Integratorme may2016

Authorized Value Added Distributor

StorIT Distribution fzco P.O.Box 17417 Dubai, United Arab Emirates Tel: +971 4 881 9690 | Fax: +971 4 887 1637 Email: info@storit.ae

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Tel: +966.1.276.8014 | Email: ksa@storit.ae www.storit.ae

ontents

Editorial

Cover Story - 18

From script to execution I

t was never an easy task to think outside the box but that is where the opportunities are. For some companies, they have mastered the strategy of not being pioneers or innovators but are very quick followers. They move in fast for the kill when an opportunity opens up and take a king sized share of the market opportunity during its lifecycle.

One of the significant trends during the current volatile phase for the industry is the possibility of companies that are looking to be bought out. For potential buyers, they need to take a hard look at whether they really need the acquisition to go through. Of course, the process of due diligence could be accomplished without any reason to negate the proposition. However, history of the past decade tells us that some of the large acquisitions that have happened in the ICT industry haven’t always been success stories and those failures are often poorly masked. It makes us wonder what may have gone wrong and why those presumed synergies never materialized? Perhaps the execution must have been poorly staged although the plan was foolproof on paper.

And then there are companies that have quietly exited those segments that were beginning to fade away before they could start hurting them. They continue to forge ahead steadily into all identified and specific emerging technologies even as they moved away from their legacies, looking almost unrecognizable in their present avatar from what they started out as.

Speed is of the essence when it comes to any Business segment, least of all in ICT where technology evolves like a runaway train. At times, even big companies get swept away by its speed. Make a wrong move and the company could be left behind. Making a comeback is a challenge but cannot be ruled out. Backed with a team and leadership that is dynamic and consistent, companies can always script a strong revival.

Unleashing the network

The awareness to invest in quality network management tools to help enhance Business productivity at companies is on the upswing

News In Detail

Cisco unveils Digital network Architecture - 12

Promise holds surveillance summit - 13 TechKnow - 26

Detect and protect

Alberto J. Arango, VP, WW Sales and Jeremy Boorer Director – Europe, Middle East and Africa at Easy Solutions discuss the company’s anti-fraud solutions

Point2Point

Tested and trusted - 14

Nabeel Ahmed, Founder and CEO of TNC Middle East FZE speaks abou the company’s focus

Focused pursuit - 16

Leenna Jayachaandran, Director-Enterprise, Genome Technology discusses the company’s road map

Safe measures - 22

Jose Thomas, CEO of Bulwark discusses some of the emerging focus areas for the distributor

Enabling payments on the go - 24

Niranj Sangal, Group CEO, OMA Emirates Group discusses the evolving focus areas for the company

Insight

The integrated approach - 28

Businesses in UAE need an integrated approach to the Threat Defense Lifecycle writes Raj Samani, VP & CTO, EMEA, Intel Security

Disruptions in storage Industry - 30

Christian Putz, Director, Emerging Markets, Europe, Middle East & Africa at Pure Storage discusses the shifts in the storage industry

Regulars

R. Narayan Managing Editor

Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. Narayan Art Director: Faiz Ahmed Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh

News Bytes EyeTech Market Stats

Published by: JNS Media International MFZE

P.O Box 121075, Dubai UAE, Tel: +971-4-3705022 Fax: +971-4-3706639, website: www.VARonline.com Sales Inquiries: sales@var-mea.com All other Inquiries: info@var-mea.com | Editorial: editor@var-mea.com Disclaimer: While the publishers have made every attempt possible to get accurate information on published content in this handbook they cannot be held liable for any errors herein.

News Bytes

Falcon Group collaborates with Aptec Falcon Group has partnered with Aptec, an Ingram Micro company, allowing the company to offer extended payment terms to its resellers, above and beyond its current payment period – creating differential advantage in the GCC region.

Addressing the demands across the marketplace, this unique arrangement is aimed at improving liquidity within the distribution channel, matching their resellers’ cash conversion cycle, increasing confidence and further strengthening Aptec’s strong client relationships.

This solution, where Falcon provides dedicated facilities for resellers for their Aptec orders, enables partners the opportunity to add value through winning new orders, project origination, and improved financial drivers.

“Partnering with Falcon, enables us as of today to offer attractive Finance to Channel Partners in the GCC region. We can now support our channel partners with extended payment terms which in turn will enable them to win new and significant business,” says Dr. Ali Baghdadi, Senior Vice President and Chief Executive of Ingram Micro META region.

A global financier with a turnover in excess of US$3 billion, Falcon Group provides bespoke financing to companies across the Middle East, AsiaPacific, Europe and the Americas. It has a dedicated team working closely with Aptec to activate reseller facilities and support transactions.

4 | May 2016

Microsoft demonstrates innovations at Cloud MENA Microsoft showcased innovative solutions in its participation at the Cloud MENA Summit held on 11th and 12th April at the Conrad Hotel, Dubai.

The demonstrations focused on various scenarios around Microsoft Azure such as storage, disaster recovery, and developing modern applications. Sample dashboards showcasing Power BI, predictive management and health monitoring scenarios were also shown at the event, with focus on Microsoft customers ThyssenKrupp and DartmouthHitchcock Healthcare Systems that draw up on the potential of IoT and utilization of predictive analysis for intelligent actions. The audience were able to experience how Microsoft technologies can be used to garner insights for improving business intelligence.

Amongst keynote sessions, the agenda also hosted an address by Mehmet Nuri Cankaya - Microsoft Azure Regional Marketing Manager, Microsoft MEA, who talked about the Cloud as we know it, and its future with digital transformation as well as driving new revenue streams enabled by cloud technologies.

Nexans unveils new innovations for data centre Nexans unveiled its latest data centre innovations under the name of “Smart Choices for Digital Infrastructure” in the Middle East. The different data centre infrastructure technologies will help managers to support the exponential increase in data transmission.

‘Smart Choices for Digital Infrastructure’ is a concept which supports managers through the decision process by incorporating cabling systems which support several consecutive generations of active equipment and that are robust, flexible and scalable to adapt to new requirements.

Nexans’ offering includes flexible, cost-effective bandwidth architectures, optimised space usage, performance protection and enhancement, faster modular deployment and ‘Design through to operation’ support services.

LANmark high speed copper and fibre solutions provide scalable migration paths, and include ENSPACE ultra high density fibre together with pre-terminated options for fast deployment. LANsense management monitors and manages the systems once installed to maximise operational effectiveness and all of this is supported through the Engage best practice services program.

“In this digital era, organisations are looking for smart solutions that flexible, scalable and are future-ready. Through our ‘Smart Choices for Digital Infrastructure’, Nexans looks forward to supporting IT and Network managers in their decisions to build and operate the most efficient and cost-effective data centre networks,” said Tarek Helmy, Regional Director Gulf and Middle East, South & East Africa at Nexans Cabling Solutions.

Awards Survey 2013

High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SAP HANA 速

The Platform of Choice for: SAP HANA速 SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Cloud Solutions from SAP SAP速 S/4 HANA

suse.com

apteconline.com

News Bytes

StorIT and Commvault sign Agreement StorIT has signed a Value Added Distribution agreement with Commvault, a global player in enterprise data protection and information management for the Middle East markets. According to the agreement, StorIT will promote and distribute Commvault’s complete range of solutions for data protection, backup and recovery; cloud and infrastructure management; and retention and compliance through its extensive channel network of value-added resellers and systems integrators across the region.

"We are pleased to announce our new partnership with Commvault, the leader in Data Protection and Information Management solutions.

Commvault will strengthen and complement our existing portfolio of best of breed solutions from leading technology vendors in the Data Management domain. We look forward to working closely with Commvault to engage our channel partners in identifying new opportunities and ensure that they have the right tools, resources, training and support required to sell Commvault’s solutions effectively,” says Suren Vedantham, MD, StorIT Distribution fzco.

As a Middle East value added distributor, StorIT will help Commvault identify and onboard systems integrators and resellers, provide value-added services and conduct focused channel development and enablement activities.

6 | May 2016

Fortinet unveils security fabric Fortinet has unveiled its Security Fabric, an integrated, collaborative, and adaptive architecture designed to deliver distributed security for global enterprises providing protections against threats from IoT and remote devices, through the infrastructure core, and into the cloud.

“Pervasive digitization continues to redefine business, while technology trends like IoT and cloud computing are blurring the edges of the network today. Unfortunately, many enterprises continue to rely on security strategies developed decades ago that can no longer support the ever-increasing speed of business,” says Ken Xie, founder, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Fortinet. “Unlike platforms loosely coupled at the management level, the security fabric weaves together highly sophisticated hardware and software, enabling direct communication between solutions for a unified and rapid response to threats. Fortinet is committed to delivering security without compromise. With its Security Fabric, Fortinet is the only vendor to be able to provide its customers with seamless protection across the expanding attack surface, and, the power to take on ever increasing performance requirements of the borderless network – today and into the future” Fortinet also launched its latest FortiGate 6000E and 2000E series enterprise firewalls powered by its next generation FortiASIC CP9 content processor to deliver unprecedented levels of network security performance across the Fabric.

To address the challenges brought on by the digital economy and subsequent evolving enterprise IT infrastructure, Fortinet’s Security Fabric brings traditionally autonomous systems together into a single architecture, designed with five critical and interdependent attributes – scalability, awareness, security, actionable, and open.

Dell expanding One Network solution set for the campus Dell Networking has introduced new capabilities for campus and data centre environments, including the launch of new cloud-managed wired and wireless solutions powered by Dell and Aerohive, Operating System 10 milestones and in-rack platforms for the data centre.

“Major trends such as cloud and software-defined create a dynamically changing IT landscape, both on campus and in the data centre,” said Tom Burns, vice president and general manager, Dell Networking and Enterprise Infrastructure. “These new Dell Networking solutions help our customers navigate these changes with future-ready architectures, open technology and hyper-scale inspired efficiency.”

Building on its One Network campus vision, Dell Networking has collaborated with Aerohive to deliver a new cloud-managed solution that integrates and manages wired and wireless infrastructure. The co-branded solution incorporates Dell N-Series switches and Aerohive access points into Aerohive’s HiveManager NG – a next-generation cloudbased management solution. This solution greatly simplifies end-user access, setting a new standard for wired and wireless network convergence by bringing enterprise-class management to the public or private cloud.

With a customisable user-focused interface, HiveManager NG allows for highlevel or in-depth views of all facets of Dell and Aerohive networking devices including applications, users, policy management and switch port status. Further simplifying wired and wireless converged network management, Dell has expanded its industry-leading ProSupport to provide users with a single point of contact for unified network support.

Awards Survey 2013

Grow your Sales

49% of senior executives came to GITEX with open RFPs

82%

were closed at the show

“GITEX brought together some of the best technology minds in the world and it was a pleasure to discuss new advances and best practice with worldwide industry leaders” CELIA WADE-BROWN, MAYOR OF WELLINGTON “Gitex is extremely important for us. We generate leads for incremental business and it gives us an opportunity to interact and demonstrate.”

RABIH DABBOUSSI FORMER MD & GM, UAE, CISCO

MAKE GITEX PART OF YOUR GROWTH STRATEGY TO GENERATE LEADS AND WIN BUSINESS NETWORK WITH THE C-SUITE

TARGET NEW INDUSTRIES

3,000 C-Suite executives and senior government officials from over 15 countries came to Gitex in 2015 to network with technology companies

Target your customer verticals in banking, healthcare, education, public sector, retail and energy

MEET NEW PROSPECTS

BE SEEN AS A THOUGHT LEADER

Identify and meet new senior level contacts pre event 24,000 meetings were arranged through our Connexions meeting program

Hear from industry speakers, your peers and competitors on how the industry landscape is evolving

EXHIBITION | CONFERENCES | STARTUP | NETWORKING Get in touch today at gitexsales@dwtc.com or call +971 4308 6037/6901/6566 to discuss your involvement in GITEX 2016 Organised by

Exclusive Digital Transformation Partner

Startup Incubation Partner

Supporting Partners

Official Publisher

Official Airline Partner

Official Travel Partner

News Bytes

Netscout launches new enterprise channel program NETSCOUT SYSTEMS has announced the launch of its unified global enterprise channel partner program. CONNECT360 is a channel-friendly, multi-tiered program that enables global and regional partners to market NETSCOUT’s entire enterprise product portfolio spanning service assurance solutions and portable network analysis and troubleshooting tools.

CONNECT360 is a multi-tiered program for any NETSCOUT Enterprise Systems or Handheld Network Test Solutions partner. It is designed to enable highly-valued partners to sell more effectively and profitably. The MyNETSCOUT partner portal provides partners with a convenient, one-stop online destination for accessing the NETSCOUT solution knowledgebase, obtaining collateral materials, registering sales opportunities and applying for marketing event funds.

“The introduction of the CONNECT360 channel partner program is a momentous occasion for NETSCOUT because it unifies previously separate channel strategies across our enterprise network product lines and provides a strong foundation for building stronger relationships with our most valued partners. This program will be a major driver of our vision for the future, helping the company to efficiently scale its business and address customer demand worldwide,” stated Gary Staley, vice president of world-wide channel sales for NETSCOUT.

8 | May 2016

Help AG signs up as partners for Tenable Network Security Help AG announced a new partnership with Tenable Network Security, the leader in continuous network monitoring. The agreement, which makes Help AG Tenable’s authorised gold Partner for the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, will allow the systems integrator to offer the vendor’s suite of next-generation security solutions for continuous network monitoring and vulnerability management to enterprises in the region.

According to a study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tenable, organizations that have implemented continuous monitoring are more than twice as likely to be satisfied with their vulnerability management approach compared to those that use periodic scanning. “The introduction of mobile devices, virtualization, and cloud-based applications in enterprise IT in recent years has resulted in a host of new vulnerabilities and exploits. Without the right visibility tools to identify the resulting security gaps, organizations run the risk of falling victim to breaches and suffering the loss of sensitive business-critical data,” said Stephan Berner, Managing Director at Help AG. He added, “Our partnership with Tenable further enhances our competencies in the vulnerability management domain and compliments the range of products, technologies and services that we offer.” Help AG has already met the stringent partnership requirements set by Tenable which include technical and sales enablement, as well as technical certifications. “We will be fully enabled from the technical, pre-sales, sales, and support points of view by end of Q1 2016, following which we will focus on achieving their Professional Services partner status,” said Stephan.

The Tenable Network Security solutions now offered by Help AG include SecurityCenter Continuous View (SecurityCenter CV), Nessus and Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS).

Paladion concludes its GISEC 2016 exhibition at a high note Paladion, a leading cyber security provider, witnessed a turnout of over 600 IT and Security professionals at its booth at GISEC 2016 in Dubai. Visitors at the booth were keen to witness Paladion’s innovations in information security under its CyberActiveSM banner.

Paladion conducted live demonstration of their solutions and live hacks at the event to explain the complexity of recent cyber-attacks that affected banks and enterprises.

“Cyber threats are getting creative and stealthy. Traditional approach to cyber security is not effective anymore. Information security professionals need to continuously come together to share their knowledge and learning, so cyber defenses can hold against the complex and persistent threats we are witnessing today. GISEC is a platform for us to showcase our innovations, share our intelligence and build a stronger defense network.” said Firosh Ummer, Managing Director of EMEA at Paladion.

He added, “Our theme this year ‘Active, Continuous Innovation for Powerful Cyber Defense’ was an outcome of our CyberActiveSM model. Our CyberActiveSM Services embodies over 15 years of experience providing round the clock information security and continuous innovation of our tools and techniques. It uses an always-on approach to security where every client gets active cyber defenders that continuously discover and respond to threats. Active defenders are a team of security professionals that work from our CyberActiveSM security operations center and comprises of researchers, data scientists, hunters, ethical hackers and analysts who work in tandem.”

Awards Survey 2013

Teramind is an industry leader in insider threat prevention Detect and stop malicious users in real-time.

We do 100% monitoring, and can block any malicious user activity.

Prevent insider threats Know what’s going on Optimize your team Enterprize-grade Scalability

ENHANCE YOUR SECURITY TODAY!

News Bytes

Dell expands hyper-converged portfolio Dell has announced expansions to its hyper-converged infrastructure portfolio. New additions, from VCE VxRail appliances and VxRack systems to flexible VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes and next generation Dell XC Series hyper-converged appliances, help Dell offer a wide range of hyperconverged solutions.

According to IDC, the worldwide hyper-converged systems market is expected to grow at a nearly 60 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2019, reaching more than $3.9 billion in sales.

“Dell’s hyper-converged infrastructure approach is consistent with our overall philosophy, which focuses on enabling customer outcomes versus pushing a onesize-fits-all agenda,” said Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president, Enterprise Solutions, Dell.

“Our hyper-converged portfolio spans a broad range of the most trusted and differentiated purpose-built appliances, integrated systems, factory installed solutions and flexible reference architectures, allowing Dell to offer systems that can be deployed and scale in minutes or help customers flexibly build their own systems with existing IT. This expansion, added to our Blueprint program, enables Dell to offer customers prescriptive choices to meet their own particular demands and, ultimately, best support their desired business outcomes.”

10 | April 2016

Nexthink raises $40 Million in new investments Nexthink, provider of End-user IT Analytics, announced it has raised $40 million in new investment, led by Highland Europe, a leading global venture capital firm.

This is the largest round of funding to date for Nexthink and includes participation from the Bertarelli family’s Waypoint Capital.

This latest round brings the total capital raised by Nexthink to $65 million since the Company was founded in Switzerland in 2004. With the Middle East and Asia being a significant contributor to Nexthink’s business growth, 20% of the investment will be allocated towards regional expansion, creating further jobs and building an innovation hub to meet the growing needs of customers.

Nexthink reported record quarterly growth in 2015 for the ninth consecutive year and annual growth of over 50%.

Today the Company has over 600 customers worldwide and some of their key customers in the region include Wipro, Saudi Electricity Company, du, National Commercial Bank, ADCO, Jumeriah Group, and the Ministry of Health UAE. Equipped with the latest round of funding, Nexthink also moves its US sales headquarters to Boston.

“There is universal pain and a big need to have end-user visibility for any IT team world-wide. This latest round enables us to expand in key markets and add new modules to our product roadmap. Many new surprises are coming up very soon,” said Pedro Bados, CEO/President and Co-founder of Nexthink. “We had multiple options to pick the right partners and we truly believe Highland Europe and Waypoint are the perfect choice.

We were convinced by their proximity, strong network, financial capabilities and proven track-record in this space.”

Citrix introduces new incentives for channel As part of its ongoing commitment to the partner community, Citrix has announced updates to its partner program and incentive portfolio. Citrix is delineating its partner incentives to reward distinct sales activities. Specifically, Citrix is introducing a new suggested upfront discount for partner-identified and qualified opportunities, clarifying existing incentives to focus rewards on objective activities, and expanding its marketing development funds to fuel partner growth.

Designed to drive mid-market focused demand generation and enablement activities that target high-potential opportunities, Citrix is introducing a new Strategic Development Fund for Citrix Solution Advisors (CSAs) and distributors. It will replace existing marketing fund programs and provide partners with funds to drive down the cost of planned and documented marketing activities which target the highest ROI opportunities in the midmarket.

Citrix is launching the Net New Partner Sourced program to enable CSA, SI and ISV partners to be rewarded for identifying and qualifying new opportunities, especially in the mid-market. Under the program, partners will be eligible for a seven percent suggested upfront discount on all new partner qualified opportunities. This new incentive is additive to existing up front suggested discounts including Specialist CAR Plus and Opportunity Registration for Networking.

In response to partner feedback, Citrix is updating all aspects of the CAR program with simplified objective processes that reward solution selling activities throughout the sales cycle.

Awards Survey 2013

Symantec Report reveals a record nine mega breaches Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Volume 21, reveals an organizational shift by cybercriminals: They are adopting corporate best practices and establishing professional businesses in order to increase the efficiency of their attacks.

“Advanced criminal attack groups now echo the skill sets of nation-state attackers. They have extensive resources and highlyskilled technical staff that operate with such efficiency that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off,” said Hassam Sidani, Regional Manager for Gulf, Symantec.

The UAE’s 2015 Internet Security Threat Profile has dramatically jumped in world ranking from 49 in 2014 to 41 in 2015. This shift indicates a higher global percentage of sourcebased security threats, including malicious code, spam, phishing hosts, web and network attacks, and bots from the country. In the Middle East and Africa, UAE dropped down one position to 6th place compared to the previous year.

Ingram Micro expands agreement with Acronis Aptec, an Ingram Micro company signed a distribution agreement with Acronis, a global leader in hybrid cloud data protection solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. With this agreement, Ingram Micro is now authorized to distribute Acronis to channel partners in United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and South Africa.

Due to the rising threat of data loss from security breaches, system failures, and man-made and natural disasters, many organizations are turning to cloud and hybrid cloud solutions to protect their sensitive information and critical workloads.

Built on advanced cloud architecture, Acronis solutions are powered by AnyData Engine, a set of unique and powerful hybrid cloud data protection solutions that safeguard critical workloads and ensure business continuity and productivity across any cloud or hybrid environment. Acronis delivers a complete and integrated set of data protection solutions for backup, secure file sync and share, and disaster recovery, enabling channel partners to offer customizable and affordable data protection solutions to their end customers.

Genome is a company dedicated to providing bespoke IT Solutions, Technical enablement, Training & Sales Consulting services in the Middle East and Africa. We are didicated to providing bespoke IT Solutions, Technical enablement, Training and Sales Consultation run by the most experienced team of experts in the industry.

Awards Survey 2013

May 2016 | 11

News In Detail

C

isco recently unveiled its Digital Network Architecture (DNA), an open, extensible and software driven architecture for digital business.

Cisco DNA complements Cisco’s market leading, data center based Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology by extending the policy driven approach and software strategy throughout the entire network: from campus to branch, wired to wireless, core to edge. Cisco DNA is delivered within the Cisco ONE Software family, enabling simplified software-based licensing, investment protection and flexibility.

“In the IoT era, enterprises are addressing how to move to digitization with tremendous innovation in networking, including software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), open API’s, cloud management, analytics and more. Though these innovations offer great promise to improve operational efficiency and enable digital applications, adoption has been slow due to the difficulty in consuming these many new technologies.

The market needs a solution that integrates the critical innovations in networking software into an architecture that can achieve these promises in an integrated and easy to consume manner. Cisco DNA does just that,” said Mike Weston, Vice President, Cisco Middle East.

Cisco DNA is built on five guiding principles. The first is about virtualizing everything to give organizations freedom of choice to run any service

12 | May 2016

Cisco unveils Digital network Architecture

anywhere, independent of the underlying platform – physical or virtual, on premise or in the cloud. The second principle is about fundamentally changing the approach to network management, with the design focusing on automation to make networks and services on those networks easy to deploy, manage and maintain.

The third is pervasive analytics to provide insights on the operation of the network, IT infrastructure and the business – information that only the network can provide. The fourth, service management is delivered from the cloud to unify policy and orchestration across the network – enabling the agility of cloud with the security and control of on premises solutions. The fifth is about an open, extensible and programmable at every layer – Integrating Cisco and 3rd party technology, open API’s and a developer platform, to support a rich ecosystem of network-

enabled applications.

“The digital network is the platform for digital business,” said Rob Soderbery, SVP for Enterprise Products and Solutions, Cisco. “Cisco DNA brings together virtualization, automation, analytics, cloud and programmability to build that platform. The acronym for the Digital Networking Architecture – DNA – isn’t an accident. We’re fundamentally changing the DNA of networking technology.”

Cisco recently announced automation, virtualization and cloud management capabilities in support of the DNA architecture, including APIC-Enterprise Module (APIC EM) Platform and Automation Services, Evolved IOS-XE and Enterprise NFV and CMX Cloud.

To support Cisco customers and partners on this network transformation journey, the Learning at Cisco and Cisco DevNet developer programs are committed to educating

and enabling networking professionals transitioning to a software-driven networking model. Network Programmability Specialist Certification is available built on top of Industry award winning CCIE and CCNP programs. As developers and engineers build on DNA, Cisco is making available training, hands on exercises and certifications to enable the workforce of the future.

Cisco Capital Easy Pay is a new global offer is specifically created for DNA. It allows a three-year fair market value 0% lease for all products as part of Cisco DNA. Customers pay 90% of the cost, over the three-year term, providing predictable monthly payments and cash flow management.

At the end of the threeyear term the customer has three options: keep, return and refresh or purchase the assets for 10% of the original purchase price

Awards Survey 2013

News In Detail

Promise holds surveillance summit

T

he Promise Surveillance

visitors of the event and to

and events like the Promise

and unified storage platform

Solutions Summit 2016

our partners who shared

Surveillance Solutions Summit

lines. Promise also provides

wrapped up in Dubai on May

their expertise of the video

that ensures our customers

dynamic software defined

12th and attracted visitors

surveillance market,” said

are up to date and informed

storage solutions for vertical

from throughout the Middle

John van den Elzen, General

on what is happening in the

markets, including cloud and

East and North Africa (MENA)

Manager, Surveillance Business

industry now and how to be

IT storage solutions, video

eager to learn more about the

Unit, Promise Technology.

prepared for what’s coming in

surveillance storage solutions,

newest trends and solutions

“Promise’s philosophy is about

the future.”

rich media storage solutions

for the video surveillance

working together to succeed

market. Promise Technology,

together and the summit in

one of the leading Value

the developer of the open

Dubai captured this perfectly.

Added Distributors in the

Series of NVR appliances and

storage platform for video

We are really looking forward

region by consistently bringing

external storage solutions

surveillance, hosted the event

to hosting our next summit in

an unprecedented level of

for IP video surveillance are

along with its distribution

the region soon.”

knowledge and resources

custom designed for video

“Musallam has become

and much more.

The manufacturer's Vess

to our customer base of

surveillance and include

the Palace Downtown Dubai.

VIP guests who joined us at

integrators and dealers. The

unique technologies that

Axxonsoft, Microsoft, Intel and

the summit, including those

Promise Surveillance Solutions

allow security professionals

Toshiba together with Promise

from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,

Summit is another example

to overcome performance

shared valuable insight on

Qatar, Lebanon, Bahrain, Egypt,

of how our understanding

bottlenecks and handle

what technologies are driving

Sudan, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and

of the leading technologies

a higher number of IP

the industry, what the future

Al Ain,” said Eng. Mostafa

helps Musallam offer the best

cameras than competing

of video surveillance will look

Fawzi, Business Development

solutions for our customers,”

solutions. They deliver proven

like over the next several

Director, Musallam Trading.

he added.

performance and reliability

years and how the group

“As a value added distributor,

of companies are working

Musallam Trading understands

developed its own enterprise-

platform, which makes

together to provide solutions

the importance of not only

class hardware and software

them ideal for even the

for a safer tomorrow.

selling excellent solutions

storage architecture, in

most demanding security

but also offering programs

addition to complete SAN, NAS

environments.

partner Musallam Trading at

“Thank you to all of the

Awards Survey 2013

“I want to thank all of the

Promise Technology has

in a flexible, easy-to-use

May 2016 | 13

TechKnow | TNC Middle East

Discuss the company’s operations in brief The Network Centre was formed in 1995 and focuses on network testing services end to end. TNC Middle East is a sister concern and focuses on distribution of testing solutions and services through resellers.

Vendors have seen that we work with some very large accounts. That gave them the confidence to make us distributors for their testing solutions.

As distributors, we are not box movers but focus our business around skillsets we have for helping our partners in executing projects. We decided to stay in the niche market segment, providing specialized solutions. Our company has been built up around a strong technology background. As the head of the company, I come from a strong technology background and likewise the entire team is filled with technical experts with each having an experience of around 10-12 years.

One of the vendors that we partner with, Ixia technologies – specializes in network visibility and testing.

We are distributors for IXIA testing solutions. We don’t only sell their solutions- we create the need in the market.

We educate the customer segments- actively meeting them and meeting their requirements.

The sales cycles are typically long, anywhere from 6 months to 2 years and in some case even as long as 3 years. We therefore are committed to a longer term vision as a company.

Customers have trust in our solutions and services. They are comfortable with the results we can show them in

14 | May2016

PoC and we go on to deploy these solutions as part of our testing services.

For instance, we are working with several service providers. We show them solutions that can add value to the services they are looking to launch. We show them the level of services and quality of experience- this helps them beforehand to know the impact from the real life traffic scenarios that we simulate. This helps them roll out services without the risk of experimenting. They sometimes buy these solutions through our resellers. We make sure our resellers are trained and up to speed to take care of the customer’s needs.

How do you engage with potential customers?

We directly engage with our end customers, making presentations and sometimes take help from vendors.

However, at the transaction level, our resellers get involved.

There are well known companies with whom we may have not established relationships. We usually try to meet and approach these customers on our own. We introduce our portfolios in our initial meetings.

As a second strategy, having a good footprint of resellers with a good set of customers helps. We pick and choose our resellers and have worked with them in the past. We take their help to get engaged with those customers.

Further, these partners may have customers who may have used some solutions from them in the past and we are certain they will need some kind of testing tools.

Nabeel Ahmed Founder & CEO TNC Middle East

Tested and trusted The Network Center - also known as TNC Dubai, established in 1995 has successfully delivered network and security support, testing, training and consultancy services across the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Australia. Nabeel Ahmed, Founder and CEO of TNC Middle East FZE speaks abou the company’s focus on services as well as distribution

Awards Survey 2013

And lastly, vendors engage us with some of their customers they believe need testing services.

How do you ensure customer retention?

We provide services and support to customers after the solutions are deployed. We are focused on our customers - we have some big names in our client base. Our customers are oil and gas companies, major service providers etc. We keep our customers happy and they come back to us for more services.

We have reliable access to a pool of resources including experts from outside the company which we could use if needed and if there is a small gap in our expertise to deliver a project. I don’t remember a single instance when we have delayed a

project for a lack of resources on our side.

For instance when it comes to testing a wireless network, we have solutions that can completely verify quality of service in wireless networks.

We generate in-depth reports.

We are not there to please the customer when it comes to testing but rather show them the reality. They come back to us for the solution to fix the issues. However, we show them the results and it is up to them to contact any other partner or supplier and see why their network results were disappointing. They may need to upgrade or replace; that is a decision they need to make on their own and we don’t influence that.

Discuss your partner focus We have strong partner relationships and with some

of these partners, we have relationships for over two decades. We have a select network of resellers in GCC and Lebanon and have a good footprint of partners- our channel is not numerous as it is a niche market.

Once the opportunity with a customer matures, we introduce the reseller partner of ours. It is also important to ensure, we bring in a partner we trust. We make joint visits to customer until the sale is closed. When the purchase order is closed, that is when we see the beginning of our relationship with the customer.

We work with partners who can bring business and is working some large accounts. At the same time, we are also working with partners in some instances that are larger in size than us.

Are there instance when

Visit Paxton on Stand G1650

partners have qualified resources that are on par with your technical experts?

We treat our team’s expertise as our asset. We hand pick our staff and they have domain knowledge and know the technologies they deal with inside out. We want ensure our projects are delivered to in time with quality, leaving a happy customer in the end.

It is not often that resources available with our partners can match the expertise of our trained resources. So that is a certain value-add we provide our partners.

Besides testing services, which other area is a major focus?

Network visibility solutions is another major focus for us. Oil & gas companies, Financials, ministries, service providers are among our customers.

Paxton

June 21st - 23rd | ExCeL - London • Products IP ready, wired and wireless electronic access control and door entry solutions

• Ultimate Support Industry leading technical support and five year product guarantee

• Seamless Integration Easy integration with CCTV, fire alarm, intruder alarm and biometric systems

• Training & Education Free practical and sales training, ensuring you always offer the best solution

> To register visit www.paxton.info/2507

Integrator_hlfpg_IFSEC_2016-05.indd 1 Awards Survey 2013

| 15

09/05/2016 16:52:44 May 2016

Point2Point | Genome Technology significant business growth includes Oil & Gas, Hospitality, Health care, residential properties too.

Leenna Jayachaandran Director-Enterprise Business Genome Technology

Discuss the growth in the contact center-setup business? Are your customers for these solutions across both enterprise and SMB segments?

Contact centers have undergone an irreversible evolution over the last decade.

Digital contact – in the form of email, web chat, social media, and self-service channels – continues its volatile growth as popular engagement method. It means that more and more contact center customers around the world no longer want to use the telephone to communicate with organizations. In fact, should the evolution continue

contact centre which is more focused on the digitalization methods of being connected.

We cater to most of the SMB segment customers with select customers in the Enterprise segment as well.

Elaborate on the company’s technical resource team of engineers- are they mostly certified across the various technologies from networking to collaboration and UC? Our team of engineers are certified on the technologies and experts in domains of UCCC, Networking, Security and Collaboration.

Discuss your focus on secure access solutions in terms of vendors and solutions?

Genome helps enable employees of our clients to

Focused pursuit Genome Technology is relatively young as an SI and has been operational since 2011 building its Business through focus on chosen domains including networking and UC. Leenna Jayachaandran, Director-Enterprise Business, Genome Technology discusses the company’s roadmap As an SI, please discuss your key areas of focus in terms of technology domains as well as customer verticals?

Genome Technology has been in business in the region since 2011 and has been focusing on Cisco, HP, Aruba, Dell, Huwaei, Kaspersky, Imagicle, EMC as a system integrator.

The core competencies include pre-consulting and helping customer optimize the solution for best output.

Our teams consist of sales and technology driven enthusiasts who provide the complete range of technology and sales consultation services to empower companies from the

16 | May 2016

Infrastructure perspective We are broadly focused around three verticals and these are Structured Cabling, Active Networking and Training. We deliver robust and scalable cabling solutions to our clients and also help clients build the solution post a site survey with our expertise and experience in understanding the best optimized solution for our clients. Genome is been pioneers in collaboration solutions on IP Telephony, Unified messaging, Telepresence, contact center solutions etc.

The customer verticals where we have seen

at its current pace, there are research which shows that digital will overtake voicebased contact within two years. This is so because customers demand it.

Customers younger than 40 would much rather use social media and web chat than any other way of achieving their desired service outcomes.

So, for contact centers, the message is clear: incorporate digital channels into your overall engagement strategy, or they will face extinction Genome works on helping customer adapt to the transition and provide the industry standard solutions on

securely and efficiently work from anywhere, whether it is from home permanently or only specific times during the day. We provide solutions that are seamless in integration to the corporate network.

With today’s economy and technology enabling a mobile workforce has become a new way to enhance your employees’ productivity .

Secure Access solution provides business policy governed infrastructure for highly secure access across your wired, wireless & VPN network. We emphasis on network security solutions that target attack across the entire attack –

Awards Survey 2013

before, during and after the attack.

We currently focus more towards the Cisco solutions for Secure Access Solutions Do you see rising demand among enterprise/ SMB customers who have LAN deployments in place for wireless network deployments and upgrades?

Yes of course. Increasingly businesses of all sizes are embracing the competitive and productivity benefits of wireless LANs. The growth in demand for wireless LANs catalyzes the need for wireless networks to meet the scale, resiliency, and security of wired networks. Wireless LAN deployments have skyrocketed for remote and branch offices

"We provide solutions that are seamless in integration to the corporate network. With today’s economy and technology enabling a mobile workforce has become a new way to enhance your employees’ productivity." and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and it’s not hard to see why. With little or no onsite IT staff and rapid schedules for bringing the remote office up and making employees productive, wireless LANs have become a popular way to quickly deploy a network. Growing offices and frequent relocations increase the desirability of wireless LANs because employees and networks can be moved, added, or changed in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days. To manage

Reliable Infrastructure Solutions for Every IT Environment Core Elements. Simple Integration.

these remote installations, businesses have shifted from standalone intelligent access points to centralized wireless LAN controller solutions (sometimes referred to as wireless switches) in order to simplify configuration and management Overall, how would you sum up the mood of the market in terms of ICT spending?

Gartner report says every Business Unit is becoming a Technology startup. There is a dramatic shift in IT spending

power. Thirty-eight percent of the total IT spend is outside of IT already, with a disproportionate amount in digital.

By 2017, it will be over 50 percent.

The impact that the digital business economy is having on the IT industry is dramatic. Worldwide IT spending is expected to post a major slowdown in 2016, as economic weakness in emerging markets and saturation of the smartphone market combine to result in a significantly slower pace of tech spending growth compared to the past six years. Growth in other emerging markets will be more volatile, however, as economic weakness inhibits IT spending

PROTECT

COOL

Over 100 efficient online and line-interactive UPS systems for highavailability applications.

Portable, in-row and rack-mount solutions for precise server room and data center cooling.

POWER

CONTROL

Basic, metered, monitored and switched PDUs ensure reliable rack-mount power distribution.

KVM switches and rack and IP console servers enable local and remote management.

HOUSE

CONNECT

Vendor-neutral enclosures, open frame and wallmount racks store and organize.

Hundreds of cables, adapters and patch panels available in a variety of connectors, lengths and colors.

Discover how to increase your earning potential with Tripp Lite.

Visit go.tripplite.com/channel Tripp Lite Middle East www.tripplite.com +971.4.887.1633 infome@tripplite.com

Awards Survey 2013

May 2016 | 17

CLIENT

TRIPP LITE

DESIGN BY

Cover Feature | Network Management

UNLEASHING THE NETWORK The awareness to invest in quality network management tools to help enhance Business productivity at companies is on the upswing

18  |  May 2016

Awards Survey 2013

M

onitoring and managing the network may be one of the key secrets to getting the most out of the IT infrastructure that companies deploy and upgrade as and when required. An ICT network without capable network management tools deployed may be struggling in terms of achieving optimal performance. Companies need to to stay focused on performance milestones rather than be curbed by network performance bottlenecks, which is why network management is a key priortiy.

There is a greater awareness in recent times about the purposeful objectives that a set of robust network management tools can deliver which include visibility, security and agility. This is precisely why companies in the domain offering network management tools are making greater inroads in the region.

Network management as a segment is witnessing significant growth both globally as well as in the Middle East. According to a report by Marketsandmarkets, the global network management market will be worth US$11,058.6 Million by 2019.

Network management includes a wide range of hardware and software solutions that help businesses manage their networks effectively. This includes security, performance and reliability solutions that ensure that the network is protected from unauthorized users, monitored for malfunctions, managed and available to users at all times.

Network Management includes solutions from network performance monitoring and management to network security management, network device management and network traffic management.

ManageEngine is one of these network management vendors who have engaged the channel and users quite committedly in the region. In fact, the company recently concluded its user group conference in Dubai, a forum that it organizes on an annual basis, interacting with end users and partners.

“With the network being crucial for

Awards Survey 2013

every business, optimizing network performance has become a necessity. With the increased uptake of network virtualization, mobility and adoption of cloud computing, monitoring the network has become even more challenging, which has driven organizations to deploy network performance monitoring and management solutions and tools to ensure real-time end-to-end visibility of the network,” says Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President, ManageEngine.

ManageEngine’s network management portfolio includes Network Monitoring software, Bandwidth Monitoring &Traffic Analysis, Network Configuration Management and IP Address Management (IPAM). The company recently launched OpManager Plus, which the company claims sets a new

Sridhar Iyengar Vice President ManageEngine

"With the increased uptake of network virtualization, mobility and adoption of cloud computing, monitoring the network has become even more challenging, which has driven organizations to deploy network performance monitoring and management solutions and tools to ensure real-time end-to-end visibility of the network"

standard for unified IT monitoring.

Sridhar adds, “It is the first truly integrated network management platform that helps large enterprises and SMEs manage their networks and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost effectively. It integrates network monitoring, server monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, firewall management, network configuration management, and IP address and switch port management in a single EXE, thereby making network management simpler and smarter.

The solution not only monitors the performance and security of the network but also helps in anticipating and decreasing future network problems and ensuring everything runs well together.”

Sandvine is a company that offers solutions for network optimization. The company’s solutions focus on delivering traffic with the highest possible quality of experience for the greatest number of users at all times under all network conditions, including times of congestion.

The company sees significant growth May 2016 | 19

Cover Feature | Network Management

Husam Khater VP Sales, Middle East & Turkey Sandvine

be managed by identifying and deploying solutions to manage different aspects that make up the network.

Bhaskar Peruri, Regional Sales Manager – Middle East at Silverpeak says, “Network Management has different sections in the network, LAN & WAN. LAN management gives a complete management if the internal network with Desktops, printer, servers, storages etc. On the WAN side there are a lot of appliances that needs to managed, Switches, Firewall, routers etc. Previously there were very few & expensive options for enterprises but now there are many solutions who have different modules that manage different aspect in the network.”

The cloud enables momentum potential ahead with need for traffic optimization and delivery of heavier applications.

“Traffic can be managed by application, subscriber, subscriber tier, time of day, and a variety of other relevant parameters. The solution area was the main growth engine for Sandvine for years, such that today traffic optimization is relatively broadly deployed, particularly in fixed line networks. The largest growth opportunity ahead likely lies in more ubiquitous deployment of traffic optimization in the wireless market, where to date the focus has been more on increasing network speeds rather than optimizing existing infrastructure. The ongoing growth of video traffic and the transition of all voice traffic to VoLTE will require an increasing amount of traffic optimization to ensure high quality delivery for these highly valued applications,” says Husam Khater, VP Sales, Middle East & Turkey at Sandvine.

The vastness of the network needs to

20 | May 2016

Although network management tools have been around for long, they have been largely proprietary vendor solutions.

There are also open source tools available now offering basic functionalities that may be good enough to start with. The market is now adopting tools that are relatively inexpensive but not free and offer satisfactory performance.

Bhaskar adds, “Open Source tools are limited to being used in the initial stages by customers as they only delivery basic reports and functionalities but as they grow, SMB & Enterprise companies would need to ideally purchase full functionalities of the solutions. In the region, customer are opting for easy to install & manage, inexpensive solutions that give enough functionalities, reports, customization etc. Also, many server, storage, virtualization, backup etc vendors come with in-built management functionalities, which are also used to get specific details on their products.”

According to Sridhar, the costs with network management tools can be overwhelming in the face of the growing

complexity of networks. So customers are on the lookout for open source tools that may offer comparable performance without intimidating costs.

Sridhar adds, “With the increased uptake of trends such as Internet of Things, BYOD, Big Data and Cloud, managing networks is becoming more complex and expensive. Hence many SMBs and Enterprises are exploring open source network management tools and are slowly shifting to it with an objective to reduce costs.”

ManageEngine claims its realtime IT management tools are used by over 120,000 companies around the world including three of every five Fortune 500 companies that rely on ManageEngine products to ensure the optimal performance of their critical IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, applications, desktops and more.

The company also offers free editions of ManageEngine products which it says are being used by another 300,000-plus admins to optimize their respective IT networks. The company claims to be the fastest growing alternative to traditional network management frameworks. The company has very recently unveiled OpManager, an easy-to-use & powerful network management solution that helps businesses manage IT resources such as Network devices, WAN & VoIP links, physical servers, virtual servers (VMware and Hyper-V), essential apps & other IT devices.

With cloud deployments gaining significant traction in seeing mainstream adoption, it makes it more conducive to deployment of network management tools via the cloud, all available on subscriber basis as a service.

Husam says, “While tools have existed for some time to optimize traffic in the SMB and enterprise market, they have been implemented through

Awards Survey 2013

proprietary equipment deployed on the customer premises. SDN and NVF is creating a new opportunity to enable communications service providers to host traffic optimization solutions in the “carrier cloud” and offer them as a service to SMBs and enterprises. The model gives such businesses access to the latest traffic optimization tools, personalized to their own requirements through a simple Web interface with the carrier. For example, a business could prioritize salesforce.com traffic, restrict access to social networking sites during work hours, and mitigate malicious traffic, all with the click of a radio button and as a monthly or annual service, thereby eliminating the resources required to manage its own data centre.”

According to Husam, SDN and NFV have already started increasing the adoption of traffic optimization solution.

He claims Sandvine has already deployed the “Virtual Series” version of its traffic optimization solutions for a number of small operators globally, who otherwise may not have considered a full-scale traffic optimization solution viable.

He elaborates, “Virtualization allows for maximum versatility such that smaller network operators can instantiate more (or fewer) instances of the product as network demands quickly change, allowing them to preserve the subscriber quality of experience in the same way as their larger competitors.

Additionally, because the Virtual Series is sold “as a service”, high upfront costs are eliminated in favour of monthly or annual fees. Ultimately, due to these benefits and others, all operators are in the process of considering their migration to fully virtualized networks, and traffic optimization will be a necessary part of that.”

Bhaskar argues that the advent of SDN could actually drive down demand for network management tools as SDN

Awards Survey 2013

enable intelligent provision of network resources on real time basis. With SDN, enterprises can automate networking provisioning for each application, which reduces provisioning time from days down to minutes.

Bhaskar says, “With SDN the network management is built-in and I don’t see enterprise will need any more network management tools anymore. The whole concept of SD network is to have zero touch deployment, managed & configured completely by central management console with predefined configure files.

SDN will bring down the device in the network so there will be less devices to manage & monitor. The center console/ portal can/will give enough reports, management and easier to install and manage.”

Bhaskar Peruri Regional Sales Manager ME Silver Peak

“With SDN the network management is built-in and I don’t see enterprise will need any more network management tools anymore. The whole concept of SD network is to have zero touch deployment, managed & configured completely by central management console with predefined configure files."

On the contrary, Sridhar opines that along with the growing deployment of SDN solutions, companies are more keen about network management tools that can further scale up their performance.

He says, “With SDN evolving, it is now easy for Enterprises to manage their networks more efficiently and provide more options for scalability and this will probably enhance the adoption of network management tools.”

Sridhar opines that in the digital era, Network Management has become a crucial part of every business and is a significant opportunity for partners.

He adds, “This creates huge opportunities for partners to deploy their network management solutions and services as well as offer skilled resources to manage them.”

Network management tools might evolve further to keep pace with growing demands that network will face with increasing need to manage Big Data and IoT applications such as for instance, development of unified management tools. Management tools that enable real time visibility and control over expanding networks will therefore continue to play a key role.

May 2016 | 21

Point2Point | Bulwark

Safe measures Bulwark Technologies was an exhibitor at GISEC’s recently concluded edition. Jose Thomas, CEO of Bulwark discusses how the event shaped up as well as elaborates on some of the emerging focus areas for the distributor Discuss major outcomes from your participation at GISEC – did this also include interesting meetings with potential new vendors that you may look to sign up?

Bulwark, represented by its team of local experts and key vendors at GISEC 2016, achieved a high level of brand and product awareness by showcasing an integrated range of innovative and specialized security solutions and services for the IT Security industry. Bulwark also spotlighted and demonstrated their ‘Best in Class’ Security products and solutions and elaborated on their collaboration with key vendors to act as their extended arms in the Middle East Region.

GISEC provided an excellent platform to discuss on some major partnerships with potential new vendors, which could enable us to announce

22 | May 2016

some new collaborations in the near future.

Discuss your Managed security offerings - how is that picking up in the region?

Bulwark is a leading and specialized Security distributor in the region and provides a complete and comprehensive Security portfolio comprising of Managed Security offerings to customers in the ME region. The Managed Security Services is anticipated to grow at a tremendous rate in the region, on account of non-availability of the right trained technical resources to address the increasing cybercrimes and growing concerns regarding malicious malware attacks, zero-day attacks, Synchronization (SYN) floods and Encrypted Attacks. Moreover, recently, organizations like Qatar

Jose Thomas CEO Bulwark

National Bank and Invest Bank have reported Data Breaches.

Rising number of such cybercrime attacks in various sectors, especially banking & financial sector is expected to result in an increasing number of organizations across the region opting for managed security services (MSS) over the next few years.

Management, Managed Services, Tokenless TwoFactor Authentication among others. Simultaneously, we are constantly evaluating our product portfolio to collaborate with key vendors and fill up any niche in our current Security Product Portfolio to address the growing security concerns.

Do you think you have a portfolio extensive enough now to be end to end or are there specific niches that you may look to fill?

Bulwark is a specialized Security value-added distributor offering broad and extensive security portfolio covering end-to-end security solutions. Currently, we offer solutions for Unified Threat Management, Endpoint Security, Mail Server, Data Encryption, Data Access Governance, Privileged Identity

Do you offer solutions around application security and management?

Yes, we do have solutions, which could be integrated with various applications to provide data security, secure access, auditing of user activities and management to ensure customer’s information and assets are protected.

With demand for integrated security, what is your approach as a distributor?

Do you offer a security

Awards Survey 2013

framework program that includes solutions from your different vendors so that it helps partners position these solutions with more clarity?

As a value-added and specialized security distributor, we believe in offering a security framework program to help partners position these solutions to their customers.

Value Addition has been at the very core of Bulwark’s operations, making the company a pioneer in the domain of Information Security value distribution and has helped it and its channel grow at an accelerated rate. We take extra efforts in studying the customer’s requirement and assist the reseller partners to propose an integrated solution to address the same. In the highly competitive IT Security Distribution market and keeping well-paced with ever changing Security landscape in the region, we have been

successful in the introduction of niche Security Technologies which addresses customer pain areas and provides a co mplete end to end solution to their ever-growing and changing Security requirements.

What is the feedback from partners regarding market outlook at the end of the first quarter?

The feedback from partners regarding market outlook has been positive this quarter.

Information Security is a big area of business. Security would continue to remain a priority for organizations and would show significant growth and development and gain momentum in the upcoming quarters of the year 2016.

Discuss partner enablement initiatives including PoC support, training etc?

Bulwark has excelled in providing and delivering

value-added services, that include solutions pre-sales consulting, training, channel enablement programs, post-sales implementation and technical support, and adding value at every stage of product life cycle. Channel development and growth into focused territories across GCC and Middle East has been our constant endeavor.

As part of this strategy, we execute comprehensive, action-oriented and effective Channel programs which benefits our channel through deal registrations, better rebates, joint marketing activities, technical and sales enablement and promotes greater synergy among our vendors and partners and added value to end customers.

Bulwark always ensure that our Engineers are certified for any technology or new vendor we sign up for distribution to provide local support to

our partners and customers.

Further we keep our channel community up-to-date on the specialized cutting-edge technology products and solutions. It is our continuous and ongoing effort to invest on channel initiatives which include long term partner growth plans, partner certification and reward programs and channel enablement sessions. Our constant focus is on channel growth & development.

Bulwark is a truly channeldriven organization with constant focus on enhancing our sales, marketing and technical competencies to enable the channel community to meet its desired goals and objectives. Our constant endeavor is to work in a highly efficient manner to create mutual growth for our vendors, partners and customers and strive towards improving the security landscape in the region.

250+ Professional Team | 150+ Enterprise Clients | 20+ Nationalities | 15+ International Awards | 10+ Global Locations +971 4 368 7855

Awards Survey 2013

info@finessedirect.com

www.finessedirect.com

www.facebook.com/finessedirect

May 2016 | 23

Point2Point | OMA Emirates

Niranj Sangal Group CEO OMA Emirates Group

Enabling payments on the go OMA Emirates is a leading provider of technology for the payment industry in the region, offering solutions from finance and banking, telecom,retail, government and oil and gas sectors. The company has also expanded its reach into markets like Serbia, Nepal and Morocco, Bangladesh and India. Niranj Sangal, Group CEO, OMA Emirates Group discusses the evolving focus areas for the company

24 | May 2016

Discuss your focus as a service provider for mobile and card payment solutions?

We have been offering payment solutions for over two decades. While we have been using cards as the primary platform, we are now looking to web-enable everything and offer solutions that enhance payment services for customers. Client server based services seem to be increasingly passé; we want to offer mPOS solutions using mobile phone, tablets, NFC that are available via any phone device and not restricted to smartphones. We are therefore also offering solutions that work with earlier generation devices with a micro-sim.

With this, we are trying to cater to blue-collar workers who probably may have a smartphone or not and we want to ensure that we get to enable those services which they can access with what devices they already have. In a market that is probably 80% penetrated by smartphones, there is the balance 20% on old generation phones and we have a focus on that.

Discuss the evolving trends and focus for the company from Banks to other segments?

We started our journey with Banks. In Banking there are two parts, one is issuance of cards and the other is acquiring where you use cards. We have been providing these solutions for over two decades. A good number of Banks in the region use our solutions.

However Banks don’t complete the whole ecosystem. We moved into

covering oil and gas as well as government entities. Now, we focus on retail merchants because they are the ones with a lot of customers. Banks only facilitate payments, ensuring customers get their payments.

For Merchants, customer data is necessary so that they can provide services. It doesn’t matter whether the payment is from Bank ‘A’ or ‘B’; when a customer comes to the merchant with a card which could also be on the mobile, the merchant wants to ensure he can provide services to the customer.

As a trend, credit card acceptance has gone up higher. Consumers are using cards to make more payments in retail. So the retail merchant is a key focus.

In sum, all segments are covered from Banks to retail.

Solutions on offer could pertain to anything and everything. They are modular – so customers can pick up a telecom solution or a horizontal retail solution. The channel can be anything from a card, a mobile or a kiosk.

Discuss the company’s value added services focus?

The focus in recent years has been on adding value added services using the same portfolio which in turn has given birth to our range of Managed Services. These value added services could be government services payments or any utility services payments. Our Managed Services include leasing of Terminal and POS services, POS network services, ATMs, remote IT infrastructure and payment solutions for Banks.

Contactless payments is a major trend. Of late

Awards Survey 2013

need to invest a queue busting "The focus in recent years has been on adding huge sum upfront. solutions have value added services using the same portfolio which made inroads and Discuss your customer service in turn has given birth to our range of Managed infrastructure and has become major Services. These value added services could be presence in other focus to retain government services payments or any utility markets outside customers. Queue services payments." the UAE? busting solutions We have servers help reduce installed here, in Eastern business to have its own the time of transaction for transactions in any outlet and loyalty programs, it costs a lot Europe, Morocco etc. We are the customer and speeds manage stocks in an easier starting out with Asia Pacific, and not many businesses can up check out in a retail or way. expanding to places like bear that cost. In this case of banking environment. For With smaller retailers, Nepal, India, Indonesia etc.

‘Benefits Beyond’, they can instance, when a customer there could be challenges We have heavily invested in be part of a larger network walks in to a branch, his card around these aspects if they hardware and software in for a nominal fee and enjoy is automatically scanned and don’t have a dedicated IT these markets. the benefits. You could buy if he is a premium customer, team from their side. We from somewhere and redeem he can be accorded priority need to educate them about Do you offer analytics the points elsewhere. We are service. On the other hand, the benefits. products of your own? trying to build a marketplace while customers may not A mid-size chain has We have created analytics where people could do such be frequenting Banks on reasonable volume of products in-house. We don’t flexible transactions and we a daily basis, they may be transactions and while they resell any products as the will take care of settlements making visits to retail outlets can benefit from these value future is all about services for everyone in the chain. including the neighboring add payment services, they and doesn’t hold anything For mid-sized companies grocery on a more frequent may not need or want to for product reselling. We can and above, who want more basis. They will need those incur those upfront costs. build a system within days information and data, we kind of solutions that enhance They could therefore want for any particular requirement can offer them the OMA customer experience and we to look at outsourcing these from a customer.

Retail Suite which provides are working towards offering services. The awareness We are almost at 50% customer data and links technologies pertaining to among retailers seems to be of the market share. There the services through any those kind of requirements. rising. In the last year or so, are many players but only a CRM with a mobile friendly we have increased the focus handful who actually have application. The Retail on the mid-size to smaller How different are the own solutions to offer. For Suite which represents an retailers because most of scenarios of working with those companies who use ecosystem of web portals the bigger retail chains have retailers of different sizes? many third party solutions to and mobile based Windows, already deployed integrated With bigger retail, there is no offer such services, their cost Android application, is fully solutions. As more mid-sized major challenge as they have increases tremendously. merchants realize the need to automated with ERP systems a dedicated IT team to help and is highly scalable for deploy technologies and with us out with what we want Do you seeing growing future requirements. point based loyalty programs them to do. For instance, adoption of smart That can help retailers making big strides, they are we have provided solutions governance solutions to offer targeted promotions looking for managed services for Carrefour that integrates extending into payment from service providers like us. and messaging instead of with the backend- provides services? bulk SMS for instance. This reconciliation between cash Smart Government can again help predefine Do you enable loyalty card and card payments etc. All transactions are a very big what you want to offer. Such services? these could be pre-defined opportunity with national data integration services We are working on a concept at the time of integration.

ID issuance and renewals. worldwide are usually on we refer to as ‘Benefits The solutions can be ported The national IDs can be used the expensive side and Beyond’ terminals. We don’t to new store locations. For to do a KYC (know your which is why mostly only want to sell loyalty program a chain like Carrefour that customer) authentication the larger retail players have to anyone- we are laying has multiple formats from with payments. This down a network and they can done this. However, this is hypermarket to express, eliminates many bottlenecks again a service we offer as a be a part of the system. Any the solutions can deployed and can facilitate more Business from a taxi company managed service- they can in all formats. The process receptive adoption of smart pay on a monthly basis as to a florist that has a product is the same and a central governance. long as they use – they don’t location can identify real time can be part of it. For a

Awards Survey 2013

May 2016 | 25

TechKnow | Easy Solutions to build extra security into the application such as antiphishing protection. So they are embedding our anti-fraud technology in their app. That is a typical scenario for our antifraud solutions.

Alberto J. Arango VP, WW Sales Easy Solutions

Detect and protect Easy Solutions is a leader in detection and prevention of electronic fraud across all devices, channels and clouds and the company is catering to an increased demand for anti-fraud solutions across all industries, thanks to new and continually emerging types of fraud that stem from an overall surge in digital transactions. Alberto J. Arango, VP, WW Sales and Jeremy Boorer Director – Europe, Middle East and Africa at Easy Solutions discuss the company’s focus on anti-fraud solutions Discuss opportunities in different customer verticals for your solutions?

Jeremy Boorer: While the best fit for our solutions end to end are Financial institutions, the solutions pretty much addresses needs of any vertical that could lose money dues to fraudulent activity. So we have among our customers,

26 | May 2016

airlines, gaming companies, government institutions as well. We have been meeting several customers from across verticals in the region.

We have a customer in the region who is launching a mobile banking application and is concerned that there are no fake versions of the application created to extract money. They want

Elaborate some highlights of your solutions Alberto J. Arango: Our product portfolio offers cross-channel fraud protection across transactions performed via online and mobile platforms, as well as via ATMs, PoS terminals, and IVR systems for enterprise organizations across a range of industries, including financial services, retail, and professional services. Easy Solutions prevent criminals right through the fraud lifecycle and enables authorized users to conduct their transactions.

Our solutions provide the best in omni-channel, multi-platform, flexible integrations. This makes it possible for our solutions to work as standalone as well as a part of a collaborative suite of complete end to end fraud detection and prevention solutions. There are also APIs and SDKs that help our customers to leverage previous investments and development efforts.

Our solutions reduce false positives and helps reduce the overheads of running the antifraud program.

Discus your global operations and local presence?

Alberto J. Arango: Latin America is the leading market and the US is next. MEA as an emerging market is keener to embrace new technologies compared to matured markets as we have seen from our engagement.

We started MEA operations

from London in 2014 and opened a local sales office here last year. The local office is there to help the channel, not compete with them.

What do you see as a compelling proposition of your solutions?

Jeremy Boorer: Gartner has positioned as a visionary in web fraud detection in 2013. The company has also been cited in Gartner's Market Guide for Online Fraud Detection as a Representative Vendor last year. The Market Guide is designed to help fraud managers choose the most appropriate products for projects within their environment. The reason Gartner also mentioned us as a one stop shop for electronic fraud detection is that there is no single vendor that does end to end solutions for electronic fraud protection like we do. This is a compelling proposition and matches the strategies of our customers as they have to engage with only one company and the TCO is therefore much lower.

Are the solutions a mix of cloud and on-premises deployments? How do your products integrate with other vendor products in a likely customer scenario?

Jeremy Boorer: Some are cloud based and some are on premise. On premise solutions typically need to be integrated with core Banking solutions which are done with standards based approach.

This will also include product sharing intelligence among the products. If you have other vendor product, we can have intelligence shared with them too but obviously standalone would be the best too.

To elaborate, if a customer

Awards Survey 2013

wants to use a mix and match approach, the standards based approach that our products allow will make it possible to integrate with other vendor.

For example, we will have web services as a way to integrate the authentication products with the application that is protected. And that is what a lot of vendors do. So in an integration scenario, if the other vendor in question had an authentication product and it supported web services as a standard and they are using our transaction analysis, the products will still talk to each other because of the standards based approach.

Having said that, the easiest integration would be to use our authentication products with our transaction analysis as they are from the same vendor.

What is the actual threat scenario of financial fraudsters in the region and what is the company’s best approach to tackle these?

Jeremy Boorer: Fraudsters try to extract cash in one way or other. That is their end goal. Some companies will focus on transaction analysis but the issues starts way earlier than that when the fraudsters try and steal data by luring a victim to a website with malware on it and then accessing all credentials including passwords. We look externally at where the problem starts- try and lookout for phishing websites, fake mobile apps, stolen credit cards, emails sent out pretending to be you- we find them and remove them.

For instance if a fraudster creates a fake twitter account pretending to be from a Bank and sends out some fake news from the Bank with links to a

Awards Survey 2013

phishing website, we will not only deal with the fake twitter account and have it shut down but also the website the links are directed to. So by the time of transactions, we would have removed at least half the scale of threats. We have a lot of solutions that deal with the external threats.

What is the longer term vision for the company?

Alberto J. Arango: We want to be the worldwide leader in electronic fraud protection because that is the only thing we do and focus on. We have 45% of our revenues spent on research and development so that we are able to continue strengthening our anti-fraud platforms to protect our customers.

Discuss the recently held event for partners Alberto J. Arango: We are a partner focused company and sell 100% through resellers.

We held the reseller meet for MEA where we had about 20 partners participating in the event. At the event, we presented our products and roadmap and gave them ideas on how to grow their business.

Jeremy Boorer: The key is channel education. As our sales model is 100% through channel, we focus on providing a lot of training through such days of engagement. We had sales and pre-sales staff from our reseller partners in attendance at the event.

We presented our product updates as well as discussed case studies. Presentation of the type of solutions deployed and what pain points they addressed help to illustrate to partners that they can similarly address requirements of customers.

Jeremy Boorer Director Europe, MEA Easy Solutions

Discuss what kind of partners you focus on?

Jeremy Boorer: The resellers often come from security backgrounds. They have good grasp of these kind of technologies. Some may be new and there would be a need for education. We usually look for those who are offering similar products in the security space such as Nanjgel solutions. Sometimes, we have partners who can see our solutions as alternative offerings for whatever reason from functionalities and would switch to our solutions. Sometimes, partners brings us opportunitiestheir customers would want them to find an anti-phishing solution and they find us and the relationship starts.

Discuss partner strategy, enablement and incentives?

Jeremy Boorer: We included recognitions for partners at the recent event. Nanjgel

were among our most successful partners last year with dedicated resources for our products and they were recognized as the partner of the year from among the 15 partners. Such recognitions are also encouraging for partners and hopefully acts as an incentive for all our partners to perform better.

We want our partners to think of us as their head office and we want to treat them as our local office. We want to give them enough knowledge and support so that they think of selling our products before selling for some other vendor.

Initially we signed up one partner per country.

The reason was that we didn’t want to introduce any channel conflict. If the partners continue to meet our expectations like Nanjgel for instance, we are quite happy to maintain the status quo and not change anything.

May 2016 | 27

Insight | Intel Security

The integrated approach Businesses in UAE need an integrated approach to the Threat Defense Lifecycle writes Raj Samani, VP & CTO, EMEA, Intel Security

A

ttackers today use multiple techniques to penetrate an organizations’ infrastructure and compromise their vital data assets or systems. This problem has only been exasperated with the proliferation of the cloud and IoT and today’s targeted multiphase attacks consist of a series of steps that make up the cyberattack chain: reconnaissance, scanning for vulnerabilities, exploitation, and, finally, exfiltration of valuable corporate data.

As attacks grow in complexity, precision, and volume, yesterday’s approach to Threat Intelligence (TI) is no longer adequate. Investigating targeted attacks is no easy task. The dynamic behavior of the attackers, the greater variety and availability of local and global threat intelligence sources, and the diversity of TI data formats can make the aggregation and digestion of threat intelligence into security

28 | May 2016

operations center (SOC) tools more challenging than ever before.

A mixed-vendor environment, which is typical of most enterprises, adds to the difficulty of sharing event data and promoting event visibility throughout the organization. As Gartner points out in its report, Technology Overview for Threat Intelligence Platforms, “An organization’s inability to share TI is an advantage to cyber threat actors. TI sharing is a force multiplier and is becoming a key element in keeping up with the increasing number of threat actors and the attacks they use”

The case against point solutions Sharing threat intelligence alone will not necessarily result in sustainable corrective action and prevention. Security analysts can quickly become overwhelmed with too much

information. Most security teams are engaged in an exhausting manual process of analyzing millions of security events and suspicious files in an effort to piece together a mountain of data and try to reconstruct the targeted attack.

Ultimately, this impairs the thoroughness and speed of the response process. With a lessthan-complete comprehension of threats, security teams are struggling to contain attacks in a timely manner.

These challenges result from insufficient integration between inspection, intelligence gathering, analytics, and enforcement elements of the security architecture. Silos of data and point controls complicate operations and increase risk.

For example, the data each control generates and the context of each situation are poorly captured and seldom shared. A firewall may block a payload coming from an

untrusted domain because it knows about communications, not malware. It will permit that payload coming through a trusted domain. Similarly, antimalware could block unknown payloads received from known bad addresses if it knows to think beyond the payload or look within the payload to consider IP addresses.

Unintegrated security functions like these keep organizations in a firefighting mode, always reacting and pouring human resources into each breach. Process inefficiency exhausts scarce investigative resources and lengthens the timeline in which data and networks are exposed to determined attackers. These islands of security products, data sets, and operations give sophisticated attackers ample space and white noise in which to enter, hide, and persist within the targeted organization.

Awards Survey 2013

An integrated approach to the threat defense lifecycle Integration improves effectiveness, as active sharing of data and accelerated crosscontrol processes make it practical and possible for every security control to leverage the strengths and experiences of the others around it. It is an adaptive threat prevention model that is quickly replacing traditional, unintegrated architectures as security teams work to achieve sustainable advantage against complex threats.

Rather than treating each malware interaction as a stand-alone event, an adaptive threat prevention model integrates processes and data through an efficient messaging layer. This provides reinforced levels of inspection and analysis informed by expanded forms of intelligence and connects end-to-end components to generate and consume as much actionable intelligence as possible from each contact and process.

Protect, Detect, Correct The shift to adaptive threat prevention helps overcome the all-too-common functional fences that shackle detection, response, and any chance of improved prevention. This transformation requires IT teams to adopt a protectdetect-correct approach.

Protection involves enabling users to be more productive while blocking the most pervasive attacks and disrupting never before seen techniques and payloads.

Detection requires the gathering of both local and global security intelligence, integrating an array of

Awards Survey 2013

behavioral and contextual analytics, and leveraging centralized management for better insight, more effective threat identification and faster investigation of events. Finally, correction should streamline the threat defense lifecycle by facilitating triage, investigation, and remediation, all while learning from security incidents and continually evolving, providing the organization better protection going forward.

By unifying protection, detection and correction with real-time centralized management into an adaptive feedback loop, known as the threat defense lifecycle, security then evolves and learns in an iterative cycle that improves over time. This model helps organizations become more effective at blocking threats, identifying compromises, and implementing remediation as well as countermeasure improvements more quickly.

Summary In today’s world where every business is always on and (close to) everything is always connected, there is no silver bullet when it comes to securing an organizations’ critical assets. To shorten response times and contain the largest number of threats possible, organizations in the UAE, need a holistic security approach that addresses the entire threat defense lifecycle, seamlessly integrates and offers a truly connected approach to putting actionable threat information and control at the fingertips of security management teams — all with the fastest available performance to enable the organization to take action in real time.

Critical need for improved trust to advance cloud adoption Intel Security recently released Blue Skies Ahead? The State of Cloud Adoption, a global report advocating the need for technology vendors to help businesses, governments and consumers understand the implications surrounding the growing adoption of the cloud. With a majority (77 percent) of participants noting that their organizations trust cloud computing more than a year ago, just 13 percent completely trust public cloud providers to secure sensitive data. These findings highlight that improved trust and security are critical to encouraging continued adoption of the cloud.

Survey highlights: • Cloud Investment Trends: A majority of organizations are planning on investing in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) (81 percent), closely followed by security-as-a-service (79 percent), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) (69 percent), and lastly software-as-a-service (SaaS) (60 percent).

• Security and Compliance: A majority of respondents (72 percent) list compliance as the primary concern across all types of cloud deployments, and only 13 percent of respondents noted knowing whether or not their organizations stored sensitive data in the cloud.

• Security Risks and the Cloud: Perception and Reality: More than 1 in 5 respondents expressed that their main concern around using SaaS is having a data security incident, and correspondingly, data breaches were a top concern for IaaS and private clouds. On the contrary, results found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of enterprises are aware of data breaches with their cloud service providers.

• The C-Suite Blind Spot: High-profile data breaches with major financial and reputational consequences have made data security a top-of-mind concern for C-level executives, however many respondents feel there is still a need for more education and increased awareness and understanding of risks associated with storing sensitive data in the cloud.

Only one-third (34 percent) of respondents feel senior management in their organization fully understand the security implications of the cloud.

• Shadow IT, Risk and Opportunity: Despite IT departments’ activity to cull shadow IT activity, 52 percent of the lines of business still expect IT to secure their unauthorized department-sourced cloud services. This lack of visibility into cloud usage due to shadow IT appears to be causing IT departments concern when it comes to security, with a majority (58 percent) of respondents surveyed in Orchestrating Security in the Cloud noting that shadow IT has a negative impact on their ability to keep cloud services secure.

May 2016 | 29

Insight | Intel Security

O

ver the past 25 years, mobile phones have been completely rethought, thanks to Moore’s Law and the advent of the World-wide Web, touchscreens, and so on. Ditto most everything in the data center, with servers and networks getting roughly 1000X faster (thanks again, Dr. Moore) and seismic shifts like virtualization and network switching.

But then there’s storage.

Most enterprise storage solutions in use today were designed 20+ years ago.

Storage has been stagnant because of mechanical disk.

Hard drives do not follow Moore’s Law – yes, they have gotten denser, but not faster.

As a result, there has been little impetus to innovate.

disk and disk is tape.

Of course, flash has been used for years as a cache or tier to accelerate disk storage.

However, the performance disparity between flash and disk is so great that hybrids of flash and disk perform like disk as the “long” disk operations dominate. To use an analogy, the difference is like that between traveling internationally by jet or ship, and it is pretty hard to plan a business trip if you and your colleagues don’t know which one each will get. (Perhaps this is one of the reasons why next-gen hybrid solutions have thus far not done as well as hoped in the enterprise?)

The reason of course that flash was originally limited to a cache/tier was that it

Christian Putz Direcotor, Emerging Markets, Europe & MEA Pure Storage

Disruptions in storage Industry Christian Putz, Director, Emerging Markets, Europe, Middle East & Africa at Pure Storage discusses the shifts in the storage industry Until now.

Disruption #1: Flash memory Over the past decade, flash memory has redefined the consumer technology experience. It is the storage inside your smart phone and is used heavily in modern data centers like those of Google, Apple and Facebook. Flash is not only much faster, but also more reliable, denser and power efficient. It is only a matter of time before flash will supplant hard drives for all hot and warm data.

Paraphrasing Jim Gray: as a result of Moore’s Law, flash is

30 | May 2016

was expensive. Back in 2011, the price of consumer-grade multi-level cell (cMLC) flash was about four times higher than the price of a fast hard drive (15K rpm). Today, cMLC costs less than fast disk, the same fast disk that underpins the $24B performanceoptimized (a.k.a. “Tier 1”) storage and related software market. Given its advantages in nearly every dimension, it is no wonder that flash has rendered performance hard drives obsolete.

Disruption #2: The cloud Cloud is a more nebulous

concept than all-flash (pun intended), but it is having a similarly disruptive impact on the storage industry. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has simply reset the bar for IT by making it dramatically easier

Generally, the term public cloud is used to refer to Infrastructure/Platform as a Service (IaaS/PaaS) offerings like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine. However, like most,

for developers to deploy and scale applications. As a result, all data centers aspire to be cloud-like - to meld together commodity hardware with software and automation that delivers agility, elasticity, resiliency, security and most of all, simplicity (by shedding decades of accumulated complexity in storage and networking).

we also include multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) providers like Salesforce and Netsuite, as well as consumer Internet giants like Apple and Facebook (B2C SaaS). Keep in mind that the success of public cloud does not mean the world is moving to a handful of data centers. Rather we see public cloud customers investing aggressively in Awards Survey 2013

their own cloud on a Moore’s infrastructures as a Law curve. At "So what will the storage industry look like in the core competency, the same time, next few years? Expect even more major shifts in convinced that storage must shed the storage industry going forward. It is high time, they are not only the complexity, for at least the performance storage market, to join saving money at consulting the scale at which overhead and servers and networks on a Moore’s Law curve." they operate, but unfriendly also differentiating business practices to be close to the users they So rather than move core their products relative to the that have helped make serve (thereby delivering a workloads to a public cloud, competition.

AWS so appealing. Alone, user experience that’s better many of these large end users That being said, despite either the transition to than a laptop with a local are building their own clouds the growth of public cloud, flash or the cloud would SSD); for the same reasons that SaaS be profoundly disruptive. private clouds will continue to • Healthcare providers, and consumer tech players thrive for a few key reasons: Taken together, none of the • Manufacturers need storage close to the equipment they control; • High frequency trading must be executed close to exchanges; • Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and other IO-intensive applications need

Awards Survey 2013

financial institutions and federal agencies have additional security constraints that necessitate keeping data in data centers they control; • Current application designs may not afford easy migration to the cloud; and so on

are.

So what will the storage industry look like in the next few years? Expect even more major shifts in the storage industry going forward. It is high time, for at least the performance storage market, to join servers and networks

storage solutions designed for mechanical disk and the traditional data center will make the leap to the solid-state cloud. Now the competition is on to see which storage solutions will deliver the most compelling business value in all-flash.

May 2016 | 31

EyeTech

FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY TX2560 M2 Overview: Fujitsu has announced a full refresh of its PRIMERGY dualsocket server line up from tower servers to nodes for high performance computing clusters, delivering new levels of performance combined with greater energy savings than ever before. The new PRIMERGY line-up includes classical towers, racks, blades and slimline nodes for clusters, and dedicated rack models for service providers and hosters. The broad lineup provides a flexible enough choice to meet the needs of businesses large and small, across all vertical markets.

The FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY TX2560 M2 offers maximum performance, best expandability and highest availability without any compromises. Branches, data centers and SMEs value the performance of the two Intel Xeon E5 v4 processors and 1536 GB DDR4 memory support. Up to 10 extension slots and the redundant power supply enable top availability levels and excellent expandability options. The server is thus ideal for performance hungry applications, virtualization solutions and storage demanding scenarios.

Key features: • Increased general computing performance of up to 38% compared to the previous generation • Optimized for performance hungry applications, virtualization solutions and storage demanding scenarios.

• Modular concept for the base unit as well as a choice for LAN controller, RAID controller and power supplies • Upgrade kits for hard disk drives, backup devices as well as LTO drives • Comprehensive power management including pre-defined power profiles and a scheduled mode to switch between the profiles automatically • Two hot-plug power supply units with up to 96 % efficiency

32 | May 2016

Riverbed SteelConnect

Overview: Riverbed Technology launched Riverbed SteelConnect, an SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solution that offers a new approach to networking in a cloud-centric world. SteelConnect is designed to enable business-intent policies for applications to provide the performance and agility enterprises need today.

SteelConnect is the industry’s first and only product to unify network connectivity and orchestration of application delivery across hybrid WANs, remote LANs and cloud networks such as AWS (available today) and Microsoft Azure (later this year).

With a fully integrated line of secure WAN gateways, remote LAN switches and Wi-Fi access points, all managed centrally through a cloud console with an intuitive and graphical user interface, SteelConnect dramatically simplifies and streamlines the process of designing, deploying and managing distributed networks, enabling organizations to modernize their network architecture to realize the full potential of digital transformation. The SteelConnect system is designed to address modern challenges associated with ensuring fast, agile and secure delivery of applications across a hybrid enterprise with a unique set of capabilities.

Key features: • Both new NAS series offers not only four inbuilt Gigabit Ethernet ports but also two 10GbE SFP+ ports to fully support 10GbE high-speed networks, making them beneficial for IOPS-demanding applications such as virtualization, databases, high-resolution video editing, and sharing workflows.

• Being 10GbE-ready, both new series support Qtier (Storage Auto-tiering), SSD caching, excellent cross- platform file sharing, iSCSI-SAN and virtualization, as well as feature-rich business applications including Virtualization Station for hosting VMs, Container Station for containerized virtualization, and Qsirch, the near real-time NAS search engine.

• The new series can fully satisfy mission-critical storage needs, delivering persistent throughput to balance resource-demanding applications.

Awards Survey 2013

HP Z1 G3 Workstation Overview: HP announced a bold evolution and a series of updates to the world’s first workstation all-in-one1 -- the new HP Z1 G3 Workstation - combining the simplicity of an All-in-One design with performance typically found in traditional tower workstations. Built for demanding users, the third generation HP Z1 Workstation is smaller, thinner and lighter delivering screaming performance at a great value.

The HP Z1 G3 continues to offer professionals the ability to bundle all the features of a workstation in a compelling AiO form factor. New functionalities and technologies in the next generation bring accelerated performance and greater reliability to the all-in-one workstation class.

Key features: • The new HP Z1 G3 Workstation is 47 percent smaller, 51 percent lighter and 21 percent less expensive than the previous generation.

• It features a 23.6 inch (59.9cm) diagonal anti-glare UHD 4K display for the outstanding visual clarity when working on graphic intensive projects.

• It include Intel Xeon processor options for powerful workstation-class processing technology for the most demanding applications.

• The HP Z1 is designed leveraging 30 years of HP Z DNA with extensive ISV certifications and a minimum of 115,000 hours of testing in HP's Total Test Process.

AXIS Perimeter Defender

Overview: Axis Communications announced a solution for large-scale perimeter protection with the introduction of AXIS Perimeter Defender, a high-end video analytics application for intrusion detection for the enterprise market. With this launch, Axis enables its partners to deliver a scalable and flexible perimeter defense solution using Axis thermal cameras and optical pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) cameras, AXIS Perimeter Defender and Axis network horn speakers.

Designed for easy installation, configuration and management, AXIS Perimeter Defender uses edge-based video analytics for maximum accuracy, efficiency and scalability. The application supports multiple detection scenarios including several types of intrusion detection and loitering. It specifically meets the needs of high-security perimeter protection scenarios such as oil & gas companies, power plants, chemical plants and demanding installations where there is a need to reinforce the physical access control system with reliable intrusion detection.

Key features: • The application comes with intuitive management and setup tools in one single management interface. A dedicated, easy- to-use design tool simplifies the initial system layout and the installation.

• The central management interface allows operators to configure and manage all analytics-enabled cameras in the network through efficient and time-saving batch operations.

• In addition, a graphical representation of detection distances ensures that any potential blind spots are eliminated, and the entire perimeter is protected with the highest level of accuracy and consistency.

• AXIS Perimeter Defender is based on proven technology from Digital Barriers, a company with extensive experience in surveillance analytics.

• AXIS Perimeter Defender has been certified for sterile zone monitoring applications by i-LIDS, the UK government's benchmark for Video Analytics (VA) systems developed in partnership with the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure.

Awards Survey 2013

May 2016 | 33

Stats & Trends

Worldwide IoT Security Spending to Reach $348 Million in 2016

W

orldwide spending on Internet of Things (IoT) security will reach $348 million in 2016, a 23.7 percent increase from 2015 spending of $281.5 million, according to Gartner, Inc. Spending on IoT security is expected to reach $547 million in 2018 (see Table 1). Although overall spending will initially be moderate, Gartner predicts that IoT security market spending will increase at a faster rate after 2020, as improved skills, organizational change and more scalable service options improve execution.

"The market for IoT security products is currently small but it is growing as both consumers and businesses start using connected devices in ever greater numbers," said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner. "Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015,

and will reach 11.4 billion by 2018. However, considerable variation exists among different industry sectors as a result of different levels of prioritization and security awareness."

The market for IoT security products is dependent on IoT adoption by the consumer and industry sectors. Endpoint spending will be dominated by connected cars, as well as other complex machines and vehicles, such as heavy trucks, commercial aircraft, and farming and construction equipment.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 25 percent of identified attacks in enterprises will involve

IoT, although IoT will account for less than 10 percent of IT security budgets. Security vendors will be challenged to provide usable IoT security features because of the limited assigned budgets for IoT and the decentralized approach to early IoT implementations in organizations. Vendors will focus too much on spotting vulnerabilities and exploits, rather than segmentation and other long-term means that better protect IoT. "The effort of securing IoT is expected to focus more and more on the management, analytics and provisioning of devices and their data. IoT business scenarios will require

a delivery mechanism that can also grow and keep pace with requirements in monitoring, detection, access control and other security needs," said Mr. Contu. "The future of cloudbased security services is in part linked with the future of the IoT. In fact, the IoT's fundamental strength in scale and presence will not be fully realized without cloud-based security services to deliver an acceptable level of operation for many organizations in a cost-effective manner.

By 2020, Gartner predicts that over half of all IoT implementations will use some form of cloud-based security service."

Worldwide IoT Security Spending Forecast (Millions of Dollars)

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

231.86

281.54

348.32

433.95

547.2

Source: Gartner (April 2016)

Cybercriminals targeting the retail and hospitality sector

F

ireEye has recently uncovered the activities of a highly lethal group of cybercriminals, dubbed FIN6.

In 2015, FireEye Threat Intelligence supported several Mandiant Consulting investigations in the hospitality and retail sectors where FIN6 actors had aggressively targeted and compromised point-of-sale (POS) systems, making off with millions of payment card numbers. These card

34 | May 2016

numbers were later sold on a particular underground “card shop,” potentially earning FIN6 hundreds of millions of dollars.

FireEye Threat Intelligence and iSIGHT Partners recently combined their research to provide a unique and extensive look into the activities of this group.

This combined insight has provided unique and extensive visibility into FIN6’s operations, from initial

intrusion to the methods used to navigate the victims’ networks to the sale of the stolen payment card data in an underground marketplace.

Stolen data from several of FIN6’s victims have been identified as being sold as far back as 2014. This connection means that data stolen by FIN6 has almost certainly ended up in the hands of fraud operators across the world, as they buy and exploit payment

cards from the underground shop. In each case, the stolen data began appearing in the shop within six months of the FIN6 breach. While the amount of data sold through the shop varies by breach, in some cases more than 10 million cards associated with a specific FIN6-linked breach have been identified on the shop. After being posted, much of the stolen card data is quickly purchased for exploitation.

Awards Survey 2013