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Age of the data scientist“Data science and big data – they are so much more interesting than the subject of storage. You have to be honest about it,” said Josh Klahr, vice president of products at Greenplum.

indepth interview on big data, on the sidelines of EMC World 2012. The

by the time I got to have a chat with Klahr. It was, however, the day of the

scientists – to discuss the evolution and relevance of information, as well as the ways in which more information can be extracted from raw data.

what Klahr was referring to.

a data scientist was at last year’s EMC World 2011.

effectively brings together multiple disciplines within a single fold.

visualisations, computer programming, data mining, machine learning and database engineering to solve complex data problems. That is according

over a decade. The International Council for Science: Committee on Data for Science and Technology has been publishing the CODATA Data Science Journal since April 2002).

global storm as the area of big data gains traction among organisations.

America start to increase.

understanding of data creation and have an interest in understanding patterns. Then, the trainee also needs to have a penchant towards statistics,

and has an interest in understanding more of the data layers, is a prime

them proper data scientists.On the day of the Data Science Summit, I was witness to a heated debate

a particular stream can be a helpful base for a future data scientist, as long as the said person is adaptive enough to learn new streams and integrate

currently operates will be imitated and repeated a hundred times over by

interesting than plain old storage.

Sathya Mithra AshokSenior Editor

E-mail:[email protected]

EDITORIAL

PublisherDominic De Sousa

Group COONadeem Hood

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PRODUCTION AND DESIGN

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Talk to us:

Walking a tightropeAlong with cloud and big data, BYOD seems to have found a place in the pantheon of hottest buzzwords in technology today.

the tidal wave of consumerisation of IT that shows no signs of ebbing away.

study that found out a vast majority of organisations in the US are adopting

is easy to customise with productivity tools and apps than a clumsy device issued by the IT department? Cisco estimates that the annual company cash

on the employee’s job role. When you allow your employees to bring their own personal gadgets, it saves you the trouble of investing in and procuring hardware, which explains the cost savings.

A survey done by the wireless vendor Aruba in EMEA indicates that both

control who may not be concerned about security policies or the sensitive data they carry in their devices. Though vendors have jumped into the fray

an unstoppable trend that enterprises in the Middle East will have to deal

Jeevan ThanpakkanSenior Editor

E-mail:[email protected]

EDITORIAL

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ANALYSIS

8 Growth on the cards

the Middle East as a major area of growth. COO Randy Crenshaw was

10 HP bets on SDN

space, Interop Las Vegas 2012 was the stage it chose to declare it is

14 A story of transformation

At EMC World 2012, the company focused its energies on highlighting

as to capitalise on a new age of growth.

18 The end of email

asserts its messaging and collaboration solutions exemplify the future

at IBM Software Group, explains why the company believes traditional email will soon be a thing of the past.

20 A natural move

22 Roadmap to the cloud

24 Round-up

CASE STUDY

38 Evaluating infrastructure

infrastructure a few months ago. But the hiring of a new CIO and an

ContentsISSUE 245 | JUNE 2012

Saudi Arabia Airlines discusses the mammoth IT project that enabled a business transition.

32 Taking off

42 High grades

resources for both students and teachers.

SOLUTIONS WORLD

48 A tough job

sweeping the Middle East and how much CIOs are happy to leave it all

NETWORK WORLD

56 Gigabit wireless steams ahead

shelves sporting the faster wireless protocol.

6 Computer News Middle East JUNE 2012 www.cnmeonline.com

58 Securing wireless networks

When it comes to ensuring 24/7 security and compliance monitoring

demands the need for cost optimisation. And yet, guaranteeing the

reveals how to maximise ROI without compromising corporate data.

STORAGE ADVISOR

64 Big data in the cloud

There’s a wealth of data that companies can use to better understand customers and identify emerging business opportunities and threats.

service called data as a service, or DaaS, promises to help.

SECURITY ADVISOR

70 Achieving maturity

What is the business case for GRC in a modern organisation,

experts to answer these burning questions.

TELECOMS WORLD

78 The rise of the machines

communications may have had a subdued year during 2011, but industry experts expect it to emerge as one of the underlying technologies of smart

2012.

INTEGRATION ADVISOR

84 Post a merger

and acquisition is very different from conducting the same

reaching success.

CAREERS ADVISOR

88 Emiratisation in IT

Rossi examines the subject of Emiratisation in IT.

INTERVIEW

94 All systems go Cloud, virtualisation and mobility are driving the

the crest of this new wave. The company’s

blueprint for growth.

96 Sharing lessons

Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO and COO, Global Centers of

adoption of cloud and big data, and the challenges they faced along the way, on the sidelines of EMC World 2012.

LAST WORD

98

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7Computer News Middle EastJUNE 2012www.cnmeonline.com

The Middle East is seen as a promising emerging region for many global companies going

forward. Richard Crenshaw, COO at CommScope, says that gaining double-‐digit growth is a minimum forecast for the networking company’s own investments in the region.

“This is just due to the vibrancy of the economy. Certainly the petrochemical base in the region doesn’t hurt and being a central

ANALYSISCommScope

Growth on the cardsNetwork infrastructure provider CommScope is setting its sights on the Middle East as a major area of growth. COO Richard Crenshaw was in Saudi Arabia and the UAE last month to facilitate discussions. He speaks to CNME about CommScope’s plans for the region and the major trends in the networking space.

it very critical. ” he says. “Also there’s just this demand there for

wireless as people go straight to a wireless infrastructure and don’t even bother with

These are all growth areas,” he adds.Crenshaw was in Saudi Arabia and

particularly the KSA.

“We’re increasing investment and

with our new joint venture over there, which is dedicated more towards the enterprise space. We also have a distribution centre in Dubai and are upping the investment there in support of a lot of initiatives going on in both the wired and wireless space,” Crenshaw says.

Crenshaw believes the region is once again showing positive signs of growth


the issue of who pays for increasing capacity out there.

up with the demands that the devices are placing on them,” he says.

“So how do they adequately manager

parties involved? They can’t continue to give

tailored to the application?” he adds.

the operators are going to say they can’t

So I anticipate them to start building more

that can handle the capacity based on where

“There is a lot of discussion around

consumers – both commercial and personal

media is going to ultimately win out. There is a shift towards pushing out a lot of the

basis,” he concludes.

capacity, the ability to steer the signal so we can utilise information and to get more sophisticated systems,” he adds.

as a “turning point.”“The expectation that people want to

have the same performance when they’re moving as they have when sat at a connected

today but, particularly with younger users

to support all those devices,” he says.Whilst those are the trends affecting the

year, Crenshaw believes moving forward

following the economic bust it suffered and

of that.“Obviously there’s been a large boom

are seeing evidence of an improvement, particularly around infrastructure and

so much the commercial side yet – there’s still lots of overbuild and empty space – but

starting to spend, with airport construction,

starting to move,” he says.

CommScope’s Middle East business to be

compared to the last quarter of 2011 as a

the region. “We’ve been in the Middle East for a long

time. We’ve been through the ups and downs. We see the area as a very critical hub for us, not only serving the Middle East but Africa and parts of Europe as well. It’s a very good logistical location. We have a lot of support

in the region, and we’re constantly adding support personnel there,” Crenshaw says.

“We’ve recently consolidated all of our enterprise businesses and our wireless businesses in one new location. They have

centre, so we’re aggregating it as a regional technical hub for the company. My travels allow me to assess what the conditions are,” he adds.

Trends

Crenshaw believes a major trend affecting

“As consumers want more features

LTE – they are increasingly having capacity issues in high urban areas where people

Android devices. These tend to consume a lot of bandwidth and therefore require better management and infrastructure,” he says.

“We’re just seeing extreme capacity

Richard Crenshaw, COO at CommScope

We’re increasing investment and doubling the size of our business in Saudi with our new joint

venture over there, which is dedicated more towards the enterprise space. We also have a distribution centre in Dubai and are upping the investment there in support of a lot of initiatives going on in both the wired and wireless space.”


ANALYSISInterop

HP began the Interop conference by making several key announcements regarding its

networking portfolio, and positioned itself as a main talking point for the remainder of the week.

the announcement of its partnership with

The solutions are based on the

The new technology will offer what

Mike Banic, VP of marketing at HP Networking

Bethany Mayer, GM at HP Networking

HP bets on SDNIn a week where HP made several significant plays in the networking space, Interop Las Vegas 2012 was the stage it chose to declare it is not only pioneering, but also ready to lead, the ‘mega shift’ towards software defined networking (SDN).

and time to manage and then they don’t have to spend as much time on maintaining

other innovations and they can also be able

on this 10 years from now, they’ll write that

operational costs from man power.

have been run, everything’s been managed

orchestration, eliminating manual configuration and enabling application deployment in minutes.

throughout the remainder of the conference.

“Our aim is to deliver technologies that are innovative and in some way disruptive. We have a very good advantage

provides customers with virtualisation and helps them simplify the management of their

because it is something customers want. “It’s the way to go because it’s a means

from a single point of control vs. having to run around managing each of the boxes separately,” she said.


doing this rudimentary programming, the

you’re busying their time by doing mundane programming,” Banic said.

and give them some very simple policy driven tools to automate all that and hide that complexity, you free them up to deliver

money to go and execute on products that will help you win the game and possibly change the rules,” he added.

It was clear for all to see at Interop that

to the point where it has become a leading division within the organisation.

way up to Meg Whitman, who is probably one

very passionate about our success and she

Mayer said.

was cloud. Allan Leinwand, CTO of infrastructure

at Zynga, shared the story of how the social gaming giant was saved by the public cloud,

private cloud.When Zynga started out in 2007 with

was simple to manage and subsequent game launches followed a similar process.

in 2009, its large popularity led to serious issues for Zynga.

was explosive growth,” Leinwand said.“We couldn’t get power fast enough.

We couldn’t get servers fast enough. We couldn’t get cooling or our internet service providers to give us bandwidth fast enough. We just couldn’t scale our infrastructure to match the needs of

he added.

for the company to leverage and save the business from collapsing from the overwhelming demand.

Our aim is to deliver technologies that are innovative and in some way disruptive. We have

a very good advantage with the combination of work we’ve done in OpenFlow, as well as our work with the Virtual Application Networks solution, which provides customers with virtualisation and helps them simplify the management of their network.”

component of our infrastructure. It allowed us to scale, and we then launched a number of games on the public cloud. We launched CityVille on the public cloud, which at the time was the fastest growing game on

to realise its strong dependency on the public

opportunity.“We realised that we were renting

what we could own. We wanted to own the base of our infrastructure. That base of our infrastructure would be the hidden gem and core component of our infrastructure plans. Infrastructure would be there to drive our business,” Leinwand said.

Subsequently, Zynga began to explore the idea of building its own private cloud.

out small. We went from building a proof of concept to a new data centre, new servers,

layer – everything from scratch. We did this

and operate the same as the public cloud, it decided to get it ready for full production.

centres. We built it in multiple geographies, interconnected it with fibre, and connected

and public cloud partners. Once we had that done we began the integration of

Allan Leinwand,!CTO of infrastructure at Zynga


Leinwand said.The culmination of this preparation was

“CastleVille’s growth eclipsed the growth

day active players in six days, compared to CityVille’s three million in the same time. It was the fastest growing game in Zynga’s history and it was launched and scaled on

The result was a massive decline in data

public cloud.

playing up in the public cloud. But once we realised we could build a private cloud that could match the needs of our players, we doubled down and started to move

“At the end of 2011 that number had

While Zynga’s cloud story impressed the exhibitors and delegates at Interop with its successful deployment of existing cloud models, another company was setting out to

revealed at Interop it will bring its “game changing” service to the Middle East in the third quarter of 2012.

The company aims to give companies access to the global cloud in an affordable,

Its stated intent to expand to the region came after it announced on day two of the

cloud to regions where AWS does not have a presence.

service through partnership with a regional service provider.

of them. They will give us the infrastructure

put our technology there and then they will sell the technology to their global customers

“This is going to give companies in the Middle East region a global access. Most cloud instances are hosted in the U.S.,

Singapore. We are in all of those places so we’ve built that full mesh already across

we add Dubai to that mesh, we bring companies in that region closer to all cloud services around the world,” she added.

East region, with companies’ concerns over

security limiting their experiences to private and hybrid models.

“Most enterprises, as much as they want to be on the public cloud, they want their experience to be private. They want it to

internet and they don’t trust it – especially in

With us they can get up and running in two days,” she added.

Suri said she believes this new way of accessing the cloud will change the

“This gives Middle East companies a

world for enterprises and you don’t have to

before large corporations follow suit.

pulling into this direction and start leveraging global resources, then the big guys will start realising they are losing out because these little guys are doing this.

trends are made,” she said.

Networking is a high priority for HP. It is viewed very strategically within HP all the way up to

Meg Whitman, who is probably one of the best sales people for networking. She’s very passionate about our success and she spends a lot of time with customers talking about the products we o!er in networking.”

ANALYSISInterop

Sonal Puri, VP of marketing and sales at Aryaka


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Computer_News_ME_20277p.indd 1 2012-05-25 12:22:17

ANALYSISEMC

A story of transformationAt EMC World 2012, the company focused its energies on highlighting the need for organisations to change their thinking and functioning so as to capitalise on a new age of growth.

EMC World 2012 was all about the message of transformation. At its twelfth global annual conference,

which brought together more than 13,000 customers and partners, the company focused on launching a set of products that were meant to take forward the message of transforming technology and business.

“We are calling this Megalaunch 2. Megalaunch 1 was last year. We are launching around 42 products this time over. These

capabilities for customers and partners,”

EMC’s information infrastructure products

at the conference focused around the transformative power of cloud computing

to the advantages of the hybrid cloud and true data analysis.

“Throughout the evolution of IT, the data itself has remained the ultimate source of

or server centres; but rigid technology constraints effectively forced data to a lower priority. The onset of virtualisation, cloud computing and big data analytics, however, have restored data to its rightful place as the centre of IT gravity. The shift is swift and irreversible, from dedicated infrastructure

approach to computing. Today’s EMC announcements address this fundamental shift head on and deliver to customers


our service provider and enterprise customers to manage their expanding cloud

Group.EMC also announced that the Greenplum

that will act as a lab environment for accelerating the pace of big data innovation – is now live. One of the primary uses of

Pat Gelsinger, the president and COO of EMC

be to act as an environment for running

are available to the open source community in an effort to leverage the resources of

technology for big data.Greenplum will use the Analytics

infrastructure technology and also to explore the models for applying big data analytics.

intensive research studies, or collaborating with big data application developers, Greenplum has plans to provide the most

“We’re thrilled to announce that the

With more companies implementing big data

batch processing of data at massive scale,

to driving even better, faster data analytics,”

Greenplum.

made available to members of Greenplum’s

launching this summer, Greenplum will offer

the next wave of technology required as they transform their IT, their business and themselves,” said Gelsinger.

Keeping in tune with the overall theme, there were multiple announcements made

recovery and Isilon. Around the areas of big data, the

enhancements made to the Atmos cloud platform that is meant to transform the way service providers and enterprises manage

storage environments. EMC also announced

even easier and faster to move data in and

According to EMC, a new Atmos Event Manager improves system visibility by

aggregated logging at the system, data centre

time visibility into overall system activity and performance. The new technology also speeds node upgrades in globally distributed

greatly reduced maintenance windows.

have new options to access an Atmos cloud from their native environment. The suite of web access tools is expanded to include

have a new set of capabilities in the Atmos

their applications and traditional apps have new tools and capabilities to move their content into a cloud environment.

“Rapid cloud adoption and Big Data are driving exponentially greater consumption of cloud storage. As service providers and enterprises scale their infrastructures to

in managing ever larger, globally distributed cloud environments. With these announcements, EMC demonstrates

With the Cloud Accelerators, end-users have new options to access an Atmos

cloud from their native environment. The suite of web access tools is expanded to include Google Chrome and HTML5 and complement the existing Firefox browser tool.


programs designed to provide participants

is that any individual who successfully completes the course will be granted access

environment.

the result of several hardware and software companies coming together to collectively facilitate the development of Apache

analytics. This includes EMC, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Seagate, SuperMicro, Switch and VMware.

Apart from these product announcements, EMC used the same time

conference, along with the second Data Science Summit, where it brought together aspiring data scientists to discuss the various

and the challenges involved in analysing and mining data for information.

Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC

Overall, the message was loud and clear.As Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of

EMC put it, “Transformation – across infrastructure and technology, and across the business with big data, along with the

ANALYSISEMC

EMC HOSTS END-USER EVENT WITH MDS SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

Global IT giant EMC, along with MDS Systems

Integration, brought together more than 70 end-

users at an exclusive event to discuss virtualisation

and IT strategies in Dubai last month.

“The event brought together end-users

from across the UAE to discuss the benefits of

virtualisation, and the relevance of big data to

growing organisations. There were also various

conversations on the set of EMC solutions and

their aptness for organisations in the country,”

said Hadi Nader, GM of storage solutions at MDS

Systems Integration.

MDS is one of the biggest, most established

systems integration firms in the UAE. Having

had experience in working with end-users and

solutions for decades now, MDS conducts similar

events in order to educate the market on the latest

in storage and data management solutions.

“We have been around for a long time. We

are constantly working to meet the customer’s

expectations and this has ensured that we enjoy

consistent year-on-year growth – anywhere from

16% to 25%. We have been working with EMC for a

long time, and have consistently won awards from

them for being the best and most reliable partner,”

adds Nader.

MDS is focused on providing consultancy,

designing and delivering solutions and equipment,

along with implementing them and providing after-

sales support to the EMC-portfolio in relation to its

storage and data management solutions.

“The UAE market is well developed in

terms of the overall awareness on storage and

data management technology. MDS is playing a

big role in complementing this awareness, and

helping reach the vision of organisations across

various verticals – from telc to banking, from

government to the military, to all kinds of private

firms. We are formalising their vision with the help

of EMC solutions, and by ensuring that they are

implemented in the right way,” says Nader.

According to Nader, the market needs for

storage and data management in the UAE alone

would average around $300 million, and is set to

increase as more organisations get interested in

the area of big data.

“EMC’s portfolio is very comprehensive

and diversified. And our main aim is to address

the necessity of mid-size as well as enterprise

organisations to fulfil their needs related to data

and to ensure business continuity. MDS has a

defined and clear strategy to continue investing in

resources because they are the main asset for the

company and provides the base for further growth.

We are investing yearly on resources across both

our Dubai and Abu Dhabi o"ces. We have a

very stable plan in place in order to achieve the

demand in the market and to support our growing

end-user base,” concludes Nader.

mindsets of IT personnel themselves – is essential to capitalise on the new dynamics

global organisation start the journey now, and EMC is here to help.”


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ANALYSISIBM

Email has become an integral aspect of communication both internal and external of a business.

However, IBM believe the social revolution is about to change that.

Organisations want a very fast and collaborative environment when it comes to communicating with colleagues, partners and

WW messaging at IBM Software Group. “They don’t want to sit and process

emails all day. They want to bring social software in to their existing environments

young talent that are used to these mobile and social tools,” Welch says.

going to be brought into the enterprise more and more,” he adds.

social, but rather a combination of that with classic messaging.

in a social environment but they still want to bring some of that classic messaging in,” Welch says.

“There’s classic messaging where some

The end of emailIBM is a firm believer in the future of the enterprise being social and asserts its messaging and collaboration solutions exemplify the future of business communications. Jack Welch, director of global messaging at IBM Software Group, explains why the company believes traditional email will soon be a thing of the past.

social environment and then pull in some of that messaging countering and invite communications into that,” he adds.

In January IBM announced its intent to enable messaging inside the context of the social user experience.

“Some users may stay in the classic form

add a bit of messaging,” Welch says. Although IBM admits its messaging and

collaboration business did go through a degree of uncertainty, it has now experienced several quarters of positive growth.

“One of the reasons for that growth

with our connections platform. Another is applying or entitling companies to use some

environment,” Welch says.“That has not only triggered loyal

customers to renew subscription, but some customers to say they’re adding new users because of the social capabilities included

particularly of interest to many customers,” he adds.

warrant investment.“I would simply say it’s going to give

you speed. That’s one of the most noticeable attributes. Once the social transformation does begin, there are savings,” he says.

“We have a discipline and engagement that will tease out those savings and show

organisations that have transformed with our social software, speed is one thing that continuously surfaces as a clear advantage over competitors,” he adds.

Welch believes the Middle East is quite

social, but more so on a consumer level. “Where I see similarities in this region

to other regions is the way the people uses

that very creatively and aggressively, but I

aggressively,” he says.Asides from social, however, he

ultimately sees 2012 as the year of mobile.

tablets and many of the product teams that we

partners – are optimising their user experience for tablets,” he concludes.

They don’t want to sit and process emails all day. They want to bring social software in to their

existing environments and they want to be able to use it to work faster, smarter and to take advantage of young talent that are used to these mobile and social tools.”

Jack Welch, director of WW messaging at IBM Software Group


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ANALYSISFujitsu

When Fujitsu staged its IT Future Roadshow at Atlantis hotel in Dubai on May 21 it sent out a

clear message that the Middle East is a region it is betting on going forward.

Solutions, says the region is becoming of high

over the world, so holding it in the Middle

brings us much closer to our customers and partners in the region. It is a very good forum for our global business executives to exchange ideas and best practices with their regional counterparts,” he says.

and is where substantial economic growth

industry. We have been engaging in discussions with several customers and we feel strongly about them and the future for

A natural moveFujitsu brought its IT Future World Tour to the UAE for the first time last month. Satoru Hayashi, executive vice chairman of the board for Fujitsu Technology Solutions, spoke to Ben Rossi about how the IT giant perceives the Middle East market.

trends and integration of new technologies,

“Whenever I come here I always see new buildings, monorails and infrastructure. It is a cosmopolitan life here and companies

There is big hope for this region,” he adds.

launched in the Middle East ahead of any other region.

capabilities that can automatically resume operations in less than eight minutes. By launching the product here, it shows great

cluster region to have extensive presentation

government.“Right now industries in Saudi Arabia are

facing a large pollution problem. As a result we are using sensors to help us capture air, water and soil data. These sensors which store information will be able to give the Saudi government more insight into what is being emitted into the atmosphere, how much is being emitted and will be able to give a prediction of how the problem might

“It will help the Saudi government to understand what they are dealing with and this data could aid in forming a solution. IT can shape business and government

The Japanese government plans to provide an Intelligent Transport System to

reduce CO2 emissions. “By placing sensors on taxis we can aid in

gathering information by measuring speed, distance and time. This is something that we could also roll out as a pilot phase here in the

to the extent that the company sees energy

which collects data from nuclear plants. Through monitoring this and analysing the information we receive we can come up with a solution to reduce the reliance on power plants. At the moment there is effective collection and utilisation of this sensor data

meters operated by 10 regional utilities in

Whenever I come here I always see new buildings, monorails and infrastructure. It is a cosmopolitan

life here and companies here are very keen to take on new challenges. There is big hope for this region.”

Satoru Hayashi, executive vice chairman of the board for Fujitsu Technology Solutions


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ANALYSISICT Roadmap

In an era where no business can afford system downtime, building a next-‐gen, high performance data centre is

a delicate, ongoing balancing act. Today’s data centres pack more processing power than ever before; consolidation has decreased the physical footprint but has created new power and cooling challenges. This has been further exacerbated with the advent of cloud and virtualisation.

The ICT Roadmap event in Riyadh focused on some of the burning issues

about the need for IT transformation. “Besides security, a major challenge facing

enterprises is the exponential growth in data, which is going be 44 times of what we have today by the end of this decade. On the other hand, data centre complexity is growing and the massive data growth is caused by what

most organisations are struggling to deal with the growth in data. The answer to this predicament is cloud,” he said.

great things about it – its controlled by IT, so

Roadmap to the cloudThe ICT Roadmap event, organised by CNME in Riyadh last month, discussed some of the key strategies and technologies for building next-gen data centres to start the cloud journey.

came along and delivered simplicity,

is the best of both worlds – the security and reliability of enterprise IT with the simplicity and agility of cloud.”

Ahmed Aamer, Group Applications

user’s perspective, who said cloud is still in its infancy and one of the biggest impediments is connectivity. “We need to see how we can shift from a data centric model to a cloud centric one, and carefully evaluate the business processes. Cloud is not about technology, it is all about business

you have to see what your priorities before moving to cloud.”

percent organisations which are adopting cloud and there are many obstacles such as regulations, infrastructure and bandwidth. “We need to focus on the challenges within the data centre that prevents us from moving to cloud. One main concern is that expectations

one data centre challenge and today’s storage

challenges before moving into the cloud era

in cloud.”

about applications in the context of

Data Solutions, said infrastructure is most important element for cloud and

architecture, which discussed some of the data centre issues today related to consolidation, bandwidth, etc.

Bridging, that will allow to decouple the physical infrastructure from the connectivity

provisioning,” he said.

The next leg of ICT Roadmap will take place in Doha on 18th of June, at the Sharq Village. Visit www.ictroadmap.com for more details.


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MEEZA IT Services & Solutions Provider

Located on its own campus, 30km outside of Doha, M-VAULT 2 is scheduled to begin operation at the beginning of the 3rd quarter of this year. It is designed and built to Uptime Institute Tier III Standards, with 99.98%

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M-Vault 2 and M-Vault-3, enthuse the ICT sector in Qatar and the region

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To accomplish the goals of meeting the IT requirements of the local organisations, MEEZA set forth in the strategic plan, an effort to identify a list of industries with

industries. These industries are: Please contact our team of experts to discuss your business challenges and to explore the added value of our services and solutions to support your business objectives.

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Business services and solutions available through a private, hybrid or public cloud gives MEEZA clients access to a robust selection of instantly scalable applications without the high costs of ownership and maintenance.

Meeting the market demands across all industries

Schneider Electric announced that recent acquisition Telvent has completed

transportation system, SmartMobility Road Suite, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

reduction in both the number of accidents and travel time within city limits, as well as a drop in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, the company said.

Urban populations are set to double by

population. To meet the challenges this will create, Schneider Electric said its Smart Mobility solutions for integrated city management

to be implemented in Saudi Arabia – on King Abdullah Road – Schneider Electrics SmartMobility manages interurban expressway

The system controls and manages the

devices in place along the expressway’s

user safety and security and improving infrastructure maintenance.

information on traffic conditions, which

and efficiently to any incidents that may occur on the expressway, in accordance with action plans that are predetermined by the application.

this information in real time, gaining the capability to select the route that best suits their interests at any time.

system on King Abdullah Road, the company

said Christophe Campagne, Schneider Electric country president for Saudi Arabia.

“The cities will experience reduced

use and lower emissions by providing residents with easier travel across modes of transport,” he added.

SmartMobility is part of the smart cities solutions provided by Schneider Electric, which also include smart grid, smart buildings, smart water and smart public services.

Month in view

ROUND-UP

Schneider Electric implements intelligent transportation system in KSA

Hewlett-‐Packard will trim 27,000 employees as part of its long-‐term restructuring plan, the company said

results.

combination of layoffs and retirement

vary by country.

The restructuring program is expected

savings will be reinvested in the company,

also are “necessary to improve execution

Meg Whitman said in a statement.

same quarter a year ago. It reported revenue

from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.The company also forecast third

analysts had forecast.

HP to trim 27,000 employees


Huawei has been selected by Saudi Telecom Company (STC) to supply new solutions to the company’s next-‐generation metro WDM networks in Saudi Arabia.

As the biggest operator in the Middle

broadband services in recent years, rapidly

services in Saudi Arabia.

Device) technology to save on both space and

and serve our customers more agilely,” said

director at STC.Due to its simple design and structure,

WDM architecture by integrating

photonic components of the WDM system – such as lasers, modulators, detectors, multiplexers and demultiplexers –

Compared to a traditional

space and power

according to

“Bringing new

this endeavor as a means for developing in KSA.

Month in view

ROUND-UP

Saudi Telecom selects Huawei for metro WDM networks

European enterprises plan to spend almost one-‐third of their annual IT budget on cloud computing over the next 18 months, according to research commissioned by virtualisation software firm VMware.

The study, which explored the views of IT leaders involved in the purchase process for cloud computing systems across seven EMEA countries, including

budgets are allocated to cloud computing, which is up from the 26 percent in a

VMware said the increase in cloud spending was a result of organisations wanting a more agile, productive and

connected enterprise. The vast majority

EMEA consider cloud computing to be

percent) consider it a “critical/high

followed by 24 percent in public and 22 percent in public/private hybrid clouds.

technology the control of data and security are still a major concern, with

security is their number one barrier to cloud adoption.

Joe Baguley, chief cloud technologist

at VMware EMEA, said: “Cloud is no longer just about cost cutting and peripheral applications. We’re seeing a significant shift in the way enterprises

cloud is at the absolute heart of that.”The VMware survey was conducted

firms in the EMEA region that employed

In other cloud deployment news

Rodolpho Cardenuto, said that Latin

application.

EMEA firms spend a third of IT budget on the cloud


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SAP is buying cloud-‐based e-‐commerce vendor Ariba for US$4.3 billion, the companies announced.

said in a statement.The deal has been unanimously approved

by Ariba’s board and is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of this year, subject

When complete, the Ariba transaction

cloud software, which got a previous boost

human resources applications.

out further details of its overall cloud

computing strategy, with which it hopes to shoulder aside rivals such as Oracle as well

during 2011 and has 2,600 employees. Its

collaborations, and intelligence among

to a statement.

assets” under the auspices of Ariba, which will operate as an independent subsidiary. Its CEO, Bob Calderoni, will be nominated to

which has other options for B2B commerce platforms, feel secure in their investments.

McDermott said during a conference call with media and analysts. “The growth opportunity in this arena is huge,” he said.

to other platforms, allowing customers to tap it from “any source system,” according to

McDermott. “All those companies that are not

planning) suite Business ByDesign, as well as the Business One application for smaller companies, McDermott said.

In one respect, the deal is surprising,

company with some capabilities that overlap

according to Calderoni.

and Ariba technology platforms, Snabe

well as analytics, which will help customers better understand their spending and supplier relations.

Month in view

ROUND-UP

SAP is buying Ariba for $4.3 billion

Tech managers need to do a better job developing talent, with too much judgment and not enough instruction, according to new poll data from Dice.com.

relationship between managers and their

relationship isn’t an important factor in the decision to stay at a job, and another

respondents are either between jobs or are the boss.)

In addition to influencing an employee’s job search decisions, an IT boss has the power to influence a company’s reputation and its ability to recruit tech talent, said Tom Silver,

grade,” Silver noted in a report released this month.

A majority of IT professionals judge their current managers as graders

more important to create a nurturing

Silver said.“There will always be a need for some

grading, but the emphasis should be on teaching. Tech professionals do their best

new solutions, explore alternatives and fail,” Silver said.

If tech employees don’t feel valued, they’re going to jump ship. Turnover has fallen below average for 41 months in a row, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but tech managers can’t count on a struggling economy and tight job

Tech managers not doing a good job developing talent: survey


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©2012 Dell Products. Dell, the Dell logo and PowerEdge are registered or unregistered trade marks of Dell Inc. in the United States and other countries. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks or trade names may be used in this document to refer to third-party products (such as operating systems and software) included with the products o"ered by Dell and the entities claiming the marks and names of those products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Dell Corporation Ltd, Dell House, The Boulevard, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1LF.

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CASE STUDYSaudi Arabian Airlines

Taking offAfter state-owned Saudi Arabian Airlines was approved by the

Saudi cabinet in 2007 to convert its strategic units into companies following the launch of a long-awaited privatisation, a mammoth

IT project was on hand to enable the transition. Ben Rossi reports.


“We would never be able to consolidate

to maintain that aspect of uniformity and standardisation between these various

procurement, vendor management and

processes,” he adds.

The IT department at Saudi Airlines, led by CIO Muhammad Ali M. Albakri, were tasked with setting

up the application systems and core business processes of 13 companies, as well as a holding company, on the SAP platform.

business. So catering, ground services,

those units have been separated from the main airlines and they all now have their

“Some of them we have sold part of,

services, which we forged a joint venture on and now it handles all the airlines that

ensure that those companies are set up and

separated,” he adds. The implementation of the entire suite of

separation of the companies.

maintenance, fuel management, logistics, vendor management, CRM – you name

the concept of consolidating to the holding,”

Despite the separation of the companies, the airlines made the decision for each of them to share the same set of processes.

“We made a strategic decision not to have a different implementation for each

is we wanted to bring in uniformity between these units and standardise the processes because if you allow each company to have their own processes, standards, procedures

together would become a nightmare,”

Knowledge transfer

transfer was imperative for Saudi Airlines.

journey you have to see it as a long term strategy. If a company isn’t willing to commit

it needs patience, it needs determination and

“We decided to build an internal centre of excellence to support these units. We hired a hundred fresh college graduates. We’re very proud of that and now we’re hiring 20

intelligence) portal arena. We also localised the training so they get the necessary

training its own employees, the airlines also commits to training its users.

time we introduce a new feature or function

With the implementation being such a big project, it was inevitable the IT team

entire implementation was “one massive challenge.”

Muhammad Ali M. Albakri, CIO at Saudi Arabian Airlines

It’s not just the fact that we did this for Saudi Airlines but I think it has changed a lot of the

perceptions about what you can do with technology in the region. All the large and mega consulting firms in the world came to Jeddah and said this plan will never work. They said it’s too much to do at the same time. Now they’re all coming back and wanting to know how we did it.”


“I got most of my grey hair from it

before becoming the CIO. So it was my baby from the start and something I will always be proud of. Really the business change was the biggest challenge. Maintaining a continuous

on a single project. The data migration was

technology that we had to pull information

challenge,” he adds.Integral to the handling of these challenges

was the integrator of the implementation.

challenge after they changed integrator.

left and IBM came in, so we had a change of integrator about midway, which was another challenge. When they left we hired all their consultants to ensure continuity. We also hired those 100 people early on

through the training and involved them in the implementation itself. That provided us with

lot. Whenever we needed expertise in niche areas we had contracts and agreements with

we needed. With data migration, we set

implementation, which helped with that. On top of this, the project team with

and any issues would be discussed.

CASE STUDY

the business strategies so they can generate more revenue. That’s the whole game – IT

he adds.

has led to higher revenue generation and reduced costs, and that more importantly it has swayed the public opinion of Saudi Airlines and its services.

that even attempted to do this. We had to do it because 20 years ago Saudi Airlines was

and products were not being renewed and we continued to be a government run organisation. So something had to be done

“The restructure of the airline from the top to the bottom was another one, and heavy investment in information and telecommunication technology was seen as the vehicle to facilitate and enable these massive changes over a very short period of time. Between 2007 and 2011 we spent

IT master plan has really allowed us to better serve the airlines and all the sister companies, and try to regain the success Saudi Airlines had enjoyed for decades before that,” he adds.

Last year, Saudi Airlines won the award for having the best website in the

“We also briefed our steering board for

we briefed the IT steering committee once a

worthwhile.

operations. Standardising the process and

one system to another has really increased the accuracy and reduced the confusion

says.Most of all, he adds, the implementation

has meant that IT now really enables the airlines to pursue business programmes and strategies.

because of the nature of the legacy system. It was very hard to change and maintain, and there was not a lot of integration between the systems where you had to build interfaces

“In the competitive world of airlines you have to move fast. We sometimes change our

meet the demand of the clients and support

We made a strategic decision not to have a di!erent implementation for each unit. One of

the reasons we brought in SAP is we wanted to bring in uniformity between these units and standardise the processes because if you allow each company to have their own processes, standards, procedures and systems, interconnecting and working together would become a nightmare.”

Saudi Arabian Airlines


internet. The airlines also introduced a unique

payment service that allows customers to pay through an ATM machine or through

its domestic sales are processed through this form of payment and it has also improved the

“Before, people would go through travel agents and other forms of payment and it

that is an immediate cash transfer to our

Power of ITAs well as contributing to its own

implementation has had the wider effect of showing other companies the power of IT.

“It’s not just the fact that we did this for

lot of the perceptions about what you can do with technology in the region. All the

came to Jeddah and said this plan will never

and gained from this experience for others to see how you can go ahead and do this and

of people spend a lot of money on upgrading

infrastructure but do they really impact the business and clients and do they really change the way you do business? We’ve

by using these implementations,” he adds.It is for these reasons that Saudi Airlines

to its IT division. We have about 600 employees under

payroll. Then when you count our partners, because we outsource certain processes in the EMEA, and the outsourced processes, the total

IT at Saudi Airlines acts as an independent department where everything

approved by a board before an SLA is signed between them.

CASE STUDYSaudi Arabian Airlines

our services more valuable to the business because they do have the right to go and

why we continue to review our processes

and we review our contracts with our

the best deals so we can carry it over to our clients,” he says.

It is clear through these investments that the management of Saudi Airlines is not only support of IT, but considers it integral to its success.

“Our biggest support comes from our CEO. When he came to Saudi Airlines in 2006

but he started with IT because he realised

“One of the important things that happened in the transformation of our IT is

all the business boards, all the committees and we participate in the actual business

I got most of my grey hair from it because I was origionally the ERP director and responsible for

implementing the ERP before becoming the CIO. So it was my baby from the start and something I will always be proud of.”


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Evaluating infrastructureShipping firm IAL Logistics didn’t have much with regards to an IT infrastructure a few months ago. But the hiring of a new CIO and an open-ended budget meant it was time to change. Ben Rossi writes.

CASE STUDY IAL Logistics

IAL Logistics has been operating in the region for a long time – 19 years to be exact. With its headquarters in Dubai,

it also has around 20 other branches across the Middle East and in India.

Middle East, its IT infrastructure was not quite up to scratch.

believe IT is “very strategic and extremely important” to the company’s success, it has set out 2012 as the year to upgrade its infrastructure.

Core to this plan is the hiring of a new CIO, Ian Sparrow. Upon arriving at IAL, one

antivirus software, but we found that it was

becoming slow. The client software was becoming heavy,” Sparrow says.


“I’ve been in other organisations with other products and have experienced similar

is utilised by the antivirus software, which has an adverse affect,” he adds.

IAL went through a process of researching and testing other antivirus brands and, after a brief trial with eScan, decided to opt for ESET

“Our main reason to opt for different

lightweight product and after testing other

came out on top in the end,” Sparrow says.“When you compare antivirus software I

Symantec or whoever else. I’m sure

they’re all going to do what they say they’re going to do. But our main reasoning is the

ImplementationIAL’s three month implementation of EDET

shared his case study in May the product had been rolled out to about a third of its user base.

“So far we are happy with it. The

months in total because we’re not in a

uninstall, so we physically have to connect

new software from a central site,” he says.

upgrades are automatic. But unfortunately you can only allot so much time each day to do that. That’s why I’m planning a three month roll out,” he adds.

Sparrow says there is still an element of that going on and training into how to get the most out of the product.

“We’re still learning the niceties of the

up to date information from that one central site, so we’re learning what other features and functions we can get out of the product,” he adds.

With the solution living up to IAL’s

system that IAL uses.


“We use Lotus Domino as our mail system and ESET did not include mail antivirus software. It wasn’t a requirement

Exchange etcetera – but we’ve already got a different solution on our Lotus environment anyway,” Sparrow says.

is a centralised monitoring system.“So once the user are on, we can then

get up to date information on what’s happening. All the other antiviruses have got them as well, but it’s a nice feature that we didn’t have before,” he says.

Revaluation

“We have a central site hosted in Etisalat, where all our servers are. All of our

operations,” Sparrow says.

team because of the products they use.

our business application and because we’ve

The implementation will take about three months in total because we’re not in a centralised

o"ce so with 20 plus remote o"ces it will take time. First we’ve got to uninstall, so we physically have to connect to each PC because we can’t just throw out new software from a central site.”

The recent arrival of Sparrow led to a revaluation on the technology side of IAL.

“I’m basically transforming the whole IT

the current infrastructure is, it’s just the start of what is being planned.” Sparrow says.

complete, the two projects that Sparrow says will lead the agenda in this transformation are virtualisation and

“Our main priority is to change our physical servers into a virtualisation environment. We have got a few servers in the branches at the moment, so we’ve got to centralise them as well,” he says.

will really help the communication aspect because we do have a lot of disparate

video conferencing should minimise the cost and travel factor of communications,” he adds.

CASE STUDY IAL Logistics

Ian Sparrow, CIO at IAL Logistics


DYNAMIC DIST

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OR TO

THE

MIDDL

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MINDWARE FZ LLC

PO Box 55609, Dubai, United Arab EmiratesTel: +971 4 450 0600, Fax: +971 4 450 0678

MINDWARE SAUDI ARABIA

Olaya Street (opposite Olaya Mall next to

Postal Code 11443, Olaya, Riyadh, KSATel: +966 1 215 3126, Fax: +966 1 215 3127

MINDWARE LEBANON

6th Floor, St Georges Center,Main Road, Horch Tabet, Sin El Fil, Beirut, Lebanon,

Tel: + 961 1 499 399, Fax: + 961 1 490 274

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Sameh Kandil, Country Area Manager

www.mindware.ae

As competition between educational institutions heats up, schools are increasingly investing in

new technology as a way to differentiate their instructional offerings and drive

being spent in the classroom and in

a global, technology-‐driven economy, a growing number of classrooms are beginning to incorporate technology

High gradesThe Indian High School in Dubai taps into technology to provide better resources for both students and teachers.

CASE STUDYIndian High School

collaborative, interactive and mobile learning experience.

classrooms in one single premise. The school functions in three campuses with close to

teachers in addition to 200 plus support staff.

and computer labs and even boasts of its own radio broadcasting station.

IT is not always a priority for school but

a pervasive role in augmenting the teaching process. The school has been one of the early adopters of the smartboard technology and its IT department has developed a

evaluation of students on all grounds. What is probably unique is that the school’s IT


teachers it is just too strange and new to integrate into old teaching habits.

“We had to go a very lengthy change management process with the teachers with the introduction of technology into

Through the training programme that lasted three years, educators were shown techniques that allow them to be

in the classroom with a better set of tools. “Technology provides new ways of communication information, as well helping teachers in grading and managing their classes – and gives them access to huge resource of content. We are now in the process of starting podcasts for revision chapters,” says Kumar.

Chaturvedi says the school’s IT infrastructure is very robust and scalable to meet the future growth needs. “We upgrade our infrastructure to match increases in the

volume of content and number of users. We go through software upgrades every three

years. We do provide advanced IT support

storage to support student data and online

It is mandatory for schools these days

seriously and have put in place multiple layers of defense mechanisms to prevent data breaches.

outstanding category, has recently opened a new campus in Dubai Silicon Oasis, which is a perfect showcase of the positive impacts of exploiting technology in education. The new

virtualised and terabytes of storage.

in the process of adding video streaming

we will also be able to build a private cloud

many ways and there are many schools in the region that have emulated the school’s model and its approach to harnessing technology to provide better education.

department comprises mostly of teachers

applications such as database, and runs on a

coverage is ubiquitous and students are encouraged to bring their own devices to access the learning resources.

are major challenges. But we have been able to develop most of our applications

down. Of course, there are areas where we

alliances with vendors such as Microsoft, which provides us technologies at hugely

Advisor to the school.ICT has been embedded in the

curriculum at all levels and is an integral

teachers, technology is a mixed blessing. It threatens them, and excites them. It is a great educational tool but there is a new set of

Ashok Kumar, CEO, IHS

From left to right: Gerald Johnson, IT administrator of IHS with MN Chaturvedi, IT Advisor


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SolutionsWorld

A tough jobHiring new sta! for an IT team can be a tricky task for CIOs. With technical skills being of such imperative value, certifications are important things CIOs have to look for. CNME explores what those all-important certifications are, how they are influenced by IT trends sweeping the Middle East and how much CIOs are happy to leave it all to in-house training.

SOLUTIONS WORLDTraining and certifications

Judging a person’s IT ability by the limited information a resume

can help CIOs make the decision on who is the best candidate for the job.

However, views on their reliability as a key indicator of ability are mixed.

Ananthakrishnan Tharakes, technical and training manager and head of Autodesk Education at Omnix ME, says new staff

very important at Omnix.One key reason for this is its specialisation

in building information modelling (BIM), which is a specialised concept used in architectural, structural and civil design.


very little about the individual’s capabilities,

hold too much power when an individual is being evaluated,” he says.

“Hypothetically speaking everybody sees themselves as an IT expert, but one needs to distinguish between theoretical knowledge and practical experience. Many organisations in the Middle East would like

them instead of educating, training and knowledge that can be utilised in different job functions required on the market. We have often seen people claiming to be Cisco

tracks available on the market) but in reality the practical knowledge does not exist to even handle simple basic tasks. This applies across all segments within the IT industry,” he adds.

TrainingSolling also reckons enterprise organisations, government entities and system integrators in the region do not allocate enough budget to training their employees.

“We do see cases where customers have implemented the most expensive oversized technologies but they are hardly able to operate, administrate and maintain them. This is not always a mistake of the end customer, it is also very much driven by the vendors who, instead of doing the proper sizing, tend to oversell the product part. As part of our helpAG policy, all projects need to have a proper implementation documentation, knowledge transfer and handover of the solution plus trainings as part of the project,” he says.

Jose George, manager of business and escalation, enterprise infrastructure at Emitac,

which experience can be built on.

relevant experience is a key consideration

are recognition by many product vendors for gaining specialised product knowledge and marketability. As system integrator, we have to keep the level of expertise for the products and services we offer, wherein

experience is considered a weighing factor,” George says.

He adds that Emitac will generally recruit consultants and engineers who are ready for production.

“However, we prioritise their skills to match with industry requirements. I don’t see anyone struggling because of lack

BY THE NUMBERS

80,000 5X 96% 7%11 cloud computing companies added

80,000 jobs in 2010

The employment rate at these organisations was five times that

of the high-tech sector overall

amount of information security professionals currently employed

amount of information security professionals that had been

unemployed at any point during 2011

Source: San Hill Group, (ISC)2, 2012

Ananthakrishnan Tharakes, technical and training manager and head of Autodesk Education at Omnix ME

“We have seen that many of the country’s

in their early adoption stages, which means that much is to be learned. We have seen the strong potential of BIM across key segments like construction, architecture, engineering, interior design, planning, facilities management and maintenance. Therefore, industry professionals are calling for more trainings, workshops and skills development for this innovative new design solution,” Tharakes says.

“The instructors that we have at our AATCs

solutions. This is because we offer programs where our students can learn from highly

are up-‐to-‐date on Autodesk’s latest technology. The instructors we have are design software

and more than 10,000 hours of teaching experience,” he adds.

Nicolai Solling, director of technology services at helpAG Middle East, disagrees on

they are often an unreliable indicator of an applicant’s credentials, but his opinion

with. As a security focused system integrator and consultancy business we have a steep requirement from many of our suppliers

in order to meet the requirements of their partnership programs. However, being in the industry for a very long time I am also


of information or training. An individual who is a quick learner will have all the

he says.Tharakes went into more detail of why

Omnix deems it important to employ IT team

Autodesk programs.

the candidate’s completion of training but also show how knowledgeable and

matter. We strongly recommend the

civil, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, manufacturing, structural, multimedia and visualisation,” he says.

He does add, however, that asides from

to immediately address any issues and challenges brought to them by the client.

Evolution of ITGeorge says the evolution of IT and trends

created a demand for staff who understand its potential in the modern world.

“We are seeing the computing power reach the palmtops and mobiles in a rapid way, which is changing the outlook of the young graduates. I have come from an era when object-‐oriented programming was a way of life,” George says.

Information explosions are the avalanche that never stops. Also the struggles, priorities and timelines take a different leap. Key focus here is the management of these demands and how to evaluate the priorities. So the task force should be capable of a leading role in complex deliverables to clients,” he adds.

Nitin Anand, director at Skyline University College, points to social media as a factor of a candidate’s potential employment that is potentially more important than

“A key trend affecting talent management and that requires immediate attention is the impact of social media on various aspects of business. Social media is a major trend this year affecting development and recruitment criteria. It is not an unknown fact that social media is considered as a referral during the pre recruitment process not only for background checks but also analyse the network of a candidate to enhance the visibility of organisation,” Anand says.

He adds that the mobile trend is another element organisations are looking at when hiring for the IT team.

“This technology is not limited to communication these days. Early adoption of this platform is considered as best practice for any organisation. It has become mandatory for the business managers to make sure their staff are well versed with such technology, and if not, given appropriate training for same,” he says.

Andrew Hurt, general manager at Xerox Emirates, believes that graduates are generally not well trained in key industry trends. He says that because they come from an academic environment they are book smart but have no proper industry experience.

apply themselves and their competencies to a given situation and also how they can develop these further in theory and in practice,” he says.

GraduatesSolling says helpAG has gotten by this by recently opening an internship program for graduates.

“We were a bit reluctant in this in the past because we were not ready with the correct support in our organisation. However

with a permanent position for the engineer

Being in the industry for a very long time I am extremely aware that certifications only say very little about the individual’s capabilities, which is

why you cannot let certifications hold too much power when an individual is being evaluated.”

SOLUTIONS WORLD

Jose George, manager of business and escalation, enterprise infrastructure at Emitac

Nicolai Solling, director of technology services at helpAG Middle East

Training and certifications


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and we were very happy with the potential of this individual,” he says.

He adds that training is an “absolute must” at helpAG.

“Training can be two fold based on

also about giving the engineers the ability and capabilities to study new solutions and applications of existing solution. In order to do this you need to allow time and provide the correct technical environment, which is why helpAG have a very high budget every year for demo devices and technical training,” he says.

“Every engineer in helpAG will have a training and development plan created together with their manager, which allows

development path documented,” he adds.George describes the employment

process for the IT team as a “two way process.”

“We have to keep up with stringent requirement of our solution vendors and on the other side, we have to show our value add to our customers. Hence the

aligned with the market requirements, while keeping the partner levels optimal for it,” he says.

“Currently we have a large partner ecosystem, starting with infrastructure vendors to cloud providers. Quite a bit of them are dynamic in their evaluation process. Consulting level expertise skills with the market leaders are often considered,” he adds.

Hurt says that Xerox often favours hiring young people who it can shape and train into where they need to be.

on students that we can train and develop accordingly. We then boot camp them to the required level through various development methods like on the job experience, coaching and project work,” he says.

Anand agrees that training is paramount and points to the things that Skyline trains existing staff on.

“We train existing staff on search engine optimisation (SEO), social media optimisation (SMO), social media marketing (SMM) and Google Adwords. We also train our faculty and staff on plagiarism and advanced Excel operations. The need for data recording, managing and generating reports is essential in educational institutions to respond promptly to student queries. Training on these areas is provided at regular intervals,” he says.

PersonalSolling adds that identifying the correct individuals to hire is key to the success of helpAG.

“I am happy that we are able to grow our organisation with a very controlled way with very high retention. In order to maintain this

personal as well as technical capabilities,” Solling says.

“We all spend a lot of hours at work, so it is important that we provide a

comfortable working environment – both at the personal and professional level. Keeping in tune is very important, but in a technical environment like helpAG we do have a very technical approach and within the team there is a lot of knowledge sharing,” he adds.

Despite the importance of training and

aptitude to learn quickly is just as important when hiring new member of staff.

“We believe that there has to be a balance in our approach in terms of these factors. One does not necessarily triumph over the other because at the end of the day

it boils down to how and to what extent an individual will apply their unique skill sets to any given position,” Hurt says.

Tharakes says Omnix seeks individuals who are enthusiastic and demonstrate the ability to learn more.

“Omnix invests heavily in its team in terms of training and getting certified across newer programs that come along. This move assures us that our IT Team is ready to deal with any challenges presented to them,” he adds.

Nitin concludes that candidates with aptitude to learn will prevail over more experience applicants.

“It is an inevitable fact that the only thing permanent is change. If a candidate has an aptitude to learn new industry trends quickly then they are preferred because they will be moving in conjunction with the future changes. However, a combination of experience with enthusiasm and an aptitude to learn is the best choice,” he says.

Andrew Hurt, general manager at Xerox Emirates

SOLUTIONS WORLD

I think the significant trends we see today are the need for the software to be made customisable

because most of the trends we see are towards mobility and social networking. There seems to be an increased need for things like sales force automation and customer service automation.”

Training and certifications


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NetworkWorld

STRATEGIC IT NETWORKING PARTNER

Gigabit wireless steams ahead

I802.11n wireless routers and devices became available-‐-‐also well ahead of

standard. 802.11ac is also referred to as “gigabit Wi-‐Fi” and will be capable of

than the current 802.11n.

Your 802.11n wireless network and devices are about to become passé. Although the o"cial 802.11ac specification won’t be

finalised until sometime in 2013, wireless equipment will soon appear on store shelves sporting the faster wireless protocol.

for enterprises is that 802.11ac is 5Ghz only. As the technology is adopted, more devices will support 5Ghz, and this is capacity-‐rich band. This gives more capacity options in congested places like a conference centre for example,” says Nader Baghdadi, Middle East Regional Sales Director of Ruckus Wireless.

Chris Kozup, Senior Marketing Director of Aruba Networks, says the main driving

802.11n works in both 5GHz and 2.4GHz frequency ranges. 802.11ac will be purely 5GHz. The higher frequency has less range when dealing with walls and other obstacles, but there is also far less interference in the 5GHz range.

“As with all innovations, 802.11ac aims to deliver a faster, more reliable

NETWORK WORLDNETWORK WORLDWireless


force behind 802.11ac is the need for increased capacity in access layer networking

which provided up to 11 mbps data rates per radio in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. The next evolution was 802.11a which provided up to 54 mbps data rates per radio in the 5 GHz spectrum. 802.11g came out shortly after enabling 54 mbps per radio in the 2.4 GHz

802.11n spec allows for data rates up to 600 mbps per radio and the current generation of 802.11n allows for up to 450 mbps per radio. 802.11ac builds on 11n and enables wireless speeds of over a gigabit per second.”

802.11ac uses wider channels to move more data. 802.11n relies on 40MHz channels. 802.11ac doubles that to 80MHz by default, with an option to use 160MHz channels. Coupled with QAM encoding that’s

transferring data at 433Mbps. Also, there are twice as many spatial

streams available in 802.11ac as there are in 802.11n. With eight spatial streams-‐-‐each capable of a theoretical 433Mbps-‐-‐802.11ac devices that use eight antennas can reach speeds up to nearly 7Gbps.

Beamforming is another unique feature

angles and surfaces arrive at the device out of phase from each other and cancel each

Nader Baghdadi, Middle East Regional Sales Director of Ruckus Wireless

Severine Real, Senior Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

other out. Beamforming resolves the phase

stable throughput. 802.11n is capable of beamforming, but the technique is rarely used. Beamforming is still optional in 802.11ac, but will likely be used much more commonly in 802.11ac devices.

Products based on 802.11ac are expected to begin appearing late this year, delivering improved coverage and theoretical speeds up to twice those offered by the fastest 802.11n gear. “The 802.11ac project was approved in September 2008 and Draft 1.3 is currently available. The internal working group’s November 2011 ballot did not pass. It required 75% approval and it failed with 74% approval. Efforts are underway to address the

802.11ac access points are expected to hit the market sometime in 2013. Consumer devices

products will likely be based on a draft of the spec similar to 802.11n,” says Kozup.

Although 802.11n has been around for years, there are still many routers and wireless devices in use that rely on the older 802.11b and 802.11g protocols. As we transition to 802.11ac, there will still be 802.11b-‐g devices, and it will take years for 802.11n to be replaced

802.11ac will support fallback to older Wi-‐

Some devices may only be capable of 5GHz, which means they’d only be able to revert to 802.11n. However, many devices will most likely still be dual-‐band, and be capable of switching to 2.4GHz and connecting with 802.11b or 802.11g if necessary.

Will enterprises need to upgrade switches, controllers and cabling to migrate to 802.11ac? “This will depend on the maturity level of the customer’s existing infrastructure. 802.11ac APs will perform very well when plugged into gigabit ports that support POE+ (802.11at). While the standard supports data rates up to almost 7 gigabits per second (gbps), those rates will not be supported in early products. Early 802.11ac APs are likely to only support up to 3 streams and 80 MHz channels,” says Kozup.

That puts theoretical radio throughput around 1.3 gbps. Actually throughput will be lower and adequately served by a gigabit port. 802.11ac APs are likely to require POE+ (802.3at) power due to increased power draws of the faster CPUs and radios. Additionally, even if the AP infrastructure is upgraded, it will take time for the client population to migrate to

While the APs have to be upgraded to support

switch upgrades can coincide with the rate at which 802.11ac clients connect to the network, he adds.

According to research company In-‐Stat, the emerging 802.11ac standard will be quickly adopted over the next four years but will still be dwarfed by the current 802.11n technology. In-‐Stat estimates that nearly 350 million routers, client devices and attached modems with 11ac will ship annually by 2015, following a sharp curve up from about 1 million units in 2012, probably the

But even in 2015, shipments of 11n will outnumber sales of the new technology.

In-‐Stat also says because of cost and the fact that it will drive more speed than a phone would typically need, 11ac is not likely to be built into many handsets. As a result, most carriers probably won’t deploy it as


NETWORK WORLDNETWORK WORLD

Securing wireless networks

Protecting WLAN from those bent on corporate espionage is not easy. Hacking is on the rise for

many reasons: a tough trading economy; frequent job changes; and pure and simply it provides a quick and easy way of lowering the knowledge barriers that prevent market entry. A motivated hacker knows that most security programs focus on regulatory compliance. He or she also knows that IT departments have limited budgets, which often become diluted when attempting to defend against an almost continuous stream of attack vectors. The

When it comes to ensuring 24/7 security and compliance monitoring of corporate Wi-Fi networks, straightforward business economics demands the need for cost optimisation. And yet, guaranteeing the biggest bang for your buck is easier said than done. Fluke Networks reveals how to maximise ROI without compromising corporate data.

increasing WLAN stress. Large, complex corporate systems are pushed hard beyond

congestion and gaps in both performance and security. Ultimately there are often too many wireless variables, which along with increasingly complex application infrastructure, often mean intermittent

With budgets stretched everywhere, IT operations are frequently not optimised to address such issues effectively. User reports are often too general and too late. Tech support is over-‐burdened, and because

Wi-‐Fi all around

continues unabated. As a technology it has become ubiquitous and the workplace is no

with tightening requirements for adherence to compliance standards such as PCI, there is an increasing need for full time compliance monitoring solutions in retail, banking and

associated costs that implies.

it saves costs, and so more and more applications are moving towards wireless. However, with rising numbers of devices

WLAN


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this achieved? Well, there’s more than a new trick or two on offer, arguably chief among

(SSA) for WLAN security and performance monitoring, which takes the functionality of a hardware-‐based sensor and makes it

client PC. The concept means that the SSA can be

added to existing laptops or even desktop PCs deployed around the enterprise (just add a USB wireless adapter), and a battery of performance tests can be scheduled to run periodically, along with continuous detection for rogue access points. A low cost solution, the SSA essentially acts as a force multiplier for WLAN support and basic WIPS needs.

Economic viabilityIn comparison with, say, two hardware sensors, cabling and ceiling installation, 4 x SSA with WLAN adaptors and PC install presents a far more cost effective solution for stretched IT budgets. There is also the option to mix SSA and hardware sensors to optimise cost, deployment plans and security monitoring needs. Ultimately, it allows

solution from standard hardware sensors, which are the core technology for monitoring WLANs, and a cost effective software alternative for multi-‐site health care, retail and concession operations needing basic PCI or HIPAA compliance monitoring.

Additionally in version 10, the market’s

exercises the likes of authentication servers, DNS and throughput SLAs automatically from a number of locations on the network. Again, a

NETWORK WORLDNETWORK WORLD

many users will only try tech support once or twice if they do not get a quick resolution, and then not report issues again – immediate detection of performance gaps with detailed root cause is critical. Adding to the problems, the correlation of data from disparate tools is

In poor health

with multiple reports of trouble connecting at different sites. The problem was the partial outage of electronic health record (EHR) wireless carts, but various investigations over seven days proved inconclusive. It was only discovered later that the RADIUS networking protocol showed failed authentication attempts of six times the normal rate during the problem period, by which time problems had begun to stack up: there were extensive patient care delays, staff were frustrated and carts were out of position.

Many in the past who have thrown money at problems such as these, have often been left frustrated and out-‐of-‐pocket, particularly given the cost of high end enterprise wireless solutions and their vendor-‐locked management systems. However, like it or not, there are gaps in the offerings of many wireless management platforms, and the door is open for a solution that can pick up the slack.

Vendor independentIncreasingly, a dedicated third-‐party system for WLAN full time compliance monitoring and security is the preferred choice for enterprises serious about protecting their wireless networks. The proven and reliable troubleshooting capability of such systems means fewer false alarms, greater problem diagnosis and solution, and ultimately, more time for managers to spend on core business activities.

One such vendor-‐independent solution is

which in its latest version 10 seeks to make

the WLAN gets ever more complex. So how is

cost effective means of proactively monitoring WLAN health from the end user to the cloud, AHC provides detailed measurement and trending reports. This functionality is able to instantly pinpoint network service or application outages, wireless authentication failures and download speed degradation before users are affected. The upshot is increased WLAN quality and availability while minimising help desk and IT resources.

Vital signs improvingReturning to the example of the health care company, AHC resolved the issue of verifying wireless EHRs. With the automated AHC test

to time-‐out at RADIUS authentication. Here,

unreachable’, notifying users and activating back-‐up procedures. The alarm then triggered

This not only minimised the impact on users, it provided immediate information on the situation with the time to resolve reduced

able to focus on exact root causes only, eliminating unstructured analysis.

what occurs in the air is mandatory, despite the complexities. Simply generating a list of rogues and neighbouring noise sources is

experience automatically for signs of network service trouble is nothing short of essential.

WLAN

Increasingly, a dedicated third-party system for WLAN full time compliance monitoring and security is the

preferred choice for enterprises serious about protecting their wireless networks. The proven and reliable troubleshooting capability of such systems means fewer false alarms, greater problem diagnosis and solution, and ultimately, more time for managers to spend on core business activities.


Copyright © 2011 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell Corporation Limited, Reg. No. 02081369, Dell House, The Boulevard, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 1LF.

Maximise the benefi ts of virtualisation with Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers and Dell EqualLogic™ storage

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Designed for performance-intensive applicationsDell makes it easy to fi nd the perfect tower, rack or blade servers – PowerEdge

increased memory capacity and I/O rates for intense applications in demanding environments. Manageable, scalable and fl exibleChoose from a range of options with easy confi guration, powerful open-standards systems management, scalable storage and fl exible services.

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StorageAdvisor

STRATEGIC IT STORAGE PARTNER

Big data in the cloudThere’s a wealth of data that companies can use to better understand customers and identify emerging business opportunities and threats. But how to access and work with all the data? An emerging type of service called data as a service, or DaaS, promises to help.

With DaaS, organisations can gain access to information they need on an on-‐demand basis,

much like they acquire applications via software as a service (SaaS) and storage, servers, and networking components through infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Data is stored by the service provider and accessible to users from the Internet.

Experts say that although DaaS is still an emerging concept, it’s becoming more relevant as organisations leverage big data – gathering and analysing massive amounts of information to help run the business, provide services to customers, identify trends, and open up new market opportunities.

McKinsey Global Institute pointed out in a May 2011 report, the amount of data in the

STORAGE ADVISORData for the business

world is exploding, and analysing large data sets “will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus.” The growing volume and detail of information captured by organisations, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the “Internet of things” will fuel exponential growth in data for

“With the growth of size, speed, and spread of the big data sets and the never-‐ending quest for a competitive advantage, organisations are turning to large repositories of corporate and external data to uncover trends, statistics, and other actionable information to help decide on their next move,” says Srini Prabhala, head of the

Because businesses increasingly want

to capitalise on information they don’t own

beyond its transactional data to analyse social data to better understand what customers like and don’t like – DaaS is likely to thrive.

How should IT and business users prepare for DaaS? Here are some recommendations from consultants and other experts.

1Create a “data mind-‐set”To get the most out of a DaaS

deployment, IT management and staff need to think more in terms of data rather than hardware, software applications, networking, and other IT components, says Paul Gustafson,

consulting services.“To move to DaaS means that data – not

in thinking, Gustafson says. IT departments need to adjust their focus from managing computing infrastructure to making sure the organisation leverages data in the best ways possible to foster innovation, he says.

That includes making data available to users and business partners whenever appropriate, providing scalable architectures, adopting cloud storage, and presenting case studies of data-‐driven business success stories to business and IT staff.

2But don’t neglect infrastructureEven with data taking centre stage over

infrastructure issues and companies accessing much of this data via the cloud, many organisations still need to deploy greater internal storage capacity and bandwidth to leverage massive volumes of data if the information is available for download from the service provider.

The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute conducts a lot of genome analysis and DNA sequencing using some 100TB of data gathered each week from all over the world. To manage that volume, it is looking into using DaaS to help with its data collecting and analysis, says Harold Garner, the institute’s executive director.

Having adequate storage and processors with lots of memory will be an issue as the


services add another layer that can slow down response time to service requests, enterprises should enable distributed data caching with data services to improve performance and scale, he says.

3Build a strong governance mechanism

With DaaS, extremely large amounts of data come in to organisations from a variety of sources and with varying degrees of criticality and requirements for privacy and security.

Organisations need to have strong governance around standards, guidelines, and policies related to DaaS. “Data governance plays a critical role in data services, ensuring that applications, users, and processes get the right data which they have access to and [that] the data is trusted,” Yuhanna says.

Security of the DaaS offerings is contingent on how data access controls are implemented, Prabhala says, and security of accessing the data service itself needs to be

standardised. Concerns over the security of

as well.“The drawbacks of data as a service

are generally similar to those associated with any type of cloud computing, such as the reliance of the customer on the service provider’s ability to avoid server downtime,” Prabhala says. So governance related to terms of ensuring scalability and availability of the data sources applies to DaaS as it does to PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS.

But DaaS brings its own special governance concerns that require companies to reconsider the effectiveness of traditional data protection mechanisms, Prabhala says.

“The characteristics of [this] deployment model differ widely from those of traditional architectures,” he says.

5Emphasise data qualityData quality should be part of the

DaaS governance effort, but it deserves separate mention. If quality is not a high priority, DaaS might end up being a waste of time and money.

“Businesses should understand the quality mechanisms that a data provider has in place,” Corriveau says. “Poor quality leads to poor [results] and/or poor user experience.”

service provider is cleaning its data so that customers don’t have to spend resources

tools, or managing issues related to poor data quality. “Businesses should demand quality data and ask a provider about how they maintain data quality,” StockTwits’ Corriveau says.

6Ramp up your analytics skillsMuch of the data that organisations

acquire will need to be analysed in some way and put into context to create more value for the business. Although some vendors provide analytics-‐as-‐a-‐service offerings and your company might already have data analytics capabilities, you’ll need to build up internal analytics resources and skills like never before.

A growing number of organisations are leveraging the R programming language and software environment for analytics and statistical modeling, CSC’s Gustafson says. He expects this to accelerate as DaaS services gain momentum.

Some companies might opt to create

volume of data continues to grow with DaaS, Garner says. “You’ve got to have lots of local storage because you need to move stuff [to local storage] anyway,” he says. “You always have to take this data and combine it with other data.”

3Try before you buy, check references, and insist on SLAs

Be prepared to do your research. “Ask for sample data or even access to the data service from each provider to see how it will work for your application and developers,” advises Chris Corriveau, chief technology

online community of stock market traders and investors and uses DaaS via cloud provider Xignite.

“Not all services are the same, and data format and access will really vary,” Corriveau says. “Shop around. As data becomes a commodity in some industries, you can strike

your budget and data quality.”DaaS vendors should offer some kind of

prepurchase trial, Infosys’s Prabhala says. “Because the data is already available on the cloud, there should be no issues with giving prospective customers a test run,” he says. “Any vendor that avoids doing so either has to offer a very good explanation or has something to hide.”

Because DaaS is a relatively new service, be sure to check out references of other paying customers. “It’s still an emerging model with few established best practices, so

right pricing model and proposition to start getting market traction,” Prabhala says. “If it has referenceable customers on its books, that’s a good sign that it’s found its feet.”

Once you select a data provider, always insist on a service-‐level agreement (SLA). The cost of monitoring and administering an SLA might increase the overall cost of the service, Prabhala says, but if an outage occurs companies will have benchmarks to tell how hard the provider is trying to restore service.

A big concern with DaaS has been performance, says Noel Yuhanna, a principal

With the growth of size, speed, and spread of the big data sets and the never-ending quest for a

competitive advantage, organisations are turning to large repositories of corporate and external data to uncover trends, statistics, and other actionable information to help decide on their next move.”


STORAGE ADVISOR

entirely new entities to handle the data

Gustafson says, consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, a big user of DaaS, has established a text analytics group to deal with the new realm of data gathered from outside the company. Much of the data the group analyses comes from resources such as social media.

7Know when to use DaaS and how to measure results

IT needs to work with its internal business partners to identify business need for DaaS. “A solid understanding of business data and the use and value of business data to various roles and stakeholders is critical in determining opportunities to leverage DaaS for the business,” says Mike Sabin, senior

vice president of global sales and marketing at Dun & Bradstreet, a provider of commercial information on businesses. D&B, as both a user and provider of DaaS, deploys data services to deliver information on demand via the cloud to users through its Web services.

where DaaS can provide critical business value – for example, helping internal research, human resources recruiting, supply chain management, sales prospecting, and marketing

measure the expected return on investment. “Like any IT project, there should be stated goals and outcomes to measure criteria for success or failure of the program,” Sabin says.

DaaS use is on the rise to gain competitive advantage.

Clearly, the use of DaaS is on the rise in a range of industries as organisations look for ways to gain a competitive advantage

estimates that more than 1,500 enterprises worldwide are using such data services to support requirements for agile business intelligence, enterprise search, high-‐performance applications, real-‐time reporting, and dashboards.

“Business users should use data services to support all their enterprise data needs, because it offers consistent real-‐time data to support various queries and reports,” Yuhanna says.

Through the right preparation and ongoing maintenance on the part of IT and the business lines, organisations can take advantage of DaaS to turn big data into a big advantage.

Data for the business

Contact us: +973-‐17-‐58 2811 | MENA@so wareag.com |


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SecurityAdvisor

GRC

SECURITY ADVISOR

As the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market matures, users are struggling to make the case for GRC implementations. What is the business case for GRC in a modern organisation, and does it really pay o!? Ben Rossi speaks to industry experts to answer these burning questions.

Achieving maturity


view of their respective risk exposure. Because of this, banks had demonstrated a new found awareness on compliance risk, which along with internal policy compliance, also included statutory aspects and regulatory compliance,” he says.

“Banks were also faced with non-‐

With this in mind, not only did the concept of risk management come about but also the concept of properly handling governance and compliance, which in turn gave banks a total view of the management of all risks,” he adds.

ChangeAbdulnabi lays out how RSA believes GRC has changed beyond the role of compliance as the main driver of such initiatives.

“In 2010 we saw a shift from compliance to risk evaluation and visibility as a major driver. Not to say that compliance is still not an issue and a catalyst for projects, but risk

then see some very mature GRC programs now just to further leverage the valuable information being maintained in GRC platforms,” he says.

“This is driving companies to utilise GRC for measuring business performance in relation to their strategic objectives. This maturity cycle will bring with it some very critical expectations of a company’s GRC platform. We question an organisation’s ability to have a successful mature GRC platform without some fundamental critical capabilities,” he adds.

The economic downturn had a

implementations, according to Nima Saraf, team leader technical, advanced networking

“In recent years, especially during the economic downturn, many organisations shifted from a basic interest in GRC as a means to meet compliance regulations to a position that leverages GRC solutions to improve overall internal processes, build more productive workplaces, and enhance business value,” he says.

“GRC used to be maintained as separate disciplines for each of its components. As market needs have changed, GRC in today’s

enterprises has been converged to reduce overlapping job requirements, save money

designed and implemented to make business run smoother and become more cost effective,” he adds.

Dr Angelika Plate, director of strategic services at help AG Middle East, believes that, whilst compliance is an important part of GRC, the over-‐emphasis on it misses the important element of governance.

“Governance, if implemented correctly, ensures that top management directions and decisions are integrated into the organisation, and that top management

informed decision making,” she says.

Making a case

evolution of GRC involves, it remains that many users have recently struggled to make a case for its implementations.

A major reason for this falls down to the challenge of demonstrating return on investment.

This is due to the lack of certain parameters

Hadi Jaafaraw, sales director at I(TS)2.“The cost of GRC implementation can

Klaus Kristensen, head of risk practice at SAS Institute EMEA

In recent years, the role of GRC as a business framework has evolved. What previously heavily revolved

around compliance has now become something more.

GRC is now often spoken in more of a general sense when referring to the internal processes of a business and initiatives to create a more effective workplace.

Alaa Abdulnabi, regional pre-‐sales manager at RSA Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East, says the rise of GRC programs origionally came about to help companies in their attempts to comply with increasingly demanding regulatory requirements.

“GRC was vital and important to ease off the pain of compliance efforts and to bridge the gap with business. Interest in GRC was sparked by the need for design and implementation of suitable governance controls for regulatory compliance, but the focus of GRC has since shifted towards adding business value through improving operational decision making and strategic planning. It therefore has relevance beyond the compliance world,” Abdulnabi says.

The start of operational risk management can be traced back to the time when banks were rushing to comply with strict rules and regulations, according to Klaus Kristensen, head of risk practice at SAS Institute EMEA.

“It was during this period that banks realised that they did not have an integrated

Alaa Abdulnabi, regional pre-sales manager at RSA Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East

STRIP AD HERE 71Computer News Middle EastJUNE 2012www.cnmeonline.com

like better strategic decisions using risk information and compliance,” Jaafaraw says.

a case for GRC because of its tendency to be a heavy project to oversee.

“There is a large amount of corporate information, data, regulations, policies, controls and groups involved across an enterprise. Both vendors and IT managers

or build a business case to justify the expense of a software and hardware platform. This is certainly not due to a lack of value, but rather a lack of parameters to work with when

However, Ollie Hart, head of public sector at Sophos, believes it is the users with an

attitude” that struggle to make the case for GRC implementations.

“The best GRC implementation is one where employees are all aware and the

behaviour required to meet the policy becomes natural, so that people say a policy and framework is not required. Across security, the role of a SIRO/CISO has evolved so that much of the GRC falls within this

his roles and responsibilities lie with other people,” Hart says.

Return on investmentAbdulnabi is adamant that there is a

programs and tools. He refers to recent research published by

enterprise customers from different verticals who implemented and deployed GRC programs.

from GRC and concluded a 572% ROI within a three year period. The ROI varies from one environment to the other, and depends on what the GRC program is automating, enhancing or maybe replacing. In all cases, the return on investment from GRC is tangible and of a

Whilst acknowledging that GRC implementation costs can be high, Saraf

“There is one more important factor that needs to be considered when building a case for GRC implementation and that is it

to opportunities and threats. A well-‐thought out GRC program supports business growth and agility, and is an important consideration when calculating ROI,” she says.

With the maturation and adaption of GRC’s role in the enterprise, ultimately the business case has changed with it.

“Originally, the business case for a GRC solution was simple, comply at any cost or

Nima Saraf, team leader technical, advanced networking and information security at FVC MEA

SECURITY ADVISOR

With the increased demand on virtualisation towards cloud-based computing, and attempts by end users

to reduce their environmental footprint and CAPEX, the uptake of IPS and probably other security services have been a!ected by a lower adoption of virtualised ecosystems by some vendors.”

Dr Angelika Plate, director of strategic services at help AG Middle East

STRIP AD HERE

BY THE NUMBERS

44% 52% 44% 20%Amount of organisations that state their GRC activities are

primarily contained within the IT function.

Amount of organisations that state lack of cooperation as the biggest barrier in

achieving GRC-related goals.

Amount of organisations that state lack of collaboration as the biggest barrier in

achieving GRC-related goals.

Amount of organisations that say they have a clearly defined GRC strategy that pertains to

the entire enterprise.

Source: Ponemon Institute, 2011

GRC


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implementation of GRC solutions was suffering

disparate technologies and a lack of connection to business strategy,” says Jaafaraw.

“Nowadays, GRC professionals’ focus is more concentrated on educating the board of directors, developing and communicating basic business values and committing to deliver higher level value over time. That includes reduced business risks, provides greater control and improves oversight and a holistic view of business objectives,” he adds.

Dr. Plate says there is a growing awareness of different disciplines that help organisations to operate in a more controlled and effective way – and GRC is one of them.

“With the growing understanding of these concepts, organisations start to realise

bring. It is nevertheless still a journey that only just begun, and more understanding of these concepts and how to apply them in an organisation is necessary to make this a successful business case,” she says.

Jaafaraw gives his view on the role and importance of GRC if implemented successfully in a modern organisation.

“It would lead to a strong connection between governance, risk and compliance functions themselves and their interaction with their relevant organisational silos. It would

the same or similar risks and controls, and consistency within the governance, risk and

can achieve transparency in approach across the frameworks and organisation, and reduce

and controls,” he says.

ManagementProper management of a GRC framework will identify strategies to address the business and security challenges an organisation faces, according to Dr. Plate.

“By strengthening the governance processes and risk culture, organisations can gain more control over their situation. Another positive aspect of this business intelligence is a better forecast of new risks and the appropriate reaction to them, as well

she says.The future of GRC implementations does

look strong, according to the industry experts quizzed.

Jaafaraw believes in the coming years more and more integration of internal GRC functions are going to work together more effectively.

“GRC implementations will not be viewed as a technology alone, but as one important piece of the organisation’s strategy, processes, technology and people that will enable organisations to effectively

The integration of GRC functions across different departments will allow executives, managers and supervisors to have a more holistic view about the critical functions of the organisation and reduce risks to meet the

company’s business goals and objectives,” he says.

Kristensen refers to the present high demand for the integration of more data sources, along with the ability to automate the GRC management process, as a positive indicator of the future of GRC.

“This would also include the ability to automate the measurement of KRI through rules engines, which utilises business data while rules are run in batch and issues are created in an automated way combined with the ability to manage the implementation of action plans to rectify or implement controls,” he says.

with more extensive case management systems allows for the extensive investigation of incidents or control failures. This can be provided as part of the SAS capability as well as the integration of fraud events or as part of the risk management capability, thereby allowing for the control of the process to rectify broken controls and allow for the measurement of fraudulent activity in the risk management process,” he adds.

In the next year the relevance and important which still be very high. BYOD increases the number

of threats, which increases the need for more threat management and IPS in the infrastructure over time. So there will be more demand for IPS driven by BYOD.”

Hadi Jaafaraw, sales director at I(TS)2

Ollie Hart, head of public sector at Sophos

SECURITY ADVISOR

STRIP AD HERE

GRC


TelecomsWorld

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

M2M Communications

TELECOMS WORLD

The rise of machinesMachine to machine (M2M) communications may have had a subdued year during 2011, but industry experts expect it to emerge as one of the underlying technologies of smart grids, smart homes and e-health in 2012.


Major upgrades to networks across the Middle East last year laid a foundation of faster

and more reliable connectivity with lower latencies. Wireless networks in particular were also sporting increased bandwidth and early stage deployments of next generation 4G/LTE networks, and ever faster smartphone devices were all suggestive of foundations enabling greater communication between devices.

of IP addresses by the increasing use of IPv6 also meant that every device -‐-‐ from fridges, to smart meters, to pacemakers to cars -‐-‐ could all be wirelessly connected to one another.

M2M technology is poised to come back with a vengeance in 2012 with many factors working in its favour. For the uninitiated, M2M describes networked sensors, devices, and applications that can be used to monitor physical assets -‐-‐ such as humidity levels in a manufacturing facility, or the location of all of the vehicles in a delivery company’s

resources that can “provide information on the life of products, assets, or even people.” The idea of people being part of an M2M network may seem far-‐fetched, until you consider that millions carry health monitoring devices with them, and tens of millions of people carry smartphones, which, if equipped with the right technology and applications, can serve as remote sensors or part of an information-‐aware grid.

“M2M systems within the Middle East represent a major step towards the future and will facilitate a host of new services within areas such as e-‐healthcare, smart cities, intelligent transportation, and other advanced logistics systems. In many countries in the Middle East there are far more devices than people, so we are talking about an enormous market in which numerous opportunities are opening up for vendors, solution providers, systems integrators and MNOs. If we are to exploit this potential, the region’s network

transport of a huge number of connections

with varying requirements on bandwidth and quality of service,” says Ihab Ghattas, Assistant President of Middle East, Huawei

Attila Kesimgil, Customer Principle & Driver of M2M Business, Region Middle East, Ericsson, likens M2M industry to the early days of the PC industry in 1980s. “In order for the PC market in those days to take off, one needed the operating system and the PC application software. The PC

similar situation for M2M. In order to reach critical mass for M2M, one requires services and applications. In order to attract application service providers, however, one requires connectivity platforms and APIs to build applications. The players who will create an ecosystem for MNO’s, application

service providers will drive the M2M takeoff in the region.”

Mohammed Anis Chemli, Global Account Manager, Telecom Business Unit from

be the year of M2M and points out the technology is there, which creates new sources of revenues for mobile operators

businesses using the technology and allowing them to offer better services to their customers while reducing risk management and operational costs.

“However, security is also paramount to drive adoption. In some critical installations – like water processing plants, medical devices, alarm systems and factories – security and protection from hacking, data

Ihab Ghattas, Assistant President of Middle East, Huawei

M2M systems within the Middle East represent a major step towards the future and will facilitate a

host of new services within areas such as e-healthcare, smart cities, intelligent transportation, and other advanced logistics systems. In many countries in the Middle East there are far more devices than people, so we are talking about an enormous market in which numerous opportunities are opening up for vendors, solution providers, systems integrators and MNOs.

loss and downtime are all crucial. The fundamental ingredients enabling M2M to realise its potential are also reliability and

According to Frost & Sullivan, 2012 is likely to witness massive adoption of M2M globally, however it may not be very impressive due to certain restraints. “Firstly, majority of the industrial applications such as smart metering and remote monitoring require a huge amount of customisation and M2M has not been seen as a scalable opportunity yet. Secondly, cost is seen as one of the major impediments to the adoption of M2M as the end users must be able and willing to pay for this value addition,” says Jonas Zelba, Research Analyst, Information and Communication


TELECOMS WORLD

Right now M2M solutions are generally running on proprietary platforms but we predict a shift from

vertically integrated and closed solutions to a layered, open approach. While M2M communications are already being utilised in certain regional markets and verticals, there is definitely room to grow as more widespread applications are deployed in 2012.”

Technologies Practice,Middle East and North Africa, Frost & Sullivan.

Frost & Sullivan expects M2M adoption to be driven by MNOs. Zelba says M2M provides new revenue opportunities for operators in the saturated mobile markets. While information technology and network capabilities enable M2M deployments, the applications will come from the industry verticals. Furthermore, as technology becomes more compact, lower priced,

modules and devices may decrease, driving the number of innovative applications.

Industry experts say legislation on a global scale will further drive the adoption of M2M, such as the use of M2M in automotive emergency calls with eCall and ERA-‐GLONASS (aimed at saving lives and increasing road safety); CO2 reduction through smart metering and grid control, stolen vehicle recovery for insurances and

An array of apps One vertical where M2M is poised to take off is the health industry as a multitude of devices are implemented to constantly collect health data from patient and consolidate it back into cloud solutions. By way of example, machine to machine to person (M2M2P) technology could be used in an e-‐health context to wirelessly connect patients’ pacemakers or blood pressure monitoring devices to a consolidation point which then feeds data into health software through which doctors could observe the patient’s health remotely and over time.

While M2M’s diversity of applications

poses a challenge in the creation and

mechanisms—particularly over different types of wireless networks such as UMTS, WiMAX and LTE,” says Ghattas.

Furthermore, the industry chain can be complex and needs a powerful integrator. If you’re looking at a public transportation network, for instance, it may impact areas beyond transportation including environmental protection, public security, insurance, vehicle maintenance, and so on. To manage these systems and make M2M

involved, the industry chain will need stronger integration solutions.

“Right now M2M solutions are generally running on proprietary platforms but we predict a shift from vertically integrated and closed solutions to a layered, open approach. While M2M communications are already being utilised in certain regional markets and

more widespread applications are deployed in 2012,” Ghattas adds.

Some of the verticals that are expected to represent greatest business opportunities globally are healthcare, transportation and logistics, government (smartcities / connected cities), utilities (across value chain of oil and gas to consumption of electricity and gas at premise by end consumers) and telecoms, according to Frost & Sullivan.

According to the latest analyst reports there are approximately 5.3 million known wireless connected devices in the Middle East and it is expected to grow exponantially to reach to the levels of hundreds of millions. “We see that applications like

services industry are widely adopted accross the region today. However, there will be differences from country to country depending on their unique requirements. For example, in Turkey, where the cost of energy is high and there is high dependency on energy imports, adoption of smart meters in utilities as well as building energy management solutions present a good number of opportunities,” says Kemisgil.

Whereas in GCC countries, we see increasing demand for solutions addressing the oil and gas industry, as well as mHealth solutions due to the increased spending on healthcare as a result of increased wealth as well as transition from government funded healthcare to private healthcare. Furthermore, in countries like Sudan and Egypt solutions addressing agriculture industry from livestock management applications to sensors on crops and greenhouses, present growth opportunities. Finally security and surveillance solutions are in demand due to growing security concerns accross the region, he adds.

The emergence of 4G/LTE is expected to accelerate M2M adoption. 4G/LTE will certainly help in accelerating M2M adoption as LTE network is becoming a prerequisite for M2M adoption. When mobile operators upgrade their old infrastructure to 4G/LTE,

Attila Kesimgil, Customer Principle & Driver of M2M Business, Region Middle East, Ericsson

M2M Communications


IN PURSUIT OF M2M CRAZE

M2M market is enormous, providing

is an important element of environmental

they will have the opportunity to implement technology that enables new levels of

Sullivan expects a dramatic growth in M2M applications enabled by LTE,” says Zeba.

Kesimgil from Ericsson agrees: “4G/LTE will open up new opportunities for M2M applications, which otherwise would not be feasible. However, the majority of the M2M connectivity is still based on 2.5G (and some 3G), since there are a lot of applications with little bandwidth and latency requirements.”

Data burstsThe greater adoption of M2M may have a

coupled with the impact on already growing bandwidth demand from the service providers requires service providers to have a bandwidth strategy for M2M.

“The main challenge telecom service

understanding capability of treating data

or ensuring the security of data and data storage or shaping for different data transmission tiers,” says Zelba.

M2M data can be communicated over any regular medium although it is going to generate a tremendous amount of data

getting serious about this space.“In most applications there will be short

bursts of data at regular, short intervals. Therefore when millions of devices are going on an off-‐line to carry short bursts of data, it becomes impractical to allocate

IP address in the regular dynamic way. The overhead is far too high. Therefore the devices are given a static address, with data often being transported over a secure VPN,” says Ghattas.

MNOs are just one player–albeit an important one–in the value chain. As indicated earlier, most MNOs have played an indirect role in the development of M2M applications; their role has been that of a bit pipe. The key link in the value chain is the middleware platform and the companies who have created a platform in order to provide a managed, secure, wireless data service, he adds.

Despite a slow start, advances in M2M technology have occurred internationally during the past year. In April last year Ericsson signed an agreement to acquire Telenor Connexion’s machine-‐to-‐machine (M2M) platform, in an effort to get more technology and know-‐how in the growing sector.

Mohammed Anis Chemli,

The main challenge telecom service providers may face due to M2M tra!c is understanding capability

of treating data tra!c. This relates to the possibility of monetising tra!c for third party revenues or ensuring the security of data and data storage or shaping for di"erent data transmission tiers.”

This year, Qualcomm has released a low-‐power 802.11n radio chip designed for embedded machine-‐to-‐machine wireless communications for smart building and smart appliance applications.

The new chip, from Qualcomm’s Atheros division, is aimed at a burgeoning market for wireless machine-‐to-‐machine (or M2M) communications, to network a wide array of battery-‐operated sensors, consumer electronics, meters, medical monitoring gear and other devices. Applications include smart energy, the “intelligent home,” security and surveillance, building automation, and remote health monitoring.

M2M represents both a new set of uses for mobile technology and a new source of revenue for mobile operators, and the Middle East telecom service providers need to aggressively invest in this area.


IntegrationAdvisor

INTEGRATION ADVISOR Working in an M&A

POST A MERGERPerforming systems integration in the scenario of a merger and acquisition is very di!erent from conducting the same for internal systems. Here are some

tips on how to go about reaching success.


chance to call off the M&A before both sides commit, and as such, a CIO should be looking for red and yellow flags that suggest the integration will be harder than expected (and budgeted for). Conversely, the CIO of the acquiring company can also be looking for positive reinforcement: systems or processes from the other company that remind everyone why the merger or acquisition seemed like a good idea in the first place.

An examination of the cultural differences between the two companies planning to blend must be part of the diligence phase. CIOs warn that when it comes to systems integration, cultural differences can be a ticking bomb.

The classic absorption model in which one company’s systems are devoured by the other is a way around this type of problem, but there are dangers to that approach as well. Part of what you are buying is the intellectual assets, and presumably you are buying them because you like what the company has done.

Once the diligence phase is complete and the two sides agree to go ahead with the merger, the planning begins. The goal of the planning phase is to break the seemingly daunting task of integrating two companies into a series of smaller IT projects. It is crucial that one of the two partners emerge as the driving force behind the integration.

Once the plan is complete, the integration work can begin in earnest. Just as there needs to be a dominant side in the planning phase, the integration work itself has to have a single person who is ultimately accountable.

To successfully integrate two companies, a CIO needs to be aggressive and understand that he is working toward a business goal. But you also have to get creative, Darukhanavala says. “You go through, and you throw so much out, only keeping what you have to,” he says. “Actually it’s a lot like cleaning out the garage.”

Integration during a merger and acquisition (M&A) is a different beast from your typical internal

system integration effort. The CIOs who have survived an M&A talk about it with the same heart-‐quickening cadence an adrenaline junkie uses to describe an extreme sport. If an integration project of the sort discussed in the rest of the CIO-‐100 issue is the IT equivalent of surfing andrequiring a CIO to stay on top of the project’s breaking waves?then integration during an M&A is like sky surfing: It’s riskier and you’re traveling much faster.

Integration during an M&A is not a simple IT project but part of a bigger business goal. Too often, companies engaging in mergers or acquisitions ignore the IT scalability of their new business partner or their own systems. It’s not that companies should make or break business decisions based on the IT architecture of the company they plan to join or take over, but it is important to have up-‐front knowledge of how the IT merger is likely to go. A slow or poorly handled IT integration between merging companies can jeopardise the business goals. So once an M&A is set in motion, the CIO’s role is to make sure that the IT integration happens fast and smoothly.

All successful M&As therefore come down to one thing: planning. Because of the emphasis on speed, most of the work during an M&A is done before the hands-‐on integration work begins. Stephen N. David, CIO and B2B officer of Cincinnati-‐based Procter & Gamble, a CIO-‐100 honoree, says that 75 percent of an integration effort during a merger or acquisition

is determining which systems to keep, what data is important and how much integration is actually needed before the companies are technically joined. Once that kind of planning is complete, the actual hands-‐on work should be just like any other IT project, only a little more exciting.

Know thyselfOnce your company has decided that it plans to grow via mergers or acquisitions, the first step for the CIO is to come up with a detailed map of the company’s IT infrastructure and communicate to the other executives the company’s readiness to do an M&A. Even before a merger or acquisition candidate is chosen, the CIO needs to have explicit knowledge of his own architecture and what the most important systems are.

Good, scalable architecture makes integrating two companies possible. Make sure that the base technology that you have in place is the technology you want to grow the company with.

If your company does not have a scalable architecture in place, you need to make it known to the business executives before your company starts down the M&A path. Otherwise the consequences are deadly. It is vital that all the executives understand the impact the IT architecture will have on the M&A. And it’s up to the CIO to ensure that information is part of the business discussions and planning up front.

Do diligenceOnce an M&A is proposed, there are two separate yet equally important steps to go through: diligence and planning. The diligence phase is realistically the last

All successful M&As therefore come down to one thing: planning. Because of the emphasis on speed,

most of the work during an M&A is done before the hands-on integration work begins.


CareersAdvisor

CAREER ADVISOREmiratisation in IT

Emiratisation in ITCNME delves into the perceived trend that there is a lack of citizens working for private sector organisations in the UAE. Through the inspection of key research, as well as feedback from end-users, Ben Rossi examines the subject of Emiratisation in IT.


Most importantly we have a graduate development programme called Masar, and an agreement with the Higher College of Technology to address their students’ English competency,” Obaid says.

He adds that with Masar, graduates go through an 18 month development programme where du addresses different aspects of their careers.

“We have a different talent programme they can also do, so it’s basically about developing UAE nationals to work for us. Especially for graduates, we look at their English, their competency, and other things like team work, how able they are to meet the work environment, their education, personality and attitude. There is also the factor of how well they can work with multinational colleagues,” Obaid says.

PollIn September 2011 job search website Bayt.com published results of a poll it had conducted into the hiring of locals in the Middle East.

Whilst the study, titled ‘Localisation Hiring Policies in the GCC’, looked at the entire GCC region – rather than just the

still provides insightful information on the

particularly on Emiratis. “We have over 63,000 Emirati job

seekers on Bayt.com, which is a large number when measured against the population ratio of employment-‐age professionals looking for jobs,” says Suhail Masri, VP of sales at Bayt.com.

With such a heavy expat community, the UAE is an interesting country when it

comes to employment quotas. Most countries around the world have

no problems when it comes to organisations hiring nationals. Indeed, many countries even encourage quotas of non-‐national hires in private sector companies.

However, it remains that expats overwhelm Emiratis when it comes to the private sector workforce in the UAE.

to a lack of bench strength in terms of UAE nationals, who want to work in the private sector. However, we are always looking to hire high caliber UAE nationals and welcome applications,” says Andrew Hurt, general manager at Xerox Emirates.

He adds Xerox does not designate much focus to having the exact skills and

“We feel that anyone who possesses the ability to learn quickly, to have a transferable skill set and aptitudes, and who is proactive and takes initiative, will be an asset to our organisation,” Hurt says.

organisations in the UAE commit to Emiratisation initiatives to maintain a quote of citizens in their workforce.

Yaser Obaid, senior VP of HR at du, says du has a complete programme of Emiratisation employment.

“We are at the stage of having a 29% Emirati employment rate, whilst 55% of the collective management are UAE nationals.

I think it’s very important. We work within a community and this community dictates for us

to be responsible for the citizens of this community. It’s a part of our goal to ensure that citizens in the community we work in get the opportunity not only for a job but also for the development and training we provide.”


CAREERS ADVISOR

Policies in the GCC’ poll show that 33% of respondents reported having senior level Emirati citizens working in their companies,” he adds.

Stephan Berner, MD at helpAG Middle

August 2011.

“At helpAG we truly believe in the right balance of workforce, which should include locals as well. As a matter of fact it took us a while to identify the right calibre of person but we did it. Uniquely enough, we have a total of 35 people of 20 nationalities,” Berner says.

the right approach to the customer and their company culture -‐ apart from the obvious technical skills -‐ can prove to be key. We reap

maintain such a culturally diverse balance of highly skilled people. It isn’t easy though,” he adds.

Hurt believes that, whilst it is very important for Xerox – as a “responsible

corporate citizen” – to support and drive UAE-‐national employment quotas, realistically it is not sustainable in practice.

“Xerox Emirates functions in an industry

of staff is always a challenge,” he says.

He adds that Xerox essentially believes in

regardless of their nationality.“Essentially we believe in hiring the

the priority in order for us to reach our organisational goals which ensure the longevity of the organisation. The candidate has to have positive attributes which, with support and development, could be an asset to the organisation,” Hurt says.

Indeed, 43.6% of the respondents in Bayt.com’s 2011 poll said that between 0-‐5% of locals work for their company.

“Around 13.3% said between 5-‐15%, 8.6% between 16-‐25%, 12% between 26-‐

50%, 9.7% between 51-‐75% and 12.8% between 76-‐100%,” Masri says.

The problem lies in the salary expectations, according to Berner. He says young locals need to re-‐evaluate.

“To grow and to be successful and competitive globally – not just locally -‐ you should always get paid what you deserve and you should be evaluated based on the outcome of your actions and what they brought to the company you work for,” Berner says.

“Today, in too many cases, the gap is still too big. Gulf countries have developed a great deal in the last 10 years, but to make sure success continues local population needs to become a bit more proactive and take more responsibility,” he adds.

63,000 43.6% 47.5% 31%Emirati job seekers

on Bayt.com.GCC organisations with between 0-5% of locals

working for their company.

MENA organisations that says the search for local

talent is di"cult.

UAE organisations that plan on hiring more Emiratis in the

coming year.

Source: BY THE NUMBERS

Yaser Obaid, senior VP of HR at du

Essentially we believe in hiring the best fit candidate for the position. That is the priority

in order for us to reach our organisational goals which ensure the longevity of the organisation. The candidate has to have positive attributes which, with support and development, could be an asset to the organisation.”

Emiratisation in IT


CAREERS ADVISOR

However, Obaid disagrees and believes du’s demonstrated record of employing Emiratis is evidence that it is a reasonably realistic aim.

“I think it’s very important. We work within a community and this community dictates for us to be responsible for the citizens of this community. It’s a part of our goal to ensure that citizens in the community we work in get the opportunity not only for a job but also for the development and training we provide,” he says.

“There are issues like if the UAE nationals don’t have the proper skills for the job, but I’m sure now with the large number of graduates from UAE universities we can get the right people in. We also have key positions that require UAE nationals and

citizens get these roles,” he adds. Bayt.com’s poll revealed that 47.5% of

respondents across the MENA region state that the search for local talent is proving to

“However, 48.5% said the company they work for adheres to a localisation hiring policy and 49.2% stated their company plan to hire more local talent. 31% of respondents said that their companies plan on hiring more Emiratis in the coming year,” Masri says.

QuotasHurt says for the quotas of UAE nationals working in the private sector to go up, there needs to be continued government initiatives to encourage Emiratis to be open to working in private organisations as much as in the public sector.

“Additionally, up skilling citizens in

provide them with the necessary skills in

compete for jobs in these areas. We are also working on a Performance Academy, which would be an excellent way for a citizen to grow and develop within our organisation,” he adds.

Obaid believes the key lies in offering an attractive package that will attract UAE-‐nationals to the prospect of working for a private company.

“I would recommend providing different aspects to attract UAE-‐nationals, like a competitive package, on-‐the-‐job training and – the most important thing – a good pension. Also, if private sector companies work with

colleges, university and the government, they will be able to attract a good number of UAE nationals,” he says.

Another interesting aspect of the region’s employment rates is career trajectory, as discovered by the Bayt.com poll.

“A good 43% of the poll takers claimed locals get promoted a lot faster than others, while 21% believed that to be untrue and stated both locals and non-‐locals had the same career trajectory. However, 36% said locals got promoted a lot slower as compared to others in their company,” Masri says.

Berner says companies are afraid to hire locals as the criteria and employment laws are not the same for everybody and differ for ex-‐pats and locals.

He believes it is important to the development of the UAE to integrate Emiratis within all work functions of the enterprise, not only government functions.

“As long as the young Emiratis do not step into enterprise business they cannot really compete on the market and as long as they cannot compete they will not learn how to succeed or fail. Company or personal growth can only happen by making mistakes and I think that the current employment system is based on making no mistakes at all, therefore people are afraid of the consequences,” he concludes.

As long as the young Emiratis do not step into enterprise business they cannot really compete

on the market and as long as they cannot compete they will not learn how to succeed or fail. Company or personal growth can only happen by making mistakes and I think that the current employment system is based on making no mistakes at all.”

Stephan Berner,

Suhail Masri,

Emiratisation in IT


Naresh Kothari

INTERVIEW

Cloud, virtualisation and mobility are driving the latest boom in the systems integration market and the UAE-based Intertec Systems is all set to ride the crest of this new

wave. The company’s MD, Naresh Kothari spoke to us about the blueprint for growth.

ALL SYSTEMS GO


The challenging economic climate has had an adverse on the SI market. How have you fared?

We have grown from 100 to 300 people within a span of four years. The business had been tight from 2008 to 2010, and it was veering towards negative growth, but last year we achieved a 30 percent growth and this year looks promising as well. There are ups and downs because of the choppy market situation, but players who are focused on customers will have an opportunity to grow. The new trend that we have seen, at least in Dubai, is that

come up and we are seeing lot of investments being ploughed into the market here, and the UAE contributes 90 percent of our business.

is a very different market where the style of doing business is unique. The major bulk of our business in the kingdom will be done through our channel partners and our object is to provide the local support.

What is your focus as a SI? Are there any particular technologies that you focus on?Our focus is on system integration, which means quite a few things. There are people who call themselves SIs but in reality they only supply products. We don’t do that and our focus is delivering full steam projects. Our focus is on the customer, his business and the solution that is suited for his business.

If you are a SI, focusing on one particular technology doesn’t really work. We are partnering with 21 different vendors and when you are dealing with 21 different technologies you have to have skill sets internally to deliver the support, implementation, development, etc. Anything we want to sell, we want to develop

the internal delivery capabilities because the major focus is repeat sales, as sustainance is the best way.

Second thing is, particularly in matured markets like the UAE and Bahrain, customers are looking at service level agreements. As a company we have set ourselves 90 percent KPI and today we do around 93 percent on that. When you achieve that sort of level, you get your customer attention. Though there are issues of prices, and shrinking margins, it’s up to us how you can manage those margins.

Which are the major vendors you work with?We work wit hHP and Cisco on the infrastructure side, where the focus is mostly on security, systems and storage. On the

applications side, we work with Oracle and Microsoft. The future for SIs is managed services and that is where we are moving to this year. We already have a managed services model wherein we have our engineers based on customer premises and a helpdesk based in

set up a network operations centre. If you are not into managed services,

you are not going to be in business for long, especially with the advent of cloud. Every large vendor today has a cloud offering and what is going to be big is the private cloud. The infrastructure for cloud is already available and issue has been with applications, which have started coming in from last year. We will be focusing on building private clouds for the enterprises.

This year, we are going to increase our focus on two areas – virtualisation and mobility. Today, ever customer is looking at mobile and applications have to be compatible. We will also focus on VDI, which has been gaining lot of traction in the region. The technology has come

a long way, it is more mature now and the costs are down. Another trend that we see coming is the BYOD phenomenon, which may sometime in the region. However, you need to create an infrastructure that can support all these emerging technologies.

One of the earliest adopters of VDI has been the education sectors. Which other sectors are you targeting for this?Pretty much every vertical. VDI hasn’t been really successful because of the ROI issues. But

can achieve 20-‐25 percent savings. We have realised that selling VDI as it is doesn’t really work; you have to build that as part of the infrastructure, which is cost effective.

You mentioned about skill sets before. Do

Yes we invest a lot in training and our average yearly budget is $100000 on training people. This is not just product training, as we also spend on skill sets training. Then comes the

can meet service delivery commitments.

How big is your focus on services? What are the verticals you focus on?As an SI, our focus is three areas – infrastructure, applications and services. Today, 60 percent of our business comes from the infrastructure with the rest coming from software and services. In terms of verticals, 40 percent of our revenues come from corporate sector, 40 percent from government and the

Do you follow industry best practices when it comes to project management?

and we follow industry best practices and frameworks. Our success rate on project delivery is 90 percent.

What is your roadmap for this year?It is of course on new channels and areas of business. We are looking to improve our banking portfolio as well. Banks haven’t been spending on the levels they should be, especially on the risk side of the business and we expect that to happen this year.

This year, we are going to increase our focus on two areas – virtualisation and mobility. Today, ever

customer is looking at mobile and applications have to be compatible. We will also focus on VDI, which has been gaining lot of traction in the region. The technology has come a long way, it is more mature now and the costs are down.


Sanjay Mirchandani

INTERVIEW

Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO and COO, Global Centers of Excellence at EMC discusses with CNME the company’s adoption of cloud and big data, and the challenges they

faced along the way, on the sidelines of EMC World 2012.

SHARING LESSONS

The focus of EMC World 2012 is on transformation. Give us an idea of EMC’s own transformation story.

A: about the IT side of things. IT transformation is the process around which you absorb any new technology, like big data, making you leaner, more agile and driving value. The business gets value from what you do with that. So big data is a great user case, data science is a great user case, where building on a cloud infrastructure you can then add things like big data and other things on top of it. There has never been a better time to be in IT, the business appetite to absorb technology is perfectly aligned. The stars are aligned – it is upto IT to really adapt and deliver that value in a way that is truly agile.

Q: How do you see transformation in the people who are driving IT? How will this be adopted across geographies and verticals around the globe?A: IT and business transformation is like building a state of the art factory. What you produce in this factory is what this phase of transformation for IT is all about – so

architecture, big data and bringing all those moving parts together.

We have produced it, we have made a

wants to consume, and IT has to change the way it delivers stuff. It is not about us anymore, it is about the business. What does that mean? The transformation means that we need deeper skills in some areas, technical skills for example. When I provision storage today I am no longer provisioning it

ago, I am provisioning it for the enterprise. So I have got to go deeper with my technical skills. If I am building a highly virtulalised data centre I need architects that I have never had before – cloud architects. So when you start thinking about the transformation on the technology side, you need skills that go deeper.

How does the business want to consume IT? The business wants to consume IT the way you and I interact with the iTunes store.


There has never been a better time to be in IT, because technology, the business appetite to

absorb technology is perfectly aligned. The stars are aligned – it is upto IT to really adapt and deliver that value in a way that is truly agile.

You like an app, you download it, you pay for it, you may like it, you may want to change it for something else – you want choices to make decisions whenever you want to do it. The business does not want me to build infra and spend capital on something that might have a peak load in Christmas of 2014. They want just in time IT, they want services that they can move up or down. If that is how they want to buy it, that is how I have got to produce and sell it.

Said differently I am moving from a cost basis to a pricing basis. IT doesn’t think like that; IT thinks like a monopoly mostly. But businesses now have a choice, if they don’t like us, and what we do, they are going to go to the public cloud and buy it with a credit card. I can’t stop them. So the currency of IT, the way we deliver, the way it is consumed, the way business is thinking about it – these are all human elements – the technology is there, are we ready to deliver it the way the business wants it and the pace at which business wants it? That is the transformation on people and that’s what we are going through.

Q: EMC started this cloud journey much earlier than most others. What were the major challenges you faced and how were they overcome?

A: We as an organisation were subject to certain early versions of technology. We didn’t have a broad ecosytstem when we started in 2004, 2005. Our own skills were developing. We probably learnt lessons tougher than we needed to, these days those

of our journey took us four years. If you were to embark on that journey today you would probably do it better than we did it; I hope so. That is because things have moved forward now. There is an ecosystem, there are better skill sets, more experiences, you can mitigate risk, the technologies are far ahead. Some of the other things we learned are independent of technology.

One, you absolutely need to have deep conviction to the journey. Thirty percent is not victory. You have to drive to 100%. You

metric that makes sense to your business,

either earnings per share or cost of IT per

can track. So you can get a baseline. Do some good baselining before you start the journey,

towards it. Don’t stop till you get the goal. Another thing is no u-‐turns. Once you

make the decision, you are going virtual and going into the cloud, so don’t entertain a physical, non-‐virtualised app. No matter how

your decided cloud platform, your virtualised platform, don’t take it. Why? Because you are taking a retro step, taking a step backwards, you are going to have new tool sets, new middleware, new ways to manage it, new hardware, you have just introduced a whole set of expense, complications, points of failure that you are trying to get away from .

Q: What is your transformation story in terms of big data and predictive analysis? A: The chief architect came to me a couple of years ago and told me that we need to start looking at our data management capabilities, because what is going to be ubiquitous

We started looking at key data items. We put in data governance, data cleansing, data management capabilities -‐ we started putting them into place.

Today when we look back, am so glad we did, because that gave us control of the structured information that we were putting in. That was the lifeblood of our organisation. As that was happening, unstructured data came into play, we started seeing our internal corporate. We have an internal social media site that is extremely vibrant – EMCOne. It is a vibrant, active website; globally used. Lot of unstructured, object-‐based data, being generated – stored, used, looked at. We started seeing a pattern there, and then we

happened to get involved with companies like Greenplum and Isilon, and that accelerated. So we basically did some upfront work on making sure that our data elements were well thought through, there was some hygiene and discipline in our data.

We looked at the security and access models around that information. Then we started putting the tools into place. So we started moving things into Greenplum just to see what it looked like, then Chorus came along we hired a few data scientists as we were looking ata data collaboration. We

see, to get our hands dirty with it -‐ one in the area of security, one in quality, one in data centre management – so we picked a few areas that we wanted to get learning with, and we are learning in the process on how to

deal with unstructured data. We created BI as a service, so we started taking this data, collect across the company and present it as an asset to internal users, to then extract and use in different ways as a service so they weren’t creating data models of their own, but rather using one version of the truth that we were presenting up to them. All of this has happened in the last 18 to 24 months.

Q: What is the next big thing after cloud and big data?A: Cloud and big data are big, they are disruptive. I think consumerisation, the end device, the topmost layer – that is going to be huge. The fact that you and I want to consume information on any device, anytime anywhere is going to be critical. It is going to be pivotal, and how successful things are within the enterprise. Right now I think the user experience is something we don’t spend enough time talking about, but I think it is going to be huge.


Network WorldMPLSMPLS is still the dominant WAN technology but compelling alternatives are emerging. CNME investigates the options available.

Telecoms WorldFemtocellsDelivering high quality cellular service inside

carriers, especially for high-‐speed data which requires strong signals. Traditional in-‐building solutions are expensive and take a long time to implement, but a new generation of femtocells offer s quicker and cheaper answer. We demystify the technology.

CareersThird-party trainersArmed with a university degree one might be, but third-‐party trainers and one-‐off courses can still add a lot of value to every IT aspirant, regardless of rank. CNME looks at these third-‐party trainers and how they can contribute to the development of both internal IT staff, and university students.

Last word

Next issue

EventsRME Partner Excellence Conference and Awards 201212th June 2012 http://www.resellerme.com/awards-‐2012-‐draft/conference.php

Software Congress 2012 25th June 2012 The Address Hotel, Dubai Marinahttp://www.softwarecongressme.com/2012/

Online

What we’rereading

Risk of fraud and misconductRichard H Girgenti and Timothy P HedleyBook

compliance and flag unusual transactions

model for preventing, detecting and responding

Managing the Risk of Fraud and Misconduct:

Life as a healthcare CIODr John D HalamkaBlog

Geekdoctor.blogspot.com

July 2012

Solutions WorldEnterprise architectureEnterprise architecture (EA) is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. CNME examines whether organisations in the Middle East are taking it seriously enough to implement it.

Storage AdvisorLifecyle management – from cradle to the graveCNME highlights the tips that enterprises can follow in order to manage and get more from the data from the point of creation, to the eventual end-‐of-‐line for its usage.

Security AdvisorEnd-point securityWith the advent of virtualisation, cloud and BYOD phenomenon, enterprises face the challenge of choosing the right endpoint

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.cnmeonline.com

protection that can protect their key information assets. We look at the technology choices available in the market.

Integration AdvisorGlobal sourcing in the partnership strategyAs a growing enterprise, reaching into markets beyond the region, one has to examine the value that global partners can bring to the business. We look at how organisations can choose global partners, and what they need to keep in mind to get the best out of the relationship.


Virtualization is as easy as 1.

Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA)provides everything you need to create an enterprise wide private cloud infrastructure,

built on open standards. With the touch of a button, you can provision next-generation

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everywhere. Your network will be more powerful and scalable, with dramatically improved

performance and reliability. To learn how Avaya can help bring your business into the

collaborative age, visit avaya.com/vena.

© 2011 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

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