October 2015 / Volume 4 / Issue 45
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Software Defined Era: Simplifying Complexity A Market Status & Perspective Report on SDN P-30
Point2Point - P-52
Simplifying Converged Infrastructure
TechKnow - P-18
Experience the Transformation
Insight - P-44
PoS The Game Changer of Retail
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Editorial
Cover Feature - 30
Software Defined Era: Simplifying Complexity
Welcome Innovation at Gitex 2015 W
e all know that technology is growing dynamically. Now, the question is how this dynamics shaping up and how does it actually work. Newer technologies that are getting introduced, day by day, are the symbolic of dynamic growth, perhaps this statement is not completely true. The actual answer of this quest can be understood by the size of latest Dell-EMC acquisition deal. Yes, this $67 Billion deal bought the enterprise IT and cloud computing on the centre stage of financial world. By enlarge this can be understood as – how dynamically is the enterprise technology is growing In this issue of the Integrator Magazine we unlocked this deal dynamics along with Middle East flavored market trends. Yes, we are looking at 35th edition of Gitex. Overwhelming response of the entire industry and stakeholder shows the market trends and directions. Another important emerging trend that we have explored through this issue is SDN (Software Defined Networking). Though at a nascent stage, this trend have shown it’s value to the industry. SDN is not just making media headlines but large enterprises in the telecom space are already using it. In addition to the large setups, SDN also holds prominence to mid market organizations. The cover story has covered some interesting insights regarding this trend. While the whole IT industry is under Gitex fever, we would like to keep vigilant eye on the upcoming wave in this technology domain. The domain which is always open for innovation. So, this Gitex, let’s explore innovation. Innovation which can unleash the glimpse of the technology’s future. Lets welcome innovation at the 35th edition of Gitex Technology Week 2015. Happy Gitexing
Faiz Askari Senior Editor
News In Detail
Faster Insights with SQL Servers - 10
Dell Acquires EMC for $67 Bn - 12 Progress Distribution Enters ME - 14 TechKnow
Unleashing the Next Wave - 16
Experience the Transformation - 18 Smart Cities & Big Data: Unfurl Opportunities - 20
MPS driving the Document Management Market - 22 Visualise Zero Downtime Vision with Suse - 24 Insight
10 Best Practices to Deal with Major incidents in IT - 42 PoS The Game Changer of Retail - 44
Point2Point
Tapping the Next Gen Netwokring - 48
Unfolding Unified Communications - 50
Simplifying Converged Infrastructure - 52 Agility Drive Cloud Acceptance - 58 Big Data & IoT set to Transform the Technology - 60 Regulars
News Bytes EyeTech Market Stats
Published by: JNS Media International MFZE Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Senior Editor: Faiz Askari Art Director: Faiz Ahmed Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh
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
Odyssey wins Data Impact Award Odyssey received a great distinction at 2015 Data Impact Awards, where the company was announced as the winner in the category of Operational Analytics for the most admirable architecture. Odyssey's Executive Directors received the award at a ceremony hosted by Cloudera in New York. Data Impact Awards, having become firmly established in the BigData field, aim to honor organizations that have seen a material impact within their business operations using CDH, the world’s most dynamic open source Hadoopbased distribution. Odyssey competed amongst many international widely known organizations, and was selected as the winner by a committee of over 20 esteemed industry experts and thought leaders. In his statements, the Executive Director of Odyssey, Eleftherios Antoniades, expressed his pride and satisfaction for this honorable distinction and stressed that this is a great reward for the company's efforts but also a global recognition of the architecture and performance of the ClearSkies SECaaS SIEM platform. "Through implementing CDH", he stated, "this revolutionary approach comes, in fact, to set new foundations in the field because among other things, it drastically increases the multilevel analysis and correlation of billions or trillions of events in mere minutes or even seconds.
4 | October 2015
Starlink to highlight proactive risk management at GITEX 2015 StarLink, the region’s trusted security-specialized “True” Value-Added-Distributor (VAD), will be present at GITEX this year in the same prime location (Stand A2-2) as last year, and will showcase 12 leading vendors from its portfolio. To successfully deliver security capable of addressing today's risks, organizations need to take a holistic approach to IT Security. StarLink’s portfolio of technologies was designed to simplify risk management and ensure that all critical controls for effective enterprise IT Security are in place. Every year StarLink exhibits at GITEX to nurture Partner, Customer and Vendor relationships, each of whom have the opportunity to network with each other on the stand, as well as, meet with StarLink’s Management team tolearn more about StarLink’s Security Framework, Solutions Lifecycle and business strategy. Mahmoud Nimer, General Manager at StarLink said, “The number of security breaches are on the rise, so we are excited to be at GITEX again this year, and to engage 12 of our vendors with our Customers and Partners to help in the further fortification of enterprise networks.” He added, “We want to be able to communicate the risks organizations are facing, and how StarLink’s consultative approach and support delivery capabilities, backed by a robust in-house technical team and a strong bandwidth of Strategic Partners from across the region, can help Customers identify and address their security challenges.”
Imperva Hacker Intelligence Report Reveals the Hidden Risk of today’s Malware Gulf IT is the authorised distributor for Imperva across GCC. Imperva committed to protecting business-critical data and applications in the cloud and on-premises, unveiled its latest Hacker Intelligence Initiative (HII) Report: “Phishing Trip to Brazil.” This new report, published by the Imperva Application DefenseCenter (ADC), offers a detailed look at a cyber attack targeting consumers using a banking Trojan, and shows how consumercentric cyber crimes can compromise the enterprise. The report also demonstrates that despite potential anti-malware defenses, attacks that target individual employees can easily enter the enterprise network. “Our research underscores that work life and personal life intersect, and when an employee receives a suspicious email from a vendor they trust, like a bank, they are more likely to open it. Unfortunately, if an employee reads one of these emails on a home computer while connected to an enterprise Virtual Private Network (VPN), they are opening up their employer to a potential attack,” said Amichai Shulman, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Imperva. “With malware evolving faster than antivirus protection, companies should shift their focus from detecting malware to directly monitoring and protecting enterprise data, applications, and user accounts. With the prevalence of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and remote working, data and file activity monitoring are the best way to protect against compromise of sensitive enterprise information.”
News Bytes
Schneider Electric join hands with AIT Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, has formed a strategic alliance with Applied Instrument Technologies, Inc. (AIT), a leading provider of process analyzers for online and real-time process analysis in hydrocarbon, chemical, pharmaceutical and steel-making industries. The new partnership extends the capabilities of both companies to provide industry-leading process automation solutions to their respective global customer bases. “We are always looking out for new ways to address critical challenges around efficiency, quality and safety that our customers face in their businesses. This alliance enables us to team up with a great partner to offer our customers better solutions and to improve their businesses,” said Chris Lyden, Senior Vice President, Process Automation Strategy & Offer Management, Industry Business, Schneider Electric. “Together, Schneider Electric and AIT can now provide more technologies and expertise in one integrated solution for online and real-time process analysis, process control and advanced applications, such as blend management, optimization and planning. This will help to improve efficiencies and add significant value for our customers’ overall business.” The combination of Schneider Electric’s Process Automation portfolio, including the Foxboro Evo Distributed Control System and Triconex® safety instrumented systems, and global delivery capabilities, together with AIT’s leading portfolio of spectroscopy and chromatography products, particularly its realtime process analyzers, will offer customers more comprehensive process analysis, control and advanced operations management solutions in one integrated automation solution from a single vendor. This partnership promises to simplify the path to improved productivity and operational efficiency for our customers and builds on a strong existing relationship between the two companies. “AIT welcomes the opportunity to market its unique portfolio, including ANALECT®, FXI®, MGA™, PIONIR® and RPM® analyzers through Schneider Electric. This provides customers with the most advanced integrated process control and analytical solution with a single point of purchase,” added JosephLaConte, President, AIT.
6 | October 2015
Netcure partners with RISK IQ Netcure have announced a partnership with RISK IQ to expand their Security Managed Services. Risk IQ is delivered in the cloud and tracks Mobile Apps and Internet Assets to detect fraudulent activities from a customer perspective. As the enterprise expands and their dependency on the web applications and mobile apps increases its important to track the customers experience and proactively detect Security threats targeted at customers. Commenting on this development, Jeff Ogden - Managing Director – Netcure says, “RISKIQ Technology allows us to discover and test all of customers external assets in real time. The crawler technology simulates a customers experiences and ensure they are not led to fraudulent web or mobile sites. 90% of our customers do not track their external assets and we guarantee to find unknown activities as part of our ‘90 days Quick Start’ program.”
Sophos appoints Harish Chibas Vice President Middle East & Africa Global leader in network and endpoint security technology appointed Harish Chib as vice-president for its Middle East & Africa (MEA) region. This new strategic leadership position will focus on strengthening the company’s sales and channel strategy for that region. Harish joined Sophos through the acquisition of Cyberoam in 2014 where he successfully led channel strategy and sales operations for 10 years. In this new role, he will drive business development opportunities, and oversee the integration and expansion of Sophos and Cyberoam channel ecosystems acrossMEA. “Harish’s expertise in leading and scaling sales operations and leveraging the partner ecosystem makes him the ideal leader for Sophos' growing focus in the Middle East and Africa,” said Karl Heinz Warum, VP CEEMEA, Sophos. “His proven success with Cyberoam's sales and channel gives him the right experience to further expand our strong sales and partner network.It is our ambition to be the vendor of choice for both endpoint and network security solutions, and under Harish’s leadership, we willbring together our channel and sales organization with the Cyberoam ecosystem and bolster sales engineering and reseller enablement initiatives in MEA.” Commenting on his new role Harish said, “A growing number of businesses in MEA are experiencing increased digitization, however, the menace of cyber-attacks and cyber-crime is stalling their ICT adoption. Resellers from across the region have a tremendous opportunity to leverage the synergy of both Sophos and Cyberoam products in endpoint, cloud and network security to protect their customers with advanced technology.” Sophos is the only IT security company to be positioned as a Leader by Gartner in three critical security Magic Quadrant reports: September 2014 [October 2015] Magic Quadrant for Mobile Data Protection, December 2014 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, and the September 2015 Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management (UTM).
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News Bytes
Fortinet Appoints Redington Value as Distributor Fortinet – the global leader in highperformance cyber security solutions announced that it has appointed Redington Value as its new value added distributor for the Middle East. The strategic partnership is in line with Fortinet’s aggressive regional growth and expansion plans. This move means that Fortinet’s market leading security solutions will now be distributed by Redington Value, Exclusive Networks and Oxygen. Redington Value will distribute Fortinet’s entire security solutions portfolio across the GCC, Saudi Arabia, Levant, Pakistan and Sub-Saharan Africa. Fortinet’s next generation firewall and UTM technology, as well as its end-to-end security solutions covering perimeter, core networks, server, datacenter, application and wireless access security market place will also enable the distributor to target more segments and verticals such as telecom operators, service providers and MSSPs, through cloud ready and network embedded solutions. The distributor will also provide customers with pre and post-sales services and support, training, consultancy, proof of concept facilities, and end user demand generation, as part of its value-added services offering. “We are excited to work with Redington Value, and look forward to strengthening our already healthy position in the market,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President- ME at Fortinet.
8 | October 2015
STME prepares ME enterprises for systems integration success Over the past three decades, Dubai-based STME, leading IT solutions provider and systems integrator, has been helping regional businesses adapt to ever-evolving technology enabling change within their organisations. Ayman Al Bayaa, CEO of STME said, “Innovation is the key to maximizing the processes and applications that drive business growth within the region or anywhere else in the world.” “Because of our extensive history in the IT industry, we have witnessed how the technological evolution dramatically transformed the way organisations in the Middle East operate their businesses irrespective of their size,” Mr Al Bayaa said. “At STME, our goal has always been to help businesses achieve operational excellence by ensuring process efficiencies, so they can respond to market changes,” he noted. With offices in the UAE (Dubai and Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia (Riyadh, Jeddah, and Al Khobbar), Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Egypt, as well as over 120 technically qualified staff, STME is in prime position to respond to the needs of businesses region-wide. It has an existing partnership with more than 10 world-class technology vendors. Its broad experience and technological know-how has made STME the go-to company for organisations looking for solutions in: storage systems (both enterprise and modular), cloud services, SAN infrastructure, virtualisation, data protection and recovery, data availability, data management, security, high availability, disaster recovery, information lifecycle management (ILM) products, remote application delivery and server hardware.
ValueMentor Strengthens its SME focused security assessment services Cyber Security consulting & services company ValueMentor is launching a slew of Security Assessment services focused on the SME segment. They are seeking to grow their market share in the SME space and also increase their channel partner’s strength. ValueMentor currently offers a wide range of security assessment services to large enterprises and government organizations in the Middle East, India and United States. With the introduction of security assessment services targeted at SMEs, ValueMentor intends to expand the channel network, so that a large number of SME customers will have access to the ValueMentor Security Assessment services at affordable costs. "In the recent past, we have seen a large number of SME businesses getting affected by various cyber security incidents. SME business often ignores the importance of cyber security until an incident occurs. Cost of security and awareness are the two key reasons, why they tend to ignore Information Security. With our new service line focused on the SME’s, we intent to bridge this Gap and help SMEs establish enterprise level security practices” said Binoy Koonammavu, CEO and Principal Consultant at ValueMentor. “The benefit will accrue not only to its existing partners, but also to potential new partners as we are taking these services to the SME space where IT resources are far more limited,” said Mridul Menon, Head of Business & Strategy for ValueMentor.
News Bytes
Faster insights with SQL Server 2014 Even the modern business intelligence (BI) platform must adapt to a whole new scope, scale, and diversity of information and data, and it must continue to embrace the new ways that we discover and collaborate on information every day. SQL Server 2014 delivers critical performance across all workloads with in-memory built-in, faster insights from any data with familiar tools, and a platform for hybrid cloud enabling organisations to easily build, deploy and manage solutions than span on-premises and cloud. Mission critical performance. SQL Server 2014 features enhanced in-memory performance with up to 30x faster transactions, more than 100x faster queries than disk based relational databases and real-time operational analytics. It is ranked the least vulnerable database five years in a row. The always encrypted technology helps protect data at rest and in motion, on-premises and in the cloud, with master keys sitting with the application, without any application changes. It features even higher availability and performance than SQL Server 2014 with Always On secondaries with the ability to have up to 3 synchronous replicas, DTC support and round-robin load balancing of the secondaries. SQL Server 2014 also features enhanced database caching across multiple cores and support for Windows Server 2014 that efficiently scale,compute, networking and storage in both physical and virtual environments. Deeper insights across data. Microsoft SQL Server 2014 makes it easy to access data, whether small or big. Users can search, access, and shape internal and external data, and combine with unstructured data to broaden insights.
10 | October 2015
New Generation Smart Systems from Rittal at GITEX 2015 Rittal, a leading manufacturer of IT Racks and Datacentre solution provider continues to reinstate its strong presence in Middle East region with their New Generation SMART Systems for IT Infrastructure displayed and showcased on their 108 SQM Innovation Stand participation at GITEX 2015. Products taking centre stage this year will be the Datacentre-in-a-Box tailored products and solutions, the latest TS-IT frame and variants, Outdoor IT Racks, Cooling solutions last but not least packed with DCIM software showcase. A preview into the Standardised Datacentre solution from Rittal – ‘Rimatrix S’ will be a key highlight as well on the stand this year. Joseph Najjar, Managing Director, Rittal Middle East said, “GITEX platform being a regional meeting event, with growing international recognition – will surely help in building great brand awareness and consolidate Rittal brand equity too. Since GITEX is the only IT exhibition where Rittal participates directly in the region, it’s an important event that offers a growth stimulus for Rittal in the region.” Rittal is showcasing it’s products at HALL 1, Stand A1-15. Innovation defines Rittal and differentiates us from competition. We are proud to be a leading adaptor to the Industry 4.0 revolution. Talking about the merging of IT and industry, i.e. the way in which a virtual, software-supported world is networking with the real world. Instead of simply focusing on individual products and process sequences, the task now is to take into account entire value chains. As in previous years, we introduce NEW products acknowledging market feedback and requirements for niche verticals & market segments. Partners benefit from our innovations and solutions to meet the growing trends and needs of the IT industry.
Array Networks launched new web application firewall appliances Array Networks Inc, leader in application delivery networking, announced the availability of its AWF Series Web application firewall appliances. Three new hardware appliances and a software appliance for virtual environments protect Web applications and cloud services from a variety of attacks that slip through generalpurpose security solutions. Array’s AWF Series Web application firewalls extend beyond traditional firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDSs) to provide comprehensive protection for business-critical Web applications. The AWF Series provides extremely fine-grained attack detection and analysis capabilities, while protecting against the most common Web application threats including SQL injection attacks, Web page tampering, Website malicious code, and disclosure of sensitive information. The new Web application firewalls are a perfect complement to Array’s portfolio of application delivery networking products and solutions, which includes load balancers, SSL VPNs and WAN optimization controllers. “Array Networks is dedicated to helping businesses optimize the availability, performance and security of their business-critical applications,” said Paul Andersen, Senior Director of Marketing at Array Networks. “Our new AWF Series Web application firewalls double down on the security component, giving customers the ability to look deeper into their networks and application traffic to guard against more sophisticated threats and attacks.”
News In Detail
I
n a largest IT industry’s acquisition, Dell Inc bought world’s leader in data storage -EMC Corp for $67 billion, setting a record in the technology industry, as it tries to transform itself into a giant in the fastgrowing market for managing and storing corporate data. The major driver for this acquisition is considered to be Cloud Computing business. This deal is expected to help Dell, the world's No. 3 computer maker, diversify from a stagnant consumer PC market and give it greater scale in the more profitable and fastergrowing market for cloud-based data services. By combining Dell's server businesses with EMC's storage and virtualization assets, the new, enlarged company will have a broader range of products to challenge Cisco Systems Inc, IBM and HewlettPackard in the areas of cloud computing, mobility and cyber security. The stock market gave the deal a lukewarm response. EMC shares rose 1.8 percent to $28.36 after earlier jumping more than 2.5 percent. VMware shares plunged 7.8 percent to $72.48, decreasing the value of Dell's offer. VMware will remain a publicly traded company. FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said shareholders were concerned, however, that VMware would lose talented employees amid uncertainty about their future under Dell, eventually hurting the company's performance. EMC's board has approved the merger and will recommend that shareholders do so as well. The deal will be financed through a combination of new equity from Dell's owners founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell, its investment
12 | October 2015
Dell acquires EMC for $67bn, tech history's largest acquisition firm MSD Partners, private equity firm Silver Lake and Singapore state-owned investor Temasek Holdings - as well as the issuance of the tracking stock, new debt and cash on hand. Michael Dell, with the help of Silver Lake, took the PC maker private in $25 billion deal two years ago. The combined companies will have about $50 billion in debt, of which $32 billion is associated with the new transaction, plus an unspecified amount of refinanced EMC debt, according to two people familiar with matter, who asked not to be named as the information was not public. Dell's owners will invest more than $3 billion as new equity. Dell first approached EMC
in October 2014 following speculation over a deal between Hewlett-Packard and EMC collapsing and Elliott attacking the company, the source said. Michael Dell then met EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2015 in Davos in January, the source added. Negotiations between Dell and EMC intensified in the last two months. "This is a bittersweet announcement for me. I am incredibly proud of the business we have built here at EMC. But I also recognize the need for change, and size, coupled with focus of mission, and capabilities, matter!" Tucci wrote in a blog post on EMC's website.
The transaction is expected to close between May and October 2016, the companies said. Morgan Stanley, Evercore Partners Inc, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP advised EMC. JPMorgan Chase & Co advised Dell and Silver Lake and was global financing co-ordinator, alongside Credit Suisse Group AG. Barclays Plc, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and RBC Capital Markets also provided financing. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP offered legal advice to Dell and Silver Lake. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is legal adviser to Michael Dell and MSD Partners.
News In Detail
P
rogress Distribution is a boutique IT distributor that focuses on emerging technologies within Security, Networking, Infrastructure and Storage. Officially launched earlier this month, Progress Distribution has quickly made an unprecedented name for itself as one of the leading IT Distribution companies throughout the Middle East. Besides offering resellers with commercial and marketing support, the company also has a dedicated professional services division, which provides consulting, training, deployment and technical support. The Progress Distribution management team is comprised of high-profile and experienced professionals who are veterans of the Middle East IT Distribution industry. With decades of collective experience, Tim Martin, Keith Rich and Gareth Morgan are responsible for the launch of the company and ongoing success of their vendors. Keith Rich, the current CEO of Progress Distribution launched Online Distribution in 1993 and continued to run the business for several years after its acquisition in 2000. He was previously the Senior Vice President at the multi-billion dollar global IT Distributor Westcon, where he was solely responsible for the Africa, India and Middle East regions. The Chief Financial Officer of Progress Distribution, Tim Martin has over 20 years of experience in the Middle East IT market and previously launched his own business entitled Fusion Distribution. After selling the company to Computerlinks, Martin remained apart of the team and helped grow company revenues of over $100 million.
14 | October 2015
Progress Distribution Enters Middle East The Progress Distribution Sales Director Gareth Morgan launched a startup distributor Clarity in the United Kingdom. He was able to grow revenues of over $30 million in 4 years before leaving to take senior management roles for international Security and Networking companies. Since 2009, Morgan has worked as a Sales Director for Computerlinksand Arrow ECSin Dubai. “After over 20 years of success with major
distributors throughout the Middle East, I am very excited to be launching Progress Distribution.” explains Tim Martin. “We will provide resellers with the support they need to grow their business in the region.” Together, the Progress Distribution team will act as an alternative to the region’s typical distributors. Instead of focusing solely on fulfillment and reactive business, Progress Distribution thoroughly engages with their partners. They pride
themselves in understanding each business they work with and are able to create demand with new technologies and profitable vendors. Despite the company's recent launch, Progress Distribution is already working with a number of innovative vendors including Censornet, Xangati, Plixer, and AVG. In the upcoming weeks, the company plans on announcing other major vendors who will be joining the portfolio throughout the next year.
TechKnow | EliteVAD
George Ezzat CEO EliteVAD
For any business it is very important to understand the upcoming trend in his trade. By such understanding, the business can become adaptable to the next wave of opportunity. EliteVAD is a prominent name among the technology companies in the Middle East region, who have the edge to understand the next wave. George Ezzat - CEO – EliteVAD explains his perspective on the upcoming trends and the technologies which will drive the market.
infrastructures. For this to be real, at every stage it is equally important that we collaborate meritoriously with Stakeholders, Business-units, Information Security and Risk assurance teams and other governing bodies to successfully drive them towards a robust security integrated business model. We believe that the rewards will be great as we become part to lead such a qualitative change to help protect thousands of enterprises, service providers and government networks against a new age of security-threats. Security was considered as a challenge in cloud adoption. How is the scenario look like from today’s perspective? It is un-doubtful that until recently security has been considered a major challenge in cloud computing, though cloud computing as such has been set for a boom in the region. There have been concerns about security associated with shared infrastructures, with the
Unleashing the Next Wave What are the key trends you are observing in the Middle East market with respect to technology? In terms of technology as we already sees it, the Middle East market is witnessing real-time fast-growth segments- Traffic Intelligence, Lawful Interception, Enhanced Information Security & Regulatory compliance demands, Network & Cloud performance, ever increasing demands for tighter Security Management at the very pace of Businesses are all key trends with realtime growth curves. What are the technologies that are set to drive the next wave of technology consumption in this region? In this region we already have witnessed that, there are a list of technologies which are strong drivers with huge amount of possibilities to set forth a next wave of technology consumption. For example, with the everincreasing GIGA volumes of huge network traffic , traffic Intelligence and visibility solutions offers the much
16 | October 2015
needed visibility, flexibility, and most effective control of highly complex networks. Online Financial Anti-Fraud platforms, Technologies for faster Security provisioning & automation of security work flows, robust application connectivity management, are all next to principal needs. How is EliteVAD focusing on opportunities such as ensuring robust security layer? Primarily, with the advancement of most sophisticated security threats, It is utmost important that entrepreneurs are also exposed to the most innovative security technologies in order for them to empower themselves and their organizations towards having effective & improved security intelligence and stronger security platforms ultimately protecting them against financial and reputational losses. EliteVAD focuses on bringing about such changes in mindsets and towards effective realization of “Robust security protection layer” within network
information residing across multiple locations etc. But today’s perspective is changing with more businesses open to cloud adoption. A fundamental change of perception that, whether on cloud or otherwise understanding the importance of having clarity on possible attackvectors and taking measures to stay protected is what is utmost important have really helped. According to you, what are the key drivers of Cloud solution adoption in the region? Growing businesses with ever increasing presence of Global Companies, Growth of large-scale projects, major developments in economies and increased investments, expansion of educational & telecom industries and financial sectors are all factors that foster growth of Cloud solution adoption. With more and more people opting for “Solutions as a Service” options in the region which, while minimizing IT management workloads and complexities also drives cloud solution adoption.
TechKnow | TrippLite
Alexander Khalaev VP, Sales MENA, CIS & Baltics TrippLite
Alexander Khalaev, Vice President of Sales - MENA, CIS and Baltics for Tripp Lite shared an overview about his organization’s expertise and focus towards the market. In an exclusive interview with The Integrator Magazine, Alexander emphasized on technology based transformations that are happening around Middle East and GCC region.
a single source, and that we work with our customers to personalize solutions to meet their unique needs. The custom requirements of our clients often drive new solutions for challenging installations, and many of these modifications make their way into our standard product offering. For example, we now offer racks of varying widths and depths to accommodate the needs of varying environments, and we are constantly enhancing our product lines with features our customers have requested, like PDUs with Automatic Transfer Switches or hotswappable UPS systems. Industry verticals such as government, healthcare and education are adopting newer technologies and applications. What impact does it make to critical components of IT infrastructure tools such as switching, networking and cabling? IT users in verticals like government, healthcare, and education should find a trusted supplier of quality products. As technologies like switches, networks, and
Experience the Transformation & Prepare for a Change Networking infrastructure in the new age datacenters is transforming exponentially. How do you experience this transformation? Transformations in today’s datacenters are driven by virtualization, cloud computing, service-oriented architectures, and the explosion of data and storage needs. All these factors increase network complexity and density and create the need for a more reliable infrastructure with higher capacity, precise cooling solutions, and effective power management. Tripp Lite offers a full range of infrastructure products for modern datacenters, including high-capacity modular UPS systems, Power Distribution Units (PDUs), racks, in-row and supplemental cooling units, cables and connectivity products, and more. Recently, we have been seeing more and more requests for complete
18 | October 2015
and integrated datacenter infrastructure solutions, and we are happy to comply with these requests by working with our customers to design customized infrastructure solutions that are tailored to their needs. What are the key drivers for Tripp Lite’s business? Tripp Lite was established in 1922, and since then we have remained an industry leader thanks to the company’s emphasis on the quality of our products, constant innovation of new solutions, and customer service. We work with a loyal and professional channel, and we always strive to provide a great value for the price of our products. But what really drives Tripp Lite’s business is the fact that we are able to construct a complete infrastructure solution for a customer from
servers become more commonly used in diverse environments like hospitals, classrooms, and government agencies, infrastructure components must become more flexible so that they can integrate into a variety of applications. Infrastructure vendors need to adapt by supplying versatile solutions with innovative features. Tripp Lite has developed application-specific solutions like hospitalgrade UPS systems and secure KVM switches for use in government agencies, but our standard products are adaptable and vendor-neutral so that they can integrate into the existing infrastructure in any application. For example, we recently expanded our line of wall-mount racks. They now come in a wider variety of sizes, ranging from five to 26U, and include more customizable features like glass doors, wall hinges, extra width
or depth, or low suppressors and profile. This means power inverters, "Trend is the need for 100% system availability, as we can now offer so since we have uptime is essential for the continuity of any business. a rack solution an offering for Tripp Lite is uniquely positioned to meet the highest just about any just about every availability demands thanks to the Hot-Swap application. segment of the capabilities of our enterprise-grade UPS systems, which On a related market, we see have built-in PDU bypass switches." note, since enormous potential space is usually in the region. more limited in systems, many of which have a power environments outside of the traditional With regards to partner’s role in this factor of 0.9 or higher, and by expanding datacenter, it is important to provide business. What are the key areas of our portfolio of power distribution cross-functional solutions that can opportunity you witness for the partner accomplish multiple tasks while occupying solutions, which optimize the efficiency of segment? a network and allow users to accurately small amount of space. A good example As I mentioned, our partners play a key monitor equipment power consumption. of this is a PDU with Automatic Transfer role in our go-to-market strategy, so With regards to power demands, Switch, which provides a redundant A/B there is as much potential for them in the another trend is the need for 100% power option for network devices in market as there is for the Tripp Lite brand. addition to power distribution, monitoring, system availability, as uptime is essential We are completely loyal to our channel and individual outlet control. Tripp Lite ATS for the continuity of any business. Tripp and never sell direct, and we offer Lite is uniquely positioned to meet the PDUs can accomplish all of this in only 1 multifaceted sales support that includes highest availability demands thanks or 2U of rack space. training and certification programs, to the Hot-Swap capabilities of our marketing tools, and volume pricing. We enterprise-grade UPS systems, which How are power & cooling demands also sustain higher margins in the channel. have built-in PDU bypass switches. This evolving in the market? Plus, Tripp Lite provides additional allows for service or battery replacement Thanks to the data boom and trends opportunities for partners by allowing without interrupting the power supply towards virtualization and cloud them to sell on top of the box, offering to connected equipment, therefore computing, datacenters are increasing add-ons like extended warranties, startup eliminating maintenance downtime. in density. More equipment is being services, and service contracts. packed into each rack, which means What is your go-to-market strategy for power demands are increasing as well. Which are the geographies in this the EMEA/GCC region? Customers are now looking for highregion are doing great for your The most important part of our go-topower, highly efficient infrastructure business? market strategy in MEA/GCC is maintaining solutions and investing in renewable Business has been great across the region a healthy distribution model. We rely on sources of energy. in general, but the countries where we the loyalty and professionalism of our Cooling in particular has become more see the most growth are the United partners, and we do whatever we can to challenging and more expensive in the Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. support their sales efforts. We are also able However, we see great potential across region. As the density of a datacenter to respond quickly to regional demands as increases, the equipment inside produces the entire GCC. we maintain a significant stock of readymore heat, and there is less room for to-ship inventory on the ground in our ventilation. Standalone systems are no What are the emerging industry Dubai warehouse. And finally, we provide longer sufficient, and recently we have verticals for Tripp Lite? our customers with quality service, which seen a critical need for supplemental Tripp Lite is well established in as an includes comprehensive post-sales support cooling units like our SRXCOOL12K to infrastructure provider in IT and a variety and warranty options. remove hot spots. Plus, cooling costs are of industries - our products are currently usually elevated in the Middle East due to supporting IT equipment in diverse high temperatures, so efficient and precise What potential do you witness in this environments, including bank vaults, cooling solutions are even more important market segment? hospital labs and patient care areas, digital In the Middle East market, there is huge here than in other parts of the world. cinema projection systems, classrooms, potential in all segments. The datacenter The SRXCOOL33K, our in-row cooling unit, mobile datacenters, and even mines. market here is booming, but we have allows for precision cooling adjustments, But some new industries that we are also seen significant demand in home which can reduce energy consumption by breaking into include Digital Signage, CCTV and small office applications. Tripp Lite’s up to 33%. and security applications, and alternative product portfolio is diverse and includes Tripp Lite has also responded to power. Our equipment is versatile and everything from three-phase UPS the demand for energy efficiency by vendor-neutral and can integrate into any systems and in-row cooling units to surge improving the efficiency of our UPS existing infrastructure.
October 2015 | 19
TechKnow | Comguard
Boby Joseph Strategic Consultant Comguard
Smart Cities are set to redesign the way of lives of people. Technology has a multi layered role to play in this. Boby Joseph – Strategic Consultant (Emerging Technologies) Comguard explained insightful trends in the technology domain and he also highlighted his organization’s approach towards Big Data and Smart Cities.
Smart Cities & BIG Data: Unfurl Opportunities According to you, what all enterprise computing trends evolving in the Middle East region? Enterprise computing trend has now gone into hybrid state. The Local enterprise infrastructure and applications are now moving to Cloud. Enterprise public cloud is now widely acceptable and it has taken over the most commonly used customer and internal customer facing applications like, CRM, Service Desk, and Project Management etc., The enterprise IT on premise has now given way to Cloud based ITSM, global skill set utilization and MSP. Infrastructure is slowly chaining over to alliances, converged or special purpose hardwares. Application licensing have mixed models like on premise and cloud based. DWH (data warehouse) in new companies are now Hadoop systems and
20 | October 2015
NoSql repositories. Hardwares are nonproprietary, commoditized and Open (Open Compute Project). Mobile and Compute Anywhere is also a major trend adoption int he coming years starting last year and reaching higher adoption this year. Government is betting big on the Smart City projects. How ComGuard is looking at this opportunity? Comguard is an active partner in the Government initiative and is currently engaged in multiple Projects, Prototypes of Smart City Initiative. Comgaurd also extend consulting and city framework expertise in Open Standards. Comgaurd designs the total framework which is vendor agnostic and adheres to the standards and facilitate statistical standards of data exchange. The purpose of the Project is to design a Open
Data Exchange which will be used by all agencies and the public if the need be. This will help Smart Cities to become a monetized authority in future. We create a framework for Smart City to be provider of Microservices on SDME standards which can be then be consumed by the public or various organizations. Big Data has become an important element in today’s technology landscape. What are your observations on this trend? How does data Analytics can transform the technology consumption? Comgaurd has taken Big Data to a different level what we call as Big Data 2.0 where the products and services of Big Data is available to customer designed into vertical where the Projects have all the turn key components wot deliver the Intelligence and framework for the analytics delivery and DSS. Comguard calls this as the Spectrum Framework Ver 1.0 for Applied Analytics. What are ComGuard’s business priorities for next one year? Comgaurd has made large investments into Emerging Technologies where IoT, Big Data, Smart Technologies, Smart Data, Microservices, and Managed Service Provisions are major ares of focus and have registered gains in the region. With the growing complexity of Information technology, what are the key challenges you witness as the technology provider? The KEY Challenges will remain in Security and Data Exchange. When the new world gets more connected the challenges of security in the OT part of IoT is going to be a major challenge. Other challenge will be in the vast gap of skill set and resource availability the gap is so huge that some services will require higher spending to adapt. What the key technologies on which Comguard is working on? Big Data & Analytics, IoT, Cloud Integration, Security of IoT, IT Systems, cloud and Managed Services and Smart Technology, Smart City, Consulting Services.
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According to you, what are the visible market trends in the Middle East & GCC region? We are witnessing great wave of ‘staying connected’ in the region. Companies are seeking innovative companies like Sharp to develop fully integrated, intelligent office solutions that enhance productivity and facilitate cross-appliance communication. The workplace transformation remains a critically important phenomenon across all industries in the Middle East. This has led to many industry decision-makers focusing on adopting new technologies to improve business operations by addressing developments such as the convergence of social, mobile, cloud and big data. How is the document management market evolving in the region? Managed Print Services (MPS) has lead the evolution in the document management market, which has helped a shift in customer mindset. Today, more document related software like digital document management and scan related workflows have become an integral part of MPS. This is because customers are not interested in buying these high-end software products as a standalone. Therefore, a lot of hardware vendors have moved towards the software business to cover up the same gap and an offer a more comprehensive solution to customers. What are the key drivers of office Printers market? An uncontrolled print environment is a becoming a key concern for companies, which is a driving force behind the widespread adoption of enterprise print services in the region. Ever increasing print costs and untrained IT staff that handle a rangeof imaging devices will continue driving the demand of Enterprise Print Services across the region.Customer education is vital to drive benefits for the organization and the service provider. What are the key priorities for Sharp in the Middle East market? Sharp is dedicated to pioneering technological innovations, through significant investments in developing world-class, cutting-edge solutions that set a benchmark in the market for others to follow. Sharp deeply values its
22 | October 2015
The Middle East is one of the world’s most connected regions and that technology organizations are witnessing the rise of the “always-connected” user, which is driving the need for integrated solutions across businesses. Discussing some important market trends and insights, Ravinder Kumar, General Manager – Business Solutions Division, Sharp Middle East and Africa expressed his views on the acceptance of office productivity solutions in the region.
Ravinder Kumar, GM, Business Solutions Divisition, Sharp
TechKnow | Sharp
MPS driving the document management market
How is the consumer mindset changing with the advent of trends such as Internet of Things and Smart Homes etc. How are these trends affecting the Sharp? The rise of IoT and smart establishments have resulted to increased consumer demand for products that are always connected and able to retrieve information anytime using cloud technology. Therefore,the connectivity and cloud adoption within the education sector complements our intelligent touch board solutions for smart learning, which enables wireless collaboration with PCs and mobile devices, sharing onscreen content and bidirectional writing.
viewing experience through extraordinarily high resolution and low energy consumption. Users view the content of four full HD screens on a single, seamless display. This super-high resolution makes the monitor ideally suited to a wide range of professional applications in settings where detailed information needs to be displayed with tremendous precision. Furthermore, IGZO is powering the speedy development of the MEMS shutter display. This revolutionary technology enables constant moving picture displays easily visible in almost any type of environment. Customers are no longer just looking to purchase a display but also seek a managed solution for their signage displays. Sharp’s Sharp Digital Signage Software (SDSS) is a highly versatile, yet easy-to-use, management software solution that provides total support for creating, scheduling, distributing, displaying and monitoring all types of digital signage deployments.
What technologies are driving the professional displays? One of the technologies driving professional displays is Sharp’s pioneered IGZO technology, which offers an enhanced
Intelligence is driving at every level. How does this factor effecting the professional display market? The need for intelligent display solutions has become a necessity for more and more
regional customers by offering end-toend technology solutions, which include industry-leading products and tailor-made integrated software solutions that make a real difference to their business.
and impressive industry verticals. "The need for intelligent display solutions super-highToday, intelligent resolution image display solutions has become a necessity for more and more quality to showcase are being used industry verticals. Today, intelligent display solutions all manner of heavily in industries content, from such as hospitality, are being used heavily in industries such as detailed text to education, corporate hospitality, education, corporate and retail." beautifully textured and retail. Education graphics. and hospitality next-generation 80” intelligent touch board, are key verticals with high-growth for the which takes annotations and collaboration According to you, what are the key professional display sector. In this light, to a different level. It delivers breakthrough market expectations from next 2 years? some of the display solutions that we in capacitive touch-panel technology. Due We expect to continue seeing strong growth supply to our education and hospitality to its fully flat screen design and the option in the corporate and education business clients include interactive displays, to install both portrait and landscape – it is a pillars, with elevated demand for our Intelligent Touch Boards, LED displays, Ultra perfect fit in any educational environment, Interactive LED Displays, which are perfect HD Displays and video walls. with the option of installing more than one for both boardroom and classroom settings. board side by side for a bigger and better Furthermore, with an increased Please share a glimpse about the writing surface and experience. government focus on education, particularly Professional Display Solutions portfolio On the other hand, the Sharp PN-H701 is within the UAE, and especially on innovation from SHARP. a 70” 4K Ultra HD Monitor, which offers the and technology, we foresee continued Sharp’s portfolio of professional display size and image quality that is 4 times the growth of interactive displays and classroom solutions are products that embrace resolution of 1080P Full HD. More than just a technology over the coming years. With style, simplicity in design and intelligent superb digital signage solution, this monitor the explosion of digital content and online innovation. Two of our latest display can be set up to provide eye-catching usage, interactive displays enable students products include the Sharp PN-80TC3 communication in a wide variety of settings. and teachers to create, share and interact Intelligent Touch Board and the Sharp The PN-H701 boasts a screen with the size with this new-age of digital content. PN-H701 LCD Monitor. The PN-80TC3 is a
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October 2015 | 23
TechKnow | SUSE
Paul Abi-Chahine Regional Director, Emerging EMEA SUSE
Research clearly shows that system downtime continues to be a major issue for IT decision makers, causing trouble for both small and large companies. Paul AbiChahine, Regional Director, Emerging EMEA, at SUSE shared an overview on the Middle East/GCC market and also discussed some speciafic challneges that are faced by the IT managers.
Visualise Zero Downtime Vision with Suse With the growing complexity of ICT environment, what are the major demands that are arising from the IT manager’s side? A recent survey from SUSE found that 80% of IT professionals experienced unplanned downtime, largely as a result of technology failure. CIOs are calculating the financial impact this has on their organisation and recognising that changes need to be made. While some level of downtime may be inevitable as organisations begin the process of getting unplanned downtime under control, zero downtime should still be the end goal. Companies failing to take steps now may find themselves falling behind as their competitors tackle this issue, investing in strong IT initiatives which safeguard their workloads against downtime, increase productivity and boost growth.
24 | October 2015
System Downtime is a major issue for any enterprise CIOs. What are the new cutting edge ways to tackle this challenge? Making near-zero downtime a reality is more important now than ever as IT becomes an integral aspect of all areas of business. New strategies should be implemented in order to identify the causes of downtime and defend against these threats. Reducing downtime does require new initiatives, whether this involves changing hardware infrastructure or upgrading operating system functionality. It’s clear that reducing downtime is a priority for IT departments across the globe, however, organisations do not yet see ‘zero downtime’ as a realistic possibility, accepting for now that at least a small level of downtime is unavoidable. This is an unacceptable situation, yet there
are steps that can be taken to address the issue that don’t require wholesale rip and replace. Key steps should include: • Building on firm foundations – Getting the right hardware and operating platform in the first place is critical in preventing downtime, providing extra stability and availability. • Minimising human mistakes – Humans inevitably make mistakes, and IT infrastructure management is no different. The best way to cut down on these is to make tools as easy to use for employees as possible, cutting down on operational mistakes. • Developing clusters – Clustering technologies are used today to improve availability of the system through redundancy. By clustering and combining several redundant servers into one cluster, higher availability can be achieved than with a single server. What are the key business priorities of SUSE? System downtime – particularly unplanned downtime – negatively affects organizations of all types and sizes, limiting growth, reducing revenue and affecting productivity. CIOs and IT professionals recognize the need to reduce downtime, and they should work with software and hardware vendors who share their commitment to making near-zero downtime a reality. Besides empowering businesses to achieve zero downtime – SUSE’s business priorities are to offer customers a variety of best-of-breed solutions for enterprises desiring to modernize and standardize their IT infrastructure, leverage cloud computing, and implement software defined storage, such as our SUSE Linux Enterprise based server operating systems, and SUSE Manager server management, SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage software. What are the common reasons of systems downtime? What is the average approximate cost of such downtime? According to Forrester analyst Rachel Dines, just 5 minutes of Google downtime in August 2013 reduced global web traffic by 40% and cost the company
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TechKnow | SUSE a mammoth $500,000. This is one key example of the effect that unplanned downtime can have on an organisation’s finances, as well as its reputation. However, this example is not to imply that the cost of downtime is only relevant to large companies like Google. Organisations of all sizes can be affected by an outage at a service provider. Whether a huge global enterprise like Amazon or a small business, it’s vital that any organisation has a strategy to identify the reasons for potential downtime. Once these causes have been acknowledged, companies must put plans in place to defend against those threats. Only then will it be possible to accomplish the ultimate goal of “zero downtime”. New research from SUSE, based on responses from IT professionals, unearthed the following significant findings: Unplanned downtime was experienced by 80% of respondents. Those that did suffer unplanned downtime encountered the problem an average of more than twice a year on their most important workload. Technology failure - 31% of downtime is caused by hardware failure - was far and away the most prevalent source of unplanned downtime, while 13% of downtime is caused by human error. How the data centre environment is evolving? What are the key trends in this space? At the moment there is a paradigm shift happening in the areas of storage and networking. As Linux once replaced many alternatives in the server market, the same thing is now happening in the spaces under the umbrella of what we might call “Software Defined Everything”. Inflexible and costly proprietary solutions are being replaced by Software Defined Storage (SDS) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) – approaches that are more agile, more cost effective, more innovative and ultimately more powerful. Linux has established itself in the OS world and now it and its new siblings like OpenStack and Ceph are spreading even further, rapidly becoming pillars of a Software Defined Everything world. What are the key attractions of SUSE for a typical enterprise class CIOs?
26 | October 2015
IT marginalization and loss of control, is a significant hidden challenge and risk facing IT organizations today. Underfunded IT organizations are having a harder time responding rapidly to the needs of its internal line-of-business (LOB) stakeholders. Unable to wait, these LOBs implement their own IT solutions, increasing costs and risk to their company. According to Forrester Research, more than 70 percent of IT budgets are spent just maintaining IT infrastructure. This leaves little extra budget to spend on new technologies to support strategic business objectives like cloud computing, software defined storage or big data. SUSE offers solutions that help IT organizations respond more rapidly to the needs of their business, while saving time, reclaiming budget and leveraging innovation, thus enabling them to regain control over their IT environment. What level of importance does partner ecosystem carries for SUSE? SUSE's strategy is to partner with leading technology providers to deliver enterprises practical, best of breed, open source based solutions that reduce the risk of technological obsolescence and vendor lock in. ISVs are important members in SUSE's ecosystem, because most people usually purchase an operating system in order to run an application. We work with ISVs to port, test and certify their applications on our operating systems and various hardware combinations. There are over 7000 applications today that are certified to run on SUSE Linux Enterprise. In addition to ISVs, SUSE partners with a variety of other hardware technology companies to ensure our joint customers have certified, support solutions they can implement into their production IT environments, such as Cisco, Cray, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Lenovo, SGI, Unisys and VCE. Take for example our partnership with SAP: SAP HANA the flexible, multipurpose, in-memory appliance, helps customers instantly analyse large-volume workloads of transactional data from virtually any data source in real time. SUSE Linux Enterprise has been exclusively selected for use by SAP HANA, in fact SAP developed SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
IoT is becoming a great enabler for the industry. What role SUSE is set to play in the upcoming IoT regime? We at SUSE believe, that open source and Linux, developed by a huge community of individuals and organizations is key to further innovation like the IoT. The open source community is driving a lot of new technologies that are important for he IoT, OpenStack or Ceph are only the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at the industrial internet for example – fundamental for the communication from machine to machine is the use of open standards, the ability to move between different types of clouds. Open source solutions build on open standards and we at SUSE adhere to that credo. SUSE’s operating platform SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is open for future innovation. SUSE Products like SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE OpenStack Cloud are pillars of a Software Defined data center which is a critical enabler of the IoT. How do you foresee the next wave of business? Big Data is getting bigger: IDC forecasts that we will generate 40 zettabytes of data by 2020, enterprises have been looking for somewhere to store these vast amounts of data – somewhere with more flexibility and redundancy, at an affordable cost.Therefore we expect the market for data analytics and real-time data analytics in combination with software defined storage will become one of the big drivers over the next years. In addition we see a huge need of business to achieve zero downtime. Nearly three-quarters of IT professionals surveyed by our study said their organization considers achieving zero downtime for their enterprise computing systems an important goal. One part of creating a more flexible and agile environment is he cloud. Definitely a rising wave of business is the topic of private clouds and here I’m talking about the open source based OpenStack private Cloud. Many businesses have been in the process transforming their data centres from hardware centric architectures into virtualized environments, seeking better utilisation and automation, along with lower costs.
TechKnow | Resemble Systems
deploying a new tool to address each new risk. We’ve observed one company was using 85 tools from 45 different software vendors! Now they have to install, configure, manage, patch, upgrade, and pay for dozens of non-integrated solutions with limited views of the landscape. Costly and complex, these fragmented security capabilities do not provide the visibility and coordination needed to stop today’s sophisticated attacks.
Nazeer Aval CEO & Founder Resemble Systems
Securing the Cloud: Resemble Systems While cloud is gaining momentum in the industry, cloud security is one of the major areas of consideration for most of the enterprise customers. Nazeer Aval, CEO & Founder of Resemble Systems explained some of the key insights on cloud adoption and cloud security as a trend in the industry. What are the drivers for Security solutions in the enterprise environment? 83% of the CISOs say that the challenge posed by external threats has increased in the last 3 years with dramatic increase in daily leaks of sensitive data. New technologies introduce new risks, in fact, businesses are adopting cloud and mobile technologies at unprecedented rates. This influx of new innovation, technologies, and end-points push more and more business transactions outside company walls and completely transform enterprise security as we know it. As the traditional network perimeter around the data center permanently dissolves, it is more difficult to defend company data from the increasing gaps in security, and to verify that users accessing data are protected. Enterprise applications which run on cloud deals with business critical data.
28 | October 2015
What are your views on ensuring best level security standards to avoid and data breach on cloud? In one study, 70% of security executives expressed concern about cloud and mobile security. Theft or loss of mobile devices, privacy concerns associated with cloud, and accidental sharing of sensitive data are some of the key fears. And, according to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Quarterly Report, at any given time, mobile malware is affecting 11.6 million mobile devices. Without dynamic protection, an organization may spend more time recovering from attacks than it does preventing them. And those who do not prepare for change are leaving their companies dangerously exposed. How is cloud security as a trend evolving in the enterprise market? Until recently, organizations have responded to security concerns by
What are the key parameters that enterprise CIOs/IT Managers must consider while selecting a cloud solutions partner for their infrastructure? The skills and expertise needed to keep up with a constant stream of new threats is not always available. In fact, 83% of enterprises report having difficulty finding the security skills they need. As new risks emerge, the environment will grow more complex and the skills gap will grow even wider. What are the main business priorities for Resemble Systems? Being an IBM Premier Business Partner, we offer a deep enterprise security portfolio customized to our customer's needs. Our unmatched ability to help our clients from disrupting new threats, support deploy security innovations and help reduce the cost and complexity of IT security, Resemble Systems can safeguard our client's most critical data from compromise. IBM has been committed to providing comprehensive security that meets evolving technological needs. IBM have invested substantially in inorganic growth to supplement and enhance organically developed security solutions to build a comprehensive portfolio that can help our clients move up the maturity model from basic to proficient to advanced. What are main industry verticals that your organization is targeting? Today data is sensitive across all verticals and cross industry segments. We work with both private and public sectors such as Government institutions, Banking, Insurance, Retail, Manufacturing, and Healthcare sectors.
Wave Tech Computers LLC P.O. Box: 3421, Sharjah, Toll Free 800WAVE-8009283 aten@wavetechgroup.com, www.wavetechgroup.com
Cover Feature | SDN
Software Defined Era: Simplifying Complexity A Market Status & Perspective Report on SDN
S
oftware Defined Networking (SDN) is gaining so huge attention, so customers and market is well aware of this trend in Middle East, and every data centre and service provider that wants to remain in business over the next few years - is looking at how they can better automate and orchestrate assets for competitive gain and they are exploring or already deploying Software Defined Networking. Faiz Askari, Senior Editor of The Integrator Magazine spoke to industry leaders and experts and found some key insights, trends and market directors that are evolving due to emergence of SDN in the Middle East region. In theoretical discussions, the move to software-defined everything makes valuable sense. Software-defined networks (SDN), software-defined storage (SDS),
30 | October 2015
software-defined computing (SDC), software-defined data centres (SDDC) – the IT world is full of 'SDs'. It seems IT vendors want to move away from any dependence on hardware differentiation and look to a more dynamic and responsive platform of software functionality. The feature looks at what the practicalities of the 'SD' business approach are and implications for channel partners. Coming over to SDN, there is still some residual skepticism about what SDN means in practice, and whether it can deliver everything it promises. However the underlying premise of SDN appears compelling in terms of reducing equipment costs in the core, reduced complexity and improved control and transparency. Given the scale of some of the infrastructure in the Middle East, larger service providers
and large enterprise customers are set take the lead on this turf. Commenting on this market trend, Glen Ogden, Regional Sales Director, Middle East at A10 Networks said, “SDN is still a relatively new concept globally. Enterprises in certain countries in the Middle East like the UAE are known to be ‘early technology adopters’ and no doubt adoption of SDN technologies in these regions will happen at the same rate as regions such as the US and Europe. We are at an interesting crossroads right now, and we are seeing early innovators taking the lead with these new hybrid software defined and cloud infrastructures, both across service providers and in the enterprise space. Nobody appears to have a definitive view on the adoption rates for public and private cloud. Even though
the standards and even some of the reference models are not quite there yet, some of these large organizations have an imperative to start rolling out architectures that will take them through the next five years, reducing costs and scaling in a much more agile way. This is fundamental to their business strategy for the next five years.” Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director – MEMA at Brocade expressed his views by saying, “There is already a real interest from enterprises that are keen to be among the first to see how deploying SDN in their own private or hybrid cloud environments can deliver greater business agility and allow them to roll out innovative services faster and more efficiently. One thing that will be vital to the future of SDN is the establishment of open standards. These are crucial since they guarantee that network products will be interoperable regardless of which company manufactured them; something which is a key factor in enabling a more holistic approach to network management. Fortunately, we are seeing a shift toward open, more flexible, efficient, highly programmable and elastic network infrastructure solutions with key initiatives such as OpenStack and the Open Daylight Project, as well as disruptive technologies that will ultimately benefit organisations.” Some industries have a stronger use case than others at present, as the capabilities of the technology are still being explored. Cloud Service Providers, for example – who tend to be among the early adopters for any new networking or data centre technology – stand to benefit because their network infrastructure is their core business and any efficiency gains can quickly deliver huge return on investment. Cherif Sleiman, General Manager, Middle East at Infoblox said, “To me, there are two parts to SDN – first is the virtualization of functions that we used to get in hardware and the second is bringing these functions together to deliver a co-ordinated service via a controller that focuses on policy and business needs rather than bits and bytes. So, from that point of view, irrespective of where we are in the world, SDN is in its infancy as we are still in the virtualization stage.
Moreover, this virtualization is specifically in the computing and storage space but we have some work to do in the networking space because while the technology is there, the ecosystem and architecture isn’t mature yet.” He also said, “Given this situation, I think we have the opportunity in the Middle East to leapfrog other parts of the world as we don’t have a lot of legacy infrastructure and as a result the transition and migration isn’t as complicated.” Believing in the potential of SDN, Sunil Paul, Chief Operating Officer of Finesse said, “SDN works best for large enterprises Glen Ogden Regional Sales Director, ME A10 Networks
“Whether it is a reality or a trend for different sized enterprises, it is undoubtedly the future and will leave its mark. IDC forecasts that the SDN market will reach more than $3.5 billion in revenues by next year and this market is set to grow globally from $960 million in 2014 to more than $8 billion by 2018.” which have massive data traffic. For smaller enterprises or even average sized organizations, SDN probably is not the network answer right now. But yes, an eye can be kept out for the same. Till then it will just be that - a trend.” While sharing his expectation from the SDN’s market, Sunil added, “Whether it is a reality or a trend for different sized enterprises, it is undoubtedly the future and will leave its mark. IDC forecasts that the SDN market will reach more than $3.5 billion in revenues by next year and this market is set to grow globally from $960 million in 2014 to more than $8 billion by 2018.
Attractions For the Early Adopters Major forces driving software defined networking in MEA are primarily around
the need for control, resource optimization, asset consolidation, improving power and cooling, and optimizing TCO. Fundamentally SDN is all about optimization and agility. “As data centres and infrastructures move towards multitenant cloud models, there is a real need to be able to spin up assets on demand, under policy control, on a per workload basis,” informed Glen of A10 Networks. While commenting on the key verticals that are early adopters of SDN, Deepak Narain, Regional Presales Manager, MENA at VMware commented, “The acceptance of SDN is horizontal. We are seeing adoption across the board. Our goal is to simplify the network and better align it with the new architecture of the virtual data center. The early adopters have been the ones who’re feeling this pain October 2015 | 31
Cover Feature | SDN change once, and it is distributed across all of the networks, scaling delivering, and driving new business models and growth.
Telecom Sector: Early Adopter of SDN
Cherif Sleiman Channel Manager, ME Infoblox
the most. Our first customers have been those who both place a big premium on security and understand that wide scale virtualization has created new traffic flows and new security threats that go with these. Similarly with server virtualization, we find the finance and telcos were the first one to sit up and take notice. Now that the initial wave of early adopters has gone into production, we’re starting to see a more horizontal adoption.” Giving an insight on why customers are getting hooked towards SDN, Binoy Koonammavu Principal Consultant of ValueMentor stated, “SDN helps in separating the control plane from the data plane. In such an environment, the control plane, which defines the soft controls such as routes, quality of service and other network meta-characteristics; can be programmed without affecting the network infrastructure? This helps the network application developers & engineers in writing software components and applications that manages the control plane. This helps in developing a software controlled traffic management, independent of the network infrastructure. Virtualization& flexibility are two major advantages of SDN.” Binoy further added, “The need for the integration of the security capabilities into the SDN architecture is important due to a number of applications that are in the market to control the control plane.” In
32 | October 2015
Yarob Sakhnini Regional Director, MEMA Brocade
addition, the applications and management consoles that interface with the control plane can become a point of weakness. Explaining the impact of data and devices growth on trends such as SDN, IoT and future-ready Data Centers, Ashley Woodbridge, Customer Solutions Architect, Cisco UAE said, “As the number of people, devices, machines and sensors coming online across the Internet of Everything (IoE), Middle East service providers require new capabilities to lead in the delivery of value-added, cloud-based services and applications. IoT will require networks to become more agile to accommodate the increased amount of transmitted data along with the expansion of connected devices. In looking ahead to what is in store for networks, IoT and SDN is a viable solution to manage the increased traffic and its quality of service.” Further explaining the regional effect, Ashley added, “In the Middle East, we are seeing strong demand for SDN from industries with complex networks that need to quickly process large amounts of data – especially service providers, banking and finance; energy, oil and gas; aviation and transportation; malls and retail; and safety and security. Thanks to network abstraction and automation that reduce network operations workload, SDN enables companies to grow their network to meet demands, and to pull back when necessary. IT departments can apply a
Telecom sector is leading the way when it comes to verticals and it is the networking vendors when it comes to the IT sector. “If you look at Cisco’s play on SDN, which is Application-Centric Infrastructure, then some of our first deployments worldwide – and some of our largest – have been in the Middle East in the telecoms/service providers sector.” Ashley also said, ”For instance, du was the first telecom company in the world to deploy ACI for its next-generation data center. We are also working on our largest ACI installation in the Middle East to date with Saudi Telecom Company (STC), which is building three data centers to accelerate and streamline cloud adoption in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
Parameters to Consider while going for SDN According to Glen of A10 Network, the following are important points to be kept in mind when making the switch to SDN: Start small and inexpensive: Ripping and replacing legacy network hardware with new SDN-aware hardware routers and switches is risky and expensive. A better strategy takes advantage of much lower priced SDN-enabled Layer 3 switch and router software which lets organizations get started with a lower, less risky investment. Compatibility with Legacy Networks: Many of today’s SDN offerings add unnecessary complexity and cost by forcing IT to build and manage a separate SDNenabled network. For an easier, smoother deployment, look for SDN solutions that interoperate fully with legacy networks and Layer 2 switches via standard network protocols such as BGP, IGMP, and OSPF. Network Knowhow: SDN solutions must achieve deep network visibility and insight to anticipate, isolate, and remediate network and service issues. At minimum they should be able to characterize and correlate network and service information at multiple layers and provide a comprehensive, real-time view
Cover Feature | SDN set up a new of content, session, "A 2014 IDC study estimates the global software network in less and IP topology defined networking market will grow from $960 million than 15% of the on a hop-by-hop time it used to take basis. Look for a to $8 billion-plus in 2018. The Middle East region is you) and create solution with tried very much at the forefront of adopting SDN. Globally, the foundation and tested network many large institutions and state governments are for a major analysis and IP adopting converged data center architectures." reduction in capex service assurance by decoupling capabilities. dynamic organizations. If we map this to switching from network control.” An End-to-End Solution: Most SDN organizations, then the most likely ones Many network operators expect solutions today focus almost exclusively on to deploy SDN early would be the energy, the near-term benefits of SDN to the data center, which can be a risky place banking, aviation, service provider sectors be operational in nature: greater for an initial SDN deployment. A less risky and governments that are obsessing over management efficiency, fewer strategy deploys SDN at branch offices excellence when it comes to providing interoperability challenges, possible first, much the way early IP Telephony citizen services,” said Cherif Sleiman of OpEx reduction. However, the original adopters deployed IP Telephony initially Infoblox. promise of SDN—faster, custom innovation at the branch office. This lets enterprise IT through programmability—provides new get its feet wet with SDN at low risk, then opportunities for rapid service innovation Advantage SDN extend SDN across the enterprise network and monetization for organizations with Enterprise provisioning and management gradually as the IT staff develops expertise the resources and processes in place to is made easier through SDN, as it provides and comfort with the technology. Such develop and deploy them. Adding to this, a centralized view of the entire network. a strategy requires an end-to-end SDN Brocade’s Yarob Sakhnini commented, “SDN can also accelerate service delivery solution, not one with a narrow focus on “Not surprisingly, SDN has seen early and provide more agility in provisioning the data center. both virtual and physical network devices Application Knowhow: SDN’s need from a central location. SDN allows IT robust application awareness and managers to experiment with network interoperability to acquire and interpret configuration to accommodate new the rich level of application information applications and technologies without necessary to optimize the network impacting the network,” Sunil of Finesse effectively for maximum performance. added, “With the single central point of Robust application-level service assurance control for various devices and networks, is especially critical for latency-sensitive the advantage is in the ability to distribute functions such as unified communications. security and policy information consistently Look for solutions that have a proven track throughout the enterprise. SDN can be record for interacting with the applications effectively used to manage security if you care most about. implemented securely and properly.” Centralized SDN Management and Leading enterprises know that SDN Automation: Centralized network visibility and Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) and control are key requirements for are critical to modern IT. “They are using effective enterprise SDN. Look for SDDCs to help drive innovation, accelerate solutions that provide a unified view of business velocity, establish competitive multiple network layers and combine advantage, and reduce overall IT costs. real-time network service analytics SDN is just one feature of the SDDC,” with automated network performance believes VMware’s Deepak Narain. He also remediation. The arcane, static CLI of yore said, while explaining the advantage of is simply unacceptable in a dynamic SDN SDN, “Network Virtualization unlocks new environment. Look for graphical, intuitive, use cases and creates new capabilities for responsive management interfaces. enterprises that didn’t exist earlier. New Unified, simplified network control will capabilities like higher security through be an essential enabler of quick network micro segmentation, automation and optimization adjustments as application orchestration of network provisioning, loads change continually. seamless disaster recovery. And let’s “Obviously there is a cost with face it, none of us would be doing it if it Ashley Woodbridge migrating from today’s world to the SDN didn’t come with a significant reduction Customer Solutions Architect world and that is going to be initially in operational expense (e.g. You can Cisco, UAE the luxury of the larger and more
34 | October 2015
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Cover Feature | SDN
Sunil Paul Chief Operating Officer Finesse
adoption in service providers and large enterprises with early-adopter IT cultures and active cloud deployments. On the other hand, smaller organizations with very finite infrastructure resources and staff are using SDN to manage traffic spikes and large flows in more efficient ways.” Yarob also said, “The network has never been more critical to business success of enterprises in the Middle East. For organisations of any size and in any sector, it is the network that will turn the promise of new and evolving technologies like cloud, Big Data, Machine-to-Machine communications, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and seamless mobility into reality.”
SDN Brings Scalability SDN creates a programmable network fabric, which enables massive operation. Studies show that the industry is looking at an 87% reduction in time taken to put a network into production. “We know from experience that when it comes to putting a new service into production, the long pole in the tent is creating a network and ensuring the right security policies are in place. With SDN, we are looking at reducing that time drastically, which means higher agility and dynamism,” Deepak of VMware said “In addition, Network Virtualization allows you to do things to networks that were just not possible before – networks can be backed up, cloned, rolled back, snapshot – just
36 | October 2015
Deepak Narain Regional Presales Manager VMware
like virtual machines. When you match your network management capabilities to your server management capabilities, this means a massive increase in agility for the organization.”
Cost Effective Factor Operational savings are achieved through administrative efficiency, improvements in server utilization, better control of virtualization, and other benefits like lower costs, high performance and new functionality. In addition to the above point, Sunil also said, “It is still in nascent stages to really show proof of savings, but SDN should typically lower operational costs and result in overall savings as much of the routine network and administration issues are centralized and automated. SDN makes it easier to optimize commoditized hardware, thus enabling hardware savings and thereby reducing capital expenditure.” Cost also plays a major part in the adoption of SDN, highlighted Deepak, and he further explained that SDN allows organizations to reduce their operational cost, but this is more of a fringe benefit than the core reason. Organizations are looking to SDN to allow them to do new things that they couldn’t do before, to support their scalability and agility goals.
Security Testing & Software Defined Storage Commenting on this important subject
related to SDN, Binoy of ValueMentor said, “Implementing Software Defined Storage (SDS) in an SDN environment improves the security management capabilities. However, any mis-configurations / malicious use of the SDN components would result in a compromised security environment. Periodic review and testing of the SDS / SDN environments would help businesses in maintaining a health network environment.” Further explaining SDS, Binoy added, “The SDS implementation improves the SDN Security. To address the evolving threat landscape around the SDN, the SDS environment requires constant improvement. Periodic SDN security testing, risk assessment and threat mitigation are critical to determine which threat elements would result in realistic risks to the SDN environment. The SDS deployment should be modified to address the identified threats and thus achieving SDN security.” Considering the fact that security has been another important driver for SDN, Deepak of VMware emphasized, “By virtualization organizations are putting a lot more eggs in one basket than their security teams are comfortable with. Traditional Firewalls are like forts – you define a group of buildings that you want to defend and you put one around them. They’re expensive, so you try to be smart about how many you get. Need some more security? Dig a big moat around the fort. But, once somebody breaches a fort – all spoils are theirs for the taking. SDN allows you to do something called “micro segmentation”. This is like putting a fort around each building. If an attacker breaches the outer perimeter, they’ve reached one application environment. Micro segmentation will prevent them from spreading their tentacles to other applications in the datacenter.”
Cloud Performance on SDN Network Virtualization has unlocked the true potential of the hybrid cloud – by abstracting away the physical network and allowing service owners to work at a higher layer of abstraction has meant that not just virtual machines but also security policies can be migrated out to the public could, or back into the private cloud.
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S
oftware Defined Storage (SDS) has been a concept that many of the key players in the data storage industry have been pushing as the evolving alternative to traditional storage systems for the past few years. A lot of product development and marketing spend has gone into developing SDS as an offer for customers. However there is still a level of confusion when it comes to full SDS deployment and for end users to be comfortable with the concept and its benefits there is still education to be done. Despite many naysayers arguing that what SDS provides can already be done through current storage virtualisation solutions, SDS offers a significant improvement on traditional storage. What SDS does is breakdown the physical barriers that keep data bound to specific storage hardware: an enterprise’s entire IT infrastructure, be it on-premises or in the cloud, acts as a single entity.
More scale and lower cost As the software creates a data management platform that sits across the whole storage infrastructure, effectively making it a single huge storage layer, data can be shifted around easily. Therefore, for service providers or end users, if maintenance needs to be carried out on a particular area, the data that needs to be accessed within it can be moved to another area. This virtually eliminates downtime as access to backups is made easier and data can be moved for planned downtime and maintenance. In traditional storage systems the Control and Data planes are tightly coupled,
40 | October 2015
whereas in SDS the planes are autonomous: The control plane deals with the management of the system, providing features and functions such as data management, security, protection, housekeeping and provisioning. The data plane describes where the data lives. The benefit of the separation is that the system can be easily designed for distributed operation and is essentially self-managing. This has the additional benefit that horizontal storage scale can be achieved with low management overhead and at lower cost.
Partnering to realise the full SDS potential Ultimately, SDS offers faster response times, greater autonomy and increased business flexibility when compared to traditional storage solutions. There are however challenges to full SDS deployment: Firstly, storage is not standardised. Vendor platforms use different interfaces and protocols, thereby creating the need for any SDS solution to be able to interact with all of these and bring them all together to create a seamless storage infrastructure that interacts and acts as a one.Secondly, the amount of data enterprises need to store and manage is expanding at an exponential rate. Creating and moving around that huge quantity of data is no small feat. Service providersand resellers need to work with a vendor that can provide SDS solutions that can integrate multiple vendor storage platforms as well as have the functionality to manage the mobilisation of huge quantities of data around an enterprise storage infrastructure.
Fadi Kanafani Regional Director MENA & Pakistan NetApp
SDS – Does It Really Improve Traditional Storage? In addition, to ensure ROI on SDS deployment CIOs should deploy resources to the three groups within most organisations that have the greatest visibility of SDS ROI. These are: • IT infrastructure teams o Provision storage based on priority service level and operate from pre-set, policybased security and delegation • Application owners o Who can dynamically respond to shifts in demand and instantly deploy new
applications and services • Purchasing decision makers o Who extend capabilities of existing assets and can choose any platform in the future
Turn complexity into an opportunity SDS can be seen as a complex solution to data management due to the lack of standards. Vendors and resellers alike need to take away the headaches and allow the CIO to transform the way their business manages its data.
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Insight | ManageEngine
Each time a major incident, such as a payroll crash, happens, the IT team gets into a fire-fighting mode and takes the resolution process to a whole new level. This doesn't have to be the norm, if you can follow these 10 best practices. In no time, you would resolve the major incident, and with no panic. By Prithiv Raj Kumar Marketing Analyst, ManageEngine
10 Best Practices to Deal with Major Incidents in IT Clearly Define a Major Incident When an issue causes a huge business impact on several users, you can categorize it as a major incident. It is one that forces an organization to deviate from existing incident management processes. Usually, high-priority incidents are wrongly perceived as major incidents. This is probably due to the absence of clear ITIL guidelines. Therefore, to avoid any confusion, you must define a major incident clearly based on factors such as urgency, impact, and severity. Have Exclusive Workflows Implementing a robust workflow helps you restore a disrupted service quickly. Separate workflows for major incidents help in seamless resolution. Focus on automating and simplifying the following when you formulate a workflow for major incidents. Also have a no-approval process for resolving major
42 | October 2015
incidents. • Identifying the major incident • Communicating to the impacted stakeholders • Assigning the right people • Tracking the major incident throughout its life cycle • Escalation upon breach of SLAs • Resolution and closure • Generation and analyses of reports Reel in the Right Resources Ensure that your best resources are working on major incidents. Also, clearly define their roles and responsibilities because of the high impact these incidents have on business. You could have a dedicated or a temporary team depending on how often major incidents occur. Some organizations have a dedicated major incident team headed by a major incident manager, whereas others have a dynamic, ad hoc team that has experts from various departments. Your primary objective must be to keep your
resources engaged and avoid conflict of time and priorities. Train Your Personnel and Equip Them With the Right Tools You don't know when a major incident can strike your IT but the first step to handling it is by being prepared. Divide your major incident management team into subteams and train them in major incident management. Assign responsibilities by mapping skills with requirements. Run simulation tests on a regular basis to identify strengths, evaluate performance and address gaps as needed. This would also help your team to cope with stress and be prepared when facing real time scenarios. Equip your team with the right tools such as smart phones, phablets, and tablets with seamless connectivity for them to work from anywhere during an emergency.
Configure Stringent SLAs and Hierarchical Escalations Define stringent SLAs for major incidents. Set up separate response and resolution SLAs with clear escalation points for any breach of the process. In addition, follow a manual escalation process if the assigned technician lacks the expertise to resolve the incident. Moreover, ensure that a backup technician is always available. Keep Your Stakeholders Informed Throughout the life cycle of major incidents, send announcements, notifications, and status updates to the stakeholders. Announcements in the self-service portal will prevent end users from raising duplicate tickets and overloading the help desk. Also send hourly or bi-hourly updates during a service downtime caused by major incidents. Have a dedicated line to respond to major
incidents immediately and offer support to stakeholders. Use the fastest means of communication, such as telephone calls, direct walkins, live chat, and remote control desktop, instead of relying on email. Tie Major Incidents with Other ITIL Processes After a major incident is resolved, perform a root cause analysis by using problem management methods. Then, implement organizationwide changes to prevent the occurrence of similar incidents in the future by following the change management process. Speed up the entire incident, problem, and change management process by providing detailed information about the assets involved by
using asset management. Improvise Your Knowledge Base Formulate simple knowledge base article templates that capture critical details such as the type of major incident the article relates to, the latest issue resolved using the article, owner of the article, and the resources that would be needed to implement the solution. Create and track solutions separately for major incidents so that you can access them quickly with very little effort. Review and Report on Major Incidents Document and analyze all major incidents so that you can identify areas of improvement. This will help
your team efficiently handle similar issues in the future. Also, generate major incidentspecific reports for analysis, evaluation, and decisionmaking. You could generate the following reports to help in efficient decision-making. 1) Number of major incidents raised and closed each month 2) Average resolution time for major incidents 3) Percentage of downtime cause of major incidents 4) Problems and changes linked to major incidents Document Major Incident Processes for Continual Service Improvement It is a best practice to document major incident
processes and workflows for ready reference. This could capture details like number of personnel involved, their roles and responsibilities, communication channels, tools used for the fix, approval and escalation workflows, and the overall strategy along with baseline metrics for response and resolution. The top management must evaluate processes on a regular basis to check if targeted performance levels in major incident management are met. This can help rectify flaws and serve for continual service improvement. Major incidents are unavoidable and each one is a learning experience for your team. Adhering to these practices could be your first step towards mastering the art of handling major incidents.
October 2015  |  43
Insight | Posiflex
Gareth Omar Cornish, MD, Posiflex MENA
This has been helped by fan free POS systems now being available with the latest Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, meeting the demands for the modern retailer and hospitality applications. There are obvious advantages of fan free technology such as higher reliability and less noise but the major factor has been the lower running cost. As more contemporary companies embrace their green environmental responsibilities and the company finance departments don’t just look at
platforms such as social media that has led to unparalleled access to information. Put simply, the consumer expects more than a simple transaction from their retail experience. Over last few year, how is POS (Point of Sales) have evolved as a technology oriented process? Traditionally POS systems have been used by retailers to scan merchandise and generate basic transactions for customers - reducing customer engagement to the
What are the news business opportunities emerging for your business ? 26 % Retailers currently implementing tablet POS devices. 33% Retailers already investing in mobile POS. 53% Retailers that are adding assisted selling to their tablet applications. 28% Retailers increasing store IT spending on tablets. Mobile in retail is now a $7.8 Billion business worldwide and one that continues to grow rapidly. It is the single fastest moving
PoS: The Game Changer of Retail The technology at retail segment revolves around facilitating better control and better customer service. Point of Sales (PoS) holds prominent position in the technology adoption space. Gareth Omar Cornish, Managing Director – Posiflex MENA shared an overview on how his organization is looking at leveraging technology for the retail industry. The retail industry in the Middle East region has always considered as the early adopters of technology. How do you consider this market from the perspective of technology adoption? Not all the Middle East adopts new technology at the same pace and is some MENA countries it still lacks behind Northern Europe and the USA. However Saudi Arabia and the UAE are leading the Middle East in implementing new POS technology within MENA and are fast catching up to the more developed countries in the West. Retail PoS systems have grown to a great extent. What level of technology up gradation is been accepted by the industry? The Middle East is slowly moving to fan free technology and now realizing that fan free POS systems will work at higher temperatures then the older fanned systems.
44 | October 2015
an initial purchase price, but look at the running cost and total cost of ownership over the life of the POS system, then fan free technology becomes far more appealing. There are many factors that affect the total cost of ownership over the life of a POS system and less than 30% is the initial purchase price. What are the key technology buying and adoption trends you are witnessing in the Middle East & GCC region? The general technology trends and the market dynamics are driven by the consumer. Most existing retail store and hospitality infrastructure and systems, including POS, have not been designed to handle multi-directional data communication and synchronization from multiple channels.On the other hand, there is an empowered consumer who is equipped with the latest technologies (smartphones and tablets) and
transactional level. However, a transformational change in retail, fueled by empowered consumers, is redefining POS as more than just a cash register or aggregator of transactional data; to where retailers, hotels and food outlets engage customers to build long-term relationships and loyalty, irrespective of sales channels. New POS systems and tailor made mobile POS systems now allow retail associates to support multiple operations and comprehensive Omni-channel process flows such as sales tracking, inventory management, promotion management, strategic planning and budgeting, accounting, and loyalty management, to name a few. The main objective behind having an Omni-channel POS is to have a uniform user experience between ecommerce and store POS to enable ease of use for integrated business processes such as different order types.
trend in retail since the internet was added to retail stores. Posiflex has already developed both Intel and Android mobile POS systems not to be confused with consumer tablets. The expected growth rate for Android mobile POS systems is over 104% and 128% for Windows. Further, in North America, Windows 8.1 Embedded mobile POS devices are projected to grow 184% and we believe the Middle East, especially in the Gulf will follow this trend. What are the key business priorities for your business? As Posiflex is the number one POS company in the Middle East for 2014 (source www. rbrlondon.com) then our aim to maintain our position. We have invested heavily in opening our new office and warehouse facility in Dubai, to offer a first class service to key customers throughout the Middle East and better support our distributors and system integrators.
Insight | Sophos some 950,000,000 Androids might be at risk, Stagefright got more publicity that most. Eventually, Zimperium didn't release any actual exploits at Black Hat, giving the Android ecosystem a bit more time to get its patches tested and shipped.
Public exploit code But that was a month ago, and the company has now decided to wait no longer. Zimperium has published a Python program that generates booby-trapped .MP4 movie
The good news is that the exploit seems, at best, to be device specific. At any rate, the blog article says that: This exploit has several caveats. First, it is not a generic exploit. We only tested it to work on a single device model. We tested this exploit on a Nexus running Android 4.0.4. Also, due to variances in heap layout, this is not a 100% reliable exploit by itself. We were able achieve 100% reliability when delivered through an attack vector that allowed multiple attempts.
way. The memory available for allocation to a program is known as the heap, and the heap layout will typically vary between different devices, between different versions of the operating system, and even between reboots. As Zimperium points out, this greatly diminishes the chance that its proof-of-concept exploits will work in the real world without modification. The second trick needed by many exploits, including Stagefright, is ROP, or Return Oriented Programming. Thanks to DEP,
Android’s Stagefright is back! Here’s what you need to know By Chester Wisniewski, Senior Security Consultant at Sophos
T
he Android vulnerability known as Stagefright is back in the limelight. Stagefright is a bug, or more accurately a series of similar bugs, in an Android programming library called libstagefright. It is part of the operating system that handles media files such as movies. If you receive an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) message that links to a video, or watch a clip embedded in a web page, or download a video for later, your Android will probably load up and use the libstagefright software to play the file. Researchers at Zimperium found a number of memory corruption bugs in the libstagefright code, and prepared a paper for the recent Black Hat conference to talk about them. Presentations at Black Hat that deal with vulnerabilities in widespread devices often get a lot of publicity before the event, and with Zimperium claiming that
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files, apparently to help you test whether your device is patched. The bad news is that the "test" program doesn't merely prove that you have an exploitable Android, for example by popping up the Android calculator program without asking. (Running CALC.EXE is a standard proofof-concept in the Windows world.) The test program produces a movie file exploit that calls home to an internet address you specify when you create the file, and gives you a command shell on the victim's Android device. This sort of exploit is known as a "reverse shell" - reverse because the attacked computer connects to you, rather than you logging in to it; shell because that's the Unix-flavoured name for a command prompt. So, as much as Zimperium's Python script is a proof-of-concept, it's also, strictly speaking, a Remote Access Trojan creation kit. (Sophos Anti-Virus detects them as Exp/20151538-A.)
Finally, this vulnerability was one of several that was neutered by GCC 5.0’s ‘new[]’ integer overflow mitigation present on Android 5.0 and later. As we explained in a recent article about boobytrapped files (in that article we dealt with a Word-based attack rather than a moviebased one), modern exploits often rely on two tricks. One is known as a spray, where the attacker knows he can crash your device, but is only able to aim control at a general area of memory. So he pads out his attack code, or repeats it over and over, in the hope that when it is loaded by Word, or by libstagefright, or whatever, it's a big enough target in a suitable place. Padding or repeating your attack code is known as spraying memory, for obvious reasons. But operating systems, both by accident and by design, don't always allocate memory in a repeatable or predictable
or Data Execution Prevention, an attacker can't blindly jump to exploit code he has sprayed onto the heap: it's labelled as data, so trying to run it will fail and the exploit will be prevented. So, the attacker needs to identify code fragments that are already in executable memory, and string them together as a precursor to his attack. He then creates a list of the addresses at which these fragments are located, and jumps to them in turn. On Intel processors, this "jumping" is usually done by an instruction called RET, short for short for return from subroutine, which is how Return Oriented Programming gets its name. But recent versions of Android, along with every other modern operating system, has a feature called ASLR, or Address Space Layout Randomisation. ASLR does what its name suggests: it loads the components of your program at a different place in memory every time.
Point2Point | ZyXEL capable products that respond to the sentiments of the consumer. What are the key business opportunities on which ZyXel is working? ZyXEL is probably one of the very few technology brands that develop and provide solutions for Telecom Service Providers, SMB or SME and to the home user. With this extensive exposure in the industry we understand what people need today from various perspectives. Smart Innovations yet reliable and useful. This is pretty much what we as a brand stand for.
Muhammad Arsalan VP Sales, Teleco & Channel Business ZyXEL Middle East
Smart Homes is an emerging business category. How is your organization targeting this segment? ZyXEL has already delivered a comprehensive Smart Home
Tapping the Next Generation Networking Smart homes are becoming emerging mega trend for today’s the router and wireless networking market. Muhammad Arsalan, VP Sales, Telco & Channel Business, ZyXEL Middle East, shared an exclusive insightful on this trend and ZyXEL’s approach towards this changing dynamics of the technology market.
According to you what are the technology trends evolving in the market? We believe that consumers are now more aware of their requirements at home or even office. With the influx of Wireless IP cams, Internet and new Smart Home devices, our dependency on Wifi has increased multi-fold. The Wireless Routers at home have to be upgraded very soon as they cannot handle all these new home gadgetry which is Wifi hungry. This means an
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upgrade to 11AC from 11N and actually to the faster 11AC routers available today. Next generation networking is becoming a great enabler for the industry. How does ZyXel look at this trend? ZyXEL has always evolved around consumer needs and so the technology has changed with time but the goal is same. Devices are now becoming Smarter and to keep up with the market trends is essential to develop new and more
Solution since last few years. We have an effective solution targeting Energy Management, Security & Surveillance and Home Monitoring. Today we deliver these services with leading Telecom Service Providers in the region. Different demographics have different cultures and hence different requirements, but the overall solution is same and this is a fast growing business segment. What are the major demands from enterprise customers
that you are experiencing? We feel that the Hospitality sector in the GCC is still growing and our solutions are an ideal fit for this. Active solutions for Public Wifi Hotspots and Network infrastructure are in demand. Internet Security is also an area for growth and with more and more demands for a Unified Threat Management system, we believe there is much to be done. What are the drivers for your business? The key market indicators dictate our focus in the market. Where ever a unique and robust solution is required we are the first ones to contribute. Our strong belief and capability in Solution Selling has differentiated us from other box movers in the market. Resellers and Partners realize the benefit in selling solutions rather than boxes and are quickly catching on to the idea. How is the SME business evolving in the Middle East region? SME probably has been mostly a stable business despite the market changes and financial implications. Business has to move on and everyone needs connectivity. Wifi has been in the driving seat for some years now and with evolving technology to keep up with the pace has always driven the SMB market. The constant change to upgrade has been a life line for technology business. How do you ensure ease of management of complex business networking environments? From conception to delivery, every step requires a lot of detail to be handled and that is only possible if you have the right approach to business.
Point2Point | Granite Telecommunications customer-facing proprietary online account management, billing and reporting portal, “Rock Reports;” and our advanced billing options like providing a single invoice covering all services and locations. As noted by Granite at the Channel Partners event in Boston this September, the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) recent order requiring telecom carriers to provide wholesale services to competitors at reasonably comparable rates, terms and conditions during the transition to IP-based networks, ensures that Granite will continue to be able to offer our enterprise customers opportunities to simplify their communications while saving the money going forward. Each of Granite’s Partners are able to offer all our products and services to enterprises across the US and Canada.
Charlie Pagliazzo VP Granite Channels Program Granite Telecommunications
Unfolding Unified Communication Unified communication has witnessed a fair amount of experience and is growing its acceptance among the enterprise. Charlie Pagliazzo, VP of Granite Channels Program at Granite Telecommunications discussed key opportunities that his organization has bought for the industry and channels in particular in the field of unified communication. What are the key opportunities that you foresee for any enterprise partner? Granite Telecommunications, LLC (Granite) has been partnering with large multisite enterprises for well over a decade, currently counting among our customers more than 85 of the Fortune 100 companies in the U.S., to provide them with the opportunities that come with consolidating communications services nationwide. Granite’s
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unified communications solutions’ value adds include not only the direct price savings we offer through our agreements with the underlying carriers, but also the internal operational cost savings and convenience Granite offers by giving our customers a one-stop shop communications solution. All of Granite’s solutions incorporate our industryleading customer service, with a single point of contact account manager; our
Leveraging our services and our scope provides Granite’s Partners the ability to augment and customize their value proposition to the end user. What are the key parameters for Granite Telecommunications for the selection of channel partners? Granite looks to start relationships with Partners who are interested in a long term, mutually beneficial partnership with Granite. Channel partners
who understand and appreciate the unique comprehensive solutions Granite brings to the table and can effectively explain the benefits of our unified communications solutions to enterprise customers. RoI is becoming a top priority for customers. How partner ecosystem should gain from this current business scenario? Granite views such changes as providing Granite and our Channel Partners with new opportunities to market the benefits of our unified communications solutions to enterprise customers; national solutions where Granite offers uniform nationwide savings rather than a collection of differing regional solutions. Using the example provided, RoI, the savings that Granite solutions provide to our customers, on the services themselves as well as on internal operating costs, leads to a quicker return on investment for businesses than other solutions. Moreover, our consolidated solutions provide for greater overall visibility into costs making it easier for Granite’s customer to assess factors like RoI more confidently. From our Partners’ perspective, the cost savings and efficiencies that Granite solutions create are often the starting point in the implementation of multiple solutions that Partners look to bring to the table for their clients. What are the key priorities for Granite Telecommunications? Granite’s number one priority is ensuring that our enterprise customers’ communications needs are met and that they are met during the course of the IP transition.
Point2Point | Arrow ECS definitely are some of the exciting challenges that lie ahead of us. With the emergence of Cloud, IoT, Mobility, companies needs to open up their internal networks to the outside world (mobility) and to all kinds of devices (IoT) which creates vulnerabilities. Such security vulnerabilities are to be addressed by identity management to access the corporate network. We bring enterprises a comprehensive perspective, safeguarding both physical and intellectual property – from before the assets are created all the way through their end of life. And although our approach is all encompassing, it’s never restrictive. We ensure enterprises’ data and interests are secure without inhibiting their employees, customers or innovations. Arrow has a
Nagham Elhalaby Marketing Manager Arrow ECS
Simplifying Converged Infrastructure One of the leading value added distributor -- Arrow ECS has made it’s position as a strong link between the IT systems OEMs and resellers. In an exclusive interaction with The Integrator Magazine, Nagham Elhalaby Marketing Manager at Arrow ECS highlighted some key industry trends and Arrow’s unique strengths to capture the best out of these trends. What is your unique approach in helping out those enterprise organizations who opt to create cloud environment? Finding a way into cloud infrastructure and into IT-asa-service platform is one of the important challenging the resellers are now facing. That’s why Arrow is betting on ArrowSphere which is our own cloud platform. It is our proprietary platform for distribution of cloud services, making it possible for our vendors and resellers to sell software as a service in the
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cloud mode. We are looking forward to lunch ArrowSphere in the region this year and the launch will be through our partners only. Security becomes vital element with respect to the high amount of network complexity, mobility and information access. How do you look at security as a trend in the market? What kind of security threats are evolving in the market? The security landscape is a constantly changing environment and these
world-leading security portfolio in the Middle-East: F5, Intel Security, Websense, TrendMicro, RSA, Infoblox, Checkpoint. Convergence is happening at very dynamic pace. As a solution provider how do you look at convergence as a trend? What are the key drivers of converged infrastructure? The adoption of converged infrastructure is gaining pace in the market. The concept of converged infrastructure provides data centers with an "all–in-one" solution for
the entire infrastructure. It includes servers, storage, and networking equipment which are all bundled and preintegrated from a single vendor.
The benefits: • Eliminating integration and interoperability problems and offers better management , Allowing to the user to select the IT configuration that best meets their needs in a costeffective manner. • High-density, cost-effective, and energy-efficient "all-in-one" IT solutions addressing various limiting factors, such as floor space, energy consumption, high density zones, separate cabling and configuration, data center infrastructure management, and staffing demands to meet the business objectives in a cost-effective and efficient manner. • Easier to install, deploy, update, and manage infrastructure, Can you share some Middle East specific market drivers and trends? In the Middle East, the factors driving growth are infrastructure projects, and these projects are known to be big and numerous. There are growing interests for hybrid cloud solutions and converged systems will be a key area of growth as more organizations look to leverage the agility, productivity, flexibility, and cost-saving benefits presented by such solutions. Security investments will remain reactive due to 3rd Platform uptake and In the Middle East, demand will be particularly strong from Smart City initiatives and the implementation of large-scale transportation projects Gitex 2015 is set to showcase some of the futuristic technologies to the world. What expectations do you
have from this show? What are the key highlights from Arrow’s portfolio? This incredibly intense week gives us the opportunity to meet again with our partners community and push forward our collaboration on all fronts of today’s incredibly dynamic ICT scene. We believe Arrow ECS brings great value to its vendors and partners in the Middle-East and North Africa, MENA, where we have been present for many years. There’s a lot we can do together. Yet, our model is to offer a broad portfolio, which helps partners respond to increasingly integrated solutions and helps vendors expand their partner community. This year, we are vastly expanding our training services, in response to the region’s crying need for hands on skills and employability of its youth. We are also launching
Arrow’s after-sale Support Services, which give end-users the assistance they need to operate and optimize the solutions they invest in. Next on our list is ArrowSphere, our proprietary cloud services platform, designed to help resellers quote, meter and invoice cloud services from a vast array of vendors. All these initiatives illustrate our pragmatic approach and our long-standing commitment to the MENA region. We are proud to share our stand with prestigious vendors EMC, VCE, RSA, IBM Security Solutions, Trend Micro and Intel Security (McAfee). Every one of them has a wide range of solutions for today’s customer needs, namely softwaredefined. mobility, virtualization and the Internet of Things. What are the key industry verticals that Arrow is
targeting for its business growth? We have always focused on large enterprise and have had particular success selling alongside our partners into verticals such as Government, Finance Banking and Insurance, Oil and Gas, Healthcare and Hospitality. More recently we have been working closely with our vendors and partners to create opportunities in the MidMarket and SMB space. This year, we will be focusing on showing Arrow’s database analytics solutions, hyper converged infrastructure and flash Storage. In our security pillar, we will showcase threat prevention, security analytics and endpoint security solutions. On networking, network virtualization technology has emerged to change the architecture of networking and have already started to build skills around that.
What is your company’s GoTo-market strategy for the Middle East region for the next one year? The MEA region is the secondfastest growing market worldwide and certainly presents business opportunities and growth potential for Arrow. Our priority is to achieve healthy growth which we plan to achieve by expanding by expanding our market share in regions in which we are not yet fully establishes such as Egypt, KSA and South Africa. Another priority is aligning with our partners initiatives from a technology and channel standpoint and we will continue supporting our partners commercially and technically to create and find markets for these solutions through: Extensive program of training and enablement, Partner incentive program and Marketing
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Point2Point | Wavetech What are the key trends in the ICT adoption among the enterprise segment of the ME and GCC region? The Middle East market is fast moving towards a technology oriented market with increasing customer awareness of the latest trends in the IT industry. This has resulted in IT companies developing products with a keen focus on understanding customer and market needs.
Karthik Narayan Asia Pacific Sales Director ATEN International
Technology Designed for Customers’ ease ICT adoption in the Middle East has seen a manifold growth in recent years due to a lot of investment in infrastructure. The Middle market is fast moving towards a technology oriented market with increasing customer awareness of the latest trends in the IT industry. Discussing this and much more, Karthik Narayan, Asia Pacific Sales Director, ATEN International Ltd. explained many trends that are contributing into the rapid evolution of ICT industry in the Middle east region.
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How do you look at the changing dynamics of data center market? Data Centers have generally adhered to traditional IT infrastructure in the past 10 years. However with cost of electricity and cooling increasing in recent times, data centers have focussed their synergies on getting efficient so as to reduce power and cooling costs. This has resulted in Data centers moving towards being “GREENER”. Most data centers are now focussed on incorporating products which help them achieve the maximum cost savings without any compromise in efficiency . What are the key drivers of Next Gen Networking solutions adoption in the Middle East market? Mobile and wireless technology seems to be the current fad in the networking arena now. With the growth of the mobile industry in the past 5 years, the market has realised the need for growing with the times. The solutions of the future will be more driven by mobility and also wireless solutions as customers also move towards preferring convenience over other things. What are your views on Smart Home market, how is this segment evolving and
what are the key trends in this? The Middle East is the largest growth market for infrastructure in recent years. Most investors prefer to invest in smart homes as it gives them complete control and convenience over their homes. Owners of smart homes are increasingly preferring the use of “ one touch control” technology which allows them to control most of the equipments at home at the single touch of a button. This trend is expected to grow in the coming years as home owners migrate to a smarter way of living. Similarly, cloud is changing the whole industry. What are your views on such transformation? The use of cloud is still in the nascent stages in the middle eastern market. One reason for that is the high initial cost for setting up the infrastructure for the cloud. Using third party vendors for cloud management services also raises a risk of information breach and security. The use of Cloud as a full fledged service is still many years away in the Middle Eastern market. How do you foresee the market potential from opportunities such as Internet of Things and smart cities? ‘The Internet of Things’ needed to be understood from the standpoint of the market trend and demand. Although this concept focuses on Machine to Machine communication, it actually refers to sensors which again are dependent on a very strong cloud system to work anytime anywhere. Hence , from a cost perspective, the ‘Internet of Things’ will still need time to catch the attention of the people.
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Point2Point | Cloudwave Technologies Which are the industry segments that are showing great interest in the cloud based solutions? Leading industry segments in private sectors are Retail, Technology, Media, Healthcare, BFSI and Education. Cloud is central in every company’s IT strategy and you will find early adopters in every segment. It’s on every CIO’s agenda to explore how to maximize benefits from cloud technologies. Cloud-based Services are growing exponentially and this will accelerate consumption by sectors whichsparingly usecloud computing today, maybe just for collaboration, communication or sales productivity. Kamal Bhojwani Managing Director Cloudwave Technologies
Agility Drives Cloud Acceptance Cloud solutions are gaining trust from every industry vertical. Kamal Bhojwani, Managing Director of Cloudwave Technologies FZE, explained the insights on cloud adoption among the enterprise and SMB segment of the Middle East.
How is the acceptance level of Cloud solutions in the Middle East region? The growth predictions by major industry analysts suggest cloud uptake is on the rise, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry segment and will continue to make significant gains in the coming few years. In fact, the growth predicted in the Middle East market is higher than developed countries.
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Cloud infrastructureis now available locally through regional providers as well as by established international players and is the platform of choice for upcoming infra projects. Surveys conducted show tight correlation between adoption of the cloud and increase in revenue and profit margin. Enterprises which are still considering their first move,risk losing competitive advantage.
What are the drivers of Cloud computing solution? For enterprises, Cloud provides business agility to deploy in new markets and also flexibility to conform to local legal, regulatory and compliance guidelines. Enterprises can concentrate on growth and not worry about overcoming resource challenges in terms of systems, technical personnel and datacenter premises. Cloud is a game changer for SMB segment as it provides a level playing field to compete with large enterprises by giving access to enterprise grade infrastructure and applications. Instant scalability provides computing power to take care of peak workloads and at the same time keeps operational expenses within budget. New startups benefit from quick deployment and with managed environments they have accessto technical expertise and also save on hiring administrators. Cloud gives flexibility in the choice of computing power and monthly
service charges reduce initial investment burden. Fusion of business and technology is happening. How do you look at the challenges that arose from this fusion? What kind of solutions does your organization offers to such challenges? Strategic alignment of IT and business is vital to succeed. Enterprises are recognizing how newdisruptive technologieshave the power to drive business and the importanceof CIOs to take center stage and be involved in business strategy. Initially, it was perceived that business functions could procure cloud solutions without involvement of IT, however this assumption has been laid to rest. Today, IT is in control of selecting cloud technologies as it involves tackling complex issues of security, governance and interoperability. We provide consultancy services to align IT strategy with business needs. We have the technical expertise to harness cloud technologies, address business challenges and provide competitive advantage. Do you still experience security as a challenge in the adoption of cloud computing? Security continues to be the top concern in adoption of cloud computing. Cloud providers are addressing it by complying with various security standards, certifications and showcasing how their operations are geared to ensure data security. Enterprises moving to the cloud need to put policies and procedures in place, ensure secure access, authentication and identity management, data protection and perform security audits. Organizations can have better control over security if they build their own private cloud.
Point2Point | Grenke How is the SME segment evolving in Middle east? The SME sector in the Middle East is becoming increasingly important. Especially, by its dynamic economy in the Middle East , the SME sector can be seen as an economic growth engine. What are the key technologies driving the SME segment? The IT sector is currently the fastest growing economy. SMEs are using the latest technology to ensure staying one step ahead of the competition and support their growth. Technology is a key distinguisher for their business and strategic priority in driving growth. It helps them to reduce their project and contract cycles. What are the key drivers for Grenke’s business? As a company we want to shape the future of the market, GRENKE always have ambitious entrepreneurial goals. We systematically take advantage of opportunities that the market currently offers and we establish the foundations for future growth by adopting a forward-looking approach. The company’s customer oriented strategy has set the source for making us a future-ready. We aim to become the driving force in our market segment. How is IT leasing is evolving in the GCC/ME region? In order not to bind valuable assets in investments that quickly loses its value, companies in the Middle East are looking more and more for OPEX models. Companies save their cash instead by leasing IT and office systems. The attractive leasing terms protect their capital and give them
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more leverage and leeway when it comes to credit lines with bank and suppliers. The capital cost is spread over the entire life of the leased asset. What are the key technology trends that you are witnessing? Efficiency and cost reduction are obviously major components in gaining competitive advantage therefore we think that mobile computing and cloud computing will become more important and attractive in the coming years. The trend is to get away from the ownership and focus on the benefit of IT. What are the business verticals within SMEs that are doing great business for your company? GRENKE core competency is the leasing of IT and office equipment. Retail, education and commercial are part of the business verticals requiring the latest technologies without tying up their capital. What are the key challenges that come across in the IT Leasing domain or when it comes to selling the technology to Mid-sized businesses? The initial situation of SME companies in all dynamic markets is similar. With an average liquidity for SME’s, IT investments have limited strategic competitive advantage, this result in reduced IT budget. But with a flexible IT leasing solution tailored to the customers’ specific needs, mid-sized companies have always a excellent technical solution which helps them maximize their sales revenues. At the end, this increases their customer loyalty.
Thomas Sauerteig Managing Partner Grenke Middle East
Grenke: Focused on SMEs Small and medium enterprises segment commonly known as SMEs are in the forefront for technology adoption. Most of the technology players are targeting this segment aggressively. Thomas Sauerteig, Managing Partner, Grenke Middle East shared his views on this segment’s growing importance for the industry and Grenke’s unique approach towards the SMEs.
Point2Point | DVCom Which are the key technologies according to you are transforming the IT market in today’s time? Technology has helped bridge the communication gap making the world a smaller place. With the pace of technological advancements from the evolvement of smart connects to unification of communication, we can expect a future where technology is seamlessly embedded into our lives that it seems like a part of our world. The cloud has been trending for a while now and we are seeing many services on cloud being deployed in the region. Big Data is fast becoming a priority in large enterprises, health and government verticals. There is also lots of buzz around IoT and the business opportunities it offers. IDC forecasts that the worldwide market for IoT solutions will grow from $1.9 to 7.1 trillion by 2020. How is the IP Communication market evolving in the region? With the advent of technologies like cloud computing and mobility, the IP Communication space is poised for a rapid change. SIP technology allows many different types of communication technologies to be integrated along with voice – thus evolving the IP PBX into a UC manager. SIPbased devices, from phones to surveillance cameras to the videoconferencing systems to door access cameras, can all communicate together via the IP PBX to add features, additional methods of communication, and stronger security protection to the solution. Collaboration is becoming
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Sabu Thomas V.P., Channel & Alliances DVCom
Big Data & IoT set to Transform the Technology With the advent of technologies like cloud computing and mobility, the IP Communication space is poised for a rapid change, Sabu Thomas , V.P - Channel & Alliances at DVCOM emphasized the evolving market dynamics and also highlighted trends such as Cloud, Big Data and IoT. an important component of the UC space. This allows for geographically distributed employees and work groups to cooperate with each other to achieve a business objective or goal. Mobility enhances the solutions that we provide whether it be softphone use by remote workers or downloaded apps which work with the IP intercom and CCTV systems to provide security from any location. What are your expectations from this year’s Gitex? GITEX provides us with a
unique platform to showcase our products and services to our clients and channel partners across the region. It also enables us to identify strategic vendor that can strengthen our portfolio and new technology that can augment our solution offering. What are the flagship products that DVCOM will highlight in this year’s Gitex? One of DVCOM’s main attraction this GITEX will be Yealink’s full HD video conferencing system, the VC
series. The brand is working to create a customer experience room at GITEX, giving visitors a real-time demonstration encompassing the VC400, VC110 and the new desktop video phone T49G. This GITEX will also have DrayTek launch their latest Vigor2925 LTE - an LTE embedded router. The Secured networking solution will inherit the series versatile firewall mechanism from the previous Vigor series. DVCOM will also showcase a WebRTC based contact center solution as part of its growing
Point2Point | DVCom portfolio of customizable communication solutions. This solution can also integrate with any web based or custom CRM. How is Network Security as a technology subject evolving among the enterprise segment? Which are the key trends in this space? Technology companies are continuously evolving, developing technically advanced products, tools with built-in intelligence to sense & sniff the threats and attacks that might jeopardise the companies IT Infrastructure, where the business critical data and information resides and grows. Since, the need and demand both are dynamically changing due to rapidly changing trends in the ways businesses are being managed, the managed security services
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have taken a lead role to provide vigilant solutions based on the latest technological advancements. According to a Gartner report, the cloud-based security services market will be valued at $2.1 billion in 2013, rising to $3.1 billion by 2015. The strongest interest will be in encryption products from cloud security service providers, which are comparatively easy for deployment with options for on-premises encryption management. They also predict the top three most soughtafter cloud security services moving forward will remain email security, web security services and identity and access management (IAM). How is the role of partners are evolving with the advent of newer market trends?
The changing consumption model requires the channel partners to update their business models. An important aspect that the partners need to keep in mind is to keep educating and training themselves to be in a position to meet the increasing customization needs of the customer. Value addition is the differentiator and partners should be vigilant in observing the market trends and move to high-growth areas. Smart Cities and Smart Homes is an emerging trend. How does DVCOM look at this as an area of business? Dubai is already poised to become a smart city and the transformation is taking rapid pace and we are completely
aware of the opportunities in this space. Our association with Czech company 2N last year was essentially a step in this direction. 2N has a range of Intercoms and access control systems which are compatible with home automation systems and with the indoor touch panel can not only initiate a conversation with your visitor, but you can even unlock the door or turn on the lights in the corridor or entry hall. They also have a range of machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions for remote monitoring & control. 2N’s software for M2M Centralized Management allows remote device management over IP network, remotely read data from energy meters, control of individual devices, contactless payment etc.
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Overview: The Allied Telesis AR Series of Next-Generation Firewalls and secure VPN routers provide advanced security features to meet the needs of modern businesses. With online activity now based around applications, content, and user interaction, enterprises can enjoy increased efficiency and improved collaboration, and discover new ways to manage customer interaction. AR Series products deliver the breadth of functionality that small and medium-sized businesses require, at a price point they can afford, and with the proven reliability that makes Allied Telesis a trusted networking partner. Key features: • Powerful intrusion protection uses specialized multi- core CPUs. • Optimized for single-pass low-latency performance, and have threat signature databases that are updated regularly for up-to-the-minute protection against malware, viruses and other cyber-attacks. • Full application control allows organizations to manage which online applications their people use and how they use them.
Overview: IGEL redefined the entry-level thin client category with its latest smaller, more powerful and energy saving UD2 series. Equipped with the latest Intel Atom processor, the new UD2 delivers a 30% increase in performance with a smaller energy consumption. The new UD2 comes supplied with two digital monitor outputs (DVI-I and DVI-D), which means that users can work efficiently on two connected display units. In addition to the three USB ports (2.0) on the back, a fourth USB 3.0 port has been built into the front of the housing to ensure even faster data transmission. With a 2GB random access memory and additional hardware improvements, the new IGEL UD2 is the perfect device for office workers that also have to deal with multimedia content. The outstanding price/performance ratio makes the UD2 the perfect entry level device for modern virtual desktop computing.
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Key features: • IGEL UD2 works with browser-based CRM and ERP systems, Microsoft Office/ Office 365 or the smooth playback of full-HD videos. • Supported by an Intel Atom processor (1.46 GHz single core), Intel HD Graphics (64 – 256 MB shared) and 2 GB RAM (DDR3L) • Works with modern operating systems such as Windows 7, 8.x or Windows 10 (depending on availability). • It consumes just 5 watts in operation and when in stand-by mode less than 1 watt.
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• Identity Tokens • Back-up / Recovery Systems • Software Protection • Biometric Identification Systems • Data Access Protection • User Rights Management
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eyetech
VM6404H 4x4 4K HDMI Matrix Switch with Scaler
DLINK 4G LTE USB Router DWR 910
Overview: 4K is the next generation of image quality for high definition video. 4K delivers eight million pixels which is four times as much detail as 1080p Full HD resolutions. ATEN’s VM6404H 4K HDMI Matrix Switch with Scaler is compatible with the two latest 4K video resolution standards: 3840 x 2160 and 4096 x 2160. The VM6404H provides powerful HD processing to produce 4K resolutions across four displays with crystal clear images. The VM6404H easily converts various input resolutions into various output display resolutions, giving viewers the best video and picture quality across all displays. The switch integrates video wall functionality with an easy to use web GUI that lets you create 8 connection profiles that can be customized into different video wall layouts. Key features: • The VM6404H supports 4K@60Hz, HDMI 2.0* and HDCP 2.2 • Features seamless switching that employs a FPGA matrix architecture that ensures continuous video streams, real-time control and stable signal transmissions. • With a built-in high-performance scaler, the VM6404H easily converts various input resolutions into various output display resolutions. • The switch integrates video wall functionality with an easy to use web GUI. • This lets you create 8 connection profiles that can be customized into different video wall layouts.
Overview: The 4G LTE USB Router lets you share your fast mobile connection over Wi-Fi from a device small enough to fit in your pocket. With the DWR-910, you can get online with your notebook, smartphone, tablet, and any other wireless device by sharing a single 4G LTE connection. The DWR910 will provide high-speed Wireless N Internet access for everybody – whether you are with colleagues on a business trip, or when you are travelling with friends and family. Open a browser, connect the router, and you can set up your network right from a web interface. Notebooks and netbooks without a CDROM drive can connect and get up and running in no time. You can even plug the DWR-910 into any powered USB port and provide wireless connectivity to your mobile devices without a PC. The DWR-910 is truly plug-and-play with drivers built right into the router so you can connect without the need to install anything. Open a browser, connect the router, and you can set up your network right from a web interface. Key features: • The DWR-910 is truly plug-and-play with drivers built right into the router • Internal LTE main antenna/ Internal LTE diversity antenna /Internal Wi-Fi antenna USB 2.0, microSD card slot (up to 32 GB), SIM slot (6-pin) • The DWR-910 will provide high-speed Wireless N Internet access • WPA2-PSK Auto (TKIP / AES), WPA-PSK Auto (TKIP / AES), WEP (64 / 128-bit), MAC filter
68 | October 2015
Stats & Trends
Total EMEA Security Appliance Market Remains Flat: IDC According to International Data Corporation's (IDC) Europe, Middle East, and Africa Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker, the EMEA security appliance market reached $837.65 million in 2Q15, for a 0.2% year-on-year decline. Shipments increased 4.0% year on year to 183,885 units. Over the next five years the security appliance market is expected to accelerate at a CAGR of 6.3% and reach $4.59 billion (1,018,373 units) by the end of 2019.
EMEA Market Highlights Unified threat management (UTM) appliances were the only product category that increased in value in 2Q15, expanding 12.9% year on year. As a result, their value share reached 53.9% of the total. Over the next five years, UTM is expected to remain the largest product category, representing about 62% by 2019. Check Point secured the top position in 2Q15 in the overall security appliance vendor
market with 19.2% value share. Cisco's market share has increased for the past three quarters and represented 16.8% value market share. With a very strong second quarter (40.6% annual growth in value), Fortinet took the third spot with 11.1% of the market.
appliance research, IDC. "Unified threat management appliances continue to be the main market driver in Western Europe, and although IDC sees organizations' interest in IDP products, they often prefer to have it deployed through UTM/ NGFW rather than a standalone product."
to increase, taking the largest share of shipments to CEMA. The product category reached maturity and, with many successful stories from neighboring Western European countries, end users are no longer hesitant about consolidating their datacenter security.
Western Europe Market Highlights
Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa Market Highlights
EMEA Security Appliance Market by Product Categories, Q2 2013 - Q2 2015, Value Shares
The Western European market showed moderate growth in security appliances, with $646.79 million in value in 2Q15, representing 2.4% growth over the same quarter in 2014. The main market driver of the security appliance market in Europe remains UTM solutions, which represented over half of the value (56.5%) in 2Q15, with associated 16.9% growth. "The European appliance market is driven by the U.K. and Germany — the two largest economies — which represented over 45% of the total Western European market last quarter," said Romain Fouchereau, manager, security
In the emerging markets of CEMA, security appliance hardware shipments contracted 2.2% year on year in 2Q15. Vendor revenue declined in turn by 6.7% over the same period, to $150 million. "Central European and Gulf region countries are slowly regaining health as confidence in the market increases," said Mohamed Hefny, senior analyst, systems and infrastructure, IDC. "Amid geopolitical tension and instability, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are still in decline." UTM adoption continued
IDC's EMEA Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker offers the ability to quickly and effectively respond to today's dynamic security server appliance market by keeping pace with evolving functionality and the rapid deployment of new models competing in the marketplace. The product provides insight into customer trends by delivering geography-specific product line and vendor market share information in an easy-to-use product interface, enabling quick table customization for business planning activities.
Top 5 Vendors, EMEA Security Appliance Market Value, 2Q15 Vendor Check Point Cisco Fortinet Palo Alto Juniper Others
2Q14 Value $147.79 $166.12 $66.40 $42.86 $45.40 $370.96
2Q14 Market Share 17.60% 19.80% 7.90% 5.10% 5.40% 44.20%
Total market
$839.53
100.00%
70 | October 2015
2Q15 Value $160.69 $140.90 $93.34 $54.55 $40.40 $347.47
2Q15 Market Share 19.20% 16.80% 11.10% 6.50% 4.80% 41.60%
Growth 2Q15/2Q14 8.70% -15.20% 40.60% 28.00% -11.00% -6.30%
$837.65
100.00%
-0.20%