The Integrator

Page 1



Looking forward to the future With the year ending, we reflect on how its been so far and have our sights set on bigger things for 2019. Last month we participated in the biggest technology event of the year – GITEX Technology Week. It was a fantastic week spent on soaking in the latest innovations, meeting with our customers and partners. In addition to the GITEX Technology Week, we hosted the 12th edition of the Choice of Channel awards which was held on the 14th of October at Ibis Hotel, World Trade Centre, Dubai. The event felicitated winners in different categories of the industry’s most prestigious channel awards. It was a great success and a good start to the GITEX Technology Week. The event also saw the launch of our new category – UNEQ Products. UNEQ was conceptualized to bring attention to the latest innovations that stand out from the crowd. The winners in this category set themselves apart with their truly unique features. In this edition of The Integrator magazine our cover story focuses on Artificial Intelligence, one of the buzzwords at this year’s GITEX Technology Week. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is booming in today’s technology space. It is being widely used today and affects the way we live, work and even entertain ourselves. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that the compound annual growth rate for global spending on AI will be 50.1%, reaching $57.6 billion by 2021. So, it is clear that at this juncture in time, AI is rapidly growing. We will delve deep into the state of artificial intelligence in the technology space today and spell out the challenges that companies face when dealing with artificial intelligence, and the solutions that they consider to overcome these challenges. I would like to take this opportunity to wish our readers a Happy National Day!

Vivek Sharma Managing Editor

Assistant Editor: Sweta Fernandes Art Director: Faiz Ahmed

Cover Feature

AI: The World of Intelligence – 9

TechKnow

AI is the Brain and IoT the Body of a Business – 13

AI Promises Economic Benefits Despite Disruption – 14

Rasilient Systems and Seagate Technology deliver upgraded security for Global Village Dubai – 24 A management approach for migrating to the public cloud – 27 Global Cyber Security Ecosystem Needed – 28

EnGenius EWS355AP and EnGenius ENS620EXT at GITEX - 30

Interview

Follow the 3-2-1 Rule to Secure Data – 16 UAE is One of the Most Progressive Countries in the Region – 17 Affordability and ROI are Big Stories for Us – 18

SDN is Not a Simple World to Live In – 19 Look Beyond Traditional Solution – 20 It’s the People That Matter – 21

Adopt Edge to Core to Cloud Model – 23

Stay tuned.

Managing Editor: Vivek Sharma

ontents

Editorial

ManageEngine Strengthens Unified Endpoint Management – 26

Published by: JNS Media International MFZE

P.O Box 121075, Dubai UAE, Tel: +971-4-3705022 Fax: +971-4-3706639, website: www.VARonline.com Sales Inquiries: sales@var-mea.com All other Inquiries: info@var-mea.com | Editorial: editor@var-mea.com Disclaimer: While the publishers have made every attempt possible to get accurate information on published content in this handbook they cannot be held liable for any errors herein.


News Bytes

ESET's New Solutions Protect Constantlyconnected Users ESET's latest versions of ESET NOD32 Antivirus, ESET Internet Security and ESET Smart Security Premium provide fortified multilayered protection, enhanced IoT protection, product referral and a new security report feature to enable users to protect their constantly-connected devices. The global increase in the number of connected devices increases cybersecurity threats, leading to greater amounts of personal data shared over networks. “Hackers will use this rise in the number of internetconnected devices to their advantage and users, therefore, cannot afford to neglect taking security measures,” says Matej Kritofík, Product Manager at ESET. Users can fight these threats using basic protection, additional layers of security on top of the basic anti-malware solution, and the most advanced protection and features on the market. Built on machine learning and three decades of knowledge, ESET products run in the background and provide users with comfortable and ultra-fast scanning without impacting the operating system or their experience.

Greater Freedom with Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Digital computing is one of the key technological drivers of digital transformation initiatives in Saudi Arabia, highlighting that it is the primary mover of the current digital revolution. People and jobs within companies looking for insight, flexibility, scalability, and freedom went to the public cloud for answers. "While users benefit from consumer-centric applications that enable them to better manage customer experience, IT teams must address the usability, security and governance challenges in decentralized systems" explains Aaron White, Regional Manager at Nutanix Middle East. "The antidote to the public cloud is the freedom to move easily between clouds which includes knowing costs and the ability to choose the right location for the right data, and the belief that security and governance are not a secondary issue since they revolve around blurring the lines between the public and private sectors and between leasing and ownership. Earlier this year, Nutanix acquired “Frame” to enable Nutanix’s customers to use Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

Akamai Enhances its Platform Akamai has added intelligent security automation, advanced threat protection for web apps, deeper real-time insights, and improved efficiencies to its intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences. These updates can drive insight, agility, and quality for businesses delivering digital experiences to secure and enable cloudbased applications and web-based experiences. These new capabilities will improve resiliency for apps with automated protections, streamlined workflows, and support for additional apps and use cases; enable visibility and insight to facilitate prioritization, streamline decision making, and ensure better business outcomes; drive cost reduction associated with egress from public clouds, and enhance performance, security and quality for streaming TV experiences; and provide APIs and automation to empower developers and simplify complex tasks to maintain agile development practices. “As more companies move their operations and apps to the cloud, they need greater insight, agility and quality from their service provider partners to get there in a cost effective way,” said Ari Weil, vice president of product marketing at Akamai. “Akamai is innovating to help organizations meet continuously evolving challenges, threats, and competitive pressures.”

4  |  November 2018


Emaratech, Dell EMC to Transform Dubai Airports and Seaports emaratech, has announced a strategic partnership with Dell EMC to enable Dubai Airports and Seaports enhance operations, ensure a better travel experience and develop new efficiencies. Earlier this year, emaratech had installed smart e-gates at Dubai International Airport to reduce transaction times to 10-15 seconds. To offer uninterrupted services to passengers, emaratech needs scalable, reliable and readily available data management and storage architecture. Dell EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) solution will help realize a response time less than 200mS for e-gates. “In line with our mission to create innovative high-tech products and world-class services that impact lives, we believe our partnership with Dell EMC will help us realize our digital vision, as well as strengthen our efforts to make Dubai not only smart, but a sustainable city with higher quality of life,” said H.E Thani Abdulla Alzaffin, Director General & Board Member at emaratech Fady Richmany, Senior Director and General Manager, United Arab Emirates, at Dell EMC said, “We are proud to be a part of emaratech’s journey of providing their customers and partners with advanced solutions designed to fuel growth and manage business demands of today and tomorrow.”

NetApp Acquires StackPointCloud NetApp has announced acquisition of StackPointCloud, a provider of multi-cloud Kubernetes as-a-service and a contributor to the Kubernetes project. The combined NetApp Kubernetes Service will be the first complete Kubernetes platform for multi-cloud deployments and cloud-based stack for Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and NetApp HCI. It will allow customers to easily manage data and applications in the cloud and across clouds and put data where it needs to be.

OMA Emirates and Mawgif Enhance Parking Payment for Dubai Airports OMA Emirates, a provider of technology solutions for the payment industry and National Parking Company, Mawgif, have joined hands to improve parking payment at Dubai Airports. To improve services, Mawgif is using hardware and Point of Sale (POS) applications from OMA Emirates, including Ingenico iSelf series, an easy and unattended payment solution that reinforces Mawgif’s move towards encouraging self-service options for its customers. “The GCC has been witnessing exponential growth in the transportation industry which demands huge parking space allocations along with additional requirements for parking across the cities. Concerned authorities are now working with reputed companies such as Mawgif to manage and provide quality services with a superior mix of technology in order to raise the customer satisfaction levels,” said Niranj Sangal, Group CEO, OMA Emirates Group. “As a leading parking management company, it was important for us to work with a payment solution provider who is in a strong position to integrate hardware, software and payment applications in totality.

"This acquisition will benefit customers looking to simplify the delivery of data and applications in clouds, across clouds and hybrid clouds," said Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President and General Manager of NetApp's Cloud Data Services business unit. "The StackPointCloud Kubernetes-as-a-service platform combined with NetApp's Cloud Data Services creates a complete DevOps solution, so customers can focus on innovation, not administration." By acquiring StackPointCloud, NetApp gains an advanced Kubernetes-as-a-service platform that directly supports the application orchestration capabilities of NetApp's Data Fabric. It will integrate with NetApp Cloud Volumes and Trident, enabling multi-cloud application orchestration with persistent

November 2018  |  5


News Bytes

Software AG signs MoU with GDRFA-Dubai Protecting Small Businesses Kaspersky Lab's report “Growing Businesses Safely: Cloud Adoption vs Security Concerns”, says nearly 32% VSBs, with 5-50 computers, entrust the task of cybersecurity to employees with no expertise. Therefore, these businesses must implement an easyto-use solution. Kaspersky's new Small Office Security provides small businesses with greater control and once installed on the devices, the solution doesn’t require any special attention. In addition, Kaspersky Small Office Security notifications have been updated and won’t appear if the event is not crucial, causing less disturbance to the working day. “New technologies give businesses new opportunities to grow, but threats are always present: fake websites,

Software AG has signed an agreement with the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs in Dubai (GDRFA) to assist in the digital transformation of immigration operations and harness the full potential of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain. The memorandum was signed by Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO, Software AG; Major General Obaid Muhair bin Suroor, Deputy Director, GDRFA-Dubai and Dr. Abdulqader Al Khayat, Chairman of Palmira Software House LLC. Nasri Nassereddine, Regional Territory Manager, Software AG, said, “The partnership with GDRFA reflects our commitment to continuously support the government in accelerating the UAE’s digital transformation, thereby playing a role in the achievement of the targets set by the National Agenda for UAE Vision 2021.” Major Khalid Bin Mediya Al Falasi, Assistant General Director of Smart Services, GDRFA-Dubai, said, “The partnership aims to harness the full potential of the ongoing digital revolution, particularly artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain.”

malicious pictures and unprotected networks; free but unsecure Wi-Fi spots; and even lost or stolen work devices. When focusing on growth, and their busy day-to-day tasks, companies don’t always prioritize the prevention of these attacks,” says Sergey Martsynkyan, Head of B2B Product Marketing, Kaspersky Lab. “That’s why we are constantly improving Kaspersky Small Office Security. It is an efficient, set-and-forget and easy-to-use cybersecurity solution, which doesn’t require heavy investment or technical expertise from its small business users.”

6  |  November 2018

Veritas and Pure Storage for Advance Data Management Veritas Technologies and Pure Storage have announced a new global effort to help customers modernize data protection and maximize the value of their data for competitive advantage. The collaboration will enable organizations to confidently consolidate modern workloads onto Pure Storage’s unique data hub architecture, powered by Pure Storage FlashBlade. With the integration of NetBackup, Veritas’ flagship technology, enterprise data can be shared, protected and unlocked for unprecedented value. “Modern enterprises need to derive value from all data, regardless of where it’s stored. A data hub architecture unifies data siloes, which makes it easier to extract value from the massive data sets that drive AI, big data and IoT,” said Katie Colbert, vice president, Alliances, Pure Storage. “By partnering with Veritas, Pure Storage customers will enjoy the benefits of NetBackup to protect their valuable data and manage their entire infrastructure through a single unified solution.” “The combination of NetBackup and Pure Storage provides critical data protection, but with ultra-fast backup to allow businesses to stay a step ahead of customer expectations and needs, versus merely reacting to them, said Jyothi Swaroop, vice president, Global Solutions and Strategy, Veritas.


Riverbed Appoints Mark Jopling as Senior Vice President Sales in EMEA Riverbed has announced joining of Mark Jopling as Senior Vice President (SVP) Sales of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Riverbed. Jopling will be responsible for the company’s sales strategy and go-to-market execution in EMEA, leading the team across its five EMEA markets, as well as to generate new business opportunities with strategic partners, to deliver continued success and acceleration across Riverbed’s portfolio of industryleading digital performance solutions. Jopling will report to Andy Elder, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at Riverbed. “Mark’s experience in leading large cross-functional customer-orientated teams, delivering excellence in operational performance through mutual strategic channel partnerships, and his deep knowledge of the enterprise market including the financial services industry, makes him the ideal leader of the EMEA region and a great addition to the leadership team,” explains Andy Elder, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at Riverbed. “I’m delighted to be joining the company and working with the EMEA team and our partner community, to help our customers modernize their IT architecture for the cloud and digital, with the ever-increasing demand for Riverbed’s digital performance solutions. Digital innovations are simply transforming industries every day, and I’m very excited to be part of it with Riverbed.”

Spire Solutions to Launch New PPV Service The digital wave sweeping through the Middle East has left the region’s businesses vulnerable to multiple security threats. To help organisations navigate the threat landscape in the most cost-effective manner possible, value-added-distributor Spire Solutions will introduce its exclusive Pay-Per Vulnerability (PPV) service at this year’s edition of the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit.

McAfee's New Report on Cloud Data McAfee has released its latest Cloud Adoption and Risk Report, which reveals that nearly a quarter of the data in the cloud is sensitive and can put an organization at risk, if stolen. Since sharing sensitive data in the cloud has increased 53 percent YoY, businesses that do not adopt a cloud strategy which includes data loss protection, configuration audits and collaboration controls, will endanger the security of their most valuable asset—data—and expose themselves to increased risk of noncompliance with regulations. The study has found that while organizations aggressively use the public cloud to create new digital experiences for their customers, an average enterprise experiences more than 2,200 misconfiguration incidents per month in their infrastructure-asa-service (IaaS) and platform-as-aservice (PaaS) instances. “Accidental sharing, collaboration errors in SaaS cloud services, configuration errors in IaaS/PaaS cloud services, and threats are all increasing. To continue accelerating their business, organizations need a cloud-native and frictionless way to consistently protect their data and defend from threats across the spectrum of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of the Cloud Security Business, McAfee.

This new PPV service will allow companies to uncover gaps in their cyber security posture, while simultaneously enable customers to pay only for issues identified with no up-front commitment. “The core concept behind the creation of this PPV service is simple: the maturity of an organisation’s security roadmap varies from one to the next. Some organisations will have already invested heavily in keeping their digital infrastructure secure, while others might only be in the initial stages of doing so. Our value proposition from a threat mitigation perspective is that organisations should only have to pay for areas of weakness that are identified,” explains Avinash Advani, CEO at Spire Solutions.

November 2018  |  7


Cover Feature | Artificial Intelligence

AI:

THE WORLD OF

INTELLIGENCE Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), and its allied technologies including machine learning and robotics have resulted in ‘smart automation’ and promise many benefits to the economy


A

rtificial intelligence is faciltating understanding the subtelities of the human mind. And, with further advancements in technology, machines have evolved to understand subtle—and seemingly unrelated—patterns from varied data sets to provide meaningful insights. These smart machines are now capable of picking up nuances of the words used and a number of useful applications are being developed using deep learning. Businesses have a lot to benefit from AI. They can gain the much-needed competitive advantage by using these insights and technological advancements to fine-tune their go-to-market strategies and enhance customer experience. As a result, many businesses around the world are now including AI capabilities in their business strategies. IDC, a global research firm, predicts that revenues from cognitive software and cognitive server infrastructure will reach $10 billion and $9 billion, respectively, by the year 2021.

Advancements in AI According to a research by the McKinsey Global Institute, AI promises considerable economic benefits. Artficial Intelligence is progressing at a breathtaking pace with companies intensely fighting each other for dominance. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are competing among themselves to become the operating system of the future by building AI-based platforms and AI utilities for their cloud computing services. This has led to AI becoming more accessible and it has become easier for businesses to leverage the benfits of AI at affordable costs. “AI is already powering numerous real-world applications—facial recognition, language translators, and assistants like Siri and Alexa—that we barely notice it,” says Alain Penel, Regional Vice President, Middle East at Fortinet. One of the landmark advancements in AI, is the victory of Google's AlphaGo over Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players. What makes this victory

more significant than DeepBlue's success is that it has made a strong case for reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique where computers learn to respond to situations without instructions. This technique also eliminates the need for large data sets that are usually required to train machines, as the computer learns from the outcomes—positive or negative—through the actions it perfoms. Reinforcement learning has, therefore, opened up realistic opportunities of building AI applications with general-use deep learning algorithms. Another notable advancement is the dueling neural networks bringing imagination to AI. Machine learning systems, inherently, do not have imagination abilities. But, generative adversarial network (GAN) might just provide machines with this ability as well.

Types of Artificial Intelligence AI can be categorized in two categories: Weak AI: Also known as narrow AI, this system is

This is how it works. Two neural networks are trained on the same dataset and are made to play a 'real or fake' game. While one network creates variations of the images it has been shown, the other network differentiates between the real image (on which it has been trained) or fake (the ones created by the first network). Over time, the first network learns to create images that look so real that the second network cannot distinguish between the real and the created images. As a result of dueling neural networks, it will soon become possible to create entirely synthetic datasets that will be used to train machine learning models. The ongoing research and development work on GAN is known to have produced great results. Researchers are also working on making AI systems go beyond just mimicing human thought patterns like reasoning and perception. While AI has made many advances in understanding how humans process data, there is still a lot of ground that needs covered before AI can become humanlike. Presently, AI requires huge amounts of data sets for learning purposes. One of the advancements which is still at the research and development stage and has the potential to transform the current landscape of AI is the use of small datasets to train the AI systems. Another one will be unsupervised learning, where machines can learn on their own. And then there is deep learning that can power development of useful AI-based applications.

designed and trained for

Adoption of AI

a particular task such as

Probably the most talked-about use case of artificial intelligence is the selfdriving cars. Self-driving cars are being tested and improved continuously. As a result, commercial self-driving cars will soon become a reality. And, in the wake of AI promising immense benefits to businesses, a number of industries and sectors are adopting AI with open arms. There are umpteen use cases that businesses can review and learn from before joining the AI bandwagon. These

virtual personal assistants like Siri, Alexa and so forth. Strong AI: Also called artificial general intelligence, strong AI is a system that posseses enough intelligence

November 2018  |  9


Cover Feature | Artificial Intelligence

include IT automation, automated threat and regulation intelligence, fraud analysis and investigation, diagnosis and treatment, quality management, asset management, customized shopping advisory, and so on. One of the sectors that's making intensive use of AI with fabulous results is healthcare. Armed with mobile devices and smart wearables, patients are creating a lot of health data while providers are creating electronic health records. Artificial Intelligence allows using this electronic data for efficient diagnosis and quick treatment. Probably the biggest beneficiary of AI is the marketing function. Automating the marketing function allows businesses to enhance customer experience and augment user engagement through presonalised services and products. Adext AI is one such company working towards automating marketing function. Chatbot, sitting quietly in a corner of a website, can be a great tool to enhance online sales by helping visitors navigate through the right products and engaging with customers at the moment of their interest. Intelligent and smart voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home are already engaging in meaningful converstaions with humans. As machine learning improves further, these systems will only evolve further to speak naturally. Apart from voice recognition, dictation and other communication technologies are becoming much more efficient which when combined with other technologies such as virtual reality will improve productivity.

“ AI is becoming more accessible and it has become easier for businesses to leverage its benfits at affordable costs"

Statistical methods and machine learning are used for text analytics in order to understand the structure of sentences, their meaning and intention. This is currently being used for fraud detection, security, and automated assistants. Basis Technology, Coveo, Expert System, Indico, Knime, Lexalytics, Linguamatics, Mindbreeze, Sinequa, Stratifyd, and Synapsify are some of the companies working in this area. The retail sector has adopted AI like a fish adapts to water. AI is reshaping the way retailers are enhancing customer experience through customized shopping carts, digital fitting rooms, and loyalty programs.

In the wake of increasing data breaches and evolving cyber threats, one of the most important uses of artificial intelligence and allied technologies like machine learning is to protect computer networks, information and the infrastructure. Coupled with machine learning techniques, neural networks can create supervised learning technologies to detect suspicious patterns and potential cyber attacks. Darktrace, Cylance, Simility, and DeepInstinct are some of the cyber defense companies. With increasing threats to personally identifiable customer details, directives such as the General Data Protection Regulation, (GDPR) and revised Payments Solutions Directive (PSD2) have been enforced mandating businesses (primarily dealing in customer data) to ensure security of the data they possess. Non-compliance can attract hefty fines. AI- and NLP-powered solutions are helping businesses stay compliant with these regulations. Similarly, capital stress testing solutions that use predictive analytics and scenario builders are enabling organizations to stay compliant with the regulations. Some of the companies operating in this area include Compliance.ai, Merlon Intelligence, Simility, and Socure. Biometrics is now finding wide-spread use in identifying and analyzing human behavior, which can be used in fighting fraud and other criminal activities. Some of the biometric companies engaged in research work on making human-machine interactions more natural include 3VR,

• Alan Turing's paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” written in 1950 opened the corridors for development of a technology that came to be known as AI later. • John McCarthy is considered the father of artificial intelligence and coined this name for the first time in 1956 at the first academic conference on this subject. • The biggest advances in the sixty-year journey of AI have been in search algorithms, machine learning algorithms, and integrating statistical analysis into understanding the world. • Most AI breathroughs and uses are so subtle that they aren't even noticeable.

10  |  November 2018


Affectiva, Agnitio, FaceFirst, Sensory, Synqera and Tahzoo. We've all heard about automation using robots. This automation mechanism is a result of scripts that mimic and automate human tasks, especially in jobs that are routine or expensive when done by humans. A few companies engaged in robotic processes automation are Blue Prism, UiPath, Advanced Systems Concepts, Automation Anywhere, and WorkFusion. A digital twin or a software construct bridges the gap between physical systems and the digital world. They can be as small as a bit of software code to as large as 3D CAD drawings. Akselos, Supply Dynamics, are a couple of names that are using this technology. Listed as the second most disruptive technology trend, automation of knowledge work is helping employees in their knowledge related work such as in legal or medical professions. A number of companies are working in this area such as Kim Technologies and Kyndi. AI is also powering content creation which includes blogs, white papers, videos and any other visual or written content pieces. SaaS tools such as Wibbitz and Wordsmith are enabling publishers to create videos from written scripts in no time. Using image and audio data processing, AI is making it possible to not only read emotions but also capture micro-expressions on a human face, voice intonations, or body language cues. Beyond Verbal, nViso, and Affectiva’s Emotion AI are some names working in this area. AI coupled with image recognition allows identification of objects or special features in a digital image or video. Images can be searched from social media platforms which can then be compared with a data set. This technology is useful in identifying license plates or diagnose diseases. Some companies working in this field include Clarifai, SenseTime, and GumGum. Peer-to-peer networks allow sharing of data without an intermediary server.

These P2P networks are being used by cryptocurrencies and have the capabilities to solve some of the most complex problems. Nano Vision and Presearch are a couple of names using AI in P2P networks.

Influence in the Industry Artificial intelligence is adding value to businesses by enhancing customer experience, reducing costs, and increasing revenues. Businesses have come to realize that AI applications can help seize fleeting business opportunities and, therefore, achieve business growth. According to a study called Sizing the Prize by PwC, a global consulting firm, these technologies are expected to contribute up to 14% to the global GDP by 2030, which translates into approximately $15 trillion at today’s values. As a result, more and more businesses globally are responding to the new opportunities that AI workloads— applications based on machine learning and deep learning—offer. A number of businesses are already deploying AI workloads. There are a few others that are at the experimentation stage, while still others are at the drawing board, evaluating the outcomes AI applications can bring to them. There cannot be a single, standard approach to AI that all businesses can follow. It is recommended that organizations must evaluate and adopt an appropriate AI development approach that best meets their business objectives and is in accordance with the size of the business. For instance, solutions for unique small to medium-sized AI initiatives can be developed in-house. The prime benefit of this appraoch is that in addition to creating a tailored solution for their business, everyone involved—developers, LOBs, data analysts/scientists, and the infrastructure team—gains critically important skill sets such as preparing data sets and the related models, testing frameworks, evaluating the hardware to develop, and so forth. However, if off-theshelf commercial solutions are available, they can prove to be more cost-efficient. In case of larger AI initiatives, external

Waiting in the Wings In today's data-driven world, every business will need AI to civilize and digest big data in order to gain actionable insights. Kevin Kelly, the author of the best-selling book 'The Inevitable', has noted that big data without AI is a 'big headache'. The book forecasts some of the prolific technologies that will shape the society in the next two decades. And, all these technologies are based on AI! The rapid advancements in the suite of technologies artificial intelligence, big data, GPUs, and deep learning are catalyzing the next wave of innovation. Some of the innovative breakthroughs at the prototype stage and just waiting to make a powerful impact include:

Artificial Embryos The medicine world went ecstatic with the creation of a fully functional human lung using stem cells as it made organ transplants a reality. Probably the next big achievement that the medical world will witness is the creation of an artificial embryo from stems cells. What makes this feat unique is that the embryo does not involve sperm cells or female ovum (eggs). While this technology can provide insights into the origins of human life, it also carries a fear that these genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or 'designer babies' can be manipulated or exploited to create unnatural human life. Since genetic modification is categorized as ‘legal unethicality’, it comes with sanctions and regulations that these GMOs cannot be maintained for more than 14 days, and cannot be implanted into a uterus.

November 2018  |  11


Cover Feature | Artificial Intelligence

support can prove more beneficial as in-house development of solutions for larger initiatives are time consuming, resource-intensive, and costly. Also, deployment of third-party AI solutions is much quicker. That said, third-party solutions may not offer the flexibility or customization capabilities according to the business needs. For instance, some larger AI initiatives that use SaaS solutions are known to face limitations in terms of flexibility and scalability, being dependent on the provider's infratsructure. Also, these initiatives need consulting, which not only creates dependencies but is also expensive. According to IDC, of all the businesses using accelerated infrastructure for AI applications, 65% run these solutions on-premise. Of these, 22% run them onpremise only and 43% both on-premise and in the cloud.

A Number of Roadblocks Artificial Intelligence promises immense benefits, both in the near- and long-term. However, there is a range of challenges that businesses face and a number of questions that businesses must find satisfactory answers to before adopting AI. Businesses are aware that not adopting AI can lead to forgoing exceptional business opportunities handing their competitors an edge. But, they are also aware of the limitations they face in terms of infrastructure, IT workforce, availability of skilled personnel, costs of recruting data scientists and engineers, and so forth. According to IDC, 77% businesses feel limited by their architecture while 23% of businesses are yet to identify the right solution for the AIdefined infrastructure they’re considering. Many businesses are unsure of the use cases that can bring them benefits. They are not aware of the software, or infrastructure needed for in-house development/deployment. A number of businesses at the POC or production stages have hit the infratsructure wall at some point or the other. This is because AI applications, especially deep learning

12  |  November 2018

systems, parse enormous amounts of data and require powerful processing capabilities. Crunching volumes of data at AI speed also requires greater analysis and storage capabilities, high throughput, and GPU acceleration. Therefore, these businesses had to overhaul their infrastructures in order to meet the demanding requirements of AI applications. IDC reports that 22.8% businesses use third-generation infrastructure to run AI applications, while 37.6% are on second-generation infrastructure and 39.6% are on firstgeneration servers. These figures indicate that the perfect infrastruture is still elusive. Businesses must be able to capture data, derive insights in real time and deploy a tested, optimized and validated AI solution. Most businesses have large amounts of data sets, and many struggle with cleansing the data and making it ready for analysis. Managing and storing these huge amounts of data and ensuring its security are other challenges that businesses must contend with. On the technology front, while machines have evolved in their

understanding to help solve problems and unearth patterns from varied data, they are still far from understanding the nuances of how the human brain works. Deep learning is helping create applications, but still there are miles to go before machines can understand how human cognition works and how it is applied to critical thinking or creativity, for instance. Then there is lack of availability of appropriately skilled professionals. And the cost of employing fully qualified AI engineers and data scientists is quite high. As a result, many businesses choose to start AI initiatives through external support. Last, there is the much discussed fear of AI gobbling up jobs. At present that does not seem to be the case, though. PwC's latest job automation study says that by the year 2020, only 3% of the jobs are at risk from automation. That said, about 44% of low-skill jobs will be replaced by automation by mid-2030s, the study claims. Therefore, to stay relevant in the AI-powered job market, professionals will need to continually upgrade their skills.

Conclusion

“In reinforcement learning, computers learn to respond to situations without instructions”

Presently, the AI environment is rife with chaos and businesses are at vastly different stages of AI adoption— some at advanced deployment, some experimenting while the others still evaluating the idea. A period of hit and trial is common, with many businesses hitting the infrastructure wall. That, however, has not deterred these businesses and they have continued to experiment with deep learning algorithms and AI applications, with the infrastructure team preparing for the next stage of beginning production of the AI applications under development. Given the tireless work that a lot of organizations globally are doing to help unlock the immense possibilities of artificial intelligence, the time is not far when the hurdles will be overcome.


Interview | SAS

AI is the Brain and IoT the Body of a Business An organization’s data management approach should be designed with several factors in mind, as it doesn’t make sense to apply one data management approach for all data-related projects, advises Marcel Yammine, General Manager - Gulf & Emerging Markets, SAS

How can businesses use big data analytics to get the maximum value? Big data analytics helps organizations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities. That, in turn, leads to smarter business moves, more efficient operations, higher profits and happier customers. Organizations that leverage insights from big data gain value in the following ways: • Cost reduction: Big data technologies such as Hadoop and cloud-based analytics bring significant cost advantages when it comes to storing large amounts of data. Plus, they can identify more efficient ways of doing business. • Faster, better decision making: With the speed of advanced solutions helping develop new capabilities to analyze new sources of data, businesses are able to analyze information immediately – and make faster decisions based on what they’ve learned. • New products and services: With the ability to gauge customer needs and satisfaction through analytics, comes the power to give customers what they want. What major challenges does big data pose for businesses? Major challenges that big data poses include, but not limited to, are: • Finding and analyzing relevant data at the speed of business • Understanding the structured data • Ensuring high-level data quality • Displaying meaningful results from an ever-growing volume of data What strategies can businesses adopt

to be successful in data-driven digital economy? The key to preparing your organization to capitalize on big data lies in three main components: • Data – the foundation for decisions. The data flooding your organization is complicated and fast-moving. It’s time to embrace all of that data by leveraging the right technology to find new ways to solve problems. • Discovery – the first steps toward intelligence. We, at SAS, help organizations explore even the biggest data sets and be creative about finding the truth hidden in the data. • Deployment – turning discovery into action. What good is a discovery if it doesn’t change the way you do business? This phase takes the insights gleaned from discovery and turns them into part of your production analytics environment. What are the trends in big data analytics that businesses must know? One of the emerging trends in big data analytics is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which are known to make data smarter and more valuable. Internet of Things (IoT) and AI have a remarkably synergistic relationship. You might say that AI is the brain of the business and IoT is the body. AI, especially machine learning, provides intelligence – the ability to evaluate options, learn from experience and make smart business decisions. IoT, like the body, provides the ability to sense and act. IoT delivers both the data AI needs, and the physical means to act on AI’s decisions. Furthermore, as AI,

Marcel Yammine GM, Gulf & Emerging Markets SAS

edge and fog technologies mature, they are accelerating IoT toward a tipping point – moving from creating incremental value to creating entirely new value propositions, business models and even industries. The convergence of AI and IoT is creating countless new opportunities and business outcomes. In manufacturing, predictive analytics gives production managers the intelligence to evaluate the trade-offs between building a new plant, for example, or buying extra capacity as needed. And preventive maintenance systems use IoT data plus AI to predict and prevent equipment problems before they happen, saving millions of dollars in unplanned downtime costs. November 2018  |  13


Interview | Fortinet

AI Promises Economic Benefits Despite Disruption In the wake of increased digitizaton, what can businesses do to enable digital transformation and improve RoI? From a network security vendor perspective, as the drive towards digital transformation gathers momentum, this is an appropriate time for organizations to pause and reflect for a moment on their security strategies. It’s beyond doubt that integration of digital technology into all areas of a business can result in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Technologies typically associated with digital transformation (DX) include SD-WAN, IoT, and Cloud, and the changes they’re driving are quite revolutionary. However, without an accompanying security transformation (SX) strategy, any DX effort can fall apart. What does acquisition of Zonefox mean to your product portfolio? ZoneFox is a cloud-based solution that identifies insider threats with the ability to distill billions of events into useful insights using machine learning and big data analytics, and to stop the threat before it spreads. The combination of Fortinet and ZoneFox further enhances the Fortinet Security Fabric by providing enterprises with deeper visibility into endpoints, user behavior as well as resource access and data movement. This capability helps shine light on security blind spots, thus addressing CISOs’ concerns on insider risks. Some use cases include, but are not limited to, endpoint-to-endpoint threat movement, data exfiltration, internal recon, insider fraud, unauthorized asset access, and account misuse or compromise. With the integration of ZoneFox into the Fortinet Security Fabric, we now offer both EDR and UEBA capabilities to allow enterprises to bolster their security posture and quickly

14  |  November 2018

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly pervasive in consumer applications. At the same time, businesses are beginning to adopt it across their operations, at times with striking results, informs Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East at Fortinet

spot both expected and unexpected emerging threats before they become major incidents and compromise the entire organization. How do you see Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacting day-to-day life? As AI becomes more common and more sophisticated, it consistently clarifies an important truth: the value, power and efficiency of AI does not arise from its ability to replace human beings. According to research by the McKinsey Global Institute, AI promises considerable economic benefits, even as it disrupts the world of work. AI now powers so many real-world applications, ranging from facial recognition to language translators and assistants like Siri and Alexa, that we barely notice it. Along with these consumer applications, companies across sectors are increasingly harnessing AI’s power in their operations. Some occupations as well as demand for some skills will decline, while others grow and many change as people work alongside ever-evolving and increasingly capable machines. While AI is increasingly pervasive in consumer

Alain Penel Regional Vice President, ME Fortinet

applications, businesses are beginning to adopt it across their operations, at times with striking results. AI can be used to improve business performance in areas including predictive maintenance, where deep learning’s ability to analyze large amounts of high-dimensional data from audio and images can effectively detect anomalies in factory assembly lines or aircraft engines. In logistics, AI can optimize routing of delivery traffic, improving fuel efficiency and reducing delivery times. In customer service management, AI has become a valuable tool in call centers, thanks to improved speech recognition. In sales, combining customer demographic and past transaction data with social media monitoring can help generate individualized “next product to buy” recommendations, which many retailers now use routinely. AI is also touted as the go-to technology when it comes to fighting fraud. What are your thoughts on this? Cyber criminals are smarter and more dangerous than ever before, adopting automated and scripted attacks that


increase their speed and scale. With the volume, velocity, and sophistication of today’s global threat landscape, we must be able to respond in real time at machine speed to effectively counter these aggressive attacks. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can help in this fight. The FortiGuard Labs' proprietary Self-Evolving Detection System (SEDS), in development and training for more than six years, has proven successful in detection effectiveness, even with zero-day malware. This mature machine learning and artificial intelligence program features a continuous training model to autonomously collect, analyze, and classify threats. It then develops new and effective defensive signatures that are distributed across the connected Fortinet Security Fabric in real time. Our artificial intelligence and machine learning program integrates into Fortinet’s threat intelligence back-end to power all the threat detection

capabilities that FortiGuard services share across the Fortinet Security Fabric. What are the top threats businesses must protect against? Cybercriminals have already begun leveraging automated and scripted techniques in an effort to drastically increase the speed and scale of their attacks. One of the largest areas of digital transformation happening across industries is the incorporation of IoT and OT devices into corporate networks. Cybercriminals already have the opportunity and capability to launch rapid, complex attacks on these inherently vulnerable devices that act as entryways into corporate networks. The potential attack capabilities posed by AI will only further compound the threats to today’s digital transformation efforts. No firm is immune to the evolving attack trends of cybercriminals. FortiGuard

Labs detected 96% of firms experiencing at least one severe exploit. In addition, nearly a quarter of companies saw cryptomining malware, and just six malware variants spread to over 10% of all organizations. FortiGuard Labs also found 30 new zero-day attacks during the quarter. Top three threats to look out for are as follows: - Cryptomining: Cybercriminals are adding IoT devices to their arsenal of tools used for mining for cryptocurrency, including home media devices. - Botnets: Cybercriminals are maximizing the impact of botnets by loading them with multiple malicious action - Malware: Recent attack trends show that malware authors are turning to agile development practices to make their malware even more challenging to detect, as well as to counter the latest tactics of anti-malware products.

INFRA MANAGEMENT

November 2018  |  15


Interview | Veeam

Follow the 3-2-1 Rule to Secure Data Data availability for 24/7/365 is mission critical for about 71% organizations in the Middle East. But, 72% have an 'availability gap' and lack expertise to ensure data availability. Graham Porter, Manager of Channels of Veeam spoke to The Integrator about their solutions to bridge this gap and other achievements Could you talk about your new products at this year’s GITEX? We’ve been known for back-up, recovery, and management for VMware and Microsoft and Hyper-V. Since the GITEX event last year, we have added a number of solutions that customers have been asking for, such as providing support for physical servers and end-points. How important is data 'availability'? Tell us about the Veeam Availability Suite V10 and how it addresses the 'availability gap'. Veeam’s vision is about having a cloud, a physical server, visualized servers, different locations that allow customers to see their data and be able to move and manage it. This is what we call 'availability'. It's all about having your systems available 24/7/365. We do an annual survey of CIOs, globally in the Middle East region. In the Middle East, we asked customers about the importance of data availability 24/7/365. About 71% respondents in the Middle East pronounced it as 'mission critical' as it made data available to the customers, partners, and employees. But, unfortunately 72% had an 'availability gap' and lacked expertise to ensure availability. So, we are introducing newer solutions for data 'availability' such as the recently added support for Unix. We’ve also provided that for IBM AIX and for Oracle Solaris. At the same time, we have relationships with Microsoft for Azure and also with Amazon Web Services. Veeam’s software 'Veeam Cloud Connect' allows customers to migrate to an Etisalat or Amazon or Microsoft, whenever they want. How do you help companies maintain business continuity? We work with all the different storage

16  |  November 2018

Tell us about your partner ecosystem. Since we have a number of different businesses, we’ve got a lot of partners. We’ve got a number of key relationships. Last year we signed re-seller agreements with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Cisco, NetApp, and most recently with Lenovo. Our products are on their price lists and they are all re-selling Veaam. We have also added support for Nutanix. Customers looking for something new in the storage and the hyper-converged environment and considering Nutanix, get our support.

Graham Porter Channel Manager Veeam

products, the different hyper vices, the operating systems. So, we manage data to cloud and move it around. If there is a problem with an internet cable connection that’s gone down between certain parts of the Gulf, you can move your data to an alternate place. Once the problem is solved you can restore your data, ensuring minimum downtime. Or, if you start to see ransomware coming out of a certain country. You can move your data to make sure you have a safe copy. We also suggest that businesses should have at least three copies of their data. At least two separate media, so it could be disk, tape, cloud and at least one copy should be offline. So that no hackers can get to it. So, in a very basic way, if you want to have availability and you want your data to be secure, follow the 3 2 1 rule.

What's been new with you in the last year? We have a pretty big year in the last 12 months filling in the product portfolio. We’ve got a lot of other things that we’re still working on, such as certifications with SAP and Oracle. We also now support Office 365 for a lot of customers. This really has been a big year because we will hit the billion dollar revenue, which is rare because only about 17 companies have hit this mark. We are looking at the two million dollar mark by 2022 and 2023. We have witnessed high growth, done a lot of R&D, and added to our portfolio. We also supported a lot of storage vendors and their products. Continuing with the good story, we were in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We were recognised by IDC and Ovum as being very good at what we do. We became number two last year in terms of back-up where we took on Commvault. By the end of next year 2019, we will overtake Veritas to become number one worldwide in terms of the back-up. So just looking at the revenue growth and how we’re doing, we will overtake them.


Interview | NetApp

UAE is One of the Most Progressive Countries in the Region From modernizing data centres to hyper convergence, cloud data services, and partnership with Nvidia, Fadi Kanafani, Managing Director, NetApp, talks in-depth about the products and offerings

Can you talk about your offerings at your stand this year? This is our fifth edition of GITEX participation and it’s been great. It was a wonderful opportunity to connect with some of our customers and partners in the market. But better yet, also make new connections with new customers and showcase our offerings in the booth and discuss some potential proof of concepts in the coming weeks. We are focusing on the customer environments as we promote our offerings at GITEX. There are some customers that are governed by certain policies and regulations where the data must reside on premise. And they must modernize their data centre to help the changing needs of the applications they are using, for whatever reason. For them, we are showcasing our offerings for modernizing the data centres. Then we have customers that would like to explore the cloud and want to mimic the cloud on premise. We present our hyper converged offering to such customers, allowing them to manage multi-tenant in their own environment and provide them with SLAs and quality of service through our ACI offering. Last, we are talking about our cloud data services with Google, AWS, as well as Microsoft Azure on the workloads that lend themselves to cloud, giving our customers the flexibility, ability, and the agility they need to have in their operation. They can put their data to the cloud, manage it in the cloud, secure and manipulate it in the cloud, and still be able to bring it back to premise in the same format that they have put it in. We are, therefore, promoting three things. First, modernizing the data centre. Second, hyper convergence to help develop own hybrid cloud. And third, cloud data services when customers are ready to go to cloud fully, or partially.

Fadi Kanafani Managing Director NetApp

Please elaborate on your new partnerships and future plans. We are showcasing our partnership with Nvidia here. Together with Nvidia, we have developed a containerized stack to support artificial intelligence and specifically deep learning. We have an NVME platform running at 100 gigabit per second, eliminating the bottlenecks of network so that all the high iops and compute requirements needed to drive the analytics for artificial intelligence are available. GITEX this year has been quite good. I have had the opportunity to meet up with the government officials, as well as CIOs and CTOs from private companies. From business point of view, we have entered into discussions related to proof of concepts as a result of the visit. It is great to be in the UAE, as it is one of the most progressive countries in the region, when we start looking at autonomous cars, taxi drones, hyper loops, and smart cities. Between now and 2019, we'll be announcing a few new things. NetApp, normally, starts announcing the new innovations at the Insight event and we will officially talk about the new innovations for 2019 then. November 2018  |  17


Interview | Sage

Affordability and ROI are Big Stories for Us We want to be part of a solution that helps our customers increase profit. We don’t want to be a burden on their pocket, says Sam Tanay, MD at Sage Can you talk about what’s new this year at GITEX? This is the first year we've had a substantial presence at GITEX and it has exceeded our expectations with lots of customers, partners, new leads, and existing customers. We're running a session in the media auditorium, with a full house. Please tell us about your ERP solutions? Our solutions range from $10 right up to $10 million for the largest enterprises. We have a solution, Sage accounting, for small and micro enterprises. It's a cloud solution that even one-man-shops like hairdressers or barbers, owners, proprietors, consultants can work with. You log in, set up your account, your payroll. Even if you watch a couple of YouTube videos, you can learn to use it and make your business fully compliant. In addition, we have Sage enterprise management product, which recently sold to some of the largest enterprises in the region. Potentially, that’s a 100 thousand/million-dollar product. We are displaying subsets of solutions from our range of applications. Sam Tanay Managing Director Sage Middle East

"In addition, we're focusing on affordability. We want to be part of a solution that helps our customers increase profit. We don’t want to be a burden on their pocket."

18  |  November 2018

Could you also talk about your solutions that revolve around Human Resource Management? Within all our products we have two segments. One that is focused on accounting and finance. And the other on human resources and payroll. We will continue to expand our reach in the market to continue growth by talking to more customers, more prospects. I'd like to highlight our solutions for the environment that are ready to go for example in the UAE or in Saudi Arabia. The Human Resource Payroll and the legislation needed to work in a local environment are Sage native. We develop and support them ourselves and our solutions are customised out of the box. We recently announced partnerships with RAK Bank and Etisalat. We’re working with many other partners across the region. In addition, we're focusing on affordability. We want to be part of a solution that helps our customers increase profit. We don’t want to be a burden on their pocket.


Interview | NoviFlow

SDN is Not a Simple World to Live In Marc Leclerc, VP Strategy and Marketing, NoviFlow, talks in detail about the company's latest product offerings and future plans

What’s new this year at GITEX 2018? Noviflow’s core offering is called programmable forwarding planes. This is software defined networking SDN. We've implemented the full open source specifications on high performance network processors. This means we have a fully programmable environment where users can change the behaviour of the switches based on the demands of the software. We’re the first company to offer this functionality on network processors. Most other companies have delivered this on standard x86 processors, which is good upto a certain capacity. With companies having virtualized their software, they can scale easily, spin up a new version of the software, move it around, in order to maximize utilization of resources. But, the problem arises when a certain degree of total bandwidth is hit and they can't scale up. With our forwarding planes, one of our switches was very often replacing 30, or 40 broad switches. But, with the arrival of virtualization, the ability to go beyond 40 to 45 has become a major problem. By implementing forwarding plane with SDN, we transfer all of the data processing process (the data plane functions) from the servers onto the switch. We also created an abstraction layer on top of this, which makes it simpler and easier to access. This is particularly useful for cyber security companies, as they are most hurt by this limitation of the 40 to 45 gig. We also made it easy for them to integrate this with their existing systems and now it's within their technical means to deploy this. Also by using filtering and load balancing, we have made the cyber security applications affordable and more efficient. We've already announced a partnership with Fortinet and we're working with other major names. Then we have gateways and DSOs—domain specific objects, on display here at GITEX. Our partner, in this region, MBuzz, are the system integrator for all this. What's next for 2019? We're looking to see what would be the next things that we would do. We have a customer who told us that they had tested over 50 BNG servers. We have entered into an agreement with a company that's doing one of these virtual BNGs and they will be using exactly the same system, but for Robin network gateways. These are very specific markets and we work with

Marc Leclerc VP, Strategy & Marketing NoviFlow

partners that have their own channels. So, working with Fortinet means, we're getting this solution propagated within Fortinet’s own partner network, which is huge because they're the security experts. Same thing with the BNG. We have a partner - netelastic, who are the experts in this area. We have a whole series of partnerships that we are developing. We are the forwarding plane experts as we know how to design actual forwarding planes. In future, we will continue to provide these types of abstraction layers, and pre-package in the domain specific objects so that they'll be usable by a much broader community. We will introduce the P4 runtime northbound interface so that customers can program this via opensource GRPC and P4 runtime. And to accelerate this process, Noviflow has joined the Stratum project of the ONF. In this project, we are providing GRPC interfaces. We hope a lot of companies create P4 based applications, which we will then be able to integrate into Noviware NAS. There'll be a whole community of companies adding functions and features. We have our sister company – Kaloom—which is also working with Mbuzz and there are many other companies joining this community. November 2018  |  19


Interview | Raqmiyat

Look Beyond Traditional Solutions Businesses of all sizes are transforming to digital. How are you helping businesses achieve this? Business has changed and digitalization is a top priority. We believe that digital transformation initiatives don’t stop with just a single application. It’s a process of innovation and Raqmiyat is giving unprecedented access to capabilities, resources and talent innovation by offering world class digital transformation solutions and technologies to our customers with our strong connections across the region. We achieve this by closely working with our regional digital transformation technology partners to realize the value of a great digital businesses for all sizes. Many businesses do not necessarily have a transformation strategy. How do you help such businesses? Businesses must align digital transformation projects to business value. Organizations must clearly define how digital transformation projects create business value, both in terms of long-term strategic positioning and short-term financial benefits. Raqmiyat acts as an enabler for such end-to-end transformation to help organizations realize the effect of meeting rapid digital demands, and we do this by simply creating digital vision, setting up core concepts of digital vision, evaluating digital opportunities and delivering quick results, and precisely setting up a digital factory for organizations to accomplish their digital transformation strategy. What is unified enterprise planning and how does it benefit businesses? Unified enterprise planning at its core is a single integrated platform that enhances planning, analytics, performance, and reporting requirements with seamless integration and multidimensional capabilities by leveraging the latest computing technology. Organizations constantly drive towards creating business

20  |  November 2018

Organizations constantly drive towards creating business value. Today, they are looking beyond traditional solutions to achieve business benefits, informs Mahesh Vishwanath, Senior Manager—Digital Transformation, Raqmiyat

value. Today, they are looking beyond traditional solutions to achieve business benefits by adapting to integrated planning, reduce resource requirements, improved and faster outcomes, reduce planning complexity, save time, and importantly align operational planning with strategic goals. What solutions are you providing for secure mobile payments? We integrate with everything (it’s easy!). With Raqmiyat’s high-end SI capabilities, it is extremely easy to securely integrate with third-party mobile payment apps, payment gateways, external enterprise systems, databases, or custom apps. We achieve this through enterprise connectors and plugins such as PayPal, WeChat Pay, Bitcoin, Apple Pay, Google Pay etc. all in compliance with payment card industry (PCI) data security standard.

Mahesh Vishwanath Senior Manager, Digital Transformation Raqmiyat

Please elaborate about your latest partnerships and how they are helping businesses? The world is entering a new age with digital transformation. It presents unprecedented challenges for everyone and we believe Raqmiyat’s digital services will help overcome these challenges and transform businesses by leveraging digital technologies. Our recent and prominent partnerships with OutSystems (a low code digital transformation platform), kore.ai (for AI-rich conversational interfaces with smart bot platform), Jedox (unified enterprise planning and business intelligence), emudhra (security and paperless office solutions) have been added to our digital portfolio. Our strategic association with our partners will help customers to accelerate their digital transformation plans and vision into reality.


Interview | Emitac

It’s the People That Matter In 2019, we are looking to expand beyond UAE into some other markets, like Saudi for sure and then Oman and Qatar, informs Gautam Raj, CEO, Emitac

Could you elaborate about what’s new with Emitac this year at GITEX? Emitac is a 42-year-old company, the oldest IT company in the Middle East, by far. We’ve been evolving. We started as HP in this region. And a lot of people in the region still know us as HP. Then there was a phase when we were Blackberry in Middle East and Africa. And a lot of people associate Emitac with Blackberry. So, currently, we are transforming the company and we adapt our terms of transforming ourselves to be most relevant system integrators in the cloud world. We've invested a lot of money and resources on the transformation of Emitac. Therefore, we are trying to showcase the new Emitac at GITEX this year. Could you elaborate on your enterprise solutions? With businesses moving to the cloud, we advise them to build capabilities according to the right suite of technologies appropriate for them so they can transition to cloud when they want. The second is in terms of transforming applications from on-premise to cloud. We are displaying a technology called CloudHealth that helps assess and understand how it will appear and the savings by moving to the cloud. The third thing is ensuring costefficiency when moving to the cloud. You can use your data center whenever and however you want to. But, in a public cloud, you pay by the time. And if you leave data, you pay for the entire duration. With CloudHealth, we are providing customers with a tool to get a granular view of who in your organization is using which part of the cloud and who's efficient. This enables them to bring down

Gautam Raj CEO Emitac

the costs. We have signed up a joint venture with an Indian company called 3i-Infotech on the services front. This will enable us to offer managed services for this whole environment. We are also demonstrating a technology called Maggie, an artificial intelligence tool to automate level 1 service help desk. That significantly brings down the cost of operation. Similarly, we are displaying a technology for big data. Everybody talks big data, it’s difficult to find talented data scientists. We have created a framework to automate processes thus eliminating the need for data scientists. Last, we've got a product called Syngrafii, an e-signature solution. It's a unique, patented technology where a robotic arm signs on behalf of the person

on his/her mobile or touch device with a pen. The receiver has a device which receives the signed document. What are your plans for 2019? In 2019, we would have completed an acquisition of a company, where we would offer our own branded software on cloud. In terms of technology, there are many big things lined up for us in real estate, banking, hospitality, and a number of other segments. Other than that, in 2019, we are looking to expand beyond UAE into some other markets, like Saudi for sure and then Oman and Qatar. As a system integrator, you sell someone else's products. But the value that you add is in terms of talent. I think so we've got some exciting talent and we've been able to attract and retain some really strong talent this year. November 2018  |  21


TechKnow | RSA

UAE viewpoint: Security is in the driving seat for IT innovation

T

he Middle East is becoming more and more connected as we continue to inject technology into every walk of life. Once thought of as part of the consumer market, mobile and IoT have migrated into the business world, and their presence in our infrastructure systems, such as the national grid and transport networks, shows it is of critical concern. With cyberthreats on the rise, the stakes could not be higher: We’re talking about the potential physical damage as well as digital data breaches. From IoT, to the cloud, to machine learning and automation, security and risk programs can be leveraged to reshape businesses in the Middle East, while overcoming the existing barriers to ensure safety and efficiency. Based on RSA’s own research and discussions with partners and customers we see four key trends emerging in the year ahead: Trend one: Consumer technologies at the core of the Enterprise IoT started on the consumer side with wearable devices. However, security was at the low end of consideration and passwords were embedded at the factory level, which meant that most IoT devices were not secured. While data leaks due to poor security on consumer IoT devices may not pose that much risk (consumers may not care if the number of steps they took in a day are leaked), once these devices make their way into the business and enterprise use-cases, that risk grows. Trend two: The rise of Shadow IT Shadow IT, where systems and solutions are built and used inside organizations without explicit organizational approval, is a growing digital risk in the region, and we will potentially see data breaches next

22  |  November 2018

year targeting organizations through this growing exposure surface. Smaller teams within the same organization are doing things their own way. Craving more agility and faster delivery, they end up creating their own IT environment that is usually cloud-based and unmanaged by the IT infrastructure team and outside the scope of the risk and compliance teams. Shadow IT creates a backdoor and it’s a growing danger. Organizations in the Middle East must not ignore the presence of such environments, and start taking measures to reduce the risks. Trend three: The accelerated rate in cloud adoption The Middle East market has been slower to adopt the cloud as it has been portrayed as something unsafe. But adoption is now growing, as it's no longer a choice for the business. It’s a reality. In the next year, cloud adoption will accelerate significantly, and organizations will have more confidence in the cloud overall. This will put pressure on regional organizations to keep themselves secure

through the transition. This includes ensuring their identity and access management remains up to par, and that their risk programs expand to cover third party. Trend four: Targeting Critical infrastructure will continue Attacks on SCADA systems and critical infrastructure will increase, and the risk of causing physical damage beyond the digital one will also increase. SCADA and IoT security will become a significant area of investment in the region. We have seen a list of targeted attacks against critical infrastructure. Traditionally isolated infrastructure, but as OT and modern IT systems converge, the “It’s isolated, so it’s secure” concept becomes a myth. SCADA systems are quite outdated and the potential damage is immense — whilst a phishing attack leading to data theft can be very harmful to organisations; attacks on critical infrastructure are on a whole new level. Physical damage can be caused to critical infrastructure posing threat to human life — e.g., crippling national services, major power cuts, air or road traffic incidents.


Interview | Pivot3

Adopt Edge to Core to Cloud Model How can businesses optimize their IT infrastructure for efficient surveillance of data storage? Video surveillance is becoming more commonplace around the world, but especially in the Middle East market. It is also becoming more critical to organisations as the regulations around capturing, storage and protection of video surveillance data increase. When you combine this with the improvements in video quality, the number of cameras deployed and the lengthened retention periods, organisations are facing a real scenario where they must manage multiple petabytes (PBs) of data. This can get expensive, very quickly, if the organisation relies on datacenter designed storage technologies to do that – replicating data (like the majority of HCI vendors do). This will mean, organizations will need to purchase 2x or 3x the amount of storage required for video, which is cost prohibitive. Video data can’t be snapshotted either, since it is too intensive during the write process, and there is not enough bandwidth to back it up to the cloud. The only logical answer is to use Erasure Coding as the primary data protection method, which will deliver up to 6x 9s of availability, and do so at approximately 80% raw to usable storage. The system also needs to be modular, so that it can scale simply and predictably as new cameras are deployed or new regulations come in. Finally, it has to be centrally managed, and in a way that the data center team is comfortable with. Managing through vCenter for example, can enable you to do that quite comfortably. With workloads migrating to cloudbased environments, what can businesses do to streamline IT operations? Intelligent management, orchestration and automation are key to managing an infrastructure that is spread across numerous locations and delivery platforms. Pivot3 allows customers to manage their data

IT infrastructures will scale to a point where it becomes incredibly difficult for the human mind to manage effectively, which is where automation and orchestration of a system becomes vital, says Anand Chakravarthi, Area Vice President, Pivot3

regardless of whether it is at the edge, in the core, or in the cloud through an intelligent policy-based management process. I believe that over time, IT infrastructures will scale to a point where it becomes incredibly difficult for the human mind to manage effectively, which is where automation and orchestration of a system becomes vital. The ability to ensure that your mission critical applications are meeting their performance service level agreements (SLAs) directly impacts business outcomes becomes critical, and the only way to manage this at scale is to have a system that automates this process and makes these calculations for the IT administrator. Finally, having the IT infrastructure balance itself, regardless of the location of the application or IT hardware to meet cost/performance or cost/resilience criteria allows IT budgets to be used more efficiently and helps to keep cost down. IT infrastructures are getting increasingly complex with diverse platforms to meet varied business needs. What must businesses do to simplify their operations? A robust set of management frameworks, processes and policies are vital in

Anand Chakravarthi Area Vice President Pivot3

this instance. If you can use a single management interface to manage all of the infrastructure, and that management engine is intelligent and delivers a high degree of automation, then you are starting at a good place. Consistency is achieved through policy-based management, allowing any member of the IT team the ability to deliver resources efficiently, and knowing that the parameters they are delivering against are standardised. This consistency then leads to better business outcomes because performance is more consistent and that consistent performance ensures a better user experience. In the wake of Internet of Things (IoT) and ensuing data explosion, how can businesses leverage this data to gain competitive advantage? Customers must have a clear definition of what they are trying to achieve when it comes to IoT. It is all very well creating petabytes, and even zettabytes, worth of data, but if you aren’t clear about what patterns you are trying to uncover, or what stimuli you are wishing to provide responses to, then your data is essentially useless. November 2018  |  23


TechKnow | Seagate

Rasilient Systems and Seagate Technology deliver upgraded security Seagate SkyHawk video surveillance storage solution protects Rasilient customers against frame drops

R

asilient Systems is a leading provider of server and storage architecture designed specifically for IP video surveillance systems. Rasilient has partnered with Seagate Technology to integrate Seagate’s SkyHawk surveillance hard drives across Rasilient’s systems, helping thousands of customers around the world to build smarter, safer and more secure IP surveillance systems. Global Village Dubai is one of Rasilient’s latest customers to implement the new technology. The partnership between Rasilient Systems and Seagate Technology is intended to solve frame rate drop, which is one of the IP surveillance industry’s biggest problems. The consequences of lost frames in a surveillance recording are serious: recording gaps mean valuable business or security intelligence is lost, and can even lead to severe financial damages. Tackling frame rate drop through superior data performance Frame rate drop is a common problem in the industry, and comes from a variety of causes. The performance of the hard drive on which the video data is stored is a key factor. When there are a large amount of read commands to the hard drive, write performance is directly impacted, and this leads to video loss. Rasilient wanted to reduce video loss for its customers, and ultimately achieve the goal of 0 frame rate drops. One of the initial challenges Rasilient faced was

24  |  November 2018

the lack of dedicated surveillance drives available on the market. Hard drives for standard desktop computing applications are not designed for the heavy 24/7 read and write loads that IP surveillance

systems require. Dedicated surveillance hard drives such as Seagate’s SkyHawk drives are specially designed to handle these loads with minimized chance of dropped frames.


“The biggest reason we chose Seagate was the reliability and support we were getting during the qualification process,” said Bing Wan, director, Middle East operations at Rasilient Systems. “Seagate allowed us to lower the total cost of ownership and achieve great performance in large-scale deployments. After switching to Seagate, we have lower disk failure rates.” Global Village Dubai upgrades its security systems with Rasilient and Seagate Global Village Dubai is the Middle East’s first and largest family-friendly tourist destination for entertainment, shopping and culture. The venue attracts over five million visitors each year, and its network of over 30 pavilions, 120 kiosks and dozens of restaurants and cafes generate a combined revenue of nearly AED2.2 billion ($599 million USD). With a high volume of guests located across a large site, Global Village Dubai needed an IP video surveillance system that could deliver high quality, high volume video recording with stability, reliability and minimal dropped frames. Rasilient Systems was selected to implement the solution, leveraging Seagate’s SkyHawk storage technology. Following a successful implementation completed in partnership with Forceis Integrated Security Systems, the system is now operational and managed by Milestone’s XProtect Corporate Video Management Software (VMS). Global Village Dubai is impressed with the results: “System uptime is crucial to our business, and we have had zero outages since we installed Rasilient,” said Mansoor Salem, senior security manager at Global Village Dubai. “We are

confident in our ability to rapidly scale our IT infrastructure no matter how many customers walk through our doors.” Rasilient achieves ‘No Frame Drop” certification with Seagate Seagate’s SkyHawk drive technology powers Rasilient’s ‘No Frame Drop’ (NFD) video surveillance storage solutions. Rasilient customers can capture and store every single camera frame, which is crucial to customers like Global Village Dubai who face a variety of security scenarios which may call for video retrieval. Rasilient was certified by Milestone as part of their Global Village Dubai implementation, and achieved remarkable results. Under the Milestone certification criteria, a frame drop rate of 0.1% or below is considered acceptable. Rasilient beat these expectations, operating 1,000 two-megapixel cameras streaming for 72 hours at 25 FPS in HD, and no frames were dropped. Rasilient stress-tested their systems further, increasing the recording bandwidth to 2.1GB/s and simulating a disk failure. Again, no frame was dropped. “Seagate SkyHawk drives are definitely a contributing factor to this success,” said Wan. Rasilient expands Seagate deployment to other projects Rasilient has made their NFD solution, powered by Seagate SkyHawk technology, a key part of their regional customer strategy. Seagate’s SkyHawk drives have also been deployed in Rasilient solutions at Abu Dhabi’s Central Market, which features 2,200 cameras and 3.2 petabytes of storage, and the Imam Hussein Shrine in Iraq, which features 1,230 cameras and 4 petabytes of storage, monitoring 30 million visitors annually.

Business need • Implement video surveillance storage solutions with minimal dropped frames Solution • Rasilient ApplianceStor (with Seagate SkyHawk) and video management software (VMS) Benefits • High scalability enterprise-level IP surveillance storage solutions • Reduction in video recording loss • No frame drop • HD video quality recording • Zero recording gaps Solution Featured • Video surveillance storage solutions

November 2018  |  25


TechKnow | ManageEngine

UAE viewpoint: Security is in the driving seat for IT innovation Desktop Central Adds AI-powered Voice Assistant to Its Mobile App

M

anageEngine, the real-time IT management company, today announced the launch of voice assistant and geo-fencing features for Desktop Central, its unified endpoint security and management solution. Available immediately, the latest version of Desktop Central allows IT teams to manage endpoints via voice commands from the solution’s mobile app. This version includes a geo-fencing feature that closes IT security gaps by enforcing location-specific IT policies on mobile devices. ManageEngine employs AI in Desktop Central's new virtual assistant, which comes integrated with its mobile app for Android devices. With the AI-powered virtual assistant, IT teams can perform complex tasks—like scanning, detecting, and deploying missing patches; performing asset scans; uninstalling software; blocking unauthenticated executable; prohibiting software; establishing remote connections; and shutting down and waking up computers—in a few quick voice commands. To further streamline endpoint management, Desktop Central adds geofencing capabilities that provide IT teams with location-specific security commands. "Endpoint management is critical to IT security, because most security breaches originate from the endpoints," said Mathivanan Venkatachalam, vice president at ManageEngine. "IT teams today spend a lot of time on redundant tasks, with one or more tools. Infusing AI, we could automate most of the complex endpoint management tasks using simple voice commands, saving a lot of time and features like geo fencing and remote OS

26  |  November 2018

Mathivanan Venkatachalam Vice President ManageEngine

deployment will reduce IT time and efforts and increase productivity.

Highlights of the New Desktop Central

 Remote Control: Initiate remote connections to a machine by saying its name.  Tools: Remotely wake up and shut down computers.

Virtual Assistant

Geo-Fencing

Administrators can use voice commands on Desktop Central's mobile app for Android devices to perform the following operations:  Patch Management: Scan a network for patches, detect and deploy missing patches, and ask for details on which computers in the network are vulnerable.  Software Deployment: Uninstall software, prohibit or block nonproductive software and applications, apply licensees, and more.  IT Asset Management: Ask for hardware and software details of network computers, as well as check license compliance status.

The new geo-fencing will help IT teams automate IT security policies on a device based on its location, including locking it or completely wiping corporate data from the device it if it leaves the established geographical range.

Remote Office OS Deployment OS Deployment to remote computers being the most challenging and timeconsuming task is now made easy with the newest version of Desktop Central. Deploying OS images to computer anywhere in the world, at any time, in a few simple clicks, allows IT teams to master on-boarding activities.


Interview | eHosting DataFort

A management approach for migrating to the public cloud

T

he benefits of migrating to a public cloud platform are now becoming increasingly well known. Whether small and medium businesses or large enterprises, there are multiple large-scale benefits. While using a cloud platform, businesses no longer need to invest in hardware and computing infrastructures. These are now hosted in the cloud platform. They can choose to opt for the services that best suit their businesses and pay for them based on their usage. This is the pay as you use model. On the flip side, businesses that choose to migrate to using a public cloud platform need to accept a vanilla formula of features and usually have limited flexibility to change them. But the smooth functioning and uptime of the cloud platform is managed by a specialist hosting provider. Hence, businesses do not need to navigate and invest in the challenges of keeping themselves abreast of the latest technologies. For businesses that have been using technology on-site and wish to access the benefits of a cloud platform, there are migration best practices to move forward. These ensure that an established way of working on-site is smoothly rebuilt on the cloud platform without minimum interruption to day to day business. Moreover, security practices that have been established on-site need to be migrated and reset to work in the cloud without failure. These often require discussion with the cloud hosting service provider as well as with any third-party suppliers. By following a managementbased approach to migration, business can ensure that they encounter minimum interruption to their day to day business. When initiating a project that involves migration to the public cloud, making a checklist of critical factors is crucial. This

2. Identify the operating system The performance of an application and its database are also dependent on the operating system and its version that is running on-site. If the public cloud environment is using a different operating system or a different version of the same operating system, plan for variations in performance and response.

3. Monitor all points of cross-over

Yasser Zeineldin, Managing Director, LiveRoute and CEO, eHosting DataFort explains how the complex process of migrating to the public cloud can be enabled by adopting a management approach.

helps to prioritize and draws attention to a roll back plan in case things do not run smoothly. Here is a list of the top seven factors that you should take into consideration.

1. Database structure and applications You want all your data to be migrated in its original format and want to use it off the cloud in the same way. However, many databases that run from the cloud have different structures than their onsite counterparts. This is one area that you really need to look into from the beginning. The same differences are likely to appear in applications that have cloud and on-premises variants.

The migration team must monitor the progress and success of the public cloud migration at various cross-over points including IP servers, IP gateways, storage application and third-party suppliers. Legacy applications that are being managed by outsourced suppliers, associated with long-term support contracts are high probability points of failure, at least in the initial stages. They need to be given more time and attention to reduce the impact of failures.

4. Application architecture Not all applications are cloud ready. Ascertain that the applications that you are using on-premises are ready to be used in the cloud. Scalability and open API's are a critical part of cloud robustness and cloud-ready application architectures.

5. Identify all redundancies During an on-site to public cloud migration, redundancies and backups and roll back plans are a great idea. But once the migration plan has been completed and signed off, keeping redundancies in place play no role, and are an added cost. Decommission these resources in a planned manner. November 2018  |  27


TechKnow | Dahua Technology

Global Cyber Security Ecosystem Needed Gerry Tong Regional Technical Manager, ME Dahua Technology

What are the key technologies that you use in your surveillance products and services? Based on core video technologies, Dahua video surveillance products integrate artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and other advanced intelligent and innovative technologies, improving product functionalities and performance. Dahua Technology has established various product lines that cater to diverse customer needs including: Artificial Intelligence Dahua Technology’s video-based AI technology covers wide range, like intelligent traffic algorithms, face detection and recognition, video structuring, behavior analysis, crowd analysis, character recognition, customer flow

28  |  November 2018

Cyber safety requires good defense in every aspect from product design, installation, operation and maintenance, and is often broken in the weakest link, feels, ME Region Technical Manager Gerry Tong, Dahua Technology

analysis, license plate recognition, item recognition, target detection and tracking, perimeter management, X-ray machine, multidimensional sensing, and other AI algorithms and products, providing complete coverage across multiple fields. Cloud and Big Data Dahua Video Cloud supports linking millions of devices, aggregating a diverse range of IoT sensing data. This configuration forms an intelligent collaboration of sensing devices across the entire network, enabling intelligent business operations and achieving integrated front and backend management with algorithms and computing power distributed and managed across the network on demand.

HDCVI Technology High definition audio video signal transmission over a single co-ax cable AV Signal Processing Smart picture parameter settings, super high resolution, ISP technology, smart encoding, directional sound collection, recognition and applications Optical Technology Optical lens design, temperature compensation, optical image stabilizer Chip Technology Controller chip with nanometer technology, SoC and HDCVI transceiver chips What products or services are you


offering to enable Internet of Things (IoT)? The vision of Dahua Technology is to become a world leading video-centric smart IoT solution and service provider. To achieve this goal, Dahua Technology has offered the following products and services to the market: Dahua HDCVI-IoT Product Series HDCVI-IoT is an IoT based series of products upon HDCVI technology, offering a comprehensive ecosystem linking conventional HD-over-Coax video and audio data with sensor information (such as temperature and humidity) and alarms. This offers users potential risk warnings with visual evidence, allowing them to secure personnel and property across all dimensions. Dahua Consumer IoT Brand Dahua Technology also released Imou as its consumer IoT brand. Imou offers a wide range of products from video device, alarm, smoke detector, lock etc for different scenarios around home applications. Dahua Technology has continued to explore the value of video in emerging business operations, extending towards emerging areas in video IoT such as machine vision, video conferencing systems, professional drones, smart firefighting, electronic license plates, RFID, and robotics to ensure its long-term development. Privacy and security of customer data is a key concern, which has led to implementation of directives such as GDPR. How are you enabling your business partners stay compliant with regulatory requirements? Dahua is devoted to helping users to realize effective, safe and compliant

"Therefore, it is important to establish a solid global cyber security ecosystem. Dahua insists on creating safety value, and is calling attention to establish a global new network security ecosystem, protecting network security for end users, installers and device manufacturers."

processing of personal data. We have established a special team of personal data protection, which consists of Dahua legal experts, personal data protection experts, network security experts and in-depth cooperative experts with authorized certification of personal data and privacy protection. We have created personal data protection design specification requirements of Dahua products via deep learning of GDPR act and deep understanding of users’ needs. Besides, we have made comprehensive assessment over personal data protection capability of Dahua products and services, which is also fully promoted and improved. And Dahua is the first company in the global video surveillance industry whose products have been certified by TÜV Rheinland.

Increased digitization, instant payments and fund transfers, have increased the attack surface for cyber threats for financial institutions. What can these businesses do to block fraud without disrupting customer experience? Market awareness about cyber security is increasing. Cyber safety requires good defense in every aspect from product design, installation, operation and maintenance, and is often broken in the weakest link. Therefore, it is important to establish a solid global cyber security ecosystem. Dahua insists on creating safety value, and is calling attention to establish a global new network security ecosystem, protecting network security for end users, installers and device manufacturers. A community with good information sharing, technical training and access to expertise will greatly improve our safety in the cyber space. The Dahua Smart Banking and Finance Solution relies on the Dahua Heart of City (HOC) 1+2+N framework and support from its full sensing, full intelligence, full computing, and full ecosystem capabilities. It employs smart branch, smart ATM, smart vault, smart building, smart risk management, and other various scenario-based applications to not only ensure overall financial transaction security, but also assist the financial industry in upgrading to smart technologies. In the near future, we are planning to apply the AI technology to block fraud without disrupting customer experience like noninductive pay with 3D face recognition algorithms. AI cloud computing with big data model helps humans to proactively avoid cyber threats with their daily financial activities. November 2018  |  29


TechKnow | EnGenius

EnGenius EWS355AP and EnGenius ENS620EXT at GITEX

Alishan Zaidi Regional Sales Manager EnGenius International Dubai

E

nGenius International Dubai promoted their Wave 2 managed indoor and outdoor wireless access points—EnGenius EWS355AP 802.11ac and EnGenius ENS620EXT 11ac—during the GITEX Technology Week. The EWS355AP comes with an advanced hardware and latest technology that allows more wireless clients to connect for demanding business use. In addition, the AP’s Beamforming function provides optimal signal strength to improve the overall client experience. With multiple APs configured, roaming users can access seamless and reliable connectivity. On the other hand, the ENS620EXT is designed for peak performance in harsh climates and features an IP55-rated waterproof and dustproof enclosure ensuring it can withstand harsh outdoor and indoor environments including prolonged exposure to sunlight, extreme cold, frost, snow, rain, hail, heat, and humidity, and indoors where temperature

30  |  November 2018

"The ENS620EXT is designed for peak performance in harsh climates and features an IP55-rated waterproof and dustproof enclosure ensuring it can withstand harsh outdoor and indoor environments including prolonged exposure to sunlight, extreme cold, frost, snow, rain, hail, heat, and humidity, and indoors where temperature may be a factor."

may be a factor. Alishan Zaidi, Regional Sales Manager, EnGenius International Dubai said, “We were very excited and proud to have participated at this year’s GITEX Technology Week together with our distributor Bulwark Technologies. The exhibition is always a highlight for us and we could not wait to promote our new range of indoor and outdoor wireless APs to channel partners and their end user customers.” The EWS355AP harnesses Wave 2 MU-MIMO technology to meet the Wi-Fi business demands of laptops, tablets, and other devices that tackle large volumes of email, conduct online research, analyse Big Data, and transfer high-resolution marketing collateral and multimedia files. Visitors at the GITEX learnt how to connect and power the ENS620EXT via its Gigabit Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) port in locations where power outlets are limited or unavailable, such as under the eaves of roofs, on light poles or in other remote locations.



Phone: +971 48863850 E-mail: info@asbisme.ae www.asbisme.ae


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.