Cont

ents

R. NarayanManaging Editor

Disclaimer: While the publishers have made every attempt possibleto get accurate information on published content in this handbookthey cannot be held liable for any errors herein.

Editorial

Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. NarayanArt Director: Faiz Ahmed Sales Director: Alishan ZaidiSr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh

Published by: JNS Media International MFZEP.O. Box: 121075, Montana Building 404, Zabeel Road,Near GPO, Karama, Dubai-UAE - Tel: 04-3705022 Fax: 04-3706639

Cover Story - 18

Steering the cloudCloud adoption is getting a move on as more organizations understand the benefits of leveraging the benefits of cloud

News in Detail - 11

Lenovo completes integration of IBM’s x86 Server Business

Point2Point

Thriving on focus - 14Parag Vadodaria, CEO of Zio Technologies LLC discusses the company’s focus

Staying ahead - 26Sanjeev Walia, Director, Spire Solutions discusses some of the key challenges in the market as well as the key directions of focus for the distributor in the year

Feature - 16

Intersec spotlightIntersec 2015 concluded on a high with several innovative solutions on display that promise enhanced security as well connectivity

TechKnow

Angle of Action - 22Information Security solutions vendor Paladion is betting big on the Middle East, with major investments in the region that has seen more than its fair share of online threats.

Net Gain - 24Graham Porter MENA Channel Manager and Fadi Kanafani Regional Director, MENA and Pakistan discuss the company’s strategy for the evolving data centre

Insight

Big Data is here to stay - 28Big Data is still evolving but definitely moving towards a systematic future writes Santosh, Senior Data Analyst at Finesse

Hotels can leverage Wi-Fi smartly - 30To remain competitive, hotels in the region need to leverage a smarter, adaptive network infrastructure opines Graeme Kane, Sales Manager, Hospitality at Aruba Networks

Regulars

News BytesEyetechStats & trends

Businesses will have rising expectations and undoubtedly expect their IT infrastructures, especially their

mission critical systems to be reliable and resilient. More importantly, they need solutions that enable them to provide enhanced customer experiences, which in turn require innovative approaches, not always the conventional.

For systems integrators, it is necessary to build teams including technology domain experts as well as vertical experts. That will provide an ideal combination of technology knowhow as well as the industry knowledge to help design solutions that address their customer’s needs for Business innovation using technology as companies look to leverage IT solutions more for better Business outcomes.

Within various industries, there will always be a varying scale of how individual Businesses are adopting technologies.For instance, a study end of last year had found out that early technology adopters are more likely to experience better Business outcomes including growth of revenues. Logically, those who fail to upgrade their IT infrastructure as required will not hold a competitive edge.Since there will always be early adopters and there will be companies that are amongst the last to adopt new Technologies, it is best to have different go to market strategies when approaching them.

It therefore makes good sense for integrators to map out their potential as well as established client base, classifying them into early adopters, followers and laggards. In any case, such an approach is utilitarian in the sense that it allows the company to target customers based on potential. Accordingly, they can consult those companies around what they are most likely to buy in the short term rather than engage them over very long term proposals that may come to naught eventually.

So for a company that has a cautious outlook traditionally, maybe from the leadership top down, towards IT upgrades and purchases, it is best to keep it simple. Even when sounding them out on new solutions, focus precisely on what they would like to buy rather than what you would want them to buy.

Mapping customers

4 | February 2015

News Bytes

Aruba Networks is expanding its EMEA Aruba PartnerEdge Programme to better address the needs of small to mid-sized enterprises (SME) and the channel partners that serve them. With recently introduced 802.11ac products designed for the SME, a wide variety of new programmes, promotions and SME enablement support, as well as a focused SME competence centre in Cork, Irelands. The competency centre will focus on supporting partners to sell the Aruba Networks cloud-based central solution and Instant Access points which are easy to install and maintain and are an excellent fit for small to mid-sized enterprises.

According to Osama AlHaj-Eisa, Channel Director, Middle East & Turkey at Aruba Networks, “Hundreds of partners are enjoying excellent growth with the Aruba SME portfolio and the demand for covering the market is increasing. With the centralized SME competence centre Aruba provides a single, consistent and easy to reach support centre for our existing and the new to be recruited partners."

Aruba expands EMEA Channel Program

Arrow Electronics has been positioned by Gartner in the “Leaders” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for IT Asset Disposition, Worldwide.”

“For us, it is extremely gratifying to see the market recognition and external validation that the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Asset Disposition, Worldwide provides,” said Mark Majeske, president of Arrow’s global reverse logistics business. “We take our role as leaders seriously.”

Gartner’s evaluation of IT vendors involves a heavy emphasis on client feedback, as Gartner considers this component to be one of the most important measures of a vendor’s success as well as the scoring.

Identified “Leaders” are those companies that execute well against a robust vision, and are well-positioned for the future. As a result, they have the highest scores for “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision.”

“Our capabilities and reach are growing with the global demand for ITAD, and we believe we have the most robust set of capabilities and the greatest reach available to serve our customers wherever they need us,” Majeske said.

StarLink has signed a distribution agreement with Palo Alto Networks, the leader in enterprise security. As the largest and fastest growing IT Security distributor in the Middle East with strong on-the-ground presence across the region, StarLink will sell and support the Palo Alto Networks enterprise security platform offering through its extensive network of channel partners to enterprise and government customers in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council).

Palo Alto Networks offers a natively integrated platform that includes a next-generation firewall, cloud-based threat intelligence and advanced endpoint protection, helping enterprises and governments secure their organizations, detect and prevent both known and unknown threats, and safely enable an increasingly complex and rapidly growing number of applications.

“This event marks a key milestone for StarLink. Historically we were renowned for bringing niche best-of-breed technologies into this region to assist customers in compliance and protect themselves against the latest threats. So we always looked at firewalls as being traditional security, until Palo Alto Networks emerged with the most disruptive firewall technology offering in the market," said AvinashAdvani, VP Business Strategy at StarLink. "As StarLink has grown, our portfolio has also evolved into a defense-in-depth framework, which can only be completed with the leading Palo Alto Networks enterprise security platform. We are excited to now be able to provide our partners with the most sophisticated and automated security offering.”

Arrow in Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Asset Disposition

StarLink Expands Middle East Distribution of Palo Alto Networks

Build new revenue streams for your business with the Axis video surveillance solution. With the conversion from analog to digital, this opportunity is increasing. What’s more, you already have the relationships and knowledge to capitalize on it.

Secure an opportunity at www.axis.com/companion

Introducing the Axis video surveillance solution.

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6 | February 2015

News Bytes

STME is strengthening its focus on providing a vast array of IT managed services for the SMB sector. Ayman Al Bayaa, CEO of STME, said outsourcing the supervision of day-to-day IT-related processes allows SME owners to remain focused on their core business.

“Because most business processes are IT-based, a growing business often also demands a more complex IT structure, which can impact a company’s performance,” said Ayman. “It, therefore, makes economic sense for business owners to secure a specialist company’s skills and resources for either a short- or long-term contract and provide the organisation the ability to address potential shortfalls.”

Al Bayaa said STME currently provides Managed Services offerings in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Egypt. These services include project planning, resource management, technical resources, project reporting and analysis, change control, cost and time management, as well as examination and remote monitoring of IT systems, among others.

STME offers Managed Services for SME segment

Exclaimer Limited, a supplier of management email signature software, announced a new channel partnership with Prologix to develop its international operations. The partnership will bring the full Exclaimer suite of software to the UAE business markets and will enable Exclaimer to reach new international customers. The leading UAE software provider, Prologix, will enhance its existing portfolio with Exclaimer’s award-winning email utility software for Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Office 365.

Exclaimer’s solutions enable businesses to fully manage corporate branding, legal disclaimers and use

signatures for targeted marketing campaigns within all corporate email. Its patented solutions also include next generation email archiving, an advanced email auto response system, business grade anti-spam, email image analysis technology and more.

Prologix LLC will be distributing the entire range of Exclaimer products, including the award-winning Signature Manager Product suite, Mail Archiver, Email Alias Manager for Exchange, Auto Responder and Outlook Photos.

Sarwan Singh, Managing Director at Prologix, explains, “We are delighted to add the Exclaimer product suite to our portfolio as it furthers our commitment to provide the right technology solution to our customer base. One of the core strengths of Prologix is our unbeatable leadership in the reseller market which sets a powerful goal for us, and Exclaimer software offers our customers additional features that take email management to the next level.”

Exclaimer in partnership with Prologix

Kaspersky Lab announces the appointment of OvanesMikhaylov as the new Managing Director in the Middle East. Ovanes has delivered great results in his previous roles at Kaspersky Lab over the last 10 years. In his new role he will be responsible for strategic planning and implementation to reinforce the company’s regional leadership in the B2C market and strengthen its B2B presence.

“The Middle East is an interesting and rapidly developing market that understands the importance of IT. I’m looking forward to applying my international experience in management and sales here. One of the most important tasks ahead of us will be strengthening our partner network in the region, helping local companies boost their own business while expanding Kaspersky Lab’s customer base, and making security solutions available with high-quality services”, said Ovanes Mikhaylov.

Ovanes joined Kaspersky Lab in 2004 as a Channel Sales Manager of the International Distribution Department in the company’s headquarters in Moscow in 2004. His skills and professionalism earned him a promotion to become General Manager of Kaspersky Lab Iberia in 2008. As Managing Director for Kaspersky Lab Middle East, Ovanes will be based in Dubai, UAE, reporting directly to Garry Kondakov, Chief Business Officer.

Kaspersky Lab appoints new MD

8 | February 2015

News Bytes

In response to the evolving needs of the Middle East and North African security landscape, Honeywell showcased its portfolio of ‘connected’ smart security, safety and home automation solutions at Intersec.

The three-day event saw Honeywell experts demonstrate industry-leading IP enabled surveillance kits, a range of fire safety solutions as well as its innovative ‘Connected Home’ concept featuring Wi-Fi thermostats.

As regional governments and real estate developers continue to invest heavily in the building of Smart Cities and Smart Homes, Honeywell is bringing to market pioneering ‘connected’ solutions and redefining the regional smart security landscape.

“The Honeywell ‘connected’ portfolio has a holistic solution catering to the safety and security of large-scale industries, businesses and homes in the region. From intrusion, fire and home automation systems, to the latest IP video and access control, Honeywell brings the vision of a secure and ‘connected’ infrastructure a reality in the region,” said Norm Gilsdorf, Honeywell’s President & CEO of Russia, Middle East and Central Asia.

Honeywell focuses on ‘connected’ solutions In a move to help organisations harness today’s

workplace patterns and culture and stay ahead of the changes in workforce dynamics, while reducing energy and real estate costs, Dimension Data has announced the launch of its workspaces for tomorrow strategy.

Nadeem Ahmad, Dimension Data’s Global Technology Director says, “During the course of any day, people complete many different work activities. Some require high levels of concentration; others more collaboration. Workspaces for tomorrow is a workplace strategy that captures these varied work styles, and empowers individuals with the freedom to choose different types of

work settings to suit their various work activities.”At the foundation of workspaces for tomorrow is Dimension Data’s End-user

Computing (EUC) platform which enables client projects rapidly because it helps deal with any variables when implementing the overall solution. In conjunction with the EUC platform, Dimension Data delivers other relevant networking, security and communications solutions required by clients for their specific implementation to create an overall solution architecture.

Dimension Data announces workspaces for tomorrow strategy

After a decade of offering design-led storage solutions to private and public sector companies across the region, the UAE-based IT firm, Condo Protego, has reaffirmed its commitment to offering customers world-class consultative services.

Condo Protego was established in 2005 by its CEO, Andrew Calthorpe, and COO, Savitha Bhaskar.

“We have built our reputation over the last 10 years from a start-up company, to a top-of-the-mind IT solutions provider in the market,” said Savitha. “We now hold the largest market share in the UAE when it comes to customized enterprise back-up and recovery solutions.”

This achievement was only made possible through focus and determination, says Savitha. Rather than pursuing a generalist approach, the firm grew “organically”, expanding its portfolio only once it has fully developed its professional and technical capacity to do so.

“We are not a reseller, but a consultative solutions provider. This means we want to offer a solution that we can support completely, from the design stage to implementation and post-sales support,” said Savitha.

“For example, we started with pure-play disk storage, then moved on to archival and enterprise back-up, and following that high-availability and disaster recovery, ensuring that our team was comprehensively trained every step of the way."

Condo Protego celebrates 10 Years of operations

Learn more about these award-winning servers and revolutionary in-server flash designs.

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

1 Based on Principled Technologies report ‘Simplifying systems management with Dell OpenManage on 13G Dell PowerEdge servers’, September 2014, commissioned by Dell, testing Dell’s 13th generation R730 with Enterprise-level Dell systems management. As compared to manual configuration.

2 Based on product specifications for Intel S3700 SATA SSD and Express Flash results from the Storage Networking Industry Association.3 Based on Dell internal analysis August 2014 comparing SATA SSDs to Express Flash - PCIe-Gen3 x4 testing random reads.

©2015 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell, the Dell logo and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Scale smarter. Manage easier. Innovate faster.New PowerEdge servers can be configured up to 99% faster1 and boost IOPS by up to 10x.2

Whether your business relies on data to predict the future, improve outcomes or engage more customers, the next generation of PowerEdge servers with Intel® Xeon® processors will help boost application and workload performance — so you can scale smarter, manage easier, innovate faster.

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10 | February 2015

News Bytes

TechAccess has entered into a strategic Distribution Channel Partnership agreement with Extreme Networks E to Deliver Networking solutions in the Middle East. Extreme offers business solutions that in include high-performance switching and routing products for data center, core-to-edge networks, wired/wireless LAN access, and unified network management and control. This new relationship will enable the distribution of Extreme’s solutions through TA’s extensive channel of resellers and systems integrators in the target territories of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Jordan.

TA will further enhance the vendor’s offerings through its suite of value added services; conduct training & POC’s at the multi-million dollar solution center, sales and pre-sales support, and marketing and business development support to facilitate its growth in these target territories.

Chris Cornelius, senior vice president sales and support, Tech Access, expressed his enthusiasm for this new venture, stating, “TA is now going to enable its resellers and systems integrators to take the Extreme solutions to market and penetrate the vast number of customers who need network-powered innovations at their fingertips. Extreme is a great fit to our existing products portfolio as it is in line with our strategy to boost the ability of our channel partners to offer high performance networking solutions to their end-customers in these regions.”

TechAccess inks agreement with Extreme Networks

Cisco, in partnership with industry steering committee members, announced that the Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) 2015 will take place in Dubai from December 6 to 8, 2015 at the Dubai World Trade Centre.

The third annual IoTWF in Dubai will mark yet another milestone in the growth of the IoT and promises to continue overwhelming success of the 2013 Barcelona and 2014 Chicago IoT World Forum events.

The 2015 IoTWF in Dubai aims to convene top thought leaders, implementers and creators across public sector, private business and education from throughout the Middle East as well as globally in one place at one

time to collaborate, network, partner, and build the industry's ecosystem together.The IoTWF is an event where members of the IoT community can share the latest

developments in the industry including emerging applications. Industry leaders will also share their understanding of what they can do to advance the Internet of Things, build new relationships with other like-minded leaders, and create strategies for maximizing IoT benefits—both for their organizations and the industry as a whole.

Rabih Dabboussi, GM, Cisco UAE said, “Hosting the Internet of Things World Forum is an exciting milestone for Dubai, placing it at the forefront of what is already a global industry phenomenon. The IoTWF will give Dubai the opportunity to showcase first-hand, the numerous technology initiatives that are already contributing towards it becoming an exemplary smart city pioneer, not only throughout the region but also on a global scale.”

ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, announced that Desktop Central now supports Samsung KNOX, a multi-layered security technology that enables a secure and productive workspace for mobile professionals. By partnering with Samsung to support KNOX, ManageEngine bolsters its desktop and mobile device management (MDM) software with advanced mobile device management capabilities that let IT personnel secure Samsung devices without invading user privacy.

Mobile device usage among employees continues to grow at a tremendous speed, driven by user-friendly trends like BYOD. Understanding this trend in enterprise mobility, Samsung Electronics, a global leader in digital media and digital convergence technologies, has developed the KNOX platform to provide a comprehensive security solution for enterprise Samsung mobile devices.

“In 2013, we partnered with Samsung to support SAFE devices. Now, we’re adding KNOX capability to elevate that partnership one step further,” said MathivananVenkatachalam, director of product management at ManageEngine. “This enhanced security feature helps IT teams exercise precise control over the corporate data accessed by employees. And it provides flexible mobile device management operations without compromising on data security.”

Dates Announced for IoTWF2015 in Dubai

ManageEngine provides KNOX capability to customers

Array expands its AVX10650 application delivery controller

Array Networks updated its multi-tenant application delivery controller (ADC), the AVX10650. The latest edition of its high speed ADC boasts a higher number of independent ADC instances that service providers and large enterprises can support on one appliance.

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The AVX10650 is a dual-power appliance that supports 4, 8, 16 or 32 independent instances, each supporting all APV Series load balancing and application delivery features. Each instance is supported via dedicated CPU, SSL, memory and I/O resources, and customers may purchase the system at ¼, ½ ¾ or full capacity and upgrade to higher capacity as needed. The second-generation AVX10650 is currently available for sale.

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12 | February 2015

News In Detail

Lenovo and IBM have successfully closed the

transaction in Lenovo Middle East and Africa (MEA) and completed the move of IBM x86 employees and business operations to Lenovo effective January 1st.

Lenovo completed the initial closing for the acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business at worldwide level on October 1st. Due to the large number of countries and processes involved in EMEA, the company

announced employees and business operations in this region would be transitioned over the next few months in order to ensure a smooth integration.

With the integration of x86, Lenovo adds a world-class business that extends the company’s capabilities in enterprise hardware and services, positioning Lenovo as a top player in the server market. By combining Lenovo’s global reach, efficiency and operational excellence with IBM’s quality, innovation and service, Lenovo believes it will have competitive advantages to drive profitable growth and build the company into an enterprise leader.

“We are glad to formally welcome IBM x86 team now joining Lenovo MEA. Our priorities are to deliver a seamless transition for

customers and partners, while we accelerate our server business. We have big plans for the enterprise market and aim to repeat the success we had in PCs”, said Oliver Ebel, Vice President and General Manager, Lenovo MEA.

“We have been working closely during the past months to ensure a fast start of the x86 business following the closing of the transaction in MEA, so we are ready to compete vigorously for customers across

every sector now that we have become one team”, said Guy England, Director EBG, Lenovo MEA.

Lenovo is acquiring IBM's x86 server business intact and is committed to following the IBM x86 product roadmap, including Flex and x86-based PureFlex integrated systems. Lenovo will continue to drive innovation in these products. As previously disclosed, IBM will continue to provide maintenance delivery on Lenovo’s behalf for an extended period of time, so customers will experience a seamless transition with no change in their maintenance support.

Lenovo and IBM have also established a strategic alliance where Lenovo will serve as an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to IBM and resell selected products

from IBM’s industry-leading storage and software portfolio. These include IBM’s entry and midrange Storwize storage product family, Linear Tape Open (LTO) products, and elements of IBM’s system software portfolio, including Smart Cloud software, General Parallel File System and Platform Computing solutions.

This strategic alliance means Lenovo can now offer these products as part of a more comprehensive enterprise IT solution, allowing it to support a greater range of customer needs in data

centers.Lenovo’s acquisition of

IBM’s x86 server business was first announced in September last year. The acquired portfolio includes System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking and maintenance operations. IBM retains its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances.

Lenovo completes integration of IBM’s x86 Server Business in MEA

Oliver EbelVice President & General Manager, Lenovo, MEA

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14 | February 2015

Discuss the areas of focus for your SI services?Our areas of focus include A/V, Digital Signange, Security Systems and IT Infrastructure and solutions. We have the capability to execute large and complex projects and are geared to provide turnkey solutions end to end.

Discuss the growth in the various segments you focus on – from AV, CCTV to telephony and IT solutions? As Dubai is developing itself as tourist and business hub, for all the infrastructure under development is will require most of the above systems. There are good growth opportunities.

Are there any new domains that you intend to expand into like cloud computing integration, Big Data analytics etc?Zio is working on dynamic business principles and we are always trying to enhance the portfolio of the products/service offering that we offer to the market. Cloud Computing, Data analytics, BMS, Connected Home etc.are the areas of future expansion that we are looking at. For instance, we already offer analytics in security systems but we are going to extend that for Digital Signange and various other systems.

Which are the strongest customer segments for you? Do you see investments into ICT infrastructure rising?We have a major customers in all the segments as we provide a large portfolio of services we are able to address need of all the segments we cater to. But we see a good growth in hospitality, retail and education sectors.

What have been recent milestones for the company in terms of large projects deployed?Zio is involved in some of the most prestigious projects in this regions. Recently we handed over Cleveland Clinic and Yas Mall in Abudhabi. These are the landmark

projects for our industry and Zio was able to provide a vast range of services. Currently we are awarded Habtoor City projects for all the 3 hotels (st. Regis, Westin and W).

Discuss the focus on technical certifications for engineers on an ongoing basis? Do you think that is a challenge as you keep bringing in new Technologies?This is the only way forward. Any company in this fields need to constantly upgrade certifications and keep training their team. AS technology is changing rapidly and to keep pace with the modern requirements we must focus on certification and develop a strong IP inside organization to be effective.

Do you also focus on markets outside the UAE?There are good opportunities in the MENA

region and Dubai is considered as gateway to the Middle East. We are working on some very good projects in GCC and Africa. We have a presence in Bahrain and Iraq. We also plan to grow our business in Qatar, KSA and Oman.

What is the edge that the company has when compared to competition in the AV segment?There are many companies doing ICT solutions and most of our competitors pitch through the IT domain. We have advantages being seen as an A/V company and we have strong capabilities to offer solutions in-house whereas most of the IT companies outsource their AV requirements.

Hence, we feel Zio has positioned itself in a special niche in the industry and is successful in getting awarded some very prestigious projects.

Thriving on focus

Zio Technologies LLC is a leading

systems integrator of Audio/Visual

(AV) Systems, Security Systems,

Telecommuni-cations and IT

Solutions. Parag Vadodaria, CEO of

Zio Technologies LLC discusses the company’s focus

Point2Point | Zio Technologies

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16 | February 2015

Intersec 2015 concluded on a high with several innovative solutions on display that

promise enhanced secured access as well as connectivity

Intersec 2015 saw a greater attendance this year compared to last year from

exhibitors and visitors. There were innovative solutions on display in abundance, from IP surveillance to secure identity solutions.

Surveillance in focusThere were several IP camera and security solutions manufacturers among the exhibitors and the focus has been on the latest advances in picture quality, analytics, new cameras with more features etc.

Axis Communications showcased its new ‘4k Ultra HD cameras’ during the three day event. Axis Communications was among the very first companies to introduce HDTV network cameras in the video surveillance market and the 4K Ultra

up at this moment. We are starting to see specific industries outside of the Middle East jumping on board with banking and oil and gas segments very interested.”

Marwan adds that it also depend how the application development partners and technology partners can develop better solutions to help customers. In addition, he opines that the need for Analytics is also playing a central role in driving the industry towards considering higher image visibility.

He says, “We already have high levels of image quality, so it’s more about what we can do with those technologies –and we are not just talking to security people but a range of stakeholders in all the major industries like retail for instance and the merchandisers and marketers as to how they can utilize our solutions for better

Intersec spotlight

customer service.”Panasonic was one of the others who

unveiled 4K standard surveillance cameras at Intersec. The Manufacturer launched itsr first 9 megapixel 360-degree network cameras for indoor and outdoor use. The WV-SFN480 and WV-SFV481 360-degree cameras provide detailed 9 megapixel images with a fisheye, panoramic and de-warped view. They are ideal for surveillance applications that require wide area coverage.

Hayashi Noriyuki, Senior Manager, System Solutions Department, PMMAF, said “The 360-degree cameras are a breakthrough in surveillance technology as it supports 4K technology which supports resolution four times higher than full HD 1080p. The clarity of the 4K technology is what sets it apart, ensuring quality surveillance and clear identification. Most surveillance cameras especially outdoor provide pixelated footage which does not

Feature | Intersec 2015

allow proper recognition, whereas our 360 degree network camera does not only deliver crystal clear images but the WV-SFV481 is weather and impact resistant with IP66- and IK10-ratings. Our technology promises easy and complete surveillance through clear cut technology.”

The 360-degree cameras provide business intelligence features which improve marketing effectiveness, store operations, traffic patterns and more. The cameras track the flow of people in their wide view and identify hot spots and bottlenecks in the area, making reports such as people counting and heat map.

Room for storageWith the growing demand for surveillance storage, storage hardware manufacturers

HD cameras provide the ability to conduct better investigations by counting and identifying people, vehicle plate recognition and identifying objects through real-time observation and forensic review. It also offers the opportunity to improve business intelligence in retail environments through applications like tracking personnel and customer paths. 4K Technology has been grabbing the interest of manufacturers and customers alike in terms of the enhanced output the Technology can deliver.

Marwan Khoury, Marketing Manager, MEA, Axis says, “Technology that supports 4K is becoming the next big thing. With 4K supported cameras, while image quality is superior, it also gives you the ability to scan wide areas and this brings costs down considerably in terms of how many camera installations you have on site. It’s still a bit early for 4K as the entire system comprises of different elements from software to storage as well; so everyone is catching

Khwaja SaifudinSenior Sales Director, MEA & India, WD

February 2015 | 17

like WD and Seagate were among the exhibitors at the show. WD has been being associated with this exhibition for several past editions now.

The Manufacturer provides WD Purple Surveillance Storage designed for high temperature, always-on, surveillance security systems.

Khwaja Saifudin, Senior Sales Director, Middle East, Africa and India at WD said, “We are not just a storage provider; we are a specialized storage provider for several verticals. At INTERSEC, the focus was about our storage solutions for security and surveillance which has gone almost fully digital and wherever there’s digital data that is produced, you’ll find WD there. We were at the show with different partners and SIs who are propagating, assembling and selling our solutions around security and surveillance to customers.”

For entry level surveillance, WD offers the Purple drives which are designed to replace standard desktop drives that were not designed for the harsh 24/7 always-on, high-definition surveillance environment. WD Purple storage is tested and recommended for use in surveillance and security systems up to 8 bays and optimized for 32 HD cameras. For additional surveillance capacity, WD recommends its datacenter hard drives.

Saif adds, “Surveillance is very much a growing market because even the installed cameras are getting more intelligent and they are getting changed as we transition from analogue to digital. DVRs are becoming increasingly IP-enabled. So this is still a very dynamic segment. Smart initiatives by governments in the region are real drivers of surveillance in the region as well."

Seagate showcased its seventh-generation 6TB Seagate Surveillance hard drives as well as the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD which deliver high capacity without sacrificing performance for reliable access to bulk storage of unstructured data. In addition, the manufacturer also highlighted its Video Surveillance Systems Solution Center. Hosted through a dedicated online portal, the center features a library of resources including a new Video Storage

Selector and Surveillance Drive Selection Guide, as well as a number of surveillance articles and case studies. The manufacturer is focusing on storage innovations and surveillance is a strong focus segment for the company.

“Data has evolved from static information stored and forgotten to a living entity that drives every day interactions. Storage innovation must therefore focus on new systems and solutions which are faster, more reliable and expansive,” says Christian Assaf, Senior Sales Manager MEA, Seagate.

Connected and secureHoneywell showcased its portfolio of ‘connected’ smart security, safety and home automation solutions at Intersec 2015. Solutions showcased included IP enabled surveillance kits as well as its innovative ‘Connected Home’ concept featuring Wi-Fi thermostats. These include the LYNX Touch, an all-in-One Home Control System that enables homeowners to control their security system, lights, locks and thermostats using a single platform. Users can view video on the full-color touch screen or on their smart phones, tablets and other Wi-Fi enabled devices enhancing the user experience. The Wi-Fi range of programmable Thermostats from Honeywell allows home-owners to monitor and control the cooling of their homes remotely-from anywhere at any time- from their iOS and Android smart-phones and tablets.

Dilip Sinha, General Manager of Honeywell ECC says, “Connected homes are about smart devices from the door access to the security camera to the fire system with the connected thermostat an integral part of this equation. Through our solutions, we help make the vision of a secure and ‘connected’ infrastructure a reality in the region.”

HID Global exhibited under the theme “Your Security Connected.” IT demonstrated the power to connect people, devices and applications with its broad Genuine HID portfolio of interoperable and future-proof secure identity solutions, at Intersec.

The vendor demonstrated its extensive suite of technologies, products, solutions and services that provided visitors a

hands-on understanding of how to address real-world security challenges by creating, managing and using secure identities. You can typically use just a single card or one mobile access device for many applications including the ability to combine access control for physical access to buildings as well as IT resources such as computers, networks, data and cloud applications.

“This creates a fully interoperable, multi-layered security strategy that can protect the organization’s buildings, networks, systems and applications. So this is the combination of physical and IT security,” says Nat Pisupati, Regional Sales Director Identity & Access Management, Middle East & Africa with HID Global.

The strong show at Intersec reveals that the security solutions market is seeing vibrant growth. Further, a recent research by Frost & Sullivan suggests that the Middle East physical security market including video surveillance and access control systems, is expected to be worth more than AED 40 billion by 2020, enough reasons for an upbeat outlook in the segment.

Marwan KhouryMarketing Manager, MEA, Axis

18 | February 2015

Cover Feature | Cloud Computing

Cloud services adoption may have just moved up a notch in the region

over the past year. According to a study commissioned by EMC and conducted by Dun & Bradstreet for the UAE, 95% of enterprises surveyed have already implemented or plan to implement a cloud computing model. Further, 49% of enterprises stated to have currently implemented a private cloud model and 35% consider their environment to be a public cloud. Underlining the preference towards a hybrid model, 23% of respondents stated they have plans

to implement an Advanced Hybrid Cloud model. These are impressive numbers and just goes to show that cloud computing adoption is indeed gaining speed.

James Spearman, Principle Cloud Consultant & Head of Data Centre Infrastructure, Dimension Data that offers multiple cloud solutions on premise, in the public cloud or in a hybrid model says, “We’re seeing a general acceleration in the discussions around cloud services with most CIO’s either having a cloud strategy in place or looking at us to assist them in determining their strategy, in order to

ensure that they start realising the benefits cloud may bring and deliver against the requests business is now demanding. Clearly each area of the business has different requirements, so the infrastructure and applications teams have different cloud service requirements. This has brought about different cloud uptake levels within areas of the business.”

For all obvious reasons like operational efficiencies and scalability plus access to infrastructure and solutions at optimized costs, there is an increased demand for private cloud services.

Shams Hasan, Enterprise Product Manager, Middle East at Dell Middle East says that a discussion about the Cloud needs a separation of the public cloud from the private cloud and believes the latter will see significant growth.

He adds, “We will see increased momentum in Private Cloud projects in 2015 as more and more organizations leverage benefits that range from cost-saving to security. Another key benefit, agility, will be a highlight for private cloud's continued success in 2015. The rise of converged infrastructure technologies and the ability to remove infrastructure modules as needed should make private clouds an even more agile and attractive option for CIOs looking to reap the other benefits of private clouds. Cloud computing offers tremendous untapped opportunities for MEA enterprises looking to develop agility and up-to-the-times business practices.”

While private clouds are seeing significant traction, Gartner predicts that public cloud services in the MENA region will grow at 17.1 percent in 2015 to total $851 million with Software as a service (SaaS), estimated to be the largest segment at $205.7 million.

John adds, “SaaS and PaaS discussions are a little more mature than the infrastructure discussions with business putting pressure on IT to deliver against the IaaS discussions. There will be a continued push into cloud based solutions with more and more enterprises starting to explore Cloud solutions for non-critical workloads or alternative consumptions methods for DR.

Steering the cloud

Cloud adoption is getting a move on as more organizations understand the benefits of leveraging the benefits of cloud computing

February 2015 | 19

Shams says, “As the region recoups from recent exposés in security and data privacy, Business and IT leaders and managers scrutinize cloud computing opportunities with a more prudent eye. In the Middle East there are still three mega trends influencing cloud adoption: trust; government regulations; and technology adoption. Some of these trends have less to do with technology and have also seen limited development over the past year in the region impacting to a larger degree the plans for adoption of Public Cloud services adoption. Dell’s observation is that Middle East Customers are still wary with Public Cloud offerings, but are very interested in Private Cloud builds; Dell has had a few successful engagements with Customers with the latter.”

Private to hybrid – the cloud accelerates!A private cloud provides a distinct and secure cloud based environment where the computing power of the virtualized infrastructure is delivered only to the specified client organization that owns the cloud. So there is greater control and privacy vis-à-vis a public cloud and it suits organizations in some of the critical sectors like Banking, Government etc to have critical workloads run in such secured environments.

Rashid says, “Current adoption of private cloud computing is a work in progress for most organizations as they continue to implement server virtualization, automation and orchestration capabilities. Private clouds will dominate the most critical

functions. Many factors drive the decision over public or private cloud. Industries with the strongest adoption of private clouds are financial services, healthcare and Government services, with financial services and healthcare facing heavy regulatory and compliance issues that are exacerbated, though not impossible in the cloud.”

Shams claims that the year has seen cloud adoption move from discussions in the board room to tangible adoption but there are many more opportunities in the cloud up ahead.Technology innovations including converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure, I/O virtualization, software-defined-networking, software-defined-storage, open-networking, and density-optimized servers have significantly reduced the barriers for Private Cloud adoption.

Forward thinking vendors are now starting to offer their key products in cloud based consumption models that show great appeal to the business.”

The momentum is also being helped along by the fact that CIOs are noticing their peers moving ahead with implementation. Businesses in the region may have been all along circumspect about security issues related to cloud but there is a growing level of confidence with the availability of mature product offerings.

Rajesh Abraham, Director, Product Development, eHostingDataFort that offers both Hosted Private Cloud and Public Cloud options for businesses says, “The hype around cloud services is over and it is becoming a reality. The apprehensions around challenges of cloud adoption have reduced significantly and enterprises are now ready to leverage the advantages of cloud services. Cloud adoption challenges are slowly reducing as vendor offerings become more mature and organizations start noticing their industry peers implementing cloud services.”

That is not to say that all bottlenecks on the way ahead have been cleared.Several challenges confront a growing adoption of cloud services but they may even be non-technical in nature.

“Even though the cloud computing has moved into the mainstream of IT, there are a significant number of non-IT challenges exist, number of non-technical issues, mostly revolving around people, processes, security challenges, contractual agreements and change management issues. These issues or challenges are usually harder to solve than technology problems. The cloud is the foreseeable future for IT but it will exist in many different forms and will evolve significantly over the next few years in UAE,” says Rashid Al Shamsi, Chairman of ixtel, a next generation IT services provider that provides Enterprise Cloud Services.

Non-technology issues can slow down public cloud adoption even as more customers go in for private cloud infrastructure. Security will always be a paramount issue in the region.

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“ There will be a continued push intocloud based solutions with more and more

enterprises starting to explore Cloudsolutions for non-critical workloads or alternative

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20 | February 2015

He adds, “We are starting to see enterprises in the region take advantage of Cloud opportunities in different ways. Larger traditional enterprises are testing Public Cloud offerings with non-mission-critical functions, temporary workloads, and administrative tasks while also implementing Private Clouds to leverage faster, more flexible, and more cost-effective ways to meet the technology needs of their organizations. Meanwhile young digitally native startups and SMEs are taking larger opportunities in the cloud to grow their businesses rapidly.”

However, he hurries to add that with the diversity of businesses in the Middle East, there’s a variety of comfort levels with the cloud ranging from large enterprises to SMBs, and from the public-sector organizations that operate in stringent verticals such as Defense to organizations (in both private- & public- sector spaces) that enjoy less stringent demands. So for business critical data and workloads, a large number of organizations, in his opinion will prefer to keep it in-house, they can.

James opines that there are many organizations that have delivered Private Cloud solutions within their organizations and while they may not have been full scale

deployments of cloud, should provide some key lessons moving ahead.

He comments, “In the past, these have tended to deliver against the automation and orchestration elements of cloud and have been designed to fulfil on one specific area of business – such as highly automated VDI. But nonetheless great learnings and strides have been taken by many organizations. It is rare to find a full true cloud deployment with granulated metering or self service capabilities delivering fully against the true cloud definition. These early adopters have, however, learnt some great lessons around what cloud can deliver and how by embracing the true benefits of cloud in public, private and hybrid usage, will really drive the future shape of how IT will start delivering and consuming in the future.”

Hybrid clouds bring the best of the two approaches and is winning over more customer confidence. That seems to be the case with the region in terms of deployments as well.As the study conducted by Dun & Bradstreet reveals, there is a growing interest in Advanced Hybrid cloud solutions with respondents stating they have plans to implement an Advanced Hybrid Cloud model that will allow greater flexibility.

As Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President and Regional Manager, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Middle East, EMC Corporation said, “IT organizations are striving to transform to deliver services that support the changing needs of their customers. Today, IT must leverage private cloud because it is trusted, controlled, and reliable, and public cloud because it’s simple, low cost, and flexible. This study clearly highlights the growing interest in adopting advanced hybrid cloud models to create a perfect blend of the two worlds.”

The hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness of public cloud services and at the same time makes sure that sensitive data is kept absolutely secure in the private cloud. Managing this in a seamless way without disruptions will be key.

Rashid says, “Many enterprise are opting for hybrid cloud when it wants to get the best of both worlds – private and public. For example it has a bunch of data that it doesn’t mind putting on the public cloud, and it also has some highly sensitive data that it wants to keep on-premises by using the private cloud.

However, the negative aspect when going for a hybrid cloud solution is that businesses will have to fine tune the lines of collaboration and communication between Public and Private cloud users.”

Globally, IDC predicts that almost half of the large enterprises will have deployed hybrid cloud by the end of 2017. All this clearly indicates that customers are more comfortable adopting a hybrid cloud. Enterprise customers are making sure they have a mix of strategies in place that provide them the best solutions. Several other factors including availability of public cloud services locally will have a significant role to play.

James says, “Most organizations will settle on a hybrid cloud architecture moving forward. The percentage of on/off site cloud usage will of course vary immensely based upon many factors and local availability of public cloud will be a driving factor that may also shift over time. We’re also seeing a big push from vendors to unlock the ability to transition to a Hybrid IT environment as they see this transformation happening within their customer base. In this region, we are seeing enterprises considering how they will enable this process moving forward and often ask how IT can integrate the public cloud environment with their on premise solutions to attain the efficiencies being promised by cloud.”

Security concerns are always a top priority when it comes to hosting the data in the cloud. Many customers seem to be more comfortable keeping their data in a datacenter that are local rather than have data stored in datacenters that located elsewhere.

Rashid says, “Not surprisingly, challenges relating to security and privacy continue to rank highly on the list of concerns for both IT and business

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Cover Feature | Cloud Computing

February 2015 | 21

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executives. However, the organizations are becoming more confident in the security of cloud providers if the data remains’ in local datacenters. This does not mean that security is no longer a key issue for business. Of the possible security concerns, data loss and privacy risks are the main concerns along with legal and regulatory compliance which is often security related.”

Security concerns will never go away and shouldn’t according to James because that is an important factor of choosing your cloud supplier. Further, choosing the cloud supplier needs to be based around a more elaborate process rather than just basing the decision on where the data is going to be stored locally.

James adds, “Most global cloud suppliers have an extremely tight story around security and will normally over deliver on the security processes of traditional enterprise data center. Understandably most local organizations are more comfortable for their data to stay on shore. When a local cloud supplier is able to demonstrate the ability to deliver cloud services competitively to the same security level as the global cloud suppliers, then it would make sense to choose local suppliers."

He believe there is a degree of workload profiling that needs to be undertaken by enterprises to understand if there is any risk to moving some of the data out of country. That will made the decision making better.

"Many times you see enterprises making the decision around their entire data set rather than data for certain workloads. Data location is not just security and sovereignty though, there is also a network performance and outgoing bandwidth cost based decision. A comprehensive approach to assessing the security of cloud providers will mitigate concerns and, in certain cases, illustrate that cloud providers are able to offer more comprehensive security for a company’s data.”

The ability of the cloud provider to meet the organization’s needs should be the key consideration.

Rajesh says, “Local players can provide enterprises with a local data centre and

24/7 bilingual local support. Low latency and faster access to applications is another advantage offered by local data center service providers. However, choosing a local data center provider over multinational companies and vice-versa depends upon the nature and size of the business and it does get tricky to determine the right services provider to best suit the company’s needs.So rather than basing criteria on Local or Global, we suggest working with an experienced services provider, offering customized plans to meet customers’ specific requirements.”

The journey to the cloud is an ongoing task. Companies like Dimension Data are enabling organizations build the IT strategy around cloud, identify the necessary cloud migration projects, deliver the actual cloud capacity and assist transform the workloads to be cloud capable when required.

Eventually, a larger percentage of workloads in a typical enterprise IT infrastructure would shift to cloud but which will vary customer by customer but there will be ever growing confidence and also the conviction that cloud will enable the organization to be more agile and stay ahead. Shams believes that Cloud usage correlates with revenue growth as cloud

adopters see significant benefits – which are even greater for organizations with a deeper commitment to cloud – over those that have not adopted cloud solutions.

He adds, “According to findings of the Dell Global Technology Adoption Index (GTAI): nearly every IT decision-maker surveyed said their company either uses or plans to use cloud solutions; only a mere 3 percent of respondents are not planning to leverage cloud solutions. Exploring what drives this trend, the Dell GTAI observes: there’s a strong correlation between cloud use and company growth. Of those using cloud, 72 percent of organizations surveyed experienced 6 percent growth or more in the last three years, with just 4 percent experiencing zero or negative growth. This is in sharp contrast with companies not using cloud, where just 24 percent have growth of 6 percent or more, and 37 percent had either zero or negative growth.”

Rashid is optimistic that the typical enterprise may eventually run nearly as much as 70 percent of its infrastructure in the cloud in the next three years. While that number at the moment may look to be on the higher side, there sure is a strong case to believe that the journey to the cloud is in a higher gear now.

22 | February 2015

There’s a lot more awareness and concern today in the Middle East of online threats. What is driving this renewed vigilance?RM: The security situation has changed considerably in the Middle East in recent years and the conversation around online security has shifted sharply. This is primarily driven by a few factors chief among them a rise in the number of attacks on targets in the Middle East coming courtesy of state actors as well as organized hacking groups. There have also been a lot of threats targeting financial transactions and institutions. Subsequently, there has also been a lot more awareness

Information Security solutions vendor Paladion is betting big on the Middle East, with major investments in the region that has seen more than its fair share of online threats. CEO Rajat Mohanty and Firosh Ummer, Managing Director, MEA, discuss this regional strategy

Angle of Action

TechKnow | Paladion

and education on the threat landscape and the vulnerabilities that exist. A lot of this awareness is driven by vendors like Paladion with the message targeted not just at CIOs, but at business owners as well.

FU: In the last few years, there have been several hacking incidents in the region, some politically motivated and targeting critical infrastructure like oil & gas. There have also been several attacks on ME financial institutions. The region is currently at the centre of global attention as a result of the awarding of Expo 2020 to Dubai as well as football World Cup in Qatar. That interest however

Firosh UmmerMD, MEA, Paladion

Rajat MohantyCEO, Paladion

February 2015 | 23

also tends to attract unwanted attention from hackers. In addition, an increasing number of people are simply getting online whether to access public or private resources online. There are risks associated with that-now you have application issues, infrastructure protection concerns etc. These are the priorities for a lot of organizations here.

How does Paladion handle these threats that is different from the normRM:Our focus is to help companies build internal capabilities to defend themselves. We do not simply sell tools to be installed by organizations and then leave them to fend for themselves. That will not build the capability organizations need to effectively defend themselves. This type of capability comes when you know how to use those tools and the process around it, then having the requisite people skills for it and finally having in place a long term programme to continuously harness those resources. Thus, as a company, we provide the managed security solution which we either build for the customer or offer it remotely via the cloud. At the end of the day, wherever there’s a problem organizations want to solve, our objective is to put together a holistic way to solve the problem. We work

with multiple parties to bring the right technology, but our focus remains to help the customer get the capability to defend against threats. Whether organizations have been attacked or not, they need to have the capability to prevent any kind of attack.

Discuss how you offer your managed security solution and how this is a better delivery model for Paladion solutionsFU:We want to be recognized as a one-stop-shop for Managed Security services. We make sure that our customers’ security preparedness is intact to protect them from known and emerging threats. Paladion Managed Security offering is delivered in co-source and in-source models. It is delivered with a mix of both the onsite and off-site teams that leverage existing investment in security technologies at the customer premises. For management of risks, Paladion brings in its repository of risk and controls, security tools and automated processes.Managed Security services are offered in a modular manner with the following components-Managed Governance, Risk and Compliance; Managed Security Operation Centre;

Managed Testing and Assurance and; Managed Identity and Access.

RM:We are also in the process of launching a cloud product for our managed security for which we will be going primarily through our reseller partners. For large enterprises, we go with one-to-one deals.

Discuss Paladion’s market strategy for the MEA region and the importance of the region to company’s bottom-lineRM:The Middle East is one of the most potential markets in the world right now. We are thus making a lot of investments here. We seek to set-up a Security Operations Centre here in Dubai. Like aforementioned, we are setting up the cloud operations where we will be working with resellers and value added service providers in the region. We are also increasing our people here having doubled the workforce here in the Middle East in the last year. The industry is expected to grow at between 20-23% YoY while Paladion as a company has set up aggressive targets for us by increasing our investments. We want to see ourselves growing much more than the market average.

"We want to be recognized as a one-stop-shopfor Managed Security services. We make

sure that our customers’ securitypreparedness is intact to protect them from

known and emerging threats."

FU: Paladion’s strategy in the Middle East is to consolidate more of the existing markets like UAE, Saudi and Qatar by bringing more capabilities like the

local monitoring centre we are in the process of setting up. The second front is to expand into the African market. We already have ongoing projects in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. So the strategy moving forward is to consolidate where we are stronger, bring more capabilities and take a market leadership position at the same time. We will work on the partnership model in new markets to learn about markets before we venture directly into these markets.

Discuss future offerings from Paladion and expected impact in the marketRM:Apart from the Cloud-managed security, we are implementing security intelligence solutions using machine learning to understand how security performs in real time. For a typical organization that has set up multiple security products in their environment that are producing a lot of data, it’s not feasible to have teams of people sitting and analysing the same. The solution is having machines that can do the analysing for them. So we are bringing a solution that is based on machine-learning to understand security and provide action-level intelligence.

24 | February 2015

Discuss the impact of Flash technology in the age of CloudGP: There’s a misconception that only the smaller storage companies are involved in flash. In reality, NetApp is a major Flash vendor and we offer a whole range of flash arrays,including a Hybrid array which is a mix of flash and traditional disk arrays. We are making a lot of investments in this space and we have been able to double our sales with over 1,300 pure flash arrays sold, a rate that is doubling year on year from 2013.

Flash and Cloud is what most of the

TechKnow | NetApp

Virtualization and Cloud adoption rates

continue to soar in the Middle East, with

storage giant NetApp one of the main

beneficiaries. Graham Porter MENA Channel

Manager and Fadi Kanafani Regional Director,

MENA and Pakistan discuss the company’s

strategy for the evolving data centre

Net Gain

customers like to hear about. Working with Cisco offers us a new opportunity to sell flash in integrated systems. In the last one year, because of our R&D capabilities, about half of our products have been refreshed. We typically invest 14% of our revenues in R&D as opposed to around 2% for our competitors. This means that partners have an up-to-date, state of the art product to sell-they’ve got Flash products and now the integrated stack that we are offering with Cisco.

Discuss NetApp’s FlexPod and how

integrated systems will impact enterprise storage moving forwardIntegrated systems are growing extremely well-the prediction from Gartner is that by 2015, 35% of all storage sales will beintegratedsystems. The FlexPod,is a combination of networking servers from Cisco, NetApp storage with software from VMware for virtualization. The result is an integrated stack which solves the problems companies had in the past of buying and building their solutions and trying to make them work. The FlexPod is configured to work from the get go and

Fadi KanafaniRegional Director, MENA & Pakistan, NetApp

February 2015 | 25

is typically used by customers wishing to build a private cloud and then start to move towards a hybrid public.

FK:We have 50 validated designs between us and Cisco for this integrated stack which makes it the number one converged cloud-based solution in the market now, a market that now exceeds 3B dollars globally. We have in excess of 4000 customers on the FlexPod which is showing over 80% growth from 2013 to 2014. The good thing about our Cloud solutions, our customers can enjoy the services if they prefer to stay private, if they want to go public or adopt hybrid cloud deployments. Our Data ONTAP allows them to manage their data no matter where the data resides-private, public or somewhere in between-which is the key differentiator for our platform.

Discuss some deployments with NetApp’s Flash solutions and the benefits therein for customersGP: An example is SAP and their HANA solution which allows them to do business intelligence in memory. The challenge in the past was in the amount of memory you would get; but now with Flash, you are guaranteed large data transfer very quickly. This facilitates a lot of intelligence and analytics that you could not do before. So a lot of customers are looking at flash and realizing they can take a large amount of data and manipulate that very quickly, something they simply could not do before. We have the solution with SAP HANA and every kind of customeris now able to take decisions by analysing their Big Data and being able to do this with flash and software applications.

What in your opinion is NetApp’s USP?FK: When customers are trying to balance risk & cost vs performance, benefits& features, we do not believe that one size fits all. So our systems allow customers to have flash and disk

at the same time and within the same system and both analysed with the same operating system. And that is another differentiator with NetApp, depending on your workload, you can decide to use disk for certain applications and certain workloads, flash for others and then customers can segment their system

so that it runs separate workloads differently.

Discuss the state of Cloud adoption in the region and what is holding back many

organizationsFK: What we have found unique here in the Middle East is that data sovereignty is very important. Certain governments prefer that their data stay within their boundaries and that is why the private cloud is more feasible in the region. We see more private cloud deployments. A lot of storage vendors are thus working closely with local service providers to provide the hybrid cloud.

GP: Cloud implementations here in the region via integrated systems like the FlexPodhave gone up byover 60% between 2013 and 2014. Still, this market is at least a couple years behind Europe and America. In the region now you have companies such as e-Hosting Data Fort and Equinox offering hosted services. We are also working with various Telcos in the region so that they can offer services such as hosting, co-location services and applications.

Some of the larger partners have their own large data centres and becoming resellers of cloud services. We have local partners that have built three data centres and now some of these partners are thinking of how they can sell services instead of selling the boxes.

"We have 50 validated designs between usand Cisco for this integrated stack which

makes it the number one converged cloud-based solution in the market now, a market that

now exceeds 3B dollars globally."

Net GainGraham Porter

Channel Manager, MENA, NetApp

26 | February 2015

managed computing services across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments

They have a vast portfolio of solutions and we are now working with them on enhancing market awareness of their solutions in the region.

How was the participation at Intersec?Intersec was a huge show and provided good exposure overall. We had quality attendance from industry. In retrospect, perhaps the positioning of commercial security segment could have been better to attract better footfall although the way it was done was logical.

Would you be exhibiting at GISEC this year?We are definitely going to be at GISEC this year. We have been one of the earliest supporters of the show.

What are the likely focus areas this year in terms of the company’s investments?We will increase our resources. However, we will choose very carefully. We will also be investing significantly in enhancing training facilities for our channel partners.

Spire Solutions is a leading value add distributor for Information Security products and solutions in the region. Sanjeev Walia, Director, Spire Solutions discusses some of the key challenges in the market as well as the key directions of focus for the distributor in the year.

How did the year 2014 turn out for Spire Solutions?It was an excellent year as we were able to break into many more segments and establish our partners. We got excellent referrals from our existing customers for new Business. The information security solutions and services segment saw a healthy growth in demand as awareness grew. So overall, the year was good.

What is the major challenge that needs to be addressed in the market?That is a big challenge for customers because of the plethora of tools in the market. But there is more awareness of customers that the threat scenario is getting enhanced and therefore there is a need for more security tools that can provide you necessary alerts and information. Conversations with several industry leaders in the Information security space suggests to me that that the biggest challenge is that while there are enough tools, the team strength is not growing. Despite having more information, you are taking more time to respond. So there will a lot of impetus on proliferation of Technologies that can reduce the response time after a

threat has been detected. The challenge is to do that without having to deploy an army of Information security professionals, which in any case is not available in plenty in the market.

There is a dearth of information security professionals worldwide. We therefore see the need to be able to provide protection solutions that don’t require additional manpower and respond to the security incidents much faster. We also want to ensure that their existing IT team doesn’t have to be bogged down by routine tasks that the automated solution can take care of and therefore they are able to focus on more important tasks. The Security Orchestrator from CSG Invotas for instance is such a solution that can help time-constrained organizations. The Invotas Security Orchestrator (ISO), is an Automated Threat Response platform that integrates your enterprise security management into a single console, giving you the ability to unify your defenses, orchestrate your response, and automate your counterattacks.

Do you see a shift in favor of Managed services?We see a growing interest and need for

Staying ahead

Point2Point | Spire Solutions

sure, however there is also disappointment. It looks good on paper to believe that you don’t need to invest on solutions, people etc and you have a third party providing monitoring. But as I said, many customers seem unhappy with the quality of reporting and the actions that have been initiated in the wake of alerts etc. That needs to be improved.

Discuss new vendors you have signed up?We have signed up with a company called NetIQ. NetIQ offers scalable, automated solutions for Identity, Access, Governance, Security, Systems and Application, Service and Workload Management that help organizations securely deliver, measure and

Sanjeev WaliaDirector, Spire Solutions,

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28 | February 2015

Insight | FINESSE

Each Industry follows their own pattern of data. For

grocery shopping they will understand the customers buying patterns, customer habits, frequency and time of shopping. Quantity analysis as well as qualitative analysis are measured here based on the data gathered. Customers love spending time shopping in malls, trying out new restaurants and all these activities provide businesses with ample amount of data regarding consumer purchase behavior and spending patterns.

Big data analytics is all about information you have about your customer’s choice of brands, shopping, and purchases. Based on this, e-commerce giants like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal target their customers with the offers on products that customers usually buy or even prospective customers who are most likely to purchase. They do this by tracking the website visitors and use various channels to follow up, including active social media marketing.

There has been a huge impact on the velocity of data that’s been growing for last few years and this has been happening in all the industry sectors. Healthcare, BFSI, Retail, Entertainment, whichever maybe the industry, data analytics provide dynamic

reporting, business insights, end-user convenience, to get more customers. The analyzed data helps them understand their customer behavior, increase revenue and sales. Most of the companies consider information to be their most valuable and differentiated asset. Few things that make a huge difference out of data analytics is its dynamic reporting, dashboards, associate approach, in-memory technology, lower implementation cycle and cost of ownership.

We all have to realize that all the latest technology advances have evolved out of the data used and analyzed in the past. Each one of us has definitely benefited out of it. For e.g. Big data used as a part of Learning and Development, Recruitment, productivity and skill set. Choosing the best slot for the right job, based on skills, one can use Big Data to extract data from all possible sources for analysis. One good source is social media. Today’s job seekers, if not everyone, most of them are on social media. A lot of companies have invested in technology to go through candidates’ social data and gather valuable insights about the candidates. Big Data insights can help HR redesign hiring strategies for efficiency.Talent Acquisition team will definitely benefit by adopting big data.

SantoshSenior Data Analyst, Finesse

Big Data is connecting the dots and making the world see the bigger picture. It is still evolving but definitely moving towards a systematic future writes Santosh, Senior Data Analyst at Finesse

Big Datais here tostay…

February 2015 | 29

Everything works on data these days. Big data helps you derive on decisions.

Few things that make Big data unique of its kind:Human Capital to extract value from big datainitiativesImproving the quality of the decision-making processIncrease the speed of decision-makingImproving planning and forecastingDeveloping new products/ services and revenue streams

According to the recent study 70% of enterprise organizations already deployed/plan to deploy big-data projects versus 56% of small and medium businesses (SMBs).Survey and predictions for 2014 finding that on average, enterprises will spend $8M on big data. So, is your organization big data ready???

1. Visual data discovery tools will be growing 2.5 times faster than rest of the business intelligence (BI) market. By 2018, investing in this enabler of end-user self service will become a requirement for all enterprises.

2. Over the next five years spending on cloud-based Big Data and analytics (BDA) solutions will grow three times faster than spending for on-premise solutions. Hybrid on/off premise deployments will become a requirement.

3. Shortage of skilled staff will persist. In the U.S. alone there will be 181,000 deep analytics roles in 2018 and five times that many positions requiring related skills in data management and interpretation.

4. By 2017 unified data platform architecture will become the foundation of BDA strategy. The unification will occur across information management, analysis, and search technology.

5. Growth in applications incorporating advanced and predictive analytics, including machine learning, will accelerate in 2015. These apps will grow 65% faster than apps

without predictive functionality.

6. 70% of large organizations already purchase external data and 100% will do so by 2019. In parallel more organizations will begin to monetize their data by selling them or providing value-added content.

7. Adoption of technology to continuously analyze streams of events will accelerate in 2015 as it is applied to Internet of Things (IoT) analytics, which is expected to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30%.

8. Decision management platforms will expand at a CAGR of 60% through 2019 in response to the need for greater consistency in decision making and decision making process knowledge retention.

9. Rich media (video, audio, image) analytics will at least triple in 2015 and emerge as the key driver for BDA technology investment.10. By 2018 half of all consumers will interact with services based on cognitive computing on a regular basis.

Predictions from the IDC FutureScape for Big Data and Analytics are:

30 | February 2015

arrive at a hotel, they expect to connect to everything all the time. Guests now demand always-on Wi-Fi across the hotel complex, access to self-service apps and content streaming without delay.

This mobility revolution has created a need for hotels to engage guests through smartphone apps and untether their front-desk staff so they can assist guests anywhere on the property. Essentially, providing a memorable guest Wi-Fi experience is now a fundamental part of customer satisfaction.

There is clear evidence of the change in guests' mentality. A recently conducted survey by Aruba Networks found that with respect to hospitality, #GenMobile, a term coined for the growing segment of people for whom smartphones is now an integral part of their personal

To remain competitive, hotels in the region need to leverage a smarter, adaptive network infrastructure. That should delivers table, simple, smart, secure Wi-Fi access to thousands of devices at a time, support mobile collaboration for staff, and enable personalized and location-based mobile engagement for guests opines Graeme Kane at Aruba Networks

Rapid advancement of mobile computing in the

Middle East is giving hoteliers the opportunity to create additional value for their guests and lower operational costs by implementing mobile technology solutions.

A revolution has taken place, from the days when we had one Ethernet port in the room with the hotels offering guests a wired connection, or a dedicated hotel business centre often found in the lobby. A couple years ago, the typical traveller would have carried only a laptop and a phone. With the mass adoption of smart phones and tablets in the last 3 years travellers now use their devices anytime and anywhere – for business, personal entertainment, social media engagement and other such purposes. And when they

Hotels can leverage Wi-Fi smartly

Insight | ARUBA Networks

and professional lives, displayed some interesting characteristics. For example, 65% of travellers have three or more devices and 94% cite Wi-Fi as the most important amenity. The survey also found that 77% of #GenMobiletravellers reference reviews before choosing a hotel and 36% will hesitate to rebook after a poor Wi-Fi experience

Business travellers now require the ability to establish VPN connections to their headquarters while leisure travellers feel the constant need to update their online photo albums. These requirements demand for broadband internet speeds to be delivered over Wi-Fi networks.

Evolving with the Needs of the Modern TravellerTo remain competitive, hotels need to leverage a smarter,

adaptive network infrastructure that delivers stable, simple, smart, secure Wi-Fi access to thousands of devices at a time, supports mobile collaboration for staff, and enables personalized and location-based mobile engagement for guests. There are therefore a number of aspects that must be looked into and addressed in order to achieve this which include:

Wi-Fi standards and hardware placement:With the smartphone explosion and the growing demand for media-rich content, older 802.11n wireless enterprise networks will no longer be capable of meeting user expectations. To cater to these demands and future-proof their investments, hotels must adopt the latest 802.11ac standard which provides better signal and coverage at a lower cost than its

Graeme KaneSales Manager, Hospitality, Aruba Networks

February 2015 | 31

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predecessors.Instead of limiting wired/

wireless connections to individual rooms, hotels can dramatically scale their Wi-Fi coverage with indoor and outdoor 802.11ac Access Points (APs) that allow for high-bandwidth streaming from guests’ mobile devices throughout the property. These APs also extend support to older 802.11n devices. This opens up new possibilities such as allowing guests to streaming high-bandwidth movies and music applications at the outdoor pool areas and hotels running high-resolution IP cameras and digital signage over Wi-Fi as well.

Automatic assignment of devices to access points:Unpredictable peaks in traffic shouldn’t slow down the Wi-Fi

network for guests and staff. The deployed solution should ensure that every device connects to the best-performing AP on the network - no matter how crowded it gets and no matter where a guest is within the venue i.e. indoors or outdoors. If a next-generation mobility firewall is deployed, the solution should easily integrate with this as it will allow for the solution to prioritize the most important work apps, as well as delay-sensitive voice and video surveillance traffic.

Ease of logging in:Before checking out the pool or entertainment, the first thing the modern traveller wants to access is the hotel's Wi-Fi network. It is therefore imperative to make it easy for them to self-register for secure Wi-Fi access without IT assistance or dealing with multiple login

screens. The solution should integrate with the existing property management system and allow the hotel to create custom-branded registration portals and browser pages that display venue ads and special promotions.

Context-Based Engagement:Once the hotel has deployed a reliable high speed Wi-Fi network, it can then look at leveraging this as a tool to enhance the guests' experience. The increased amount of data that is readily available on the Wi-Fi network has opened the door to creating more context-aware communications. Advances in location related technologies now allow venues to customize the guest experience based on who and where they are. For example, turn-by-turn navigation within a mobile app.

Hotels continue to use traditional static promotional signage. But this doesn’t always reach guests and often doesn’t relate to them. Location-aware technology can also be used to push out relevant and timely offers to guests' mobile devices based on where they are on the venue’s property. Hotels, resorts and casinos can now reward loyal guests by sending them personalized push-notifications that contain exclusive offers on in-house services or events.

By delivering stable, simple, smart and secure Wi-Fi to guests and then leveraging this network as a platform for innovation, hotels can set themselves apart in this highly competitive market. Done right, guests might use the very network developed for their satisfaction to post glowing reviews about the hotel and the service they received!

32 | February 2015

eyetech

NetApp EF560 all-flash array

Huawei eSpace 8950

Overview:

NetApphas announced the NetApp EF560 all-flash array

with improvements in storage performance to offer the

absolute and consistent latency, bandwidth and IOPS critical

to enterprise database and analytics applications. Based on

a new Storage Performance Council SPC-1 Result, the all-

flash EF560 achieved the leading SPC-1 Price-Performance

for all-flash arrays with an average response time of under

one millisecond, at $0.54/SPC-1 IOPS.

The NetApp EF560 maximizes the value of flash to

provide the top SPC-1 Price-Performance value for a

storage array with an average response time of under

one millisecond, reaching 245,011.76 SPC-1 IOPS with an

average response time of 0.93 milliseconds in the SPC-1

Result.

The new SPC-1 Result also confirmed that at 50 percent

of the specified SPC-1 load level the EF560 delivers an

impressive 122,491.97 SPC-1 IOPS at an average response

time of 0.34 milliseconds.

Key features:• ItissupportedwiththelatestNetAppSANtricity 8.20 software. NetApp SANtricity 8.20 features multicore performance and online disk firmware upgrades.

• Fordatabaseadministrators,theall-flashEF560also offers integration with database management software including Oracle Enterprise Manager, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Systems Center and Splunk.

• Additionally,NetAppOnCommandInsightstorage management software provides operational best practices for capacity planning and storage utilization.

• Forprivateclouddeployments,NetAppprovides OpenStack block storage (Cinder) drivers.

Overview:

Aimed at boosting office and employee productivity across organizations in the Middle East, Huawei—a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider—has recently unveiled its latest next-generation full-HD video phone, the eSpace 8950 with plans to offer the flagship device for Middle East enterprises.

According to Huawei, full-touch screen technology is captivating businesses across the world as growing popularity of intelligent office video phones have fostered user habits in using new communication methods. The eSpace 8950 delivers an optimal experience, making enterprise communication more pleasant and efficient with full touch operations. The video phone provides a consistent user experience across computers, smart phones and tablets with its context awareness technology ensuring that users can use Bluetooth to switch between desktop phone terminal and mobile device without dropping off the call. Its Full-touch video conferences deliver an optimal video experience and simplified conference control.

Key features:• TheeSpace8950phonehasa6mmultra-thinbody while the multi-touch design subverts the traditional push-button design. • Ahighlysensitive,In-PlaneSwitching(IPS) touchscreen offers a super-wide viewing angle• TheflattenedUIenablesuserstoperformfrequent operations within three steps. • Withthehands-freefunction,andwhileusing Bluetooth, the voice is automatically switched to the user's mobile phone is the user wishes to leave the office zone.

• TheeSpace8950ensuresthatenterprisescanmanage and control sensitive and essential information to ensure high security.

February 2015 | 33

Overview:

Delivering on its commitment to transform the storage industry

with industry-leading customer value and economics, Dell

announced the global availability of new enterprise class Dell

Storage all-flash array (AFA) configurations starting at only

$25,000 (US). With this launch, Dell offers customers the lowest

entry price for an all-flash mid-range solution by any major

vendor.

The new Dell Storage SC4020 AFA configurations offer an

economical starting point for all-flash performance to support a

wide range of applications and workloads. Dell is now shipping

two options the Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level AFA single-tier

configuration and the Dell Storage SC4020 Flash-Optimised AFA

multi-tier configuration.

Key features:

• TheDellStorageSC4020Entry-LevelAFAsingle-tier

configuration includes six 480GB read-intensive SSDs for a

total of 2.8 terabytes of raw capacity for an advertised street

price of $25,000 (US).

• TheDellStorageSC4020Flash-OptimisedAFAmulti-tier

configuration provides even faster write performance,

while continuing to optimise cost, with six 480GB read-

intensive SSDs, plus an additional six 200GB write-intensive

SSDs for a total of more than 4 terabytes of raw capacity and

an advertised street price of $35,000 (US).

• BothnewAFAconfigurationsarebasedontheDellStorage

SC4020 array, which includes 24 drive bays and dual

controllers in a 2U chassis, plus all standard software,

options, installation and three-years of Dell Copilot support.

• CustomersmaycontinuetoexpandtheirDellStorageSC4020

AFA as an all-flash solution by adding additional read-

intensive or write-intense drives – or achieve additional cost

savings at any time by automatically moving cold data to

one or more optional tiers of traditional spinning disks.

IBM z13Mainframe

Overview:

IBMhas announced the z13—one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built. It delivers scale and economics together with real-time encryption and analytics to help meet the expectations of consumers for speed and safety for trillions of transactions in the mobile economy. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Consumers expect fast, easy and secure mobile transactions. The implication for business is the creation of a secure, high performance infrastructure with sophisticated analytics. IBM Global Financing offerings for the new model z13 include customized Fair Market Value leases with payment deferrals for credit qualified customers that want to upgrade from older models to z13, convert an owned z system to leasing while upgrading, or acquire a net new z13.

Key features:

• z13isthefirstsystemabletoprocess2.5billion transactions a day - equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year.

• z13isthefirstsystemtomakepracticalreal-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale.

• z13isthefirstmainframesystemwithembedded analytics providing real-time insights on all transactions. This capability can help guarantee the ability of the client to run real-time fraud detection on 100 percent of their business transactions by delivering ‘on the fly’ analytic insights that are 17X faster than compared competitive systems at a fraction of the cost.

• WhencombinedwithIBMMobileFirstsolutions, the z13 delivers enhanced performance, availability, analytics and security that will drive optimal mobile user experiences.

• Thez13featurestheworld’sfastestmicroprocessor, 2X faster than the most common server processors, 300 percent more memory, 100 percent more bandwidth and vector processing analytics to speed mobile transactions.

Dell Storage SC Series Entry-Level Flash array

34 | February 2015

IDC predicts that by 2016, 65% of global competitive

strategies will require real-time 3rd Platform IT as a Service (ITaaS). The ability of CIOs and IT organizations to grasp how business wants services that serve actual business needs, not traditional IT components, is significantly altering the ways in which service management is defined as successful.

According to its report, IDC PlanScape: Accelerating IT’s Progress to Business Maturity, 3rd Platform technologies are fundamentally altering how IT organizations function, how business is conducted, and how enterprises compete. This demands restructuring IT to deliver ITaaS 3rd Platform services that are focused on realizing the enterprises' competitive strategies. The ability of IT to immediately achieve a maturing business

Stats & Trends

focus within its strategic planning and execution process is now an imperative.

Additional key findings:

•Withoutquestion,maturing the IT business dimension requires the active participation of top IT management. Equally imperative is to ensure all stakeholders and beneficiaries of IT within the enterprise are kept abreast of the business dimension maturity process and actively solicited for feedback whenever possible.

•Serviceinnovationdemands a multifaceted approach that seeks to ensure that all five maturity dimensions are simultaneously addressed, continually focusing on the least mature process or the bottleneck that is holding up all other maturity dimensions.

Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.8 trillion in 2015, a 2.4

percent increase from 2014; however, this growth rate is down from earlier projections of 3.9 percent, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. The slower outlook for 2015 is largely attributed to the rising U.S. dollar as well as a modest reduction in growth expectations for devices, IT services and telecom services.

Data center systems spending is projected to reach $143 billion in 2015, a 1.8 percent increase from 2014. Growth for the enterprise communications applications and

Worldwide IT Spending on Pace to Grow 2.4 Percent

enterprise network equipment segments of the market have been increased from the previous quarter's forecast, while growth for the servers and external controller-based storage segments has been lowered. These growth fluctuations are also due to a higher than previously anticipated switch to cloud-based services.

In the enterprise software market, spending is on pace to total $335 billion, a 5.5 percent increase from 2014. More price erosion and vendor consolidation is expected in 2015 because of fierce competition between cloud and on-premises software

providers. In particular, in the customer relationship management (CRM) market, a key cloud battleground, seat prices for segments such as sales force automation (SFA) are expected to decline by 25 percent through 2018. This will be caused by incumbent on-premises vendors discounting their cloud offerings heavily to try and maintain their customer base. There will also be increased price competition from cloud offerings in other areas (such as DBMS and application infrastructure and middleware, albeit at a somewhat slower and weaker pace than for CRM.

•RatherthantackleITbusiness-facing objectives through massive project implementations, IDC recommends companies take a "theory of constraints" approach, frequently used within IT as a Service to quickly identify, analyze, and resolve a prioritized impediment (constraint) to IT-business alignment, thereby empowering subsequent

energy and action for a second and third IT-business alignment constraint.

• ITorganizationsthatachieve long-term success will be characterized by a service-centric culture that tracks effectiveness through an "outside in" or customer-focused perspective, rigorous IT competitive analysis, and business-oriented service metrics.

3rd Platform IT services tooffer competitive advantage

“The perfect opportunity to connect with CIOs, CTOs, CSOs”

Sanjeev Walia,Director, Spire Solutions

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