Enterprise Channels MEA Solutions Handbook

MEA

SOLUTIONS HANDBOOK 2013 ANNUAL SPECIAL EDITION ABOUT HANDBOOK CLOUD COMPUTING D ATA C E N T E R SECURITY B I G D ATA U N I F I E D C O M M U N I C AT I O N NETWORKING VA D S PA C E T O P P L AY E R S

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Come and visit Dell SonicWALL at Gitex, booth number D1-21

Copyright 2013 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell SonicWALL is a trademark of Dell Inc. and all other Dell SonicWALL product and service names and slogans are trademarks of Dell Inc.

Go deeper at: www.sonicwall.com/deepernetsec

Not all next-generation firewalls are the same. To start, Dell SonicWALL next-generation firewalls scan every byte of every packet while maintaining the high performance and low latency that busy networks require.

Additionally, Dell SonicWALL network security goes deeper than other firewalls by providing high-performance SSL decryption and inspection, an intrusion prevention system that features sophisticated anti-evasion technology, and network-based malware protection that leverages the power of the cloud. Now your organization can block sophisticated new threats that emerge on a daily basis.

Dell™ SonicWALL™ next-gen firewalls provide a deeper level of network security without slowing down performance.

look beyond the obvious.

For deeper network security

ABOUT HANDBOOK

CONTENTS

ANNUAL SUPPLEMENT OCTOBER 2013 WWW.ACCENTINFOMEDIAMEA.COM PUBLISHER: SANJIB MOHAPATRA COO: TUSHAR SAH00 EDITOR: SANJAY MOHAPATRA sanjay@accentinfomedia.com +971 555 119 432 ASSOCIATE EDITOR: NIVEDAN PRAKASH nivedan@accentinfomedia.com ASST. EDITOR: KARMA NEGI karma@accentinfomedia.com SUB EDITOR: MANALI MISRA manali@accentinfomedia.com REPORTER: APARAJITA CHOUDHURY

SOLUTIONS TO WATCH OUT FOR GITEX 2013 holds great significance to this market as far as Information and Communication technology is concerned. Like every year, this year also there will be thousands of visitors from the UAE and neighbouring countries and continents. There is a great expectation from visitors - specially from the channel partners and the CXOs - in terms of finding many new solutions which could not only alleviate their pain point of drying margins but also offer opportunity to engage with their customers aggressively.

Everyone is aware that the industry is swinging back and climbing to the cliff of growth – courtesy multibillion projects outlay in the region. However, people do not forget the market slowdown so easily. So before investing on any technology they look at measuring the burden on the resources.

They look at technologies which can help them help their customers.

Therefore, they are trying to learn more about solutions like Cloud Computing, Datacentre, Big Data, BYOD, etc. Enterprise computing will sooner or later be Datacentre dependent. Virtualization will influence the entire spectrum of technologies including computing, storage, security and networking. The region is going to see more targeted attacks in the future times, which will prompt the industry to start looking at next- generation security solutions more seriously than before. So, with all these actions at the back, channel partners see their business to be at the tippint point of where to go - whether to make a turn arround of their business or remain where they are. So in a sense Gitex 2013 will instill a lot of confidence in them to understand the actionable situations. And, as responsive media, we are also bringing out this handbook to demystify technologies and trends around the next-gen solutions like Virtualization and Cloud Computing, Big Data, Decanter, SDN, etc. We are also trying to make the partners understand how important are they to the entire eco system and unless they empower themselves , they cannot grow and also help the industry to go.

I hope this collation will be of great help to you. If you wish to convey your feedback, pls. send in your comments at info@accentinfomedia.com.

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aparajita@accentinfomedia.com COPY EDITOR: NEIL D’SOUZA

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ADVTS

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CLOUD COMPUTING

DATA CENTER

SECURITY

BIG DATA

UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

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NETWORKING

CLOUD COMPUTING

CLOUD COMPUTING

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

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Cloud Computing Cloud represents the biggest technology disruption since the transition from mainframe to clientserver computing.

As we move from the PC era to the cloud era, an increasing number of businesses are looking to cloud as a way to transform service delivery and empower the workforce. In 2013 cloud services are starting to go genuinely mainstream - moving beyond the hype curve. Eighteen months ago there were a relatively limited number of true cloud services available to the enterprise. Now, there are early signs of leaders emerging in many segments of the cloud market and that will continue to play out in 2013, as enterprise clouds come online and service provider clouds ramp up. This is an exciting time for IT managers and consumers, as well as the technology vendors that serve them. Next year, cloud will continue to change the way we build, deliver and consume applications.

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“In the Middle East and Africa region, we are currently in the process of expanding our channel base in the next three to six months.”

—NOMAN ABDUL QADIR

Director – Channel, Citrix Middle East and Africa

In the Middle East there are really three mega trends influencing cloud adoption: trust; government regulations; and technology adoption.

Trust and the ability to offer high service levels is a critical element of cloud adoption – there is still some way to go before customers can really get the service levels, security and transparency they require from public cloud offerings to enable this to be a widely-adopted business proposition. Some of the same challenges exist for private clouds, but at the same time there are tools, business process design templates and software offerings that Dell has made available to help customers overcome these challenges.

Government regulations for data location mean there is an imperative to drive cloud offerings locally, be they public or private. The lack of proprietary infrastructure, as well as the up-to-date infrastructure, that exists in the Middle East means customers are able to move to a cloud services infrastructure more rapidly than they might be able to in other regions.

This is already evident, with the deployment of software solutions that are a path to cloud, such as virtualization. Infrastructure convergence and virtualization are key enablers for the enterprise technology evolution currently taking place. A highly virtualized approach to networking and storage can complement server virtualization by providing ready access to critical data, while avoiding unnecessary hardware purchases and the associated power, cooling, and management expenses that go along with them.

When it comes to virtualization, the impact of mobility and consumerisation in the enterprise world is profound – and virtualization is an integral enabler for these trends. According to analyst house IDC, by 2015 the world’s mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion, representing approximately 37.2 per cent of the total workforce. Mobile workers use multiple devices, laptops, smartphones and tablets in the office and on the road. They expect their desktop and their data to be available wherever they need to work.

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KEY CHALLENGES

OPPORTUNITY IN THE REGION

Security in the cloud is probably the main issue that CIOs grapple with, especially in the enterprise arena. This is compounded by today’s generation of mobile workers, which are driving new demands for service levels agreements, new forms of collaboration and the need for anytime, anywhere, any device data access. IT organizations are challenged to meet these needs while ensuring the highest level of data security and regulatory compliance.

During the transition to the cloud, the current best practice amongst a lot of enterprise CIOs is to tier their applications and adopt a gradual migration strategy to private and public cloud. At the beginning of this journey, customers tend to opt for putting non-critical as well as test and development applications onto the public cloud, leaving missioncritical applications on private clouds. As some applications will be based in the private cloud while others are on the public cloud, data integration challenges arise between these applications.

In terms of smaller businesses, making capital investments in IT can be a resource-intensive exercise. The main challenge for CIOs that fall into this category is therefore to ensure that any cloud or virtualization deployment is managed in a way that ensures the company retains focus on its core business and customers while any transition is taking place. Once complete, however, the latest cloud and virtualization solutions will offer the versatility and scalability that CIOs want.

For large enterprises in the region, the main reason for moving corporate data into the cloud is cost and convenience. Storage is the largest expense in the data center and the amount of data generated by companies continues to increase.

For SMBs, the motivation for moving information into the cloud is often ease and convenience. Individuals are familiar with using cloud services such as Dropbox and Hotmail in their personal lives, so they can easily extend this to a small company.

Over the next 18 months, there will be an increase of companies moving their data into the cloud, which will lead to more cloud providers and ultimately a better understanding of information in the cloud. The reality is that many organizations – whether they are from the finance sector, the retail sector or any other industry where there is constant data generation – are currently dealing with complex, overgrown, often antiquated and underutilized computing platforms.

These depreciate quickly, take up valuable data center space, consume large amounts of power, and cause management headaches.

IT resources in a typical data center are locked into silos dedicated to particular applications. Cloud, however, increases organizational agility, which is why the benefits to organizations are both immediate and clear.

“Fortunately, Dell’s application integration platform Boomi AtomSphere can help to solve this challenge, enabling the flexibility and scalability for hybrid cloud deployments.”

OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANNEL PARTNERS

The channel has a critical role to play in deploying cloud offerings today, acting as a trusted advisor to customers seeking to understand how their organizations can benefit from cloud-based offerings. Those channel organizations that can provide guidance and help to customers will be the ones that succeed, but there is also a need for distributors, VARs and system integrators to harness their expertise.

SMB customers will look to their trusted resellers to provide advice on cloud deployment and in turn these resellers will look to their distribution partnerships to provide the right hardware, software and services guidance. It is unlikely that small resellers will have the resources to develop the skills and consultancy in-house to support their customer base, so in this situation the distribution offering around cloud becomes particularly important.

There are multiple roles a distributor can play when it comes to offering cloud services. They can provide a ‘template’ to resellers on how to design cloud offerings for customers, or they can offer a hosted cloud environment for their resellers to sell on as a hosted type service.

At the same time, larger midmarket and enterprise customers are going to be looking for specific cloud solutions built for their individual needs and this is where the larger VAR or SI needs to show they understand the customer environment and build a solution that addresses these specific needs. Distributors can also play a role here, but the economics will likely mean that in this market segment there will be more of a consultancy-led sale and the larger channel partners will rely on their relationships with key vendors to help provide cloud offerings to their customers.

07

BASIL AYASS,

Marketing Director, Dell Middle East

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VENDOR VIEWS

“Security in the cloud is probably the main issue” Sherif AbdElGawad, Business Solution Strategist, VMware Accelerate Advisory Services

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“Over the next 18 months, there will be an increase of companies moving their data into the cloud, which will lead to more cloud providers and ultimately a better understanding of information in the cloud.”

Sherif AbdElGawad

Business Solution Strategist, VMware Accelerate - Advisory Services

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What are the challenges in the market from a CIO point of view?

Security in the cloud is probably the main issue that CIOs grapple with, especially in the enterprise arena.

This is compounded by today’s generation of mobile workers, which are driving new demands for service levels agreements, new forms of collaboration and the need for anytime, anywhere, any device data access. IT organizations are challenged to meet these needs while ensuring the highest level of data security and regulatory compliance.

During the transition to the cloud, the current best practice amongst a lot of enterprise CIOs is to tier their applications and adopt a gradual migration strategy to private and public cloud. At the beginning of this journey, customers tend to opt for putting non-critical as well as test and development applications onto the public cloud, leaving missioncritical applications on private

clouds. As some applications will be based in the private cloud while others are on the public cloud, data integration challenges arise between these applications.

Fortunately, Dell’s application integration platform Boomi AtomSphere can help to solve this challenge, enabling the flexibility and scalability for hybrid cloud deployments. In terms of smaller businesses, making capital investments in IT can be a resourceintensive exercise. The main challenge for CIOs that fall into this category is therefore to ensure that any cloud or virtualization deployment is managed in a way that ensures the company retains focus on its core business and customers while any transition is taking place.

Once complete, however, the latest cloud and virtualization solutions will offer the versatility and scalability that CIOs want.

Additionally, one of the other main challenges that CIOs in the Middle East may recognise when exploring cloud adoption is that

while there are regulations in place, they can be confusing, inconsistent and in some cases contradictory. It is important for CIOs to understand that regardless of where the information resides – whether inside or outside their premises – the business that owns the data retains the responsibility for the data. At the same time, the cloud provider has a responsibility for the availability, reliability and security of information stored in the cloud, which is typically dealt with through Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

What is the opportunity for the channel partners?

The channel has a critical role to play in deploying cloud offerings today, acting as a trusted advisor to customers seeking to understand how their organizations can benefit from cloud-based offerings. Those channel organizations that can provide guidance and help to customers will be the ones that succeed, but there is also a need for distributors, VARs and system integrators to harness their expertise.

SMB customers will look to their trusted resellers to provide advice on cloud deployment and in turn these resellers will look to their distribution partnerships to provide

the right hardware, software and services guidance. It is unlikely that small resellers will have the resources to develop the skills and consultancy in-house to support their customer base, wso in this situation the distribution offering around cloud becomes particularly important.

There are multiple roles a distributor can play when it comes to offering cloud services. They can provide a ‘template’ to resellers on how to design cloud offerings for customers, or they can offer a hosted cloud environment for their resellers to sell on as a hosted type service.

At the same time, larger midmarket and enterprise customers are going to be looking for specific cloud solutions built for their individual needs and this is where the larger VAR or SI needs to show they understand the customer environment and build a solution that addresses these specific needs. Distributors can also play a role here, but the economics will likely mean that in this market segment there will be more of a consultancy-led sale and the larger channel partners will rely on their relationships with key vendors to help provide cloud offerings to their customers.

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PA R T N E R V I E W

“Simply a One Stop Shop for All The Integration Needs” One of the leading SIs in Middle East region, Emitac can integrate virtualization and cloud. Santosh Lasrado, Senior Pre Sales Consultant, EES Service & Delivery, Emitac is talking about their USP.

What is the market potential of virtualization & cloud?

The cloud business solutions market is expanding. Cloud solution markets at $34.7 billion in 2013 are anticipated to reach $123 billion by 2019. Market growth comes as cloud computing is used to aggregate data from the smart phone end points and integrate it with front end web data and back end transaction system data, more and more systems are moving on virtual environment What are the challenges in the market?

There are multiple challenges in the virtualization market. Virtualization has really matured and is now being regarded as a commodity. As there are many players in this market matching product features neck to neck , on the other hand, there still are people with the mind-set of having reservation about virtualization and prefer to have a physical environment What brands are you carrying, what is the USP of those brands?

We Deal with HP Unix, VMWARE, Microsoft, Red Hat Linux and Citrix , HP Unix helps to Virtualize Unix Workload and VMWARE are market leaders in virtualization platform, where has Microsoft Hyper V is the fastest growing hypervisor

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As a SI, what is your role?

As a System integrators, we will understand our customer environment and propose based on their requirements, with complete end to end solution including, Networking and security, Servers, storage, virtualization hypervisor, Application integration and backup for virtual environment) simply a one stop shop for all the integration needs

SANTOSH LASRADO

SENIOR PRE SALES CONSULTANT, EES SERVICE & DELIVERY, EMITAC

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How are you different from others?

As an SI we are agile in quickly adapting to changing trends and embrace and acquire expertise in new technologies to meet the needs of our clients. We customize our options to customers based on their environment, size and budget, and also suggest the right kind of solution (be it virtualization, storage consolidation, networking etc…), as we have a highest level of partnership with most of the leading technology vendors. In addition to that we are able to provide long term comprehensive support/maintenance services and have the highest number of MS integration expertise which helps us retain loyal customer relationships.

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CLOUD COMPUTING

DATA CENTER

SECURITY

BIG DATA

UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

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NETWORKING

DATA CENTER

D ATA C E N T E R

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

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Data Center Green IT and modular data centres are the focus of the market.

As per Gartner, Middle East IT Spending to reach $192.9 Billion in 2013. Out of this , the datacentre market share and growth is signification.

This mrket is fuelled by increased construction of Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centres, especially in Saudi Arbia and UAE, primarily driven by MNC as well as regional collocation and hosting service providers. The spend in this market is expected to grow from 3.7% in 2012 to 5.6% in 2014.

As per Joseph Najjar, Managing Director, Rittal Middle East, the company foresees the adoption of cloud-based deployments continuing to gain momentum and drastically increasing among enterprises, as cloud computing is a logical progression for many organizations.

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“Rittal has always given a transparent and best technical consulting on the Datacentre planning to the channel partners on all opportunities so far and on the way.”

In the Middle East there are really three mega trends influencing cloud adoption: trust; government regulations; and technology adoption.

Trust and the ability to offer high service levels is a critical element of cloud adoption – there is still some way to go before customers can really get the service levels, security and transparency they require from public cloud offerings to enable this to be a widely-adopted business proposition. Some of the same challenges exist for private clouds, but at the same time there are tools, business process design templates and software offerings that Dell has made available to help customers overcome these challenges.

Government regulations for data location mean there is an imperative to drive cloud offerings locally, be they public or private. The lack of proprietary infrastructure, as well as the up-to-date infrastructure, that exists in the Middle East means customers are able to move to a cloud services infrastructure more rapidly than they might be able to in other regions.

This is already evident, with the deployment of software solutions that are a path to cloud, such as virtualization. Infrastructure convergence and virtualization are key enablers for the enterprise technology evolution currently taking place. A highly virtualized approach to networking and storage can complement server virtualization by providing ready access to critical data, while avoiding unnecessary hardware purchases and the associated power, cooling, and management expenses that go along with them.

—JOSEPH NAJJAR

Managing Director, Rittal Middle East

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Success comes from close partnerships in a global environment. At Logicom, our business is built on strong relationships with our partners. We are proud to deliver exceptional service, and go the extra mile so that we can celebrate in your success.

We believe GITEX is the perfect opportunity for us to get to know each other better. Our team, along with key members of senior management are looking forward to you visiting us at GITEX Technology Week.

Visit us in Hall 4.

Our Partners

We are looking forward to meeting you!

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Logicom Dubai Plot S60608 South Zone, Jebel Ali, PO BOX 54328 Dubai T: +971 4 8055399 | F: +971 4 8894950 | info@logicom.ae

www.logicomdistribution.com

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D ATA C E N T E R

KEY CHALLENGES

Challenges are many, but prima-focus is laid on having the right technical consulting for planning a DC for any organisation. Criteria’s such as location, scalable infrastructure and monitoring are key to be successful and avoid downtime costing millions.

POINTS TO REMEMBER

OPPORTUNITY IN THE REGION

Scalability, Back-Up, Network firewalls, Intrusion prevention & round the clock monitoring are some points to keep in mind to increase the operational efficiency of any DC. Rittal has always given a transparent and best technical consulting on the Datacentre planning to the channel partners on all opportunities so far and on the way. “RiMatrix” – Our Signature Data Centre offering, includes 5 important hardware elements in a Data Centre namely Racks, Power, Cooling, Security and Monitoring & Remote Management products. “RiZone” - Rittal DCIM software, provides an edge on top of the above. more of a consultancy-led sale and the larger channel partners will rely on their relationships with key vendors to help provide cloud offerings to their customers.

Noting the growing need on Data storage starting from (any and all) data of every network user in an organization, the Datacentre market is only set to expand in the next 5 yrs from the current stature.

According to Gartner, the forecast on ICT market in Middle East is set to hit $192bn in 2013. Due the fact of that the Middle East is a growing market for DC implementations (including the IT infrastructure) & stable economic growth path in sight.

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“Cursor intends to bear a resemblance of excellent service without compromising the expectation of our customers with full respect and integrity and to promote the true virtue of living.”

MURALI.G, MANAGING DIRECTOR -CURSOR TECHNOLOGIES FZCO, DUBAI Cursor Technologies is a premier IT manufacturer enhance with innovative compassion to cater the international market when it comes to technology.

Cursor is one of the major participants in global IT Accessories & Consumer Electronics in the market and top of the line when it comes to business momentum, product development and its dynamic technical marketing exploration with 15 years of international business expertise.

Cursor carries the range of over 200 SKUs across 20 product categories and continuously working to develop new products lines. The company is into a comprehensive product development with innovative product range which would attract the entire market The brand “Cursor” serves as a global path to modern innovation, empowering its perspective into the world of real technology. It is a major participant in Tablet PC’s, Computer Accessories and Peripherals, Life Style & Multimedia products, Power products, Speakers and Home Theater Systems.

Cursor already has its presence in 25 countries Middle East, South East Asia, Africa & CIS regions and is now planning to expand more in Infrastructure, strengthening its distribution network and brand building exercises across the globe.

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CLOUD COMPUTING

DATA CENTER

SECURITY

BIG DATA

UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

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NETWORKING

SECURITY

SECURITY

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

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Security Today’s threat landscape is vast and complex Organizations are increasingly finding themselves the victim of an attack by hacktivists, organized crime syndicates, and worryingly nationstate-sponsored agents.

Despite organizations becoming aware of the threat landscape, breaches are still occurring. The cost of a security breach includes a multitude of variable direct and indirect costs relating to incident response, breach notifications, customer credit or identity theft monitoring services, regulatory fines, lost business due to bad publicity, lost earnings due to downtime, and more.

“The channel partners in the region has continued opportunities to replace the ageing technologies and sell and service the new threat protection solution that can help mitigate latest and sophisticated attacks.”

—SHAHNAWAZ SHEIKH

As per Dell SonicWall, some latest trends in the enterprise security are those modern attacks that employ several complex techniques to avoid detection as they sneak quietly into corporate networks to steal intellectual property. The advanced evasion techniques such as Obfuscation, Packet Fragmentation, Server Message Block evasion etc., are on the rise. Next Generation Firewalls with strong IPS techniques are needed to decode such threats that could be harmful to the enterprise networks. The other malware threats continue to target the mid to enterprise networks with new malware attacks such as Ransomware specifically targeting those financial and confidential data of organizations.

As per Trend Micro, Increasingly, attackers know exactly what they want in payday or objective and plan their attacks accordingly. Managing vulnerabilities and threats tops the list of IT security priorities for security decision-makers.

Attacks are bypassing the most common security controls organizations already have in place and since most enterprises have already started utilizing what technology offers today (such as mobile devices/ solutions, virtualization and cloud) then this leads us to conclude - that traditional enterprise security is not sufficient any more.

Consequently security vendors and security policy makers came up (and coming up every day) with new security tools and controls to maintain the highest levels of security such as: . Mobile security solutions to protect the mobile empowered employees . Cloud and virtualization security tools to aid organizations in building a secured cloud . Detecting and defending against targeted persistent threats (aka APT’s)

Regional Director, Dell | SonicWALL Middle East & Turkey

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KEY CHALLENGES

OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANNEL PARTNERS

As per Trend Micro Information Technology is becoming one of the most important pillars of enterprises infrastructure, and it’s for the CSOs/CISOs to maintain its security in an efficient manner; i.e. proactive security and higher ROI; there are many challenges and it may differ depending on the size and technology utilization levels; nevertheless, I would like to talk about two of those challenges: Variety of solutions: there are many solutions in market and most of them use the same broad marketing headlines in addressing security concerns, choosing the right information security partner is the key word for this challenge, looking for security vendors who have decided to build products/solutions to secure your network rather than trying to secure it with their current products or services is a good answer to this challenge.

Total cost of ownership and return of investment: IT security solutions are -relatively speaking- expensive ones, thus investing in the wrong product will impose negative influences on the organization security and IT security budget.

Therefore CTO’s finds it tempting to utilize those latest technologies to better deliver products and services to customers in an efficient manner; those same technologies that we talked about earlier requires more sophisticated security systems to be in place to insure security and privacy while maintaining efficiency – not mentioning compliances to latest standards.

As per Dell SonicWall the channel partners in the region has continued opportunities to replace the ageing technologies and sell and service the new threat protection solution that can help mitigate latest and sophisticated attacks. With the best security products on one hand, the channel partners need to understand the exact customer needs and offer their expertise and skills to assist their customers with better intelligence and a trustable advise to help protect their networks. The channel partners with good sound knowledge on technology and one’s that stands out in offering the best support and services are the partners that are in high demand. With security market considered as replacement market, there is always an opportunity for channel partners to take the best technology to their new and existing customers in-spite of having sold some solutions in the past.

As per Trend Micro partners are gearing up through accepting and adopting these changes in security landscape and they understand the huge opportunity it brings with changing and targeted threat landscape.

In past few months we have noticed a great shift in partner’s response to learning and educating themselves. All our training classes are overbooked which shows there is a lot of interest in learning new technologies and ‘how to protect their customers’ approach. Some partners are early adopters and thus are trusted advisors to their customers and in turn depend on them for securing their infrastructure.

OPPORTUNITY IN THE REGION

The first opportunity or responsibility of a security vendor is to provide time zero attack protection to its customers and mitigate even the latest threats. Not all customers would be protected with equal comprehensive security solution. Reaching out to such customers and advising them to use the right solution that is needed for their businesses to run without the fear of data breaches, bandwidth loss or productivity loss is the need of the hour for most organizations in the region.

As per Trend Micro, the lack of focus on security technologies that truly combat targeted attacks is matched by the false sense of security organizations have in their ability to deal with these attacks. In reality, many of these organizations have been compromised but simply don’t have the technology available to detect the malicious activity. As a result, enterprises overestimate their abilities. As the Middle East and Africa expands, company CTO’s finds it tempting to utilize latest technologies to better deliver products and services to customers in an efficient manner; which may not necessarily be secure and safe.

From an IT Security vendor’s prospective, our region has a huge potential for the IT security industry simply because (as we have witnessed during the past few years) many enterprises rush into deploying the latest technologies relying on their current security tools without considering the need for a better matching purpose built security controls to be in place prior going live.

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“Our region is experiencing a major growth in all industries, and that kind of growth involves a great competition on all aspects.”

—IHAB MOAWAD,

Vice President of Mediterranean, Middle East, and Africa, Trend Micro

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SECURITY

G U E S T TA L K

To Stop Advanced Attackers, Look for Uncommon Indicators Anthony Perridge, Channel Director EMEA, Sourcefire explains some of the key trends arround security and vulnerability.

W

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—ANTHONY PERRIDGE Channel Director EMEA, Sourcefire

Anthony Perridge joined Sourcefire in January 2008 as EMEA Channel Director to develop and lead the Company’s EMEA channel strategy. Anthony also manages sales operations in the Middle East and Africa.

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e all know that advanced attackers have the resources, expertise and persistence to compromise any organization, at any time; attackers fundamentally understand the nature of classic security technologies and their applications and exploit the gaps between them. They relentlessly drive their attacks home, frequently using tools that have been developed specifically to circumvent the target’s chosen security infrastructure.

Once they penetrate the network they go to great lengths to remain undetected, using technologies and methods that result in nearly imperceptible indicators of compromise to accomplish their mission.

The challenge for defenders is that traditional security technologies are

focused on detecting strong indications of compromise, such as known malware and other threats, but can’t capture or analyze weaker indications of compromise. Plus, these technologies are only able to make a determination at a single point in time. If that one shot at identifying and blocking a threat is missed, most IT security professionals have no way to continue to monitor files once they enter the network and take action if they turn out to be malicious. Eventually you’ll realize a breach has happened, but if you’re like most organizations it can take months or even years to discover according to the latest Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report.

At that point you’re left calling in the forensics team to figure out what happened and what was stolen or destroyed.

To regain control against these

stealthy attacks, defenders need a new threat-centric approach to security to address the full attack continuum – before, during and after an attack – with continuous visibility into indicators of compromise and retrospective security to quickly contain and stop the damage. Examples of activities that could indicate compromise include a system attempting to communicate back to a known bad (blacklisted) IP address; trying to access a part of the network, a device or a database it hasn’t before; or creating a process that it wouldn’t under typical circumstances. In isolation each of these activities isn’t a detection or prevention event, but when correlated with malware intelligence and other behaviors, even seemingly benign or unrelated, they may suggest a compromise.

To be able to identify indicators

of compromise once a threat has entered the network, you need to take a two-tiered approach with tools and processes that combine trajectory capabilities, big data analytics and visualization to enable the following: Tier 1: Automated analysis and response. Identify technologies that use trajectory capabilities to track system-level activities, file origination and file relationships and then leverage big data analytics for root cause and forensic analysis. When combined, these technologies can highlight and pinpoint subtle patterns of behaviors and weak indicators, suggesting a compromise has happened and a breach has most likely occurred.

The ability to alert and automatically take action can speed response and help mitigate damage.

Tier 2: Actionable intelligence.

Visualization technologies are also

important so that you can quickly understand the chain of events leading up to and following a possible compromise. This allows you to apply context based on your expertise, perspective and knowledge of activities happening at that moment in your environment to make an even more nuanced determination of suspicious activity and indentify indicators of compromise. If you identify an indicator of compromise you can see what’s occurring across your environment at that moment, look back at preceding events and then control activities that could be risky. If you determine a breach has occurred, by locating the point of origination and understanding the scope of the exposure you can stop the attack and remediate.

Attackers are relying on the fact that defenders are focused on detection and prevention technologies alone to look for threats and remove them. As a result, attackers are using weak signals to create nearly imperceptible indicators of compromise to attempt to stay below defenders’ radar. While detection and prevention are essential to any security defense strategy, defenders also need the ability quickly tie together unrelated events to identify a threat that has evaded defenses. With decisive insight from trajectory, big data analytics and visualization capabilities defenders now can see that blip on the radar, hone in, understand it and take action.

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CLOUD COMPUTING

DATA CENTER

SECURITY

BIG DATA

UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

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NETWORKING

BIG DATA

B I G D ATA

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

Big Data is a development that is set to continue its predominance in the sector and the world now holds twice as many bytes of data as there are liters of water in all its oceans. Data can be captured on every aspect of our life and it is the depth of intelligence that can be garnered from this data that can transform the way in which we can predict potential outcomes in the future.

20

Big Data Big Data in this region is currently in its infancy.

According to latest reports from IDC, the external storage market in the MEA grew only two percent in the first quarter of 2013. The external storage revenue in MEA expanded slightly year on year in Q1 of 2013 to total $233 million, with terabyte capacity rising around 32 percent over the same period. The major force driving this market is the constant need among enterprises to upgrade their business processes and enhance performance and efficiency. The other factors driving this market are continuous rise of unstructured data, demand to provide advanced and predictive analytics. Companies providing hardware and software IT solutions are looking forward to gain a better competitive advantage in this growing market, thereby creating sophisticated analytical solutions and data management platforms for the enterprises.

Handbook 04.indd 20

“Storing, searching, analyzing, comparing, refining, combining, visualizing – massive sets of data can be a challenge to traditional database software, something that Microsoft has pioneered a number of solutions for.”

EMC FINDINGS ON BIG DATA

—SAMER RAMEZ ABU-LTAIF Regional Manager, Microsoft Gulf

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KEY CHALLENGES

OPPORTUNITY IN THE REGION

CHANGES IN FUTURE

The Middle East is a diverse market place and this as true for the IT sector as any other. One size certainly does not fit all and this can be challenging for companies looking for a solution that can be deployed across a number of geographies to the same standard. Customer requirements are always bespoke to a certain extent and it is important that solutions are provided that meet needs now but with a forwardthinking flexibility built in.

The development of the cloud and the need for more flexible and mobile ways of staying connected will dominate the industry for the coming years. Whether it be from a hardware or software perspective, the ever-evolving working environment means that employees want to be able to have access to core business tools no matter where they happen to be working from. Having devices and software that can support this in the most straight-forward, flexible and effective way will continue to drive cloud and mobility innovations for the foreseeable future.

Apps continues to be a strong growth market for us, and with a region that is incredibly rich in entrepreneurialism and SMBs the apps sector is one that present immense opportunity. The influence of social and the impact it can have on business - particularly a business that relies on the ability to be flexible and engaged with its specific stakeholders – is significant.

21 In the UAE, Big Data is giving rise to markedly improved decision making and is having a significant impact on companies’ competitive differentiation and ability to avert risk.

87% of respondents in the UAE reported that decisions in their organization could be improved with a better use of data, and 67% agree that their senior teams trust Big Data insights to make truly transformative business decisions.

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45% have achieved a competitive advantage as a result of Big Data analytics technology and 67% believe that industries that succeed will be the same ones using such tools.

67% of respondents agree that Big Data technology will prove vital in identifying and protecting against cyber-attacks – which could be crucial as only 66% of respondents in the UAE are confident that they could fully recover all their data should they need to.

HOWEVER, IN THE UAE: • 27% of companies surveyed have no current plans for implementing Big Data technology.

• While budget (64%) was the most important factor for overall business decision making, the most common reason cited as the inhibitor to Big Data adoption was the lack of a clear business case or proven ROI (57%).

As companies in the UAE continue to look to IT innovation to compete locally and on the global stage: • The business priorities driving IT transformation in the UAE are most commonly business process/operational efficiencies (55%) and improved governance and compliance (34%).

• 86% report their business sees technology investment as a strategic way of achieving its goals.

• 79% believe it will be a challenge to have these skills keep pace with IT innovation over the next three years.

• 79% of respondents in the UAE believe their organization has the right level of skills and knowledge to complete business priorities successfully.

• 75% of respondents in the UAE agree that the biggest barrier to coping with business priorities is cultural.

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B I G D ATA

SAMIR MARDINI, HEAD OF TALENT CONSULTING MENA, AON HEWITT MIDDLE EAST

22

“As businesses grow more competitive, there is an increasing demand for a variety of skills from their employees, to drive a significant competitive advantage creating new opportunities for young talent and career advancement of existing employees within the enterprise. This need for education and learning is driven even further by the rapid evolution of the technology landscape and the growing demand for intelligent solutions to enhance performance efficiencies and create new customer experiences.

Set against this backdrop and to cater to the increasing demand for a qualified pool of local resources in the country, the UAE continues to witness an increased focus on skills and development through strategic alliances and partnerships between industry leaders and academia, to introduce the student body to technologies like cloud computing, virtualization and big data to create a qualified workforce capable of leading the future of the country and sustaining its growth for years to come.”

ANALYST’ TAKE

SAID AKAR, DISTRICT MANAGER SOUTH GULF, EMC

“This research shows that companies in the UAE are increasingly seeing the transformative benefits that are achievable with Big Data analytics technology. Not only are senior management executives engaging with the idea of Big Data analytics but the majority of businesses are aware of the huge competitive advantages the technology brings as well as the security benefits. This is a core part of IT transformation, a process which UAE businesses are well underway with. The majority of businesses in the region have already set out to virtualize and create cloud-enabled businesses and even more incredibly, some have created a fully software defined infrastructure. This approach, combined with Big Data analytics will see the agility and competitiveness of UAE businesses increase massively.”

MAJOR YAQOUB Y. AL AHMED, HEAD OF OPERATIONS, ABU DHABI POLICE

“Safety and security remain topmost priority in the UAE government’s vision to foster an environment favorable for business opportunities and fair trade. Information Technology remains central to Abu Dhabi Police’s services from emergency field management right down to command and control systems and protocol. Investments in next-generation IT infrastructure enable our teams to stay informed, alert and resilient to create an intelligence- led, proactive and responsive security force to ensure the safety of the citizens and residents of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates. Technologies like cloud computing and virtualization have been instrumental in helping Abu Dhabi Police create a seamlessly integrated, centralized and scalable environment that is designed to perform with effortless efficiency 24/7, 365 days a year ensuring that we are constantly connected to our community and its people and ready to respond to their needs at a moment’s notice.”

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Leading edge global technology.

Established regional partners.

Efficient local execution.

Global Networking Strategies. Regional Implementation.

FVC is the leading Value Added Distributor for renowned IT vendors across the Middle East and Africa. We bring you innovative solutions in Unified Communications, Information Security and Advanced Networking. We also deliver a range of professional services including Logistics, Implementation and Training Services; enabling us to meet the real-time infrastructure needs of your business enterprise.

Distributing Innovative Technologies, Region-wide

Dubai, UAE. Tel: +971 4 4294900 | Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Tel: +966 11 2813540 | Beirut, Lebanon. Tel: +961 1 699033 | Cairo, Egypt. Tel: +20 2 26435280 Casablanca, Morrocco. Tel: +212 522 787154 | Nairobi, Kenya. Tel: +254 20 3673 208 | Lagos, Nigeria. Tel: +234 1 4623411 | Enquiries: info@fvc.com | www.fvc.com Handbook 04.indd 23

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B I G D ATA

Beer, Diapers and the Big Data Bug Big Data is all about identifying patterns from raw information

I 24

ndividuals who have studied marketing will know about the connection between beer and diapers*. It’s all about pattern recognition: how raw information can become useful when it’s interpreted and applied in the right way. According to Dimension Data, that’s where big data fits into the picture. The world, it seems, has been bitten by the big data bug.

Many commentators say that big data has the potential to help organisations spot useful trends, for example, in customer purchasing behaviour. This can go a long way toward driving more targeted sales.

But much of big data’s value has been hyped to levels approaching the unbelievable.

Stephen Green, General Manager for Data Centre Solutions at Dimension Data, agrees. “Big data has become over-hyped by commentators without understanding its full implication. It’s like ‘cloud’ – and similar to cloud, its underlying principles are fundamentally changing the way businesses will be able

Handbook 04.indd 24

to react to, or anticipate, business opportunities.”

But, warns Green, despite being a fashionable buzzword, the impact and value of big data should not be underestimated. “Imagine what’s possible with all the new data generated from web browsing, online transactions, even tracking movements within shopping malls via mobile devices. All these are forms of big data. Yes, it’s a buzzword in the ICT world – but it has the potential to fundamentally change the way organisations react to, or anticipate, business opportunities.”

In simple terms, big data refers to data sets that can’t be handled easily through traditional methods, such as dedicated servers driving a traditional database or data warehouse structure (like Oracle or Teradata), and the associated analytics toolsets like Cognos that would drive interrogation and analytics. It’s also called unstructured data, which can’t be structured into columns and rows in a SQL or other form of database. There are three attributes

—STEPHEN GREEN

General Manager for Data Centre Solutions at Dimension Data

which further define a big data environment. These include: l volume: the massive amount of data generated and collected by organisations l variety: the array of different types of collected data, from text, to audio, video, web logs, social media and more; and l velocity: the speed at which data is collected, analysed and some even say ‘anticipated’.

“Big data’s use lies in the ability to identify patterns from raw information - also called data mining. The beer and diapers principle accounts for businesses that use data mining techniques to spot patterns

*The classic beer-and-diaper example is often used to illustrate the principle of associated buying patterns. By analysing cash slips, we can discover an unexpected correlation between the sales of beer and diapers. This could be because fathers on an errand to buy diapers conveniently purchase beer at the same time. This newly discovered information can be used to motivate a change in sales strategy that could drive higher sales, such as positioning the products closer together on the shop floor. in other forms of customer behaviour. For example, in the financial services sector, banks and insurance organisations use big data to identify fraud. This involves spotting patterns that would indicate the likelihood of fraudulent transactions,” says Green.

Green sites another example within the world of telecommunications. “A large US mobile phone operator − let’s call it X Telecoms − was suffering significant customer churn across its mobile customer base. By using traditional data analytics tools and processes, the organisation was able to quantify the amount of churn quite accurately, but not the reasons for it.

“X Telecoms turned to a group of data scientists - another new buzzword - to identify the underlying cause of the churn. Using the volumes of unstructured data that X Telecoms captured every day

and by writing an advanced set of algorithms, it was able to provide some interesting insights.

“Each time one person switched a mobile plan to a competing provider, five friends would closely follow, which then meant that each of those five friends would have another five friends leaving the network … in other words, a snowball effect.

“This behaviour was driven by a bundling offer from mobile companies, offering free phone calls and texts to ‘five friends’. X Telecoms quickly took action by introducing a counter campaign: every time one of its customers switched providers, it immediately sent an offer to their five selected friends, providing them with a compelling offer to renew their plans with X Telecoms.

Through that one action, it reduced churn in its base by more than 65%.”

While unstructured data can’t be easily converted into actionable intelligence by traditional databases, these examples confirm that the tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from it are developing fast. Says Green: ‘At the forefront are rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence, such as natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning. These artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and advertisement business and its experimental robot cars – which

have navigated thousands of miles of California roads – use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tools that analyse vast quantities of data and enable instant decision-making.

These developments are ushering in massive opportunities for businesses. In turn, CIOs are coming under increasing pressure to provide the necessary tools and processes to enable a big data strategy for their businesses in order to capture market opportunities and/or prevent reputational damage.

Green points out that despite all the hype around big data, organisations don’t need large investments in infrastructure and resources to start with. “Organisations can start by installing a low-cost, simple platform to gather the data, and from there, begin to identify useful patterns that would almost immediately drive returns, if followed up with proactive activity. A small investment in such a platform can be funded from the benefits gained by its use. This is possible across all business sectors where a broader range of patterns may become relevant. These could include quality control patterns in manufacturing, patient re-admittance patterns in hospitals, bookings versus cancellations patterns in travel, and many more. Even small entry points are showing business returns that fund your business growth and allow IT to build the skills needed to take this to the next level,” he concludes.

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CLOUD COMPUTING

DATA CENTER

SECURITY

BIG DATA

UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

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NETWORKING

UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

U N I F I E D C O M M U N I C AT I O N

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

26

Unified Communication Businesses continually need to improve productivity

Unified communications has now penetrated its way into education, small and medium businesses, hospitality and other industries. With the proliferation of Internet and bandwidth coupled with powerful free applications, such as Skype and Google Hangouts, which allow for real-time communication, the bar for paid unified communication services is set pretty high. It is without question that competing with “free” is an uphill battle, but the need for security, flexibility and unique business requirements keeps the enterprise UC market growing rapidly. Though now the leaders in the UC space must continue to push the envelope for what they deliver to their clients. Both those who have systems and are seeking more and those that are looking at hanging up their old PBX or KTS are seeking to move into a next-generation UC solution.

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“The enterprise UC market continued to mature over the past 12 months and is now considered by Gartner to be entering the early mainstream adoption phase.”

—GARTNER

The unified communications (UC) market is ready to hit $61.9 billion by 2018, and is growing at a compound annual growth rate of over 15 percent With technology evolving swiftly, the trends can seem to come and go quickly, but right now there are five that are shaping the unified communications space. This includes Web Real-time collaboration (WRTC), mobility, bring your own device (BYOD), hosted (cloud UC) and social integration.

1. Web Real-time Collaboration (WRTC): The ability to move from a call to a collaboration session has never been truly ubiquitous. UC providers are building the capabilities for group chats in a desktop client to launch a Web collaboration meeting or a screen share right out of the client giving instantaneous capabilities to collaborate. This tool will allow companies to collaborate and move faster than ever before seamlessly within their UC environment.

2. Mobility: Being connected anytime anywhere is increasingly becoming the goal for any communication. While a smartphone more or less provides this ability, the requirement to be fully connected to the office requires more than a disparate device on a wireless network.

3. BYOD: This may be one of the most discussed trends in workplace technology let alone unified communications. The ability for users to integrate their personal tools into the work environment is an exciting yet controversial subject as IT leaders and staff face offover the ups and downs of BYOD. 4. Hosted (Cloud): With equipment hosted elsewhere, the lack of control for many IT leaders was unacceptable, but with top down pushes for cost cutting and the growth of cloud as a viable business model, there is a growing consensus among IT that it is here to stay.

5. Social Integration: Right now we are seeing social integration in CRM. With UC plugins for CRM apps becoming more widely available the next logical step is to allow instant communication through UC applications to social media websites.

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Handbook 04.indd 27 19/10/13 8:27 AM Advts01.indd 18

P.O. Box: 124372, Dubai, United Arab Emirates Dubai Office Phone: +9714 3860110, Fax : +9714 3860557 Email: info@ibtevolve.com, Website: www.ibtevolve.com

In IBT, we can answer all of these questions with a resounding ‘yes’. We manage vendors and service

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We’ve invested significantly in our people, processes, and systems to be able to move beyond management of point technologies to management of entire technology domain, particularly in the IT infrastructure space.

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IT Outsourcing and Remote Infrastructure Management Solutions

03/09/13 10:55 PM

U N I F I E D C O M M U N I C AT I O N

KEY CHALLENGES

28

As per the report - 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications - the first challenge is the evolution of the mix of premise and cloud options. Only a few vendors offer premise and cloud solutions. Clearly, more is required here and the trends toward seamless choices between premise, hybrid and cloud options.

The second major challenge is immaturity or unpreparedness or lack of geographic coverage of necessary understanding, skills, and services in the vendors’ channels. Of even more concern, Gartner critiques many of the vendors for not having well-prepared resellers and system integrators, even where sales and service coverage exist. The Value Added Reseller (VAR) or Systems Integrator (SI) is a key element for success of enterprise UC implementations. As look to the future, the development of advanced UC justification and implementation skills among a vendor’s channel partners will likely be much more important than R&D spending, now that the products have matured.

The third challenge which Gartner highlights is the financial status of the UC vendors. The vendors who report financial results are showing slow or no growth in what appears to be a declining market for voice telephony (which is a very different category from UC). Vendors are building their UC businesses as add-ons to a core telephony business.

Handbook 04.indd 28

FUTURE DIRECTION

As per Gartner this year, the stakes for vendors in the enterprise UC market are exceedingly high and, in some cases, existential. Gartner goes on to identify five characteristics which, “will have an important effect on the success of a UC product and the satisfaction of the users:” 1 User Experience (UX) 2 Mobility 3 Interoperability 4 Cloud and Hybrid 5 Broad solution appeal Except for Cloud and hybrid, all of these factors relate to the ability to deliver measurable changes in personal productivity or business process efficiency for the enterprise buyer of UC solutions.

As per the consulting house, increasingly, the market is seen communications “unified” with the applications and devices which the user must have to do their job. Thus, companies focus on UC integrated to the e-mail inbox and IM client (both of which drive mobile device usage); integrated into business social apps (such as IBM Connections); UC integrated to business applications such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, or other vertical market apps such as the healthcare example cited in the UC Magic Quadrant report; communications built into collaborative workspaces; or communications simply embedded in mobile device apps.

OPPORTUNITY IN THE REGION

The unified communications market is expected to reach $61.9 billion in 2018, according to a new report from Transparency Market Research, “Unified Communications (News - Alert) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Trends and Forecast, 2012 – 2018.”

With the benefits associated with unified communications, the increasing mobile workforce and enterprise mobility will have a high impact on the growth of this market. The proliferation of mobile devices that are capable of video communication is an important factor driving the unified communications market.

Transparency Market Research said that this coupled with BYOD (bring your own device) and enterprise mobility will drive corporate IT and operators to provide cost-effective and flexible communication solutions to the owners of such devices. This factor is expected to have a high impact on the global unified communications market.

However, some of the factors restraining the growth of the unified communications market include lack of interoperability between multivendor platforms and high cost of initial investment.

According to the report, the adoption and acceptance of cloud computing coupled with the proliferation of unified communications is resulting in the growth of the hosted or cloud-based UC market.

According to analyst firm Frost and Sullivan, this segment is expected to reach $235 million by 2014 “IDC believes that UC&C in the Middle East will record doubledigit growth over the next five years owing to the popularity of enterprise IP voice and collaborative applications. Market players will rely on the growth of converged IP voice, data, and video installations to pave the way for sophisticated UC&C technologies in the region. It is important to note that enterprises will continue to demand simplified and vertical-specific solutions that deliver high value.” – Senior Analyst Hasan Sandila, Telecommunications, IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey

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CLOUD COMPUTING

DATA CENTER

SECURITY

BIG DATA

UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

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NETWORKING

NETWORKING

NETWORKING

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

BROCADE SUGGEST FOLLOWING TOP 5 TRENDS:

30

Networking SDN is an enabler of cloud-based networks With ad-hoc IT procurement by individual business units, the underlying corporate network becomes increasingly business-critical in nature as it is an enabler of all business communications, activities and transactions.

The main priority of the CIO in this new role will be to make sure that the network infrastructure is future proof, flexible, scalable and robust so that any spike in data volumes and bandwidth requirements can be handled without disruptions to the network.

Another recent global survey by Brocade of 1,750 IT decision makers which evaluated the current state of their data center environments shows that 91 percent of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) stated that their current IT infrastructures still require substantial upgrades to meet the unique networking requirements created by virtualization and cloud computing.

Handbook 04.indd 30

“As organizations look to adopt new technologies like SDN, Cloud and virtualization, BYOD, etc. as well as upgrade their network infrastructures, there are tremendous opportunities for the channel.”

—KHALED KAMEL

Territory Channel Manager, MENA, Brocade Communications

• Rise of “Always-Connected User” and Death of the “Transaction-Based” user • Software-Defined Networking (SDN) deployments begin • Careful Cloud evaluation – The cloud will be under intense scrutiny. Businesses will evaluate the impact of cloud, its benefits, usage and ROI more than ever before.

• Customers bite back on vendor lock-in – Open architectures and multivendor solutions will become more prevalent in 2013 and the trend is clearly moving towards “product de-siloing”.

• Human shortcomings will be overcome by Technology – There was a time when desktop icons did not exist. A time when a user had to manually type the name of an application in a shell-like text window to access applications. This was time-consuming, error-prone and frustrating, but the desktop icon revolutionized the user experience. Innovations such as this overcame human shortcomings and simplified the user experience. There will be many more such innovations over the next two years.

Juniper sees the key trends as mobility and cloud (underpinned by security). Together these encompass what enterprises are trying to achieve with their networks – increased business agility and productivity, improved customer experience, secure always-on connectivity. Our focus on high-performance networking enables us to help customers solve their most pressing challenges in support of their business objectives.

SDN Impacting As per Juniper SDN plays into the cloud trend. A cloud-based network drives business agility (for example, the ability to tap into new services at scale very quickly, and without risk). SDN is an enabler of cloud-based networks. Juniper’s approach to SDN means its customers can create simple, open and agile infrastructure – or they can choose to work with cloud hosts/SPs who do that.

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NETWORKING

KEY CHALLENGES

32

OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANNEL PARTNERS

This global trend is especially worrying for businesses in the Middle East wherein cloud related IT investments are expected to increase substantially in the next few years. Further, a third of the survey respondents admitted that their organizations experience multiple network failures each week.

The second challenge that CIOs need to contend with are budgets.

Aging network backbones are under tremendous strain from the exponential growth in data traffic. As the cost of operating and maintaining these legacy networks continually rises, IT departments now find that they can need to invest in IT upgrades. However With financial assistance from banking institutions becoming more difficult to attain, businesses hoping to upgrade their IT infrastructures are now beginning to look to the channel, which is a great opportunity for channel. VARs and Sis can provide subscription based financing wherein the customer is permitted to increase or decrease the number of network ports they pay for on a ‘pay-as-you-go-bundle’ subscription basis. Extending this further, vendors may even enable their partners to offer finance on complete end-to-end solutions, including all third party technology and services, thereby helping customers escape the CaPEX trap and gain the solution they want on subscription. For the customer, this translates to simplicity- one contract, one deal and one solution through one partner.

Juniper sells to its customer base via local channel partners – they have the local expertise and focus and amplify our business. The strength and depth of Juniper’s solutions portfolio means that partners can build a strong, value-add business that includes additional services and support for their customers. We do not compete with our partners; it is Juniper’s approach to support them for mutual benefit.

OPPORTUNITY IN THE REGION

Networks are a key part of business in the ME today – they are the lifeblood, the enabler of new and existing businesses in the public and private sector, and for SPs and enterprises alike. Those two trends – cloud and mobility – are all about empowering everyone, connecting everything. Juniper is seeing success because we can tap into that and provide solutions to our customers’ business demands.

A good general example is in the healthcare sector – highly regulated, mission-critical, and cost-sensitive. Modern healthcare can benefit hugely from online applications that automate and simplify massive amounts of sensitive data flowing between clinics, hospitals and customer portals. So long as the underlying network is fast, secure and reliable, staff are more productive and effective in their care-giving (clinical and administrative), and patients receive a better experience when they most need reassurance and information.

“The Juniper Networks single operating system, JUNOS, across our routing, switching and security platforms also helps to simplify operations.”

—MARIO GEORGIOU

Area Partner Director, MEA Juniper Networks

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Handbook 04.indd 33

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VA D S PA C E

NEWS COMGUARD TO FOCUS ON CHANNEL EXPANSION

this Strategy. Comguard intends to announce its new comprehensive loyalty program for its partners to reward them for their continuous support and faith in the company.

SPECTRAMI TO SHOWCASE ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS AT GITEX

VALUE ADDED PLAYERS UPDATE Handbook 04.indd 34

AJAY SINGH CHAUHAN, CEO, COMGUARD Comguard will continue its association with GITEX Technology Week on a larger scale this year with a bigger stall to accommodate more partners and display its growing portfolio of products. This GITEX, Comguard is looking forward to strengthen its channel network by adding new resellers from all across various countries in the Middle East region and increasing the market share of all the brands that it represents under its banner.

Comguard intends to promote its vendor partners’ products, launch new products and meet customers and channel during the show.

Ajay Singh Chauhan, CEO, Comguard said, “We are happy to participate in GITEX once again this year. GITEX has been an ideal event for us all these years to promote our products, increase brand awareness of our vendor partners’ solutions, launches new products and sign new partnerships.”

“This year we are also be looking forward to strengthening our channel network further by consolidating existing channel base and acquiring new channel partners from all across the region,” said Chauhan.

We have designed focused relationship and enablement programme to reinforce

ANAND CHOUDHA, MANAGING DIRECTOR AT SPECTRAMI Spectrami announced its participation at GITEX Technology Week 2013, which will be held at Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre in Dubai from 20th to 24th October 2013.

Spectrami will be showing its award winning enterprise grade security and storage solutions along with its vendor partners Actifio, General Dynamics Fidelis Cybersecurity Solutions, Tenable, Verdasys and LogRhythm. Senior executives from its vendor partners will be present at the show and leading the pack will be Ash Ashutosh, the Co-founder and CEO at Actifio, and Peter George, president of General Dynamics Fidelis Cybersecurity Solutions, among others.

Expressing his happiness on participating of Spectrami at GITEX twice in a row, Anand Choudha, Managing Director at Spectrami said, “GITEX plays an important role in spreading the message and connecting with key business decision makers from across the region.”

During GITEX, Spectrami will also be honouring its key partners and customers for their support in adopting best of the breed technology in the region with an award at Spectrami Partner and Customer Awards Night on 21st October 2013 at Hotel Crowne Plaza in Dubai, UAE. “We believe GITEX will help us identify and leverage growth opportunities in the Middle East and we look forward to establish a strong channel network and liaise with industry representatives looking for business opportunities in the region,” Anand added. “We are highly excited and thrilled to organise our first Partner and Customer Awards and we are expecting a gathering of over 80 partners and customers to attend the award night.”

STORIT TO EXHIBIT LATEST DATA MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

SHASHIKANTH N, SALES MANAGER, STORIT DISTRIBUTION StorIT Distribution participates in GITEX Technology Week 2013. The company’s key focus will be on its latest solutions for Cloud Computing, Big Data and Data Management in addition to showcasing its turnkey solutions portfolio including products and services from partners such as EMC, Quantum, QLogic, Emulex, Aptare, Moonwalk, Mellanox and Supermicro. StorIT will also highlight the technical

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services capability that it offers as a value distributor with highly qualified system integration skills at the region’s leading ICT exhibition.

Speaking on their participation, Shashikanth N, Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution said, “Gitex, being the biggest technology trade show in the region, is the best single platform for us to meet our partners from all over the region, build new relationships and thank our existing ones for our longstanding partnership.

We had great success at Gitex 2012, which gave us an opportunity to promote our diverse line of products, solutions and services. It was also an ideal platform for us to announce our new partnerships and our channel expansion initiatives, as well as an opportunity to share the company’s success story.”

“At Gitex 2013, our goal is to showcase an enhanced portfolio of products and services to our partners, and also introduce exciting new alliances that will keep us ahead in the fast evolving technology landscape. StorIT is also well poised to leverage on its competitive advantage in the areas of Cloud Computing, Big Data, High Performance Computing and Enterprise IT. Gitex will be an important vehicle to drive this message to our channel and create business opportunities for our partners. We look forward to meeting customers and partners from across the Middle East region at a single location and making some important announcements at the exhibition,” Shashikanth added.

StorIT Distribution will be exhibiting in Hall 6 stand CLD-15 in the Cloud Computing Area.

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EMT DISTRIBUTION TO UNVEIL NEW PRODUCTS AT GITEX

MOHAMMAD MOBASSERI, THE CEO AT EMT DISTRIBUTION EMT Distribution announced that it will be participating at GITEX Technology Week 2013, to be held from 20-24 October 2013 at Dubai International Exhibition and Convention Center. At GITEX Technology Week this year, EMT Distribution will unveil new products from Secunia, 2X, Altaro, and Kaspersky. The company also plans to conduct special event aimed at its channel community along-side GITEX Technology Week 2013.

“If we look at the technology trends across the Middle East and Africa region, we see that IT security and virtualization solutions are in high demand,” explained Mohammad Mobasseri, the CEO at EMT Distribution. “However, in many countries in the region, due to use of state of the art IT infrastructure, certain areas of security such as encryption, DLP, web and application security, and so on, is also on the rise. The demand from end users is mainly focused towards solutions related to cloud computing and SaaS.” Mobasseri further explained that the demand for such IT solutions has been different from each industry sector. According to him, while consumers are looking for basic protection apps, SMBs are looking to have end point security and reasonable

network security products. Enterprises on the other hand are have demand for solutions such as identity management, load balancing, web monitoring and control, UTM and so on.

SOFTWARE AG LAUNCHES NEW CLOUD-BASED SERVICES

NICKY SHERIDAN, SENIOR VP – MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA & TURKEY, SOFTWARE AG. Software AG has launched two new services – Portfolios Live and Process Live – forming part of the Software AG Live cloud-based suite unifying process improvement, IT portfolio management, agile application development, and application integration. The Platform-asa-Service offerings debuted at Software AG’s three-day Innovation World 2013 global user’s conference in San Francisco, California, USA. Portfolios Live is a new cloud-based service that provides CIOs the ability to manage and transform IT landscapes based on comprehensive and accurate budget, regulatory, legal and technical information. Portfolios Live offers a set of pre-configured solutions for specific tasks that enterprise architects and portfolio managers manage on a day-to-day basis.

This new solution combines best practices and guidance to collect, connect and

assess available IT assets and support both the IT and business decision making needed to transform an organization into a Digital Enterprise.

“The cloud is gaining traction as an important platform for meeting the everincreasing IT needs of enterprises and organizations across the Middle East. Portfolios Live and Process Live combine the proven enterprise management expertise of Software AG with the strong businessenabling potentials of the cloud to deliver solutions that optimize performance, agility, management, collaboration, and integration,” concluded Nicky Sheridan, Senior VP – Middle East, Africa & Turkey, Software AG.

Marketing at FVC, said, “GITEX is an important platform for us to meet our existing and potential customers and partners.

This year we have some exciting new products to share with them. We also plan to announce several new partnerships as we continue to expand our Information Security and Advanced Networking portfolios.”

FVC REVEALS NEW PARTNERSHIPS AT GITEX

NIDAL OTHMAN, MANAGING DIRECTOR, STARLINK. StarLink announced its participation in GITEX Technology Week, to be held in Dubai. StarLink will showcase its growing portfolio of Information Security products and solutions to top IT decision makers across the Middle East region at Stand A2-2, Hall 2.

At their best to address the key security issues facing the Middle East ICT community, StarLink, and its key vendor partners, Dell Software Group, SafeNet, RedSeal Networks, Titus, SecureLink, Bit9, Boole Server, Core Security, NetOptics, Guidance Software, IronKey by imation and Ipswitch File Transfer, will be sharing experiences, best practices and insights with customers and partners during GITEX. “StarLink is committed to keeping the discerning Middle East Enterprise market updated with its most recent technologies.

GITEX 2013 will be a significant opportu-

DHARMENDRA PARMAR, GENERAL MANAGER MARKETING AT FVC FVC has expanded its presence at GITEX 2013 with a larger stand showcasing not only its existing vendor partnerships and solutions but launching some of its more recent additions to its networking portfolio including networking solutions from Cyan and Datwyler and security solutions from Watchful Software. FVC will work with its key vendor partners to showcase its expertise in Unified Communications, Information Security and Advanced Networking.

Dharmendra Parmar, General Manager

STARLINK TO EXHIBIT LATEST SECURITY PORTFOLIO

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VA D S PA C E

NEWS

nity for StarLink to showcase its new line of products, and its strength in solutions for Compliance, Advanced Persistent Threats and Vulnerability Management.

We also aim to reiterate our commitment to our customers and channel partners in the region, and continuously add value to distribution,” said Nidal Othman, Managing Director, StarLink.

LLC said, “Over the last year, Prologix has signed a number of strategic partnerships with vendors such as Anite Finland, Agilent Technologies, Fluke Networks and Digital Lightwave. We are now strongly positioned to be a leader in the field of RF technologies, solutions and services and this is what we want to emphasise through our participation at GITEX.”

PROLOGIX TO DEMONSTRATE RF CAPABILITIES

OPTIMUS LAUNCHES HUAWEI BUNDLE PROMOTION

ADITYA SAHAYA, DIRECTOR- SALES, PROLOGIX LLC Prologix Distribution is set to demonstrate its RF capabilities, particularly in the area of RF testing and measurement, at the upcoming GITEX Technology Week 2013 in Dubai.

The company will exhibit products from over 12 of its vendor partners and will also use the platform as an opportunity to highlight it service capabilities which include test equipment rental, benchmarking, in-building solutions, EMF testing, passive intermodulation testing, network synchronisation audits, transmission planning, professional telecom trainings and IT managed services. The brands that the company will highlight during GITEX are HP, Avaya, Agilent Technologies, Anite NEMO, Digital Lightwave, Empirix, Fluke, Trango Systems, Redline, Aztech and Totolink.

Aditya Sahaya, Director- Sales, Prologix

NEHUL GORADIA, VICE PRESIDENT, CHANNEL & ALLIANCES, OPTIMUS TECHNOLOGY AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS. Optimus Technology and Telecommunications along with Huawei announced the launch of exciting bundles with Huawei’s latest IP Telephony products for channel partners across the GCC region and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. As part of the promotion, Optimus and Huawei will offer two product bundles – Huawei eSpace U1910 and Huawei eSpace EGW 1530A at the most competitive pricing with rebates and other value-added services for partners including marketing, advertising and sales support. Also available in both bundles are the colour screen Huawei eSpace 7910 IP Phones.

It provides end–to-end user experience and support for seamless integration with Unified Communications services.

“We are pleased to announce our

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special Huawei bundled promotion for our channel at amazing prices and with lots of benefits. Huawei’s eSpace UCC products are quick and easy-to-deploy world class products, which offer customers low TCO, flexibility, mobility and end-to-end security in addition to investment protection as it offers customers multivendor rationalization with open standards. By offering our channel a comprehensive Huawei eSpace UCC bundle, we want to encourage them to sell more and at competitive rates.

This promotion would add tremendous value to our partners, where they can earn extra and very attractive rebates while purchasing Huawei IP telephony products, advertisement support, marketing and sales support according to the volumes they buy. We have already begun receiving great response from the market just a few days into this promotion,” said Nehul Goradia, Vice President, Channel & Alliances, Optimus Technology and Telecommunications.

HELP AG LAUNCHES SECURITY ANALYSIS DIVISION

STEPHAN BERNER, MANAGING DIRECTOR AT HELP AG Help AG has launched a Security Analysis division and offering its enterprise customers a cloud-based Co-ordinated Threat Mitigation (CTM) service. The announcement regarding the new capabilities was

made at the company’s recently concluded Security Spotlight Forum (SSF) events that were held in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, 24-26 September, 2013.

“Today’s cyber threats have evolved to a stage where traditional security technologies and procedures are no longer effective in pre-empting malicious attacks or mitigating losses from such acts.

CTM is a central intelligence and control environment solution which enables early detection and mitigation of attacks on customer environments. Currently we will deliver application level DDOS mitigation and anti-defacement services to our customers and we are confident of seeing a growing uptake of these solutions across the region,” said Stephan Berner, Managing Director at Help AG. The company also launched its Security Analysis division headed by Khaled Al Hawasli, a long standing senior staff member who formerly worked with the Dubai Police. This division augments Help AG’s technical capabilities and will offer customers five new services which are imperative to uncovering security vulnerabilities that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Al Hawasli listed these capabilities as: Security Review; Penetration Testing; Configuration Architecture Review; Vulnerability Assessment (including mobile platforms) and Social Engineering and Exploitation.

While other organizations in the region do offer penetration testing and vulnerability assessment, Khaled Al Hawasli believes Help AG has a definite advantage in this field. He said, “We will leverage our extensive technical expertise to ensure that our customers can best secure their

infrastructures and reap the maximum benefits of their IT investments.”

LOGICOM APPOINTS DIRECTOR OF SALES & MARKETING

MICHAEL PAPAERACLEOUS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF DISTRIBUTION AT LOGICOM Logicom announced the appointment of Nicholas Argyrides as Director of Sales and Marketing. Argyrides will be responsible for driving sales at Logicom in the EMEA region and leading the marketing strategy of the Group’s distribution arm.

He has over ten years’ experience in IT Distribution. His professional career includes an impressive array of leadership roles within the United States, Europe and the Middle East. His experience with Logicom dates from 2001 where he took the role of Project Fulfillment Manager/ Product Manager at the company’s headquarters in Nicosia, Cyprus. He has also served as General Manager of Logicom Jordan and Logicom Dubai.

Michael Papaeracleous, Executive Director of Distribution at Logicom said, “Nicholas’ wealth of experience in IT Distribution will be an invaluable asset to Logicom. I am confident that together, we will continue to successfully execute our customer-focused strategies and to introduce initiatives for the expansion of our business.”

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T O P P L AY E R S

D E TA I L E S

JUMBO IT DISTRIBUTION SUPRA HOUSE, UMM HUREIR, PO BOX 3426, DUBAI WWW.JUMBOCORP.COM TEL: +971 4 336 7999 FDC INTERNATIONAL FZE 5TH FLOOR, FUJAIRAH BUILDING, KHALID BIN WALID ROAD, PO BOX 17453, DUBAI, UAE WWW.FDCINTERNATIONAL.COM TEL: +971 4 397 8035

ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS POUYA PARSAFAR T +971 4 454 2708 EMAIL: POUYA@ESYSTEMS. COM DUBAI INTERNET CITY, BUSINESS CENTRAL TOWERS, UNIT 1302-B, P.O. BOX 503043, DUBAI, U.A.E.

REDINGTON GULF KHALED BIN WALED STREET PO BOX 17266 DUBAI, UAE T + 971 4 3734792 M + 971 56 6815594 F + 971 4 3591470 WWW.REDINGTONGULF.COM

DIMENSION DATA MIDDLE EAST LLC OFFICE 411, ALPHA BUILDING, DUBAI INTERNET CITY, DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 971-4-433-4934

EMITAC DISTRIBUTION LLC PO BOX 8391, DUBAI, UAE WWW.EMITAC.AE TEL: +971 4 282 7577 ALMASA IT DISTRIBUTION FZCO PO BOX 30166, DUBAI, UAE WWW.ALMASA.COM TEL: +971 4 3063 100

WIPRO UAE CERT TECHNOLOGY PARK ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: +971 2 4048768

APTEC HOLDINGS LIMITED PO BOX 33550, DUBAI INTERNET CITY, DUBAI, UAE WWW.APTECONLINE.COM TEL: +971 4 3697 111

HOW TO REACH THEM Handbook 04.indd 37

Eyad_Aleriksousi@mindware.ae

WESTCON ME JAFZA SHOWROOM SRA109 P.O. BOX 17124, T + 971 4 8120493 T +971 55 9567874 F + 971 4 8839353 WWW.WESTCONME.COM MINDWARE FZ LLC CAYAN BUSINESS CENTRE, 10TH FLOOR, TECOM AREA, AL BARSHA, DUBAI, U.A.E. CONTACT PERSON: EYAD AL-ERIKSOUSI PO BOX 55609, TEL: +971 4 4500 600 FAX +971 4 4500 678

COMTRONIX LLC UMM HURAIR, OLD ZABEEL ROAD, PO BOX 35199, DUBAI WWW.COMTRONIX.AE TEL: +971 4 335 3366 AL YOUSUF DIGITAL LLC PO BOX 25, RA13, JEBEL ALI FREE ZONE, DUBAI WWW.ALYOUSUFDIGITAL.COM TEL: +971 4 881 7277 ESYS TECHNOLOGIES FZE PO BOX 18272, JEBEL ALI FREE ZONE, DUBAI, UAE WWW.ESYSGLOBAL.COM/AE TEL: +971 4 883 9292 EMPA MIDDLE EAST FZCO JEBEL ALI FREE ZONE, SOUTH, PLOT NUMBER S-10108 WWW.EMPA-ME.COM TEL: +971 4 8039 500 ASBIS MIDDLE EAST FZCO PO BOX 17706, WAREHOUSE

VA-1, JEBEL ALI FREE ZONE, DUBAI, UAE WWW.ASBISME.AE TEL: +971 4 883 5929 GOLDEN SYSTEMS ELECTRONICS FZCO PO BOX 111282, DUBAI, UAE WWW.GSE.AE TEL: +971 4 397 2345 MTC FZCO PLOTMO 0543, JEBEL ALI FREE ZONE, DUBAI WWW.MTCDUBAI.COM TEL: +971 4 8037 333 LOGICOM DUBAI LLC OFFICE 307, AL KIFAF COMMERCIAL OFFICE BUILDING TRADE CENTRE ROAD, PO BOX 54328, DUBAI WWW.LGCOM.NET TEL: +971 4 507 8888 STORIT DISTRIBUTION FZCO JEBEL ALI FREE ZONE DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES P.O. BOX: 17417 TEL: +97148819690 FAX: +97148871637 HTTP://WWW.STORIT.AE COMPUTERLINKS FZCO PO BOX 341027, OFFICE 609 DUBAI SILICON OASIS DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES +971 4 501 5814 INFO-AE@COMPUTERLINKS.AE HTTP://WWW.COMPUTERLINKS. AE NABS INTEGRATED TECHNICAL SERVICES ABU DHABI, AIRPORT ROAD, JVC SHOW ROOM BUILDING ABU DHABI, 25958 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 971 262 16618 INJAZAT DATA SYSTEMS MOHMAED BIN ZAYED CITY PO BOX: 8230

ABU DHABI, 8230 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 00971-2-6992700 BULWARK TECHNOLOGIES LLC P.O. BOX 48739, OFFICE NO: 910, IT PLAZA DUBAI SILICON OASIS DUBAI, UAE PHONE NO: +971 4 326 2722 FAX NO: + 971 4 326 3315 STARLINK P.O. BOX 99580, OFFICE 1403, TIFFANY TOWERS – JLT SHEIKH ZAYED ROAD, DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. EMAIL: INFO@STARLINKME.NET TEL: +971 4 4473552 FAX: +971 4 4473551 ALPHA DATA LLC P.O.BOX 8829, DUBAI U.A.E EASA SALEH AL GURG BLDG OPP. KANOO BLDG., BUR DUBAI DUBAI, 8829 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 971-4-4255955

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COMPUTER NETWORK SYSTEMS ABU DHABI FUND BUILDING TOURIST CLUB AREA PO BOX 46144 ABU DHABI, 46144 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 0097126442888 PROLOGIX DISTRIBUTION OFFICE# 1602 Y CLUSTER SWISS TOWER JUMEIRAH LAKE TOWERS (JLT) DUBAI, UAE TEL : +971 4 3626218 FAX: +971 4 3683039 INTELLIGENT BUSINESS TECHNOLOGIES LLC. M 26, JOUD CENTER SHEIKH ZAYED ROAD DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES.

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D E TA I L E S

EMAIL ID: INFO@IBTEVOLVE.COM WEBSITE: WWW.IBTEVOLVE.COM PHONE: +971 (0)2 505 5555 GULF BUSINESS MACHINES 4X4, MOTORS BUILDING AIR PORT ROAD AL GARHOUD DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: +97142828398 INTERTEC SYSTEMS LLC AL DANA BUILDING AL RIGGA STREET DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 971-4-2221338

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C4 ADVANCED SOLUTIONS PO BOX 128627 ABU DHABI, 128627 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 971-26676720 SITE TECHNOLOGY LTD. P.O. BOX 44942 ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: +971 2 6346900 BIOS ME P.O.BOX 74069, DUBAI 16TH FLOOR, EMAAR BOULEVARD PLAZA 1 DOWNTOWN DUBAI DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 971 4 3789000 ITQAN-ALBAWARDI GROUP ABDULLA BIN DARWISH BLDG. SALAM STREET ABU DHABI ABU DHABI, 51526 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 971 2 6767666 EMIRCOM 702, AL NUWAIS TOWER

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AL ABERAH ELECTRICAL & MECHANCIAL WORKS EST KHALIFA STREET SHAMS BOUTIQUE BUILDING ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 0097126717373 INTERNATIONAL TURNKEY SYSTEMS NATIONAL BANK OF UMM ALQAIWAIN BLDGBUR DUBAI DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 0097143972220 SECURETECH LLC POBOX73696 ABU DHABI UAE ABU DHABI UAE, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 0097124121000 ELINEAR SOLUTIONS MIDDLE EAST FZ LLC DUBAI INTERNET CITY BUILDING 13, OFFICE 111 P.O. BOX 500216 DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 971-43900290 CISNET GLOBAL LLC PO BOX 47107 DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: +971-4-3277371 KIRAN INTERNATIONAL LEVEL 41, EMIRATES TOWER, SHEIKH ZAYED ROAD DUBAI, 112597 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 0097143490139 SIGMA TECHNOLOGIES LLC PO BOX 126346 DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

AMERICANA COMPUTER SYSTEM L.L.C. P O BOX 29212 ABU DHABI, N/A UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 971 2 6270700 GENOME TECHONOLOGY CONSULTANTS LLC AL MAKHAWI BUILDING 105B DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: +97150-7356091 SARIYA COMPANY LTD. AL KHALTHAM COMMERCIAL CENTER IBN KHALDOON STREET 1488 - DAMMAM, SAUDI ARABIA WWW.SARIYA-IT.COM PHONE: +966 3 843 5125 FAX: +966 3 843 5124 COMGUARD FZ-LLC OFFICE 312, BUILDING 12, DUBAI INTERNET CITY, P.O.BOX: 500182, DUBAI, U.A.E PHONE: +971 4 391 64 00 FAX: +971 4 391 68 67 JURASSIC TECHNOLOGIES (L.L.C.) DUBAI DUBAI UAE, NONE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: +971 4 3468800

ATES Phone: +97126355670 ATLAS.TELEC0M 4TH AL-MAROUR STREET, 30888, ABUDHABI ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 97146059100 GERAB SYSTEM P.O. BOX 17719 DUBAI, NONE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 971 56 171 5357 JAVELIN COMMUNICATIONS FZ LLC BUILDING 3 DUBAI INTERNET CITY 112 DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: +97143910860 AL FUTTAIM PO.BOX.5866 Dubai Festival City DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 971 4 7063176 INT NETLINK TECHNOLOGIES ALKHALEEJ CENTER/BUR-DUBAI DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: +97143515836 ITQAN SALAM STREET ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (AE) HTTP://WWW.ITQAN.AE

CONNECT IT TRADING LLC

P.O.BOX: 114710 DUBAI, +97142686005 GLOBETECH TECHNOLOGIES GPO ROAD, KARAMA DUBAI, 118361 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Phone: 04 3359006 SYSTRIX IT SOLUTION HAMDAN STREET ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIR-

TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS FZ LLC THURAYA TOWER 1, LEVEL 17 SUITE 1704 DUBAI MEDIA CITY UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (AE) TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS FZ LLC BUSINESS CONNEXION EXECUTIVE OFFICE NR 1, DUBAI INTERNET CITY, BUILDING NR 1 DUBAI UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (AE) BUSINESS CONNEXION

MODERN DAR ELSHIFA PHARMACY BUILDING, ELECTRA STREET P O BOX 34895 ABU DHABI UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (AE) HTTP://WWW.EMIRCOM.COM KELWAY UK LTD 2403 SHATHA TOWER DUBAI MEDIA CITY PO BOX 500833, DUBAI, UAE TEL: +971 (0) 4 434 8078 EMIRATES TECHNOLOGY CO. EMITAC P O BOX: 8391 DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES HTTP://WWW.EMITAC-EES.AE PHONE: 04-6058145 ALPHA DATA PROCESSING SERVICES L.L.C. AIRPORT ROAD, P.O.BOX 45384, ABU DHABI, UAE TEL: +971 2 6333644 FAX: +971 2 6211924 / 6392192 TOPAZ PALACE TOWER, OFFICE 2203, DUBAI SILICON OASIS DUBAI, 341248 +97143821414 SMART TECHNOLOGY SERVICES DWC LLC PO BOX 450044 DUBAI LOGESTIC CITY DUBAI 450044 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (AE) ARABIAN TECHNOLOGY & COMMNS SUITE3204, 1 LAKE PLAZA BUILDING,, CLUSTER T, JUMEIRAH LAKE TOWERS,, P.O.BOX 36224 DUBAI, +971 4 4554777 HELPAG MIDDLE EAST - JNACP DUBAI INTERNET CITY ARJAAN OFFICE TOWER 12TH FLOOR, OFFICE 1208

PO BOX 500741 DUBAI, UAE PHONE +971 4 4405666 FAX +971 4 363 6742 BETA INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY L.L.C. HEAD OFFICE P.O.BOX 19085 DUBAI UNITED ARAB EMIRATES TEL. +971-4-2868789 FAX. +971-4-2868443 EMW INC. LIWA HEIGHTS, 37TH FLOOR OFFICES 3707-3708, P.O. BOX 943300 JUMEIRAH LAKE TOWERS DUBAI, UAE MDS UAE HOLDINGS P.O.BOX 7899, GARDEN TOWER KHALIFA ST. ABU DHABI - UAE TEL : 971 (2) 6276354 FAX : 971 (2) 6273399 E-MAIL: MDSAUH@MDSUAE.AE WEBSITE: WWW.MDS.AE ZAHRA TECHNOLOGY LLC P.O. BOX 10239 - AL QUOZ IND ESTATE AL BARSHA DUBAI, PHONE: +971 434 744 22 URL: WWW.ZAHRATECH.COM MIDEAST DATA SYSTEMS/PACC BU AMIN BUILDING, UMM HURIER ROAD, DUBAI +9714 3370070 AGC NETWORKS PTE LIMITED – DUBAI BRANCH EMAAR BUSINESS PARK, BUILDING NO 4, OFF 509, SHEIKH ZAYED ROAD, P.O BOX: 61078 DUBAI, +971529055390 FUTURE TECHNOLOGY L.L.C. P.O. BOX NO .25, OFFICE NO.201, AL SHABIB BUILDING, UMM RAMMOL - RASHIDYA, DUBAI- 25 +97146090800 +97126222368 EXT100

3:37 PM

FAX NO: +9714-3860557

Phone: 971552778063

10/3/13

PHONE NO: +9714-3860110

BEHIND DANA HOTEL (MODERN DAR AL SHIFA PHARMACY BLDG), TCA PO BOX 34895 ABU DHABI, 0 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES PHONE: 971-2-6449088

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