Innovation & Tech November 2016 - Issue 28

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Global Innovation Summit 2016 - Creating Happiness, Mega Trends & Innovation . In Conversation with Deepak Verma on WannaGo Cloud Services & its Future

Mobile Innovation Wearable Tech 3D Printing Artificial Intelligence Internet Of Things Cloud Technology Smart City Big Data & Analytics Digital Ecosystem

Issue: 28 November 2016

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GLOBAL INNOVATION SUMMIT 2016 14

CREATING HAPPINESS, MEGATRENDS & INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES

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DEEPAK VERMA, CEO & FOUNDER, THINK SS TALKS ON WANNAGO CLOUD SERVICES & ITS FUTURE

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SME WORLD SUMMIT 2017

Give your Business an Unfair Advantage

22 March 2017 - Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Dubai

A grand celebration of entrepreneurship

After the grand success of 2014, 2015 & 2016 editions, SME World Summit 2017 will be back with a big bang! The summit will be held in partnership with Dubai SME in Dubai, on 22nd March 2017. The summit celebrates the hopes and ambitions of each entrepreneur who strives in the challenging environment to win the race and accomplish his vision.

It cherishes every innovative mind that seeks to bring change, every leader who aims to rise, and every investor willing to take risks to create value.

KEYNOTES

A 5 STAR EXPERIENCE

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

POWERFUL AGENDA

HIGH VALUE ENGAGEMENT

WORKSHOPS

GLOBALLY ACCLAIMED SPEAKERS

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PRODUCTIVE ENVIRONMENT

Welcome to Innovation & Tech The leading voice in enterprise innovation

Publisher’s Note Dear Readers, The Global Innovation Summit 2016 had been a huge success with top-notch thought leaders, industry experts, business tycoons, leading innovators and disruptors, and aspiring SMEs, all gathered under a single roof, for an amazing and enlightening day of innovation and technology.

This edition covers three of the best sessions from the summit – two panel discussions and a keynote – all dwelling on making this planet a happier and better place to live. The two panel discussions included are Road Map to Building the Happiest City on the Planet and Megatrends that are Driving Today’s Innovation & Redefining Business Models. The keynote by Tim Jones talks about Six Key Challenges & Major Global Innovation Opportunities around the world.

The topic of innovation would remain incomplete without the mention of Cloud. That’s why we have an exclusive interview with Deepak Verma, CEO & Founder of Think SS on their latest venture of WannaGo Cloud Services and how it plans to change the outlook of businesses in the UAE and abroad.

Healthcare is a huge area that’s garnering a lot of interest and disruption with the introduction of the latest digital and technological advancements. The expert pieces included in this edition aim to portray the different aspects, importance, and relationship between healthcare and technology.

We cannot escape digital transformation. It is the driving force behind each and every government, corporate and individual decision. To not adhere to digital trends is the route to extinction. This edition of Innovation & Tech reinforces the pragmatism in acknowledging and collaborating with technology for a better and sustainable future.

Happy Reading.

Regards,

Shantanu A.P. Publisher, SPI Group

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contentS

Contents 22

WANNAGO CLOUD SERVICES – SCALING BUSINESSES ON THE CLOUD

34

MAINSTREAMING INNOVATION IN THE IDEAS ECONOMY

46 SHIP TECHNOLOGY - IOT

ON THE EDGE, IN THE CLOUD AND ON THE WAVE

SSL TRAFFIC INSPECTION: SELECTING RIGHT TOOLS TO BEAT NETWORK 40 BLIND SPOTS

30 BLOCKCHAIN DISRUPTING HEALTHCARE 4

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WHERE SHOULD 43 ORGANIZATIONS IN UAE USE DEVOPS?

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THE SAVIOR OF URGENT, NON-EMERGENCY HEALTHCARE IS VIDEO

Entertainment

GLOBAL INNOVATION SUMMIT 2016

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CREATING HAPPINESS, MEGATRENDS & INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES

SPI Group

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Publisher & CEO Shantanu A.P. Group Editor Auritri Chatterjee Assistant Editor Jinal Chheda Web Developer Raj Shekar Reddy Creative Designer Ratheesh Viswanath Distribution: Jerry P. Sam

Writers Charlie Barlow Dr. Steve Griffiths Haider Salloum Jean-Luc Scherer

28 CONVERGENCE OF

Kazi Monirul Kabir Mary Etienne

ENERGY & INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Prof. Dr. Volker Bertram Siddharth Wadehra

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48

A DOZEN OF THE BEST APPS CURATED & REVIEWED

CLOUD – CHANGING THE GAME OF BUSINESS THE DIGITAL FUTURE OF HEALTHCARE 38

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Disclaimer The publisher cannot accept responsibility for any unsolicited material lost or damaged in the post. All text and layout is the copyright of Imagine Publishing Ltd. and SPI Publishing, GMS Advertising UAE. Nothing in this magazine may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. All copyrights are recognised and used specifically for the purpose of criticism and review. Although the magazine has endeavoured to ensure all information is correct at time of print, prices and availability may change. This magazine is fully independent and not affiliated in any way with the companies mentioned herein

© SPI Publishing 2013

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THink Tank

Akshay Lamba CIO, Deloitte, Middle East Akshay is an industry leader in the technology arena and has been associated with innovative projects such as large IT outsourcing deal across multiple industries, extending enterprise data to mobile platforms and information security paradigms in a web 3.0 world. He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School, Boston and a revered speaker, invited to a number of international platforms, widely acknowledged as a next-gen technology expert.

His forte has been in the build-up of innovative business models, with a focus on creating sustainable competitive business advantage. He is well known for leveraging strategic partnerships for both— in-house services delivery and joint go-to-market constructs.

Anthony Sayers

Internet of Things, Business Developer & Strategist at Dell A leading technologist with over 25 years of industry experience, Anthony Sayers is the Strategist and Business Developer for the Internet of Things, Dell OEM Solutions EMEA, responsible for designing Dell’s business and technology strategy for the commercial OEM market. In his day to day work, Anthony meets with customers, partners and industry experts to research customer needs and drive the relevant market solutions. Anthony regularly represents Dell at industry forums as well as speaking and writing about the future of emerging technologies.

Chirodip Basu Roy Head of Marketing Operations at Noor Bank Chirodip Basu Roy is a thought leader in strategic marketing, brand management, segmentation, targeting and positioning. He is a result-oriented brand strategist & communications architect with 13 years of success across the marketing mix. With specializations in project management, resource utilization, revenue growth, and cost reduction, he has delivered successfully and consistently in complex, highly demanding and challenging work environments. He has been a regular speaker at various conferences, including Gulf Media Advertising Congress, Sales Optimization and Marketing Excellence, MICE Middle East Forum, The Product development Show and Beyond CRM 2.0.

Haider Salloum

Director, Small & Medium Business (SMB) Segment at Microsoft Gulf Haider’s professional experiences are best described by his work over the last couple of years at Microsoft Gulf . As the Director for the Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment, Haider is tasked with helping SMEs realize their full potential, through the adoption of innovative technology and cloud transformation.

Working with SMEs across five countries, which were once emerging markets has provided Haider with significant scope and opportunity to learn, share and explore emerging trends in innovation within the SMB community .Whilst working with national governments, entrepreneurs and corporates, Haider seeks to continuously contribute to efforts to help SMEs thrive in their competitive landscapes.

Jean-Luc Scherer Founder, Innoopolis Telecommunications veteran with more than 18 years experience in the Mobile Industry, Jean-Luc Scherer’s expertise crosses multiple domains going from Mobile Application Development, to Social Media, Big Data, M2M & Internet of Things. Passionate about the Networked Society, Jean-Luc is a regular Blogger, Social Media content curator and is also a regular speaker at IoT & Smart City industry events. As an entrepreneur, innovation coach & start-up mentor, Jean-Luc can help startups from the initial concept development phase all the way to successful market introduction.

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THink Tank

Kazi Monirul Kabir

CIO, Spider Digital Innovations Kazi Monirul is a powerful, passionate, entrepreneurial, innovative and objective-driven leader with global perspective and strong empathy for emerging market realities. He posseses extensive Marketing, Communication, Innovation, Strategic Design and Business Development experience across Internet, telecom and consumer goods industries. Monirul comes with a successful track record of excelling across global enterprise, multinational, social enterprise and start-up environments. He is a great believer in the transformative power of Strategic Innovation in driving the growth and development of emerging countries and has chosen the digital realm as his current playground.

Nadine Bitar

CEO, Placemaking.me Nadine Bitar is the CEO of Placemaking.me focusing on innovation in design for sustainability and Place sourcing – a social enterprise to design for liveability in the MENA region. She has led and participated in the design development of more than 30 large scale flagship projects including leisure and entertainment clusters, commercial complex, mixed use developments, golf and residential communities, hospitality projects and branded destinations in the Middle East and North Africa. She is active in Dubai community as the chairwoman of the Advisory Board– Interior design at the American University in Dubai, an Executive Council Member of Ellevate International and is an International Associate in the American Institute of Architects.

Roberto Ordonez

Managing Partner, AlunaCatalyst ME Roberto Ordonez, Managing Partner, Aluna Catalyst ME, is an influencer and change agent with over 20 years of industry experience in the energy sector (BP, Hess Corporation, and Occidental Petroleum). He has broad multidisciplinary expertise and has held senior management positions across the areas of Operations, Finance, Strategy, Planning, Business Development, Change Management, and Procurement.

He is a Board Member of the Kellogg GCC Alumni Association, and member of Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN). Roberto has a BS and an MS in Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M University and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Dr. Steve Griffiths Vice President for Research, Interim Associate Provost at Masdar Institute of Science & Technology

Dr. Griffiths holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. At Masdar Institute, Dr. Griffiths has the overall responsibility for research, including large-scale, collaborative research programs and centers, research development, sponsored programs, technology transfer, and research laboratories. He serves as an advisor to the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science and is a Zayed Future Energy Prize Selection Committee member. He is the Associate Editor and member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal Energy Strategy Reviews and author of various works in the energy policy and energy strategy fields.

Sulaiman Al Maazmi

Vice President, Information Communication Technology, Expo 2020 Dubai Sulaiman’s role at Expo 2020 Dubai is to align business requirements with various stakeholders, support departments in order to streamline their processes when dealing with technology solutions as well as sourcing IT solutions based on current and future needs of internal and external stakeholders. Sulaiman has considerable experience in managing critical information technology projects in the Arab Gulf region, with positions in the Dubai office of the UAE Prime Minister, Thuraya Satellite Telecommunication and the Dubai Municipality, where he began his career.

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iNnovation & COLLABORATION

TRANSAD’S SMART WI-FI INITIATIVE TO PUT ABU DHABI TAXIS ON THE GLOBAL MAP

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he Centre has officially announced its partnership with Telematics Networking & Communications LLC, in its rollout of Smart Wi-Fi across its entire fleet of taxis in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

Passengers riding the Centre’s fleet of taxis in Abu Dhabi will enjoy a free Smart Wi-Fi service while on board, the largest and most innovative of its kind in the world. The rollout of the service will begin in November this year and is expected to be completed across the Centre’s entire fleet by mid 2017.

At GITEX Technology Week, Jamal Al Nuaimi, General Manager of Etisalat, Abu Dhabi and Esam Al Mazroei, Vice Chairman of Telematics, signed a five-year partnership agreement today. As part of the agreement, Etisalat, whose world-class network will power the high speed and secure Smart Wi-Fi service, will deliver its network services and sophisticated M2M platform - M2M control centre for the largest connected car platform in the region to Telematics, which will be deployed across the entire Abu Dhabi taxi fleet.

Telematics, together with its partner BlueGreen, have worked closely with the Centre to design this bespoke Smart Wi-Fi service, which, in addition to providing a secure and robust Wi-Fi network to passengers, will also offer Abu Dhabi, and indeed the UAE, the biggest mobile media service within taxis. The Wi-Fi service can be used to deliver smart value-added services, such as customer communication, satisfaction surveys, government citizen polls, as well as allowing businesses and brands the ability to gainfully engage with their consumers without any friction.

Speaking of this key initiative, Mr Mohammad Al Qamzi, General Manager of The Centre for Regulation of Transport by Hire Cars

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said, “The Centre is constantly striving to enhance the passenger experience it delivers in its taxis. We are pleased to partner with Telematics and BlueGreen to bring this world-class Smart Wi-Fi service to our passengers, who can now avail of constant connectivity in our taxis for free, and also enjoy the bespoke value-added services it will deliver. We are confident this service will enhance passenger satisfaction and happiness, and thereby increase the use of our excellent public taxi service in Abu Dhabi.”

On the occasion of the launch of the Smart Wi-Fi service, Jamal Saeed Al Nuaimi, General Manager of Etisalat, Abu Dhabi said, “UAE has always led the way in the region and globally to launch and implement smart technologies and services that make an impact in the way of life for residents in the country. Etisalat is today spearheading UAE’s smart city and digital transformation journey. We are proud to be associated with this strategic project that is a global first. This is set to transform the digital experience of passengers in Abu Dhabi taxis, and I am sure will set the benchmark for Smart Taxi services across the UAE.” In line with its smart city solution portfolio, Telematics worked eagerly on this initiative to support “the visionary leadership of the UAE in its efforts to create innovative and world-class technological services that pave the way for building a knowledgedriven society,” said Esam Al Mazroei, Vice Chairman of Telematics.

“We are very proud to be the key partner in this project, especially as a local technology company that strives to innovate in local and global markets.”

As announced in late September, the rollout will begin with Airport taxis and the Mercedes Vito compact vans.

iNnovation & COLLABORATION

Ministry of Interior deploys Cisco Collaboration Solution across its UAE Operations

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isco and the UAE Ministry of Interior (MoI) announced the commencement of the third and final stage of deployment of the Cisco Prime Collaboration which will connect all of the Ministry’s employees across the seven Emirates. The substantial deployment forms part of the MoI’s efforts to contribute to the UAE Vision 2021 National Agenda aim for the UAE to be the safest place in the world by leveraging the power of technology and innovation.

At GITEX Technology Week 2016, the MoI and Cisco also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for strategic cooperation which focuses on technology and innovation to enable the Ministry to stay at the forefront of technological updates and to harness new trends. The MoU also covers the provision of training and continuous educational opportunities to MoI employees on Cisco’s latest technologies to support the advancement of productivity and career development.

When complete, the MoI collaboration deployment will enable different departments and sections within the Ministry and across its offices and facilities in the UAE to collaborate more efficiently, and with lower operating expenses. The project was initiated nearly two years ago to gradually migrate from the current legacy PBX IP phone system to a next generation platform.

“We are playing our part by contributing to the vision of making the UAE one of the safest and greatest countries in the world by 2021 and ensuring the UAE government is a leader when it comes to excellence and innovation. The UAE Ministry of Interior places great emphasis on using world class infrastructure and technology to provide efficient and transparent government services around the clock to exceed the expectation of citizens and residents and improve the quality of life in the country,” said Brigadier Engineer Hussain Ahmad Al Harithi, Director-General of Electronics and Telecommunications Services at the Ministry of Interior. “We

constantly strive to adopt the latest developments in smart technology and partnerships with technology leaders allow us to benefit from advanced solutions to make efficient use of the city’s resources and to deliver on our mission of achieving the highest standards in the areas of security, emergency preparedness and reliability of police services and road safety.”

The MoI has offices hosting thousands of users that make communications challenging, costly and complicated.

In order to mitigate these challenges, MoI evaluated several technology providers in the area of Collaboration, selecting Cisco following multi-vendor performance tests for its compelling and concise holistic approach to the Ministry’s current and future needs.

“Cisco is honored to be working closely with the UAE’s Ministry of Interior to deliver its connectivity and communication objectives on this significant project, making the MoI our largest collaboration reference in the UAE,” said Shukri Eid, Managing Director – East Region, Cisco Middle East. “With the implementation of Cisco Prime Collaboration, we are delivering a simplified, unified management of collaboration networks that helps MoI move away from a previous distributed model that was costly and difficult to manage to a centralized, simple to manage architecture. The adoption of such advanced technology delivers a significantly reduced total cost of ownership and ensures the Ministry is a forerunner in embracing technology and digital transformation.”

The Cisco solution will enable MoI employees to connect to their regular meetings with external government entities and individuals directly through video conferencing thus reducing delays, enhancing communications and making business decisions faster. The Cisco solution to MoI converges voice, video, and data collaboration around a shared IP-based infrastructure, which simplifies making calls, sending messages, or joining audio or video conferences.

Cisco Prime Collaboration will also give MoI the benefit of rapid provisioning of users and services, while giving Ministry the capability of real-time monitoring of the entire Cisco Unified Communications system, substantially increasing productivity and lowering operating expenses. The solution also provides key performance indicators enabling MoI to analyze trends for capacity planning, resource optimization, and quality of service to further improve the overall collaboration experience.

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iNnovation & COLLABORATION

Red Hat and Ericsson Announce Broad Alliance to Enable Pervasive Adoption of Open Source Solutions

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ed Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) share a common belief in the power of open source to transform the ICT (information and communications technology) market.

Today, they announce a broad alliance to deliver fully open source and production-ready cloud infrastructure, spanning OpenStack, software-defined networking (SDN) and softwaredefined infrastructure (SDI). Ericsson and Red Hat are working together to enable customers to embrace the opportunity presented by the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, and other nextgeneration communications solutions with modern and agile solutions.

Ericsson is a leading provider of hardware, software and services for the service provider industry and is an industry acknowledged leader in NFV. Red Hat leads the technology industry in offering solutions that are open, scalable, flexible and secure. It is a leader in OpenStack, which has become a go-to platform for telco and enterprise cloud deployments.

The companies have long worked together to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware to Ericsson customers. Today the companies are expanding the collaboration to focus on NFV infrastructure (NFVi), OpenStack, SDN, SDI and containers and help define the next generation of modern technology for the communications industry, including:

Upstream collaboration: The companies are taking an “upstream first” approach to collaboration across open source projects and communities including OPNFV, OpenStack, and OpenDaylight - to address customer concerns about lock-in resulting from proprietary forks, differentiating the partnership from other providers. Engineering teams from both companies will collaborate to address customer requirements in upstream open source projects, helping accelerate technology innovation for scalable cloud deployments.

Solution certification and new joint offerings: Red Hat and Ericsson are collaborating on hardware and software roadmaps, aimed at developing new joint offerings for NFV infrastructure, SDN and SDI. Through the collaboration, the companies plan to work together to certify Ericsson’s platform and portfolio of solutions including Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment, Ericsson Cloud SDN solution, and Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat

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OpenStack Platform, and backed by reference architectures and labs.

Infrastructure solutions: Ericsson is expanding its - NFV infrastructure solution to also include Red Hat OpenStack Platform to meet the needs of service providers across the globe who require a fully open and agile infrastructure. For their joint NFV infrastructure, SDN and SDI solutions, the companies plan to work together to offer easy-to-deploy solutions, including automated deployment and management.

Technical alignment to advance container innovation and adoption: Both Red Hat and Ericsson see container technologies as a major part of the platform evolution and will collaborate in upstream activities, in for example the CNCF and OCI communities.

Backed by industry leaders: Ericsson’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based workloads, will participate in Red Hat’s certification program for applications running on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The joint solutions will be backed by service-level agreements offered by Ericsson.

Professional services: Customers looking to evolve their businesses in NFV, IT and datacenter modernization can benefit from Red Hat's consulting and training expertise in open source and emerging technology enablement, and Ericsson's expertise in end-toend consulting, systems integration, managed services, and support services. The combined portfolio of technologies, services, training, and certifications from Red Hat and Ericsson helps enable our customers to transform their business in NFV, IT and Data Center Modernization. With this joint capability, customers gain access to a global team that can position customers for success in today’s dynamic ICT market.

Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat said, “Red Hat believes that the future of the communications industry will be defined by modern architectures and open source solutions spanning the hybrid cloud, containers, software-defined infrastructure and NFV. Ericsson shares that belief, and together we can bring the communications industry into the future with open, more secure and highly scalable solutions that enable customers to transform their businesses and deliver on the promise of IoT, 5G and more.”

“The future is open and software defined,” said Jason Hoffman, head of Product Area Cloud Infrastructure, Ericsson.

“Combining Red Hat, the world’s leading open source provider, with Ericsson, the world’s leader in NFV telecom transformation, creates customer speed and choice while enabling customers to confidently embrace open source. Our job is to enable our customers to grow faster in rapidly changing times. This alliance drives exactly this.”

iNnovation & COLLABORATION

9 Awards for DEWA at Ideas America 2016

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ubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) won nine awards at the Ideas America international competition, which took place recently in Georgia, USA. It reflects DEWA’s level of excellence across a number of different fields.

DEWA won two gold in the Best Communication Excellence category and Best Evaluator of the Year category. It won three silver for the Idea of the Year, the Best Program Administrator, and Best Executive Leadership. It also scooped up two bronze awards in the Team Idea of the Year category. DEWA also won the Advocate of the Year Award and the Kudos Award for Safety Idea of the Year- Honourable Mention Award.

“Our winning of nine awards at the Ideas America international competition is a result of outstanding creative and innovative ideas, in adherence with the directives of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, to integrate innovation as a daily government practice, for a well-established culture, making Dubai government among the most innovative in the world.

DEWA adopts innovation as a major government value and seeks to cooperate with the directives of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to improve our government performance in all fields and use innovation to develop government services to face challenges and further develop Dubai’s involvement in international affairs,” said HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of DEWA. Al Tayer said the awards demonstrate DEWA’s position as an international pioneer to shine a light on its employees and their

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outstanding efforts that have made the UAE proud on many international occasions. Al Tayer congratulated the winners, as well as everybody that played a part in achieving these awards.

“DEWA continues its journey of excellence and continuous achievements. Not a week passes by without us receiving a new award or success to add to our long list of accomplishments on a local, regional and global scale. One of our most prominent achievements this year was winning the most number of awards at the 9th Dubai Government Excellence Program. We continue to fulfill the vision of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum by not resting on our laurels. DEWA continues to achieve success through its ambitious initiatives, development projects, and ongoing efforts to be at the forefront by adopting the highest international standards, in line with our vision to be a sustainable, innovative, world-class utility,” added Al Tayer.

In 2015, DEWA had won four awards at Ideas America for its suggestions from its Power and Water Planning, Power Distribution, and Power Transmission divisions. It had won silver for the Best Idea of the Year in Enhanced Medium Voltage (MV) cable efficiency and rating special backfilling material. It had also won bronze for the Best Executive Leadership and an Honorable Mention for the 2015 Best Team Idea of the Year Award for the Optimization of Lines Testing Process Approval, and the Kudos Award for Modification of Fire Pumps Maintenance in DEWA substations.

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Breakdown

GIS 2016

ROAD MAP TO BUILDING THE HAPPIEST CITY ON THE PLANET The Global Innovation Summit 2016 held at the luxurious 5-star Atlantis, The Palm was witness to an amazing, immersive panel discussion themed Road Map to Building the Happiest City on the Planet.

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he topic Road Map to the Happiest City on the Planet was in line with His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s vision to make Dubai the happiest and smartest city on Earth. The panel discussion included eminent personalities and experts from the private and public sectors of Dubai, all joined by the notion of happiness and the desire to achieve it.

Conor Griffin, Principal, Economist Intelligence Unit Ghazi Atallah, CEO, NexGen Group Bilal Sabouni, CEO, American Business Council Dr. Dalya Al Muthanna, President & CEO, GE Gulf Anne Le Guennec, CEO, Majid Al Futtaim – Enova Sulaiman Al Maazmi, VP, ICT, Expo 2020 Dubai Dr. Ali Alazzawi, City Experience Advisor, Smart Dubai Office

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The UAE is currently ranked at number 28 in the Global Happiness Index and aims to reach the top by the end of this decade. It is one of the few states in the world that actively pursue a Happiness agenda and has a dedicated Minister of Happiness.

Coupled with His Highness’ vision, this discussion couldn’t have happened at a better time. More than the philosophical aspect, the panellists stressed on how each of them and their organization are utilizing technological advances and innovation to quantify the level of happiness – that of their employees, the customers and the residents of Dubai.

While introducing the topic, Conor commented on how the happiness of a country (and by country, we mean its people) is not dependent on the GDP of the nation.

He spoke against the cynicism of people when they hear about

GIS 2016

Conor Griffin

Ghazi Atallah

Bilal Sabouni

Dr. Dalya Al Muthanna

measuring happiness and gave a broad overview on quantifying the ‘well-being’ of a person based on the following three parameters: • Life evaluation – a person’s assessment of the quality of their life • Affect – the presence of emotions in a given moment in time, e.g. happiness, joy, contentment (positive) or anger, sadness, anxiety (negative) • Eudaimonia – the ‘meaningfulness’, ‘purpose’, and ‘sense of control’ an individual feels in their life Dr Ali agreed with him and elaborated on how Dubai is ‘pragmatic’ in its approach towards the topic and has a ‘model of needs’ – A (Affect) B (Basic needs) C (Cognitive/evaluative needs) D (Deeper needs) – to analyze and quantify the meter of happiness.

“In order to make sure that is delivered, we have taken a very systematic approach to the whole thing,” he continued. He spoke about how the agenda of making Dubai the ‘Happiest City on the Planet’ is split up into four portfolios – Discovery, Measure, Interventions/Change and Awareness. He also spoke about the ‘Happiness meter’ which has been created after considering the various aspects of Dubai, important among which are the industrial

Anne Le Guennec

Sulaiman Al Maazmi

Dr. Ali Alazzawi

sectors and cultural differences and which will lead to creating more effective policies. “We are looking at a cultural shift rather than a quick fix.”

In response to Conor’s query of the key components leading to a roadmap of happiness, Ghazi Atallah, the CEO of NexGen Group asserted that the major focus is not just happiness but the roadmap to a ‘sustainable’ happiness. “The way you could do that is by improving the quality of life or by contributing to elements that improve quality of life, that provide economic opportunities that in turn will impact happiness… The fundamental building blocks of this roadmap are technological innovation, policies, data, and experience.” He also stressed on the fact that happiness is a shared agenda where both the government and the private sector need to work together and share the responsibility to creating a happy sustainable environment.

With just four years left to Dubai hosting the World Expo 2020, the presence of Sulaiman Al Maazmi, VP of ICT, added a lot of credibility to the entire discussion. The theme of the Expo 2020 Connecting Minds, Creating the Future cannot be successful without happiness and technological innovation. He then proceeded to give us a scale of the Expo – “Our size of the Expo is almost 4.38 sq kms, which is the size of Disneyland in California; we’re expecting to have over 20 million visitors which

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GIS 2016

is the population of Australia; we’re looking forward to host more than 250 nations, companies and to accommodate around 300 visitors per day including our staff. If you combine that all and if you make that kind of number happy, that will have a huge impact.”

He mentioned how innovation without service or purpose doesn’t make any impact in the cycle of happiness. That’s why ICT has come up with services based on three pillars – enhancing visitor/ participant experience, providing solutions to problems and seizing opportunities through technological mediums. Their ultimate goal is to ‘meet expectations’ and bring a smile on everyone’s face at the end of the day.

Dr. Dalya Al Muthanna spoke about GE initiatives and how GE transformed its values to beliefs to remain relevant and at pace with changing times and technology, where beliefs are underlying principles and values would guide one’s actions. She also spoke about how GE wanted something better, faster and more responsive than their Opinion Poll and came up with the GE Culture Compass, which tries to gauge the work culture of an employee and their opinion about the work and achievements of GE. With GE going through a cultural transformation itself and aiming to become the world’s leading Digital Industrial company, the collected data acts as the backbone for any customer or employeerelated policies and actions.

This brought the attention to Bilal Sabouni, who spoke about tangible initiatives that they have undertaken to provide service and happiness to its employees and members. “We have, quite a while ago, recognized that an employee’s happiness is vital. So we took a step, decades ago in Dubai, before happiness was a trend that it is today, to begin introducing social programming within our business calendar.” He continued, “For everybody in the room, what you can do is think about your number one publicfacing service or product and find a way to increase your client’s satisfaction and happiness via providing that service/product.”

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Bilal also spoke about creating win-win situations for both ABC and its customers thus providing all-round happiness to everyone involved. He provided detailed information on the unique position that ABC had created, the Engagement Manager, who looks after the happiness, networking and ways to engage its members in the most productive way.

The final part of the panel discussion centred on environment and how Enova is strategic to promoting happiness through environmental policies and procedures. Anne Le Guennec, CEO of Enova spoke about how the company is based on the vision of two companies – Majid Al Futtaim’s value of Bringing Happiness, Creating Great Moments for Everyone, Everyday and Veolia’s Resourcing the World. “Our first innovation has been focused on bringing more performance in our operation. We need to understand what we do and how we do it; so we’ve worked with the latest innovation and technology towards having a proper digital world map bringing more clarity in the data (that) we’re giving to our clients, improving our operations, performing more, supporting our clients in becoming more efficient in utility consumption and bringing more transparency in addition to reduction of costs.” She also spoke about how Enova treats its real-time data and utilizes that to provide the best of services to the residents of Dubai. The people in turn have access to a social dashboard where they can put across their views which act as a feedback for Enova and its future policies and actions.

To sum up this amazing and involved panel discussion in Dr. Ali’s words, “One way of making people happy is to actually provide things for them, but another way is to inform them… In terms of innovation (which is what the conference is about), I can use the data to go and create yet more happiness somewhere else.” He couldn’t have said it better, “It’s all about data, but it’s all about for data for people.”

GIS 2016

MEGATRENDS THAT ARE DRIVING TODAY’S INNOVATION & REDEFINING BUSINESS MODELS Simply put, megatrends are large, transformative global forces that have the power to shape our future by having a far-reaching impact on businesses, economies and industries. The Global Innovation Summit 2016 tried to identify these megatrends and find what the future holds for us.

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isruption is fundamentally changing the way the world works. There has been an exponential growth in the fields of technology, globalization and demographics that is changing the way governments, companies and individuals conduct their day-to-day business. The Global Innovation Summit 2016 explored the megatrends that are forcing a complete changeover to the current business models and society, as a whole. As Rohan Roberts, the host of the evening mentioned, “We should be excited because exponential technologies spur exponential growth.”

The panel discussion Megatrends that Driving Today’s Innovation & Redefining Business Models looked at answering some of the most critical questions that are associated with this topic. What are these megatrends that everyone is talking about? What new business models will we see as a consequence of these new technologies? Will they be transformative or disruptive? The eminent panellists gathered to shed some light on this topic included top thought-leaders and influencers across sectors, who understand megatrends,

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Kazi Monirul Kabir

Nadine Samra

Akshay Lamba

their impact and are always a step ahead of others in the game.

Kazi Monirul Kabir, CIO, Spider Digital Innovations Nadine Samra, CTO, Zee Group Akshay Lamba, CIO, Deloitte Siddharth Wadhera, Innovations Lead, Aster DM Healthcare Dr. Steve Griffiths, VP for Research & Associate Provost, Masdar Institue of Science & Technology Kazi Monirul Kabir, the moderator of the event started off the panel discussion by stating how everyone wants to innovate but most of us cannot distinguish between actual innovation and incremental progress/development. His first question was directed towards Nadine Samra about the key trends affecting the outlook of the broadcasting/media industry. She explained how digitisation has not only affected the media industry but other industries as well. The reason the media industry gets noticed is because of it being a content-driven industry which gets deeply impacted by ‘consumer behaviour and expectations.’

She mentioned demographics, urbanization, consumer behaviour and expectations, and ecosystem challenges as the driving forces behind the digital transformation across all industries. The one common thing cutting across all these factors is the consumer who needs high quality information in an immediate manner. As Nadine succinctly puts it across, digital transformation is “no longer

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Siddharth Wadhera

Dr. Steve Griffiths

a privilege, it’s actually a must at this stage.”

She also spoke about the current technological trends such as cloud computing, IoT, mobility, and social media and a highlevel of mobile penetration among the consumers; an excellent example of this would be Saudi Arabia, where 71 percent of the video streaming takes place in a mobile phone. At the end of the day, the audience wants great content and irrespective of which media sector one belongs to, they have to fulfil the audience’s expectations and more.

Being a technology-driven company is a necessity; however, it is equally important to maintain the business aspect of the organization and create a fruitful balance between the two.

Akshay Lamba, CIO of Deloitte provided his insights on the topic and brought forth three major leadership skills that help in creating that balance – Vision, Priorities and Alignment. As a leader it is important to have absolute clarity about one’s vision and whether they’re ready for the outcomes or not. The next step would be identifying the priorities (actions/steps) to get to that vision; and finally, the third step i.e. alignment looks at whether the organization or the contracts or the environment is at par with those priorities and visions. Akshay then says, “In this construct of vision, priorities and alignment, this whole piece of business construct and technological construct is really the alignment piece.”

Once the vision is crystal clear and “you know what to address in your priority list”, that “enables you to create a balance between

GIS 2016

the business and the technology construct.”

He also spoke against the misconception that traditional organizations are not innovators and gave an example of how a traditional telecom company he had worked for in the 2000’s outsourced its entire IT operations, which was at that point of time, a shock for everybody. According to Akshay, “Whether it’s a traditional firm or a new firm, innovation has no flavour.”

One of the major sectors that have and is experiencing innovation in a big way is the energy sector. These are exciting times not only for the energy industry but also its affiliated industries such as clean energy, smart buildings, and more. Dr. Steve Griffiths from Masdar Institute provided valuable insights regarding the key trends in the energy and power sector. The first would be an increased awareness and usage of more sustainable energy sources such as the solar and wind energy. The second disruptive trend talks about the prior consumer becoming a producer of energy as well. The third trend of energy efficiency brings the energy sector closer to the digital form of economy.

Steve mentioned about how “the efficiency on the demand side is particularly important, because we know that we cannot continue to supply more and more energy to the growing population,” especially with a growing inclination towards urbanization.

The fourth trend is an ‘advancement in R&D’ which is a parallel occurrence to all the other megatrends happening across the sectors. Through this R&D where the physical world meets the informational world and that converges with the energy world, it gives rise to several data and analytics through which we can understand what’s happening in the world and through that data we can shape the future of the world.

“The interesting areas for me would be distributed energy, creating smart buildings and Smart City, and transportation (particularly autonomy), ” said Stephen.

One of the major megatrends that have taken the world by storm is 3D printing. And with Aster DM Healthcare winning the Disruptor Innovator Awards for Best Innovation in Healthcare for their Aster 3D bionic hand, Siddharth Wadhera, the Innovations Lead of Aster DM Healthcare was the right person to speak about it. He started off with a simple explanation of 3D printing in layman’s terms and gradually espoused on how 3D printing and healthcare are becoming integral to each other. He validated his argument with an example of prosthetics, a critical and instudy healthcare subject. Siddharth said, “Prosthetics today, have become extremely cheap; extremely mass-customisable to the exact size of the particular patient; digitally you can transform the sizes according to the person and you can have a 3D printed image.” So, basically prosthetics which used to run into tens of thousands of dollars are now available for only around AED 400, which is a ‘phenomenal’ achievement.

Siddharth also spoke about Aster’s remote chronic care management initiative called the Aster Chronic Care @ Home based on the platform of ‘digitalisation of health services’ that addresses the major pain-points of the customer without them having to trudge all the way to an Aster clinic. E-commerce, another trend in the healthcare sector, quite popular in the US and India, though unexplored in the UAE, was also talked about. He emphasised about how innovation has always been present in the pharmaceutical sector; it is only now that the service sector has started exploring innovation seriously.

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SIX KEY CHALLENGES AND MAJOR GLOBAL INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES The introductory keynote Six Key Challenges and Major Global Innovation Opportunities by Tim Jones, Founder of Future, Growth Agenda & Innovation Leaders, was germane to this year’s Global Innovation Summit 2016.

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im segmented his entire speech into three broad categories – a big picture with major challenges apparent at a global level, a sample perspective from previously attended disruptive sessions and discussions and a detailed profile of six

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major innovation opportunities that could shape the future. So, what are the key challenging factors/questions that strive the need to innovate?

Future People:

Future Place:

With an increase in population, increasing old age, rise in inequality and people moving, it begs the question “How are we actually going to deal with the challenges of accommodating those people in the most appropriate way and in the most appropriate places?”

An increasing shift towards urbanization raises some very valid points as to how those cities will be designed and how they will be responding to the increasing migration of people.

Future Power:

Future Belief:

The shift in economic power that is moving away from the West might lead to interesting ramifications in the future and require innovation.

In an increasingly multicultural world and people with increasingly different values and beliefs, who or what will set the values and norms of how we choose to live and why.

Future Behavior:

Future Business:

As time passes, we’ll witness the emergence of some core issues and various constraints (resources, food, wealth etc.) on our way of living. How will that impact people’s behavior and which type of attitudes would lead us for a better life?

With technology taking leaps and bounds, sustainability being a key issue, and an increasing business scope and ideas, will the primary parameter for judging a business still be financial or will there be additional/different benchmarks for success?

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Once we start finding the answers to such questions, we’d encounter new perspectives and people would challenge each other’s views. According to Tim, “Around those various topics, we may be able to see certain things emerging, which might tell us about the changes taking place.” It is important that we take those perspectives and apply them to a whole range of talking points, so that we understand the connections and inter-relations among those seemingly different areas and come up with new opportunities.

So, what are some of the insights achieved from multiple expert discussions, talks and analysis over the last year?

A Shift in Demographics

The rapid, uneven change in demographics with local and international areas situated at varied stages in the ‘population age’ scale raises questions as to whether and how migration can be one of the balancing tools. It is a politically conscientious issue but equally a pragmatic one and with an imbalance in the distribution of people and resources, migration will occur – sooner or later.

A Shift in Power & Influence

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the current world about the central position of economic and political power. The shift of power is gradually heading eastwards and the current superpowers are trying their best to moderate the pace of the change.

Affordable Healthcare

The importance of healthcare is paramount. The investments being made in this sector is huge; and no one can deny the immense advancements that this field has seen. But the expenses incurred by the common people are always on a high and there’s always the underlying concern that healthcare might be unaffordable. How do you respond to that challenge?

Automation

People are interested in driverless cars and the topic of automation is always of peak interest. But we have only heard about it, there’s no one on the playing field. An obvious challenge of a driverless car would be its chemistry with humans on the road and basics like execution of roundabouts. Tim says, “But the place where people think that autonomy will happen first is very much in the trucks and logistics area, and then it will flow through into passenger based.”

Air Quality

With the level of air pollution not decreasing any time sooner, children are gradually becoming prone to asthma, air pollution and other diseases. It’s becoming a very big challenge for people to raise their kids in a pure, thriving environment and not knowing if it will ever happen.

Data value

one knows how much data is actually good or bad.

The next obvious question is which are our innovation opportunities and how do we innovate enough to at least create a solution pathway to these challenges?

Food Wastage: 30-50% of our food is wasted either in the supply chain or in consumption and could feed another 3 billion. Optimizing distribution and storage in developing countries and enabling better consumer information in others could solve this.

Basic Sanitization: Poor sanitation continues to impact public health and restrict social progress, particularly for women.

Governments and donor organizations prioritize measurement, education and innovation in a bid to drive change.

Education Revolution: Broader access to improved education acts as a major catalyst for empowerment, sustained economic growth, overcoming inequality and reducing conflict. We need an education system fit for the digital revolution.

A Data Marketplace: Data is a currency, it has a value and a price, and therefore requires a market place. An ecosystem for trading data is emerging and anything that is information is represented in a new data marketplace.

Energy Storage: Storage, and particularly electricity storage, is the missing piece in the renewable jigsaw. If solved, it can enable truly distributed solar energy as well as accelerate the electrification of the transport industry.

Deeper Collaboration Partnerships shift to become more dynamic, long-term, democratized, multi-party collaborations. Competitor alliances and wider public participation drive regulators to create new legal frameworks for open, empathetic collaboration.

What is the role of data? Is it an enabler or an entire information deck? The usage of data and its role is at an uncertain level and no

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Cloud computing

WANNAGO CLOUD SERVICES – SCALING BUSINESSES ON THE CLOUD The first-mover advantage has surely worked for the WannaGo Cloud Services. Deepak Verma, CEO & Founder, Think SS, gives an exclusive preview of the origin of WannaGo Cloud Services, the current offerings, the reason behind its exponential growth and its future plans.

• How did you come up with the idea of launching WannaGo Cloud Services? What was the inspiration behind it?

I’ve been in the Middle East for 20 years and I’ve seen its transition from an absolute box-push market, where people were just buying products because there was no technology available to a time when people required services because of increasingly complex products and technology. During this time cloud was gradually being introduced at the back end for consolidation purposes that raised the question, “Where do people go from here?” That was the point of genesis for me. I understood the transition and picked up the trend early – the need for a customer to simplify his business and move from a CAPEX environment to OPEX. Soon, we started talking to people about it and came up with the WannaGo Cloud Services.

• So, let’s start with a very basic question. Why should businesses use cloud?

Simple – to achieve consolidation across the board. If you’re a business owner, you want to focus on your business and not juggle with technology, which currently encompasses hardware, software, social media, digital and more. In case you try to learn and work with all these aspects, by the time you’re done, there’s something new in the market that would demand your attention.

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So, where do you focus? This is where you need cloud and a professional who understands the pain points of your business, the business expansion plans and can help with the expansion of technology in line with the business. If the aspiration of an SME is to become large and an industrial influence, then they cannot focus on all the aspects of technology. If the aim is to scale up the business, then cloud scales up too and helps you provision a lot of technology on the fly. In the modern technological environment, we can provision a server in just six minutes on the cloud. So, imagine the level of scalability for an SME and without any hassles.

Imagine if Careem had waited to buy all the servers and technology for their business; they probably would have been defunct by now.

• How does a business get cloud-ready? What should they keep in mind before making the transition to cloud?

I wouldn’t agree with the word ‘cloud-ready’. It’s really a mindset. Again, the example of Uber comes to my mind, because if Uber had thought that they’d like to be cloud-ready before launching their business, then they’d never come out with what they have.

The important issue here is to identify your business model, analyse it to see if it solves your problem and think about scaling up the business. Especially, if you’re an entrepreneur, the focus should be your business, your idea, and leave the technology with

the experts. We have the cloud. You just need to connect with it.

• What are the different services provided by WannaGo Cloud Services?

Can you explain in detail as to which kind of service would benefit what kind of customers?

We’re currently focussing on the SME mid-market customers because, thanks to Microsoft and Google, who gave us Office 365 and Gmail respectively, they have a fair idea about how cloud works and have been quick in embracing the concept. The SME mid-market wants to focus on their business – firstly, because they have time constraints and they want to make quick moves; and secondly, they do not have enough hands-on-deck to support their business.

We’ve started with a couple of services, which we feel are essential to any business – Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). Now, why did we choose these services? The intent is fairly simple. If you look at a large enterprise, they are heavily invested in backup plans, audit policies, DR plans, etc.; but for an SME with no such bandwidth and finance, they rely only on what they have – data. And if they lose that data by any means, the business typically would shut down. In such a scenario, when we offer BaaS at a very reasonable price, the SMEs automatically embrace it.

I’ll give you a number to highlight how quickly these services have been accepted. We started WannaGo Cloud Services on the 17th of September, and within the first week we’ve had four customers with us. By the end of the first month, there were 30 customers. Very soon we’d roll this out as a Channel Strategy in 15 countries.

The only difference between BaaS and DRaaS is of disaster recovery. We understand you’ve backed up your data in the cloud and can access them whenever required. But what about DR? For DR, we mirror your entire servers on the cloud, not just data.

So, in case your servers get destroyed in a fire or flood, you can seamlessly switch on to the DR cloud services with an average lag time of just 15 minutes.

Now another aspect is people also want to feel the presence and impact of cloud. So, now we’ve created a box which sits inside the customer premise along with one in production and the third on the cloud. So, the customer has the backup and absolute peace of mind.

We follow the Pay As You Go model which ensures that the customers get Enterprise class infrastructure and services at a very nominal and flexible rate. So, they just need to pay for what they use – it might be per month, per quarter or per GB. • The threat of ransomware is verging on the dangerous now with $209 million being paid to ransomware criminals in the first quarter of 2016. How does WannaGo Cloud Services plan on eliminating that threat and provide the customers with a sense of dependability?

We’re looking at keeping ransomware at bay. The most common way for a ransomware attack is through emails.

They are deceptive in nature and locks down your entire system when you click open that email. Once that happens, you need to just let us know and we’ll transfer all your data that we have backed up on the cloud, to a hard drive and give it to you. Now that you know which emails not to click, you can set up your system and start working immediately.

The cloud might also come under attack. But it will not affect your server because your ‘data is at rest’ there.

Data at rest, which essentially means data sitting inside a storage device inside the data centre, does not get hit by

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Cloud computing

ransomware. Also, remember that the attacks always happen to individual desktops, not the servers. Because the IP address that’s visible to the outside world are of your desktops and your laptops.

In addition to that, we have the most advanced security solutions and technologies guarding cloud to mitigate any time of attack that might occur. It’s important to mitigate rather than eliminate, because clearly, no one can eliminate all risks at all times.

• With multiple reports and opinion pieces floating around the internet about how cloud is not actually secured, what would you say to your customers to allay their fears?

The customers need to look at it from a different perspective.

When the Internet arrived in 2000, there were questions surrounding the Internet – What is Internet? Will we be able to use it? How secured is it? etc. Today, we cannot live without it, and is in fact moving to a point of consuming the Internet. Cloud is facing a similar type of situation here.

Large organizations, like Amazon and Microsoft have placed their bets on cloud and created a profitable business out of it.

Companies who were largely software sellers or product companies created their data centre for self-consumption.

Eventually, when they were rolled out into the market, the customers took it up immediately and now they are profitable businesses. Microsoft started off selling software licenses and now they have moved on to Azure, their cloud computing platform and services, and today it is a very thriving business. So, if the companies at the top have taken their bets, then the other companies who follow the trend have no other choice but to embrace cloud; else they might just lose the opportunity to scale and some other organization will cut in, scale their businesses through cloud, and rake up the moolah. In today’s world, where margins are shrinking, and complexities are becoming larger, if you are unwilling to embrace technology, you’re basically refusing to scale and your product will die.

• There are several misconceptions in the entrepreneurial world such as, only big businesses need to worry about data breaches and IT service is actually a luxury item. How would you reason with such fallacies?

Breaches happen, irrespective of the size of the industry. Now let’s think from an SME perspective. An SME doesn’t have enough money or the required skill to manage their infrastructure and secure it to the maximum. Which essentially means that if you move into the cloud, which is managed more efficiently at an Enterprise class level, the cloud is more secured. Anyone can easily breach their infrastructure because they do not know how to protect it. The most one can have is a firewall and an anti-virus, but what about the more advanced threats? Who will protect you from that? So, from a mind-set perspective, such businesses have to let these thoughts go, focus on the business and think on how it can

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grow and scale, and leave the technologies (which are gradually becoming more complex) to a professional.

• SMEs use various hosting services and web applications to manage their entire IT infrastructure, like managing social media, building and updating websites, setting up and managing emails, creating and updating employee engagement surveys, and more. How does cloud integrate all these information at a single point for the customers?

The cloud is currently at a stage of adoption, not consolidation.

For example, you might move from your current CRM to an advanced one because it doesn’t do your job anymore. We’re viewing cloud from that perspective. Currently, the cloud has two or three applications for customer to choose from; it doesn’t have 20 applications as an offering.

However, we’re in the process of developing an idea called Cloud Marketplace, where WannaGo Cloud Services will have a marketplace of its own in the next 24-36 months. To explain it further; consider that I’m offering a suite of 20-30 essential services to a number of SMEs and I’m offering applications which work with these services, as a complementary offer. So you’re dealing with a service provider who can give you multiple services. So if the SME is on an ERP and I cater to that ERP, then the customer can look at me as a service provider and come under my cloud service directly. This is the marketplace, the consolidation that I’m referring to, but it will happen over a period of time. Not now. Now the journey has just begun.

• What is the future of cloud in the Middle East and what role does WannaGo Cloud Services play in that future? Do you have any plans of expansion – in terms of location or service offerings?

As I see it, there will be an increased demand of Pay As You Go, the aspiration to scale, and business elasticity. So, basically everything that we’re working on currently. We are going to launch it as Channel Strategy in 15 countries – the GCC (six countries) and Africa. Our first road show is happening in Oman on the 22nd of Nov 2016.

We are also looking at Anti-virus as a service and Firewall as a service. Generally, once the Anti-virus software sits down as an agent in your desktop, it needs constant upgrades and you might not have the skills in the organization. Sometimes, it’s out of date and the company hasn’t bought the new version; and an attack happens on your network. Your system gets locked down and you don’t have the right tools to manage the situation. That’s the area we’re looking at and want to manage it pro-actively. The firewall is a similar concept where it sits on the perimeter of your network and defends any kind of threats to your system. In fact, firewall provides a lot of services which aren’t enabled currently because people do not have the required skills. We are looking to manage these services on the customer’s behalf.

Corporate Banking Partner

Sole Automotive Partner

JUBILEE ER

THE SI LV

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Celebrating the 25th mega edition Don’t miss this unique opportunity to interact two of the biggest business icons with tw

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February 1, 2017 - Grand Hyatt Hotel, Dubai Welcome to the 25th mega edition of Global Business Series.

Be a part of our epic silver jubilee celebrations.

An once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to partake in an up-close and personal interactive session with UAE’s two biggest business magnates.

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DIGITAl HEALTHCARE

THE SAVIOR OF URGENT, NON-EMERGENCY HEALTHCARE IS VIDEO

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DIGITAl HEALTHCARE

Telemedicine, healthcare’s new frontier can speed up diagnosis and therapeutic care delivery and enables healthcare providers to receive continuous assistance from specialized centers.

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elemedicine is fast becoming the hottest trend in the global healthcare sector, with more than $1.7bn of capital raised by US companies in the last 12 months alone.

A sub-sector of telemedicine is the ability to treat nonemergency conditions through video, with principle benefits including improved access and convenience for patients, freeing-up of Emergency Room resources in hospitals, greater reach for private sector healthcare companies and significantly reduced claims and cost efficiencies for insurers. Faster internet connections and improved software now facilitates a far smoother video consultation than in the past. With the proliferation of smartphones across developed and emerging markets, patients can now conduct video consultations from nearly anywhere in the world.

When it comes to embracing such technologies, the healthcare sector in the GCC has significant catching up to do versus some of its international counterparts.

A 2015 Deloitte study calculated there would be more than 100 million virtual doctor visits in North America by the end of 2016, with the potential existing for as many as 300 million visits a year by 2018. In the GCC there has been no officially recorded activity in this space.

Total healthcare spend in the GCC is predicted to reach US$60bn by 2025, up from US$12 billion (Source: McKinsey&Co’s 2015 ‘GCC Healthcare Report’). With annual outpatient visits in the UAE alone fast approaching 10 million per annum, the GCC health authorities would be well advised to look at US research claiming that more than 74% of doctor visits can successfully be treated by video rather than face-to-face (Source: PWC; ‘Healthcare Delivery of the Future’ 2015). No other region in the world faces such pressure on its healthcare resources, with residents unsatisfied with the availability and quality of hospitals, governments ill prepared for an aging population, and dangerous Type 2 diabetes and obesity figures.

Over the next 20 years, treatment demand will rise in the GCC by 240% (McKinsey&Co). By 2025, demand for hospital beds will more than double, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE registering the largest increase.

While basic telemedicine is available in the UAE,

there is nothing that incorporates video consultation or sophisticated app-based D2C healthcare. The mass adoption of video consultations for minor, non-emergency medical issues has had huge government benefits in the US, not least the reductions in healthcare cost, and an increase in the accessibility of healthcare, but also the increase in corporate efficiency by reducing the number of sick days taken. There is a misconception amongst some regional health authorities that patients cannot be effectively treated through video if they have not previously been seen face-to-face by the same doctor - but patients walking into an Emergency Room are not required to have had a prior appointment with the doctor. Such an approach goes against everything telemedicine stands for, and will not drive the efficiencies that telemedicine is specifically designed to create. Likewise, quality does not have to be compromised if the service is performed professionally.

There is no doubt that further education is required to encourage such a consumer/patient behavior change, but it must be remembered that video consultations are only applicable for a relatively small number of minor complaints (e.g. UTI, rashes, coughs, flu).

Technology has the ability to solve many of the issues facing the GCC healthcare sector and it is time for local health authorities to embrace this game-changing approach. The savior of urgent, non-emergency healthcare, really is video.

Charlie Barlow is an investor in early stage technology businesses through his venture capital business, Rockfirst Capital, and is also founder and CEO of Health at Hand (myhealthathand.com)

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SMart city

CONVERGENCE OF ENERGY AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS The convergence of energy disciplines, environmental factors, and economic challenges is demanding a new focus on energy goals, the answer to which is an increased interaction and interdependency between the energy system and the information system.

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he global energy system is rapidly changing. As energy supply is being diversified and distributed, localized energy production is becoming increasingly prominent. However, the energy system is not changing in isolation. Rather, energy sector evolution is being substantially influenced by advances in connected and intelligent systems capable of shaping the way energy is produced, distributed and consumed.

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Advancements in sensing technologies, communication networks and computational power are in fact creating a bridge between the world of physical objects and the world of information to drive innovation in the energy sector. This is remarkable given that the energy sector has historically been one of the least innovative sectors due to an emphasis on leveraging proven technologies to provide energy reliably and at

SMart city

least cost. Now, however, the convergence of energy systems with connected, intelligent information systems has opened opportunities for new energy sector business models and value propositions. On the supply side, distributed and connected energy systems will increasingly drive renewable energy and energy storage adoption for energy self-generation and consumption as well as participation in virtualized energy production and supply networks. On the demand side, intelligent buildings and intelligent transportation systems are reshaping energy supply and demand while simultaneously providing increased levels of comfort, safety, productivity and health.

Intelligent buildings capable of sensing, analyzing and optimizing temperature, air quality, sound and ambient lighting can improve occupant health and productivity while reducing energy consumption. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) utilize sensors and analytics to optimize transportation routes, minimize the friction between modes of transportation and support increasing levels of vehicle autonomy.

These ITS impacts collectively improve transportation safety and productivity while providing the opportunity for reduced energy consumption in the transportation sector.

Autonomous vehicles are particularly interesting because of their alignment with vehicle electrification, which is a central topic for energy system innovation. As specific examples of reinforcing alignment, autonomy can provide electric vehicles with greater range while electrification will allow autonomous vehicles to recharge wirelessly using technology that relies on charging pads mounted on both the ground and the car.

Wireless charging is already available for consumer electronics and is now emerging as a viable technology for vehicles. As a further link between energy and ITS, vehicles that are both autonomous and electric can directly benefit distributed renewables by playing a key role in intelligent energy storage. Intelligent energy storage, which in the case of electric vehicles is battery electricity storage, allows renewable energy, for instance, rooftop solar photovoltaics, to power buildings and charge electric vehicle batteries with the available sunlight. When renewable energy is not available and electric vehicles are parked, vehicle batteries can supply power.

Dubai is a city extremely well-positioned to achieve the described unification of energy and intelligent systems. Dubai’s ambition to become one of the world’s most connected and sustainable cities is exemplified by the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, which aims to achieve 25% of energy production from solar energy by 2030 and additionally calls for mandatory rooftop solar panels on city buildings in the same timeframe.

Dubai’s energy strategy is complimented by a recently

announced Autonomous Transportation Strategy that targets 25% of all personal trips in Dubai to be via autonomous vehicles by 2030 with particular emphasis on autonomous metro, autonomous buses, autonomous taxis and other autonomous transportation modes used in the first and final stages of trips.

Hence, distributed clean energy and intelligent transportation are becoming inevitable for the UAE and Dubai is serving as a catalyst. However, additional innovation for enabling technologies is required to realize this holistic smart city vision. In Gartner’s latest report on emerging technology trends, smart machine technologies connected by enabling platforms are projected to lead technological disruption in the next decade. The same report nevertheless suggests that the “plateau of productivity” for key technologies, such as Internet-ofThings (IoT) platforms and Smart Data Discovery, is 5-10 years away and for transformational technologies, such as fully autonomous vehicles and general purpose machine intelligence, the plateau is projected to be more than 10 years away. Hence, application-inspired research and development (R&D) remains essential to bringing these disruptive technologies to the market.

At the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, application-inspired R&D is our core philosophy and our research focus areas (which include energy, microelectronics and smart systems) are at the leading-edge of energy and information technology R&D. However, the research projects we undertake are aimed not just at furthering scientific understanding, but also gaining insights that can transform early-stage technologies into commercially viable innovations.

For this reason, we now have R&D partnerships with more than 50 leading local and international organizations, many of which are focused on energy and intelligent systems. Such R&D efforts are targeted toward helping Dubai and the broader UAE achieve global leadership in the multitude of innovation pursuits the country is now undertaking.

Dr. Steve Griffiths Vice President for Research, Interim Associate Provost, Masdar Institute of Science & Technology At Masdar, he's responsible for research, including large-scale, collaborative research programs & centers, research development, sponsored programs, technology transfer, and research laboratories.

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DIGITAl HEALTHCARE

BLOCKCHAIN - DISRUPTING HEALTHCARE

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DIGITAl HEALTHCARE

Blockchain opportunities and advancements are changing the global face of healthcare – innovative leaders are quick to identify the change.

Healthcare Digital Transformation Every industry is nowadays going through a digital transformation journey and technologies like cloud, IoT and mobility are speeding up that process. Healthcare is no exception to that. As everything gets connected digital transformation will disrupt current value chains and enable new eco-systems, but a big challenge for this vision to materialize is trust and security. Add privacy concerns to that and you might end up in a situation where opportunities in the healthcare industry are not realized because we have concerns from both, the patients as well as the service providers. This is where blockchain comes in handy, and its impact on healthcare could be particularly significant.

What is blockchain and why does it matter?

So what is blockchain? In its simplest definition, blockchain is a distributed public ledger; a database of transactions with a set of rules as to how the ledger gets appended, achieved by distributed consensus of participants in the system. You keep track of transactions in a distributed way, where all participants have a copy of the ledger and can potentially validate any future transactions.

An important element of the Blockchain implementation will be signatures to validate the integrity of the data.

Historically, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been one of the fundamental technologies to power such data signatures, but it does not scale. The dependency on a central authority to stamp and validate signatures creates serious limitations for large-scale scenarios and is also vulnerable to attacks involving quantum computation. This is where Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) comes to the rescue. It is designed to provide scalable digital signature-based authentication for electronic data, machines and humans. Unlike traditional approaches that depend on asymmetric key cryptography, KSI uses only hash-function cryptography, allowing verification to rely only on the security of hash-functions and the availability of a public ledger commonly referred to as a blockchain. So with KSI blockchain we can have a strong infrastructure that can secure the integrity, the validity of data and transactions. Let’s see how we can apply that to healthcare.

Securing Integrity of Electronic Health Records (EHR) As standards for Electronic Health Records have matured, they have specified what can be shared and how, but they haven't really solved the issue of securing the transactions and how to make that process open and transparent. And more and more data is produced every day.

With the evolution of technology, there will be more and more connected devices that will collect data about us, our health and wellness. A research report from Enterprise Service Group from 2012 had estimated that by now the average hospital would generate about 665TB of data. 80% of this information would be unstructured data in the form of videos, images and emails.

The amount of data is huge and largely untapped. To put things in perspective a single CT scan represents about 1GB of data, while an X-ray takes about 30MB. All this data will be available in digital format, and lead to massive amount of data, which if mined properly will dramatically improve healthcare. But mining the data also means sharing that data, aggregating data sources and providing access to stakeholders anywhere and anytime. Doctors around the world could for instance benefit from instantly accessing patients records, comparing them with records from other patients.

A key question then is where do you store this data and how do you share it in a secure and reliable way. Now, part of this answer is given by hyperscale cloud technologies which will allow you to provide storage at unbeatable costs, but then, can you trust that data?

What if it is compromised? What if your healthcare data leaks outside the circle of trusted physicians? What if that data is altered? These are some of the reasons why healthcare providers tend to keep the data on their own data centers and within their own closed eco-system.

Blockchain and KSI will secure that data cannot be tampered.

You will have a full chain of records of who created the data, who accessed it and who modified it. Each data piece in the cloud data center will be signed and transactions on that data can be audited. As mentioned earlier, blockchain and KSI will be used to provide a hashed signature of an EHR when it is in a known good state. By monitoring the time-stamped hashes, the system can then verify that the EHRs have not been altered. Any change means something about the EHR itself has changed, and that might represent an attack that can be checked by security staff.

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So combine KSI, Blockchain, EHR policies and even Open Data, and you have a solid and distributed infrastructure where data can be shared and its integrity secured. With Open Data you can even expose the data to third parties if there is consent and you can create new transactions that could be linked to that blockchain.

Enabling Health Information Exchange and Settlements The benefits from blockchain are that you can now reliably share information between service providers, decide who gets access to what data, have a trace of all transactions and make sure nobody has tampered the data. You can now easily link Doctors, Hospitals, Pharmacies, Insurance companies, and anybody who is related to the healthcare eco-system.

Doctors will have seamless access to your health records as well as your insurance policy. When the doctor writes a prescription the pharmacy will not only have access to the prescription and your insurance information, but also information about allergies or other conditions that might interfere with the prescribed medicine. This will reduce the risk of bad treatment and fraud, and also speed up the claims process. Since all information is available and all transactions are linked, that whole process can be automated and settlements could be done automatically without even having to ask for a claim.

Securing IoT Device Configurations and Software

We have been talking so far about the validity and integrity of data in the context of EHRs. Our concern about integrity needs to go beyond that. It is not only about EHR data but also about machines and operating systems, software and configurations.

Of course you will have plenty of security measures in place to create security perimeters and policies, encrypting connectivity, but you will never be able to prevent against everything.

For instance, all the medical devices and connected objects that will provide healthcare data. How do you protect these? And how do you know these devices have not been tampered with? What if the device measuring your heart rate is compromised? What if somebody had replaced the software on your connected insulin dispatcher? The consequences could be lethal and you might not even be aware that a crime has been committed.

What matters for IoT devices is protecting what’s inside it – ensuring that the software operating inside the device and its configuration have not been compromised. If the device is compromised then securing the communication from it won’t matter.

In a recent report by AT&T, "Exploring IoT Cybersecurity", the company logged that they have seen an increase by 458% of IoT vulnerability scans over the last two years. The threat is real and it is only going to increase.

Here with blockchain and KSI, we have a way to deal with the real problem and that is not to protect against all attacks, but to make sure that you are fully aware of the integrity of a system and its connected IoT devices.

With KSI Blockchain you can link the software producer with

DIGITAl HEALTHCARE

the device producer, the service staff, the device and the service provider. You can link all transactions made on the device, you can sign the software, the configurations and the transactions.

This means that breaches can be detected almost instantly as long as you monitor signature changes. You can also use these mechanisms to certify devices and to void warranties if an unauthorized person reconfigures a device. The auditability and traceability will greatly reduce insider threats.

The Future of Blockchain and Healthcare I believe the convergence of technologies will further increase the number and variety of use cases that will benefit from blockchain. Looking at the healthcare system, our focus here was primarily electronic healthcare records, IoT devices and data exchange, but there are many more that I could think of. Much of the paper work done today as part of the administrative process could be simplified; it is not only about registration and basic data, but even for signatures, like the signature required from a legal guardian to perform surgery on a child. You can connect various databases, for instance, connecting organ donors across the globe could be simplified. Notarizing documents would probably not be needed anymore. The possibilities are endless.

It is also interesting to observe how this will evolve here in the UAE. I had the opportunity to participate in a few meetings of the Global Blockchain Council in Dubai, and I can say that the interest and traction around this topic is tremendous. Almost

every industry is represented. The UAE's agenda for blockchain is aggressive and they want to pilot a number of projects to ensure faster adoption. Telecom operator Du recently announced that they will run a pilot on EHR using blockchain infrastructure. Monitor these pilots closely.

I would like to hear more from other experts! What projects do you know of that use blockchain in the healthcare context? What type of adoption do you see of this very hyped technology? Do you think healthcare will be an early adopter or do you see other industries moving faster with blockchain?

BUSINESS EFFICIENCY

MAINSTREAMING INNOVATION IN THE IDEAS ECONOMY

While innovation is at the heart of digital disruptors, it is also important for traditional businesses to invest in them and look beyond them as mere value additions.

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BUSINESS EFFICIENCY

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nnovation is an often used but equally misunderstood word.

According to BCG’s Most Innovative Companies 2015 report, 79% of global innovation executives say that innovation is one of the top three priorities for their companies. But I would not be surprised if their respective organizations are not ready to operationalize innovation in a big way.

Everyone wants to innovate in the emerging ideas economy, but many confuse it with incremental development or value addition.

The other side of innovation as a breakthrough business model is less acknowledged and appreciated. Many may even not know how that can be achieved. The often cited examples of innovation are the new age digital disruptors. What about the traditional companies? Are they not required to innovate in a big way?

My answer to the question is a resounding yes. I believe the biggest need of the time is to remove the haze around breakthrough innovation and help operationalize it for all.

I present here three interrelated domains of thinking, which can help us achieve the objective.

Putting digital at the center The mainstay of the ideas economy is digital. By allowing new ways to connect people and businesses, new ways to collect and make sense of data and new functionalities in products, digital fuels ideas for new ways to serve the customers. Digital allows ideas to take concrete shape towards creating new business value. The need is to put digital at the center of business strategy.

Big names like the Tata and Unilever have very categorically stated it as a new thrust for evolving their future. And they are investing towards that. The essential question for many is how they can put digital at the center.

The innovation evangelists across various industries – from media to consumer electronics to pharmaceuticals – face a perplexed range of new digital opportunities. While they are paying attention and eager to participate in these opportunities, there are very few lighthouses to help them navigate. The most common narrative on innovation focuses on fast-moving startups like Dropbox and Snapchat, or on high-tech celebrity firms like Apple, Google, or Amazon.

Unfortunately, with too many leaders, stories of these nimble and innovative firms just do not make sense for traditional companies that are matured, larger, and burdened with deeply rooted legacies. Leading innovators, irrespective of their position in their life cycle, however, are embracing digital tools and big data, incorporating them not only into the innovation process but also into new products and services. And finally, they are targeting adjacent growth opportunities with new processes that protect adjacent exploration from the exploitation of the core.

Revisiting the business model From Skype to Uber to Airbnb to as recent as Nintendo’s game changing 48-hour born Superstar Product Pokemon GO - all boasts major shifts in their Business Model or rather a completely new one from scratch. While we decide on how innovative and sustainable their business models are; an innovative mega trend that has redefined business models for startups and established organizations alike is a pioneering entrepreneurial tool called the Business Model Canvas (BMC). Winning strategic entrepreneurial tools like BMC is just one example of how new structural changes in strategic thinking around business modeling is allowing new and old businesses to reinvent or recreate their business models in a proper, organic (disruptive!) way. The traditional businesses can use such thought provoking tools and frameworks to question their existing business model while allowing new thinking to emerge.

Chewing gum while walking!

The Innovation is seldom about multitasking or multi prioritizing.

Top innovators across the world are leaning towards innovation models that allow them utilizing processes within an organization to try out multiple ideas, accept failure and reiterate fast; to do smaller but repeated cycles of innovation. Innovation Consultants are terming it as achieving a balance between exploitation and exploration. While these models help focus companies on the speed of innovation to keep pace with shifting market realities, it also focuses on lean processes to both, drive speed and conserve resources. Together, speed and lean foster a shift toward a more agile, “test and learn” innovation culture.

I believe if businesses can start thinking towards putting digital at the center, revisit and reinvent their business model and create a supporting operational model, innovation shall get wings towards creating business value amid disruption of the ideas economy.

Kazi Monirul Kabir CIO, Spider Digital Innovations Kazi posseses extensive Marketing, Communication, Innovation, Strategic Design and Business Development experience across Internet, telecom and consumer goods industries.

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CLOUD COMPUTING

CLOUD – CHANGING THE GAME OF BUSINESS Apart from reduced capital expenses and increased business agility, cloud computing can impact your business in five major ways.

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f you’re a business owner, you’ve probably heard about cloud computing by now. The main benefits are cost savings and greater flexibility, but there is so much more that a powerful, integrated cloud platform can do. We’ve unpacked five ways cloud services can be a game changer.

Create and host website and mobile applications Cloud computing servers allow you to set up custom-made

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applications that can track your business’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and revenue per customer. By tapping into data stored on the cloud server, these applications can perform predictive analytics to help you take forward-looking decisions.

Additionally, with the cloud, you can design mobile apps that link to your website. These provide you with real-time data and analytics into users’ behaviours, enabling you to create more targeted, personalised campaigns and notifications.

For example, if you own a store and you want to create a

CLOUD COMPUTING

unique shopping experience both online and offline, the cloud combined with data and machine learning can help you achieve this. It gives you the power to make specific, targeted product recommendations to your customers based on their past behaviour as well as predictive analytics.

Become part of the Internet of Things Along with customer experience, consumers expect a lot more from the products they buy – and it is becoming a business imperative to make “smarter”, more useful, connected products.

However, the Internet of Things (IoT) is more than simply connecting your computer or smartphone to your activity tracker, alarm system or house lights. IoT’s ability to collect big data through the power of the cloud can help you change the way you do business. According to a recent Microsoft report on IoT, “An intelligent system is transformative… new insights are generated that drive the organisation’s objectives forward on many levels.”

In simple terms, this system works by installing sensors into anything from a yoghurt cup to a bridge, or whatever product your business offers, and then using these sensors to record and send data back into the cloud. That data allows you to collect specific feedback on consumer behaviour and even what they might want in the future.

You can take it a step further by combining big data with real-time processing to better engage with your customers. John Deere did this by adding data connectivity to its equipment, giving farmers information about which crops to plant and plough, and where and when.

Virtualise your machines More businesses are using the cloud to run virtual machines that can help them save money and increase productivity.

Virtualisation refers to creating or moving to a virtual version of computer hardware, operating system, storage device or computer network resource. It is a great option if you need additional computer capacity, but don’t want to spend more money to add physical infrastructure.

By deploying virtual servers, you can reduce the operational costs of your business, increase application availability and gain flexibility. All of this allows your business to grow while enjoying greater ease of management, simplified licensing, better use of hardware, lower energy costs and easier maintenance.

Virtualisation also enables you to respond to IT challenges quicker, with the option to scale additional resources as you need them.

Create, manage and distribute media One of the greatest challenges many businesses face is how to be heard in a world saturated by messages and media. With the cloud, you can create, manage and distribute media more effectively.

NBC News is a great example of a company embracing this. They have been producing phone apps since 2008, with the strategy to be on every platform where their audience members engage. The next step was to create a special experience based on the best features each platform had to offer to their fans.

Cloud computing was critical because it allowed them to create back-end functionality for the app, and ensure it was compatible with all devices connecting to the cloud. The result was that they could deliver news in the fastest amount of time across operating systems. Users have rated the experience 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Keep your information and environment secure Along with a reputation and customer experience, security is likely at the top of your list of priorities. A trusted cloud allows automatic security updates of all servers and virtual machines based on policies that you set and control. It also enables you to control password management from a single source.

A site recovery plan can also protect physical servers. It works by automating the replication of virtual machines and workloads so that you can use the cloud as your recovery site.

You can also automate the recovery of services should there be a site outage at your primary data centre, as well as run a secondary data centre as a backup and recovery site.

Cloud services like Microsoft’s Azure provides all the above-mentioned advantages, and can effectively transform the way you do your business.

Haider Salloum SMB Director – Microsoft Gulf Haider is tasked with helping SMEs realize their full potential, through the adoption of innovative technology and cloud transformation.

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DIGITAL HEALTHCARE

THE DIGITAL FUTURE OF HEALTHCARE Digital healthcare, the convergence between life sciences and technology, is revolutionizing global markets and shaping a patient-centric ecosystem.

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edicines delivered directly to consumers using drone devices. Paperless medical records right from appointment to discharge. An app that analyses your symptoms and if necessary directs you to the nearest emergency department.

Mental health apps that can track your moods to provide therapeutic advice. A remote-health system that makes the patient’s private home the main treatment center. Medical treatments that are personalized to a patient’s individual DNA sequence. Electronic tattoos that can monitor health and pay for healthcare.

If you think these are futuristic projects, think again.

Most of these are already in place and others, well, close to implementation. Healthcare is fast undergoing a tectonic shift and the future looks right out of a sci-fi movie.

There are certain distinct trends which are fast impacting the evolution of the healthcare space. I have come up, for the benefit of the readers, with a model encompassing key attributes which attempts to encapsulate how these trends are fast shaping healthcare innovation.

Firstly, health in the hands of consumers.

This includes the growing use of wearable devices, apps and social media to monitor and report on our health and wellness.

Secondly, the impact of new technologies on how health professionals communicate with patients, as well as how they communicate with each other. Thirdly, data records in the quantified self. It includes emerging areas such as health coaching and maintenance of fitness. This includes how we store data as traditional medical records and how we store data associated with devices and apps.

The overlapping nature of these digital domains is perhaps obvious, and it's important not to draw too tight a boundary around each of them. Where healthcare innovation has perhaps the greatest impact is in the sweet spot where the three domains intersect. Ideally any healthcare innovation program being developed should consider or combine one or more aspects of these three domains for maximum impact.

We are at the beginning of an interesting dawn for consumerdriven healthcare and having intelligent e-tools at your disposal.

From the healthcare service provider perspective, the most exciting thing is about having data-driven care and the evolution of evidence-based medicine. Having specific data points relevant to the particular patient allows the idea of personalized medicine – a trend which is fast catching up in countries boasting of evolved healthcare systems.

With technology powering the healthcare provider with all the requisite information and to have all the relevant data compiled at one dashboard or a relationship of databases, things can be put together as a holistic picture. This frees up the concerned clinician to be able to work with the patient to develop treatment

strategies and to significantly improve the level of care provided.

We are truly handing over the ability for people to look after their own health.

This would empower the patient to do the thing that is right for them and works in the context of their own busy lives. Digital health which started as static websites, telepsychiatry has morphed into this amazing array of different technologies. New and emerging technologies ranging from things like a portal right through to assistive technologies, 3D printing, biometric devices and intelligent apps. What's really interesting is how one actually make the systems work together through open APIs and data modules in the context of helping doctors and clinicians make better decisions.

This, however, does come with its fair set of challenges.

Effective implementation of these ideas can get really difficult. The digital world disruption, explosive technology change – these are typically not words that the health system is used to dealing with.

So we have a whole culture change happening inside health to allow this digital health journey to occur.

Contrary to how many would perceive, it’s not just an application or an intelligent software system, it is fundamentally altering the models of care in practice today.

We are headed towards a time where the contact lens we wear would be able to give an accurate indication of the exact glucose levels in our body and the device we swallow would measure specific attributes which it has been designed for as it goes through our bodies. None of this would have been possible without someone saying, “There has to be a better way!” and by ignoring those who argue, “But, this is the way we’ve always done it.”

Healthcare is in the midst of significant change, with greater emphasis on access, costs and quality.

The only way to meet all of these new demands is through innovative thinking that can lead to new concepts, new insights and new technology.

Siddharth Wadehra is an Innovations professional having led strategic innovations outfits for a number of companies in the telecom, healthcare, IT and internet space across varied geographies - China, India, SE Asia and Middle East. He presently manages innovation initiatives for Aster DM Healthcare Group and is based out of their Corporate Headquarters in Dubai.

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SECURITY

SSL TRAFFIC INSPECTION: SELECTING RIGHT TOOLS TO BEAT NETWORK BLIND SPOTS

According to a Gartner survey, “less than 20% of organizations with a firewall, an intrusion prevention system (IPS) or a unified threat management (UTM) appliance decrypt inbound or outbound SSL traffic.”

This means that hackers can evade over 80 percent of companies’ network defenses simply by tunneling attacks in encrypted traffic

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ncrypted traffic accounts for a large and growing percentage of all network traffic. While the adoption of SSL, and its successor, Transport Layer Security (TLS), should be cause for celebration – as encryption improves confidentiality and message integrity – it also puts organizations at risk. This is because hackers can leverage encryption to conceal their exploits from security devices that do not inspect SSL traffic.

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To prevent cyber-attacks, enterprises need to inspect all traffic, and in particular encrypted traffic, for advanced threats. To do this, they need a dedicated security platform that can decrypt inbound and outbound SSL traffic. This can be complex though as SSL inspection potentially touches so many different security products – from firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) to data loss prevention (DLP), forensics, advanced threat prevention and

more. To help with the process, here are the main features that all SSL inspection platforms should provide.

Meet Current and Future SSL Performance Demands Performance is perhaps the most important evaluation criteria for SSL inspection platforms.

Organizations must assess their current Internet bandwidth requirements and ensure that their SSL inspection platform can handle future SSL throughout requirements.

While doing so, IT teams must analyze appliance performance with essential security and networking features enabled. This is important as testing SSL decryption speeds without considering the impact of deep packet inspection (DPI), URL classification or other features will not provide a clear picture of real-world performance.

Satisfy Compliance Requirements Privacy and regulatory concerns have emerged as one of the top hurdles preventing organizations from inspecting SSL traffic. IT security teams must walk a thin line between protecting employees and intellectual property, and violating employees’ privacy rights.

To address regulatory requirements like HIPAA, Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), an SSL inspection platform should be able to bypass sensitive traffic, like traffic to banking and healthcare sites. By bypassing sensitive traffic, IT security teams can rest easy knowing that confidential banking or healthcare records will not be sent to security devices or stored in log management systems.

The SSL inspection solution must be able to categorize web traffic using an automated URL classification service and also support manuallydefined URL bypass lists. To drive transparency and employee confidence, IT teams should also be able to display customizable messages to users informing them that encrypted traffic may be monitored for cyber threats and unauthorized activity.

Maximize the Uptime and the Overall Capacity of Security Infrastructure Most firewalls today can granularly control access to applications and detect intrusions and malware. Unfortunately, analyzing network traffic

SECURITY

for network-borne threats is a resource-intensive task. While firewalls have increased their capacity over time, they often cannot keep up with network demand, especially when multiple security features like IPS, URL filtering and virus inspection are enabled.

Therefore, SSL inspection platforms should not just offload SSL processing from security devices. They should also maximize the uptime and performance of these devices. When evaluating SSL inspection platforms, organizations should look for platforms that can scale security deployments with load balancing; detect and route around failed security devices; provide better value by supporting N+1 redundancy rather than just 1+1 redundancy; and support advanced health monitoring to rapidly identify network or application errors.

Securely Manage SSL Certificates and Keys Whether providing visibility to outbound or inbound SSL traffic, SSL inspection devices must securely manage SSL certificates and keys. SSL certificates and keys form the basis of trust for encrypted communications. If they are compromised, attackers can use them to impersonate legitimate sites and steal data.

To ensure that certificates are stored and administered securely, organizations should look for SSL inspection platforms that provide device-level controls to protect SSL keys and certificates.

The solution should integrate with third-party SSL certificate

AWS ABDULLA ALSUWAIDI

advocates & legal consultants

Office # 704, Bay Square Building # 02, Business Bay, P.O Box 96070 Dubai, UAE, Tel +971 4 554 76 35 Website: http://www.awsuwaidi-advocates.com E-mail: info@awsuwaidi-advocates.com

management solutions to discover, catalog, track and centrally control certificates. It is also necessary for it to support FIPS 1402 Level 2 and Level 3 certified equipment and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) that can detect physical tampering and can safeguard cryptographic key.

With SSL accounting for nearly a third of enterprise traffic and with more applications supporting 2048-bit and 4096-bit SSL keys, organizations can no longer avoid the cryptographic elephant in the room. If they wish to prevent devastating data breaches, they must gain insight into SSL traffic. By following the above mentioned guidelines, organizations can make well-informed decisions and avoid the deployment pitfalls that SSL inspection can potentially expose.

Chris Gale is EMEA Partner Director at A10 Networks where he is responsible for the build out of A10 Networks’ Partner Community across EMEA to support their dramatic revenue growth.

He is an IT industry veteran with over 25 years of experience in both IT security and infrastructure working with fast growing companies like SanDisk, Imperva, Unisys, NetApp Decru, VMware, Dell and Sun.

Your Lawyers in Town With Abdullah Al Suwaidi Advocates & Legal Consultants, you may have all your legal matters/requirements covered and secured, in the most efficient affordable way available in Dubai and all the Emirates of UAE. Our team of Lawyers & Legal Consultants proudly holds more than 20 years of solid working experience in the varied fields of legal practice, including but not limited to: Clients' representation in the Courts of Law, DIFC Court, Arbitration Committees, Disputes Resolving & Settlement Committees, Police & Public Prosecution Departments, LandDepartments, Economic Departments andFree Zones Authorities.

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DIGITAL EDGE

WHERE SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS IN UAE USE DEVOPS? DevOps – the culture of collaboration between software developers and other IT professionals to create a fast-moving, agile and effective business operation is gradually becoming popular in the Middle East.

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here lingers the misperception that DevOps is mostly for companies that sport ping-pong tables and have free sushi for lunch. Trendy web giants out on the technology bleeding edge; firms that manufacture construction equipment and have large swaths of legacy computer code? Not so much.

It’s really not surprising that this misperception exists. A traditional IT organization glances at a company like Netflix and they may see a unique entity, a ‘unicorn,’ wholly unlike themselves.

They’re not even entirely wrong. More extreme implementations of approaches such as micro services or near-continuous production releases likely won’t become the universal norm — especially in the ‘classic IT’ (aka Mode 1, to use the terminology of research firm Gartner) parts of their infrastructure. However, that doesn’t mean DevOps principles can’t also benefit the conservative

IT of conservative firms.

It’s about the software The first reason that DevOps practices apply outside of greenfield, cloud-native (aka Gartner’s Mode 2) IT is that the rules are changing. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “software is eating the world” meme has become something of a cliché but it’s no less true for that. As my Red Hat colleague James Labocki wrote recently, "Bank of America is not just a bank, they are a transaction processing company. Exxon Mobil is not only an oil and gas company, they are a GIS company. With each passing day Walgreens’ business is more reliant on electronic health records.”

Furthermore, these shifts in technology and how business is transacted are creating new competitors that come at established

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DIGITAL EDGE

firms from non-obvious directions and places. Barriers created by capital requirements, transaction costs, or even just brands become less relevant when a mobile app can change the landscape in a relative blink of an eye. (Think of all the new next-day or same-day approaches to delivery being trialed that could emerge as competition to the logistics incumbents.)

Therefore, while the priorities for classic IT may be different from those of cloud-native, business-as-usual needs to evolve. Even calling traditional IT ‘legacy’ is a dangerous and misleading turn of phrase as it implies static and in need of wholesale replacement.

Rather, this ‘low speed’ IT may prioritize stability over rapid change but it still needs to increase its relevance to new organizational initiatives and reduce complexity. To increase relevance, it needs to deliver environments for developers in minutes instead of days or weeks. To reduce complexity, it needs to implement policy-driven

automation that reduces the need for manual (and error-prone) tasks. Getting there requires a combination of policy-based hybrid cloud management and DevOps approaches.

DevOps thinking is proven to work in traditional industries DevOps as we usually talk about it today is indeed rather new. It’s the child of pervasive open source, continuous integration technologies, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), softwaredefined infrastructures, and a host of other relatively modern technologies – which taken as a whole are quite recent. However, DevOps as a general approach has many analogs going back decades in manufacturing and other industries.

Consider some of the terminology associated with DevOps such as ‘automation of process’ and ‘culture of collaboration.’ These very much describe the transformation of the automobile industry to the modern age. Concepts such as kaizen (loosely, continuous improvement), just-in-

DIGITAL EDGE

time inventory, build-to-order manufacturing, and most of all the systems thinking embodied in the ‘Toyota Way’ invite many parallels to DevOps. Indeed standardized and reusable parts—which have similarities the small reusable services commonly associated with DevOps-date to the Système Gribeauval for cannons in 1765. For their part, the processes and machinery that Brunel and Maudlay applied to sailing blocks to standardize production at the beginning of the 19th century look a lot like the repeatable automatable workflows we associate with DevOps. But cultural shift that emphasizes flexibility, cooperation, and transparency may be the most important similarity. When Jeffrey Liker wrote “The Toyota Way has been driven so deeply into the psyche of employees at all levels that it has morphed from a strategy into an important element of the company's culture,” he was talking about an automobile manufacturer. DevOps likewise requires putting in place incentives, structure, and organization to create the right kind of culture.

Where should organizations in UAE use DevOps? The lesson here is that DevOps is broadly relevant.

Oh, the details of how DevOps principles are applied will differ both between organizations and within a given organization just as the rigor of some manufacturing processes will depend on what is being built. Failing fast is fine as a general concept but the

nature and bounds of acceptable failure need to be built into the overall process.

But there are universals and this brings us back to the fact that, while DevOps is largely built around innovative open source tool chains, it is at least as much about an approach and a culture as on specific tooling. A focus on continuous improvement; an ethos of sharing information and enabling experimentation; and the creation of repeatable and automated processes wherever possible.

These apply depending on whether stability or speed is the priority for the organization in question. As a result, many analysts and other industry watchers expect DevOps to become widely used even in more traditional IT environments over the coming years.

Gordon Haff is senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat. Prior to Red Hat, Gordon wrote hundreds of research notes and was frequently quoted in publications like The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, as well as advising clients on product and marketing strategies. He also has many years of hands-on experience with both IT software and hardware.

INTERNET OF THINGS

SHIP TECHNOLOGY - IOT ON THE EDGE, IN THE CLOUD AND ON THE WAVE The transportation industry has been pretty active in the scheme of Internet of Things (IoT), and now even the conservative maritime industry is waking up to the benefits of its adoption and implementation.

H

ow is IoT and IT technology impacting the maritime industry?

While it is true that industrial controls and equipment on ships have always generated a lot of data, the big difference is that we are now using IT technology to connect to the marine equipment and access this operational data. As sensors become

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smaller, more robust and cheaper to acquire, we predict that they will be literally ‘everywhere’, in the hull, main engine, and auxiliary machinery and even small equipment items, gathering and collecting data for analysis.

INTERNET OF THINGS

Predictive Maintenance, Augmented Reality and 3D Printing This monitoring and data analysis will definitely make ships easier to operate. Examples include condition-based maintenance systems (equipment monitoring in real time to remotely service products via the Internet so parts can be swapped out at the next port of call, thereby avoiding operational down time and costly delays), preparing 3D printing or guiding repairs by people without expert knowledge of the system, and using Augmented Reality for intuitive guidance.

The 3D models will be updated as the ship is built and modified over its lifecycle. In Augmented Reality, computers overlay a live image with computer-generated information. For example, a building block may be shown with a part to be installed, illustrating how both fit together. The fitting of parts will then become very intuitive, reducing assembly times and errors.

Smart Ships: Minimum Crew-Sizes Along with reduced workload in the engine room due to cleaner fuels, we believe that these advances will allow further reductions in minimum crew sizes.

Expect to see smart ships with automatic collision avoidance, automatic berthing, a selfmonitoring hull, engine and cargo; the ability to sail autonomously for a limited time in certain conditions, and even no-crew drones for specific applications, such as, short-distance ferries, tugs and fireboats.

Automated Data-Driven DecisionMaking Whether ships are operated locally or by remote control, operational decisions will be data driven. For example, AIS (Automatic Identification System), a satellite-based data exchange allows the tracking of virtually all cargo ships for vessel routing, taking into account the weather, traffic situation and port capacities along the route.

worked with Carnival and Dell EMC OEM to build the world’s largest marine training simulation centre, providing capacity to provide best-in-class training to 6,500 deck and engineering officers per year while reducing hardware by 77 percent and energy consumption by 30 percent.

Connectivity & Security Connectivity is also growing in importance. For example, in the case of Navarino Telecom, innovative cloud technology on board is increasing productivity, lowering ship to shore communication costs and increasing data speeds by up to 50 percent. With IT becoming an indispensable part of shipping, cybersecurity is becoming a concern, both for autonomous and manned shipping, with technology following a similar approach to that deployed for other large assets, such as power plants and traffic control centres.

Some predict that all these advances in IT will ‘revolutionise’ shipping.

However, sensors, computers and telecommunications are not new to shipping, and we believe the evolution to aggregate and gain more intelligence from equipment will continue, albeit at an accelerated pace. We expect that we will see ‘more’ of the same trends as in the past decades; more exchange of data and collaboration between stakeholders. The difference is that this unique combination of technologies will enable the next wave of innovation.

Prof. Dr. Volker Bertram, World Maritime University Volker Bertram is the Visiting Professor for ship design at the World Maritime University in Malmo and three other universities. He works at DNV GL in Hamburg and organizes conferences on future technologies for the maritime industries.

Simulation & Virtual Reality The scope of simulations is already expanding beyond the classic stability, strength and hydrodynamics into aerodynamics, fire, ice-breaking, evacuation, manufacturing, energy generation and consumption in the ship system. When human interaction is important, we will increasingly use Virtual Reality as a key technology.

Virtual Reality uses 3D models of the world with fly-through or walk-through capabilities, and typically some user interaction; effectively, it is the same technology used in video games.

This technology is fast gaining popularity especially for interior designing and training. Take Transas, for example, who have

Mary Etienne, Business Development Director, Maritime, Shipping and Offshore, Dell OEM Mary Etienne joined Dell in 2011 as Business Development Director of Dell OEM EMEA, where she is responsible for creating business value for customers in the maritime, shipping, and offshore markets.

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APP REVIEW

A DOZEN OF THE BEST APPS - CURATED & REVIEWED

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APP REVIEW

Moon+ Reader The next time you want to read an e-book and do not want to invest in a Kindle, go for the Moon+ Reader app. It is an Android app and includes a variety of features, themes and support for reading formats (including EPUB, PDF, mobi, TXT, RAR, ZIP and more). It also has various types of scroll modes, paging modes and multiple viewing modes to make reading easier.

The cautious consumer in you can try out the free version first before investing in the paid one. In case, you’ve a sizeable e-library and looking out for a dependable app to go through them, then do consider Moon+ Reader to serve the purpose.

Greenify

Greenify is an Android app that helps you identify power consuming apps and place them into hibernation when you’re not using them. Not only does it stop the idle power-consuming apps from eating your battery, but it also prevents your device from slowing down thus optimizing the entire process.

Greenify does require a background running service for auto-hibernation to work. It is an extremely lightweight app with an average RAM footprint less than 5M, and almost zero CPU and battery consumption. So, the next time you feel drained because of your smartphone, install the Greenify app.

Health Authority – Abu Dhabi Though applicable only for residents of Abu Dhabi, the Health Authority – Abu Dhabi (HAAD is a very useful app for the general public and healthcare professionals situated there.

It has recently been updated and you can now search and view detailed reports on licensed doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmacies, drugs, health insurance etc. You can also book cancer screening appointment, verify sick leave, subscribe to e-publications, and verify news, events, policies and circulars related to the healthcare industry.

The HAAD app is a very strong committed step towards promoting and creating awareness about telemedicine in the UAE.

Expensify If you’re a frequent business traveller and is in the habit of piling up receipts to submit complicated expense reports, then Expensify is the app for you.

Expensify is a business traveller’s dream-come-true and one of the best Expense Account Management apps out there in the market. It allows you to manually track expenses, photolog receipts and even import purchase info from your credit card for IRS validated e-receipts.

The best feature of this app is the Smart Scan which allows you to photograph your receipt, have it read by the computer and automatically generate it into an expense. Basically, Expensify takes the headache out of the expense system.

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APP REVIEW

Resilio Sync You are concerned about the security of your data but still need cloud space? Welcome Resilio Sync that allows your laptop, desktop, NAS, tablet, and even your home-built server as a destination for syncing your phone. Formerly known as the BitTorrent Sync, it works exactly like the other major cloud storage options except that you’ll be using your own hardware to store everything.

The only thing to keep in mind is that your machine needs to be always switched on so that the file synchronization is not interrupted.

The best part is that your device acts as your personal cloud and you can have as much storage as it can hold.

Quik

Brain It On! If the name hasn’t gotten you hooked already, the game certainly will.

A deceptively simple game based on physics, it will definitely keep your brain active and increase the cell functionality while keeping you occupied in your spare time. The app has 100 levels to solve where each level has a specific objective that you need to solve by drawing shapes and patterns on the screen. If you’re super-competitive, finish it within the allotted time and shapes to get all the three stars and get to the next level.

The game has a simple interface and is pretty easy to install. However, that doesn’t make it any less challenging.

Create amazing videos from your photo and video clips with the Quik app developed by GoPro. All you need to do is choose your favorite set of photos and videos on the phone and let Quik do its magic.

The app analyzes the data to find great footage, adds beautiful transitions and effects, and syncs everything to the beat of the music. You can also customize your story with pre-loaded filters, add text and music, re-order pictures, trim the clips, change orientation and so much more. Finally, do not forget to save and share it among your friends.

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Map My Fitness You might think that getting fit is a time-consuming vocation. Well, not anymore. With the Map My Fitness app, you get to choose from more than 600 types of workouts, record GPS-based activities, such as running, walking and cycling, to view detailed reports that include stats like pace, route, distance, calorie burn, elevation profile and more. It also provides fitness routines including gym workouts, cross training, yoga and so on, all of which you can do from the comfort of your home.

The pro version provides access to more interesting details and functions like heart rate analysis, personal training plans, audio coaching and Live Tracking.

APP REVIEW

OneNote Microsoft’s OneNote helps you record your scribbling and ideas – be it text, drawing or a combination of both.

It helps that the app is pre-loaded on new Windows 10 devices and works across all platforms. You can get images from the web to give pictures to your ideas and collaborate with other people at the same time. You can either use a stylus or your fingertip to capture your thoughts on the OneNote itself and then access them from anywhere; it doesn’t matter even if you’re offline.

So let your creative juices flowing and jump into the OneNote bandwagon.

Quintessentially Lifestyle The Quintessentially Lifestyle is an exotic and high-profile app for members living the exclusive life. It is a luxury lifestyle management and concierge service provider that connects its members to the service’s Lifestyle Assistants who guide them about the latest happenings in the social circle and provide recommendations as to restaurants, events and so forth.

The app creates curated lists designed solely for its members and features the finest restaurants, hotels, spas, and nightclubs. It also has a bespoke travel service that connects its consumers to the service provider's offices in more than 60 countries to ensure that their last minute weekend getaway or planned vacation is up to par and tailored to personal preferences.

Busuu Busuu is an amazing beginner’s app if you want to broaden your horizons by learning a new language. With Busuu, you can learn how to read, write, and speak in twelve of the world’s most popular languages. The app’s learning methodologies and techniques are intuitive and geared towards providing an impactful lesson to you as a learner and are definitely better than going through dry books.

The courses have been designed by CEFR, a reputable framework for effectively learning new languages. You also get access to its vast and enriching community of 45+ million users, and native speakers with whom you can practice your language skills.

TIDAL If you’re a music buff and addicted to hi-fidelity audio, TIDAL should be your choice music streaming option. It has an extensive library of more than 25 million songs with the best sound quality around. TIDAL combines the convenience and mobility of Spotify and the fidelity and prestige of a CD collection to give you the ultimate musical experience. As an user, you can also watch 75,000 ad-free music videos, create your own lists and explore the music identification and discovery tools.

There’s no free tier, but you can definitely try the one week trial option before buying it. With a comprehensive playlist functionality, TIDAL is definitely worth a consideration.

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Entertainment INFOGRAPHIC

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF INNOVATION?

95%

Competition

feel innovation can drive a more competitive economy

91%

88%

feel innovation can create a greener economy

feel innovation is the best way to create jobs

Go Green

87%

Competition

feel we should bring volume to society as a whole, not only to individuals

86%

Jobs

Partership

feel partnership is more important than stand-alone success

Improve Lives

can successfully change citizens' lives in the next 10 years in

90% 87% 84% 84%

Communications

Health Quality

Job Market

Environmental Quality

WHAT DRIVES INNOVATION? 65% 66% 65% Value of Innovation

believe that innovation will happen when the general public is convinced of the value that innovation will bring to their lives

58% Private Investors

believe that innovation will occur when private investors are supportive of companies that need funds to innovate

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Universities & Schools

feels that innovation happens when local universities and schools provide a strong model for tomorrow's leaders

Budget Allocation

48%

believe that innovation can brew when government and public officials set aside an adequate share of their budget to support innovative companies

Patent Protection

agree that innovation can occur when the protection of the copyright laws and patents are effective

Government Support

43%

think innovation can occur when governmental support for innovation is efficiently organized and coordinated

INFOGRAPHIC THE GLOBAL INNOVATION INDEX 2016

WHO IS LEADING INNOVATION?

Every year, the Global Innovation Index ranks the innovation performance of nearly 130 countries and economies around the world. Each country is scored according to 82 indicators. www.globalinnovationindex.org

TOP INNOVATORS BY REGION 2

2 3

1

2

1

2

3

1

3

2

1

3 2

NORTH AMERICA 1. USA 2. CANADA

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN 1. CHILE 2. COSTA RICA 3. MEXICO

3

3

1

1. SINGAPORE 2. KOREA, REP. OF 3. HONG KONG (CHINA)

1 2

1

EUROPE 1. SWITZERLAND 2. COSTA RICA 3. MEXICO

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

NORTHERN AFRICA AND WESTERN ASIA

1. MAURITIUS 2. SOUTH AFRICA 3. KENYA

1. ISRAEL 2. CYPRUS 3. UAE

TOP 5 PERFORMERS WORLD WIDE 1. SWITZERLAND 2. SWEDEN 3. UNITED KINGDOM 4. USA 5. FINLAND

TOP 3 LEADERS IN INNOVATION QUALITY HIGH INCOME

1. JAPAN 2. USA 3. UNITED KINGDOM MIDDLE INCOME

SOUTH EAST ASIA, EAST ASIA AND OCEANIA

CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN ASIA 1. INDIA 2. KAZAKHSTAN 3. IRAN

TOP PERFORMERS BY INCOME GROUP UPPER-MIDDLE INCOME 1. CHINA 2. MALAYSIA 3. BULGARIA LOWER-MIDDLE INCOME 1. MOLDOVA 2. UKRAINE 3. VIETNAM LOW INCOME

1. CHINA

1. RWANDA

2. INDIA

2. MOZAMBIQUE

3. BRAZIL

3. CAMBODIA

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INFOGRAPHIC

The New Industrial Revolution 1010 0011

5 Technology Trends Driving Innovation

Manufacturing has seen three great innovations since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century: steam power, electricity & automation.

We are on the cusp of the next sea change. The new industrial revolution will bring together advanced technologies in data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. The digital and physical worlds will merge to create a new kind of enterprise that uses adaptive intelligence to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency. Here are five key trends driving the revolution:

Internet Of Things WHAT: Internet-connected sensors embedded in products collect data about them and the surrounding environment, enabling production and supply chains to operate with maximum efficiency.

The global IoT market is expected to reach $19 trillion by 2020, with 26 billion embedded devices.

EXAMPLES: Sensors in commercial vehicle fleets monitor location and equipment to optimize deliveries and prevent breakdowns. Traffic cameras collect real-time intersection data to predict and prevent accidents.

Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics 1010 0011

WHAT: Cloud storage accommodates massive volumes of data collected by IoT systems. Data analysis leads to smarter business decisions and drives innovation.

EXAMPLES: Retailers crunch customer data to predict shopping decisions.

Schools analyze information on class size, grades and graduation rates to understand why students succeed or fail.

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INFOGRAPHIC

Advanced Robotics WHAT: Robots work alongside people to perform complex tasks and free up workers for operational and strategic decisions. +

A record 14,232 robots, valued at $840 million, were ordered from North American robotics companies in the first half of 2015.

EXAMPLES: Robots work in tandem with humans on the factory floor.

Surgeons perform less invasive surgeries using robots, improving patient recovery times.

Growth Sectors include: 30% Semiconductors 23% Automotive Component 8% Life Sciences

Artificial Intelligence WHAT: Machines respond to incoming data patterns, adjusting direction or output to the situation at hand. When fully implemented, the technology will drive enormous cost and energy savings.

EXAMPLES: Smart buildings analyze data from air conditioners and lighting to predict energy usage trends and trigger actions that prevent waste. Power plants adjust electricity output based on shifting weather patterns or changing consumer demand.

3D Printing

WHAT: Printing technology couples design software with new manufacturing techniques to quickly produce intricate, custom products more cheaply.

EXAMPLES: Devices print low-cost robotic prosthetic hands for amputees. Photochemical 3D printing creates products 100 times faster than traditional 3D printing methods.

The global 3D printing market is expected to reach $ 20.2 billion in 2019.

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INFOGRAPHIC

1 2 3 4 5 56

TOP 5 HEALTH CARE TRENDS OF 2016 Higher drug prices

Drug prices reached an all-time-high in 2015 and are expected to continue

Increase in smartphone use

"Bedless hospitals" will bring the health care industry into the homes of device users allowing for health monitoring and specialized diagnosis

Increase in behavioral health care

Communitybased care

More international consumer expenses

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Behavioral health will become the forefront behind hospital visits in the upcoming year

Reduction of health care costs has led to an increase in smaller, community-based health care facilities and hospitals

Hospitals and health care companies will have to discover new ways to address these payment problems

INFOGRAPHIC

The Predicted Wearables Boom is All About the Wrist Worldwide wearable devices shipment forecast (in millions)

Eyewear

101.4

4.5

Earwear

.06

Modular

6.7

AR Theme park AR Games AR C onsu mer AR Ad sp en d

VR

e ris rp te AR n E

$120B

7.5

Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality AR Hardware

Other

VR Niche Market

Wristwear

Hardware

AR Film/TV

$30B

AR Voice

VR Games

VR Film

aCommerce

VR Theme park

VR Theme park

Source: Digi-Capital

Source: Digi-Capital

By 2016 wearable technology is expected to grow to between

Augmented reality and virtual reality

To hit $150 billion,

$39MM to $171MM

Disrupting mobile by 2020

160 140

69%

35.1%

61%

120 100 80 60 40

Of adults track a health indicator for themselves or others

Of the wearable technology market was in the healthcare and medical sector in 2012.

Of all devices in the wearable market are fitness or activity trackers.

20 0

2016

2017

2018

Augmented Reality

2019

2020

Virtual Reality

Source: Technavio's report 'Global Wearable Medical Technology Market 2012-2016'

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Oracle Cloud Applications HCM

Human Capital Recruiting Talent

CRM

Sales Service Marketing

ERP

Financials Procurement Projects Supply Chain

More Enterprise SaaS Applications Than Any Other Cloud Services Provider

Copyright Š 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

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