EC-MEA August 2020

EXCLUSIVE DEEP DIVE

l

DANNY ALLAN CTO VEEAM

PA G E S 5 8 VOLUME O8 | ISSUE 01 AUGUST 2020

Artific al Intell gence

is t ready to go Ma nstream?

Over a dozen top executives give their comments on the state of readiness of AI in terms of embedded solutions and use cases.

Adrian Pickering, Red Hat; Ahmad Dorra, Avaya; Ahmed Ibrahim, Intel; Akram Awad, BCG; Anas A Abdul-Haiy, Proven Consult; Avinash Gujje, Cloud Box; Eva Andren, Ericsson; Fadi Kanafani, NetApp; Kenny Lyu, Huawei; Marwan Zeidan, Schneider Electric; Ozlem Fidanci, Philips; Rudeon Snell, SAP; Thierry Nicault, Salesforce.

Dr Chris Cooper, Lenovo DCG. (Left to right, top to bottom)

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ARUN SHANKAR EDITOR A R U N @ G E C M E D I A G R O U P. C O M

If I just look on a daily basis in my calendar, who I spend most time with, it is Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google.

Danny Allan, CTO Veeam.

In the late eighties and early nineties, the Windows operating system for PCs and the Intel microprocessor architecture, began a stepwise innovation, to support improved graphics capability of Microsoft’s primary applications including the Browser and MS Office suites.

The rest of the Microsoft ISV ecosystem followed in its suite, upgrading to better and better user interfaces and image resolution management. And for the rest of the PC system OEMs the roadmap was clear. Follow the hardware and software architectures set up by Intel and Microsoft, do your value additions, and sell out.

Almost 15-20 years later, we see the resurgence of another inflexion point, amongst many that have happened in the intervening years. Intel is beefing up its server and highperformance computing processors to manage the next generation of use cases built around extremely large data sets, so large that data modeling becomes a natural outcome, and around algorithms, machine learning, amongst others.

The use cases that are driving these innovations for now are around image management, face recognition, object detection, voice-speech-language-text duality, amongst others.

Microsoft’s Windows will not be lagging behind Intel’s architectural disruption.

According to Ahmed Ibrahim at Intel, artificial intelligence and data analytics are the defining workloads of the coming decade. On June 18, 2020, Intel disclosed its latest hardware and software solutions that further accelerate artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads in data centers, cloud and in intelligent edge computing.

According to Red Hat’s Adrian Pickering, organisations are using Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for building artificial intelligence and machine-learning data science workflows and artificial intelligence-powered intelligent applications. OpenShift helps to provide agility, flexibility, portability and scalability across the hybrid cloud, from cloud infrastructure to edge computing deployments.

Says Dr Chris Cooper, General Manager, Lenovo DCG, artificial Intelligence has definitely a big role to play in managing unusual circumstances – particularly those that are hard to predict and require a fast response. The pandemic has shown that we are in need for AI-enabled early warning, prediction, and detection systems, as well as real-time monitoring of trends, but also for drug discovery and vaccine development.

Asks BCG’s Akram Awad, could the world have done more with artificial intelligence if we were better prepared? Maybe. Yet nevertheless, these actions have represented a step-change moment in artificial intelligence application.

For more about the impact of artificial intelligence from top industry executives, turn these pages.

Happy understanding! ë

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CONTENTS AUGUST 2020 | VOLUME 08 | ISSUE 01

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EDITOR’S PAGE.

06 MAKING SUPPLY CHAINS A NETWORK OF CONNECTIONS SULTAN SALIM AL OWAIS, EVOTEQ.

08 WHY CISOS CAN FAIL AT THE TOP AND WHAT THEY CAN DO SAM CURRY, CYBEREASON.

10-13 EVENT NEWS

14-17 CHANNEL NEWS

25-39 COVER STORY

CHALLENGES AND GAINS FROM

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE l Using OpenShift as platform for use cases l Training your contact centre to respond using bots l Building the processors for next generation intelligence

18-19 CLOUD NEWS

l Could we have done more with AI if better prepared? l Process, documentation, speech driving use cases l Agility, customer experience, costs, driving AI l What is AI by design for telecom service providers l Managing heterogenous deployments and use cases

20-21 SECURITY NEWS

l Building the entire compute infrastructure for AI l Energy, assets, productivity, driving industrial adoption l Telehealth and virtual care driving use cases l Using ERP to embed intelligence into business processes

22-23

l Bringing automation and intelligence into voice apps l Customer journey for AI adoption has three phases

CLOUD

45-48 PRODUCTS NEWS

52-53 REAL LIFE

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GUEST COLUMN

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PEOPLE NEWS

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VIEWPOINT

SULTAN SALIM AL OWAIS,

Managing Director Special Projects, EVOTEQ.

MAKING SUPPLY CHAINS A NETWORK OF CONNECTIONS

In the future technologies such as cloud computing, 5G, AI, IoT, can help make supply chains more resilient writes Sultan Salim Al Owais at EVOTEQ.

S

ometimes one’s biggest successes go unnoticed because the problem was averted even before it had a chance to arise. In the early stages of the COVID19 outbreak, a major worry of governments around the world was a shortage of necessary supplies and everyday essentials. Here in the UAE, not only did this not happen for the basics such as food and medicine, but high-demand products such as masks, gloves and hand sanitisers were not lacking from our shelves.

This can be largely put down to the UAE’s supply chain resilience and the hard work of all our frontline workers. But we should not be complacent. In recent years, globalisation has encouraged us to procure a greater volume of products from a smaller number of sources, with the emphasis on cost reduction.

This has mostly worked very well, but it leaves countries in a

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precarious position when a black swan event threatens to derail the flow of goods or services.

Take for instance when various business and manufacturing hubs in China were shut as authorities worked to contain the infectious coronavirus. This move hurt several economies that depend on China to buy or supply them with materials and parts for exported goods.

The key takeaway from this is that businesses must not rely on particular products or markets, and diversify their supply chains as much as possible to withstand any unforeseen emergencies.

If we were to redesign our supply chains as a spider web of interactions rather than a linear model, we would have a network more resilient to sudden shocks in any one part of the system. This might seem overwhelming complex, but it can work if we make use of technologies across the whole spectrum

VIEWPOINT

Trade in counterfeit and pirated goods now stands at 3.3% of global trade

Importance of digitalisation is shown by lack of visibility across the supply chain to strengthen business systems and operations, such as cloud computing, 5G, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

The importance of this digitalisation process is shown by the current lack of visibility across the supply chain. Businesses that sell a final product usually do not have or have not audited suppliers further up the chain. This matters less if you are selling a toaster, but if it is an essential healthcare item, then it would be very helpful to know of potential issues so that alternative strategies can be formulated.

As obvious as it would seem, this requires a move away from paper to digitization, while trade across industries is still far too reliant on

paper-based processes. Blockchain will be very useful in this equation as it can control transactions involving peer-to-peer data, and no one else can alter those transactions without a majority of the network’s approval.

This technology will also help breed confidence among suppliers who are worried about the security of their data. They must be able to control who receives what data from them, and independently verify these controls.

These processes will dramatically increase the flow of data, which for many industries could seem overwhelming. Here is where cloud-based artificial intelligence systems will come into their own, providing real-time big data analytics on everything from supplier updates to the weather, political events and commodity or transport prices.

The foundation for all of this will be the successful roll-out of cloud-based artificial intelligence systems, which will provide a rich wealth of useable data for businesses and governments. This, in partnership with 5G will be a powerful combination to unlock a host of new opportunities due to much better data speeds.

Now that we have discussed the ability to procure goods from a more diverse source base, let us turn to how we ensure authenticity, efficiency, reliability and correct expiry dates.

To give a timely example, when a nation suddenly needs to import vast quantities of hand sanitiser, medicine and masks from as many sources as possible, how does it know that those products are genuine, reliable and safe?

Smart tracking platforms are a very good answer for this issue, and many more besides.

The cloud-based platform follows the flow of goods and product information from point-of-manufacture to point-of-sale and the end-users. This streamlines the supply chain process to enhance operational efficiency.

It gives customers real-time information of the source of their products or services, and ensures the production and distribution of

Cloud-based platform follows the flow of goods and product information from point-of-manufacture to point-of-sale quality products and services in a timely fashion.

The significance of this sort of transparency becomes apparent when we look at the problem of counterfeit goods. Trade in counterfeit and pirated goods now stands at 3.3% of global trade, according to a report by the OECD. This can represent serious health and safety risks ranging from ineffective prescription drugs, fire hazards from substandard electronic goods and unverified chemicals in cosmetics and baby formula.

Expired goods and product recalls is another major issue for supply chains. In a country like America, with stringent checks and balances in place, there were more than 200 food-related recalls, in the first six months of 2018, based on information from the Food and Drug Administration.

Imagine the logistics challenges for the size and spread of the country’s population. However, with a solution that can monitor exactly where each produced batch of goods is at any specific time before consumption, regulators, health authorities and companies can swiftly and accurately address the problem.

From a technological view, the public and private sector have the means to create robust, safe, secure systems that benefit all parties, which is critical as the world becomes ever more complex and interwoven. ĂŤ

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VIEWPOINT

SAM CURRY,

Chief Security Officer, Cybereason.

WHY CISOs CAN FAIL AT THE TOP AND WHAT THEY CAN DO The dialogue between the CISO and the CXO is not something the CISO learns on the way up and needs to be developed, explains Sam Curry at Cybereason.

W

hen I ask CISOs and security teams to talk through some of their biggest challenges, I hear everything from ensuring employees do not fall prey to phishing scams to effectively patching vulnerabilities and everything in between. And yes, these are all very real challenges but I would argue that at a strategic level, the number one issue in security is misalignment with the business.

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There are myriad of reasons for this, which I shall delve into, but the antidote is really very simple. The key to aligning to the business is having a frequent risk dialog with the business. That does not mean reporting on the number of viruses stopped in a month or tracking the right KPIs, which you should do, but rather it is about a two-way dialog that really leads to changes in behaviors on both sides, starting with security.

Most security professionals rose through the ranks to the

VIEWPOINT

The key to aligning to business is having a frequent risk dialog

The number one issue in security is misalignment with the business executive level by being the smartest security person in the room. Lo-and-behold, when they reach the C-suite or even get close to it, they often find that no one cares. This first introduction is crucial because first impressions with CxOs are lasting. For the security person to really shine they will be staring into a headwind as they have to prove themselves in a new and fundamentally different way and convince CxOs that they are about the business.

For many this is difficult, as the newlyminted CISO often suffers Security Fear of Missing Out — they like security and want to stay current and fresh and continue to prove their security chops. This, however, is a mistake. The real job of the CISO is to serve the business and to perform a vital logistical and managerial function for the security discipline in the company.

This means that the minutiae of people

management, budgeting and aligning to company priorities are the most important things they can be doing, from soft skills in the C-suite offices to hard financial skills with the general and administrative expenses G&A staff.

All of this depends on talking and thinking about risk at a company level and understanding that many of your co-workers are also custodians of risk, including those who manage legal, market, financial, operational and other IT risks, the general counsel, CMO, CRO, CFO, COO, CIO and so on. Do not be the CISO that waltz’s in and says I am the enemy fighting risk guru, and I am here to help.

On the flip side, most of the business deals with first order risk outside security — risk that is not intelligently adaptive and does not fight back. The weather is a good example of first order risk: how you take shelter from the storm does not affect the path of the storm. However, like those in sales dealing with competitors and those in legal fighting other lawyers, security is a department that handles second order risk with an intelligent, motivated and capable opponent.

In security, the storm definitely changes course based on what and how you protect the company. Many non-security executives feel a deep-seated frustration that the security problem has not yet been solved or that there is not a simple solution to plug in and forget about.

The plain and simple truth is that there will always be a top issue in security. If by some chance you solve the top three issues, there will be the next three issues; and the priority order will change and shift. For a COO or a CIO or head of R&D who is used to a simple risk registry and then managing those down to acceptable levels with an arsenal of managerial tools and budgets, this can be deeply frustrating.

The mindset of pursuing the five-nines of availability, for instance, becomes completely

The first introduction is crucial because first impressions with CxOs are lasting

frustrated with a department that has an active and malicious ghost in the machine as enemy number one instead of quality in supply chain or process waste removal.

The answer to all of this is setting expectations. The newly minted CISO or the long-in-the-tooth CISO both need to set the expectation of a changing landscape of risk and an ongoing dialog with the business. KPIs are important, removing waste is important, automation is important; but they are secondary to being adaptive and flexible and focusing on how you improve in the moment.

All of this demands that the CISO in fact not leap on all security items as they appear, which ostracises peers; and it demands that the CISO pay close attention to non-security issues and risks. The CISO must both encourage involvement and contribution by others in security and weigh in as a business person first on non-security items.

Ultimately, the CISO must be an insider to the business in addition to the de facto role as the voice of and advocate of information security risk among all the other business risks at the C-level. If done right, the company can lower the most insidious risks to acceptable levels and become a best-of-breed company focusing on the core business. Done wrong, the company will get blindsided and the CISO will fail in their primary mission of aligning the security department with the organisations’ core business. ë

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EVENT NEWS

Global CIO Forum honours winners of Global Future Security Leaders Awards 2020 On July 14, over 15 leading security experts took part in the Security and Risk Management WebSummit, hosted by Global CIO Forum, GCF. With remote working becoming the norm, it has given rise to unique security challenges for companies. To mitigate these security risks, organisations must implement clear and comprehensive policies and take proactive measures to ensure the safety and integrity of company data. The speakers participating in the Security and Risk Management WebSummit shared their experiences and offered cogent advice.

The WebSummit also hosted an engaging Workforce Security Expert Panel featuring CISOs from six different countries who shared their experiences on the pandemic and how the lives of CISOs have changed forever.

Strategic partners for the WebSummit were BeyondTrust, Exclusive Network, Spectrami, CyberKnight, IronNet and Finesse.

Global Future Security Leaders Awards 2020 A key highlight of the Security and Risk Management WebSummit was the Global Future Security Leaders Awards 2020. Top CIOs from across the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Egypt were honoured as GCF Certified Security Leader. Similarly, top vendors and channels were honoured with the Security Players Awards. The awards also celebrated the ever-changing role of CISOs

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in organisations, and how they have been instrumental in bringing about change.

Vendor awards While GCF awarded CISOs who have been the sentinels of their organisations, it was also equally important to recognise the key security players in the region. GCF felicitated five leading security players who have stepped up their game and made a difference with their solution offerings along with their alliance partners. l Cohesive Security Solution award: Spectrami l Future of Security award: RNS technology Services l Next-Gen Security award: Pulse Secure l Innovative Security Solution award: Bulwark Technologies l Future of Security award: Cybereason Blockchain verified certificates In an industry first, the awards to security leaders were delivered as a state-of-the-art Blockchain verified certificate. Winners have the option to add their credentials to a Blockchain record for added security. And once the certificate is made public, based on the skillsets, winners would be attracting the most appropriate job offers from the industry.

Each skillset has over 18000+ relevant jobs in the marketplace.

To create the Blockchain certificates, GCF enlisted Accredible, a service that specialises

in sending digital certificates and badges. These certificates are secure and digitally verifiable, relying on bank-level encryption and Blockchain logging that makes faking them impossible. They can also be shared on social media and professional networking sites with a single click.

How Blockchain verification works Accredible uses the Bitcoin Blockchain to store record of credentials. This is an incorruptible digital ledger of bitcoin transactions that can be used to securely record virtually anything of value. Anything that is written to the Blockchain can’t be altered in the future by any party because of the complexity of the Blockchain. When an Accredible credential is issued and recorded to the Blockchain, the record of the credential is written into the list of Blockchain transactions.

Because the Blockchain is public anyone can verify that the credential was recorded at the correct time, validating that information is correct.

How it prevents fraud When the issuer of a credential decides to issue a Blockchain Credential, Accredible makes an encrypted record of: l The issuer l The recipient l The award l The date of creation These pieces of data are encrypted right onto the blockchain. This means that every blockchain credential is incredibly secure.

EVENT NEWS

TESTIMONIALS

EVENT NEWS

ROTIMI AKINYELE,

MANAGER, Information Security and Business Continuity, Ras Al Khaimah Government Entity.

“ Thanks for selecting me for this award.

Since the Corona pandemic began you will agree with me thatthe role of the CISO has changed tremendously. We no longer play just the cybersecurity technical leadership role, but we also play the strategic business continuity role.”

VIRAG THAKKAR, Head IT GRC, Agoda.

“ Technology landscapes have changed

drastically over the course of the year along with ever-changing laws about data privacy. This award gives me the assurance that I am on the right path and have the community support to overcome any future challenges. Thank you so much.”

ABDELMAJED AHMED SAEED FADOL, CISO, Medgulf.

“ 2020 is a really big challenge for each one of us because of this pandemic.

Our lives have changed and the way of working for CISOs has also changed, because most people are now working from home and trying to get access to data. This award really means a lot to me and thank you everybody.”

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THE WINNERS

Global CIO Forum bestowed winners with the title of GCF Certified Security Leader for fulfilling and demonstrating the competencies and skillsets of a next-gen CISO. The list included:

DR ERDAL OZKAYA,

CHANDER MOHAN RAINA,

Regional CISO, Standard Chartered Bank

IT & Systems Manager, Wyndham Grand Regency

AYAD (ED) SLEIMAN,

AMIR SIDDIQUI,

Head of Information Security, KAUST

CISO, Samba Bank Limited

ABDUL RAHIM AHMAD,

ANAND PRABHU SELVAKUMAR,

CTO & CISO, Securities & Exchange Commission Of Pakistan

Senior Manager IT Security, Qatar Insurance Group

MOHAMMED ISHTIAQ HUSSAIN,

VIVEK SILLA,

Head of IT Infrastructure and IT Security, Doha Bank

AVP, IT Security Governance & Risk Management, Public Investment Fund

ANAND SINHA,

AMIN M SIDDIQUI,

CIO & Director IT, OCS Group India

Vice President of Information Security Governance and Risk, Public Investment Fund

ABDELMAJED AHMED SAEED FADOL, CISO, Medgulf

BITTU BALAKRISHNAN, Project Manager Business Systems, Adyard Abu Dhabi LLC

ROTIMI AKINYELE, Manager, Information Security and Business Continuity, Ras Al Khaimah Government Entity

VIRAG THAKKAR,

SAMIR KASIM PAWASKAR, Head, Cyber Security Policy and Standards, Ministry of Transport and Communications

SAGHIR AHMAD KHAN,

Head IT GRC, Agoda

Manager Incidents Management, Alrajhi bank

VARUN VIJ, Information Security Lead, SERCO

ABUBAKAR ARSHAD, Director Cyber Security, BNET

SUNIL KUMAR SHARMA, Vice President, Information Security & Compliance (CISO), Aldar Properties

MANSOOR MUGHAL,

JURAGESWARAN SHETTY,

MOHAMED NIROZ,

Manager, IT Security and Infrastructure, GulfTainer

CISO, Abdul Rahman Kanoo International School

SYED ALI NOUMAN,

MOHAMMED ALSHAMRANI,

Manager IT Security, Doha Bank

CISO, Bidaya Home Finance

HOSSAM ABBAS BARAKAT,

ABDULMAJEED ALRASHEED,

GM IT, Egypt Gas

Head of Information Security, GIB

TOM GAMALI,

MUSTAPHA HUNEYD,

Group CISO, ALJ

Former CISO, Ooredoo Group

PRADEEP KRISHNAN NAIR,

NAVANEETHAN M,

Assistant Director IT Security, University of Sharjah

Senior VP-CISO, Naspers Group

AYMAN ALAWAMI,

SYED ABDUL QADIR,

Head Of Cyber Security, Amlak International

Director, Technology Advisory and Cyber Risk Assurance, A. F. Ferguson & Co, PwC Pakistan

BILAL AHMAD, Information Security Manager, Union Cooperative Society 12

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Deputy Information Security Manager, DFM

VIVEK GUPTA, Vice President, Head of Information Security, GEMS Education

EVENT NEWS

Global CIO Forum, Bahrain’s AI Society host Session 2 of BotTalk on AI and Covid-19

On June 28 Global CIO Forum, in partnership with Bahrain’s Artificial Intelligence Society, hosted the second session, in Arabic, of the BotTalk AI Virtual Conference. The topics discussed included AI Ethics, Roles of AI in Education Post Covid-19, and GCC Countries Strategies on AI. The BotTalk series discusses the impact of AI on the Covid-19 pandemic, and what the future holds.

It covers nine different sectors with keynote speakers and expertise from the health, finance, legislation, industrial, beverages and education sector.

The partnership between GEC Media Group and the Artificial Intelligence Society has entered its 4th year, and it has contributed significantly towards awareness of AI and digital transformation, in Bahrain and amongst its CIOs. The guest speaker for the BotTalk AI Virtual Conference, Arabic, Session 2, was HE Abdul Nabi Salman, First Deputy Speaker of the Representatives Council, Bahrain. The Conference Chairman was Dr Jassim Haji, the President of Artificial Intelligence Society, Bahrain. He is a veteran in the field Information and Communications Technology with over three decades of robust experience in implementing IT strategies across sectors.

Dr Haji was joined by Dr Ahmed Zeki, Assistant Professor, College of IT, University of Bahrain; Dr Jaflah Al-Ammary, Assistant Professor, College of IT, University of Bahrain; and Ahmed Buhazza from Bahrain’s Artificial Intelligence Society.

The session was moderated by Ahmed Saleh AlBalooshi, Managing Director, Fintech IT Services & Consultations.

presented actionable insights that can help organisations improve network visibility and protect against cyber-attacks.

Global CIO Forum, RNS and Gigamon host WebSummit on cyber defence On July 21, Global CIO Forum in association with RNS Technology and Gigamon, successfully hosted the RNS Cyber Defence Conference, Series 1 WebSummit. Cyber threats are everywhere, and in today’s online landscape, they’re not only more prevalent but also more sophisticated.

No company wants to be in the next cyber-attack news headline. The exclusive WebSummit

Topic covered l Gain control of your complex security network l Increase return on existing security investments l Remove challenges associated with making changes to your current setup l Remove the need for network changes to impact the security team l Be committed to create experiences of unmatched quality, scalability and efficiency The keynote speakers for the RNS Cyber Defence Conference, Series 1 WebSummit included Samir Chopra, Founder and CEO at RNS Technology Services and Vijay Babber, Senior Channel Manager MEA at Gigamon. The presentations were followed by an illuminating live hacking session and concluded with a round of Q&A. The RNS Cyber Defence Conference, Series 1 WebSummit brought together attendees from across GCC and the Middle East.

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CHANNEL NEWS

SecureLink to distribute Circadence’s Al-based cybersecurity platform

REGHU MOHANDAS, DIRECTOR, RISK ADVISORY AND ANALYTICS, SECURELINK.

SecureLink, a risk advisory firm based in Dubai, has announced a new strategic distribution partnership with Circadence, makers of hands-on, gamified and self-evaluating online cyber-learning that helps to build cybersecurity skills. Through this partnership, SecureLink aims to provide customers in the META region with an innovative Al-based, next generation cybersecurity learning platform, Project Ares.

The partnership was born out of the market demands and challenges currently facing the cybersecurity community, namely the shortage of skilled professionals who seek hands-on skills training to keep pace with evolving threats. Circadence has responded to these dynamic challenges by delivering its award-winning gamified, training and learning platform, Project Ares. The online cyber range learning solution helps cyber operators build and advance in skills and competencies.

The virtual range environment exercises are reflective of today’s cyberattacks so organisations can better prepare their cyber workforce. These cybersecurity challenges, coupled with a need for remote learning and work-from-home mandates, are touching enterprise, government and higher education customers, and is changing their approach to learning and how they ensure cyber security professionals are positioned for success.

In this environment, SecureLink’s expertise and geographical coverage are critical to delivering a superior customer experience through a deep understanding of Circadence’s product and the cybersecurity landscape.

CyberKnight, Armis to address threats to OT, IoT and ICS installations

Researchers have uncovered a series of 19 zero-day vulnerabilities that could impact hundreds of millions of IoT devices. These vulnerabilities, collectively referred to as Ripple20, were found in a Treck TCP-IP stack that is widely embedded in enterprise and consumergrade products including transportation systems, power grids, industrial equipment, and others. Ripple20 could allow attackers to easily take over smart devices, while attacks are possible via the internet or from local networks.

According to Gartner, there will be 25 billion connected devices by 2021. The challenge faced is that these unmanaged devices have no security and represent the fastest growing attack landscape for organisations globally, with attacks up 300% in 2019 alone.

To address challenges related to prevention, detection, and mitigation of IoT, OT and ICS threats faced by enterprise and government customers in the Middle East, CyberKnight has partnered with Armis. Named a Leader by Forrester Research in The Forrester New Wave: Connected Medical Device Security Q2, 2020, the Armis Agentless Device Security Platform has extensive device identification capabilities and threat research and analysis for complete device protection.

Armis provides passive and unparalleled asset inventory, risk management, and detection and response. Beyond identifying impacted devices and risk factors, Armis is able to see and stop active attacks, whether that be a Ripple20 exploit or more prevalent ransomware.

VIVEK GUPTA, CO-FOUNDER AND COO AT CYBERKNIGHT TECHNOLOGIES.

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CHANNEL NEWS

Kodak Alaris announces 2020 Partner of the Year winners for EMEA Kodak Alaris has recognised eight partners from the Europe, Africa and Middle East, EMEA, region in its annual Partner of the Year awards. The awards are an integral part of the global information capture leader’s annual Partner Summit, which this year was held as a virtual event due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Kodak Alaris Partner Awards acknowledge partners who have demonstrated

excellent growth, engagement, innovation, and implementation of customer-centric solutions based on Kodak Alaris’ technology and services portfolio. The finalists and winners were chosen based on their commitment to customers, investment in solutions from Kodak Alaris, year on year revenue and growth trajectory, as well as successful joint wins over the past year.

Instant Response, Juniper Networks launch support centre in Amman With security services and network security ranking highest among the spending priorities for CISOs in the Middle East and North Africa, businesses across the region are investing heavily in networking technologies that drive business transformation. In a move that will enable it to expertly support enterprises in achieving this objective, Instant Response has announced that it

Spigraph, Benelux was named Top ValueAdded Distributor; the company has collaborated closely with the Kodak Alaris sales team and continued to drive high market share in the region. Having delivered significant revenue growth in FY20, long-standing partner ALOS, a system provider of capture and Enterprise Content Management solutions in Germanspeaking countries, secured the Top Performing Partner accolade.

Kodak Alaris’ complete hardware, software and services offering, was won by e-das, Germany.

Pitney Bowes UK scooped the Top Strategic Partner award. The partnership between the two companies is a relatively new one. Pitney Bowes has very quickly integrated Kodak Alaris into its solutions portfolio, rapidly growing the business and is driving new opportunities, particularly within the digital mailroom. In the service category, Restore Digital UK won the 2020 Service Partner Large Deal award, and the Service Partner Loyalty award was presented to Scanfabrik KG. A Special Award went to Wietec in Israel celebrating its successes over the past 12 months, most notably winning three major tenders to deliver election solutions despite tough competition. And Dubai-based distributor Rookie Ninja, was the first recipient of the Service Partner Start-up award which was designed to recognise a partner that has built a successful service business from scratch.

is partnering with Juniper Networks to establish a first-of-its-kind technical support centre in Amman, Jordan.

The new facility will enable Instant Response to offer enterprises comprehensive Level 1, 2 and up to Level 3 support services across Juniper’s entire portfolio of networking and security solutions. While the centre will focus on supporting businesses in the Middle East, it has also been fully certified to offer services to Juniper customers worldwide.

From the new centre in Amman, Instant Response will now offer support to Juniper customers via the channel of their choice including email, chat, web and telephone. Juniper has integrated the systems implemented at Instant Response’s new support centre with its own global customer service infrastructure. Instant Response has thus been empowered to serve customers with stringent SLAs and operate as an extension of the vendor’s global support team.

Instant Response has made significant investments to ensure that its agents are well-trained and achieve required Juniper certifications.

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CHANNEL NEWS

Spire Solutions to distribute D3 Security’s NextGen SOAR platform

SUNEEL RANGAMANI, D3 SECURITY’S SALES DIRECTOR FOR THE MEA REGION.

D3 Security has announced it has appointed Spire Solutions as a value-added distributor in the Middle East and Africa.

Under this partnership, Spire Solutions will support the distribution of D3 Security’s NextGen SOAR platform, known for its advanced security orchestration, automation and response, SOAR, capabilities with the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix built in.

With D3 Security’s next-generation SOAR features and partner-centric go-to-market model, distributors play a crucial role in supporting resellers and MSSPs, and driving growth across numerous markets. Spire Solutions, with its carefully selected portfolio of leading IT security solutions, is the ideal partner for D3 Security as it expands its global reach.

D3 Security’s mission is to make security operations, incident response, and threat hunting dramatically easier and faster. Today’s SOAR market faces huge challenges around managing playbook lifecycles and product integrations. D3 Security’s NextGen SOAR Platform leads the way with 260+ product integrations and a low-code, no-code interface that makes it possible to build, adjust, and scale playbooks and integrations without extensive Python coding skills. It has also disrupted the market with built-in MITRE ATT&CK TTP automation, enabling SOC operators to see a complete picture beyond the individual stages of an attack.

Westcon signs deal to distribute Cybereason products in the ME

STEVE LOCKIE, GROUP MANAGING DIRECTOR, WESTCON-COMSTOR MIDDLE EAST.

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Westcon has announced that it has signed a Middle East distribution agreement with Cybereason to market, distribute, and service Cybereason products and solutions in the Middle East region.

The Cybereason Defence Platform is used by more than 600 of the world’s largest and best-known enterprises. The platform provides complete endpoint protection against today’s most advanced threats. Cybereason excels at helping enterprises around the globe future-proof their businesses from sophisticated cyberthreats and automates the work previously done by security analysts.

The company also recently launched Cybereason Mobile, a new cloud-based offering designed to help enterprises prevent, detect and respond to both mobile device and traditional endpoint risks by connecting disparate threats in a single and complete malicious operation, Malop.

With a wide footprint across the Middle East region, Westcon offers channel partners value-added distribution services that include global logistical capabilities and a range of support and technical services. Along with offering a wide range of value-added services, such as Professional Services and Marketing as a Service that revolve around the unique EDGE framework, Westcon also offers integrated Digital Distribution Platforms including PartnerView, which helps deliver the technology integration and automation partners need to grow and thrive.

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StarLink reports double digit growth in H1 2020 The last few months will be remembered as the most challenging times in this new decade for all enterprises as well as individuals. Despite Covid-19’s unprecedented global impact, we are proud to report that StarLink, a fast growing True VAD for Cyber and Cloud in the META region, had a record second quarter and a successful finish for H1 2020, closing the half with double digit growth, and close to making the plan that was set out at the beginning of the year.

How StarLink responded to these challenging times is a testimony of the company’s solid foundation and a reflection on its agile and successful strategy addressing market opportunities and challenges proactively forming a business continuity teams who’ve been tasked to build business continuity and contingency plans and take precautionary measure to ensure employees safety and security while StarLink continues to deliver on its commitments towards vendors, partners and customers and support them during those challenging times.

Throughout Q2, despite the suspension of all events and meetings, the StarLink Digital Summit served as a platform to more than 15 vendors, to showcase unique integrated solutions, thus educating, inspiring, and creating value to customers and partners alike. The webinars hosted by StarLink in Q2 alone saw 2500-plus attendees consisting of partners and end-customers, not to mention the collective top of mind awareness achieved through consistent social media marketing.

RZAIDOUN ARBAD, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, STARLINK.

CHANNEL NEWS

Logicom achieves Cisco Customer Experience specialisation in MEA Logicom has achieved Cisco Customer Experience, CX, Specialisation for the MEA region, and becomes the first regional distributor to secure this Specialised status for the countries in which it maintains Cisco contracts, including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait,

Oman, Bahrain and Levant. The Specialisation gives Logicom partners an edge to work with Logicom’s Cisco certified professionals to drive incremental business in software and services while building their own Lifecycle Practice based on the Cisco Customer Experience

lifecycle.

Via the Customer Experience Lifecycle model, partners can sell more of their services, differentiate themselves with new offers, deliver new managed services, increase product expansion and improve renewal rates. The goal is to help our partners develop a Customer Success practice with the right people, tools, processes, and infrastructure to best support their customers.

Spectrum Networks, Automation Anywhere launch RPA courses Spectrum Networks, an IT training and learning services provider in the Middle East and APAC region, has announced a partnership with Automation Anywhere as the Authorised Training Partner for product and certification training throughout the MENA and APAC regions. Robotic Process Automation is a simple but powerful business process automation software.

It provides organisations with tools

required to create customised software robots to automate any business process. These bots are configurable software set up to perform the tasks that are assign and to control.

The course is designed to meet the evolving requirements of RPA and would be suitable for those who are currently holding the job roles such as business analyst, process analyst, project manager, process manager, data scientist, bi analyst, developer, and

machine learning engineer.

The course coverage is quite comprehensive providing an overview of the various components of software, as well as development, runtime client, and control room. Trainees will learn how to make the Bots using various types of recorders, editor, and basic commands. This also includes hands-on exercises for a few topics during the course.

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CLOUD NEWS

Oracle brings Autonomous Database to customer data centres Building on Oracle’s Exadata Cloud@Customer service over the last three years, Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer.

This new offering combines the latest Oracle Database with the fastest Oracle Database platform, Exadata, delivered as a cloud service in customer data centres eliminating database management and capital expenditures while enabling pay-per-use and elastic consumption of database cloud resources.

Now Autonomous Database is available to run in customer data centres both as a standalone offering and as part of Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the industry’s first on-premises cloud region.

Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer is the simplest and fastest transition to a cloud model with typical deployments taking less than a week. Existing applications in a data centre can simply connect and run without requiring any application

changes, while data never leaves the customer’s data centre. This is ideal for enterprises that find it challenging to move their missioncritical database workloads to the public cloud due to data sovereignty and regulatory requirements, security and performance concerns, or because their on-premises applications and databases are tightly coupled.

Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer enables organisations to move to an environment where everything is automated and managed by Oracle. Autonomous operations include: database provisioning, tuning, clustering, disaster protection, elastic scaling, securing and patching, which eliminates manual processes and human error while reducing costs and increasing performance, security and availability.

The architecture automatically scales to match changing workloads, freeing DBAs and developers from mundane maintenance tasks and enabling them to innovate and create more

Oman ICT Group leverages Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer Driven by strong customer demand, Oracle has announced Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the industry’s first fullymanaged cloud region that brings all of Oracle’s second-generation cloud services, including Autonomous Database and Oracle SaaS applications, to customer data centres, starting at only $500K a month.

With this offering, enterprises get the exact same complete set of modern cloud services, APIs, industry-leading SLAs, superior priceperformance, and highest levels of security available from Oracle’s public cloud regions in

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their own data centres. This is ideal for highly regulated or security-focused businesses needing to meet demanding latency and data residency requirements, reduce operational costs, and modernise legacy applications.

Over the past few years, enterprise adoption of public clouds has gone mainstream as companies took advantage of the pay-asyou-go economics, scale, and agility of cloud computing. However, most enterprises expect to continue to run a portion of their workloads in on-premises data centres for the foreseeable future. This has resulted in strong demand

LARRY ELLISON, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER AT ORACLE.

business value.

Customers can leverage Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer to consolidate thousands of databases and run the converged, open Oracle Database for multiple data types and workloads including ML, graph, spatial, IOT and In-Memory, instead of deploying fragmented specialpurpose databases.

from customers for a hybrid architecture where the same services, same functionality, and easy portability of applications exists between their public and on-premises cloud environments.

But until today, no solution was able to bridge the gap between cloud and on-premises environments. On-premises offerings from other cloud providers offer a very small subset of the services available in their public cloud regions. With this announcement, Oracle is making all of its cloud services available onpremises so enterprises can use Oracle’s cloud services wherever they need them, in the cloud or on premises via Cloud@Customer.

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer includes full management capabilities and access to new features and functions the moment they become available in Oracle’s public cloud. It provides strong isolation of customer data, including all API operations, which remain local to customer data centres and provide the highest levels of security.

Additionally, Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is certified to seamlessly run Oracle SaaS products including ERPFinancials, HCM, SCM, and CX, making it a completely integrated cloud experience on-premises. Customers only pay for services they consume using the same predictable low pricing offered in Oracle’s public cloud regions.

CLOUD NEWS

Equinix extends customer access to Alibaba Cloud in 17 markets Equinix has announced it will extend access to Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, through Platform Equinix for customers from 17 metros globally, including Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, as well as US metros such as Chicago, Dallas, Denver. This expansion, along with its API integration with Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, will help enterprises from these global markets easily and privately connect to Alibaba Cloud on Platform Equinix.

Alibaba Cloud is the third largest global provider of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and the largest in Asia-Pacific, according to Gartner.?

With the partnership, Alibaba Cloud can also enjoy secure, direct access to a robust, interconnected ecosystem of more than 9,700 customers, including 1,800 network providers and over 2,900 cloud and IT service providers globally to enhance performance, lower latency, and increase reliability for its

customers.

As a key enabler of digital transformation, cloud has been heavily adopted by multinational enterprises as they seek to modernise and mobilise their IT systems. According to Gartner, IaaS is expected to reach $62 billion in 2021 globally, and is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 24% during the forecast period 2019-2024.? To deliver on the expectations of transformation, it is critical for enterprises to ensure they can securely and seamlessly access multiple cloud service providers, such as Alibaba Cloud.

In view of increasing market demand, Alibaba Cloud has also integrated its API with ECX Fabric to streamline the process for enterprises to facilitate private and direct connections to Alibaba Cloud. Through a single portal, customers can create and manage private connections to Alibaba Cloud on demand in any of the 45 ECX Fabric metros, in minutes.

ROYCE THOMAS, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT, EQUINIX.

Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, which include Elastic Compute Service, Storage, Relational Databases, Big Data Solution and CDN. Its rich and diverse ecosystem ranges from e-commerce and payments, to logistics and supply chain management solutions.

Oracle adds regional customers for Cloud Applications

LEOPOLDO BOADO, Senior Vice President, Business Applications for ECEMEA region, Oracle.

Oracle is witnessing rapid adoption of Oracle Cloud Applications in the Middle East, with DP World, Emirates NBD, Dubai Airports, Galadari Automobiles, Nissan Middle East, Emaar, AW Rostamani, Kamal Osman Jamjoom Group, Ducab, du telecom, First Abu Dhabi Bank and many more driving major transformations with Oracle Cloud Applications.

Oracle also announced two new regional appointments to support its cloud business in the Middle East. Leopoldo Boado has been appointed as the Senior Vice President, Business Applications for Eastern, Central Europe and Middle East Africa, ECEMEA, region. Marwan Alzughaibi joins Oracle as the new Business Applications Leader for Saudi Arabia.

These appointments are part of Oracle’s commitment to deliver the most modern cloud technologies and infrastructure for the region, and to support Oracle customers’ digital transformation initiatives. The appointments follow the announcement that Oracle’s first cloud data centre for the region has gone live in Jeddah. Oracle’s infrastructure roadmap for the region includes three more cloud infrastructure regions for the GCC, with one additional region in Saudi Arabia and two in the UAE.

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SECURITY NEWS

Sophos finds paying ransom doubles the cost of recovery Sophos has announced the findings of its global survey, The State of Ransomware 2020, which reveals that paying cybercriminals to restore data encrypted during a ransomware attack is not an easy and inexpensive path to recovery.

In fact, the total cost of recovery almost doubles when organisations pay a ransom. The survey polled 5,000 IT decision makers in organisations in 26 countries across six continents, including Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

51% of organisations had experienced a significant ransomware attack in the previous 12 months, compared to 54% in 2017. In the UAE, 49% of the organisations surveyed mentioned a ransomware attack in the last one year. Globally Data was encrypted in 73% of attacks that successfully breached an organisation, while in the UAE, it was 78%.

The average cost of addressing the impact of

such an attack, including business downtime, lost orders, operational costs, and more, but not including the ransom, was more than $730,000.

This average cost rose to $1.4 million, almost twice as much, when organisations paid the ransom. 27% of organisations hit by ransomware admitted paying the ransom. The survey also revealed 19% of the organisations that were attacked in the UAE admitted to paying the ransom.

56% of the IT managers surveyed were able to recover their data from backups without paying the ransom compared to 66% in the UAE. In a very small minority of cases, 1%, paying the ransom did not lead to the recovery of data.

This figure rose to 5% for public sector organisations. In fact, 13% of the public sector organisations surveyed never managed to restore their encrypted data, compared to 6% overall.

However, contrary to popular belief, the

CHESTER WISNIEWSKI, PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST, SOPHOS.

public sector was least affected by ransomware, with just 45% of the organisations surveyed in this category saying they were hit by a significant attack in the previous year. At a global level, media, leisure and entertainment businesses in the private sector were most affected by ransomware, with 60% of respondents reporting attacks.

SANS Institute launches CyberStart Game to fight cyber crime As part of the ongoing emphasis on online learning and the heightened levels of security threats during the pandemic, SANS Institute has announced the availability of CyberStart Game for students and young adults across the Middle East and Africa. CyberStart Game provides a gamified learning experience that can be used in the classroom or accessed at home.

This 100% online learning platform is designed to teach complex security concepts promoting self-exploration and investigation over traditional learning methods. Students can play over 200 challenges are in control of their learning as they train at pace that suits them and their ability.

According to research findings in a report titled, SANS EMEA Survey: the iGen and

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Cyber Security, among 14-18-year-olds across seven countries in the Middle East and Europe, the choice of IT, including cyber security, as a career is highest in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, 47% and 46% respectively. Of those students who are interested in a career in IT, 49% were specifically interested in cyber security across the EMEA sample of students, with Saudi Arabia and UAE leading the pack at 63% and 58% respectively.

CyberStart Game has been created by cyber security expert, James Lyne, who is the CTO at SANS Institute. It is the only training resource that focuses learning around real-world scenarios and cyberattacks, the challenges in CyberStart Game have been developed based on historical events and cyber breaches.

CyberStart Game is built so that students can

NED BALTAGI, MANAGING DIRECTOR, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA AT SANS INSTITUTE.

work independently.

If they get stuck, there are various clues and tips and videos in-built to prompt them and help them through the challenge. Available now for schools, institutes and universities. The inbuilt simplicity and gamification experience of CyberStart Game means that teachers or parents do not need to be experts, they simply need to provide encouragement.

SECURITY NEWS

Ivanti launches hyper-automation platform for cybersecurity Ivanti, a company that automates IT and security operations to discover, manage, secure and service from cloud to edge, has unveiled Ivanti Neurons, a new hyper-automation platform that empowers organisations to proactively, predictably and autonomously self-heal and self-secure devices, and self-service end users.

Ivanti Neurons augments IT teams with automation bots that detect and resolve issues and security vulnerabilities while improving the accuracy, speed and costs of services IT delivers. Early adopters of the solution have

reduced unplanned outages up to 63%, reduced time to deploy security updates by 88%, and resolved up to 80% of endpoint issues before users reported them.

The new Ivanti Neurons hyper-automation platform offers multiple capabilities for enterprises: l Ivanti Neurons for Edge Intelligence gives IT the ability to query all edge devices using natural language and get real-time intelligence across the enterprise in seconds. It provides quick operational awareness, real-time inven-

tory, and security configurations across the edge leveraging sensor-based architecture. l Ivanti Neurons for Healing offers an army of automation bots to proactively detect, diagnose, and auto-remediate configuration drift issues, performance issues, compliance issues, and security issues for endpoints.

Automation of routine tasks paves the way to creating a truly self-healing environment, reducing time, costs, and improving employee experience. l Ivanti Neurons for Discovery delivers accurate and actionable asset information in minutes. This provides visibility in real-time using active and passive scanning and thirdparty connectors. These provide normalised hardware and software inventory data, software usage information and actionable insights to efficiently feed configuration management and asset management databases. l Ivanti Neurons Workspace provides a 360-degree view of devices, users, applications, and services, with real-time data. This allows first-line analysts to resolve issues previously escalated to specialists. User and device views cut complexity, long wait times and high escalation costs, resulting in faster end user resolution and greater productivity.

Condo Protego joins Secureworks’ partner programme to boost cybersecurity in ME Condo Protego, the UAE-based IT infrastructure and information management consultancy, has joined the Secureworks Global Partner Programme, helping to boost the region’s $22 billion cybersecurity market and enhance security in the digitally connected world. As Middle East countries and organisations digitally transform, especially as remote work ramps up amid the Covid-19 era, they are also expanding the threat surface while confronting an ever-growing roster of increasingly complex cyber-threats.

Showing the strong market potential, the Middle East’s cyber security market is set to reach a record-high of $22 billion by 2022, roughly double the value of $11 billion in 2017, according to a recent report by Markets and Markets. Secureworks enriches organisations’ defences with intelligence from up to 310 billion cyber events that the company observes each day. Worldwide, Secureworks counts more than 4,100 customers across more than 50 countries.

In the Middle East, Condo Protego is seeing strong demand for Secureworks solutions such as Adversarial Security Testing and Security Consulting to test security defences; Incident Response, which helps organisations to prepare for and respond to cyber incidents; and Red Cloak Threat Detection and Response, which applies advanced analytics and threat intelligence to alert about suspicious activity.

MAUREEN PERRELLI, CHIEF CHANNEL OFFICER AT SECUREWORKS.

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CLOUD

BY ARUN SHANKAR

D

DANNY ALLAN,

CTO and Senior Vice President, Product Strategy, Veeam.

DATA PORTABILITY

WHY MAPPING HYPER SCALARS IS SO CRITICAL FOR VEEAM Inside Veeam’s Act II, data portability across the public cloud is a strategic part of its remapping driven by transformation and post pandemic workplace.

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igital transformation and the emergence of the post pandemic world, have worked hand in hand to boost adoption of cloud, wherever it was laggard, and reinforced the securing of remote work collaboration. Organisations that were used to working on-premises have been forced to migrate workloads to the cloud. And those that were already working in the cloud have been compelled to consider data portability from one cloud hyper scalar to the other.

In June this year, Veeam Software, a vendor in backup solutions that delivers cloud data management, announced that it was now in Act II of its own transformation. According to Veeam’s Danny Allan, CTO and Senior Vice President, Product Strategy, there are three key aspects that now define the vendor’s transformation into Act II. The first aspect of Act II is how this transformation has impacted its products.

“Act I for us was very much about protecting data that was on-premises,” says Allan. This included physical systems and virtual systems while supporting vSphere, Hyper V, Acropolis, amongst others.

The second aspect of Act II is how transformation has impacted the key enabling platform, and this is about migrating from on-premises to the cloud. Rather than focusing on storage, snapshot integration and hypervisor integration, Veeam is focusing on APIs of hyper scalar public clouds. There are many aspects of the on-premises world that are missing in the public cloud world and that need to be developed and delivered by Veeam.

“Act II at a technology level, is about moving to the cloud. There is a big distinction, because public clouds may not have core capabilities like change block tracking, log transactions, iterative log transactions for databases. Those need to be introduced for a cloud world. But the high level is going from on-premises to a cloud centric world,” explains Allan.

Moving from on-premises to the cloud has also meant more efforts on continuous development, innovation and product releases to end users. In Act I, which was driven by on-premises installation, Veeam solutions for datacentres were upgraded once or twice a year.

“People do not want to change their infrastructure on a regular basis. And you typically would release every six months or every year because they are not updating their datacentre on a regular basis,” continues Allan.

However, upgrades in the public cloud by hyper scalars are much more frequent. When

CLOUD

people are deploying in AWS or in Azure or in Google, they are updating continuously. In fact, there is a term - continuous integration and continuous development, where they are always updating. And so, from Veeam, there is an expectation of much faster release cycles in Act II than in Act I, points out Allan.

The third aspect of Act II is how this transformation has impacted Veeam’s business model and includes software licensing. For Veeam, the on-premises model for software licensing used sockets and servers. However, in the cloud, these units do not exist and the concept is around instances of databases in the cloud. “So, the licensing model has also shifted,” points out Allan.

In summary, Veeam’s Act II is about shifting from on-premises to the cloud; shifting the release mechanism to match cloud movement; and licensing similar to how people are consuming in the cloud.

WHY ARE HYPER SCALARS SO IMPORTANT? The pandemic has accelerated the move towards digital transformation. “The shift that we are seeing right now in digital transformation is that the major part of the market is simply adopting more digital technologies,” reflects Allan.

This acceleration of digital transformation and the huge leaps in adoption of remote working is creating a challenge for Veeam. “One of the things that has impacted us is how do we take the data that we are collecting and make it more accessible to partners,” says Allan.

This is about making data highly available across all platforms including the public cloud.

This is about meeting the hugely increasing demand for data portability and the need for data reuse.

The predominant driver of why Veeam is working with the hyper scalars is therefore, simply the movement of workloads into the cloud, according to Allan. This translates into three types of innovation activities by Veeam.

The first innovation is taking backups onpremises and then moving them to the public cloud. End users are increasingly creating data on-premises and moving them to the cloud subsequently. “Customers do not want to manage storage on-premises anymore,” points out Allan.

The second innovation is to manage and power-on workloads and backups in the various public cloud hyper scalars, whether it is Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google.

“If you are storing your backups already

in the cloud, you might want to hit a button and say, well, it is already there, just power it on. And so that is the second capability,” he explains.

The third innovation is ensuring the high availability of workloads in public cloud hyper scalars, through data protection and data recovery. And the reason for this is again, working in the cloud for end users is not the same as working on-premises.

The public cloud creates limitations in access to the system and compute resources on which it is running, that end users do not experience when they are working on-premises. “In the public cloud, that is not the case. They do not have access to the hypervisor, they do not have access to the storage system. They only have access to the API’s that are available,” says Allan.

This puts the pressure back on Veeam to ensure that the same level of performance that end users are used to on-premises is made available to them in the cloud as well. As an example, through its engagement with hyper scalars and through their APIs, Veeam has been able to activate change block tracking inside AWS, that end users were not aware of that they needed.

WORKING WITH HYPER SCALARS Going forward into 2021, the top focus for Veeam is in the last three words of its vision statement. And that is to be the most trusted provider of backup solutions that deliver cloud data management. Remarks Allan, “If I just look on a daily basis in my calendar, who I spend the most time with, it is Microsoft Azure, it is AWS, it is Google. So, all three of those public hyper scalars. I spend more time with them than I do with traditional onpremises partners.”

That is not to say that the on-premises ecosystem is not important for Veeam, “But I do believe that the public cloud will be the strategic focus for us,” clarifies Allan.

In its most recent announcements, Veeam is now supporting Google Cloud Storage and support for Google Cloud VMware engine.

For Veeam’s Allan, the API portfolio of the cloud providers is of most interest. When operations are being run on-premises, end users and developers have full access to the underlying systems infrastructure, right down to chipsets. However, in the public cloud, things are very different.

Developers no longer have that level of access and that requires all APIs related to the specific public cloud to be made available to

achieve the same outcomes that they would have achieved on-premises.

Says Allan, “I am always most interested in working with them. First of all, examining, but then working with them to make sure that the right API’s are available for customers to achieve those best possible outcomes,” he explains.

Allan also points out that the reason for his interest is that cloud hyper scalars and cloud service providers tend to focus more on infrastructure resiliency and sometimes miss out on the need for data resiliency and business resiliency. “They do not always believe that those APIs are needed and so they do not expose and turn on those APIs,” elaborates Allan.

ORCHESTRATING THE CLOUD Veeam Availability Orchestrator Version 3 was made available from July this year.

This is an enterprise tool that orchestrates recovery from either snapshot replication or from backups or from storage replication.

Allan points out that most Veeam products are so simple that anyone can use them, except for Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

“The reason for that is not because the tool cannot be used by small and medium and commercial businesses, but because it requires expertise to understand the processes,” he says.

Orchestration is not about technology.

Orchestration is taking manual processes of an organisation and codifying them so that you can create dynamic documentation, that can be tested on regular basis. This means ensuring that all the workflows that you would expect to work will actually work.

And that requires subject matter expertise.

Continues Allan, “Everyone talks about people, process and technology. It is not really about technology. And it is not really about people. It is about process. And it requires expertise to automate that process.”

What enterprises are orchestrating today is their on-premises disaster recovery. Allan expects this orchestration to shift to the cloud in a year or two. “I expect there to be more of a focus on disaster recovery and business continuity into the public cloud as opposed from datacentre to datacentre.”

Over the last 14 years, if Veeam has been so successful in the on-premises market, its diligent and strategic remapping and alignment with hyper scalars promises an equally healthy dose of innovation yet to come. ë

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www.fitsmea.com

Live WebSummit

UNVEILING THE FUTURE AT #FITSMEA20

6

2020

#SMARTEverything Region’s Tech Future is here.

Sep 16-17, 2020

BROUGHT BY

OFFICIAL MEDIA PARTNERS

COVER FEATURE

CHALLENGES AND GAINS FROM

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Top industry executives give their comments on the cultural and technology challenges and benefits available from AI embedded solutions and use cases.

l Adrian Pickering, Regional General Manager, Red Hat l Ahmad Dorra, Customer Experience Solutions Sales Leader, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, Avaya l Ahmed Ibrahim, Director, Sales Enablement, Service Providers, EMEA, Intel l Akram Awad, Principal, BCG l Anas A Abdul-Haiy, Director and Deputy CEO, Proven Consult l Avinash Gujje, Practice Head Infrastructure, Cloud Box Technologies l Eva Andren, Head of Managed Services, Ericsson Middle East and Africa l Fadi Kanafani, General Manager and Managing Director, Middle East, NetApp l Kenny Lyu, Director, Ascend Computing International Business Dept, Huawei Cloud and AI BG l Marwan Zeidan, Real Estate and Healthcare Segment Director, Middle East and Africa, Schneider Electric l Ozlem Fidanci, CEO, Philips Middle East and Turkey l Rudeon Snell, Senior Director, Industries and Customer Advisory, SAP MENA l Thierry Nicault, Regional Vice-President for Enterprise Business Unit, Middle East, Africa, and Central Europe, Salesforce l Dr Chris Cooper, General Manager, Lenovo DCG.

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COVER STORY

RED HAT

USING OPENSHIFT AS PLATFORM FOR USE CASES

OpenShift is suitable for developing machine learning models and intelligent applications into production quickly and without vendor lock-in.

INSIGHTS Using OpenShift, channel partners and consultants help customers accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning workflows. n

The leading segments in the region for artificial intelligence adoption are airlines, oil and gas, financial services, and the public sector. n

Artificial intelligence has a vital role in helping researcher’s efforts to fight COVID-19. n

ADRIAN PICKERING,

Regional General Manager, Red Hat.

O

rganisations are using Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for building artificial intelligence and machine-learning data science workflows and artificial intelligence-powered intelligent applications. OpenShift helps to provide agility, flexibility, portability and scalability across the hybrid cloud, from cloud infrastructure to edge computing deployments. OpenShift is a necessity for developing and deploying machine learning models and intelligent applications into production more quickly and without vendor lock-in.

As a production-proven enterprise

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container and Kubernetes platform, OpenShift delivers integrated DevOps capabilities for independent software vendors via Kubernetes Operators and NVIDIA GPU-powered infrastructure platforms. This combination can help organisations simplify the deployment and lifecycle management of artificial intelligence machine learning toolchains, as well as support hybrid cloud infrastructure.

With these enhancements, data scientists and software developers are empowered to better collaborate and innovate in the hybrid cloud, rather than simply manage infrastructure resource requests.

Using OpenShift, channel partners and consultants help customers accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning workflows, facilitate their journey to the cloud, deliver artificial intelligence-powered intelligent applications, transform business operations in

support of new artificial intelligence, machine learning, and DL workloads, and streamline the adoption of artificial intelligence-enabled infrastructure in enterprise datacenters.

The leading segments in the region for artificial intelligence adoption are airlines, oil and gas, financial services, and the public sector.

Artificial intelligence has a vital role in helping researcher’s efforts to fight COVID-19 and is an important tool for the work being done at various institutions such as Mayo Clinic, where experts have a platform-approach to handling COVID-19. They created an artificial intelligence platform encompassing twelve parallel workstreams that deal with everything related from the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the COVID-19 disease.

This has boosted capabilities in relation to basic virology experiments on the virus, artificial intelligence activities, database creation, perspective biobanking, translational studies, immunology studies, health disparities research, clinical trials, and clinical trial implementation.

Using Kasikorn Business-Technology Group as an example, this organisation supports the day-to-day operations of KBank, one of Thailand’s largest commercial banks, and also provides technology developer and partner services for fintech firms across Thailand.

To support the doubling of KBank’s user base, KBTG developed K PLUS artificial intelligence-Driven Experience KADE to help analyse customer behavior and deliver a more personalised experience.

They also launched UCenter, a unified notification feed system – and both of these have been built and deployed on Red Hat OpenShift. Other customer cases of artificial intelligence machine learning solutions on Red Hat OpenShift include Boston Children’s Hospital. ë

COVER STORY

AVAYA

TRAINING YOUR CONTACT CENTRE TO RESPOND USING BOTS

Organisations can leverage machine learning to optimise bots for learning about the user, retaining information on them for future relevance.

AHMAD DORRA,

Customer Experience Solutions Sales Leader, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, Avaya.

T

he power of artificial intelligence and forecasting models have definitely come forward during the pandemic, and has been applied to the challenges in managing it. In Egypt, Avaya collaborated with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, United Nations Development Programme, to extend the capabilities of WASEL – a dedicated contact center service for people of determination – adding automated testing for COVID19 symptoms for the hard-of-hearing.

The chatbot solution offered by the technology company via their Tamkeen website or WASEL application utilises artificial intelligence to enable sign-language-based interaction, providing users intuitive access to critical information and support while reducing the workload on call center agents.

Avaya affirms that there is no typical journey when it comes to the adoption of artificial intelligence within each entity and that processes differ based on the organisational goal. Organisations need access to real intelligence – powered by the analytics and referencing provided by artificial intelligencebased solutions.

Today, natural learning processing chatbots that use artificial intelligence have become an integral part of the customer experience.

They are able to hold basic conversations using if-then logic. A human operator – typically a digital marketer – will map out the bot’s conversation paths using logical next steps and clear call-to-action buttons.

Organisations can also leverage machine learning to optimise bots for learning about the user, retaining information on them for future relevance, and predicting a conversation’s direction.

Channel partners are the ones that bring the specialist artificial intelligence solutions to life, and advocate inclusion within the technology infrastructure. To enable this quickly, artificial intelligence Connect from Avaya reduces transaction times, drive agent productivity, and enhance customer service.

In this region, artificial intelligence has been adopted primarily by organisations within the banking, telecoms and public services industries. Although artificial intelligence is still being spoken about as an emerging technology, many of these organisations have developed reasonably mature use cases for

artificial intelligence in support of improving customer experience.

Avaya believes that improving the customer and employee experience within a contact center is all about intelligent routing – directing the customer to the right agent in the first instance. This requires an artificial intelligence solution that can predict customer needs or quickly understand the immediate requirement.

The company’s artificial intelligence routing solution — Avaya artificial intelligence Routing with Afiniti AiRo – enables anyone to implement artificial intelligence in their processes. Users can connect up to six of their own data feeds, and allow the solution to find the best match for customers and agents based on subtle patterns within existing data.

New self-service capabilities also allow organisations to control and contribute their own data ownership and security, enabling swift modifications in response to market, industry, environmental, and consumer demands to shorten sales cycles and time to revenue.

Avaya solutions are designed to enhance user and customer experiences by making better use of artificial intelligence to make automated interactions more relevant and engaging.

Avaya artificial intelligence Virtual Agent and Avaya artificial intelligence Agent Assist are both developed with Google Cloud. Implementing artificial intelligence through these solutions replaces the typical structured IVR experience with a virtual agent that is capable of understanding customer intent and sentiment whilst responding in a relevant manner. Ultimately, it is a step towards a significantly improved customer and user experience. ë

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COVER STORY

INTEL

BUILDING THE PROCESSORS FOR NEXT GENERATION INTELLIGENCE

The next generation processors are being built to manage AI compute much faster and with much less data training using bfloat16, addressing use cases.

AHMED IBRAHIM,

Director, Sales Enablement Service Providers EMEA, Intel.

A

rtificial intelligence and data analytics are the defining workloads of the coming decade.

On June 18, 2020, Intel disclosed its latest hardware and software solutions that further accelerate the development and deployment of artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads in data centers, cloud and in intelligent edge computing.

These solutions include CPUs, FPGA accelerators, memory & storage solutions and software solutions that ease the process for deploying artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads.

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Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to improve business outcomes requires a broad mix of technology – hardware and software. From silicon to storage, Intel artificial intelligence solutions are helping customers deliver true business value.

The new 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors are the foundation for artificial intelligence, with value, scalability, built-in artificial intelligence acceleration, and inference leadership. These processors continue Intel’s initiative in built-in artificial intelligence acceleration, and are the first mainstream server CPUs with built-in bfloat16 support, which increases artificial intelligence throughput by reducing the amount of data required for the same training accuracy.

The integration of bfloat16 also allows for significant reduction in memory footprint and sharing of compute, memory, storage resources at a socket level.

Artificial intelligence instructions and Intel DL Boost capabilities on Xeon provide inherent acceleration across a broad swath of artificial intelligence workloads such as image recognition, recommendation systems, NLP and object detection.

Artificial intelligence is coming across as a vital technology to gain a better understanding and addressing of pandemics such as COVID19. artificial intelligence can help physicians and researchers in the pursuit of a vaccine, prevent the spread of the disease, speed up recovery and save lives by unlocking complex and varied data sets to develop new insights.

Artificial intelligence can speed genomics processing and make medical image analysis faster and more accurate for personalised treatment.

It is important to understand that implementing artificial intelligence in any organisation will be a journey. The first step

in that journey is to define the challenge you want to go solve, through brainstorming what challenges you are facing and prioritising them.

Once you have identified opportunities to investigate, the next step is to figure out which artificial intelligence approach is best suited to each problem.

The next step is to assess if you have the expertise required to implement the solution, and whether those team members embrace a fail-fast continuous improvement philosophy.

Once the human element is in place, the next step is to source data and prepare it for analysis, as well as stand up whatever technology infrastructure is required to tackle the problem.

Last, but certainly not least, you can do all the heavy-lifting to utilise data to solve business challenges, but if your organisation is not ready to accept data-driven insights, then all that work may have been ultimately for nothing.

To be a leader in artificial intelligence, we need to lead, and part of how we do that is through attracting and modeling top talent, sponsor research, participate on advisory boards, fund startup programs, shape public policy, and more.

We want to lift up our ecosystem of partners through different routes – from partnering with an Intel artificial intelligence Builder to access more than 100 artificial intelligence solutions and spinning up an Intel-optimised instance in the public cloud, to building your own infrastructure using an artificial intelligence-optimised configuration from the Intel Select Solution catalog.

Early adopter industries will be consumer with smart assistants, chatbots and personalisation search, and healthcare where artificial intelligence will have immediate impact with enhanced diagnosis, drug discovery, patient care, and research. ë

COVER STORY

BCG

COULD WE HAVE DONE MORE WITH AI IF BETTER PREPARED? Many have a flawed perception of AI by viewing it as just another IT project, it is essential that buying into AI is a strategic priority for leaders.

INSIGHTS Recent experiences are giving artificial intelligence a boost in healthcare and government sectors. n

Industry 4.0 can potentially drive industrial artificial intelligence in the region. n

The region is witnessing accelerated artificial intelligence interest across many sectors despite low artificial intelligence adoption rates. n

AKRAM AWAD,

Principal, BCG.

T

he power of artificial intelligence and forecasting models have definitely come forward during the pandemic, and has been applied to the challenges in managing it. In Egypt, Avaya collaborated with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, United Nations Development Programme, to extend the capabilities of WASEL – a dedicated contact center service for people of determination – adding automated testing for COVID19 symptoms for the hard-of-hearing.

The pandemic has certainly accelerated artificial intelligence usage across different sectors in light of varying challenges. Besides tracing and fighting the virus, artificial intelligence has been used for forecasting supply and demand during uncertain times, accelerating decision making through real-time protective analytics, improving resource allocation and cost efficiency to counter operations and supply chain disruptions, and responding to consumer priority changes through enhanced R&D together with real-time hyper-personalisation offerings.

Could the world have done more with artificial intelligence if we were better prepared?

Maybe. Yet nevertheless, these actions have represented a step-change moment in artificial intelligence application.

Many have a flawed perception of the artificial intelligence journey by viewing it as just another IT project, and it is essential that buying into artificial intelligence is a strategic priority for leaders of end user organisations, much like digital was a few years ago.

Organisations should have a clear view of the business case for artificial intelligence, identify specific pilot use cases, and understand data integration needs along with organisational and capability hurdles before scaling up those use cases.

The deal-breaker is whether the organisation itself, along with business processes, can then be reimagined to capture artificial intelligence’s value fully.

Channel partners and consultants make a case for change by establishing a strong business case and use portfolio. They then drive change by championing new enterprise architectures, putting data and artificial intelligence the organisation’s core, and educating end users on new ways of working to get the most out of artificial intelligence.

The region is witnessing accelerated artificial intelligence interest across many sectors, despite low artificial intelligence adoption rates, with increased competition and higher consumer expectations driving areas including banking and retail to adopt artificial intelligence and provide more personalised offerings.

Furthermore, recent experiences are also likely to give artificial intelligence a boost in healthcare and government sectors, while Industry 4.0 can potentially drive industrial artificial intelligence in the region. ë

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COVER STORY

PROVEN CONSULT

PROCESS, DOCUMENTATION, SPEECH DRIVING USE CASES Use cases are emerging built on process, document improvements, next-gen tools, that assist knowledge worker by removing repetitive, routine tasks.

INSIGHTS Conversational AI converges three separate technologies AI, messaging apps, speech recognition. n

Combining language technology with artificial intelligence has changed the game entirely. n

Bots have a role to play from lead generation to customer support to post-purchase customer insights. n

ANAS A ABDUL-HAIY,

Director and Deputy CEO, Proven Consult.

A

rtificial intelligence in business intelligence is evolving into everyday business. It enables companies to incorporate solutions to their enterprise and is now becoming a vital ingredient for growth and success. Many institutions are benefitting from artificial intelligence solutions such as Intelligent Process Automation, Intelligent Document Processing, Conversational AI and humanoid robots to improve automation, enhance productivity and efficiency, reduce operational risks, and improve customer experiences.

Intelligent Process Automation and Intelli-

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gent Document Processing are an emerging set of new technologies that combines fundamental process redesign with robotic process automation, OCR and machine learning. It is a suite of business process and document improvements and next-generation tools that assists the knowledge worker by removing repetitive, replicable and routine tasks.

It can radically improve customer journeys by simplifying interactions and speeding up processes. IPA and IDP mimics activities carried out by humans and, over time, learns to do them even better.

Conversational AI converges three separate technologies: artificial intelligence, messaging apps, and speech recognition. But combining language technology with artificial intelligence has changed the game entirely. Conversational Analytics and AI ChatBot are some examples of Conversational AI solutions. The uses for Conversational AI are endless across the business cycle. Bots have a role to play in each step, from lead generation to customer support to post-purchase customer insights and analytics.

There are many forms of artificial intelligence but humanoid robots are one of the most popular forms. humanoid robots are developed to carry out different human tasks and occupy different roles in the employment sector. Some of the roles they could occupy are the role of a personal assistant, receptionist, front desk officer and so on.

Artificial intelligence is an innovative technology, which is helpful to fight the COVID19 pandemic. This technology is helpful for proper screening, tracking and predicting the current and future patients. The major applications of this artificial intelligence are for early detection and diagnosis of the infection. artificial intelligence is used for the development of drugs and vaccines, and the reduction of workload of healthcare workers.

Artificial intelligence is now guiding decisions on everything from crop harvests to bank loans, and automated customer. artificial intelligence has the biggest impact when it’s developed by cross-functional teams with a mix of skills and perspectives. Having business and operational people work side by side with analytics experts will ensure that initiatives address broad organisational priorities, not just isolated business issues.

Channel partners may find work in a variety of roles. Consulting services will be much in demand as customers seek advice on how best to deploy artificial intelligence technologies.

Implementation and project management services will kick in once customers decide on a direction.

As for vertical markets, channel partners will find opportunities to deliver artificial intelligence applications in healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing and government. Channel partners with specific domain expertise will have an advantage when it comes to customising artificial intelligence to meet the needs of specific industries.

According to ResearchAndMarkets study, the global artificial intelligence market is expected to grow from $28.42 billion in 2019 to $40.74 billion in 2020. The growth is mainly due to the COVID-19 health emergency across the globe that has led to a new wave of transformative technologies including the revolutionary artificial intelligence technology emerging as a possible solution to contain the epidemic. The market is then expected to recover and reach $99.94 billion. ĂŤ

COVER STORY

CLOUD BOX TECHNOLOGIES

AGILITY, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, COSTS, DRIVING AI There is success when users begin their journey with baby steps and pick up pace of adoption to penetrate across different aspects of the business.

INSIGHTS With AI becoming more accessible and coupled with HPC, it is seeing higher adoption levels across multiple industries. n

Convergence of HPC and AI creates additional opportunities to tackle the most complex challenges. n

It is essential organisations spend time in understanding how it needs to promote the cultural and technical shifts. n

AVINASH GUJJE,

Practice Head Infrastructure, Cloud Box Technologies.

A

s an organisation that has partnered with global vendors, Cloud Box is capable of offering artificial intelligence products and solutions. With artificial intelligence touching so many facets of daily life, Cloud Box is focused on offering solutions to some of the sectors that are trailblazers in this area.

From e-commerce, where artificial intelligence is enabling shoppers to discover associated products and improvisation of visual capabilities, to healthcare, for internal and external communication that enables greater productivity and the retail sector where online shopping is adding to the endless possibilities

of artificial intelligence improving customer experiences and services.

With artificial intelligence becoming more accessible and coupled with High Performance Computing HPC, it is seeing higher adoption levels across multiple industries. The convergence of HPC and artificial intelligence creates additional opportunities to tackle the most complex challenges. Along with vendor partners, Cloud Box provides solutions for HPC, which simplify and shorten the time to design and configure HPC systems.

The current situation has definitely given a thrust to artificial intelligence and forecasting models. This has been very clearly demonstrated in the e-commerce sector, where consumer data is used to push products or services based on customer preferences. Or on the other hand, the use of select products seeing a spike in purchase has had forecasting and artificial intelligence provide deeper analytics for manufacturing, supply chain as well the geographical forecasting for these products.

As an example, within the healthcare sector while using artificial intelligence and stored data, the machine learning model is trained to measure an individual’s clinical risk of becoming infected with COVID-19 and could assess the probability of the need for intensive care services.

There are three main factors that are driving organisations to invest in artificial intelligence, these are focused on ensuring organisational agility, improving customer experiences and reducing costs. We see a higher success rate when companies begin their artificial intelligence journey with baby steps and ensure that they gradually pick up the pace of adoption to penetrate across different aspects of the business.

However, it is essential that organisations

Be aware of the skills gap that could exist within the organisation and how to circumvent these challenges. n

spend time in understanding how it needs to promote the cultural and technical shift that artificial intelligence will bring along both internally as well as externally. They must also be aware of the technical skills gap that could possibly exist within the organisation and how they will circumvent these challenges through talent acquisition or outsourcing the required professional skills.

One of the biggest fears that customers have in adopting artificial intelligence are the challenges that revolve around it. Channel partners and consultants must focus on the reasons for the end user implementing artificial intelligence and how it is all about the business outcomes and not so much the technology enablement.

Another area is the focus on skills requirement and how they can fill in any gaps. It is also important that due attention is paid to ensure that customer data is safe and calls for extreme precautions for data security and privacy.

The use of artificial intelligence is prevalent in every aspect of business and industry leaders are ensuring that they are moving with the times and making the right investments to leverage technology. At this point the government, healthcare, road and transport, education, banking and logistics sectors are some of the biggest adopters and users of artificial intelligence. ĂŤ

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COVER STORY

ERICSSON

WHAT IS AI BY DESIGN FOR TELECOM SERVICE PROVIDERS Ericsson is not building a general-purpose AI platform, instead it has invested in development of telcom AI to address challenges of service providers.

INSIGHTS The value of AI becomes apparent as more service providers complete their transformations. n

A lot of work is driven by the fact that current networks are so complex that humans cannot optimize them. n

Future networks must be able to handle errors and faults itself. n

EVA ANDREN,

Head of Managed Services, Ericsson Middle East and Africa.

A

rtificial intelligence solutions and capabilities are applied to solve the right challenges, creating value where it matters the most. We call it AI by Design. Ericsson is not building a general-purpose artificial intelligence platform, trying to solve problems in every industry. Instead, Ericsson has invested in development of skills and capabilities in telcom artificial intelligence to address the very real and current challenges of the service providers.

Working closely with customer challenges,

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data and products, Ericsson is providing a different approach to getting value from networks. We have learned through experience that co-creation – developing solutions together across competence areas with customers – is critical and creates additional value for customers.

A lot of the work is driven by the fact that current networks are so complex that while humans can manage them, they cannot optimize them without the help of machines. So future networks must be able to handle errors and faults itself, either without the need for human interaction or augmenting the abilities of humans to make crucial decisions.

Ericsson develops artificial intelligence in the field together with customers with real network data, leveraging domain expertise and a portfolio of ready-made use cases and pre-trained algorithms that adapts to customer contexts and problems. Ericsson can solve the right problems for customers, instead of providing an untrained general platform or solutions that only solve specific challenges.

To rise to that challenge, employees must be set free from the repetitive tasks, continuous monitoring and fire drills that today consume so much of their time and attention. If

deployed judiciously, artificial intelligence and automation can do just that: let computers do what they do best, so people can focus their attention on what they do best. This is why Ericsson believe the most important challenge is making the right machine versus people decisions.

Instead of looking to automation and artificial intelligence merely as a way to reduce staffing and other OPEX, the focus should be on how to deploy automation and artificial intelligence solutions to enable trust, justifiability and traceability. This will increase respondence rates and result in greater models for performance and decision making.

Service providers are on a journey from legacy telecom service providers to becoming digital service providers. Ericsson’s strategy is to enable this transformation in three principal dimensions – relentless efficiency, end-customer experience, and new revenue streams.

In fact, artificial intelligence, automation, and the power of data, are rewriting the rules of designing, operating and optimizing the networks of the future. As the world is racing towards a new digital era, powered by 5G, IoT and the 4th industrial revolution, highperforming and intelligent mobile networks will be the drumbeat of this new digital world order.

Successful network operations will depend on advanced artificial intelligence, automation and analytics to move from reactive to proactive – making sense of billions of data points and acting before network issues become user issues.

The value of artificial intelligence and automation becomes more and more apparent as more service providers complete their transformations. Service providers are building or subscribing to infrastructures with components such as software-defined data centers, network slicing, distributed cloud, edge computing and cloud-native applications.

Just as importantly, they are restructuring their operations – not to mirror their infrastructure, but rather to reflect the way their digital services are assembled within a partner ecosystem and consumed by customers.

This restructuring includes a change in the corporate culture from the relentless drive to optimize the efficiency of vertical value chains into a culture of innovation and agility, and to contribute superior value to partner ecosystems. ë

COVER STORY

NETAPP

MANAGING HETEROGENOUS DEPLOYMENTS AND USE CASES AI deployments are heterogenous in nature and require knowledge of infrastructure, stacks, interoperability, application landscapes, and data science.

INSIGHTS Data scientists wish to iterate learning cycles to deliver higher accuracies. n

Artificial intelligence deployments are heterogenous in nature. n

NetApp looks to organisations who are looking to make their customers lives more efficient. n

Artificial intelligence will not impact one or few industries, it will impact and empower every industry. n

FADI KANAFANI,

General Manager and Managing Director, Middle East, NetApp.

T

ypically, customers start with a business challenge that needs to deliver insight to build intrinsic value to their business, whether that is to save costs and gain efficiencies, or maintain and create new streams of income. At the beginning, customers start with building an artificial intelligence model in a proof of concept environment, for example in the cloud on a relatively small data set.

Data scientists wish to be able to iterate their learning cycles to challenge themselves and deliver higher training accuracies. Once the

concept has been proved, they typically wish to run the model training on a more meaningful dataset, this can prove costly in the cloud, so in most cases is done on-premise.

Once the pilot is successful, the model can be deployed to production. Some customers have in-house expertise, some customers rely on artificial intelligence consultancies to deliver these platforms.

Artificial intelligence deployments are heterogenous in nature. On the infrastructure side for example, there needs to be knowledge of the full stack, including specialised features for artificial intelligence. Then there is the question of integration and interoperability.

One must also navigate vertical requirements and individual application landscapes, and if needed contribute data science expertise.

The channel is the crucial element here.

Partners stitch all these elements and capabilities together, according to each customers’ unique requirements, and deliver a holistic

solution. Therefore, partners must have competency and the right skills. NetApp fully supports our artificial intelligence channel ecosystem and helps them build their artificial intelligence practice.

When it comes to leading market segments, NetApp looks at the most impactful areas of artificial intelligence that can be delivered.

With this in mind, medical imaging for the detection of diseases earlier can enable and empower patient pathways.

In automotive, where the first thing that comes to mind is self-driving cars, NetApp believes that autonomous vehicle safety and driver aids are fantastic uses of artificial intelligence deployed already today.

NetApp also looks to organisations who are looking to make their own and their customers lives more efficient, whether that be through Robotic Process Automation, Predictive Maintenance or recommendation and decisionmaking engines. Artificial intelligence will not impact one or few industries, it will impact and empower every industry.

NetApp ONTAP AI, is a joint pod solution powered by NVIDIA DGX-Systems, Mellanox or Cisco Networking and NetApp ONTAP AFF Flash based systems. NetApp have built a range of solutions to support various verticalised industry workloads. Many customers have adopted our platform wrapped from edge to core to cloud, leveraging a Data Fabric approach to enable data mobility and have data where the compute artificial intelligence needs to be trained and inferred production artificial intelligence.

A second solution offering is the NetApp HCI Platform enabled with NVIDIA Tesla technology, which enables edge based or R&D based compute and storage ability within an artificial intelligence ops environment for sizing artificial intelligence models into production.

The NetApp artificial intelligence portfolio enables data fabric, and in essence, the ability to move data to where it needs to be for various data science workflow tasks.

Customers are also leveraging the NetApp AI Control plane, to enable a completely flexible orchestrated and provisioned environment for data science tasks – with revisioning built in, enabling seamless preparation of data sets, development of artificial intelligence models, AB Testing and production flows to help customers gain insights and deploy artificial intelligence into production faster. Í

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COVER STORY

HUAWEI

BUILDING THE ENTIRE COMPUTE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR AI The vendor is building a full-stack portfolio of chipsets, cards, servers, application kits, training, to allow end users to rapidly develop applications.

INSIGHTS When it comes to AI collaboration, Huawei works closely with the academic community, to promote development. n

In the region, governments are leading the way towards digital transformation using artificial intelligence. n

UAE government has implemented the Dubai Autonomous Transportation strategy, transforming 25% to autonomous by 2030. n

KENNY LYU,

Director, Ascend Computing International, Huawei Cloud and AI.

C

ovid-19 has swept across the world and impacted the public health systems as well as daily lives. As a result, the medical industry in particular is looking for ways to improve and expedite diagnosis and treatment. Using artificial intelligence-empowered medical technology has certainly helped to contain the virus and save lives when it has been applied.

In March 2020, Huawei and Advanced Global Solution jointly launched an artificial intelligence-based medical image diagnosis system to supercharge the diagnosis and treatment for Covid-19. This diagnosis solution runs on the artificial intelligence foundation

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and ultimate computing power of the Atlas 800 server and Atlas 300 inference card needed in a wide range of intelligent functions.

Combined with the artificial intelligence image diagnosis system and the expertise of doctors, the solution identifies the symptoms of patients with Covid-19 within two to three minutes, and evaluates the treatment effect with an accuracy rate of 98%. The fast and accurate diagnosis is crucial to the treatment of pandemics like Covid-19.

When it comes to artificial intelligence ecosystem-based collaboration, Huawei works closely with the academic community, partners, and industry organisations to promote artificial intelligence development. Huawei feel it is crucial to advance both technology and industries as a whole. To make that happen, one must also open up hardware and make software open source, enabling partner contributions.

In the region, governments are leading the way towards digital transformation using artificial intelligence. In the UAE for example, through the Smart Dubai 2021 strategy, governments are transforming the city by promoting technological advances that benefit the city’s people, its economy, and its resources.

Additionally, the UAE government has implemented the Dubai Autonomous Transportation strategy, which aims to transform 25% of the total transportation in Dubai to autonomous mode by 2030.

Across the Middle East various industries such as energy, health, retail, and education are also reaping the benefits of artificial intelligence technology.

Huawei has made progress since the announcement of its artificial intelligence strategy in October 2018. In 2019, Huawei delivered on its promise to provide a full-stack, all-scenario artificial intelligence portfolio

through the release of the Ascend series of artificial intelligence processors. This includes the Ascend 310 artificial intelligence processor for inference and the Ascend 910 artificial intelligence processor for training.

Huawei also released an all-scenario artificial intelligence computing framework MindSpore, a full Atlas AI portfolio, the Atlas 200 Al Accelerator Module, Atlas 300 AI Accelerator Card, Atlas 500 AI Edge Station, Atlas 800 AI Server, and Atlas 900 AI Cluster, and the Ascend-based cloud services.

Since the commercial launch of the Atlas artificial intelligence computing platform, Huawei has worked with artificial intelligence partners locally and around the world to craft state-of-the-art artificial intelligence solutions for multiple industries such as smart cities, transportation, power, finance, and telecoms.

These solutions have already been widely adopted in many industries.

Huawei can create artificial intelligence use cases through providing a full-stack, allscenario artificial intelligence portfolio. That offering of all-scenario means the portfolio covers deployment scenarios such as public cloud, private cloud, edge computing, industrial IoT devices, and consumer devices.

A full-stack portfolio also covers everything from chipsets, cards, and servers to a training and inference framework, application SDKs, and CANN – chipset enablement for software stacks. These strengths ultimately allow customers to rapidly develop applications using Huawei’s artificial intelligence processors and to deploy those applications easier than ever before. ë

COVER STORY

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

ENERGY, ASSETS, PRODUCTIVITY, DRIVING INDUSTRIAL ADOPTION General AI models are insufficient for industrial cases and need to work across energy management, asset performance, and operational productivity.

INSIGHTS Every company is at a different place in their digital journey. n

Buildings generate a huge amount of data from sensors and systems. n

Strong domain expertise is critical to making artificial intelligence projects successful. n

What we do need are much better ways to tap business value of data. n

MARWAN ZEIDAN,

Real Estate and Healthcare Segment Director, Middle East and Africa, Schneider Electric.

A

t Schneider Electric, artificial intelligence technologies turn data into actionable insights.

Its IoT-enabled, open-platform EcoStruxure architecture is the vehicle for doing so. General artificial intelligence models are not enough. Schneider Electric’s artificial intelligence models are applied to realistic applications, including energy management, asset performance, and operational productivity, to make artificial intelligence worth the financial and human investment.

Bear in mind that artificial intelligence technology is just the foundation. Actionable insights, such as productivity, energy, power quality, environmental conditions, and potential risk of failure gleaned from continually training and re-training models, hold the real key to the data-driven decision-making behind valuable business outcomes.

Buildings and operations generate a huge amount of data from a variety of sensors and systems. Big data and analytics are bringing in an entirely new dimension and range of opportunities, whether it is predicting equipment failure, identifying sources of energy efficiency, or helping to better understand and plan space utilisation. These insights have the potential to help buildings and operations become hyper-efficient.

The vendor has introduced a range of advisory services such as EcoStruxure Building Advisor and EcoStruxure Power Advisor to help facility teams, EcoStruxure

Workplace Advisor for real estate and wellbeing management, the EcoStruxure Engage Mobile Application for personalised occupant services, and EcoStruxure Resource Advisor for sustainability improvements.

The world was faced with unprecedented and unexpected challenges with the pandemic.

Artificial intelligence models were applied in different areas to learn fast from the initial limited data. With continuous fine tuning, these artificial intelligence models are the best means we have to assess the results of different actions and analyse what-if scenarios so that we are better prepared for similar scenarios.

Every company is at a different place in their digital journey. Some are very interested in taking the next step and looking at technologies such as artificial intelligence, whereas others take a more educational approach. The best way to mitigate the fear of the unknown is by demonstrating that these technologies work, and that they’re providing value in the marketplace today.

Having strong domain expertise is critical to making artificial intelligence projects successful. What we do need are much better ways to tap the business value of that data.

Most companies are not artificial intelligence experts; channeling domain expertise is what will make artificial intelligence projects relevant to companies and their customers.

Channel partners and consultants are key in building end user competence in usage of artificial intelligence. In a world where co-innovation and customer centricity are the new norm, it becomes critical for every company to leverage the brainpower, agility, and disruptive ability of a large ecosystem to create competitive, innovative differentiation.

In the industrial space, such as manufacturing, oil and gas, with critical and complex operations, artificial intelligence’s value is undeniable. In manufacturing, artificial intelligence has the potential to skyrocket rates of profitability by an average of 39% by 2035.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more present in data centers too, as refined algorithms are being built for task automation and predictive maintenance.

Green energy, is important to decrease consumption and increase energy efficiency.

Microsoft and Schneider launched artificial intelligence for Green Energy: an initiative that is focused on finding new ways to use artificial intelligence to decrease consumption and increase energy efficiency. ë

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PHILIPS

TELEHEALTH AND VIRTUAL CARE DRIVING USE CASES

Pandemic has accelerated requirement of networked healthcare, telehealth, virtual care and guidance, and consumer engagement in family health.

OZLEM FIDANCI,

CEO, Philips Middle East and Turkey.

A

rtificial intelligence has the potential to improve people’s lives across the health continuum, from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, treatment, and home care. Philips combines artificial intelligence with deep clinical and domain knowledge to create enabled solutions that empower the people who use them, adapt to the context and integrate into people’s daily workflow or environment.

Artificial intelligence in healthcare can make a difference. In radiology, artificial intelligence

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enabled solutions allow MRI examinations to be set up in less than a minute. Philip’s advance visualisation programmes feature machine learning capability to support radiologists to achieve precise diagnosis in the first instance thereby allowing for efficiency and accuracy.

In oncology, to ensure a patient centric approach, Philips provides a cloud-based software that intelligently integrates information across different clinical domains such as radiology, pathology, and genomics, and key data in one location, to provide a clear, intuitive view of patient disease status.

Philips has also introduced IntelliSpace Discovery 3.0, a comprehensive, open platform to enable the development and deployment of artificial intelligence assets in radiology with the aim to support radiologists in their clinical and translational research The pandemic has made Philips realise that the acceleration of three profound trends will help reshape healthcare. This is the concept of a networked healthcare system, the acceleration of telehealth and virtual care and guidance, and the increase in consumer engagement in our own health and that of our families.

With the pandemic, Philips also realised that networked healthcare system, supporting health hubs in the community and patients at home is needed now more than ever. The networked hospital will support care that is more personal, more accessible, and more dynamic to address the health needs that have evolved rapidly with the spread of Covid.

Telehealth has made an impact to the healthcare system. Remotely guided ICUs are helping hospitals scale care during the crisis and taking the load off frontline staff. In the near future, tele-ICUs within larger hospitals will be connected to mobile facilities and community-based hubs by a single digital infrastructure.

INSIGHTS Visualisation programmes feature machine learning to support radiologists to achieve diagnosis in the first instance. n

Cloud software integrates information across radiology, pathology, genomics, in one location, to provide patient disease status. n

Tele-ICUs within larger hospitals will be connected to mobile facilities and community-based hubs by a single digital infrastructure. n

Tele-ICU’s are now being used, enabling a team of intensivists and critical care nurses to remotely monitor patients in the ICU regardless of patient location, supported by highdefinition cameras, predictive analytics, data visualisation and advanced reporting capabilities to support their frontline colleagues.

Artificial intelligence will enable clinicians to uncover correlations and patterns in health information to provide predictive care for entire populations – by spotting when groups of people in a certain city are likely to develop a disease, this enables clinicians to take preventative action, reduce health risk, and save unnecessary costs.

Those of us who live with chronic diseases or who may have even recently been discharged from hospital care, biometric sensors can already continuously relay vital signs such as our heart rate and respiratory rate back to algorithms that will notify care teams, in case of deterioration. This means hospitals can start to predict when we might need help, as well as where and when they will need extra beds, equipment or staff.

Philips, is determined to make the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation. Philips’ goal is to improve the lives of three billion people a year by 2030.

Philips helps to deliver on the quadruple aim: enhancing patient experience, improving health outcomes, lowering the cost of care and increasing staff satisfaction. ë

COVER STORY

SAP

USING ERP TO EMBED INTELLIGENCE INTO BUSINESS PROCESSES While using ERP, the focus must be on how this tool is able to drive business value and differentiated business outcomes inside the organisation.

INSIGHTS AI will engrain itself into every industry and every segment of the market. n

SAP has launched Bridge-IT, an AI powered app to combat the spread of fake news on Covid-19. n

SAP has a range of artificial intelligence powered solutions that are industry specific. n

RUDEON SNELL,

Senior Director, Industries and Customer Advisory, SAP MENA.

T

he ambition is to embed artificial intelligence into the end to end business processes of any organisation in order to natively bring intelligence into the enterprise and allow enterprises to become a digital business.

In terms of solutions that are artificial intelligence powered, this could range from embedding artificial intelligence into the flagship ERP S4 HANA, the iRPA offerings,

the Conversational AI solutions, Intelligent buildings solutions, Intelligent transportation solutions.

SAP has a range of artificial intelligence powered solutions that are industry specific, helping drive true business outcomes and business value for customers.

SAP has launched Bridge-IT, an artificial intelligence powered app to combat the spread of fake news on Covid-19 and provide customers with accurate real-time facts on COVID19. Also, the power of artificial intelligence was once again brought to bear with Deutsche Telekom and SAP Publishing a Corona Warning App after just 50 days of development.

Artificial intelligence is being actively used during the pandemic to detect, prevent, respond and help with tracking economic recovery for Covid-19 related incidents.

The focus must be on how this tool is able to drive business value and differentiated business outcomes inside the organisation. How

can the organisations use artificial intelligence powered solutions to help them engage and serve customers better; how can artificial intelligence be used to improve operations; or empower employees to achieve more; or create new products, services and business capabilities.

Artificial intelligence success comes from adoption and consumption of the solutions as part of the business processes of an enterprise.

By envisaging the art of what is possible, piloting new capabilities, ensuring the right support in terms of resources, showcasing meaningful ROI, scaling artificial intelligence solution capabilities and driving adoption and change management organisations are able to gain true business value from their artificial intelligence investments.

First, you start with the business outcome in mind. You ask key questions around what new capabilities are required to achieve desired outcomes, how will success be measured, how do you ensure ethical and responsible artificial intelligence usage, what resources, skills, tools and technologies must be brought to bear in order to realise the goals and ambitions set.

Then weave together, technology and human ingenuity in order to usher in transformational capabilities to help customers serve their customers in unique and differentiated ways.

Channel partners allow scalability and market penetration in geographies that vendors might not have a strong presence.

No single vendor can be everywhere across the globe, as such, being able to partner for mutual success is key to drive mutual benefit and reach a broader customer base.

Partners are able to engage customers directly through implementing and deploy artificial intelligence solutions into their environments as well as helping them adopt and consume implemented artificial intelligence solutions.

Artificial intelligence will engrain itself into every industry and every segment of the market moving forward. We see an increased adoption of artificial intelligence-based solutions with industries such as manufacturing, public sector, retail and consumer goods, transport and logistics and financial services all being big adopters of artificial intelligence and having contributions to GDP of the region. ĂŤ

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COVER STORY

SALESFORCE

BRINGING AUTOMATION AND INTELLIGENCE INTO VOICE APPS In future voice will be an integral part of applications that companies offer, making it easier for customers to use in any situation.

THIERRY NICAULT,

Regional Vice President, Enterprise Business Unit, Middle East, Africa, and Central Europe, Salesforce.

M

iddle East organisations are increasingly embedding artificial intelligence functionality directly into apps used by businesses every day, saving them time and money, and helping them make smarter decisions.

Recent research shows that 75% of business buyers consider emerging technologies, such as chatbots and voice assistants, changing their expectations of companies. In future, we can expect voice technology to be an integral part of apps that companies offer, making it easier

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for customers of all backgrounds to use in any situation, re-framing the way we engage with technology.

Middle East organisations should first identify their business goals, not every challenge requires artificial intelligence though artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in every solution. Then, organisations should work with experienced and knowledgeable channel partners to identify the best solutions, test them, and identify the KPIs. Finally, organisations should constantly measure and evaluate the results and how they should evolve.

Middle East channel partners that have the knowledge and experience in artificial intelligence deployments can help organisations to identify business goals, share best practices from other organisations across the region and worldwide, and support re-skilling and upskilling employees on optimising the solutions.

As artificial intelligence is an emerging and rapidly-evolving field, organisations should choose channel partners with consultants who are aligned with leading artificial intelligence vendors.

In government and public sector, Salesforce Research has announced the artificial intelligence Economist, a new line of research that studies how to improve economic design and tax policies using artificial intelligence to optimise social outcomes in the real world.

Artificial intelligence is not only helping companies to stay connected with customers during the public health crisis, it is also ensuring their safety. As the need for artificial intelligence-powered contact center messaging has risen, for instance, artificial intelligence agents are helping businesses to solve customer problems while facilitating social distancing among their workforce.

Drug discovery for rare diseases, a traditionally slow process, has proved much easier,

INSIGHTS 75% of business buyers consider chatbots and voice assistants changing their expectations of companies. n

In government and public sector, Salesforce Research announced the artificial intelligence Economist. n

faster, and likelier to succeed with the assistance of artificial intelligence systems. Beyond helping us to understand the coronavirus, how it can be managed, and its effects can be contained, algorithms and machine learning are speeding up the development of the design and re-purposing of drugs as well as the planning of clinical trials.

Health providers are also utilising artificial intelligence systems to help predict demand for intensive care beds and ventilators, something which has the potential to revolutionise how our health systems operate today and long into the future.

Beyond coronavirus-related cases, artificial intelligence solutions are helping hospitals to streamline decisions around how they assign beds to patients and which patients are ready to leave hospital and who should stay.

Salesforce Einstein AI platform is helping organisations make decisions faster, employees more productive, and customers happier.

Salesforce is rolling out Einstein innovations, including customisable services, the Financial Services Cloud with Einstein Analytics, and the Einstein Voice platform.

Einstein Analytics for Financial Services, a customisable analytics solution that provides artificial intelligence-augmented business intelligence for wealth advisors, retail bankers and managers.

Einstein Voice, Einstein, the Salesforce AI platform, already delivers more than 3 billion predictions every day, helping customers make smarter, more impactful decisions by acting as a smart CRM assistant Businesses are also using Salesforce’s Einstein Voice technology to make everyday business transactions, like logging meeting notes or updating data in CRM systems, as seamless as possible. Í

COVER STORY

LENOVO

CUSTOMER JOURNEY FOR AI ADOPTION HAS THREE PHASES Customers go through three phases covering discovery and benefits, infrastructure selection, deployment of infrastructure, to begin their AI journey.

INSIGHTS IDC suggests the biggest opportunity for AI in Middle East and Africa is in the financial sector. n

Lenovo takes a customer-centric approach to AI and divides the customer journey into three sections. n

DR CHRIS COOPER,

General Manager, Lenovo DCG.

A

rtificial Intelligence has definitely a big role to play in managing unusual circumstances – particularly those that are hard to predict and require a fast response. The pandemic has shown that we are in need for AI-enabled early warning, prediction, and detection systems, as well as real-time monitoring of trends, but also for drug discovery and vaccine development.

Lenovo offers AI-powered solutions that include: l FEVERcheck, measures body temperature automatically and without contact. l SAFEworkspace, checks that the prescribed

personal protective equipment is worn. l FACEfind, verifies the identity of the person using face biometrics and allows access to areas reserved only for authorised persons. l VISIONsentry, analyses video streams from surveillance cameras or transmitted by drones, identifies, and counts people and vehicles. l SOCIALdistancing, automatically and in real time calculates the distance between each person and reports violations of the regulations.

Whilst implementing AI strategies and infrastructure can be daunting task as businesses often do not know where to begin or lack the expertise to operate it, Lenovo has created an end-to-end ecosystem that allows us to support customers every step of the way as they explore AI strategies and unleash the power of augmented intelligence.

Lenovo takes a customer-centric approach to AI implementation and broadly divide the customer journey into three sections. This journey includes a discovery phase in which we help customers to look at the potential benefits AI brings to their organisation. We then look at what is the best infrastructure for the them and finally how we can deploy the infrastructure to make the best use of the technology for them.

Research conducted by IDC suggests that the biggest opportunity for AI in the Middle East and Africa region is in the financial sector where it is estimated that 25% of all AI investment in the region predicted for 2021, or $28.3 million, will be spent on developing AI solutions. This is followed by the public services, including education and healthcare, and the manufacturing sector.

Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration is a software solution that simplifies the use of clustered computing resources for AI model development and training. Recently, we launched AI Studio module to help users with data curation and hyperparameter tuning.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR670, with the support of 4 x NVIDIA/AMD GPU, this server is for AI workloads. It was named as Best AI Product or Technology 2019 by HPC Wire.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 Edge Server, purpose-built server that is half the width and significantly shorter than a traditional server, making it ideal for deployment in tight spaces. With the support of T4 GPUs its suggested uses include edge computing, IoT, AI, machine learning.

The newly launched ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers, new offerings that enable customers to more easily navigate the complexities of data management to deliver actionable business insights through artificial intelligence and analytics, while getting maximum results when combined with business applications such as SAP HANA. Lenovo Validated Design enables a flexible and scalable Artificial Intelligence infrastructure on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers. It provides a predefined and optimised hardware infrastructure for data access, model training and inference under various usage scenarios.

The reference architecture provides planning, design considerations, and best practices for implementing the AI infrastructure with Lenovo products.

This Lenovo ThinkSystem server and NetApp ONTAP storage solution is designed to handle AI training on large datasets using the processing power of GPUs alongside traditional CPUs. This validation demonstrates high performance and optimal data management with a scale-out architecture that uses either one, two, or four Lenovo SR670 servers alongside a single NetApp storage system. ĂŤ

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COVER STORY

INNOVATION

PANDEMIC REALIGNING CISOs, VENDORS, CHANNEL PARTNERS, BOARD The rapid change in external environment due to the pandemic has altered the previous balance in the security organisation leading to a new normal.

CHRIS KUBIC,

Chief Information Security Officer at Fidelis Cybersecurity.

I

n the post pandemic world, IT and cybersecurity have become even more essential to companies as their business operations are now wholly dependent on secure connectivity and communications among work at home employees, customers, and suppliers.

In addition, many companies were required to shift, almost overnight, to having all employees work at home.

Many of the solutions deployed to support this rapid change in business operations were less than ideal and required companies to weigh the security and business risks of various solutions being considered. “I think this has helped to solidify the relationship between CISOs and the board,” says Chris Kubic, Chief Information Security Officer at Fidelis Cybersecurity.

The change in relationship between vendors

Many of the solutions deployed to support rapid change in business operations were less than ideal. and channel partners has been driven by the need to rapidly roll out new remote access and security solutions to support the shift to work at home. CISOs needed information quickly on security product features, cost, and availability and were more inclined to be directly involved in those discussion with vendors and channel partners.

“I believe there has also been a change in the relationship between CISOs. There is more of a willingness to connect with peer CISOs across business verticals to exchange information and ideas,” feels Kubic.

Due to the pandemic, many companies have reassessed their level of IT and security staffing looking for efficiencies to offset reduced revenue, have had to quickly deploy and expand remote access and endpoint security solutions to support work at home employees, and have accelerated their migration to cloud-based services. This is requiring some companies to bring on additional expertise to support this shift.

“I do not believe COVID-19 has driven the need for organisational changes with respect to IT and security job functions and roles, but it has certainly changed the way IT services are delivered,” adds Kubic.

IT departments have also had to rethink their approach to remotely providing IT support, cybersecurity and compliance monitoring, incident response, and data management for their employees working from home.

If anything, IT and cybersecurity have become even more essential to companies as their business operations are now wholly dependent of secure connectivity and communications among work at home employees, customers, and suppliers.

While some companies are starting to think about returning employees to the office, it is safe to assume that the shift back to office will not happen overnight so we need to be prepared for an environment where some workers are in the office, some are continuing to work from home, and some are shifting back and forth.

“I think this will be the new normal well into next year. I also believe that many companies are seeing significant benefits, for both the company and their employees, to working at home and may opt to make work at home permanent,” says Kubic.

Given the prolonged need to have employees work from home, companies will continue to invest in improvements to their IT and security services to provide more robust and more secure access for their work at home employees. ë

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INNOVATION

MALCO TECHNOLOGIES

INTELLIGENT AND SMART INFRASTRUCTURE FOR DATACENTRES

As a value-added distributor, Malco is helping channel partners to sell energy savings, efficiency, automation solutions, in the post pandemic workplace.

T

he ongoing pandemic is changing the way we live and work in innumerable ways. Millions of us transitioned overnight to working from home. Industries have been confronted with fundamental changes in the way they interact with clientele. IT systems and networks that were seen as complementary to traditional functions such as online communication, data sharing, and privacy protection in every sector, suddenly became critical. Thus, compelling IT services industry to evolve to meet these new needs.

Understanding network equipment and the power and cooling infrastructure at each site allows service personnel to better understand emerging issues and respond quickly. This sort of remote monitoring was happening at critical edge sites before the pandemic. Now the demand for remote monitoring and visibility is more broad spread. “ Malco was engaging in daily video conference with team members during work from home. The challenge has been to, prioritise and coordinate initiatives that will future-proof the organisation,” explains Huzaifa N Kanorwala, General Manager, Malco Technologies.

The team has access to inventory management that is integrated and easy to use. Malco made sure that the decision making was not slowed down due to remote working and the distribution of products were conducted in a secure way for employees as well as customers.

Malco was able to ensure warehouse processes were running smoothly keeping in mind hygiene guidelines for employees.

As restrictions have been eased, Malco is conducting training sessions remotely. It is also promoting webinars conducted by its vendor partners, so that channel partners have access to training and product information. Through its digital presence Malco provides assistance to

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customers without delay.

“Malco believes infrastructure is the foundation on which modern businesses are built,” points out Kanorwala. The right infrastructure is crucial and ensures that the end customer is most productive, maximising ROI and minimising costs and risks. The type of infrastructure that is best for every channel partner is dependent on several factors, there is no one size fits all.

Malco believes in providing companies with infrastructure solutions that focus and cater to customer requirements. With a specialised team of technology experts and industry knowledge from multiple business sectors, Malco works with clients to ensure they have a choice of infrastructure solutions for business requirements. Malco has an in-house experience center where people can engage with products and solutions

PORTFOLIO OF SOLUTIONS Smart infrastructure, enabled by technologies like IoT, offer numerous advantages bringing cost savings and efficiencies. “As the technologies of the Internet of Things IoT become increasingly prolific, smart cities will improve the way we live, work and travel. Manufacturing industries and factories around the world have large amounts of data that need to be stored and secured. Data, noisy IT equipment, unsafe cable management, are the problems industries face and loose ends pose a threat to principle industries,” elaborates Kanorwala.

Malco distributes a variety of products like servers, networks, racks and accessories, and also provides services that to store, secure, integrate and systemise passive and active network components. Solutions from Malco are implemented in sectors such as hospitality, oil and gas, airports, retail, government.

One of the key trends in IoT is the rise of decentralised processing, better known as edge computing. Edge is about managing data locally, rather than relying on servers that may be hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. Devices are designed to think for themselves, using artificial intelligence and algorithms that can identify specific types of behavior. This is possible through a unique digital fingerprint.

VENDOR PARTNERS Malco partners with a number of vendors across its infrastructure solutions. This includes the following: Advanced network services, infrastructure solutions l Nexans l Molex l Warren and Brown l Netrack Smart infrastructure solutions l Nexans l Molex l Netrack l Austin Hughes l AKCP l BPC

AUSTIN HUGHES Austin Hughes is a design and manufacturing group that offers a broad range of solutions, specialised in intelligent PDU, door access, control locks, KVM and monitoring sensors. Products include single or three phase PDU, metered and outlet switched WS PDU, environmental monitoring, sensors, peripherals, Intelligent PDU. Austin Hughes also gives a free integrated platform for today’s datacentres. Users can remotely manage the environment and condi-

INNOVATION

INSIGHTS One of the key trends in IoT is the rise of decentralised processing, better known as edge computing. n

Smart infrastructure, enabled by technologies like IoT, bring cost savings and efficiencies. n

Solutions from Malco are implemented in sectors like hospitality, oil and gas, airports, retail, government. n

HUZAIFA N KANORWALA,

General Manager, Malco Technologies.

tions in racks via IP. This can help reducing manpower and travel costs by negating the need for staff to actually be at the rack location.

AKCP AKCP provides professional sensor management solutions which include networked temperature, environmental and power monitoring with 30+ years of experience.

Products include smoke detector, temperature sensor monitoring, humidity sensor, water leak detection.

BPC BPC manufactures a wide range of UPS and related power protection products aimed at networking, telecom, midrange computer, emergency lighting and three phase sectors of the market.

MOLEX Molex is a globally recognised company from providing electronic, electrical and fiber optic

interconnection systems. Molex offers over 100,000 products, across a variety of industries including telecom and networking. Products include Cat6, Cat6A, Cat7A, fibre patch panels, pre-terminated fibre trunk assemblies.

NETRACK Netrack is a datacentre solutions provider offering products like server rack, network rack and accessories. The vendor provides an array of services that serve to store, secure, integrate and systemise passive and active network components. Products include cold aisle containment, air-seal kit and blank panel, server rack solutions, acoustic rack solutions.

Malco are the sole distributors of Netrack in the GCC.

NEXANS Nexans is a global expert in cables and cabling systems which includes copper, fiber and intelligent cabling solutions. It caters to business areas like data and telecom, buildings and ter-

ritories, high voltage and projects, industry and solutions. Real-time cable traceability helps reduce downtime, improves safety, optimises asset management, and streamlines supply chain. Products include Cat6, Cat6A, Cat7A, pre-terminated Copper assemblies, fibre patch panels, switches, amongst others.

Nexans provides Middle East customers an alternative approach to structured cabling with their LANactive solutions. By combining passive cabling with active switching, the LANactive solution will provide significant cost savings, especially those that have several restrictions, especially in terms of capacity and space. Customers from across the region have already shown interest in LANactive and Malco is confident this solution will be an alternative for certain verticals Nexans is positioned to expand its offering beyond cables with services and solutions leveraging radio-frequency identification technologies that straddle the worlds of both hardware and software. Real-time cable traceability helps reduce downtime, improves safety, optimizes asset management, and streamlines supply chain.

WARREN AND BROWN TECHNOLOGIES Warren and Brown Technologies are an Australian company, providing innovation in optical fibre containment, duct solution. ĂŤ

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PRODUCT NEWS

Honeywell’s new cooling tech for data centres reduces environmental impact Honeywell has announced the launch of a breakthrough platform of liquid heat transfer agents that cool high-performance electronics more efficiently and effectively than traditional methods that use air and water. These new heat transfer agents’ lower operational costs for applications such as data centres that use high-performance servers.

Solstice E-Cooling, the newest addition to Honeywell’s revolutionary line of next-generation low-global-warming potential refrigerant technologies, uses a two-phase liquid cooling process to remove heat from electronic applications while reducing environmental impact.

Data centres currently use about 3% of the world’s electricity, and that number is expected to rise to 8% by 2030, according to research by Global Markets Insights. With cooling systems

accounting for approximately 40% of total energy consumption, the need for intelligent and energy-efficient solutions is expected to drive data centre cooling market growth.

The two-phase Solstice E-Cooling process allows for more energy-efficient and uniform cooling, better heat rejection, and reduced pumping power than single-phase liquid cooling, where fluid remains in its liquid form throughout the cooling process. Solstice E-Cooling is also a dielectric solution, serving as an electrical insulator for equipment to prevent damage from contact with fluids.

Honeywell has a long history of innovation in developing leading heat transfer agents, including R-410A, Solstice yf, Solstice ze, and Solstice zd. With an ultra-low GWP and zero ozone depletion potential, Solstice E-Cooling

CHRIS LAPIETRA, VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, HONEYWELL STATIONARY REFRIGERANTS.

allows for improved cooling capabilities while minimising environmental impact. Along with its extensive heat transfer agent portfolio, Honeywell has commercialised applications to prove the viability of two-phase liquid cooling and to test products like Solstice E-Cooling for global adoption.

Passive industrial cabling SPE provides consistent IP communication from sensor to cloud, revolutionising industrial data transmission. Standardised pin connector patterns form the basis for the barrier-free networking of a wide range of components and devices, providing an alternative to today’s fieldbus systems.

R&M and alliance partners drive development of Single Pair Ethernet for IIoT

R&M, a Swiss developer and provider of connectivity systems for high-quality, high-performance network infrastructures, has co-founded a Single Pair Ethernet, SPE, Alliance together with Fluke Networks, Phoenix Contact, Weidmller, and Telegartner. The main objective of the Alliance is to drive development of SPE for Industrial Internet of Things, IIoT, and collaborate on related technological challenges. The companies aim to accelerate development of their SPE technology expertise, ensuring this can be implemented in their products faster and more reliably.

SPE and its main application areas SPE, based on xBASE-T1, uses a single twisted pair for data transmission with miniaturised connectors. A key benefit is that it offers uniform manufacturer-independent connectivity instead of introducing specialised connectivity for each application. Ranges of up to 1000m and transmission speeds of up to 1 Gbps make this technology suitable for use across applications, and the flexibility to reuse and extend existing cable installations.

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Building automation Smart buildings and factories can be costeffectively realised by connecting devices to the building management system via LAN networks and the cloud. Application-specific fieldbus systems are no longer required, making gateways, complex interfaces, and different protocols obsolete. SPE is an ideal solution for connecting numerous small sensors and actuators in Digital Ceiling zones.

Sensors, controls, WLAN access points and other distributed services are simply plugged in and instantly powered and connected to the network.

Sensor technology Sensors and actuators are increasingly supplying data to IIoT applications. SPE’s miniaturised, standardised connection technology makes it possible to quickly and easily connect smaller sensors to Ethernet networks and power these.

PRODUCT NEWS

Remote working and connectivity Healthcare has traditionally been a worksite dependent industry, but with the need to follow social distancing and self-quarantine guidelines, enabling workers to be productive at home is now essential. Aruba Remote Access Points extend the same network services and security policies to an employee’s home, just as if they were in a hospital, clinic or office.

Aruba offers solutions to help healthcare sector navigate the pandemic With the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe over the past few months, prominent stakeholders in various industries have had to adjust their strategy with the rapidly evolving situation. The healthcare industry in the Middle East will have to undergo crucial reforms once the crisis takes a back seat.

Technological advancements, cost control, and greater access will be indispensable part of these reforms.

In health systems all over the world, there is what’s known as a rapid response team. When a patient’s clinical status deteriorates, the best practice is to assemble a multi-disciplinary

team of medical experts to rapidly solve the problem. As the world continues to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, health organisations are quickly initiating Rapid Response plans.

Digital transformation technologies in healthcare While the use of technology in healthcare has risen to prominence in the last few years, it is likely to take bigger strides during and post Covid-19. Aruba provides an insight into how technology in healthcare will evolve and how the company’s solutions are driving this transformation:

Western Digital introduces higher capacity enterprise-class drives Following the recent availability of WD Gold NVMe SSDs, Western Digital has again expanded its WD Gold family of drives for channel customers to include 16TB and 18TB CMR HDD models. Available now and featuring a five-year limited warranty, the new WD Gold CMR HDDs are specifically designed for use in enterprise-class server and storage systems and are purpose-built for heavy workloads and a broad array of big data applications.

With up to 2.5M hours MTBF, WD Gold

HDDs deliver enhanced levels of dependability and durability, as well as vibration protection technology for improved, consistent performance. WD Gold HDDs are designed to handle workloads up to 550TB per year, which is among the highest of any 3.5-inch hard drive.

The new WD Gold drives also feature Western Digital’s HelioSeal technology that enables high capacities with a low power draw.

Also announced today are Western Digital’s Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs, and Serv60+8 storage server that have

Expanded network coverage Many hospitals are building drive-through testing stations and rapid triage areas outside of their facilities. These environments can be challenging, but through the use of Aruba’s Zero-Touch Provisioning, a network can be installed and configured without IT being physically involved. Aruba Access Points can easily be made to work over cellular connections if needed.

Aruba technology helps organisations leverage the power of the cloud. One key facet of cloud service delivery is the ability to grow capacity as needed. This current pandemic is a great example of how this capability proves valuable. Aruba Central for cloud-managed networking allows healthcare institutions manage new and existing networks simply and without on-site presence. When the need for these temporary installations passes, they can simply scale back to normal delivery.

been upgraded to leverage the company’s enterprise-class 16TB and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs. With up to 1.836PB in a 4U, these new platforms are available now and come with a five-year limited warranty.

Ultrastar platforms with upgrades to Ultrastar DC HC650 20TB SMR HDDs are expected to follow next quarter.

The Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 are key elements of next-generation disaggregated storage and SDS infrastructure. The Ultrastar Serv60+8 is a high-capacity hybrid storage server with compute included. These Ultrastar platforms address the demanding needs of large enterprise customers, OEMs, cloud service providers, and integrators that require dense, shared HDD or hybrid storage. The Data60 and Data102 provide the flexibility to specify the HDD and SSD combinations with up to 24 drive slots configured with SSDs, while the Serv60+8 offers a choice of CPUs, memory and drives. All of this enables organisations to balance capacity, performance and cost.

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PRODUCT NEWS

Nutanix launches remote IT solutions for cloud infrastructure Nutanix has announced new solutions that will allow IT teams to deploy, upgrade and troubleshoot their cloud infrastructure while working from anywhere, whether at home or from a central office location. These solutions will be delivered via Nutanix Foundation Central, Insights and Lifecycle Manager, all of which will be available as part of Nutanix HCI software at no additional cost to customers.

While IT teams have been working overtime to deliver remote work solutions for businesses worldwide in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’re not always able to do so themselves. Managing IT infrastructure, troubleshooting issues, and updating software often requires IT teams to be on-site at their datacenter, something even more challenging with social distancing requirements.

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These Nutanix solutions will allow IT teams to remotely manage cloud infrastructure throughout the entire software lifecycle.

New or expanded cloud infrastructure deployments Managed through the Prism interface, Nutanix Foundation Central allows IT teams to deploy private cloud infrastructure on a global scale from a single interface, and from any location. After quickly installing non-configured appliances or servers on site, Foundation Central then takes over to image and configure Nutanix nodes, and install any Nutanix software solution.

In addition to automating and centralising infrastructure software deployment, Foundation Central enables organisations to simply

scale existing infrastructure capacity to keep pace with business growth.

Predictive health and intelligent support Nutanix Insights will provide predictive health and automated support services to streamline IT operations globally. The new service will analyse telemetry from customers’ cloud deployments, including all clusters, sites and geographies, to identify on-going and potential issues that could impact application and data availability.

Once identified, the Insights service can provide customised recommendations to optimise the health and performance of the infrastructure.

These recommendations are based on established IT best practices, as well as a deep knowledge accumulated by Nutanix in supporting more than 16,000 enterprises around the world.

PRODUCT NEWS

AVEVA releases smart app for manufacturing and industrial operations AVEVA has announced the launch of the AVEVA Insight OMI app, a first in the industry to infuse real-time artificial intelligence into an operator’s decision-making as well as improve overall operational agility. The smart app provides industrial businesses with an accelerated path toward implementing artificial intelligence in the control room or on the plant floor, presenting real-time anomaly detection in a context-aware OMI visualisation display. It will benefit operators, engineers, and operations managers from various industries including Water and Wastewater, Energy, Food and Beverage amongst others.

The AVEVA Insight OMI app introduces AI capabilities into the AVEVA System Platform, formerly Wonderware, and leverages predictive early warning and automatic detection of unusual operational behaviour. This provides users with early notification so they can

quickly resolve issues before they become critical business problems such as unplanned downtime and production losses.

A simple management interface enables operations, maintenance and production teams to quickly train the AI engine to adapt to the enterprise’s specific implementation. An intuitive thumbs-up or thumbs-down confirmation ensures AI-driven notifications are relevant to the needs of the user and support overall enterprise objectives, with no programming or data science knowledge required.

This closed-loop feedback improves the accuracy of the AI prediction engine over time and enables users to see what matters. As anomalous patterns are identified, they can be captured and presented by the app within an organisation’s on-premise HMI/SCADA solution, delivering insights directly where operators need it.

Kingston adds 128GB capacities to encrypted USB flash drives Kingston Digital Europe, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, has announced the addition of 128GB capacity options to three of its encrypted USB flash drives. The drives are part of a full line of encrypted solutions to suit customer needs of all levels. Consumers and organisations have become more aware of data privacy and protection needs due to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Additional data security options have become a necessity as work-from-home increases. The simple inclusion of encrypted USB flash drives into a daily workflow is a simple step to ensuring data is safe. Whether it’s personal, company or client information, finding the right encrypted drive can make all the difference between peace of mind and the worry of loss of data.

DataTraveler Locker+ G3 secures personal

RASHESH MODY, VICE PRESIDENT, MONITORING AND CONTROL, AVEVA.

AVEVA System Platform is a responsive, scalable solution for supervisory, SCADA, HMI, and IIoT applications that integrates with the enterprise processes. It provides a collaborative, standards-based foundation that unifies assets across all facilities for continuous operational improvement and real-time decision support.

It offers enterprise-wide standards compliance across processes, functional teams, and sites.

data with hardware encryption and password protection for a double layer of data security.

DTLPG3 offers cloud backup as an optional feature allowing users to automatically back up data from their USB to Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox or Box. The feature gives added peace of mind as users can access data if the drive is not present.

DataTraveler Locker+ G3 is easy to setup and easy to use, with no application installation required; all the software and security needed is built in. The drive works on both Windows and Mac operating systems so users can access files from multiple devices, without installing a programme on every computer used.

Kingston’s DataTraveler Vault Privacy 3.0 USB flash drive provides affordable businessgrade security with 256-bit AES hardwarebased encryption in XTS mode. It also features a read-only access mode to avoid potential malware risks. DTVP 3.0 allows organisations to customise drives to meet internal corporate IT requirements.

Co-logo, serialisation numbering, number of attempted password entries, minimum password length and customised product identifiers for integration with standard endpoint management software are all available through customisation.

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PRODUCT NEWS

Aruba works with UAE educational institutions to power the new normal Most governments around the world have temporarily closed educational institutions in an attempt to contain the spread of the Covid19 pandemic and have mandated that schools and universities introduce distance learning programmes. This has been the case in the UAE as well. In a short period of time, institutions have had to grapple with integrating information technology into their educational systems in order to provide a user experience consistent with classroom sessions.

Post pandemic, we see there likely to be a hybrid model where online education will eventually become an integral component of school education. Educational systems will need to be more agile, flexible and technologically advanced.

Aruba is currently working with educational institutions in the UAE to share new perspectives and trends as they emerge and enable new learnings. The company is playing an

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important role in helping these institutions re-envision the future of education and chart their journey post pandemic. Aruba is working to address their most critical technological needs and is channelising its efforts towards few critical areas: l Physical distancing monitoring l Contact tracing l Thermal cameras and video analytics for fever detection l Touch-less operations l High speed outdoor links l Flexible remote connectivity l Extending SD-WAN to public clouds l Dynamic segmentation l Unified cloud management l Proactive user experience monitoring With online and hybrid leaning models becoming strategically important for institutions, reliable, high performance Wi-Fi across the campus is as critical as classroom

connectivity. Aruba powers up networks using high performance wireless point-to-point connectivity with ease, thus extending the network to support on-demand applications, thermal screening, IoT cameras and other touchless entry devices.

To help alleviate some of the current financial strain that institutions are facing today, the company, through HPE Financial Services is offering IT financing solutions to address economic challenges. From helping release capital from existing infrastructures to deferring payments and providing pre-owned tech to relieve capacity strain, the company is helping institutions prepare for the future.

This forced and abrupt move to a hybrid mode of learning will not be easy. However, it can provide institutions with an opportunity to experiment and innovate. Piloting new approaches and building on practices that are proven to work can help create positive and enduring changes.

Distance is NO BARRIER

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REAL LIFE

with several further launches already in the pipeline.

To keep pace with the changing demands of retail, private and corporate customers, and to align with its plans of continued growth, the bank began an ambitious digital transfor-

mation programme that targeted mobile applications and the governance of financial services.

Warba Bank’s journey to hyperconverged architecture began with software-defined storage. The organisation then migrated to full IT automation lifecycle management. By digitising its online banking services through Nutanix’s platforms, Warba Bank is now able to enhance the customer experience, by bringing newfound stability and simplicity to backend infrastructure, and delivering rich digital interfaces to its clients at the front end.

Nutanix also supported Warba’s stakeholders in their migration of the company’s critical mobile banking application. The core services of Warba’s mobile banking services run on top of Nutanix. A series of legacy vendors had to be integrated to carry Warba’s digital transformation ambitions forward. By simplifying management and maintenance, and by enhancing provisioning speeds, Warba Bank discovered that its IT function was freed up to innovate. The team can now concentrate on the enhancement of the customer experience.

Saudi Arabia, a clinic in Jeddah, and an expanding presence in the UAE. However, the size and scale of the company presented challenges for its finance department, which had relied on manual systems for tasks including payments, financial control and financial planning.

Nahdi Medical deployed three modules from Infor Treasury Management: Bank Account Management, Treasury Cash Management, and Treasury Payments. Combined,

these modules have enabled Nahdi Medical to fully automate and simplify all finance-related aspects of its business, from bank reconciliation, to cash payments, and working capital strategies, while enabling the company to collect and analyse important financial data.

Nahdi Medical started deploying Infor Treasury at the start of 2020 and completed the deployment in June. Infor’s partner in Saudi Arabia, IT services company Kariba Systems, carried out the installation.

DEVOPS ROCKSTARS AWARD PRESENTED TO WARBA BANK AT NUTANIX’S .NEXT COPENHAGEN CUSTOMER AWARDS.

Kuwait’s Warba Bank leverages Nutanix platform to digitise online banking Nutanix has announced that Kuwait’s Warba Bank has digitally transformed its financial services and mobile banking using the power of Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure platform. Warba Bank was established in 2010 and currently runs 14 branches nationwide,

Nahdi Medical Company uses Infor solution to automate systems Infor has announced that Nahdi Medical Company, a Saudi Arabia-based pharmacy retail chain, has digitally transformed its financial management, payment systems, and financial planning with Infor Treasury Management.

This solution allows vast improvements to Nahdi Medical’s financial management and planning capabilities, placing the company in a strong position to expand its operations in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 ambition to increase the private sector participation in the provision of healthcare services. Saudi Arabia is the GCC leader in pharmaceuticals, with the region set to double its pharmaceutical drug market to $20 billion by 2025, according to Kuick Research.

Nahdi Medical operates the MENA region’s largest pharmacy retail chain, with a network of pharmacies in all cities and villages across

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REAL LIFE

IBM creates cloud advisory council, focuses on financial services IBM has announced that several global banks including BNP Paribas, one of Europe’s largest banks, will join a growing ecosystem of financial institutions and more than 30 new technology providers adopting IBM Cloud for Financial Services. This also marks a significant milestone in IBM’s collaboration with Bank of America, with the availability of the IBM Cloud Policy Framework for Financial Services.

The IBM Cloud Policy Framework for Financial Services establishes a new generation of cloud for enterprises with common operational criteria and streamlined compliance controls framework specifically for the financial services industry, allowing IBM’s growing financial services ecosystem to transact with confidence.

IBM is also announcing the formation of the Financial Services Cloud Advisory Council to support this effort and advise on the ongoing advancement of the IBM Cloud Policy Frame-

work for Financial Services. Chief Technology Officer Tony Kerrison will represent Bank of America on the Council, which will be led by Howard Boville, SVP, IBM Cloud. The Council will be focused on bringing major financial institutions together to help drive the strategic evolution of cloud security in this highly regulated sector.

Central to the development of the IBM Cloud for Financial Services, IBM collaborated with Bank of America and Promontory, an IBM Services business unit and global leader in financial services regulatory compliance consulting, to establish a set of cloud security and compliance control requirements as the basis of its policy framework, which will allow financial institutions to confidently host key applications and workloads.

The IBM Cloud Policy Framework for Financial Services is now available and aims to deliver the industry-informed IBM public cloud controls required to operate securely

HOWARD BOVILLE, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, IBM CLOUD.

with bank-sensitive data in the public cloud.

IBM, Promontory and the advisory council will continue to collaborate to assure that the framework will be up to date to address the latest industry regulations.

IBM has also expanded its growing ecosystem of Independent Software Vendors to include more than 30 partners. These technology providers have committed to onboarding offerings and cloud services to IBM Cloud for Financial Services that will help address stringent security, resiliency and compliance requirements and can accelerate transactions with financial services institutions.

Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University migrates to AWS cloud Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University, HBMSU, has announced the successful and complete migration of its systems and applications from its on-premises data centres to the Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud. This development is in line with HBMSU’s pioneering efforts to establish a new educational culture by shifting away from the on premises, traditional model of education in order to raise highly qualified and globally competitive future generations.

The advanced digital transformation initiative has made HBMSU the first university in the MENA region to shift its on premises legacy systems to a full cloud computing model on AWS. The achievement further highlights the success of the University’s efforts to develop its technological resources and smart infrastructure, which was lauded by the global technology cloud service provider AWS; as a model in the sector in the region.

The strategic collaboration with the AWS reflects HBMSU’s commitment to make a fundamental and positive change in the education system in order to provide the best education to innovators and creators of the future, in accordance with

the directives of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and President of HBMSU, to enhance the readiness to build the future based on quality education.

The announcement was made during a virtual media event held via the Zoom platform, with the participation of high-profile dignitaries including HE Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, Deputy Chairman of Police and General Security in Dubai and Chairman of HBMSU’s Board of Governors; Dr Mansoor Al Awar, Chancellor of HBMSU; Paul Grist, Head of Education, International, AWS; Zubin Chagpar, Head of Middle East and Africa, AWS. The migration to the AWS Cloud is of great significance as it reinforces HBMSU’s position as a role model in harnessing the capabilities of advanced technologies and Cloud Computing in reshaping the future of education according to the requirements of the 21st century.

The University’s forward-thinking approach focuses on the principles of innovation, scientific research and technological development to establish the culture of smart learning as cornerstones in the creation of a new generation of entrepreneurs, innovators, knowledge ambassadors and future leaders instead of just job seekers.

DR MANSOOR AL AWAR, CHANCELLOR OF HBMSU.

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REAL LIFE

Schneider Electric to upgrade energy distribution system at DP World terminal

Schneider Electric has been selected by DP World to implement an end-to-end smart energy MV, LV distribution system at DP World’s Sokhna Basin 2 Terminal, situated near the southern entrance to the Suez Canal on the Red Sea. The solution will improve safety, save on electricity and maintenance costs, and reduce carbon emissions at one of Egypt’s largest ports. The EcoStruxure Power solution is Internet-Of-Things-enabled, which will allow DP World to run a variety of digital applications, analytics and other technologies across the system, to further improve operations and ensure business continuity.

The full installation will include both hardware and software to manage, monitor and optimise the power across Basin 2’s electrical distribution network. The system will give DP World Sokhna’s

staff, both those on-site as well as people working remotely, full control of the power grid at Basin 2, and ensure that the electrical system is functioning up to the top recognised international standards, so operations can run smoothly. Predictive maintenance will help reduce downtime at Basin 2, ensuring greater efficiency of DP World’s assets and reduce operational costs.

DP World’s Sokhna is part of DP World’s international network of 127 business units in 51 countries across 6 continents. The port’s location on the Red Sea, just below the southern entrance to the Suez Canal, is ideally suited to handle cargo transiting through one of the world’s busiest commercial waterways which facilitates trade between East and West.

The expansion of Basin 2 at the port has been developed at a cost of $520 million, taking DP World’s total investments in Egypt to $1.6 billion.

Once operational, DP World’s total handling capacity at the Sokhna port will almost double to 1.75TEU, from a current 970,000. Basin 2 includes a 1,300-metre quay with additional 750 meter already in use in Phase 1, and a 350,000 square metre container yard. It will also link two operational basins in the port as one entity.

Pure Health selects BIOS Middle East for cloud and managed services UAE-based Pure Health, which is a laboratory network with over 117 laboratories in the UAE, has signed an agreement with BIOS Middle East, a cloud and managed service provider for Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, which features hosting for Pure Health’s core Laboratory Information System, LIS, on CloudHPT. CloudHPT, is a fully owned and managed cloud delivered by BIOS. An intricate infrastructure of over 20 servers was delivered in under two days to Pure Health for application installation and testing. All servers, networking, storage, security and backups are fully managed by BIOS, ensuring Pure Health only focuses on the LIS application.

Pure Health hosted LIS is an automated platform that reads and collects patient’s data, resulting in minimal manual input and accelerating the screening process. Pure Health takes pride in adopting to state-of-the-art technologies in their vision of being an advanced data-driven organisation capable of meeting the increased expectations for modern pathology services. Even in its emergency response to the Covid19 situation, Pure Health IT have adopted multiple technologies to streamline operation and integrated with government entities in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the Northern Emirates.

Pure Health currently has four labs in the UAE dedicated to Covid-19 testing, in the capital Abu Dhabi Dubai and in Sharjah. Accordingly, this is the largest Covid-19 testing capability in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia with the capacity to perform 80,000 tests daily.

ADNAN ASIF, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER AT PURE HEALTH.

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REAL LIFE

across the continent by enabling students to stay on track with their studies using Avaya Spaces.

Avaya Spaces, the all-in-one video collaboration app for the digital workplace, changes the way works gets done. It helps bring together distributed groups of people instantly with

immersive work spaces where they can message, meet, share content and manage tasks from a browser or mobile device, and provides an easy, secure and effective way to collaborate in the cloud.

Earlier this year, Avaya Spaces was offered for free to educational institutions worldwide, giving them all the meeting and team collaboration features they needed to keep students learning and curriculums on track.

With Avaya Spaces, African schools such as Icon International School in Ghana, Charter College in South Africa, and Waldorf Woodlands in Kenya, have kept students safely engaged in their education by using the app to create virtual classrooms that can be accessed securely from anywhere on any device.

Icon International School, a Ghanaian institution that caters to learners from multiple grade levels, is one such school that has turned to technology to ensure the continued delivery of education for its students. Initially getting by with various freemium consumer apps, the school eventually put in place a comprehensive remote learning programme for students using Avaya Spaces. The cloud-based video and collaboration app enables Icon to seamlessly deliver a Montessori-style education across geographies.

region.

The IKK Group operates a centralised IT department that oversees technology services for all IKK Group lines of business. One of the key concerns of this central IT team is to guarantee uptime of services for all users and customers. With lack of prompt support, rising errors and system incidents, the IKK Group’s legacy backup solution presented a significant business risk.

After careful market analysis, the IKK Group selected Veeam Availability Suite to address the technology and support shortcom-

ings it was facing.

The financial benefits were evident immediately.

Veeam’s innovative licensing model which bases fees on number of sockets as opposed to terabytes, proved to be 30% more cost-effective than IKK Group’s previous legacy backup solution. Further resource savings have been made possible by Veeam ONE, which provides the centralised IT team with comprehensive monitoring and analytics for their virtual and physical environments.

This has enabled IKK Group to optimise resource planning and maximise utilisation of existing investments as they scale their IT infrastructure.

Avaya supports remote learning across Africa with Avaya Spaces As many as 250 million children across Africa are currently unable to access primary and secondary schools as a result of Covid-19related closures. Analysts have shared concerns that this may create a lost generation of learners, causing many children to leave school prematurely. Avaya is helping to stem this loss

IKK Group deploys Veeam solutions to guarantee services uptime

Veeam Software has announced that the Issam Khairy Kabbani Group of Companies, IKK Group, in Saudi Arabia has implemented Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam ONE in order to guarantee uptime of services for all users and customers. Veeam’s solutions have increased efficiency of the system engineers, enabling them to focus on enhancements and improvements, besides proving 30% more cost effective than the legacy solution. The introduction of the instant recovery feature has cut restore time from days to a few hours.

IKK Group which started operations in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s is a diversified group in terms of products, services, and geography operating in the field of trading, manufacturing and contracting. Today, some 14,000 staff work in 42 independent IKK Group companies, spread over many divisions, branches, and outlets in more than ten countries. The Group’s showrooms, sales offices, factories and R&D offices can be found across the MENA

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GUEST COLUMN

WHY ONLINE MEETINGS LEAVE PARTICIPANTS DISENGAGED

Technologies to make virtual meetings engaging are now available and team leaders need to proactively integrate and use them, writes Ramzi Itani at Barco.

A

s the lockdown eases globally and employees trickle back into offices, we need to accept that the working world is not going back to where it was at the start of this year anytime soon.

With many employees preferring to work from home and practice social distancing, companies are turning to a hybrid working environment to meet employee and organisational needs.

Building a hybrid model will allow companies to be flexible after the pandemic, so they can deploy human resources swiftly when and where they are needed. Tapping into a home-based, remote, yet agile workforce will be critical, as will managing an office-based workforce that may be more distributed across multiple rooms or office locations.

Bayt.com’s Remote Work survey revealed that 9 in 10 professionals in the Middle East and North Africa region anticipate remote working to increase in the next few years. The results also demonstrated that majority, three quarters of the respondents, prefer a job that gives the option to work from home and 87% reported having all necessary resources to operate remotely.

Before the crisis hit, virtual meetings were already rising exponentially. As some begin to return to the office, getting the technology right will be crucial for companies going forward. Platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have provided vital videoconferencing capabilities during the lockdown and this will continue in the new normal, but in the longterm businesses will want more.

Those hosting conferences from office meeting rooms will now be looking for ways to connect peripheral cameras and microphones wirelessly to their screens so they can stream rich, audio-visual content to remote workers and ensure a great experience at home. Their key aim is to enhance the virtual experience and improve the engagement and participation of remote participants, who live on their

Research has found nearly half of employees feel less important when joining remotely, while 43% feel frustrated RAMZI ITANI,

Vice President, Middle East and Africa, Barco.

We need to be designing meeting rooms in offices that enable virtual participants in remote locations to feel part of the action laptops and whose productivity is directly affected by this experience.

At the same time, the pandemic has seen a massive rise in the number of employees using their own computers to join virtual meetings.

The next evolution of this trend has been dubbed as Bring Your Own Meeting, where

employees use their preferred video conferencing software on their own device.

Yet it can still be harder for remote participants to engage in a meeting compared to those attending in the office. Research has found that nearly half of employees feel less important when joining remotely, while 43% feel frustrated or disengaged.

As we look to the future, we need to be designing meeting rooms in offices that enable virtual participants in remote locations to feel part of the action and engage with other participants as if they are there in the room. It’s state-of-the-art technology that will facilitate this.

People also want shorter, more efficient and, crucially, more engaging meetings, whether they are in the room or joining virtually. Over the course of the global lockdown, people have discovered virtual tools that they did not know existed, from online white boards to virtual breakout sessions.

Whatever happens over the months ahead, businesses realise remote working brings real benefits. We will see a significant shift towards this hybrid model, but more importantly it is a model that provides much more freedom and flexibility to choose how and where workforces collaborate and communicate.ë

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PEOPLE

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENTS Tech Mahindra elevates Ram Ramachandran to SVP and Head MEA

ServiceNow names cloud veteran Paul Smith to lead EMEA region

ServiceNow has announced that Paul Smith has joined the company as Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMEA. Smith joins the company from Salesforce, where he held a number of pan EMEA roles and most recently served as Executive Vice President and UK General Manager.

Smith brings to ServiceNow 17 years’ experience in leadership and senior management roles in the technology industry, with a track record in leading sales, go-to-market operations and developing new markets to drive triple digit growth. Smith will lead a region that includes many of the company’s most important markets and growth opportunities. ServiceNow’s EMEA revenues grew 32% in 2019 over the prior year; EMEA achieved an approximately $1 billion revenue run-rate as of Q1 2020.

Smith began his career with Procter and Gamble but soon followed a passion for the technology industry that took him to Microsoft and leadership of a number of innovative start-up businesses.

He joined Salesforce in 2012 to lead their EMEA Marketing Cloud business.

Tech Mahindra, a provider of digital transformation, consulting and business reengineering services and solutions, has announced the appointment of Ram Ramachandran as Senior Vice President and Head for Middle East and Africa region. This includes the entire portfolio of Enterprise, Communications, Media and Entertainment lines of business of Tech Mahindra.

Ramachandran is recognised by Forbes as a Top 100 Global Leader in Middle East and also in Top 50 Indian Executives in the Arab World. Under his leadership the MEA region has shown exceptional growth and today Tech Mahindra ranks amongst the largest IT service providers in the region.

He is a member of Tech Mahindra’s Leadership Council and was the General Manager and Head, Enterprise Division, for Middle East and Africa. Tech Mahindra has been present in Middle East and Africa for over 20 years and has 125,200+ professionals across 90 countries, helping 973 global customers including Fortune 500 companies.

Oracle appoints Leopoldo Boado as SVP Business Applications for ECEMEA

Leopoldo Boado has been appointed as the Senior Vice President, Business Applications for Eastern, Central Europe and Middle East Africa region.

This appointment is part of Oracle’s commitment to deliver the most modern cloud technologies and infrastructure for the region, and to support customers’ digital transformation initiatives.

Boado has been with Oracle since 2006, and has held several leadership positions within the organisation. Prior to the new role, Leopoldo held the position of Senior Vice President, Customer Experience for Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Leopoldo was also the Country Leader, Oracle Spain. Previously, Leopoldo led key functions at Cap Gemini Group. Leopoldo has a law degree from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the Universidad CEU San Pablo and has a PDG from IESE Business School.

The appointments follow the announcement that Oracle’s first cloud data centre for the region has gone live in Jeddah. Oracle’s infrastructure roadmap for the region includes three more cloud infrastructure regions for the GCC, one additional region in Saudi Arabia and two in the UAE.

NetApp promotes Maya Zakhour to Channel Director for MEA, Italy and Spain

NetApp has announced that Maya Zakhour will take on an expanded role as Channel Director for Middle East and Africa, Italy and Spain. Maya will report to Kristian Kerr, VP Partner Organisation EMEA. In her new role, Maya will work closely with in-country channel leaders, distributors and alliances to build a stronger partner ecosystem, increase NetApp’s footprint and grow the business across her new territories.

With Italy and Spain being hard hit due to Covid-19, the impact on businesses has been significant. With a competent in-country partner ecosystem, Maya is tasked with driving partners to leverage NetApp’s strong cloud offering along with its public cloud alliances across MEA, Italy and Spain.

As an organisation that partners closely with the channel, NetApp is globally committed to engage its partners to help customers build their data fabric so that they can thrive during these difficult times and be prepared for any future disruption. A key part of Maya’s role will be to encourage partners to secure their installed base, engage its strategy partners to leverage NetApp’s converged offerings and drive cloud adoption to adapt to a remote-working model to ensure business continuity. NetApp has a strong financial care programme in place to support partners and help them remain sustainable and profitable even in challenging times.

Zakhour will be supported by a strong local team of channel leaders based across the MEA, Italy and Spain.

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