Arabian Computer News - July 2010 by ITP Business Publishing

ARABIAN COMPUTER NEWS

July 2010 Vol. 23 Issue 7

An ITP Technology Publication Licensed by Dubai Media City

ALIGNING BUSINESS AND IT STRATEGIES FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

OUTWARD BOUND HIGH PRIORITY Focus on cost management impacts CIO spending patterns

GUEST RELATIONS How the hospitality sector is embracing the latest applications

GAME CHANGER

Ahmad Bhadir, Head of IT, UAE Football Association

GULF FIRMS SPEND ON PRINTING HARDWARE I DELL UPDATES DATA CENTRE PORTFOLIO I LACK OF SKILLS HARMING ICT SECTOR

Our top 10 tips to guarantee IT outsourcing success

UAE Football Association shoots for enterprise glory with new storage and server infrastructure I SSN 1997- 7700 9 771997 770009

CONTENTS

24 GAME CHANGER The UAE Football Association recently completed an office move and enterprise IT infrastructure upgrade in record time. Mark Sutton reports.

News & Views

Case Study

Comment

5 EDITOR’S LETTER 7 NEWS All the latest IT news in the region including: Hewlett-Packard closes in on new managing director for its Middle East operations; Microsoft Office launched in the Gulf; Dell updates data centre solutions portfolio; hardware disposal concerns are going ignored, warns data erasure specialist; Abu Dhabi eyes up technology cluster; investment in infrastructure pays dividends for Qatar Islamic Bank; EMW achieves Avaya certification; and Netgear targets the Saudi SMB market.

17 An increase in global cybercrime is bringing a new set of challenges that CIOs need to treat seriously, insists Wael Al Kabbany, managing director for BT in the MENA region.

14 WORLD NEWS The latest IT news from around the world including: NetApp and Microsoft make storage pact; Trend Micro moves into cloud storage with humyo acquisition; disaster recovery the major priority for healthcare organisations; and Brocade pips HP ProCurve with new EMEA sales chief.

SECURITY CONSCIOUS VAULT KEEPER

Faced with a need to monitor its ever-expanding network traffic logs for suspicious activity, ADCB turned to security vendor Symantec for managed services.

News Analysis

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HIGH PRIORITY

HOSTING HELP

There has been a lot of talk in the past 18 months about the “state of the IT market” and that subject was top of the agenda at the recent IDC Managers Forum.

Panasonic Middle East turned to eHDF’s managed hosting services to give its IT staff strategic focus and allow the company to concentrate on profit generation.

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CONTENTS

36 GUEST RELATIONS As the travel and tourist industry faces up to some significant challenges, IT managers in the hospitality sector are turning to the latest industry-specific applications and solutions to give their businesses the edge.

Interviews

40 OUTSOURCING TIPS

ADAPTABLE ERP

THE FILE FACTOR

Matt Muldoon, senior director for product marketing at Epicor, explains how the firm’s SOA approach is helping midmarket companies to gain competitive advantage from their ERP systems, and make them greener.

EMEA business development consultant Mark Govan explains how F5 Networks is aiming to boost uptake of its ARX file virtualisation devices as customers look to simplify their data management policies.

50 INSPECTING GADGETS ACN rounds up the latest in executive gadgets, from Motorola’s E400 digital assistant to Nokia’s X5-01 handset. We also take a peek at the new iPhone - not necessarily a classic enterprise device but a phone that packs enough punch to excite technology lovers from shop floor to boardroom level.

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FINANCIAL FOCUS Sean Lee, director of financial services for EMC global verticals, discusses cloud, compliance and other issues facing the banking sector. He also outlines what EMC is bringing to the table in terms of enterprise storage solutions.

52 PROJECT ROUNDUP The latest project announcements including: Egyptian Resorts Company embraces IP-based entertainment services; Intercontinental Hotels Group turns to Avaya for unified communications; Mumtalakat unveils plans to deploy cloud-based unified e-mail management services; Dubai World Trade Centre hires ITWorx to develop new content management system; Qatar Airways strikes a deal to procure communication services; the National Bank of Abu Dhabi deploys Misys solution; and Dubai Municipality invests in EAM software.

56 SECRET CIO Secret CIO finds out what it is like to become invisible as he switches jobs.

EDITOR’S LETTER

CHAIN OF COMMAND A SURVEY CARRIED OUT BY GLOBAL analyst alyst firm Gartner last month revealed something that a lot of CIOs in the Middle East have probably known for quite some time: the CFO is increasingly becoming the top technology investment decision-maker in many organisations. According to Gartner’s latest study on the market, the CFO plays a “vital role” in determining IT investment in 75% of companies, with more IT organisations now reporting to the CFO than the CEO - or any other executive for that matter. So why does it matter? Well, it reinforces just how important it is for the CFO and CIO functions to understand one another, especially in these challenging times. What motivates one doesn’t necessarily motivate the other, but that shouldn’t detract from the

over-arching objectives that companies are striving to achieve. Together, CIOs and CFOs single-handedly possess the opportunity to build an alliance that generates considerable value for their enterprise. Of course, it’s difficult to get away from seeing the CFO as anything but the money man; the guy who gives you the nod to buy those expensive software licenses, or who requests yet another detailed ROI spreadsheet before signing off on that new storage order. As Gartner itself points out, for CIOs to see progress these days, they have to provide their financial counterparts with the appropriate understanding of technology, as well as communicate the business value that can be achieved – all while stressing that it fits within the budget, of course!

With that in mind, there can be few bigger decisions that a CIO or IT manager has to make than those which concern outsourcing, whether it’s a system, service or any other w part of the technology domain. pa Outsourcing has become a way for O companies to improve process efficiency, co while keeping the CFO happy from a costw management perspective – but it is not m something that can ever be taken lightly. so We W felt it was an opportune time to revisit this subject and lay out all the things you th need to bear in mind, whether you are ne considering outsourcing something for the co very first time or simply renegotiating ve existing agreements. ex From nailing down SLAs to favouring core F over context, turn to page 40 to read ACN’s top 10 tips for outsourcing success. Elsewhere in these pages, we spend time with the main IT decision-makers at ADCB, Panasonic and the UAE Football Association to learn how they are overcoming the IT infrastructure challenges that their organisations face, while Imthishan Giado reports from the latest IDC IT Managers’ Forum that took place in Abu Dhabi. Enjoy the issue and, as always, don’t hesitate to contact the ACN editorial desk with your news and views on the market.

Andrew Seymour Group Editor, ITP Technology THE ONLINE HOME OF

EDITOR’S CHOICES NEWS BLACKBERRY BOLD 9700 PRICE DROPS TO AED999 Etisalat slashes the cost of the latest Bold smartphone by more than 50%

NEWS

FEATURES

BICSI PUBLISHES DATA CENTRE STANDARD IT systems association releases latest standard for data centre implementation

OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE Peter Job, CEO of Intergence Systems, explains how companies can get the most from their infrastructure

ANALYSIS & OPINION

Business iPad: ideal tool for mobile contact centres Networks Data movement changing the industry Web Privacy concerns cast a shadow over social media Telecoms Will new UAE policy cut spam marketing? Channel Why channel expansion can be dangerous

MOST COMMENTED ON

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Regional telcos as cloud providers Apple to open UAE office this year BlackBerry Bold price drops Ex-Almasa head joins Logitech LG’s top netbook costs AED4,200

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Al Hosani Computer LLC OfďŹ cial Distributor in the Middle East and West Asia 1703 BelResheed Tower, Buhaira Corniche,Sharjah, UAE Tel. +9716-575-444-3, Fax +9716-575-444-9 www.alhosanime.com, Email: sales@alhosanime.com

NEWS

PEOPLE

DIGITAL DIVIDE AND LACK OF TECH SKILLS HARMING GULF ICT MARKET THE DIGITAL DIVIDE and lack of skilled talent are the main problems plaguing the Gulf’s developing IT industry, according to Shaik Umar, the Middle East centre director for the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore. While both issues threaten to hamper the development of the regional market, he says the challenges are being mirrored across the globe. However, demographics make it more of an issue in the Middle East, Umar suggests. “These two issues are common everywhere but, for some countries in the Middle East it is more prominent because of smaller populations,” said Umar. Shaik Umar was speaking on the sidelines of the 2010 Infocomm Media Business Exchange (imbX ) event in Singapore, which had the attendance of several high-ranking delegations from the ME region. “Many Middle East governments see Singapore as a good partner and collaborator in their own developments. F or this pur-

pose we have MoUs with Q atar, K uwait and Oman. As part of the MoUs we exchange information... and (the MoUs) help us to share Singapore plans that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.” In the UAE, a number of major projects have been assigned to Singaporean companies. Singapore Technologies Electronics (ST Electronics) won an US$8 million contract to provide an advanced taxi fleet management system in Sharjah. The win, which was announced in 2008, is still being implemented, according to Umar. CrimsonLogic, another Singaporean firm, is behind the development of Abu Dhabi’s eJustice programme for the Ministry of Justice that aims to enhance transparency and efficiency. The five-year programme involves developing an integrated platform for easy case filing, legal research, and notary services along with case and document management. A couple of years ago, Singapore-based InfoTrack Solutions merged with Abu

Regional and global industry news

MONTH IN... Numbers

31.8% Umar: Shortage of talent is a problem for the industry.

Dhabi’s CERT Telematics to form CERT InfoTrack Telematics, and their first win involved a US$4 3million government contract with the capital’s Centre of Regulation of Transport. The contract sees the company equipping taxis in Abu Dhabi with a tracking and dispatch device which features detailed maps of the UAE, an electronic metre and a database recording system.

The growth in shipment value of printer sales in the Gulf from Q1 2009 to Q1 2010, according to the latest study from IDC.

94 The number of languages that Microsoft Office 2010 will eventually be available in. It currently supports 10 languages, including Arabic.

500,000 The volume of iPhones sold in the MEA region last year – a figure which has prompted Twofour54 to launch a new fund programme dedicated to Arabic application development on the platform.

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HARDWARE DISPOSAL CONCERNS IGNORED ORGANISATIONS IN THE Middle East are not taking enough care to protect their data at the end of the hardware lifecycle, according to data erasure specialists Blancco. The iFnnish company says that many companies in the region are disposing of old hardware, without ensuring that data is properly removed for drives. Sami Saarinen, regional sales manager for the Middle East, said:“Companies spend an amaz ing amount of money on AV, firewalls, encryption and so on, but at the end of the lifecycle, they are really giving a computer full of data to someone. All that investment on IT security is useless. It happens due to ignorance,” he added.

NEWS

Saarinen says that Blancco is looking to educate regional organisations about its data erasure software, which provides certifiable erasure of data from IT assets at end of lifecycle, or if assets are being reassigned within an organisation. Blancco’s solutions are in use with many government organisations around the world, including NATO, the US Department of Defense and the National Security Testing Lab. They also meet military and intelligence level standards, along with programmes including Japan’s Refurbished Information Technology Equipment Association (REUSE). The software scales up to data centre level, and is capable of handling multiple drives of all

“With this kind of position it takes time to find the right candidate. But we have begun that process and we definitely hope to be able to announce something soon.” - A spokesperson for HP Middle East insists it will leave no stone unturned as it looks to find a replacement for outgoing managing director John Hoonhout.

types. It also creates detailed, authenticated reports to prove erasure of data, which it says is a requirement that is now being added to several compliance standards. Additionally, Blancco has a solution for mobile phones.

“In 2009, end-users adopted an extremely price-sensitive approach and became very wary of suffering dips in their cash flow.” – IDC MEA’s Siamak Rahnama reflects on the reason for a decline in laser printer sales last year.

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NEWS

BITS AND BYTES

PRODUCT

MS OFFICE ARRIVES IN THE GULF ENPI SELECTS MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX PLATFORM Plastics manufacturer Emirates National Plastic Industries (ENPI)has begun a roll out of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009ER P, to help improve its business processes and reduce costs. The deployment will serve 129users across a range of business functions, including finance, supply chain, manufacturing, R ,H payroll and maintenance. The initial stage of the deployment project will include finance, supply chain and basic manufacturing, and is intended to go live by August.

MENA FIRMS FLOUTING SOFTWARE REGULATIONS Two-thirds of companies in the Middle East are putting business operations at risk without adequate systems to manage software licenses and renewals, according to independent research released by Adobe Systems MENA. In a survey of the region’s business executives, Adobe Systems identified that % 7 5 of companies have no standard process for managing software authenticity.

ZAIN JORDAN AND I(TS)2 TEAM UP FOR CO-BRANDED MSS aZin oJrdan and I(TS)2 have created a strategic alliance to deliver managed security services to aZin’s enterprise customers. aZin will co-brand I(TS)2’s MSS, and will leverage I(TS)2’s Security Operation Centre in Amman to deliver services to customers.

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MICROSOFT HAS LAUNCHED Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 in the Gulf region. Retail copies of the software suite are already available in retail stores. “Microsoft’s commitment to innovation has empowered people to be more productive and creative and has helped transform the way they work,” said Elias Tabet, business and marketing director at Microsoft Gulf. “As more and more people across the Gulf region embrace mobile applications and social networking tools to share information and stay connected, Office 2010 offers them greater buying choice, making it easier than ever before to unlock the power of

Office on new and existing PCs,” added Tabet. There are multiple versions of Office 2010, including Office Home, Student 2010, Office Home & Business 2010 and Office Professional 2010. Microsoft is also offering Office Mobile 2010 from its Windows Phone Marketplace; this software suite is compatible with all Windows Mobile 6.5 phones. Microsoft is also working with handheld giant Nokia and is set to offer its Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Sharepoint applications and services on Nokia’s E series business phones. The applications could later be made available on other Nokia devices.

Office 10 is available in Arabic. Microsoft Office 2010 is available in 10 languages, including Arabic. Besides retail stores Office 2010 can be purchased with desktops and laptops from international PC makers including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.

PRODUCT

DELL UPDATES PORTFOLIO

ABU DHABI EYES UP TECHNOLOGY CLUSTER

DELL HAS ANNOUNCED A NEW release of storage, networking and server hardware, plus services and systems management solutions focused on data centres. The new product offerings are intended to enable businesses to add open-standard systems to extend existing data centres or for new deployments, with pre-configured solutions allowing companies to easily deploy virtualisation solutions. The launch includes new Dell EqualLogic storage products, Dell PowerConnect networking solutions and Dell PowerEdge blade servers, new systems management updates and new storage, virtualisation and support services. “Organisations benefit from Dell’s approach to open, capable and affordable technologies that preserve choice and free up budgets for innovation and today we are introducing several new product and solution offerings to reinforce that direction,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president for the enterprise product group at Dell. “With new solutions for virtualisation management, new innovations in our server and storage product lines and expanded service offerings, our customers can utilise Dell for the benefits of a

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY Investment Company (ATIC), majority stakeholder of Globalfoundries, plans to set up a technology cluster in Abu Dhabi, furthering its vision of becoming a leader in the global semiconductor industry. The three square kilometer site close to the Abu Dhabi International Airport aims to be the Middle Eastern hub of ATIC’s global technology and manufacturing network. According to Ibrahim Ajami, CEO of ATIC, creating an advanced technology cluster is the next step towards the vision of making Abu Dhabi a leader in the semiconductor industry. Globalfoundries was formed off the microprocessor manufacturing business of AMD in 2007, with ATIC investing US$2.1 billion for a 55.6% stake in Globalfoundries. The deal was later renegotiated to give it 65.8% of the company. The company is also focusing on the Middle East region, promising to share its wealth of expertise in cluster creation and “putting a significant technology and manufacturing presence in the region long term.”

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Anderson: Dell offers choice. converged architecture - dynamic workload allocation, faster time to deployment, seamless management - but they don’t want to be locked into a closed technology stack,” he added. Among the new launches are Dell EqualLogic and PowerVault storage platforms, and PowerVault systems for SMBs. Blade and rack PowerEdge servers, optimised for virtualisation, and updates to the LifeCycle Controller, Chassis Management Controller and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller systems management solutions are also included. The launch encompasses new networking solutions and PowerConnect B-series chassis switches, produced through OEM agreements with Juniper and Brocade respectively.

NEWS

BITS AND BYTES

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INVESTMENT IN INFRASTRUCTURE PAYS DIVIDENDS FOR QATAR ISLAMIC BANK ORACLE RELEASES LATEST PRIMAVERA SOLUTION Oracle has announced the availability of its Primavera P6 Analytics solution, which it insists will help organisations obtain up-to-the-minute information about their project portfolios, and in turn make better project investment decisions. Primavera P6 Analytics is a business intelligence solution that enables organisations to identify issues and uncover trends to reveal valuable insights into project and programme performance.

SUCCESS LIES IN CUTTING SHARE OF SECURITY SPEND While security risks are not going away for companies, efficient and secure enterprises will actually safely reduce the share of security spending by between 3% and 6% of their overall IT budgets through 2011, suggests Gartner. It claims firms with very mature and updated security programmes will be able to show even greater efficiencies.

TRIPP LITE PROVIDES DETAILS OF LATEST SOFTWARE EDITION Tripp Lite has launched the latest version of its ‘PowerAlert’ power management software – the first to offer USB communication protocols for Linux users in the Middle East. Compatible with Linux’s Fedora 8 and OpenSUSE 11.0, the software now allows users of the operating system to monitor power conditions.

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QATAR ISLAMIC BANK (QIB), the first Islamic bank in Qatar, has qualified for ISO 27001:2005 certification in relation to its electronic banking. The bank was awarded the certification after assessment by TUV, which looked at standards, procedures and compliance. Salah Jaidah, CEO of QIB said that the ISO standard was a logical step to build on three years of investment by QIB in new banking systems and technology. “Receiving this ISO certification ensures that the development of QIB’s banking techniques and constant upgrading of information technology, which is the backbone of the bank’s services and administration, becomes our strategic priority,” said Jaidah. QIB worked with strategic security partner, Paramount Computer Systems, to conduct a detailed

risk assessment before ISO testing, with elements such as intrusion testing and simulated hacking attempts, and studies of how employees across sites had access to physical locations such as the main technology centre back up locations, as well as access to core systems. Paramount then developed and enhanced the bank’s policies and procedures to improve security. Hammad Al Zamli, assistant general manager of the operations and IT group, commented: “The ISO 27001 certification is the result of establishing the Information Systems and Technology Centre in 2008, which is equipped with all high-end technical specifications such as operating systems, surveillance systems, security and protection systems. All this provides high performance and capabilities with non-stop, continuous operations.”

Kurup: Certification endorses the quality of QIB’s IT environment Premchand Kurup, CEO at Paramount Computer Systems, said: “The ISO 27001 certification assures QIB’s customers, associates and stakeholders that it now owns very high-end technical systems and an excellent IT environment that provides the highest level of banking information security as well as enhanced banking services.”

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JORDANIAN ICT MINISTRY TEAMS UP WITH INDUSTRY THE JORDANIAN MINISTRY OF Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and representatives of the IT industry have visited universities based in southern Jordan to build greater cooperation between the IT industry and academia. His Excellency Minister of ICT, Marwan Juma, was joined by members of the Information and Technology Association in Jordan (Intaj), and Eskadenia Software, along with other companies, to meet senior academic staff at Al Hussein Bil Talal University in Ma’an and Al Tafila Technical University. The visit was intended to encourage co-operation, particularly with a view to aligning graduates’ needs with the industry’s human resource requirements. Topics that were discussed included the need to

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update computer labs at the universities and to introduce more computers to students at an earlier age; provision of internet coverage for universities and local communities, and the need for non-technical skills courses in university curricula. Doha Abdelkhaleq of Eskadenia Software commented: “This site visit has indeed strengthened our belief in the high quality of the academic and specialised levels of these universities; I was pleased to know that females make up 60% of the graduates of Al Hussein Bil Talal University in Ma’an. The universities have committed to provide us with the names of pioneering students to open for them training and job opportunities in early stages through easy to use communication mechanisms set by the ministry.”

MENA IP TRAFFIC TO GROW 30% PER YEAR BUSINESS-BASED IP COMPUTER traffic in the Middle East and North Africa will grow at an average annual rate of 30% until 2014, a new global study has predicted. The ‘Visual Networking Index Forecast 2009-2014’ by global networking experts Cisco, said that while global business IP traffic was expected to grow at an average rate of 21%, traffic in the Middle East and North Africa will show the fastest growth and will surge by 30% a year until 2014. Overall, MENA IP traffic will reach one exabyte per month and should see almost seven-fold growth by 2014. Monthly internet traffic is expected to generate the average equivalent of 182m DVDs worth of traffic, the report added. The MENA region is also forecast to have the strongest mobile data traffic growth of any region, with an average growth rate of 133% per annum until 2014.

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BITS AND BYTES

GULF BUSINESSES BEGIN TO BUY PRINTERS AGAIN THE GULF REGION’S HARDCOPY peripherals market is showing signs of recovery, according to IDC, after suffering badly in 2009. The latest report from the analyst’s Gulf Quarterly Hardcopy Peripherals Tracker showed 31.8% growth in shipment value from Q1 2009 compared to Q1 2010, although volume of shipments was down 4.4%. IDC forecasts that the market will grow 5.3% year-on-year for 2010 as a whole, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar all recording improvements in terms of overall unit shipments. “The market’s volume remained relatively unchanged year on year, but the high growth in value was due to a strong surge in shipments of laser devices,” said

Siamak Rahnama, a research analyst with IDC Middle East, Africa and Turkey. “In 2009, end-users adopted an extremely price-sensitive approach and became very wary of suffering dips in their cash flow, which resulted in a drastic reduction in their expenditure levels on laser devices. As the region stabilises, a sense of normality has returned to the market, reinvigorating HCP sales, especially in the laser segment.” Rahnama warned that while growth would return, it would not be to the rates of previous years, and vendors would have to develop more services and a broader focus on vertical sectors. “The UAE has set off on its path to recovery, and we expect the market to perform much better

Recovery: The Gulf printer market is growing in shipment value. than in 2009. That said, a return to the phenomenal growth rates experienced before the economic crisis hit is not expected,” Rahnama said. “Vendors must diversify their vertical focus during 2010 and beyond, especially as the previously big-spending real estate and construction sectors were heavily impacted by the crisis,” added Rahnama. “They also need to develop their printing services strategies, placing a special focus on the provision of managed print services.”

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EMW’S AVAYA FIRST CONVERGED COMMUNICATIONS specialist EMW ME has become the first company in the Middle East to gain Avaya’s Service Expert Certification. EMW is the only company in the region to hold the certification, which recognises the company’s ability to deliver set standards of service, at present. To gain the certification, EMW had to meet set standards of skills and qualifications needed to deliver the full range of implementation and support services to its Avaya customers. Serjios El-Hage, CEO of EMW ME, commented: “We are very proud to have received this prestigious award, which recognises and honours our technical expertise, agility and ability to deliver solutions that meet and exceed our customers’ expectations in terms of performance, reliability and cost of ownership. Most of the projects completed by us are very complex and challenging and we are happy to say that our success rate has been 100% with no liabilities whatsoever.”

HEWLETT-PACKARD CLOSES IN ON NEW REGIONAL CHIEF HEWLETT-PACKARD HAS begun the process of identifying candidates to take over from John Hoonhout as managing director and technology solutions lead for the Middle East. Hoonhout recently left the company after two and a half years at the helm, spurring HP to appoint regional operations manager, Mohamed Itani, as acting managing director. HP would not comment on whether Itani was in the frame to get the job permanently, except to say that it is looking at both internal and external candidates. A spokesperson for the company said it had not set a timeframe on making a decision: “With this kind of position it takes time to find the right candidate. But we have begun that process and we definitely hope to be able to announce something soon.” Part of the managing director’s role at HP involves overseeing the company’s technology solu-

tions business. That responsibility is currently being handled by Fawwaz Qadan, HP’s enterprise and services director for the Middle East region. Hoonhout’s departure comes on the back of what was arguably HP’s toughest year in the region as the global economic recession led to reduced spending on enterprise infrastructure and computing equipment. According to HP, Hoonhout has begun a new venture, although it did not say where. “John decided to pursue a new opportunity outside of HP and we wish him the best of luck as he has been around HP since 1984. We thank him for his contribution during his leadership of the Middle East,” said the company’s spokesperson. Hoonhout succeeded Joseph Hanania when he was appointed managing director back in September 2007. Prior to that he ran the US-based company’s services operation in the region.

NETGEAR SETS SIGHTS ON SAUDI ENTERPRISES Netgear is eyeing a 10% growth in Saudi Arabia this year due to an anticipated increase in SME activity. In line with this, the company is planning to roll out an awareness campaign in KSA. Netgear’s regional boss, Ahmad Zeidan, said: “Saudi Arabia’s growing population and youthful demographic, rising PC penetration and per capita IT spend rates and an SMB sector that is increasingly turning to technologically-advanced networking products to enhance their business processes make the Kingdom a very important market for us.”

SONICWALL BOLSTERS SECURITY PORTFOLIO SonicWall has launched its e-mail security appliance (ESA) 3300 and ESA 4300, which it claims will bring market-leading high performance, highly scalable and cost-effective e-mail security to organisations.

EGYPTIAN IT SALES SET TO REACH NEW HIGH IT spending in Egypt is set to reach US$ 2.1 billion by 2014, making it one of the fastest growing IT economies in the world. Q1 data from BMI states that Egyptian IT spend will grow from US$1.3 billion at a CAGR of 12% due to the economic recovery, higher incomes and new technology upgrade cycles.

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CA FORMS NEW VENTURE FOR MIDDLE EAST WITH MIDIS GROUP CA HAS ANNOUNCED THAT it has shifted its operating model for the Middle East to a new strategic partnership with UAE-based Midis Group (formerly the MDS Group). The new venture - CA MENA - will be the sole representative of CA Technologies in the Middle East, Levant, North Africa and Pakistan. CA MENA will have access to the full range of CA solutions, and its staff will have the same training as CA Technologies, and the relationship with the customer should be entirely transparent, according to Gilbert Lacroix, senior vice president for EMEA at CA. “For customers it is totally transparent, they will deal with CA MENA instead of what was CA Arabia. The interesting thing for us is instantly we have a presence in every Arab country,” he said.

The new partnership builds on the existing, five-year relationship between Midis and CA, with the majority of CA Arabia staff transferring to CA MENA, while a small group of technical staff has set up its own operation in Lebanon, which will partner with CA MENA, confirms Lacroix. Lacroix said that the operating model was not new to CA, having set up a similar model to serve southern and eastern Africa, fourteen months ago. This model has allowed the company to grow its business in the region, he said, with similar expectations for CA MENA based on Midis Group’s strong presence in the region. Lacroix said that the company decided to change to the new model, instead of its previous indirect approach, to allow it to better address

Lacroix: CA now has presence in every Arab country. the region, particularly with reach into all countries, after facing difficulties with some of its local partners. “We had a choice, do we want to invest in people and actually put people in every country, and make a very intensive investment in dollars and time; or do we want to find one local company or group who can help us to achieve that,” he said.

PRODUCT

WINSOFT RELEASES TASMEEM 5 ARABIC ADD-ON TOOLS WINSOFT INTERNATIONAL has announced the release of its Tasmeem 5 Arabic calligraphy tools for Adobe InDesign. The latest edition of the tool set, which the company says is compatible with the newly released Adobe InDesign CS5 Middle Eastern version, has been designed to enable professional Arabic typography and design page layout in the popular DTP application. Tasmeem 5 comes in two version: a Dubai Pack, which features a mix of modern, graphic fonts and traditional fonts; and a Cairo Pack, which is more focused on classical Arabic typography. Users can access English or French menus according to the version installed, and the solution also

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allows designers to use any Opentype font along with their installed Tasmeem fonts, while the text remains editable and searchable. The application also includes word and text shaping presets, and tools to form rings, catchwords and special Tasmeem characters. “Tasmeem 5 is a continuation of our work to express the refinement of Arabic script in digital documents,” said Kamel Gaddas, the chief executive officer for WinSoft. Arabic speaker and graphic designer, Samar Makaron, commented: “I think WinSoft International has done a lot for Arabic designers in the sense that it adapted high-tech digital products for us and made them relevant for the script, the cul-

Gaddas: Tasmeem 5 will boost the Arabic design industry.

ture and the medium of design. It allowed contemporary Arab designers to produce products as sophisticated as the rest of the world, by adapting the tools to their needs. The more I work with Tasmeem, the more I realise how useful it is; it is kind of like working with a calligrapher who will change the text according to the designer’s needs,” he added.

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UAE-BASED TECHNOLOGY PROVIDER PREPARES FOR CHANGE IN STRUCTURE EACH OF THE FOUR MAIN business units that comprise the Emitac Group will be converted into separate legal entities with complete operational autonomy by the end of this year, the company’s group executive director has confirmed. The reorganisation is designed to leave each unit (IT distribution, enterprise solutions, mobile solutions and healthcare) with a complete management, financial and commercial business structure, and therefore the operational flexibility to go to market as independent businesses. Emitac plans to put a shared services concept in place to address the common functions of corporate marketing, human resources and IT, as well as the

book-keeping aspect of financial accounting, but aside from those each unit will be responsible for their own strategy. The move will cap an initiative that Emitac first embarked on three years ago when it consolidated 17 existing major revenue streams into the four business units that exist now. In April last year it then took the step of appointing respective CEOs for each of those businesses. “We have started the legal aspect [of separation] and we are completely revamping our ERP,” explained Balall Yaqub, group executive director at Emitac Group. “We have just signed up with Oracle and that’s a project which is already under implementation. The shared services

concept has already been agreed to, so as soon as the Oracle ERP is in place we will start implementing that,” he said. Yaqub said he expected the changes to Yaqub: Each business unit is established in the market. be finished by the end of the year and that they were not The new structure is not dependent on the performance thought to involve any change of each unit. in ownership details. UAE-based “Each of these units now has a Emitac, which is a major Acer very long history of being estab- and Hewlett-Packard partner lished - and a very successful his- and the regional distributor for tory - so I think the business model RIM, is part of the Bukhatir and is tried and tested,” he said. Ghobash Group of Industries.

PRODUCT

ENTERPRISES NEED TO GET UP TO SPEED WITH SOA DYNAMICS

FUND AIMS TO BOLSTER ARABIC MOBILE DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

3I INFOTECH believes enterprises in the Middle East region need to pay more attention to software oriented architecture (SOA) if they wish to stay ahead of the technology curve. The software company has been helping customers migrate to SOA Narayan: Enterprises in the Middle East need to attach more importance to systems architecture. environments and address some of the building blocks, such as identity ness module and enterprises enabled SOA and governance. should attach more importance 3i Infotech claims Middle East to their systems architecture businesses are pursuing SOA and while facilitating alignment,” insists that large-scale adoption said V Narayan, vice-president is expected in the next 18 months and regional head for the Middle to two years for sectors such as East at 3i Infotech. insurance, banking, and tele“Companies today need to coms, as well as manufacturing. adapt immediately to changing “SOA is a major shift in tech- market conditions and be more nology that has the potential to alert to meet the continuously make a huge impact on a busi- growing demands of businesses.”

TWOFOUR54 HAS LAUNCHED a new fund programme dedicated to Arabic application development on the Apple iPhone platform in a bid to nurture a strong mobile developer community in the region. AppsArabia, by twofour54’s business arm ibtikar, will invest in the most promising ideas for applications on the Apple iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. “There’s a great talent pool in the region. Part of our role is to help develop that talent and provide the right set of support mechanisms, be that mentoring and industry expertise, that allows them to fulfil that potential,” said Wayne Borg, COO at twofour54. “We’re hoping we’ll unearth some entrepreneurial developers very soon.” David Ashford, general manager of AppsArabia, says that AppsArabia’s focus on the iPhone OS platform is a matter of ‘prioritisation’ considering

Borg: We want to provide support mechanisms for developers. the appetite of the regional market. “We know that nearly half a million iPhone units were sold in the Middle East and African regions in 2009, which is over a 1,300% increase on the year before,” said Ashford. “It’s about prioritisation and clearly it’s very sensible to focus on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad because the Apple ecosystem has proven itself as a commercially viable marketplace and, as we’re seeing the devices grow very heavily here, it’s something we want to harness.”

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WORLD NEWS

BITS AND BYTES INTEL REVEALS PLANS FOR ATOM PROCESSOR FAMILY Intel has revealed the first set of details of its next-generation Atom platform, codenamed ‘Oak Trail’. The platform is said to deliver as much as a 50% reduction in average power consumption and has been designed specifically for tablet machines and extremely thin netbooks. Products based on Oak Trail are scheduled to become available to Intel customers in early 2011.

PERSONNEL CHANGES AT SECURITY VENDOR MCAFEE Security software vendor McAfee has selected Christopher Brennan as the man to run its business in the Middle East and a number of emerging markets in the EMEA region. As VP for emerging markets at McAfee, his territory will include Russia, MEA, Greece and Turkey. Brennan is well-versed in the challenges of driving regional software sales from his time as Adobe’s head of Eastern Europe and MEA.

MOTOROLA MOBILISES THE WORKFORCE WITH ES400 The Enterprise Mobility Solutions division of Motorola has unveiled the newest addition to its mobile computing portfolio - the ES400 global enterprise digital assistant (EDA). The ES400’s integrated voice and data capabilities unleash the full potential of mobile professionals by empowering them with the information they need to transform operations, increase enterprise profitability and complete their jobs remotely.

TECHNOLOGY

NETAPP AND MICROSOFT MAKE PACT NETAPP HAS ANNOUNCED tight integration of its storage solutions with Microsoft technology, which it says will give customers easier management of data centres and cloud computing. The integration builds on the companies’ three-year strategic alliance, announced in December last year, and will allow Microsoft customers to use Microsoft System Centre for administration of NetApp solutions. The technology integration includes a new management pack from NetApp based on Microsoft’s extensible management framework, that enables Microsoft customers to manage NetApp storage efficiency technologies, plus basic self-healing capabilities with Microsoft System Centre Virtual Machine Manager. NetApp

Rogers: Partnership centres on delivering a unified architecture.

ApplianceWatch PRO 2.1 includes new PRO Tips that provide granular control and include auto remediation for common storage utilisation, replication, and configuration issues that can affect Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). In addition, Microsoft customers

can now create automated reports, troubleshoot storage issues, and view mapping of storage to individual VMs via Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager. “As part of our strategic alliance, NetApp and Microsoft continue to deliver on our promise to help customers transform their data centres to achieve greater efficiencies, increase agility, and respond faster to changing business needs,” said Patrick Rogers, VP of products, alliances, and solutions marketing at NetApp. “Our joint vision with Microsoft centres on delivering a unified architecture for customers to design and build highly efficient, virtualised, and dynamic data centres to enable enterprises, integrators and service providers to deliver IT as a service.”

CORPORATE

HUMYO BUY TAKES TREND INTO ONLINE STORAGE TREND MICRO IS MOVING into cloud storage, with the purchase of UK-based online storage provider humyo. Trend has bought the storage specialist, which currently caters for 700,000 users and 350 million files, for an undisclosed amount in order to be able to tap into the growing market for online storage and back-up. IDC estimates the market for online storage will grow by 25% between 2009 to 2011, and Trend believes that humyo’s consumer and small business offering will be a good fit with its existing data protection range. “humyo’s superior data synchronisation tech-

Chen: humyo’s consumer technology is a good fit with Trend Micro’s portfolio.

nology - which allows multiple devices including PCs, Macs and smartphones to automatically back up to a common folder in the

cloud so that consumer users can easily access their data from whatever device they have in hand - is a clear differentiator that helps to ensure that users’ files are always safe and secure as well as effortlessly organised,” stated Trend CEO Eva Chen. “Their online storage - basically a cloud technology - fits into our strategy of providing security from and for the cloud,” she said. The humyo storage solution is web browser-based, with automatic data synchronisation of files to a secure online storage centre across all of a user’s selected computers, as well as internetconnected devices.

MONTH IN PICTURES

A Palestinian youth checks his PC while watching a 2010 World Cup match.

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A Star Wars storm trooper character takes a break during the E3 Expo in LA.

July 2010 | www.itp.net

Indian actor Aamir Khan poses with Samsung’s latest smartphones.

Pedestrians walk past an Apple store, where iPhone orders have rocketed.

WORLD NEWS

TECHNOLOGY

BITS AND BYTES

DISASTER RECOVERY TOP OF THE BILL RESEARCH INTO THE SPENDING priorities of the global healthcare industry has revealed that disaster recovery remains firmly at the top of the list. The results show that 44% of healthcare organisations rank data back-up, business continuity and disaster recovery as their top IT investment priority over the next 12 months. Next on the list is picture archiving and communication systems (38%), followed by digitising paper records (35%). The survey indicates healthcare leaders’ expectations of a significant rise in data volume in the near future. 41% of respondents are preparing for annual increases of up to 25%, and an additional 18% are expecting data volume to rise between 25% and 50% per year.

DR is top of the healthcare industry’s IT priorities, according to new research.

In considering the leading drivers of this growth, digital imaging ranks highest followed by EHR documents and scanned documents such as insurance ID cards and healthcare proxy forms. “We believe these results are reflective of the state of the indus-

try today,” said Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software, which carried out the research. “Healthcare is making a rapid transition from paper-based to electronic documents, transforming how organisations plan for and manage data,” he added.

PLAN

BROCADE PIPS PROCURVE WITH NEW SALES BOSS IN THE WAKE OF ITS Technology Day in New York, networking infrastructure vendor Brocade has named Alberto Soto as its new head of sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He replaces Ulrich Plechschmidt, who returns to Brocade’s HQ to lead its global sales enablement and marketing department. Soto was formerly at rival HP ProCurve, which employed him as its vice president and general manager for the EMEA region. Before joining the Palo Altobased firm, Soto worked for 3Com as the country manager for the Iberian peninsula, growing the business to more than $200 mil-

Gamers try out the TRON title at the SIMS exhibit during the E3 show.

lion. He will now report to Ian Whiting, senior vice president of worldwide sales. “As we outlined at our recently held Technology Day, we see opportunities abound across the networking industry, which we believe is undergoing another major innovation cycle,” said Whiting. “Veteran leadership like the kind Alberto brings to Brocade is crucial for our company to separate from the pack in a hypercompetitive yet strategically important market that EMEA is.” At his new position in California, Plechschmidt will report to John McHugh, vice president and chief marketing officer - who was the

Promoters display the iTwin, a remote access USB resembling a thumb drive.

BLUE COAT BLAZES A TRAIL IN WAN MARKET Blue Coat has continued its lead in the WAN optimisation market through the entire calendar year of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010, according to the latest market share report from Infonetics. “Our market share leadership is strong confirmation that enterprises value Blue Coat’s advanced portfolio of application delivery network infrastructure solutions that optimise and secure the delivery of applications and web content,” said Nigel Hawthorn, VP EMEA marketing at the firm.

SYMANTEC RAMPS UP SMB PORTFOLIO WITH NEW SUITE Symantec has unveiled enhancements to its software portfolio in the shape of the new Symantec Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition. The software is designed to provide SMBs with complete protection, including endpoint and messaging security as well as desktop, laptop and server back-up and recovery to ensure business continuity.

GLASSHOUSE BUILDS ON MEEZA PARTNERSHIP

John McHugh is teaming up with his ex-HP colleague Alberto Soto again.

top executive at HP ProCurve and, in the eyes of many, the reason behind its rise as a US$1 billion networking company. McHugh left ProCurve in June 2008 for unspecified reasons.

Visitors walk through the Chinese pavilion at CommunicAsia 2010.

GlassHouse Technologies has established a new relationship with MEEZA, the Qatar-based managed IT services provider. In addition to their existing data centre in Qatar, MEEZA is in the process of building out 11,000 square feet of additional data centre space to serve its customers in the Gulf. The pair have agreed to work together in Qatar to offer data centre and storage infrastructure services.

World Cup fever leads to Asian hardware vendors seeing a spike in 3D TV sales.

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COMMENT

El Kabbany: CEOs and CIOs need to have strict policies in place to prevent their companies from being harmed by cyber-crime.

SECURITY CONSCIOUS Security concerns lie at the heart of pretty much every aspect of networked IT services today, but as a global increase in cyber-crime brings a new set of challenges that CIOs and CEOs in the Middle East need to treat seriously, Wael El Kabbany, managing director for BT Middle East and North Africa, asks if the real corporate security questions are being addressed. There is more to prevention than just damage limitation The question being asked in boardrooms is “can we truly protect ourselves against the next generation of hacking - or is damage limitation the best we can hope for?” Providing reassurance is a tricky thing because firms involved in providing security solutions need to be transparent and responsible with their claims. So let us be very clear, here, from the outset: there is no easy panacea to this problem. There is no single product or service that can be plugged in and means your data is safe. It means companies need to sit

up and take this problem seriously at a senior level and not relegate it to a nuts-and-bolts IT services issue.

Don’t expect technology to solve the problem on its own Firstly, it is vital to recognise how the very nature of globalisation has altered the challenge. Once upon a time, a virus detection programme could easily check IP addresses linked to a PC or server, spot any beginning 85.xxx, recognise that this was going to China, for example, and block the address. Today, of course, most international companies will be sending and

receiving legitimate data packets to and from China daily – suppliers’ details, product data, order information. So modern software has to learn what activity is legitimate and what is not before it begins to run effectively. This is hugely powerful, but the understanding of the process is not always there. Too many organisations, erroneously, think they have this activity covered as soon as they’ve installed the new kit. Just because suspicious activity has not been detected does not mean that it’s not going on. The very language we use is also a problem. The term “cyber-crime” leads us to forget that the data still starts and ends with a physical machine, and so the physical threat is frequently overlooked. You can have the best technology in the world, but it won’t help if your office cleaners are easily able to smuggle information out of your building on a data stick. Ultimately, what is needed is a combination of good corporate policy, married to effective technology. Far too often, we see one without the other and, in 2010, this is not good enough.

Four-point plan for practical security 1. Check physical security. Ensure that your technology, facilities management and human resources departments, at the very least, are talking to each other. Any external suppliers with access to your building should be properly vetted. 2. Ensure you have the appropriate technology in place and that it is set up correctly. Software-based anomaly detection, located in the network, coupled with solid firewalls at your data centre end. 3. Link this up with effective policy adherence – rigorous testing, monitoring, recording – such as is demanded by ISO 27001 (BS7799), the Information Security Management System (‘ISMS’). 4. Ensure that policy is in place for follow-through. Detecting and countering an attack is one thing you need to be able to trace it and build up the chain of evidence so that, should you ever need to take someone to court, there is a proper chain of evidence. This means your IT people need to be trained to log dates and times properly, and your legal department will need to be involved to ensure your policies adhere to privacy laws.

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NEWS ANALYSIS

CIOs at IDC’s latest event were told to focus on the bigger picture and not make the mistake of managing silotype projects.

HIGH PRIORITY Imthishan Giado attended IDC’s recent IT Managers Forum in Abu Dhabi to find out where the IT market is heading for the remainder of 2010.

THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF coffee-table talk in the past 18 months about the “state of the IT market”. From IT backrooms to vendor boardrooms, nearly everyone has an opinion on how things stand. For the most part, while everyone could agree that the situation was direst in late 2008, the following year drew differing opinions. Vendors claimed that the market had rebounded quickly, but many Middle East CIOs expressed in private that the New Year had seen vastly slashed budgets and dramatic retractions on expansion. The truth as always, is somewhere in the middle. Analysts IDC recently held its IT Managers Forum at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi to discuss how CIOs will direct their spending for the next year and in their belief, the market has been transformed. “We are entering a new normality. From a period of hyper growth, we are slowing down a little bit. There’s a very strong focus in terms of reducing cost, aligning business with management.

What is important is that the role of the IT decision maker, director or CIO has changed,” says Margaret Adams, the firm’s research director of IT services for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, in her keynote. “You need to be able to justify any business investments in terms of the real business benefits that it can have to the organisation. You need to look at projects that can provide cost management particularly in the short term, support growing the business in a very short period of time. Our advice is to push tactical projects in a shorter time frame. To push anything bigger than that is going to be a challenge in the current environment – but in saying that, these projects should fall within a broad strategy so that you don’t make the mistake of managing silo-type projects. They need to be integrated into a long term IT portfolio management strategy,” she continued. Adnan Ansari, IT manager at Dubai’s United Holdings, concurs with this view. As he explains, the downturn and

the cuts in the budget has meant that he’s had little need to attend events of this kind over the past year. But now the situation is getting better – and as IDC suggests, companies are moving to largely strategic investments in IT. “Last year it was very worrying. This year we are allowed to do more investments in IT infrastructure. Our advice from top management is: regardless of whether the project is short-term or long-term, it should bring cash. Regarding our buying priorities, whatever expansion was planned for United Holdings was already designed in late 2008. In 2009 we were pretty much on our track but due to our top

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NEWS ANALYSIS

Adams: IT heads need to justify investments in terms of real business benefits.

management changes, we have to hold our projects. Now, from April, they are all back on track again,” he states. One of the first priorities for Ansari’s firm in the “new normality” is to implement effective ERP and disaster recovery systems. As the organisation

has limited IT staff, it maintains just one datacentre but he’s well aware of how fragile relying on that one point can be. “Our company has very limited sites but a strong team of professionals. The data which we get is from consultants involving different feasibility studies

Ansari: Whether a project is shortor long-term, it should boost the bottom line.

On the back of datacentre investment, there’s also been a lot of investment in networks and related infrastructure. We’ve also seen a huge demand for virtualisation. What’s important to note about this prediction is that virtualisation can’t solve complexity

GET YOUR PRIORITIES RIGHT According to IDC, these are the top priorities for IT managers in 2010: * Outsourcing / Managed Services * Virtualisation * Regulatory Compliance * Security * Business Intelligence * Environmental Awareness / Sustainability * Unified Communications

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and these kinds of things. That data is valuable to us – one study might cost us half a million dirhams or dollars,” he explains. “So setting up a datacentre was a strategic move for us – we already have one in our Emirates Towers head office but we need a DR site which will be probably with Etisalat. We are in talks now, they have made an offer and are almost done. So this is what my resolution is this year.” This news doesn’t come as a surprise to Adams at IDC: “Datacentre discussion is really hot right now. There’s certainly a lot happening in this region and it’s really escalated over the past quarter. We’re seeing a lot of interest in things like how to invest smartly in datacentres and how to maximise existing infrastructure. “On the back of datacentre investment, there’s also been a lot of investment in networks and related infrastructure. We’ve also seen a huge demand for virtualisation. What’s important to note about this prediction is that virtualisation can’t solve complexity. Before changing the business strategy, we need to be prepared for the change in management that is required. We will now face more challenges in terms of workload management, performance management as well as virtual machine sprawl.” Surprisingly for a region where events continue to be heavily focused on cloud computing, Adams notes that the region has a mixed response to the heavily promoted technology. “We’ve seen some adoption of IT cloud. We are seeing private cloud, a lot

NEWS ANALYSIS

IT managers in the Middle East are embracing outsourcing and managed services.

of acceptance to this model, but we’re still seeing a bit of lukewarm reaction to public clouds. A lot of it can be related to communication costs and security concerns that need to be addressed. The SMB market is very underpenetrated in the region and cloud provides a very

technical know-how internally. We really do see this on the networking space. When you get into advanced networking and complex distributed networks, those kinds of people are expensive to keep, train and retrain right. Many are looking to outsourcing

IT environments just got too complex. You cannot do it internally. Even if you look at service providers, you’re seeing them changing from a one stop shop and offering everything, to starting to focus on their core competencies good opportunity in that space. We anticipate a lot of telco providers will start getting very active and there should be increased competition in this space as well,” Adams details. One area that’s seen a lot of interest will not come as a surprise to most CIOs and IT managers – outsourcing and managed services. Adams explains the reason that this has gained traction over the past year: “IT environments just got too complex. You cannot do it internally. Even if you look at service providers, you’re seeing them changing from a one stop shop and offering everything, to starting to focus on their core competencies. Managed services is a delivery method that’s on the back of a more global IT trend anyway. “There’s two sides to it. One is outsourcing non-core in order to keep costs low. The other is outsourcing areas where you don’t necessarily have the

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that to a provider,” she continues. United Holding’s Ansari, a firm proponent of outsourcing, agrees. “I am quite pro-outsourcing. I have hosted

e-mail and even my IT support is outsourced. If you have proper strategic thinking from the management, plans for say five years, then you could have potentially 30% to 40% savings. I started a test project in February 2008 and until now, have made those 30% to 40% savings.” Nevertheless, a lot of regional firms have still experienced a healthy amount of scepticism about the effectiveness in these kinds of cost-cutting measures. But few boardrooms would turn down the savings on offer and so for many enterprises, whether they like it or not, outsourcing of non-critical functions is something they’ll just have to live with. “I don’t think any of them love the idea of outsourcing. The reality is that it’s a business model which makes a lot of sense. Attitudes have changed and it’s accelerated over the last 18 months. I’ve been looking at the managed services market for about three years. Initially there was very little understanding and huge reluctance, but now they’re a lot more open to it,” says Adams. Part of the reason for that openness is the notes that a hybrid model is emerging where services are delivered, but there’s still a human face available. “In this region it tends to be local. What you get is a dual-model. I’m seeing that companies are more comfortable with a combination of remote and on-site delivery. They still want to have that relationship with a person and somebody to call and escalate but they are more comfortable with a remote delivery method. You’re seeing a kind of hybrid model develop where the technology can be remotely delivered but there’s still a person involved,” she confirms.

PROJECT NOTES If there’s one element which became clear from IDC’s conference, it’s that the ‘big picture’ priorities haven’t changed dramatically. Companies are still eyeing virtualisation, whether it be for servers or networks, cloud computing is still ticking along on the agenda and as always green IT manages to find a spot somewhere as well. What’s changed is not so much the priorities but the manner in which CIOs attack them. In the past, management seemed keen to complete projects as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Today, it’s simply become a case of justifying them from a ROI perspective. More than one CIO at the event noted the pressure from management to deliver projects in a short time frame, but all seconded IDC’s core assertion: as the IT division becomes closer to the business, its importance rises – but only if it is able to deliver real value.

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CASE STUDY

GAME CHANGER The UAE Football Association recently completed an office move and enterprise IT infrastructure upgrade in record time. Mark Sutton reports.

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CASE STUDY

The ESS team behind the storage, security and telephony project at the UAE FA’s new headquarters.

MOVING OFFICE LOCATIONS CAN be a challenge for any company, but moving office while carrying out a major upgrade of all of the company’s IT systems - and while working to a very tight deadline and without disruption to end-users - is a task that many IT departments would baulk at. It was such a situation, however, that faced the UAE Football Association at the start of this year, when it moved from its existing headq uarters to a new building in the Al K hawaneej district of Dubai. The UAE FA had only a short period left of its agreement with its existing offices when its new, purpose-built building became ready. This left the FA, and its systems integration and support partner Emitac Support Services E ( SS), to compress what would normally have been a seven-week project into a three-week time frame, with just nine days to move around 70 users to the new facility. Alongside moving physical location, the UAE FA

wanted to upgrade its IT infrastructure, update systems, introduce new services and add additional layers of security and reliability for services. The organisation’s existing IT set-up used a single server to host its Exchange e-mail application, with no back-up, a single domain server and an additional server to run a bespoke sports management application, running on Oracle. The system had rudimentary security, and only tape back-up. The IT solutions were not hosted in a data centre, and the FA was also reliant on an old telephony system, with no UC systems in place. The decision was made to introduce new systems for almost all aspects of the FA’s IT, to both provide better tools and connectivity for the staff, create more reliability in systems and to provide a stable platform for external connectivity and to launch new services. The new building includes a full data centre deployment, with a properly

configured data centre and supporting physical infrastructure including power, fire detection and alarm system, humidity controls and air conditioning, all of which was designed and deployed by ESS. Ahmad Bhadir, head of IT for the UAE Football Association, explained that the organisation wanted the highest standards for its new data centre infrastructure: “In our previous location, we were using one Exchange server without any back up, and one

We thought seriously about making our data centre high availability, that is why we asked for four servers for Exchange, two servers for the domain and two servers for RightFax. All these servers and applications are communicating with each other and the high availability is also there July 2010 | www.itp.net

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CASE STUDY

Bhadir: The FA’s previous server infrastructure was disruptive to productivity.

domain server and a server for the Oracle application, so if there was any failure in the server, we would have to stop work. We thought seriously about making our data centre high availability, that is why we asked Emitac to provide four servers for Exchange, two servers for the domain, for active directory, and also two servers for RightFax. “All these servers and applications are communicating with each other, there is integration between them and the high availability is also there. We have two UPSs, we have monitoring for the environment inside the data centres, we have fire systems for the data centre - we are using the latest technology,” he stresses.

Blade boost At the heart of the new data centre, the FA has switched to HP blade enclosures and HP blade servers to run its core applications, spread over two locations in the HQ building. For back-up, the organisation has switched to an HP MSA storage array, running HP StorageWorks storage mirroring software, and HP Data Protector software, to provide replication and failover of data, and

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automated back-up of data respectively. Previously, the FA had very little back-up provision, but the new system not only gives it much more resilient systems, but has allowed the organisation to cut backup times from five or six hours down to 45 minutes. The data centre hosts a number of key applications for the FA, including Microsoft Exchange 2007 for e-mail, Microsoft Active Directory 2008, RightFax fax server, SQL server and Microsoft Office Communications server. The UAE FA took the opportunity to upgrade some of its applications during the move, while migrating the Active Directory and Exchange mail boxes. One of the most important applications for the UAE FA is its inhouse sports management application, which was custom built by Emitac for the FA in 2003. The solution runs on Oracle, and handles most of the core functions and data of the FA, in terms of registering players, coaches and other officials in UAE football, recording match information and scheduling, and administering the financing around these activities.

Bhadir explains: “We have about 7,000 players registered every year with the UAE FA, we have about 1,500 matches every year and more than 1,000 officials every season, so there is a lot of data.” As well as the data centre solutions, the organisation also rolled out an entirely new network infrastructure. ESS deployed Cisco routing and switching across the whole HQ facility, to provide the LAN, as well as Cisco wireless controllers and access points to provide a complete wireless network. The data centre also switched to fibre connectivity to improve speeds, and the network deployment also included software for network management to maintain the highest possible availability. Another important upgrade for the project was to move from fairly lowend security solutions to full enterprise-level protection with two layer security, and appliances installed to provide firewall, VPN and security gateway. The UAE FA took a significant step up with its telephony as well, switching from basic telephony to Cisco IP telephones integrated with Microsoft Unified Communications

CASE STUDY

server. The new set-up provides advanced features to the FA staff, including voice dialling, IVR and integration with Exchange for added flexibility. The FA is also extending communications onto mobile devices, with pocket PCs to facilitate remote access to e-mail. “Before we had a very old telephone system. The new one integrates with Exchange server so the user will get an e-mail notification for any missed calls, and we can check our voice messages from outside the building all these features are new for our employees,” says Bhadir.

Rigorous planning The final part of the migration involved a desktop hardware refresh, with around 65 new PCs rolled out, along with migration of all PC files and personal data from the old hardware to the new. In order to deploy all of the new infrastructure, and migrate the users smoothly without any disruption to services, ESS had to plan rigorously

out constant monitoring of the plan, and communication with the FA, to ensure delivery. The end result was the critical core of the project was completed in just nine days, with no disruption to end-users. The UAE FA was so impressed that it recognised ESS’ work in a formal ceremony and with the presentation of a certificate. “Emitac helped us to finish our project very quickly, it took only about three weeks and the plan was for more than seven weeks. When [our staff] came here, everything was ready, we did not have any issues regarding the IT requirements, everything was here. I would like to thank Emitac for supporting us in this project and finishing the project in a very short time,” Bhadir comments. Abusaffaqa adds: “It feels great to be appreciated and recognised by our customers for our efforts. The main aim of Emitac Support Services has always been to provide customers with an uncompromising and highlyflexible quality of service in the form of deliveries that are both fast and

Bhadir: We have replaced our telephony system with one that integrates with Exchange server.

Proper risk planning was essential for a project of this size, so a risk plan was created to identify and manage the risk involved with the project delivery throughout, and our backend procedures were also strengthened to quickly handle and support the project and resolve any issues to make sure that all of the required hardware would be on site, and that the teams involved in the deployment would be able to work on parallel roll-outs of critical systems to make sure that deadlines were met. The planning took in all elements, including design of the infrastructure, procurement of the required solutions and risk assessment. Ayman Abusaffaqa, deputy general manager for data centre at ESS/NS and Support Services, says: “We ensured the products were ordered and ready on time for installation. That was the first step towards completing the project on time. Proper risk planning was also essential for a project of this size, so a risk plan was created to identify and manage the risk involved with the project delivery throughout. Our back-end procedures were also strengthened to handle and support the project and resolve any issues.” The ESS team worked around the clock on delivery, and also carried

reliable. We at Emitac nurture and believe in long-term partnerships with our valued customers and ensure we provide them with the best of technologies and services.” In order to provide a smooth handover of the project, ESS provided

training to the FA’s own technical staff on the Cisco networking infrastructure, while the end-users were also trained on the IP telephony solutions and unified communications. The new infrastructure will also provide the FA with the foundation to develop new projects, including connecting football clubs across the UAE to the FA’s data centre so that they are able to use the FA’s computing infrastructure. It will also allow it develop a new, web-based version of the sports administration application it runs. With a project of such scale behind it, there can be no denying that Bhadir and his department have a major role to play in the FA’s future success - on and off the field.

INSIDE THE INFRASTRUCTURE: UAE FA HEADQUARTERS DATA CENTRE PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE UPS Fire detection system Climate control DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS HP blade enclosures and blade servers HP MSA storage array HP StorageWorks storage mirroring HP Data Protector software HP StorageWorks Virtual Library System NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE Cisco switches

Cisco routers Cisco IP telephony Cisco wireless solutions Network management Security solutions APPLICATIONS Oracle-based bespoke sports administration Microsoft Exchange 2007 Microsoft Active Directory 2008 RightFax fax server SQL server Microsoft Office Unified Communications

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CASE STUDY

North: ADCB has made a massive leap forward from an IT point of view since moving to a managed security services approach.

VAULT KEEPER Faced with a need to monitor its ever-expanding network traffic logs for suspicious activity, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) eschewed hiring additional staff and turned instead to security and storage vendor Symantec for managed services. Imthishan Giado reports. 028

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“WHERE’S THE BIGGEST DANGER? People. I don’t trust any of my people. They’re people – they’re human.” This is not something you are likely to hear very often from a regional CIO, given that most like to project an image of confidence and belief in their teams. It’s most certainly not what you’d expect to ever hear from the head of a major UAE financial institution. But for anyone who knows Lee North, the outspoken SVP and head of IT for Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, such frankness comes as little surprise. In this instance, North is discussing his team’s latest achievement: implementing managed security services. This is a new solution in which a team of professionals at Symantec’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) at Reading in the UK constantly monitor the bank’s internal network for threats. It was a natural progression’s from the firm’s earlier Endpoint Protection system – also managed by Symantec – which combined firewall, antivirus and intrusion prevention. This impressive technology achievement is a far cry from the dark days of 2004, when North first joined the bank. At the time – and this is scarcely believable for a major financial institution – ADCB did not even have an e-mail system in place. As he recalls, it was an uphill task from the beginning: “I was brought in as a part of a management team to restructure ADCB and put more technology in. The bank had not actually spent money on technology for quite some time. It was one of those false understandings that you save money by not spending, but effectively you lose money by not spending. From a technology point of view, the IT department had been run down. When I joined, we didn’t have e-mail, no online presence at all.

CASE STUDY

ADCB’s IT department is split between two locations – head office and an external operations centre on the edge of Abu Dhabi.

“We were running seven different versions of Windows all the way back to NT. We had no licensing agreements, no anti-virus – it was in a pretty poor state,” he admits. With the bank’s IT systems in such a chaotic state, one might imagine that North was to leap to its rescue with the help of his chequebook. But while the bank did make major changes in a swift timeframe, he says the real change began with individuals. “It wasn’t necessarily about buying more technology, it was having a look at the people that I’d got and what I could do with those people. We had to make some tough decisions about the people that we had in the IT department. It was very much a cultural thing; many people had been working for the bank for many years. Some people stayed and we still have them today. Some people had to leave because the mentality wouldn’t fit. In the first year, I wasn’t particularly very popular with some people,” he says.

Serious about security The planning behind the Symantec projects first started in 2007 when North and Steve Dulvin, his head of IT operations and assistant vice president decided they needed to up their security game. But once again, the problem was people. “We were struggling to attract skills – in particular, security type skills. They were very expensive and very difficult to find. We tried our best to do it ourselves but as everyone appreciates, security isn’t nine till five. When that person goes home, security doesn’t

stop. It’s a matter of: are you serious about security or are you not serious? For me to actually have the kind of coverage I get today, I would have to run shifts of people. For me to have done it myself, you’re probably talking about 12 to 13 full-time people and not necessarily having the right skills,” he states. After a rigorous selection process, ADCB selected Symantec to manage its endpoints, going live in 2008. A year later, they went to a full managed security services arrangement – an approach which North says ADCB is one of the first in the region to adopt. “We did a proof of concept with Symantec for them to manage our locks on the perimeter – so we’re talking about IPS and firewalls and the network locks. Symantec were vendoragnostic,” he says. “It didn’t matter what was being logged, we have an SLA with them and they have to respond within 10 minutes to any alert, then the security group gets notified. Symantec doesn’t respond to the issue – we have to respond to the issue. What they do is tell us about it. That’s how we first started.” “Then I believe we were the first ones in the world to give them the internal network. So now we have a collector of all our logs from our network devices and our operating systems. It doesn’t matter what the operating system is, it’s connected in one place and Symantec monitors those logs. They also manage our endpoints – so anti-virus is managed by them. I used to have real problems with virus definitions not being

North: It has been a challenge for the company to find people with the specific IT security skills required.

updated on time,” remembers North. The focus on skills, attracting the right people and, most importantly, keeping them – was a key factor for the bank and it’s paid off in spades. A major benefit of the managed services system is that ADCB now only has three security staff in place – one of whom is a national trainee. North insists that it is a win-win situation. “I don’t want to be in that situation where I worry about one person. I nurture that skill but I’m not going to be held hostage. The problem is that those skills are rare. I now have two very good security guys and a national trainee. It’s far more interesting for them because they don’t want to go through logs. What they do now is research and their job is far more

INSIDE THE INFRASTRUCTURE SYMANTEC PRODUCTS INSTALLED AT ADCB INCLUDE: Symantec Endpoint Protection Symantec Control Compliance Suite Symantec Security Information Manager SYMANTEC SERVICES IN USE: Symantec Consulting Services Symantec Managed Security Services Symantec Hosted Services Symantec Business Critical Services OPERATING SYSTEMS Microsoft Windows IBM AIX Sun Solaris

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surprising now because they manage an issue that’s been highlighted to them by experts,” he says. It’s one of the truisms of enterprise computing that every organisation puts security at the top of the agenda. Again, speak to any CIO and few would deny that they put the security of their network and their confidential data - and for a bank, customer data – above all else. It is enormously tricky to pull off successfully though, both in concept and execution. The solution, says North, is to focus on the cost of cleaning up after an incident. “I would still say today – and it’s fundamental in most organisations – that security tends to be a blindspot. They assume it’s just getting done, we try our best to do it ourselves but we stumble. We think we’re doing a good job, but there’s no control over it, no governance around it. I don’t think security is discussed until there is an issue at the senior level. When you go for an approval, you can highlight the risk of not doing it and very few executives will ignore that risk.” Unfortunately, in the real world, the absence of published incidents can lull many banks into a sense of complacency. Even though CIOs know that people are trying to penetrate

would feel the need to go further and allow the vendor to monitor its internal network for threats. But as North claims, the imperative was always there. “Always recognised the need. Always had a problem with giving it to somebody else. We tried to do it ourselves but it’s very difficult to get an army of people to go through those logs. It’s about being honest – this is not something you can do with this amount of people and with these skillsets and then trying to keep them,” he re-iterates.

Logging on North is certainly not exaggerating when it comes to the size of the logs – literally everything that transpires on the servers and databases is logged. While these logs are created in a readable format, the sheer quantity of data is impossible to parse – it runs into several terabytes. “When it comes down to the internal network, how many times does somebody try to log on and fail? We have an alert for that. When the administrator password is used, we have an alert for that. When the privilege rights of a user ID is changed, we have an alert for that.”

Staff strength at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank currently stands at 80.

We had to make some tough decisions about the people that we had in the IT department. It was very much a cultural thing; many people had been working for the bank for many years... some people had to leave because the mentality wouldn’t fit. In the first year, I wasn’t particularly very popular with some people their boundaries, without a highlypublic breach, few in the boardroom would take seriously the urgent need to fix security holes. The tables are turned though, when those in high office find their names in the spotlight. “We use surveillance for our antiphishing and brand protection. When we’re being discussed on Facebook or Twitter, any of these social networks, they get looked at for mention of ADCB and anything that’s detrimental. We recently started to highlight this to senior managers because we’ve had their names mentioned. It’s not really until you have an incident that people take it seriously. With Symantec managing the endpoint with its vast range of tools, some might well wonder why ADCB

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And even if he had the staff, North doubts that staff would actually bother to go through the immense logs: “Nobody’s monitoring them. They say they are but they’re not. In some cases we didn’t even have the audit logs turned on. This is my problem. It’s a problem that any IT manager would have. You can ask a DBA if he has auditing switched on, he’d say yes. Am I going to go and check?” In his opinion, Symantec’s existing endpoint monitoring made it the only sensible choice to proceed with the internal component: “In terms of the correlation of events, it needs to be with one group. If someone’s looking at the perimeter and another is looking inside, the correlation won’t take place. They can see the whole thing

including the endpoints. This is where I think it’s unique and has never been done before. Right from the desktop to the perimeter, they see the whole piece so they can do true correlation. “It’s worth noting that nothing leaves here. They look at it in place through a secure connection. All they do is tell us about an event – they don’t fix an event. They look at logs, they don’t see any customer information,” he says.

The watchmen North says the benefits of the managed security service approach is that he can focus on other elements of technology and focus on bringing better value to the business, rather than having a large team focused on the mundane task of log-watching. “I sleep better. Without any doubt at all, I know that wherever I am or wherever my people are, somebody is looking. That’s peace of mind. It’s not bulletproof. We know they’ve missed some things. The fall back for us is going back to how we were before, which is not up to scratch,” he says. “For me, we’ve made a massive leap forward. I don’t think we could go much further. I can go one other step – manage. Not monitor, but manage. That’ s part of their [Symantec’s] offering. I can ask them to make changes on my firewall. We don’t do that. I would never do it,” he concludes firmly.

CASE STUDY

Salem: IT functions needed to operate like clockwork to support the company’s wider expansion plans for the region.

HOSTING HELP Panasonic Middle East turned to eHDF’s managed hosting services to give its IT staff strategic focus and the time to deliver new services to boost the bottom line. 032

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RIDDING THE IT DEPARTMENT OF the burden of maintenance and simply keeping systems online is becoming an increasingly popular strategy, enabled by infrastructure automation and developments such as cloud computing, but the idea of letting someone else handle the day-to-day business of IT has been around for some time in the form of outsourcing and managed services. For companies operating in emerging markets particularly, business can expand rapidly across diverse territories, meaning IT systems and solutions are required to support growth when the company cannot quite provide the operational level of delivery that is necessary. Panasonic Middle East faced just this situation, with growing regional business meaning IT staff time was taken up just with ‘keeping the lights on’, instead of being able to deliver new and innovative services to the organisation, its partners in the market and customers. Sharjil Salem, senior manager for infrastructure and data centre in the IT department of Panasonic Marketing Middle East FZ E, outlines the challenge it faced:“In expanding our regional presence in the Middle East, we needed to ensure that all of our IT operations would operate like clockwork to support our business in the region. A large chunk of time was being consumed by routine day-today management of the IT infrastructure by our internal IT team. Rather than dealing with the mundane operational activities of IT,

CASE STUDY

we needed to understand the technology needs of the business and address them such that it would benefit Panasonic’s bottom line. Having little time to innovate and understand the business’ needs made it increasingly challenging to nurture or demonstrate innovation for the business,” says Salem. In 2007, the company decided to relieve this burden by looking to a hosted solution, and after performing due diligence, launched into a deal with A UE-based eHosting DataFort (eHDF). The initial project saw eHDF hosting Panasonic’s SAP ERP deployment, serving Panasonic’s internal user base across six representative offices in the Middle East, and connecting back to Panasonic Corporation’s global headquarters in Japan. The relationship included hosting and management of the SAP Business Information Warehouse - the business intelligence and data warehousing component of SAP which provides management reporting relating to sales, procurement, profitability analysis, stock positions and inventories. eHDF helped Panasonic by managing its IT infrastructure right up to the operating system level, with connectivity and operations also handled by eHDF. The initial project included knowledge transfer between eHDF’s application and service support team and Panasonic’s own IT team, along with the deployment of an online data centre monitoring system, which enables Panasonic’s employees to

The initial project saw eHDF host Panasonic’s SAP ERP deployment, serving an internal user base across six branch offices.

keep track of all events, activities and service desk calls, giving transparency into the service. Service level agreements governed the terms of the contract, including issues such as the amount of downtime. Salem comments:“A mutual learning curve between eHDF and Panasonic at the start of the relationship was necessary, and it meant that there was a need for us to adapt and break away from the typical routine jobs we were used to,

Through real time collaboration and exchange of business information, distinct content and transactions relating to logistics and shipping information can now be shared with our partners who can share sales-related information with our internal users July 2010 | www.itp.net

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while eHDF needed to gain an understanding of the way that our business operates.” The project also included the migration of Panasonic’s storage area network (SAN) to eHDF, which was also then added into eHDF’s standard monitoring model, with the storage infrastructure expanding approximately 20% year-on-year since migration. Since the initial SAP ERP project, Panasonic has increased its hosted services deal considerably, as the company has looked to launch more services to support the business and its partners, and to hand off the maintenance and management of those to eHDF. One core part of this, is eHDF’s hosting of Panasonic’s database cluster. This database facilitates all of the web-based services used by the electronics manufacturer and enables several key Panasonic solutions. Panasonic’s corporate website for the Middle East, which was earlier hosted in a separate location, has been migrated to eHDF’s hosting environment. Subsequently, the setup was further expanded to include Panasonic’s signature loyalty programme and direct marketing tools as well. The Plus Card programme is a consumer-facing loyalty scheme, for

which can then be automatically seen and registered by the Panasonic procurement team in real-time. The order can then be placed as soon as the information is acknowledged, improving the flow of the procurement cycle and ensuring the products are delivered in the right time frame. This solution also provides warehouse management for the spare parts division. Another web-based service is a forecast planning application, which provides data to internal staff in areas such as weekly sales, product availability and inventory information. This then helps those staff members with business decision making and strategy planning. “The partnership has meant that our ability to meet the ever-growing technology demands has greatly improved,” said Salem. “Through real time collaboration and exchange of business information, distinct content and transactions relating to logistics and shipping information can now be shared with our partners who can share sales-related information with our internal users. “We are also in the design phase of creating a solution that will facilitate agents in their sales process. Some services for consumers are also in the pipeline. In short, the system will improve the efficiency of the

Salem: A hosted infrastructure provides a much higher level of systems availability.

We are also in the design phase of creating a solution that will facilitate agents in their sales process. Some services for consumers are also in the pipeline. In short, the system will improve the efficiency of the information and transaction processing cycle, making selling more effective. That will ultimately benefit our customers Panasonic retail consumers, with the solution handling the automatic accumulation of points every time a Panasonic purchase is made at any of the authorised agent’s electronic retail stores. It also allows consumers to administer their loyalty account online, and giving Panasonic’s sales team a direct route to its consumers. The system also benefits partners, through Panasonic’s online spare parts ordering system, which has also been migrated to eHDF recently. Panasonic’s business partners are now able to place their spare part requests through an online system,

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information and transaction processing cycle, making selling more effective. That will ultimately benefit our customers,” he adds. The relationship has included other services for Panasonic internal users, such as the introduction of BlackBerry services. Panasonic previously struggled to find and manage the necessary connectivity, monitoring and security solutions to deploy the mobility solution, but through working with eHDF, the infrastructure and network protection application components were already in place so that

Panasonic’s BlackBerry users were able to start operating the smart phone device immediately. Since 2007, as more and more bandwidth-hungry applications were added to Panasonic’s portfolio, the need for a larger gateway to the internet was felt. To address this need Panasonic’s link to the internet was doubled, as was the connection between eHDF and Panasonic’s regional headquarters in Jebel Ali, Dubai, increasing the speed of connectivity and, ultimately, the exchange of information needed to generate a faster flow of data, work and outcomes. “System downtime has reduced dramatically,” says Salem. “The hosted infrastructure provides a much higher level of availability to our IT systems. We now have the time to address the technological needs that can impact our business’ bottom line. Rather than getting consumed with ‘keeping the lights on’ activities we can now contribute towards innovation and think about what further drives the Panasonic business to success and increased growth.” For Salem and his IT team, that represents real progress.

IN DEPTH Management insight and industry profiles

GUEST RELATIONS 036

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As the travel and tourist industry faces up to some significant challenges, IT managers in the hospitality sector are turning to the latest industry-specific applications and solutions to give their businesses the edge. Piers Ford reports. THESE ARE TOUGH TIMES FOR THE hospitality sector. Global economic uncertainty combined with the disruptive impact of events like the Icelandic ash cloud means that businesses are more inclined to take a long, hard look at their travel budgets. And travellers themselves are much more demanding when it comes to accommodation and location choices. Expectation is everything, and the technology-based services they are offered by hotels and conference centres is an increasingly important strategic element in an intensely competitive market. “Economic recovery has been slow to reach many parts of the global hospitality sector, and one of the most sluggish areas to improve has been the meetings and association business,” says Hani Nofal, regional sales manager at Cisco UAE. “Even as business activity resumes, the recession and other events, including the Icelandic volcano eruption, have caused firms to review their corporate meeting patterns. “In parallel, a significant disruption with profound implications for the hospitality sector is occurring in the form of technology-enabled businesstravel substitution. Corporate travel departments seeking innovative ways to reduce costs, enhance productivity, reduce carbon footprints, and transform the meeting experience are turning to rapidly maturing video and virtual meeting technologies to replace conventional transient and event-oriented business travel.” IP technology vendors win either way, of course, and it’s up to customers in the hospitality sector to respond with facilities and service offerings that make a sufficiently

compelling argument for the business benefits of physical rather than virtual travel. At the same time, players in the hospitality sector – hotels in particular – need to combine the delivery of cutting-edge technology-based services with reduced operating costs. This creates several challenges that have a direct impact on ICT decisionmaking, according to Nofal. Guest expectations aside, many hotels still run their operations with a multiplicity of single-purpose proprietary networks and applications. As a result, they don’t benefit from business intelligence and comprehensive access to the information that would help them create opportunities for sustainable revenue growth and drive operational efficiencies for their organisations. And if hotel owners take shorter leases on real estate, they want lowrisk, future-proof systems that will help them optimise returns and manage operating expenses at low, sustainable levels – while continuing to grow their revenues. Nofal says that several leading hotel chains in the region have introduced video and virtual meeting technologies as lines of business. If they adapt, he adds, they will be able to turn the disruption of new technology into a competitive advantage and increase market share. Networking vendors clearly see the sector as a major market in the Middle East. Cisco’s Connected Hotel, for example, has been designed as a comprehensive platform delivering guest and staff services, and property management operations. “It allows hotel properties to integrate communications, security,

services and building management systems over one IP-based network,” explains Nofal. “Data, voice, video and critical applications can be managed over a single network that will grow to accommodate property needs in the future.” At Avaya, director of hospitality solutions, Fredrick Sabty, says the vendor’s focus on the hospitality sector in the region is “huge”. Hotels are implementing more advanced solutions, with integration capabilities, multiple features and ease of use among their top criteria. “Avaya is developing interfaces that speak to and interact with different products used in hotels,” he says. “Ease of use is critical and that’s what we’re focusing on when it comes to product development for the hospitality sector. This trend supports vendors who offer their customers a product with a quick ROI that fulfils the demands of hotel rooms.” Sabty says the region’s hospitality sector has actually been least impacted by the economic crisis; hotel owners will continue to invest in solutions that offer maximum guest satisfaction. But he says they are not always best served by vendors or consultants who fail to give them a proper choice of product expertise and system capability. Avaya has recently signed contracts with two major hotel chains in the Middle East. The fast-growing Citymax brand, catering for budgetconscious and leisure travellers, is deploying a mix of analogue and IP solutions to more than 2,000 extensions at three of its hotels in the UAE, linking its main Bur Dubai hotel with other branches across a single network.

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Nofal: Corporate travel departments are using the latest video and virtual technologies to reduce the cost of conventional forms of travel.

Saeb: Advanced technology provides a competitive edge in the Middle East hospitality market and helps to generate revenue.

A significant disruption with profound implications for the hospitality sector is occurring in the form of technologyenabled business-travel substitution. Corporate travel departments seeking innovative ways to reduce costs, enhance productivity, reduce carbon footprints, and transform the meeting experience are turning to rapidly maturing video and virtual meeting technologies to replace conventional transient and event-oriented business travel

As well as guest room telephony, the solution brings Unified Communications (UC) into the back office so that calls ring simultaneously on staff office and mobile phones, and they can transfer or conference calls wherever they are in the hotel, allowing them to meet guest requests instantly. Michael Weyland, general manager at Citymax’s Hotel Division, says affordable hospitality is one of the

MOBILE SERVICES FLYING HIGH Traveller’s expectations of facilities and services don’t just focus on the hotels they stay in. Their experience of a country or region begins and ends at the airport. In the Middle East, airlines and airport authorities are investing heavily in the new technology available to them in order to improve the customer experience in transit. Abu Dhabi Airports Company has introduced self-service kiosks at Abu Dhabi International Airport, as has Sharjah International Airport, where the world’s first such kiosks with an Arabic interface were deployed in February this year. Both technology systems were supplied by air industry specialist SITA. Hani El Assaad, SITA’s regional vice president for the Middle East and North Africa (pictured), says technologies aimed at reducing waiting times are increasingly popular, and will encourage more customers as the airport experience becomes less stressful. “As customers become savvier travellers and technology users, mobile technology is expected to play a bigger role in the travel IT infrastructure,” he comments “In fact, going forward, the advent of mobile technologies will become the norm, as airports are now citing mobility as one of the top three trends influencing airport IT infrastructure in the short term. Plans to expand self-service to passenger mobile phones are gaining traction.”

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El Assaad says the focus today is to improve passenger processing or to provide new revenue opportunities: “Most airports plan to implement flight status notification services on passenger mobile phones. Today, 32% of airports already provide this service – and this will rise to 64% by 2012. The biggest areas of interest for new mobile services for passengers depend on bar-coded boarding pass standards. This could become standard for UAE airports in two or three years’ time.”

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brand’s drivers, making it important to deliver superior customer services and enhance the guest’s experience. At the same time, he says: “The fact that the system connects all Citymax properties in a single network and is managed remotely will help us reduce administration and network management costs.” The Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) has also signed a contract with Avaya that includes systems for in-room management, staff mobility, UC and contact centres at its properties in the Middle East. A complete telephony solution is under way at the Crowne Plaza, Dubai, and data, Wi-Fi and IP telephony systems are also being installed at the Intercontinental Al Ain. “Advanced technology provides a competitive edge in the hospitality market in attracting sophisticated business and leisure travellers, adding value and generating revenue,” says Ali Saeb, IHG MEA’s director of technology. He says the new technology will add value to services and improve the overall experience for guests. The willingness of hospitality service providers to embrace new technology in the interest of improved customer experience and streamlined operations isn’t restricted to their communications infrastructure. Software is an equally important factor, with specialist applications like Epicor’s sectorspecific ERP system delivering the all-important management information that allows hotels and chains to react much more quickly to events and shifts in local demand for their services. Safir Hotels & Resorts, for example, a long-term customer, will implement Epicor for Hospitality at its new hotel in Kuwait, taking advantage of a tool set that includes property management, point-of-sale integration, cash and sales reconciliation, procurement and supply chain management, as well as integrated back office capabilities. “We chose it because it’s well suited to the specific requirements of a regional chain of luxury properties like Safir, and it easily integrates with our other IT systems,” says director of IT, Roy Joseph. “We have found it great value for the investment in terms of TCO, making it affordable to run in the long term. We also really appreciate the system’s flexibility.”

Sabty: When it comes to product development for hospitality solutions, ease of use remains the number one priority on the list.

Hotel properties can now integrate communications, security, services and building management systems over one IP-based network. Data, voice, video and critical applications can be managed over a single network that will grow to accommodate property needs in the future TECHNOLOGY DRIVES EASE OF USE Most of us now use the internet to make our travel arrangements, and expect access to web-based payment services wherever we are in the world. In a market where individual countries are effectively competing for our business, it is becoming more and more important for them to provide access to easy-to-use services at every stage of our experience. Projects like Jordan’s recently announced plan to develop an electronic payment service for its tourism sector indicate just how seriously the wider hospitality sector is now taking this challenge. The USAID/Jordan Tourism Development Project II (Siyaha) is a joint project between Visa Jordan Card Services (VJCS) and Specialized Technical Services (STS) aimed at creating a simple, costeffective way for Jordan’s tourism providers to sell their products online. It is based around Paynet, the electronic payment gateway developed by VJCS and STS, and will give tourist businesses access to local e-payment facilities rather than having to negotiate with international providers. Several workshops in key Jordanian cities will promote the benefits of using digital sales and

marketing tools, and USAID/Siyaha will fund up to 30 businesses to integrate the new payment gateway with their websites. “As the use of electronic payments continues to increase, Paynet provides instant e-payment services to meet the increasing flow of secure electronic transactions over the web,” comments Ramzi Zeine, STS executive chairman (pictured). “We believe this initiative will enable travellers and users of the internet to order and pay for their varied travel arrangements with utmost ease, reliability and security.”

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TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL OUTSOURCING 040

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Deciding whether to outsource IT processes and entire systems to an external provider is a dilemma that most CIOs and IT managers in the Middle East will face at some stage in their careers. With that in mind, ACN brings you its top 0 1 tips for successful IT outsourcing. ICT OUTSOURCING POSSIBILITIES have risen steadily up the CIO’s agenda over the last five years and there are signs that as the influence of multinational enterprises is felt in the wider business community, even SMB IT managers are starting to explore the benefits of distributing the day-to-day responsibility for managing some or all of their infrastructure and system delivery. Research house IDC estimates that outsourcing will account for 23% of IT spending in the Middle East by the end of the year. With IT spend

currently growing at around 12% a year, and expected to reach US$1.8 billion by 2013, a huge investment in across-the-board managed ICT services is clearly under way. Increased automation, the webenablement of swathes of business applications and, of course, the ubiquitous expectations of the cloud, have all had a profound impact on the CIO’s imagination. It isn’t just about cutting costs, either. The efficiencies and improvements to business processes generated by outsourcing are

Kemp: Outsourcing is now starting to come of age in the Middle East region.

increasingly demonstrable to even the most hard-nosed IT manager. “IT outsourcing has come of age in many countries within the Middle East,” insists Derek Kemp, president of EMEA at Patni Computer Systems, who spent six years in Dubai running Logica’s operations. “But not all countries have the human capital to enable large projects to thrive and scale upwards. As well as bringing skills and experience, outsourcers can bring established best practices and methodologies into their clients’ businesses,” he says.

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OUTSOURCING MEANS STAYING IN CONTROL

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The decision to outsource even an element of the ICT function – a particular application or service, for example – can feel like an abdication of responsibility to a nervous CIO. In fact, with the right choices behind him, the CIO is actually reinforcing his strategic role within the organisation. Any perception of a diminishing role is wrong. “It can be addressed by reassuring the CIO that in an outsourced scenario, he has all the requisite control of the strategic IT function of the organisation – in fact more time than before to focus on the strategic imperatives and the roadmap that the organisation’s IT function needs to take,” says Pinaki Kar, general manager at outsourcer Wipro. “He is ideally not sucked into the day-today operational issues, where ostensibly the service provider has more experience, scale and brings in enhanced efficiency benefits,” adds Kar.

DON’T FOCUS ON COST AT THE EXPENSE OF EVERYTHING ELSE

Economy is often the primary motivation behind an IT outsourcing project, but expectations must be realistic. A long-term relationship with an appropriate partner is far more likely to deliver the business benefits of outsourcing than a decision made purely on price, which should not be the only criteria: “Peanuts generally give you monkeys,” says Momenta Global’s Thampi. “The most compelling argument for outsourcing is made on the basis of costsaving which, though true, needs the patience of the CIO and the service provider to be realised,” says Pimaki Kar at Wipro. “Generally, the cost of operations has a temporary upward spike in the first year of outsourcing due to the one-time transition costs, and the synergies kick in only when the steady state of the operations sets in. So the CIO has to be patient and navigate the expectation of his own organisation in terms of the timeliness of cost-saving, so there is no mismatch of priorities.”

Faulty evaluation of the outsourcing provider is a key factor in failed or misfiring projects. Remember that not all outsourcing companies in the IT space have the same competencies. A local office always helps, as the needs of the market you are operating in are clearly and better understood. “The service levels expected and the definition of what constitutes ‘acceptable output’ and ‘project sign-off’ need to be clearly defined and laid out to ensure successful closure of the project,” says Suraj Thampi, CEO at managed service specialist Momenta Global. “Contracts, SLAs and all negotiations should be complete and on paper before you start the project. Client references are a good idea – and sample the outsourcer’s services by awarding a pilot engagement before handing over a big project. Outsourcers who are providing the same service to your competition make more sense since they will have valid experience and will have learnt from their experiences,” insists Thampi.

REMEMBER THE VALUE OF COST-EFFECTIVENESS

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CHOOSE A PARTNER WHICH CAN DEMONSTRATE SLA COMMITMENT

Lindsey McDonald, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan’s ICT Practice MENA, says that potential outsourcing partners must demonstrate their commitment to minimum downtime. If you’re an SMB, the impact of application failure can be as devastating as it would be for a large enterprise. And your required level of sophistication can be equally high; so demand a quality of service to match. “Cost is important, but so is cost-effectiveness,” she says. “Look at the value of the proposition you are being offered rather than just the plain pricing of the service. Gauge the flexibility of the solution. Is it modular enough for your needs? If you are running the IT function in a business with seasonal highs, can the outsourcer scale the solution up and down to match your demand? “Don’t assume the service provider understands your business. The real indicator is if they are prepared to come in and see how you actually work – whether you’re a 300,000-strong enterprise or an SMB!”

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Stuart Hodkinson, Courion

KEEP SECURITY POLICIES CONSISTENT

Checking the certifications and security-related infrastructure of a potential outsourcing partner goes without saying. Tough contractual clauses are vital to ensure the security of customer data, for example. And if you pick an outsourcing partner that is based outside your region, make sure your regulatory compliance is not compromised. “Outsourcing data or applications to an external SaaS provider or cloud operator does not mean that those applications can’t be subjected to the same policies and security processes as you still use in-house,” says Stuart Hodkinson, general manager at access assurance specialist Courion, which has several customers in the Middle East. “Ensure that the outsourced provider makes available the necessary APIs and data connections needed to integrate external functions into your existing, centrally controlled, IT management and policy solution. “By its very definition, when businesses outsource, they immediately have a lack of control over often-sensitive company data and need to extend the reach of existing privileges. It is important that you implement a solid access assurance strategy so that only the right people have access to the right data at the right time.”

Lindsey McDonald, Frost & Sullivan

IN DEPTH

FAVOUR CORE OVER CONTEXT

Successful ITC outsourcing may depend on you retaining your core competencies – the specialisms that make your IT function intrinsic to the performance of the whole organisation – in-house. “The CIO needs to decide what is core to his function and what is context,” says Pinaki Kar. “Ideally, he should retain only the core, sometimes a unique competency that the organisation possesses in house, and outsource the context. This is where the third-party service provider ideally brings in a lot of competence and efficiency, since that is core to his operations.” And remember that whether you are outsourcing for economic reasons or to compensate for a shortage of in-house skills, you still share responsibility for the most effective distribution of resources. “Whatever the reason, the utilisation of resources and project plan optimisation is not only the responsibility of the outsourcing company but of the client too,” says Suraj Thampi. “Outsourcing is only successful when the outsourcer and the provider work as partners to realise the results desired.”

FIND OUT WHAT’S ON YOUR NETWORK

It’s strange but true: CIOs don’t necessarily know what they have running on their networks. So when they decide to outsource their private networks to a managed service provider, or buy into the cloud vision of software delivered as a service, the bandwidth implications can come as a genuine shock. “Before outsourcing, CIOs might find it useful to get an audit of all the applications they are responsible for,” says Adrian Conley, a product manager at BT Global Services who specialises in MPLS and managing acceleration applications. “What will be the impact of their decision on the infrastructure? If a company is going to give everything to a service provider, there will be implications for the network and the application performance. We had one customer who lives and dies by their use of SAP. But when we audited their bandwidth consumption, SAP turned out to consume just 2%. “The big drain was an IP CCTV feed running over the global WAN rather than the local LAN, five times more bandwidth-hungry! Once you find these things out, outsourcing becomes all about optimising the network and at that point you can talk money: network availability is worth x amount.”

FOCUS ON THE APPLICATION RATHER THAN THE NETWORK

Infrastructure-based outsourcing is often achieved at the expense of the applications that run across the network. But CIOs who see the cloud as the be all and end all risk everything if they don’t ensure that the outsourced network can cope with the increased application traffic. Conley says this is one reason for striking the right balance between the outsourced application route and the pure networking route to outsourcing. And that means involving your endusers in the process. “You need to consider the trade-off between bandwidth requirements, and application control and optimisation,” he says. “And that means talking to your users. If they have systems that their jobs live or die by, then the focus of the outsourcing will probably be more about application acceleration than control.”

Suraj Thampi, Momenta

START SMALL AND MEASURE YOUR PACE

For small and medium-sized businesses in particular, the prospect of wholesale outsourcing can be intimidating. The pressures might be intense: to reduce costs or to overcome the fact that the business is growing too quickly to develop essential IT skills internally. Either way, it’s important to take your time and, if necessary, start the process with a modest element of outsourcing, define the scope of the project (the majority of IT outsourcing mishaps are caused by lack of clarity in scope and deliverables, according to Momenta Global’s Thampi), and link payment to milestones. “These are potentially great changes and transitions,” says Frost & Sullivan’s McDonald. “You need clear milestones that will allow you to make them gradually rather than wholesale. Start with the less crucial aspects and have the service provider prove themselves at every stage. Make sure you have all your KPIs in place and take a phased approach,” she adds.

DON’T CUT THINGS SHORT

Research house Gartner predicts that in the next two years, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets, such is the force of the movement towards infrastructure outsourcing. But as organisations look at what no longer needs to stay in house, they would do well to remember one thing: outsourcing contracts pay dividends over time. CIOs looking for a quick fix will almost always be disappointed, mainly because they are failing to stimulate a top-quality response from the service provider. Trying for a too short contract tenure is one of the pitfalls that needs to be avoided, as the rewards are often not what they seem. “Most of the benefits of outsourcing contracts come in if the contract is a long-term one, since it gives revenue visibility to the service provider, who generally does not mind making disproportionate investments for the customer organisation in that place,” says Wipro’s Pinaki Kar. “If, instead, the CIO tries to limit the contract tenure to too short a lifespan, it does not incentivise the service provider to put his skin in the game – and the real benefit of outsourcing does not get realised.”

Pinaki Kar, Wipro

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INTERVIEW problem with consistency and accuracy, you have problems with enforcement, and you end up using a lot more people to do it, and the key to being operationally successful is to be able to focus your people on operational parts of the business, and let the transactions help manage the business, not slow it down.

ADAPTABLE ERP Matt Muldoon, senior director for product marketing at Epicor, explains how the firm’s SOA approach helps midmarket companies to gain competitive advantage from their ERP, and how it can even make them greener. : Epicor is listed in the ‘visionary’ sector of Gartner’s magic quadrant for mid-level ERP. How pertinent is that to the Middle East? Matt Muldoon: In the past we have called ourselves a midmarket specialist. Companies like SAP and Oracle are trying to move into that market because they see that tier one is just saturated. I would say that we definitely have an advantage there from a number of points of view, basic price point is one of them, both the cost of the software and the cost of the services, but technologically as well. The Middle East is a midmarket, from both a price point and the size of the businesses that are in the Middle East. Technology is a real enabler there because midmarket companies, unlike tier-one companies have to be agile. They

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change their business models all the time, and they need technology that allows them to make those changes, and then to enforce them. One of the reasons we are seen as an innovator is because we have so heavily moved into the service oriented and made it end-user enabled. We have adopted and have been using service oriented architecture for several years, true SOA. We have broken off the data at the application layer, we have broken apart all of our methods and objects, and we have true business process management between every transaction that happens, which means that the user can intervene at any step within the transaction. They can build everything from validations to automated workflow routines. That is important, because if you can’t do that, you have got a

: Why does Epicor focus on that user ability to configure and customise ERP deployments? MM: If you look at some of the other products, they offer low-end alternatives, they are basically preconfigured systems, but they are completely pre-configured. If I bought it and my competitors bought it, we would all have the same basic procedures, and there is nothing that makes me unique from that point of view. You have got to be able to give people the ability to put their even better practices into the application, where they can gain in efficiency in the place that’s going to allow them to capture market share. That’s what this market is all about. We all know what the economy is like at the moment, but the companies that are doing well are the ones that see it as an opportunity to grab market share, not just to survive, and we are seeing a lot of organisations that are out there right now, looking for ways to better their operations, and we are being pretty successful selling into that. They see that the more they can automate of their basic process flows, the more they can focus on their customers and selling more products and innovating in that way. The technology is making that a lot easier. We do a lot of things in high technology - you get manufacturers that build to order for companies that design the products themselves, so you have to be very, very agile in accepting changes to those. And they change all the time, and if that’s a two or three week process, eventually they are going to get fed up. If you can automate that so it gets taken care of quickly, then they will be that much faster to market for their customers, and everybody is going to benefit. Financial services have to offer new services everyday, they have to change the way they package services, offer different types of services, and they have to understand what that relationship is. It always amazes me that I work with

INTERVIEW a high-street bank in the UK, but the fact that the mortgage I have with them, and my private banking officer, and my insurance, are all from the same brand but don’t talk to each other drives me bonkers. : Do you think that customers get the idea of flexibility and adaptability in your products? MM: If you talk to companies here in the Middle East, they are constantly adding new businesses; it is very entrepreneurial, companies start up new businesses, often in a completely different area. In the past, you would almost have to buy a different app to manage the new part of the business, but what we have done is develop a product that is based on engines or configurations that allow me to focus different parts of the business in different areas, and have it all work together. We believe in global business management, and transactions to flow between my entities and my customers and suppliers, and that’s what SOA gives us. Another thing we are really big on is master data management. We have designed the system so all the key master data elements, the customer, supplier, currency, parts, whatever, they can all be designated as global, which

your relationships are and making it easier for your customers to work with you. : Do you see a strong level of demand from midmarket companies here in the Middle East region? MM: One of the big things I have come across is a big focus on cash flow management, understanding how the cash is moving. Unlike in the old days, when there was a dip, the ability to fill that gap with credit is disappearing rapidly, so they want to catch on the high side, and see when the dips are coming, by reducing that slope. One of the other things that we are seeing is midmarket organisations becoming more focused on real-time management of their risk. They don’t have two months to react to a problem anymore. If you don’t react today, you could be in trouble tomorrow. More and more of the organisations are looking for embedded business intelligence. They want to be able to look at their graphs, their analytics today, to tell them what happened yesterday, so that they can react today for tomorrow, not a few weeks ago. That’s a good differentiator for us, we come with hundreds of predefined analytics.

The Middle East is a midmarket, from both a price point and the size of the businesses that are in the Middle East. Technology is a real enabler there because midmarket companies, unlike tier-one companies, have to be agile. They change their business models all the time means that anywhere within the organisation, they are replicated automatically. Part of the key to getting that right is allowing ownership, so we have set that up so that each master data element can be set up anywhere, and designated as global and assign ownership, and then the rest of [the users] are subscribers to that data. They have the ability to reject it or maintain it themselves, but then we have traceability as to what the differences are. That is key, if you don’t know who the customer of my car dealership is over here, and my parts company over here and my machine company over here, and they are the same person, I better treat them a lot better than just a one-off sell. It is part of gaining market share - understanding what

: A lot of the major ERP players are looking towards the midmarket as well. Are you concerned about competing with them? MM: At the moment, we are competing with them quite successfully, because they have two alternatives, they either implement their large end systems, and they end up giving you an all you can eat ‘this-is-how-it-has-to-be’ deployment or it will cost you millions [to customise]; or they have got lower end applications, which are probably underneath us in capabilities. The other thing we are finding is that a lot of companies that are tierone subscribers, global companies, are finding those products are not economically viable for smaller markets, emerging markets, so they are adopting a two-tier strategy. A

customer we have in the UK, Costa Coffee, came to us and told us they have a strict Oracle policy, they were on the [company’s] Oracle implementation list, but they are going to come to us in about five years, so they wanted to buy something in the meantime. To buy and implement a system that did everything they wanted from us was going to cost them about the same as it was going to cost them for their annual maintenance [for Oracle] when they finally got it. What actually happened was they liked it so much that the company then authorised us as second-tier supplier, and we have taken in other parts of the business. : What is coming up for Epicor in terms of product development? MM: The new technologies that are out there are driving the trend. It is a combination of more controlled systems, but with better accessibility. What you are seeing there is the adoption of social networking as a business messaging environment, people having discussion boards around transactions, being able to use things like Facebook and Twitter as messaging systems. We have built enterprise search into the application so you can decide what parts of your business or data are indexed, and then we have a search engine. You can do it in the app or using the web, type in a keyword, and every instance of that pops up into a list. That’s how people expect to find things, they don’t want to have to go through 12 keystrokes to do something anymore. Social responsibility is also something that ERP is having to adopt to, mainly because there is so much data required in order to prove that you are becoming greener. To prove it, you need statistics on numbers of miles travelled by your trucks, how much was your electricity bill this year compared to last year, or how much paper did you push? Epicor holds the statistics on what your spend is, how much petrol you bought, track maintenance on industrial machinery, keeping that up to date and efficient, and we are adding more and more as we go along, linking to third parties for other applications. As we enable tracking of those things, companies can trim down their costs, making them more socially responsible and more successful.

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INTERVIEW not so much here, I don’t get a sense that that’s the concern here, but certainly on a worldwide basis a lot of banks were in damage control, now they are winning the customer back.

Lee: IT priorities in the banking sector must be linked to managing risk and multi-channel delivery.

FINANCIAL FOCUS Sean Lee, director, financial services, EMC global verticals, discusses cloud, compliance and other issues facing the banking sector. : You’ve just completed a financial services roadshow in the region, what was the purpose of that? Sean Lee: It was geared specifically towards banking institutions, customers of ours in Dubai, K uwait, Q atar, Cairo, Istanbul, and R iyadh. The roadshow was designed not to be an overview of EMC in general, but very specific into this particular vertical, with a lot of specific customer examples, and to allow the customers to kind of see EMC not just in a traditional storage stance, but looking at one EMC, the entire portfolio of EMC in terms of security, compliance, governance, contact management, portal management, capture and of course back-up recovery and business continuity. : What are the main themes that are occupying the financial sector? SL: There are really three things that most banks are talking about now. They are talking about managing risk, we all know why that’s the case; containing costs, rather than reducing costs - you can’t really win new business when you are constantly in a cost-slashing mode, so they call it

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cost containment. They maintain the operational cost, but at the same time allocate enough for innovative projects, whether it’s new products, new markets, cross selling and different ideas. Then the third one is multi-channel delivery, getting closer to the customer. During the road show we spent a lot of time talking about our customer centricity, multi-channel delivery capability. If you look at the IDC reports, they are saying winning banks will focus on delivering the information to the customer, not so much having the information readily available for the customer to see, but to actually deliver it to them in a very personalised manner. It is about mimicking that experience when we used to walk into a branch and there is someone there to greet you, and to get to know you and build a profile around you. It’s difficult to do that online, especially on a mobile device, but there are still things that you can do to map that journey so that you can at least allow the customers to feel like the bank is a trusted entity again. The financial crisis really damaged a lot of reputations, maybe

: Do you see a lot of differences between banks here and banks in other parts of the world? SL: I see similarities and I see differences. Banking services are banking services - they are managing people’s money, savings and loans and mortgages and investment portfolios and so on. It’s very, very similar in that regard, so the type of projects that we see are very similar. They are trying to protect the information, the customer data, they are trying to fight against fraud, they are trying to make their operations more efficient, whether it’s business or IT, all of those are very, very similar. Cost savings mode may not be as high a priority for obvious reasons because this is still a very fast growing region. In other areas they may be more stringent in terms of savings and IT budget, but at the end of the day it’s very similar. Now, differences, a lot of the banks in North America, in Western Europe have been around for a very long time, so they have a lot of legacy systems, infrastructures and applications that they still need to maintain, because they still have systems or records that are sitting in there. They keep the records forever, which means a lot of those legacy systems still need to be powered on. Banks over here are much less of a problem. The infrastructure is much newer, the application is newer - it almost seems like they skipped a few generations of IT, especially in the banking industry. So I think they have more flexibility to really look at new, innovative ideas and adopt those ideas quicker because they don’t have the legacy systems, the

For banks, it’s more important that they have control... they know what they need to do in the physical world, now they are just changing into the virtual world. That’s why we advocate the notion of private cloud, because customers can control access in terms of how that information is distributed and corporate IT can almost act as that internal service provider now

INTERVIEW APIs and integration to worry about. I think that’s a definite competitive advantage that I see the banks here having, especially in the UAE. : There’s a comparative lack of regulation for the financial sector in this region - does that make a difference to what the banks are asking from EMC? SL: It does in some sense. Some of the audiences, all they wanted to talk about was GR C [governance, risk and compliance]. They want to understand not so much what they need to do now, but more about mature banking institutions elsewhere, either in the region or worldwide. They wanted to learn from what they are doing, how they are preparing for it, and what they have done already. : Do you feel banks see GRC as a headache or an opportunity? SL: I think IT sees it as a headache and the compliance officers, the CIOs see it is an opportunity. IT, very often, doesn’t know why it needs to do things a certain way, which was great for our events because we have a mix of business and IT in the room, so we were almost translating between the business unit and the IT why some of these things are important from a technology perspective, but obviously also from the business perspective as well. It is absolutely an advantage because the more you follow and play along with the rules, the better prepared you will be. We know the world is going to be more regulated and it will start in the highly mature markets, and those will trickle down into the more emerging markets as well. We know that’s going to happen. : How much can EMC bring to the table in terms of helping banks with emerging compliance issues? SL: We can actually bring quite a bit, both from a consulting perspective as well as tools that enable risk and compliance to be maintained, designed and enforced. We have very, very strong consulting capabilities worldwide, we have compliance and security expertise in the region and we will continue to build that team. A lot of the time when we are dealing with business issues, technology is just an enabler - it does what you tell it to do. So unless you have a clear understanding of what the clients are trying to accomplish, the tools are only going to get you so far. We have a very strong consulting organisation,

to go in, work with the customers, gather the requirements, help them do analysis and assessments of what their current capabilities are and where do they want to go. On the technology side, if you look at risk management, compliance and regulations, a lot of these need to be enforced on the technology aspect. Whether you are looking at information storage or security, you need to really gather enough data out of those systems on a daily, real time, basis so that you understand the activities that you are interacting with your customers, to see whether it matches with the policies that you are defining on the corporate side. We have a lot of the tools to extract data from the networking system, from the security system, from the storage environment, from the server environment, from the database environment, and then we have got the tools to put it into a dashboard. So now the compliance officers and legal officers that are responsible for defining the rules and procedures, instead of looking at log files, they are looking at charts, they are looking at trending diagrams, they are looking at reports that have been aggregated, and they can make intelligent decisions on whether the rules are applied properly or if they need to be modified, on an ongoing basis. : What sort of strategy towards cloud are you seeing from banks? SL: I think if there is one industry that will fully embrace cloud, in whatever form or concept, it is the financial services industry. Financial services have the tendency to grab on to new ideas faster, but more so because the cloud notion of distributed computing, distributed storage and shared resources in a pooled environment is highly applicable to the business that they are in, especially the global banks. If you look at the kind of round-theworld operation, the notion of cloud becomes very, very applicable. Information and applications and access need to move along, no matter where people are residing, but the infrastructure and networking and everything around it has to support that as well. We are talking to a lot of customers about it, a lot of customers are already starting projects around it, and the idea is also very attractive for the banks that we have talked to in the region as well. One thing I do want to caution though is EMC as a company is not

Lee: Customers need to have a long-term strategy for cloud services.

advocating that you should just jump into the cloud today. There is a lot of preparation that needs to be done before you can transform your infrastructure environment to take on the notion of a cloud. That’s why we focus more on the EMC slogan, ‘Journey to the Private Cloud’. The journey part is more important than where you actually end up. The journey, the IT transformation, whether it is automating the desktop environments for your remote users or your data centre operations, your business continuity areas, virtualising your applications, all of those are things that you need to do in order for cloud to be really something that you can get a hold of within the bank. For banks, it’s more important that they have control, they have their own internal procedures, their own internal IT control, they know what they need to do in the physical world, now they are just changing into the virtual world. So that’s why we advocate the notion of private cloud, because customers can actually handle and control access in terms of how that information is distributed, but at the same time corporate IT can almost act as that internal service provider now.

The infrastructure is much newer, the application is newer - it almost seems like they skipped a few generations of IT, especially in the banking industry. So I think they have more flexibility to really look at new, innovative ideas and adopting those ideas quicker because they don’t have the legacy systems, the APIs and integration to worry about July 2010 | www.itp.net

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INTERVIEW

THE FILE FACTOR F5 Networks is aiming to boost uptake of its ARX file virtualisation devices as customers increasingly look to simplify data management and reduce storage costs. Mark Govan, EMEA business development consultant for ARX solutions at F5, outlines the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s proposition for the Middle East market. : What are the main challenges when it comes to data growth among enterprise organisations at present? Mark Govan (MG): Growth rates in data are a challenge for just about every customer. It leads to ongoing capital expenditure in storage hardware and even though the unit price of storage falls, the cost of management still rises. As well as this, people tend to forget that for every GB created, an additional GB

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has to be backed up and protected for business continuity and compliance purposes. : So what sort of data growth are customers generally seeing? Are we talking about single-digit percentages or a much higher figure? MG: The customers that we engage with typically have growth rates in excess of 65% CAGR- some well over 100% - in their file

environments. Of this data, 8 0% has not been accessed or modified in the previous 9 0 days and a significant percentage of the overall storage pool may be non-business critical data such as .mp3, .pst or .vob. The challenge related to the inactive and non-business critical data is that it is being allocated key storage resources and tying up back-up capacity and disaster recovery resources whilst not being critical to the business.

INTERVIEW : What solutions does F5 have to these issues, and how do they actually work? MG: F5 AR X, our unique stub-less tiering functionality, enables file data to be split in to separately manageable pools of data. For example, 20% of the data will be automatically allocated to critical file storage (tier 1), while 8 0% will be automatically allocated to less critical storage or optimised file storage such as de-duplicated file servers (tier 2). The real benefit for customers is that this is totally transparent and you can apply different back-up policies to each pool of storage. For most customers, this means applying their usual back-up policies to tier 1 but only backing up tier 2 on a monthly basis (the tiering operation is run on a schedule). This gives dramatic cost savings and operational efficiencies, reducing back-up times by up to 0 9.% : Does it allow non-disruptive migration of data between file servers? This would probably be a feature many organisations would consider a priorityâ&#x20AC;Ś MG: Yes, the solution also enables non-disruptive migration of data between file servers, which makes for seamless movement of data and high speed consolidation or

market for AR X. A good example of the increasing maturity of the market is our partnership with NetApp with whom we are an Advantage Alliance Partner. We are collaborating with NetApp to provide customers with unified application and data delivery solutions to enable more agile and dynamic data centres. : What does that partnership with NetApp entail, and how is it helping customers? MG: Working together, F5 and NetApp will help customers bridge the gap from traditional to dynamic infrastructures by increasing the flexibility between users and resources. Agile IT environments allow enterprises to respond quickly to change - adding, removing, and changing application and data services on demand. The result is a powerful IT architecture encompassing security, access, acceleration, availability, and data management - that adapts smoothly to an organisationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s evolving IT requirements. In addition to outlining a long-term strategy, F5 and NetApp are providing immediate benefits to their joint customers with initial solutions that leverage application delivery and file virtualisation to unleash the power of data mobility today.

Govan: ARX solutions help customers address the source of their file storage issues.

The challenge related to the inactive and non-business critical data is that it is being allocated key storage resources and tying up back-up capacity and disaster recovery resources whilst not being critical to the business migration capabilities. There is a typical reduction in migration times of 50% -plus. This integrated dynamic capacity balancing drives up the utilisation of existing file servers and extends the life of storage assets in a client environment, offsetting capital expenditure, thus enabling businesses to manage their costs and operate more efficiently. : What sort of demand do you see in the Middle East? MG: The adoption of our technology is primarily driven by the growth of file storage and we have seen each market in EMEA emerge at a different rate and with specific market needs. We are seeing significant interest from a number of major organisations across the region, which is validating the

: How easy is it to implement storage tiering, especially for a business with changing requirements? AR X storage tiering is easy to deploy within a customer environment because it relies on the existing file server assets within a customer environment. We are especially suited to changing environments because we enable rapid transformation of a customer environment with no disruption. All of our solutions have delivered significant operational benefits and achieved rapid R OI due to the fact that we have solved problems that have drastically reduced the time required for a strategic business activity. For example, a customer that faced a migration project that was due to take three months and result in multiple outages was able

to complete the work within two weeks with no downtime when using the AR X solution. : There are a lot of vendors converging in the network, virtualisation and storage space at present. How can F5 stand out from what is a very competitive crowd? MG: One of our key differentiators is the maturity of our product and customer base that includes multipetabyte deployments at major organisations around the world. The key to any solution standing out in a market is when it delivers significant business benefits in a short period of time. We are successful with AR X because we help customers address the source of the issue (each data file and its content) rather than carry out operations at a level that will deliver less impact (at a volume or share level). For example, we give customers visibility in to their data, enable them to address each file based on a business policy and automate the process of management. : How does that differ from rival solutions that are out there, then? MG: Many other tools in the market space solve similar problems to us, but their implementation creates data management problems of another kind, such as creating backup issues with stub base tiering. Other vendors approach the problem at too high a level, resulting in data being needlessly virtualised with no benefit to the customer. In fact, it can increase the cost of implementation and reduce return on investment.

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IN DEPTH

INSPECTING GADGETS ACN rounds up the latest and greatest executive gadgets, from the new Versace fashion phone to the toughest in rugged storage.

Your flexible friend Over the last few years, we’ve seen all manner of ruggedised devices from the likes of Nokia and Sonim. They’ve all come with tough sounding names, luminous paint jobs and increasingly-ludicrous levels of ability to withstand punishment; for example, Sonim used to have a webcam on its site of its flagship XP3 being repeatedly bashed with a hammer, 24 hours a day. It made for riveting viewing, I can tell you. But today, the world is ever-so slightly different. We’ve accepted that we’re not that tough, that actually we’re a little bit soft and yes, we would like a decaf latte

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instead of a full-strength espresso. And that flows into our gadgets as well – pretty and thin are now in, not chunky and bulky. That’s why everyone continues to go gaga (with respect to the Lady) over everything Apple, but is decidedly ambivalent about more prosaic-looking metal. What then, can you make of Motorola’s distinctly non-cool E400 Enterprise Digital Assistant? Essentially the smart phone for the pocket protector set, it resembles the very best efforts of the graduating class of telephone design from 2003. The display is large at 3-inches, but pales in comparison to Cupertino’s

latest effort. And it’s worth mentioning that it’s best used with a stylus. Get used to hunting and pecking again, people, no fingerfriendly swiping for you. Under the hood, the E400 runs a version of Windows Mobile 6.5, which again, won’t light anyone’s visual synapses on fire if you’re used to Android or the ilk. The phone isn’t exactly svelte either – at 156 grams, it’ll tug at your pocket like a wayward billiard ball. At least the feature set is reasonably complete – 3 megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi and HSPA data, while the standard battery life quoted is an impressive six days. You might think I’m being a bit harsh – after all, this will spend most of its days on the field being coated in various kinds of muck. But based on the number of BlackBerry devices I’ve seen out in the same places, one has to realise that people tend to choose style over substance.

IN DEPTH

Mobile Spongebob Nokia has one of the most enviable design histories in the business when it comes to handsets. This is the same company that gave us the gorgeous Kenzodesigned 8210, the iconic 7110 matrixslider – and who can forget the elegant 6310, a phone which was so well-loved that many examples are still in use nearly a decade later. But there’s a dark side to Nokia. Remember its first camera phone, the 7650? It closely resembled two completely unrelated phones which had been duct taped together. What about the ‘leaf-inspired’ 7600, a phone so unrelated to the human anatomy that you can easily identify former users by the permanentlytwisted claw shapes of their hands? And then there’s the 7380, a phone which resembles a pen. Ever tried to dial on a pen? Now you know why it wasn’t a runaway hit. All of which brings us to the cunningly-titled X5-01, which suggests that there’s a number 2 out there. I really hope not, because this square masterpiece should stay unique. Essentially a slider with a QWERTY keyboard, it looks like a proper phone that’s been sawn in half. There are some advantages – the landscape screen means that web pages are easier to browse, but really, with Symbian as the OS don’t expect too much from the web experience. The spec’s lacking as well in the some of the more prevalent mod cons – at this level, GPS should really come standard, while the camera’s only packing 5 megapixel. What this should really come with, though, is a paper bag – to disguise its “unique” appearance.

Truly magical It’s June, so every technogeek knows what time it is. Yes, it’s time for the latest version of Apple’s now iconic iPhone to be revealed in all its glory. Fans ooh and aah at its new improvements and then rush in hordes to purchase it at the nearest temple of Apple. Job (sorry) done, another US$100 million in the Cupertino coffers. Things didn’t go quite according to the script though, as readers of the Gizmodo blog well know. First the phone’s design was leaked inadvertently to the press, and then its launch was plagued by reports of poor reception for left-handed users. It’s not a great start, to say the least. But underneath the hype, the major changes this year are to the exterior. The plastic slab looks of the old model have been replaced by a svelte glass-and-metal exterior, where the stainless steel band doubles as an antenna. It’s also a lot thinner, at just 9.3mm thick, while the much-touted display packs in 326 pixels per square inch – virtually pixel-free to the naked eye, so Apple claims. The OS and hardware updates aren’t dramatic – a 5 megapixel camera replaces the old 3 megapixel one, while the processor is purportedly the same as the one in the iPad, giving it a nice speed boost. The real

hardware jump this year is from FaceTime, Apple’s Wi-Fi only-app that provides video-calling capability via the front-mounted camera. That won’t impress those who first saw 3G video calling back in 2003, but I have a hunch that Apple’s ease-of-use might attract more users this time. Three years after it launched, it’s a little easier to understand what the iPhone is about now – and principally, that it’s an application delivery platform rather than a revolution hardware. Apple’s update was necessary to keep fashionconscious users happy (and everyone else in penury) but the basic feel of the OS remains the same. Even the introduction of faux-multitasking is secondary; all that matters is that users must have it and have it now. Though the iPhone may look more grown-up now, many will question how that applies to its buyers.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

PROJECT ROUND-UP Who’s doing what: ACN presents the latest project announcements and customer wins from across the Middle East. Egyptian Resorts Company: IP-based entertainment services (Egypt) Egyptian Resorts Company (ERC) has appointed hiBAHN as a longterm partner to provide digital entertainment and internet solutions to its Sahl Hasheesh International Resort Community. The resort, on Egypt’s Red Sea coast south of Hurgahda, is intended to include multiple hotels and outlets over 41 million square metres, making it one of the largest in the world. iBAHN will provide hospitality and IP-based entertainment services across the complex. The first stage of the deployment will be at the fivestar Pyramisa Sahl Hasheesh Hotel, with high-speed internet access (HSIA) and wireless connectivity in the common areas and other services to be added over the next year. iBAHN will provide a number of solutions from its portfolio, including HD IPTV and HSIA over fibre, with integration of guest services and hospitality applications with the entertainment solutions. David Tully, chief communication and technology officer at ERC, said: “Sahl Hasheesh is thrilled to partner with iBAHN, as it offers superior technical systems and reliable 24-hour support. This is the highest quality system we’ve found and we believe iBAHN will complement our integrated services at Sahl Hasheesh.” Graeme Powell, managing director EMEA at iBAHN, added: “Working in partnership with ERC on the biggest tourism project yet undertaken in the region confirms iBAHN’s global reputation for ability to create exceptional information and entertainment experiences for the world’s travellers. This will enable our partners in the ERC development to leverage our

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abilities to drive both guest satisfaction and repeat business. iBAHN’s global presence means we can provide 24-hour Arabic language support in addition to other languages including Mandarin and Cantonese.”

Intercontinental Hotels Group: Unified communications (MEA) Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) is set to boost its unified communications infrastructure across all of the hotels it operates in the Middle East and Africa after selecting Avaya as its preferred communications partner. The agreement will see Avaya deploy its UC portfolio, in particular its dedicated hospitality solutions such as in-room management and staff mobility solutions, to IHG properties in the region. IHG is the largest hotel company in world based on room numbers, and operates the InterContinental hotels, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Staybridge Suites brands in MEA. Avaya solutions are already being rolled out at the Crowne Plaza Dubai and the Intercontinental Al Ain. Ali Saeb, director of technology for IHG MEA

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Mumtalakat: Unified e-mail management services (Bahrain) Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company, the investment entity for Bahrain, has announced plans to deploy

commented: “Advanced technology provides a competitive edge in the hospitality market in attracting sophisticated business and leisure travellers, adding value and generating revenue. Working with a leading hospitality solution provider such as Avaya will add value to our services and improve our guests’ overall experience, leaving us well positioned to grow market share. Saeb says it expects the adoption of Avaya’s technologies to translate into measurable results. “We believe Avava’s communications solutions will enhance customer satisfaction levels, help increase staff productivity and efficiency, trim down maintenance costs and reduce total cost of ownership. Avaya is one of the leading providers of communication systems for the region’s hospitality industry and we look forward to working with them,” he said.

could-based unified e-mail management (UEM) services from Mimecast. Through the deal, Mimecast will provide Mumtalakat with its Software as a Service (SaaS) based e-mail archiving, security, compliance and business continuity in a single integrated platform from the cloud. By removing the need for several different in-house solutions, Mumtalakat hopes to minimise risk and complexity, as well as significantly reduce its e-mail management costs. Jameel Al Sharaf, Mumtalakat’s VP of IT, says the solution will help it to overcome one of its main IT challenges: “Mumtalakat is a young and innovative organisation and we’re always looking at how we can create efficiencies in our business process whilst reducing costs. We chose to implement Mimecast’s cloud solution as it helps to address one of the biggest challenges for IT departments in any significant organisation nowadays: the growing requirement to manage and store business critical information stored on e-mail systems,” he explained. Mohammed Naqui Mirza, regional director of Mimecast Middle East, says that because e-mail is the most common channel of communication within organisations, managing its volume can prove to be a costly challenge for any IT department, especially for entities as diverse as Mumtalakat. “Our cloud-based technologies offer scalable e-mail solutions that allow customers to maintain complete control of their e-mail, whilst removing the headache of spiralling storage costs, business continuity risks and security breaches. This frees up IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives that add real value to the business,” added Mirza.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Dubai World Trade Centre: Content management system (UAE) The Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) has launched a new online portal and content management system (CMS) following a deployment managed by Egyptian IT services and software company ITWorx. The Cairo-based outfit designed and built the new CMS, which is based on Vignette software. It is integrated with a public portal to provide information and services to exhibitors, visitors and partners of the DWTC’s meetings and exhibition services. “A content management system enables the creation, management, distribution and publishing of information, whether text, images or video in a simple and efficient manner,” explained Hossam Badr, ITWorx’s regional sales and marketing director for EMEA. “By automating many processes, organisations can deliver the right content in the right context, which helps improve sales, increase user satisfaction and facilitate communication with the public,” he added. The portal, which is available in Arabic and English, includes an event calendar, event planner for online reservations, and a virtual tour of the DWTC venue. For the CMS, DWTC will be able to publish content, including multimedia, to the site, while following strict workflows defined by the organisation, and will also be able to use a web analytics module for reporting. “We were very pleased to have partnered with ITWorx for our website project and were impressed with their knowledge, commitment and flexibility in meeting our requirements,” said Wesam Lootah, DWTC VP for information technology.

Qatar Airways: Communication services (Qatar) Flag carrier Qatar Airways has struck a deal with aviation IT specialist SITA to procure communication services over a three-year deal. The agreement comes as Qatar Airways plans a significant

expansion of its fleet over the next three years from 80 to 120 planes in total, including the as-yet unreleased Boeing 787. Qatar Airways CEO, Akbar Al Baker, said: “This growth needs to be supported by a partner who is leading the way when it comes to use of satellite and ground communications between the cockpit and the control tower. SITA was the first to utilise the new 4th generation Inmarsat satellites for this purpose and we are confident that SITA can support our expansion, which

National Bank of Abu Dhabi: Banking software (UAE) The National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) will deploy Misys’ commercial lending solution, Misys Loan IQ, to improve its lending-related back office operations. The Misys Loan IQ application will help NBAD to streamline workflows and improve its efficiency when processing commercial loans. The Misys solution, which currently processes over a third of international syndicated loans and more than a half of the world’s loan trades, is compatible with multi-currency and multibranch usage, and provides comprehensive coverage for highly structured syndicated deals. Misys says that users have reported cost savings of as much as 20% through systems consolidation and reduced headcount. “The bank preferred a turnkey product, highly

includes the introduction of six new long-haul routes this year.” According to Hani El Assaad, SITA regional VP for the Middle East and North Africa, the company already provides a number of cockpit-based data communication services to airlines in the Gulf States using existing Inmarsat satellites, and Qatar Airways is the latest to benefit from this arrangement. “The service provides access to the expanding number of Air Traffic Control agencies that have begun to use aircraft data link to

capable of resolving their operational issues, which will be delivered via our Loan IQ system. Misys Loan IQ is backed by our 18 years of expertise in the lending field and has all the functionality needed to meet complex loan trading transactions,” said Roy Froud, director for the Middle East and Africa at Misys. Kevin Hayden, treasury and capital markets operations director for MEA at Misys, added: “The solution proposed by Misys will provide the bank with market-leading functionality that addresses each area of the bank’s requirements from the structured finance team, credit management, risk control, accounting and compliance and portfolio management. It will also enable NBAD to capitalise on the unparalleled commercial lending expertise that Misys has gained from working with the top financial institutions worldwide,” commented Hayden.

optimise flight routes. Our new AIRCOM IP service will also be securely integrated into the Qatar Airways IT environment. We are very pleased at the confidence that this outstanding airline has shown in SITA,” said Assaad.

Dubai Municipality: EAM software (UAE) Dubai eGovernment has deployed an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution to help manage maintenance of Dubai Municipality’s Public Transport Department. The EAM, which is integrated with Dubai’s Government Resource Planning (GRP) system will monitor all processes relating to periodic and corrective maintenance, equipment and spare parts for the municipality’s fleet of 2,000 light and heavy vehicles. The EAM runs from data in a central database that helps in monitoring the extent of damages, estimating repair costs, optimising preventive maintenance plans, upgrading asset management and planning and distributing available resources. Ahmed Bin Humaidan, Director General of Dubai eGovernment, said: “The EAM system was implemented by the GRP Systems Department with the aim of carrying out the maintenance of vehicles and equipment and ensuring the supply of spare parts at the municipality. Its deployment is an important step for enhancing the effectiveness and productivity of the municipality’s Public Transport Department. The new system provides the department with effective tools that will contribute to improving asset management and increasing profits by following the best preventive maintenance methods. It is also designed to ensure optimal asset productivity, and reduce costs, as well as help the municipality manage the sustainability of its services.

STARTED A NEW PROJECT? WON A CONTRACT? E-mail the ACN team at acn@itp.com to let us know

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LETTERS ALIGNING BUSINESS AND IT STRATEGIES FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

Registered at Dubai Media City PO Box 50024, Dubai, UAE Tel: + 971 (0)4 210 8000 Fax: + 971 (0)4 210 8080 Web: www.itp.com Offices in Dubai & London

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR DEAR SIR, If there’s one lesson we have learned from the recession, one word we have to keep repeating to ourselves over and over again, then I think that word is agility. My company, a major financing house, has managed to weather the crisis fairly well. But it’s not because our leadership was particularly good, but simply because they put every single project on hold last year. From what I am given to understand, that’s what most of the banks out here did and it’s not a good strategy, I think, because they are still proceeding with initiatives that were built for a rapidly expanding market, not a contracting one. egards, R Daniel, A UE ACN replies: It’s an interesting point you make, Daniel, and the topic is certainly one we’re sure is driving many conversations in boardrooms around the region right now. It’s no good for companies just to re-ignite projects that they postponed 18 months ago – so much has changed in the business environment since then. They have to revisit their plans and assess whether it fits with their corporate priorities postrecession. Only then is it safe to press the ‘restart’ button.

ITP Technology Publishing CEO Walid Akawi Managing Director Neil Davies Managing Director Karam Awad General Manager Peter Conmy Publisher Natasha Pendleton

happening? It’s also alarming because companies are no longer hiring security personnel but outsourcing to a third-party instead. That sounds positively mad to me – how can we trust an external organisation with monitoring our data, when we don’t trust our internal people! Maybe it’s because these particular skills are not well developed in this region, or simply that people are hard to keep in one position. egards, R u Gy, A UE

EDITORIAL Senior Group Editor Mark Sutton Tel: +971 4 210 8225 email: mark.sutton@itp.com Group Editor Andrew Seymour Tel: +971 4 210 8320 e-mail: andrew.seymour@itp.com Contributors Piers Ford, Imthishan Giado ADVERTISING Group Advertising Manager Brett Pearson Tel: +971 4 210 8 345 e-mail: brett.pearson@itp.com STUDIO Senior Designer Michel Al Asmar PHOTOGRAPHY Director of Photography Sevag Davidian Chief Photographer Khatuna Khutsishvili Senior Photographers Efraim Evidor, Thanos Lazopoulos, G-nie Arambulo Staff Photographers, Jovana Obradovic, Isidora Bojovic, Rajesh Raghav, Ruel Pableo, Lyubov Galushko, George Dipin PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION Group Production Manager Kyle Smith Deputy Production Manager Ali Fahmi Production Co-ordinator Basel Al Kassem Managing Picture Editor Patrick Littlejohn Distribution Manager Karima Ashwell Distribution Executive Nada Al Alami

ACN replies: Whether to keep security functions in-house or outsource them is a debate that has always raged at end-user level. Clearly it depends on a multitude of factors from the core policies of the company and the sensitivity of the data involved to the associated management costs. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) is one organisation that has really overhauled its security practices in recent times by embracing a managed services approach, but there are also aspects of its in-house security procedures that it would never consider moving outside. Turn to page 28 for our exclusive interview with the company’s IT head to find out more.

CIRCULATION Head of Circulation & Database Gaurav Gulati

MARKETING Marketing Executive Martin Chambers Event Manager Preeta Panicker

ITP DIGITAL Assistant Editor Vineetha Menon Tel: +971 4 210 8579 e-mail: vineetha.menon@itp.com Group Sales Manager ITP Digital Websites Ahmad Bashour Tel: +971 4 210 8549 e-mail: Ahmad Bashour@itp.com Senior Sales Manager, ITP.net Nathalie Akl Tel: +971 4 210 8520 e-mail: nathalie.akl@itp.com ITP GROUP Chairman Andrew Neil Managing Director Robert Serafin Finance Director Toby Jay Spencer-Davies Board of Directors KM Jamieson, Mike Bayman, Walid Akawi, Neil Davies, Rob Corder, Mary Serafin Circulation Customer Service Tel: +971 4 286 8559 Printed by Color Lines Printing Press. Controlled Distribution by Blue Truck Subscribe online at www.itp.com/subscriptions The publishers regret that they cannot accept liability for error or omissions contained in this publication, however caused. The opinions and views contained in this publication are not necessarily those of the publishers. Readers are advised to seek specialist advice before acting on information contained in this publication, which is provided for general use and may not be appropriate for the readers’ particular circumstances. The ownership of trademarks is acknowledged. No part of this publication or any part of the contents thereof may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form without the permission of the publishers in writing. An exemption is hereby granted for extracts used for the purpose of fair review.

DEAR SIR, Why don’t you do articles more regularly on security in your magaz ine? It’s such a big topic outside this region, yet no one talks about it all out here. Do people think that because the press does not report incidents (for whatever reason, I don’t know personally) that they are not

HAVE YOUR SAY — Letters should be sent to The Editor, Arabian Computer News, P.O. Box 500024, Dubai, UAE. Or by e-mail to acn@itp.com. We reserve the right to alter the length of letters and edit any offensive content. ACN does not necessarily agree, nor can it be held responsible for, any of the views expressed in letters published.

THE MONTH AHEAD – AUGUST IT GOVERNANCE

STAFF EDUCATION

PUBLIC SCRUTINY

Are enterprises still ignorant of the benefits of proper IT governance and standards? ACN explores a subject that CIOs and IT managers can only expect to hear more of in future.

Qualified resources are becoming harder to find, as many CIOs in the Middle East probably know only too well. We examine which qualifications and certifications still have relevance.

We take an in-depth look at a major UAE public sector IT deployment to find out how investments in new technology are benefitting both citizens and the institution at the heart of the project.

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July 2010 | www.itp.net

EXIT

SEE-THROUGH Secret CIO finds out what it’s like to become invisible IT ALL HAPPENED SO SUDDENLY. One minute you’re there, the next minute you’re not. I’m talking about being visible. Free of the pesky restrictions of the visible light spectrum, I entered a world of glorious peace and tranquillity, wandering the office far and wide like an IT version of David Bellamy. You’re never completely invisible of course, people really do tend to have some sort of sixth sense sometimes and will step out of your way at the last minute or crinkle their nose when standing very close to you. Before you think that this monthly column has entered the Twilight Zone, let me reassure you firmly that I didn’t

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July 2010 | www.itp.net

actually become incorporeal, but am merely in the mundane process of changing jobs. I’d just been headhunted (which I’ll get to in a moment) and as you’d expect, serving my one-month notice became something of an exercise in ambiguity. Where once you had supreme authority over the IT department, now people don’t really have a good reason to listen to you anymore. However, they don’t want to actually spell it out, so instead, the most common tactic is simply agree to whatever you say, nod reassuringly and then ensure that no record of said meeting remains afterward, whether in electronic or written form.

So in effect, you’re invisible. Where people once bothered to invite you into their conversations, now you’re brushed off faster than a tsetse fly. Enter the room and the topic spins over to meaningless babble faster than a Vegas roulette wheel. On the plus side, it does mean that I can go to meetings in flip flops and no one will say a blessed thing. They may do that nose crinkling thing again, but no one will actually say anything to you, because out-and-out dissent is simply not done. Besides, as they reason, you’re leaving anyway – what’s the point of disciplinary action? Ah yes, the leaving thing. I’ve never been headhunted before, and the experience is nothing less than quixotic. In the old days it was also a lot more classy and discreet – you might get an after-hours phone call or a message from a sender with no name asking you to meet at a certain location to discuss a “business opportunity”. If you chose to respond, you’d inevitably have dinner at the swankiest restaurant in town. The opposition would never come alone – a “friendly” manager would inevitably turn up as well and the two (never more than two) would spend all night laughing at your jokes and listening to your complaints about the industry. If you choose to slag them off, that was fine as well – they’d take the jibes as signs of constructive criticism. Things go a little differently compared to other markets when it comes to headhunting. There’s no real interview process and if you make it to that dinner, you’ve essentially got the job. The only real topic of discussion is the amount of salary they’re going to offer and at this level, the upwardsbump is never less than satisfactory. So what was the job? Oh, to be CIO at a small up-and-coming bank. Not a mega-institution, but one with reasonable growth potential and an IT department that doesn’t have too many rigid processes in place. The board is also smart enough to stay out of my way although as always, the CFO will be a problem. What about my old job? Well, they’ve been looking for a way to cut my salary for the last year now, so by leaving I’ve done them a favour. My faithful secondin-command has been promoted into my position, although at considerably less than what I was being paid. And so the endless merry-go-round of the regional workplace continues. I suspect however, that the next stop will be my last.