Computer News Middle East

WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS

WWW.CNMEONLINE.COMISSUE 237 | OCTOBER 2011

STRATEGIC ICT PARTNER

INSIDE OUTSOURCING | DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT | EDUCATIONPUBLICATION LICENSED BY IMPZ

@computernewsme #cnmeawds11

KUWAIT’S TELECOM MAJORGETS DATA SMART

www.cnmeonline.com

Subscribe now and get 1 month FREE*

Call 800 5800 or visit www.etisalat.ae/businessonesuper

Experience high-speed Internet with BusinessOne Super on Etisalat’s state-of-the-art fibre optic network.

Call today to find out how fast your business can go.

BusinessOne Super

T&C

appl

y

Broadband up to 100 Mbps

Work faster, work smarter

*Offer valid till 16 December 2011

ANALYSIS

6 A congress for clouds

At the recent two day Cloud Congress 2011, end-users and vendors discussed the various elements that are necessary to speed up the adoption of solutions and services in the cloud.

12 Winds of change

Speakers at the IDC IT Managers Forum highlighted a noticeable shift in the priorities of enterprises across the world.

14 Robust outlook

Infrastructure solutions vendor Commscope is looking forward to growth in the region with an integrated office and a stronger economy.

16 A leader for HP

If Meg Whitman doesn’t work out, Marc Benioff, Steve Mills, Charles Phillips or even Mark Hurd come to mind as candidates.

18 Round-up

We bring you a quick round-up of IT industry news.

CASE STUDY

38 Challenging the norm

Dubai’s Department of Economic Development (DED) has deployed a network that turns almost all capex into opex. Sathya Mithra Ashok writes on how they achieved the feat.

44 Critical connections

KSA’s Jarir Bookstore battles the challenges associated with connecting disparate centres of business to support strategic growth.

FEATURE

50 Sourcing success

Many large organisations have outsourced some or all of their IT functions. Pallavi Sharma finds out what challenges and drives this trend and how the Middle East ITO market is keeping up.

56 Turning a new leaf CIOs in the Middle East still struggle to give green ICT investments

a business language and this is hampering the adoption of environmentally-sane choices in organisations.

62 Back to school

The application of IT is not only transforming the way students learn, but also the way they are being taught. Pallavi Sharma studies how educational institutions in the region are leveraging technology.

INTERVIEW

68 A solutions company Michael Dell, CEO of Dell outlines agressive plans to acquire more intellectual property to benefit customers and long time partners.

INSIGHT

74 Application virtualisation-the impact

Server virtualisation gets more buzz, but application virtualisation might provide more significant business benefits in the long run.

78 The big deal

A new group of data mining technologies promises to change forever the way we sift through out vast stores of data, making it faster and cheaper.

HOW TO

82 Build a turnkey private and hybrid cloud

Here’s how you as an enterprise can evaluate and understand the essential elements that constitute a turnkey private or hybrid cloud.

84 Mitigate risk in the outsourcing market

Forrester has some recommendations on how to mitigate risk and achieve value from relationships with global outsource vendors.

88 Improve collaboration between development and operations

Here are six ways that IT managers can get their DevOps teams to work together.

PRODUCTS

90 CNME gets down in the dirt with the latest gizmos and gadgets, and gives you the verdict.

LAST WORD

94 A look at what major events await you, what we’re reading, and a sneak peek at the contents of the next issue of CNME.

ContentsISSUE 237 | OCTOBER 2011

Kuwait’s Viva Telecom implements a data warehouse and business intelligence solution to benefit business operations, Pallavi Sharma reports.

32 Viva vibe

3Computer News Middle Eastoctober 2011www.cnmeonline.com

Second time aroundEven when the second half of the year starts, it is very difficult not thinking of GITEX. And if it looms at your doorstep (as it does when I write this editorial) then it would seem absolutely criminal to ignore it.

But that is exactly what I am going to do.This is not because we have anything against GITEX or in any way believe that

the event has become any less of the social-calendar-must-do it has been for years for the IT industry in the Middle East. No, not at all.

It is just that at CNME we are currently pre-occupied with our very own second annual ICT Achievement Awards.

If you are reading this, chances are you are already at the Awards venue, or the Awards has already come to an end and we have announced our winners on a glorious evening that brought together the who’s-who of the entire industry.

The second episode of the region’s premier Awards ceremony is set to imitate the success of the first – only it will be slightly larger in scale and ambition. CNME’s team received a staggering 352 nominations for the Awards this year, making it a truly regional representation of deployments, end-users and vendors.

This year we will be honouring a couple of new categories (besides the tried-and-tested set of categories, and a ‘surprise’ category that you will hear about only on the evening of the Awards), and we have moved our venue to the prominent Monarch Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road, right across from the GITEX venue of DWTC.

As I sit here writing this though, we already know some of the winners, and it looks much like the biggest growth markets in the region will be the ones taking home most of the trophies. In simpler terms, we are talking about enterprises in KSA, UAE and Qatar.

There have been some spectacular stories from many other countries in the region as well, especifically Jordan and Egypt, and they will be highlighted during the Awards event as well.

And I will stop there, for I certainly want to hold on to the surprise element of announcing the winners on the evening of the Awards ceremony. You will hear (in brief) about each of the projects and the people who won the hard-fought accolade on the 9th of October 2011.

For a more detailed story on each of the winners, you will have to wait for the November issue.

Now you know why we can’t think of GITEX, and why you should be at CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2011. I mean, would anyone really want to miss the evening where we honour the crème-de-la-crème of the Middle East ICT industry?

To attend the Awards evening, please register at www.computernewsme.com/ictachievementawards2011/registration.php.

You can also follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/computernewsme) and look for Awards tweets with #CNMEAwds11.)

Sathya Mithra AshokSenior Editor

E-mail:[email protected]

Twitter:@computernewsme

Facebook:www.facebook.com/

computernewsme

If you’d like to receive your own copy of CNME

every month, log on and request a subscription:

www.computernewsme.com

eDItorIAL

PublisherDominic De Sousa

COONadeem Hood

Managing DirectorRichard Judd

[email protected] +971 4 4409126

Commercial DirectorChris Stevenson


EDitORiAl

Dave [email protected] +971 4 4409106

Senior EditorSathya Mithra Ashok


Sub-EditorPallavi Sharma


CiRCulAtiON

Database and Circulation ManagerRajeesh M


PRODuCtiON AND DESigN

Production ManagerJames P tharian


Art DirectorKamil Roxas


DesignerAnalou Balbero


PhotographerCris Mejorada


DigitAl SERViCES

Digital Services Managertristan troy P Maagma

Web DevelopersJerus King Bation

Erik BrionesJefferson de Joya

louie Alma

[email protected]+971 4 440 9100

Published by

1013 Centre Road, New Castle County,Wilmington, Delaware, uSA

Branch OfficePO Box 13700

Dubai, uAE

tel: +971 4 440 9100Fax: +971 4 447 2409

Printed byPrintwell Printing Press

Regional partner of

© Copyright 2011 CPiAll rights reserved

While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information

in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

Talk to us:

WHERE TECHNOLOGY MEANS BUSINESS

WWW.COMPUTERNEWSME.COMISSUE 237 | OCTOBER 2011

STRATEGIC ICT PARTNER

INSIDE OUTSOURCING | DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT | EDUCATIONPUBLICATION LICENSED BY IMPZ

@computernewsme #cnmeawds11

KUWAIT’S TELECOM MAJORGETS DATA SMART

www.facebook.com/computernewsme

APC integrated cooling future-proofs your IT room without breaking the bank Is your server room a barrier to adopting new technologies? Consolidation, virtualization, network convergence, blade servers — these new technologies improve efficiency, cut costs, and allow you to ‘do more with less’. But they also bring high-density power, cooling, and management challenges that server rooms were never designed to handle. You’re relying on guesswork, depending on building air conditioning, or improvising remedies. So, how can you increase the level of reliability and control in your server room without spending a fortune?

Introducing the APC by Schneider Electric™ total server room solution Now you can get power, cooling, monitoring, and management components that easily deploy together as a complete, integrated solution. Everything has been pre-engineered to work together and integrate seamlessly with your existing equipment. Just slide this proven, plug-and-play solution into most existing spaces — there’s no need for confusing cooling configurations or expensive mechanical re-engineering. The modular, ‘pay as you grow’ design lets you be 100 per cent confident that your server room will keep pace with ever-changing demands.

Future-proof your server room easily, cost-effectively APC takes the hassle out of configuring server rooms. Self-contained InRow™ cooling units, high-density NetShelter™ enclosures, and the APC rack air containment system combine to create a proper IT ecosystem in almost any environment. Rack-level monitoring sensors, intelligent controls built into the cooling unit, and integrated management software provide complete remote control and unprecedented visibility into the entire system. Simply add power protection (such as undisputed best-in-class Smart-UPS™ or Symmetra™ units) and you have a total solution for today, tomorrow, and beyond.

Introducing server room in a box APC rack-

based cooling draws in hot air from the rear, at its source, and then sends conditioned air out the front, ready to be used by adjoining racks.

If you have dedicated IT space… Get pre-validated, high-density cooling as a single offering.

APC InRow SC System combines an InRow SC precision cooling unit (up to 7 kW capacity), NetShelter SX rack enclosure, and rack air containment system.

If you don’t… Introducing the NetShelter CX: portable server cabinets, with extreme noise reduction, designed for offi ce environments.

These solutions integrate power, cooling, and management in a secure, quiet, cooled enclosure that’s indistinguishable from other office furniture.

Three steps to WIN an iPad!1. Bring this ad and your business card to the APC by Schneider Electric booth at Gitex 2011, Hall 1, Stand E1-40.2. Take the four-step tour and receive a FREE bag.

3. Enter the lucky draw to win an iPad – we’re giving away one a day for fi ve days!*

For more information on solutions:Visit www.apc.com/promo and enter Key Code 97321tCall +9714 7099690 (Arabic) / +9714 7099691 (English) Fax +9714 7099650

©2011 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, InRow, NetShelter, Smart-UPS, and Symmetra are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. APC Middle East – PO Box 53852 – Dubai – United Arab Emirates. • 998-2029_GB*Conditions apply. Promotion giveaways are at the discretion of APC. Details and conditions for the lucky draw available at the APC by Schneider Electric booth.

Computer_News_ME_97321t.indd 1 2011-09-27 10:28:20

month in viewEvENt

A congress for cloudsAt the recent two day Cloud Congress 2011, organised by CNME, end-users and vendors debated on the relevance of cloud technologies to the region and the

various elements that are necessary to speed adoption of solutions and services in the cloud. Sathya Mithra Ashok reports.

6 Computer News Middle East october 2011 www.cnmeonline.com

Cloud computing in the region is still immature, and there are several challenges that exist

in the region. Nevertheless, there is constant innovation and improvement that is taking place, and we are likely to see dramatic improvements in the near future. This was the conclusion of the speakers at the first day of Cloud Congress 2011.

End-users, industry experts and multiple other stakeholders got together at the ground-breaking event to discuss the state of cloud solutions and services in the region.

At the opening keynote, Tibor Loncsar, director of strategy and operations for IT at DWTC, explained the hybrid model used by his organisation and how they have profited from it.

“DWTC uses a hybrid cloud for its corporate email and we have been pleasantly surprised by the results. The primary concern was the interoperability and the ability to have it function with internal infrastructure. With everything in place now the hybrid cloud provides continuity, quick recovery, security filtering and archiving,” said Loncsar.

Loncsar, an open advocate for cloud computing, advised organisations to go for it as it is easier and better than what could be expected. “The bottom line though – expect the unexpected. It will get more complicated as you grow and you are ready to take the next step,” said Loncsar.

The Congress, which was divided into two tracks, brought together exceptional speakers to talk on the various elements surrounding cloud computing.

Ali Radhi, head of IT at MBC Group, started the tracks with his session on cloud optimisation focusing on interoperability and standardisation. He drew from his own experiences at MBC to illustrate the points he made during his presentation.

“MBC has been deploying cloud solutions for the last three years. We have

moved from private to hybrid to private over the years, and interoperability has been a major issue,” said Radhi.

“Risk management is essential before using cloud computing and business decision makers need to be involved. It is very important for every organisation to build its information base for cloud sharing, and understand that integration with multiple platforms is one of the biggest challenges in cloud computing,” he stated.

Mohamed Roushdy, CIO of Siraj Finance, discussed the various ROI models that could be used to evaluate cloud providers and solutions, and expanded on the methods in which end-users could

profit from their cloud investments in the shortest possible time.

“Bringing about a cultural change within the organisation is the most difficult element in any cloud computing project. Convincing the CEO, CFO and other business heads that this could potentially help the business, and some of the issues can be handled for the betterment of the company is a huge change management project. Half the success of any cloud computing project simply depends on getting this sign-off from the higher management,” he stressed during his session.

Organisations should not be deterred by challenges. They should understand business needs and invest in a model that suits you, he added.

Mike Tsalidis, server and tools business group lead for Microsoft MEA, discussed cloud for the greater good, and improving productivity with cloud investments during

his session. While detailing the main differences between private and public clouds, Tsalidis also gave shape to the company’s cloud strategy and solutions.

Talking about linking cloud strategy to IT strategy, Javed Abbasi, director of IT and operations at Gisba Group from Saudi Arabia, said, “Aligning IT strategy to business is very different from integrating IT strategies with business. Without strategy, IT is untamed.” He added, “With relation to the cloud people often forget that the service depends on a physical data centre. Organisations must understand and verify the infrastructure, operations and management processes that the provider has in place.”

“There is a lot of difference between a local cloud partners and a strategic cloud partner. The maturity of enterprises and partners are not mature enough to move there yet. But enterprises should try to move there, because they are then likely to see more benefits from the partnership,” said Ed Capaldi, divisional director of IT at Al Nisr Publishing.

Strategic partners will work in co-ordination with the IT and the business departments of the organisation for the long-term benefit of the firm. Capaldi outlined ten considerations for enterprises when choosing a strategic cloud partner including openness, outlining KPIs, partner’s understanding of the organisation’s cloud strategy, financial stability and scale of the partner and SLAs (service level agreements).

“Good strategy is the result of correct decisions, and half the time it is simply

Bringing about a cultural change within the organisation is the most difficult element in any

cloud computing project.”


Deepak Kalra, group IT director at the Safeer Group

Ramesh Krishna Bhandari, business development specialist – business solutions, central marketing at Etisalat

Ed Capaldi, divisional director of IT at Al

Nisr Publishing

Mark Lewis, senior director of marketing and alliances for EMEA at Riverbed

Fayyaz Alam, VP of IT production services at Emirates Group

Joseph Aninias, manager of IT and telecommunication services at the University of Wollongong in Dubai

Dr Hazem Turki El-Khatib, IT director at the Department of Finance in Abu Dhabi

Ali Radhi, head of IT at MBC Group

Geethalakshmi R, CEO and managing partner at Associated Business Attorneys

Javed Abbasi, director of IT and operations at Gisba Group from Saudi Arabia

Trevor Moore, Director of IT and Communications at Abu Dhabi University.

Mohamed Roushdy, CIO of Siraj Finance

Tibor Loncsar, director of strategy and operations for IT at DWTC

Nick Black, technical manager for the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa at Trend Micro

month in viewEvENt

Mike Tsalidis, server and tools business group lead for Microsoft MEA


knowing what not to do. Currently though cloud computing remains unstable and therefore a highly risky proposition for companies,” said Capaldi. He also bemoaned the lack of skilled personnel for IT jobs, calling most of the people who are entering the region as new recruits as “idiots right out of college.”

Ramesh Krishna Bhandari, business development specialist – business solutions, central marketing at Etisalat, said, “Cloud spending in 2010 was $37.8 billion and is expected to grow 26% and hit $121 billion by 2015. More than 80% of this is expected to be SaaS-centric cloud spending.”

“Data is growing at 6 trillion bytes per second. Considering all this, and the multiple benefits that come with the cloud, over 70% of businesses in the Middle East are either using or will be using cloud in the next 6-12 months,” he said.

He was speaking on the subject of growing with the cloud at the Congress. He added that while the cloud gives exponential opportunities for any business to grow, there is no one size fits all with these services and solutions, and that a truly flexible cloud requires team effort.

Nick Black, technical manager for the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa at Trend Micro, spoke at length about virtualisation and cloud computing, and the role of security within these implementations.

“Deep Security protects virtual machines (VMs) and ensures that the host defends itself against the changing threat landscape. This is the ideal situation. It can even be used to defend public clouds – even those with multi-tenancy,” said Black.

Nevertheless, regardless of the security solutions used by a service provider in the public cloud, the end-user should encrypt his data when transferring and storing it with the service provider. The decryption key should remain with the end-user and this is the only way to ensure that critical

organisational information remains protected even when they move from one service provider to another,” said Black.

He also stated that an organisation can use Trend Micro’s management console

to keep an idea on security on the public cloud where its information is stored. He also touched briefly upon the controversial subject of who owned the data and who would take responsibility for it when, and if, security failed.

“Even well established public cloud service providers have clauses in their agreements whereby they move responsibility for security and data loss over to the person who buys the service. Keeping this in mind, it is always best for the end-user to take a more direct interest in the security of their information when handing it to a service provider,” said Black.

The panel at the end of the day that brought together all the speakers of the day discussed the multiple challenges that faced the cloud, and identified areas of growth in specific industries for it as well. An involved debate on SLAs and service providers also ensued between the panellists, with some stating that the dominant service provider should take steps to provide end-to-end SLA provisions that come with penalties attached to them.

The second day of Cloud Congress 2011 was all about the legalities involved in working with public and hybrid clouds, and the ways in which contracts can be fashioned better for end-users going forward.

The debate and discussion that was the highlight of the panel discussion of the

day was preceded by sessions covering the operation and management of the cloud to back-up and disaster recovery (DR) necessities when working with any chosen cloud model.

The opening keynote of the second day was delivered by Dr Hazem Turki El-Khatib, IT director at the Department of Finance in Abu Dhabi. Dr El-Khatib spoke about the financial shared services that they had implemented across multiple divisions.

“There are several advantages to the shared services model and there are several challenges associated with it as well. Moving to a private cloud entirely might come with different challenges, but we do believe that we have achieved most of the efficiencies that the cloud can provide. And the question we are still battling with is whether we should move to a full-scale cloud deployment at all or whether we are happeier with the current shared service provision,” said Dr El-Khatib.

Deepak Kalra, group IT director at the Safeer Group, the first speaker on the first track of the second day, discussed escalation procedures with cloud implementations.

“Cloud computing has reached escape velocity and is transferring into mainstream computing. Cloud implementations vary across business sectors and these variations need to be supported by the parent provider of the cloud platform and/or servicesCloud computing leads to right sizing and businesses are free to choose the delivery model that suits them best,” said Kalra.

He added that every service provider that is investing in the cloud should create a

Good strategy is the result of correct decisions, and half the time it is simply knowing what not to do.

Currently though cloud computing remains unstable and therefore a highly risky proposition for companies.”


knowledge base or a community to enhance user learning. He advised that the industry should look to organisations like CSA, ENISA and CIF who are trying to maintain a standard surrounding cloud service provision. He concluded that the Safeer Group itself had invested in a private cloud, faced with the lack of SLAs from service providers in the region.

In track two, experienced advocate Geethalakshmi R, CEO and managing partner at Associated Business Attorneys, spoke at length about the pitfalls that await customers when they begin to form a contract with a service provider.

“The first mistake that most customers make is that they don’t read the entire contract from page to page. This is absolutely essential. They should also have a clear idea of their goals, and make sure that the contract matches their requirements. Enterprises should also keep a keen eye out for certain terms and statements that should be a part of every cloud contract,” stated Geethalakshmi.

She also warned customers to be wary of ‘virtual cloud providers’ who did not own datacentres themselves, but simply leased data centre space to provide cloud services. She also encouraged customers to be aware of the jurisdiction under which their contracts would fall, and take an active part in the decision of the laws that would govern the SLA (service level agreement).

“In the current scenario, in the current legislative setup especially in the UAE, it is simply a case of buyer beware. They have to be careful, they have to understand that only general laws apply to a cloud contract, and work with their requirements in mind all the time. Loss of data is as good as a loss of business these days,” stated Geethalakshmi.

Backup and disaster recovery in the cloud was expanded upon by Mark Lewis, senior director of marketing and alliances for EMEA at Riverbed. Introducing Riverbed’s work in the private cloud arena,

Lewis stated that the company had recently ventured into public clouds as well.

Citing examples of customers who have moved archiving to a cloud environment and achieved optimisation of storage requirements by way of the same, Lewis demonstrated the benefits that the cloud could offer.

“Archiving in the cloud can prove to be advantageous, especially if you do not need to access this for a certain number

of years. Comparing this to back-up where you might have to deal with duplication, the cloud offers efficient storage options,” said Lewis.

Despite these advantages though, Lewis said that storage tapes cannot die because people love them and they are a longer lasting backup solution. He also discussed WAN optimisation, its need and implications in a cloud environment.

“The right WAN optimisation solution can considerably reduce both the RPO (recovery point objectives) and RTO (recovery time objective), and the time to replicate data. There are multiple case studies from Riverbed alone to reinforce the use of WAN optimisation technologies for cloud environments,” stated Lewis.

Joseph Aninias, manager of IT and telecommunication services at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, conducted a session on virtualisation and the private cloud, with specific reference to the work done within his educational institution. He also expanded on working with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

and the advantages it brings to an IT team especially within a collegiate-structure.

The final panel discussed at length the things that needed to be in place for the cloud to take off in the Middle East, including a legislative structure and a well-formed cloud ecosystem.

“It is essential for partners and distributors, along with vendors to understand the products and the cloud technologies well. They have to be able to fit

these solutions to customer requirements and avoid promising more or overselling. There should also be educated consultants to lead the way. As soon as this cloud ecosystem comes into place and begins to function in tune, we will be able to see more enterprises moving to the cloud with ease,” said Saji Oomen, GM for group IT at Al Batha Group.

The panel discussion was followed by in-depth end user workshops on everything from strategising for the cloud to working with hybrid cloud elements and including security in them. These workshops were conducted by Fayyaz Alam, VP of IT production services at Emirates Group, and Trevor Moore, Director of IT and Communications at Abu Dhabi University.

Cloud Congress 2011 was conducted on the 19th and the 20th of September in Dubai. The event was organised by CNME, the premier technology magazine of the region and CPI, one of the leading publishing houses of the Middle East.

Cloud Congress 2011 was sponsored by Etisalat and Riverbed.

month in view

Archiving in the cloud can prove to be advantageous, especially if you do not need to

access this for a certain number of years. Comparing this to back-up where you might have to deal with duplication, the cloud offers efficient storage options.”

EvENt


www.emc.com

month in viewANALYSIS

Having spent the last 24 months focusing on trimming the fat and building lean, mean technology

infrastructures, the region’s IT managers are now gearing up their systems for a period of sustained growth and constantly increasing competition.

Consequently today, we are witnessing greater dependency on IT systems to enhance business processes, reduce costs and improve network and data security. This was the general consensus at the Dubai chapter of the IDC IT Managers Forum 2011.

According to recent IDC research, improvements to security, supporting innovation and business requirements through IT initiatives and upgrades to business applications are the top three priorities for the region’s IT managers for the next 12 months.

“The focus is now on driving the innovative use of technology to spur efficiency gains, improve internal processes, reduce risk and extend customer reach with business imperatives, amid the evolving demands of today’s increasingly mobile, distributed and interconnected workplace. IT

managers are tasked with providing a reliable and agile platform that adapts to rapidly changing business requirements and constantly evolving technology parameters,” said Jyoti Lalchandani, VP and regional MD for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, IDC.

Lalchandani added, “An inevitable side effect of the unrelenting cost reductions of the last two years is the considerable increase in the influence of the CFO over technology adoption plans, a trend that is set to continue for the foreseeable future. Considerations such as measurable business-IT alignment, return on investment, risk mitigation and compliance are now firmly ingrained in the purchase decision-making process and we expect more collaboration between technology and finance departments to ensure more value is wrung out of existing systems.”

The shifting dynamics from technology for technology sake to technology for business sake was reiterated during the course of the panel discussion at the forum.

Abdulsalam Rahma Bastaki, vice president of IT at Dubai Silicon Oasis (DSO) and Shafique R Ibrahim, manager – IT

operations, Al Fardan Group agreed that there was increasing pressure from management to invest in technologies that enable strategic business growth. However, tight budgets remain a cause of concern for a majority of the CIOs in the region.

Addressing the changing role of CIOs across organisations in the Middle East, Bastaki said, “We have witnessed a significant increase in business dependence on IT. No longer is the IT team considered a bunch of technical geeks, they are now known to understand business processes and in a position to evaluate what technologies will service the enterprise purpose best.”

Ibrahim pointed out that the most notable change has been the shift in focus from “good to make investments” to “need to make investments. “Higher management better understand the need to invest in technology to deliver a

Winds of changeAs the markets of Middle East, Africa and Turkey continue to recover from the effects of a long lasting recession, speakers at the IDC IT Managers Forum this year stated that there was a noticeable shift in the priorities of enterprises across the world.

The focus is now on driving the innovative use of technology to spur efficiency gains, improve

internal processes, reduce risk and extend customer reach with business imperatives amid the evolving demands of today’s increasingly mobile, distributed and interconnected workplace.”


significant competitive advantage through reduced business costs and manual errors. Enterprises are heavily investing in business applications and analytics for automation and data governance. Cloud computing is a reality that is here to stay. A roadmap to deploying the cloud is slowly emerging and more IT managers will soon invest in the cloud to enable business savings.”

Addressing the general apprehension surrounding the concept of cloud computing, Ibrahim opined, “The hesitation to invest in a cloud environment has to do with the fact that a cloud implementation requires additional resources because applications need to be attuned and customised to integrate with a cloud infrastructure. Without this integration the cloud deployment would not be worthwhile.”

Bastaki believes that the major driver for cloud implementations in

the region is the need to create a cost saving infrastructure. He said the DSO is considering investing in the cloud for ERP applications and is experimenting with how the environment and its management is affected if a part of that ERP is moved to a separate environment.

Both experts opined that when investing in the cloud the right approach is gradual. “It is important that an organisation understand the driver and the need to implement a cloud, and then align this need with which cloud model would work best for achieving these objectives within a competitive budget. Once the organisation has decided on the type of cloud it wants to deploy, the next step is to communicate the process of implementation to the users. This process of knowledge transfer needs to combine the technical people with the business users to ensure minimal

resistance to change in the organisation and smooth deployment.”

They also said that when selecting a vendor, decision makers need to evaluate the product, service or platform against the business requirement using a scoresheet that compares the different options, their strengths and weakness.

“We are all concerned about the lack of legislation but at the end of the day the decision is yours, know what you want, ask around to gather an idea of how well the vendor understands the business need for the investment. If after all that, you’re still not sure about the technology, don’t invest in it,” concluded Ibrahim.

The IDC IT Managers Forum 2011 running under the theme “The Smart IT Buyer” opened in Casablanca on March 29 and is visiting 23 of the region’s key business centres before the end of the year.



Commscope, the global infrastructure solutions company, has recently consolidated

its divisions and established a new headquarters for the Middle East. The company, which has a long history in the region, believes that this step will enable it to address customer requirements in a more focused manner.

“The Middle East and African region has been identified as a huge growth area by Commscope globally. There are a whole range of growth opportunities here and this combined office, bringing together our wireless and enterprise teams, will help us address this better,” say Ben Cardwell, senior VP for the wireless division at Commscope.

Anne-Marie Kenneally, senior VP for the enterprise division at Commscope adds, “There are quite a few enterprise customers looking for wireless solutions, and a great many operators looking for the expertise that we can offer on the enterprise side, especially within data centres. By bringing the teams together, we are able to consolidate our sales efforts better, and also improve our service levels to both sets of

customers, and enable better co-relation of the product sets.”

She says that Commscope had recorded exponential growth in the enterprise division in the recent past. “MEA has become a big part of our global business. We have seen a five fold increase in enterprise revenue over the last five years. The dynamics in the region are very specific in nature. To address this, and to continue our growth, we will continue to hire people as necessary, but this might not be entirely in the UAE. The hiring will take place across the region.”

The integrated infrastructure strategies will help to target the biggest customers across geographies in the Middle East, says Ciaran Forde, VP-Sales for Middle East, Pakistan and Africa at Commscope.

When asked about the company’s working pattern with contractors, Forde states, “Contractors play a huge role in the real world of business. At the end of the day they are the ones that undertake the tasks and implement projects. We are conscious of this community’s importance and always try to deliver a tailored message to them. Commscope as a company is very good at talking to end-user clients but with the growth rates in the region we are not covering enough of that client base. We are shifting our attention to consultants and contractors so they understand the key elements of the technology. We are carrying the message to them and trying to partner with them to execute projects. The world of technology changes so fast, and it is our responsibility to keep them informed and aligned with what the customer wants, what we can provide, and give them the quality

robust outlookInfrastructure solutions vendor Commscope states that despite the slowdown business has remained good in the region and the company is looking forward to further growth with an integrated office and a stronger economy.

Contractors play a huge role in the real world of business. At the end of the day they are the ones

that undertake the tasks and implement projects. We are conscious of this community’s importance and always try to deliver a tailored message to them.”

Ben Cardwell, senior VP for the wireless division at Commscope


and bandwidth necessary for the protection of their investment.”

Speaking of the recent acquisition of Argus Technologies, Cardwell says, “They have a range of speciality products that are particularly useful in high traffic environments, and for urban areas with high density data traffic and multiple frequency bands. They have already been doing great business with companies in the Middle East, but we will be launching the products to the wider market within the next quarter.”

Touching upon the challenges faced by the firm Kenneally states, “They are not specific to emerging markets. They are virtually everywhere. The enterprise and wireless markets are very different in nature. Externally, we deal with very different markets, but we are finding that we can create a common platform through our products and find some common ground. Transferring that knowledge to customers is the key.”

“From a regional perspective, we are looking for more support from telecom service providers. In other markets, where there is a competitive, open market, many property owners are given freedom to deploy their own concept wireless system and just arrange for the service provider to activate these systems. We are still some way off here; but such a vision will help enable more in-building within the wireless space across the region,” said Forde.

He add, “We have to understand that upwards of 70% of all calls either start or end within a building, and as we move to higher frequencies coverage within these buildings become key. Working with the property builder for more dynamic in-building of wireless solutions will help enable just that and get the region to be on pace with the rest of the world.”

As the divisions come together both Cardwell and Kenneally agree that the

potential for growth in the region is enormous, and that “hopefully there will be a doubling of growth in the next five years, and more going onwards.”

“UAE - despite the downturn and no visible swinging of construction cranes – remains one of our important markets in the region. The economic foundations of the country are sound, and we have enjoyed year-on-year growth here, which surprises a few people. However, the biggest market in the region remains KSA, because of the level of construction in the enterprise space. In fact, KSA not only has the top position in the

region, it remains among the top five growth countries in the entire EMEA. We have also seen steady business levels from Egypt. A lot people have been speaking about the after-effects of the political turmoil, but with solutions tailored for the professional end of the market, most of our work has continued, and we have a very strong postion in the market. We have developed enough bandwidth now to get business even from emerging regions within the Middle East, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Our outlook, to say the least, is quite robust for the region,” concludes Forde.

From a regional perspective, we are looking for more support from telecom service

providers. In other markets, where there is a competitive, open market, many property owners are given freedom to deploy their own concept wireless system and just arrange for the service provider to activate these systems.”

Ciaran Forde, VP-Sales, Middle East, Pakistan and Africa, Commscope

Anne-Marie Kenneally, senior VP for the enterprise division at Commscope


Having gone through a rash of CEOs in the past 10 to 15 years, Hewlett-Packard may soon find

itself looking for yet another new chief, despite just tapping Meg Whitman for that job this week. HP’s recent announcement of board member Whitman as its insider choice to replace Leo Apotheker after less than a year came under fire from some who believe that the company should have named an interim leader and conducted an executive search.

“HP decided against conducting an outside search because it wasn’t necessary,” board Executive Chairman Ray Lane said. But having just conducted the search for Apotheker, HP still had a good idea of who was available and “if we thought there was a better choice on the outside, we would have conducted [a new] search,” Lane said.

But if Whitman doesn’t last, here’s a look at some potential outside CEO candidates HP could pursue down the road:

1. Steve Mills, senior VP and group executive, software and systems, IBM.Mills’ name came up regularly as a potential HP CEO after Mark Hurd left the company. In addition, he would bring broad-based experience to HP thanks to his current role, where he oversees IBM’s software and hardware strategy and manages more than 100,000 employees.

“Mills was also at IBM in the 1990s, when the company went through a similar transition as HP is going through now,” said Frank Scavo, managing partner of IT strategy consulting firm Strativa. On the minus side, Mills wasn’t CEO at the time, Scavo said. “

In addition, Mills only gained control of IBM’s hardware business last year, giving him less experience in that arena than software.

This aside, “Steve is definitely CEO material,” said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research.

“He’s actually one of the best managers in the business. He’s managed their mergers and acquisition strategy and has done a good job of aligning those with industries and back end services,” Wang added.

However, “I don’t know if it’s likely for him to go to HP,” Wang said. “They’d have to try really hard to bring him aboard, given they’ve been fierce competitors.”

2. Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.comThe outspoken and flamboyant Benioff “really is a tech visionary,” said Forrester Research analyst Paul Hamerman. “Salesforce.com is one of the most innovative companies from a technical standpoint.” In addition, “he’s a great communicator,” Hamerman said.

Salesforce.com, known for its array of cloud-based software, has experienced dramatic growth but its profits remain relatively small compared to revenue. That’s not necessarily a knock against Benioff, given that Salesforce.com is still “investing in growth initiatives,” Hamerman pointed-out.

Benioff however isn’t likely couldn’t be lured by money given his already substantial net worth,” Hamerman added.

Moreover, “he’s had no experience with [HP’s] kind of problem,” Scavo said. “He’s an entrepreneur. HP is the antithesis of a startup. He’s good at a lot of things, but he’s never been through something like this.”

“Marc would be a great addition just in terms of vision and morale and the ability to attract talent in the Valley,” Wang said. And money may not be a motivator for Benioff.

A leader for HP


If Meg Whitman doesn’t work out, Marc Benioff, Steve Mills, Charles Phillips or even Mark Hurd come to mind as candidates.


“This is about the challenge, making the transformation,” he said. “I don’t know if he would want that challenge, but an acquisition of Salesforce.com would bring him aboard.”

3. Charles Phillips, CEO, Infor, and a former Oracle co-president.Phillips is known for his cool, crisp demeanor and his role in architecting Oracle’s vast array of acquisitions. And as a former financial analyst, he is “highly credible with the investment community,” Scavo said. “HP could certainly use someone credible at the top.”

He left Oracle last year under what are understood to be generally agreeable terms, despite a scandal involving billboards around the U.S. that bore romantic photos of Phillips and a woman to whom he was not married. Phillips later confirmed that he and the woman had a “serious relationship,” which he said had ended.

Phillips has long since moved on from that episode and spent the past year or so launching a reinvention of Infor’s software portfolio and continuing his yen for acquisitions with the purchase of Lawson Software.

While Infor is the third-largest ERP software vendor after SAP and Oracle, it’s no HP in terms of prominence. For an executive like Phillips, whose name was cast about at times as a potential successor to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison , the top job at HP may be a tempting prize.

But while Phillips may know business software inside and out, he only had a short time to get acquainted with hardware after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in early 2010.

That may be a problem for him as CEO of HP, which still derives only a tiny percentage of revenue from software. “He’s a software

executive, and HP is not a software company,” Hamerman said.

But Wang held a different view, saying HP would likely be in solid hands from an operational standpoint with Phillips at the helm. “He is the executor.”

4. Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP.SAP-co CEO Bill McDermott presents in his regular public appearances the type of controlled, smooth confidence that HP could use in a leader right now.

He’s also considered by experts to be one of the industry’s top salesmen, focusing on that aspect of SAP’s business while his co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe handles the technology end of things.

“If anything, he’d be able to improve the customer relationships,” Wang said.

Hamerman echoed the notion. “I think he’s a great spokesman for SAP. He projects the kind of communication skills and persona that Leo didn’t have.”

“On the other hand he’s not a tech visionary,” Hamerman said. “That’s not what SAP wants him to do. His role is to focus on customer relationships and being an articulate spokesman. Right now HP needs a tech visionary and he’s not the guy.”

In addition, McDermott lacks experience in hardware, and actually makes a habit of saying publicly how disinterested SAP is in getting into that business directly. It’s not clear how investors would react to him being chosen to lead the hardware-centric HP.

5. Mark Hurd, co-president of Oracle.Yes, the same Mark Hurd who was ousted as HP CEO after a scandal involving his relationship a with a company contractor, and ended up quickly grabbing a job as co-president of Oracle.

On the plus side, “he knows HP inside and out, and from the financial side he

already turned it around [as CEO there],” Scavo said.

But morale at HP was said to suffer under Hurd’s watch. And obviously, he “doesn’t have the best relationship with HP’s board,” Scavo said.

Not to mention that going back to HP would certainly constitute a betrayal of Hurd’s close friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who famously defended Hurd and slammed the HP board after his firing.

Truth be told, anybody wanting Hurd back in the fold at HP is probably dreaming, according to Hamerman.

“[The HP board] made a big mess out of something they could have kept quiet, and embarrassed themselves in the process,” he said. “They shouldn’t have rocked the boat. But there’s no chance he’ll go back. That bridge is burned.”

But there are some factors going against Benioff as head of HP, namely the fact that he likely couldn’t

be lured by money given his already substantial net worth. Moreover, he’s had no experience with [HP’s] kind of problem.

Charles Phillips, CEO, Infor, and a former Oracle co-president

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com


month in viewROUND-UP

cnMe’s IcT Achievement Awards to take place on first day of gITeX

UAE residents fall victim to cybercrime: NortonNorton by Symantec recently released the Norton Cybercrime Report, detailing research and analysis on the UAE’s digital landscape that shows at least two UAE residents are becoming victims of cybercrime every minute as a result of viruses, online scams and phishing attacks being used by cybercriminals, the company said.

According to Tamim Tanfiq, head of consumer sales, MENA, Symantec 84% of cybercrime victims in the UAE found an online attack to be just as frustrating and upsetting as one in the ‘real world.

“The solution is simple; users must take their security into their own hands by being smart and safe when they are connected.” Taufiq said.

In UAE, the most common – and most preventable – type of cybercrime

falls with computer viruses or malware (51% overall, of which 65% occurred in the past 12 months), Symantec said. Online Scams (19% overall, of which 54% occurred in the last 12 months) and Phishing messages (18% overall, of which 53% occurred in the last 12 months) also rank high in the types of attacks being used by cybercriminals to steal personal data for their own gain, according to the report.

Mobile crime appears to be a major threat for the future with 20% of all cybercrime in the UAE occurring on mobile devices, said analysts.

‘Cyber-apathy’ is costing UAE consumers time and money; in the past 12 months UAE residents have spent on average 16 days trying to satisfactorily resolve cybercrime attacks with time

being cited as the ‘biggest hassle’ faced because of cybercrime by 31% of victims, according to the company.

66% of users in the UAE say that cybercrime is a risk everyone takes when they access the Internet and 65% say that the possibility of cybercrime is something they are always aware of when online. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents agree that more needs to be done to bring cybercriminals to justice.

Despite these figures, only 2 in 10 cybercrime victims said they reported the cybercrime to the police while 53% of residents revealed they don’t have up-to-date security software to protect themselves and their personal information and only a marginal 8% of mobile phone users have taken steps to secure their devices.

CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2011, the premier Awards function for the IT industry in the Middle East that honours trend-setting people and projects across 20 categories, will take place on the 9th of October 2011 (the first day of GITEX Technology Week).

The function will bring together more than 400 stakeholders from across the region, and will be held at The Monarch Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai (right across from the GITEX venue at DWTC).

“We have received more than 350 nominations this year. This number indicates a phenomenal increase in submissions over last year, and establishes the growing relevance of the ICT Achievement Awards in the Middle East,” said Richard Judd, Managing Director at CPI Technology and Business.

“Much like last year, many of these nominations have come in from end-users themselves – across the region – from KSA

to Pakistan. Many of the vendor nominations have also been submitted by enterprise end-users who have worked with them. The judges are currently going through these nominations and the final winners will be announced on the evening of the 9th of October 2011 at Sheikh Rashid Hall in DWTC,” he added.

While nominations have poured in across all categories, the most popular ones have remained CIO of the Year and Government Deployment of the Year, both of which brought in nearly 90 nominations between them alone.

“CIO of the Year has been one of the most popular categories this year. We have received a whole lot of deserving nominations and it has been a struggle for the judges to decide the one winner. In order to felicitate other equally high-profile CIOs, many of these nominations will be considered for our CIO 50 Awards as well, which will take place in January

next year,” said Sathya Mithra Ashok, Senior Editor of CNME.

“We look forward to welcoming the winners, nominees, end-users and vendors from across the region at our annual ICT Achievement Awards 2011. It is definitely going to be the event to be seen at this GITEX,” she added.

Register to attend CNME’s ICT Achievement Awards 2011 at http://www.computernewsme.com/ictachievementawards2011/registration.php.

Follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/computernewsme) and look for Awards tweets with #CNMEAwds11.


www.computernewsme.com/ictachievementawards2011/registration.php/computernewsme

Switch to single platform Simpana® software

for truly modern data and information management…

…and reduce storage-related costs

by up to 50%.

1207 Al Thuraya Tower 2, Dubai Internet City, PO Box 502224, Dubai UAE Tel: +971 4 3753491

Find out how by visiting the CommVault stand at Gitex stand No. H2-2

CV-1140 EMEA Gitex Ad FINAL.indd 1 9/28/11 11:31 AM


Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker was ousted from his position last month and replaced by HP director and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, less than a year after he took the job.

To successfully execute its strategy, the company requires “additional attributes” in its CEO, traits that Whitman possesses, HP board said.

In addition to naming Whitman president and CEO, HP said that Ray Lane has now changed positions, from non-executive chairman of HP’s board to executive chairman. The board “intends to appoint a lead independent director promptly,” HP representatives added.

“We are fortunate to have someone of Meg Whitman’s caliber and experience step up to lead HP,” Lane said in a statement.

Whitman is “a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution,” and a “strong communicator,” he added. “Furthermore, as a member of HP’s board of directors for the past eight months, Meg has a solid understanding of our products and markets.”

“I am honored and excited to lead HP,” Whitman said. “I believe HP matters – it matters to Silicon Valley, California, the country and the world.”

Rumours had swirled in recent days that HP’s board was about to part ways with Apotheker, a former CEO of business software vendor SAP. Only a tiny amount of HP’s business currently comes from software, a fact Apotheker sought to change in a strategy he laid out soon after joining the company in September 2010.

Apotheker came to HP at a turbulent time following the departure of its high-profile CEO, Mark Hurd, after a scandal involving his relationship with an HP contractor. Hurd ended up securing a post as co-president of HP rival Oracle.

The market did not react well to a number of announcements and moves Apotheker made, including the planned purchase of infrastructure software vendor Autonomy and talk of spinning off HP’s PC division. This last topic sparked a major

downturn in HP’s stock price, which may have quickened Apotheker’s removal.

Overall, the HP experience must have had an element of deja vu for Apotheker, given the trouble he experienced as sole CEO of Germany-based SAP.

A long-time SAP executive, Apotheker ultimately lasted less than a year in the top post there as well, and was replaced by insiders Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott in February 2010 as SAP returned to the co-CEO format it had used in the past.

“I think that Apotheker came into something of a thankless job,” said Charles King, president and principal analyst with Pund-IT. “It’s difficult for any CEO to come into a company that is in turmoil, which HP clearly was after the ouster of Mark Hurd.”

Still, moves such as the possible PC business spinoff “may simply have been too radical a surgery for the market to stand,” King added.

Other big factors leading to the change in leadership were HP’s missing its financial targets in three recent quarters and paying a lot of money to get deeper into the software business through acquisitions like Automony and Vertica without giving a clear strategy for the future, according to IDC analyst Crawford Del Prete.

HP board ousts Apotheker for Whitman

AUST deploys Blue CoatAjman University of Science and Technology (AUST), a private institution of higher education in the United Arab Emirates, has deployed Blue Coat ProxySG and PacketShaper appliances to accelerate the delivery of important content and applications while protecting against Web-based threats.

AUST faces constantly growing Internet demand from 8,000 students and staff as well as demands placed by new services, such as a sophisticated e-learning system and an online library, that add to the university’s overall bandwidth requirements, representatives of the university said.

“To operate within the bounds of our network capacity, it became imperative for us to have visibility into Web traffic and then be able to intelligently manage it,” said Mohammed Salman, IT director, AUST. “We found that Blue Coat solutions provided precise, yet flexible controls, a high level of Web security and considerable Internet bandwidth savings while also enhancing the Internet experience.”

AUST deployed PacketShaper appliances to discover and categorise applications on the network, measure network application performance,

guarantee quality of service (QoS) for priority applications and mitigate the network impact of non-business applications and content, AUST said.

The university also deployed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances at its Internet gateway to provide comprehensive, real-time protection against Web-based malware and other malicious content without compromising network performance, it was reported. Through the use of industry-leading technology, the ProxySG appliances improve the user’s Web experience by caching frequently accessed content on site, AUST pointed out.

Meg Whitman, new CEO at HP

KYOCERA MITA MIDDLE EAST:Office 157, Bldg. 17, Dubai Internet CityP.O. Box 500817 Dubai, United Arab EmiratesTel: +971 4 4330412Fax: +971 4 4231944www.kyoceramita.ae

Now there’s an output solution that inspires creativity rather than restricts it!

The new colour MFPs of the TASKalfa 5550ci series offer the perfect solution for offi ce

applications in excellent colour. With powerful fi nishing options, fl exible media handling,

high scan speeds and innovative functionality, these devices set new standards when it comes

to productivity, fl exibility and ease of use. The use of components with exceptionally

long lifetimes guarantees maximum cost effi ciency and reliability.

KYOCERA. COUNT ON US.

KYOCERA MITA Middle East - www.kyoceramita.ae

KYOCERA MITA Corporation – www.kyoceramita.com

YOU CREATE THE MAGIC.WE PRINT THE RESULT.

TASKalfa 5550ci series


A0034_Alphard_AD_PROD_207x270_RZ_110609.indd 1 12-09-11 14:12


KYOCERA MITA MIDDLE EAST:Office 157, Bldg. 17, Dubai Internet CityP.O. Box 500817 Dubai, United Arab EmiratesTel: +971 4 4330412Fax: +971 4 4231944www.kyoceramita.ae

Now there’s an output solution that inspires creativity rather than restricts it!

The new colour MFPs of the TASKalfa 5550ci series offer the perfect solution for offi ce

applications in excellent colour. With powerful fi nishing options, fl exible media handling,

high scan speeds and innovative functionality, these devices set new standards when it comes

to productivity, fl exibility and ease of use. The use of components with exceptionally

long lifetimes guarantees maximum cost effi ciency and reliability.

KYOCERA. COUNT ON US.

KYOCERA MITA Middle East - www.kyoceramita.ae

KYOCERA MITA Corporation – www.kyoceramita.com

YOU CREATE THE MAGIC.WE PRINT THE RESULT.



A0034_Alphard_AD_PROD_207x270_RZ_110609.indd 1 12-09-11 14:12


The University of Wollongong Dubai (UOWD) has selected Dell to implement end-user computing solutions for UOWD, designed to deliver best-in-class services to its students and faculty.

Through Dell’s virtual desktop infrastructure solution, academic information, such as e-books, lecture notes, and class schedules, that were once only available on desktops in UOWD’s computer labs are now available to students and faculty anywhere on campus from any device at any time, UOWD representatives said.

Plans for secure, remote off-campus access to academic information are already in progress. In addition, Dell’s virtualised desktop solution increases the amount of compute power that faculty and students can utilise, they added.

Designed to securely increase productivity, communication and information access for UOWD’s community, while reducing cost and complexity, the virtualised solution allows organisations like UOWD to adapt to changing dynamics in education and technology, while enabling technology resources in a more rapid and

cost-effective manner, Dell said. For example, UOWD is able to provision technology resources to faculty and students working on research projects that require large amounts of compute power more rapidly and economically than previously possible.

The Dell desktop virtualisation solution is easily scalable to quickly accommodate changing classes and curricula, as well as increasing UOWD’s ability to more rapidly respond to security threats, install new technologies and upgrade old ones, resulting in an improved technology experience for students and faculty alike, Dell representatives added. The solution also lays the foundation for UOWD to develop its own private cloud, UOWD said.

“Through virtualisation, UOWD will be able to maximise the efficiency of its assets and students will get a virtual private lounge that allows access to applications from anywhere. We are delighted to partner with Dell to migrate from a traditional computer environment to a virtualised desktop and the cloud to improve the quality of academic life for the university community. In addition, we are the first UOW campus to implement

this technology, and we are piloting it for the UOW’s Australian campus,” said Joseph Aninias, IT manager, University of Wollongong in Dubai.

“Dell listened to the University’s exact requirements and by providing assessment, design, implementation and project management services, as well as tailored solutions, this allowed us to exceed their expectations,” said Dave Brooke, Dell ME commercial GM, Dell ME.

university of Wollongong dubai selects dell

Qtel switches homes in Qatar to high-speed fibreThe next stage in the momentous campaign to provide high-speed Internet to homes and businesses across Qatar has begun, as customers begin to make the switch to Fibre, representatives of Qatar’s Qtel said recently.

In recent months, Qtel field teams have laid out over 1,200 kilometres of fibre cable throughout Doha, capable of connecting more than 60,000 homes. According to the company, this will provide the potential to offer the fastest-ever Internet experience, as well as high definition television through Qtel Mozaic TV.

Starting in August, the Qtel Fibre Teams have been visiting homes to complete the final technical upgrades necessary for customers to receive the state-of-the-art services, the company said.

After initial work in the West Bay Lagoon area, there are now teams working in other areas of Doha, with plans to move into new districts in the coming months, representatives said. Residences which are eligible to be connected to the Qtel Fibre network are being leafleted to ensure they expect a visit from the Fibre Team.

The Fibre Team will increase to almost 1,000 installers in the coming months, to enable a high number of homes in the designated areas to migrate to fibre.

With fibre laid across Doha and Umm Said, 2,000 customers’ homes are already receiving high-speed Internet and Qtel Mozaic TV, Qtel confirmed.

Qtel customer service teams will work with each new customer to enable them to migrate to higher speeds without

increasing their monthly Internet costs, the company said. In addition, there will also be options for new customers to receive Mozaic TV alongside their improved Internet package.

The move into the migration phase is a major step in the long-term development of world-class Internet infrastructure in Qatar, and marks the culmination of months of planning, development and implementation for the new Qtel Fibre network, the company added.

The company’s QR600 million investment in fibre technology will have an incredible impact on entertainment, information access and education within homes in Qatar, and contribute to the National Strategy for building a knowledge-based economy, the Qtel said.


www.avaya.com/contactcenters


Carol Bartz has been fired from her job as Yahoo CEO and replaced on an interim basis by the company’s CFO, Tim Morse, Yahoo announced recently.

Bartz sent out a brief e-mail to employees saying she had been fired by Yahoo’s chairman, according to the Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report her shocking departure.

“I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward,” Bartz wrote.

The struggling search company has created an “executive leadership council” to help Morse run the company and to conduct a “comprehensive strategic review” aimed at getting Yahoo back on a growth track. The council includes Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo.

Bartz’s tenure as CEO began in January 2009 after Yang announced plans to step down. She took over following an extensive courtship in which Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo, but which eventually turned into a partnership between the companies.

That partnership hasn’t paid off as well as Yahoo hoped. Revenue at the company continues to fall, and its display advertising business, where it historically was a leader, has begun to suffer too.

“It’s not a surprise” to see Bartz go, said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.

Bartz was widely supported in the beginning. “She was kind of a breath of fresh air for a while,” said Sterling. She had a strong track record as CEO of Autodesk and before that as an executive at Sun Microsystems, and had a “no-nonsense” style, Sterling said.

“Bartz made a number of organisational changes and for a while had the bad economy to blame for Yahoo’s lacklustre performance,” Sterling said. “But ultimately she failed to retain some top talent who have left the company since she took over. There were just a ton of great people that came out of there that abandoned ship,” he said.

“Yahoo needs a dynamic leader who will get people excited and bring a strong product vision,” Sterling said. “Morse would clearly be an interim leader while the company looks to hire a permanent replacement,” he said.

Taking on a new leader while the company continues to struggle will be a challenge. “The problem with a new CEO is if you have more of a revolving door,” Sterling said. Often, new leaders want to bring in their trusted advisers and remove some existing executives.

carol Bartz out as Yahoo ceo

SaaS revenue to reach $12.1bn in 2011: GartnerWorldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue is on pace to reach $12.1 billion in 2011, a 20.7% increase from 2010 of $10 billion, according to Gartner.

“Increasing familiarity with the model, continued oversight on IT budgets, and the growth of platform as a service (PaaS) developer communities and interest in cloud computing are now driving adoption forward,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner.

“Usage varies within markets, regions and countries, and the reasons for adopting SaaS vary by region. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a primary driver in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), while ease and speed of deployment is the key reason for choosing SaaS in Asia/Pacific and North America,” she added.

The top issues encountered when deploying SaaS also vary by region, Gartner said. Limited flexibility of customisation is a top issue in EMEA, while limited integration to existing systems is the primary reason in North America and Asia/Pacific, it added.

North America, specifically the U.S., represents the largest opportunity for SaaS, and it is the most mature of the regional markets. North American SaaS revenue is forecast to reach $12.9 billion in 2015.

“In North America, ease and speed of deployment are primary reasons for SaaS adoption, followed by lower TCO,” Mertz said. “Limited capital expense is also considered more important in North America than in the other regions.

“SaaS penetration and adoption is occurring mostly in Northern Europe, is

due to a culturally open outlook toward technology adoption, well-established and generally good Internet infrastructure within these countries, and English being the primary business language,” she said.

“SaaS adoption is prominent because of their established infrastructure, such as more-stable networks, as well as the availability of vendor sales, marketing and support service structures.” Mertz said.

“SaaS demand in Japan will grow for sales force automation solutions to improve reaction to customers, while demand for marketing analysis solutions will also be higher,” Mertz said. “In addition, it is easy to adopt SaaS solutions for B2B call centre services because the workflow of this business is standardised and transaction volume is constant in Japan.”

Carol Bartz, ex-CEO, Yahoo


Don’t underestimate your attacker. They only need to be lucky once.

Secure your business with help AG. help AG is an information security service and solutions provider. Known for its unmatched technical expertise and support services, help AG understands the correlation between technical and strategic information security and brings you the best solutions available on this planet.

Strategic Consulting • Technical Services • Support Services

www.helpag.com


eHosting DataFort (eHDF), the managed IT and advisory services provider and a member of TECOM Investments, announced that it has entered into a strategic tie-up with Switzerland’s Security Lab to host its IT infrastructure and protect the confidential data of its customers within the UAE.

Security Lab specialises in providing security audits to banks and multinationals, delivering services that include vulnerability assessment and penetration testing and has a portfolio of global clients from the legal and financial sectors, many of who are setting up base in Dubai, the company said. According to eHDF, regional tie-ups with IT service providers is a core strategy that the security firm adopts around the world to host highly sensitive customer information and communications securely.

Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHDF, said, “The UAE is attracting global businesses by providing a business friendly and progressive environment that facilitates the expansion of their operations across the region. For many of these organisations, working with a local managed IT service provider offers a value-add as critical customer data remains within the country.”

“It was essential to work with a local managed IT company, not only to physically

protect their IT infrastructure, but also to ensure secure communications that meet international compliance standards.”

eHDF’s clients include both government and large multinational corporations, a sign of the growing confidence that the public sector and corporates have in the company’s secure co-location solutions.

Alberto Redi, Partner at Security Lab, also said, “Digital threats pose major challenges to organisations that need to protect sensitive data; communications and IT assets and they want to partner with specialists in the area of security and managed services, such as Security Lab and business partners like eHDF.”

“We are extremely satisfied with the services provided by eHDF. Its impressive client base ensures confidence and trust amongst our customers. As a local service provider, we are assured of eHDF’s highest levels of security, prompt response time and superior service account management,” Zeineldin concluded.

eHdf shields data for swiss firm’s uAe customers

“Consumerisation of IT” taking its toll on IT managers: survey

“Consumerisation of IT” may be an overused phrase, but it is by no means a fad. Workers all over the world are coming to expect that personal devices will connect to corporate networks.

But while the use of personal devices such as smartphones, laptops and tablets is liberating workers, it is handcuffing many IT departments. For every salesperson using his or her personal iPad to access corporate email or CRM, there are IT managers behind the scenes scrambling to manage personal devices, protect data IP, and ensure compliance.

And many of these “consumerisation of IT” strategies are haphazard, rattled by security fears and unclear data management policies, according to a survey of 750 front-line IT professionals, managers and executives, conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by Dell KACE.

The survey results shut the door on any doubts that “consumer IT” is just a catchphrase. Of the 750 survey respondents, 87% said their employees use personal devices for work-related purposes ranging from email and calendaring to texting to CRM and ERP. 80% reported that employees use personal smartphones and 69% said personal PCs are brought to work by employees.

Those are big numbers, and IT groups are feeling the pressure, according to the Dimensional Research report. With more devices in the workplace, there are more operating systems to manage and connect to corporate networks.

Of all the personal devices used for work, the Apple iPhone leads the way (72%), followed by Android-based smartphones (63%), Windows laptops or

desktops (63%), the iPad tablet (60%) and the BlackBerry smartphone (52%), the research found.

Among just PCs, employees are bringing in personal machines running Windows (63%), Mac OS X (37%) and Linux (14%), analysts said.

But despite the benefits to workers, the consumerisation of IT is a thorn in the side of most IT departments, according to the survey. Fears and concerns abound. The majority, 82%, reported they are concerned about the use of personal devices for work purposes, with the biggest concern being potential network security breaches (62%), followed by possible loss of customer enterprise data (50%), potential theft of intellectual property (48%) and difficulty meeting compliance requirements (43%).


ULTIMATE UC EXPERIENCEFROM THE ULTIMATE UC LEADER—POLYCOM. It’s the latest buzz. Polycom is the world leader in Unified Communications. That’s because only Polycom

offers a total communications solution—one that will work for you today and grow with you as your

business evolves. It’s because our products are best-in-class and backed by Polycom’s history as an

industry innovator. Oh, and we’re the only provider of collaboration solutions built on open, standards-

based architecture.

Increase your productivity even as you reduce your costs and lower your carbon footprint with Polycom.

Transform your business. theartofconversation.com

©2

01

0 P

olycom, Inc.

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

Polycom - Start UC.pdf 1 3/31/2011 11:54:29 AM

www.theartofconversation.com

Bank Alfalah Limited, a commercial bank in Pakistan, has upgraded to the latest version of SunGard’s Ambit Card Management solution including the Ambit 3D Secure module, the company announced.

According to the company, the solution will help the bank increase revenues and grow its credit card and retail merchant customer base.

With the Ambit Card Management solution, the bank will be able to cost efficiently issue MasterCard and Visa (EMV) chip cards, corporate cards and pre-paid cards, SunGard said. Ambit 3D Secure will help the bank securely process credit card transactions over the Internet, helping it increase business via its online channel, it added.

Bank Alfalah is a long time user of SunGard’s Ambit Card Management solution and according to Visa is the largest issuer of Visa credit card and merchant acquirers in Pakistan.

According to Bank Alfalah, it provides plastic money services to over 675,000

customers and merchant facilities to over 33,000 merchants. Since first installing Ambit Card Management in 2002 as the backbone of its credit card system, more than a million applications have passed through Bank Alfalah’s card issuing and acquiring system, Bank Alfalah said.

The introduction of EMV chip cards and 3D secure technology will help Bank Alfalah deploy high levels of security for credit card transactions, representatives said. Upgrading to the latest version of Ambit Card Management will help the bank further grow its credit card customer and merchant base, Sungard said.

Adil Rashid, group head of consumer finance at Bank Alfalah Limited, said, “Staying at the forefront of innovation and modern technology has always been a top priority for Bank Alfalah and expanding our credit card business is a part of this aim. Our existing relationship with SunGard gives us confidence that it will continue to provide a high standard of service with

an established presence in Pakistan and a deep understanding of our market and challenges, SunGard is a trusted technology partner and the Ambit Card Management solution will help us provide enhanced security around our card management business and help us grow revenues while lowering operational costs.”

Bank Alfalah selects sungard

Gmail threatens Microsoft in the enterprise: GartnerGoogle’s share of the enterprise email market currently “hovers” at around 1%, but will reach 10% within a few years, Gartner recently predicted.

Google is gaining ground with enterprises that have 5,000 or more seats, Gartner said, naming several public- and private-sector users with more than 10,000 Gmail seats.

Big organisations that use Gmail include Motorola Mobility, with 22,000 users; the U.S. General Services Administration, with 17,000; the Los Angeles city government, with 17,000; automaker Jaguar Land Rover, with 15,000; the InterContinental hotel chain, with 25,000; and the Wyoming state government, with 10,000.

“We are at the start of a major escalation in the war of the email clouds,” said Gartner analyst Matthew Cain, in a report on Google’s enterprise progress.

Cloud-based email systems account for about 4% of the overall enterprise email market, according to the research firm.

Microsoft released a cloud-based Exchange service in 2010, and ran expansive cloud offering, Office 365, earlier this year.

“Google, meanwhile, has been making improvements to its platform at a blistering pace,” said Cain, counting more than two dozen “substantial changes” to the platform in the past 12 months.

Those upgrades included improvements in security and manageability, Gartner said. For example, new security features include the ability to reset a user’s sign-on cookies. And enhancements to the system’s manageability include the ability to manage policy by user groups.

Microsoft’s answer to Google’s upgrade pace “is that it intends to add


functionality to Exchange in the cloud before adding it to the on-premises version,” Cain said. “This represents a major shift for Microsoft, and its execution has to be demonstrated.”

But Cain said a major reason why enterprises may reject Google is because their needs are too complex for a cloud-based offering. “Their requirements in areas such as internal routing, application integration and compliance may be too much for cloud-based services to handle,” he explained.

In addition to which, Cain, in his report, cited a number of things Google has to do to win more enterprise businesses. Among other things, he said the company must deliver new features on schedule. “Another obstacle for Google is a lack of transparency, which is a problem affecting the cloud in general,” he said.


www.emitac.ae

Blogs: Analysis: Reviews:

CNME Poll:

New AMD CEO faces challenges in mobility

Newly minted Advanced Micro Devices CEO Rory Read faces a challenge in turning around the company’s mobile strategy to wage a competitive battle against rivals Intel and ARM.

HP customers seek stability with Whitman

Customers who felt disrupted by recent changes at HP said they want Whitman to stabilise a chaotic situation by quickly and decisively

communicating a product road map.

http://bit.ly/oVdcd3

http://bit.ly/q7UCjb

A week with the DroidThe latest top-of-the-line Android phone from Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless is more of everything.

read more online

read more online

http://bit.ly/nynW8Bread more online

Who’s using social media today?Kristin Burnham, journalist and blogger

http://bit.ly/nzorGrread more online

Twenty years ago today

http://bit.ly/nlZXAqread more online

Dave Reeder, Editorial Director, CPI

Objectivity traps

http://bit.ly/plzXMwread more online

Bob Lewis, President, IT Catalysts

What is your favourite smartphone for business use?

Nokia N Series

41%BlackBerry Bold or Curve

35%Apple iPhone

20%Samsung Galaxy I or II

6%HTC Desire

5%

Find us online

www.cnmeonline.com


www.leviton.com/opt-xunity

www.leviton.com/me

mailto:[email protected]

CASE StUDYViva

Kuwait’s Viva Telecom implements a data warehouse and business intelligence (DWBI) solution to benefit

business operations. Pallavi Sharma reports.


As part of its ambitious path of strategic growth, Saudi Telecom operator (STC), began expanding

its footprint beyond the Kingdom’s borders to international markets, forming a network of businesses and investments in a number of countries across the GCC, Asia and Africa.

After an extensive feasibility research ,emphasising the prospects it held for attracting international investments STC ventured into the Kuwait telecommunications space with its subsidiary Viva to deliver new, meaningful value to the market in Kuwait through diversified outstanding services.

Launched in December 2008, Viva Telecom became the youngest telecommunications service provider in Kuwait. Key among the many challenges that the new service provider had to face was the task of having to compete with, and claim success over, two veteran players in the Kuwait telecommunications market- Zain and Wataniya.

Viva’s objective was simple enough - extend state of the art services to its clients while optimising staff performance. According to Arnold Ali Cender, DWBI (data warehousing/business intelligence) project manager, Viva Telecom, Kuwait the ability to enhance relationships with new customers through the provision of innovative services built on a robust network, meant that first and foremost, the company needed to focus on the way the company was generating, storing and using its information.

“Faced with increasing competition in the local telecommunications market, we realised that it was essential to provide different stakeholders with timely, accurate and relevant information about the business and its operations. Sharing and storing information not only enables us to build transparent relationships with our customers and shareholders but also provides us the ability to cope with change and competition through more collaboration

between the different business departments,” Cender says.

Calling the shotsFor its launch in 2008, Viva Telecom had only made investments in the technology that was needed first to get the company up and running. To fulfill it’s information needs, Viva had invested in a reporting portal that provided basic operational reports. As the business and demand for Viva’s services began to grow, so did the need to invest in a more elaborate dand efficient data warehousing mechanism.

“We needed a solution that generated department specific reports, to cater to the unique information requirements of each business function. For instance, where the marketing department may require information associated with product launches such as cost of product, sales and revenue in comparison to other competitors in the segment, the sales department would require details associated with the performance of a particular customer segment, overall revenue, product or service specific revenue etc,” says Cender.

The senior management also felt that a data warehousing solution would serve well the organisation’s need to store and archive huge amounts of information in a more secure and convenient environment, and minimise costs associated with human errors, loss or damage, money and time.

In February of 2009, having clearly understood the need for a data warehouse solution and outlined the basic functionality that it wanted from the solution, Viva Telecom began looking out for a comprehensive data warehouse and business intelligence solution that would serve the needs of the organisation’s current as well as future information needs.

Cender says that when deciding on a vendor to work with, Viva Telecom takes in account not just the technical solution and its ability to integrate with the existing architecture, but also the vendor’s approach and ability to implement the project in the shortest span. “We also try and analyse the vendor’s expertise in the telecom vertical and consider references from other users who have worked with the vendor,” he says.

“We looked at various vendors such as Teradata, IBM and even some of the lesser known names. We analysed Gartner reports to study the different vendors. At around the same time, Oracle announced the launch of the Oracle Exadata machine and, although it may seem like a bit of a risk for us to have chosen a wholly new solution, it met our requirements best,” he adds.

According to Cender, the Exadata launch was a defining step for Oracle, which prior to the launch of Exadata separated hardware components from software elements. “The Exadata, machine integrated both components and provided a BI tool, data

“Another reason for choosing Mahindra Satyam, was what they call iDecisions, a

telecommunications BI application framework. It’s a framework for different business sectors with data models and business reports, which we felt gave us a head start in terms of deployment. We had a set of basic guidelines that helped us decide how to begin and proceed with the implementation”


mining tool, data integrator and Extract Transform and Load tool (ETL). And these made up the main components of Viva’s data warehouse infrastructure,” he said.

Once Viva Telecom made its decision on the right platform to deliver its requirements, it began looking for a company that would act as the solution provider and project manager for the entire implementation. “The search for these partners was done through RFP, where we invited a number of different players based on recommendations from Oracle to bid for a complete solution. We invested time in a detailed process of evaluating how the vendor, systems integrator, the solution and our existing infrastructure all fit together Mahindra Satyam scored the highest points and were chosen for the project,” says Cender.

“Another reason for choosing Mahindra Satyam, was what they call iDecisions, a telecommunications BI application framework. It’s a framework for different business sectors with data models and business reports, which we felt gave us a head start in terms of deployment. We had a set of basic guidelines that helped us decide how to begin and proceed with the implementation,” he adds.

InitiationViva began the implementation of the solution with the process of defining the sources of basic data, such as customer usage data, billing and payment data among others. The next step was to analyse the information that could be gained from the different kinds of data and the business areas that this information would relate to.

Knowing all too well that a data warehouse implementation can take well over a year before reaping any semblance of benefit from it, the team decided to go ahead and follow the iDecisions framework to help them deploy the solution using a phased approach. “We needed the implementation to be up and running in a span of six months,” says Cender.

“The iDecision framework entails 17 different subject areas which we then split

into four different phases based on business criticality. The implementation began in November 2009, with phase 1 including the deployment of the Exadata DW machine, BI servers and five key subject areas. This went live by the end of June 2010. Phase 2 went

live by the end of September 2010, phase 3 by the end of November 2010 and phase 4 by the end December 2010. The entire deployment was expected to take 16 months but was successfully completed in a span of 14 months,” adds Cender.

CASE StUDYViva

Once Viva Telecom made its decision on the right platform to deliver its requirements, it began looking for a company that would act as the solution provider


www.cdcdp.com

www.cdcmp.com

Applications and related data are listed and integrated to the data warehousing solution through this Oracle LTL tool. Each time, we had to do this, we got the owners of the operation systems to make the data available to us in an operational data store on a timely basis that fit into our schedule. The information was then extracted from that data store,” he explains.

According to him, the key thing for Viva was identifying the data required, building the operational data store [which skims the application desk to extract the data] and finally, pouring this data into the data warehouse or Oracle data integrator tool. The integration is a one way street from the operational systems into the data through what we call the operations data store warehouse as project manager it was my job to coordinate with the different parties both internal and external. We set up a project steering committee which included representatives from Viva IT, Mahindra Satyam and Oracle. The steering committee met monthly in addition to holding weekly project meetings to keep an eye on the implementation progress.”

Reaping rewardsCender says that the implementation did not pose any major challenges. Deployment was fairly straightforward and timely due to time spent planning prior to the implementation actually going live.

“The solution deliver on its requirements through the provision of regular KPI reports, management dashboards and drill downs. It has also resulted in significant cost savings through the elimination of old reports and human errors associated with manual report processing,” Cender states.

He believes that the business continue to thirst for information to help create a unique user experience and gain a significant competitive advantage, the company continues to feel the need to build on top of the existing DWBI platform. “We have already established an MIS Team to deliver adhoc reports, and are in the process of implementing targeted analytical tools on top of this suite, which will cater to the marketing team’s need for more information,” he says.

“We have also begun working on what we call BI fast reports, more analytical and detailed reports associated with the daily operations. This will make the DWBI platform the single version of the truth, where every department get relevant information from one central repository,” he adds.

In Cender’s opinion, the most important thing is for a platform of this nature to gain credibility amongst its users. “It is

natural that where information is concerned, decision makers will check, analyse and reconcile everything to make sure that it is accurate. In that sense, we at Viva have managed to gain the trust of our employees, who are now increasingly comfortable with basing their reports on automatically generated analytics to present their case to a senior manager,” he explains.

“Now that we have the platform, we can build on top of it, we can add more areas , add new types of data and extract more intelligence from wider sources of data. We can link with different network elements to provide more detailed analysis of the customer and provide detailed transaction information. This is what we are looking at now,” says Cender.

He believes that as IT becomes much more central to business operations different stakeholders are increasingly depending on the ability of technology to accurately derive information of consequence from both structured and unstructured sources of data. The use of social networking platforms for business and marketing, have driven the need to study now different data types are becoming increasingly.

“We are not there yet. While our daily information is sufficient at the moment, in the future, there may be certain areas that would benefit from real time feed, like linking trends to the call centre, so agents have more insights into what kind of products or services customers are investing in,” Cender predicts.

CASE StUDY

Steady RiSe

2008 Viva controlled 4.2% of Kuwait’s

telecommunication market

2009 Viva’s market share in the Kuwait

telecommunications sector increased

to 13%

2010 Viva Telecoms announced that it had

successfully captured 18% of Kuwait’s

telecoms

800, 000 was the number of subscribers

Viva Telecom had by the end of 2010

Viva

We are not there yet. While our daily information is sufficient at the moment,

in the future, there may be certain areas that would benefit from real time feed, like linking trends to the call centre, so agents have more insights into what kind of products or services customers are investing in.”


Your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system may have been tailored to fi t the needs of your business exactly, but markets and business practices have moved on.

And just like Ted here, what was a comfortable fi t then may now feel infl exible and restrictive, holding you and your organisation back from further growth.

Discover how much more freedom you can get from a more agile system www.meetted.net or email us at [email protected] .

© Copyright 2011 Epicor Software Corporation. Epicor and the Epicor logo are registered trademarks of Epicor Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

Is your IT department being hindered by infl exible ERP?

at

cHAllengIng THe norMDubai’s Department of Economic Development (DED) has managed something most IT managers only dream of – implement a network and turn almost all costs into opex. Sathya Mithra Ashok writes on how they achieved the feat.

CASE StUDYDepartment of Economic Development, Dubai


The Department of Economic Development (DED) is at the very heart of Dubai’s transformation,

organising, regulating, and boosting trade and industry throughout the Emirate. As well as managing traditional activities, such as business registration, licensing, and commercial protection, DED’s mandate is to support the visionary objectives of the Dubai Strategic Plan 2015 by driving economic policy, advocacy, and regulatory reforms.

The end goal is to create an environment where small and large businesses, investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers can co-exist and thrive together. eGovernment is central to DED’s vision for the future, enabling services to be automated online and delivered faster and more cost effectively.

“DED had three main elements within it – there was the licensing element, the commercial compliance and protection element and then there was the consumer regulations part. Besides that we have our economic studies and research, and that’s another pillar of DED itself, where we do research and draft the policies. And this is how we functioned till around 2008, when there came a decree by which more establishments were moved under the control of DED,” says Abdullah Hassan, IT director at DED.

The decree gave DED its current structure, whereby its agencies include Dubai Export Development Corporation, Dubai Events and Promotion Establishment and Foreign Direct Investment in addition to the Mohammed Bin Rashid Establishment for SME Development.

According to Hassan, the movement of these agencies to the ambit of DED proved to be a crucial turning point.

“With these agencies we realised that we would need to change the concepts with which we had been working in IT till then. Suddenly we had these islands of apps – HR, finance, admin and even IT – right across

DED and these agencies. There was the drive to formulate a shared services concept, where we centralised those departments’ IT requirements. The idea was to provide for some space for specific requirements based on the nature of the agency, but to centralise most of the services within the group headquarters,” says Hassan.

The first part of this effort involved IT understanding the services that could be centralised, and the specific services that would need to be within the control of each agency. The timing of this effort happened to coincide with a larger move of premises that the DED had been planning.

Rapid expansion, with the creation of several new departments for the development of export, retail, entrepreneurship, and foreign investment, meant that DED had effectively outgrown not

only its headquarters building but also the three branch offices in Dubai. In response, the agency decided to co-locate all of its management and services teams within a brand new building situated in Dubai’s Business Village. The move also provided the ideal opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate other strategic priorities.

“Although IT worked alongside HR, finance, and facilities management, as part of a shared services organisation, we still had some way to go in terms of centralising IT management,” says Hassan. “The move also gave us a blank canvas for designing a more scalable, energy-efficient infrastructure for the organisation capable of supporting IP telephony, video, and other productivity enhancing solutions.”

The infrastructure at DED was nearly eight years old, and the IT team decided that the move would be a perfect time to re-invest and update the existing systems.

“Initially we had a lot of trouble in deciding whether we would start implementing new systems at the current data centre or put in all new solutions at the new location. We finally decided that we would implement part of the new systems in the current data centre, but leave a majority of the new IT work for the new location,” Hassan explains.

Vendor provisioningWhen it came to investing in the new systems, DED decided to go with partners that they had worked with before, and who had strategically helped them achieve more with technology in the past.

“I don’t believe in testing new vendors for big projects. I believe in going with partners that we have previously worked with for long periods of time; vendors who are trusted and have consistently delivered for us,” says Hassan.

This was one of the primary reasons that DED looked to Cisco for the network provisions at its new premises. Over the years, the two organisations had worked closely together to consolidate and refresh the DED’s various networks.

After much consultation and discussion between the two entities, DED finally decided on Cisco’s Borderless Network design. Thus DED’s new converged IP network supports mobility (via 48 Cisco Aironet 1100 Series access points) and private branch exchange

Suddenly we had these islands of apps – HR, finance, admin and even IT – right across DED and

these agencies. There was then the drive to formulate a shared services concept, where we centralised those departments’ IT requirements.”


(PBX)-based telephony services, providing employees with a single platform from which they can instantly communicate and access information and tools, anytime, anywhere.

The inclusion of 10 Gb Power-over-Ethernet capabilities, server racks, power and cooling, and firewalls means that in the future the DED can migrate to IP telephony, and additionally, introduce video, quickly and with minimal cost.

“For our servers, we decided to continue using Dell, who are again long-term partners. It is a blade environment, though we have not invested in virtualisation yet. We have got brand new EqualLogic storage solutions for our new locations,” says Hassan

DED also wanted a risk-sharing model, one that replaced upfront capital expenditure (capex) with predictable monthly operating expense (opex).

A custom finance solution from Cisco Capital allowed project costs to be spread over five years. At the end of the contract term, DED has a choice of four options: it can buy the equipment (at pre-agreed fair market value), return the equipment (with no financial obligation), continue renting (at reduced rate), or carry out another refresh (either purchasing, or entering into a new agreement with Cisco).

“Like everyone, we are always looking for smarter ways to procure our technology,”

Hassan says. “Using a capex to opex solution was important, because it meant we could speed-up implementation and deliver all the benefits to users from day one.”

Like many organisations, a large proportion of DED’s IT budget is consumed by maintenance and support, leaving only a small remainder to be spent on innovation and new projects. “Without Cisco Capital, we would have been looking at a much slower, phased deployment. This would have significantly delayed our plans for the delivery of cost savings and customer service improvements,” says Hassan.

The Cisco Capital solution has helped to improve lifecycle management and provided a ready-made asset register and inventory checklist, according to Hassan.

At the end of the technology lifecycle, Cisco Capital can also help with asset

recovery, for example, by offering data destruction, recycling, or environmental disposal. In some cases, this approach can reduce total cost of ownership by as much as 5%, as well as providing a much more environmentally friendly solution to placing old equipment in a landfill site.

The deal, which is intended to last till 2015, will enable DED to optimise on its costs and gain additional benefits going forward. Hassan states that ideally they would like to have such agreements with

every major vendor that DED is working with but understands that this might take time and will be a possible option only when the budgets demanded for the investment are relatively high.

Moving onAccording to Hassan, the move to the premises and the new data centre should be completed before the end of the year. Meanwhile, DED has already centralised some of the services to be shared among the agencies, while most others (like Exchange, mobility solutions and parts of SharePoint)

aBOUt ded

The Department of Economic Development

(DED) was established in March 1992, with the

objective to organise, regulate and boost trade

and industry within the Emirate of Dubai.

In October 2008, HH Sheikh Mohammed

bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Prime Minister

and Vice-President, and Ruler of Dubai, issued

Decree no. 25 giving full responsibility to DED

to plan and regulate the overall economic

performance of Dubai, supervise its functions

and support the economic development to

ensure the objectives of the Dubai Strategic

Plan are achieved.

The new mandate brought about a new

leadership with a new vision for the DED.

DED is still responsible for its traditional

activities of business registration, licensing and

commercial protection in Dubai however with

four new agencies now under the umbrella

of DED, the mandate has extended to include

export development, retail development,

among others.

The development of these sectors are

the responsibility of DED’s agencies: Dubai

Export Development Corporation, Mohammed

Bin Rashid Establishment for Young Business

Leaders, Dubai Shopping Festival Office and

the Foreign Investment Office.

The DED also wanted a risk-sharing model, one that replaced upfront capital expenditure (capex) with

predictable monthly operating expense (opex). A custom finance solution from Cisco Capital allowed project costs to be spread over five years. At the end of the contract term, the DED has a choice of four options: it can buy the equipment (at pre-agreed fair market value), return the equipment (with no financial obligation), continue renting (at reduced rate), or carry out another refresh (either purchasing, or entering into a new agreement).

Department of Economic Development, DubaiCASE StUDY


www.sbm.com.sa

will become fully operational as shared elements after the move to the new premises.

“We are also looking seriously at virtualisation solutions. When we complete the move, we might start working with it in small pockets. After we ensure that it is secure, and that we are getting the right productivity out of it, we will move it to our production environment,” says Hassan.

Apart from this, the DED IT team of 26 members have an active application development element, wherein most of the core apps and other necessary software elements are created or maintained within DED itself.

“We believe in gathering the expertise that we require within DED’s walls and enabling our IT team to handle it. Most of our apps are created or managed by our IT team. When we do work with third party application providers we insist on on-the-job training from the vendor to ensure that DED’s IT team can handle the app in the future,” Hassen says.

Besides this, according to him DED is also looking actively at video conferencing facilities, as well as a wider unified communications (UC) project to provide reliable connectivity options.

“We are looking into UC technology quite keenly and considering how it might be of benefit to us. Again, we are considering video conferencing as part of our investments for the future, simply because we are an establishment that deals with external customers on a regular basis, and that involves a lot of travelling. Video conferencing can help us cut costs,” expalins Hassan.

The IT team is also working on expanding the online services that it

offers its customers, and also ensuring that established services are upgraded, improved and managed effectively.

Hassan states that much of the success of the IT team at DED can be directly attributed to the support and conviction of the higher management. In fact, he believes that even the movement of cost for capex to opex with Cisco, while it took time, could not have been

achieved without the extensive involvement of top management teams at both Cisco’s and DED’s ends.

“We are not an isolated department, we are a business enabler. What we do is not for IT itself, it is done for the entire business. So all projects are done in discussion with different departments within the business and at every point we do have to convince them about budgets, and connect every project to the benefits it can provide to the larger organisation,” says Hassan.

Understanding the critical nature of the work they do has helped the IT team to structure their plans and excel in all their execution scenarios. For as DED’s IT team, so is DED; and as is DED, so will be Dubai.

Department of Economic Development, Dubai

We are not an isolated department, we are a business enabler. What we do is not for IT itself,

it is done for the entire business. So all projects are done in discussion with different departments within the business.”

As DED’s IT team, so is DED; and as is DED, so will be Dubai.

CASE StUDY


Corporate Ad_20.5x27.5 9/1/10 2:51 PM Page 1

www.gbm4ibm.com

Jarir BookstoreCASE StUDY

crITIcAl connecTIons KSA’s Jarir Bookstore battled the challenges associated with connecting disparate centres of business by deploying SonicWALL’s NSA Series and building secure VPN tunnels to support strategic growth. Pallavi Sharma writes.


With 32 years of experience, Jarir Bookstore, has been a notable player in the Kingdom

of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) office stationery and school supplies market. Having started with a small store located on Jarir Street in Riyadh, the company now boasts over 30 outlets across the GCC countries, mainly in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.

Established by the Al-Agil brothers who steered the company towards growth and exemplary vision, the company owns one centralised warehouse and three branch offices across KSA alone.

At a point in time the orgnaisation realised that the infrastructure it had was not the right set to support its rapid growth. The initial IT infrastructure across the 30 locations of Jarir Bookstore was connected through a single WAN (wide-area-network), in addition to which, Cisco PIX firewalls and Microsoft ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) servers were used at the head offices to control and monitor Internet traffic.

Majid Felemban, IT manager, Jarir Bookstore says, “At the time our Internet Service Provider (ISP) set up an MPLS VPN to better manage and speed up its network traffic. This architecture created multiple points of failure, compounded by very low bandwidth of 512 KB and high recurring maintenance costs. We tried experimenting with a variety of different mediums such as fibre optic connectivity and WiMAX to increase bandwidth to no avail.”

“Our objective was to create a network that could balance the load and maintain multiple connections. We also wanted to use VPN (Virtual Private Network) tunnels assess total cost of ownership (TCO) and the drain created on the bandwidth,” he adds.

On the lookout It was then that Jarir Bookstore began looking for options to help them address this challenge and build an infrastructure that was not only scalable but also cost efficient. NAJTech, Jarir’s network security supplier, suggested that instead of investing in purchasing more bandwidth from their

ISP they search for alternative solutions that would give them the capability to do their own tunneling.

“We looked at different solutions but none of them had the complete functionality we were looking for. Sometimes either the load balancing was not to our liking or other times the power usage and financial costs did not make the investment seem worthy,” he adds. Jarir Bookstore went ahead to invite bids and trials from applications vendors, until they found the best fit in the SonicWALL NSA series.

According to Felemban, one key consideration for deciding on the SonicWALL NSA series was that the solution reduced TCO by combining VPN with security capabilities. “The real time visualisation option allows IT managers to control and monitor traffic and even reports threats instanteously,” he adds.

Jarir Bookstore then went ahead with a proof-of-concept (POC) phase, deploying it across a reasonably big showroom with over 40 users and a variety of point-of-sale (POS) machines and personal computers. The IT team then went about connecting both virtual machines, like NEC’s Virtual PC Centre (VPCC), and the non-virtual machines to assess the strength of the connection.

After this successful proof-of-concept stage, Jarir Bookstore deployed the NSA series across their network. “In addition to this, we also decided to purchase our bandwidth and internet connection from three separate data service providers (DSP). This internet service provision was monitored by our previous ISP,” he adds.

Success storyFelemban points out that switching over from MPLS took quite some time because this needed to be done branch-by-branch, beginning with the head office first, the process took about two weeks. “The entire process required detailed planning before implementation and involved a transition period of one month where the two networks (connectivity) overlapped to avoid any disruptions,” Felemban explains.

“The installation was fairly straightforward, very smooth. The solution is working perfectly and delivering on all objectives. The NSA series provides robust performance and application intelligence, in addition to intrusion prevention and anti malware capabilities. Deployed as a next-generation firewall, the solution combines multi-core hardware with reassembly-free

At the time our Internet Service Provider (ISP) set up an MPLS VPN to better manage and speed up

its network traffic. This architecture created multiple points of failure, compounded by very low bandwidth of 512 KB and high recurring maintenance costs. We tried experimenting with a variety of different mediums such as fibre optic connectivity and WiMAX to increase bandwidth to no avail.”

Majid Felemban, IT manager, Jarir Bookstore


deep packet inspection (RFDPI) for added protection and performance,” he adds.

Felemban points out that with advanced routing, stateful high-availability and high-speed IPSec and SSL VPN technology, the NSA series delivered security, reliability, functionality and productivity to branch offices, central sites and distributed mid-enterprise networks, while minimising cost and complexity. “To sustain a VPN, a corporation needs highly redundant and resilient connectivity. The NSA Series served the purpose in terms of increasing the bandwidth and therefore tremendously improving productivity,” he says.

Most importantly, Felemban opines that investing in SonicWALL actually helped the company replace fixed firewalls in most locations and get rid of a lot of applications that it earlier needed for internet and network connectivity, controls and monitoring, among others. It helped consolidate the underlying infrastructure and controls, and made managing connectivity a lot easier.

Felemban also points out that the deployment of the SonicWALL NSA Series resulted in a 43% decrease in recurring costs per month, and an increase in bandwidth speeds to 15MB, a 3000% jump from the initial bandwidth of 512 KB.

“The move stabilised our network and gave us the ability to create hotspots of connectivity in showrooms, a move we couldn’t have even contemplated with the MPLS network,” he says.

“The NSA series deployment has given us the ability to expand our operations much faster and more easily than in the past. The solution allows remote access to our network through reliable and secure VPN tunnels, making the process of expansion absolutely

hassle free and making the deployment a resounding success,” he says.

Going forward Felemban believes that the decision of the small, yet immensely capabale, IT team of 13 at Jarir Bookstore to work with vendors who not only deliver a state of the art solution, but also have the ability to support the process of knowledge transfer and change management, is a contributing factor to a project’s success.

Having successfully deployed SonicWALL at its retail division, Jarir is already working on deploying the NSA Series at each of the eleven branches of Jarir Marketing, the wholesale division, and even has plans to roll out SonicWALL to its investment division, with the intention of connecting all their divisions through their VPN.

Felemban believes that seeing the greater bandwidth capabilities that Jarir

Bookstore has at its disposal, in additional to the time and cost efficiencies of these latest technologies, it will only be a matter of time before more companies begin investing in building their own VPN tunnels.

Addressing the future of Jarir’s IT investments, Felemban says, “First we have focused on the infrastructure; going forward, in the next few years, we will focus on applications. We have already started working on this.”

“The idea behind investing in application projects is to enhance business goals. It wasn’t a one track project, we have two directions. One that addresses current issues to stabilise our business operations and the other track focuses on initiatives to benefit the strategic growth of the business. It began with infrastructure because we need a robust back end to make any changes to applications or the network.” he explains.

He concludes by pointing to trends like virtualisation and cloud computing as being a long term IT reality, that will not only change the way IT does business but will also enhance business capabilities, the necessity for these investments will vary across organisations and so large scale adoption of cloud computing technology is still a sometime away.

To sustain a VPN, a corporation needs highly redundant and resilient connectivity. The NSA Series served the

purpose in terms of, increasing the bandwidth and therefore tremendously improving productivity,”

Jarir BookstoreCASE StUDY

Having successfully deployed SonicWALL at its retail division, Jarir is already working on deploying the NSA Series at each of the eleven branches of Jarir Marketing


ANTIVIRUS | ANTISPYWARE | FIREWALL | ANTISPAM | PARENTAL CONTROL

Realsecurityin a digital worldESET SMART SECURITY 5

GITEX OFFER

AED 199.00

for User Pack3

Visit us at GITEX 2011 - Hall 1 : F1-1 Call: +971 4 375 4052www.eset.com/me

SILVE

R LINI

NGTH

E LOW

DOWN

ON CL

OUD C

OMPU

TING

EVOL

UTION

2001

2003

2005

2007

2009

2011

2020

VMw

are

Serv

er

laun

ched

Xen

Hype

rviso

r in

trodu

ced

EM

C ac

quire

sVM

war

e

Mic

roso

ftvir

tual

ser

ver

laun

ched

Amaz

on E

C2re

leas

ed

Mic

roso

ft Hy

per-V

intro

duce

d

VMw

are

vClo

ud

laun

ched

Go

ogle

App

eng

ine

rele

ased

W

orld

wid

e clo

udsp

endi

ng $

68Bn

Ra

cksp

ace

anno

unce

Open

Stac

k

Mic

roso

ft W

indo

ws

Azur

e pl

atfo

rman

noun

ced

M

icro

soft

Offic

e36

5 is

laun

ched

W

orld

wid

e sp

endi

ng o

n pu

blic

clo

ud s

ervic

esto

tals

over

$89

Bn

Wor

ldw

ide

spen

ding

on p

rivat

e clo

uds

$15.

3Bn

Ga

rtner

pre

dict

sW

orld

wid

e re

venu

efo

r pub

lic a

nd

priva

te c

loud

se

rvic

es w

illre

ach

$241

Bn

THE H

ORIZO

N

50m

illion

phy

sica

l ser

vers

in th

e w

orld

toda

y

33,1

57da

ta c

entre

pro

vide

rsar

ound

the

wor

ld:

23,6

562,

740

2,66

02,

371

1,73

0

STAT

ISTICS

IDC

say

s th

at th

e w

orld

’s in

form

atio

n is

mor

e th

an

doub

ling

ever

y tw

o ye

ars-

with

an

unim

agin

able

1.8

ze

ttaby

tes

to b

e cr

eate

d an

d re

plic

ated

in 2

011

IDC

pre

dict

s th

at w

hile

clo

ud c

ompu

ting

reve

nue

will

cont

inue

to in

crea

se, t

he w

ay o

rgan

isat

ions

use

the

tech

nolo

gy w

ill al

so c

hang

e ov

er th

e ne

xt fe

w y

ears

:

Gar

tner

fore

cast

s th

at w

orld

wid

e pu

blic

clo

ud

serv

ices

will

cont

inue

to g

row

at a

CA

GR

of

19%

per

yea

r fro

m 2

010

thro

ugh

to 2

015.

Gar

tner

als

o sa

ys th

at w

ithin

clo

ud s

ervi

ces,

bu

sine

ss p

roce

ss s

ervi

ces

are

expe

cted

to

garn

er th

e la

rges

t spe

ndin

g of

por

tion

each

yea

r, to

tallin

g ab

out $

70bi

llion

by th

e en

d of

201

1.

8%

serv

er

9%

app

licat

ion

s d

evel

op

men

tan

d d

eplo

ymen

t

13%

sto

rag

e

18%

infr

astr

uct

ure

so

ftw

are

52

%b

usi

nes

s ap

plic

atio

ns

USER

S SPE

AKIND

USTR

Y SPE

AK

USING

THE C

LOUD

HAS

1Si

mp

lified

IT m

anag

emen

t p

roce

ss:

70

% A

gree

10

% D

isag

ree

20

% N

eutr

al

2Im

pro

ved

exp

erie

nce

72

% A

gree

12

% D

isag

ree

16

% N

eutr

al

3D

ecre

ased

IT p

erfo

rman

ce c

hal

len

ges

63

% A

gree

17

% D

isag

ree

20

% N

eutr

al

4R

edu

ced

co

st o

f in

fras

tru

ctu

re

73%

Agr

ee

10%

Dis

agre

e

17%

Neu

tral

5A

llevi

ated

inte

rnal

res

ou

rce

pre

ssu

res

74

% A

gree

8%

Dis

agre

e

18%

Neu

tral

TOP 5

ADVA

NTAG

ES OF

CLOU

D COM

PUTIN

G1

77.9

%Pa

y o

nly

for

wh

at y

ou

use

77.7

%Ea

sy a

nd

fast

er d

eplo

ymen

t to

use

rs

75.3

%M

on

thly

pay

men

t p

lan

s

68

.5%

Enco

ura

ges

sta

nd

ard

sys

tem

s

67%

req

uir

es le

ss in

ho

use

man

agem

ent

and

sta

�

CLOU

D DEP

LOYM

ENT M

ODEL

S THA

TCO

MPAN

IES US

E OR I

NTEN

D TO U

SE14

%C

om

mu

nit

y cl

ou

d

29%

Pu

blic

clo

ud

36%

Hyb

rid

clo

ud

54

%P

riva

te c

lou

d

INDUS

TRY U

SE OF

CLOU

D COM

PUTIN

G63

%Fi

nan

cial

Ser

vice

s

59

%H

ealt

hca

re

41%

Tra

nsp

ort

atio

n

62

%M

anu

fact

uri

ng

INDIVI

DUAL

USE O

F CLO

UD CO

MPUT

ING5

6%

of I

nte

rnet

use

rs u

se W

ebm

ail s

ervi

ces

such

as

Gm

ail,

Ho

tmai

l or Y

aho

o m

ail

34%

sto

re p

erso

nal

ph

oto

s o

nlin

e

29%

Use

on

line

appl

icat

ion

s su

ch a

s G

oo

gle

Do

cs o

r Ph

oto

sho

p E

xpre

ss

7%St

ore

per

son

al v

ideo

s o

nlin

e

5%

Pay

to s

tore

co

mp

ute

r fil

s o

nlin

e

5%

Bac

k-u

p h

ard

dri

ve to

an

on

line

site

2 3 4 5

THE P

LAYE

RS

30%

GREE

N PAS

TURE

Sre

duct

ion

in e

nerg

y co

nsum

ptio

n an

d ca

rbon

em

issi

ons

by la

rge

com

pani

es a

dopt

ing

the

clou

d

90%

redu

ctio

n in

ene

rgy

cons

umpt

ion

and

carb

on e

mis

sion

s by

S

MB

s ad

optin

g th

e cl

oud

1,0

00

clo

ud

ser

vers

cu

t 50

% o

f car

bo

n e

mis

sio

ns

= c

arb

on

em

issi

on

s re

du

ced

by

pla

nti

ng

5,8

10 t

rees

to

o�

set

carb

on

foo

tpri

nts

SILVE

R LINI

NGTH

E LOW

DOWN

ON CL

OUD C

OMPU

TING

EVOL

UTION

2001

2003

2005

2007

2009

2011

2020

VMw

are

Serv

er

laun

ched

Xen

Hype

rviso

r in

trodu

ced

EM

C ac

quire

sVM

war

e

Mic

roso

ftvir

tual

ser

ver

laun

ched

Amaz

on E

C2re

leas

ed

Mic

roso

ft Hy

per-V

intro

duce

d

VMw

are

vClo

ud

laun

ched

Go

ogle

App

eng

ine

rele

ased

W

orld

wid

e clo

udsp

endi

ng $

68Bn

Ra

cksp

ace

anno

unce

Open

Stac

k

Mic

roso

ft W

indo

ws

Azur

e pl

atfo

rman

noun

ced

M

icro

soft

Offic

e36

5 is

laun

ched

W

orld

wid

e sp

endi

ng o

n pu

blic

clo

ud s

ervic

esto

tals

over

$89

Bn

Wor

ldw

ide

spen

ding

on p

rivat

e clo

uds

$15.

3Bn

Ga

rtner

pre

dict

sW

orld

wid

e re

venu

efo

r pub

lic a

nd

priva

te c

loud

se

rvic

es w

illre

ach

$241

Bn

THE H

ORIZO

N

50m

illion

phy

sica

l ser

vers

in th

e w

orld

toda

y

33,1

57da

ta c

entre

pro

vide

rsar

ound

the

wor

ld:

23,6

562,

740

2,66

02,

371

1,73

0

STAT

ISTICS

IDC

say

s th

at th

e w

orld

’s in

form

atio

n is

mor

e th

an

doub

ling

ever

y tw

o ye

ars-

with

an

unim

agin

able

1.8

ze

ttaby

tes

to b

e cr

eate

d an

d re

plic

ated

in 2

011

IDC

pre

dict

s th

at w

hile

clo

ud c

ompu

ting

reve

nue

will

cont

inue

to in

crea

se, t

he w

ay o

rgan

isat

ions

use

the

tech

nolo

gy w

ill al

so c

hang

e ov

er th

e ne

xt fe

w y

ears

:

Gar

tner

fore

cast

s th

at w

orld

wid

e pu

blic

clo

ud

serv

ices

will

cont

inue

to g

row

at a

CA

GR

of

19%

per

yea

r fro

m 2

010

thro

ugh

to 2

015.

Gar

tner

als

o sa

ys th

at w

ithin

clo

ud s

ervi

ces,

bu

sine

ss p

roce

ss s

ervi

ces

are

expe

cted

to

garn

er th

e la

rges

t spe

ndin

g of

por

tion

each

yea

r, to

tallin

g ab

out $

70bi

llion

by th

e en

d of

201

1.

8%

serv

er

9%

app

licat

ion

s d

evel

op

men

tan

d d

eplo

ymen

t

13%

sto

rag

e

18%

infr

astr

uct

ure

so

ftw

are

52

%b

usi

nes

s ap

plic

atio

ns

USER

S SPE

AKIND

USTR

Y SPE

AK

USING

THE C

LOUD

HAS

1Si

mp

lified

IT m

anag

emen

t p

roce

ss:

70

% A

gree

10

% D

isag

ree

20

% N

eutr

al

2Im

pro

ved

exp

erie

nce

72

% A

gree

12

% D

isag

ree

16

% N

eutr

al

3D

ecre

ased

IT p

erfo

rman

ce c

hal

len

ges

63

% A

gree

17

% D

isag

ree

20

% N

eutr

al

4R

edu

ced

co

st o

f in

fras

tru

ctu

re

73%

Agr

ee

10%

Dis

agre

e

17%

Neu

tral

5A

llevi

ated

inte

rnal

res

ou

rce

pre

ssu

res

74

% A

gree

8%

Dis

agre

e

18%

Neu

tral

TOP 5

ADVA

NTAG

ES OF

CLOU

D COM

PUTIN

G1

77.9

%Pa

y o

nly

for

wh

at y

ou

use

77.7

%Ea

sy a

nd

fast

er d

eplo

ymen

t to

use

rs

75.3

%M

on

thly

pay

men

t p

lan

s

68

.5%

Enco

ura

ges

sta

nd

ard

sys

tem

s

67%

req

uir

es le

ss in

ho

use

man

agem

ent

and

sta

�

CLOU

D DEP

LOYM

ENT M

ODEL

S THA

TCO

MPAN

IES US

E OR I

NTEN

D TO U

SE14

%C

om

mu

nit

y cl

ou

d

29%

Pu

blic

clo

ud

36%

Hyb

rid

clo

ud

54

%P

riva

te c

lou

d

INDUS

TRY U

SE OF

CLOU

D COM

PUTIN

G63

%Fi

nan

cial

Ser

vice

s

59

%H

ealt

hca

re

41%

Tra

nsp

ort

atio

n

62

%M

anu

fact

uri

ng

INDIVI

DUAL

USE O

F CLO

UD CO

MPUT

ING5

6%

of I

nte

rnet

use

rs u

se W

ebm

ail s

ervi

ces

such

as

Gm

ail,

Ho

tmai

l or Y

aho

o m

ail

34%

sto

re p

erso

nal

ph

oto

s o

nlin

e

29%

Use

on

line

appl

icat

ion

s su

ch a

s G

oo

gle

Do

cs o

r Ph

oto

sho

p E

xpre

ss

7%St

ore

per

son

al v

ideo

s o

nlin

e

5%

Pay

to s

tore

co

mp

ute

r fil

s o

nlin

e

5%

Bac

k-u

p h

ard

dri

ve to

an

on

line

site

2 3 4 5

THE P

LAYE

RS

30%

GREE

N PAS

TURE

Sre

duct

ion

in e

nerg

y co

nsum

ptio

n an

d ca

rbon

em

issi

ons

by la

rge

com

pani

es a

dopt

ing

the

clou

d

90%

redu

ctio

n in

ene

rgy

cons

umpt

ion

and

carb

on e

mis

sion

s by

S

MB

s ad

optin

g th

e cl

oud

1,0

00

clo

ud

ser

vers

cu

t 50

% o

f car

bo

n e

mis

sio

ns

= c

arb

on

em

issi

on

s re

du

ced

by

pla

nti

ng

5,8

10 t

rees

to

o�

set

carb

on

foo

tpri

nts

SILVE

R LINI

NGTH

E LOW

DOWN

ON CL

OUD C

OMPU

TING

EVOL

UTION

2001

2003

2005

2007

2009

2011

2020

VMw

are

Serv

er

laun

ched

Xen

Hype

rviso

r in

trodu

ced

EM

C ac

quire

sVM

war

e

Mic

roso

ftvir

tual

ser

ver

laun

ched

Amaz

on E

C2re

leas

ed

Mic

roso

ft Hy

per-V

intro

duce

d

VMw

are

vClo

ud

laun

ched

Go

ogle

App

eng

ine

rele

ased

W

orld

wid

e clo

udsp

endi

ng $

68Bn

Ra

cksp

ace

anno

unce

Open

Stac

k

Mic

roso

ft W

indo

ws

Azur

e pl

atfo

rman

noun

ced

M

icro

soft

Offic

e36

5 is

laun

ched

W

orld

wid

e sp

endi

ng o

n pu

blic

clo

ud s

ervic

esto

tals

over

$89

Bn

Wor

ldw

ide

spen

ding

on p

rivat

e clo

uds

$15.

3Bn

Ga

rtner

pre

dict

sW

orld

wid

e re

venu

efo

r pub

lic a

nd

priva

te c

loud

se

rvic

es w

illre

ach

$241

Bn

THE H

ORIZO

N

50m

illion

phy

sica

l ser

vers

in th

e w

orld

toda

y

33,1

57da

ta c

entre

pro

vide

rsar

ound

the

wor

ld:

23,6

562,

740

2,66

02,

371

1,73

0

STAT

ISTICS

IDC

say

s th

at th

e w

orld

’s in

form

atio

n is

mor

e th

an

doub

ling

ever

y tw

o ye

ars-

with

an

unim

agin

able

1.8

ze

ttaby

tes

to b

e cr

eate

d an

d re

plic

ated

in 2

011

IDC

pre

dict

s th

at w

hile

clo

ud c

ompu

ting

reve

nue

will

cont

inue

to in

crea

se, t

he w

ay o

rgan

isat

ions

use

the

tech

nolo

gy w

ill al

so c

hang

e ov

er th

e ne

xt fe

w y

ears

:

Gar

tner

fore

cast

s th

at w

orld

wid

e pu

blic

clo

ud

serv

ices

will

cont

inue

to g

row

at a

CA

GR

of

19%

per

yea

r fro

m 2

010

thro

ugh

to 2

015.

Gar

tner

als

o sa

ys th

at w

ithin

clo

ud s

ervi

ces,

bu

sine

ss p

roce

ss s

ervi

ces

are

expe

cted

to

garn

er th

e la

rges

t spe

ndin

g of

por

tion

each

yea

r, to

tallin

g ab

out $

70bi

llion

by th

e en

d of

201

1.

8%

serv

er

9%

app

licat

ion

s d

evel

op

men

tan

d d

eplo

ymen

t

13%

sto

rag

e

18%

infr

astr

uct

ure

so

ftw

are

52

%b

usi

nes

s ap

plic

atio

ns

USER

S SPE

AKIND

USTR

Y SPE

AK

USING

THE C

LOUD

HAS

1Si

mp

lified

IT m

anag

emen

t p

roce

ss:

70

% A

gree

10

% D

isag

ree

20

% N

eutr

al

2Im

pro

ved

exp

erie

nce

72

% A

gree

12

% D

isag

ree

16

% N

eutr

al

3D

ecre

ased

IT p

erfo

rman

ce c

hal

len

ges

63

% A

gree

17

% D

isag

ree

20

% N

eutr

al

4R

edu

ced

co

st o

f in

fras

tru

ctu

re

73%

Agr

ee

10%

Dis

agre

e

17%

Neu

tral

5A

llevi

ated

inte

rnal

res

ou

rce

pre

ssu

res

74

% A

gree

8%

Dis

agre

e

18%

Neu

tral

TOP 5

ADVA

NTAG

ES OF

CLOU

D COM

PUTIN

G1

77.9

%Pa

y o

nly

for

wh

at y

ou

use

77.7

%Ea

sy a

nd

fast

er d

eplo

ymen

t to

use

rs

75.3

%M

on

thly

pay

men

t p

lan

s

68

.5%

Enco

ura

ges

sta

nd

ard

sys

tem

s

67%

req

uir

es le

ss in

ho

use

man

agem

ent

and

sta

�

CLOU

D DEP

LOYM

ENT M

ODEL

S THA

TCO

MPAN

IES US

E OR I

NTEN

D TO U

SE14

%C

om

mu

nit

y cl

ou

d

29%

Pu

blic

clo

ud

36%

Hyb

rid

clo

ud

54

%P

riva

te c

lou

d

INDUS

TRY U

SE OF

CLOU

D COM

PUTIN

G63

%Fi

nan

cial

Ser

vice

s

59

%H

ealt

hca

re

41%

Tra

nsp

ort

atio

n

62

%M

anu

fact

uri

ng

INDIVI

DUAL

USE O

F CLO

UD CO

MPUT

ING5

6%

of I

nte

rnet

use

rs u

se W

ebm

ail s

ervi

ces

such

as

Gm

ail,

Ho

tmai

l or Y

aho

o m

ail

34%

sto

re p

erso

nal

ph

oto

s o

nlin

e

29%

Use

on

line

appl

icat

ion

s su

ch a

s G

oo

gle

Do

cs o

r Ph

oto

sho

p E

xpre

ss

7%St

ore

per

son

al v

ideo

s o

nlin

e

5%

Pay

to s

tore

co

mp

ute

r fil

s o

nlin

e

5%

Bac

k-u

p h

ard

dri

ve to

an

on

line

site

2 3 4 5

THE P

LAYE

RS

30%

GREE

N PAS

TURE

Sre

duct

ion

in e

nerg

y co

nsum

ptio

n an

d ca

rbon

em

issi

ons

by la

rge

com

pani

es a

dopt

ing

the

clou

d

90%

redu

ctio

n in

ene

rgy

cons

umpt

ion

and

carb

on e

mis

sion

s by

S

MB

s ad

optin

g th

e cl

oud

1,0

00

clo

ud

ser

vers

cu

t 50

% o

f car

bo

n e

mis

sio

ns

= c

arb

on

em

issi

on

s re

du

ced

by

pla

nti

ng

5,8

10 t

rees

to

o�

set

carb

on

foo

tpri

nts

FEAtUREOutsourcing

In today’s global economy, outsourcing has become a very common phenomenon. Many large organisations have outsourced some or all of their IT functions. Pallavi Sharma finds out what challenges and drives this trend, and how the Middle East ITO market is keeping up.

sourcing success

We are all aware of the way IT has not only transformed the way businesses operate

and interact with their customers but has also become a key enabler for strategic growth. But what happens when organisations grow and the complexities associated with building, managing and improving their existing IT infrastructure to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving market increase exponentially? The answer for many organisations might lie in the practice of outsourcing.

As most experts point out, the definition of IT outsourcing has yet to be agreed upon. However, outsourcing is often viewed as involving the “contracting out“of a business function - commonly one previously performed in-house - to an external provider. In this sense, two or more organisations may enter into a contractual agreement involving an exchange of services and payment.

In recent years, businesses across the world have been spending increasing amounts of money to outsource both critical and non-critical IT operations to meet their individual requirements, be they for reducing

cost or achieving greater flexibility.

Following a recent survey covering 47 ITO (IT outsourcing) providers representing all major geographies and all types of services including infrastructure (data centre, desktop, storage and network), applications and cloud services, Gartner predicted that the ITO services market will reach $313.2 billion in 2011, a growth of 6.9% from 2010.

The survey also found that growth is the top strategic goal for ITO providers this year, with aggressive marketing plans and investments in cloud, utility and “as a service” offerings. “Many ITO providers intend to commit serious marketing funds and target new accounts to outgrow the market,” says Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner. “The survey found that at least 50% of outsourcing providers said they’ll be spending 2 to 5% of revenue on marketing in 2011, which is higher than the historical norm for marketing expenditure as a percent of revenue,” he adds.

According to Antonio Antonuccio, COO, Injazat, enterprises in the Middle East contribute heavily to the growth of the global ITO market. “Outsourcing industries have already been flourishing in Asia and Africa; and Middle Eastern organisations are

looking at this success as they accelerate their adoption of outsourced service

provision,” he says.“ITO in the region began

with a small base in the UAE that eventually grew to entire

establishments like the Dubai Outsource Zone . Now the Emirates’ ITO industry is


clearly amongst the most mature in the region as demonstrated by the incidence of IT Services revenues on UAE total IT spend (more than 50 %),” Antonuccio adds.

“In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the region’s largest IT market, the number of organisations opting for third-party IT managed services grew from 6.5% in 2008 to 22.7%in 2009, accounting for 18.4% of corporate spend on IT services. This is indicative of how the region’s enterprises have taken a strong liking to ITO as a means to enhance business. Some trends that are dictating the regional market are the rising legitimacy of offshore outsourcing and demand for service oriented architecture (SOA),” he points out.

Experts point out that the key drivers for the adoption of IT outsourcing are associated with cost reductions, increased flexibility, reduced time to market, optimal allocation and utilisation of resources, and the ability to allocate key resources to an organisation’s critical business operations.

“The cyclical and secular changes that businesses have been facing over the last few years have provided further momentum to outsourcing. Besides searching for cost savings to fund growth and innovation, businesses are required to complement the benefit from labour arbitrage by the improved efficiency and effectiveness that third-party providers can deliver. They need to focus more intensely on operational efficiency. As a result, firms must closely examine what activities are core to their business and what should be done by someone else. They must therefore look at driving more work and corresponding budget to a global delivery model,” explains Stephen Fernandes, country manager, Middle East, Cognizant.

Proactive planningAs is the case with any technology trend, IT outsourcing in the Middle East is hindered by a number of risks that experts believe can be mitigated with the clever use of communication and planning.

Fernandes says, “To mitigate any risks associated with outsourcing, organisations must clearly identify their objectives for outsourcing as these business drivers would determine the nature and efficacy of outsourcing models.”

Understanding the underlying need to outsource an operation would help decide what core knowledge an organisation wants to protect to avoid becoming too dependent on the vendors. Such dependence affects the ability to negotiate budgets and outsource contracts.

Parag Sule, regional head, GCC, Tech Mahindra adds, “Another risk associated with ITO is security and the ability to trust the vendor with your confidential data and organisation’s integrity. The best way to deal with this is to enquire about the vendor’s security infrastructure and provisions, analysing these policies and parameters to ensure that they meet the organisation’s internal standard of security. This is especially so in the case of offshore contracts, where decision makers should ideally visit the vendor’s site to get a better idea of the infrastructure the outsourcer has in place. Organisation’s can also place access controls to enable granular access to sensitive data.”

Antonuccio says, “Governance and communication is critical. The success of an outsource project depends on the ability to clearly assign roles and responsibility and define the scope of accountability

The cyclical and secular changes that businesses have been facing over the last

few years have provided further momentum to outsourcing. Besides searching for cost savings to fund growth and innovation, businesses are required to complement the benefit from labour arbitrage by the improved efficiency and effectiveness that third-party providers can deliver.”

Antonio Antonuccio, COO, Injazat

Parag Sule, regional head, GCC, Tech Mahindra


for outsourced operations. In addition to which, both parties must clearly outline the expectations and requirements that are ultimately embedded into a set of SLA metrics to ensure that they are being met. Without these basic measures, the relationship could be jeopardized by misunderstandings and possible disappointments associated with not meeting or understanding unsaid expectations.”

The success of an ITO project critically depends on the people factor and the organisation’s ability to manage change. “The entire project initiative can take a nose dive, if the people working for the organisation feel threatened by it. The best way to mitigate this risk is to communicate the benefits and the process of implementation with associated employees to keep them informed,” explains Sule.

According to Sule, senior management must explain the firm’s strategy to all its employees, and must tie this strategy to the current business environment. He recommends that organisations invest in training their employees to work in an outsourced environment that often involves different technology in addition to involving

them in educational seminars and training programs at regular intervals.

Analysts point out that one of the most biggest challenges associated with ITO is the ability to choose the right partner or outsource service provider to work with. Fernandes advices, “Across industries, enterprise decision-makers must look for partners that bring deep domain and industry expertise, strong onsite presence, and well-honed relationship management capabilities, coupled with a seamlessly integrated global delivery network that provides access to the best talent at an appropriate price point.”

He opines that organisations must look for service providers that can deliver significant value in re-architecting business models and technology footprints to reduce costs and implement tailored solutions that

address the changes in their industries and help them become more competitive.

“The service provider should complement a company’s culture and business objectives with the right experience, communication skills and working style. After all, it will become a part of the organisation and so it should fit in as well as an actual employee. In addition to which organizations must ensure that they work with a partner who has significant experience working with the vertical in question. This will not only guarantee that they have the right expertise and skill to meet business requirements but that they understanding the underlying business and operational needs,” explains Manish Mishra, VP , Middle East Head, HCL Technologies.

Settling scoresWith so many elements challenging the success of an outsourced IT operation, it is only natural that decision makers pay careful attention to the content of an outsource contract to make sure that both parties clearly understand the mutual expectations and eventually gain from a win-win situation.

Antonuccio says, “The contract should ensure that the needs and expectations of the client are clearly defined and that stated requirements are equitable, cost-effective and ultimately beneficial for both parties. Second, the Objective Service Levels and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be measurable, realistic and aligned with business needs and priorities.”

According to him, this must be followed by a clause covering the right governance

Manish Mishra, VP and Middle East head, HCL Technologies.

Stephen Fernandes, country manager, Middle East, Cognizant

Mike Sneesby, VP of IPTV and operations , Intigral

The service provider should complement a company’s culture and business objectives

with the right experience, communication skills and working style. After all, it will become a part of the organisation and so it should fit in as well as an actual employee.”

FEAtUREOutsourcing


www.hp.com/go/servervirtualization

and change management structures. “Fourth, there should be flexibility in adapting and responding to business change over the term of the agreement, in order to avoid lengthy and expensive negotiations that might delay important projects or upgrades. Finally, there should be clearly expressed terms and conditions for change, exits, liabilities, remedies and the likes,” he adds.

Mishra largely agrees but adds, “The contract must clearly define the outsourcing model, whether it is managed services, project based outsourcing, built operational transfer or out-tasking. Based

on the model, the contract must then clearly mention the pricing model that both parties have agreed upon this may be a fixed price model or a time and material based initiative. In the case of offshore outsourcing situations, it is recommended that both parties work out price changes that may arise due to fluctuations in forex rates, again this may be a fixed percentage change in price after a decided duration or vary based on forex rates.”

Sule believes that ITO adoption in the Middle East region is only just maturing.

“I think the most basic thing is to generate awareness about IT outsourcing, how it works, how to go about deciding on a model and the benefits. This will help address the fear of loss of control and other apprehensions that organisations may have. Also, outsource partners and the government can work together to build a regional domain focused on outsourcing, to help develop relevant skills and contribute to building a subscriber and supplier base,” he says.

Antonuccio believes that although the Middle East ITO is showing great

growth prospects there is room for more. “Providers must ensure that the ITO proposition has a sound business rationale with clear benefits for the company, ultimately helping it to implement its strategy and successfully compete in the market,” he explains.

Most vendors agree that governments can play a huge role in driving both the public and private sector to evaluate and embrace ITO, as this will benefit and encourage the development of knowledge-based digital societies.

Decision makers share an optimistic outlook towards the future of the ITO market the world over. “In this virtualised, globalised environment where new technologies like cloud computing and social networks intersect with the millennial generation, clients are looking for better ways to organise teams, cultivate innovation, allocate resources, and reinvent knowledge processes. The next few years will be characterised by transitions in technology, industry structures, and business and technology architecture. Businesses will continue to look beyond cost optimisation and aim for incremental efficiencies from existing technology investments, and operational excellence,” says Fernandes.

Gartner, in its recent survey found that between 60% and 64% of providers nominated cloud investments in the top three ITO investment priorities for 2011. While, the average percentage of deals expected to include cloud services and utility services or “as a service” delivery models is 18% for data centre deals in 2011, growing to 24% in 2012 Gartner analysts said.

“There is no going back to business-as-usual for ITO providers,” said Allie Young, vice president at Gartner. “Traditional business models are being turned inside out: it has started with the new business models and cloud ecosystem, and these trends will continue to impact the outsourcing business. Providers that ignore those trends could find themselves stuck with yesterday’s delivery models and high cost structures as the market moves on around them,” Young rightly points out.

By tHe NUMBeRS

6.3% 5% 3.8% 8.9% 17.9%growth expected in worldwide BPO

market in 2011

growth expected in worldwide BPO

market in 2012

growth in North American BPO market in 2011

growth in Western Europe BPO

market in 2011

growth in Asia-Pacific BPO

market in 2011

Source: Gartner BPO Estimates, March 2011

I think the most basic thing is to generate awareness about IT outsourcing, how it works,

how to go about deciding on a model and the benefits. This will help address the fear of loss of control and other apprehensions that organisations may have.”

FEAtUREOutsourcing


Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Fast, Effective, Simple

http://www.smeadvisor.com/ms/trendmicro/index.html

I get the support I need Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security is easy to install, easy to maintain. It just works, and that leaves the customer free to do what they do best.

FEAtUREGreen Computing

Turning a new leafCIOs in the Middle East still struggle to give green ICT

investments a business language, and this is hampering the adoption of environmentally-sane choices in organisations.


A lthough the buzz surrounding green tech has quieted significantly over the past

couple of years, don’t take that to mean the job is finished. Despite the significant innovations that have helped organisations boost the energy efficiency of their operations while reducing waste, there are still plenty of opportunities to raise the green bar.

All those petabytes of Web content generated on a daily basis need to reside somewhere, ready to be pushed at a moment’s notice to the increasing number of smartphones and other mobile devices flooding the market. All of that translates to more storage and processing, which in turn translates to higher capital and operating expenses for companies. The solution: green IT, which allows you to make more efficient use of IT by doing more with less.

“There’s a clear global consensus that energy efficiency and emission reductions are critical to sustainable ICT development. International organizations and governments have already enacted policies aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon footprints. The global ICT industry has also undertaken serious efforts to research efficiency standards, with the world’s big-name operators and equipment vendors having mapped out a series of best practices and environmental protection standards,” says Leo Xu, VP of the Middle East region at Huawei.

However, are Middle East enterprises really paying attention to the green story?

“In reality, some are and some aren’t. Green IT is on some of the lists we do receive in terms of needs, however it is generally not in the top five or six needs that are documented or expressed to us. The top needs are typically focused on delivering what their business needs as the primary requirement to be addressed,” says George De Bono, GM for the MEA at Red Hat.

Adds Mahesh Vaidya, CEO at ISIT, “Yes and no. As a drive, green IT doesn’t largely exist in Middle East. However, by bringing in cloud computing, virtualisation and server consolidation technologies major businesses today are looking to redesign the way all of IT is setup, managed and services the business. Indeed, this is the core value of green IT.”

Globally, green ICT has garnered a lot of mind share. However, the topic remains

a nascent area of interest for managers in the Middle East, and there are multiple reasons for the apparent lack of empathy.

Green consciousness“Sustainable IT management and use has to do with the way a company manages its IT assets. It includes purchasing energy-efficient desktops, notebooks, servers and other IT equipment, as well as managing the power consumption of that equipment.

It also refers to the environmentally safe disposal of that equipment, through recycling or donation at the end of its lifecycle,” points out Vaidya.

In other words, the green ideology should permeate every aspect of IT and influence every element of lifecycle management from start to finish. Some others believe that this thought process should stretch to departments outside IT as well; that the mindset of sustainability

By tHe NUMBeRS

26.6% $10.2 billion

84% 70%is the increase in spend

(CAGR) on smart building systems expected from

2010-2015 is forecast for sales by 2015

of respondents incorporate energy efficiency or

conservation measures as a component of their operations

of a building’s energy is

consumed by HVAC

Source: IDC Energy Insights 2011

Yes and no. As a drive green IT doesn’t largely exist in Middle East. However, by bringing

in cloud computing, virtualisation and server consolidation technologies major businesses today are looking to redesign the way all of IT is setup, managed and services the business. Indeed, this is the core value of green IT.”


should touch every aspect of an organisation’s functioning to have a true impact on IT as well as operational efficiency.

However, for such far-reaching changes within companies, any green investment would have to tick two very critical boxes – it has to be connected to a business line of thought, and it would have to help cut a lot of costs, if not add directly to the bottomline.

“The biggest challenge we face is that a lot of our markets are classified as emerging, and are growing at such a rate, that non green options are the easiest and cheapest to deploy,” points out De Bono.

While power remains relatively cheap in the Middle East, and construction remains on a high point across most geogrpahies, companies will tend to invest in established infrastructure solutions that might not carry the green tag, and

are certainly cheaper (in terms of capex atleast) when compared to their more power-hungry cousins.

Walking the talkDespite these significant challenges, which restricts the amount any vendor can push the message and how much they can sell to an end-user, some organisations in the region are making piece-meal investments in greener technologies.

“Every entity is unique in how IT solutions are applied within their existing infrastructure—and the benefits that they can expect from such initiatives. What we see today is a number of organizations that have set up sustainability governance teams that work above IT support groups in order to identify solutions that address overall “green” strategies and goals,” states Xu. George De Bono, GM for the MEA at Red Hat.


MeaSURiNg tHe data ceNtRe

Hardware vendors still have work to do, though,

in creating gear to meet organisations’ green

needs. It remains common for Google and

Facebook to use their own specially designed

servers in their data centers, rather than going

with off-the-shelf offerings from the server

makers. Those companies have been quite

open with their special server designs; for

example, they both embrace techniques such as

eliminating superfluous components. Facebook

has gone so far as to place dual processors

side by side on a motherboard, rather than one

behind the other, because it improves airflow

enough to make a difference.

Proponents of green IT point to many

challenges that the industry continues to face

in boosting energy efficiency in the data centre.

For starters, according to the Climate Savers

Computing Initiative, organisations are failing

to taking full advantage of power-management

features in desktop computers and servers. The

latter particularly is a challenge, as data centre

operators are loathe to power down servers when

they’re not in use for fear that they won’t wake

up quickly enough (if at all). Solving that dilemma

likely requires software and hardware vendors

to better collaborate on reliable solutions while

convincing admins that powering down servers

isn’t necessarily as risky as they might fear.

Further, many companies have yet to

take full advantage of virtualisation, which is

proving itself time and again a key technology

to enable companies not only consolidate their

infrastructure but also to boost server utilisation,

which is traditionally pathetically low.

The tech industry is also working to come

up with a better metric than PUE for gauging

data center efficiency. PUE compares how

much energy a data center consumes as a

whole (powering IT equipment as well as for

nonproductive tasks such as cooling, lighting,

and watts lost to conversions) to how much the

facility uses for just powering its IT equipment. A

PUE of 2.0 would mean that for every two watts at

the meter, only one watt gets to the IT hardware,

for example; a PUE of 1.0 -- the lowest possible

-- means that every watt a data centre consumes

goes toward powering IT equipment.

The problem with PUE: It doesn’t always

provide a fully accurate picture of a data centre’s

efficiency or inefficiency. For example, if a data

centre’s servers are cooled at the rack level

instead of with full-room or aisle-by-aisle CRAC

units, the PUE doesn’t penalise the facility for the

watts “wasted” on cooling.

That’s not to say that PUE is going away

anytime soon, as it still has value. A data centre

operator could gauge the general progress of

various green technologies and practices by

measuring PUE on a regular basis. (Google, for

example, does just that.)

But the ideal metric would allow a data

centre operator to measure performance per

watt, or performance per watt per dollar, to

gauge just how much bang a facility is getting

for its buck. The challenge is coming up with a

meaningful, universal way to measure data centre

(or IT equipment) performance. A data centre for

a lightweight search engine, for example, could

be just as efficient as one for heavy-duty financial

crunching -- but the former would have far more

transactions per minute. Think in terms of MPG

for vehicles. A hybrid sedan has a higher MPG

rating than an SUV, but it’s not an apt comparison

if you don’t know how the vehicle is being used:

carpooling on the freeway to work or hauling

heavy equipment off-road?


www.computerlinks.ae

“I know of a few organisations who are moving to things like solar energy to power their data centres and facilities, moves like this need to be highlighted and the organisations taking these steps need to be congratulated. Let’s face it, we have a very good constant source of alternate power, and the more we use it, the less impact it has on our environment,” says De Bono.

Apart from identifying and working with alternate power sources, companies are making choices more consciously from options like power and cooling solutions. As budgets shrink, more CIOs are looking to stop the drain on the opex front and are making capex decisions that will hold them stronger in the long term.

IT managers in organisations that are more reticent can do better, by working to increase knowledge on the extended benefits of going green.

“As mentioned earlier, the primary concern must be “does the proposed green

solution meet the business requirement”? Once you get across that, the other considerations are power consumption, efficient use of resources, recyclablity of the components. Constant awareness, and recognition or exposure of organisations that are successfully deploying green solutions are essential weapons for explaining better the benefits that come with green IT,” says De Bono.

“There are many IT investments IT managers probably want to make anyway that will also reduce your impact on the environment. Cloud computing, virtualisation technologies, server consolidation, PC power management and

deployment of more efficient equipment when you do a refresh can reduce energy consumption while simultaneously improving IT operations,” says Vaidya.

He adds, “Awareness campaigns explaining what green IT really means to business and how to incorporate it into every business aspect with minimal changes to the way things are done would help more companies move towards green IT.”

In the perfect data centre world, servers could sit in a shed sans any kind of air conditioning, relying on free outside air to stay sufficiently cooled. That vision may draw closer to reality: ASHRAE not long ago adjusted the recommended

temperatures for operating servers; Dell recently announced an array of servers, storage and networking equipment capable of peration in temperatures upto 113 degrees F; and vendors like Intel have conducted experiments to determine just how resilient servers can be.

“Implementing sustainable ICT solutions takes the collective efforts of an organisation. Senior management is crucial to driving high-level initiatives, with individual employees playing a key role in the maintenance and optimization of these systems. The fact is that energy consumed by network equipments, power systems and data centres take up an increasingly larger proportion of total energy consumption, so in addition to having the right mindset, applying the right technical solutions is equally important,” states Xu.

But till we reach that ideal, it is left upto individuals in organisations to lead the way, and it is time that more IT managers pick up the cudgels for the green cause.

“It starts with the individual, whether they are top management, or a lower level employee, or a hardware or software engineer. Waiting for others to start environmental friendly approaches is really an attempt to pass the responsibility on to others. If we all do our little piece, we can make a difference, and if that is as simple as feeling better about ourselves as individuals, then that is fine. Remember all we can truly influence is our immediate sphere or space, and if we focus on that, then we have made a start or a move in the right direction,” concludes De Bono.

The biggest challenge we face is that a lot of our markets are classified as emerging, and

are growing at such a rate, that non green options are the easiest and cheapest to deploy.”

Mahesh Vaidya, CEO of ISIT


Sustainable ICT 2011 Join CNME, CPI and Etisalat as we discuss the

future of green ICT investments and usage in

Middle East enterprises at the Sustainable ICT

2011 event. Log onto www.sustainableictme.

com for more information.

Discover the new Iconia Tab W500 at your nearest computer superstore. Acer and the Acer logo are registered trademarks of Acer Incorporated. Copyright 2011 Acer Inc. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows and the Windows logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. Speci� cations subject to change without notice. Pictures are intended simply to illustrate the product.

• Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium• 10.1” LED-backlit LCD display (1280x800)• 2GB DDR3 RAM, 32GB SSD• Dual 1.3 MP webcam with AV recording• WI-FI & Bluetooth 3.0• Optional full size Keyboard Docking station• Simple social networking with Acer SocialJogger• Complete your new PC. Buy Microsoft® Offi ce 2010

• Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium

Windows® 7. Your PC, simplifi ed

Acer recommends Windows® 7.

circ

le-l

ine.

eu

Complete your PC

Complete your PC

Life is full of choices: work or play, home or away, touch or type, accept or ignore.Why choose and get just half the experience?

PC or Tablet? Choose both.


Discover the new Iconia Tab W500 at your nearest computer superstore. Acer and the Acer logo are registered trademarks of Acer Incorporated. Copyright 2011 Acer Inc. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows and the Windows logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. Speci� cations subject to change without notice. Pictures are intended simply to illustrate the product.

• Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium• 10.1” LED-backlit LCD display (1280x800)• 2GB DDR3 RAM, 32GB SSD• Dual 1.3 MP webcam with AV recording• WI-FI & Bluetooth 3.0• Optional full size Keyboard Docking station• Simple social networking with Acer SocialJogger• Complete your new PC. Buy Microsoft® Offi ce 2010

• Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium

Windows® 7. Your PC, simplifi ed

Acer recommends Windows® 7.

circ

le-l

ine.

eu

Complete your PC

Complete your PC

Life is full of choices: work or play, home or away, touch or type, accept or ignore.Why choose and get just half the experience?

PC or Tablet? Choose both.

FEAtUREEducation

The application of IT is not only transforming the way students learn, but also the way they are being taught. Pallavi Sharma studies how

educational institutions in the region are leveraging technology.


The Internet and globalisation have together created an economy that is powered by technology, fuelled

by information and driven by knowledge. Faced with rapidly evolving technology and dynamic business environments, one of the challenges that economies around the world continue to face is preparing their societies and governments amidst this Internet revolution.

Ashi Sheth, IT director, American University of Sharjah (AUS) explains, “Education is the cornerstone of preparing the current and future generations in fundamental skills and knowledge so that they are not only successful but also active participants of communities across the globe. An educational institution needs to be able to provide access to a world of information utilising technology while at the same time, from an operational perspective, expose students to the potentials of technology in improving students’ life and the lives of those around them.”

While rapidly evolving technology has necessitated the need for educational institutions to invest in solutions to hone future citizens, it has also transformed the way these same advancements is used to enhance teaching. Trevor Moore, director of IT and communications at the Abu Dhabi University (ADU) says, “Technology and the need for technology has changed like the rest of the world from accessing information internally, to using the Internet on personal computers to today using multiple kinds of mobile devices to learn and share information. Every student now has a smart phone, tablet, netbook or laptop which they want to use to access educational resources. Therefore, IT has to have this picture in mind when architectinginfrastructure”

Experts agree that engaging technology in active learning has also changed the expectations students have from their educational institutions. “They no longer just expect an online presence or a computer lab, but demand full access to their course work, social network integration, and online collaboration tools that a few years ago would have

been considered groundbreaking,” says Hanny Alshazly, senior manager, business development and marketing, ITS educational.

AlShazly adds, “The ability to capture lecture content is gaining momentum. Students expect that their schools or universities record lecture sessions and make them accessible from anywhere, from any device and at any time. In addition to this, they want to be able to check their class schedules or any changes that are made via theonline medium. Students also want to be able to interact with their faculty and immediate administration after school hours, this not only enables interactive learning but enables students to engage in school work at their leisure.”

Studying the challengesIT professionals in the education sector believe that the challenges associated with deploying the latest technology are no different from any other sector. IT teams are expected to ensure that they engage in detailed cost-benefit analysis, make sure that the implementation is done in time and within budget and most importantly, proactively deal with resistance to change.

Sheth points out that one of the most notable challenges for any educational institution is finding and choosing the right vendor or partner to work with. “In education, we have all the needs of a massive multinational, in the locality of a single campus. In addition to this, the security requirements from an educational institution vary greatly from an enterprise environment. For one thing the priority of the education vertical is to enable the sharing of information and not limiting

access to it. Universities and schools also have to deal with managing a much larger number of independent devices than any other vertical. Therefore, finding partners willing to invest time in learning this difference is key for the success of any deployment,” he says.

Sheth also says that having senior management recognise IT as more than just infrastructure service is extremely critical. “Some universities have this understanding – others don’t and still treat IT as just a support function. This attitude has to be corrected and requires bringing the technology, academic, and administrative leaders all into the same conversation discussing the institution and where it would like to go. IT today can separate

one institution from another if given the opportunity and embraced as part of the institution’s vision,” he adds.

Moore agree adding, “Universities are unique and it is difficult for IT to understand the educational requirement. To bridge this gap between IT and the academic side today most universities have instructional technologists who are experts in technology and teaching methods and IT works closely with them.” .

Undeterred by the many challenges, educational institutions in the Middle East are investing in technology to make learning flexible and a lot more interactive than was previously possible – and examples can be found all over the region

Moore and team at ADU are actively working on the idea of engaging smartphones in education. “Our Blackboard Learning management system was only accessible via an internet browser until

They no longer just expect an online presence or a computer lab, but demand full access to

their course work, social network integration, and online collaboration tools that a few years ago would have been considered groundbreaking”


recently. ADU was the first university in the GCC to allow students to access Blackboard using mobile technologies such as iPad, iPhone and Android based smartphones,” he says.

According to him, the university is also in the process of implementing Oracle PeopleSoft ERP for back office and student information systems. “The reasons for implementing ERP are numerous, but one of the key driiving forces was to improve the quality of services to students. With the solution, students can pay their fee online, the registration process are also online and many other functions. ERP has the added advantage of streamlining back office business processes such as procurement, finance and HR,” Moore adds.

In the last 18 months, ADU has also replaced all the old computers (over 800 computers) in the classrooms and labs to newer ones with more powerful software (SPSS, AutoCAD, Mathcad etc), and have upgraded to Windows 7 as the preferred OS from the previous Windows XP. In addition to this all projectors in the classrooms have also been replaced.

AUS, meanwhile, has been investing in both desktop and data centre virtualisation.

“Our environment is now 80% virtualised in the data centre as we’ve moved to 15 node VMWare vSphere cluster supporting over 200 virtual production and pre-production services. As part of this conversion, we’ve been able to realise a higher availability rate and faster failover in the event of any problems. This past February, we converted our core Student Information System, Sungard Banner, onto a virtual platform as well and have realised both a cost savings in capital as well as a redundancy that could not have been provided under our old model,” Sheth adds.

The School of Research Science, Dubai has also invested in virtualisation based on 125 HP thin client servers to support a robust back end infrastructure that will enable scalability and increased efficiency. Herve Dechoux, CIO of the school says, “It’s been a year since we implemented the HP thin client servers and since then we haven’t had to replace even one.”

“Making this investment meant that our core budget is now freed up to invest in more strategic IT initiatives. Earlier, we had to freeze a significant portion of our annual budget to service, manage or replace the desktops. The thin clients have also served as power efficient and helped us reduce the institution’s carbon footprint and energy consumption significantly,” Dechoux adds.

The school has also used technology like the Microsoft SQL server and MultiPoint to set up IT clusters in primary grade classrooms, so students don’t need to leave the classroom to have access to computers or the Internet. In this way, the institution and its faculty are encouraging the development of basic IT skills right from the start of a student’s educational lifecycle.

Working hardHaving successfully deployed a variety of technology solutions across their respective institutions, these decision makers are geared up for more.

“AUS is in the early stages of delivering virtual applications and desktops to students to improve their access to information and licensed software. In

our first phase, we will be deploying two labs in our College of Engineering with certain key applications deployed via the Web. The students in these classes will be able to access these applications from their dormitories, homes, or even when travelling, since the technology in place opens up a whole new avenue for continuous learning and advancement,” explins Sheth.

The School of Research Science is considering investing in mobile thin client technology to enable the use of independent devices such as tablets, smartphones and laptops for interactive learning and information sharing. Dechoux says, “We plan to create more apps to engage independent devices in the learning process in anticipation of a scenario where instead of notebooks students and faculty will both engage in learning over a tablet and use more web based resources and tools.”

From a provider of education technology perspective, Alshazly says, “Most new universities’ technology investment are geared towards infrastructure systems and ERP solutions such as Student Information Systems, which are the most important technologies needed to get the university up and running. Established universities,

FEAtUREEducation

Ashi Sheth, IT director, American University of Sharjah

Trevor Moore, director of IT and communications at the Abu Dhabi University


www.escanav.com






on the other hand, focus their technology investments on offering better services and learning experiences to students by spending more on the implementation of online learning technologies such as learning management systems, lecture capaital solutions, along with portal systems and integration with social networking solutions.”

Having interacted with vendors and investing in the latest technology, IT professionals believe that there is yet more room for growth across the provision of services for the education vertical in the Middle East.

“The solutions provided in the region are pretty good but tend to be a little behind Europe, US, Canada. For example, technologies like virtualisation and cloud are still quite new to the GCC, although they are fast gaining the market’s attention. The major problem with vendors I find is they can be hit and miss depending on who is assigned to the project. If you get a really good person the project runs smoothly but the opposite can happen too. Vendors need to improve the overall quality of the technical staff, help them garner a greater understanding of what their particular needs are and ensure that the levels of delivery promised are then attained,” says Moore.

Dechoux explains, “So far our experience with vendors and partners in the region has been pretty good. The only issue we ever faced was associated with pricing. In western economies, vendors and partners provide special pricing for educational institutions. Although Microsoft has such a provision here none of the other major

vendors do. So I have had to battle for quite some time on pricing with HP, a vendor who exhibits worldwide commitment to education, but has no provision for special funding or pricing for educational institutions in the region.”

GraduatingIT decision makers across the education sector believe that this is only the very beginning of the technology revolution and its effects on this vertical.

“Although there has been a lot of buzz surrounding mobile learning for the past five years or so, this trend was not able to really take off until this year. This was mainly because, while the technology was available in the form of true smartphone devices, the cost associated with accessing course material, and collaboration tools using mobile devices was too expensive and too slow,” says AlShazly.

“At the beginning of this year however, the situation has shown signs of improvement primarily because of the many new data packages offered by mobile carriers. In addition to this, we have more country-wide agreements being signed and announced with eLearning providers to enable greater accessibility,” he adds.

Sheth concludes by adding another dynamic to this conversation, “Education in the region is going to have to come to terms with the hybrid/distance learning model in order to continue to attract both the level of faculty and students that are needed to enable the region to grow. The uncertainty caused by recent events in the region has made it less attractive to those we need

most. While the student demand for schools in calmer countries has increased, the ability to attract the top talent to support these students hasn’t increased at the same rate in the region. It’s also implausible to expect to fly guest lecturers or discipline experts on as frequent a basis as we would like just on a cost basis.”

He believes that videoconferencing, online classrooms, and other technologies can help bridge that gap and introduce both local and international students to reach out support the sharing of knowledge. “This doesn’t mean that there has to be a loss of curricular integrity, but it does require a shift in the methods used to teach to more closely align with the methods used by our students to learn,” he rightly states.

Hanny Alshazly, senior manager, business development and marketing, ITS educational

FEAtUREEducation

By tHe NUMBeRS

30% 2014 2014 50%By 2014: hardware

purchases by school districts will be reduced

CIOs in the education sector will utilise desktop virtualisation

and cloud offerings to reach client devices

educational institutions will purchase twice as many tablet-like computing devices as opposed to

laptops and notebooks.

higher education CIOs will lose their jobs

for failing to balance customer efficiency with organisational efficiency.

Source: Gartner

By By

who can turn security into “know” instead of “no”?you canWith our unique ability to know across all environments. Saying “no” to unauthorized access is important. But “know” is far more important. Content-Aware Identity and Access Management from CA Technologies brings the power of “know” all the way down to the data level. Identities. Access. Information. Compliance. For a secure solution, use the power of know to make your business more agile.

To put the power of know to work for you, contact us at [email protected]

Copyright © 2011 CA. All rights reserved.66 Computer News Middle East october 2011 www.cnmeonline.com

who can turn security into “know” instead of “no”?you canWith our unique ability to know across all environments. Saying “no” to unauthorized access is important. But “know” is far more important. Content-Aware Identity and Access Management from CA Technologies brings the power of “know” all the way down to the data level. Identities. Access. Information. Compliance. For a secure solution, use the power of know to make your business more agile.

To put the power of know to work for you, contact us at [email protected]

Copyright © 2011 CA. All rights reserved.

Ernesto Baca

A solutions companyMichael Dell, CEO of Dell outlines the company’s aggressive plans to grow

its portfolio of solutions by acquiring more intellectual property and what that means for customers and long time partners. Excerpts from the interview.

Michael Dell

Q&A


Q Dell says it has become an enterprise solutions provider. That’s a big shift from being a box

seller and a fast adopter of new technology. Why is Dell making this change and what are you trying to accomplish?A: Throughout the latter part of the ‘90s and early 2000s, we started creating more and more powerful enterprise products, and as we sold those products into the data centre, it became clear to us that customers wanted more than products. We started building a bigger business services capability and to verticalise the business. It was most prevalent in the public sector -- because it was a business of verticals, with education and health care and the defence and civilian aspects of the federal government. nd we were doing that, it became clear we needed to go faster.

So we bought Perot Systems, and for the last year or so we’ve been pretty aggressively investing both organically and inorganically in accelerating our solutions momentum. The reason is that we found that it works really well. I think the reason it works is that we’re solving the real problem that the customer has -- and getting into the real opportunities in a bigger way.

Q: How did you approach customers before?A: Five years ago we would say: Hey, we’ve got shiny boxes. And the customer would sort of say: Well, don’t really care, I’m busy, leave me alone. What do you actually know about my problem? And can you help me solve this problem I have? I’m trying to build a next-generation supply chain. I’m trying to make my sales force more productive. I want to get better outcomes for my students or my patients. If you know something about that in the vertical that I’m in, then I want to talk to you. If you don’t, go away and leave me alone.

Building that capability requires new skills, new capabilities, new intellectual property, some of which we can grow organically, some of which we have been acquiring. I think it also changes the frame of reference of the opportunities for Dell, because now we look at the entire $2.7 trillion IT industry and say: That’s actually

the entire space that we’re going after. We’re not confined to this box or that box.

If you look at what we’re doing today, certainly you can find some places where we’re highly advanced -- like in health care IT, where we’re number one in the world. We’re doing health information systems and evidence-based medicine systems, electronic medical records and claims adjudication systems, affiliated physician systems, and really entire solutions that help care providers ultimately deliver better outcomes for patients. That’s actually what they want to do. They don’t want shiny boxes, although shiny boxes may be part of the solution. We’ve changed the conversation, and that is producing a steady stream of improving results financially. Our GAAP earnings in the last year have more than

doubled. That’s a good thing. We like that. People seem to like that.

That success gives us a greater degree of freedom in terms of our ability to expand and grow and invest organically and inorganically. And that requires some new things. It’s not as if we started doing this last quarter, right? So three and a half years ago, we bought a company called EqualLogic up in Nashua, N.H., and that was in a space that we were pretty familiar with. Dell has sold 15 million servers in the last decade -- pretty hard to find a data centre where it’s not Dell. About a third of the servers sold in North America are Dell. So what goes with servers? Well, storage goes with servers, networking goes with servers. Those are pretty obvious places for us to expand.

Q: You mentioned vertical solutions; Dell has also talked about a big focus on providing horizontal solutions that go

across midsize companies of all kinds. What sorts of solutions are really catching on with those customers right now?A: Among all the solutions, you’d say roughly 80% of them are horizontal and 20% of them are vertical. To the extent you can create the horizontal solutions first, you can sell them to everybody, and there’s more demand. Things like virtualisation -- no great surprise there. What does the next-generation data centre look like? How do I implement cloud computing? What does the mobile client look like? What about IT security, migration to the cloud? There are pretty big horizontal solutions that are highly repeatable activities. You can almost apply factorylike thinking in terms of how you deploy them -- efficiently for customers, with a very high degree of

predictability that’s going to be successful and implemented on time. It’s just not that hard to do over and over again.

We much focus on the midmarket because we see a lot of new solutions being created there -- and moving up. Think about x86 servers. When the x86 server started, it wasn’t the world’s biggest companies. In fact, I remember very well going to some of those big companies and they said go away because we’re doing mainframes, we’re not doing x86 servers. Actually, x86 servers started with the small, nimble, fast companies, worked their way up into medium and large [businesses], from the Web tier to applications and to the database layer. And now it’s finally eating away at the core of the data centre in the world’s largest enterprises across.

Q: What’s wrong with targeting big corporate customers?A: It’s not necessarily a bad thing to do.

If you look at what we’re doing today, certainly you can find some places where we’re highly

advanced -- like in health care IT, where we’re number one in the world. We’re doing what they want us to do. They don’t want only shiny boxes, although shiny boxes may be part of the solution.


We sell to those customers, they sell to those customers. They use channels and distributors and multistep distribution to deal with these customers, although one could argue whether they’ve done a particularly good job at it or not.

So we sell to the biggest companies in the world and we sell to the smallest, the consumer. But we also think the SMB market is not only the biggest, but it’s also the fastest-growing. Think about all the new emerging companies around the world.

The other thing you find is that the pyramid of companies is like unbelievably wide. Go to LinkedIn and they have advanced search tools that let you look at companies by size. You’ll notice that there’s an enormous number of companies that have 1,000 people or 5,000 people. There aren’t that many companies that have 100,000 people.

Q: Obviously, you’re not the only company to lead with services and solutions. Compared with IBM and HP, is the only difference in your target audience, or are there other differences?A: I think [the market segment] is one difference. The other difference is that we don’t have the legacy of an installed base of proprietary stuff, which is why we’ve taken this open approach. If you look at our approach in the data centre to orchestration, to systems management, it’s a very open approach. Dell has always been a leader in standards, and I think customers know and appreciate that. It’s a great position for us to continue to carve out. It’s pretty different than our competitors.

Q: The companies you’ve acquired have expanded your portfolio of IP. Does it change Dell as an open company -- or as a great strategic partner -- if more and more of what you deliver is your own versus pulling together solutions from across the industry?A: I think we’re going to continue to pull together solutions across the industry, but there are clearly areas where we’re investing more heavily in our own technology. What I’d also tell you is if you look at the way we’re

delivering our solutions, we’re still giving customers an enormous amount of choice. With our data centre solutions, yes, you can buy networking from us, and you can buy storage from us, you could buy servers from us, and you could buy orchestration from us. But if you want our orchestration and you don’t want to buy any of our servers or networking or storage, you can do that, too. So we’re much more open than really anyone in the industry.

Q: But are your strategic partners as excited about this transition as you are?A: Well, we certainly don’t design our deterministic future to make others in the industry happy. We decided to make customers and shareholders happy and give people at Dell a great opportunity. So “don’t really care” is the simple answer.

Q: But you don’t think it changes the customer view of Dell?A: Actually, we’re seeing very positive response from customers as we learn more about their problems. We’re able to bring more definitive solutions, and customers appreciate that we’ve invested heavily in key intellectual property. Now, of course, it

has to be the right [solution], it has to work well, and I think we’ve chosen quite carefully. Our track record speaks for itself in terms of our ability. I mean, when you acquire something, you don’t create any value. When you successfully integrate it and continue to invest in it, that’s when you create value.

Q: Can you give us a longer-range view of your cloud strategy and compare that with, say, Microsoft, HP, others who are moving into the space?A: Well, I think we see customers increasingly embracing cloud as a way to transform their IT environment.

Q: Public and private cloud?A: Public, private, hybrid. And we don’t believe there’s one-size-fits-all in terms of the cloud or most other aspects of IT, but certainly not the cloud. If you look at large companies, they tend to be held hostage by their legacy environments, and they look at cloud and they say -- hey, this is a way for us to break free from some of these old systems and have a more flexible infrastructure, and we really want that. They may want a private cloud. I think no matter what you do you’re going to have a

Q&A

Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Computers

Michael Dell


Network Performance Management SoftwareTrusted by over a million administrators worldwide

ManageEnginePowering IT ahead

ManageEngine

Customer speaks:

“…Before ManageEngine, we were

using a number of different monitoring

systems depending on the type and

brand of equipment being Monitored....

NowNow we have a single application that

monitors nearly any piece of equipment

we have on our network...”

w w w . m a n a g e e n g i n e . c o m / n p m

www.manageengine.com/npmAndrew Harkins,

Network Operations Team,

Avera McKennan Hospital Our Network Performance Management includes:

Automatic L2/ L3 Network Mapping | Network devices health and performance monitoring | WAN and VoIPperformance monitoring | Network Traffic Analysis | Network Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring | Network Change and Configuration Management | EventLog, Syslog and SNMP Trap monitoring | Server Virtualization

monitoring – VMware/ Hyper-V | Indepth Application Performance Monitoring

90% of the features of the Big 4 at 10% of the price

90:10 [email protected]

Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to gain 100% visibility in to your

network performance even as the IT budget is shrinking?

Try ManageEngine!Download the free 30 days trial now

Awards:

Eas

y to

use

Pow

erfu

l

Af

ford

able

www.manageengine.com/npm

www.manageengine.com/npm


hybrid cloud, because you’ve got services that are outside of your data centre, you’ve got services that are inside your data centre, you’ve got to connect those things together. Data integration is a big, big deal. That’s why we bought Boomi -- really helping customers link those together.

Q: What are the specific opportunities for Dell to fill in those gaps in the cloud for your customers and in the solutions that you’re providing?A: Well, I think it’s certainly in the infrastructure layer. That’s a natural place to start; we have a lot of experience there -- a big advantage. We’re the leading supplier to the Internet companies. We’re now on, I think, the fourth generation of our modular data centre, really leading in innovating in terms of densely organised modular data centres. I think roughly 60% of the Chinese Internet runs on Dell.

We’ve done a great job in serving the most complex users out there. We know how to build the cloud infrastructure layer, whether a company wants to build its own private cloud or they want us to operate it for them in one of our data centres. I think data integration is a big barrier and challenge/opportunity. I have an old XYZ system and I want to go to Workday or I want to go to Salesforce.com or I want to go to SuccessFactors, or whatever it may be, how do I connect that with my old system? That’s what Boomi does.

If I have two cloud systems, how do I connect them together? Cloud providers will tell you -- oh no, you don’t want to do that. Because they want all the data to stay in their system and not go anywhere. But that’s really impractical, the bigger the company the more you need data to integrate and talk to each other. So again, Boomi is perfect for that.

Q: Can we shift to the old business for a second? The Windows PC market has taken a dip and we’re seeing a lot of other devices surging in the market right now. If it turns out that tablets, smartphones ... Android and iPad devices represent a major shift from the Windows PC into this multiplicity of devices, how does that

affect your business in the long term?A: Well, it would have affected it a lot more maybe 5 or 10 years ago than it does today, because our business is very different. If you look at our sources of margin and profit, the majority of them are not the stuff you’re talking about. I think there’s definitely an enormous variety of devices out there and usage patterns are changing.

I don’t necessarily see that they’re all replacing each other. A lot of the new

devices are in addition to the devices you already have. So, for example, when you get a smartphone do you get rid of your PC? I don’t think so. Now, the interesting one is the tablet. When you get a tablet do you get rid of your smartphone?

No. OK, so now we went from a person who has one device to one who has three devices. Now explain to me why this is a problem. When we’re in the server business and storage business and making data centres? Now, would I love it to be our smartphone and our tablet? Absolutely. But if the total market expands, you know, if the 2.7 trillion becomes 3.7 trillion because people are storing more data...

I mean, I look at some of our big customers, the fast-growing customers, and they have nothing to do with PCs. We have a big customer in China called TenCent, and TenCent I think has like 700 million mobile phone customers. Almost everyone in China who has a phone uses one of the TenCent services. So we’re selling them huge data centres and servers and storage and networking -- nothing to do with a PC. When people consume content, video, whatever, on tablets, smartphones, the content has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from? It comes from servers and storage.

You look at these new companies that are popping up all the time with streaming audio, streaming video, and there’s a pretty good chance those are running on Dell servers.

Q: You’ve been a small business, a medium business, a large business, a global business. Today it’s a tough environment for medium businesses or small businesses. What would your advice be to someone who is running IT at one of

these medium to small businesses? What would you do?A: If you’re running a business, you have to think about surviving. That’s just part of running a business, particularly a small or medium-sized business. I think that there are so many opportunities to get ahead using informationtechnology.

I’ll give you a big one that I think is extremely relevant to medium-sized business. We’ve been providing storage systems to midsized companies for a long, long time, and they’ve been storing their data because they had to [due to] regulations, because it was thought to be a good idea. You have to have a database; you have to maintain all the information. But how does the information actually help you make better decisions?

People talk about big data. I think: big impact, big decisions, and big insights. And there’s a lot of work going on in our industry. Dell is working on this in a big way to say how do you take all the data companies have stored and then turn that into much better decisions? And smart midsized companies will actually be able to do that in a faster, more nimble way than some of their larger competitors who are kind of stuck in these larger legacy systems.

So we sell to the biggest companies in the world and we sell to the smallest, the consumer. But we

also think the SMB market is not only the biggest, but it’s also the fastest-growing. Think about all the new emerging companies around the world.

Q&AMichael Dell


www.kofax.com

www.kofax.com

[email protected]

[email protected]

INSIGHtVirtualisation

Application virtualisation – the impact

Server virtualisation gets more buzz, but application virtualisation might provide more significant business benefits in the long run.

Server virtualisation gets most of the glory, but it’s application virtualisation that may ultimately

have a more significant impact on enterprise IT architectures, supporting new modes of business and smoothing the path to the new services-oriented online structure known as the cloud.

Application virtualisation has been around a while, and many IT shops use it in one form or another. In the form of terminal services, application virtualisation is employed in most large organisations to support remote offices. At the individual application level, virtualisation is used

to obviate compatibility issues when installing new apps across a wide network of users.

Lately, the ongoing migration to Windows 7 has spurred the use of application virtualisation tools to ensure that older but still critical applications run on the new OS.

Application virtualisation is also being used to prep a push into virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). And despite initial skepticism, virtualisation is moving to the most critical applications—those that organisations depend on to run their businesses—such as ERP and database.

Agility and flexibilityVirtualisation, in general, refers to isolating or unbinding computing resources so that they can run without depending on a particular platform or environment. Virtualisation applies to both hardware and software, and can be used in connection with servers, storage and applications.

Application virtualisation itself can have multiple meanings. That’s why some experts say application virtualisation is better addressed according to the problem you’re trying to solve. “It’s a business conversation more than just a technology conversation,” says Kevin Strohmeyer, senior product


manager for the enterprise, desktops and applications group at Citrix, which markets both terminal services and application virtualisation technology.

Application virtualisation offers business advantages in terms of agility and flexibility. For instance, app virtualisation can be a cost-effective strategy when setting up a temporary office or a limited-run project. Because of virtualisation’s ability to contain and control messy interactions with the operating system, a virtualised application will leave behind very little digital detritus. That allows a server purchased for one project to be re-deployed much more quickly and efficiently when that project is completed.

Forced marchThe biggest impetus these days for employing application virtualisation is the forced march to Windows 7. Even organizations that sat out the upgrade to Windows Vista are moving to Windows 7, and as might be expected, they occasionally run into application conflicts. “Tax software giant Intuit, for example, needs to keep running older versions of its tax software to support customers still operating on those older versions and calling in looking for help,” says Michael Caouette, senior engineer with the company’s employee services IT Group. Then came Windows 7. “We ended up with a lot of application compatibility problems,” he says.

His group uses Microsoft’s application virtualisation technology, App-V, as well as that from a third-party vendor, InstallFree. He says they’ve virtualized as many as 30 apps so far, including IE6-based apps, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Firefox and Quickbooks.

Virtualisation helps with application compatibility and aids in the installation process because “I only have to stream [the virtualized application] down to the desktop,” Caouette says.

Similarly, Autodesk, the CAD/CAM software developer, needed to support

the client side of its Seibel sales force system, which uses the IE 6 browser as its interface, when the IT organization shot-gunned 12,000 nodes of Windows 7 throughout the company. Scott Baker, application programmer or analyst in the desktop support group, says Microsoft’s app virtualisation technology was no help because “App-V did not support the virtualisation of IE6 .” So Baker used InstallFree to keep the legacy-yet-critical Siebel call centre application up and running for the country.

Overcoming limitationsThere are scenarios that do not lend themselves to application virtualisation. For instance, it can be difficult—if not impossible;to virtualise applications that interact in a significant way with the operating system at the kernel level. From a less technical standpoint, if an organisation standardises enterprise-wide on a specific version of an application or application suite, it probably makes sense to run that software natively.

One of the limiting scenarios, however, used to involve virtualising “mission-critical” server-based applications. Conventional wisdom had it that there were too many architectural challenges, too many potential “gotchas,” such as IP hooks and security issues, to make virtualising server applications feasible.

But that’s changing. Microsoft is now testing a version of its application

virtualisation technology for Windows server applications, known as Server App-V. And at least one third-party vendor, AppZero, is touting its virtualisation technology for server apps that run on a variety of operating systems platforms.

Server App-V will be part of a new version of Microsoft’s System Center management console, and is intended to be used with Microsoft’s cloud software and service, Azure. AppZero’s virtualisation technology allows applications to migrate to various server platforms, such as moving legacy applications to updated environments.

Greg O’Connor, CEO and president of AppZero, says he has two types of customers: ISVs looking to ship server applications for the Windows platform without the help of Microsoft; and end-users looking to migrate critical server-based applications to managed services providers and the cloud.

“We can make it so you can pick up an Oracle database and move it from your data center to the Amazon storage cloud and then to RackSpace,” O’Connor says.

The opposite is also true, O’Connor points out. Virtualised server apps can be moved back into an organisation’s data center with relative ease, mitigating the risk of “vendor lock-in” to a specific cloud services provider.

The mobile imperativeThe virtual desktop is not the same thing as the virtualised application—but they

Application virtualisation has been around a while, and many IT shops use it in one form or

another. In the form of terminal services, application virtualisation is employed in most large organisations to support remote offices. At the individual application level, virtualisation is used to obviate compatibility issues when installing new apps across a wide network of users.


complement each other. The virtual desktop is an “image” of what the user wants and/or needs on a PC, laptop or thin client (OS, apps, user profile, etc.), streaming over the network from a remote server. Because app virtualisation ensures application compatibility and flexibility, it supports a stable yet easily updateable “single image” virtual desktop environment.

“NSK Corp., a global auto parts dealer, employed InstallFree’s application virtualisation technology to support its IE6-based applications when it began its move to Windows 7,” says Todd Warner, LAN/WAN supervisor. Now he’s using it to make PC support easier across the organisation. Users can install their applications automatically

from a self-service portal, which “cuts down on desk tickets,” he says.

Warner is considering application virtualisation in connection with VDI. NSK is “starting to virtualise desktops for developers,” he says, using VMware’s virtual desktop technology, VMware View. By virtualising applications for developers, those virtual desktops can be updated “automatically,” across the organisation, Warner says.

He’s also “playing with [application virtualisation] for tablets—Galaxy, iPad 2 and Zoom,” Warner says. “We have a lot of executives wanting to use iPad 2s.”

Application virtualisation aimed at mobile devices is the next step. Not only does

virtualisation make mobile apps easier to migrate across servers and easier to support in a virtual environment, vendors are starting to offer tools to develop virtual apps that run on smartphones and other mobile devices. For example, VMware markets its Mobile Virtualisation Platform, which is designed to enable developers to build mobile apps for multiple environments and to let users have multiple profiles on a single device.

A virtual worldVirtualisation has been, and continues to be, one of the building blocks of the Web 2.0 corporate infrastructure. For IT managers, hardware virtualisation is having a direct impact in terms of ROI dollars right now. The ramifications of application virtualisation are less direct, longer term, but potentially more significant and meaningful in a highly mobile world. As NSK’s Wartner says, “Once I have it virtualised I can push it anywhere I want.”

“In light of the onslaught of virtualisation, and in particular the potential of application virtualisation, the marching orders for IT managers are obvious,” says Alon Yaffe, director of marketing at InstallFree: “IT needs to start managing more things on the back end and less things on the client.”

Application virtualisation offers business advantages in terms of agility and flexibility. For

instance, app virtualisation can be a cost-effective strategy when setting up a temporary office or a limited-run project. Because of virtualisation’s ability to contain and control messy interactions with the operating system, a virtualised application will leave behind very little digital detritus.

INSIGHtVirtualisation

Application virtualisation aimed at mobile devices is the next step.


Indranil Guha, Head of IT Infrastructure, Commercial Bank of Dubai

Mohammed Shehata, Director of Engineering and GTA Data Centres, PTS Consulting

Richard Whitaker, Director - Energy and Sustainability, hurleypalmerfl att

Rodney Callaghan, Vice President – UAE & Gulf Countries, APC by Schneider Electric

Middle East & Africa conference locations for 2011

Featured Speakers

Design, Build, Operate is our longest running conference theme and focuses on every part of the mission-critical facility lifecycle. From site selection and engineering design through to power availability and full data center automation; these are must-attend sessions for any organization embarking on a new data center project or operating existing facilities.

For every decision to build a data center there is one to outsource. From colocation to Platform- as-a-Service, from Software-as-a-Service, to building your data center capacity in the cloud, what are the options most appropriate to your organization? This conference theme explores an enterprise’s strategic options for data center outsourcing, weighing up the economic benefi ts, the risks and the performance characteristics against those of doing it yourself.

The effi ciency of the facility is only half the equation – optimizing all the systems that run within it is crucial: from processing to storage, to network to application. The ITO conference stream provides insight on how IT needs drive data center strategy and how that impacts infrastructure requirements.

For more information visit:

www.datacenterdynamics.com

To register, call:

+44 (0)20 7377 1907

Thanks for organizing such an excellent event. It was extremely informative and rich in content.”

Abdul Saleem Gerab Systems Technology

“

`

26 DubaiOCT Jumeirah Beach Hotel

Global Training and Certification Services

Gold Sponsors

Doha29th November 2011

Johannesburg8th September 2011

Dubai26th October 2011

Abu Dhabi30th May 2011

Muscat25th September 2011

Riyadh28th March 2011

We’ve all heard the predictions: By 2020, the quantity of electronically stored data will

reach 35 trillion gigabytes, a forty-four-fold increase from 2009. We had already reached 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes, by the end of 2010, according to IDC. That’s enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to the moon and back -- about 240,000 miles each way.

For alarmists, this is an ominous data storage doomsday forecast. For opportunists, it’s an information gold mine whose riches will be increasingly easy to excavate as technology advances.

Enter “big data,” a nascent group of data mining technologies that are making the storage, manipulation and analysis of reams of data cheaper and faster than ever. Once relegated to the supercomputing environment, big data technology is becoming available to the enterprise masses -- and along the way it is changing the way many industries do business.

We define big data as the mining of huge sets of structured and unstructured data for useful insights using non-traditional data-sifting tools, including but not limited to Hadoop.

Much like “the cloud,” big data has been the subject of much hype and a lot of uncertainty. We asked analysts and big data enthusiasts to explain what it is and isn’t, as well as what big data means to the future of data mining.

The big dealA new group of data mining technologies promises to change forever the way we sift through our vast stores of data, making it faster and cheaper.

Setting the stage for big data“Big data for the enterprises has emerged thanks in part to the lower cost of computing power and the fact that the systems are able to perform multiprocessing. Main memory costs have also dropped, and companies can process more data in memory than ever before. What’s more, it’s easier to link computers together into server clusters. Those three things combined have created big data,” says Carl Olofson, a database management analyst at IDC.

“We can not only do those things well, but do them affordably,” he says. “Some of the big supercomputers of the past involved heavy multiprocessing of systems that were linked together into tightly knit clusters, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more because they were specialised hardware. Now we can achieve those kinds of configurations with commodity hardware. That’s what has helped us be able to process more data faster and more cheaply.”

Not every company with vast data warehouses can say it’s using big data technology. To qualify as big data, IDC says, the technology must first be affordable, and then meet two out of the three criteria that

IBM describes as the three V’s: variety, volume and velocity.

Variety means data comes in structured and unstructured forms. Volume means the amount of data being gathered and analysed is very large. And velocity refers to the speed at which the data is processed. It “isn’t always hundreds of terabytes,” Olofson says. “Depending on the use case, a few hundred gigabytes could be quite large because of the third dimension, which is speed or time. If I can perform an analytic process against 300GB in a second, and it used to take an hour, that greatly changes what I can do with the results, so it adds value. Big data is the affordable application of at least two out of three of those.”

The open-source connection“A lot of people consider Hadoop and big data to be synonyms. That’s a mistake,” Olofson says. Some implementations of Teradata, MySQL and “clever clustering technologies” that don’t use Hadoop can also be considered big data, he explains.

Hadoop, an application environment for big data, has drawn the most attention because

INSIGHtBig data


it’s based on MapReduce, an approach common in supercomputing circles but simplified and made elegant by a project largely funded by Google. Hadoop is the predominant implementation of a mix of closely related Apache projects, including the HBase database found in the MapReduce environment.

Software developers have responded by coming up with all kinds of techniques to exploit Hadoop and similar advanced technologies -- many of them developed in open-source communities. “They’ve created a dizzying variety of so-called noSQL databases, which are mostly key-value paired databases that optimize either on throughput or variety or size with various techniques,” according to Olofson.

The open-source technologies aren’t commercially supported, “so those things are going to have to evolve for a while and will have to shake out, which could take several years. That’s the nascent aspect of big data that won’t come to fruition for a while” in the general marketplace, he adds. In the meantime, IDC expects at least three commercial vendors to offer some type of support services for Hadoop by year’s end. Also, several vendors, such as Datameer, will come out with analytics tools with Hadoop components that let enterprises develop their own applications. Cloudera and Tableau already use Hadoop in their offerings.

Upgraded RDBMSIndustry-watchers disagree on whether upgraded relational database management systems should also be considered big data technology. “I think it satisfies the criteria of faster, bigger, cheaper,” Olofson says. Teradata, for instance, has made its system more affordable, and it’s a scalable, clustered environment, he adds.

But others disagree. “The processing that you ordinarily do using an RDBMS in general, using standard BI tools -- that’s not really big data,” says Marcus Collins, a data management analyst at Gartner. “That processing has been around for a long time.”

So, who is really doing big data analytics? A year ago, the primary users of big data technology were large Web companies, such

as Facebook and Yahoo, that wanted to analyze clickstream data. But today, “it’s moving outside the main Web properties into just about any company that you can think of that’s got large volumes of data,” Collins says. Banks, utilities, the intelligence community -- all of them are jumping on the big data bandwagon.

Some of the technologies are actively being used by people on the bleeding edge who need the technology now, like those involved in creating Web-based services that are driven by social media. They’re also heavily contributing to these projects.

In other vertical industries, businesses are realising that much more of their value proposition is information-based than they had previously thought, which will allow big data technologies to gain traction quickly, Olofson says. Couple that with affordable hardware and software, and enterprises find themselves in a perfect storm of business transformation opportunities.

New York-based TRA helps organisations measure the value of TV advertising by matching the advertisements received in a given home via TVs and DVRs with buying behavior at the retail checkout counter. The company gathers data from cable company DVRs and grocery store loyalty card programs to make these correlations. TRA’s big data system processes reams of data that represents the second-by-second viewing habits of 1.7 million households -- a feat that would have been impossible without big data technology. It deployed Kognitio’s WX2 database, which allows the company to load, profile and analyse data quickly, collect

granular ad-viewing information from DVRs, integrate it with detailed point-of-sale data, and produce customised reports.

“Kognitio has an in-memory solution, so a full half of our current entire database can be memory, which means the response time when a customer of ours runs a query literally can be in seconds as opposed to hours and days,” says TRA’s CEO, Mark Lieberman.

The database runs on commodity hardware, and TRA uses its own front-end application built in .Net Visual Studio. “We still use a little bit of MySQL, and the user

interface was developed with DevExpress,” Lieberman adds.

He says that big data has the potential to revolutionise the $70 billion TV ad buying business. Traditional methods of measuring viewership required installing special set-top boxes in a sampling of as few as 20,000 households nationwide. Today, data can be analyzed in detail from 2.5 million DVR and cable boxes.

“We’re injecting accountability into that $70 billion -- giving advertisers more confidence that TV is a good place to advertise,” Lieberman says. “That’s the big step, and it’s all about big data analytics.”

Greg Belkin, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, says the tools used by TRA and others satisfy the velocity, volume and variety requirements to be labeled big data. “This is very poignant in retail because you have a lot of exploding sources of data that haven’t traditionally been mined,” such as social media websites, DVR boxes and grocery store loyalty card data, Belkin says. “It’s data that is so enormous

Big data for the enterprise has emerged thanks in part to the lower cost of computing power and

the fact that the systems are able to perform multiprocessing. Main memory costs have also dropped, and companies can process more data “in memory” than ever before. What’s more, it’s easier to link computers together into server clusters. Those three things combined have created big data.


and complex that it can’t be analysed using traditional database methods, so retailers are turning toward these big data platforms.”

Similarly, big data technology has revolutionised business at Catalina Marketing. The company runs a huge customer loyalty database of 2.5 petabytes that has years of purchasing history data for more than 190 million U.S. grocery shoppers. Its largest single database houses a staggering 425 billion rows of data, and the company manages 625 million rows each day in that one database.

By analyzing the data, Catalina helps major consumer goods manufacturers and large supermarket chains predict what customers are likely to buy and who will be interested in new products.

“We wanted to bring the technology to the data and not the data to the technology,” says Eric Williams, executive vice president and CIO at Catalina. “The technology exists now that allows companies like SAS to move their [analytics] technology into the database. That has exponentially changed the entire corporation. We were doing these things before but had serious limitations that would not allow us to get where we wanted

to go. We had to use homegrown tools, and they were very rudimentary in what they could accomplish. Bringing big data technology to the forefront has changed our entire organisation.”

Big data is fundamentally changing the way Bank of America does business, according to Abhishek Mehta, formerly Bank of America’s managing director for big data and analytics, speaking at Hadoop World in October 2010. “I look at Hadoop today as what Linux was 20 years ago. We all have seen what Linux has done in the enterprise software space. It has been massively disruptive. Hadoop will do the same. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when.”

Beyond clickstream and transaction analysis, Hadoop allows Bank of America to quickly solve business problems. “Now, as a bank, I can think of eliminating fraud,” Mehta says. “Now I can build a model looking at every incidence of fraud going back five years for every single person, rather than sampling it now, building a model, realising there is an outlier that breaks the model, and then rebuilding the model. Those days are over.”

Proceed with cautionBig data technology is evolving rapidly. The companies that are using it right now have IT staffs that are exceptionally technically savvy and can adapt with the technology’s

advancements and their companies’ multiple requirements.

“If you’re not in a position to do that, then work with a service provider -- maybe a cloud service -- or wait until these things have reached a point where there’s a number of established software products and services that are supported,” Olofson suggests. “You’ll have something that your business people will understand.”

No doubt, data mining has changed forever. But analysts say that big data technology won’t completely replace today’s data warehouse and data mining tools.

“Today, data mining is really about building relatively sophisticated models with not very much data,” Gartner’s Collins says. “Now, big data gives you huge volumes of data -- so it could well be that you don’t need as sophisticated a model anymore.

“My view is that it will actually augment [the data warehouse market],” Olofson says. “They’ll use a technology like MapReduce, whether Hadoop or some other commercial augmentation, to generate interesting business intelligence data they never could have gotten at before. Then, in order to reuse it and track historical patterns, they will put it in the data warehouse and actually expand its use.”

Scale represents another challenge, Collins says, along with “the fact that there are not established architectural patterns on deploying and using this technology. We’re learning as we go.”

Some of the technical risks are dissipating with the introduction of prepackaged tools, but the technology is still very much a programming interface -- which is a step backward for business intelligence, he says. For instance, Collins says, “Hadoop is a pretty techie system, and the drive in business intelligence has been to push it down in the enterprise and onto the desktop with a very user-friendly interface. We’ve taken a step back with Hadoop, but new vendors will help put it back into the user community where it needs to be.

“[Big data technology] needs to leap out of being in IT, and we have to put tools in the hands of users” in the business units, he adds. “That hasn’t happened yet.”

tHRee MytHS aBOUt Big data

There is a good deal of confusion over what

big data is and what it can do. Here are three

myths about big data:

1. Relational databases can’t scale to very large

volumes and therefore can’t be considered big

data technologies. (Not true.)

2. Hadoop or, by extension, any MapReduce

environment is the best choice for big data

regardless of the workload or use case. (Also

not true.)

3. The era of schematic database management

systems is over. Schema development only

gets in the way of big data deployment.

(Laughably untrue.)

Source: IDC, The Big Deal About Big Data,

February 2011

INSIGHtBig data

Big data technology is evolving rapidly.


Green principles in IT is not just about technology, it is about an organisational mindset.

With Sustainable ICT 2011, CNME – the region's premier technology magazine – and CPI, one of the leading publishing houses of the Middle East is bringing together producers and consumers of green technology solutions to discuss and debate the relevance of these solutions to the region, and ways in which adoption can be increased across enterprises in every corner of the Middle East.

Sustainable ICT 2011 will play host to more than 100 stakeholders from the ICT industry as they voice concerns and learn from each other on adding value to the bottomline, while being ecologically relevant, with green IT and technology.

Contacts:

Sathya Mithra AshokSenior Editor, CNME+971 4 440 9111 [email protected]

Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic ICT Partner

To register, visit www.sustainableictme.com

AWARDS CATEGORIES

Vendor awardsGreen Champion – E-waste handling

Green Champion – HardwareGreen Champion – Management software

Green Champion – Product innovationGreen Champion – Market education

End-user awardsGreen Champion – Data Centre

Green Champion – E-wasteGreen Champion – Desktop / printing

Green Champion – OperationalGreen Champion – Innovation

GREEN CHAMPION AWARDS

Organised by

HOw tOTurnkey cloud

Build a turnkey private and hybrid cloud

The hype around cloud computing is hard to ignore and as each vendor is trying to put the word

“cloud” in front of all its products, enterprises are finding it extremely difficult to sift through the noise and really find which products work best specifically for their data centre.

While the ability to utilise the public cloud is extremely appealing due to the

reduced infrastructure management needed in a public rather than private environment, CIOs and data centre managers are hesitant to place important data and applications in the public cloud. With this cautious viewpoint, enterprises are turning to private or hybrid cloud solutions that will enable them to receive the benefits of a public cloud while keeping their infrastructure under their

control and experience improved agility and infrastructure utilisation-leading to dramatic cost and time savings.

Therefore, the popularity in turnkey, ready to go, cloud solutions has skyrocketed over the past year as enterprises are on an active search for the simplest and quickest way to get their private cloud infrastructure up and running. A turnkey cloud promises some appealing benefits like simplicity,

Here’s how you as an enterprise can evaluate and understand the essential elements that constitute a turnkey private or hybrid cloud.


quick roll-out, and cost savings, but many organizations are still perplexed by how to evaluate a turnkey solution-or even what capabilities one should include-and how to integrate it with their existing network, compute and storage infrastructure.

To help enterprises evaluate here are the three essential elements that should constitute any turnkey private and/or hybrid cloud solution:

1. Intelligent and reliable automation features: A turnkey cloud solution must be able to automatically provision configurations when needed and decommission devices when not needed. Additionally, it should be able to combine all known devices, discover new devices and compile them into a resource pool. With the introduction of hybrid cloud computing the importance for intelligent automation features significantly increases. Enterprises need to be able to reliably and securely burst into a public cloud when resources are not available in the private cloud.

One of the most important elements of ensuring the selection of the correct turnkey solution for an environment is selecting a solution that not only provisions virtualised resources but physical and public cloud resources as well. Today, when organisations think of cloud solutions they seem to jump right to technology that only handles virtualisation. However, this is only a partial solution as enterprises on average have only 50% of their applications virtualised. Therefore, when building a private cloud using a tool that provisions hardware is a necessity to gain the full benefits of a private cloud. The ability to provision and decommission entire hardware and virtualised topologies that include compute, network and storage is a crucial element of a turnkey solution. This feature is crucial to controlling resource sprawl and maximising the utilisation of existing resources. 2. Out-of-the-box adaptors for existing infrastructure: Seamless integration of a cloud management tool into an enterprise’s existing infrastructure is extremely

important as CIOs and data centre managers are trying to get the most out of their existing infrastructure. All environments these days are heterogeneous with equipment from multiple systems, network and storage vendors. So, when enterprises bring in a private cloud solution it needs to be able to work across these multi-vendor devices.

If additional resources need to be added to a workload IT should not have to hesitate because they have a Dell system but would like an HP system. Similar to the frustration that arises if someone gets a flat tire and has a Goodyear right around the corner but all they can use is Michelin, a turnkey solution that is not able to provision a wide variety of devices can cause a lot of headaches for IT.

There are thousands of hardware devices and several virtualisation vendors that exist today and writing an adaptor for each of these resources is extremely time consuming which is why enterprises need to look for tools that have pre-built adaptors for most of the popular hardware devices and virtual resources from vendors including Dell, IBM, HP, NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, among others. By creating a private cloud out of existing hardware it not only saves on time, but also creates significant CAPEX savings by re-utilizing existing resources and spare capacity for new workloads instead of purchasing new equipment. 3. Predefined templates for commonly used compute, network and storage configurations: It is important to first

mention that without predefined templates a cloud solution cannot be turnkey. The initial starting point to ensure this requirement is met is looking for the library of predefined templates. The greatest expense for building a private cloud is in the designing and crafting of the templates for the topologies that will frequently be used. Additionally, with most cloud solutions one can also build custom templates that need to take the existing environment in the data centre into consideration.

When the turnkey cloud solution offered a pre-built library of templates for commonly used topologies then enterprises are able to significantly speed up the time it takes to get a private cloud up and running, thus accelerating their time to value. These predefined templates can deliver 50% to 90% percent of the design for an environment and all they require is IT making easy customisations to make the template fit their specific environment perfectly.

The purpose for a turnkey solution is to be able to quickly and reliably convert an existing static environment into a self-service dynamic environment. And in order for this environment to be successful the turnkey solution must contain the three elements discussed. These capabilities will be crucial for enterprises looking to deploy a turnkey private or hybrid cloud.

Garima Thockchom is VP of Marketing at Gale Technologies, a leading provider of infrastructure automation software solutions that power IT as a Service for labs, enterprises, and service providers.

Seamless integration of a cloud management tool into an enterprise’s existing infrastructure

is extremely important as CIOs and data centre managers are trying to get the most out of their existing infrastructure. All environments these days are heterogeneous with equipment from multiple systems, network and storage vendors.


HOw tOOutsourcing

When it comes to global outsourcing, particular in India, the risks and the

stakes are higher than ever. Global sourcing vendors are being given more responsibility from a technical and business perspective, and they are being given greater access to internal systems and customers. At the same time, the increasingly volatile, inconsistent, and expensive labor pool in India makes this increased trust much riskier.

Given these realities, it is even more important today to continuously evaluate and monitor vendor performance. Even as many mature sourcing and vendor management (SVM) groups focus on advanced topics like establishing new governance models and driving innovation, conversations with enterprise reveal that it’s all too easy to neglect the seemingly mundane risks related to employee attrition, questionable vendor viability, and the risks associated with the

As global sourcing vendors are being given more responsibility from a technical and business perspective, it is more important than ever to continuously evaluate and monitor vendor performance. Forrester has some recommendations on how to mitigate risk and derive value from your vendor relationships.

Mitigate risk in the outsourcing market


www.computernewsme.com

[email protected]

HOw tO

increasingly popular managed services engagement model. To mitigate risk and maintain value from vendor relationships, Forrester recommends that SVM executives look to:

Ensure quality processes and standards are behind vendor PromisesSome companies assume that all vendors in India (whether it is IBM, Infosys, Accenture, or other small vendors) are adhering to the same high- quality standards. This is not true. The top tier Indian vendors (e.g., Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro) ignited this industry by delivering excellence, in large part, by adhering to the highest possible quality coding and delivery standards. Today the most important certification, CMMI Level 5, is the standard that all vendors use, but many vendors, particularly newer or smaller vendors, have either not bothered to get this certification or have not gotten this certification for all parts of their business. SVM executives must audit or demand proof of relevant certification (third-party certification from an auditor such as KPMG) for the teams and facilities that are supporting their business.

Audit staff resource qualifications and certificationsAre fresh 21- or 22-year-old graduates given a two-week training course in advanced business application programming (ABAP) before they are set loose on your SAP system? Have they been certified in SAP,

either by SAP or through a rigorous internal, but externally certified, training program? The importance of staff certifications applies to software work, but also to more critical roles. For example, clients often pay a premium for project managers, but many of these project managers are not project management professional (PMP)-certified or today customers see phony CVs with inflated experience levels on a regular basis, and the clients that insist on interviewing project team members are often shocked by the discrepancy between resumes and actual qualifications. The easiest way to solve this problem is to require proof of certification from relevant vendors or standard bodies.

Evaluate a vendor’s HR and recruiting capabilitiesThe HR and recruiting functions at your vendor partners have never been more important. Attrition in India is skyrocketing. Your vendors need to have state-of-the-art HR and recruiting capabilities to retain staff, keep them happy, and to employ new staff. SVM executives need to audit these capabilities to ensure that the vendors they are selecting have made the right investments in HR (especially if they are not in the top tier, or if there is unusually high turnover on their accounts).

Look forinnovation from vendors with deep vertical/industry expertiseVendors that have clients concentrated in specific verticals often claim to have expertise in those same verticals, however, customers can’t take that as an indicator of vertical capability. SVM executives must evaluate the vendors’ vertical experts and the vertical intellectual property in order to confirm vertical capability.

Evaluate pricing and productivity issues in the context of qualityWhile customers are generally less price sensitive they need to be aware of the productivity-price trade-off. An over emphasis on rates and rate cards and a neglect of seniority metrics can result in very low rates, as well as less productive and experienced people on your projects. To gain transparency into developer productivity and code quality, some companies are using tools, such as those from vendors like Cast, to evaluate the quality of externally developed code and ensure that it meets certain coding and productivity standards.

Beware of managed services engagements obfuscating realityWhile managed services engagements can be extremely beneficial for clients, in this tight labour market; customers must ensure that the managed service model is not just a vehicle for hiding junior resources or short-cutting parts of the software development life cycle (SDLC) in order to save money. Service-level agreements (SLAs) have to be sophisticated enough to prevent this, and SVM executives who are concerned about their vendors’ managed service maturity may still need to evaluate key project team members.

Even as many mature sourcing and vendor management (SVM) groups focus on advanced

topics like establishing new governance models and driving innovation, conversations with enterprises reveal that it’s all too easy to neglect the seemingly mundane risks related to employee attrition, questionable vendor viability, and the risks associated with the increasingly popular managed services engagement model.

Outsourcing


T managers have long bemoaned the tension between “change-the-business” (development) and “run-

the-business” (operations) IT teams and their activities. In fact, most organisations suffer this curse, and stereotypes that reflect this animosity abound.

As IT organisations struggle to deal with the changing IT and business landscapes, the concept of DevOps (i.e. development and operations) has been singled out by many as the way in which infrastructure and operations (I&O) can work more efficiently with other IT silos to benefit the entire business. More specifically, Forrester defines DevOps as:

A set of processes, methods, and systems for communication, collaboration, and integration among the IT functions responsible for application development, infrastructure and operations, and quality assurance; with the functions working together to produce fit-for-purpose and timely software products and services.

For DevOps to work — and it must — I&O teams must accept that 1) the sibling rivalry between app dev and IT ops ultimately hurts the business and 2) IT is now a business expense rather than a business function. While both parties must transform their behaviors, I&O leaders can begin to build a tighter relationship with dev groups by considering the following six proactive measures:

1. Change your change management As noted, many ops groups have change management in place. Ensure that the process is being executed consistently. Any changes performed outside the process should be identified and rectified immediately. Without

execution compliance at or very near 100%, changes will continue to be risky and dev discontent with ops will persist.

2. Communicate more often with the app dev group to increase its knowledge of operations IT teams need to get better at communicating successes to the business and to other IT groups. Aim to adapt work practices to ensure greater exposure between IT silos and greater collaboration on new IT initiatives.

3. Educate app dev on the evolution of I&O as a services-centric organisation I&O leaders should extend ITIL and IT service management education and training to app dev and enterprise architecture in the context of why it’s important to them and to the business service life cycle as a whole. The 2007 introduction of ITIL v3 framework is no longer ops-centric, it accounts for all phases of the service life cycle, including those driven and fulfilled by dev. This is an introduction into modern thinking around IT delivery to meet business needs. The right approach will compel dev to desire a role in ITIL and not feel they’re being forced into it.

4. Consider app dev as “service dev” a subcomponent of the overall IT service. Sitting alongside service design activities, any written code is ultimately part of a more broadly defined IT service that gets delivered to the rightful consumers of that service. I&O execs should therefore build on the aforementioned educational activities to position the somewhat isolated app dev role into a more central service dev role. Instead of isolating dev group members as the narcissistic “them” who look down on “us,” embrace this team as partners in providing relevant services to your joint customers. Key service metric monitoring and liberal use of feedback mechanisms will need to be in place to ensure that mindsets, and resulting behaviours, are actually changing.

5. Understand and manage the diversity of views on IT delivery Senior management needs to ensure that there is a better mix of skills and personality types within IT functional groups. Review people management and development processes and not only frameworks in conjunction with HR. This will identify issues and gaps in IT people but also study their knowledge, skills, and continues development.

6. Integrate I&O’s mission statement with the business Stop repeating the IT-to-business alignment mantra and get on with making IT a crucial business enabler. IT doesn’t align with the business; IT is the business! Start by abandoning the nebulous and ill-conceived alignment and become integrated. There should be no I&O employees, just employees of and contractors to the business that provide technology-enabled capabilities to the business.

HOw tOCollaboration

IT managers struggle with getting development and operations (DevOps) teams working together more efficiently. Here are six ways infrastructure and operations (I&O) can improve collaboration.

Improve collaboration with development and operations


www.blackhat.com

UNITED ARAB EMIRATESEMIRATES PALACE

TRAINING: DECEMBER 12 – 13 BRIEFINGS: DECEMBER 14 – 15 EXPO: DECEMBER 14 – 15[dates]

Two day training courses:

SAVE $540. REGISTER AT GITEX (TRA STAND)*Saving is on briefings. Training courses are charged separately. GITEX price $1255 [non-GITEX early price $1395 until Oct 17 and late price $1795 from Oct 18 – Dec 15]

Keynote speaker: General (Retired) Michael Hayden, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Deputy Director

of the National Security Agency (NSA) presents “cyber security and cyber threats in a changing world”.

TEHTRI-Security: Advanced PHP Hacking

Cyber Network Defense Bootcamp

SensePost: Hacking by Numbers: Unplugged Edition

Infrastructure Attacktecs & Defentecs: Hacking Cisco Networks

HotWAN: Mobile Hacking

Assessing and Exploiting Web Applications with Samurai-WTF

The Exploit Laboratory

Incident Response: Black Hat Edition by MANDIANT

Foundstone: Malware Forensics & Incident Response

TaoSecurity: TCP/IP Weapons School 3.0

Silver sponsorsGold sponsor

Official media partnersOfficial news wire

Organised byICT Partner

Join us on Facebook: Blackhat // LinkedIn: Black Hat // Twitter: @BlackHatEvents or BlackHatHQ // Flickr: BlackHatEvents

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

Black Hat_Computer News ME_Advert_2011_20.7x27 cm_New_04_High Res.pdf 1 9/26/11 12:16 PM

PRODUCtSMobility

The Galaxy S II builds on Samsung’s successful line of Galaxy Android phones with new display

technology, a dual-core processor and 4G speeds.

The first thing I noticed when I picked up the Galaxy S II was how thin and light it is. It felt pretty good in hand, too--less plasticky than some of the previous-generation Galasxy S phones. Overall, the phone has an attractive, minimalist look. One nice feature is that the face is made of Gorilla Glass, which is the same scratch-resistant glass as that of the Apple iPhone 4.

Measuring 4.9 inches tall by 2.6 inches wide by 0.3 inch thick, the Galaxy S II is remarkably svelte.

The Galaxy S II’s display is gorgeous--one of the best we’ve ever seen. It uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus display technology. According to Samsung, Super AMOLED Plus displays have 50% more subpixels than the first-generation Super AMOLED displays and perform even better that their predecessors in bright light.

Finally we got to review a phone with the latest version of Android--version 2.3 (aka Gingerbread). Though the Galaxy S II also runs a Samsung-built overlay, TouchWiz 4.0, most of the new features in Gingerbread remain untouched.

The user interface for the cameras differs from the stock Gingerbread version, but you can still switch between the front-

stunning and speedy

facing camera and the back-facing one via a consistent icon at the top of the camera viewer. Google introduced this small but useful feature in Gingerbread in anticipation of an onslaught of smartphones with front-facing cameras due out this year.

The new version of TouchWiz comes with new Music, Game, and Readers Hubs that join the Social and Media Hubs.

Like all Galaxy phones, the S II provides the Media Hub for your movie and TV-watching pleasure. Video looked fantastic on the handset’s display and played back smoothly. Even if you don’t like Samsung’s Media Hub, you’re going to want to watch a lot of movies and TV shows on this phone.

Like many other recent high-end phones, the Galaxy S II has an 8-megapixel camera plus a front-facing camera for video calls. I was very impressed with the image quality of my photos, both indoor shots and outdoor ones. The shutter speed on the camera was fast enough to capture photos of sports, kids, and other quick-moving subjects.

The Galaxy S II is powered by a dual-core processor, and the dual-core power was apparent in just about every aspect of the phone’s performance. Scrolling was fluid in apps and Web pages, video played back smoothly, and I zipped speedily through the phone’s menus.

If you’re in the market for a new phone this spring, you’re going to have some tough decisions to make.

The decision-making process really comes down to variations in the Android overlays. TouchWiz 4.0 adds some cool features and functions to the platform. Like the Galaxy S II, it’s a 4G dual-core phone, but it runs plain Android 2.2 (which I hope will soon be upgraded to Android 2.3).

VERDICT: Aye, definitely


www.infocomm-mea.com

PRODUCtSMobility

with ports. Along the lower left (portrait), or bottom edge (landscape), sits the full-size USB 2.0 port for use with USB devices like a flash drive or hard drive.

Lenovo’s business-friendly tweaks go beyond the hardware. In addition to providing the Lenovo Launch Zone and handy App Wheel—both handy, customisable home screen app widgets first introduced with the IdeaPad K1—the company provides preloaded software applications aimed at business users.

For the corporate IT market that Lenovo caters to with its ThinkPad brand, the tablet has a handful of custom features that court this audience.

The ThinkPad Tablet looks and feels bulky, but it’s the first tablet to truly target business users with its configuration. The ThinkPad’s pen input is a benefit; its poor built-in speaker a deterrent, especially for presenters who need passable audio. Still, together with the Folio case, this tablet makes a compelling case for business users and even students who want to switch more of their day-to-day tasks to a tablet.

VERDICT: Aye (if you are a business user)

Thinking different

The ThinkPad Tablet, like its laptop brethren, has its sights squarely set on business users. And like the

ThinkPad laptops, Lenovo largely succeeds in putting together a business-worthy package with its own design, features, and associated bundled software.

The ThinkPad Tablet has a starkly different design as compared with its sibling, the IdeaPad. It has four physical buttons on the front, situated along the bottom beneath the screen, and is optimised for use in portrait orientation.

The specs of the ThinkPad Tablet ring familiar for an Android 3.1 Honeycomb tablet. It packs a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of memory, and a choice of 16GB ($499), 32GB ($569), or 64GB ($699) for internal storage.

The overall photo-viewing experience compares favorably to the Apple iPad 2 Colours were bright but not oversaturated, and skin tones looked warmer and more natural than they have on other Android tablets we’ve tested. The display had an impressive viewing angle, as you’d expect from IPS technology (Lenovo claims it’s a 178 degree angle), and it has Corning Gorilla Glass to prevent against accidental scratches and breakage.

Other familiar specs include Wi-Fi and 3G (all models have a SIM card slot, but 3G certification will be complete later this fall),

a slew of sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, assisted GPS, ambient light sensor), as well as dual cameras.

As with its IdeaPad K1, Lenovo has made some tweaks to the stock Android Honeycomb interface to improve usability. The three core home screen navigation buttons are redesigned to be more cleanly defined the recently opened apps scroll offers a way to kill apps and a redesigned settings pop-up menu, to provide wider access to frequently changed settings than Android provides by default.

The ThinkPad Tablet has some purposeful inclusions that Lenovo counts on holding appeal for business and IT users. Some of these, however, have appeal for consumers, too.

For starters, Lenovo is the first to bring a large-screen Android tablet to market with pen input; the company uses N-trig’s digitiser technology. Unlike other tablets that have pen input, the touch sensor grid was not immediately visible or distracting in use.

Lenovo also packs the ThinkPad Tablet


www.gitex.com

www.gitex.com/cn

Last word

Next issue Events

ICT Achievement Awards 20119th October 2011 Sheikh Rashid Hall, Dubai World Trade Centrewww.computernewsme.com/ictachievementawards2011

Infrastructure Strategies 2011 31st October 2011 Dubai (venue to be confirmed)www.infrastructurestrategiesme.com

Sustainable ICT 2011 21st November 2011 Dubai (venue to be confirmed)www.sustainableictme.com

Online

WHat We’Re ReadiNg

Higher AmbitionMichael Beer, Flemming Norrgren and co-authors Book

Want to make the world a better

place? Start with your workplace.

Beer and Norrgren say that

by keeping one eye on the

greater good, you can improve

your company while producing

benefits for society at large. This

book synthesises the experience of 36 CEOs, many

of whom inherited failing companies, and explains

how they ran their companies in socially responsible

ways, became more approachable leaders, and still

kept shareholders happy.

Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create

Economic and Social Value (Harvard Business

Review Press)

CredibilityJames M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner Book

Getting people—both above

and below you on the

organisational ladder—to

listen to you takes credibility.

The authors of The Leadership Challenge have

expanded on that book by updating this one.

Originally published in 1993, Credibility provides

new insights and interviews from leaders who

have built trust and used it to acheive great things.

Kouzes and Posner don’t just talk to leaders, though,

but also their constituents. One hundred thousand

people were asked what qualities they look for in

those they follow, and Kouzes and Posner came up

with some surprising tips. For example: Build hope

by acknowledging reality but refusing to accept that

bad predictions will inevitably come true.

Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why

People Demand It ( Jossey-Bass)

OctOber 2011


Technology focus: Collaboration technologies

From web conferencing and chat, to video conferencing and unified communications, from closed-loop enterprise communications to social media, options for collaboration tools abound for the modern organisation. CNME asks how organisations can pick the right tool from the choices that exist, and the elements they need to keep in mind to gain the highest productivity from their investments.

Technology focus: Business continuity

You can have state-of-the-art infrastructure and the best in software solutions, but if your storage crashes on you or your connectivity goes down, how are you going to get to the information you need to keep your organisation on your feet? CNME reveals the latest in business continuity solutions and strategies.

Vertical focus: Construction and real estate

Construction is one of the biggest spenders on IT solutions in the region. While the recession might have affected some geographies, others still continue to build and spend massively on the latest in IT solutions. We ask what specialised solutions this industry requires, and whether it is getting the right support from vendors and partners.

For the latest in news, analysis, features, case studies, and blog articles on trends and issues in the ICT industry across the globe and in the Middle East, please visit www.computernewsme.com

www.riverbed.com/microsite/disaster_recovery/

[email protected]

Optimize your data protection capabilities withRiverbed and recover fasterTo find out how. go to

Contact Us:

www.sas.com/performance

Date post:	31-Mar-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	computernews-middle-east
View:	217 times
Download:	0 times

Computer News Middle East

Documents