Editorial Cover Feature - P 18
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he SMB segment is a sizeable opportunity in any region and the Middle East boasts of a vibrant SMB sector. They are likely candidates to invest in scalable IT systems that can propel Business growth and profitability, but with the assured caveats of cost savings and ‘reasonable’ upfront CAPEX. Since the SMB segment is varied and widespread in different verticals, each Business would have its individual story and would need a custom IT roadmap that can help them progress in their industry. SMBs can be expected to move to cloud computing aggressively as they seek to grow their revenues and build their Businesses. In a report, Techaisle suggests that Virtualization, Cloud, Mobility and Managed Services together form the Four Pillars of IT that will support the transformation of SMB. According to its forecasts, the global SMB Cloud spend will grow by 22 percent in 2013, Mobility by 14 percent, Managed Services by 15 percent, Virtualization by 25 percent and datacenter by 8 percent. Cloud-based productivity suites are expected to accelerate among SMBs and among other trends, with BYOD becoming more pervasive, the priority for SMBs will be towards data and applications management. SMB companies can also be expected to consider new generation BI and mobile BI applications and with some larger ones looking at deploying Big Data analytics tools which will harness their growing volume of data. With the arrival of the cloud, direct sales engagements by vendors is a threat and therefore the channel will need to fiercely protect their turf by developing aggressive sales capabilities and delivering proof of their indispensable value both to their vendors and to their customers. In the SMB segment, which will more often lack requisite in-house IT expertise to gauge their IT needs or bottlenecks of existing infrastructure, the channel engagement in the role of trusted consultants will always have a significant stake.
Content
Tapping into the SMB opportunity
Virtual Benefits
Customers moving into virtualised solutions will consider more options than take a one-vendor approach
News in Detail - P 10/12
Avaya enables partners to address the growing mid-size market
Cisco outlines regional strategy at Cisco Connect UAE 2013
News Feature - P 14/16 A new vision
Vision Solutions is keen to be the vendor of choice as local service providers take their data recovery to the cloud.
Online education gets a shot in the arm
Universities can now reach thousands more students thanks to a cheaper open online learning platform from Visionaire
Tech know- P 24/26 Risk Averse
Brent Lees of Riverbed elaborates on how Granite solutions enable the consolidation of storage infrastructure
Staying on top
eHostingDataFort CEO, Yasser Zeineldin, on some of the trends and challenges in the hosting and managed IT services industry.
Feature - P 22/28 On Cloud Nine
Using the cloud, Capillary Technologies is helping retailers attract and retain customers in the face of fierce competition
Rising to the challenge
You cannot put new wine into old bottles, old wisdom holds. The same rings true for online security.
Insight- P 31
Managing Big Data Storage
George DeBono, GM, at Red Hat MEA on how a Unified Platform and Intelligent Open Source Software in combination can help manage the deluge of Big Data
Regulars
R. Narayan Managing Editor
Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. Narayan Assistant Editor: David Ndichu Art Director: Faiz Ahmed Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh
News Bytes Eyetech Stats & trends
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News Bytes
EMC extends Flash portfolio EMC extended the EMC Xtrem Family of Flash-optimized server and storage products with the introduction of EMC XtremSF, a new family of PCIe-based Flash cards that accelerate application performance.XtremSF is server Flash hardware, available in a broad set of eMLC and SLC capacities. It can be deployed as either direct attached storage (DAS) that sits within the server to deliver high performance— or it can be deployed in combination with EMC XtremSW Cache (formerly EMC VFCache) server caching software to turbocharge network storage array performance while maintaining the level of protection required of mission-critical application environments. XtremSF joins EMC’s growing portfolio of extremeperformance Flash products, which include Flash optimized hybrid storage arrays – EMC Isilon, EMC VMAX and EMC VNX, as well as the EMC XtremIO all-Flash scaleout enterprise storage array. EMC also announced the release of XtremIO to select customers. XtremIO is purpose built to leverage Flash and deliver new levels of real-world performance, administrative ease, and advanced data services. Its scale-out architecture delivers higher levels of "functional IOPS" to applications that require high levels of random I/O performance, such as OLTP databases, server virtualization and VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).
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Huawei appoints Optimus as VAD for Enterprise Optimus Technology and Telecommunications has signed a value added distribution (VAD) agreement with Huawei to promote and distribute the company’s enterprise product range for networking, unified communications (UC) and security through its channel network. According to the terms of the agreement, Optimus will expand Huawei’s channel network across the GCC region, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq and conduct activities to help increase the vendor’s market share and reach. “Huawei is one of the global leaders in telecommunications technology and is making milestone progress in the enterprise space.The partnership is very important for Optimus as Huawei brings a complete range of technology for businesses across industries to help fulfill customers’ IT requirements. The Huawei product offerings are a value-add to our best-of-breed technology offerings within the MENA market and complement our existing solutions within this space,” says Ms. Meera Kaul, Managing Director of Optimus Technology and Telecommunications. Huawei’s enterprise products include solutions for data centres, cloud computing, enterprise networking and wireless, as well as Unified Communication & Collaboration (UC&C), video conference and telepresence solutions.
Lenovo appoints Mindware as distributor of Lenovo Think products Mindware is now an official distributor of Lenovo’s Think product range including; ThinkPad Edge and ThinkPad Classic for United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. Mindware will focus on increasing the reach of Think product range into the region’s market. With ThinkPad designs crafted for especially large businesses, government and education entities and ThinkPad Edge designs for SMB’s, each product under the Lenovo’s Think range is designed to meet different customer needs. Mohammed Hilili, General Manager Gulf for Lenovo, said: “We are excited to be partnering with Mindware to increase the availability of our Think range of products in the Middle East. Today, 95 per cent of businesses registered in the UAE and 93 per cent of businesses in Saudi Arabia into the SME category, whilst overall in the Middle East and North Africa SMBs are recognised for their contribution of 28% of the region’s income. Through Mindware’s extensive reach, the distributor will work with Lenovo to educate and increase sales of Think products starting from April 2013. Mario Gay, General Manager at Mindware, said: “The region’s SMB workforces tend to be highly mobile. As a result corporations need to equip their team with products that are robust, durable and lightweight – all key elements of the Lenovo Think range. We believe this partnership will help boost productivity amongst the SMB community."
News Bytes
Kaspersky highlights its integrated MDM A survey conducted in late 2012 by Kaspersky Lab in cooperation with B2B International found that just 28% of companies worldwide have opted to deploy comprehensive Mobile Device Management (MDM) technology. With that in mind, Kaspersky is now highlighting its integrated MDM. The Mobile Device Management technology integrated into Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, Kaspersky Lab’s new platform for securing corporate networks, ensures reliable management and security of any mobile device used in a company. MDM tools allow system administrators to remotely manage the content stored on a device, blocking access to it if the device is lost or stolen. MDM also enables IT specialists to designate all content on a mobile device as personal or corporate. Another advantage of Kaspersky MDM solution is its centralized management and control system, which fits into corporate security systems and helps track all threats to the organization’s mobile IT infrastructures.
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StorIT offers flexible Data Center Solutions Bundles StorIT, a data storage specialist value added distributor in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, has introduced pre-built Data Center Solutions bundlesthat are simple, flexible and efficient, ideal for resellers and systems integrators selling into small and medium businesses with limited IT infrastructure expertise. The bundles are built on EMC’s VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, where StorIT can configure the solutions by using a wide range of technology from major players in enterprise applications, virtualization hypervisors, servers, storage, and networking as per the customers’ requirements. “To build a data center, organizations can either acquire all the components of a data center such as servers, storage, networking and other applications from different vendors and try to put it together themselves or they can buy one complete tested and certified assembled solution of fixed configuration that is easy to deploy and simple to use. Most SMEs and mid-range Enterprises look for solutions that are not only cost-effective but also flexible and easily customizable,” says Ranjith Kaippada, Product Sales Specialist at StorIT Distribution. The Data center solution bundles provide StorIT’s channel partners with a solution to take to their customers with individual warranties from each vendor. Apart from offering pre-built solutions that include EMC storage solutions, StorIT will also support its channel partners by offering its expertise, implementation support and professional services.
RedHat announces Agenda for RedHat Summit Red Hat Summit 2013, the industry’s premier open source technology event, now in its ninth year, will be held in Boston from June 11-14, 2013. This year’s agenda will feature Red Hat’s entire portfolio of open source solutions with open hybrid cloud taking center stage. The world is more connected now than ever before. From smart phones to the cloud, technology enables people to communicate and do work with anyone, from anywhere, and advance innovation openly. As organizations embrace these changes, they also face another technological revolution – the move from hardware to software-based infrastructure. Red Hat Summit 2013 will explore how enterprises can “connect” to an ecosystem of innovation to support this shift in the IT landscape. Paul Cormier, president, Products & Technologies, Red Hat said, “Our ninth annual Red Hat Summit will be our largest event ever, and it’s truly become one of the industry’s ‘can’t miss’ technology events of the year. We’re looking forward to bringing customers, partners, and Red Hat executives and experts together to build connections and share the innovations that are driving the future of technology in the enterprise.”
News Bytes
Software AG appoints Nicky Sheridan as new Senior VP Nicky Sheridan has joined Software AG to lead their business in the fast-growing region of Middle East, Turkey & Africa. Nicky Sheridan said: “Software AG has been developing and introducing technology solutions that have empowered businesses worldwide to reach their full potential and break new frontiers. The company stays very close to its customers. It doesn’t make sales, it forms partnerships. It is therefore a great opportunity to be part of an organization that is driven by a passion for excellence, leadership and innovation. I am eager to share my ideas and utilize my deep understanding of the regional market dynamics to help chart a successful and profitable future for the company in the Middle East, Africa and Turkey.” Prior to joining Software AG, Nicky held a variety of roles at Oracle from HQ in California to his base in Cape Town, South Africa.
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Comguard unveils EAL 4+ certified Firewalls from gateprotect Comguard, a Dubai based leading value added distributor for IT security products today announced the availability of the latest array of Common Criteria EAL 4+ gateprotect firewalls in the Middle East region. The EAL4+ certification under Common Criteria was evaluated by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in Germany. This certification is the most important international security standard for IT security products. For products that are freely available in the market, level 4+ is the highest possible level of evaluation. Sudarshan S. Avadhany, Sales Director - MENA at gateprotect, said “EAL 4+ certification assures customers that a security product is robust and was methodically defined, tested and verified. This is assured not only by the independent auditors, but also by the very high level of examination based on standards that are acknowledged worldwide. We are proud that our procedures and our development have been examined by an institution like the BSI and obtained an official quality label by way of the successful certification“ The next generation firewalls from gateprotect protect companies of any size against malware attacks, viruses, unauthorized access and misuse. They are characterized by a multitude of sophisticated security features – as well as optimal scalability, security and performance.
New extensions to RealPresence Platform delivers Lync 2013 Interoperability Polycom has announced broad interoperability for Microsoft Lync 2013 that includes new qualified Polycom voice solutions and a new software extension to the Polycom RealPresence Platform that will deliver interoperability between Lync 2013 and the full portfolio of Polycom standards-based video collaboration and content sharing solutions. These announcements further the extensive partnership between the two companies, building on Polycom’s portfolio of 40 video, voice and content sharing solutions that are interoperable or optimised to work with Lync 2010 today. Together, Microsoft and Polycom offer the most complete UC&C portfolio at the lowest total cost of ownership. "With today’s announcement, Polycom will deliver the broadest interoperability for Lync 2013 in our industry,” said Andy Miller, President and CEO, Polycom. “The majority of companies choose Polycom and Microsoft over other vendors for a complete UC&C solution today, and we will continue to ensure that our joint customers have a superior collaboration experience, unmatched interoperability and investment protection. The combination of Polycom and Microsoft software provides a seamless UC solution for video, voice, conferencing and collaboration, from anywhere, anytime, and drives increased productivity across organisations.”
MDS Computers launches Cloud Centre of Excellence MDS Computers has launched a Cloud Centre of Excellence in the UAE and the region.The new MDS Computers centre, is built entirely around the latest technology using the HP CloudSystem Matrix, which delivers a virtualized pool of network, storage, and computing resources that can be optimized and adjusted to meet the dynamic business demands of its users. Nader Eid, MDS Computers General Manager says: “MDS is referred to as one of the leading providers of cloud computing solutions. We are extremely proud to set up the first Cloud Centre of Excellence in the whole region. The MDS Computers centre will be open to our clients and other stakeholders to demonstrate and experience the fully fledged Cloud Center of Excellence.” Built on technologies provided by HP such as HP BladeSystem and HP Matrix Operating Environment, The CloudSystem Matrix can be combined with HP Storage to deliver a fully integrated solution at all time. The HP CloudSystem Matrix is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) for private and hybrid cloud environments; it allows users to provision physical and virtual infrastructures in minutes. This offering includes a self-service infrastructure portal for quick autoprovisioning, along with built-in lifecycle management to optimize infrastructure, manage the resource pools, and help ensure uptime.
Spectrami Enables its Channel Partners to Grow Faster Spectrami conducted a series of technical training workshop called ‘Spectrami Tech Workshop’ for its partners spread all across the region. The Tech Workshop focused on the technologies that it carries in its portfolio like SIEM, Advanced Threat Protection, Real Time Threat Intelligence and Vulnerability Management among others. Spectrami provided technical training to its channel partners on key products and solutions from LogRhythm, General Dynamics Fidelis, Invincea, Tenable and Verdasys to further enhance their knowledge, skill sets, technical capabilities empower and update them about the latest trends in both regional as well as global market place. Experts from both Spectrami and its respective vendors gave presentation and training to enhance the understanding of both technology and product. This will enable its channel partners to engage more proficiently with their customers and help them close deals much faster pace. Anand Choudha, Managing Director, Spectrami, said, "We are extremely happy with the response from our channel partners to attend these Tech Workshops. This overwhelming support from our partners reflects their commitment and faith in these world class technologies. It has been our mission to empower our partners to open up new avenues for their growth.
DVCOM Awarded Digium Pinnacle Partner Award DVCOM Technology, a leading solutions provider of Open Source VoIP Telephony, has been awarded a Digium Pinnacle Partner award in the category ‘outstanding sales and service of Switchvox Business Phone Systems and Asterisk Custom Communications.’ Renjan George, MD at DVCOM said, “We are very pleased and honoured to receive this award which recognizes our fast growth status and collaboration with Digium.” “We have seen rapid growth in Digium business over the last few years. Our company’s VoIP expertise and UC capabilities combined with Digium’s compelling product portfolio has led to this continued growth. ” George added. The Pinnacle Partner awards are presented annually to leading Digium partners who have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with Digium and driving customer success for Switchvox Unified Communications (UC) and Asterisk Custom Communications solutions. DVCOM was selected on the bases of annual sales and commitment to customer satisfaction.
April 2013 | 9
News In-Detail
Nidal Abou Latif Vice Presedent, MEA & Turkey Avaya
Avaya enables partners to address the growing mid-size market R
ecognizing the unprecedented opportunity to address the needs of millions of underserved mid-size enterprise across the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, or the companies earmarked to become ‘The New Big’ enterprises of tomorrow,’ Avaya, a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services,has launched their a region-specific program for AvayaConnect partners. The program, designed for AvayaConnect partners,is set to aggressively address and understand the needs and challenges of the midmarket throughout the Middle East Africa and Turkey, which requires simplified
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solutions thatmeet changing customerdemands for collaboration and mobility while still keeping costs low. Avaya’s new programis fully fledged with sales incentive that motivates partners’ sales teams to win more deals as well as rewards the partner organization with aggressive rebates schemes when increasing revenue in the midmarket segment. The program also provides a seven day course for channel partners held at the company’s new regional training center at Dubai Silicon Oasis, partners will learn new sales methods, as well as receive sixteen training certificates in voice, data, video and networking, which will empower our channel in
addressing the full needs of their customer’s. On top of these program benefits, Avaya will offer marketing funding support to participating partners to take their message out to the market. “Evolving with the regional market and supplying our channel with the tools and solutions needed to address its fastest-growing segment – SMEs -- is key for us at Avaya,” said Nidal Abou-Latif, VP of Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. “Avaya’s aggressive new program enables our channel partners to address the challenges faced by the region’s mid-size enterprises, sometimes referred to as the ‘ants of the economy’ as despite of the lower number of
staff than large organizations, they carry more than 20 times their weight in terms of productivity.” Avaya believes it has the right solutions to properly equip its channel partners in resolving the challenges faced by mid-sized organizations. The new program will assist Avaya partners in increasing gross margin and profitability, without requiring complex engineers to install the solutions, which will enable them to address all the needs of their customers at lower costs. By providing solutions that are affordable and simple to use giving the regions mid-size businesses – The New Big – competitive advantage, cost savings and the ability to grow.
News In-Detail
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enior Cisco Executives outlined the company’s strategy for the Middle East region in 2013 at Cisco Connect 2013 UAE. Led by Cisco’s Managing Director for the UAE, Rabih Dabboussi the focus of the press sessions was on how Cisco would drive its business forward in the region in 2013 with an emphasis on continued investment in the Middle East region, a heightened focus on ICT skills training as well as new technology capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunities for businesses and individuals in the region This year’s rebranded and expanded flagship technology event, which was held at the Atlantis the Palm Hotel, in Dubai, boosted an unprecedented 2000 attendees and provided a platform for Cisco to discuss and showcase current ICT trends such as the Internet of Everything (IoE), and how organizations and government throughout the Middle East can leverage these trends to drive business success and make their visions possible. According to Dabboussi,
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“Cisco’s operations in the Middle East have continued to grow year on year representing a product and services business that is one of the largest in Cisco’s Emerging Theater within Europe, Middle East Africa and Russia (EMEAR). Cisco is committed to collaborate with indigenous organizations and governments in the Middle East to help support plans for further accelerated development. In 2013 company’s focus will continue to be is information communications technology (ICT) energy, the critical national infrastructure, education, healthcare, defense & national security and the service provider market”. Rabih Dabboussi, continued, “Our goal is to drive customer and partner success by making it easier to do business with Cisco in the Middle East region. As we continue to align with country agendas we will continue to focus on creating job opportunities for the growing youth population who are entering the workforce today and in the future.”
Rabih Dabboussi, Managing Director, Cisco, UAE
Cisco outlines regional strategy at Cisco Connect UAE 2013
Howard Charney, Senior Vice President, Office of the President, one of the speakers at the event focused on the Internet of Everything (IoE) and how it already changing the world as we know it today. This means new opportunities, new businesses, new experiences and new services as well as big opportunities for people, companies, and countries. Den Sullivan, Head of Architectures and Enterprise, Emerging Theatre, Cisco in his address discussed Cisco’s new unified access products designed to simplify operations as need increases to connect more people, data, processes
and things to the network in the Middle East. Peter Ford, Managing Director, Cisco Consulting Services discussed how big data is already transforming businesses today and playing an integral role in defining new processes to aid in new innovation. Participants also benefited from presentations and technology breakout sessions delivered by Cisco subject matter experts, as well as Cisco partner workshops. These sessions also embraced technology topics such as cloud, collaboration, video, virtualization and borderless networks.
Ahmed Kattab, VP Sales, Growth Markets, Vision Solutions
News Feature | Vision Solutions
A new vision
Tight IT budgets and growing awareness are coaxing local service providers into considering taking their data recovery solutions to the cloud. Vision Solutions is keen to be the vendor of choice in providing this very service.
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egional cloud service providers stand to save a bundle as data recovery and backup goes to the cloud, thanks to leading replication, availability and disaster recovery services provider, Vision Solutions. Vision Solution’s new Cloud Protection & Recovery (CP&R) offering, based on the company’s Double-Take and MIMIX products, enables cloud service providers to accelerate their cloud businesses by offering their customers Recovery-as-aService (RaaS), providing them the advantage of a simplified pay-per-use pricing. “The cost of maintaining data centre is steep and our customers wanted a way of reducing their costs and that is why we came
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up with RaaS,” said Ahmad Kattab, VP for Sales in Growth markets for Vision Solutions. Gartner expects RaaS to continue to grow as a logical extension to cloud infrastructure services with worldwide RaaS spending grow to $1.2 billion by 2017, a CAGR of 21% from 2012. For Vision, business in the MEA region grew by 15% year-on-year from 2012 while demand for the company’s solutions in the market grew by 5%. A key component of the RaaS model from Vision is the metered usage feature allowing cloud providers to consume licenses of Vision Solutions’ Disaster Recovery, Migration and High Availability solutions in a pay-as-yougo fashion. “This offering
reduces business risks for cloud providers and helps create affordable cloud-based DR, HA and Migration solutions for the end-user,” explained Henry Martinez, VP Sales Engineering at Vision Solutions. Flexibility also means supporting other software and solutions through the provision of Software Development Kit (SDK). Double-Take SDK offers cloud providers the ability to use APIs for custom integration of Double-Take into their cloud ecosystem. This enables a higher degree of automation and helps reduce administrative costs for cloud providers, Martinez said. “We are platform-independent. If clients want to provide cloud storage by putting it in two different kinds of devices,
we provide them the tools to expose their infrastructure and do the billing,” said Martinez. In the age of mergers and acquisitions, buyouts and business failures, there’s a new kind of disaster that companies have to deal with that’s driven by commercial needs and the need to move valuable data. Computers are not that important anymore, it’s the information inside those computers that is crucial. “If a company goes bankrupt,” Martinez explained, “there’s anacquiring company that comes in. They already have their computers; what they need is the data inside those computers. So we provide the tools to take that data and move it to their computers.”Sometimesthough, the data is in a different operating system or a different data base. Vision is able to transform that data and move it to the new database or we move it from HPUX to Windows, Linux, or IAX. “We are the tool company,” Martinez concluded. Vision prides itself on being able to deal with real data centre scenarios and all its uncertainties. This would include customers who put up their data in the cloud and then decide to get it off due to a possible security issue. “Our solutions would go from cloud to virtual or physical to cloud in one step,” explained Martinez. “Many of our competitors are only able to go from virtual to virtual,while a few others are able to go from virtual to cloud. But when you have to come down to the physical layer, we are the people you come to.”
Henry Martinez, VP Sales Engineering, Vision Solutions
A typical scenario where Vision solutions would come to play would be if data in an organization got accidentally erased both on the client and the server. Vision’s replication softwareoffers the concept of continuous data protection. “When such things happen, you can simply go back in time to the time when these two files existed. You can rescue the file to restore it and this minimizes a lot of downtime for companies,” said Ahmad. A lot of data is lost due to human errorwith no bad intentions and not always through natural disasters, explained Ahmad. We protect the “usual stuff”. In a region undergoing bouts of instability, having a data backup system in a more stable locale is sound business practise. “We are a global company with a local flavour,” said Ahmad. “Our technology can take local replication of your data at the local level and then have it stored somewhere elsethat is more secure.”
DR as a Service Market worth $5.7 Billion by 2018 T
he global DRaaS and business continuity market is estimated to grow from $640.8 million in 2013 to $5.77 billion by 2018 according to Research firm Markets and Markets. This represents a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.2% from 2013 to 2018. Implementation of RaaS in organizations is expected to increase in order to ensure business continuity and to minimize future investments on IT infrastructure. The RaaS and business continuity markets, along with each of their sub-segments are further bifurcated by region. The bifurcation includes North America (NA), Europe, AsiaPacific; including Japan (APAC), Latin America (LA), Middle East and Africa (MEA). Over the next five years, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe and North America is expected to experience increased market traction, by increasing awareness on cloud based technologies driving this market. MarketsandMarkets has segmented the global Recovery-asa-Service market based on types, storage, providers, verticals and organization size. The RaaS types segment comprises of self disaster recovery model, hardware to cloud disaster recovery, cloud to cloud disaster recovery model; whilst the storage types have been segmented based on 1 TB and below, 1 TB 10 TB, 10 TB and above. The RaaS providers segment comprises of disaster recovery service providers, cloud service providers, Telecom and communications service
providers (CSP), technology partners and suppliers, and others. The vertical segment comprises of banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), E-commerce and web, academia and government, manufacturing, healthcare and others. Organization size comprises of small office / home office (SOHO), small and medium businesses (SMB) as well as enterprises. The major forces driving the market are factors such as low cost, high level of automation, dynamism, 24*7 support, secure storage and backup, location independence, virtualization, easy deployability, recovery, management and control, along with high utility based Business Continuity. At the same time, customers are concerned about security and privacy in terms of cloud based DR implementation. Disaster recovery and business continuity has been in the market since the late 2000s. However, the buzz among organizations about DR and business continuity is just a few years old. DRaaS is expected to replace IT infrastructure burden with cost effective and reliable solutions. The report also profiles major market players in the cloud based DR space, which includes VMware, EVault, Geminare, NTT America, Windstream Communications, CA technologies, Microsoft, IBM, Carpathia Hosting, CommVault, HP, Doyenz, FusionStorm, Rackspace, Amazon web services, nScaled, SunGard, Datto, OpSource and Zerto amongst others.
April 2013 | 15
News Feature | Visionaire
Online education gets a shot in the arm Universities in the region have an opportunity to reach thousands more students thanks to a cheaper online learning platform recently launched by Visionaire.
Visionaire is leveraging its UC capabilities to deliver the classroom of the future in the regionthroughopen source technology. Visionaire, with its partner company Arrive Systems, has brought the Matterhorn OpenCast technology in the UAE with hopes of providing local universities with an economical online platform to deliver classes tomany more students. The OpenCast technology was collaboratively built by Berkeley and ETH Zurich universities. Thirteen universities then joined the Matterhorn OpenCast Project to produce the lecture capture solution on a large scale and built the entire platform. Visionaire will work as system integrators for the project. “Our partner company Arrive builds the capture hardware based on specifications provided,” said
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Aseem Gupta, Chief Visionary at Visionaire. “Matterhorn is a large server software that does all the injecting of the video, creating and optimizing it for the internet and then catalogues, publishes and extracts it to make it ideal for a student to re-repeat these lectures on a regular basis. So, when you combine the hardware and software, this becomes a very powerful solution.” OpenCast, according to its promoters, is an open source based community that works in collaboration of individuals, higher education institutions and organizations to develop best practices and technologies for management of audiovisual content in academia. The community shares experiences with existing technologies and practices, thus identifying future approaches and requirements. The community also seeks broad participation
to allow members share expertise and experiences and collaborate in related projects. Most people are reluctant when they hear “Open Source”, according to Aseem. Linux has however shown how successful open source technology can become. “Matterhorn is built on this scale and one can do thousands of classes at a time using this method,” said Aseem. The OpenCast technology provides the ability to virtually archive and broadcast training, lecture and classroom sessions over the internet for "timeless" views while creating a library of rich media resources for use by educators and trainers. The video is offered in Full HD, integrated with voice and presentation feeds and presented on any connected device, mobile or fixed to display video, voice and presentation on the same screen.
Aseem Gupta Chief Visionary, Visionaire
The Arrive View Point solution from Arrive Systems is based on OpenCast platform and offers the HD low-cost lecture recording appliance. This solution removes the need for a dedicated computer capture agent at the presenters' side, reducing connectors, space and power consumption, maintenance, spares and backups. This can in turn save money, thus simplifying installation and increasing reliability with fewer devices in the classroom, explained Aseem. “What we are giving is the opportunity to be able to create this new blend of learning
Visionaire Continues Mission to Promote Innovations in MEA
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solution for our clients, and we sell the hardware and the service,” said Aseem. Despite the obvious benefits, adoption of lecture capture technology in the region has been hindered by the high cost of proprietary software. Commercial lecture capture solutions are very expensive and the software alone can cost an institution around 60,000USD, according to Aseem. The institution will still have to invest in the capture hardware and with the addition of microphones and cameras in the classroom, the cost adds up to an additional 18,000-20,000USD per classroom. Theproprietary software itself is locked and one has to go back to the vendors for any additional services or upgrades. Matterhorn on the other hand is offering this open solution for free.“Matterhorn was built by universities, for universities and so they decided to keep it open. The system is free and will cost nothing for the licenses,” said Aseem. Universities generally operate under very tight budgets. The few universities that can afford the CAPEX do not even have the means to sustain the system. UAE University will be the first institution in the region to implement the Matterhorn system, a project that will be running before the second half of this year. Visionaire will install the system in 85 classrooms. Visionaire has been providing lecture capture technology since 2005 but with few takers because of the high cost overlay. This time around, Visionaire is hoping to make money on volume. “We will be able to sell more of the open source solution rather than a few expensive ones as a lot more schools can now afford this solution,” said Aseem. Visionaire will install the Arrive solution for around 3,500 USD per classroom.
isionaire, a leading Information & Communication Technology (ICT) solution provider in the Middle East, was for the 4th year in a row a Gold Sponsor for Innovations, the International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology. Innovations ’13, was a three day conference organized by College of Information Technology, UAE University, Al Ain, UAE from 17th to 19th March 2013. This is the 9th edition of the conference which over the years has evolved to become a leading forum to address, discuss and exchange knowledge on all disciplines of Information Technology (IT). It provides an excellent opportunity to present theoretical, experimental and visionary research results and work in progress papers in various topics of IT. The event featured a panel of world-renowned speakers from all across the globe highlighting the challenges and opportunities in the IT landscape that can enable new innovations to reshape the future of this region. Topics of discussion would include Communication Networks, Information Security, Computing and Embedded Systems, Intelligent and Software Systems, Intelligent and Software Systems, Communication Networks, Applications and Web Service. During the conference, Visionaire promoted OpenCast Matterhorn platform within the education community targeting both educators and researchers. The new platform is based on open-source that supports the management of educational audio and video content (see related story). This technology serves as lecture capture, streaming to manage lecture recordings, existing video,
Aneeta Gupta Director & Group CEO Visionaire
serve designated distribution channels, and provide user interfaces to engage students with educational videos. Aneeta Gupta, Director & Group CEO at Visionaire, said: “We have been associated with International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology since 2008 and have always found it to be an inspiring experience. This year we are mainly highlighting new tools based on OpenCast Matterhorn platform and products like Arrive ViewPoint that will influence the dynamics of learning within and beyond the classroom for both higher education and research community in the region.”
April 2013 | 17
Cover Feature | Virtualization
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hile Virtualization is not new, its importance is better understood and the value more appreciated now. With most customers having deployed virtualization in varying degrees in their datacentres, trends of IT investments in this direction are becoming quite-objective driven. Customers are in a position to make more informed decisions and they are taking a hard look at various options rather than adopt a single vendor approach. George De Bono, GM at Red Hat says, “Virtualization is a mature product - thus many customers are currently looking for a second source of virtualization. New projects are still driven by consolidation and hardware saving in the first place. Also many customers want to take advantage of
multivendor platforms that besides optimizing costs also gives them options to look at solutions that justify different requirementswith best perceived results. This also provides customers the advantage of mitigating risk rather than have all eggs in one basket, such as banking on one stop virtualization strategy with a single vendor. Laurence James, Product Alliance & Solutions Marketing Manager at NetApp says, “We are seeing customers seeking to inject more competition into the hypervisor market. The licensing costs and complexity rise so the investment in multiple hypervisor technologies is following a well-trodden path of multivendor policy designed to ensure a healthy competitive landscape.” Customers who have
also give them room to scale. Yannick Kunegel, Technical Manager at Citrix MENA says, “Hypervisors tend to become commodity, with multiple products satisfying enterprise needs. With this in mind, many customers are now running multiple hypervisors in their datacenter and there are various reasons for this. First, cost remains an important decision factor. Apart from the software cost itself, some workloads do perform better on some hypervisors vs others, which contributes to reducing infrastructure requirements and as a result the overall cost of a solution. Secondly, removing the dependency to a single hypervisor minimizes the risk impacting the entire datacenter down in case of a bug/failure affecting the software. History has proven such thing can happen and that risk can’t
Interoperability is key and Microsoft offers interoperability through the System Central Server, part of Windows Sever 2012. System Central` Server is the core management software that allows management of virtualization, private cloud and the public cloud not just on Microsoft’s Technology, but also on VMware and other platforms. It helps us to seamlessly build a system where its customers can get the best benefits out their data center investments but can also easily be extended to other hosted or other data centers. Goksel Topbas, Server & Tools Business Group Lead for Microsoft Gulf says, “Within our cloud solution you do not necessarily need to have Hyper V; you may have VMware for instance and this is the major differentiation of our
Virtual Benefits Customers now moving into advanced deployments of virtualised solutions will be more objective driven about options that suits them best rather than take a one vendor approach the efficiencies public clouds have shown to them. Linux normally is a big part of those infrastructures. Virtualization is a first step onto the way of a Private or Hybrid Cloud.” The multi hypervisor environment,for instance is now truly here and customers are looking at investing in
18 | April 2013
already deployed some form of Virtualisation and looking to further consolidate their infrastructure, are most likely to study options. Cost efficiencies and the fact that there is better interoperability than in the past may well drive them towards a multihypervisor strategy which may
be completely ignored. Third, support is critical and if a vendor can provide full support for not only the hypervisor but also the virtualized workloads, this is usually well perceived. Most resellers in the region do have the expertise to deliver enterprise solutions based on different hypervisors.”
cloud solution. However, since almost 85% of all workloads running on virtual machines are Microsoft workloads like Exchange etc, those workloads can have tighter integration with Hyper-V. Our workloads always run faster on Hyper-V and we have full insight and if there’s an issue we address
those issues much faster and better. With Windows Server 2012, we have seen faster acceleration in our market share. In the UAE, we have doubled our market share in virtualization in the last one year and we are number one in the market. Customers value us because they see our platform is not closed.”
Goksel Topbas, Server & Tools Business Group Lead Microsoft Gulf
now when it is easier to visualise “Almost all workloads can be virtualized nowadays, the advantages. It and with the emergence of Mobility and BYOD allows customer to initiatives, the demand for virtualizing desktop take decisions on workloads is also rapidly increasing." capacity planning for processes and allocate as required. Topbas says, straight forward- consolidate This is necessary to keep “Virtualization is the core hardware resources, drastically pace with growing volumes technology that enables the reduce CAPEX by a factor of of demand that traditional cloud. Virtualization helps us to 20, decrease OPEX as well. We architectures will struggle to utilize our version of hardware have some breakup figures handle. to use at the highest density. of how companies derive Kunegel adds “Most Previously, you were installing different kinds of benefits in datacenters are virtualized in More virtualized one operating system and you the various stages of their the Middle-East. Even more, if workloads were probably able to use journey towards the cloud.” this hasn’t been done already, Virtualization deployments 15-20% utilization rate. With He adds, “What we have many organizations are now have become broad based virtualization, you can use up found is that all customers working on transforming their within organizations. Many to 95% of the hardware. Today find CAPEX and OPEX infrastructure to a private critical workloads are now we are talking about server savings as soon as they start cloud, adding some level of virtualized but organizations virtualization. orchestration/automation. may still opt to keep In fact it is Almost all workloads can be virtualization out of some virtualized nowadays, and with proportionate to critical areas. the percentage the emergence of Mobility and James adds, “There remain of Virtualisation. BYOD initiatives, the demand workloads that are ring-fenced The customers for virtualizing desktop from virtualization, such as who begin to workloads is also rapidly high transaction databases, see topline increasing.” where low latency and high benefits are the Companies who have throughput are important for one who begin firsthand experienced the consistent response times. to do high level Business value of deploying But outside of this specific of automation. Virtualization are keener to workload the opportunity to You can drive further scale up virtualization virtualize all workloads is high. out highly deployments. There is a The percentage of virtualization virtualization significant saving on CAPEX within organizations varies environment, and OPEX for companies that wildly with some customers drastically have deployed virtualization being 90+ percent virtualized reducing people and helps companies focus while others languish at requirements better on core competencies below 20 percent. We rarely and freeing up rather than worry about IT see customers who have no resources that infrastructural bottlenecks. virtualization technologies. The can focus then Rob Jenkins. Director, number of those that have on innovation.” Advisory Services EMEA, virtualized the entire stack – The Business VMware says, “We develop server, storage and network case for Business cases associated – is increasing rapidly.” virtualization with the strategy for The majority of datacenters has never been transformation. The Business in the region have already stronger as case for Virtualization is quite deployed virtual infrastructures.
April 2013 | 19
Cover Feature | Virtualization
Laurence James Product Alliance & Solutions Marketing Manager NetApp
hardware with hundreds of processors with up to 64 ports. Imagine the power of one single server. It can actually now run a full bank now.” He adds, “Since there’s a pool of resources, you can for instance decide to run a customer campaign on a server and utilize say six virtual machines, 8GB of storage and then a certain amount of bandwidth. Then you go ahead and define this capacity from where it’s available. This helps brings business and IT very close. Previously, IT always had the challenges about how much capacity they have and how they are able to allocate capacity to the business in a short time. There was always the complaint about IT not really enabling business well and about missed opportunities in
20 | April 2013
the market. With Virtualization, Business and IT can get real close: Business can function smoothly and IT can provide the value immediately which helps the company to move fast. “ While enterprises have been traditionally more prone towards Virtualisation, SMB customers have for the larger part shied away, perhaps because of costs involved. However, the increased agility and higher availability that virtualization makes possible more than offsets the cost concerns. Virtualization also helps reduce maintenance expenses of IT infrastructures.
Yannick Kunegel Technical Manager Citrixm MENA
“It is attractive for SMB businesses because of the service protection and availability that virtualization offers, combined with the efficiency savings. The other key aspect is the flexibility virtualization affords compared with fixed application/server environments.” According to a recent survey by Techaisle, It's common for SMBs to use a mix of virtualization vendors rather than standardize on a single platform. One in three SMBs that use VMware for server virtualization may use a different vendor -- usually Citrix or Microsoft -- for client
"It's common for SMBs to use a mix of virtualization vendors rather than standardize on a single platform. One in three SMBs that use VMware for server virtualization may use a different vendor -- usually Citrix or Microsoft"
virtualization. Citrix continues to be a prominent presence in desktop virtualization and offers tailored solutions for every business—from the affordable all-in-one VDI-ina-Box for IT organizations that require simplicity to Xen Desktop which is designed for enterprises. Kunegel says, “When it comes to desktop virtualization, we do see a mix of enterprise and SMB customers in the region. While Citrix VDI in a Box makes the benefits of desktop virtualization available to businesses of all sizes, it particularly suits the needs of SMB making it easy to deliver centrally managed, personalized virtual desktops securely to any device on any network, at a fraction of the cost of other Desktop Virtualization. Enterprise
the biggest growth areas now is in tier one application virtualization. VMware is dominant in almost all of Virtualized environments and almost 80% of workloads. The easier to virtualize part of IT is done and now the need is to look at virtualizing the applications. The rate of tier one application virtualization is increasing. The only platform for which SAP offers a virtualized version is VMware. We have gone beyond the tipping point in terms of tier one Application virtualization. There is the technical acceptance and Business value is more understood.” The rise of BYOD is also driving the need to application virtualization. With the consumerization of IT, there is a need to deliver Windows based applications to any device (Windows, iOS, Android,) hence the need for centralized application virtualization solutions where users have remote access to a Windows application running in the datacenter, from any device. Kunegel says, “This concept is now also evolving with the need to deliver not only Windows applications, but also providing seamless access to any type of applications (native mobile application, Web based, SaaS) via an enterprise application store. Mobility is clearly on the agenda of many CIOs at the moment, and Citrix partners are well positioned to accompany them in these initiatives.” Virtualisation is also seen as a step towards the cloud,
while not essential by itself to enable cloud computing. As Topbas adds, “The core of this cloud technology is virtualization. The Cloud is the solution that gives all the benefits to the business including cost savings agility, convenience, business to IT and more benefits.” While virtualization may not be seen as essential before adopting cloud computing, cloud deployments in virtual environments deliver optimized results. Kunegel adds, “Virtualization is not essential before adopting cloud computing, but certainly an element of any Private Cloud solution. If an organization has not yet virtualized any workload but considering this, they have today the possibility to design and build their datacenter to enable self-service, automation and orchestration from the beginning. This is very likely what most System Integrators will suggest. “ As IT groups
automate their virtualized environment, taking advantage of resource pooling and automatic workload allocation, they can start planning to apply these efficiencies to deliver cloud capabilities to their business groups. And many are already heading in that direction. The final objectives behind all these technology deployments is to build a flexible and innovative IT infrastructure which though would no end in itself, will help foster an environment for companies to innovate and grow.
Rob Jenkins, Director, Advisory Services EMEA, VMware
customers do typically need different flavors of desktop virtualization (VDI, Shared Desktops, Virtual desktops on the go …) to satisfy all their user requirements. Moving forward, we do expect to see more and more bundled solutions available through resellers as turnkey solutions for SMB customers.” Desktop, storage and server virtualization are most prominent focus areas when it comes to virtualization deployments. However, there is acceleration on other fronts as well such as application delivery and network virtualization. Kunegel adds, “Most virtualized workloads are either server or desktop workloads. We do however see an increased interest in virtualizing network and application delivery (application acceleration, load balancing, security) services as well. This fits particularly well the needs of either organizations that do not have the budget for hardware-based appliances, or cloud providers willing to offer such services to their tenants.” An exciting development is the growing trend towards application virtualization that lets applications run on computers and handheld devices without having to be installed. Virtualisation of tier one applications which run the most critical processes is gaining further ground as customers are gaining confidence that VMs are reliable and fast. Jenkins says, “One of
April 2013 | 21
Feature | Capillary
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ith the dazzling assortment of retail outlets in the UAE, keeping a fickle clientele loyal should cause any retail manager some unease. But thanks to the cloud, the task has become that much simpler, and cheaper. Capillary Technologies is providing cloud-based software solutions that help retailers engage with customers through mobile, social and instore channels. Through these
Aneesh Reddy CEO & Co-Founder Capillary
Using the cloud, Capillary Technologies is helping local retailers attract and retain customers in the face of fierce competition.
22 | April 2013
out. The software is able to integrate with Windows/ Linux OS printer drivers and read the information from the driver itself: what exactly the customer has purchased including the bill number, the bill amount, the discount and the total number of items bought. The software autocaptures this and will instruct the cashier tocomplete the transaction by entering a customers' name, mobile number and/or card number.
need for additional support and training. Nonetheless,the company maintains support staff all over the world that would be able to provide any support when needed. “The only issue is that in retail, there are a lot of part time workers as well as high staff turnover: thesefrontline staff will need training on a regular basis; otherwise the support requirement is minimal” said Aneesh. The cloud has become to
On Cloud Nine solutions,Capillary powers endto-end customer engagement, clienteling, loyalty and social CRM solutions and instant shopper gratification to a growing legion of retailers in the region, according to Aneesh Reddy, Capillary CEO and Cofounder. Capillary, an ISO Certified company, has been in the market for 40 years, and the company’s solutions are being used in over l0, 000 stores globally.Clients in the ME region include major retail chains like Home R Us, Red Tag and othersfor different solutions, according to Vikas Tayal, Regional Head, Middle East and Africa. The Capillary application sits on the POS machine. In real time, this application reads the detailsof the receipt as its being printed
Capillary’s major strength, according to Aneesh, is the quick and simple way the software integrates with existing systems. It will typically take 7-10 days to integrate with the POS software in the store. But once a customer has integrated the system in one store, they can roll out the same batch across all the other stores. “Then we are able to provide our clients’ marketing or accounting teams with intelligent reports of what we have collected from the stores and then the client can run a campaign or a points program based on this information,” said Aneesh. In addition, Capillary software is able to do analysis in real time Capillary takes care of the installation and training remotely through the software. Generally, there's very little
signify cost savings and ease of use and CRM on the cloud is no exception. A typical retailer would who wants to install an on-site loyalty program, Aneesh explained, would go and buy a CRM Software, then acquire business intelligent software to run an analytics program before adding a campaign-management software. In addition to the three pieces of software, they will need a server and then piece all of these components together. In Capillary’s case, the software offers an end-to end solution that sits on the cloud. The same solution can be used to collect information in-store, online or in social media, then the data is fed into Capillary’scustomer intelligence tool that gives provides the insight, and then the clients can
run a campaign and push it out to the public faster. “Because all this is in the cloud, our time to go live with the retailer is around 15-20 days. With other software,the clients have to invest in servers, the different pieces of software and then integration. They would need six months to a year to go live. This is a very compelling reason for a retailer to go with a capillary solution,” said Vikas. In a typical retail scenario, a customer would buy an item of clothing andthe Capillary system would, based on what they bought,decide what else can be cross-sold to them. So as a customer is making the purchase at the point of sale, thesystem will push a coupon at the same time. “The system is also highly customized, so if for instance a customer is buying a formal pair of trousers, he will get a coupon or points towards the purchase of a formal shirtfor the same day. We have noticed that 7-10% of customers will go and make that second purchase right there and then,” said Aneesh. A typical retailer will start seeing a ROI in about three months and about 2-3% of growth in sales in about 2-3 months, according to Aneesh. Marketing managers for the retail chains do not have time to do heavy duty analysis while trying to come up with
insights. Capillary’s account managers will then go to the marketing and merchandising manager and advise them on the steps they need to take to attract and keep their customers. “If there's a retail problem, we help the retailers know how to attack it,” said Aneesh. If a retailer has a large number of stores, they can first sign up for a few stores for three months and then roll out across the board when they see the benefits. According to Aneesh, retailers who adopt a Capillary solution would typically see between 3-7% of growth in sales after a period of between a quarter and one year and about 30%improvement in retention rate: these are the new customers that they are able to convert into loyal customers. Capillary has been in the Middle East for about two years now and has already exceeded its own growth projections for the region, according to Vikas. Capillary was expecting to sign up about five retailers by the end of the second year as well as achieve the one million dollar mark between year two and three, numbers
the company has been able to hit well before that. The companyis hoping to do about 2 milliondollars’ worth of business by next year as its own market matures. Capillary solutions are diverse and flexible enough to be customized for different clients’ needs, according to Vikas. At Homes R Us, Capillary’s objective is to engage with the end consumer for the retailers to increase customers’ interaction and increase customer’s frequency to the store. “What we do for Homes R US is analyze the customer data and identify the customer different preferences in terms of buying behavior and endeavor how we can bring those customers back,” Vikas explained. For Red Tag,Capillaryis launching a loyalty program and oncethat’sin place, the company will help the marketing team come up with a better above-the-line campaign and optimize their marketing expenses and reduce costs. “Our solutions are customized forthe customer requirements. Depending on the customer business objective, we are able to
Vikas Tayal Regional Head, ME & Africa Capillary
customize the solution to them as well as the analytics we do,” said Vikas. And loyalty programs could soon be coming to a smartphone near you. Aneesh reckons Consumers do not have the capacity to carry 10 loyalty cards and Capillary can run customer campaign on mobile number or email address. In
Because all this is in the cloud, our time to go live with the retailer is around 15-20 days. With other software, they would need six months to a year to go live.
other markets, the company is already running campaigns using Google Wallet and Apple Passbook. April 2013 | 23
TechKnow | Riverbed
Risk Averse Data in remote branch sites is at risk from various fronts. Granite products from Riverbed enable the consolidation of storage infrastructures from branch offices back to the data center without inhibiting branch application performance. Senior Product Marketing Manager Brent Lees explains.
Discuss any specific threats that businesses in the Middle East face that makes data backup necessary An obvious example is the recent earthquake that rocked the Middle East.The problems of leaving data anywhere where it's vulnerable is that if your branch site was in the centre of natural disaster like that and the property was damaged, then all that data would be lost. However,backingupthat data using a product like Granite and then keeping that data in a more safe environment somewhere off-site, it becomes easy to keep that data safe. In addition, one needs to consider the politics of some of the countries of the Middle East. A lot of organizations would be nervous about storing corporate data in some of the volatile countries and cities within the region. Having a product like Granite would protect that data in the branch site in that vulnerable city, by backing it up in the data centre within the confines of their own country. In other countries in the region, concerns are of a different kind. In certain parts of Africafor instance, crime is themajor issue that clients are more concerned about. How much in CAPEX would an average business require deploying a Granite solution(s) and what would be their ROI? Some organizations would of course benefit more than othersbased on their hardware and IT resources. Generally though, for organizations consolidating their data from the branches, we are seeing about 50% in cost savings in a typical setting. CAPEX would depend on thesize organization. It could start at a few thousand dollars for a few sites, but if you have a large corporation with hundreds of sites, then you can go up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and beyond depending in the nature
24  |  April 2013
of the business, the type of communication and the amount of data that is being sent. Discuss any integration that you can provide with Granite and other solutions from the Riverbed portfolio Granite can be sold as a separate device without the need for bundling with solutions such as Riverbed WAN optimization. However, a lot of enterprises that are dispersed over quite a large geography will probably benefit from a sort of WAN optimization solution. In a lot of times, we will sell Granite in conjunction with a Steelhead product. And this is why it fits nicely if you get the Granite software and the branch will fit in the Steelhead appliance as well. The final outlay of the Granite and Steelhead will be less if you team them together than if you deployeach in isolation. Sothere are sensible business reasons to do that as well. So if you have dispersed sites all across a region, you may require WAN acceleration and WAN optimization as well as consolidation of that branch data back in the data centre. What are the key benefits accrued from consolidating data at the data centre? If you have data in all these remote sites and you have non-IT personnel doing the data backup, chances of major errors occurring will be high. But if you can centralize that data in the data centre, than the process of backup is that much easier to as the data centre is where your IT experts are. Further, if a company wishes to back up the data centre itself and have a secondary one, we have WAN optimization and WAN acceleration tools that facilitate that within our portfolio. For companies that want to back up to the cloud, we have the tools to do that as well. The whole portfolio of Riverbed products complements
Brent Lees Senior Product Marketing Manager Riverbed
each other and help an organization do the consolidation bit as well as the back-up. Discuss your solutions for the SMB market who lack the luxury of expensive data centres For SMBs that may not have the money to deploy major data centres or afford the IT expertise to maintain them, companies like Amazon are providing back-up solutions for core data for companies to store and back up their data at a low cost. Riverbed has number of tools that allow that backup if that data over the Internet or Wide Area connection into Amazon and other cloud service providers. Customers can still get the solutions that they would expect from Riverbed like de-duplication or some level of encryption as well as a certain amount of storage. This will enable a customer keep some certain amount of data in the data centre even though it has been backed up, thus allowing it to be recovered very quickly if need be.
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TechKnow | eHostingDataFort
Staying on top
Yasser Zeineldin Chief Executive Officer, Dubai eHostingDataFort With world-class data centres, resilient and scalable infrastructure as well as roundthe-clock managed operations, eHostingDataFort has established itself as a market leader in the field of hosting and managed IT services. eHDF is the only managed service provider with three production and disaster recovery data centres in Dubai and with a reputation for hosting prestigious enterprise and government clients.Chief Executive Officer Yasser Zeineldin of eHostingDataFort elaborates on some of the trends in the industry as well as some of the challenges that service providers face
26 | April 2013
What are the growth trends among the services you offer? We offer co-location services, Managed services and cloud services. Some aspects of collocation and Managed hosting services are showing greater growth, predominantly, DR and Business continuity solutions. We have pretty large number of clients holding their mission critical systems with us. In case there are outages, there would be automatic failover to DR systems, typically in Minutes to an hour. Besides, there is always real time data replication and all instances of data are already stored on DR systems. Managed hosting services is seeing good traction. We provide not only co-location but also security including Firewalls, server monitoring. We have SLA agreements with customers so that they focus only on Applications and don’t have to worry about operational aspects. Discuss major customer segments for you? We have a large number of clients in the public and government sector including Dubai e-Government, Ministry of Public works, federal Government. In the Consumer Electronics segment, we have Panasonic. In the Financial sector, we have Dubai Financial Markets, Duniya Finance etc. We have a variety of clients for Managed Services because customers
are seeing huge benefits from working with a service provider. The strategic benefits include the considerable less time to market and the fact that they don’t have to worry about technology upgrades. It reduces CAPEX considerably. The operational benefits are considerable since it partly helps resolve the issues of hiring, maintaining, retaining in-house staff otherwise required for managing IT. The certified, 24 by 7 support is something customers find valuable instead of having to do it on their own. We use ITEL framework. We are perhaps the only company certified on Business continuity (BS 25999). We are certified on IT security management (ISO 27001 - the only auditable international standard which defines the requirements for an Information Security Management System), IT service management (ISO 20000 - Describes an integrated set of management processes for the effective delivery of services to the business and its customers) etc. What are the challenges for a service provider in terms of keeping up to date with certifications for engineers? Even if companies have all IT systems in place, it is difficult to have all certifications. Typical challenges for the SI are of economies of scale and scalability. We choose areas carefully. For instance, we
don’t as of now focus on Applications because that is very wide spectrum. However, we do offer expertise in infrastructural and operational aspects that can be leveraged and optimized by offering to many customers along with system management tools that we offer to do this in an effective manner. We try to standardize on a number of key components from a technology standpoint. While we don’t get into many vertical specific applications, we do look into horizontal applications like messaging, portals etc that are similar in nature across segments. Some service providers do get their hands burnt because they might have won a large project but signing it off by meeting customer expectations can be a challenge if you don’t really don’t know how to liaison with the Business and set the scope. We continue to focus on our forte and where we do best where this can add real value to customers. Are there occasions when there is gap in customer understanding and expectations? Depending on how sophisticated the IT operations of the client are, they can understand the issues and challenges. We typically explain and give examples to further their understanding of requirements and possible gaps. For instance, if you are handling application monitoring for a client, you will pass on the alerts. However, if the customer does not ask you to monitor a sub-service that can affect the overall targeted service, then you can have a challenge in expectations. We have tools to monitor at all levels. Monitoring only a part can be misleading. Some customers who are familiar with systems monitoring tools can understand from the scope. With certain customers however, we work on expectation setting and management exercise at the beginning and once that is done, it works out fine.
eHostingDataFort showcases Managed Hosting Solutions at DC Tops Middle East
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HostingDataFort (eHDF) concluded a successful participation at the DC Tops Middle East event. Held on 19 March, at the Burj Al Arab Hotel, the event saw the world's leading data centre manufacturers, technology and service providers showcasing the latest technology advancements, developments, standards, practices and concepts under one roof. eHDF highlighted its managed hosting solutions that enable customers to use a service provider’s expertise to effectively manage all aspects of IT infrastructure, from their data centre to core IT infrastructure including servers, networks, storage, back-up and security. The eHDF delegation was led by their Chief Executive Officer Yasser Zeineldin. Over the course of the event, the eHDF team highlighted its expertise in delivering Managed Data Centre services to enterprises in the financial services, government, media, entertainment and other key sectors in the industry. The team also spoke on trends, future technologies and the regional outlook.
Zeineldin said, “Our participation in this event allows us to share our latest market offerings and network with other industry experts and partners to exchange insights and ideas on maximizing the value of services to our customers.” Data Center Tops is an exclusive data center technology conference for elite corporate and government executives, where data center "top" owners, operators, providers and vendors gather in one place, at one time. DC Tops is the world’s only exclusive data center event, which is for VIPs only, aimed for latest standards, best practices and “future” technologies. eHostingDataFort has established itself as a market leader in the field of hosting and managed IT services with its multiple state-of-the-art Tier 3 data centres, resilient and scalable infrastructure and round-the-clock managed operations. The company has also been recognised as a ‘Best Managed Service Provider of the Year’ for four years consecutively, as well as ‘Best Colocation Facility’ in 2010 and 2011.
April 2013 | 27
Feature | SonicWALL
as anti-intrusion andcontent filtering devices. Organizations then built layers within their networks resulting in disparate networks that, by default, became very difficult to manage. In response, vendors launched UTMs specifically for the SMB market, where theycould put all these security features in a single device. The challenge became how to scale these systems for larger businesses and the enterprise. The market also needed to
Rising to the Challenge
Andy Zollo Regional Director EMEA Dell-SonicWALL
N
ext Generation firewalls from SonicWALL are raising the level of protection in an era of powerful and complex threats. The firewall of yesteryears just cannot copewith the security risks organizations face today. Their technology has become obsolete as they are unable to inspect the data payload of network packets sentby cyber criminalstoday. These firewalls use
28 | April 2013
other hand can identify applications flowing through the networks. So now one can visualize and see what is happening on the network in real timeas well asthe applicationsrunning such as Salesforce or YouTubeamong others. Having the ability to identify applicationsgives the IT manager the capability to decide what they want to do with them. With traditional firewalls, you had to block a site like YouTube or Facebook in its
You cannot put new wine into old bottles, old wisdom holds. The same rings true for online security. theStateful Packet Inspection Engine (SPIE) technology which would basically identifythe message’s header, whereit’s coming from, where it's going and then allow the traffic through, said Andy Zollo, Regional Director EMEA for Dell-SonicWALL. These firewalls had done a good job providing the perimeter protectionup to this point. Afterwards IT managers realized they needed additional devices such
get over the prejudice that UTMs were an exclusively SMB technology. The solution was a new kind of a firewall. “What the next-generation firewall did was the ability to scale on the performance side while alsogiving the user the very useful application inspection feature,” said Zollo. A traditional firewall would look at and identify the basicssuch asIP addresses, explained Zollo. Nextgeneration firewalls on the
entirety.But a lot ofthese web 2.0 applications like Facebook and Twitter have a lot of business uses today. With next-generation firewalls, you can blockapplicationswithin a website itself. For instance, you could block only the games application onFacebook while other features within the site continue to be accessible to employees.The network administrator can also decide how much bandwidth an application is allowed to use.
“Next generation for SonicWALL. firewall gives you According to Zollo, "application control has now been added in addition a granular level SonicWALL was to the UTM technology. If this was not the case, an of control that is long considered of real business more of a medium organization would need to deploy an additional benefit. Businesses business appliance appliance doing the application management" can now be able in many parts of to enforce their IT the world. This policy,” said Zollo. association with right on the right hand side, The next generation According to Shahnawaz Dell moves SonicWALL into a the area where every vendor firewall technology isstill at Sheikh, Regional Director, larger customer base and also wants to be. On intrusionthe education stage. “We Dell-SonicWALL Middle East larger organizations that they prevention tests, SonicWALL are training people and & Turkey, SonicWALL has could not reach before, based still ended up on the right hand on the Dell brand recognition. engaging in a lot ofpractical not only added processing corner evenagainst dedicated demonstrations and a lot of power to the new firewall but “The word has already devices. “We build this business managers are getting more functionalities as well. gone out about our association hardware platform which is not with Dell and we are seeing itresulting in budgets being “For example, application only scalable; it also offers so freed for these firewalls,” control has now been added accelerated deals through what much performance as we have we call the ‘Dell Effect’. This said Zollo, adding“98% of in addition to the UTM added a lot other functions to all firewalls in organizations technology. If this was not the association has taken us to a it. Even with all these other arenot next-gen, so there's case, an organization would whole new level of partners functions, performance is never and our channel has grown as huge market potential in need to deploy an additional affected. The architecture we appliance doing the application customers upgrading their a result of that,” said Zollo. have engineered is a chassis systems.” management. So you are able “You have brand with blades so if you want Next-generation firewalls to manage numerous security recognition, SonicWALL more performance, just add are a real Proof of Concept processes in a single device. technology and the scalability more blades in,” Zollo added. (PoC) technology, said Zollo, In future, you still have the and ease of use of the The SonicWALL nextso resellers can install the scalability if you still need appliance. This is the perfect generation line-up’s signature appliance on a trial basis. anything added on.” bundle that we are taking appliance is the SuperMassive, Customers will then be shown The need for next to the market enabling us offering the same technology which threats the SonicWALL generation firewall has also to acquire larger accounts for enterprises, large and firewall was able to stop and arisen due to the exponential especially in the enterprise small. “What we have become then produce a report for growth of the internet. space,” said Shahnawaz. experts in doing is taking the same. “We have a very A decade or so ago, the Having a single point the ease-of-use of low-end strong not-for resale program internet was small, applied device that does it all is a device and putting into high where the channel can receive for basic uses like browsing big economic advantage for end devices; and taking the highly discounted products for or email.Today with web 2.0 customers instead of multi performance of high-end the purposes of taking these applications however, the point devices from different devices and giving it to SMBs, appliances to the client and Internet flow has expanded vendors. The key, according plus everything in between,” prove to them what they can beyond comprehension. For to Shahnawaz, is the common Zollo said. do,” said Zollo. hackers, it means they now interface to manage all The acquisition by Dell SonicWALL is up there have larger targets to attack. these appliances even ina last year was a game changer with the best of them in the “Before, attackers were multi-location deployment appliances space. Information targeting networks just to security research firm NSS Labs prove they could. Now hacking hascarried out tests on nexthas become organized crime generation firewall appliances on a massive scale. The nature and produced security value of intrusion was charged as maps for next generation well with malware being firewalls similar to Gartner the greatest threat today,” quadrants. SonicWALL was explained Zollo.
April 2013 | 29
Feature | SonicWALL
Shahnawaz Sheikh Regional Director, ME & Turkey Dell-SonicWALL
environment. “This could be a single user policy or a group policy or even a global policy; it does not matter. We are able to manage all the users across the globe through a single management tool.” According to Zollo, the comparatively higher sticker price for the next-generation firewall is eventually offset in the long term. “When you consider the acquisition cost, the personnel cost and the maintenance cost over the life of the appliance, a next generation firewall makes more economic sense.” BYOD is not a
30 | April 2013
new concept for SonicWALL as the company has been enabling secure remote access for some time. What has changed has been the delivery model with smart phones taking centre stage in recent years. With BYOD, the first step for SonicWALL, was to enable all the devices including Windows, Apple, Android, PC, etc. that allow people to get secure access to their remote resources. Second was to identity whoever is getting access to the network. The traditional way is checking the user name and password; with the next generation firewall, one can check the device itself through its IMEI number and then tie that up to the owner. “When someone puts in the correct password and the device they are using is a corporate-trusted gadget,they are allowedaccess as if theywere in the office itself,” explained Zollo. In other instances, an employee may be accessing the network through a device that’s not a corporate trusted one, like in a cybercafé. The appliance will check if the device is patched up with the right firmware version
or if it has antivirus running. Depending on response to these queries, the employee is allowed access, but usually for certain applications, say Outlook, because although they have the right user name and password, the device they are using cannot be trusted. During such a session, Zollo explained, SonicWALL usesthe deep packet inspection capability of the firewall to make sure that the transaction is clean so that no oneattempts to attach a malware at the back of the traffic coming through. “We have the technology to check when someoneopens a session as well as during the session itself. We have given remote workers the ability to connect with any of the devices, but we tie that up that with a strong corporate policy that specifies the types of devices only allowed on the corporate network and then ones that aren’t.” The education segment is one area where SonicWALL is seeing increased demand for BYOD-centric solutions. A lot of students are now using tablets and the challenge is how to securely enable them access when they are on campus and
“If there’s something strange in any corner of the world and we get a pattern of a new attack or derivatives of old viruses, our security experts will develop new signatures to guard against these threats in a process called signature mapping"
then be able to push all the content to them. Shahnawaz however warns thatBYODmay become a victim of its own success. As BYOD grows, organizations may start considering these hitherto personal devices as corporate devices and finally as managed devices. The result is that people now start carrying additional devices. “Moving forward though, we will see granular developments like bring your own apps to access info on the corporate network,” observed Shahnawaz. To back up SonicWALL appliances is the Dell Grid Network. Every one of the appliances deployed around the world acts as a monitoring point. “If there’s something strange in any corner of the world and we get a pattern of a new attack or derivatives of old viruses, our security experts will develop new signatures to guard against these threats in a process called signature mapping. These signatures are then pushed into all the other firewalls,” explained Zollo. With about two million firewalls deployed around the world, Dell has a solid early warning system in place. “The first attack is always the most difficult to mitigate against,” said Shahnawaz. “What we can do is make sure that we identify it quickly, fix it and give it out to the rest of our customers.”
Insight | Red Hat
Managing Big Data Storage George DeBono, General Manager, Middle East & Africa at Red Hat writes about how a Unified Platform and Intelligent Open Source Software in combination can help manage the deluge of Big Data
D
eployment of new and advanced technologies, support for an increasing number of devices, increasing virtualization and the general expansion of business have dramatically altered the volume and nature of the workloads beings handled by data storage systems. The need to implement a strategy to deal with growing storage requirements is one which resonates with IT managers and CIOs across the region. According to Gartner, the Middle East & African IT infrastructure market, comprising of servers, storage and networking equipment, is forecast to reach US$ 3.9 billion in 2013, which is a 4 percent increase from 2012 . In a race to accommodate the deluge of data, all too often, enterprise IT teams are forced to react by creating storage silos, each with its own IT operations model. As data centers have been scaled up over time, all too often, these new storage systems have been added without sufficient consideration for what was previously deployed. This has then led to a scenario wherein there exists a storage silo for each application workload: database data; a silo for shared file data; a silo for web object data; and so
on. This reactive approach can not only increase the capex for storage but can create a huge impact on on-going operational expenses owing to the different management tools, different provisioning tools and different skill sets required. Given the size and rapid growth of data, and the prohibitive cost of copying large data sets around the enterprise, organizations simply cannot afford to build dedicated storage silos. Virtualization is now being widely employed by enterprises in order to both reduce infrastructure costs though better utilization as well as to pave the way towards cloud deployments. Since the success of these virtualization deployments depends on shared, network enabled storage infrastructure capable of eliminating the disparate silos associated with various applications and workloads, data storage and data management are now seen as a top priority for IT managers. In addition, a centralized approach to data management is no longer feasible in the age of big data. Data sets are too large, WAN bandwidth is too limited, and the consequences of a single point of failure are too costly. A big data storage platform must be able to
manage data through a single, unified pool distributed across the global enterprise. Instead, managing storage though a unified platform is a viable solution that not only simplifies data access and management but also greatly improves operational aspects such as power, cooling and space utilization in data centers.
The Unified Storage Approach The ideal approach to data storage is to have all the data reside in a general enterprise storage pool and make this data accessible to many enterprise workloads. This provides a unified platform for the procurement, provisioning, and management of enterprise storage. Furthermore, this approach is agnostic to the type of data such as files, objects, and semi-structured or unstructured data. What is also important for CIOs to bear in mind is that rather than attempting to protect against failure through the use of proprietary, enterprise-grade hardware, they can opt for an open unified big data storage platform which assumes that hardware failure is inevitable and offers reliable data availability and integrity through intelligent software.
George DeBono General Manager, MEA Red Hat
Accomplishing this requires a different approach by storage software vendors- one that is based on community-driven innovation. Community-driven innovation is the hallmark of a true open source approach to solving enterprise storage problems. For example, the emerging area of big data alone has more than 100 distinct open source big data projects with thousands of software developers contributing code, enhancing features, and increasing stability. It is hard to match this pace of innovation when software is being written within a vendor’s four walls. April 2013  |  31
eyetech
Ruckus ZoneFlex 7055 Wi-Fi wall switch Overview The Ruckus Wireless ZoneFlex 7055 Wi-Fi wall switch, is the only integrated solution in the industry to offer the simultaneous operation of 2.4 and 5 GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi along with wireless meshing, the ZoneFlex 7055 Wi-Fi wall switch uniquely combines wired and wireless connectivity within a universal low-profile form factor (13.6 cm square by 30 cm deep) that fits into any standard United States or European electrical junction box, among others. Functioning as a standalone device or managed centrally by the Ruckus ZoneDirector wireless LAN (WLAN) controller, the ZoneFlex 7055 Wi-Fi wall switch is also fit for schools and large institutional organizations wishing to address the proliferation of 5 GHz capable client devices like the Apple iPhone 5 and others, while continuing to support 2.4 GHz and wired access.
Key features: • Offers up to 600 Mbps of throughput,featuring dual 802.11n (2x2:2) radios and 16 virtual WLANs (SSIDs), • Features a Gigabit Ethernet uplink port, plus four front-facing Fast Ethernet ports • Delivers 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) to power devices such as a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone, using one of its front-facing Ethernet ports. •
An additional pass-through port allows direct wired connectivity for devices that need to bypass the Ethernet switch altogether or provide a guest with VLAN connectivity.
•
With support for Ruckus Wireless SmartMesh Networking, the ZoneFlex 7055 is an excellent solution for buildings where running Ethernet cable behind the walls is difficult or prohibitively expensive.
•
In-room wired and wireless access can be provided in several rooms, each hosting a single ZoneFlex 7055 device powered by a power adapter and meshed with a centrally wired (root) access point (AP). Since only the root AP requires a cabled Ethernet uplink, multiple rooms are covered with just a single cable drop.
32 | April 2013
Lenovo ThinkPad T431s Overview: The lenovo ThinkPad T431s is the thinnest T series ever featuring a sleek, innovative trackpad, enhanced keyboard and refined aesthetics. The results of Lenovo’s research found that respondents prioritize simplicity and modern elements when it comes to their technology. Lenovo designed the new T431s with these priorities in mind to directly enrich the user experience.
Key features: • Streamlined Interior: Lenovo updated the award- winning ThinkPad precision keyboard by improving key placement while maintaining shortcuts for a sleeker-looking keyboard, designing the display with a super thin bezel, and debuting a new Graphite Black color. • Enhanced trackpad experience: The new ThinkPad trackpad is an evolution of the TrackPoint and TouchPad featuring a new larger, smooth, responsive, multi-touch glass surface that optimizes Windows 8 gestures, click functionality, and integrates TrackPoint behavior to deliver a customized, improved experience for all users. • Thinness, Durability, Reliability: The ThinkPad T431s, the thinnest and lightest T series ever made and the first device incorporating the new design elements, weighs just 3.6 pounds (1.63kg) and measures only 0.82 inches (20.6mm) thin. The carbon fiber top cover and magnesium exterior continue ThinkPad’s heritage of business- class rugged design and durability. • The T431s is powered by Intel 3rd generation Core processors with Turbo Boost, features improved Intel HD Graphics, up to 12 GB of memory and additional HDD and SSD storage options. The T431s has a 14-inch HD+ (1600 x 900) anti- glare display, two USB 3.0 ports for fast data transfer.
Brocade 6520 Switch
HP ElitePad 900
Overview:
Overview
Brocade announced the availability of the Brocade Fabric Vision technology, an advanced storage area networking (SAN) hardware and software solution, and the high-density Brocade 6520 switch. The company is also working closely with its storage partners to lead efforts in the OpenStack community to ensure investment protection of Fibre Channel SANs as enterprises and service providers move to cloud orchestration frameworks. The Brocade 6520 Switch, which the company claims is the industry's highest-density fixed configuration SAN switch, bolsters the vendor's comprehensive portfolio of Gen 5 Fibre Channel
HP has introduced theElitePad 900, a tablet that balances a beautiful design with enterprise-grade features, functionality and support. Designed for business, government, healthcare and retail, it features HP ElitePad Smart Jackets, which add connectivity options and longer battery life along with specific add-ons that customize the tablet for specialized uses. The HP ElitePad is an ultrathin, lightweight Microsoft Windows 8 tablet that offers full serviceability, enhanced security and manageability found in HP Elite PCs, packed
modular, fixed port and embedded solutions based
with a battery that passed over 115,000 hours of tests.
on the 16 GbpsFibre Channel standard. The switch
Key features:
offers 96 Fibre Channel ports in a 2U form factor for
• Ergonomically shaped to fit comfortably in the hand, the
maximum port density and space utilization for data
HP ElitePad offers a 25.7 cm (10.1”) display, weighs just
center consolidation projects.
0.68 and measures 9.2 millimeters (mm) thin. • The 16-by-10 aspect ratio maximizes the display area for ideal viewing of traditional business applications, as well as video content. • Precision crafted, with an eye toward fit and finish, the HP ElitePad uses stylish, premium materials such as CNC-machined aluminum and CorningGorilla Glass 2. • Powered by next-generation Intel® mobile processors,
Key features: • Critical diagnostic and monitoring capabilities to help ensure early problem detection and recovery
the HP ElitePad delivers PC productivity for those on the go and Intel x86 compatibility for existing business application support.
• Non-intrusive and non-disruptive monitoring on every port to provide a comprehensive end-to-end view of the entire fabric
• It is optimized for Windows 8 and supports touch-, pen-
• Forward Error Correction (FEC) to recover from bit errors on links, enhancing transmission reliability and performance
smartphone-style convenience with compatibility
• Additional buffers to overcome performance degradation and congestion due to buffer credit loss • Monitoring of real-time bandwidth consumption by hosts/applications on Inter-Switch Links (ISLs) to easily identify hot spots and potential network congestion
or voice-based input. • The HP ElitePad also provides power efficiency and for traditional Windows applications, as well as easy integration into existing IT environments. • The unique, productivity-enhancing ecosystem of HP Smart Jackets and additional accessories designed specifically for the HP ElitePad expand the tablet’s potential, turning it into a total enterprise solution:
April 2013 | 33
Stats & Trends
Security Appliance Market Continues to Grow Steadily
A
to the fourth quarter of 2011. Fortinet saw the largest revenue ccording to IDC, both factory revenue and unit shipment growth among the top five vendors at 27.2%. The combined growth rose in the fourth quarter of 2012 (4Q12) compared shares of the top 5 global vendors represented 46.3% of the to the previous quarter. Worldwide factory revenue was up 7.2% market in Q4 2012 losing 2.6 points compared to a year ago. The year on year to $2.3 billion, as shipments increased 5.2% to share of Others increased primarily due to strong quarters from 538,428 units. In the previous quarter, factory revenue growth Blue Coat, Palo Alto Networks, Barracuda, Sourcefire, and Dell was 6.3% and unit growth was 1.3% compared to Q3 2011. SonicWALL Geographically, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan)(APeJ) with a At the functional market level, the Unified Threat revenue share of 19.3% continued to see the highest growth at Management (UTM) segment saw the largest year-over-year 18.0% year over year. Western Europe growth picked up in the revenue growth at 34.3% and accounted for 35.0% of security final quarter of 2012, with factory revenue rising 3.9% versus Q4 appliance revenue in 4Q12, as multi-function appliances continue 2011. Japan had the highest unit growth year over year at 25.1%, to drive growth in the overall market. The Firewall/VPN market followed closely by APeJ at 17.4%. The United States recorded represented 24.0% of security appliance revenue despite a year4.1% revenue growth and a unit decrease of 1.1% compared to over-year decline of 2.8% after ten consecutive quarters of steady Q4 2011, indicating some softness in lower price bands and that growth. The IPS segment declined by 3.6% compared to the prior revenue growth was driven by larger enterprises and service year as these dedicated products continue to battle for share in providers. the mid-market with UTM appliances. "Typical fourth quarter seasonality seemed to help the market a bit, with overall growth picking up thanks to end Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Security Appliance Revenue, of year initiatives on the vendor side and budget flush on the buyer side," said John Grady, research Fourth Quarter of 2012 (revenues in $ millions) manager, Security Products at IDC. "Organizations 4Q12/4 continue to prioritize security within their overall IT 4Q11 4Q11 Vendor 4Q12 4Q12 Q11 Revenue Share budget. With advanced, targeted threats a growing Revenue Share Growth concern, IDC expects continued high single-digit 1. Cisco $351 15.50% $373 17.70% -5.90% growth in the security appliance segment." 2. Check Point $288 12.70% $267 12.70% 7.80% Cisco continues to lead the overall security 3. Juniper $157 6.90% $168 8.00% -6.90% appliance market with 15.5% share in factory 4. Fortinet $136 6.00% $107 5.10% 27.20% revenue for the fourth quarter, but this was down 5. McAfee $116 5.20% $117 5.60% -0.90% from 17.7% in the prior year period. Check Point Others $1,210 53.70% $1,073 50.90% 12.80% held the number two spot with a 12.7% share for Total $2,258 100% $2,105 100% 7.20% the quarter as revenue increased 7.8% compared Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker, March 21, 2013
Increase in IT spending predicted in 2013 for EMEA CIOs
R
iverbed Technology has revealed that 71% of CIOs expect to increase IT spending in 2013. The findings are the result of an independent research project regarding IT spending priorities across numerous industries in EMEA. Respondents were asked to pick their top five spending priorities over the next year
The EMEA top five investment priorities • Server virtualisation – 50% • Data Centre consolidation – 40% • Storage consolidation – 34% • Desk-top virtualisation – 33% • Server upgrades – 33%
34 | April 2013
IT Spending Trends for EMEA CIOs • 10% of respondents plan to make aggressive investments to improve their company’s competitiveness • For 28% of companies efficiency and cuts to overall spend are key drivers for the investments they will make • 33% stated that they will approach investment in IT ‘cautiously’ in 2013, • 20% assume that spend will continue at the same level as the last three to five years • Only 9% of the total sample indicated that IT budgets were shrinking and that they would be spending less over the next 12 months.
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