NEWS

HPE STRENGTHENS PARTNERSHIP WITH SAP FOR THE CLOUD SERVICES BUSINESS With HPE GreenLake, SAP will be enabled to offer the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud

Keith White Senior Vice President & GM, HPE GreenLake

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced plans to partner with SAP for the cloud services business in the UAE and globe. The partnership delivers the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with HPE GreenLake, as a fully managed service at the edge, in the customer’s data center or colocation facility of their choice. The customers in the UAE and globe will be able to keep their SAP software landscape and data on-premises while gaining the benefits of a subscription-based, agile, elastic, and consistent cloud experience from SAP with HPE GreenLake. With HPE GreenLake, SAP will be enabled to offer the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with a consistent, automated cloud experience and their flexible subscription-based as-a-service model.

“Customers are increasingly turning to HPE GreenLake to enable them to benefit from the agility and flexibility of the cloud while also offering the security, data sovereignty, compliance, visibility, and cost controls of an on-premises deployment,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, at HPE. “We have a tremendous opportunity to build on the extensive proven partnership that HPE and SAP have built over decades, with the combination of our rapidly-growing cloud services business with HPE GreenLake and our leadership in powering SAP workloads.”

Peter Pluim, EVP, Global Head of Enterprise Cloud Services, at SAP said, “The new deployment model SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, customer edition is a direct response to customers who want the flexibility and service level of a managed private cloud, but need to keep their systems in their own data centers, such as public sector and regulated industry customers. We are planning to make that possible with cloud services from HPE GreenLake and whiteglove operations and application management services from SAP, which will help unlock value and create new experiences for our joint customers.”

AL-FUTTAIM GROUP TAPS INTO MICROSOFT CLOUD

Three-year partnership will leverage the intelligent cloud to integrate infrastructure, apps, and data, while continuing to support AI, DevOps for deployment speed, agility and scalability

Al-Futtaim Group has adopted the Microsoft intelligent Cloud to accelerate its digital transformation journey and reimagine its business model.

experiences for our customers,” said Gurmeet Singh, Al- Futtaim Group Chief Digital Officer. “This requires us to invest in advanced technologies and infuse digital innovations into our customer-first philosophy, enabling us to make a direct impact across all of our business entities. Microsoft is an ideal partner on this journey, to help realise our vision to create powerful and enriching experiences for our customers.” Sayed Hashish General Manager, Microsoft UAE

points with its customers, building a Customer Data Platform, that will deepen its knowledge of their preferences to deliver personalized messages, experiences and recommendations, driving greater loyalty to Al-Futtaim brand. This will be powered by the use of advanced analytics for a variety of case scenarios, as part of an AI Factory that will serve all Al-Futtaim business units. Various business challenges will be tackled around product recommendation, forecasting demand, pricing and many others. Al-Futtaim will migrate its data centre to the intelligent cloud by modernizing its core business applications and SAP environment to the cloud. Cloud-native services and microservices will also enable an omni-channel experience for end customers, bridging the gap between physical and digital experiences. “Our goal is to unlock hyper-personalised

Sayed Hashish, GM Microsoft UAE said, “Knowing your customers, empowering employees, delivering on an intelligent retail operation and reinventing business models sit at the heart of digitally enabled business transformation for the group. Al-Futtaim’s journey to the secure, intelligent and trusted Microsoft Cloud is a leap forward in its ambitions to reinvent customer experiences, and we look forward to providing the best tools and technologies for the company to achieve their goals”.

NUTANIX LAUNCHES KUBERNETES PLATFORM-AS-ASERVICE FOR THE MULTICLOUD ERA Karbon Platform Services provides Managed Offering to accelerate container-based Application Delivery and Operations on any cloud

Enterprises, with their sights set on realizing the benefits of digital initiatives, often struggle to unleash the full potential of their software developers and the agile DevOps processes by which they need to operate. Kubernetes, along with its ecosystem of cloud native technologies, continues to rapidly evolve, making it increasingly difficult to implement without extensive technical resources. Furthermore, organizations need to be able to leverage both on-premises and public cloud-based Kubernetes deployments without compromising their ability to manage data, applications, and IT resources simply and effectively.

Rajiv Mirani CTO, Nutanix

Nutanix announced Karbon Platform Services, a Kubernetes-based multicloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with automated system-managed security, to accelerate the developcloud. This offering provides software developers with a turnkey managed services experience, on-premises, in the public cloud, and at the edge, to build and run cloud native applications while enabling them to decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure. It also provides IT operations teams with a simplified and consistent application lifecycle management and security framework. This announcement marks a significant milestone for Nutanix as it looks to expand offerings aimed at accelerating enterprises’ cloud native journeys. “IT resources are the engines that power digital enterprises. But as a company scales, adopts hybrid cloud, and manages an increasing number of applications, supporting engineering needs can be challenging for IT,” said Rajiv Mirani, CTO at Nutanix. “With Karbon Platform Services, we aim to simplify

ment and deployment of microservices-based apps across any application development and orchestration while streamlining the relationship between IT and development teams to support our customers’ DevOps strategies.”

This new cloud native PaaS will help software engineers to streamline application development and orchestration without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. Karbon Platform Services builds on the core Kubernetes lifecycle management capabilities initially introduced with Karbon as an integrated component of the Nutanix HCI software. This new offering brings automated, system-managed security and multi-tenancy to run a wide range of microservices- based applications across multiple cloud infrastructures.

MORO HUB ANNOUNCES COLLABORATION WITH SMART DUBAI

The collaboration will help empower Government entities with seamless network access

Moro Hub, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DEWA has joined forces with Smart Dubai for the provision of a high-end node at Moro Hub to accelerate the digital transformation initiatives of Dubai Government entities and avail latest digital services.

Dubai Government Information Network (GIN), is the internetworking infrastructure, providing the information backbone between Dubai Government entities and the Internet. GIN serves as the cornerstone of the electronic infrastructure connecting government systems that effectively transfers information and handles transactions. The network comprises of secure and highly robust mesh infrastructure connecting all government offices by using state-of-the-art multi-service networking technology. In line with the digital adoption in Dubai and the implementation of the Dubai Paperless Strategy, the collaboration agreement was signed digitally by both parties through the secured UAE pass that embodies the digital transformation evolution in Dubai and UAE.

Eng. Marwan Bin Haider, Vice Chairman of Moro Hub, commented: “Our collaboration with Smart Dubai brings value-added offerings to government entities. To this effect, Smart Dubai has hosted a highend node in Moro Hub Data Centre to cater to the GIN connectivity requirements of the government entities.

FORCEPOINT INTRODUCES DYNAMIC USER PROTECTION

The EMEA-wide survey also found that the lack of contract process automation is resulting in wasted resources

Forcepoint has announced the introduction of Dynamic User Protection that redefines modern user activity monitoring (UAM) and insider threat protection with the industry’s first cloud-native solution to deliver out-of-the-box functionality with no policy configuration. Through this capability, security teams are now empowered with real-time visibility into true risk behaviors of compromised and malicious users within hybrid cloud environments.

All security begins with visibility and the massive shift to remote work created blind spots into user activities with critical data and intellectual property in unmanaged home environments. It is a competitive imperative today that businesses gain needed visibility to mitigate a data breach in real-time. With Dynamic User Protection, user activity monitoring not only becomes easy-to-deploy it also brings mainstream enterprise access to continuous risk assessment across security control points.

“In this next phase of cybersecurity,

Mimecast Limited, a leading email security and cyber resilience company, has announced the availability of

Mimecast Cloud Archive for Theta

Lake. The robust integration is designed to streamline risk analysis and governance efforts in the current remote working era to enable capture, retention, eDiscovery, and automated risk detection across relevant productivity applications. Key productivity applications include e-mail, audio, video, and chat data from Webex Teams,

Webex Meetings, Zoom (Meetings,

Phone, Chat), Microsoft Teams (Chat,

Calls, and Meetings), RingCentral Office, Slack, LogMeIn, BlueJeans, and more. Integrating archive data into a unified environment can help bring significant benefits including speed of search, risk reduction, cost minimization and user-friendly compliance.

Effective risk and information governance have always been a business-critical issue, and the introduction Nico Popp Chief Product Officer, Forcepoint

managing risk across the cloud, network and endpoint will drive everything. With Dynamic User Protection, Forcepoint is changing the rules of the cybersecurity game by delivering global enterprises the ability to automatically enforce security policy across all control points tailored to a specific end-user based on the risk they represent,” said Nico Popp, Chief Product

Garth Landers Director of Product Marketing, Mimecast of new productivity and communication applications to support remote working efforts has only increased the need. Organizations must adapt to intelligently capture, manage and retain rich, high- volume data. When data is stored in multiple silos and disparate cloud environments, governance releOfficer at Forcepoint. “Dynamic UserProtection is the heart of our new converged cloud security platform with integration into Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention available today with future integration planned across the entirety of the Forcepoint portfolio, including our recently announced Cloud Security Gateway SASE solution which will be delivered in first-quarter 2021.”

Dynamic User Protection utilizes Indicators of Behavior (IoB) as the real-time analytics engine to determine the overall risk of an entity. These IoBs deliver security teams context around behaviors and by combining multiple behaviors determines true risk scores that assess overall risk of an entity as good and/or bad.

Delivered in an easy-to-consume SaaS model, Dynamic User Protection is fast and easy to deploy with a small 30MB footprint on the endpoint that installs in under 30 seconds with no reboot re-

MIMECAST ANNOUNCES INTEGRATION WITH THETA LAKE Integrating archive data into a unified environment can help bring significant benefits

quired. vant data becomes difficult to identify and collect.

“Although the way we conduct business has dramatically changed in recent months, governance requirements remain and are increasing with new privacy regulations and litigation on the rise. All organizations must adapt to intelligently capture, manage and retain their communication data,” said Garth Landers, director of product marketing at Mimecast. “Mimecast Cloud Archive for Theta Lake is designed to streamline information governance in the remote working era, allowing key stakeholders to quickly analyze data, manage risk and monitor productivity applications.”

Theta Lake provides a fully-featured, supervised-focused media player, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted review workspace, timestamp of risk detections and a search across any content – spoken, shown or shared.

SKILLS AS MUCH IMPORTANT AS TECHNOLOGY TO MAXIMIZE VALUE FROM AI

Global research released by Microsoft reveals that companies see the biggest business benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) when they combine deployment of AI with skilling initiatives that focus on both tech and soft skills. Surveying more than 600 employees and leaders within larger enterprises across the UAE, the research focuses on skills needed to thrive as AI becomes increasingly adopted by UAE businesses, giving enterprises insights into where to best place their investment.

Among the UAE companies that are the most mature in terms of AI adoption, the majority of their senior leaders (93%) say they are actively building the skills of their workers or have plans to do so. Further, almost two-thirds (78%) of employees at these businesses say they have already benefitted from reskilling programs.

The research shows that companies prioritizing AI are focused on ensuring it’s complementing the talents of their people. Mindware, a regional leader in Value Added Distribution, has signed a commercial distribution agreement across the Middle East with Acer. This will include the vendor’s commercial and education portfolio including Windows based laptops, Chromebook devices, accessories, projectors, Enduro and ConceptD devices. The main focus will be on the Travelmate Series, specifically designed both for the corporate world and the public sector. Nicholas Argyrides, General Manager – Gulf at Mindware stated, “The work from home and e-learning trends have fuelled demand for laptops and smart devices. For remote workers to maintain high productivity levels, devices need to have good processing power, portability, and durability combined with business features and advanced connectivity opThese businesses are cultivating employee skills across every category – ranging from advanced data analysis and critical thinking to communications and creativity. AI is supporting the creation of company cultures more focused on innovation and learning

In the UAE, almost all workers (97%) are keen to take part in AI reskilling initiatives. The majority (77%) of those working within an organization using more AI say their organization is actively preparing them for a digital future that will be increasingly powered by AI. To address the skills gap in today’s workforce, Microsoft has set up a virtual training ecosystem de-

MINDWARE SIGNS AGREEMENT TO DRIVE ACER’S ME MARKET SHARE IN THE COMMERCIAL SECTOR

The distribution agreement cover Acer’s commercial and education portfolio with a large focus on the Travelmate Series

signed to benefit employees.

Nicholas Argyrides GM, Gulf, Mindware tions. On the education front, teaching staff and students need to have access to modern, purpose-built devices and apps that support the new blended learning model.”

Acer Middle East has achieved great success in the education market with a 92% market share in Chrome OS devices for Q1’ 2020 in UAE, as per latest statistics from research and consulting firm Futuresource Consulting.

Acer Middle East and Mindware will work closely together in conducting events and webinars so as to interact and engage with resellers. Acer Middle East will be offering the channel the opportunity of joining its Synergy program, which provides business rewards for supporting the Acer line-up.

REDINGTON VALUE SIGNS DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT WITH FIREEYE Redington will work with FireEye in key markets of MEA towards enabling its partners to use the new security practices Redington Value has signed an agreement with FireEye to distribute its cybersecurity offerings in West & North Africa, the UAE and Oman. This agreement will see both organisations engaging with local channel partners to provide end customers with comprehensive security solutions that offer protection against the latest cyber threats facing the region.

FireEye delivers a complete suite of detection, protection, and response capabilities with solutions spanning: Network Security, Endpoint Security, Email Security, and Cloud Security, all tightly integrated with their Helix security operations platform. FireEye also offers Mandiant Security Validation which gives security practitioners the evidence to manage and report on their organization’s systemic cybersecurity risks. SIGN PARTNERSHIP Proven Consult, a UAE-based digital consulting services and solutions provider, has announced a strategic partnership with VSight, a pioneer in augmented reality (AR) remote support solutions. As per the terms of the agreement, Proven Consult will be VSight’s exclusive partner in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. VSight specializes in AR to eliminate physical boundaries and enhance productivity in remote environments. As an artificial intelligence solutions provider, Proven Consult will deliver consulting services for VSight’s offerings to customers across verticals such as manufacturing, oil & gas, telecom, energy, utialities, automotive and machinery. Proven’s experienced technical team across the GCC will assist customers to address their remote work challenges through VSight’s AR driven solutions. “The modern dependency on data has created a degree of vulnerability, which if not addressed can cause serious harm to organisations and their customers. We have chosen to work with FireEye because I believe their solutions are world-class and they support our aim to deliver high quality protection to our customers who are facing cyber attacks targeting their critical data and assets,” said Sayantan Dev, President at Redington Value.

“This distribution agreement with Redington Value allows us to serve an increasing number of customers throughout the region, this includes locations where we would like to significantly expand our footprint,” said Hussam Sidani, Regional Director of Gulf, Levant and Africa at

PROVEN CONSULT AND VSIGHT

Proven Consult to deliver consulting services for VSight’s offerings to Middle East customers across verticals such as manufacturing, oil & gas, telecom, energy, utilities, automotive and machinery

FireEye. “We’re pleased to be working

Anas A. Abdul-Haiy

Director and Deputy CEO,

Proven Consult.

A recent report by research firm IDC earlier this year said that enterprises are moving to augmented and virtual reality majorly driven by leading use cases with US$ 31.2 Billion spend by 2023. Sayantan Dev President, Redington Value

with a distributor like Redington Value which has a proven track record of delivering high quality technology to its partners. Together, we will strive to defend organisations facing the complex Middle Eastern and African threat landscape.”

“Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are transforming the traditional business landscape to offer boundless collaboration opportunities and enhance workforce productivity to a whole new level. Our latest partnership with AR technology specialist VSight will further enable us to strengthen our comprehensive portfolio and offer ground-breaking solutions and consulting services to our valued regional customers. We are thrilled to expand our offerings with VSight and look forward to solving customers’ challenges and building regional AR expertise with innovative use cases,”said Anas A. Abdul-Haiy, Director and Deputy CEO, Proven Consult.

As a leading provider of AR remote support and remote assistance software platform, VSight enables customer organizations to easily share knowledge to perform operations such as maintenance, repair, inspection, training remotely. Developed for enterprises, VSight Remote integrated with smart glasses provides a hands-free approach for field workers to perform their tasks effortlessly and offers a huge potential for efficiency gains.