Network Middle East - July 2010 by ITP Business Publishing

An ITP Technology Publication

THE BIG SWITCH Juniper reveals its plan to dominate the datacentre

DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

OUT OF CONTROL

Why are our smart cities taking so long to build?

Virtualisation stalls as enterprises tighten belts

Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank puts managed security to the test Licensed by Dubai Media City

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SECRET SERVICE

PRIORITY LIST IT managers talk planning after a year of recession

JULY 2010 VOLUME 16 ISSUE 7

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Contents

July 2010 Vol.17 No.07

Up close: Secret service 20

Faced with a need to monitor its ever-expanding network traffic logs for suspicious activity, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank eschewed hiring additional staff and turned instead to Symantec for managed services. Imthishan Giado reports.

Market buzz 2

Stories making the headlines this month: EMW gaining an Avaya Service Expert certification, KACST deploying Blue Coat security appliances, and Qatar Airways signing a three year deal with SITA.

In depth: The big switch 12 Imthishan Giado sat down with Juniper’s top management during its recent EMEA Press Summit in Barcelona to find out more about the firm’s plans to tackle its rivals.

In depth: Priority list 16 Imthishan Giado attended IDC’s IT Manager Forum in Abu Dhabi last month, to find out where the IT market is heading in 2010.

Recovery position 36 Wouter Vancoppenolle, regional sales director for eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa at Double-Take Software, explains four possible options for disaster recovery for your virtual environment.

Up close: Out of control 30 The hype around virtualisation continues to build, but is it really as successful in the Middle East as vendors claim? Imthishan Giado looks at the state of the market.

Days of future past 24

Over the past decade, property developers in the Middle East have been infatuated with the idea of building smart cities. NME looks at the current obstacles to progress.

BICSI publishes new data centre standard

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Market Buzz

Industry

Our new AIRCOM IP service will also be securely integrated into the overall Qatar Airways IT environment, says SITA’s Assaad.

Qatar Airways signs SITA up for three years

Implementation

Aviation IT specialist SITA has struck a three-year deal with flag carrier Qatar Airways for communication services. According to Hani El Assaad, SITA regional vice president for the Middle East and North Africa, the company already provides cockpit-based data communication services to airlines in the Gulf States using existing Inmarsat satellites, and Qatar Airways is the latest to this arrangement. “The service provides access to the expanding number of Air

Traffic Control agencies that have begun to use aircraft data link to 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 regional airline has shown in SITA,” commented Assaad. The agreement comes as Qatar Airways plans a significant expansion of its fleet over the fleet in the next three years from 80 to 120 planes in total, including the

as-yet unreleased Boeing 787, which is still facing delays. 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. We are confident that SITA can support our expansion which includes six new long-haul routes this year.”

Brocade pips ProCurve with EMEA sales boss Industry 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 home base in San Jose to lead its global sales enablement and marketing department. Soto was formerly at rival HP ProCurve, which employed him as its VP and GM for the EMEA region. Before joining the Palo Alto-based firm, Soto worked for 3Com as the country manager for the Iberian peninsula, growing business by more than $200

and on site delivery for managed services says IDC’s

million. He will now report to Ian Whiting, SVP 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 hyper-competitive yet strategically important market that EMEA is.” At his new position in California, Plechschmidt will report to John McHugh, VP and CMO – who was the top executive at HP ProCurve and, for many, the driver behind its rise as a $1 billion networking firm. McHugh left ProCurve in June 2008

IT systems association BICSI has released its latest standard for datacentre design and implementation. The new standard, BICSI 002-2010, Data Center Design and Implementation Best Practices, is intended to reflect the growing complexity of data centre deployments, and the need for companies to now understand mechanical, electrical and telecommunications systems issues involved when designing new infrastructure. The standard includes best practice, requirements and considerations for data centre design including factors such as site selection, layout, thermal systems and security, and has been designed to be compatible with existing standards. Jonathan Jew, co-chair of the Data Center Standards Subcommittee and lead editor of the standard said: “BICSI 002 is a great resource for datacentre designers because it provides a wealth of information on the subjects important to this audience. It is the culmination of the efforts of more than 150 subject matter experts in a wide variety of disciplines related to datacentre design.” “This is truly a great achievement for BICSI and our membership as BICSI 002-2010, Data Center Design and Implementation Best Practices is the ultimate standard for anyone working in the data center arena,” said Brian Hansen, RCDD, NTS, CSI, BICSI President. “I’d like to extend a thanks to all of the Data Center Subcommittee members for their hard work and dedication in producing what we believe to be the most comprehensive data center standard to date.” BICSO is a professional association supporting the information technology systems (ITS) industry. The new standard is available from www.bicsi.org/standards.

Skype aims to oﬀer better value to users

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Market Buzz

Industry

Our solutions are bringing safe and efficient services to KACST, says Taha.

KACST locks out intruders with Blue Coat Implementation Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has signed up Blue Coat to provide its Internet Services Unit (ISU) with a range of appliances to both defend its network against external threats and keep bandwidth demands in line. KACST looked at solutions from a number of vendors before opting for Blue Coat’s solution, which comprises ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances. In the case of the former, the ISU claims that it’s been able to double its existing bandwidth capacity while also offering IPv6 support. The ProxyAV appliances, meanwhile,

have been deployed to provide malware and AV protection. Dr. Hesham Bin-Abbas, director, internet services unit at KACST said, “ISU needs to have the most sophisticated, efficient and scalable infrastructure to support our increasing number of clients and escalating security challenges. We needed a high performance platform that could support expansion and provide flexibility. In addition we also required a way to bridge the gap between IPv4 and IPv6”. “We are pleased to see the important role our solutions play in helping ISU at KACST bring safe

and efficient Internet services to its users. Blue Coat appliances provide critical Web security while also decreasing bandwidth consumption and serving as a transparent gateway between IPv4 and IPv6 content and infrastructure,” commented Nidal Taha, Regional Director for ME and Turkey, Blue Coat Systems. As one of Saudi Arabia’s muchtouted “smart cities”, KACST is responsible for growing the the Kingdom’s emerging knowledge economy. The ISU unit with KACST is designed to create and provide internet services exclusively to the academic sector.

EMW gains Avaya Service Expert certiﬁcation Industry

This certification recognises our ability to exceed expectations, says El-Hage.

Systems integrator EMW ME has become the first firm in the Middle East to gain Avaya’s Service Expert Certification. The certification recognises a company’s ability to deliver set standards of service. 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 it’s Avaya customers. Other factors in gaining the certifica-

tion were EMW’s large proportion of technical staff, involvement in complex projects, and use of proof-of-concept deployments to introduce new technologies. Serjios El-Hage, CEO of EMW ME commented: “We are very proud to have received this prestigious award which recognises and honours our ability to deliver solutions that meet and exceed our customers’ expectations in terms of performance, reliability and cost of ownership.”

Global IP telephony firm Skype is serious about partnering with telecommunications companies in the Middle East, with regional head Rouzbeh Pasha stating that any deals made will serve to “bring better value” to customers. The United Arab Emirates Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) recently updated its VOIP policy which clarifies that using Skype is considered ‘illegal’ at this stage. Reacting to the news at the time, Pasha said that in other advanced markets, no license was required to provide IP-based communications and that market prices in the UAE would remain high and few new services deployed until real competition was introduced. According to TRA rules, Skype needs to either be licensed by the TRA to provide their services in the country or collaborate with the four existing licensees, which also includes Etisalat and Du. Du chief commercial officer Fareed Faraidooni has already confirmed, through recent media reports, that the telco would be launching its own VoIP services next month. Etisalat launched its enterprise VoIP solution in March this year, calling it the “first phase” of its overall strategy for VoIP services in the country. He admits he is presently engaged in talks with a ‘few’ regional, but asserts that Skype is not bound by the TRA as it is a software firm and “does not fall under telecom regulations”. “Our strategy for partnering with companies is really to make sure that our offer becomes even better for users,” he stated. “We want to make sure that whatever offer we bring to the users in this region really does take into account the benefit to the user, and that takes a little bit longer than somewhere in Europe,” continues Skype’s Pasha.

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ITP TECHNOLOGY PUBLISHING

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Market Buzz

The Sahl hasheesh resort is situated on Egypt’s Red Sea Coast and encompass over 41 million square metres.

iBAHN makes partner grade for ERC Implementation

iBAHN has been appointed as a long-term partner for the Egyptian Resorts Company (ERC), 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 five-star 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 & technology officer at ERC commented: “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 fully integrated services at Sahl Hasheesh.” Graeme Powell, managing director EMEA, iBAHN, stated: “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 to leverage our 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,” he adds.

Smart cities lead race for FTTH adoption Industry Swiss cabling vendor R&M predicts that Fibre to the Home (FTT) will see a strong surge in the Middle East over the next five years. As the region continues to build more “smart cities” whose residents make use of higher bandwidth to deliver triple-play services, the vendor believes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar will see the most growth. Jean Pierre Labry, managing director of R&M Middle East and Africa says: “A high performance fiber network will be the key in-

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frastructure in the future. Only a robust FTTH infrastructure can offer the speed, security and transmission quality needed to accommodate future bandwidth requirements for triple play in the Middle East.” “R&M anticipates that FTTH networks will be increasingly deployed and become the standard network infrastructure. Already we are seeing investment by regional network operators and real estate developers into FTTH networks,” he continues.

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July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

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Meydan Group’s network races oﬀ the blocks UAE’s Meydan Group has selected Cisco to deliver a range of networking, security and unified communications systems for its flagship horseracing development. The networking vendor completed the deployment with the aid of its gold partner, Gulf Business Machines. The development has seen the deployment of a raft of Cisco systems, including a fully converged IP infrastructure, building management and security, covering the main Meydan Grandstand as well as the Meydan Hotel. The latter also features a new unified communications system for guest use as well as IPTV, which provides interactive TV services to hotel customers.

The Meydan racecourse recently played host to the world’s horse race, the Dubai World Cup.

Wassim Hamwi, chief information officer for Meydan commented: “The Cisco converged network implemented by Meydan enabled us to transport

video, voice and data over a single network as well as support the necessary infrastructure for remote management of a wide range of services including

EDITOR’S CHOICE

access control, public address systems, video surveillance and interactive visitor information. Through the IP network, all information required to record and react to any given situation will be available to Meydan’s management team in real-time”. Wayne Hull, director and GM for Cisco in the UAE says: “Working with the developers of one of the world’s largest integrated racing facilities to deploy Cisco’s next-generation “connected stadium” technology is a key milestone for Cisco as it plays an important role in transforming the fan experience, and enabling facility operators to change their business processes and realise a competitive advantage.”

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July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Editor’s comment

Fast Changes Welcome to a brand new Network Middle East.

ime never stands still in the dynamic world of networking. As the new editor of Network Middle East, it already feels like it’s rushing out of my grasp. Many of you may already know me from my earlier position as deputy editor of NME’s sister magazine, Arabian Computer News, a position I’ve occupied for the last three years. Having extensively written about the Middle East’s enterprise computing industry, I now approach the world of networks with renewed enthusiasm and a desire to get to the heart of this crucial segment of the industry. After all, the network underpins virtually every segment of our lives, which is no mean achievement for something which barely existed half a century ago. In many ways, we can all truly say that we’ve lived through interesting times and have seen more change happen more quickly than ever before in human history. In my meagre lifetime alone, the list is astounding. I’ve witnessed

the birth of the cellphone and its transformation from clunky fashion accessory to – well, it’s still a fashion accessory for some but it’s also become the most essential communications device on the planet. I have watched the rise, fall and rebirth of the PDA as internet tablet. From a bulky tome that occupied endless shelf space, all of human history is now searchable in a user-edited online database (although granted, it isn’t always accurate). Even the publishing industry has not escaped the transformation power of the network. Where once we might wait a month to hear from our readers, today every single word I write can be critiqued and commented upon instantly, both publicly and privately. What’s more, where journalism was once a black art that required years of training and apprenticeship, today anyone can report on the events of the world – or merely his or her daily existence, if they choose. It may not always subscribe to the same standard, but the voices of the amateur and

professional journalist can have equal weight in a world where few boundaries remain. And let’s not forget the explosion in data growth in the last five years. In the past, your data rarely stretched beyond the boundaries of your e-mail inbox and its associated documents – but today, the term ‘digital

communication is the humble network. From wires to wave, it is our invisible but omnipresent link between each other. As your humble guide on this journey to charting the future of the network, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to every reader of this magazine and bid you buenvido – welcome. You’re all most invited

The network underpins virtually every segment of our lives, which is no mean achievement for something which barely existed half a century ago. lifestyle’ is widely bandied about as a means of describing the veritable explosion in data we carry around with us everywhere. And we want access to it absolutely everywhere – even our cars are not safe, judging by the number of new models from manufacturers like Audi which sport mobile hotspot options. At the heart of all this data movement, this revolution in

to join in with your thoughts, comments and suggestions about where we’re heading – please get in touch.

Imthishan Giado Editor imthishan.giado@itp.com

05 VOL 13

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July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

In depth

The big switch Imthishan Giado sat down with Juniper’s top management during its recent EMEA Press Summit in Barcelona to find out more about the firm’s plans to tackle its rivals and transform the world of networking.

n technology, you rarely get a straight answer about anything. Few are guiltier of this crime than technology vendors, who have made an art out of obfuscation. But that’s not an accusation you can perhaps level at the man who created Juniper Networks – Pradeep Sindhu. As director and vice chairman of the board, he is especially pointed about where the blame lies for stagnation in development today. “If you look at the founding vision of Juniper, which is to build a global network that connects all people and all information systems and devices into one

single network – we’re well on our way to achieving that vision,” he declares. “But the problem that we have is that the service providers that are a key part of building this network come from a very different world, an old network world where you have different networks for different applications. That old network is economically challenged because the revenues that people are getting from them are not keeping up with costs of the growing network,” he continues. Sindhu was speaking during its recent press summit in Barcelona where the Sunnyvale-

based firm launched a raft of new products and services designed to reduce expenditure without increasing the alreadyclogged infrastructure of the average datacentre. The firm also announced new 10 gigabit Ethernet switches and routers that yield up to a five-fold and eight-fold improvement in network performance, respectively. A particular emphasis was on its new Virtual Chassis fabric, which has the stated objective of reducing the existing networking infrastructure in the datacentre from three layers to two, and eventually just one with its long-term Stratus project.

If you build a network which is general purpose, the CAPEX is amortised across all applications and users. If you build a network that is automated, then the OPEX decreases as well because you’re replacing human labour with automation.

UCS forces the customer to get locked into a Cisco solution, says Sindhu.

The closely-guarded Stratus project has been the subject of much speculation since its unveiling early last year in February. To date, no partners or products have been announced, leading many to wonder if Juniper is not perhaps pushing some sort of vapour ware which may never come to fruition. The reliance on partners is also a point of concern for many, as few have yet to be announced. Alexander Gray, Juniper’s SVP and general manager for the SLT branch solutions business unit, firmly denies that charge: “We’ve been very clear on conceptually what it is, which is a way of simplifying the datacentre. The phrase “3-2-1” has gotten a lot of resonance. Today the typical architecture in the datacentre is a three layer architecture with an Edge or Access layer aggregation and core. There is just tremendous waste in duplication, layering adds latency. That was a great architecture when traffic was primarily going north-south

– so host applications, clientserver applications. “With the modern datacentre with modern web-based applications and SOA, 75% of the traffic is now between servers. That hierarchical model scales poorly. With the Stratus project, we’re talking about it. We are hard at work on developing it as you might expect. A product like Stratus requires some pretty high levels of invention. We’re very clear last fall that investment in very sophisticated silicon is how we innovate and bring value,” he continues. The other big question around Stratus is quite simply: who will buy it? With most CIO budgets still in a very precarious state, few have plans to make major investments in any kind of technology, particularly one as CAPEX-intensive as network infrastructure. For Gray, one driver of tech adoption is the fact that the world is shifting quickly towards a mobile infrastructure. “The emergence of the smart phone and the amount of data that it is driving, especially in the wireless space, is continuing to drive high levels of investment. For a number of the larger US operators that have bigger wireless networks, the capital expenditures are typically higher now in the wireless side of the business than in the land line side,” he explains. “A good planning assumption for a business like Juniper is that the expectation should be in the nearly future that there’s almost no place you can go and not be in range of some wireless network,” continues Gray. “In most of Western Europe we’re there, and that’s true of most of the US as well. But our emphasis on wired products is pretty strong. We continue to add new members of the EX series switching family, whether it’s wired

switching and interconnects in a datacentre or the same capabilities in a campus. We’re certainly not planning to let up in our product commitments to the fixed wired network.” As far as Sindhu is concerned however, CIOs need to approach the whole task of building infrastructure in a completely different way: “Clearly people don’t have the money to do it. If you build a network which is general purpose, the CAPEX is

amortised across all applications and users. If you build a network that is automated, then the OPEX decreases as well because you’re replacing expensive human labour with automation. “If you make the network infrastructure programmable, what ends up happening is that the innovation of lots and lots of people applies to increasing the applications that people actually enjoy using. Those are the three things that we are focused on to

make sure that the benefits stay much higher than the costs. As long as you can ensure that, the CIO will be willing to spend on these initiatives,” he believes.

Going head to head In many ways, Cisco and Juniper are facing the same problem – how to deal with a world which will come to rely on the network for all forms of communication in the future. Both want a simpler, more organic datacentre that

The assumption you make there is that by having that kind of proprietary approach, customers are going to be enamoured by it. My discussions with customers suggest that they want to run away as fast as possible. Juniper’s Stratus project will go head to head with Cisco’s UCS for domination of the datacentre.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7 13

can quickly reconfigure to meet the needs of the organisation, while being easier to implement to manage. The difference – and the devil, as they say – is in the details. Cisco plans to go inhouse for server development, while Juniper plans to work with server, storage and software companies to achieve its network vision. As Sindhu recalls, the company made the strategic choice not to expand out of its core remit. “We started the conception of the Stratus project in 2006 and started earnestly the design work in 2008. It took us two long years of trying to understand the problem, figure out what role Juniper could play. Juniper is a pure-play networking company – we don’t want to build computers and storage devices and other things,” he states. “This problem is insanely complicated, and for any company to think that they can solve the problems in computing and storage as well as people who specialise in the [individual technologies] is a tall order,” chastises Sindhu. “They’re trying to bite off more than they can chew – there’s no question in my mind. You’ll end up with average

14 July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

solutions. If you look at UCS for example, it completely misses the problem of large-scale organisations. It’s a solution which is intended to solve Cisco’s problem, which is: how do you increase your revenues? It doesn’t solve the customer’s problem. In fact, it forces the customer to get locked into a Cisco solution.” Nevertheless, one wonders why Juniper would want to turn down additional revenue streams. After all, Cisco has certainly done well with this strategy in the past, if you consider its consumer success with the Linksys acquisition of 2003. Nevertheless, concludes Sindhu, the enterprises have spoken; and they don’t want a one-vendor solution. “The assumption you make there is that by having that kind of proprietary approach, customers are going to be enamoured by it. My discussions with customers are that they want to run away as fast as possible. There is one attraction [of UCS]: you have a one-stop shop. But the opposite of attraction is really the fear that they’re going to get completely locked into a proprietary and old solution. That’s the fear that’s being realised as we speak,” he says.

The People Speak

Juniper expects that the Stratus Project will start delivering working prototypes by early 2011.

Few vendors work in a vacuum when it comes to product design, and it’s often valuable to seek the input of existing customers on future products. As Juniper’s Alex Gray relates, it can work, but in a limited fashion. “Juniper’s philosophy is that there is definitely room for innovation that’s inspired by customers but perhaps does not come directly from them. Clearly, all of our developments or product specifications have been designed in conjunction with our customers. Certainly having leading customers like the NYSE, Euronext is a great example of a very large customer that we’ve listened to. One of the concerns we hear all the time is that even though our latency performance is excellent, today’s customers in financial services want it even lower. It’s a good example of having to continuously improve the products,” he says. With the rapid pace of the financial market, the financial services market is an obvious fit for lowlatency products, but Gray says it’s not the only one with special needs. “Some sectors, including education and public sector tend be more price-sensitive and therefore are going to want very high levels of performance. But they also don’t typically have as much money to invest as a financial services customer. Service providers have their own separate set of concerns in place and some of the highest levels of availability are necessary,” he states. “ Wireless service providers are pushing us very hard on some of the product capabilities like session ramp rates and session scale. Today we are at 10 million sessions for an SRX 5800 and that’s not enough,” concludes Gray.

Despite the growth of the wireless business, our emphasis on wired products remains pretty strong, says Gray.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

In depth

Priority list Imthishan Giado attended IDC’s IT Manager Forum in Abu Dhabi last month, to find out where the IT market is heading in 2010.

here’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 differ-

ing opinions. Vendors claimed that the market had rebounded quickly, but many 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 manage-

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.

ment. 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 frames. To push anything bigger than that is going to be a challenge in the current environ-

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.

ment – 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 shortterm 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 management changes, we have to hold our projects. Now from April, they are all back on track,” he states. One of the first priorities for Ansari’s firm in the “new normality” as IDC calls it, 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 number of sites but a strong team of professionals. The data which we get is from consultants involving different feasibility studies That data is valuable to us – one study might cost us in the region of 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 my resolution for this year,” he finishes. This news doesn’t surprise IDC’s Adams: “Datacentre discussion is really hot right now. There’s certainly a lot happen-

ing in this region and it’s really escalated over the past quarter. We’re seeing in a lot of interest in things like to how 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 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,” she continues. 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 of acceptance to this mode, 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 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 renewed interest will not come as a surprise to most CIOs and

I’m seeing that companies are more comfortable with a combination of remote and on-site delivery for managed services, says IDC’s Margaret Adams.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7 17

This year’s IT Manager Conference was staged at the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi and the Atlantis hotel in Dubai.

18 July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

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 2008 February and till now, have made those 30%-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 at the end. “In this region it tends to be local. What you get is a dualmodel. 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.

Things to do If there’s one element which became clear from IDC’s events, it’s that the “big picture” priorities haven’t changed dramatically. Companies are still eyeing

The List

IT managers – outsourcing and managed services. Adams explains why 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 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 that to a provider,” she continues. United Holding’s Ansari, a firm proponent of outsourcing, agrees. “I am quite prooutsourcing. I have hosted e-mail and even my IT support is outsourced. If you have proper

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 as possible and cheaply as possible. Today, it’s simply become a case of justifying them from a ROI perspective. More than one IT manager at the event noted the pressure from management on delivering 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.

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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July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Up close

Secret Service Faced with a need to monitor its ever-expanding network traffic logs for suspicious activity, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank eschewed hiring additional staff and turned instead to Symantec for managed services. Imthishan Giado reports.

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? online presence at all. 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 confirms. 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 surprisingly swift timeframe (see boxout) 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

Satisfaction guaranteed

“

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 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 – ACDB 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 these 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

those people. We have 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 admits. 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

Lee North explains why customer satisfaction – particularly when a security breach happens – is never something that should be taken lightly. “One of the difficult questions is, what do you do when someone’s account is compromised? The customer himself has given those credentials out. I read that Mashreq Bank recently refused to refund the customer [in a similar incident]. They said it was your fault, you shouldn’t have done that and all the rest. Our stance is to refund the customer because we do not want that publicity,” comments North. “People out there are a little bit naïve in terms of how to manage their accounts. Other banks will say no, it’s your fault. It’s in our agreement, if you look at the small print, it says we’re not liable for your credentials. Mashreq probably learnt a lesson with that one because it was two pages in The National about customers who were not getting their money. It’s small amounts of money so the reputational risk versus the financial cost – it’s just not worth it,” he states.

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 was vendor-agnostic,” 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 July 2010 Vol.16 No.7 21

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.

The Product

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 updated on time,” remembers North. The benefits are certainly wide-ranging. Under the new system, ADCB gets immediately notified when something leaves the network, which to North is far more important than merely stopping attacks at the perimeter. Botnet-type attacks are also well catered for.

Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank’s 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 says it’s 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 surprising now because they manage an issue that’s been highlighted to them by experts,” he says.

Symantec products installed at ADCB: • 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 & Business Critical Services Operating Systems • Microsoft Windows • IBM AIX • Sun Solaris

22 July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Deeper underground With Symantec managing the endpoint with its vast range of tools, some might well wonder why ADCB 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. 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 Staff strength at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank currently stands at 80.

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,” he says. And even if he had the employees, 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

The IT department is split between two locations – the head office and an external operations centre on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

Testing times Some may well wonder why ADCB took nearly a year to complete each of stage of the Symantec deployments. The answer – or rather, the root – of the malaise lies well back at the proof-of-concept stage. “The PoC proved to be difficult because we had to come up with business rules in terms of the escalation. That process took about nine months to actually get to the point where we said, ‘we’re happy with that.’ We had to upgrade some of the operating systems on some of these boxes, they had some issues on the collectors. It wasn’t straightforward. We have a number of firewalls with different vendors because everyone has different strengths and weak-

nesses. We had a problem with some of the people that came from Symantec and there was a point where it was just taking so long to be done,” says North. The final version of managed services that’s feature-complete went live in May 2010. The last and final delay came from developing connectors for the four AIX servers that run ADCB’s core banking system . Until this delay was sorted, the system was what North describes as “95% complete”. “It took them a year to implement and it shouldn’t have taken them a year. I’m not saying it wasn’t partially in [complete] – it was – but it was not working to my satisfaction,” he declares.

The watchmen In the end, 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 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 comments. “For me, we’ve made a massive leap forward. I don’t think we

Rapid fire

done before. Right from the desktop to the server 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,” confirms North.

could go much further. I can go one other step – manage. Not monitor, but manage. That’s part of [Symantec’s] offering. I can ask them to make changes on my firewall. We don’t do that. I would never do it,” he confirms. Somehow you know he means it.

The dire state of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank’s old IT systems when Lee North joined in 2004 meant that he had to effect rapid changes to bring it up to level with modern era banking. Here, he details the changes. “We replaced our core banking system which was running on unsupported hardware and software at that time. That was achieved in a year when we changed to Flexcube. With that came our online presence and of course the anti-virus, the e-mail , all those things that you would expect to have in an organisation were put in place during those first 18 months,” comments North. “Our product team were very active. On the consumer side, we’ve got more branches, bigger ATM estate out there. We’re very much about coming up with new products for customers – and our customer base has probably gone up 300% to 400% in that period of time. We are small in terms of an IT department. We don’t develop – we used to say that if we can’t build it in 30 days, we buy it. Unlike our competitors who do a lot of development, we do very little development. We have been doing it in the last couple of years where we found that we could have actually better control over that delivery than relying on that vendor,” he concludes.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7 23

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Up close

Days of future past Over the past decade, property developers in the Middle East have been infatuated with the idea of building smart cities. Imthishan Giado investigates the current obstacles to progress in this market.

Bandwidth as utility

here’s an old trope from the world of science fiction, which states very simply: life imitates art. In the 1960s for example, writers dreamed of all manner of inventions that seemed extraordinarily farfetched at the time, such as easy video chatting, or computers controlled by voice. Even the very notion of a PC – a device that could receive, store and process information that was smaller than your average living room seemed unlikely. Scientists found inspiration in these tales of wonder and quickly set to work to build working equivalents. There’s one place, however, where science fiction and science fact is still yet to find an agreeable meeting ground and that’s the idea of the smart city. Again, films like Minority Report have created the idea of a futuristic place dotted with vast swathes of elegant spires that reach for the heavens, where technology is unobtrusive but effectively frees up citizens to be

A smart city is one where citizens, businesses and government authorities are receiving services beyond the standard triple play services. They’re receiving intelligent services that contribute either to the business processes or the eﬃciencies or the quality of life. both more productive and recreational. Essentially, it’s a place without boundaries. And that’s the metaphor which most marketing brochures used to describe the concept when it was introduced to the Middle East. The smart city world is also closely-linked to real estate and as any resident of this region will be aware, that’s a topic that was enormously popular for most of this decade. Saudi Arabia in particular bought heavily into this movement, with the former creating vast cities in the desert devoted to education and R&D. Not to be left behind, the UAE announced it too was creating a

KEC’s Mohamed Shah explains how increasing bandwidth is the most crucial element of the smart city puzzle – and how fibre-optic connectivity is the key to solving the smartphone puzzle. He says: “Even if you look at the recent connectivity of existing communities, maybe a couple of years ago you might have had 100kbps or 512kbps connectivity – now you can get 5 or 10 Megs on a mobile spec. That’s why you work on a fibre-base because that’s what will be there in the future. It’s a lane wide enough to carry an ever-growing demand of bandwidth. In the future you will see more and more bandwidth-hungry applications, people will want much richer experiences on the net. You will see a growth in internet-based, broadcast-based, high-definition-based experiences. “Once bandwidth becomes available, it is in a sense a utility. It is a bit like electricity. These highly-connected communities become the fourth utility. If you look at the evolution of electricity, you initially had usage only based for the lightbulb. From a bandwidth perspective, your triple play internet is just the baseline,” insists Shah.

city – the Masdar project outside Abu Dhabi which aims to create the region’s first sustainable, zero-carbon development. Where does technology come into this vision? Quite simply, it’s the glue that holds the bricks and mortar together, from the design and master planning stage to final completion, when the cities are electronically managed for maximum efficiency of both energy and inhabitants. Networking hardware vendor Cisco has been heavily associated with the smart city, particularly in Saudi Arabia where it’s won millions of dollars in contracts to help create these ambitious new projects. Amr Salem, director, emerging markets for smart and connected communities at the firm explains his vision of what a smart city should be: “A smart city is one where citizens, businesses and government authorities are receiving services beyond the standard triple play services. They’re receiving intelligent services that contribute either to the business processes or the efficiencies or the quality of life. Also in a smart city, the city operator will be running the city at a much lower cost of maintenance and support than a non-smart city.” When it comes to such a new concept, it’s always good to turn to existing models and see how they can be adopted to the vagaries of this

region, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Fortunately, best practice does exist when it comes to building a smart city that makes the best use of connectivity. And it comes from an unlikely source – South Korea. In Saudi Arabia, Mohamed Shah, vice president of technology for infrastructure and services for the upcoming Madinah Knowledge Economic City, readily admits the debt owed to the Koreans in terms of development. “It’s best to focus and work with vendors and advisors that have the skills and experience in this emerging area. In terms of smart cities, what we do is look at

In the Middle East, we’re fortunate with the lack of legacy infrastructure, says Salem.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7 25

There’s a global demand for maintenance, facility management and building management people of a high calibre. Here, technology can augment and extend limitations in expertise. It allows you to automate processes and diminish the amount of expertise that you require. innovation inside the communities. One of the pioneers globally is really the Koreans. There, they term it as ubiquitous cities – they are international leaders in providing what we in the region call smart city infrastructure. There are some similar places in Europe and China, but predominantly Korea is looked at as a an example of a highly connected environment,” he says. “When you look at how the Koreans used modern fibre-based connectivity, providing FTTx which is fibre to x or any location – so you could have fibre-to-thehome, fibre-to-the-building – it’s many elements that we around the globe can utilise,” adds Shah. Cisco’s Salem agrees: “There are many examples around the world where you will find that the smart city concept has been explored, including initiatives in places like Barcelona, Toronto and San Francisco. The most dominant ones will be in Korea. We have a number of large-sized communities that have adopted a set of smart services that is superior to other places. “In the Middle East, we’re fortunate with the lack of legacy infrastructure. A lot of the new and upcoming economies in the Middle East have the luck of being aided to build greenfield infrastructure. That allows us to build a number of services but at the same time, this opportunity has not been well taken on board in certain cases from a planning perspective,” he warns.

26 July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Reality versus expectation But Salem’s warning has not been heeded by many of the region’s premier real estate developers, who often fell victim to the feeding frenzy that characterised the burgeonging property market for much of this decade. Margaret Adam, IDC’s research director of IT services for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, says the net effect was that everyone wanted to cash in on the “smart” boom – but few walked the talk. “We looked at this about two years ago. Every development that was going up as part of the boom wanted to be a smart city or stated that they were going to be smart to some extent. A lot of research showed that once you scratch the surface that wasn’t necessarily the case – there was a lot more positioning than actual real strategic planning. When the crisis hit, a lot of these more “piein-the-sky” projects were killed off,” she confirms. In her view, the elements that fell by the wayside first was the actual construction process: “You get a masterplan and you subcontract that to people who do mechanical engineering and so on. You need to have that comms infrastructure in place – so you might have the right idea, but whether that applies to the people that are actually putting the pipes in the ground? Not necessarily. That process needed to be refined and you needed a very detailed IT plan from the master planning stage.

“When people think of smart cities or smart buildings, they see the nice features like the controls and LCDs, but there are a lot more elements to it where I get interested. I don’t want a fridge that can tell me when my milk’s going bad – I can do that myself! But where I see it really playing out is in terms of power metering and government services and ensuring this kind of cohesion at a community level including healthcare and education.”

Once bandwidth becomes available, it is in a sense a utility, says KEC’s Shah.

Cisco’s Salem supports Adams’ view, suggesting that the sales drive was one element in the slowdown: “When the market for real estate was booming, there wasn’t enough opportunity for planning because everyone was keen to sell very quickly and catch the market. Right now, the sales market has slowed down a little bit, allowing developers and governments to spend more time on planning to ensure that the right ingredients are in place. Developers are embracing technology as an integral part of the planning of the city structure.”

Going Deep One oft-neglected aspect of the smart city revolution is how much time is required to make these projects happen. In many cases, the customer, developer and vendor have to wait upwards of

When people think of smart cities or smart buildings, they see the nice features like the controls and LCDs, but there are a lot more elements to it where I get interested. I don’t want a fridge that can tell me when my milk’s going bad – I can do that myself!

28 July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

people are not necessarily the best in terms of managing things for the common use. If they know they have to pay for it, they’re good at it. But if it’s a common thing, they’re not,” he cautions. “Skills are another big challenge. There’s a global demand for maintenance, facility management and building management people of a high calibre. Here, technology can augment and extend limitations in expertise. It allows you to automate processes and diminish the amount of expertise that you require,” continues Gunasingham. The smart city movement is far from dead, but it’s definitely hit a few roadbumps along the way. Nevertheless, it’s clear that this has helped the region’s developers refocus their efforts and think long and hard about what kind of value these developments will bring to their eventual residents. That, as KEC’s Mohamed Shah concludes, is the real objective when it comes to ensuring longterm success. “One important thing is building it out. The second is helping consumers begin to realise the benefits of that infrastructure. One issue is building the roads; the next is utilising those roads, connecting people and bringing in traffic on those roads to the benefit of all of the community. That becomes the second stage of the journey,” he says.

Execution is challenged when the development is in the process of being created, says Al Futtaim’s Raghavan.

Treacherous waters

a decade for it to be completed and this can often put a strain on relationships. Hari Gunasingham, CEO of Singapore-based Eutech Cybernetics thinks it’s still possible – but people need to change the way they work. “A decade is not a short period, it’s one-seventh of a person’s lifetime,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with being with a customer for 10 years. It’s an opportunity for vendors to move into a partnership model than one you sell and go off. Since these projects take such a long and time and are complicated with lots of co-ordination, it needs to take a longer term view. It’s not something that you can implement quickly.” Gunasingham’s firm develops software to manage buildings, including Dubai’s Festival City development – a project which was integrated by local systems integration and IT support outfit Al Futtaim Technologies. He explains that there are a number of challenges inherent to working in this region, making it unlike the many projects he has worked on in other markets like his native Singapore or India. “With the desert environment, water is a big problem, in fact probably even more important than energy. How do you conserve water? The key thing is process management. If you leave things to individual usage,

Venkat Raghavan, general manager of Al-Futtaim Technologies, explains that the design stage can often be the source of much friction between the various elements involved: “Execution is challenged when the development is in the process of being created. You have the owner, the construction company and the operator. During the time that the city is being built, the accent is all on construction. If you are going to come in and propose the engineering changes, it becomes an interruption in the plans of the construction company. “The beneficiary of this system is actually the operator because ultimately this boils down to the efficient operation of the city plus energy savings. But the construction company which has to be a facilitator for the implementation of the system does not actually stand to gain from the process, so they would like to have the least interruption,” he adds.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Up close

Out of control The hype around virtualisation continues to build, but is it really as successful in the Middle East as vendors claim? Imthishan Giado looks at the state of the market.

Of all the technology buzzwords in the enterprise space, few are as pervasive as virtualisation. In a few scant years, it has rapidly progressed from ambitious idea, to successful pilot projects, to seemingly stalwart staple of the enterprise datacentre – an impressive achievement for any system, let alone one as complex to implement as virtualisation. These figures however, tend to be global, rather than specific to this region. “Worldwide, 43% of enterprises have gone to virtualisation and we’re expecting 39% to follow over the next two years,” says Aziz Ala’ali, regional director for the Middle East and Africa at Extreme Networks. “In the Middle East, we have a much lesser embrace rate but a lot of promises. I would put it as 18%-19% of the Middle East market that have adopted virtualisation. About 60% is evaluating and considering it. 25% or 26% of that figure are actually in the testing phase.” Analysts however, are much less enthusiastic about the speed of adoption of virtualisation.

Margaret Adams, research director for IT services for the Middle East Turkey and Africa at IDC expresses a belief that adoption levels – which she pegs at about 60% – are still underwhelming. “When you compare it to global averages, that’s quite low. This is an emerging market that’s starting to mature. There’s also been massive datacentre buildout over the last decade so we’re not sitting with underutilised large datacentres. A lot of it is very new and very current. ,” she states. “The second side is skills – both at a company level as well with a provider level. People are a bit reluctant because they don’t know if they have the technical skills to support that,” continues Adams. In fact, the skills situation is rapidly shaping up to be the major obstacle towards widespread regional adoption of virtualisation. In many cases, vendors are required to provide the training to use and implement these systems directly to the end-users, because the new paradigm of virtual implementation means that there are no longer physical

switches and physical readouts for administrators to observe and manipulate – a leap forward which Extreme’s Ala’ali says many in the end-user community are still struggling to comprehend. “In the Middle East especially, there isn’t enough education done on virtualisation. We’re hosting seminars to educate our partners to make them aware of what virtualisation means to the end user and to the enterprise. The second challenge is getting the skillset in place that can go out and implement this. Everybody knows how to configure a traditional switch but if you ask a consultant to design a virtual environment, people start sweating. It helps to ask the vendors to create that atmosphere, but it’s not going to happen overnight,” he confirms. Ala’a Al Shimy, GM for networking vendor HP ProCurve, says that often skills simply aren’t available. As a result, vendors have to bolster their support levels if they are to ensure maximum effectiveness from these applications. “To be very frank, I don’t think today that there are enough

resources in the market capable of planning, designing and managing virtualised networks,” he opines. “It is still far from being mature or enough. What we are doing at HP is training our customers and partners – we are putting the investment and plans to do that. When a customer is buying a virtualised system from us and they have a training or skill development need, we make sure they have it. We also have our TS organisation and the enterprise service division so at the end of the day if the customer needs to get support, the management is ready to provide it.” But not all are in agreement that end-users are hapless at installing virtualised networks. The UAE’s RTA has dipped its toes in the virtualisation pool with strong results so far (see boxout) and as Indranil Guha, manager for IT infrastructure management firmly states, his team doesn’t need to be educated. “We know what we want. I wouldn’t say that we were ignorant in terms of virtualisation, we have very qualified architects

in our team. Our whole bidding process is very mature in terms of architecture compliance and all that. If any vendor has a suggestion about doing things in a better way, we were always open to learning,â&#x20AC;? he says. For Guha, his main issue is principally at the design stage, when the decision about which applications to virtualise needs

Virtualisation adoption in the region remains low at 60%.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7 31

About 60% of regional enterprises are evaluating and considering virtualisation, says Extreme’s Ala’Ali.

To be very frank, I don’t think today that there are enough resources in the market capable of planning, designing and managing virtualised networks, says HP’s Al Shimy.

to be taken – and when in doubt, he prefers to be cautious: “The challenge for us is identifying the applications which could be virtualised without taking business risks. Most of these applications are business critical and if I am not sure, I would take a pessimistic stance rather than going very aggressive on virtualisation.”

which apps you actually want to move there and so on. Initially it was not a planned approach but that’s all changing now. People are more organised in the methods they are using,” he continues. As one of the region’s leading integrators, Alpha Data has worked in a number of virtualisation cases already and the cost savings are not insignificant. “You reduce your management costs when you go for virtualisation. Instead of having to manage 10 or 15 servers, you’re actually only managing four or five servers in smaller environments. In larger environments for example, we did virtualisation in a bank where we reduced the number of servers from 180 to 60. That is a major saving both in terms of management time. There are also overheads like power and cooling when you have so many servers in the datacentre. When you reduce that by one third, there’s a huge saving,” he says. Server disposal is another area which is often greatly misunderstood, he says. Most enterprises rarely retire equipment prematurely which has been made redundant by virtualisation, preferring to redistribute them. “If you have, say, 180 servers, many of them will have been purchased at different points and times. They could be older generation servers, some of them might not be as powerful. Those

One of the major selling points of the virtualisation movement has been the ability to cut down on the amount of physical hardware, an aspect that has many IT managers looking forward to mothballing their servers. Unfortunately, in their rush to create virtual equivalents, many go overboard – leading to an unmanageable situation. Gigi George, business unit head of value for enterprise computing systems at integrator Alpha Data, explains how server sprawl happens and how to combat it: “There are quite a few customers who have server sprawl as we say. They have individual servers to run individual applications – but each server is being used at only 20% or 30% of its potential. “For example, we offer capacity planning as a service to our customers – it allows you to exactly know how you want to size the machines and which ones you want to use virtualisation on,

32 July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

No time like the present While the pace of virtualisation may have slowed, there’s little doubt that it will eventually become a common factor in RFPs across the region in years to come. The main stumbling blocks at the moment appear to be the same things that dog

Rapid Transit

Server sprawl

will typically get reassigned to functions which don’t need so much performance, for example. Those which are out of warranty will be completely removed from the datacentre,” he confirms.

any emerging technology: cost, experience and seeing it through to completion. ProCurve’s Al Shimy remains particularly upbeat: “If I am look at the RFPs we get from customers today, at least 80%-90% of the customers are asking for virtualisation. I would go for 100% particularly if you’re talking about a greenfield customer. IT managers want to get more features, for less money. Virtualisation is the right answer for that. “Customers need to be clear about their business requirements and the translation of that into the planning and design phase. Secondly, we need to be proactive and give the right attention of the consultancy part of the project. We need to make sure that they have the right skills to be able to manage the virtual network. Third, they shouldn’t allow everyone to come every other day with a new request to add a virtual component to the network unless it is already approved,” he concludes.

Indranil Guha from the UAE’s Road and Transport Authority explains his organisation’s approach to virtualisation in the networking space: “We did make a small investment initially to virtualise connectivity to other external organisations like the Police or the Municipality. I consider them as an external entity and my network is the core. When you travel, your laptop has different adapters for different countries. My virtual piece is like that adaptor – it can adapt to any connectivity across any organisation. It’s IP-independent so I don’t have to worry about what IP address space they are using or if it conflicts with my space. “Earlier we used to take time to get the connectivity through the telecom provider. It could be anywhere between four to six weeks to get the circuits delivered and connected. Now we are using a wireless technology and we are connecting within three to four days,” he continues. “That brings in business agility. As we move forward in the year 2011, we will look at a little bit more of a virtualised environment from an internal connectivity perspective,” concludes Guha.

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KMG markets ESET AV in Egypt

We stand for our commitment to provide our customers with the best storage solutions, says Buffalo’s Al Roomi.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Security focus

Buﬀalo improves NAS bundle for buyers Storage specialist Buffalo Technology has announced plans to bundle German data protection outfit NovaStor’s software with its range of network attached devices, which includes the LinkStation and TeraStation product lines. According to Buffalo, NovaStor’s NovaBACKUP will now come standard with its devices allowing for full local and online backup. While many customers choose network-attached storage devices for the convenience of their large storage capacity, the firm believes that many neglect to adequately protect the data.

“Data loss can be very costly,” said Jasem Al Roomi, Director at Buffalo Advantec FZCO. “Its financial impact can not only affect the productivity of a company and cost of re-creating data, it may even involve legal actions which is why data protection has always been very important for us. We stand for our commitment to provide our customers with the best storage solutions, and our partnership with NovaStor helps us deliver just that.” “When home or business customers purchase a NAS solution from Buffalo and get a program like NovaBACKUP Professional or

NovaBACKUP Business Essentials, they are truly getting a complete data storage and protection solution,” said NovaStor managing director Mike Andrews. “It’s a great strategic partnership because everyone wins.” LinkStation and TeraStation products purchased after June 21 2010 are eligible for a free upgrade to the NovaBACKUP software if it was not included with the purchase. Devices bought before that date however, will only be offered a “competitive upgrade” to what Buffalo claims is a relevant NovaBACKUP product from its range.

Seven Seas claims ﬁrst ISO certiﬁcation Seven Seas Computers claims it is among the first systems integrators in the Middle East to attain the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 9001:2008 accreditation, which is regarded as an endorsement of commitment to world-class quality standards and service. The Dubai-based outfit was awarded the certification following a two-stage recertification audit by industrial service provider Vincotte International Middle East. The process also

Nayagam Pillai (far right), CEO at Seven Seas, called the accreditation a “milestone” for his company.

included a rigorous assessment of Seven Seas’ quality management system policies and procedures

Nayagam Pillai, CEO at Seven Seas, called the accreditation a “milestone” for the company. He said: “We decided it was imperative to focus on getting recertified to the new standard in order to engrain an evolved ‘quality’ culture within the company and incorporate best practices.” Efforts to meet the requirements of ISO 9001:2008 began with the appointment of a core ISO team and the training of staff on the new standard after it was announced last year.

ADAOX Middle East has struck a retail distribution agreement with KMG Technology in Egypt to drive the sale of ESET NOD32 antivirus software in the market. ADAOX serves as the regional representative for the ESET product range. Security distributor KMG is expected to promote ESET’s security solutions by providing an expert technical team to assist customers with product demonstrations, proof of concept and after- sales support. “ESET is one of the global market leaders in the area of antivirus solutions and client security, and complements KMG’s security portfolio perfectly,” said Amir Rafla, managing partner at distributor KMG Technology. “There is an urgent need for reliable and robust security offerings in a huge market like Egypt and we believe ESET NOD32 fulfils those criteria. ,” he added.

Kaspersky shields phones from theft during World Cup Kaspersky Lab is offering free smartphone protection during the 2010 World Cup. The security company is offering a free download of its Kaspersky Mobile Security 9, which will be active for the tournament’s duration. Kaspersky Mobile Security 9 allows the user to send a pre-defined SMS to their handset, which then blocks the phone while still displaying the contact details of the owner will on the screen of a blocked smarthphone. The location of a lost smartphone can be pinpointed using its built-in GPS module, and if the SIM is replaced, the owner will receive immediate notification of the phone’s new number. Users can also choose to remotely wipe handset data.

Map unveils social media censorship

Disaster recovery tops healthcare priorities list 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%) and digitising paper records (35%). 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. In considering the leading drivers of this growth, digital imaging ranks highest followed by scanned documents such as insurance ID cards.

Security focus

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

According to research by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), popular social media sites are being restricted or blocked entirely in several Middle Eastern countries. ONI’s new worldwide Social Media Filtering Map shows where Facebook, Flickr, Orkut, Twitter and YouTube have been censored. In it, Twitter was the only site that had never been blocked from countries in the Middle East. The map does however show that Syria blocks Facebook and YouTube entirely, while the United Arab Emirates ‘selectively’ blocks YouTube videos and completely restricts access to Flickr. ONI testing reveals that the UAE filters still target social networking sites, video and photo sharing sites, and blogging services. However, filtering of these sites has not been consistent.

More than 70.2 million people used their mobiles in 2009 to transmit money to others.

Mobile payment looks up in 2010 The number of people using their mobile phone to make and receive payments will exceed 108 million this year, research firm Gartner predicts. Last year there were 70.2 million mobile payment users and that figure will more than double to reach 108.6 million in 2010. “We continue to see strong growth in developing markets in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa for mobile payment, while adoption in North America and Western Europe lags behind due to the plentiful choices of payment instruments that consumers have,” said Sandy

Shen, research director at Gartner. “Developing markets have found the right formula for mobile money services - functions that users want and an ecosystem that can sustain the service.” The EMEA region alone had 16.8 million mobile payment users last year, though the segment is expected to top 27 million in 2010. It however only represents 2.1% of all mobile users in the region. Shen says that the strong demand for mobile payment in developing markets is being driven by people that do not have ready access to the banking

infrastructure or PC, positioning mobile as the natural choice of access platform. The Gartner analyst also highlighted that the popular short sessage ervice (SMS) remains the dominant mobile payment technology for its ease of use and ubiquity in mobile devices, and warns that many financial institutions have failed to see the business case of Near Field Communication (NFC) payment, in particular, which offers similar functionality to contactless cards but with the added complexity of dealing with mobile carriers and other ecosystem partners.

Zain and I(TS)2 oﬀer managed security Zain Jordan and I(TS)2 have created a strategic alliance to deliver managed security services to Zain’s enterprise customers. Under the agreement, Zain will co-brand I(TS)2’s MSS, and will leverage its Security Operation Centre in Amman to deliver services to customers in sectors such as finance and government. The MSS portfolio will include services such as monitoring and management of customer security solutions, penetration testing and risk assessment.

The pair intend to launch services next month, in part to help banks and other companies

The agreement between Zain and I(TS)2 is set to see managed services see wide regional adoption.

involved with credit card transactions to meet the incoming PCI compliance requirements as ordered by the Central Bank of Jordan, and to meet regulations from credit card companies. “As an integral part of our strategy to provide integrated solutions to our valued enterprise customers, introducing Managed Security Services will enhance Zain’s capabilities to enrich our offerings to these sectors”, said Abdul Malek Al Jaber, Zain Jordan’s CEO.

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

Expertâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Column

Recovery position Wouter Vancoppenolle, regional sales director for eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa of DoubleTake Software, explains four possible options for disaster recovery for your virtual environment.

irtualisation is great for saving money and resources, but if you lose a virtual server you have larger bigger problems than if you had just lost a single server. While no company wants to put their business at risk by under-protecting their VMs, nobody likes to spend more than they have to on non-productive expenditures like insurance. The Small Business Administration divides businesses into two categories: those who have experienced a disaster and those who are about to experience one, and a study by CIO.com revealed that

it costs 42% of companies $1,000 per hour of downtime, 26% of companies $10,000 per hour of downtime â&#x20AC;&#x201C; with upper ranges at over $50,000 per hour. For companies that are trying to figure out the best way to protect your virtual machines, here are a few things to consider: First, in order to avoid killing a mosquito with a baseball bat, figure out your cost of downtime. These can help you (and the executives funding the bat) understand how much data and time you can afford to lose if your VMs are interrupted or if they fail all together. To figure

out how much you have to lose, think about how much money the company would lose if all the transaction data and e-mails from the last 12 to 24 hours were lost, if there are compliance risks with not being able to produce data, and what it would cost to have employees recreate the last 12 to 24 hours of data. Or, if you want to know exactly what an hour of downtime will cost you, you can use a simple formula to figure it out: Cost Per Occurrence = (TO + TD) x (HR + LR) TO = Length of Outage TD = Time Delta (the length of

time since your last backup) HR = Hourly Rate of Personnel (monthly expense per department divided by the total number of work hours) LR = Lost Revenue per Hour (applies if the department generates profit â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a good rule is to look at profitability over three months and divide by the number of work hours) Second, before deciding how to protect your data, it is important to consider what the data is being protected from. Four reasons why companies often choose to protect their data are listed overleaf.

Loss of a single resource In this scenario, a single important resource fails or is interrupted. For example, losing a virtual server that end users depend on for product ordering would cripple a business that depends on electronic procurement. Likewise, many businesses would be seriously affected by the loss of one of their primary e-mail servers. Planning for this case usually means providing both backup and availability for the virtual server. Loss of user data files This unfortunately common scenario involves the accidental or intentional loss of important data files. The most common solution is to restore the lost data from a backup, but this can involve going back to a previous snapshot of the server – often with data loss. Planned outages for maintenance or migration The goal of planned maintenance or migrations on virtual machines is usually to restore, repair or patch service. Migrations usually mean users won’t have access to applications and data on virtual machines while the migration is in progress and is tested. If you can tolerate downtime and your IT staff doesn’t mind putting in a night or weekend, the most basic migration software will do. If you require availability and for users to remain online during a migration, more advanced software will allow you to perform migrations without interruptions. Loss of an entire facility In this scenario, entire facilities and all of their resources are unavailable as a result of natural disasters, extended power outages, failure of the facility’s envi-

ronmental conditioning systems, fire, flood or any other disaster our outage that takes out power or a physical structures. In this situation, it’s best to resume operations at another site. The downtime you tolerate is based on if you require just backup or backup and availability. Few companies can tolerate days of downtime so they feel good about having an availability and disaster recovery plan in place, but don’t feel so great about sorting through the options. The good news is that if you’ve done your downtime homework, it’s not so bad. Option 1: Tape backup and recovery systems

anywhere from once-a-day to “snapshots” or point-in-time recovery to continuous, real-time options. If your production server fails, you’ve got a copy of your data (and sometimes applications) waiting on you. If you can make a home for your backup server outside of your zip code you’ll avoid building and local disasters. If you can get it out of your region you’re even better protected. When evaluating products, look for hardwareindependent capabilities – that way if your production server is actually destroyed you can recover to a different make and model and won’t have to go looking for an exact copy of the old server. Software-based backup is a great

data or time. Most availability options don’t offer a whole lot of granularity, but there are some that offers immediate failover and recovery. A comprehensive product in this category offers everything backup and recovery software does, except if your virtual server melts down, the backup server steps in immediately with a current copy of your data and applications. With good quality software, the switch happens so seamlessly that your end users won’t notice anything’s gone wonky in the server room. Option 4: The cloud The newest, and maybe coolest, kid on the block is backup and recovery in the cloud. Simply

If you’re running VMs your eggs are all in one basket, so you’ve got to have a backup and recovery plan. Once you ﬁgure out how much downtime you can tolerate, you can set a realistic budget and pick the right solution for putting that plan in place. Tape backup can provide for the long-term archival needs of virtual servers, it’s portable, fairly secure, and the cost per megabyte is low. Tape backup is right for you if you can tolerate a day or more of downtime while you rebuild a whole VM or a whole server, if you have staff that won’t forget to switch tapes, if you aren’t regulated, and if you don’t have a lot to lose in a day’s worth of data. Option 2: Replication-based backup and recovery Backup software installs on your production and backup virtual servers and replicate data

option if you can tolerate a few hours of downtime, don’t want to constantly manage the tape backup process (or can’t, as in the case of branch offices) and can’t afford to lose too much data. Option 3: Add availability The granddaddy of these options is software-based backup and recovery that includes continuous access to data and applications on your virtual machines in any situation. It’s usually not much more expensive than simple backup and recovery software, but the right product provides a whole other level of comfort if you can’t afford to lose

by installing cloud software on your VMs and renting a chunk of space from a cloud provider, you can have a virtual datacentre for a fraction of the cost of a physical datacentre. If you’re choosing cloud recovery, it’s probably a good idea to pick a software / storage combo that allows you to recover, or start up applications and data, from the cloud. If you’re running VMs your eggs are all in one basket, so you’ve got to have a backup and recovery plan. Once you figure out how much downtime you can tolerate, you can set a realistic budget and pick a method for putting that plan in place. July 2010 Vol.16 No.7 37

The top men in networking reveal their secrets for success Indranil Guha, manager for IT infrastructure management at Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority. I would say that it is the several organisational transformations [I have effected]. I like to change it if need be, to make it more efficient. My key contribution to the organisations that I’ve worked with is not just of technology or w implementing infrastructure – I don’t consider those my biggest aachievements, but simply the need of the hour.

What h iis your career progression to date? I started my career after doing my Masters with Standard Chartered Bank in 1991 as technical services officer for a year. Then I moved on to become the IT service delivery manager, looking after the eastern region, working in Calcutta. Then I moved on to Bombay in 1996 as the IT services manager for operations. From there I moved to HSBC in Dubai in 1997 as the office automation department, which is actually IT service management. Then I moved to a position with the government in Dubai Municipality (DM) as head of networking. Gigabit networks were just launched back then by Nortel, and DM wanted to implement it so I was given the challenge. I worked with them for about seven years till March 2006, when I joined the RTA as the IT infrastructure manager. What would you describe as your finest achievement so far?

W What drives you towards excellence in IT? Challenges – I am a person who strives for excellence. I am pretty much a perfectionist so I believe in process, wherever they could be put in. I believe in continuous improvement, error-free and consistent quality delivery and doing things right the first time. Who has been the biggest inspiration to you in technology? I do admire people with great leadership qualities like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. I like to try and understand how the human mind works and how some people like to get challenged to delivering their best – that is something that inspires me. An-

other thing that I really like to tell people is, do not hesitate to ask, ‘why not?’ Ask why you should do things differently. What emerging technology will impact IT the most? Overall, technology is a great driver for business today. CIOs actually have a large role to play in the boardroom and it will all be pervasive over time. In terms of specific technologies, it’s clearly mobility and collaboration. They are clearly interlinked. It’s the whole mobility space, use of collaboration tools and the use of what today we call cloud computing or virtualisation, these are all going towards ds mobility at the end of the day. You want to have IT services delivered to you where you are. e.

The inside line

Road warrior

July 2010 Vol.16 No.7

clubs. When I was a bit younger, I could have been termed as a shooter, I used to be very good at it, although I didn’t compete professionally. Also, on weekends I used to do a bit of motorcycling on my sportsbike, but I don’t do it any more these days. That was around 2000-2006. I would love to get back on the road one day. What advice would you give to young professionals seeking to become the CIO one day? Listen and observe a lot before you deliver an opinion. Don’t be afraid to ask and question to change and improve.

Outside of the office, what is your foremost passion? My hobbies keep changing over time. I like photography and love to travel. I don’t use travel services for planning my holidays, I do them myself. I love the sport of shooting and visit the local shooting

I like to try and understand how the human mind works and how some me people like to get challenged and keep delivering their best – that is something that inspires me. Do not hesitate to ask: ‘why not?’ Ask why you should do things diﬀerently.

NEXT ISSUE August 2010 volume 16 issue 8 July 2010 Vol 16 No.7

Next issue

VIDEO CONFERENCING Cutting costs with video Telepresence has been marketed by the region’s vendors for some years now as an alternative to expensive air travel. From a cost perspective, this sounds like a win-win situation for enterprises, allowing them to both reduce on carbon emissions and become efficient from an HR standpoint. But will rising bandwidth costs derail this technology?

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The network is constantly under assault from all manner of external forces, including hackers-for-hire, agents of chaos and often disgruntled employees. This phenomenon is rarely seen in the Middle East – or is it a case of incidents being under reported by CIOs? We talk to the region’s top vendors and enterprises to find out where the truth lies.

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Data centers move as fast as business when physical and virtual workloads work as one. With PlateSpin® workload management solutions from Novell®, what business wants right now, your data center can deliver right now. A single suite of products centrally monitors, manages and optimizes physical and virtual servers for you, automatically shifting workloads to the right server at the right time. Improve server utilization, reduce costs and make your data center more agile so you can respond to business demands in real time. Let us make IT work as one for you. Contact-mena@Novell.com Tel: +971 4 3912992, Fax: +971 4 3912991 www.novell.com/workload Copyright © 2009 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo and PlateSpin are registered trademarks and Making IT Work As One is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Making IT Work As One™