4HANA) is the enterprise platform, which “helps customer re-imagine their business, and their dreams”, says Chris. “Nestled on the powerful HANA platform, S4HANA harmonizes business processes – horizontally and vertically – with faster transaction process, less data redundancy and a truly simplified user experience that allows our customers to execute at an art form level” he adds. Rohan from Focus says, “Our range of products, over 14 so far, are all encompassing solutions built and deployable as modular silos allowing for complete flexibility based on the end-client requirement. The integration of all of our modules becomes an Enterprise Suite and is available on various versions ranging from Focus 8 to Focus I and Focus RT as well, depending upon the target audiences’ requirements, number of users/locations and budgets/timelines”.

LITTLE THINGS THAT MATTER MUCH In heavily virtualized application environments or those running on public and private Clouds, there are many challenges of managing applications. With market leading abilities they possess, it comes as no surprise when Chris says, “With 76% of the world’s online transactions touching SAP in their journey, it is safe to say we have the capability, flexibility and experience to help any customer succeed. While these numbers may

COST

sound large and complex, our culture prides itself on simplicity – “Run Simple” as we say. This is what we believe, and make sure that we share this belief with our customers in every customization, enablement, implementation and experience that you will have with SAP”. “Every ERP project is unique, as every customer has its own business processes and requirements” says Anish from Epicor. He further elaborates, “One size does not fit all, which is why the ‘business layers’ approach from Epicor allows our next-generation solutions to support every business from the smallest start-up, to the largest multinational, as well as the differing complexities in industries.” Anish is really upbeat about Epicor ERP 10 and says, “Epicor ERP 10 is not only easy to use, it also delivers high performance and scalability to enable companies to become more productive. It is designed on the five principles of collaboration, choice, responsiveness, simplicity and mobility to help organizations to enhance their productivity by connecting people and systems throughout the supply chain”. “Focus’ suite of products are highly customizable, and at the same time, available with “industry best practices” and remain highly secure as well” says Rohan. “Our approach, unique to our domain, has been to provide implementations with various screens of preferences and checkboxes which allow for extremely agile customization of the applications with literally no programming requirement for deployment. Moreover, this aspect of our solutions ensures that we are able to deliver our solutions to our clients within record times, beating the industry curve significantly”, he adds. Nehul puts forth the claim that Optimus’ portfolio of Enterprise Applications is agile and can be deployed over scalable and flexible IT requirements. “Our team consists of consultants who are experts across verticals as subject matter experts as well as enterprise architects who can look at business cases in a customized fashion and architect technology solutions that are effective, efficient and high performance”, adds Nehul. Consumer applications have created a high bar for mobile user experience, convenience and functionality- how far have enterprise applications managed to match the bar?

B2B VS B2C – THE BATTLE CONTINUES QUALITY

SPEED EFFICIENCY

The emergence of BYOD business organizations and the proliferation of mobile device usage means that enterprise mobility solutions will continue to be at the heart of the technology strategy and business operations for enterprises. The

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generation. Where enterprise applications need to focus in the next five years is transforming this ‘Big Data’ into ‘Smart Data’”. Of late, many vendors and partners have joined the bandwagon to provide vertical specific solution bundles. So, do enterprise applications come in such vertical-specific configurations too?

SOLUTIONS TAILOR MADE FOR EACH VERTICAL

ANISH KANARAN, CHANNEL DIRECTOR FOR EPICOR IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA & INDIA

“Unlike many other ERP vendors, Epicor solutions are based on a modern, flexible and agile technology platform. This ensures that innovative businesses can get the maximum benefit from their Epicor solution.”

“It is estimated that within the next five years Millennials will make up for roughly 75% of the workforce. This generation demands ultimate convenience and instant access to both local and global resources with a user experience that improves their lives. Where enterprise applications need to focus in the next five years is transforming this ‘Big Data’ into ‘Smart Data”

anytime, anywhere access to corporate information is dramatically improving customer service and boosting employee productivity and morale, translating into an improved bottom-line! But the ‘consumerization’ of applications over the last few years has led to B2B, rather B2E environments, demanding a B2C transaction experience. With respect to usability and design, enterprise mobile applications are still to catch up with mainstream consumer apps. However, to optimize the mobile enterprise applications user experience, a number of measures have been taken to improve functionality and ease

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CHRIS DORROW, CUSTOMER INNOVATION PRINCIPAL, SAP

“SAP HANA is our game changing platform that enables companies to simplify their landscape, accelerate their business processes and transform their business by simplifying complex IT systems down into to one single platform” of use, while balancing security protocols. Most enterprise application providers draw attention to the fact that compared to consumer applications, enterprise applications are more data heavy, and are densely packaged with extremely complex features, functionalities and capabilities in order to extract maximum digital governance out of the delivered product suite. It is, therefore, a balancing act at all times to ensure that the applications delivered are attractive enough, at the same time, maintaining the functionality that is required for effective digital governance. Chris from SAP sheds light on the crucial role of the millennial generation. “It is estimated that within the next five years Millennials will make up for roughly 75% of the workforce. This generation demands ultimate convenience and instant access to both local and global resources with a user experience that improves their lives. With real time computing, mobility in the cloud and simple user experience platforms we are doing a pretty good job at meeting this demand and capturing the data requirements of this

Rohan from Focus believes that their ability of providing solutions with vertical-specific functional expertise is what sets them apart, considering that they are the product developers who provide solutions directly to the end clients and also through a tightly integrated and governed partner network thereby enhancing implementation success stories as compared to the industry average. Optimus carries a portfolio of industry specific enterprise apps; Epicor provides tailor- made solutions too. At a time when the world is grappling with cyber threats from all possible entry points, how well are the enterprise applications safeguarded? Do they come with some tailor made features to keep them secure?

HOW SECURE ARE THE APPLICATIONS INDEED? While all enterprise applications come with some in-built security protocols, this is not enough in today’s world of borderless apps. “Since the security architecture has not kept pace with the evolution in the enterprise applications domain, vulnerability to security breaches is a common threat”, says Nehul . And while in-built security features might exist, such as passcodes and device encryption, configuring and enforcing these has been the lacunae for enterprises. Enterprise application security is a complex area, encompassing three different aspects of protection - external attacks, privilege abuse and data theft. Thus Enterprise Application Security has become a niche space on its own, with a focus on secure firewalls for networked applications, and aligning a company’s business compliance and data protection needs with appropriate security policies and frameworks. SAP takes security as seriously as simplicity. SAP Afaria (previously known as Sybase) is “a recognized leader in mobile device management that allows administrators to centrally manage, secure and deploy mobile data, application and devices. SAP takes the guesswork out of planning for the future by supporting the wide range of mobile operating systems available today, while

COVER STORY

staying ahead of the curve on devices of tomorrow”, Chris tells us. According to IDC estimates, by 2018, 27.8% of the worldwide enterprise applications market will be SaaS-based, generating $50.8B in revenue up from $22.6B or 16.6% of the market in 2013. With the wide spread advent of SaaS, what are the new opportunities as well as problems that are raising their heads?

CATCHING UP WITH THE SERVICE MODEL SaaS, or the on-demand model as it is called, has been dubbed a ‘disruptive technology’, and with good reason. “The SaaS model brings the focus onto a new approach in business, a serviceoriented, customer-centric thinking, where customer relationships shift from being seen as one-time transactional windows to becoming ongoing service opportunities. And this is a challenge as it is diametrically opposite to the business model most service providers currently function within”, says Nehul. As a SaaS provider you are not only selling a software product, but a holistic service. Revenue is generated through repeat customers. The challenge this poses from a customer perspective is the fear of a loss of control over mission critical applications and data. Plus uptime and availability concerns are intensified due to the perceived lack of ‘ownership’. SLAs that address typical customer objections as well as a comprehensive plan to deal with application security and downtime are the most effective in overcoming this concern. From a business angle, the biggest challenge is pricing your services. On the positive side, one of the biggest

opportunities that SaaS presents is the opening up of vertical markets, whereby partnerships and technology relationships with other companies within the SaaS space enable enhanced functionality, offering a greater aggregate value to customers. Rohan from Focus tells us that Focus’ suite of solutions are cloud enabled and mobility compliant, and the majority of their solutions are SaaS enabled in order to ensure that client organizations are able to benefit from these “easier to access” technologies with prepackaged industry best practices. According to Anish from Epicor, the uptake of cloud for fully integrated ERP solutions from manufacturers in the Middle East has been slow so far. “The concept of running an entire ERP solution in the cloud is still relatively new on our region and we are in an education phase where manufacturers are exploring the benefits.” But he adds that, they do see much better uptake of cloud solutions for best of breed applications such as CRM or HCM and expect that this trend will continue to soon have a considerable impact on ERP. Today enterprises are software heavy, and a third of their IT budget is spent on licenses. With a plethora of applications spread across locations, geographies, departments and functions, enterprises find themselves overwhelmed with keeping them streamlined and coordinated.

THE ROAD AIN’T ALL ROSY Traditionally speaking, onsite enterprise wide implementations were extremely complex, time consuming and very costly. But according

WORLDWIDE ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS REVENUE SHARE BY SAAS AND ON-PREMISE, 2013 - 2018 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

2013

2014

2015 SaaS

SOURCE: IDC

2016

2017 On-premise

2018

to Chris, “with the advancements made with HANA and the cloud, SAP has simplified this entire process by drastically reducing redundant data and complex configuration with simplified deployment strategies and one data reference point providing customers with a “single version of the truth”. Now customers are able to deploy full solutions in weeks, not months. This frees up critical resources to focus on their business – providing a quick return on investment and drastically reducing the total cost of ownership”. At Optimus, “we address these challenges by offering a robust range of Application Usage, Security and Mobility Management solutions that help guide enterprises through major technology upgrades like desktop transformation, virtualization, consumerization of IT and cloud computing, while balancing risk compliance and software spend”, says Nehul. According to Rohan from Focus, “Our finetuned process has matured to a level wherein the intervention of enterprise applications within organizations is one of the smoothest transitions of the industry. Our evolved organizational intelligence makes for a much quicker turnaround time which in turn minimizes the “shock” most organizations experience during ICT interventions.” Epicor is no less ready too; Anish says they have a dedicated training arm, known as Epicor University, which trains and certifies Epicor customers and partners in using Epicor solutions. The Epicor University delivers classroom and virtual education worldwide and works in conjunction with the software development teams ensuring the materials and content are always up-to-date.

FINALLY… The Middle East’s enterprise applications market has slowly started to move towards maturity but there is still a long way to go. Being adaptable and responsive is vital for enterprise applications right now. Fast, easy, simple, attractive, personalized, localized - these are major trends that are impacting the way applications are being developed and even deployed. Cloud-based apps are the future. In fact they are becoming the default development platform for most enterprise applications. The growing SaaS trend will definitely drive a demand for the cloud version of enterprise applications. However, larger organizations with inherent inertia are slower to turn towards the newer streams as opposed to younger and smaller organizations due to their inherent agility. The target is to covert the big data to smart data on an unified simplified platform and redefine the way business is done. ë

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GUEST TALK

HELP AG

The Middle East Maturing: Why Managed Security Services are Coming of Age As enterprises focus on aligning IT operations with business growth, it is becoming clear that areas such as IT security operations can be more efficiently dealt with by selecting the right outsourcing partners. And now, with the presence of skilled providers offering tailored services in the Middle East, the region is finally ready to embrace MSS.

The state of IT security in the Middle East is getting worse. Along with escalating threats, the cost of mitigating attacks too is growing. The Ponemon Institute, in its annual ‘Cost of Data Breach Study’ estimated a 15% rise in the cost of a data breach with global victims facing an average expense of $145 per compromised record . Traditionally, organizations in the Middle East have responded to these concerns by implementing basic forms of IT security and hoping that the breach happens to someone else. But even with millions being spent on the latest security devices and platforms, organizations are still getting infected! This is because despite their cost, the implemented frameworks often lack proper configuration and fine tuning and the processes for detecting and responding to incidents lack efficiency and insight. In the midst of escalating threats and constrained internal resources, Middle East organizations are beginning to realize the benefits they can reap from MSS. MSS is the outsourcing of a company’s security needs to a service provider called a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP). With the expert security resources that an MSSP has in its arsenal, it will help any organization defend against attacks and find that needle in the haystack that is probing or attacking the infrastructure.Besides freeing up precious resources, partnering with MSSPs allows firms to maximize the effectiveness of their security investments and avail of cost-effective 24x7 monitoring. MSSPs also have the ‘advantage of scale’. Since

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they protect multiple clients and have processes in places to provide workflow automation, they can significantly reduce the time required for remediation. Also, the experience and insights gained from working with large client pools gives MSSPs a much broader understanding of the threats in the region, which they then leverage across their entire client base. Deterrents to MSS So far, the Middle East has not adopted MSS as willingly as Europe and the US. Concerns about data confidentiality, integrity and location of the data are stated to be the main limiting factors. It hasn’t helped either that the majority of local MSSPs have proved to be inflexible in their offerings or are unable to deliver true value. Instead, most organizations have tried to build their own security operation centers in-house. But the region continues to lack skilled IT professionals so utilizing the precious few to carry out security operations is almost counter-productive, especially when this same limited resource pool is simultaneously tasked with delivering innovation to drive business. As enterprises focus on aligning IT operations with business growth, it is becoming clear that areas such as IT security operations can be more efficiently dealt with by selecting the right outsourcing partners. And now, with the presence of skilled providers offering tailored services in the Middle East, the region is finally ready to embrace MSS.

n WORDS: NICOLAI SOLING, D I R E C T O R O F T E C H N O L O G Y S E R V I C E S AT H E L P A G

Gearing up for MSS Picking a MSSP however is not a simple task. The criteria for selection will essentially determine success or failure. Besides cost and features, the reputation of the MSSP should hold weightage during selection. An industry renowned provider is likely to have invested in the employing highly trained security experts and would serve a rich and diverse customer base, thus contributing to the provider’s advantage of scale. The MSSP should have a deep understanding of the compliance regulations that apply to the customer’s particular industry and should conform to relevant industry-standard security and audit protocols. In addition to 24x7 monitoring and managing of its customers’ infrastructures, the MSSP should also be knowledgeable, and possibly certified to manage security solutions and platforms from multiple vendors. And finally, while any provider would boast rapid response, only those who can back this claim with water-tight SLAs that offer a fixed-scope at a fixed-price should be trusted. This guarantees that they deliver the services reliably and repeatedly. In the era of constantly evolving technologies and attack techniques, businesses cannot always give security operations their due importance. An MSSP can provide real value, visibility, insight and protection- all while relieving the stress on the organization’s over-utilized IT resources. ë

MY OPINION

Dreamlabo is such a product from Canon that would restore the importance and beauty of print on paper. Canon, with its unique sustainable print solutions, also makes sure that whatever is printed does not end up in the bin. Uniflow is a sustainable print solution from Canon that can track data to a certain period of time and in this way it also awakens the environmental sustainability consciousness of the customers. Is expansion on the radar? We are launching a new product which is an IP camera for Business. This is now bringing a very good opportunity to establish our expansion in the Middle East. For this, we are vying for new partners too. We have also launched the Dreamlabo.

NAOSHI YAMADA

DEPUTY MANAGING DIRECTOR, CANON MIDDLE EAST

Driving Sustainable Business “WHILE OFFERING MANAGED SALES, MARKETING AND TECHNICAL SUPPORT ACTIVITIES ACROSS 46 COUNTRIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA REGION, CANON MIDDLE EAST ALSO BELIEVES THAT SUSTAINABILITY IS INTEGRAL TO THE LONG-TERM GROWTH OF CORPORATIONS. NAOSHI YAMADA, DEPUTY MANAGING DIRECTOR OF CANON MIDDLE EAST TALKS TO ANUSHREE DIXIT FROM EC MEA ON CANON’S NEW INITIATIVES, BUSINESS GROWTH AND

How does Canon enhance the partner ecosystem? Most of our sales is done directly from Canon, but we also have a dedicated partner network. We look into 46 countries and have a minimum of 2 partners for each country. Our fundamental approach is to understand market and each of the verticals carefully. Then we provide value propositions. Canon also has specific training and education programs for the partners on one hand and on the other hand, the partners have a dedicated platform to understand the market and an expert sales team. Canon Emirates has recently opened a regional showroom, which has live demos and is one-ofits-kind in the UAE. Partners from across the region can bring customers to this showroom to give them real life experience. Canon Middle East provides value proposition not only to partners but also to the end users. In addition to the product manager and the area sales manager, we have Channel Account Manager who directly reports to the channels and avails the required information from the customer; and a Business Development Manager for imparting knowledge on specialized products.

EXPANSION PLANS.” (EXCERPTS)

With the market shifting its focus from products to solutions, what is Canon’s strategy from the solutions’ stand point? There is a fundamental change in the market needs and business models have been changing dramatically— globally and regionally. Traditionally,Canon business was product centric both on the hardware and the software platform but, today, the market needs more than just materials. Hence, Canon has also evolved and we

are not providing ‘only’ materials anymore but a mix of services like Managed Print Services, Managed Document Services, and Business Process Outsourcing etc. Is paperless environment still a distant dream? Information on paper and digital, both have their advantages and disadvantages. Undoubtedly, the digital information will gain pace in the future but this does not mean that paper will lose value.

Tell us something about the Canon Sustainability initiative. The UAE School Environmental Sustainability Initiative is a new public service initiative that Canon is undertaking with Emirates Wildlife Society-World Wildlife Fund (EWS – WWF). Together, the two organisations have launched an exciting environmental project in which schools across the UAE have eagerly participated. Students across the emirates have shared their ideas on how to save energy, and make our country more sustainable, starting with what they are doing at their very own school. ë

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COVER FEATURE

EMITAC

UAE FA Scores a Penalty with Emitac

When the game is football, the focus better be on the game. Emitac Enterprise Solutions helped UAE FA build an automated online football management system to handle all information and processes related to the Association; hence making it easy to conduct work with ease, mobility and simplicity. n W O R D S : S O U M YA < S O U M YA @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M >

internally; however, the pain points were quite many. The various departments at UAE FA faced difficulty in staying connected and in-line with the task progress.This often resulted in duplication of work thus wasting time and adding to the complexity and length of the operations”. Moreover, player registration was a very lengthy and time consuming process wherein players had to travel all the way to the UAE FA, submit papers, come back again if there weresome errors etc…The game involved way too many elements and it was a challenge to keep all these connected. Different elements like clubs, coaches, players, referees, match commissioners, football fans, media, etc. make the art of managing football quite a challenging one indeed. To enable all the

The UAE Football Association approached EES with a major challenge.

CHALLENGE They had an 8 year old football system which was managing some part of their operations based on client server technology. The existing system had lots of duplications, issues in storing and retrieving data, generating reports, managing, tracking & recording competitions/ tournaments manually were time consuming and it was getting difficult to handle day to day operations. Additionally the system was not scalable and they were unable to provide quick services to the clubs which became the major pain point for UAE FA. According to Ahmed Bhadir, I.T Director at UAE FA, “We had a system to manage processes

TARGET

Clubs

UAEFA Departments

Fans

Official Website

Mobile Apps

Media

Players Intermediaries

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Players

elements to work together in harmony, without repeating the work or wasting valuable time and resources, they decided to build a system (Football Managing System) that can manage all the football-related work on a single unified platform with ease.

SELECTION When the idea was conceptualized late in 2010, this kind of a management system was not known to a large part of the world, except Germany which did have a similar kind of system but only in German language. UAE FA decided to build their own managing system in United Arab Emirates in order to make the work all-connected, simplified and easy. Since the project in discussion was not just an out-of-box product or readymade solution, it was crucial to choose the right partner for executing it successfully. The relationship between UAE Football Association and Emitac dates back to 2001 when they successfully worked on the first project together. Enviable track record and excellent relationship positioned Emitac in a beneficial position during selection. So, how did they zero in on EES as the partner of choice? As Ahmed points it, “Emitac understood our requirements better than anyone else. And given the fact that no other partner in the region is very adept in dealing with football management processes, the experience of EES with UAE FA definitely added to its suitability as well. So, after a careful scrutiny and several discussions, EES was chosen to execute for UAE FA - a project which would revolutionize the

COVER FEATURE

AHMAD BHADIR,

I.T DIRECTOR, UAE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

“We highly appreciate EES for their creative efforts, consistent timely support, advice and implementation of such a wonderful system. The Emitac team was extremely patient, understood our need perfectly and executed the requirement with professionalism and excellence” tion Network). Today it is a well-known name among the football community in the region.

THE CLIENT The United Arab Emirates Football Association is the governing body of football in the United Arab Emirates. The UAEFA was established in 1971 and was affiliated to the FIFA in 1972; it has had an excellent record since its foundation at the Gulf, continental and international levels. 34 clubs are registered with UAE FA. The senior football national team made one World Cup appearance, in 1990 in Italy, won the Gulf Cup in 2007 and the Gulf Cup in 2013; the youth national team claimed the AFC U-19 Cup in 2008.

THE PARTNER Emitac Enterprise Solutions, part of Emitac Group, has established itself as a leader in delivering IT infrastructure services and solutions to clients in the UAE since 1976. EES designs, builds and provides solutions for business applications and core infrastructure including systems and storage, datacenters and enterprise wide communication and networking. Their systems integration services has a comprehensive portfolio of implementation, support and consulting services solutions with exceptional people supporting business technology in action – talented professionals who bring technical insight, process excellence and resource flexibility to help customers in various verticals. Their service portfolio, as expected from an organization with our years of experience, is one that covers practically all areas relating to the needs of an enterprise.

working of the football management system by bringing all the concerned parties to a unified platform.

SOLUTION The developed and implemented solution FA NET is a complete bilingual centralized system based on .net technology managing both local competitions and national teams and other tournaments. EEScustomized this unique solution

exclusively for UAE FA to address the evergrowing need of UAE FA. The system has nine modules including clubs, competition, national teams, eservices, persons (Players, officials, referees, observers and agents), Financial, medical, Reports, digital signatures and card printing covering the entire gamut of football association requirements. The unified system connects all the football associations and the clubs in UAE and accordingly named as FA NET (Football Associa-

The solution is completely automated and handles and manages all aspects of football operations including history of players, player profiles, all local and national tournaments and clubs, competitions registrations , contract uploads etc... Every competition has different rules, teams and schedules. Today, the system is used by the clubs to define their teams and align the competitions. For each competition, UAE FA, manages all the schedules including when, with whom, time, referee, news related to the tournament, scores, the players profile, number of players for that particular match etc... The referees would update the match report which gets populated after validation and approval. The clubs will be able to read the report / ranking, best player etc. online irrespective of the place they are in making it quick and easy to access information. The solutions unique framework facilitates both future enhancement and maintenance of the system apart from making customization easy. Less critical things like adding new fields is extremely easy and can be done by any nontechnical person. Understanding the sensitivity of the game, a strong security layer is built into the system at varied levels and layers. Controlled level of authorization access is given to the respective

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COVER FEATURE

“The customized web based application ‘FA-NET’ developed by EES for us is a comprehensive solution that comes with a lot of features including players registration, replacement, exchange; Receive online request from clubs in the form of E-Services; Process E-Services at the back office; Card Printings for players, officials and also gives us the flexibility to add other modules easily as and when required”.

2011

REGISTRATION

CLUBS Players and Officials Registration..etc

Receive Application Approve or Reject REFEREES

2012

Referees Appointments

COMPETITIONS Match Schedule MC & GC appointments

REFEREES Match Result & Report

CLUBS Starting list

MC Match Commissioner Report

2013 NATIONAL TEAMS Championships and camps

UAEFA.AE Information and statistics on UAEFA Website

2014 MOBILE APP DOCTOR

NATIONAL TEAMS Technical Reports For National Teams

Could be used any where.

Integration with UAEFA official website & Mobile App.

Online reports and statistics

Information and statistics

Medical Report

people accessing the system depending on various criteria’s to ensure there is no security leak. The application is made mobile friendly for easy access of information related to a match. People can also vote for their best players, best referee etc. through the smart phones. Live updates are yet another important feature introduced into the system. With the introduction of this new system at UAEFA, it is made mandatory that every club in the region which plays football has to register through this system only. The LIVE system now comprises profiles of around –34,937 players registered into the system with 7,000 Active players from 29 Clubs.

BENEFITS Data centralization

Club access to the system

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With FA NET, online registration has been enabled for players. In case of any error, editing can be easily done online. Apart from that, player selection for matches, cards, scores, etc, almost everything is maintained online- accessible to all the concerned people. The FA NET system has been integrated with the UAE FA website as well as their mobile app. The system is linked conveniently with the Google

maps as well to facilitate easy location of clubs, match location, etc. Information about the clubs, their location, matches, players’ info, etc is available for easy public viewing. Moreover, the FA NET has been integrated with the UAE FA YouTube channel as well as social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Since football is a popular game, the website and mobile app of UAE FA are targeted primarily at the media and the fans of the game. FA NET makes it easy to give all the football info to the target audience without any unnecessary hassles. The feedback about FA NET has been very good from across all the various quarters like the players, referees, match commissioners, media and the general public who love the game. The FA NET project started in January 2011 and was completed in December 2013. The project was executed in phases. A lot of work had to be done to migrate all the data from the older system which was in place internally within the UAE FA to the new online system which was soon to be launched. Given the fact that people had got used to the older system, sudden migration to a newer version wouldn’t have been feasible or practically a wise move. Previously, the system was offline and internal; in contrast, the new system is online, provides users with mobility, and has the capability to operate and access data anytime anywhere. Like any big project, this project has its share of hiccups along the way too. But, thanks to the extremely cooperative support team at EES, the project’s hurdles were perfectly cared for without creating difficulties in the game management or the client business. “We highly appreciate EES for their creative efforts, consistent timely support, advice and implementation of such a wonderful system. The Emitac team was extremely patient, understood our need perfectly and executed the requirement with professionalism and excellence.”

FINALLY… UAE FA believes in the continuous journey towards perfection. After putting in place a successful system with FA NET also, they are continuously engaging in efforts to add more services and features to the same so as to improve the way football association works and stays connected to the fans and the players. In football, it’s often said that in order to be a better player than you have ever been, you’ve to do something you’ve never done. With EES, they seem to have got the knack perfectly well and by carefully listening to their client’s exact requirements, they have mastered the art of delivering the services better than the others in the race and the saga goes on... ë

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PARTNER STREET

EMITAC

The Managed Services Odyssey With an Unrivalled Onsite and Offshore Workbench and ultramodern NOC that breathes superiority, EES presents a catalyst for Managed services in the region and tells us why they are here to ‘Stay’; and in this process how they are enabling the competitors to learn from their approaches.Our exclusive interview with Muhammad Salman, Business Unit Head, Managed Services at Emitac n WORDS: ANUSHREE <ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

t has been a short span of 10 months and EES Managed Service Unit has already climbed up the success ladder and tasted over 13 customer wins. A journey started by a man single-handedly has a great winning team on-board now which is all set to bridge the major legacy gaps in the market and attain new territories in the coming quarters.

THE 10 ON 10 FIGURE “Since the past 4-5 years we have entered into the services platform. The experience has been wonderful. 30% of our portfolio has been services, which is a handsome score on the board. We entered into the Managed Services portfolio last year. We started from Ground Zero in last July and I was a single-man-army. Now we are 10 people on-board focused on building a winning team”, says Muhammad Salman, Business Unit Head, Managed Services at Emitac.

THE PROMPTING FACTOR According to Salman, the market demands you to share resources. It may look very fancy to have your own dedicated data center but to afford that data center, one needs a lot of investment and the costs are always overriding. In Salman’s words, “Here we are able to give the same solution to a customer with no upfront investment..We convert everything into an OPEX model and can be flexible at the same time by growing or reducing it according to the demand. Flexibility, adaptability, and agility are the keywords. If one is able to provide these three things to the customer then they hit the nail. This is exactly what Emitac offers to the customers.”

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THE EARLY BIRDS A great number of organizations are still reluctant to have Managed services or entrust their business to third party. Convincing and winning customers is a rough road to travel. Talking about the responses that Emitac received, Salman says, “It has been a mix for Emitac as we have successfully established contracts with both government and corporate sectors. It is a mix of time, material engagement and SLA based engagement. Last year the scenario was a bit different, but today there is a visible change in the mindset of the Government organizations too. The reason for this being, in any organization with 500+ employees there are at least 15-20 people working onsite reporting on the IT infrastructure which is a huge recurring cost every month. For them, an SLA model saves a good percentage of cost. Theyalso don’t need to buy products as it is all converted to an OPEX model and this is a huge driver for them to go the managed services way” Salman believes that it is not anybody’s wish to move to managed services, but it is the need of the hour. “If you have to exist as a business, your bottom line should always be green and cash-flows positive – that is the bottom line. You must have innovative ways to create value to your organization and your customers”, says Salman.

SERVICES IN THE QUIVER According to Salman, “We are primarily an Infrastructure company, so the most obvious way was to showcase our Infrastructure managed services.”Emitac is currently offering a couple of services that includes, Outsourcing on time and material of resources;XaaS;Cloud

as a service;Platform as a service etc. .Next year we also plan to enhance the SaaS and ERP managed services platform... According to our understanding and market study, Government and Corporates use a mix of Oracle and SAP. So we believe that there is a gap to be bridged and some internal questions to be answered before we explore further into that space. As we talk, we are in the phase of identifying the right market”, opines Salman.

RULING THE ROOST The market is ruled by many when it comes to Managed Services and SIs. So how does Emitac justify its unique position? Salman says, “We are second to none. We have the required skill sets,a set roadmap and aligned processes for an ISO 27001 certification plan for next year. We are also implementing ITIL certified Cloud Service desk at present. With this our moto is to ask the customers— ‘If we can do it, why can’t you?’Another objective is to achieve a resource pool of 500 onsite resources by the end of FY-17.” “We provide solutions depending on customer’s need. We are not into the game of selling products but we utilize the resources based on the needs of the customer. We sign an SLA with the customer and provide solutions that deem right to us after clear assessment of our customers’ needs. A new fully equipped NOC at our DIC office would be ready by next month. This is a miletone achievement for the Emitac Managed Services unit. We have a 16 bench NOC that has all the capabilities to cater to the service desk for the next couple of years. We are the first SI in the region to have an NOC of such a big

PARTNER STREET

are the ultimate cost savers and if the customer has to be convinced, he needs to be patient to experience its value. It’s a journey that demands patience. It is a snowball that is gaining momentum slowly.

MIGRATION TO CLOUD

scale.Additionally, keeping in mind our customer’s apprehensions,we are also offering a free POC throughoutJune 2015 to give customers a hands-on experience and demonstrate its impact on their business.” “WHILE OFFERING MANAGED SERVICES, WE ARE NOT USURPING THE ENTERPRISE. WE ARE ENABLING ITS EFFICIENCY AND PERFORMANCE”

BRAINSTORMING WITH CIOS/CTOS “Whenever we approach a CIO or a CTO and tell them that we will manage all the services for you, the question we are faced with right away is ‘Where is the CIO’s existence then?’. So what we would like to clarify and communicate tothe CIOs at large is that— Managed Services are not here to eliminate their existence; rather they are here to enable and empower them to manage their business better. We imbibe efficiency into business processes without demanding huge investments. If we are able to prove this point to the customer, then our value is realized”, emphasizes Salman.

SUCCESS STORY Salman took us through a virtual tour of an ongoing project to explain different stages and the time frame involved in deploying any such project. He said, “We are in the middle of onboarding a customer. The ‘Convincing’ itself took us 7 months. The region is a bit conservative about any new technology and its adaption compared to the US or Asian counterparts. Discussions started in March, and we were able to

MUHAMMAD SALMAN,

BUSINESS UNIT HEAD, MANAGED SERVICES AT EMITAC

“Managed services is a snowball that is gradually gaining momentum. It is a journey that requires patience and customers’ understanding.” successfully convince the customer by October. In December we finalized the SLA. Now it’s a mix of onsite and offshore workbench. That is how we bring value. Considering their budget constraints, we deployed three resources onsite which are L1 plus resources. They do routine IT operation and when there is troubleshooting required beyond the abilities of the onsite resources we have the L2 and L3 team providing support on incident basis which will be used only if the need arises. If it is a stable organization then we would not need the L3 resources too often. To top it all and enhance it further, we have also added a component of monitoring to it. We monitor them from our NOC by aligning it properly.” Salman is of the opinion that Managed services

A good part of the world is still not comfortable moving their data on the cloud. According to Salman, ‘Cloud is a box’ regardless of where it is. He says, “Customers’ trust in the box is what matters the most. They should be able to see and feel the box and its services in order to be convinced. It’s a Pay-as-you -Go system. The time when people will realize the pain in dealing with overriding costs they will moveto cloud. Cloud is the need of the hour. Salman also says that Government organizations are still reluctant to go on the cloud due to the security issues. However, the mindset is slowly changing. “We can take the Microsoft Azure out of the office, but not the core business applications of the Government”, remarks Salman.

THE RIPE AND READY MARKET Talking about the readiness of the market in embracing Managed Services, Salman says that the market is getting ready for it. The next 2 years, according to him, are going to be very promising for cloud hosting and managed services because of the economic pressures that is pushing it. “Inline with the market,we are also introducingInfrastructure as a service. So one can buy virtual computing power from us, not a mere machine. We distribute this offering in 5 stages. 1 st -Bringing the device to the data center; 2 nd - Pluggingthe device into data center; 3 rd - RPC where we have the power cooling and rack; 4 th - System administration; 5 th - Application management(Getting ready for this) With these services, our customers can focus on their core issues rather than IT operations”, says Salman.

FINALLY… Managed services impact the organization deeply. It affects the top line and bottom line equally. Salman says that it is very important for the customers to have faith in the service in order to invest in it. “Seeing isbelieving ... I don’t buy something which I can’t touch or feel. So, one has to change their approach, present true value and make themcomfortable with the serviceby presentingevery detail required to convince and get the customer to invest in the service. ë

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FEATURE

OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SERVICES SECTOR

‘ITaaS’-THE ROAD LESS TAKEN This is the era of ‘Smart Economics’, where leveraging ICT and creating business value is not a demand— but a mandate. In this scenario, Enterprise services is garnering a huge demand, with organizations looking for optimized business plans and adopting ‘Pay as you go’ service models. A pick of key players in the industry share their experiences on treading on the road less taken, the opportunities, the hurdles and highs, and the services that are adorning their portfolios. n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT <ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM > n PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

arket today—is complex yet filled with opportunities. Outsourcing ‘Services’ is the new business soliloquy of every CIO and CTO — ‘To have or not to have’. Big Data and IoT,as the new game changers ,have been fuelling the business operations and thereby driving the need for customized services with high security infrastructure and low workforce.

TRENDS AND THE TRAILBLAZERS Moving on from products to solutions, the market is all set to be engulfed by the ‘Services Wave’. Software as a service, Platform as a service, Infrastructure as a service and and number of other services are gaining popularity. The enterprises services market has seen a radical facelift in the past few years, with more and more companies bestowing trust on third party service providers. The wall is blurring and organizations are keen to venture into the services platform. According to Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services at HelpAG , there has been a tectonic shift in the last couple of years from organizations in how they think about

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security and products. “If we just go back 5 years, customers would be under the assumption that deploying a product or a solution would actually protect them against cyber security threats, whereas today, they are fully aware that the product is actually less important than the operation of the security infrastructure.As a solution and services driven organization our services are the bulk of our income.Being able to deliver good services does not come for free and one of our major investments in 2015 and 2016 is specifically around Managed Security Services.” says Nicolai. Enterprises are using IT less for internal process transformation, and more for business transformations. “With the advent of advanced service models for nearly all enterprise software needs, like SaaS and MBaaS, transaction-based product sales lifecycles are being converted into ongoing service dialogues. And the potential and opportunity for enterprise services in this space is huge” says Meera Kaul, CEO of Optimus. Another trend among enterprise services will be an extension of mobility to include smart objects – connected TV’s, cars, homes – to enable differentiation, distinctive industry positioning and competitive advantage. “Our strategy at

Avaya is very clear.We are enabling our partners to transform themselves to a service and outcome based oriented model.” says Emir Susic, Country Service Manager, Avaya.

DEMAND-SUPPLY GRAPH As the business grows, the demand and supply curve of the services has been pre-emptive with various new services coming on board and some diminishing. “The consultancy and system integration services have seen a dramatic rise in demand of late. Cloud services are yet slow on the uptake, simply due to factors such as high OPEX beyond a certain point of critical mass, and the loss of agility on adopting a standardized solution for larger organizations.” opines Ali Hyder, Group CEO of Focus Softnet. Shafik Khashouf, SAS - Senior Regional Director, Practice Sales, Business Advisory and Professional Services for Middle East, Turkey and Africa says “We have realized significant growth and interest in high performance Risk Management solutions (software and services) driven by tighter regulation in this space. Example of these regulations are Basel 2 and Basel 3 regulatory requirements for banks, and solvency II require-

FEATURE

ments for the insurance segment.” Services within the realm of designing and managing applications and their inherent security compliances, Mobility Services, Cloud and Cyber Security are currently in high demand and will continue to grow. Services related to Smart City implementations, and Big Data are touted to boom, especially within the Middle East region.

Web Mail Hosting Services

SaaS and MBaaS are also here to stay, with a sharp growth trajectory. “Among services not picking up at the expected rate, Big data is restricted to its usage in analysis. With a better view of an organization’s data metrics, there is more to the science of big data than just analytics.” Adds Meera Kaul of Optimus.

Security Solutions

Storage & Backup Solutions

FMS & RIM

Cloud Computing

SERVICES & SOLUTIONS

IT Consulting CTO Services

Data Mgmt VPN Networking

Enterprise Messagingg

Server/ Desktop Virtualization

NEW SERVICES A LA CARTE HelpAG has most recently established their Managed Security Services (MSS) division offering customers 24/7 Monitoring, Compliance, Forensic Analysis, Incident Handling & Remediation, Log Management, Operational Event Reporting, and Security Platform Management. “These have all been designed as subscription OPEX based services that can be easily integrated with the customer’s existing security infrastructure, whether it is on-premises or cloud based.” says Nicolai of HelpAG. Besides this, we also have our Strategic Security Consulting, Technical Consulting, Security Analysis, Co-ordinated Threat Mitigation, and Support services divisions Focus Softnet recently launched “Focus 8 – Enabling You” an ERP system which is a complete revolution from traditional ERPs. “Our new product portfolio and the advanced partnership program provides the partner network an extremely robust support structure enabling them to provide the very best to end clients within record time spans.” says Ali Hyder of Focus Softnet. For SAS, Customer Intelligence and Integrated Marketing Management has always been the

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FEATURE

NICOLAI SOLLING, DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY SERVICES,HELP AG

“We believe in identifying the correct point products and then the supporting solutions which will allow the products to work together.”

strength. “. A change management angle is necessary to alleviate the organizational barriers and resistance associated with Customer Intelligence customer centric solutions.” says Shafik. Optimus has its own enterprise mobility development services, with integration to product stack. The enterprise applications and enterprise mobility (cloud) focus on Healthcare, Education, Smart city, Hospitality and Oil and Gas. Optimus has also beta launched its new big data services platform focused on retail, oil and gas, government and banking finance verticals.

SIGNLE VENDOR VS MULTI-VENDOR Today, every business organization and enterprise want to have an all integrated suite of solutions and services. So choosing between a single vendor and multi-vendor becomes a challenging job. Nicolai of HelpAG believes “When you try to do everything you end up not being the best at anything – Specifically in security your capabilities is extremely important. We believe in identifying the correct point products and then the supporting solutions which will allow the

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MEERA KAUL, CEO, OPTIMUS

“As businesses move from a focus on ‘things’, to a focus on value, the potential for service providers is massive if they can shift their business models from sale of goods/products/ things to enabling results for enterprises”

products to work together.” Ali Hyder of Focus Softnet says “As developers of systems as silos or in a modular structure, we are able to provide a very tight integration between modules. Moreover, with our advanced API kit, our ability to integrate with other third party solutions through an open-ended architecture makes us a prime choice for various markets and users.” Emir Susic of Avaya has a strong conviction that vendors who build an ecosystem of complimentary products, solutions and services, will surely immerge as winners. According to him, it is the same concept as smart cities. Not a single vendor can deliver, on its own, and end to end smart city solution. Meera Kaul opines, “You can broadly look at it two ways: from Business function perspective, greater results and long-term value come from multi-vendor solutions as they offer you better functionality, and you benefit from the expertise of the vendor. From an Operational Risk and complexity perspective, single-vendor solutions are definitely simpler to procure, easier to install, and faster to implement and upgrade.”

EMIR SUSIC,

COUNTRY SERVICE MANAGER, AVAYA

“CIOs and CEOs look for technology partners who can design, build and service their transformation whether these partners are service providers, system integrators or technology vendors” ‘CLOUD’—PROMOTER OR PROCRASTINATOR One of the most loved, hated and debated topic on the block—CLOUD. Enterprises often have this monologue—‘To cloud or not to cloud?’ The phenomenal level of thrust that it gives to business is undeniable but it has its own shares of security concerns and boxes to leap. “Help AG Middle East understands cloud services is a big problem for customers and we have therefore added assessment services and control of cloud and SAAS usage through a partnership with a very innovative company called Elastica – Key to their product is services, which we are ready to deliver, specifically as cloud and SaaS usage is more a compliance than a technical decision.” says Nicolai. According to Avaya, what the vendors in the technology communication industry are innovating is more important to make sure that cloud-based services expand to new immerging needs. “Recently, we’ve made available the AvayaLive Collaboratory,is a cloud based “sandbox” for developers and customers to innovate, experiment, and test their applications.

FEATURE

on-shore in order to be fully compliant with this guidance. This means that any individual looking or touching any customer data will be liable under local UAE law, where free-zones are normally subject to UAE criminal law, but commercial law is under the free-zone.” says Nicolai.

THIRD PARTY— TAKING THE LEAP OF FAITH

ALI HYDER,

SHAFIK KHASHOUF,

GROUP CEO, FOCUS SOFTNET

SENIOR REGIONAL DIRECTOR, SAS

“Our ability to integrate with other third party solutions through an open-ended architecture makes us a prime choice for various markets and users.”

“A change management angle is necessary to alleviate the organizational barriers and resistance associated with Customer Intelligence customer centric solutions”.

This really translates into a faster development and deployment of what the industry refers to today as Communication Enabled Business Applications or CEBA.” says Emir Susic. Ali Hyder says “Cloud platforms have certainly accelerated delivery of various enterprise systems, however, as yet, for younger and smaller organizations, cloud platforms are certainly a tremendous resource.” Meera Kaul of Optimus believes that Service delivery is an inherent component of building secure technology installations for enterprises. However to get the most out of cloud environments, a rethinking, revamping and reinvention of the service delivery models is being necessitated, from processes to roles to policies. “What is needed is a rigorous cloud go-to-market strategy, where distributors can add significant value base on their market experience of legacy solutions.” adds Meera.

requirements are the MUST and MANDATE. For Avaya, enhancing customer experience is the heart of the business. Emir of Avaya says that “Where you have a number of touch points with your customer, what will really differentiate you is the ability to deliver the same user experience across all these channels, in a seamless and consistent way.” User experience is based on ease of use and validity of the services in the whole framework of needs for the user.“Our customers are other technology companies and the role that we play in the value chain is to ensure they have access to great technology at great prices available to them locally to satisfy the need of their end customers. Our focus is to make the process of working with us seamless so that they can focus on their business and create business value and better bottom lines.” says Meera Kaul of Optimus. Nicolai states that HelpAG invested a full year into careful market analysis when they started their MSS. “A good example is the need for delivering our services on-shore, which came as an advisory from ADSIC in Abu Dhabi. We took this very seriously and created a legal entity

ENHANCING USER EXPERIENCE User is the King— everywhere, every time. Evaluating customer readiness, pain points and service

Strict market regulations, budgets, inherent fears and hesitancy to entrust business to a third party has always been a hurdle in the growth of Services. With the advent of SaaS, corporate information security has been the prime concern for many organizations. Organizations have always carried this worry on the brow that outsourcing services can diminish brand value and impact your existence in the organization. But the present scenario begs to differ as we see more and more vendors and customers eagerly entering this domain. Meera Kaul believes, “Other than the traditional benefits of outsourcing , enterprises are slowly realizing the business potential of technology. And this is the business case we use to educate companies hesitant to work with third-party service providers”. Data storage outside the country is a major element in this lack of faith.Nicolai claims, “Help AG also focuses on storing its data within the region and delivering our services locally. However certain government organizations may not be able to benefit even from this model, due to strict data regulations. In those specific environment we go one step further and deliver on premises managed environments, where data and events is monitored from our Cyber Security Operations Centre, but data never leaves the customer premise. As Ali Hyder puts it across, “There is always a certain amount of hesitation for customers to “take the plunge”. Due diligence is the key here where reference checks, and verifying historic capabilities is key. However, once this step is crossed, the trepidation goes away and the common goal is often championed by both client and ICT partner.”

FINALLY… Middle East is standing on the innovation corridor. Market as well as business are transforming at light speed. In the current wave of ‘Technologization’ trust and transformation go hand in hand. In order to put services on the pedestal now, organizations have to build a concrete platform of trust and showcase capabilities. Though the evolution to Services as a journey lacked pace, it is gaining all the momentum now. The debate continues but the opportunity grows. ë

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GUEST TALK

OPTIMUS DISTRIBUTION

Using the Cloud to Empower Channel Partners “Channel empowerment needs to be a threepronged approach that balances Knowledge transfer and enhancement, empowers the partners with new skills training, laced with Recognition &Rewards for competency and profitability, but most importantly, provides extensive support by utilizing the power of online cloud powered channel sales enablement methods and tools”

With the increasing complexity of business environments the world over, the ‘global’ nature of nearly all sales operations and the relevant ease of access to myriad solutions and technologies, revenue generation has become increasingly competitive. Against this backdrop, how does a distributor or vendor ensure they retain and increase their share of the market? This is a long-due debate that has now reached firm ground, with dedicated Channel Strategies and Programs to empower channel partners taking center-stage as the new route to market. Channel empowerment needs to be a threepronged approach that balances Knowledge transfer and enhancement, empowers the partners with new skills training, laced with Recognition &Rewards for competency and profitability, but most importantly, provides extensive support by utilizing the power of online cloud powered channel sales enablement . With mobility being the new catchphrase for enterprises and institutions, it is time for the partner ecosystem to put it to good use for its own benefit. Utilizing the power of the cloud as a seamless collaborative platform, channels can be greatly empowered. By unifying the language that vendors and distributors speak with channels, by creating a singular repository of real-time product and solution features and brand messaging, by providing channels with a simple, flexible and massively scalable tool, joint marketing and business operations become one

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efficient sales motion. The key lies in streamlining the sales process for your channels. In the current scenario, everchanging B2B and B2C needs, multiple business models and platforms, and the constant evolution of technology invariably mean continuous and contextual access to relevant and current information is a challenge. This where the cloud-based enablement programs step-in, eliminating the delays caused by the need for constant interaction, while increasing the level of support for channels. Some benefits of a cloud-based channel enablement model include channel procurement technologies that can be integrated with the ERP distribution technology as well as customized online sales models for each of the sales channels, complete with product information, promotions, sales guides and playbooks. Customization provides the channel the flexibility to scale solutions to fit their unique needs and align them with their customers specific purchasing needs, invaluably deepening the connection with the customers business. The market pulse indicates a growing need for skills investment, so that channels are qualitatively strengthened to effectively deal with the changing technology landscape.Once again cloud-based systems can simplify the partner experience here and drive higher participation in training programs by keeping them relevant, structured and easily accessible. Finally, Rewards and Recognition Programs

n WORDS: MEERA KAUL, CEO OF OPTIMUS

that balance discounts and incentives with measurable KPI’s for channels again provide a win-win equation for all. I would like to conclude by talking about another trend in the IT ecosystem – the new breed of theborn-inthe-cloud channel partners. What they need to empower them is an arm-in-arm relationship with vendors, including advance notification ofnew product releases, access to product roadmaps and to new technology, which enables the ability to sandbox development projects and gain mastery in the technology. This channel stream places a greater emphasis on experiential knowledge and learning rather than book learning and certifications. Empowering channels is all about bridging the gap from the vendors to the sales floor. Making it easy for channels to promote your technology, product or solution can be achieved bystreamlining the sales cycle, providing them with experiential knowledge of technology, allowing them some latitude, backing-them up on their recommendations, and presenting a consolidated front to customers. And cloud based channel enablement can provide all these benefits and more. And for distributors and market enablers, the only way to eventually differentiate themselves and remain competitive, will be providing their channels access to such real-time multi-vendor portals to enable their revenue and profitability in an extremely volatile technology evolution market. ë

GUEST TALK

ARUBA NETWORKS

Risky business: Why #GenMobile’s mobile lifestyles can ruin security for your organisation As if IT departments and business heads don’t already have enough headaches, it’s now revealed that your next batch of employees could increase your exposure to digital threats and corporate data loss on mobile devices. At least that’s what Aruba Networks’ recent study, titled “Securing #GenMobile: Is Your Business Running the Risk?” revealed.

#GenMobile is the term that’s used to describe a generation of people who have shaped their personal and working lives around mobile devices. From an earlier study, we found that 86 percent of #GenMobile owns at least two mobile devices. They are more likely to check their devices before brushing their teeth in the morning. They also expect to have the same freedom to use mobile devices at work, the way they do in their personal lives. “There’s an app for that” Unfortunately, a generation weaned on mobile apps can present significant security challenges for businesses worried about the loss of customer and financial data. In fact, many of the behaviours revealed in the study reads like the “Must Not Do” section of a company compliance manual. For starters, 6 out of 10

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respondents are happy to share their personal and work smartphones with others. 70 percent say they have revealed or would consider revealing the passwords on their work devices. What’s worrying is that #GenMobile attitudes toward data loss and rules governing the use of mobile devices are equally lackadaisical. Nearly a third of workers admit to having lost data due to the misuse of a mobile device, while more than half of #GenMobile employees are willing to break the rules if they feel it “gets the job done”. Still, it’s not all bad: #GenMobile’ mobile behaviours are motivated primarily by the desire to collaborate openly and freely, which can bring significant benefits to the business. So what can businesses do to harness the potential of #GenMobile employees, without losing control of security? Great mobile security

n WORDS: MANISH BHARDWAJ, S R . M A R K E T I N G M A N A G E R | M I D D L E E A S T & T U R K E Y, ARUBA NETWORKS

starts in the air A good place to start is to put in place a secure, yet adaptable, wireless network within the workplace. Here are a few things to consider: 1. Deploy flexible security policies that are capable of analysing – and acting on - the context of how the employee is using the mobile device. For instance, does the person have the authority to access the information? Where is he or she accessing it from, and from what device? Depending on the context, different policies can be applied to make sure that the right balance between flexibility and security can be applied on an individual-by-individual basis. 2. Regulate Wi-Fi traffic with intelligent policy firewalls that can keep track of app usage. This ensures that different apps are classified according to its security rating based on the role of the employee within the organization. These apps would be allowed to

be used on select mobile devices by select users, only if they satisfy live security monitoring by the policy firewall and cloud-powered content filtering. 3. Make sure that all communications over the air are encrypted and sent over secure channels. This requires a smart combinationof encryption and VPN-on-demand technologies that prevent information from being snooped on, and – even in the event that the information falls into the wrong hands – is rendered gibberish. So, there are ways for employers to keep their #GenMobile employees happy and productive, without sacrificing mobile security. By all means, organisations should embrace #GenMobile’s penchant for openness, innovation and collaboration; but only when they can understand and plan for the security risks these behaviours bring along. ë

MY OPINION

primitive systems and to change is long phases of processes to be followed. ‘Cards’ as an entity is also slowly getting erased physically. So what is next? Security in cards is something which everybody debates on. So, Cloud is what we are all looking forward to. Cloud takes you to the mobile platform and cards would practically be eliminated. The practicality and application of this is still at bay but over time everything will be virtual. We also see the use of mobile devices increasingly functioning as cards, without the card leaving the account holders hand. How do you align your business with your partners? Do you have any set criteria while working or choosing your partners? That is the first and foremost thing that we look at. We have vendor partners and not channel partners. The industry we are focusing requires a lot of investment in security every year. So we select vendor partners who have strong R&D budgets to enhance that on a yearly basis.

NIRANJ SANGAL

GROUP CEO, OMA EMIRATESSOLUTION GULF

Moving with Technology AT THE RECENTLY HELD CARDS & PAYMENTS MIDDLE EAST, NIRANJ SANGAL, GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, OMA EMIRATES-SOLUTION GULF PEPPERS HIS VIEWS TO ANUSHREE DIXIT FROM EC MEA TEAM ON CLOUD SOLUTIONS, IT INFRASTRUCTURE SHORTFALLS, OMA’S PLAN TO GO GLOBAL AND THEIR JOURNEY INTO THE MANAGED SERVICES PLATFORM.

What is ‘Different’ this year for OMA Emirates? OMA Emirates is transcending platforms and is showcasing services rather than solutions. We are looking at Managed Service launch. Apparently this has been a good year for managed services. We have already signed our three big banks this year— NBO (National Bank of Oman), ADIB and Mawarid Finance and four more are in the pipeline. Next three years focus would be on services.

In spite of all the technology and solutions in place, why are banks and finance sector still termed as the most vulnerable sector in terms of security breaches? Cards are an important part of the banking and finance industry, hence the security factor is high there. We expect banks and financial institutions to prove themselves as a benchmark for security. The fact is that, 60% of the banks are still undergoing transition. The reason is they are using very

Which are the key verticals you are focusing on? Banking and finance is always a green side for us. We are also quite aggressively into retail now. More recently we are also looking at entering the government sector for national IDs. We have marked our presence in the oil and gas sector with the RFID cards which you can see being used in a majority of petrol pumps now. So with this technology we are establishing the cashless environment with mobile credit. Apart from these we are also entering the medical as well as the insurance sector. We are trying to push ourselves more into the services platform where everybody can have a one-stop-shop access to all services. We are launching the ‘Retail suite’ that allows you to add as many customers to it and do your own eMarketing. It is like a dashboard, a web-based solution that works on a cloud and requires no installation. How are you contributing to the smartGov landscape? Talking about smartGov, mobile is the only platform we are looking at and we are launching many products on the mobile space. We are also focusing on the mWallet which is going to be the next big thing in the government sector to move everything to the cloud. ë

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GUEST TALK

FINESSE

The Future Belongs to Converged Infrastructure Converged Infrastructure or Integrated Infrastructure provides the much needed flexibility and scalability for businesses to grow dynamically while optimizing their IT investments.

Transforming the technology infrastructure of an organization to meet up with the growing demands of businesses and to reap the benefits of cloud computing needs diligent analysis, deliberation, and a progressive approach. It is also crucial to determine the strategic impact of the current environment, operational processes and technology infrastructure. The industry is moving towards Datacenter consolidation to meet up with the new challenges. Converged Infrastructure or Integrated Infrastructure provides the much needed flexibility and scalability for businesses to grow dynamically while optimizing their IT investments. Converged infrastructure is nothing but a computing box with two or more technology components are grouped together, and orchestrated to deliver high performance output. Converged infrastructure uses a preconfigured, factory tested computing solution provided by one or more vendors. It is primarily designed to provide centralized management of IT infrastructure, where all components and resources are managed through a single control panel. Gartner defines “integrated systems” or “converged infrastructure’ as “combinations of server, storage and network infrastructure, sold with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the combined unit.” The goal of an integrated infrastructure

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n WORDS: SUNIL PAUL, CO-FOUNDER & COO, FINESSE

is to reduce compatibility issues and simplify the management of servers, storage systems and network devices while reducing the costs for cabling, cooling, power and floor space. This is also sometimes referred as unified computing, datacenter-in-a-box or infrastructure-in-a-box. The main purpose of integrated infrastructure is nothing but to share all the resources and deploy the services quickly. The challenges are many with the traditional data center approach, right from the capacity sizing, system design through implementation and continue with the day-to-day operations and management. Choosing several components from various vendors and making them work together in synergy is always a mammoth task for all the IT Managers. More the difficulty is when the process and testing is continued every time when there is a patch or version upgrade is applied. According to market analysts, the converged infrastructure is growing more than 50% year after year and have created some of the world’s fastest growing IT companies such as VCE. Converged infrastructure is a unified data center where several information technology components such as servers, storage devices, networking equipments and infrastructure management applications are assembled and tested together for high performance computing requirements.

The converged infrastructure vendors typically assemble the various components at their factory, test them together and shipped directly to meet the endpoint computing requirements. This will drastically reduce the time required for the data center commissioning from months to a few weeks or even days and will substantially reduce the costs and resource requirements. This will benefit all the stakeholders as an End-Users will get reliable, faster and uninterrupted service, whether they are on a local or closed network, accessing through Cloud or service models irrespective of the devices they used to access information. It allows the IT Managers to have more control with a simplified infrastructure management. The CIOs will be happy as it will offer them a consolidated system with secure and reliable data while reducing costs and risks. As the industry is moving mostly towards cloud offerings, integrated infrastructure will be the most suitable platform for enabling services on public or private clouds or for sharing services such as ‘Infrastructure as Service’ or ‘Platform as a Service’ or ‘Software as a Service’. As we enter into the world of Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) with billions of connected devices generating Petabytes, Exabytes and Zetabytes of data from all sources simplified platforms and centralized management of integrated infrastructure can be a big relief to all. ë

MANAGED SERVICES

DELL

Retain Tradition but Eradicate Legacy

Unlike previous year, Dell chose to tell its end-to-end security and infrastructure story and demonstrated live solutions at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015, which aptly complemented the theme of the symposium that was Driving Digital Business. n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT<ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

ike the previous year, this year too Gartner Symposium left its indelible mark in the region of Middle East by making it a breeding ground for progressive thoughts and initiation of relationships. Dell being the leading infrastructure provider in the region certainly grabbed the opportunity in both the hands as it not only had a large booth to accommodate customers’ footfalls but also to demonstrate some live solutions. Unlike previous year, Dell chose to tell its end-to-end security and infrastructure story and demonstrated live solutions, which aptly complemented the theme of the symposium that was Driving Digital Business. “People usually don’t associate Dell with security but Gartner has graded us as a leader in the Managed Security Services (MSS) space. We are showcasing how CIOs can grow in their career, protect their environment and we are helping them embrace the digital business,” said Basil Ayass, Marketing Director of Dell Middle East. Basil added, “Gartner symposium is the most premier event in the Middle East. The quantity as well as the quality of the event complements each other. Dell is here to position itself amidst the attendees and we want them to know our potential and capabilities.” Elaborating his views on the theme of ‘Driving Digital Business’ Basil said that IT is all about continuation rather than a revolution. When we talk about the digital transformation of a business we must keep this in mind that digital revolution does not happen overnight, so there may be a sense of reiteration in the ideas, but they are

BASIL AYAAS,

MARKETING DIRECTOR, DELL MIDDLE EAST

“People usually don’t associate Dell with security but Gartner has graded us as a leader in the Managed Security Services (MSS) space.” fundamental. With the advent of IoT, humanity has alienated farther more from the periphery of technology. Basil says, “You can put sensors everywhere and these sensors will monitor and communicate back. So here technology is being used for the sake of using technology….but in reality you should think about the human side as well. So one has to be selective when it comes to the use of technology and one has to understand what the user wants and then deploy an efficient technology that can lead to better BI. The Middle East IT market is still maturing and they are focusing more on the traditional IT. People are more willing to make the technology work safe and scalable but very few people want to talk about

innovation, experimentation and value of IT… but this scenario will also change. The Bimodal enterprise: Giving his perspective on ‘Bimodal’ enterprise that Gartner is talking about, Basil opined, “Every time when there is a game-changing technology or revolution, the traditional players are at risk of becoming irrelevant. So bimodal enterprises says ‘Don’t throw away your traditional ones but be aware of new start-ups that are only digital and if you don’t start competing and offering value proposition to it then you become irrelevant. So Bi-modal has two modes to function. First, keep following your traditions and secondly have a new team who can innovate, experiment, and think out of the box.” “It is a conflict but it is all about surviving that conflict,” Basil signs off…. ë

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DATA VIRTUALIZATION

ACTIFIO

Making Back up Easier than Ever “Actifio eliminates data duplication. If the data changes 10% in a week, during backup, the copy of 90% of the same data remains every time. Actifio backs up the data between the last backup and the next backup.” n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT <ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

artner symposium delivered the right kind of platform for Actifio to network with the right kind of people with whom they could share their message and vision. Living up to the theme, Actifio claims it strives to transform business digitally. Grant Amos, General Manager-MEA, Actifio emphasizes “When we look at the business environment, there has been an evident and ongoing transition. Organizations have virtualized their servers and their networks. But when we look at the Storage and back-end environments, multiple products are continuously being used to control that whole environment. People are still using different kinds of digitization tools, replication tools, and backup tools to control that whole environment. Actifio is virtualizing all those products and filling in the missing components in virtualization.” Organizations are having a tough time in migrating to virtualized environment. Grant is of the opinion that challenge lies in the long term investment in the traditional architecture and since the architecture is made of multiple components it is not easy to change just one component. Sharing a success story, Grant gives the example of a test development centre where huge amount of data is accumulated and copied on daily basis. “In a large test development environment, application is the key and infrastructure is just lagging behind. So businesses are focusing now on delivering those applications efficiently, effectively and quickly. One of the challenges that a test development environment faces is that they need numerous copies of their data and it takes a lot of time to physically move the data. We take one single copy of that data and provide, for example, 20 virtual copies of that data. So they don’t need terra bytes of data space and it thus

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GRANT AMOS,

GENERAL MANAGER-MEA, ACTIFIO

saves time also. Actifio is, against perceptions; not just back-up but we are enabling enterprises to cut down on their cost and huge investment in storing data”, says Grant. Actifio revolves around virtualizing data. In a traditional system, the back-up device stores the data and incremental images of the data and when you want to see the data you have to move the data. Actifio simplifies this procedure by enabling the servers to provide you a copy of the virtualized data. “We are not moving data and therefore saving time and space. “ The legacy in backup is that, it converts every data into a proprietary language which makes it readable only to that device. The bottom line is—you cannot do anything about it. Organizations have to go through the rigorous procedure of bringing back all that data or store it in the new device or start afresh with the new device and manage all the data with the new device. “Actifio

“The challenge faced in the storage environment is that –people get very emotional. This is why we target the CIOs. They are more inclined and strategic to the business and cost side rather than the product side.” eliminates data duplication. If your data changes 10% in a week, during the backup your copy of 90% data remains the same every time. Actifio backs up the data between the last backup and the next backup” says Grant. “Actifio is unique in its SLA based products. It defines data protection and runs the business rather than the infrastructure commanding the business run. Actifio suits to the services platform as well because we bring down the infrastructure cost. “Actifio virtualizes entire copy data. With virtual data pipeline we enable instant provisioning of any size data. We massively simplify the provisioning of copy data solution enabling people to very quickly and easily provide data” signs off Grant. ë

ENTERPRISE STORAGE

TOSHIBA GULF

Toshiba flexes Enterprise Muscles with Nimble

As Toshiba partnered with Nimble storage and launched the the Adaptive Flash platform, the latest in hybrid storage innovation, in the recently held Gartner Symposium/ITXpo 2015 in Dubai, Binu Thomas, Head of Products and Services, Toshiba Gulf and Bertrand Lemarechal, Senior Systems Engineer, Nimble Storage talked to EC MEA team on how Business can now come out of the dilemma to choose between ‘Performance’ and ‘Capacity and have the best of both the worlds. n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT <ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

rom TVs and ACs to PCs, notebooks, portable storage and MFPs—Toshiba has been making its presence felt in the consumer and end user computing space very ardently, which the company will love to continue to do for next many years. But at the same time when the market – both consumer and enterprise - is moving towards embracing data centre centric approach. “Nowadays, enterprises want more than just PCs and laptops; what they need is solutions. We are partnering with a number of companies like Cisco, VMware, Microsoft, etc. and providing cutting edge technologies to the enterprises.” says Binu Thomas, Head of Products and Services at Toshiba Gulf. “People believe that we are just ‘PCs and Notebooks’ company. This is not true. We are very well into the enterprises storage space for which we have collaborated with Nimble Storage.” Toshiba has partnered with Nimble Storage, a world-leading provider of flash-optimized data storage solutions. As the distributor of Nimble Storage in the Middle East, Toshiba launched the Adaptive Flash platform, the latest in hybrid storage innovation, in the Gartner Symposium/ ITXpo 2015 in Dubai. Using hybrid storage architecture, the Adaptive Flash platform is engineered to address the industry’s most pressing storage issues by delivering better performance and capacity at a reasonable price; providing integrated protection with rapid backup and recovery; and reigning in

BINU THOMAS,

HEAD OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, TOSHIBA GULF

“People believe that we are just ‘PCs and Notebooks’ company. This is not true. We are very well into the enterprises storage space for which we have collaborated with Nimble Storage.”

BERTRAND LEMARECHAL,

SENIOR SYSTEMS ENGINEER, NIMBLE STORAGE

storage complexity. Bertrand Lemarechal Senior Systems Engineer, Nimble Storage said, “Toshiba has also implemented Nimble storage at their own place.” Bertrand also highlighted the CASL architecture of the solutions, which is a combination of flash and disk to deliver high performance and capacity – all within a small footprint. CASL and InfoSight form the foundation of the Adaptive Flash platform, which allows for the dynamic and intelligent deployment of storage resources to meet the growing demands of business-critical applications. ë

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IMAGING SOLUTIONS

KYOCERA

Kyocera Differentiates with Solution Centric Approach

Market Approach has been the backbone of Kyocera.... and as the market trend moves from box to solutions, Masahiko Murata, GM of Kyocera Digital Solutions Middle East talked to EC MEA Team at the Gartner Symposium/ ITxpo 2015 about their unique market approach, imaging solutions and the key elements that sets them a class apart from the market giants. n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT<ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

yocera might have been overshadowed by the performance of many of its competing brands but that certainly does not reflect the true character of Kyocera, which is about caring and listening to its customers. Apart from its excellent technology presentation, Kyocera differentiates its brand with a solution centric approach, unlike many of the other brands. Masahiko Murata, GM of Kyocera Digital Solutions Middle East, said, “Our approach is the key differentiator in the market against all the competing brands. We are miles away from the conservative sales approach. Price labeling is our last strategy. Our first step is meeting the customers and understanding their pain points. Second step- we establish a conversation for the entire solution around document management. And lastly, price is labeled.” “Once the customer understands Kyocera they do not go anywhere. Although Kyocera started off as a product sales company, the hat which the company would like to wear for some time more, it would certainly like a strong barge into the solutions space offering the entire end to end document management solutions that the modern days customers require”, comments Masahiko. The best thing about the company is that it takes the support of the partners in its entire go-to-market strategy - be it selling products, solutions, consulting or even services. Whatever

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MASAHIKO MURATA,

GM OF KYOCERA DIGITAL SOLUTIONS MIDDLE EAST

gets shipped out of the Kyocera is passed through the community of its local partners. Masahiko added, “Local partnerships hold great importance for us because they help us understand the market.” Although Masahiko is of opinion that Kyocera is doing good and growing quarter on quarter by achieving targets but it can’t be ruled out that there is a stiff competition in the market. Therefore Masahiko’s position is not as comfortable as others on the other side of the fence. He has to innovate in every step of his strategy and

“Our approach is the key differentiator in the market against all the competing brands. We are miles away from the conservative sales approach. Once the customer understands Kyocera they do not go anywhere” therefore for next 2-3 years he would like to invest in educating the customers in the region about Kyocera solutions and the benefits against the competition. At the same time Masahiko would also like to see their partners in the region thrive. It means he is ready to support these partners (15 distribution partners so far) in all the aspects – be it pre-sales, post-sales or knowledge transfer or even marketing. ë

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ENTERPRISE SERVICES

HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS

Accelerating Journey to IT as a Service (ITaaS) Hitachi Data Systems believes—‘To effectively unlock the value of a software-defined infrastructure, technology must simplify operations through automation.’ n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT <ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

he one application, one box concept has diminished from the enterprises landscape. Software defined infrastructure is an altogether new dimension in the storage space. Hitachi Data Systems give you that freedom where you do not need multiple storage units. “SDI is a game changer because it redefines IT in the way it should be and powers the IT back into business.” says Aaron White, GM Middle East and Pakistan at Hitachi Data systems. The Hitachi belief is fortified by the new line up of software defined infrastructure solutions; Hitachi storage virtualization operating system (SVOS), Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP), Hyper scale out Platform(HSP). Aaron believes that SDI can be inter-woven into the concept of borderless enterprise. Borderless enterprise and BYOD is an expansion of the data centre on to the mobile devices. The concept is promising, but it would pose a challenge if the organization has a law of confidential data. “There should be a centralized way to control these things. So SDI predominantly focuses on data within your enterprise—it’s a blend of all IT functions”, says Aaron. “BYOD as a concept is a way of expanding your data centre out of enterprise vicinity. All of us have one or multiple smart phones, so the pro is the amount and level of flexibility that it gives you and the con is the confidential data that it houses and you are expanding that data

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BOB PLUMRIDGE,

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, EMEA AT HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS

“SDI integrates your infrastructure and allows the same number of people to manage the infrastructure more productively”

AARON WHITE,

GENERAL MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST AND PAKISTAN AT HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS

“Software Defined Infrastructure Puts the Power of IT back into Business” centre to the mobile devices that your employees are moving around with. So, shouldn’t there be a centralized way to control those things? SDI predominantly focuses on the applications of data within your premises and there is no reason why SDI cannot move on to the mobile devices in conjunction with the others partners in technology. SDI’s main concern is to have a centralized control”, adds Aaron. According to Bob Plumridge, CTO, EMEA at HDS, SDI is the new way of doing business. “Lack of investment in technology and legacy systems are the prime factors for the slow adoption of SDI in enterprises. With Software defined infrastructure you are able to establish new services and implement them easily in your business”, says Bob. VSP family systems are built on legendary Hitachi reliability. ‘Manage Information more efficiently while lowering the cost of storage’- that is the trust that HDS decentralizes. Hitachi Data systems is also actively involved in the building of smart cities. HDS recently won a big tender from the Danish government for implementing smart city infrastructure in Copenhagen. Bob concludes that the Middle East is also an excellent place where SDI can be the most useful and essential tool for the building of a smart city. As rainfall is scarce in the Middle East and Sunlight is abundant, data analyses can be used for water conservation and using the sunlight effectively to boost solar power and better energy conservation. ë

ENTERPRISE SECURITY

SPECTRAMI

Spectrami Addressed CXOs in Oman on Security Mitigation As the security breaches are becoming rampant in the Middle East and Africa region, it becomes incumbent upon every responsible security vendor to work on the security awareness. n W O R D S : S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A < S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M >

yber security is one of the hottest topics today in the market due to the growing threat landscape and attack vectors. The biggest challenge apart from the technology is awareness about the whole thing. Looking at the market requirement, Spectrami along with Imtac organized an information security event aka Cyber Security Trendz 2015 in Oman during the last week of May. Started at 9:00 o’clock on 27th may 2015, Cyber Security Trendz 2015, Oman witnessed a gathering of more than 45 C-level executives from various vertical industries including Oil & Gas, BFSI, Govt. Aviation, hospitality, etc. The event highlighted the presentation of Amar Singh, Founder & CEO, Cyber Management Alliance and Industry Influencer & Leader. He addressed the audience about today’s infrastructure with challenges of tomorrow and protecting their infrastructure. He mused on the trends in the industry and how one can defend his/her organization. Also in the forum were leading vendors in the security solutions including Fidelis, LogRhythm and Tenable who addressed the audience. Speaking about the context Anand Choudha, MD, Spectrami said that there is a huge opportunity in the security market in the region.

ANAND CHOUDHA,

MD, SPECTRAMI

Every alternative day there is some news regarding security breaches; therefore we require a concerted approach to address the whole market. “Today, we are fortunate that we have Amar Singh, Founder & CEO, Cyber Management Alliances on our side who bringshis expertise on the whole subject. We have collaborated together to bring out standard programmes to help the user community here,” he added. “We started off with our event from Oman some days back, where we got good number of CISOs who attended and Amar had workshops with them. Not only did he speak about the pres-

AMAR SINGH,

FOUNDER & CEO, CYBER MANAGEMENT ALLIANCES

ent situation of the cyber security specific to this region and how could they mitigate those threats but also he tried to evaluate the readiness of those companies,” he maintained. Amar Singh said, “Globally and in this region too advanced persistent threat is definitely the biggest cause of concern but the challenge is not about knowing the time of attack but it is about how to respond to the attack. In the western countries, the focus has shifted from the attack to response of the attack within a short span of time. So our objective is to make the organisations and people to detect the attack and respond to the attacks.” Anand added, “I am happy that so many people came and joined us. I would like to thank our partners who put up a great show. We know that 30% of the entire defence against the attacks is technology and 70% is about people, process and understanding about it. Therefore a lot of education has to be to be done in this, where we felt the gap lies.” Anand also revealed that in October they are planning an event in this region for the CISOs of the top organisations to come together for a workshop where Amar will create the framework and during that workshop, the CISOs will come out with a white paper around threats and mitigation specific to the Middle East market. One of the CXOs who were present in the event said, “I find this event to be very informative. I would urge the security vendors across the region to come forward and work aggressively on the awareness creation in this region as Spectrami and Imtac have done today.” ë

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INFRASTRUCTURE

VCE

VCE: An Ultimate Pick for the CIOs

Innovative projects like Big Data have not come up strong in this region but have the incredible opportunity. Same is the case for mobility. Cloud is complicated and complex today. Deploying a private cloud is hard but VCE has got solutions which can offer the customers readymade fast track to the cloud. n W O R D S : S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A < S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M >

reation of Converged Infrastructure is definitely an outcome of the emerging need of reducing costs of operations, enhancing productivity, agility and flexibility in the data centre. It is an approach to data centre management that relies on a specific vendor and the vendor’s partners to provide pre-configured bundles of hardware and software in a single chassis. The goal of a converged infrastructure is to minimize compatibility issues and simplify the management of servers, storage systems and network devices while reducing costs for cabling, cooling, power and floor space. This trend at the highest level of IT has certainly drawn a lot of investment within the traditional infrastructure vendors to address this market. For example in 2009 a new company was born with the joint efforts of Cisco and EMC and some investment from VMware and Intel, which called itself as Virtual Computing Environment Company or VCE. Besides all the traditional infrastructure companies including IBM, Oracle, HP, Dell, NetApp, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc. brought out their own versions of converged infrastructures. However,VCE as a company quickly climbed the chart to become a leader by outperforming rest of the companies. Within two years of operation, VCE touched $1 Billion turnover, which made VCE one of the fastest-growing companies in the IT industry history. At the same time VCE sold 1,000th Vblock Systems and

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Gartner named VCE the leader in the integrated infrastructure segment with a commanding 57.4 percent market share. Now, after one and half years becoming a billion dollar company it well on its way to touch US$3 billion. Tom O’Reilly, CTO, Africa and the Middle East, VCE, says, “VCE pioneered a new segment of the market with Vblock— the industry’s first completely integrated IT offering with end-toend vendor accountability.” “VCE is the only company to engineer, manufacture, deliver and fully support its converged infrastructure offering with end-to-end multi-vendor visibility, enabling the leading time-to-market and one of the lowest TCO for converged cloud infrastructure. The Vblock converged infrastructure is designed to standardize processes and product life cycle management to significantly improve application availability and help enable VCE’s seamless support experience,” he added. The system is built in the VCE factory and shipped to the customer with pre-configuration usually within 45 days of the order. VCE takes all the worksof engineering, testing, and validation of all the products that go from its stable into the datacentre not allowing customers to worryany more about the data centre. So within a few years after the first launch of Vblock, VCE brought out various versions from system 100 to system 700 but during December last year, something unexpected happened to the company as EMC bought majority of the stake

in VCE making it an EMC federation company. The result of the change in guard brought in two new products to the portfolio of VCE. So during March VxBlock and Vscale fabric in the Vscale architecture surfaced in the market, and later VxRack in the early May. Tom says, “We are able to do some interesting things now which we have not been able to do in the past and launch of VxRack and Vscale fabric are two examples.” VxRack is the most recent product announcement, which happened at EMC World 2015 at Las Vegas, during the first week of May. VCE’s first hyper-converged solution based on VMware EVO: RACK architecture, it allows the customers to lookat deploying modern applications in very large scale. He adds, “Now we have number of products to fill out the converged infrastructure or integrated systems market. We have EMC VSPEX reference architecture, then we have Vblock and VxBlock converged infrastructure, and now we have the VxRack, which is the hyper-converged rack scale. Therefore we have the portfolio that a customer may want.” So the difference between the Vblock and VxBlock is that Vblock comes with Cisco ACI architecture whereas the other one comes with the option for the customers to choose either VMware NSX or Cisco ACI architecture, the hardware in both the systems are same and identical in nature. Similarly,VScale is an architecture based on the Cisco Nexus 9000 networking spine and leap technologies. So it allows the customers, who may have Vblock today, to implement Vscale architecture as spine and plug the Vblock in and as they grow and scale. So it offers the ability to have a fully architectural solution data centre, which is able to grow as the applications required. Every product available from the stable has the VCE experience of having an engineered solution that is manufactured by the company itself and delivered very quickly with single support from VCE for all the components. From the management perspective Vscale is very interesting also as you are not only managingVblock as a single set of resources but also you are managing your entire datacentre. He added, “Of course we sustain it. We offer formula level for the data centre which is called RCM or The VCE Release Certification Matrix, which stands out through the VxRack, VxBlock and the Vscale fabric.

HOW RELEVANT IS THE SOLUTION FOR THIS REGION?

INFRASTRUCTURE

TOM O’REILLY,

CTO, AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST, VCE.

“And with the launch of VxRack and Vscale architecture when VCE is moving to the next level, the competition is trying to catch up with the first level.”

Today, the Vblock and VxBlock are built on the best of the breed hardware of Cisco server, Cisco networking and EMC storage. But at the same time, VCE has started offering hyper-converged architecture – VxRack, which is built on the commodity boxes or bright boxes as called by Gartner.So it could see traction from every geography – be it North America, Europe or even MEA.These products are relevant to every region because there is a hunger in the market for the converged products. And solutions coming from a single stable, the customers find it trust worthy as they would have single head to chop. Tom adds, “The story we are really trying to tell here is that the infrastructure layer of the IT organizations in this region needs to be simplified because the organizations need not to focus on how the hardware components can stick together. The CIOs need to focus on the services that they are offering to the business – the ways they are offering innovation to the business and improving the way the business operates. And if they only focuson the keeping these components plugged in together, that is the waste of time. So we are simplifying that by abstracting the layer by offering the Vblock and other products.”“These products are so rock solid that they do not need much time and effort in operating and worrying about. Therefore the CIOs should focus on how to match the innovation with the growth of the business,” he added. Secondly, in this region, the pace of growth is

incredible and IT struggles to keep up with that growth if they have the traditional datacentre model. Tom explains, “When we talk to the CIOs, we talk about simplicity, agility and removing the unplanned downtime and outages. As the foundation in it is rock solid the applications can be provided to them in absolute risk-free environment. This resonates very well in this region.” Here, the CIOs want the solutions which offers the highest resiliency. They need to make sure that the platform is working with their applications and stable as they grow the business. Today, we find many customers in the region to have deployed SAP and SAP Hana on Vblock with great success. A lot of the customers are also trying to deploy Oracle database on Vblock in order to consolidate and reduce the number of licences, the overall cost. Another very successful case in the region is about deploying virtual desktops. Tom maintains, “Virtual desktops implementation is very tricky thing because it seems so be simple but if you have any impact on the performance, then all the users will really scream. The users of virtual desktop wants things immediately. So in this scenario Vblock have been very successful in deploying virtual desktop which offers high performance.”He added, “So the customers’ experience sometimes is better than the traditional desktops. Besides, there are many vertical applications for which Vblock is getting adopted. For example, health care application – EPAC is deployed over Vblock throughout the

world.” Therefore,the winning ratio is quite impressive in this region. Not only VCE is able to tap the green field projects but also winning the existing refresh cases. As the industry is marching forward to adopt IOT and digitisation, as per Tom all VCE solutions are future ready. The go to market of VCE is very wide in this region. Not only the company leverages its own partner networks but also leverages the partner network of EMC and Cisco because every time they sell Vblock they sell EMC storage and Cisco UCS servers and switches.

FINALLY… VCE has had credible growth by focusing on the large enterprises but when it became the part of EMC federation, VCE took in the team of VSPEX, which is the SMB play from EMC. The latter’s engineering and marketing engine is within the VCE organization now. Therefore by virtue of having VSPEX reference architecture or VSPEX blue, VCE acquires the capability to address the need of small customers or the smaller needs of the large customers. As per Tom, “As the market for converged infrastructure is growing, the competitive market scenario is also growing but VCE as a pioneer company has captured the No.1 market share from the day one.” He concluded, “The big IT companies are realizing that they may have missed it a few years ago but now they can catch up with their own solutions but there is no doubt that VCE will continue to lead this market. And with the launch of VxRack and Vscale architecture when VCE is moving to the next level, the competition is trying to catch up with the first level.” ë

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MY OPINION

What is your channel strategy in this region? BlueCat in ME is a pure channel oriented company, with Comguard as our VAD. We already have developed our reseller ecosystem , but we are still looking for key partners for many regions and verticals. What is your partner program to empower the partners? In addition to the Reseller Authorization agreement signature, we offer a full technical and sales enablement. For technical support, up to 2 partner resources can be trained by BlueCat for free, through a complete training path. We are also providing sales training sessions to provide and transfer our proposition and product positioning and to teach how to approach customers and get them interested in the niche yet really valuable technologies around IPAM and DDI.

LUCA MAIOCCHI

REGIONAL MANAGER – SOUTHERN EUROPE & ME, BLUECAT

Building Elastic Networks WITH BLUECAT, IPAM IS TIGHTLY INTEGRATED TO HARDENED DNS/DHCP SERVERS, ENABLING VISIBILITY AND CONTROL OF “EVERYTHING IP” FROM A SINGLE PANE OF GLASS. LUCA MAIOCCHI, REGIONAL MANAGER – SOUTHERN

Why should a partner go with BlueCat rather than your competitors? We offer the best DDI architecture for mid and large enterprise companies. Our channel is really well managed and every sales process is shared in a transparent way. In addition BlueCat team is always available to actively collaborate with the Authorized Partner for any sales or technical related request. Finally every BlueCat End User Customer and Partner is recognizing our Support as one of the best on the market. What is your marketing strategy in this region? We are focusing on few but key initiatives, like key trade shows (like GISEC/GITEX) and mainly on customer oriented initiatives, like specific technical seminars and face to face meetings. We will be more present on Social Networks in the near future.

EUROPE & ME, BLUECAT SPEAKS ABOUT HOW BLUECAT ENABLES ORGANIZATIONS TO CONVERT CONNECTIVITY TO A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. BLUECAT IN ME HAS COMGUARD AS ITS VAD.

What is the importance of BlueCat to this region? The Middle East is a key territory for BlueCat and the company will be investing with additional local presence soon. BlueCat already has multiple customers in the region and is going to add additional important names to the Portfolio. What are your competitive advantages over others? I think the most important advantage is the

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company itself: BlueCat is a company that wants to support the customer during the life cycle of their products, and collaborate actively with every customer to reach the maximum level of satisfaction. That’s why the biggest and largest companies from across the world are our customers. Technically and product wise, we are really software oriented. Even our HW life cycle is really long (5-7 years) without any forced “refresh” requested to the customer.

What kind of growth are you expecting in this region? We are expecting a tremendous growth, because finally a valid, important, serious and reliable alternative to the current DDI vendors is now available for every customer and partner in this region. BlueCat is one of the most fast growing companies in the IT, we are completely debt-free and the plan for the next quarters is to invest a lot on hiring key people in the sales, technical and development divisions. BlueCat is expecting to grow his headcount by 30% just in the current Fiscal Year: this is a sign of a very healthy company and of an organization actively looking to the next great revolutions inside the IT. ë

MY OPINION

NUMBER GAME

25% 70%

AMD targets to be 25% more energy efficient by 2020.

Achieved 70% of the target.

Tell us something about your recent technological ventures and your next generation processors. AMD is a pioneer in the APU technology. We are launching Carrizo –which will be the most advanced APU AMD has brought to the market, offering better performance and better efficiency than ever before, perfect for users who enjoy content on the go.AMD’s APUs are redefining graphics. AMD has the largest amount of graphics on a single piece of silicon than most of our competition. The 6th Generation A-Series APUs is the perfect solution to the growing demand for TV and video on the move.

OMAR FAKHRI

HEAD OF SALES MEA, AMD

Simplying process and staying ahead of the competition

Where do you see the market heading in terms of live streaming and other on-demand applications? Streaming is yet to be a big thing in the Middle East. Netflix, one of the most popular on-demand streaming media is yet to establish itself in the Middle East compared to other countries. According to me, the prime reason for this is connectivity. In some parts of the MEA region, connectivity per person is still very low. On top of that, mobile data is very expensive. But this situation is now changing and there are a good number of on-demand applications available now but people are not aware of it.

AFTER BEING IN THE QUIET ZONE FOR A SHORT SPAN OF TIME, AMD IS ALL SET TO MAKE NOISE IN THE REGION WITH NEW PRODUCT LAUNCHES, HARD-HITTING MARKETING STRATEGIES AND GREAT PARTNER ENABLEMENT STRATEGIES FOR THE NEXT QUARTERS. OMAR FAKHRI, HEAD OF SALES MEA, AMD SPEAKS TO ANUSHREE DIXIT FROM THE EC MEA TEAM.

What is your market approach in MEA? Partnerships have been our greatest strength and asset in catering to the demands of the region. We have a dedicated Component Partner Program that has 4 key segments wherein our partners can know exactly how to ascend in the program to gain increased benefits. Partner reviews and dashboards are key features that help

partners keep track of their progress in the program as they continue reaching for new heights. Earlier there were some language barriers to this region which we have overcome. We have also simplified our structures which have made it easy to get back to our partners within 24 hours and by this way we can be more productive, responsive and stay ahead of the competition.

AMD joined other HSA Foundation members including ARM, LG Electronics, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Samsung. How has this step helped you in bringing the industry closer? HSA empowers the graphic part of the processor and enables the GPU and CPU to communicate with each other efficiently. HSA is a very key to Carrizo. We have an application on Carrizo that would render face recognition on video also which would have been impossible without HSA. Our association on board HSA has been fantastic. HSA is truly enabling software development and applications to go on to the next level.. ë

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ENTERPRISE NETWORKING

AVAYA

Putting Technology Ahead Of Its Time While many technology vendors are claiming to bring cutting-edge contemporary technology onboard, Avaya goes a step further and claims to have technology that is 24 months ahead of time n WORDS: ANUSHREE DIXIT <ANUSHREE@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM>

he Avaya learning lab at the Gartner symposium echoed the future. The latest technological ventures of Avaya— The Avaya SDN Fx (Fabric Extended), Avaya Engagement Environment and Wireless Beacon technology have been garnering market attention and customer responsiveness equally. With a happy face, for obvious reasons, Savio Tovar Dias, Director - Sales Engineering, Global Growth Markets for Avaya, told us how Avaya’s latest innovations are redefining enterprise communication models and the smart city visions like never before. “Avaya is focusing on two core areas this season— the Avaya SDN Fx (Fabric Extended) and Avaya Engagement Environment.” The SDN Fx simplifies network. It is a networking architecture that turns your network completely invisible to hackers, delivers over 90% of the SDN promise all the way to the edge of the network, and enables you to provision services to your internal customers at the speed of business. The Avaya Engagement Environment – The Engagement Development Platform, is a portfolio of solutions that helps accelerate the development of communications-enabled applications. Now, companies, partners, business analysts, and ISVs can integrate voice, video, text, email and mobility seamlessly into breakthrough business applications. The Engagement development platform also transforms business applications to deliver the

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“smart workspace” using the latest wireless beacon technology. “We help build better communication.” claims Savio. Talking about the market attention and customer preferences that Avaya is harnessing, Savio says, “We have got a great reception from the market; we have got other vendors too who are in the fabric space but call it by different names. But Avaya is the pioneer in Fabric technology. The deployment has been large. Talking about the UC perspective, he says, “We have consolidated all on a singular experience called the Avaya Communicator.” “UC, as it evolves is going to be very much vertical centric and this is where the engagement development platform comes to the picture. With EDP we are planning to integrate other apps to pull info from database for a better and more efficient contextual communication.” So what is the base of Avaya’s claim ‘Technology that is 24 months ahead of time’? Savio says, “We have managed to extend the fabric technology to the edge while others have been doing it to the core. So we are much ahead of the other vendors. We have a true technology differentiator and a data center models that is very simplistic and delivers simplicity in technology.” Avaya is also eagerly and actively participating on the IoT and smart city platform. Savio says that the SDN Fx was innovated with the vision to be aligned with the smart city, to scale, enhance security, deliver best in class reliability and provide the best foundation to smart cities and

SAVIO TOVAR DIAS,

DIRECTOR- SALES ENGINEERING, GLOBAL GROWTH MARKETS, AVAYA.

“SDN Fx was innovated with the vision to be aligned with the smart city, to scale, enhance security, deliver best in class reliability and provide the best foundation to smart cities and IoT/IoE.” IoT/IoE. “IoT is developing very rapidly. Enterprise communication is evolving dramatically. IoT is showing new colors of technology adoption and moving away from the world of fixed devices. IoT is basically sensors and beacons that are connected and IoT will showcase new colors of technology adoption. It’s a world different from the earlier fixed devices. Avaya is driving this communication among machines.” Partners are key to any organization. As critical infrastructure is booming, Avaya also has well established several service hubs and is going strong in the infrastructure space by opening up and working closely with several channel partners. ë

MY OPINION

protected from internal and external attacks. We create a single window of access to all of these technologies. For example, One of the power plants had 20, 000 equipment in the data centre and if one equipment had three user IDs, there would be 60, 000 user IDs and passwords, which is much more than the number of their employees that is around 50, 000. So they had to protect 60 thousand user IDs and passwords to protect the entire data centre. The worry resides in the database and tables. So access and governance sits in the heat of the data centre. It is like guard the guards. This is again very under invested area and we play very significant role trying to cover all of these areas. We found good favour in these markets as there is an increased awareness about this and therefore doing very well since the last two years.

ANIL BHANDARI

CHIEF MENTOR,

ARCON TECH SOLUTION

Mission to Guard the Heart of the Enterprises ANIL BHANDARI, CHIEF MENTOR, ARCON TECH SOLUTION WHOSE ROLE IS TO UNDERSTAND THE ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM OF IT SECURITY ACROSS THE WORLD AND MENTOR THE TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION TO INFLUENCE CREATING PRODUCT ROAD MAP FOR THE FUTURE, SPEAKS ABOUT HOW IMPORTANT

Briefly tell about your solutions. We have different solutions for different challenges but reference to the privilege identity management the solution is called Arcos which sits on top of the entire data centre and integrates and absorbs all the technologies and creates an arch around them and creates a single window access for the people within the organization. The arch acts as a deterrent for the external world to easily come in and look at the privileged IDs and Passwords. The system absorbs all the passwords; so no one knows about this. Depending on the roles and responsibility, one can access the system based on the approvals. But at the same time one’s work is continuously monitored live on a separate dashboard. So any anomaly that happens during the work gets flagged on as a message in the live dashboard. The product is available in the appliance format as well as in VM format. It is priced as per the number of devices that needs to be integrated and the number of people who want to access these devices. We also have special pricing for the large customers. This solution is also available in cloud for the people to subscribe it as a service. .

IS GUARDING THE CORE OF THE NETWORK AND HOW THIS AREA IS UNDER INVESTED GLOBALLY.

What are the security challenges for the market now as there as plenty of solutions available? Different products have different roles to play. But most of the time the organizations spend huge money to protect the periphery. You spend so much of money trying to put good security there at the gate but unfortunately there is not much of investment in protecting the heart of an organization where the data resides. This is the

major cause of worry. What is Relevance of Arcon Tech Solutions in this situation? At Arcon Tech Solutions, we have unique solutions framework, which integrates with any device or equipment you have within your organization – right from your desktop to your laptops to server, to data base and to a Firewall. All of these devices are integrated and

Which are your focussed verticals? We are focusing on BFSI and Telco. Even the smaller players are also taking interest in us. What is your go to market strategy? We are engaging partners and distributors to reach out to the larger customers’ base from awareness, implementation, training and service perspective. In the Middle East region, Comguard is our distributor. ë

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MY OPINION

l Live video and IP connection for real-time evaluation and diagnosis of remote patients l Streamlined, organizational procedures that improve referral rates l Optimized patient satisfaction l Enhanced training and presentation facilities

What is driving hospitals and health systems to embrace the technology? As technology gets more agile in all areas including healthcare, the ability to deliver more in terms of productivity and performance is becoming a priority. Telemedicine is no longer a metaphor and in fact is one really strong avenue for that type of delivery. Whether it’s a congenital heart defect, a middle-aged stroke patient, skin allergy case, gynecology problem, or an aging diabetic, Telemedicine provides patients with cuttingedge care with lowest cost and a promising continuum of care. Hence, with these trends & tech savvy must haves, hospitals and other healthcare bodies are recognizing major benefits associated with investing in these.

MR. GIRISH NARAYANAN

MANAGING DIRECTOR, GRANTEQ

Healthcare just got smarter GRANTEQ IS A RENOWNED LCT (LEARNING, COMMUNICATION & TECHNOLOGY) PROVIDER BRINGING IN CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGICAL EXPERTISE FOR EACH INDUSTRY SEGMENT. THE TEAM OFFERS STATE OF THE ART TELEMEDICINE FOR HEALTH CARE SECTOR FOCUSING ON ESTABLISHING A

One of Telemedicine’s benefits cater to handling remote patients, so in what way is telemedicine essential in rural areas? Rural areas face a unique set of challenges when delivering quality healthcare and access to doctors and specialists. The best of the doctors mostly live in urban cities; hence telemedicine bridges the gap in the continuum of care between urban and rural areas. Also, when patients in remote areas get to know about a hospital using telemedicine, they have higher regard for that hospital and are less likely to bypass it for treatment at an urban spot.

STRONG CONTINUUM OF CARE, COLLABORATION AND CONNECTIVITY. THESE HEALTHCARE SOLUTIONS OFFER INNOVATIVE TOOLS THAT PROMOTE FASTER, MORE INFORMED DECISION MAKING, ENHANCED REMOTE DIAGNOSIS FACILITIES, SAVING ON TIME AND TRAVEL, YET EXTENDING CARE AND SUPPORT. MR. GIRISH NARAYANAN, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF GRANTEQ TALKS TO EC MEA ABOUT THE UPCOMING WORLD OF TELEMEDICINE.

What do you see as the benefits of telemedicine and telehealth? Granteq over the years has helped to define successful telemedicine by offering quality products and cutting-edge technologies that bring medical care to underdeveloped areas around the world. Today, as telemedicine is evolving

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into a mainstream use of delivering healthcare worldwide, Granteq expands our telemedicine expertise into new and exciting applications and medical specialties. Some of the most significant benefits of this technology include: l Convenient, end-to-end communications solutions

Why would a healthcare institute invest on a telemedicine device? The prime reasons are to increase access to patient care along with reducing costs to them & bringing maximized returns. They may have their existing patients coming, but a lot of them would be requiring their diagnosis in rural rural areas. The technology also saves time and costs, because doctors don’t have to travel to remote locations and can simply sit at a kiosk in their facility and connect virtually to those further locations. It also paves way to treat patients carrying contagious diseases by sitting away while still providing the same level of care. ë

INNOVATIONS

KEY CAPABILITIES n Offers remote diagnostic and preventive monitoring service. n Proactively measures and analyses equipment data for proactive maintenance, optimising load uptime and ensuring that the critical power protection system is maintained. n Significantly reduces operation costs. n Provides ultimate peace of mind; guaranteed availability and exceptional efficiency levels.

Emerson Next-Generation Static UPS Emerson Network Power’s nextgeneration UPS, the Trinergy Cube, is designed to meet the needs of enterprise-class data centres, offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability to evolve with today’s ever-demanding business trends. With high power density cores, optimised efficiency at partial load conditions and hot scalability, it delivers adaptability currently unavailable anywhere else in the market. Five years on from the launch of the original groundbreaking Trinergy solution, Emerson

Network Power has worked closely with customers to develop another innovative industry-leading UPS, going beyond the power revolution and enabling customers to stay ahead of business demands for availability, capacity and high efficiency. Trinergy Cube can reach up to 3 MW in a single static UPS, enabling extraordinary capacity levels previously only achieved by rotary UPS solutions. The extreme high-power density within the single unit ensures that data centre managers can make

the best use of available floor space, overcoming space constraints and ever-rising real estate costs, as well as optimising TCO. Its design is extremely flexible, as Trinergy Cube is scalable up to 20 MW in a parallel system. It can be easily configured in L-shape or back-to-back to suit the layout of a wide range of installation spaces. Trinergy Cube’s scalable and flexible design combines additional features including average operational efficiency of 98.5 per cent, and up to 99.5 per cent maximum efficiency.

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VCE VXRACK The VCE VxRack System enables customers to start from dozens of servers and scale to many thousands of servers -- tens of petabytes of storage capacity while delivering the highest performance and value per IOP. Most importantly, VCE brings its proven methodology of pre-engineered factory built infrastructure with single call lifecycle support to deliver a massively scaled out hyper-converged VxRack Systems with the same unmatched VCE customer experience. VxRack Systems are architected to connect into the recently announced VCE Vscale Architecture, and will be supported by VCE Vision software to achieve a unified data center architecture that spans multiple locations and geographies, adding another dimension to scale and flexibility offered by VCE. VxRack Systems offering a flexible choice of hypervisor, including the industry-leading VMware vSphere will be orderable in July and will begin shipping in Q3. Additional details on the VxRack System based on VMware’s EVO:RACK technology and VMware Virtual SAN will be available in Q3 of this year.

KEY CAPABILITIES n A VxRack System offering flexible choice of hypervisor, including the industry-leading VMware vSphere, or KVM or bare metal. The system leverages EMC ScaleIO softwaredefined storage, Cisco top of rack Nexus switching and can optionally incorporate factory integration of the VMware vRealize management and orchestration suite. n A VxRack System offering tailored for VMware environments, offers a fully integrated VMware stack based on VMware’s EVO:RACK technology and VMware Virtual SAN.

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INNOVATIONS

Canon imagePRESS C600i

Incorporating best-in-class technologies, the imagePRESS C600i delivers professional quality printing to address the growing needs of internal corporate print departments, creatives and small agile print shops for more frequent, shorter runs of premium output on a wider range of media. It is also the first Canon production print engine to integrate seamlessly and securely into existing office systems. Central to the appeal of the imagePRESS C600i for corporate environments and SMEs is its host of management tools designed to maximise production efficiencies and reduce costs. These include print fleet and asset optimisation, output management and control solutions, as well as optimal document workflows to deliver fully integrated managed print services. Operating at speeds of up to 60 pages per minute, the imagePRESS C600i handles an extensive range of substrates, including stocks up to 300gsm auto duplex with media sizes up to SRA3, opening up new business opportunities by enabling users to increase their in-house production of quality printed communications, such as high-end presentations, brochures, pitch collateral and internal communications. In addition, the new print engine is fully compatible with industry standards, such as PCL and PostScript, as well as ERP systems from vendors such as SAP and supports printing from Linux/Unix systems. It also benefits from embedded MEAP and MEAP web platforms, enabling the introduction of data capture and document output management solutions such as uniFLOW, eCopy and iWDesktop. Operator experience is simplified by a series of device management and eMaintenance tools to maximise efficiencies and minimise downtime. KEY CAPABILITIES n Maximises production efficiencies and reduce costs n 60 PPM n Handles an extensive range of substrates n Delivers the highest levels of colour consistency, vibrant image quality, enhanced colour calibration and accurate registration.

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HP Color LaserJet Pro M252 series HPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s re-engineered, sleek new series of LaserJet Pro M252, Pro MFP M277Enterprise M552 and M553 series are designed to make businesses more efficient. Built around the latest in toner formulation -- new Original HP Toner cartridges with JetIntelligence -- the HP LaserJets use up to 53 percent less energy, take up to 40 percent less space and wake up, print and duplex in a fraction of the time. Original HP Toner cartridges with JetIntelligence deliver up to 33 percent more professional-quality prints,peak printing performance, and protection against counterfeits with innovative anti-fraud technology. With anti-fraud technology built into every JetIntelligence toner cartridge customers have more protection that easily identifies counterfeit cartridges and enforces customer-initiated anti-theft and office-wide printing policies to manage cost and quality standards. HP also makes cartridge installation easier than ever with the new auto seal removal. The HP JetAdvantage Private Print helps prevent unauthorized access to confidential print jobs and reduces waste from misprinted jobs. Each print job is securely stored in the cloud until the user authenticates and claims the job from the printer. HP JetAdvantage Private Print also features support for HP Common Card Reader for fast authentication, as well as a mobile app available on iOS and Android devices to manage and print from tablets and smartphones for added convenience. KEY CAPABILITIES n Features smaller footprint, easier set up and installation as well as up to 40 percent faster printing from sleep versus competitors. n Anti-fraud technology n Helps prevent unauthorized access to confidential print jobs and reduces waste from misprinted jobs

Connect. Share. Give. Take. Solve. Save. Smile. Unify. Introducing Unify. Unifying business communications for the new way to work. unify.com

Scale smarter. Manage easier. Innovate faster. New PowerEdge servers can be configured up to 99% faster 1 and boost IOPS by up to 10x.2 Whether your business relies on data to predict the future, improve outcomes or engage more customers, the next generation of PowerEdge servers with Intel® Xeon® processors will help boost application and workload performance — so you can scale smarter, manage easier, innovate faster.

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To Learn More, Visit Dell.com/accelerate Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. 1 Based on Principled Technologies report ‘Simplifying systems management with Dell OpenManage on 13G Dell PowerEdge servers’, September 2014, commissioned by Dell, testing Dell’s 13th generation R730 with Enterprise-level Dell systems management. As compared to manual configuration. 2 Based on product specifications for Intel S3700 SATA SSD and Express Flash results from the Storage Networking Industry Association. 3 Based on Dell internal analysis August 2014 comparing SATA SSDs to Express Flash - PCIe-Gen3 x4 testing random reads. ©2015 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell, the Dell logo and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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