CXO Insight ME - Issue 10 - June 2019

ISSUE 10 \ JUNE 2019

DUAL IDENTITY HOW AL MASAH CAPITAL CIO DOUBLES AS THE CEO OF ITS IT SERVICES ARM

CONTENTS

45

PRODUCTS

ARUBA INSTANT ON HPE PRIMERA

DUAL IDENTITY HOW AL MASAH CAPITAL CIO DOUBLES AS THE CEO OF ITS IT SERVICES ARM

10

34 AVAYA IX COLLABORATION UNIT CU360

6 VIEWPOINT

FEATURE

TRANSFORMATION 10 A MATTER OF TRUST 24 DIGITAL IN THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY CHALLENGING THE NORM 16 FOR 32 FOUNDATIONS SUCCESS INTERVIEW THE CASE FOR INTENT33 BASED SEGMENTATION ON THE GROWTH PATH INNOVATION’S ROCKET FUEL 18 34 PLATFORM FOR GROWTH THE ABC OF DEVOPS 20 36 PUBLISHED BY INSIGHT MEDIA & PUBLISHING LLC

NEWS

AMAZON PRIME LAUNCHES IN UAE ABU DHABI’S NEW AIRPORT OFFERS 5G RPA VENDOR UIPATH PARTNERS WITH MANNAI RIT DUBAI AND IBM TEAM UP FOR DATA SCIENCE SKILLS CONSENSYS TO LAUNCH BLOACKCHAIN FOR SOCIAL IMPACT IN IRAQ

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World Record Breaker!

HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Server The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Server based on AMD EPYCTM 7601 model scored

257

on SPECrate2017_fp_base benchmark

1980

on SPECfp_rate2006

both of which are higher scores than any other two socket system has achieved! *

WHATS MORE! The AMD on Gen10 ProLiant combo ooers up to up to 50%* lower cost per virtual machine than its competitors, resulting in greater utilization and ROI for users!

Allowing you to support more virtual machines per server, process more data in parallel, and access more local storage than any other server.

*Source: 1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-amd-epyc-powered-hpe-vm-server-is-breaking-world-records/ 2. https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/a00036621enw

EDITORIAL

MAKING THE LEAP

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n this age of technology-enabled businesses, do CIOs have an edge over their C -suite colleagues to sit in the CEO’s hot seat? I have had this debate with so many people, and my argument always has been that that CIOs can step up to the plate if they think differently and see the bigger picture about their businesses. Still, I can’t really think of many CIOs who have made that successful transition to the top role. This could be because many of them lack the key attribute that characterises the head honcho – leadership.

And many of our IT leaders are reluctant to get out of their comfort zones, pick up the gauntlet and confront new challenges. If they can manage to do that, it’s my firm conviction that CIOs have a real shot at becoming CEOs because today the business is all about customer experience shaped by digital technologies. CIOs with a laser-sharp on business and ability to communicate vision and

Published by

Publication licensed by Sharjah Media City @Copyright 2019 Insight Media and Publishing

Managing Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevant@insightmediame.com +97156 - 4156425

strategy to others are indeed strong candidates for the highest rank in any organisation. In this month’s cover, we have featured a CIO who straddles both worlds with consummate ease, and we hope to find more such examples of leadership in the coming months.

On a different note, the biggest news in the high-tech industry today is the big-ticket deal of Salesforce acquiring Tableau. The $15.7 billion deal gives the number one CRM vendor a solid base in the burgeoning data analytics market, but what it really means for the market in the long term remains to be seen. The BI market is getting commoditised faster, and this deal may not be good news for smaller players.

Our contributor Sunil Paul from Finesse has analysed threadbare the implications of this acquisition in his regular column. Turn over to page number 46 for the details.

Sales Director Merle Carrasco merlec@insightmediame.com +97155 - 1181730

Production Head James Tharian jamest@insightmediame.com +97156 - 4945966

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Administration Manager Fahida Afaf Bangod fahidaa@insightmediame.com +97156 - 5741456

While the publisher has made all efforts to ensure the accuracy of information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors

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NEWS

AMAZON PRIME LAUNCHES IN UAE

F

ollowing the launch of Amazon. ae on May 1st, Amazon announced the launch of Amazon Prime in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Prime is Amazon’s premium membership program enjoyed by more than 100 million paid members in 17 countries, offering an unparalleled combination of shopping and entertainment benefits tailored to each country.

Everyone can try Prime and enjoy all of the benefits by signing up for a 30-day free trial at www.amazon.ae/prime.

Prime members in the UAE will receive free delivery on millions of local and international items, access to exclusive and award-winning Amazon Original series and other popular

movies and TV shows with Prime Video, video game benefits with Twitch Prime, exclusive Prime member deals and more. Customers can join Prime for AED 16 per month, or alternatively they can save by joining for an AED 140 annual payment. Further, until 31 October 2019, monthly customers can enjoy an introductory promotional price of AED 12 per month. All customers can try Prime free of charge with a no obligation 30-day trial.

“We are excited to provide UAE customers fast, free delivery on products from Amazon UAE and free international delivery on products from Amazon U.S.,” says Jamil Ghani, Vice President, Prime and Marketing International, Amazon.

“Prime is designed to make the lives of members better every day.

It’s only Day 1 so we will continue to make the program better through adding even more products and benefits to keep delighting customers in the UAE.”

airport. I want to extend my gratitude to all the teams involved from Etisalat and Abu Dhabi Airports in making this 5G deployment a success, which will set a benchmark by providing a platform to enable new futuristic use cases and digital transformation for all customers. Etisalat is working closely with smartphone brands to launch their devices on our 5G network as well as in the MENA region. Our aim is to ‘Drive the Digital Future to empower societies’ that will bring digital capabilities and benefits across the region.”

Bryan Thompson, Chief Executive Officer of Abu Dhabi Airports, said: “We

are delighted to have had the opportunity to work with Etisalat to incorporate state-ofthe-art 5G connectivity at our Midfield Terminal Building. We value our customers first and foremost, and access to fast cellular service is a crucial factor that makes a big difference for travelers from around the world. Technology is at the heart of our digital transformation strategy and providing our customers with enhanced connectively services at the Midfield Terminal Building is in line with our vision of becoming the world’s leading airports group.”

Etisalat is targeting to provide 5G coverage at all prestigious, iconic and high data usage locations in 2019. By collaborating with major smartphone brands Etisalat’s 5G service will be launched by second quarter this year.

ABU DHABI’S NEW AIRPORT OFFERS 5G Etisalat has become the first mobile operator in MENA to provide 5G coverage inside an international airport.

The Midfield Terminal Building (MTB), Abu Dhabi’s new international airport, will become the first airport terminal in the region to benefit from ultra-high speed connectivity, delivered by the Etisalat’s 5G network.

The deployment is based on C-Band, a first-of-its-kind in 5G digital indoor technology delivering gigabit per second download speeds.

This achievement has been enabled by efficient collaboration and coordination between Etisalat and Abu Dhabi Airports to deliver the 5G network at the MTB before its official opening.

Saeed Al Zarouni, Senior Vice President, Mobile Network, Etisalat, said: “We are very glad to activate 5G in Abu Dhabi’s new international 6

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RPA VENDOR UIPATH PARTNERS WITH MANNAI TRADING

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annai Trading and UiPath, have announced a technological partnership to drive a new level of integration of RPA to organisations in Qatar.

By harnessing Mannai’s extensive experience in delivering digital business process automation projects, this partnership with UiPath will provide customers in Qatar with access to best-of-breed implementation and management services along with industry leading RPA and Intelligent Automation technology.

Leveraging on this collaboration, customers can now easily extend RPA capabilities into their enterprise digital applications and on top of existing BPM solutions, to achieve an end-to-end business automation,

with zero replacement to any of their existing technologies.

Binu M R, Vice President – Mannai InfoTech, said: “This strategic partnership will bring the best of technologies to the market. With RPA evolving, we envisage to better

RIT DUBAI AND IBM TEAM UP FOR DATA SCIENCE SKILLS Rochester Institute of Technology Dubai (RIT Dubai) has collaborated with IBM to equip its students with future-ready skills in the fields of data science and analytics through the IBM Skills Academy program. The IBM Skills Academy is a training and certification program that is designed to bridge the skill gap between the University and the market industry.

Through this collaboration, RIT students will be given the opportunity to gain new key digital skills, improve their employability and act as accelerators for entrepreneurship to motivate economic growth.

This program is one of IBM’s set of initiatives that are designed to address the skills gap in the region and digitally enable current and future talent.

In 2017, Smart Dubai and RIT signed an agreement to develop a specialized

interdisciplinary Master’s degree in Data Science and Analytics. Under the new collaboration, IBM will also help

integrate the growing robotic workforce into the coordination of humans, systems and workflow. Our partnership with UiPath is leading the way. With this partnership, we intend to build out a Center of Excellence around RPA capabilities and create excellent client and employee experiences while accelerating an organisation’s digital transformation journey.”

Jan Ursi, VP of Partnerships for EMEA at UiPath, said: “Mannai is an excellent partner to join forces with to further drive RPA adoption in Qatar. We look forward to empowering businesses, organisations and their employees to harness the tremendous benefits of using our market-leading UiPath RPA platform to gain competitive advantage and eliminate numbing, repetitive tasks from their workflow.”

RIT in formulating and teaching the introductory courses of the Master’s degree and provide mentorship opportunities for the Master’s degree students.

Dr Yousef al Assaf, President of RIT Dubai was delighted to cooperate with IBM, Dr Al Assaf commented, “we are proud to cooperate with IBM, a leader in the information technology sector worldwide. The IBM skills academy will concentrate on preparing students to face the future advancements and challenges. We are looking to equip our students with hands on experience, not only the theoretical aspect of learning, and IBM is the best partner for this.”

“Data is the driving force behind innovation, transformation and any strategic decision,” said Amr Refaat, General Manager, IBM Middle East and Pakistan. “Equipping our talent and future leaders with the necessary data and analytics skills will not only improve their employability but accelerate their contribution to innovation and economic growth.”

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NEWS

CONSENSYS TO LAUNCH BLOACKCHAIN FOR SOCIAL IMPACT IN IRAQ

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eiterating its commitment to using technology to build a more humane society, ConsenSys has confirmed its support of Re:Coded Iraq.

Re:Coded, a humanitarian innovation non-profit organisation founded in 2017,provides coding and entrepreneurship training, mentorship opportunities and facilitates employment and freelancing opportunities for conflict affected youth across the MENA region.

The global blockchain specialist firm has developed a mentorship program for Re:Coded trainers, which includes general and technical blockchain training courses run by Mostafa Farghaly, Blockchain Protocol Engineer and Ammar Kurabi, Senior Technical Project

Manager from ConsenSys MENA. This will enable the trainers to then deliver training courses at their centers in Iraq.

Since early 2014, over 3.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced due to conflict, and more than 240,000 Syrian refugees currently live in Iraq. The humanitarian crisis has created many difficulties, disrupting sectors such as education and employment.

“Our aim in Iraq is to bring together local developers, designers, social entrepreneurs, humanitarians and community residents to develop creative technology solutions that address the specific challenges facing this war-

torn region. These include barriers to education, difficulty accessing the job market and social cohesion between displaced Iraqis and host community members,” said Samsul Karim, Senior Edtech Expert, ConsenSys. In addition to this, ConsenSys has extended its support by sharing numerous resources with Re:Coded in addition to the training and mentoring.

“One Re:Coded trainer has also received a scholarship to attend the ConsenSys Academy Developer Training Program in October, a testament to the fact that there is talent to be harnessed in this conflict zone,” added Karim

SOPHOS ACQUIRES ROOK SECURITY

trend of ‘hacker pen-testing’ to find weaknesses in their surface area.

As a result, businesses need 24/7 monitoring and management of what is happening on their network, yet many of them do not have the expertise, can’t keep up or don’t have the security teams in-house to optimally configure and manage security around-theclock,” said Joe Levy, chief technology officer at Sophos. “With MDR, Sophos’ channel partners will be able to provide businesses of all sizes with expert services that continuously detect, hunt for and respond to security incidents.”

In addition, Sophos plans to align its synchronised security technology and product portfolio with Rook Security’s 24/7 services for MDR customers. Rook Security experts will also be able to review these customer security postures to ensure optimal policy configurations for Sophos products across estates.

Sophos has acquired Rook Security, which provides managed detection and response (MDR) services. Rook Security provides a 24/7 team of cyberthreat hunters and incident response experts who monitor, hunt for, analyse and respond to security incidents for businesses of all sizes.

The privately-owned company was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Indianapolis, Ind. Sophos is creating re-sellable MDR services by combining Rook Security’s threat detection, investigation and response capabilities with its recently acquired DarkBytes technology platform. As a channel-first, channel-best security provider, Sophos will deliver the new MDR services through its network 8

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of approximately 47,000 channel partners worldwide.

“Cybercriminals are relentlessly trying to exploit organisations with techniques ranging from tried-and-true phishing emails to the more recent

SPIRE SOLUTIONS SIGNS DISTRIBUTION PACT WITH LOOKOUT

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obile security issues are growing in both volume and importance, even though Apple and Google constantly add security features.

According to Gartner Market Guide for Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) 2018, nearly one out of five business and industry apps leaks personally

EMIRATES STEEL PICKS COMMVAULT FOR DATA MANAGEMENT Commvault has announced that Emirates Steel has implemented CommvaultHyperScale to support its digitalisation ambitions and safeguard its manufacturing operations.

Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, Emirates Steel is wholly governmentowned. At full capacity, its 11 plants produce 3.5 million tons of steel products, such as sheets, beams, and reinforced bars, every year for the construction industry. The company’s digitalisation efforts include moving

identifiable information while every year, 42 million mobile malware attacks take place.

To address customer challenges related to mobile endpoint security, Spire Solutions has signed a partnership agreement with Lookout.

Through continuous conditional access, Lookout enables enterprises

to constantly assess device health and allow employees to authenticate to corporate resources over any network.

“Mobile threat vectors are particularly dangerous, and we regularly hear news about compromised mobile applications. By partnering with Lookout, we aim to increase awareness of mobile device security in the region, and help customers achieve resilience across their endpoint infrastructure.”, commented Sapan Agarwal, Deputy VP – Product Management, at Spire Solutions.

“Securing data in the post-perimeter world requires organisations to move critical security capabilities to mobile devices so that employees have the ability to browse to any site and download any app without worrying about being tracked or being infected. As we seek to accelerate our growth in the Middle East, partnering with Spire Solutions will enable us toleverage their regional coverage and top-notch technical expertise”, said Bahaa Hudairi, Regional Sales Director META, at Lookout.

its SAP modules to the cloud through Microsoft public cloud solutions.

“Backup was a challenge with underlying technology scattered across different environments and running on aging Dell hardware,” said Mohammed Azam, IT Infrastructure Head at Emirates Steel.

Commvault HyperScale and Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery protect 400 terabytes of data hosted across SAP systems, and including SQL databases, email archives, and 20 virtual machines.

“Commvault HyperScale is easy to install and use,” said Azam.

“Interoperability with both public cloud and on-premises environments means we can make IT investment decisions that boost our competitive advantage without having to worry about backup.”

Two Commvault HyperScale clusters replicate data between the company’s data centre and disaster recovery site

to provide robust business continuity capabilities. “Commvault gives us confidence that we can recover rapidly from any scenario, including potential ransomware attacks,” said Azam. “We can now restore a critical database in less than 90 minutes compared with three hours previously.”

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FEATURE

A MATTER OF TRUST THE ANATOMY OF ZERO TRUST SECURITY MODEL

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Z

ero trust is the next big thing in security. The concept was introduced by Forrester almost a decade ago as an alternative architectural approach to security based on microsegmentation and microperimeters to counter escalating risks. The core principle at the heart of zero trust model is security by design, and command and control over who has access to the network and data. It changes the paradigm from ‘trust but verify’ to ‘never trust but always verify’ with a data-centric approach to security.

With the ever-changing threat landscape and increasing sophistication, security leaders are now forced to rethink their traditional approach to security and adopt a zero trust security model to protect enterprise systems and data.

Why zero trust?

“Organisations need a zero trust security model because when it comes to networks, trust is nothing more than a vulnerability to be exploited.

Many people harbour the false notion that there are trusted networks and untrusted networks: They believe that if they are on a “trusted network,” they are safe from harm. This is a naïve and leads to a failure to adopt adequate protection: most attacks and exploits occur as a result of this trust model,” says Tarek Abbas, Director, Systems Engineering, Emerging Markets, Palo Alto Networks.

The concept of zero trust is as profound in cybersecurity as the sweeping transformation generated by the arrival of cloud, mobility, agility, and availability, according to Kamel Heus, Regional Director, Northern, Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Centrify. “Zero trust security assumes that the threat actor may be already within an organisation and is posing as an employee of the organisation.

Or, alternatively has assumed the credentials of an employee of the organisation. The concept of zero trust seeks to limit the opportunity of such an internal threat actor to use the assumed

Kamel Heus, Regional Director, Northern, Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Centrify

Maher Jadallah, Regional Director Middle East, Tenable

employee credentials and breach other parts of the organisation,” he says.

Maher Jadallah, Regional Director Middle East, Tenable, says implementing a zero-trust model is all about control.

It requires a complete picture of the environment - covering what network assets exist and where data resides, with the right level of control to provision access. Typical solutions include a robust admin access management solution, firewalls, micro-segmentation capabilities, controls on endpoints and servers, vulnerability management, etc., to ensure that all access requests are legitimate and the security posture of devices complies with existing protocols.

Nicolai Solling, CTO of Help AG, agrees that zero trust is more relevant today than it has ever been, and this is largely on account of malware and insider threats. “The issue with the threats today is that they are exploiting the elevated rights and capabilities of systems and users to spread laterally to systems with higher criticality. The obvious example is a user receiving an e-mail with a phishing element which infects the user’s machine, and the absence of zero-trust allows infection of further connected systems where rights exist. This is also sometimes referred to as lateral movement. By implementing a zero-trust approach, you greatly reduce

the attack surface on your systems and hence limit the possibility of lateral movement of attacks.”

Though the concept might sound relatively simple, and draws on a range of existing technologies, implementing a zero trust model can be a daunting challenge for many. Industry experts point out zero trust is a journey, not a destination.

“Zero trust can be challenging to implement because it doesn’t involve just one element or product but covers many functionalities within your ICT environment. It requires architecting and enhancing your infrastructure and applications with the intent of being able to control – not just the network, but also endpoints, access, user rights and privileges which are all extremely important areas to focus on,” says Solling.

Abbas from Palo Alto Networks says Implementing zero trust is, to a large extent, about changing the mindset that companies have towards cyber security and modifying the way people – whether that’s staff or customers – access your network. Firms need to ensure that all data and resources are accessed securely, based on user and location.

They must identify the traffic and data flow and have visibility to the application, the user and the flows. Understanding

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FEATURE

Mathivanan Venkatachalam, vice president, ManageEngine

who the users are, what applications they are using and the appropriate connection method is key to determining and enforcing a policy that ensures secure access to your data, he adds.

Mathivanan Venkatachalam,VP, ManageEngine, recommends that businesses implement zero trust model gradually, as opposed to embracing a particular product as an immediate solution. “Though there will likely be a boon to cybersecurity while establishing this zero trust model, there are also challenges businesses need to endure while going through the implementation process. First, the existing mindset of IT security professionals can be a challenge to overcome, as they generally expect threats to come from outside the network; now, IT personnel need to analyse entities not only from the outside but also from the inside of the network. Second, the incompatibility of legacy systems with zero trust security procedures will likely prove to be a challenge as well. Third, there will be a hit on employee productivity, as zero trust model implementation will delay the normal workflow for employees by requesting their identity every time they try to establish contact with the network.”

Jadallah says before moving anything to a zero trust model you need basic foundational controls. This requires 12

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Nicolai Solling, CTO of Help AG

THOUGH THE CONCEPT MIGHT SOUND RELATIVELY SIMPLE, AND DRAWS ON A RANGE OF EXISTING TECHNOLOGIES, IMPLEMENTING A ZERO TRUST MODEL CAN BE A DAUNTING CHALLENGE FOR MANY. INDUSTRY EXPERTS POINT OUT ZERO TRUST IS A JOURNEY, NOT A DESTINATION. understanding of what you have, how it’s accessed, and by whom. Without this basic understanding, it’s impossible to implement zero trust successfully.

The best time to align the move to zero trust is as part of current digital transformation projects. As you move to the cloud, for example. When you have a Greenfield site, it’s far easier to implement a zero trust model rather

Tarek Abbas, Director, Systems Engineering, Emerging Markets, Palo Alto Networks than trying to stick it over the top of an aging environment, he says.

What are some of the common pitfalls to avoid when you move to a Zero trust security model?

“The pitfalls to avoid are mainly around the human aspect: making sure that all departments and employees in an organisation are on board with the security procedures and understand why they need to participate in additional layers of authentication and why procedures are so important to follow.

Implementing a zero trust approach requires good communication across the organisation,” says Abbas.

Solling from Help AG notes that there are, of course, many technical pitfalls you can fall into – but at the end of the day this boils down to product selection and implementation, And just as with your car, if you choose the wrong brand or service it at the wrong mechanic, you will burn your fingers.

“However, at the root of most of the pitfalls is the fact that zero trust is very often positioned as a product while it is actually an approach or design paradigm. Once you understand this and break it down to a prioritised approach, the issue becomes much more manageable. If you try to do everything in one go, you will ultimately set yourself up for failure,” he adds.

COVER STORY

DUAL IDENTITY AS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES GAIN STEAM, IT LEADERS ARE EXPANDING THEIR ROLES TO TAKE ON THE ONUS OF DEVELOPING BUSINESS STRATEGIES. WITH EVERY BUSINESS GETTING TECH-ENABLED, CIOS HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO CLIMB TO THE TOP OF THE CORPORATE LADDER WITH DIFFERENT THINKING AND PARTNERING WITH BUSINESS PEERS. A CASE IN POINT IS ASHITH PIRIYATTIATH, CIO OF AL MASAH CAPITAL, WHO DOUBLES AS CEO OF THE GROUP’S IT SERVICES ARM, GUARDIANONE TECHNOLOGIES.

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hat was your reason for setting up GuardianOne Technologies?

This is my fourth year with the group. When I joined, the state of IT across the group was not very integrated, and there was no structure in place. I requested the management to turn IT from a cost centre to profit centre. But, being into the financial services sector, and working more towards private equity investments, it was not a feasible idea. We’d exit each private equity business after reaching a certain level of maturity in the interest of investors and whatever IT arrangement we’d have done would be an overhead. However, after a large scale infrastructure migration to the cloud, and digital transformation initiatives, we have identified that we were spending close to $2.2 million in IT operations across the group, and this was when I proposed the plan again to make IT centralised and move to a profit-centre model.

This time, the board approved the plan, and I suggested that we should have a separate IT services arm.

Initially, the idea was to serve the needs of group companies for the first two years and then extend it externally. The board agreed to put in 60 percent as working capital, with the rest coming from employees. However, there were many challenges in forming this entity. We were planning to have a data centre and development centre in India and realised that the country’s data protection laws are not in our best interest. Being a diversified group, we cater to different verticals and each has its own regulatory frameworks, and Indian data protection laws are not conducive for our business. That delayed the whole process and then we started exploring options worldwide, before zeroing in on Singapore. The fact that we have business operations in Singapore titled the scale in its favour; now we have built a state-of-the-art

PREVIOUSLY, I WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGY VISION OF THE GROUP, AND NOW I HAVE TO WEAR MULTIPLE HATS – BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AS WELL AS IT OPERATIONS. THE BIGGEST BENEFIT IS THAT I CAN PUT MYSELF INTO THE CUSTOMER’S SHOES – HAVING BEEN A TECHNOLOGY CUSTOMER FOR THE LAST 18 YEARS, I CAN UNDERSTAND THEIR PAIN POINTS, AND THIS IS WHAT I AM BRINGING TO THE TABLE. data centre in Singapore and now we are in the process of setting up another one in Dubai. We have recently opened a DR site in Mauritius as well.

Why did you decide to extend the services to external parties as well?

As I said earlier, we planned to meet the internal requirements before branching out. But, most of our investors have their businesses, and they approached us to support them. So, even before launching GuardianOne officially, we have signed 3-4 contracts, and our core expertise is in healthcare, education, logistics, F&B, and BFSI.

We are starting with cloud services, and we provide private and hybrid cloud solutions hosted in our data centres in the UAE or Singapore. Healthcare is another area where we are offering hospital information systems and patient management solutions. We have a home-grown school management system, which has been tried-andtested internally, and customised PoS and business applications for the F&B sector. We are also big on security, and we are providing security-as-a-service platform, which has seven layers of security. We don’t want our customers to make investments in security, and this will be offered as Opex model.

Another major offering is software development and implementation – we have built a customer centre of excellence to analyse, design and build a wide range of solutions from AI and business intelligence to enterprise and blockchain solutions based on the unique requirements of our customers. We also have a NOC and SOC set up in India.

For SMBs, we are offering IT-in-abox solution, whereby we take care of their whole infrastructure, business applications, and security so that they don’t have to invest anything in IT. And importantly, we have tied up some financial services firms to extend financial support to some of our customers who are facing cash flow issues to fund their IT projects.

How do you balance the dual roles?

For me, this is a new area, and I have gone through a steep learning curve in the last year. Previously, I was responsible for the strategic technology vision of the group, and now I have to wear multiple hats – business development as well as IT operations.

The biggest benefit is that I can put myself into the customer’s shoes – having been a technology customer for the last 18 years, I can understand their pain points, and this is what I am bringing to the table.

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FEATURE

CHALLENGING THE NORM INDUSTRY 4.0 PROMISES TO RESHAPE MANUFACTURING. INDUSTRY EXPERTS DISCUSS THE IMPACT OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ON MIDDLE EAST BUSINESSES.

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ndustry 4.0, in simple terms, means digital transformation of manufacturing, ushering in operational efficiencies and new business models. The concept still means different things to different people, but at its heart, Industry 4.0 is all about integrated and automated manufacturing processes.

According to Deloitte, Industry 4.0 extends far beyond the limits of Industrial IoT, which is typically where many explorations of the phenomenon begin and end. It also moves beyond the realm of manufacturing and production to focus on the entire ecosystem of partners, suppliers, customers, the workforce, and operational considerations.

“While definitions may vary among the many consultants, analysts, and media experts writing about Industry 4.0, some generalisations can be made. The term refers to “the fourth industrial revolution” and typically includes the transformative technologies disrupting operational processes, financial management and network connectivity. It’s more than just connecting machines to each other and automating some processes, though. It’s bigger and more strategic, affecting the end-to-end processes as well as the extended value chain and how the manufacturer engages with partners, suppliers, and customers,” says Jonathan Wood, GM-MEA, Infor.

Alain Kaddoum, GM, Swisslog Middle East, says though it is similar

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in important ways to IoT, Industry 4.0 provides a more comprehensive roadmap to the future because it encompasses cyber-physical systems, the Industrial Internet of Things and the Internet of Services. In doing so, it helps organisation plan for and create a future in which cyber-physical systems communicate over the IoT and cooperate with each other and humans in real time, supported by an Internet of Services in which both internal and cross-organisational services are leveraged across the value chain.

“Industry 4.0 is changing the interactions between humans and machines and between machines and other machines. This will have a huge impact on the warehouse. With decentralised, networked intelligence, advanced robotics and selforganising processes, the warehouse of the future will take a giant step forward in productivity, flexibility and efficiency,” he adds.

Hesham El Komy, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Africa & India (MEAI), Epicor Software, says essentially, Industry 4.0 is about combining artificial intelligence and data science to realise the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT), but just having access to large pools of information is no longer enough. “The important thing that manufacturers need to take advantage of, over the coming year, is using that data to gain insight,

Alain Kaddoum, GM, Swisslog Middle East

Jonathan Wood, GM-MEA, Infor

inform decisions, and drive better business outcomes.”

When it comes to harnessing the full potential of Industry 4.0, we are still in the early adoption stage globally, and there is a lack of preparedness across the Middle East.

Dr Hichem Maya, General Manager – Consumer Industries, EMEA South, SAP, says the Middle East governments and organisation have the digital transformation vision and the appetite for becoming leaders in Industry 4.0. “The UAE, for example, is advancing its strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, especially in developing research and development, intelligent and personal genomic medicine, and robotic healthcare.

Industry 4.0 is also expected to be the foundation for future cities across the Middle East.

“At SAP, we’re exchanging global best practices from global innovators with the Middle East. For example, Harley-Davidson’s Industry 4.0-enabled factory can build 1,700 bike variations on one production line and ship individualised bikes in 90 seconds, smart beverage vending machines can allow consumers their own soda flavors, and paper companies can detect or predict deteriorating quality.”

Wood says forward-thinking manufacturers are well prepared and eager to take advantage of innovative technology. “Many have been conducting proof of concept test cases and starting with modest projects to test the waters and build confidence and expertise among team members. The early adopters are moving forward with more advanced applications and engaging in systemwide re-thinking and modernisation.

Of course, there are still some companies who are reluctant to make changes. These companies may be short of capital to invest in technology or mired in indecision and reluctant to take the leap. These companies will fall further behind and have issues keeping pace with customer expectations.”

Which technologies are blurring the lines between digital and physical spheres?

“Industry 4.0 primarily relies on the Internet of Things – with increasingly powerful and lower-cost sensors and microchips now being able to be added to almost every tool, machine, and component for share real-time information. With a realtime foundation of Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, organisation can combine machine data with enterprise data to decrease cycle time, and enhance product quality and efficiency,” says Maya from SAP. In addition, emerging technologies such as 3D printing and blockchain can also further securely personalise and deliver products in Industry 4.0 tailored to customers’ preferences.

On the factory floor, workers can use augmented reality to get job information, access raw materials, and do physical inventory.

Wood from Infor adds: “Sensors are used to monitor for a wide range of physical conditions, from motion and vibration to weight, temperature, density, and volume. The sensors can be embedded in machinery, on vehicles, or within a space, like inside a refrigeration unit. The sensors, which can be very small and inexpensive, collect and communicate data to the cloud where it is aggregated and analysed looking for anomalies that need attention. When the data indicates all systems are asexpected, further action may not be needed. But, if the data falls outside of predefined ranges, indicating a problem, other action is triggered.”

What are the challenges related to Industry 4.0?

Kaddoum from Swisslog says business leaders need to understand Industry 4.0 technologies and possibilities today and begin planning how their companies will grow them tomorrow.

At the same time, supply chain leaders must commit to managing change within their organisation to ensure

Dr Hichem Maya, General Manager – Consumer Industries, EMEA South, SAP

Hesham El Komy, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Africa & India (MEAI), Epicor Software

people, processes and technology are prepared to embrace Industry 4.0 design principles.

“From our practical experiences of implementing Epicor ERP projects, we’ve found that taking a critical look at the existing technical environment is a vital first step. It’s an evaluation process that can help organisation to gauge well in advance exactly how simple or complex it will be to transfer promising Industry 4.0 pilot projects into everyday operations,” sums up EL Komy from Epicor.

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INTERVIEW

ON THE GROWTH PATH JIM CHIRICO, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF AVAYA, TELLS US WHY HIS COMPANY IS BETTER POSITIONED TO RIDE THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WAVE

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hen Avaya went public last year, you said your immediate priority was to achieve sustained profitable growth. Are you on track to do that?

Avaya is extremely profitable. Over the last 12 months, we have achieved over 60 percent gross margin range, which is good, especially if you look at our services business.

In terms of profitability, our EBITA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Amortisation) last year was around 25 percent, which is again best-inclass numbers within the industry. We are generating a significant amount of cash - we had said we would generate cash from operations in the neighborhood of 10 percent, and we are on track to do that.

As we move to private cloud solutions, migrating some of our existing managed services customers and new customers to virtually hosted platforms in our data centres in 15 countries, we will have more of a traditional cloud margin in the range of 80 plus percent, which will accelerate our gross margins percentage over time.

To what extent has Avaya been able to transition from a hardware company to a software one?

We have been at that for a while, and if you look at the last posted numbers, software, and services account for 83 percent of our revenues. We are continuing to improve that percentage to percentage every year, and the only hardware we sell today are endpoints, which is only 10 percent of our revenues.

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OVER THE NEXT 18 MONTHS, YOU ARE GOING TO SEE THE CLOUD LANDSCAPE CHANGING DRASTICALLY WITH NEW ENTRANTS IN THE MARKET AND SOME EARLIER ONES STRUGGLING BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY AND FINANCIAL STRENGTH TO MOVE TO THE NEXT LEVEL. OUR CLOUD STRATEGY, QUITE FRANKLY, IS ABOUT DELIVERING WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS REQUIRE. Where do you fit into the whole digital transformation wave?

We fit right into the core. We are focused on our customer journey, and we look at DX from a couple of different aspects. One is the cloud, where we are offering the full breadth of capabilities to enterprises with our private cloud solutions. For the mid-market, we have Powered by Avaya IP Office, and recently, we have

launched a storefront, simplifying the buying experience for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). If you look at some of the advancements we have made in Artificial Intelligence (AI), identity as a service, and mobility applications; I think we fit well into the digital transformation journey. Avaya has the richest set of applications and integration points than anyone in the industry, and we have been able to harness third-party technologies as part of our solution set, offering a much richer experience for the endcustomer.

What is Avaya’s cloud strategy?

If you look at our cloud strategy, because we are the leader in CC (Contact Centre) and UC (Unified Communications), we play in an exciting space. Again, compared to some of the pure cloud players in the SMB world, who are trying to figure out how to capitalise on that market, at Avaya, we actually own our IP and are a technology company at the core.

That differentiates us. We may not be the first to the game, but we are going to leverage our technologies to deliver what our customers in the SMB space want, and enterprises, which is core to our business need, and keep providing solutions to our client base in 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies.

Over the next 18 months, you are going to see the cloud landscape changing drastically with new entrants in the market and some earlier ones struggling because they don’t have the technology and financial strength to move to the next level. Our cloud strategy, quite frankly, is about delivering what our customers require

GOING FORWARD, OUR STRATEGY CAN BE BEST DESCRIBED AS COMMODITISATION OF AI THROUGH EXTERNAL PARTNERSHIPS AS WELL AS DEVELOPING SOME CRITICAL AI APPS FOR LARGE ENTERPRISES. shop is challenging to manage. When you can provide the simplification, eliminate the complexities, and have a converged UC-CC system, it offers significant TCO benefits. Again, we are the only one in the marketplace to deliver those capabilities.

when they want it, and we see an opportunity to provide differentiated solutions to enterprise customers and high-end of the mid-market space.

What is your competitive advantage?

One is our customer base, which is significant. They are loyal, committed, and we are a trusted partner to them.

We have 140 million lines installed out there today. Second is our services capability - we have more than 4,000 service professionals, and our managed services business has roughly around three million cloud seats under contract. We are in the heart of what our customers do, and the move to ReadyNow virtual cloud

infrastructure will enable us to offer truly multi-vendor capabilities around services. I think, more than anything, the number one advantage for us is our people – they are the best and brightest in the industry, not only in terms of technical skills but also go-tomarket expertise.

Is the convergence between UC and CC happening?

The answer is yes, and in fact, that is another competitive advantage for us, but it is still early days. We see steady but slow traction in UC-CC convergence. Everyone is under a lot of pressure in today’s environment, and having multiple suppliers in your IT

How are you leveraging AI? In a couple of different ways. One is through our partnership with Afiniti, which is around behavioural pairing.

Internally, our strategy is more about gaining deeper insights into user experience and real-time sentiment analysis with AI. Going forward, our strategy can be best described as commoditisation of AI through external partnerships as well as developing some critical AI apps for large enterprises.

Earlier on, we thought we could do a lot of it by ourselves, but you can’t keep up with the pace of the technology. We have identified a few critical applications that we will do internally, and the rest will be done by harnessing the best-in-class third-party technologies.

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INTERVIEW

PLATFORM FOR GROWTH

RAMI KICHLI, VICE PRESIDENT, SOFTWARE AG, GULF AND LEVANT REGION, ON HOW THE GERMAN ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE COMPANY IS HELPING ITS CUSTOMERS TO INNOVATE AND THRIVE IN THIS DIGITAL AGE.

S

oftware AG has been around for 50 years, which makes it one of the oldest technology companies still in business today. How has the journey been so far?

Software AG’s journey reflects some of the tectonic shifts in our industry. It began in the age of mainframes when large enterprises and government entities built their own systems. We came up with the world’s first columnar database called Adabas to cater to the massive mainframe and large server deployments, and an application development platform dubbed Natural. We have many customers who started with us in the 1960s and ‘70s and continue to use modern versions of Adabas and Natural, and we have announced that we will continue to support them until 2050. The Public Authority for Civil Information in Kuwait and the Royal Oman Police are two examples of those customers in this region.

The trends of custom development and mega suites in the 1980s and ‘90s were mostly about acquiring solutions, developing and customising them inhouse. This continued around until 15 years ago when organisations started feeling the need to be more agile. They realised agility could not be achieved with either of these approaches, built as they were for robustness and specific functionalities.

That’s when they started thinking about platforms, and we have been instrumental in driving this paradigm 20

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WE BELIEVE HELIX STRATEGY CAN HELP US ACHIEVE PROFITABLE, SUSTAINABLE GROWTH, AND THE TECHNOLOGY MARKETS WE SERVE ARE IN GROWTH MODE GLOBALLY. THE MARGIN OF GROWTH MIGHT VARY DEPENDING ON GEOGRAPHIES, BUT IT’S GROWING FASTER THAN THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND DATA CENTRE MARKETS. shift. However, we had to transform ourselves as a company first to do that as we were venturing into a new space at the risk of cannibalizing revenues from our legacy systems. We made that transition quickly, and now we are first and foremost a platform provider.

Customer expectations have changed today – it is no longer about what keeps them up at night, but about how you could help them address challenges they don’t foresee now. With the Uberisation of business, the key to survival is responding to market changes and customer demands in real time, and a platform prepares you for that.

How are you executing on your Helix strategy?

We officially launched our Helix strategy

earlier this year. It is not strictly a new strategy but just a fine-tuning of our go-to-market model, which will take us to the ultimate goal of profitable growth.

We call it a period of self-reflection.

Software AG has been successful and profitable for a good part of our 50 years of existence, and we cannot be acquired because of our shareholder structure. However, high profitability comes at a cost – it limits your growth potential. What we are trying to achieve is a balance between both, and avoid the trap of focusing only on topline growth.

We believe Helix strategy can help us achieve profitable, sustainable growth, and the technology markets we serve are in growth mode globally.

The margin of growth might vary depending on geographies, but it’s growing faster than the infrastructure and data centre markets.

We are giving our customers different options of using our software – not just on the cloud, but also on-premise in a subscription model. We don’t want to go down the path of restricting them to one particular consumption model in line with our motto ‘freedom as a service’.

You can either buy our software on the cloud, on-premise or choose to install it in your own data centre in a payas-you-go model. Basically, what this means is that our customers can rent the software as opposed to owning it perpetually, and it saves them upfront costs and lowers their risk profile. This freedom of choice is what makes us different from the competition.

By 2021 interconnection bandwidth is predicted to be

10X THE VOLUME OF INTERNET TRAFFIC

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To better understand and track how industry leaders are driving business advantage with digital-ready infrastructures, Equinix developed the Global Interconnection Index (GXI), which tracks, measures and forecasts the explosive growth in digital business.

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INTERVIEW

GETTING READY FOR A DATADRIVEN WORLD BIPUL SINHA, CEO OF RUBRIK, TALKS ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF DATA MANAGEMENT IN THIS DIGITAL AGE.

H

ow strategic is the Middle East market for you?

If you look at the trend of digitisation happening all around the world, especially in the Middle East, you have a young population, a lot more telecom, robust financial services and rapid digitisation of government services, which is resulting in a massive boom in data. How you manage that data, particularly for recovery so that your applications are up and running all the time, how do you provision data, how do you access it, and how do you ensure that there are no compliance violations are all becoming far more critical than ever. All aspects of data are Rubrik’s business, and the Middle East is a massive market for us.

Do you think of data as the new oil?

I’d take a little bit of different approach.

Oil is a very important commodity that you can exchange with people and get value for it; data is your company’s internal strength. I’d say data is the new Intellectual Property (IP). Every business needs to have IP around data, and you will not have a business without it. Today, businesses are getting technologyenabled, and if you don’t know how to use data, you will be left behind.

What is your approach to data management?

When we started, our goal was to create a comprehensive data management platform. But, some of the data platform thinking we had back then was ahead of the market. We wanted first to solve the 22

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foundation platform, which is backup and recovery. Once we start to manage data on behalf of our customers, then we can leverage algorithms, analytics, and ML to deliver products and services on top of data. That’s why we decided to focus on backup and recovery, and we simplified it in a new architecture that combines data and metadata.

Rubrik offers an all-in-one appliance that combines backup, recovery, and deduplication. Is it like a hyperconverged box?

The term hyperconvergence has been used and abused. We are a data management company, not an infrastructure company. Whether you want to keep your data on a hyperconverged platform or the cloud, we are the data management platform across everything. Think of us as the managers of data, not keepers of data.

Do you follow the scale-out architecture?

Rubrik is based on scale-out architecture, and it is where the world is moving to. It is all about fractional consumption and the ability to scale software and services incrementally.

No one wants to buy three years ahead of time. The economic cycles are shrinking, and we are living in the age of just-in-time economy, and you need a scale-out architecture to grow incrementally.

Is storage also getting software-defined?

We are not a storage company, and we

work with all storage vendors around us. What we see in the marketplace is that doing software-defined for the sake of it is not working. Businesses want to deliver the best quality of experience for their applications and end-users. What technology they use is immaterial to them- their goal is not to buy the best technology but how to deliver the best products and services to their customers. In this context, if you look at the shrinking business cycles and having to react faster to customer demands, the softwaredefined architecture allows them to have the elasticity and flexibility to grow their business and adjust to market demands.

Is backup to the cloud gaining steam now?

We introduced cloud backup five years ago, and the whole idea was – how do you connect your data centres to the public cloud? You need a single software fabric to manage both ends of the equations so that you have the flexibility for businesses to manage their backup and recovery onsite, and send data to the cloud, do DR, failover, and failback on the cloud. Ultimately, all businesses want to deliver better user experience, and you can’t do that if you don’t have the flexibility in your infrastructure and data management.

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VIEWPOINT

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY

BY AARON WHITE, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, MIDDLE EAST AT NUTANIX

I

n the digital era, manufacturing companies face business challenges that could scarcely have been imagined even a few years ago. Addressing these challenges depends on the company’s ability to take full advantage of the latest advances in information technology (IT).

Manufacturing and the Cloud Cloud computing is poised to transform every aspect of modern manufacturing.

Industry leaders—as they embrace digital transformation—are turning to cloud technologies to increase operational efficiency, improve supply chain management, and change how products are designed, produced, and distributed. No matter what type of manufacturing your company is engaged in—Consumer Goods, Automotive & Transportation, Chemicals & Metals, Industrial & High Tech, Medical & Pharma—advanced IT and cloud technologies can help you increase competitiveness, enhance innovation, and reduce costs. A recent study from Cloud Technology Partners found that the cloud can reduce total cost of ownership for manufacturers by as much as 42 percent.

Embracing cloud technology will be essential in enabling manufacturers to deliver customised products with shorter delivery times. Success will be underpinned by three technology imperatives that every manufacturer must contend with: • IoT. The Internet of Things can improve operational efficiency, decrease maintenance costs, and generate new service revenues.

• Artificial Intelligence. Manufacturing organisations are turning to big data 24

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MANUFACTURER COMPANIES ARE TURNING TO IOT TO CONNECT AND GATHER DATA FROM A WIDE VARIETY OF EQUIPMENT AND SENSORS ACROSS PRODUCTION FACILITIES, DISTRIBUTION CENTRES, TRANSPORTATION EQUIPMENT, OFFICES AND OTHER LOCATIONS TO DELIVER A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN AN INCREASINGLY WIRED AND DATA-INTENSIVE WORLD. analytics and AI in the form of machine learning and deep learning to enhance all aspects of their operations.

• Automation. Advanced automation is transforming everything from the supply chain to the manufacturing floor, to distribution, to ordering.

Cloud Success Manufacturing IT teams have to carefully navigate the evolving cloud landscape to be successful. This will require mature processes for deciding which applications and services to run in which cloud—whether that’s an onpremises private cloud, a CSP, or a big public cloud. And, because much of the operations will remain on-premises, the

company needs to transform its data centre infrastructure to deliver cloudlike agility. To build next-generation infrastructure, the company must look beyond legacy architecture to create data centres that rival the cloud. But what does this new enterprise IT stack look like, and how can the company leverage the latest innovations as it puts data centre and cloud strategies into practice? A growing number of manufacturing organisations have discovered that an enterprise cloud that offers the agility of public cloud without sacrificing control over critical resources is the answer.

Manufacturing and IoT Manufacturer companies are turning to IoT to connect and gather data from a wide variety of equipment and sensors across production facilities, distribution centres, transportation equipment, offices and other locations to deliver a competitive advantage in an increasingly wired and data-intensive world. By gathering and analysing data in a more comprehensive way, companies can improve productivity and efficiency in production processes and supply chains.

Many manufacturers are also extending these benefits to products that have been deployed by customers. For example, a maker of agricultural equipment might use IoT data received from customer machinery to enable predictive maintenance, improving customer satisfaction and customer engagement, while also increasing service revenue.

Blending Operations and IT One of the most important changes resulting from IoT is an increasing need for operational staff and IT staff to

work together. Depending on how your company is organised, both logically and geographically, these functions may be completely separate. In addition to collaboration, some reorganisation may be necessary to ensure that all parties involved understand the business problem being addressed as well as all requirements and constraints Jump-Starting IoT Efforts Many companies have difficulty identifying their best opportunities for IoT. Your goal should be to identify the places where IoT can make the biggest difference: • Where would having better data help your organisation with decisionmaking or operations planning?

• Do you have the data analysis tools in place to analyze the IoT data once you gather it?

• Which manufacturing processes are the most troublesome? Could IoT data help fix those processes?

• Which front office processes are the most troublesome?

• Could better or more complete data address those issues?

Once you have identified a list of processes that could be improved by IoT, the next step is to identify the ones that pertain to equipment that either already has or can accommodate the necessary sensors and instrumentation. Most importantly, in order to accommodate IoT needs, infrastructure flexibility is essential. If the current IT is built on infrastructure that’s complex, expensive, and rigid, it will not be easy to accommodate new IoT demands.

A flexible, agile cloud-based approach will make it easier to adapt to IoT and other new resource demands—both onpremises and in the cloud.

Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Industry leaders are taking notice of the potential of AI to transform manufacturing. According to a recent report from Infosys, companies want to use AI to further automate manufacturing in order to increase

productivity, minimise manual errors, reduce costs and eliminate the need for humans to perform repetitive tasks.

These benefits apply across a wide variety of AI use cases from the front office to production facilities.

AI Use Cases in Manufacturing There are a number of AI use cases that manufacturers are already targeting.

AI has the potential to help across your entire company, facilitating fraud prevention, predictive ordering, and opportunity assessment. Below are some: • Adaptive manufacturing - Today’s customers want products customized to their needs or taste. AI technologies are the key to making today’s rigid manufacturing and assembly line processes more flexible and able to adapt to changing demands quickly and with far less human intervention.

• Human/robot collaboration - For some tasks, humans can’t be replaced.

Artificial intelligence and improved sensing capabilities will enable new or updated robots to work more closely with humans, quickly learning new tasks as needs change and making the whole process more adaptive.

• Quality control - Performing anomaly detection on hundreds of units in seconds, rather than hours, enables manufacturers to identify and resolve production failures before expensive delays pile up. Applying AI to quality control not only accelerates production,

it can improve quality and reduce reliance on manual human inspections.

• Streamlined supply chains - AI can help make sense of supply-chain data, identifying hidden patterns and improving performance across diverse areas including warehousing, transportation, production, and packaging while also allowing operations to adapt more quickly to market changes.

• Predictive maintenance - Most manufacturers do equipment maintenance on a set schedule that doesn’t account for actual operating conditions. By analyzing equipment log data for anomalies, AI can enable companies to adapt maintenance schedules to actual needs and identify potential problems before failures occur.

Operationalising AI for Manufacturing A good rule of thumb for AI projects is: don’t reinvent the wheel. There is no reason to spend your time developing AI models to solve problems that someone else has already solved. On the other hand, you won’t achieve a competitive advantage using the same tools as everyone else, so focus on innovating in the areas where you can differentiate your company. There are two important parts of AI where IT infrastructure decisions are critical: • Managing data - The first step is to collect data efficiently from the source: IoT sensors, customer equipment, supply chain partners, etc., and stream that data for processing— usually to a datacenter or in the cloud.

• Building and operating AI training clusters - If you are creating and training deep learning algorithms, that requires a training cluster equipped with GPUs that can process data in parallel.

Manufacturing and Advanced Automation The opportunities for automation across various types of manufacturing are almost endless. Some companies are even evaluating the potential for factories that are 100% automated, with environmental conditions optimised for machines not humans.

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INTERVIEW

THE NEW AGE OF CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS SELIM BOURI, VP AND HEAD OF MIDDLE EAST NORTH AFRICA AND ASIA-PACIFIC FOR SECURE LAND COMMUNICATIONS AT AIRBUS, DELVES DEEPER INTO THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF MISSION-CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS

W

hat exactly is your business model?

We are a business unit of Airbus Defence and Space, focused on critical communications, secure networks, and collaborative applications. We provide specialised communications solutions for public safety, law enforcement agencies, and business-critical communications to some key industry verticals. We work mostly with government agencies such as Nedaa in Dubai, providing them with secure networks and terminals.

In Saudi, we work with STC Specliazed to offer network solutions for their business-critical users.

Is there a difference between mission-critical and business-critical communications?

There is a difference in terms of usage.

Mission critical network is often related to public safety, so it is more about the security of people, critical infrastructure, etc. When it comes to business-critical communications, it is related to industries such as public transportation and utilities, where the usage is also critical, but the potential impact on the lives of people is not significant. The network might be the same, but the usage is different, and we customise it depending on who is using it and how they are using it.

By network, do you mean the TETRA network primarily?

It can be different – not only TETRA but also Tetrapol and broadband. Our

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approach is to be technology-agnostic and focus more on applications. No matter what the underlying technology is, our job is to provide the right applications and more importantly, secure it. However, today the trend is more towards hybrid networks, which is a mix of TETRA and broadband.

How long have you been operating in the region?

We have been in the Middle East for almost 30 years, and we supply network solutions for pretty much all government agencies in the region. We are proud to support the public safety here, and we also work with major industries such as oil and gas, and transportation. I can name some of the major customers, including Dubai Airport and Saudi Aramco. We are not in the mass market, and out technologies are meant for professional users; it is not about selling a large number of terminals to consumers but making sure that we provide a secure network, which works perfectly the moment you need it.

In some countries, mobile broadband technologies are being leveraged to build public safety networks. Is that the new trend?

It is going to change the landscape but not in a complete way. In the last four or five years, many experts have been advocating the use of LTE and 5G for public safety networks, but in reality, that is not what is going to happen.

When it comes to public safety, it’s not as much about technology as it is

about how are you going to use it and respecting the tactical, operational procedures of the users. When you have an emergency, the most important thing is not to watch a movie on your mobile phone but having the right connectivity and coordination. Of course, the usage is evolving, and you have to take into account all these new technologies and applications. It is why our approach is more towards hybrid – keeping the base, which is critical, and adding more applications and broadband technologies on top of it.

We have recently deployed the world’s first hybrid network in China, and we are rolling our hybrid networks in many parts of the world.

With its low latency and increased throughput, isn’t 5G going to be the most preferred broadband technology for mission-critical communications?

We think the best approach for critical communications is to be independent of the radio bearer. Our approach is to offer a critical communications platform, which is radio agnostic, and it will take the best of 5G, 4G, Wi-Fi, TETRA, and satellite. You have to make sure whatever is needed will go through the network at the best moment.

Is such a platform standardised?

That is the challenge. Some of the radio bears are standardized. For example, TETRA and 3G are standardised, and 4G is ongoing. Standardisation is vital for us because interfaces are important, especially when it comes to terminals.

INTERVIEW

CREATING AGILITY IN A DIGITAL AGE VIRENDER JEET, SENIOR VP OF TECHNOLOGIES AT NEWGEN SOFTWARE, TELL US WHY THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE AGILITY IS THROUGH AI-INFUSED BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

C

an you tell us about your company?

We are a software product company that started in 1992 in India. We have grown over the years, and now we sell our products and solutions in more than 55 countries. We have been in the Middle East for around 18 years with many marquee clients in banking and financial services sector. Our product portfolio is ideally suited for the digital journey of our customers, be it business process automation or customer experience management. We have around more than 550 customers around the world, and our product portfolio is very well recognized.

Is digital a big focus area for you?

The current ecosystem is all about digital. The way it is disrupting businesses as well as providing new opportunities, all software vendors and providers are aligned with this trend to fit in or leverage it. Broadly, with our product portfolio, we are well positioned to enable the digital journey of our customers. The way we see digital is in two ways: Inside digital or what you do within an organisation, and then how you carry that digital to your customers. Our BPM/ECM suite has traditionally been suitable for inside digital in terms of modernising business processes, automation, and now with our portfolio, we can combine both internal and customer-facing digital for our customers seamlessly. We are one of the core vendors that is driving these transformation use cases, and it is across industries.

powerful solution to customers. Some of the RPA stories have been very disjointed - organisations would automate an activity, and a few years later realise that it doesn’t really fit into the organisational structure. With BPM, we have been able to automate activities, iron out the kinks, so our customers do not have to redo it.

BPM provides the context to RPA. Now intelligent process automation is being bandied around. Is that something in your radar?

The traditional RPA has been more about non-invasive integration or screen scraping, but the bigger advantage is in areas, which are analytics-driven. It could be content recognition or sentiment analytics, and those have been our core strengths as a content company. We are able to bring all those capabilities as part of the RPA ecosystem.

Did you start as a BPM vendor?

We have always been a product company and started with ECM, which evolved to BPM and then eventually customer communications management. We are focused on these three product vertical areas.

Scalability is an issue with RPA. How do you plan to address that challenge?

When you look at bots as independent agents, it is like adding workforce – you add 50, and then you don’t know what they are doing. But, if you add them to BPM, the scale doesn’t become as an issue because they are connected in the context of the business process.

With that, you can build fail-safe methods and get real-time insights into how well and efficiently bots are running, and the question of scalability doesn’t arise at all because they are not operating independently.

Do you offer any RPA tools?

There is a lot of interest around RPA now. Though the term itself is not very new, with the progress in analytics, you can do much more with the technology today. As part of our BPM strategy, which is to automate business processes and reduce human labour, RPA is a synergic tech for us. Initially, we have integrated with most of RPA tools, and now we are coming out with our own RPA suite. The focus of RPA is on activity automation and doing away with manual intervention in repetitive tasks, and BPM is about end-to-end process automation, where the activity is only one of the steps. With RPA and BPM together, it offers a much

Do you have plans to leverage AI and ML technologies?

All the software product companies are leveraging AI and ML. Analytics is another frontier we have to conquer. In ECM, there are many use cases including content analytics, which is about classification of content, sentiment mining, and easy searches. In BPM, we have process intelligence, which is more about analysing an organisation’s process landscape and getting the most out of them. In CCM, it is about customer profiling. Many of these ML and analytics uses cases are already part of our platform, and there are many more features coming.

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INTERVIEW

FIXING HEALTHCARE FODHIL BENTURQUIA, FOUNDER AND CEO OF OKADOC, ON HOW THIS DUBAIBASED TECH COMPANY PLANS TO SIMPLIFY HEALTHCARE EXPERIENCE, AND HELP CLINICS AND HOSPITALS ADDRESS SOME OF THEIR BIGGEST CHALLENGES.

or percentage of missed appointments without prior notification. Our research shows that the no-show rate in the UAE is around 37 percent, and in Saudi, it is more than 50 percent, while this is about 20 percent in the US. This translates into lost revenue opportunities worth billions of dollars for healthcare providers. It is a problem largely accepted by the industry, and we have been able to reduce it by 75 percent. Another advantage we offer to clinics and doctors is increased visibility. We averaged around 300,000 visitors last month, and we are expecting to double that number over the next couple of months.

W

hat is Okadoc’s business model?

It’s a platform for patients to search for medical practitioners or clinics by spoken languages, insurance plans, availability of doctors, location, and many more. They can look up doctors, read about their experience and cost of the consultation. And most importantly, they can make an instant booking. It’s very important to note that this is not online booking – it gives patients access to the availability of doctors in real time and they can book, reschedule and cancel within seconds.

The concept is very similar to booking a ride or ordering your food online.

For clinics and hospitals, what we offer is access to either our calendar management system or direct connection to our systems using global standards. Through our platform, we fix a major problem faced by the healthcare industry, which is no-show 28

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How did you come up with the business idea?

It came from my personal experience when I had to spend 15 minutes on the phone to book an appointment with a doctor. You can use your phone to book a ride or order food in less than 30 seconds, and it only takes less than a minute to book a ticket. With e-commerce and other technologies, we have fixed many problems, but not healthcare, which is the most important thing in our lives, and it was shocking to me. When I started looking around, I found that some startups are offering online booking, and I realized what they actually do is make online booking requests, which is misleading.

How this works is they’d sent an email to a clinic or hospital, and then you have to wait for a day or two get a call from your healthcare provider. It is a two-step process, and technology is here to reduce complexity, not increase it. We have addressed that problem with Okadoc.

Is Okadoc available only in the UAE? Yes, for now, and we are launching in Saudi very soon, and another country in the region by the end of this year.

Why is the healthcare industry late to catch up with digital transformation?

There are many other industries which got digitally mature before healthcare, and you know why. Uber couldn’t have come earlier. When smartphones were launched in 2007, we didn’t have 3G networks, phone batteries were weak, and not everyone could afford one.

A business model like Uber became possible only when we had faster networks and phones, and it became a tool for drivers. Everything in your life is now digital – your social life, shopping, transportation, etc, and I can’t answer why didn’t this happen in healthcare earlier. I can only assume that the healthcare industry has lagged behind because it is not a very sexy industry for people to get into, and it’s very fragmented. That being said, the pace of digital transformation is now accelerating in this industry now.

Are we moving into the era of cost transparency in healthcare?

We have the price list of consultation and other services available on our platform. Typically, the cost of consultation ranges from AED 100 to 600 in the UAE. Unlike the US, where not everyone has health insurance, the great thing about our country is everyone has one. However, the problem here is you are not sure who will accept your insurance plan and the price of consultation, and our platform gives you a good indication of what it could cost you for healthcare.

INTERVIEW

TRANSFORMATION REDEFINED MICHAEL OUISSI, GLOBAL CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, IFS, PARES THE FAT AROUND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND TELLS US HOW HIS COMPANY IS HELPING ITS CUSTOMERS NAVIGATE THE CHANGING TECH LANDSCAPE.

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ow do you help your customers with their digital transformation journey?

From a global perspective, we have been digitally transforming businesses since the advent of software in some shape or form. In my opinion, digital transformation is not about standardisation anymore.

If you look at the ERP industry in the past 20 years, it was around standardising processes such as finance, HR, CRM, etc. Nowadays, digitalisation is all about transforming how you compete, and it is more about how you differentiate versus competition. This is where IFS is unique in the ERP space because our focus is on helping our customers challenge the status quo and change the way they compete with others.

There are two dimensions to that, which enable digital transformation for our customers, and it is something we have done for the last 20 years.

First is the functionality for specific verticals built into the platform, and second is the architectural direction we have taken. It is open, and we allow for the re-use of the services in our platform via APIs and microservices.

What does digitalisation really mean to you?

Digitalisation has become a buzzword but what most people really mean by it is ‘how do I transform my customer

interface and what I bring to my customers through the use of digital technologies and the data that I have got in the background’.

How important is the back-end transformation?

It depends on what you mean by back-end; it can be anything that is not customer facing. If you look at IFS ERP systems, most of it is actually back-end, and a back-end needs to be open to anything else you want to build around it. The business needs and services of customers keep changing. So, as a company, you need to deploy a layered architecture that allows you to build something that is not forever, but it should be integrated into a stable back-end core, which is agile and flexible. That

is how you help your customers to serve their customers and meet their changing needs faster.

Is ERP moving to the cloud?

ERP is moving to the cloud, and it is moving to wherever the customers want it. What we have seen is customers have very different views of where they want it and the cloud is a big name for a lot of different things. It can be a private cloud or public cloud, and both approaches have pros and cons. If you are considering a public, SaaS type of model, your processes cannot change very often, and there also issues related to data integrity. On the other hand, private clouds can’t scale and don’t offer the same cost benefits of a public cloud. What we offer our customers is a choice and deploy it wherever they want it.

How limited is customization in the public cloud environments?

First of all, it depends on the solutions space. Point solutions such as CRM and field service management are more likely to move to the public cloud and can be easily customized. However, customers who have been on-prem for many years and have gone through heavy customization of their mission-critical systems are not likely to move to the public cloud anytime soon. For new customers, we will make sure that we keep customisation to a minimum by having that flexible architecture around it where you purpose-build applications on top of the platform, and employ ‘evergreen’ software models to move them from on-prem to the cloud when they want it. So the paradigm of how you deploy ERP systems will change in the future where you keep customisation to a minimum to make sure that you have got the benefits of all the architectural development that is out there and then you can deploy DevOps and agile development methodologies to develop new features.

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INTERVIEW

PRIMED FOR A DIGITAL FUTURE

RICHARD JEWELL, SENIOR VP, SUPPLY CHAIN & MANUFACTURING APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT, ORACLE, TELLS US HOW HIS COMPANY IS POSITIONING ITSELF AS A PREMIER PROVIDER OF IOT AND BLOCKCHAIN APPLICATIONS.

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hat is Oracle doing to accelerate blockchain adoption?

One of the things we do uniquely at Oracle is that we build applications. Similar to what we have already done in the Internet of Things (IoT), we are going to launch our first blockchain application in June, which is around track and trace.

In both IoT and blockchain, what we have decided to do, unlike any of our competitors, is to build applications. While everyone else, be it Cisco, Microsoft, or SAP, is offering platforms, we have gone the extra step and built fit-for-purpose applications.

In the IoT space, we have already launched five apps around asset monitoring, production monitoring, fleet monitoring, connected worker, and asset monitoring for aftermarket service. We are taking the same approach with blockchain, and second in line is what we are calling ‘IoT lineage and provenance,’ which is pharmaceutical industry oriented.

And we have ideas for some other applications as well.

The critical point here is that we are the only company in the world that has built apps for this disruptive technology, whereas everyone else is offering platforms. We think the right approach for us is to build out-of-thebox solutions that our customers can leverage and take it forward.

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So it’s a common philosophy that drives both IoT and block chain…

Coming back to IoT, as I said earlier, our approach is to build fit-forpurpose applications and they are all pre-integrated into our supply chain cloud. Our asset monitoring IoT app is integrated back into our maintenance capabilities in the cloud, and the fleet management app is integrated into our world-class transportation management system. In addition, they come with prebuilt KPIs. For example, you can take our asset management app, plug it right into the machine and it starts streaming data, giving you immediate KPIs. Then we start applying adaptive intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and start making predictions.

So if you spot an anomaly in the machine, you learn from it, and the next time you identify the same defect, the system automatically sends a message to our maintenance cloud and opens up a preventive maintenance work order against that. Then we take it up one notch and go from preventive to predictive maintenance by bringing in external data and putting things in context.

We have adopted the same philosophy with blockchain – we have built out-of- the-box capabilities and have integrated them, not only with our core supply chain processes but IoT applications as well.

Do you support digital twins and Industry 4.0 apps?

We have capabilities for both digital twins and augmented reality. We are already providing the ability for our customers to walk out on to the factory floor, point the camera at any piece of equipment already identified as a digital twin, and they’d get their roles and responsibilities within the supply chain cloud view of it.

For example, if you are a finance person, and you go out to the shop floor and take a look at a piece of machinery, you’d see its depreciation schedule and value. If you are a manufacturing person, when you look at a piece of equipment, it would tell you about throughput, efficiency, and any quality problems. Whether its tablets or a pair of glasses, we provide those tools.

And part of that is what I call making the information human digestible.

One of the things we learned from introducing adaptive intelligence and ML capabilities is that humans do not understand much of the algorithm work that we do behind the scenes.

The ultimate FUD is unless people can understand why it is doing those things, they are not comfortable with it, which is why we visualise it and give them the details. Based on what is happening on a given machine, we will provide a recommendation, and explain why it is necessary, and more importantly, the operator can either accept, reject, or modify that recommendation.

WE HAVE ADOPTED THE SAME PHILOSOPHY WITH BLOCKCHAIN – WE HAVE BUILT OUT-OF- THE-BOX CAPABILITIES AND HAVE INTEGRATED THEM, NOT ONLY WITH OUR CORE SUPPLY CHAIN PROCESSES BUT IOT APPLICATIONS AS WELL. But, if you do either of the last two things, you must give us a reason as to why you did that. When you choose to overwrite a recommendation, we are going to bring that back in and learn from it, so it’s a continuous learning capability.

Do you offer the IoT cloud as a PaaS or SaaS? Both. Our IoT platform is a PaaS offering, while IoT apps are sold as SaaS products.

How are you tackling the security concerns related to IoT? IoT applications are as secure as the rest of our apps, which is pretty much very secure. So we have the same set of security rules for IoT apps as our finance applications and any external IoT feed coming into the system has to pass through the same level of security.

What is Oracle’s application strategy in this digital era?

Unlike others, we took a decision years go to build all these new applications from scratch. I built our e-business suite set of on-prem applications, and when we started building our cloud apps, I started with a blank piece of paper. We started building applications around the same time as SAP in the 1980s and ’90s, and since then, the world has changed drastically. The data models have changed, and there is no way you can take advantage of these new technologies and capabilities with an on-prem mentality.

We do four updates a year and provide new functionalities to our customers every year, and new tech associated with it. Typically, in an onprem world, people upgraded every 5 -10 years, and that was the basic problem. We were convinced that cloudnative solutions, purpose-built for the cloud with the ability to do continuous updates, are necessary. Our customers want to have that rapid speed of innovation available to them.

We have something called an optin strategy, which means when your people go home on a Friday night, and we provide the quarterly updates during that time with substantive new functionalities in that provisioned instance, it is all behind the scenes, and none of it is immediately viewable. So, it is our commitment to our customers that when they come back on Monday morning, the system will look exactly the same as they left it on Friday evening but under the hood, there is a considerable amount of new capabilities.

You can, in your own time, look at these new functionalities and determine whether you want to take advantage of them. Only then, we will turn them on.

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VIEWPOINT

FOUNDATIONS FOR SUCCESS WITH THE INCREASING INVESTMENTS INTO DIGITAL ORGANISATIONS, ALWAYS-ON IS THE ONLY OPTION FOR ANY TYPE OF MISSION CRITICAL SUPPORT SYSTEM, BRINGING THE RELIABILITY OF NETWORKING PROTOCOLS INTO THE FOREFRONT, EXPLAINS TAREK HELMY, REGIONAL DIRECTOR GULF AND MIDDLE EAST, SOUTH & EAST AFRICA AT NEXANS CABLING SOLUTIONS

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he robustness and reliability of any network is built to meet the requirements of its users. The network of a home, a small business, a large conglomerate, and an airport or a telecom service provider are vastly different in their reliability requirements. They differ in terms of how much slack they can have in being non-operational. Any installation that falls into the category of mission critical can never be offline or switched off or nonoperational since it plays an immensely important national or societal support role.

Power plants, oil refineries, airports, ports, railways, communication and Internet Service Providers, homeland security entry and exit points, amongst others, fall into this category.

Of importance is the nature of the networking protocols used to keep such installations running and fully operational without any instance of failure.

A standard way to build operational robustness is to have an additional element of hardware available. So typically, a network may have parallel network cabling and fibre, duplicate power units, network switches, and so on. This is termed as bringing redundancy into the operational infrastructure. However, other than the hardware side, networking relies on protocols, topology, and architecture.

So, it is more meaningful to use these elements to build redundancy than just rely on hardware alone. In general, the most effective way to bring redundancy into a network, is to design it in such a way, that it can rebuild itself in the shortest possible time, whenever there is a failure.

All redundant networking models work on the same principals. There is a main root for data traffic and a redundant root as a backup. In the event of a failure 32

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in the main root, traffic switches to the redundant root. The fraction of time taken to switch over from the main root, to the redundant root, and the number of network packets lost or no packets lost, determines whether the network architecture is suitable for a mission critical infrastructure or not.

The earliest redundant network architecture to be developed in the nineties was the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). However, due to the excessive time lag required to recover from a failure, it was replaced by various superior versions including the Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) and Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP). While the time lag required to recover from a failure was reduced it was still too high to be applied to mission critical infrastructures.

Moreover, the exact time lag to recover from a failure in any of these architectures proved to be variable, depending on the position of the failed link in the network, and the number of switches in the network.

It was for this reason, that neither STP, nor RTSP, nor MSTP protocols, proved to be suitable for mission critical network infrastructures and further innovation was required. The ideal network protocol for mission critical infrastructures is therefore zero network reconďŹ guration time, and no data packet loss.

The protocols that meet modern day requirements for mission critical infrastructures are High-Availability and Seamless Redundancy, HSR and Parallel Redundancy Protocol, PRP. These two protocols use the same approach to support a modern-day, mission critical network infrastructure. These protocols create duplicate packet networks and send them across different paths to meet at the same destination simultaneously.

Moreover, the duplicate packet networks are created continuously without waiting for failure to take place at any time.

Hence their mean time to react to failure is nil, since there is always a functional, redundant and active path to reach the final destination. PRP uses parallel network paths to build redundancy and HSR uses a network ring topology to build redundancy.

With the growing digitisation of industrial networks, and the convergence of operational and IP networks, there is increasing focus now on the reliability of Ethernet switch-based networks supporting mission critical infrastructures.

Whether smart grids for power distribution, autonomous traffic systems, smart city sub-systems, aviation and road and sea hub and spoke arrangements, hospitals, government support centers, commercial data centers, all rely now on redundant and highly reliable network systems. These can only be provided by architectures using HSR and PRP networking protocols.

VIEWPOINT

THE CASE FOR INTENTBASED SEGMENTATION JONATHAN NGUYEN-DUY, VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY & ANALYTICS AT FORTINET ARGUES WHY ZERO TRUST IS NOT ENOUGH.

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etworks designed with implicit trust, even if small, simplifies allowing data and applications to move around inside the perimeter.

It’s also one of the reasons why network breaches can remain undetected for so long, malicious insiders are able to steal so much data, and unintentional errors can cause so much damage.

Even minimal implicit trust in a network needs to be replaced with a Zero Trust model that mandates a “never trust, always verify, and enforce least privilege” approach to access, from both outside and inside the network.

It starts with the premise that traffic inside the perimeter should not be more trusted any more than outside traffic.

Instead, all traffic should be inspected and logged, and all requests for network access should be verified, authenticated and validated on a need-to-know basis.

The Limits of Zero Trust While zero trust is gaining in popularity, there are also a number of limitations to such a model. These include:

• If you restrict access too tightly or take too long to verify an access request, you create bottlenecks that can cripple your network.

• Zero Trust doesn’t address issues such as DDoS attacks, human error, poorly patched or misconfigured devices, and even a number of common network issues.

• Perimeter-based security devices can be quickly overwhelmed by network traffic that is not constrained by regulated perimeter connection speeds.

• Inspecting encrypted traffic is exceptionally CPU-intensive, and will force most traditional NGFW solutions to their knees.

• Point defense products, designed to protect a specific spot on the perimeter, can impose limitations on the network’s ability to quickly adapt to changing requirements and shifting resources.

• VLANs—historically used to segment traffic—rarely have adequate security, and most are unable to seamlessly span distributed network environments.

The Need for Dynamic Segmentation A better approach is to identify, track, and isolate devices, applications, and workflows based on business and security requirements. This has two components: Network Access Control can identify and keep track of any device connecting to the network, determine its role and privilege, and limit it to a specific role within the network.

Internal Segmentation Firewalls (ISFWs) provide the scalability, span of control, and performance that traditional NGFW

solutions and VLANs simply can’t.

Administrators can: • Dynamically segment the network • Assign devices to those segments at the moment of access • Restrict applications and workflows to physical or virtual locations, groups, or devices • Assign levels of security inspection • Permit cross-segment movement based on policy Intelligent, Intent-based Segmentation However, even these solutions rarely move fast enough to accommodate digital transformation requirements.

New Intent-based Segmentation, however, can interpret business and security requirements, automatically convert them into a specific segmentation policy that spans the distributed network to protect and isolate workflows and application along their entire transactional path, and do so at digital speeds.

In addition to interpreting business intent on the front end, Intent-based Segmentation also relies on an integrated security framework that enables different tools deployed in different segments of the network to see and interact with each other. This allows them to detect and respond to threats occurring anywhere across the distributed environment, and dynamically adapt the policies governing a network segment. By combining traditional segmentation and zero trust principles, Intentbased Segmentation offers a holistic, integrated security architecture that can adapt to changing requirements, detect and mitigate advanced threats, as well as grant variable access on need-to -know basis.

The paradox of today’s networks is that while applications, and workflows need to move freely across a distributed network, open environments allow attackers to also easily move across that network to cause damage. Intentbased Segmentation solves that problem by enabling the flexibility and adaptability that today’s networks require, without compromising on security or performance.

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VIEWPOINT

INNOVATION’S ROCKET FUEL

BY PAUL CORMIER, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT & PRESIDENT, PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGIES, RED HAT

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0 years ago on July 20th, a computer placed two men on the moon. The space race was won with technology that possesses barely a fraction of the processing power of your mobile phone. But NASA did it - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched the moon and came back.

In order to expand beyond mankind’s known limits, space exploration required a wave of innovation, from advancements in computer technology to space suits, to achieve the bold goal of the moon landing. Most IT organisations aren’t trying to launch into low Earth orbit or land on a celestial body, but we have our own bold goals.

We want to build better applications, faster. We want to have 100 percent uptime. We want to anticipate the needs of users before they even know what they want. We want to just be better.

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This requires a wave of innovation, just like NASA. We need rocket fuel to push ourselves beyond the given boundaries of IT...luckily, we already have it. IT’s rocket fuel was, is and will always be Linux.

For more than two decades, we have viewed Linux as the wellspring of innovation, with the open source operating system making an indelible imprint on each of IT’s four footprints.

From Linux containers and Kubernetes to OpenStack and the bones of the public cloud, Linux is the root of IT invention. Put bluntly, Linux IS enterprise IT. It underpins nearly every modern IT deployment in some way and provides a launchpad for innovation across the open source community. Linux is rocket fuel for innovation - without it, enterprise IT is going nowhere.

If Linux is the fuel, then hybrid cloud is the rocket. Hybrid cloud is built on

and around the firmament of Linux as it expands as a default in enterprise IT landscapes. Without Linux, it’s unlikely that we would have hybrid cloud as we know it today. It helps IT organisations bridge their existing investments in servers, virtualization and traditional applications with the cloud-based future. Building on Linux, Kubernetes offers the platform to unify the IT landscape across the hybrid cloud, enabling IT organisations to build anything, anywhere, at any time.

At the Red Hat Summit 2019, we delivered a refined innovation for organisations to do more than just break the sound barrier of IT. We’re helping them take their businesses interstellar.

A more intelligent, more accessible Linux platform Linux is a workhorse, quietly keeping

KUBERNETES HAS WON. IT’S NOW THE DE FACTO STANDARD FOR CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION IN ENTERPRISE IT, HELPING CONTAINERISED APPLICATIONS ACHIEVE THE LOFTY GOALS OF COMPOSITE APPLICATIONS AND MICROSERVICES-BASED ARCHITECTURE.

the lights on in datacenters around the world. It runs connected devices, from your home’s thermostat to your phone, and at the same time enables the world’s fastest supercomputers.

It’s the enterprise datacenter standard, but it is so much more than that. Linux still needs to support production workloads, yes. But it should also help innovation thrive.

By embedding intelligence into the soul of the operating system, innovations are helping IT teams to catch problems before they occur and to gain deeper insights into the state of their deployments. It makes it easier for developers to innovate without breaking things and it does so with a whole new set of distributed containerbuilding capabilities. These platforms can also do this while lowering Linux’s barriers to entry, helping a new wave of systems administrators and IT

professionals engage with communitypowered innovation.

The open source community has evolved. Fedora remains the spark of innovation for the broader Linux world and CentOS continues to foster innovation. Now, we are also pursuing a vision of keeping the operating system “Always Ready” for regular delivery and more readily able to adapt to the fast innovation that the community and our partners pursue.

Enterprise Linux operating systems are the key to power the hybrid cloud and are critical to ensuring you innovate for the future.

And that future is, without a doubt, Kubernetes.

Enterprise Kubernetes, redefined Kubernetes has won. It’s now the de facto standard for container orchestration in enterprise IT, helping containerised applications achieve the lofty goals of composite applications and microservices-based architecture. But just like Linux decades ago, the work with Kubernetes is just starting. Its complex, deployments are sprawling and, given the allure of cloud-specific options, it’s easy to get locked into a single infrastructure, limiting future innovation.

It’s not just IT operations teams that can benefit from Kubernetes platforms.

Developers now have automation for building and deploying applications, letting them focus solely on creating better applications, faster. Extending support for Operators to the application layer is also pertinent towards making it easier to build Kubernetes applications that work like a cloud service.

Additionally, deepening collaborations with partner ecosystems can’t be overlooked in hybrid cloud computing, especially to enable IT organisations to use innovative platforms in their datacenters and more seamlessly extend these workloads. That’s the future of enterprise Kubernetes: A single platform to rule the hybrid cloud, regardless of workload.

Mixing open source rocket fuel Whether migrating from proprietary virtualisation silos, transforming financial services or launching the future of defense, global organisations are turning to open source, and they’re looking to innovative solutions to help guide them through digital transformation.

No, we aren’t landing astronauts on the moon or winning the space race.

We’re still building rockets, only ours are fueled by open source.

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VIEWPOINT

THE ABC OF DEVOPS TABREZ SURVE, REGIONAL DIRECTOR – GULF, LEVANT & TURKEY, SIMPLIFIES DEVOPS, ONE OF THE INDUSTRY’S MOST INTRIGUING AND INFLUENTIAL IT TRENDS.

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hat do you think about when you hear the term “DevOps”? Abstruse, impenetrable concept or conduit to a brave new world?

Something in between? Maybe you haven’t even heard about DevOps? Don’t worry, you soon will.

Back in the day In the past, software delivery was relatively straightforward. All requirements were defined with the customer before handover to coding and Quality and Assurance (Q&A) testing.

The Ops team then stepped in to deploy everything. So far, so neat and tidy.

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Today, the pressure is mounting for businesses to launch new features and services as and when they are needed. If speed and efficiency are not a concern, the old model still works fine. However, the status quo is becoming increasingly incompatible with modern ambitions.

Imagine a situation where multiple teams of developers are contributing in parallel. This happens all the time.

After everything is coded – or even the entire application finalised – they discover that certain components are incompatible. A huge amount of time is wasted if all teams wait to finish their tasks before merging the code into a single application. Developmental dynamism goes out the window, and it

can become a torturous clean-up and/ or retrofitting exercise.

Now, let’s imagine a second scenario where code integration is successful, and the Q&A team requests a specific environment from Ops to test their application. Without automation, Ops may take days to provide the required environment. Meanwhile, developers are likely to keep coding away. If a bug is found is found during the tests, it is possible that developers were coding on top of an existing bug or bugs.

This would potentially require a major coding overhaul.

Another common issue is the pace at which Ops can provide the right environment to test the code. In larger

organisations, such delays may take weeks and can involve more than one department. For example, Ops may deploy a new environment that requires special permission from security team (i.e. another siloed department).

So, how do we stop these frustrations from occurring and keep delivery on track?

DevOps to the rescue!

DevOps work differently. Here’s how: • Continuous Integration. The DevOps approach uses an agile methodology where, typically, smaller functional chunks of code (e.g. a new feature) are regularly and seamlessly integrated into the application’s main development branch. Errors are spotted and swiftly corrected. This is known as Continuous Integration (CI).

The small chunks of code in play here are created within their own isolated (containerised) environment where each (component) typically have a point of communication to ‘talk’ to other components known as Application Programming Interfaces (API). This gives the developer enough flexibility to add or remove components without affecting others. This is known as a microservices architecture, wherein each component basically has a plug-and-play capability • Continuous Delivery. Following CI, integrated code is automatically tested

FUNDAMENTALLY, DEVOPS IS A PRACTICE THAT CAN ELIMINATE SOURCES OF WASTE FROM THE APPLICATION DELIVERY PIPELINE. IT DRIVES EFFICIENCY

BY OPTIMISING PROCESSES, REMOVING SILOS, USING AUTOMATION TOOLS, STANDARDISING PLATFORMS AND ESTABLISHING A STRONG CULTURE OF COLLABORATION. via several environments, all the way to pre-production where it is either deployable or ready to be deployed.

Some companies do not automate further than that and prefer manual deployment. CI and CD interaction is termed as CI/CD. • Continuous Deployment. The ultimate DevOps goal: Continuous Integration followed by Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD²). As a result, applications are automatically deployed to production.

• Cloud-centricity. DevOps thrive in the cloud, as it natively supports their tools and unleashes the speed and automation needed for game-changing innovation.

• Infrastructure as a Code. A heavily automated infrastructure is ideal for the Dev team to automatically deploy code at every juncture, from test to deployment environment.

Otherwise known as Infrastructure as a Code (IaaS), it is a potent antidote to potential Dev and Ops bottlenecks.

A proper IaaS should encompass infrastructure provisioning tools, which build and deploy infrastructure via a click of a button or by quickly filling out a template. Cloud services are a good example. It should also include configuration management tools (e.g. the facility to upgrade, say, 10,000 serves with a single command).

• Collaboration. More than most IT disciplines, DevOps-related success is heavily reliant on intensive, intricately coordinated collaboration between customers, developers and IT operations. Developers need to focus on coding. IT operations need to focus on managing automated infrastructure.

Both need to talk to each other to uncover new ways to innovate and improve both process and deliverables.

Siloed working is yesterday’s news.

Fundamentally, DevOps is a practice that can eliminate sources of waste from the application delivery pipeline. It drives efficiency by optimising processes, removing silos, using automation tools, standardising platforms and establishing a strong culture of collaboration. It is a powerful way to bypass the bottlenecks of traditional software development and infrastructure norms, and an unstoppable force for innovation. It is all this and so much more. DevOps’ true influence is only just being felt; stay curious, stay open minded, keep all development teams connected and, whatever you do, don’ get left behind!

Also, the significance of DevOps for the cloud can be seen by the fact that leaders in cloud applications and technology, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix and so on, have all taken a thorough DevOps approach from the ground up. This is particularly relevant in the Middle East, where cloud adoption is starting to pick up and cloud providers are building their own datacentres.

This is going to fuel the adoption of DevOps across the Middle East and have a significant impact of creating applications for business in the Middle East region.

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REPORT

WHY MIDDLE EAST IS A HOT TARGET FOR CYBERATTACKS IN ITS FIRST SEMI-ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2019, DARKMATTER DOCUMENTS A GROWING INCIDENCE OF CYBERATTACKS ACROSS THE UAE AND THE WIDER MIDDLE EAST.

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s cybercriminals keep abreast of emerging developments in technology, they are striking in ever more sophisticated ways and aiming their weapons where they are likely to cause the most damage.

Breaches in the Middle East are both widespread and frequently undetected.

They also increasingly appear to be state-sponsored. The report also provides a particular focus on the UAE’s critical infrastructure sectors identified as the following: Oil and gas, financial, transportation, and electricity and water. A hit on any of these critical infrastructure activities could disrupt the industry and harm the economy. Oil and gas in particular, a pillar of the UAE’s

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economy that is of strategic importance to the world, faces the greatest risks from globally reaching actors called Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

General reporting remains high worldwide when it comes to longestablished threat actors targeting oil and gas, such as those believed to be linked to Iran. The same actors also aim at other sectors such as transport. Two chief motivations stand out in DarkMatter’s review of threat actors operating in the region. Espionage is now the most prominent menace for regional organisations, accounting for the majority of the assessed campaigns.

Such campaigns commonly seek illicit access to credentials and personally identifiable information to facilitate

follow-on attacks. Sabotage is another significant motivation, as seen with the Shamoon wiper malware (also known as Disttrack) or in website defacements, and it will remain a constant threat. Public-facing assets and infrastructures comprise the general attack surface in the UAE, partly a consequence of the country’s high internet penetration rate.

However, as outlined in DarkMatter’s previous report, most of the UAE’s publicly accessible hosts are located outside the nation’s borders, limiting the ability to safeguard these assets.

Adequate safeguards are yet to be enforced consistently across the UAE, DarkMatter’s examination reveals.

Unprepared organisations remain largely exposed due to negligent and disordered

systems. Weak passwords, outdated and unsupported software, insecure protocols, and open, unrestricted networks are among the most frequent vulnerabilities.

Hitting where it hurts In 2017, a Triton malware strike against Saudi oil giant Petro Rabigh came close to triggering high-pressure explosions of toxic hydrogen sulfide gases along the Red Sea coast.1 Had the attack succeeded, it could have taken a considerable toll on business and human life. Other examples of destructive attacks, such as Shamoon in Saudi Arabia and Black Energy in Ukraine, left their targets with deleted files, delayed operations and proprietary losses.

These are some ways critical infrastructure can be targeted to devastating effect. The term defines an asset or system that is essential to the functioning of a society and to its health and safety.

As explained by the EU, the damage or disruption of such resources, whether intentional or not, poses a significant danger to the security of a nation and its citizens. In the age of hyper-connected digital economies, technology is no longer merely an extension of critical infrastructure services but plays an enabling role at the core of each service. Security must consequently be ringfenced around these touchpoints. However, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure are now more sophisticated and occur more frequently, exposing worldwide governments and businesses to new risks. In the UAE, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has established the National Cyber Security Strategy (NCSS) with the aim of securing national information and communications across the country. The NCSS identifies four essential infrastructure sectors, namely oil and gas, electricity and water, finance and transportation.

Oil and gas Half of all cyberattacks in the Middle East target the oil and gas sector, according to a joint Siemens and Ponemon Institute report. Cybersecurity breaches remain

widespread and frequently undetected, and an estimated 75% of regional oil and gas companies have had their security in their operational technology (OT) environment compromised. Moreover, energy supply chains can extend the surface of attack, as we saw with the Shamoon 3 campaign, which crippled an Aramco supplier using destructive malware.

The storage and movement of money has become more vulnerable as the financial sector adopts electronic channels and relies increasingly on technology. Forbes estimates that cybercriminals target financial firms 300 times more frequently than other industries. Looked at another way, 19% of total incidents globally last year were aimed at banking and insurance, IBM reports, citing the quick monetization of customer data as incentives. The GCC is among the world’s fastest growing markets with a mature and profitable banking sector. As the UAE has established itself as the region’s financial hub, the nation’s banks have also grown.

The extent of the sector sees the UAE ranked sixth on Kaspersky’s list of most targeted countries by banking malware attacks in Q3 2018.As financial activity increases, a further increase in malware attacks is to be expected.

Transportation Transportation comprises complex networks, high volumes of real-time data and large numbers of embedded devices. Technology underpins the value chain from satellite communications to the delivery of a parcel, and minimal damage to one segment can adversely affect multiple businesses and civilians. IBM identified transportation services, including air, bus, rail and water, as the second most targeted sector globally in 2018, with 13% of all recorded cyberattacks. The industry’s continuous reliance on information technology presents a wide attack surface for malicious entities, proving an attractive target for cybercriminals such as DarkHydrus, OilRig, and APT39. In the UAE, transport remains a significant business activity. Both Abu Dhabi and Dubai consider the sector as a development pillar of their vision

strategies for the decade to 2030, and greater prominence raises the likelihood of adverse actions in the future.

Water and electricity Utilities such as water and electricity present a prime target for cybercriminals, with their role as the backbone of every nation’s infrastructure. Both are essential to economic and national security and to the daily functioning of a wide range of other industries. When compared with other industries, an attack on the utilities sector has significantly greater potential for damage, with widespread outage and cascading effects rippling across the economy, since every enterprise relies on energy for its daily functions.

Government departments in the UAE’s utilities sector have made significant efforts to bolster defenses around water and energy facilities.

Intrusion sets An intrusion set is a group of antagonistic actions and resources with common properties that is thought to be orchestrated by a single organisation.

The most common motivation is cyberespionage, where the objective is to obtain confidential or sensitive information towards a broader goal.

Credential and personally identifiable information theft are included in this understanding of a threat actor’s intent.

Such information is often used in followon operations such as crafting spear phishing attacks or compromising target systems in order to acquire further data.

Cyberespionage differs from sabotage, another common kind of cyberattack, in that threat actors seek to undermine an organisation by corrupting its assets or conducting denial of service attacks.

DarkMatter’s analysis of the actors and campaigns covered in this report establishes that spear phishing is the principal means of gaining access to targets. This could be because cybercriminals have become better at creating authentic-looking emails, or because more personal information is now available on social media, helping aggressors create personalised and believable messages.

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VIEWPOINT

THE ADVENT OF WI-FI 6

BY ALI AMER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, SERVICE PROVIDER SALES, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA AT CISCO

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long with 5G, Wi-Fi 6 is the massive shift in connectivity happening worldwide. 5G is the new industry standard for cellular networks, and Wi-Fi 6 is the new standard for those Wi-Fi networks found in businesses and hotspots around the world. Both of these new standards represent a quantum leap forward by delivering dramatically higher speeds, lower latency and greater density.

This will allow businesses and consumers to do things unimaginable on previous Wi-Fi iterations.

How does it differ from what came before?

Wi-Fi 6 offers greater speed, latency and density. If you’re in a conference room full of people, and you want 100 MBP throughput, Wi-Fi 6 is better in that high-density setting. Wi-Fi 6 also has something called deterministic scheduling, which allows for the use of any given band. It even makes significant improvements over today’s Wi-Fi’s power utilisation in devices. Last but not least, if you’re looking to download an HD movie in 10 seconds, Wi-Fi 6 can do it—however, Wi-Fi today, not likely.

Besides higher degree of predictability, the new Wi-Fi technology can support latencies of less than 1 millisecond, bandwidth of up to 10 Gbps and lowpower IoT devices reliably connected at scale. This means Wi-Fi 6 can enable the proliferation of medical IoT devices, AR/VR-based immersive training, and automatic guided vehicles in warehouses.

While supporting the trend of increasing workloads moving to the cloud with higher data rates, Wi-Fi 6 can unlock possibilities for improved operations and intelligent solutions in every vertical.

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WI-FI 6 WILL CREATE A BETTER EXPERIENCE FOR TYPICAL WIRELESS NETWORKS WITH MORE PREDICTABLE PERFORMANCE FOR DEMANDING APPLICATIONS, SUCH AS 4K OR 8K VIDEO, HIGH-DENSITY, HIGH-DEFINITION COLLABORATION APPS, ALL-WIRELESS OFFICES, AND THE IOT. WITH HIGHER SPEEDS AND LOWER LATENCY, IT HELPS CONNECTED WIFI DEVICES PRESERVE BATTERY LIFE.

How will it improve the experience for the consumer?

Wi-Fi 6 will create a better experience for typical wireless networks with more predictable performance for demanding applications, such as 4K or 8K video, high-density, high-definition collaboration apps, all-wireless offices, and the IoT. With higher speeds and lower latency, it helps connected Wi-Fi devices preserve battery life. For example, a crowded baseball stadium is filled with internetconnected devices, which leads to slow speeds and connection for fans, inhibiting their ability to share photos, videos and content. Wi-Fi 6 will significantly improve our connections and will preserve our phones’ battery life because they won’t need to struggle to remain connected.

Another way we’ll see the impact of Wi-Fi 6 is with immersive experiences that bring the physical world and digital worlds together. That’s going to require high speeds and low latency. Think of AR/VR gaming in university dorms, HD imaging in health-care settings or mixed-reality training in manufacturing.

Mixed reality requires high throughput and needs to be very quick with how things react within. As these technologies mature, so will mixedreality applications, and this will have a significant impact in our day-to-day lives.

Wi-Fi 6 is often seen as a competitor to 5G. Do you see them as competing or complementary technologies and why?

5G and Wi-Fi 6 are complementary technologies. 5G is largely outdoors and mostly affects mobile devices outside of Wi-Fi networks. For example, anytime you’re in the car or walking from the coffee shop to the office, 5G is going to keep you connected. But once you’re in the office, you will keep that connectivity strength with Wi-Fi 6 indoors.

Today, mobile and Wi-Fi networks have become pervasive. These technologies can also work in tandem by making the hand-off between the two. Today, when you go into a Starbucks, you need to manually log onto that wireless network. We believe there’s an opportunity to make the handoff between mobile and Wi-Fi network seamless and secure.

VIEWPOINT

WHY FINANCE IS MOVING TO THE CLOUD SWAMI NATARAJAN, SENIOR DIRECTOR, STRATEGY AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, ORACLE EMEA, ON HOW TO BUILD A STRONG BUSINESS CASE FOR FINANCE IN THE CLOUD.

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cquiring new finance tools and technology is not a decision that’s made overnight. Chances are, things have been working up to this for months—or even years.

You’ve been limping along with your existing system for a long time now, but you can’t put it off any longer—the software you have no longer supports your business needs.

But how do you convince the C-suite?

Getting executive buy-in is often the toughest part of any major technology purchase. For finance, it’s made even tougher because benefits are not always obvious. It’s not like purchasing customer-facing technology, where the investment often has an immediate impact on customer satisfaction.

But, as any CFO knows, customer retention is only one piece of a good business strategy. It’s your job to understand the role that finance technology plays in your strategy, and communicate that value to the board.

The Importance of an Agile Finance Organisation A new research report from the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and Oracle found cloud technology plays a crucial role in the agility of today’s finance organisations. This report surveyed 483 senior finance executives in large businesses or other organiations

one thing that the C-suite especially wants to see from you, and that’s cold, hard numbers showing exactly the kind of financial return and value that the business is likely to see from this new investment.

across the USA and Canada in six key industry segments: financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, life sciences and higher education.

Two key finance findings alone are worth highlighting and reason enough to download this compelling report. Based on their own experiences over the last three years, agile finance organisations said they could report: • Increased profitability (95%) • Increased revenues (89%) These are numbers that any board member can quickly embrace.

Yet it’s a challenge for any finance organisation to be agile when it’s weighed down with cumbersome, legacy systems that cannot measure the right KPIs or provide reliable information to predict the future and guide the business forward.

As you build your case, also think in terms of the things the C-suite needs, including: • Solving and helping already-identified and perceived problems • Overcoming macro-level challenges across the business • Helping the business compete with other key players in its market • Improving common finance KPIs—such as the cost of finance, time to process invoices, and days sales outstanding— against current benchmarks • Freeing up the finance team’s time to partner with other areas of the business, measuring non-financial KPIs which increasingly make up more of a company’s value • Recruiting and retaining talent, especially from younger generations These points, when demonstrated clearly, help build a compelling—if not exciting—business case. But there’s

Forecasting ROI and Proving Your Investment’s Worth Nothing wins the support and buyin of senior executives quite like a detailed and accurate ROI forecast. By demonstrating that you have considered exactly how your investment will impact the company’s bottom line, you can make the decision to grant approval extremely simple.

When it comes to demonstrating the value of an ERP cloud investment, you need to think about a wide variety of factors, such as: • Capital expense cost savings associated with moving on-premises ERP solutions to the cloud • Lower operational expenses, reducing the need for expensive ERP support resources through increased automation and self-service tools • Process improvements using insight granted by new ERP analytics and business standards • Increased efficiency of individual processes, especially those primarily involving paper • Improved visibility of all ERP processes, which identifies further opportunities for cost savings • Less waste and improved control over budgets, procurement, and projects Independent ROI analysis firm Nucleus Research has clearly laid this groundwork for capital and operational expenses in their 2016 white paper, Cloud Delivers 2.1 Times More ROI. As the authors note, cloud ROI is determined by a wide range of different factors. Please note, when it comes to turning all the above points into actual numbers for your organisation, you might consider the assistance of third-party experts with experience in preparing ROI forecasts for these kinds of investments.

Once you’ve secured your funding and executive buy-in, then it’s time to begin the process of selecting a partner and managing all the positive and exciting change that a new ERP system will bring.

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APPOINTMENTS

Orange Business Services names new VP for the region Orange Business Services has announced the appointment of Sahem Azzam as Vice President Middle East and Africa. He is based in the regional headquarters at Dubai Silicon Oasis in the United Arab Emirates.

Sahem brings over 15 years of experience in the region to his new role, including sales and marketing management across the ICT industry and networking space in several multinational organisations. He takes over the regional leadership p osition from Luc Serviant.

Sahem will lead the Orange Business Services regional team from the Dubai headquarters, supported by offices in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf, South Africa and Turkey. He will focus on accelerating the growth of the business, leveraging opportunities from the rapid digital business transformation across the region, which is creating a new operating landscape for enterprises and governments.

Bitdefender names Tarek Kuzbari as Middle East regional director Bitdefender has appointed Tarek Kuzbari as Regional Director for the Middle East. The move is part of Bitdefender’s strategy to expand its enterprise business in the region by capitalizing on the growing market for network traffic analytics (NTA) solutions.

“We are now poised to expand our Middle East presence and market share. With over 18 years of regional cybersecurity experience, Tarek has a keen awareness of some of the most pressing challenges facing local enterprises and governments, a thorough understanding of the market dynamics and competitive landscape, strong relationships with customers and partners and an acute business acumen. I am confident that he is the right leader to drive customer acquisition across this strategically important region for the company, and spearhead our next phase of growth,” said Rafik Hajem, Senior Managing Director Central Europe, Middle East & North Africa.

Assuming responsibility for Bitdefender’s operations in the region, Tarek will focus on growing Bitdefender’s enterprise sales, particularly in the government, finance, telco, manufacturing and healthcare sectors. With a 100% channel driven go-to-market strategy in the Middle East, Tarek will also focus on expanding Bitdefender’s channel ecosystem and will work closely with the channel team to rollout several enhancements―specifically around enablement, deal protection and margin growth—to the partner program, over the next 12-18 months.

Lenovo appoints new leader for META region In a drive to further expand business and increase its portfolio of products available in the region, Lenovo has announced the appointment of Shashank Sharma as its new Executive Director and General Manager for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa.

Shashank has an extensive 23 years of experience in the IT and mobile industries, having previously served as the Executive Director and Asia Pacific Lead of Lenovo Mobile Business Group and Motorola. He has led Lenovo and Motorola’s smartphone business in AP and MEA regions, overseeing business strategy, sales and operations, marketing and customer relations. Prior to Lenovo’s smartphone business, Shashank was handling Lenovo’s PC product and operations in MEA from 2011 till 2014. Additionally, Shashank has forayed into roles further afield in Lenovo’s Chicago, Singapore and Hong Kong offices.

Commenting on Shashank’s appointment, Francois Bornibus, President EMEA and Vice President Lenovo Group stated: “We are delighted to have Shashank representing the META region, as our Executive Director and General Manager. His expertise in the field, coupled with a wealth of international experience makes him the perfect fit for our team. Shashank has already illustrated his dedication to Lenovo, and we look forward to seeing how he will drive our strategy going forward.”

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PRODUCTS

HPE PRIMERA

ARUBA INSTANT ON Aruba Instant On is a new family of secure wireless solutions designed to address the current and future needs of small businesses with capacity for growth. The Instant On family will initially include indoor/outdoor Wi-Fi access points (APs) designed to deliver secure, highspeed wireless connectivity with hassle-free set-up and management, all with the quality, performance and exceptional support that customers expect from Aruba.

Featuring Aruba’s802.11ac Wave 2 technology, the Instant On portfolio combines Aruba’s business-grade Wi-Fi in a simple, easy-to-set-up solution that offers the flexibility to scale up as business needs dictate.

The first set of Aruba Instant On APs will begin shipping in early July, with a list price starting at $119 USD.

HPE Primera is a new platform that redefines mission-critical storage by delivering superior simplicity, availability, and performance. HPE Primera leverages the industry’s most advanced AI platform for operations, HPE InfoSight, to deliver significant breakthroughs – including 93% less time spent on managing storage , and the ability to predict and prevent issues, and accelerate application performance.

Customers can self-install HPE Primera in less than 20 minutes., and storage can be provisioned on HPE Primera within seconds. Data reduction is built-in and always-on with the flexibility to turn it off.

Built with a services-centric OS that decouples data services so they can be deployed, upgraded, or restarted independently, HPE Primera software can be upgraded by customers in 5 minutes without any disruption.Customers have the choice to deploy HPE Primera as a service with a fully managed experience and pay only for what they use through HPE GreenLake. For CapEx purchases, the ownership experience is transformed with Timeless Storage for HPE Primera, ending forklift upgrades. Customers get a non-disruptive controller refresh, all-inclusive software, and storage guarantees for data reduction and availability.

AVAYA IX COLLABORATION UNIT CU360 The Avaya CU360 is a compact all-inone video collaboration unit with full HD 1080p performance, a 4K camera sensor, along with 4K display support.

Right out of the box, the unit can be up and running in 5 minutes, providing a quick and easy “huddle room” set-up in virtually any space.

It can be integrated with an organization’s existing UC platform as well as any existing standards-based video infrastructure. By delivering access to and use of cloud-based applications, it can turn any room into a cloud-enabled collaboration room.

And if that wasn’t enough, it can also turn any TV into an Android device with a camera and microphone. This means it can be used for video recording, Skype, and any other functionality that Android apps provide.

Thanks to this simplicity and performance, it encourages and empowers employees to use video for their meetings instead of just audio, adding a personal connection to training, brainstorming, and other team meetings and customer interactions.

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BLOG

HOW TABLEAU FITS IN AT SALESFORCE SUNIL PAUL, CO-FOUNDER AND COO OF FINESSE, THROWS LIGHT ON THE LATEST IT ACQUISITION AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE INDUSTRY.

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alesforce’s acquisition of Tableau Software gives the world’s biggest CRM company a highly competitive data analytics edge just when everyone was guessing about its game plan in that regard. While Tableau had been an acquisition prospect for the big boys of IT for quite some time, it was Salesforce that bit the bullet with its $15.7 billion all-stock deal announced last week.

The biggest acquisition deal in the CRM giant’s 20-year history will provide it with the business intelligence chops that industry watchers had felt it lacked for taking on the likes of Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle. The data visualisation prowess that Tableau will bring to Salesforce’s CRM toolkit will help companies surface a more in-depth business insight, and understanding of the customer data repositories they have been accumulating using Saleforce products. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff summed it up best in a press release announcing the deal: “Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers. It’s truly the best of both worlds for our customers.”

Where Salesforce is concerned, Tableau not only complements the company’s existing analytics tools, which include Einstein and Analytics Cloud but more important, it also supports outside data sources.

The fact of the matter in today’s world is that companies need to able to make sense of not just their customer data but all data that may reside in any part of the enterprise. Salesforce is largely confined to en enterprise’s sales and marketing and related functions

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WHERE SALESFORCE IS CONCERNED, TABLEAU NOT ONLY COMPLEMENTS THE COMPANY’S EXISTING ANALYTICS TOOLS, WHICH INCLUDE EINSTEIN AND ANALYTICS CLOUD BUT MORE IMPORTANT, IT ALSO SUPPORTS OUTSIDE DATA SOURCES. but Tableau has managed to establish itself across multiple departments and functions within the enterprise thanks being able to easily connect to and make sense of a variety of data.

Of course, with Tableau, Salesforce can knock on more doors in an enterprise and help their joint customers, who had voted for the stand-alone Tableau to use with Salesforce products, to build a more comprehensive picture of their customers.

Salesforce customers who don’t have Tableau in their repertory can, thanks to this acquisition, get access to an industryleading data visualisation tool with full confidence that CRM giant’s money, might and resources are behind it.

This will also instill large companies who may have been reluctant to introduce a small vendor like Tableau into their vendor ecosystem to be more confident about doing so. And it would be fair to expect Salesforce pitch itself to Tableau-only customers running

competitor CRM systems.

The acquisition of Tableau, together with Mulseoft in 2018, has eased Salesforce, which was the pioneer of Software as a Service (SaaS) approach, into the on-premise market as well. The two acquisitions point to the CRM major’s pragmatic approach to work with companies that don’t have all or most of their data in the cloud and thus stay relevant in the highstakes data analytics battle.

Where companies are deploying Tableau Server in the cloud or subscribing to its SaaS offering, these are domains where Salesforce is the undisputed leader. All in all, Tableau is expected to catapult Salesforce to parity with its competitors on the cloud data analytics front.

However, some key concerns that Salesforce may have to address as the deal gets concluded includes: will it retain Tableau’s multi-cloud approach even while reassuring that company’s on-premise customers that their choices would be respected and supported (in fact, only one-third of Tableau deployments are in the cloud); will it ensure that integration between Tableau and Salesforce’s products will not disruptive for existing joint customers of both products as their roadmaps converge; and will smaller users of Tableau, who may be fond of large vendors, be given a raw deal.

The acquisition by Saleforce has put Tableau on solid ground about its future, but market consolidation underway in the BI space could see other independent vendors struggling to remain relevant in what is becoming a price-driven commoditised space.

THE WORLD’S ALL FLASH STORAGE

*According to the Latest Storage performance council report, Huawei Sets New SPC-1 Performance Record

Website: e.huawei.com/ae E-mail address: enterpriseME@huawei.com

Sage Middle East

www.sage.com/en-ae Office: +971 4 3900180 or 800 SAGE