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ASUS Unveils Gaming Laptops
ASUS Unveils Gaming Laptops with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs
ASUS has announced that the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPUs are offered in a diverse family of ROG and TUF Gaming notebooks, making RTX enhancements and performance available to a wider audience than ever before.
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The ROG and TUF Gaming laptops powered by the new GPUs serve up the latest processors, immersive displays, quiet cooling, and bold designs, accommodating users of all stripes—from those who need a versatile ultraportable that can do anything to gamers who demand a captivating powerhouse with a large display.
These new Laptop GPUs are powered by the Ampere architecture, the second generation of NVIDIA’s RTX technology, which combines new streaming multiprocessors with 2nd gen RT cores and 3rd gen Tensor cores to enable the most realistic raytraced graphics and advanced AI features. These improvements enable lifelike visuals while pushing frame rates to new heights. They’re backed by support for NVIDIA Reflex technologies that lower latency in select multiplayer games and NVIDIA Broadcast effects that add instant polish to live streams.
The GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs bring RTX enhancements and performance to everyone. The updated TUF and ROG laptop lineups offer these GPUs in diverse range of designs to suit different needs. ROG laptops pair the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs with the latest generation of CPUs, including 11th Gen Intel Core and AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors. ROG Intelligent Cooling technologies help to extract maximum performance from these cutting-edge platforms. The first ROG gaming 2-in-1, the ROG Flow X13, is the perfect landing place for the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti. This ultraslim 13-inches convertible notebook boasts an AMD processor up to the eight-core Ryzen 9 5980HS, yet it’s a mere 15.8mm thin and weighs only 1.3kg. Despite the ultraportable form factor, an efficient cooling system allows the RTX 3050 Ti to clock up to 1135MHz at 35W with ROG Boost, with another 5W available from Dynamic Boost. Configs with the GeForce RTX 3050 run that GPU up to 1157MHz at 35W with ROG Boost, and they can draw another 5W through Dynamic Boost.
Gamers use their PCs for a wide range of activities that extends beyond gaming and into creating. The ROG Zephyrus M16 is built to be just as versatile. It starts with a captivating display framed by super-narrow bezels on all four sides. The immersive 94% screen-to-body ratio fits a 16” screen inside a slim chassis that’s smaller than last year’s 15” Zephyrus M15. For fluid, richly detailed visuals in games, the panel combines a high WQHD resolution with a fast 165Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time. The display is also an ideal canvas for artists thanks to a taller 16:10 aspect ratio and Pantone-validated colors across 100% of the cinema-grade DCI-P3 color gamut.
Next-gen components give the Zephyrus M16 the performance to tackle any task. The latest processors up to an 11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900H drive high-refreshrate gaming and deliver multithreaded muscle for content creation, while GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs supply formidable graphics power. The GeForce RTX 3050 Ti runs at up to 1585MHz at 60W with ROG Boost, with another 15W The original Zephyrus G14 turned heads by balancing performance and portability in a sleek and stylish package. The 2021 edition builds on that foundation with updated components that enhance gaming and more. The latest Zephyrus G14 is supercharged with up to a Ryzen 9 5900HS processor. It’s available with GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPUs that make RTX graphics technologies attainable for every gamer.
With a precise balance of power and portability, the ROG Zephyrus G15 offers accessible versatility for gamers and creators. It wears the same shimmering aesthetic as the Holographic G14 but makes room for a larger 15” display. The WQHD panel with a 165Hz refresh rate and quick 3ms response time relieves gamers of having to choose between greater detail and faster performance. Full coverage of the wider DCI-P3 color space enables vivid, lifelike color that’s factory calibrated and Pantone Validated to ensure accuracy.
The new ROG Strix G15 and G17 offer exciting options built for play. Original Black and Eclipse Gray variants both have a diagonal dot-matrix design across the keyboard deck and aluminum-capped lid, while Electro Punk makes a bolder statement with Coded Puzzle aesthetic and speckled pink accent. All three let users pick their own colors with a wrap-around light bar and keyboard illuminated by Aura Sync.
New for 2021, the TUF Dash F15 is engineered to make thin-and-light gaming a reality for everyone. Its super-slim design is lightweight and easy to carry. The latest processors up to an 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11370H CPU join forces with GeForce RTX GPUs to blitz through games, with power to spare for serious work. Cooling upgrades borrowed from ROG laptops help to get the most out of the hardware.
The combination of 11th Gen Intel Core CPUs and GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs prime the new TUF Gaming F15 and F17 for gamers who demand powerful components, sensible style, and reliable performance at an accessible price. Comprehensive cooling lets those processors achieve their full potential. The GeForce RTX 3050 Ti runs at up to 1585MHz at 60W with ROG Boost, with another 15W available from Dynamic Boost, while the RTX 3050 ramps up to 1600MHz at 60W with GPU Boost, with an extra 15W on tap via Dynamic Boost.
Juniper Networks has announced that the company is continuing its investment in the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market with the introduction of Juniper Security Director Cloud, a cloud-based portal that distributes connectivity and security services to sites, users and applications, as well as manages customers’ SASE transformations. Technology disruptors, such as 5G and an increasingly distributed workforce, are changing how organizations do business and architect their networks.
Juniper Security Director Cloud bridges organizations’ current security deployments with their future SASE rollouts by providing security that is managed anywhere and everywhere, on-premises and in the cloud, from the cloud. Benefits include:
• Experience-led management to facilitate network transformation. Security
Director Cloud delivers a transformational management experience that reduces overhead that is inherent in architectural shifts and distributed security delivery.
• Unified policies across physical, virtual and cloud-based security. Customers can create security policies — including user- and application-based access, IPS, anti-malware and web security policies — that follow users, devices or applications as they move to new locations, and automatically apply
• Validated security effectiveness. Juniper provides cyberattack protection that has been validated by objective, third-party testing to be more than 99% effective against network and application exploits, new and commodity malware, IoT botnets and other attack techniques targeted at the edge and in the data center.
• Visibility into threat behaviors across the entire network with Security
Director Insights. Security Director
Cloud features correlated visibility into attacks across the network by bringing together threat detection information – including detections from other vendors’ products – into an attack timeline, and it enables onetouch mitigation to quickly address gaps in defense.
Huawei Calls for Closer Public-Private Sector Cooperation to Restore Trust in Tech
Catherine Chen, Corporate Senior Vice President and BOD Member at Huawei, has underscored how building trust in a digital society will require the joint efforts of policymakers, regulators, and the private sector. Her comments came during a speech at the St. Gallen Symposium, an annual gathering of current and future leaders from across the globe. The annual gathering of current and future leaders celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, welcoming 1,000 participants in the three-day cross-generational dialogue.
Chen joined political leaders and representatives of transnational organizations to exchange their views on the theme of this year’s symposium, “Trust Matters”. “As more devices feature connectivity, more services go online, and more critical infrastructures rely on real-time data exchanges, so must governments worldwide ensure that everyone is protected by the highest security standards. Only a common set of rules can guarantee a level of security that creates trust in technology,” Chen said.
The event’s participants agreed that trust is inherently built on openness and transparency, and that it is time to take concrete, actionable steps to address the common challenges and risks that have emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We, as members of the younger generation, are connected to a greater number of people through social media, but this does not correspond to a circle of people we can trust,” said Simon Zulliger, a member of the team of 35 students from the University of St. Gallen that organized this year’s symposium.
Chen hoped that the next generation of leaders would build trust and shape a world of pervasive connectivity. “I urge them to continue developing the positive relationships between communities, individuals, and their environments. We must build strong trust in technology, enabled by a common set of rules, innovations, and progress. Only then can we commit to the sustainable and trustworthy use of technology,” she concluded.
Chen’s comments echo the company’s recent reaffirmation and commitment to supporting digital transformation across the Middle East by building stronger cybersecurity mitigation programs with local partners and governments.
That commitment comes at a time when the overall spending on information and communication technology (ICT) in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa region is expected to make a comeback, returning to positive growth of over $209.5 billion in 2021 after contracting last year, according to projections from IDC.
HP Extends First of its Kind Partner Program to Global Retailers
HP Inc. has announced the extension of HP Amplify — a first-ofits-kind global channel program — to its vast ecosystem of more than1350 online pure players, omnichannel, and brick-andmortar retail partners. Launched in the fall of 2020 to commercial partners, the powerful new partner program, built on a single, integrated structure provides the insights, capabilities, and collaboration tools needed to drive digital transformation and growth as consumer buying behaviors continue to evolve. HP will begin to transition retail partners to the HP Amplify program beginning August 2, 2021, and continue RiskIQ has announced additional investment in its Middle East operations. Fueled by revenue growth across the region of 132% in 2020, RiskIQ recently relocated Henry Staveley, Regional Sales Director to Dubai and is currently undertaking additional recruitment activity. In late 2019 RiskIQ partnered with the value-added-distributor CyberKnight Technologies, and together they quadrupled the number of RiskIQ resellers across the region in 2020.
“You can’t protect what you can’t see! That is why we partnered with RiskIQ. The platform enables enterprise and government customers to truly understand their attack surface. This is critical because when an attacker targets an organization, they will look for any possible opening. Without understanding what they can see, security teams will not be aware of the potential vulnerabilities that can be compromised and become attack vectors.”, said Avinash Advani, Founder and CEO of CyberKnight. “With the investments being made in the region by RiskIQ, we have already observed accelerated market penetration in H1 2021 and expect rapid customer acquisition, as well as revenue growth in due course.”
Commenting on the regional expansion, Fabian Libeau, RiskIQ’s VP and General Manager of EMEA, said, “While the Middle East has been a successful market for RiskIQ over several years, digital transformation initiatives, Covid-19, and the increased activity of threat actors across the region have made our solutions more relevant than ever. With these additional resource investments, we look forward to helping a growing number of Middle East organizations proactively defend themselves against cyber threats and threat actor groups.”
Built on a simplified and easy-to-navigate structure with two distinct retail tracks (Synergy and Power including Power CDR Retail targeted at retail sub-distributors), HP Amplify is designed from the ground up to turn data analytics into insights that spark new strategies, steer innovation and reward partners for performance, collaboration and capabilities while accelerating digital transformation with insights, building a data driven culture and augmenting common knowledge with collaboration tools.
“For the IT industry overall, and the retail channel specifically, it is clear that business as usual is no longer an option. HP Amplify not only makes it easier for retail partners to do business with HP, it provides a clear path, built on a proven framework, to transform their business for today while enabling long-term sustained growth in the future,” said Christoph Schell, Chief Commercial Officer, HP Inc. “Together with our partner community we are reinventing how consumers experience our products and services, by investing in our shared capabilities while developing new areas of strength to remain competitive.”
With CyberKnight as VAD, RiskIQ Middle East Business Grows 132% YoY
Vertiv Opens New Factory in Croatia to Fulfill the Demand for Integrated Modular Solutions
Vertiv has announced the opening of a new factory in Rugvica, Croatia to support its integrated modular solutions (IMS) business in EMEA. Compared to the previous factory, the site offers 130% more indoor space and 60% more outdoor space and can easily be expanded to seize the opportunities of the rapidly growing prefabricated modular data centers (PFM) market. The factory also includes a number of innovations for the construction of PFM modules as well as thermal management air handling units.
“We hear a lot about IT trends and the upcoming advances in technologies such as of 5G, IoT, and AI, but less about the innovative physical infrastructure that’s behind it,” says Giordano Albertazzi, president for Vertiv in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). “We are seeing strong growth in the adoption of prefabricated modular solutions to support these new technologies, and as market leaders we are investing both in capacity and innovation to continue to meet our customers’ needs and stay ahead of the curve. This new site ultimately means supporting the plans and enabling the success of our EMEA and global customers, and is reflective of our continued investment in the markets in which we operate.” “The Rugvica factory boasts all the latest technologies, production processes, tools and testing labs,” says Viktor Petik, VP for Vertiv’s IMS business in EMEA. “The facility is designed to provide a complete range of prefabricated modular solutions, from cable landing stations powering the internet and connecting geographies, to bespoke data centre building blocks. The new factory testifies our commitment towards innovation and growth, and I am proud to say that we’ve created about 150 jobs in the last year, many being engineering or skilled professionals from this region.”
Kaspersky Strengthens West African Footprint
As part of its strategy to grow its business in West Africa, Kaspersky has partnered with value-added distributor DataGroupIT who will provide the global cybersecurity company with access to new markets in Nigeria and Ghana. “DataGroupIT is a well-known distributor in Africa with a clear value-add when it comes to generating focused business growth, especially in the enterprise segment. It also has the capacity to support the Kaspersky business logistically and provide valuable technical expertise on Kaspersky solutions,” says Lehan van den Heever, Enterprise Cyber Security Advisor for Kaspersky in Africa.
DataGroupIT has more than 1 000 clients in over 15 Sub-Saharan African countries with its professional teams delivering exceptional sales, pre-sale, logistic, marketing, and financial support. The partnership between the two organisations will further enhance Kaspersky’s rapidly expanding footprint in Africa. It is designed to empower customers to leverage Kaspersky’s knowledge, market intelligence, and world-class cybersecurity professionals with best-in-class local market support.
“West Africa is becoming a major focus for Kaspersky. The agreement with DataGroupIT will see Kaspersky gain access to new verticals in this region while helping new and existing customers build their cybersecurity strategy. It also puts Kaspersky in a position to work with major regulators to elevate the digital protection threshold across the region,” says van den Heever.
Amir Shtarkman, VP Business Development at DataGroupIT says; “Our partnership with Kaspersky is an excellent fit for our growing product portfolio, and our ‘6 pillar model’. Kaspersky is an experienced vendor and a leader on their product portfolio. Their offerings will enable our customers across the region to realise the benefits of cybersecurity and, in particular, endpoint protection and cyber intelligence. DataGroupIT has a wealth of experience in the cybersecurity market in Africa, and we are looking forward to growing the Kaspersky business with this partnership.”
With the DataGroupIT partnership in place, Kaspersky plans to replicate the success it has observed in other African regions. “This expansion will help move the maturity of cyber defense tools and processes in West Africa to a new level especially at a time when organisations and consumers are adapting to a new distributed working environment that creates the potential for additional cyber risk,” concludes van den Heever.
AVEVA and Maire Tecnimont Group Sign Strategic Partnership
AVEVA has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor Tecnimont, a subsidiary of the Maire Tecnimont Group, a leader in the global natural resource processing industry, to create new digital predictive and prescriptive maintenance services that drive enhanced business outcomes. This partnership will extend usage of AVEVA’s Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions across the Maire Tecnimont Group, globally, enhancing plant operability and lowering maintenance costs.
This will in turn deliver increased information availability empowering better, more informed decision-making, and ultimately improving overall business performance. As part of the agreement, the two companies will work together over a twelve-month period on a defined number of customer projects to promote the application of predictive maintenance technology for critical plant assets.
“Digital transformation is one of the technology drivers most needed to give our industry a much-needed boost. This MoU with AVEVA aligns seamlessly with Maire Tecnimont’s strategy for digital transformation: it complements our value proposition which focuses on NextPlant, our new digital services and solutions portfolio that has been designed to fully meet customer’s needs, while simultaneously improving our operational model through the creation of digital enablers,” commented Pierroberto Folgiero, CEO Maire Tecnimont Group. ment suite is well positioned to advance industrial operations of the future. By enabling companies to predict failures before they occur, we are helping to reduce unplanned downtime as well as drive efficiency and safety throughout plant operations. We are excited about the partnership with Maire Tecnimont and look forward to supporting our joint customers in overcoming today’s industrial challenges by leveraging human experience with artificial intelligence.” commented Kim Custeau, Vice President, Asset Performance Management, AVEVA.
As an EPC contractor and global leader in the transformation of natural resources, Maire Tecnimont will leverage its unique process, automation, and maintenance competencies to supply plant owners with perfectly customized digital products and solutions that are tailor-made for their maintenance needs. The combination of Maire Tecnimont’s proven market experience and AVEVA’s leadership as an industrial technology provider will deliver improved analytics which in turn will help to reduce inefficiencies, optimize operations, and improve our customer’s profitability.
With this MoU, Maire Tecnimont Group has reached a new milestone in its digital transformation journey, with the activation of a new technology-enabled value stream which is a crucial part of its roadmap. To achieve its drive to become the ‘contractor of the future’, Maire Tecnimont is enhancing overall value for plant owners through a suite of advanced digital products and services geared towards EPC customers.
SHAREit Group Gets New Sales Director for GCC Operations
SHAREit Group has confirmed the appointment of Mrwan Gharzeddine as the new Sales Director for related activities across the GCC. With extensive experience in the digital advertising segment and a comprehensive understanding of the regional market, Gharzeddine joins SHAREit Group with a proven track record of meeting sales targets, influencing key stakeholders, and maintaining excellent relationships with agencies and partners. Moving forward, he will oversee all sales operations across the GCC, utilizing his leadership skills and passion for digital advertising to lead development projects, secure new business opportunities, meet sales objectives, generate revenue, and further grow SHAREit Group’s regional profile.
“I am delighted to be joining SHAREit Group as Sales Director for the GCC,” said Gharzeddine. “In recent years, SHAREit Group’s influence and impact across the region and beyond has grown dramatically. Sustained success in eliminating digital content limitations, supporting clients, and facilitating access for users to discover and consume diverse, high-quality content has seen the company’s popularity continue to rise, and the coming period is one full of potential from a brand standpoint. As such, I am looking forward to working with our internal teams to realize our aspirations and make a real difference. Sales success is an integrated operations model component for every business, and it is important for us to continue capitalizing on our strong momentum to ensure that we exceed every requirement.”
A Business Marketing graduate from California State University, USA, Gharzeddine joins SHAREit Group with almost two decades of sales experience. Since pursuing his sales career in 2004, he has applied an entrepreneurial mindset in each of his previous roles, effectively managing and mentoring diverse teams of sales managers and junior representatives. His most recent position was Digital Advertising Lead at dubizzle.com, the UAE’s leading buying and selling platform. During his six-year tenure, Gharzeddine successfully led partnership programs with agencies and clients, securing annual budgets, nurturing external relationships, and securing $1.7 million in revenue per year. Prior to this position, he also flourished as Digital Sales Manager at Chill Media, Business Development Manager at MobiComputing, and Business Development Executive at Ipsos. Qualys has announced that its Board of Directors has named Sumedh Thakar as President and Chief Executive Officer. Sumedh, long-standing Qualys executive and chief product officer, was previously Interim CEO. “After careful consideration, the board has concluded that Sumedh is the right leader to take Qualys into the future. Given his tenure with the company and his steady guidance since taking on the role of interim CEO in February, we have complete confidence that he can rally the company to execute on our vision,” said Sandra E. Bergeron, Qualys’ Lead Independent Director. “As he moves into the CEO role, we have the unique opportunity to leverage his deep knowledge of the company and the market to enable him to move us forward with speed and agility.”
Sumedh has been with Qualys for nearly 20 years in various positions starting as a software engineer. Since 2014, he has served as Chief Product Officer overseeing product strategy and leading the transformation of the Qualys Cloud Platform from a single security solution to an evolving portfolio of integrated apps that deliver 360-degree visibility across on-premises, endpoints, cloud, containers, and mobile environments providing the visibility businesses need to assess critical security intelligence and to automate the full spectrum of auditing, compliance, and protection for IT systems and web applications. As president since 2019, Sumedh has been deeply involved in expanding Qualys’ go-to-market strategy and building and driving the sales and partner teams to expand Qualys’ addressable market and drive customer retention and revenue growth.
“I have been fortunate to be part of Qualys’ journey of innovation from the early days when Qualys started as one of the first cloud-based security solutions. We’ve made great strides since then, expanding our cloud platform to address the security and compliance needs of today’s modern IT infrastructure,” said Thakar. “I’m thankful to the Qualys board and excited to have the opportunity to take Qualys to the next level and lead the incredibly talented global Qualys team. I look forward to continuing to accelerate innovation, advancing our go-to-market strategy and creating value for our customers and shareholders.”
Qualys Board Names Sumedh Thakar as CEO
ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021 // INTERVIEW STEM IS ALL ABOUT SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING
Peter Lacey, the Commercial Head for MEA at Acer Middle East, speaks about the challenges faced by the education sector, how these challenges can be overcome and the way forward for the industry
How has the pandemic affected the education sector in the region?
The single biggest change has been the environmental one. With schooling moving from a classroom to a home setting in 2020, teachers have had to adapt to a new way of delivering lessons and parents have had to turn into ‘assistant teachers’. The need for educators to be able to teach, communicate and interact with students drove hardware sales but it came with a steep learning curve. Schools that already had a one-to-one strategy (one student, one device) going into 2020 benefited from not having to adapt to and learn new teaching methodologies. Connectivity became the buzzword and of course, the Wifi capability of a device became more important than the processor.
In light of this, the Acer TMB311 flourished as we never compromised on the quality of product and provided the latest Wi-fi technology in all our student and teacher devices. Acer also understood that the amount of time which would be spent in front of a screen was going to increase dramatically, so our devices come with Acer Bluelight technology to assist with protecting eyesight. Anti-microbial solutions were also introduced on the surface of the chassis, the touchscreen, top cover, keyboard, and touchpad. With this, devices can stay cleaner longer and will not require regular alcohol scrubbing or specialised covers.
What sort of opportunities do you see in the regional education sector?
In 2018, Acer began an Innovative School program that brought together teachers from across the Middle East and Europe and gave them a platform to share best practices and learn from each other. In 2020, these relationships became fruitful, as the best practices these teachers were sharing with each other over the course of three years, were being put into practice due to online learning. They were quickly able to transfer these skills across their schools and upskill their staff to work in this new environment.
As schools start to open up in the region, we will continue to strengthen these relationships and identify how through technology, we can together offer an innovative hybrid learning experience. We will continue to work closely with our partners like Adobe and Magix, which will result in us being able to propose curriculum development courses and look at internship programs that will deliver new skills to students in a safe and controlled environment.
Is there a digital disconnect despite tech tools being available for distance education?
The disconnect is more about how students use the internet when directed by their teachers or school as opposed to the same educational usage outside of the school environment. With so many control measures in place to protect students in the school environment the restrictions to their freedom of access to information can lead to quite the opposite: misinformation, false reports, cyber bullying and dystopian views of society.
How can this digital disconnect be bridged?
This can be achieved through freedom of access in a controlled environment. This will be difficult to achieve and will rely on machine learning to gradually expand the horizons of students and their access to material online that will enhance the education experience. STEM has risen as the go to stream of education during the pandemic. What importance does STEM have in developing the skillsets of a student? STEM is really about social and emotional learning, often referred to as EQ (Emotional Intelligence). With students being away from the classroom environment, STEM could give opportunities to reinforce the teaching experience. It should help develop and enable them to apply skills (creative thinking) to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve goals, maintain positive relationships and increase problem-solving abilities in real-life situations.
This topic is difficult to cover in detail in a short question but how it relates to technology is easier to see. By offering project-based work, STEM has allowed students to explore independently of the teaching environment. My belief is that we are developing “thinkers” who will be able to solve the problems of the future. Acer for Education is driven by the by innovation, engagement and empowerment and this is reflected in the high quality of our devices. With a focus on quality stylus and screens, Acer is not limiting the learner’s ability to create and deliver projects conceptualised in their minds. Acer gives them tools to effectively bring those thoughts and dreams to life.
Do you provide solutions today to make STEM learning a seamless experience?
At Acer, we are continuously looking to partners, particularly in Maths and Science, who are developing applications and software that test the critical thinking of students. For example, projects like Scottie Go!, a simple robotics program for young learners, has the ability to get students thinking laterally.
