Value Journal | Issue 11 | May 2017

Issue 11 // May 2017

DELL EMC: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION EFFORTS STILL LAGGING Only 5% of large companies prepared to meet IT requirements of the new digital business.

Mohammed Amin, Dell EMC EMEA

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lobal senior IT leaders and decision-making managers of large companies said that their organisations have yet to fully embrace the aspects of IT transformation needed to remain competitive as per an ESG 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Curve study commissioned by Dell EMC.

The study shows 95 percent of survey respondents indicate their organisations are at risk of falling behind a smaller group of industry peers that are transforming their IT infrastructures, processes and delivery methods to accelerate their goals of becoming digital businesses.

Many organisations still measure application cycle times in months, if not years; have siloed infrastructures; and continue to grapple with rigid legacy architectures – all barriers

to undertaking a successful digital transformation.

“These findings mirror how the vast majority of customers are telling us they need to optimise their existing infrastructures to take advantage of digitalage opportunities,” said Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Dell EMC. “However, the research shows that most respondents are falling behind a small and elite set of competitors who have

Microsoft urges upskilling in cloud Microsoft’s cloud trainings allow IT professionals to broaden their horizons by gaining applicable cloud skills.

Microsoft has called for IT professionals across UAE and the wider Middle East to prepare themselves for a cloud future by sharpening their skills in Microsoft Azure, through the company’s cloud trainings and certifications.

Azure trainings and certifications run as a blend of

scheduled and on-demand online courses, covering generalised and niche, cloud-focused subject areas for getting up to speed with Azure. IT Pros can choose to learn in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with labs, or study for a test and take a certification exam. Completing any MOOC includes a digital

cracked the IT transformation code, and they’re competing more vigorously because of it. As organisations progress in their IT transformation investments, they can overcome the conflict between legacy IT and digital business initiatives to realise their goals, speed time to market and increase competitiveness.”

Based on the survey, a majority of respondents (71 percent) agree that IT transformation is essential Continued on page 3

certificate of completion, and passing a certification exam earns IT Pros the related certification and its digital badges.

“Microsoft’s cloud trainings allow IT professionals to broaden their horizons by gaining practical, instantly applicable cloud skills,” said Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Business Solutions Lead, Microsoft Gulf.

“Whether beginner or expert, we have the course to help them Continued on page3

Redington Value is a value added distributor for the following brands in parts of Middle East & Africa:

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to ongoing business competitiveness. Of the ‘transformed’ companies, 85 percent believe their organisations are in a ‘very strong’ or ‘strong’ position to compete and succeed in their market over the next few years contrasted with 43 percent of the least mature companies.

It also revealed that these organisations are eight times more likely than the least mature organisations to report a highly cooperative relationship between IT and the business. In addition, these ‘transformed’ firms have made ‘excellent progress’ running IT as a profit center rather than a cost center (seven times more likely than the least mature).

level up in their cloud career. We have invested heavily in Azure training, because our global reach and Azure’s versatility means it is a platform that can fit any need, no matter the business scale or the industry; so anyone who takes our courses will learn things that relate directly to their existing job and allow them to add value. Our trainings will show you guide IT Pros to build hybrid or open-source solutions, and the courseware provides tactile learning experiences that you can employ immediately, while earning technical certifications that prepare you for rewarding career advancement.”

A recent worldwide survey conducted by Microsoft showed a marked increase in the

salaries of cloud professionals, as companies recruit for their digital transformation journeys.

The survey also noted that 37 percent of respondents in the Middle East and Africa region cited a skills gap as the main barrier to cloud adoption.

“In the GCC, governments have initiated bold economicdevelopment visions centred on technology,” said Ozyucel. “Much of the activity in the private and public sectors around these programmes – especially given the emerging constraints of the petrochemical price dip – is about doing more with less. In the context of digital transformation, that means cloud, so the surge in demand for cloud specialists is to be expected.”

Huawei launches OpenLab Dubai It aims to accelerate Middle East digital transformation with global partners.

Huawei has announced the launch of its OpenLab Dubai, its first to serve customers and partners in the Middle East, and a part of Huawei’s Global OpenLab program.

The Chinese firm plans to add seven new OpenLabs across the world in 2017, and has announced that it will invest $200 million and add nearly 1,000 people globally in the next three years, bringing the total number of OpenLabs to 20 by 2019.

OpenLab Dubai aims to give customers a hands-on experience of public safety, smart city, oil and gas solutions, and has been jointly launched with more than 30 solutions and over 20 partners.

OpenLab Dubai has a mandate to provide “innovative solutions for IoT, cloud computing, large data, intelligent analysis, eLTE, converged communications and other new technologies to build public safety, smart city and oil and gas solutions.” The initiative has attracted YITU, Zenith, Walkbase, 7G, IOmniscient, Nedap, Richfit and more than 20 other partners.

With the “Platform + Ecosystem, accelerate the Middle East digital transformation of the industry”, OpenLab Dubai brings together partners and customers from around the world to discuss the importance of collaboration in the development of a local digital ecosystem.

Fan Siyong, Huawei’s President of its public sector business, said, “The digital transformation is causing disruption across every industry. Huawei has established OpenLabs across the world with the theme “platform + ecosystem”, and is committed to working with global multi-specialty and industry partners to build customer-centric, innovative industry solutions to promote digital transformation and promote ecosystem development through the creation of an ‘open, flexible and safe’ platform that fully supports the ecosystem.”

Xijiang Lin, Director of Huawei Enterprise Business Group’s Middle East Solution Development Center, said, “OpenLab Dubai will aggregate the world’s best resources to meet local digital transformation needs, and continuously enhance the ICT platform capabilities and development of local ecosystems.

OpenLab Dubai is focused on building capabilities to easily apply technical solutions in the actual network environment; developing competitive, commercially viable and industry-oriented solutions.”

Key to transformation

By Ramkumar Balakrishnan, President, Redington Gulf – Value Distribution

Transformation is critical to every business. Enterprises are moving rapidly to the new digital era and are expecting the same swiftness and agility from partners, compelling them to transform business processes, delivery and operations.

Transformation is no longer just a buzz word and partners need to understand its importance. The answer to why they should evolve is simply because end customers are demanding it. Today customers do not want to invest a lot of time procuring products and getting them implemented. They want outcomebased conversations and are looking to deploy solutions. Therefore, partners should learn to move in this direction where they are not just offering products but complete solutions. This is what is driving transformation across the board – solutions selling.

This change will lead to the next phase in the industry, which is everything-as-a-service.

Today customers are increasingly demanding more offerings around security-as-a-service, voice-as-aservice and infrastructure-as-aservice. It is essential to note that it is relevant not only to public cloud providers such as the likes of Amazons or Microsofts but each Redington partner will have to transform on what they offer to end customers as a service. Services will be the next big phase and those partners who prepare their businesses today to be conducive to such an environment will be able to make the most of the opportunities.

At Redington Value, we offer support and training in enabling our partners to make this transition to the digital era, by ensuring a deep focus on services and solutions.

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Avaya introduces framework for the Everywhere Data Center Avaya Pivot addresses key challenges of distributed computing, allowing more structure and control while lowering risk and complexity. transformation push compute functions out to the edge of the network. The Avaya framework for the Everywhere Data Center addresses these challenges, introducing the Avaya Pivot operating platform and the Avaya Arc orchestration engine. The company has also announced the Avaya VSP 8600, a modular Ethernet switch specifically designed to complement the capabilities of Avaya Pivot and Avaya Arc. Avaya’s framework for the Everywhere Data Center has two essential parts – Avaya Pivot and Avaya Arc. The Avaya Pivot operating platform creates the ability to deploy virtualised network functions (VNFs) anywhere in the network. With the

Avaya Arc orchestration engine, these functions can be automatically chained together into full-featured services using centralised policy-based tools.

Individual functions could include network virtualisation, firewall, IDS/IPS, QoS, and specialided gateways, which are selected based upon the unique requirements of a particular application.

These two elements provide the necessary structure and control directly into the Campus edge, using concepts that have been thoroughly proven in the data center while avoiding the need for numerous standalone appliances.

“With new challenges from traffic at the campus edge, Avaya is leveraging proven

models taken from the data center ‘clean room’ applying them to the more fragmented environment of the campus.

The Avaya Pivot operating platform provides native NFV support on virtual machines or containers, including support for virtualised Network Operating Systems,” said Maan Al-Shakarchi, Head of Networking in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific, Avaya. “As the complementary orchestration component, Avaya Arc provides a means to automate service deployment and create intent-based service chains.

Ultimately, the Everywhere Data Center can reduce latency, cost and risk while preserving or enhancing scalability.”

Fortinet extends Security Fabric automation, visibility and control to cloud environments

pricing and automation options for end customers. FortiCASB is a new cloud access security broker service for on and off-network visibility and control of Office 365 and other SaaS applications.

John Maddison, Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions, Fortinet, said, “Companies are building out flexible and scalable infrastructure with the use of private and public clouds. As such, maintaining a strong and consistent security posture is essential. Fortinet is enhancing its security capabilities across private, infrastructure and application (SaaS) clouds through its Security Fabric.

This ranges from increased scalability, new public cloud features and SaaS visibility via a new CASB offering, delivering optimal security performance at cloud-scale.”

Maan Al-Shakarchi, Avaya

Avaya has introduced a framework to help enterprises deal with the security and efficiency challenges arising as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and digital

This spans private and public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

John Maddison, Fortinet

Fortinet has announced that it has extended the performance, automation, visibility and management of the Fortinet Security Fabric into all types of cloud environments, spanning private and public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds to Software-as-aService (SaaS) applications.

The company delivers cloud security scale, performance and value for private and public clouds with expanded virtualised FortiGate capacities. Enabling

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enterprises to pay for cloud security as needed, Fortinet solutions are now available on-demand in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Optimising automation of public cloud deployments, FortiGate delivers enhanced auto-scaling and orchestration capabilities for AWS workloads, both on-demand and bring-your-own-license (BYOL). New Fortinet VM OnDemand pay-as-you-go licensing programme for cloud providers and MSSPs delivers flexible

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Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 now available Enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform expands application support, enhances platform security, while adding new innovations.

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Ashesh Badani, Red Hat

Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade, Kubernetesnative container application platform. While enabling enterprises like Swiss Railways, Produban and Pioneer to actively

It provides a Kubernetes-based platform for traditional and cloudnative applications with the tools, greater security features and capabilities designed to retain existing IT investments while planning for future needs and business growth.”

embrace cloud-native applications in mission-critical roles, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 also helps enterprises retain existing IT investments through expanded support for traditional business applications. This dual application support is provided by new security enhancements

as well as several innovations emerging from the Kubernetes upstream community.

As a leading contributor to both the docker and Kubernetes open source projects, Red Hat provides an enterprise-ready container platform based on Kubernetes 1.5, Red Hat Enterprise

Fujitsu, VMware offer IoT solutions in the automobile sector Fujitsu OTA Reprograming Solution will be combined with VMware IoT solutions to enable automobile manufacturers and partners to drive solutions with connected cars and autonomous driving.

Fujitsu and VMware has announced an expanded strategic collaboration to bring innovative IoT solutions to customers in the automobile industry.

Extending Fujitsu and VMware’s longstanding collaboration,

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the Fujitsu OTA Reprograming Solution will be combined with VMware IoT solutions, enabling automobile manufacturers and partners to drive robust solutions in the future with connected cars and autonomous driving.

The connected car industry continues to proliferate, and innovative and sophisticated technologies play a key role in the way automobile manufacturers can create a unique and enjoyable experience for drivers.”

“Fujitsu has partnered with VMware since 2006, and we are pleased to say that our partnership with VMware now extends to the IoT industry as well. For our OTA Reprograming Solution, as we are seeing increasing demands from automobile manufacturers and their tier 1 components manufacturers as a global standard, we will provide an OTA platform for connected cars by integrating VMware IoT solutions into our secure and effective OTA Reprograming Solution. We look forward to fostering these offerings in our mobile business,” said Shikou

Linux and the integrated docker container runtime through the latest version of Red Hat’s container application platform.

This helps customers to more quickly roll out new services with the support of a stable, reliable and more secure enterprise platform powered by the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.

Ashesh Badani, General Manager, OpenShift, Red Hat, said, “While containerised applications and associated infrastructure present a vision of enterprise IT’s future, traditional applications still function as the workhorse for modern businesses and should not be left behind as enterprises add next-generation services to their technology mix. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 provides a Kubernetes-based platform for traditional and cloud-native applications with the tools, greater security features and capabilities designed to retain existing IT investments while planning for future needs and business growth.”

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 is available now via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Kikuta, SVP, Head of Mobility IoT Business Unit, Fujitsu.

To help global automobile manufacturers and their tier 1 components manufacturers, Fujitsu will team with VMware to provide a one-stop service to meet automobile manufacturers’ reliability requirements by integrating VMware IoT solutions into Fujitsu’s OTA Reprograming Solution.

“The connected car industry continues to proliferate, and innovative and sophisticated technologies play a key role in the way automobile manufacturers can create a unique and enjoyable experience for drivers,” said Mimi Spier, Vice President, Internet of Things, VMware. “We see our collaboration with Fujitsu as a significant benefit for automobile manufacturers, as we empower them to easily and quickly deploy software updates in a secure and seamless manner to their connected cars.”

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EVENTS Microsoft - Security Seminar - Muscat - 24 April

Aruba - Enablement Session - Dubai - 5 April

Cyberark - Technical Bootcamp - Dubai - 13 April

Gigamon and Checkpoint - NSX Roadshow - Dubai - 19 April

Microsoft - Security Seminar - Kuwait - 23

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Check Point - Security Seminar - Dubai - 5 April

Fortinet - NSE4 Bootcamp - Doha - 3-4 April

Microsoft - Security Seminar - Doha - 23 April

Microsoft - Security Seminar - Manama - 24 April

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EVENTS Oracle - Optimised Infrastructure for Optimised Results - Muscat - 19 April

Red Hat - Datacenter Infrastructure Solutions Seminar - Dubai - 11 April

Trend Micro - Security Forum - Doha - 5 April

VMware Airwatch Bootcamp

Dell EMC-Hyper Converged Infrastructure event-Riyadh-13th April

Splunk - Partner Immersion Bootcamp - Dubai - 27-29 April

Trend Micro - Technical Bootcamp- Doha - 26-27 April

Dell EMC-Hyper convered Infrastructure event- Jeddah- 26th April

Fortinet-NSE4 bootcamp - Jeddah-24th April

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EVENTS Cisco - End Customer Event With Neurotech - Kenya - 26 April

Oracle - Optimised Infrastructure for Optimised Results - Ethiopia - 27 April

Oracle - Optimised Infrastructure for Optimised Results - Senegal - 20 April

Cisco - Partner Event - Nigeria - 13 April

Fortinet-NSE4 bootcamp - Jeddah-25th April

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Oracle - Optimised Infrastructure for Optimised Results -Ivory Coast - 18 April

Cisco - End Customer Event With CASPER Technologies - Nigeria - 6 April

VMware-VMware airwatch Bootcamp-Riyadh

Red Hat - Jboss Event - Riyadh- 26th April

AD

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SonicWall announces key milestones Registered SecureFirst channel partners reach 10,000 in 150 days since SonicWall became an independent company with 20 percent of new partners.

SonicWall has announced key milestones as an independent cybersecurity company since it separated from Dell and introduced the SonicWall SecureFirst Partner Program on November 1, 2016. With over 10,000 partners already registered as SonicWall resellers, the firm has introduced two initiatives designed to help these partners secure customers in the shifting cyber arms race – SonicWall University to train partners on cybersecurity, and new global marketing programmes and incentives to help the SonicWall channel deliver their cybersecurity solutions and services for small and mediumsize businesses (SMBs).

SonicWall University – this channel enablement programme is designed as an extension of the SecureFirst Partner

Program, helping communicate insights SonicWall has gleaned from the SonicWall GRID Threat Network to the partner community in a structure they can learn from easily.

“The response from SonicWall’s channel partners to our spin out from Dell far exceeded even our own expectations,” said Bill Conner, President and CEO. “We’re

excited that 10,000 partners have already joined the SecureFirst Partner Program and pleased to welcome 2,000 new partners to SonicWall. Now, we are announcing major investments in education and marketing to help enable these 10,000 partners to assist their customers with securing their business. We know these cyber threats are shifting and small to medium-

Trend Micro leverages XGen security capabilities in WorryFree Services XGen security infuses high-fidelity machine learning into a blend of threat protection techniques to best protect against threats across any user activity and endpoint.

Trend Micro has announced it is enhancing protection of small business endpoints by leveraging its newest capabilities of XGen security, including machine learning, inside Trend Micro Worry-Free Services. XGen security infuses high-fidelity machine learning into a blend of

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threat protection techniques to best protect against the full range of known and unknown threats across any user activity and endpoint. It constantly learns, adapts and automatically shares threat intelligence across the platforms and applications that matter most to customers.

Advanced security protection is critical to ensure small businesses vigorously defend against today’s cyber-attacks and those to come in the future.”

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Trend Micro’s XGen security approach for small businesses uses proven methods to quickly identify benign data and known threats, freeing its smart advanced techniques, such as application control, exploit prevention, behavioral analysis, sandboxing and machine learning, to more quickly and accurately identify unknown threats. According to the firm, it is the first to infuse ‘high-fidelity’ machine learning into its approach – uniquely analysing files both before execution and at runtime, using

size businesses are increasingly becoming targets, but they often lack in-house expertise and rely on trusted partners to keep their infrastructure secure.”

The company has also unveiled a major marketing campaign in response to partner requests to help educate prospective and current customers on the most pressing cyber threats today. Partners can access prepackaged campaign materials and apply for market development funds online through a new SonicWall Partner Portal. Partners can earn special discounts and rebates for using these programmes to drive business.

SonicWall University is available globally now at no cost to authorised partners participating in the SonicWall SecureFirst Partner Program.

‘noise cancellation’ features like census checking and whitelisting to reduce false positives. All of these capabilities are fueled by the cloud-based global threat intelligence of the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, which supplies rapid response updates when a new threat is detected, enabling faster time to protection.

“Small businesses are not immune to the 500,000 new, unique threats created every day. In fact, Trend Micro saw a 752 percent increase in new ransomware families that ultimately resulted in $1 billion in losses for organisations worldwide in 2016,” said Partha Panda, Vice President, Corporate and Business Development, Trend Micro. “These threats and attacks can disrupt operations and require costly fixes and manpower to correct. Advanced security protection is critical to ensure small businesses vigorously defend against today’s cyber-attacks and those to come in the future.”

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Malwarebytes integrates with ForeScout to deliver real-time threat visibility and remediation The Malwarebytes integration with ForeScout helps businesses accelerate their incident response, stop zero-day exploits and reduce their exposure to emerging security threats.

Monty Venkersammy, Malwarebytes

Malwarebytes has announced an integration with ForeScout Technologies, to provide joint customers real-time threat

visibility and remediation for both managed and unmanaged devices.

The Malwarebytes integration with ForeScout helps businesses accelerate their incident response, stop zero-day exploits and reduce their exposure to emerging security threats. With the integrated solution, customers benefit from a reduction in attack surface through the capability to proactively prevent compromise, sweep the network for latent threats, assess the enterprise-wide exposure to and impact of an active threat, and automate real-time threat

response directly from the ForeScout CounterACT console.

This integration employs the following Malwarebytes enterprise offerings which communicate bidirectionally with the ForeScout CounterACT console: • Malwarebytes Breach Remediation, which provides advanced threat sweeping, confirmation, investigation and thorough removal via an extensible and agentless application.

• Malwarebytes Endpoint Security, which provides nextgeneration protection from advanced zero-hour threats using six unified defense

Pivot3 releases Acuity Solution features advanced policy-based management to simply and predictably run multiple enterprise workloads with optimal performance.

Pivot3, provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), has announced the release of Acuity, the industry’s first priority-aware HCI software platform that enables IT to confidently consolidate multiple mixed-application workloads onto a single infrastructure while also delivering breakthrough performance.

Until now, organisations have deployed HCI for single, standalone use cases — like virtual desktop infrastructure — due to the unpredictable performance of multiple applications on the system, lack of automation, and inefficient scale and capacity that restrict data center consolidation.

Pivot3’s new Acuity software

platform delivers greater performance, scale and efficiency across a wider range of applications to overcome these limitations.

It simplifies workload management with Pivot3’s fifth-generation policybased management engine and comprehensive data services. As a priority-aware software platform, Acuity

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intelligently and automatically applies resources to missioncritical applications for guaranteed performance and predictable results.

Acuity’s advanced policybased management engine has been optimised to make the most efficient use of NVMe PCIe flash to deliver six times the performance of conventional HCI solutions. This means IT

With Acuity, we’re turbocharging HCI and redefining the next generation of the enterprise data center.”

layers to proactively block an attack before it begins.

• The integration provides customers with visibility into emerging threats, rapid threat detection and remediation and automated threat response.

“Today’s threats are more destructive than ever, hitting organisations at an unprecedented velocity and sophistication – easily overwhelming and evading perimeter security defenses,” said Monty Venkersammy, VP of Business Development, Malwarebytes. “Automatically identifying devices appearing on the network and understanding their contribution to the enterprise attack surface is vital to preventing malicious activity in a breach. This integration not only provides critical threat visibility but additionally the power to respond, delivering thorough investigation and remediation in real-time.”

can improve response times for databases, enterprise applications, business analytics and VDI. Acuity also delivers increased density, enabling IT to run two to three times more virtual machines per HCI node, resulting in a smaller datacenter footprint and significant reductions in OPEX and CAPEX. “With Acuity, we’re turbocharging HCI and redefining the next generation of the enterprise data center,” said Ron Nash, CEO, Pivot3.

“Businesses are demanding more out of hyperconvergence, and expect these solutions to effectively manage multiple mission-critical applications. By bringing together breakthrough performance and sophisticated intelligence, we’re supporting the transition to the private cloud and software-defined data center in a way that’s never been seen before.”

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