Arabian Computer News - May 2010

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ALIGNING BUSINESS AND IT STRATEGIES FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

An ITP Technology PublicationLicensed by Dubai Media City

BAHRAIN BD1.5 | EGYPT LE15 | JORDAN JD2 KSA SR15 | KUWAIT KD1.5 | OMAN OR1.5

QATAR QR1.5 | UAE DHS15 | UK £5 | USA $8

May 2010Vol. 23 Issue 5

9 771997 770009

I SSN 1997-77000 5

CHIP IMPACTMeasuring the impact of

processors on performance

LOOK TO THE SKIESCloud computing fi nds mixed response from local IT bosses

Our top CIOs reveal their secret recipe for success in 2010

ENTERPRISE ROADMAP

5 EDITOR’S LETTER

7 NEWSAll the latest IT news in the region, including: EMC posts record earnings for Q1; Yahoo! puts $500k into Egypt innovation fund; Google clears up its censorship policy; Indian missions across the world under attack from web hackers; Recycling firm offers cash for mobiles in the UAE; Eros looking for up to $544 million in electronic sales locally; Acer lines up partners for launch of Gateway products; and Qatar joins race for Arabic domain names.

14 WORLD NEWSThe latest IT news from around the world including: HK trade chief calls 3D TVs a ‘gimmick’; top Indian job site hit by phishers; Intel posts record revenue figures for Q1; Ciso completes

News & Views

CONTENTS

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11 19

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HITTING THE (TRADE) MARKFiona Robertson from the Rights Lawyers explores a recent case regarding the use of Google Ad-Words and how it might affect how you use search keywords.

WORLD CONNECTIONSTata Communications is posi-tioning itself to be an indispen-sible partner to operators amid a global surge in data demand. CommsMEA reports.

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Comment

News Analysis

April 2010 | www.itp.net

LOOK TO THE SKIESOn the sidelines of the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation Summit which took place last month in Abu Dhabi, Imthishan Giado finds what the CIOs in attendance think of the burgeoning movement and whether it’s got real substance – or is just more hot air.

May 2010 | www.itp.net002

CONTENTS

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49 INSPECTING GADGETSACN rounds up the latest and greatest in executive gadgets, from Nokia’s new E5 Blackberry-alike, to the real deal, the new Bold2 or 9700 to its friends. We also take a look at the Jabra Stone, a Bluetooth headset which would not look out of place on the beach – literally.

Interviews

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FUTURE VOICEIn its 2009 Voice of the CIO report, IBM spoke to more than 2500 CIOs globally to get their views. Peter Korsten, partner and VP at the IBM Institute for Business Value, explains the technology giant’s findings.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDUREDuring his recent visit to Dubai, David Awcock, group head of technology for Standard Chartered Bank sat down with Imthishan Giado to discuss his future plans for the institution.

ENTERPRISEROADMAP Three of the region’s top CIOs explain how they are building their ideal roadmap for success this year – and how they are learning from the tough times of the past.

CHIP IMPACTFor most enterprises, the processor is the unseen element of IT infrastructure, processing millions of instructions every second, yet it’s still given short shrift. Piers Ford explains why the CPU still matters.

TOUGH AT THE TOPGeorge Bevir from Comms caught up with Ericsson chief executive officer Hans Vestberg when he visited the UAE last month to speak at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, to discuss his direction for the telecoms provider.

CONTENTS

buyout of Tandberg video conferencing outfit; Huawei results show continued growth; Nvidia takes wraps off first Fermi-based graphics cards; and Apple admits that Wi-Fi issues plague new iPad tablet device.

52 PROJECT ROUNDUPThe latest project announcements including: MovenPick Hotel in Saudi Arabia opts for ABB’s Room Master solution; and Juma Al Majid chooses ESET for centralised security.

55 SECRET CIOSecret CIO reveals another of his secrets of success to being the laziest IT professional in human existence. This month, it’s all about the art of blagging your way into user groups.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

005May 2010 | www.itp.net

Imthishan GiadoDeputy Editor

EASE OF USELAST MONTH, MICROSOFT QUIETLYput a gun to the head of one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever seen being developed at the Redwood-based firm and without a hint of remorse, pulled the trigger. And I’m glad that they did.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about, I’m referring to its now-departed Courier dual-screen tablet designed for creative, artistic types. Rendered videos of the proposed device’s UI are still available on YouTube (no one ever laid eyes on the finished product) and truth be told, are very impressive indeed. Microsoft had envisioned a book-shaped device far beyond even what its famous Cupertino rival could deliver; the elegant pen-based interface allowed you to move seamlessly between applications, create notes on the fly, annotate them and then append to ‘swatches’ which can be laid out like so much confetti.

Some may see it as nothing more than a notebook for artists but I think it had real potential for anyone who needed to keep track of multiple projects and were capable of understanding their own handwriting. The interface seemed straight out of Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report, with interface elements completely invisible and swooping into view only when needed, where needed.

But there is, I think, a very good reason why the Courier never came to market and that swoopy interface is the key – and incidentally, also explains why recent developments like cloud computing should be taken with a metric tonne of salt.

Simply put, the Courier promised too much. That interface described an ease of use that might not be possible in this decade, and similarly, cloud computing promises to shift essential services off your servers at the click of a mouse – but it’s just not possible.

Last month, I attended the Cloud Cmputing and Virtualisation summit in Abu Dhabi and listened to speaker after speaker talk about how simple it was to shift to the cloud, the massive cost savings that were possible and how it could dramatically simplify your infrastructure. The audience was receptive, but there were some, like Dubai Aluminium’s famously-outspoken vice president of IT Ahmad Al Mulla, who were considerably less enthused.

“It’s not [that] simple. I don’t care who says whatever, I don’t believe it,” he declared.

I’m inclined to agree with him. To hear about vendors talk about cloud computing is hear tales of a Courier-style future; but the harsh reality is that every enterprise is very different. For the younger organisations, new builds and new datacentres are ripe

for moving to the cloud, but older ones will still require massive amounts of development time to make sense of a proper strategy.

And then there’s costs. Yes, cloud computing has immense potential to reduce your infrastructure needs, but what do you do with the systems you decommission? Scrap them? Redistribute is the obvious answer, but with IT projects being put on hold everywhere, you’re very likely to end up with a load of servers being put in dusty storage rather than put to useful work.

Redistribution of resources is another timebomb of a problem. What do you do with the employees who are no longer maintaining all those systems? The politically-correct thing to say of course, is to put them to work on other projects. But IT staff are not interchangeable widgets, anda server tech is a (generally) a poor fit for application development or a customer-facing role without some serious retraining time. A number of boardrooms might simply take the most judicious option available and slash and burn at the workforce, unless the CIO is tough enough to stand his ground and resist the cost pressures. Most aren’t.

Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic. But as a natural cynic, I remain deeply sceptical of this brave new world being painted by vendors, which seems much like the fanciful rendered drawings on the now-dead Courier. In their rush to market, vendors may need to take a lesson from Microsoft, which eventually killed the device because it couldn’t manage to make sense of what it had in the end. Enterprises and vendors alike should heed that lesson.

NEWS


NEWS

Numbers

$272 million The amount UAE telco Du plans to raise through a rights issue to support future growth.

12% The percentage by which IT spending will increase in 2010, according to analysts IDC.

Quotes

“When we receive those requests, we examine them closely to ensure they comply with the law, and if we think they’re overly broad, we attempt to narrow them down.”– Rachel Whetstone, VP of Global

Communications and Public Affairs at Google, clarifying the firm’s global censorship policy.

“We assess that computers at the Embassy of India, Kabul, the Embassy of India, Moscow, the Consulate General of India, Dubai, and the High Commission of India in Abuja, Nigeria were compromised based on the documents exfiltrated by the attackers,” – the Shadows in the Cloud report, describing alleged attacks by Chinese hackers on a number of Indian diplomatic missions around the world.

MONTH IN...

Regional and global industry news

PLAN

EMC POSTS RECORD EARNINGS FOR Q1; REVENUES UP 23% FROM Q1 ‘09 EMC HAS POSTED ITS SECOND consecutive quarter of record reve-nue, with consolidated revenue in Q1 up 23% to $3.9 billion com-pared to Q1 09.

Net income rose by 92% year-on-year, to reach $373 million, while the company also hit record quar-terly operating cash flow of $1.3 billion and record quarterly free cash flow of $1.1 billion.

The company attributed the suc-cess to strong growth strategies for core markets. EMC’s Information Infrastructure division, which includes storage, RSA security, content management and archiving business grew 22% year-on-year in product and service revenue, reaching $3.3 billion, while the

HEWLETT-PACKARD HAS MADEan unexpected push into the smart-phone market with its acquisition of US-based Palm in a deal worth $1.2 billion.

Palm, the makers of smartphones and the Palm webOS mobile plat-form, have been struggling to make a profit for some time now. They posted a net loss of $22 million in their latest Q3 results but the figure reflects a better performance com-pared to the same quarter last year that saw losses amounting to a total of $98 million.

HP says the acquisition of Palm will ‘accelerate HP’s growth within the more than $100 billion con-nected mobile device market’ – one

PLAN

Tucci (left): Our private cloud strategy and focus on four multi-billion dollar markets – each expected to experience rapid growth for many years to come – are resonating very well with customers.

Backup and Recovery Systems Division (BRS), EMC Data Domain and Avamar next-generation back-up and recovery products each grew over 100% on a year-over-year basis.

Virtualisation leader VMware, majority owned by EMC, contrib-uted $632 million to EMC’s bal-ance sheet, up 34% from Q1 2009.

Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and CEO commented: “EMC is off to a strong start in 2010, turning in the best first quarter in company his-tory with record first-quarter reve-nue, high double-digit profit growth and all-time record free cash flow. Our private cloud strat-egy and focus on four multi-billion dollar markets – each expected to

experience rapid growth for many years to come – are reso-nating well with customers. We are confident in our ability to lead the next IT wave.”

David Goulden, EMC EVP and CFO, said: “During the first quarter, we saw customers move forward with increased confidence, focusing not only on cost cutting initiatives, but beginning new innovative proj-ects in their traditional and virtual data centre infrastruc-tures. This helped us clearly achieve the ‘triple play’ we projected last quarter by gain-ing market share while invest-ing for the future and increas-ing profitability.”

HP BUYS PALM FOR $1.2BNthat is currently dominated by Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones.

HP is the latest PC and notebook manufacturer to enter the smart-phone market following the likes of Dell and Acer. While Dell’s Mini 3 handsets are confirmed only for the Chinese market, Acer’s smart-phones are available in several key local markets, including the Middle East region.

“Palm’s innovative operating sys-tem provides an ideal platform to expand HP’s mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connect-ed devices,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal

Systems Group, HP. “And, Palm possesses significant IP assets and has a highly skilled team. The smartphone market is large, profitable and rapidly growing, and companies that can pro-vide an integrated device and experience command a higher share. Advances in mobility are offering significant opportuni-ties, and HP intends to be a leader in this market.”

May 2010 | www.itp.net

NEWS

YAHOO! PUTS $500K IN EGYPT

GOOGLE CLEARS UP CENSORSHIP

PLAN

PEOPLE

UAE RANKED FIRST FOR ICT READINESS IN REGIONTHE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES has been named the most ‘net-worked’ country regionally in a new study by global business school Insead that examines the link between ICT readiness and economic growth.Global Information Technology Report for 2009/2010, jointly published by the World Economic Forum, uses a Networked Readiness Index (NRI) to find how prepared countries around the world are to use ICT effec-tively in three areas: general busi-ness, regulatory and infrastruc-ture environment for ICT; the readiness of key stakeholder groups to use and benefit from ICT; and the actual usage of the latest information and communi-cation technologies available.

The key is to find out how ICT acts “as an enabler of a more eco-nomically, environmentally and socially sustainable world in the aftermath of the most serious economic crisis in decades”, the study states.

The UAE has been climbing progressively higher with each edition of Insead’s report – In 2008/2009 the country was ranked 27 globally and the year before it was placed at 29.

YAHOO! AND EGYPT-BASEDNGO Nahdet El Mahrousa have launched a campaign called ‘Social Innovation Starts with YOU’ that hopes to inspire and motivate young Egyptians to be social entrepreneurs.

The campaign is in line with the U.S. Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship that will take place on April 26-27, 2010 in Washington D.C., where Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang will deliver a keynote speech on how the Internet can positively transform lives, societies, and economies in Arab communities.

From April, two Egyptian social entrepreneurs between the ages of 21 and 35 years will be featured on

the campaign’s website, sharing their stories and offering advice to future entrepreneurs. This will continue till the end of June so that up to ten entrepreneurs are fea-tured, with visitors voting for the entrepreneur that they think has made the biggest potential impact on their communities.

The winner will be invited to be a judge for the campaign’s Social Innovation Competition, which is also expected to kick off on June 2nd. For the contest, Yahoo! and Nahdet El Mahrousa will invite people across the country to be the next generation of innovators based on new ideas in the fields of education, health, environment, and a special ‘wildcard’ category.

SEARCH GIANT GOOGLE has clarified its global censorship pol-icy following its high-profile deci-sion to stop censoring search results in China and revealed that no Gulf country has approached them to remove specific content or disclose user data as yet.

Google products, including Blogger and YouTube, have been blocked in 25 of the 100 coun-tries where the company offers its services, with the firm ‘regu-larly’ receiving requests from governments around the world to restrict or remove certain content from their products.

“When we receive those requests, we examine them close-ly to ensure they comply with the law, and if we think they’re over-ly broad, we attempt to narrow them down. Where possible, we are also transparent with our users about what content we have been required to block or remove so they understand that they may not be getting the full picture,” explains Rachel Whetstone, VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google.

Google recently released a map depicting which government agencies asked them to remove content or provide data on spe-cific users. Though the figures

ETISALAT ROLLS OUT HSPA+ NETWORK TO CITIES IN UAE Operator Etisalat has completed the roll out of its HSPA+ mobile network to cities in the UAE.

Senior VP of marketing at Etisalat, Khalifa Al Shamsi (below), said: “With the exponential growth of smartphones, UAE residents are embracing wireless data and services like never before.”

BITS AND BYTES

IDC: MENA IT SPENDING SET TO GROW 12% IN 2010 IT spending in the Middle East and North Africa region is set to grow at four times the global rate this year, according to new research from analysts.

The MENA region is set to see IT spending grow 12% in 2010, compared to the global average of 3%, according to IDC, a global market intelligence company that specialises in information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets.

DU AIMS TO RAISE $272MN WITH MAY RIGHTS ISSUEDu plans to raise $272.2 million through a rights issue, with the capital used to fund an accelerated growth strategy.

An extraordinary general meeting will be held in May to approve the increase in the company’s share capital and the issue of new shares to shareholders on a pro rata basis, the company added in a official statement.

Yahoo! has revealed it plans to contribute $500,000 to the cam-paign, providing nearly $250,000 in monetary grants to the ten winners selected as part of the Social Innovation Competition, who will also be receiving training and men-toring support over the course of three years to ensure their ideas are transformed into reality.

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Yahoo will provide $500k to the innovation campaign.

are not meant to indicate whether Google complied with those requests, countries including Australia, Canada, India, the United States of Ameria and the United Kingdom all feature on the list. Gulf countries, however, are noticeably absent.

While that may lead some to believe that statistics for Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been left out, Joanne Kubba, manager of MENA global com-munications and public affairs at Google, clarified to itp.net that that is not the case and there have been no requests for remov-al of content or the disclosure of user data from countries in the Arab world.

Google deals with the the issue of controversial content internal-ly in different ways depending on the product. Content plat-forms such as YouTube have the most restrictive policies because “they are commercial products intended to generate revenue.”

Out of all three, Google’s Search is considered to be the least restricted with the company only removing content in ‘narrow cir-cumstances’ such as those related child pornography, links to copy-righted material and spam.

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NEWS

010

PRODUCT

PLAN

QATAR HAS JOINED A GROW-ING list of Middle Eastern coun-tries eager to have internet domains written entirely in Arabic. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that Qatar, along with Palestine and Tunisia have passed the second step of a detailed three-part registration process.

“This is indeed good news for those applicants in their endeav-ours to getting their country names in Arabic as TLD (top-level domain) strings,” commented Baher Esmat, regional manager for ICANN. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates already passed this stage in January.

The registration process includes initial preparation, evaluating the string submitted (for example ‘.emarat’ written in Arabic for the UAE) and then finally submitting it to the DNS root zone, managed by

QATAR JOINS RACE FOR ARABIC DOMAIN NAMES

GOLDMAN SACHS DOWNGRADES ZAIN

TWO OF THE GULF’S LEADINGtelecom operators have been downgraded by Goldman Sachs. The US investment bank down-graded Kuwait’s Zain to ‘sell’ from ‘neutral’, while Qatari incumbent Qtel saw its rating changed to ‘neutral’ from ‘buy’.

An analysts with Goldman Sachs said in a note that the mar-ket had reacted “too positively” to Zain’s deal to sell its African assets to Bharti Airtel, and added that the Kuwaiti company had one of the lowest real growth outlooks among its peers in cen-tral Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa due to a deteriorating home market.

Meanwhile, Qtel, which faced fresh competition in its home market last year, had its rating cut and its 12-month price esti-mate reduced by 21% to 184 riyals with Goldman Sachs cit-ing slow growth.

CHANGE OF GUARD AT THE TOP OF LENOVO MIDDLE EASTPC vendor Lenovo has officially installed Ali Al Amine as its regional general manager for the Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan (MEEP), effective immediately.

Al Amine – who joined the company last May as transactional business director – had been carrying out the GM role on an acting basis since Khaled Kamel resigned from the company to pursue other opportunities earlier this year.

BITS AND BYTES

ZAIN PLANS ‘COMPREHENSIVE’ MANAGEMENT RESTRUCTURING Telecom operator Zain is set to reshuffle its management team, according to the firm’s CEO, with redundancies likely and staff expected to be moved out of the firm’s main group headquarters in Bahrain.

Zain chief executive Nabil bin Salama said in a statement that the company was undertaking a “comprehensive” restructuring of its management team “in preparation for the next phase”.

OPTIMUS PRIMED FOR LOCAL STOCKING OUTSIDE UAENetworking equipment distributor Optimus Technology and Telecom is to begin holding Avaya stocks in Egypt, Qatar and Pakistan,

Meera Kaul Sawhney (below), MD at Optimus, felt the time was right to strengthen its logistics capabilities.

NEWS

RETAILER CELLUCOM CLOSES UP SHOP FOR GOOD IN UAELEADING MOBILE PHONEretailer Cellucom has closed all of its stores in the United Arab Emirates and its chief executive Arun Nagar has fled to Africa as a legal wrangle ensues.

The news, which was broken by UAE daily The National but said that Cellucom stores throughout the country began closing in September 2009 after its major stakeholder Al Rostamani Group filed for liqui-dation of the retailer. According to the Abu-Dhabi based paper, the retailer was closed by the Al Rostamani Group because it “could no longer sustain itself as a going concern”.

“Al Rostamani Group has acted responsibly in the interests of the Cellucom creditors and share-holders in filing the liquidation proceedings,” the company was quoted as saying in a statement.

the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a department within ICANN.

Egypt, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the UAE are at the last stage that involves delega-tion with the IANA. Esmat explains this crucial step is about getting the name (TLD) into the root (Internet root servers), so that when you type in an address like itp.net, it can be accessed because .net is already in the root and itp is a domain regis-tered under .net.

While Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates passed through the stages ahead of Qatar and Palestine, Esmat says that that’s not an indication of which regional country will be the first to intro-duce Arabic domains.

“It is very difficult to estimate how long the delegation process would take, because it simply var-ies from one case to another,” adds

Esmat, though the new internet extensions are expected to come online in approved countries some-time this year.

ICANN made a decision to end the exclusive use of Latin charac-ters for internet addresses in October 2009 and shortly after began to accept applications from different countries that wished to use characters from their native languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Japanese for an entire internet address, instead of just parts of addresses as in the case of the .com or .net subdomains.

Presently, ICANN has received a total of 19 requests from coun-tries that want to use internet domain names in a language other than English.

Cellucom CEO Arun Nagar is reported to have left the country last year and is now said to be in Tanzania, expanding the busi-ness on African soil. The compa-ny has operations across the Gulf, as well as Africa and India, with more than 25 outlets in the UAE at one time.

Al Rostamani’s liquidation applications are still subject to a final decision by the Dubai Courts, according to a related Gulf News report.

“Al Rostamani Group can make no further comment at this stage. It is worth noting that the appli-cation to liquidate Cellucom does not reflect in any material way on the financial position of the Al Rostamani Group or any of its group companies, nor on the con-tinuation of any of their respec-tive businesses,” a statement from the company read.

NEWS


NEWS

011

UAE FIRM LAUNCHES IPHONE APP FOR FILMSNAVIFLIX IS A MOBILE applica-tion that gives users instant access to real time movie listings and show times for all cinemas across the UAE.

Movie-goers will have the ability to browse movie listings from all Reel Cinemas, Cinestar and Grand Cinema locations, with the appli-cation tapping into the iPhone’s core location based technology to find theaters closest to the user. Information about films can also be sorted by movie title, location or show times, and users can also mark movies as favourites, read film synopsis, cast lists and view upcoming trailers.

On the launch of the application, Dinesh Lalvani, managing partner of Flip Media says, “We are always looking for ways to harness the advances of mobile technology to benefit consumers. Most of us here at Flip are big movie buffs, and we saw a void in the market for useful, on-the-go information.”

“The UAE is the region’s second-largest film market, with gross box office receipts of US$74 million. Those figuresmakes mobile apps a strategic point to reach consum-ers,” he says.

PRODUCT

PLAN

EUROPEAN PHONE recycling company Zonzoo has just entered the Middle Eastern market through a joint venture with Enviroserve, the region’s only government-endorsed e-scrap recycling and management firm.

The 50/50 joint venture between the two companies offers a ‘cash for phones’ promise, mirroring a similar recycling initiative by Emax announced a couple of months ago. It’s the latest green effort to tackle e-waste, which is considered to be a serious problem in the region.

Customers can log on to the Zonzoo.me website, which details the cash amounts offered for dif-ferent cellphone models, and ini-tiate the trade online. An Aramex

RECYCLING FIRM: CASH FOR MOBILES

SENSITIVE INFORMATIONabout India’s relations with the Middle East has been stolen and computers at the Consulate General of India in Dubai com-promised in a cyber espionage attack blamed on people in China, according to a report by research-ers from the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto.

The Shadows in the Cloud report details a cyber espionage attack that involves Indian nation-al security information being sto-len along with 1,500 e-mails in total from the Dalai Lama’s office and several other sensitive docu-ments that were marked ‘secret’ and ‘confidential’.

Researchers, who have been monitoring the hacking for the last eight months, said the attack was traced back to servers in China and specifically to people based in the city of Chengdu, but that there was no definitive evi-dence the Chinese government was involved.

Aside from the Joint Intelligence Committee in India and corpora-

INDIAN MISSIONS UNDER ATTACK FROM HACKERS

SAUDI HAS NEW PLAN TO FIGHT TRAFFIC CRIME Saudi Arabia is set to introduce a new electronic traffic control system called Saher to improve road safety in the country.

According to estimates from a national study, there are 9 million traffic violations in the Kingdom every year with 18 road-related deaths happening in a day. Last year alone, 6,458 people died on the streets of Saudi Arabia.

BITS AND BYTES

APTEC’S WORLD CUP TREAT FOR SAUDI RESELLERSTrack Distribution has commenced a ‘mega promotion’ that will eventually see some of its Saudi reseller customers earn an all-expenses-paid trip to this year’s FIFA World Cup set to be staged in South Africa.

News of the promotion follows the recent launch of the Aptec-owned distributor’s Cisco business in KSA after its contract was expanded to include the kingdom.

SYMANTEC ADDS INSIGHT TO TACKLE UNSTRUCTURED DATASymantec has launched a new solution to investigate unstructured data to help companies to better manage the unstructured business data.

Johnny Karam (below),MENA regional director for Symantec, says: “Unstructured critical data continues to be problematic to secure.”

courier agent will then be dis-patched to collect the used mobile and, within days, Zonzoo will give the customer the agreed cash value for the mobile phone only if it is in working condition. This can include credit to an Etisalat mobile phone account, payment to a bank account or a Western Union transfer.

Zonzoo will sell working mobile phones to developing countries in Africa, South America, Asia and India. Phones that don’t make the cut go through a refining process to extract gold, silver and other materials which are sold for use in new products.

In addition to paying consumers the value of their phone, Zonzoo will also donate 2% of the phone’s

value to the charities Senses and Gulf For Good.

Zonzoo managed to recycle nearly two million mobile phones last year and has a goal of tripling that figure in 2010 from its operations in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Portugal and Austria and now from the Middle East as well.

tions such as Tata being affected, diplomatic missions including the Consulate General of India in Dubai have fallen prey to the widespread attack.

“We assess that computers at the Embassy of India, Kabul, the Embassy of India, Moscow, the Consulate General of India, Dubai, and the High Commission of India in Abuja, Nigeria were compro-mised based on the documents exfiltrated by the attackers,” reads the Shadows in the Cloud report.

Their research found that confi-dential documents, diplomatic correspondence, documents con-taining personal, financial and travel information on embassy and diplomatic staff, as well as “numerous” visa applications were stolen in the attack.

“In addition, they [documents] contain confidential information taken from Indian embassies regarding India’s international relations with assessment of activ-ities in West Africa, Russia/Commonwealth of Independent States and the Middle East,” the report adds.


NEWS

012

NEWS

ACER LINES UP PARTNERS FOR UPCOMING GATEWAY LAUNCH

PEOPLE

PLAN

GATEWAY PCS AND storage systems could be available in the Middle East from as early as May if Acer succeeds in con-cluding discussions with a series of partners it has lined up to market the products, Channel Middle East can reveal.

Acer has re-hired its one-time country sales manager for Saudi Arabia, Sunil Nair, to launch the Gateway business in the MEA region. He is currently in the process of building a channel partner network from scratch.

The vendor is looking at two types of partner to carry the commercial-focused Gateway line-up, which consists of a complete range of servers, stor-age systems and PC clients.

“Our primary focus is on what we call enterprise-class partners and these will be large partners who represent our products on a back-to-back basis in large deals and government tenders,” explained Nair, whose most

RETAIL SUPPLIER EROSGroup believes its target of generating US$544m in sales by the end of this year is achievable if forthcoming plans to open a series of new outlets come to fruition.

Eros serves as the regional distributor for electronics giant Hitachi. It also sells a host of other brands through its retail chains, including the well-known Samsung, Hitachi, Taurus and Lennox.

Deepak Babani, CEO at Eros Group, says the company has been eyeing the milestone for some time, adding that achiev-ing the target depends on its ability to get closer to custom-ers by expanding its existing retail operations.

“We intend to open three to

Babani: We intend to open three to five outlets in UAE and have already opened a new warehouse in Abu Dhabi to address consumer demands.

EROS EYEING $544M IN LOCAL ELECTRONIC SALES

recent management role has been with distributor BDL Gulf.

“The second category is coun-try-specific distribution part-ners, which will have the rights to stock and sell. For the time being we are looking at partners with a lot of experience selling servers and storage,” he added.

Discussions with prospective partners are already at their third stage and Nair remains optimistic that the company will be in a position to confirm at least 10 tie-ups within the next few weeks.

“During the initial phase we are looking at countries such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, and we will appoint partners there immediately,” he said. “I am also looking at Egypt and South Africa.”

The Middle East roll-out of Gateway, which Acer purchased for US$710m in 2007, follows on from last year’s launch in

Western Europe, where the product range is largely distrib-uted by Tech Data.

Nair insists partners that embrace the brand will gain access to the latest enterprise technology and attractive mar-gin opportunities.

“The advantage for the chan-nel is that they would be deal-ing with a company which is very well versed in channel go-to-market strategy and can offer an excellent product profile and product range that was not pres-ent earlier,” he said.

five outlets in UAE and have already opened a new ware-house in Abu Dhabi to address the growing consumer demands in the Emirate,” said Babani. “Regionally, we are also looking at setting up branch offices in Qatar, Bahrain and Oman.”

If Eros is able to meet its sales objectives then it would represent an impressive 25% growth on the (US$435m) turnover that it claims to have made last year.

The company can certainly expect its main vendor part-ners to push it hard as it sets about accomplishing its quest. Earlier, Hitachi’s management in the region revealed that their aggressive future expan-sion plans for the Gulf also

include achieving growth of at least 50% during the next three years.

Eros Group now oversees 28 retail outlets in the UAE after launching its latest showroom in the recently-opened Mirdif City Centre mall.

ACN 225x300mm.ai 1 4/27/10 4:32 PMACN 225x300mm.ai 1 4/27/10 4:32 PM

014

WORLD NEWS

May 2010 | www.itp.net

TECHNOLOGY

PLAN

EASSY CABLE SET FOR JUNE LAUNCH TO LINK AFRICAOne of the biggest submarine cable systems linking Africa to the rest of the world, the East African Submarine Cable System (Eassy), is set to go live by the end of June, the CEO of the project’s largest investor has confirmed.

Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC, the biggest single investor in Eassy, confirmed that the project was on schedule after the cable system landed in Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania.

FACEBOOK MAY SHARE USER INFORMATION WITH OTHERSFacebook’s updated privacy policy states that personal details of over 400 million of its users could be shared with select sites that have been ‘pre-approved’.

Third-party applications are known to require a “small set of basic information” about users in order to provide a more relevant experience, but Facebook says it could also be shared with certain partner sites by default.

MOZAMBIQUE TO GAIN THIRD MOBILE OPERATOR SOONThe government of Mozambique has issued a tender for a third mobile licence in a move that will open up competition with the country’s existing mobile operators Mcel, the mobile arm of incumbent operator Telecomunicaçöes de Moçambique, and Vodacom.

Mozambique’s government, which was originally expected to launch the tender by the end of 2009, put a reserve price of US$25 million on the license.

BITS AND BYTES

K. B. CHAN, CHAIRMAN of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council Electronic and Electrical Appliances Industries Advisory Committee, says that 3D televi-sions are a ‘gimmick’ and will be slow to take off.

Speaking to itp.net at the 2010 Spring edition of the Hong Kong Electronics Expo which took place from April 13 – 16, Chan said that 3D TV is a fad right now with all the TV manufacturers saying they must have one, and that there are serious challenges to be consid-ered aside from the high price fac-tor and the additional 3D glasses needed to view them.

“The difficulty is the content because there’s very little real 3D content. When you make the movie or the TV serial, it’s made the 3D way. So a lot of content will

be 2D computer-converted into 3D, but that is not a very good pic-ture because in a 2D picture the depth information is not there and you have to use a computer to guess that,” he said.

Predicting that the 3D TV trend will take off, but slowly, Chan says that the first major shift in the tele-vision industry will be LED backlit TVs, which also brings in the new concept of Dynamic TVs which will basically see a front LCD screen backlit by 1,000 LEDs, each responsible for specific colours offering an unbeatable contrast ratio of 2 million to 1.

Aside from TVs, Chan also pre-dicts that the iPad will “cause a stir” and that nobody can come close to Apple just yet. While none of Apple’s products can be consid-ered a technological breakthrough,

Chan believes that Steve Jobs does a great job with marketing.

“He doesn’t have to design any-thing because you have one hun-dred thousand apps. By the time we sit down here next year, it may be two hundred thousand. It’s growing every day,” Chan said.

HK TRADE CHIEF: 3D TVS A ‘GIMMICK’

LEADING INDIAN JOB SITE Naukri.com was the target of a phishing attack designed to trick users into revealing their sensi-tive information.

In late March, Symantec noticed a phishing website that “took advantage of the brand of a popu-lar Indian job site”. Though Symantec does not reveal which job site was targeted, the screen-shot sample provided mimics the design of Naukri.com, touted as being ‘India’s No.1 job site’.

The phishing page, designed to look like the original, steals employers’ login credentials which are then used to send tar-geted spam messages to employ-

ers asking them to pay an amount to upgrade their subscription or continue their access to particu-lar recruitment solutions.

The link provided in the spam message asks for confidential information including credit card and PIN numbers.

TOP INDIAN JOB SITE HIT BY PHISHERS

MONTH IN PICTURES

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg delivers a keynote at the f8 Developer Conference.

The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing shows off the new $100 note.

Two Frenchmen show off a harness they have invented for disabled dogs.

A passenger uses his laptop in Hong Kong airport during the ash delays.

WORLD NEWS


CORPORATE

Cisco will now compete head to head with US video conferencing giant Polycom, which is now the only remaining significant inde-pendent player in the field.

Cisco said it was working to ensure its video conferencing sys-tems become fully interoperable with third-party systems and PC video clients, including Microsoft

CISCO COMPLETES TANDBERG BUYOUTBITS AND BYTES

HUAWEI RESULTS SHOW CONTINUED GROWTHHuawei has reported strong financial results for 2009, posting a 19% growth in revenues and an increase in net profit margin of 12.2%.

The company continued to grow despite a slowdown in spending by telecom network operators, citing growth in its home market of China, and ongoing global expansion.

NVIDIA UNVEILS FIRST LINE OF FERMI PRODUCTSNVIDIA has officially launched its new flagship graphics processors, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470, the first products in its Fermi line of GPU products.

‘Fermi’ is the next generation CUDA architecture that is said to help deliver supercomputing features and performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power of most traditional CPU-only servers.

APPLE ADMITS WI-FI WOES EXIST WITH IPAD TABLETLess than a month after the official launch of the new Apple iPad, hundreds have already complained about issues with connecting the device to the internet using its built-in Wi-Fi connection.

Most complaints refer to the iPad’s Wi-Fi signal being weak, while others say they are unable to join their network after iPads are restarted. The company has detailed remedies to the problem with one solutions being to “move closer to the Wi-Fi router”.

INTEL POSTS RECORD REVENUES FOR Q1

CORPORATE

INTEL has reported its highest ever first quarter revenue, with income growth of over 400% cit-ing the mobility sector as the source of strong growth.

The company posted revenue of $10.3 billion, up over 400% from Q1 09, with operating income of $3.4 billion and net income of $2.4 billion, up from $629 mil-lion reported in the same quarter last year.

The growth was driven by record mobile microprocessor revenue, although PC Client Group revenue was flat, with Data Center Group revenue down 8% and other Intel Architecture group revenue down 9%.

CISCO has completed its acquisi-tion of Norwegian video confer-encing specialist Tandberg, for $3.3 billion, in a move that will allow the networking giant to compete head to head with US video conferencing rival Polycom.

Tandberg’s entire video confer-encing portfolio is now part of Cisco’s telepresence portfolio, and Fredrik Halvorsen, the former CEO of Tandberg, has been appointed senior vice president and leader of the new TelePresence Technology Group within Cisco.

The acquisition is a significant step for Cisco, which had previ-ously lacked a presence in the wider video conferencing sector despite investing heavily in its high end telepresence product. With the addition of Tandberg’s full video conferencing portfolio,

“The investments we’re making in leading edge technology are delivering the most compelling product line-up in our history,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. “These leadership prod-ucts combined with growing worldwide demand and contin-ued outstanding execution result-ed in Intel’s best first quarter ever. Looking forward, we’re optimistic about our business as Intel prod-ucts are designed into a variety of new and exciting segments.”

Average selling price (ASP) for microprocessors was slightly up, although it was flat if Intel Atom microprocessors were excluded. Intel Atom microprocessor and

Office Communicator. The firm also added that it was now plan-ning to make its Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) architecture open source, and said it will publish the TIP source code libraries by July 1, 2010. Nine of the major videoconferencing and telepresence vendors have licensed TIP so far, Cisco said.

chipset revenue of $355 million was down 19%.

R&D plus MG&A spending of $3.1 billion was higher than the company’s prior expectations.

Chinese paramilitary guard the entrance to the World Expo in Shanghai.

A blogger demonstrates the iPad at Republica 2010 in Berlin.

Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas speaks during the first Twitter conference.

German firm Mobi’s WePad aims to go head to head with Apple’s tablet.

COMMENT


that promoting the image of fake Louis Vuitton alongside real Louis Vuitton was not appropriate for their branding. Louis Vuitton in France did something about it and sued Google for the practice on the basis that it constituted an infringement of the existing Louis Vuitton trademarks.

The case ended up in the European Court of Justice which handed its decision down recently. Undeniably, this was an important case for Google and, continuing its wonderful stream of business luck, Google did win the case. Essentially, the court held that Google itself was not breaching the trademarks of Louis Vuitton and the other plaintiffs in this case, as it was providing the service but not the content that was included in that service. This content was obviously supplied by third parties.

Before brand owners begin crying in their pretzels about a decision that allows retailers of fake goods to use their trade marks in order to attract attention to their services, I do want to add that the European Court of Justice did indicate that Google was, in this case, simply the wrong defendant. The court stated that the people who were inserting words like Louis Vuitton into this search criteria were potentially vulnerable to a claim of trade mark infringement although it could not, on the facts in front of it, make a decision on that matter.

So, a keen trade mark owner might still try and chase the people who are actually using the trade marks by inserting them in the advertising service Ad Words. This will be a less desirable option for brand owners given the difficulty of locating these people and the possibility that they could simply disappear overnight leaving the brand owner with high legal fees.

The bottom line is that the use of the trade mark of another party as a key word in your search engine is a practice that is potentially going to attract attention and that attention may not be always desirable. It may end up involving lawyers.

you plenty of information but it also gives you a sponsored link like “Go to the moon.”

Google in accepting advertising in this area, was reasonably relaxed about the key words that they allowed advertisers to use in order to appear as sponsored links. For example, if you sold Louis Vuitton handbags, even though you are not Louis Vuitton, you could use Louis Vuitton as a key word in order to attract potential buyers to your website. Interestingly, if you were the seller of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, you could use the key word of Louis Vuitton in order to attract potential buyers to your sales website.

Louis Vuitton, unsurprisingly, took exception to this practice. No doubt felt

HITTING THE (TRADE)MARK Fiona Robertson from the Rights Lawyers explores a recent case that discussed the use of Ad Words in Google, and the way that it still might affect how you and your users employ keywords in web search engines.

NO ONE CAN DOUBT THE POWER and strength of the Google brand. It has moved into the vernacular. “Google it”, we say to each other without so much as a blink of the eye. Its power as a search engine cannot be underestimated – anybody looking for services anywhere in the world will, in all likelihood, just go to Google, stick in the key word and press search. If you’re marketing a product, you will know that there are ways to be high on the returned list in Google searching.

One way to be noticed in Google search is the use of Ad Words. An advertiser can pay to come up on screen, as a sponsored link, whenever certain words are typed into Google. So for example, typing in “space” will give

Robertson: Using another party’s trademark could attract the wrong kind of attention.

NEWS ANALYSIS


LOOK TO THE SKIES

On the sidelines of the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation Summit in Abu Dhabi, Imthishan Giado finds what CIOs think of the burgeoning movement and whether it’s got

real substance – or is just more hot air.

It’s very simple. If your data is compromised, that’s a breach of contract. If your system is not available when you want it, that’s a breach of contract. There have to be heavy penalties. The number one thing you will suffer from, especially in the Middle East is your reputation. Once your image is tarnished, you’re out of business. Slowly, your customers are going to be impacted and affected. The name you carry is very important


NEWS ANALYSIS

having all of that expensive up front capital expenditure,” he states.

“In other parts of the world, the larger companies went in first. Here, there will probably be a wave of SMEs. The issue is education, awareness and understanding. That’s going to be the challenge for the vendors and organisations providing cloud computing – to package the services in a nice simple easy to consume way,” adds Shah.

Of course, the key to success is adoption. Nevertheless, cloud computing has yet to see mass acceptance in the Middle East where few are willing to be pioneers – or as many believe, scapegoats – in the pursuit of progress. Sabbagh’s team pushed forward with a software-as-a-service based CRM, but it was an uphill struggle.

“The challenge is that it’s something new to us,” he admits. “We have not seen real success stories in the region so the risk was high for us in that dimension. On the opposite side, we have a strong business case that has pushed us to get into that direction. That has led us to a lot of savings in terms of our overall capital expenditure and budgeting.

“You have seen what has happened in the last two years at the time of

He’s not the only one to maintain such faith, either. Mohammad Shah, vice president of technology for infrastructure and services at Madinah Knowledge Economic City, who also participated in the event, believes that though it’s early days yet, the tech will succeed in breaking through to the mainstream elements of the market. But, he cautions, large enterprises may not necessarily lead the way.

“The exciting thing about cloud computing is that there is potentially going to be a huge demand because of the nature of technology in the region. We have a large number of SME businesses. Cloud computing really gives you that affordability of moving into new technology without

“CLOUD COMPUTING HAS REACHEDa level that adoption is now a defacto situation. Any new investment should get into cloud computing now.”

Judging from the confidence of that statement, one would normally associate it as coming from a technology vendor that’s planning to set up shop in the region, or at the very least comes from someone with stakes in one of the big regional telcos. But in fact, you’d be wrong, because these are the words of an ACN Award-winning CIO who has been among the pioneers of the movement in the Middle East – Zaki Sabbagh, CIO of Saudi industrial titan Zamil industrial and a speaker at the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation Summit in Abu Dhabi.

This year’s event was held at Abu Dhabi’s new Yas Island circuit.

Cloud computing really gives us this benefit that we have not really seen in the past of very compelling returns and relatively low risks. In the old days when you implement a solution, there’s a lot of capex so that if you have a failure or a problem, it’s a cost. With cloud computing, there’s a much lower risk associated with it

NEWS ANALYSIS


recession. IT budgets have dropped – believe me, my IT investment budget was cut by 63%. We were forced to be more innovative in terms of selecting better approaches in order to keep delivering better IT solutions,” he declares.

There’s little doubt that cash is a major driver behind the movement to cloud computing. But as KEC’s Shah explains, it’s cash, coupled with cost.

“With the problems of the global credit crunch, everybody talks about cash being a most critical thing. The beauty of cloud computing here in the region is that it kills two birds with one stone. You don’t need a lot of upfront cash because you don’t have all that upfront capex and infrastructure. Secondly, from a cost point of view, because it’s a pay-as-you-go usage model, you’re only paying for a technology utility. When you do your ROI and TCO, it’s going to be very appealing on both elements,” he says.

Cost savings are the headline act for cloud computing – but how much is realistically possible, away from overly optimistic vendor projections?

Sabbagh provides some perspective: “The direct savings are minimal because the initial cost is a big cost. But the indirect savings are huge. In terms of IaaS – infrastructure-as-a-service – we have built our private cloud and now the capacity planning process has been improved drastically. We have been able to reduce the number of required servers. For example, we started with ten servers, now we have been able to save more than 20 servers out of it. Some of them were moved to a test environment, some ended up being placed in remote areas – others were just retired.”

DECISION TIMESo the hype has convinced you, the head of the technology unit. You’ve heard the business cases and the potential cost savings, done the surveys and considered all the angles. It’s a gamble, but it’s a gamble with huge potential cost benefits.

But the reality is that you do not make the call – the board of directors does. They control the ever-shrinking budget – and this, in most cases is where cloud computing hits a solid wall. Quite simply, few within the boardroom understand the concept.

“Cloud computing is a very technical term. When it comes to the

looked at getting better returns from technology. Cloud computing really gives us this benefit that we have not really seen in the past of very compelling returns and relatively low risks. In the old days when you implement a solution, there’s a lot of capex so that if you have a failure or a problem, it’s a cost. With cloud computing, there’s a much lower risk associated with it,” he continues.

The other aspect which many CIOs neglect during the rush to cloud computing is whether there is enough security with your data residing in the cloud. That situation varies depending on the criticality of your data. For Emad Khatib, CIO of UAE-based bureau Emcredit, there can be no compromise, but even he will admit that that many are too fearful, and there are plenty of advantages.

“People have to get away from the traditional thinking, where they

board, it is not presented the way we discuss today. We come to them with a different approach – a model, a justification. We write it in a business case,” he says.

Shah agrees, but notes that many CIOs themselves often lack proper understanding of the concept: “At the moment, the understanding is at its very initial stages – not only at the boardroom, but at the CIO table. It’s a paradigm shift and it’s very conceptual. When we come from technical backgrounds and are used to a world of physical comprehension, we’re not really comfortable in the conceptual realm of things. So at the CIO table, there still needs to be more education, more grasping of the key benefits so that they’re able to position a winning business case and ROI for the board.

“From a board POV, it should be appealing because they’ve always

Many at the event suggested that level of discussion was not really at an advanced stage.


NEWS ANALYSIS

believe information has to reside in their company and they cannot afford to let it go outside. You need to prove to the board that this is an investment, not an expense. How do you do that? By strategically articulating that it is better for me internally and would reduce my TCO. Instead of buying hardware and recruiting and whole lot of other ‘ands’, I can have this run outside effectively and as efficiently as I need. How do you sell it to the board? Ask them what the impact is and what is the actual cost in the budgeting when you don’t take this action,” he declares.

However, data security is not just about data leakage. As Sabbagh points out, the other major stumbling block to cloud adoption here is the lack of regional datacentres, with most of the majority to be found in the UAE and Qatar. This, he says, is unacceptable – for a number of reasons.

“You have Injazat, MEEZA, EHDF, but these are all still government owned. Can I trust them? I have no options. Compared to what I have [inhouse], their environment is better. This should be a strategic movement by the governments. Secondly, this should be governed by legislation. We are hosting in one of these datacentres – but who is protecting your interests? Any SLA or penalty that is not supported by a direct legislation process in the country

itself, it will not work. It will only be a matter of trust in how big these companies are,” he claims.

The matter of penalties is of paramount importance. Hosted services are always governed by an SLA which provides compensation to the customer if service levels are not acceptable. Nevertheless, this is not the only byproduct of failure, says Emcredit’s Khatib.

“It’s very simple. If your data is compromised, that’s a breach of contract. If your system is not available when you want it, that’s a breach of contract. There have to be heavy penalties. The number one thing you will suffer from, especially in the Middle East is your reputation. Once your image is tarnished, you’re out of business. Slowly, your customers are going to be impacted and affected. The name you carry is very important,” he declares.

While many have rushed to declare cloud computing the answer to every conceivable solution, there is always a possibility – however remote – that it may not in fact be the panaceas that enterprises are looking for, the answer to the great conundrum of always-expanding infrastructure.

“There is always a risk of that. But when you look at cloud computing in detail, it ticks off many of the issues and concerns and requirements of technology and investment. It seems to answer all the right questions. Of

course, time will tell. A year or two from now, we can look back and see if people have either used SaaS, Paas or IaaS and see how they’re succeeded in that, how they’re tried to hit the right model. It’s too premature to make a judgement at the moment from what we see of the data in the US and Europe where there is a very high degree of success. That degree of success in technology is a very rare thing,” says Shah.

Khatib: You need to prove to the board that this is an investment, not an expense.

Sabbagh: The initial cost is a big cost, but the indirect savings are eventually huge.

Shah: Unlike other parts of the world, SMEs will lead the way forward in the region for cloud.

26 – 29 September 2010Yas HotelAbu Dhabi, U.A.E.

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NEWS ANALYSIS


Europe and the US, with fewer links to international cable systems that many other regions.

But all that is starting to change with investment pouring in to terrestrial and undersea cables in the MEA region.

TATA’S GULF CABLE SYSTEMOne company that is focusing on the growing global demand for data capacity and services is Tata Communications, part of the Indian business conglomerate Tata Group.

Most recently, Tata Communications, which specialises in international backhaul, enterprise data and internet services, is busy working on a $2 billion global expansion plan that includes about $200 million for the development of telecom operations in the Middle East, including an ambitious project to connect Gulf countries via its TGN Gulf Cable system.

The project, which was announced in February, will see Tata Communications connect Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Oman with its cable system, which will then link to its wider international network of cable systems via India and Europe.

Tata Communications said it was working with five partners in the region on the project, comprising Bahrain Internet Exchange, Nawras of Oman, Qtel of Qatar, Mobily of Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s Etisalat.

The project, which is due to be completed in 2011, is intended to allow Tata Communications and its partners to build “strategic relationships” that will support the development advanced telecoms services such as global ethernet, MPLS based VPN, managed security, and telepresence.

For Srinath Narasimhan, Tata Communications’ CEO, the investment is a logical choice in a

and Africa. Network optimisation player Aircom International confirmed recently to CommsMEA that it saw the Middle East as one of the world’s fastest growing markets in terms of data use.

Fabricio Martinez, director of the company’s services division, said that on a per user the basis, data consumption in the Middle East was “three or four times higher than the rest of the world” at 1.5GB per user per month. He added that by 2014, this will be around six to seven GB per month per user.

Amid these kinds of rises in data demand, operators in the Middle East and Africa are keen to strengthen their connections to international networks, a trend that is magnified by the fact that the region lags behind more developed regions such as

WORLD CONNECTIONSTata Communications is positioning itself to be an indispensible partner to operators amid a global surge in data demand. CommsMEA reports.

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THEpast two years have marked a turning point in data use, with the increasing popularity of services such as video-on-demand and mobile broadband leading to a glut of data working its way through global communication networks.According to Allot Communications, a US-based IP optimisation specialist, use of global mobile data bandwidth increased by a staggering 72% in the second half of 2009, led by video applications including Youtube.

The Nasdaq-listed company also pointed out that the trend is not just dominated by US user habits. Indeed, Asia Pacific lead the growth in demand with an 86% increase in demand for mobile data bandwidth, while EMEA posted 70% growth.

Allot is not the only company to see a spike in demand in the Middle East

Srinivasa Addepalli says emerging markets will be a major driver for the company in the coming years.

BIG NUMBERS200 MILLION200 MILLIONInvestment committed by Tata Communications for new infra-

structure in the Middle East over the next two years.

Over the last 12 months, it is only emerging markets where growth has happened, which to some extent reflects the vibrancy and optimism that is still to be found in most of these markets

TGN GULF CABLE SYSTEM – OPERATOR’S VIEW

While the Middle East is already served by several cable systems, operators involved in the TGN Gulf Cable System spearheaded by Tata Communications are upbeat about the newest addition.

For example, Ross Cormack, CEO of Oman’s second operator Nawras, said the cable was of “vital importance” because it would secure Nawras’ own international connectivity out of Oman for the first time.

“The major advantage of this project compared to others in the region is that it will immediately secure direct connection to all major telecom hubs around the globe,” adds Nawra’s Carmack.

He added that the cable will be used to provide Nawras customers with reliable high speed bandwidth to key cities worldwide

while also adding “resilience and diversity to the communications infrastructure” in Oman.

“The TGN cable will be an important building block for Nawras to be able to offer highly reliable and affordable data, internet and voice services to both its residential and business customers in the Sultanate of Oman,” Cormack said. “For the first time, we will be able to have end-to-end quality and cost control over all our international voice and data traffic.”

Cormack added that Nawras currently purchases international connectivity from Omantel, which has enjoyed a monopoly on the provision of international services. “The rates charged by Omantel for that connectivity are on the higher side in comparison to internationally available rates and this limits Nawras’ ability to provide advanced data services at more affordable and competitive rates,” he said.


NEWS ANALYSIS

broadband services on the back of 3G and 4G technology, the demand for internet services from people like ourselves will be expected to grow,” Narasimhan ssays.

He adds that on the back of the higher capacity, the markets will “pick up in terms of more broadband access” leading to growth of enterprise customers and a corresponding rise in demand for VPN and MPLS will increase.

EXPANDING HORIZONSFor Tata Communications, this not only means increased business in terms of backhaul, but also the potential to offer its local partners, including operators, additional managed services such as media content and delivery, cloud computing and storage.

“We clearly recognise that the market is now moving towards value added services,” Narasimhan says.

“The conventional telecom infrastructure services of pure bandwidth or pure co-location are becoming more and more commoditised and clearly the customer is now starting to say: ‘I don’t want just pipes from you, manage my infrastructure.’

“They are asking for a completely different set of services. Our strategy is to amend and modify our service portfolio to play into that story.”

To this end, Narasimhan admits that Tata Communications will become more “like a services company than a telecom company” in the coming years, with services such as telepresence and cloud computing shaping up to be drivers of demand.

Demand for managed services is rising partly due to the global recession, which has led all types of enterprises to look at their operations and see where they can make savings and increase efficiency.

Managed services also allow companies to upscale and downscale their IT systems without having to invest in hardware or even software, which helps remove any risks of over-investing during an upswing in business, Narasimhan says. ICT is also an area that many organisations see as non-core activities that can be handled better by a third party.

Tata Communications is in a strong position to offer such services because it already has most of these emerging “building blocks” in place, according to Narasimhan.

three cables in the region, including Flag Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4 were cut within days of each other.

“The drivers for this submarine business are not just capacity,” Narasimhan says. “If you were going to go just by capacity, theoretically many of the cables that we have installed globally are not necessary.

“What drives investment in cable systems apart from bandwidth considerations is also the need for diversity. Typically enterprise customers who put their critical applications on to a cable system are not comfortable depending on a single cable system or a single vendor and like to put their traffic on different systems, so if one system goes down, their business operations are not affected.

“To that extent in a market like the Middle East, East Africa or West Africa, the availability of cables is not there yet to give diversity.”

Diversity aside, demand for data backhaul is still growing, and operators need diverse cable systems to transfer it. Increasing mobile data usage globally is also driving demand for the type of backhaul that Tata Communications offers.

“As we get a proliferation of mobile

market that holds significant potential. “As the general business activity level grows in these markets all the associated telecom services follow,” he says. “As the region grows faster than other parts of the world, the growth of telecom services in these markets tends to be more than other areas.”

“We believe it is important to create certain pieces of infrastructure to increase the overall availability of telecom services, specifically in the Middle East, with investments such as the undersea cable system.”

According to Narasimhan, there is an opportunity for “another cable in the Gulf region to connect all the Gulf countries” to India on one side and Europe on the other, to increase the availability of international bandwidth in many of those markets.

“Typically cables in the past have gone to the UAE or Saudi Arabia and then other local cables have tended to pick up the traffic from those cables into the region,” he says.

But the planned cable system is also about more than merely increasing data capacity to the region. It is also about increasing the diversity of routes open to operators in the region, which is something that was brought into focus in 2008 when

We believe it is important to create certain pieces of infrastructure to increase the overall availability of telecom services, specifically in the Middle East, with investments such as the undersea cable system

NEWS ANALYSIS


For example, the CEO says that Tata Communications already provides its customers with co-location space and network connectivity services which customers use to connect to partners including their suppliers, sales force, and factories.

“With a service such as cloud computing we are just going one step further and saying we will provide you with the ability to manage your operating system, your databases and through our partnerships we can even manage your applications.”

The advantage for Tata Communications, apart from offering a wider range of services, is that it also becomes a more critical partner to its customers.

“You are no longer one of three bandwidth suppliers, no longer one of two datacentres suppliers,” he says. “You now are the service provider that runs his core services.”

EMERGING OPPORTUNITIESAs well as managed services, Tata Communications also sees major growth potential in emerging markets and technologies such as convergence over IP, according to Srinivasa Addepalli, the company’s senior vice president of corporate strategy.

Initially, the company looked at emerging markets as it sought to expand in 2004 and 2005 because it saw similarities with its home market of India.

The first emerging market that Tata Communications expanded into was Sri Lanka, back in 2003. The company has since moved into several new markets and now considers India, Africa, China and the Middle East to be among its key emerging markets.

Addepalli points out that while emerging markets were once viewed as regions to be used for cheap manufacturing and services, they now represent the world’s fastest growing consumer markets, and as such, the best opportunity for players such as Tata Communications to counter slowing pace of growth in more developed markets.

“Over the last 12 months, it is only emerging markets where growth has happened, which to some extent reflects the vibrancy and optimism that is still to be found in most of these markets,” he says.

He adds that emerging markets are also becoming places where “innovation is happening” in terms of

advantage of already having a strong presence in South Africa, through Neotel, the fixed-line operator it acquired a stake in back in 2008.

These markets also hold significant long term potential because many of Tata Communications’ customers in emerging markets are looking beyond the larger cities to what Addepalli refers to as tier-1 and tier-2 towns, which account for a big proportion of each country’s population and represent pent-up demand for telecoms and ICT services.

The challenges that emerging markets present to enterprises is also an opportunity for Tata Communications, which already has significant experience of operating in these areas.

“All of this knowledge is something that gets distilled into our thinking and that is something that we can take to our customers,” Addepalli says. “The challenges for our customers are often cost, how to get access to these markets, and how to cope with the rapid change in emerging markets, as there is a lot of uncertainty about the economic situation in a lot of these markets.

“This is where our partnerships and managed services and the flexibility that we provide in terms of the technology architecture, as well as our partnership models, help us address the major challenges that our customers face,” he concludes.

new patents being filed and also the latest technology being deployed.

Addepalli says Tata Communications continues to study emerging markets continually, looking at various macro-economic indicators, the state of the telecom market, the regulatory climate, the level of competition and whether or not Tata Communications or Tata Group already has partners there.

Using these criteria, the company recognised the Middle East and Africa as two key markets. “The Middle East was a region that was growing very fast, that had strong economic potential as well as opportunities for new players to enter,” Addepalli says. “We came to the conclusion that given the very strong players already present in many of the Middle Eastern markets, our best chance of growth potential was working with local partners in the region.”

Addepalli says that Tata Communications is keen to expand its operations in country’s including Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Algeria, while in Asia, the company is also looking to expand in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and China. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are highlighted as among the key markets.

Tata Communications also identified Africa as having significant potential, and the company also had the

Mobile Revenues from Data Sales

Source: Ovum Mobile Voice and Data Forecast Pack: 2009–14

(Million)

IN DEPTH

Management insight and industry profiles


ENTERPRISE ROADMAP


THERE’S LITTLE DOUBT THAT IT’Sbeen a rollercoaster ride for the Middle East technology industry over the past few years. Investment exploded in the latter part of this decade as companies sought to cover perceived gaps in their infrastructure and then quickly vanished when the economic boom turned to a bust.

Today, it’s clear that the market has forever changed – and not least, because of the increasing adoption of time and money saving technologies like virtualisation. Instead, CIOs have learnt how to take a good long hard look at their needs and find ways to achieving those business objectives – without having to break the bank of the CFO.

In this feature, we sat down with three of the region’s most progressive CIOs to find out how they plan to implement technology going forward for the remainder of 2010. We also asked how they approached the process of planning technology and working with the major decision makers and stake holders to achieve success – and most importantly of all, we found out how they have dealt with the errors of the past.

MANUFACTURINGAhmad Al Mulla, vice president of IT at smelter Dubai Aluminium is always bullish about the state of technology and never far from the cutting edge.

At the time of publication, his roadmapping exercise is still underway with the help of external consultants. Though it is not yet 100% complete, he feels confident that the focus this year will be to build on earlier successes like his Arab Technology Award-winning Smelter Analytics project.

“The main focus will be BI, definitely. Unfortunately vendors talk about things in a very simplified way. When you talk about BI, it’s a journey. We have started the first step with a good project but now we want to take it further,” he confirms.

For Al Mulla, BI is a big beast and success was by no means guaranteed: “We focused our first version [of the project] on the sort of things people look for. In IT, the model works like this: the business gives you a requirement and then you find a way to do it for them.

“But then when the business does not know technology such as BI, they cannot give your requirements or everyone gives it to you in a certain way and they mean something else. Instead, we took a leadership role. We did a proof-of-concept, business reports which people saw and said were good. Suddenly the CEO came along and asked for weekly reports,” he adds.

“We started thinking of what things they would probably want. But we have not progressed in the sense of deploying it into multiple areas. Now we want to do that. That will be the theme of this year and probably next year,” finishes Al Mulla.

Now, with an organisation the size of Dubal, one single BI project would hardly suffice and a listing of every single implementation under way or

IN DEPTH

Three of the region’s top CIOs explain how they are building their ideal roadmap for success in 2010.

under consideration might well take up the entire space for this feature.

“For example, we are doing a customer portal. If I go to manufacturing, we are replacing our cast house management system. If I go under production, we are continuously enhancing our pot control system, because we sell that technology. If I go to the sales department, we are building a new customer portal whereby we’re going to allow our customers to do even transactions online. If I go to finance, we have started activity-based costing

module. We are also revamping the whole corporate intranet system, putting a new one in place. These are the high level things that we are doing. Is that enough for this year?” jokes Al Mulla.

These are again just some of the elements he’s working. But with working with organisations of this nature, how often do you create a business roadmap and how long should it be valid?

For Dubal, it’s a question of where the business plans to go and if there are any major changes such as mergers or acquisitions on the horizon: “That really affects your roadmap. For example, take sales – are they going to open new offices? Are they going to change the way they sell metal? They come to us explaining where they see themselves

CIOs toimplemfor theasked hprocesworkinmakerssucceswe fouwith th

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I overcommitted. I did not estimate the kind of hurdles which could come, of which 90% was change management and co-operation from the people. There was a reluctance which we didn’t see in our plans


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March 2011, we have plans for a time and attendance module. March will also see us implementing a specialised operating theatre module,” he explains.

His plans, he says, extend until June 2011 and then proceed into a general roadmap which will centre on gradual refinement of the new system: “For example, when we go live with the new hospital information system, we know that it will require at least a couple of years to refine the usage of all the medical information. We go live with one set of forms and capture screens and then we have a task of reviewing and redefining the areas by specialty. It’s an ongoing task but it’s going to take a year-and-a-half to two years to have the model as we want it finished.”

“When you add an ERP or HIS and go live, you think that it’s a success. But I believe that actually, after you go live, you have a long time where you really have to start making it worth it for you. The go-live is just a first step to get it going. For us, there’s a lot of work as a CIO,” adds Oasis’s Perfetti.

What else is he looking at in 2010? Well, he has his hands full with the new infrastructure but one thing he’s sure about is that cloud computing is definitely not on the agenda: “Cloud computing and outsourcing of services in terms of healthcare, it’s always delicate because of the whole issue of confidentiality of patient information. That’s a big taboo. Our hospital is not prone to outsource our

Al Mulla: Be careful of how you set your expectations to the boardroom.

in the future. We usually do a three to five year plan. Once you accumulate information from all the businesses, you then ask yourself where you put the technology roadmap – because technology has to support this.

“The first thing we do is sit at the very highest level of every division. Sales, finance, HR, maintenance and so on – then we do workshops at the next level. After the findings are complete, we go and present back to the executive level. They confirm that

they are happy with the roadmap and then we proceed. The execution and technology stops at my level – IT. No business head thinks about technology because it’s not a business call; it’s a vehicle that enables progress. But it should not be technology driven – it should be business driven,” he emphasises.

Of course, with any technology implementation, there are bound to be errors in judgement – and they often have their roots in the planning stages. In Al Mulla’s personal recollection, it’s clear that mistakes stem from two areas.

“One is simplifying things too much. Take cloud computing: things

are not simple here. The second is to do with setting expectations. These are the two killers. If you ask about mistakes we have done a few years ago, I would tell you that we have promised things and set expectations high. This was a long time ago but we have learned this lesson. You can say that BI can do this and that for you, then expectations will hit the roof. But when it comes to delivering, you’ll find a lot of limitations,” he cautions other CIOs.

HEALTHCAREFrom hot aluminium factories, we move to the calm, tranquil world of hospitals. Luis Perfetti, CIO of Oasis Hospital in Al Ain is currently in the midst of finishing a massive revamp of the hospital’s infrastructure, the crowning glory of which is the installation of a new hospital information system (HIS), which will manage its electronic medical record system (EMR).

“The implementation of the HIS and EMR are on the 1st of October. Then in November, we have a learning management module planned followed by a performance management module in December. In

Perfetti: Outsourcing of healthcare services is always delicate because of the issue of patient confidentiality.

Even if you do 30%, look at the amount of savings we have if 30% of the people and 30% of the time is flexible. If I don’t have to come to office twice or thrice a week, but I’m working still 12 or 16 hours a day and can be with my kids. So there’s definitely a morale bonus


IN DEPTH

database and patient data to outside facilities so for patient data, it’s difficult to consider.”

For Perfetti, 2009 was a dramatic learning curve in terms of juggling a multitude of very complex projects. When asked how he would improve on the efforts of the previous year, he is adamant that project management needs to be brought under control.

“I would correct a lot of things there in tracking, managing the projects professionally. According to the Standish Group, only 35% of the projects in any organisation are

and CIO of media agency Middle East Communication Networks, who’s presently engaged in an extremely ambitious cloud computing project.When we say ambitious, we mean ambitious – he wants most of his employees to be out of the office.

“We are moving ahead in phases, the first of which is rolling out the basic software across the region. We want to have all our information captured in one data warehouse. Anybody can stay anywhere and work anywhere. That will probably be done in a year’s time,” he posits.

“Will it be 100%? That’s never possible. Look at the amount of savings we have if 30% of the people and 30% of the time is flexible. If I don’t have to come to office twice or thrice a week, but I’m working still 12 or 16 hours a day and can be with my kids. So there’s definitely a morale bonus. That’s what we still have to sell [to the board]. I don’t want to sell them a dream which I cannot execute. If you tell people something, they want it implemented within the next three months – not even six months,” says Raj.

The question of how to reward your team is always a tricky one and naturally a contentious part of the budget discussion. Over the past year, Raj’s team has been creating a series of successful portals. Interestingly, he plans to use the money to fund the development of the team, instead of giving them bonuses.

“We never had a budget for research. We used to manage it within the IT budget of the company. This year, we have made money from the portals we have developed. We don’t want to put it back into giving raises for the people – that comes from the company anyway. We decided to give it back to the same guys but they will put it into enhancing themselves. We are making a significant figure which could take care of most of the salaries of the entire IT team – we are making that kind of money,” he says.

So what does he regret from 2009? Like Perfetti, he underestimated the challenges he took on,

“I overcommitted. I did not estimate the kind of hurdles coming, of which 90% was change management and co-operation from the people. There was a reluctance which we didn’t see in our plans. So this year, we have kept a buffer, running software through the users first,” he ends.

Raj: I don’t want to sell the board a dream which I cannot execute.

I would correct a lot of things there in tracking, managing the projects professionally. According to the Standish Group, only 35% of the projects in any organisation are considered successful. The other majority are either stressed and overbudget, or of less scope. Some end up being directly cancelled

considered successful. The other majority are either stressed and overbudget, or of less scope. Some are directly cancelled,” he states.

“How do we reduce that and be a much more efficient IT organisation? That’s about investing in the right projects, controlling them and being more successful or cancelling them early rather than spending the money and then regretting it,” he says.

MEDIALast but certainly not least, we turn to Naveen Raj, vice president of finance

SOWING THE SEEDS OF HARMONY

In a large enterprise regardless of the vertical, IT is always bound to be in demand. This can lead to a delicate situation as different wings of the business demand different things from the technology department.

Dubal’s Ahmad Al Mulla says it can require subtle diplomacy on his part: “We try to convince people by sitting with them separately and then coming to the executive committee with a list of the top things people want. However, we recommend the top

priorities, so in the end it becomes a discussion. Then when the CEO decides something, nobody says anything else. But we prepare for that. I sit with the chief exec and brief him, so when he comes to the meeting, he is already ready to say what he is expected to.

“You can call it backroom diplomacy. But at the end, you are only able to do certain things so you’d better do it in a friendly way. You have to remain friends with people even if people ask for things and we can’t do it until the year after. The message has to come from the top guy and not from a peer,” he believes.

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IN DEPTH

Management insight and industry profiles



BACK IN 1965, GORDON MOORE, co-founder of chip giant Intel, forecast a future in which processing power would double every two years. He was right, of course. The industry has thrived on its ability to find new ways of multiplying transistors on minute integrated circuits. Today, there is more processing power on the average PDA than was available to the first men who landed on the moon in 1969.

And how we take it for granted. Server upgrades are no longer seen as the obvious answer to the business challenges that preoccupy most senior IT decision-makers. There is much more focus on the distribution of applications. The emergence of the cloud is threatening to obscure processing power as a strategically important issue at the heart of the organisation to the periphery, where it is primarily the responsibility of the service provider.

Not surprisingly, manufacturers have responded with characteristic inventiveness. Intel plans to launch a 22-nanometer processor next year – matching the current physical limit to the number of transistors on a circuit. AMD positions itself as a system performance platform provider rather than a component vendor.

Chip makers collaborate closely with enterprise software vendors as they develop applications that exploit new processor technology as it emerges. This has the benefit of helping organisations to exploit the vast power of modern processors

rather than relying on retro-adapted software to do the job.

Intel, for example, has been firmly behind the arrival of a new database engine – Ingres VectorWise – which claims to scale dizzying heights (as much as a ten-fold performance improvement) of data analysis capacity. The development has

already seized the imagination of the government of Jordan, which has chosen Ingres VectorWise to drive Open Source adoption across the country’s ICT infrastructure (see box).

So who in the enterprise actually cares about what’s under the hood these days? CIO priorities have shifted radically since the heady days of the mid-1990s when processing power seemed to somersault up the scale what seemed like a weekly basis. And even the gaming community, traditionally in the vanguard when it comes to adopting ever-meatier processors, is increasingly focused on maximising existing power for the experience

IN DEPTH

For most enterprises, the processor is the unseen element of IT infrastructure, processing millions of instructions every second. Piers Ford explains why the CPU still matters.

today, rather than living in a state of constant anticipation for the next hike in capacity.

Part of this is certainly due to the global economic climate. “Owing to the financial downturn, the server buying decision criterion has changed from pure performance and performance-per-watt, to performance

per-watt, per-dollar,” says Andrew Buxton, director of sales at AMD’s Components Channel.

“IT managers and CIOs are looking for ways to maximise their computing power and hardware utilisation to cope with the ever-increasing workloads and complexities without further increasing their often limited budget. At AMD we have seen new technologies evolving such as cloud computing and virtualisation to maximise server utilisation and prevent server sprawl. At the heart of these technologies lies the processor that includes features like virtualisation instructions, multi-core processing and power management

And how we takServer upgrades athe obvious answchallenges that prsenior IT decisionmuch more focusof applications. Tcloud is threateniprocessing powerimportant issue atorganisation to thit is primarily thethe service provid

Not surprisinglyhave responded winventiveness. Int22-nanometer promatching the currthe number of tranAMD positions itsperformance platfthan a component

Chip makers colwith enterprise sothey develop applnew processor tecemerges. This hashelping organisativast power of mod

Processing power was one of the critical discussions we had in our sizing exercise. When we decided to purchase our infrastructure, we spent time on processing power. The decision on which servers to buy was based on the number and power of those processors – and that eventually decided which applications run on which servers

Intel’s Gordon Moore famously posited in 1965 that chip processing power would double every two years.


IN DEPTH

landscape,” says Saeed Al-Zahrani, IT manager at Saudi Cement. “There is tremendous labs-based research in this scope. However, it depends on the enterprise’s initial capacity planning to assess exact current and future needs for its environment. Yes, silicon is shrinking while being able to deliver more processing capacity and power – but is it reliable, efficient and scalable?”

For organisations with database-intensive, processing power-hungry requirements, the chip will always be a key selling point. For others, it is a commodity that does not feature so highly in the purchasing cycle.

“In most of the business nowadays, the processors of two years ago are still enough or exceed the needs of the business in terms of processing power,” says Luis Perfetti, CIO at Al Ain’s Oasis Hospital.

“In an ideal world I would try to maximise the use of the processing power as much as possible, but there are other factors that don’t allow this: memory, I/O capacity, storage and operating system. So when I’m going to add a new service or software, I’m almost forced into thinking that I need a new server, to avoid conflicts with what is already running,” he states. “For example, I might have a project to add four different software applications that must be integrated because they are all from different vendors. For this I need to have four different servers because two of them use Oracle, but in different versions, and the other two use other

Buxton: The server buying decision criterion has changed from pure performance, to performance per-dollar.

features that enable virtualisation solutions to use many virtual machines per server,” he explains.

“The buyer of a lot of technology has changed,” agrees Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide operations at Ingres. “The industry is driven by the business consumer who doesn’t care about compute power. They just want to do their job better.”

In the old days, the solution might have been to throw more money and

processors at the problem. Today, they are more likely to be looking for speed combined with value for money – and that depends on software developers designing applications that exploit modern chip designs, reducing the amount of downtime while data is accessed rather than relying on architectures optimised for chip technology that could be two generations old.

“I do not think the processor is being neglected on the enterprise

Zahrani: I do not think the processor is being neglected on the enterprise landscape.

If the difference in the choice of processor bumps up the price more than so many percent of the total cost, I don’t mind going for second best. After all, my current database is running in a three-year-old server. It might need more disk space, but it doesn’t need more processing power!

CHIP POWER AT HEART OF JORDAN PROJECT

The Government of Jordan has declared its intention to become a hub for leveraging the emerging market for open source computer skills in the Middle East, signing a memorandum of understanding with database vendor Ingres to achieve the widespread use of open source ICT-based tech across its local software infrastructure.

Maximising the power of modern Intel processors is at the heart of the Ingres VectorWise database engine architecture, which has been designed to fully exploit the current generation of commodity chips.

“If you can redesign the way a database utilises today’s existing chip structures, you can get more relevant data more quickly into the chip’s cache,” explains Steve Shine, Ingres executive vice president of worldwide operations. “Otherwise, the chip is sitting idle most of the time while you wait for data to pass from the disk to the RAM and finally to the chip itself.”

Potential speed increments – in tests, Ingres has been achieving processing rates between four and 75 times faster than with existing architectures – will allow businesses to make decisions and analyse risks far more quickly. And all this, as Shine says, using commodity-based compute power.


IN DEPTH

databases. And as I’m buying new servers I want to have the best processors available.

“But if the difference in the choice of processor bumps up the price more than so many percent of the total cost, I don’t mind going for second best. After all, my current database is running in a three-year-old server. It might need more disk space, but it doesn’t need more processing power! Even in file servers you can have processors running for several years as long as their disk space is enough and they have enough memory. Virtual machines kind of try to solve this issue and I’m using them as

power to advance beyond our imagination, but we also need to ask if it’s efficient.”

Mohammed Thameem Rizvon, group IT manager at one of Dubai’s leading retailers Kamal Osman Jamjoom, says that more focus on the impact of applications on processing power will always help to improve silicon utilisation.

“It isn’t just the economic situation. Any firm will want to use existing processing power to the maximum before investing further,” he says.

“Processing power was one of the critical discussions we had in our sizing exercise. When we decided to purchase our infrastructure, we spent time on processing power. The decision on which servers to buy was based on the number and power of those processors – and that decided which applications run on which servers,” adds Perfetti.

“With virtualisation and other new techniques, there is an opportunity for IT teams to improve the usage of existing infrastructure. We are upgrading our operating systems to the latest versions, fine-tuning our database and applications, and that will enable us to release extra infrastructure,” he continues.

So the silicon really does matter, and CIOs should still be factoring it in to their capacity planning according to many IT professionals on the front line, as well as asking some searching questions about what it means for their broader IT strategies. Moore’s Law will be around for a long time yet.

Rizvon: Vendors can explain how better processors will help reduce the number of servers needed.

Shine: The industry is driven by the business consumer who doesn’t care about compute power but just want to do their job better.

There is tremendous labs-based research in this scope. However, it depends on the enterprise’s initial capacity planning to assess exact current and future needs for its environment. Yes, silicon is shrinking while delivering more processing capacity and power – but is it reliable, efficient and scalable?

much as I can, but there are certain vendors like Oracle who do not support their databases running on VMware,” continues Perfetti.

This conservative approach to processor spending has meant that Perfetti has not felt under undue pressure from the business to capitalise on existing unused capacity rather than investing in more for the coming future.

At Saudi Cement, Al-Zahrani says capacity planning is essential to make sure that new applications do not have an adverse impact on processing power. “The question will always arise,” he says. “We expect processing

MATCHING POWER WITH STRATEGY

Vendors could do a lot more to explain the strategic benefits of processing power rather than focusing on numbers that it is almost impossible for senior business managers to understand, even if CIOs can appreciate them. Wider relevance is the key to raising awareness high in the organisation.

“Vendors can explain how better processors will help reduce the number of servers needed, how they can reduce costs in terms of

electricity and cooling,” says Mohammed Thameem Rizvon, group IT manager at UAE retail giant Kamal Osman Jamjoom. “A roadmap of processors would also help, showing how they can be upgraded without having to buy new servers,” he continues.

He also states better, more accessible information would help to create more understanding of the strategic importance of processing power at board level in businesses and organisations, where it is currently scarcely mentioned.

INTERVIEW


George Bevir caught up with Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg when he visited the UAE to speak at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit.

TOUGH AT THE TOP THERE’S A PICTURE OF HANS Vestberg that can be found on the internet that shows the CEO with blood dripping from his nose on to his chin, wide-eyed and staring off into the distance. Vestberg picked up the knock during a particularly hard-fought game of handball – a sport that could best be described as high-speed catch with body contact – when an over-eager opponent managed to

catch him offguard him with a full-on sucker punch.

That incident took place in 1993, and the injury has long since healed. But industry experts and analysts are in agreement that Vestberg’s off-court rivals are keen to give the recently-appointed CEO another bloody nose.

Ericsson is the leading telecom vendor, with current estimates of the Sweden-based firm’s share of the

infrastructure market at just over 35% (helped by its acquisition of some of Nortel’s assets) according to research firm Dell’Oro. The main threat to its status is widely regarded as coming from China. Huawei’s market share remained flat during the last quarter of 2009, at 20%. But it amassed that share rapidly, growing from 8% at the start of 2008.

“People like Huawei and ZTE are coming in and offering pretty aggressive pricing,” says Chris Lewis, GVP International Telecom at analysis firm IDC. “The higher level pricing that people have enjoyed for some years now has definitely been put under some pressure.”

When asked how Ericsson will deal with the threat posed by Huawei and ZTE, Vestberg does not dwell on the subject for long.

“It is something that we have been living with for some time, so it’s nothing new,” he says. “It is a tough market. It is very competitive and has been for some time. For Ericsson, we will focus on what we are good at, which is to continue to be number one in technology, and to continue to combine our strengths, which are technology leadership, the services organisation and the footprint we have in 175 countries. Competition will always be there.”

The good news, Lewis says, is that the underlying requirement for infrastructure still exists. “Operators still need to invest so they can buy the right networks to get the return in the coming future, so it is an ongoing investment requirement.”

And whenever operators decide to get their cheque books out, Vestberg wants to make sure the cheques are made payable to Ericsson. One way he plans to position Ericsson ahead of the gathering competition is to keep close to its customers.

Vestberg was appointed in January, and one month later he had reorganised the regional structure of the business, reducing 23 markets to 10. He also appointed the heads of Ericsson’s North America and China divisions to the vendor’s executive leadership team.

When CommsMEA caught up with him, he explained that the changes were the result of a renewed effort to put the customer first.

“What I am trying to do is get a more dynamic leadership team, in these dynamic times,” he said.

Vestberg: “The Middle East is an extremely important region for us.


INTERVIEW

The “dynamic times” include high spots such as an ever-increasing appetite for mobile data and managed services. But also a period when operators decided to cut back on capital spending.

According to Vestberg there was a “softening” on the infrastructure business in during the second half of last year. When Ericsson’s fourth quarter results were released, Vestberg said that operator investment behavior varied between regions and countries. Central Europe, Middle East and Africa, were highlighted as “increasingly cautious with investments”, while other markets including China, India and

the US showed “good development with major network build outs”.

“North America was very strong. China was strong. India was strong up to Q4 when some hesitancy crept in when the 3G licence came up. Those are three really large and important markets.”

But parts of Africa, Middle East and Asia were impacted and more cautious about investment levels, he says. “If you look at the portfolio then, we have infrastructure, the service multimedia business, and they are also playing out differently in these environments; we have growth in services, multimedia and the network was a little bit down.

Despite pegging US, China and India as key markets for Ericsson, Vestberg is keen to convey how the importance of this region is to the Swedish vendor.

“The Middle East is an extremely important region for us; many important operators operate from here,” he says. “It’s an advanced market, so for us it’s important to be here both with resources management and competence so we continue to invest in this region. We have been established here in the market for a long time – 50 years now – and we will continue to be here.”

CONNECTED WORLDVestberg’s vision of the future is a bright one, and it revolves around more and more people and devices being connected to the internet and to each other.

He says that by 2020 there will be 50 billion connections around the world. “We should stop talking about how many subscribers we have out there, and we should start talking about how many connections we have in the network,” he says.

He predicts that three billion people will have a broadband connection, with the drive in growth coming from mobile broadband as it is more efficient to install.

“If the last decade was an important step for the telecommunications industry, we believe that the next coming decade is going to be equally or more important for communication,” he says.

To prove his point, Vestberg draws on his favourite analogy, comparing the growth in broadband with the evolution of electricity consumption.

“When electricity came, the light bulb was the natural way where you needed electricity. Today, if you go home, how many things are connected to electricity? Everything. I think that in ten years, this we’re going to see hundreds of devices – not just mobiles – that will be wirelessly enabled as well.”

When looking 10 years into the future Vestberg is supremely optimistic about the growth in wireless. But when the conversation returns to the present day, he is a little cagier about the prospects for the telecom market.

ABI Research expects mobile operator capex to grow by more than 4% year-on-year in 2010, after contracting by 2.7% in 2009. Does Ericsson expect its own growth to be in line with the projected growth?

VESTBERG ON CUTS AND ACQUISITIONS

At the start of last year, Ericsson’s predecessor, Carl-Henric Svanberg, unveiled plans to make 5,000 redundancies happen from the firm’s 78,000-strong pool of salaried positions across the world.

Says Vestberg: “In the third quarter we said we had almost achieved the programme, but we intended to run that to the end which was planned for Q2 this year. And then after Q4 we updated the market to say that programme was going to be SK50-60 billion ($6.9-8.3 billion) in savings, so that is what we are striving for right now.

“It’s a balance for us because I think we grew 4,000 employees last year, even though we reduced quite a lot as well. That is part of our business now; on the one hand we need to look into areas where we are inefficient, and when we take over operations we gain people.

“In general, we believe in organic growth, but in services we always look at smaller businesses, and with multimedia we look at applications.

“One year ago I would never have believed that [Nortel] would be bankrupt and we would buy them, but if we have industry changing games we will always look into that, but from a portfolio point of view we are pretty happy at the moment.”

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“It’s a bit too early to have an opinion on that,” he says. “We see the underlying trend in the industry continue to be positive; the growth is there, new devices and smartphones coming in all the time. We said when we released out Q4 report that it’s too early to say whether or not that materialises in more capex. We will leverage our assets to keep our market share and to grow it, and then we will see where the market is going.”

MANAGED SERVICESOne of the main growth areas, managed services, is an area Vestberg knows well, having served as head of Ericsson’s Business Unit Global Services from 2003 to 2007. He says the unit accounts for 40% of the Ericsson’s total revenue.

“The underlying trigger for managed services is efficiency, competence, and then change,” Vestberg says. “All those three are in the market place at the moment; operators are looking for efficiency, many are doing technology changes, and of course how do you maintain your competence. And thirdly some have been working in the same way for many, many years, and to make a change you need to bring in someone else.”

Vestberg, too, is confident that there is potential for further growth in managed services. He says that the size of the addressable market is US$200bn, with a third of that outsourced, and two thirds still inside the operators.

“[Operators] do their own roll out, their own operation, their own integration all training – all that could have a potential to go out to the market,” says Vestberg.

IDC’s Lewis says that Ericsson is well positioned to benefit. “The change from buying equipment to buying an underlying service was a change that Ericsson picked up on very early on,” he says. “They were leaders in that, and they are market leaders in services provided to telcos now. The telcos in many ways have been very engineering focused, and in order for telcos to thrive they need to move away from being engineering focused and towards the service being delivered to the customer. They can’t stretch themselves so thinly that they can afford to do everything. Managed services are a big growth area.”

Zoran Vasiljev, partner at management consultancy firm Value Partners, agrees that Ericsson’s experience will in all likelihood stand it in good stead for sweeping

concerned that they are not getting a return on their investment in broadband networks.

Vestberg says that market forces will always define it: “We can work on the technology side, such as what can be done with the technology to make it more efficient to meet the bandwidth that is needed. And we can spread the best practice; we are in 175 countries, so we can share good ideas from how we work in different places with different operators. That is our role as a thought leader for the telecom industry to be able to talk to all operators around the world.”

One suggestion is that metred billing be used as a way of realigning profit with investment. Vestberg returns to his electricity analogy: “When electricity came, everyone had one light bulb in the street, and that is fine if you have a flat fee. But when the steel mill came and set up at the end of the street, and it was still a flat fee, it didn’t work out.

“I think that initially it has been very positive for the industry to have a flat fee to attract people to use [broadband], but over time that will evolve. I’m not sure exactly how, but it will evolve,” he continues.

“We cannot address the pricing issue,” Vestberg says. “But we can share best practice and work with the technology. We can work with operators on how they can monetise the network and get even more applications, more customers on the network. That we can do, but we cannot do anything else.”

up more of the fragmented managed services market.

“They have all the know-how and intellectual capital from more mature markets. They can bring that over here,” he says. “They can teach some of the operators how things should and shouldn’t be done, versus some players just getting into this area.”

It is not only telecom operators’ networks that Ericsson looks after; it also supports the operations of broadcasters and media firms. Forging closer alliances was one of the reasons that Ericsson was present in the UAE last month, for the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, which was attended by some of the most influential figures from the ever-converging worlds of media and communications.

“For us to be part of this industry to show what telecommunications can do is important and this is a natural step for us to continue the work with this type of customer,” says Vestberg. “If it is a cable operator, if it is a media company, they all will look into wireless, and they need IP.”

But as the twin spheres of content and media grow closer and more entwined with the telecoms sector, the debate about who pays and who profits rages on.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, one of the main beneficiaries of increased broadband penetration and faster speeds, told delegates at Mobile World Congress earlier this year that he didn’t want to turn operators into “dumb pipes”. But operators are

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During his recent visit to Dubai, David Awcock, group head of technology for Standard Chartered Bank sat down with Imthishan Giado to discuss his future plans and overall direction for the financial institution.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

: What is the main purpose of your visit to the region?David Awcock (DA): One of the things that we want to do is make sure that from our group perspective, we are focusing our overall view as a bank and making sure that our major countries are very clear about what we’re trying to do. We also want to make sure that we are able to support both the bank strategies and

each individual country strategy properly as well.

: How important is the Middle East market to your worldwide banking operations?DA: The Middle East market is important and growing in importance. The UAE is one of our five or six major markets for this bank, which is focused heavily on

Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It’s a core part of our business.

: How does this market differ in terms of specific demands?DA: If you look at the way our strategy works as a bank, I think we have global strategies for our financial markets and our wholesale banking. We would tend to say that the solutions we create are applicable across many of our markets. They may need some adaptation, but by and large we can roll out globally.

Consumer banking is slightly different. We believe that we can deliver a common service but probably have to do slightly more in terms of looking at the particularities of the market that we deal in.

For us as an international bank, where’s our critical differentiator? A lot of it is how we leverage what we can create as a group and then use it across our franchise both effectively and efficiently.

: How much local development is actually happening here in the Middle East region?DA: Our strategy is really at two levels – where and how do we do development and other is where and how do we host our systems.

If we take development, we have three major centres. One is in Chennai, India, the other is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the third is Singapore. There are very specific reasons why we are in those places and globally they make the most

Awcock: We’re a challenging customer which is very clear about what it needs.

In any situation where there are difficult markets, then you can expect a lot of phone calls from vendors who will have something appealing that they want to sell you. By and large, we want to have a relationship with the vendor which is: “We will come and speak to you when we know what it is we want. If you have something of interest to us that is different, by all means give us a call, but we’re not interested in technology for technology’s sake”


INTERVIEW

sense for us to be there. If you look at our technology operations, historically what we have done is to consolidate them around two major datacentres, one in Hong Kong and the other is in the UK. Those are the most cost effective places for us to run our global operations.

From that point of view, most of our development and delivery is done from those global hoops. We have done things locally where we have a need to do things specific for a market and we’ll have a team of people here in the UAE which are able to do that.

We’ll have some operational capability but it’ll be relatively limited to things like [installing] technology in the dealing room. That’s where we get our edge in terms of how we can deliver our solutions effectively and efficiently.

Dubai historically has been a place where we have created the solutions. For example, our core banking solution which we have rolled out is something we developed ourselves from sratch. It is a state-of-the-art J2E Linux-based system. The first place that we deployed that out of is the UAE. Today we have 38 countries that have gone live on that system. We think it gives us an edge because actually, we’re not using one of the vendor packages.

: Why have you chosen to go against the grain and develop core banking internally?DA: Although there is commoditisation in the market, we still believe that a lot of the

capabilities that we call core banking can make a difference for us. When we were first looking, we considered the obvious candidates such as Finnacle and the i-flex and some of the American offerings. The cost benefit equation for something that we were already thinking about doing actually worked in our favour.

We do run a big development shop in India. Actually, we think we are more cost-effective than most vendors and indeed our competitors. We have 80% of our system development offshored – except that Standard Chartered Bank believes that India is onshore for us. We have followed this for five years and it has been very successful and we have no regrets at all about the implementation.

We have about 45 countries that we want to bring onto that core banking system – we’re 70% of the way through that journey.

: Do you have any future plans to set up a R&D centre here?DA: One of the challenges for the Middle East is communications. We do find that the communication costs are higher than in other parts of the region and in many cases, where we have done development here before, we’ve ended up bringing in people from other locations which are probably the right places to do it. I don’t see us having a huge development centre here any time in the future.

: How has the crisis affected your position – and what steps have you taken to deal with the crisis?

One of the challenges for the Middle East is communications. We do find that the communication costs are higher than in other parts of the region and in many cases, we’ve ended up bringing in people from other locations which are probably the right places to do it

DA: The very positive things from Standard Chartered Bank’s perspective is that we have come through the crisis in good shape. We have continued to deliver to the market and our shareholders very consistent returns.

In many cases, we have continued to invest throughout the cycle. We have seen this as a real opportunity for us to position ourselves more strongly. For example, we’ve taken the opportunity to build out our financial markets business and in fact have made significant investments into markets over the last year and a half when a lot of people have actually been closing down many of their investments.

It’s been a good time in the sense that we’ve been able to take advantage of the space left by others both in recruiting the sort of people that we want and making the sort of investments that we might not otherwise have been able to. We’ve not cut expenditure. We have not cut investment. We are investing very much for the future and for improving our future positioning.

: Has there been a push from the boardroom level in terms of cutting costs through IT? DA: Within Standard Chartered, the group CIO reports directly to the chief executive. From that point of view we have a direct connection into effectively the board. What the board want us to be is business enablers. We believe that technology is capable of enabling the business, not just being an order-taker delivering to a business menu.

We are being asked to work very closely with all our business lines, help to create the strategies of the future and work out ways in which technology can really provide an added value component that may not have been the ways organisations have operated.

People see the opportunities going forward tied up in how we make best use of technology in the broader

StandardChartered’s Singapore head office is a centre for regional development.

INTERVIEW


sense of the business opportunities we can create. Yes, we will always look for efficiencies but effectiveness and transformation opportunities are what we really look forward to doing is to try and see how we can differentiate ourselves.

: What do you expect to be the big IT trends next year?DA: From my perspective, consumer banking investment is very much directed towards customer centricity, what we can do to make it easier for the customer to transact with us. There are some direct things we can do about that. We’re improving branch technologies, internet banking and mobile banking technologies at the front end which are very visible to the customer.

Behind the scenes, we’re investing in CRM-type tools where we understand our customers better and seek to offer the right sort of services to our customer. We’re investing in security and risk management to make sure that we’re protecting our customer’s interests and making sure from a regulatory point-of-view, are doing the right sort of things.

: What do you think of the current buzzwords such as virtualisation and cloud computing?

We’re not greatly enamoured by buzzwords put out by vendors. We’re very much interested in some of those types of technology which will help us further our business aims. In the case of virtualisation, we’re already well down the path of virtualising in our major data centres. There are lots of benefits you get from that – we get efficiency benefits, we also do something around the sustainability side as well

There’s a lot of hype around cloud computing. Our view is, look: we run corporate datacentres that are remote from most of our countries. That’s equivalent to a cloud as far as we’re concerned. This is nothing new, we’ve been doing this sort of thing for the last few decades.

Are there opportunities for third parties to provide unlimited computing which we get on a pay-as-you-go basis? I like the idea of that. We want to be very clear. Customer information has to be sacrosanct and protected. When we go off to the public cloud, we’re going to be very careful about the sorts of things that we want to put there.But if you talk about adding capacity and using grid-type computing,

It’s been a good time in the sense that we’ve been able to take advantage of the space left by others both in recruiting the sort of people that we want and making the sort of investments that we might not otherwise have been able to. We’ve not cut expenditure. We have not cut investment. We are investing very much for the future and for our future

Standard Chartered Bank’s trading floor is based in DIFC in the UAE.

DA: In global terms, I’d describe us as a close follower. We’re aware of the technologies that are out there and we’re looking to take advantage of them. Would I like us to be more innovative? Yes. But we know that’s not easy. Many people talk about innovation but you need to be very disciplined with your innovation. We have some plans to try and push ourselves into spaces we’re not in at the moment. My preference is that we want to be leading edge – we don’t want to be bleeding edge.

: What do you expect your outlook to be for the rest of 2010?DA: We’ll continue to make investments in many areas. We are making more investments across the board in 2010 then we were in 2009. We’re implementing new CRM-type systems into the region, we’re introducing new lending systems, often using best practice for elsewhere. We will upgrade our internet banking and our mobile banking. Those are the key focus areas for UAE and the rest of the region for 2010.

getting more power, giving more computational capabilities to some of our trading people, those things we can deliver from the cloud because they’re not going to be customer-specific.

: Have vendors more aggressively chased you for technology sales?DA: In any situation where there are difficult markets, then you can expect a lot of phone calls from vendors who will have something appealing that they want to sell you. By and large, we want to have a relationship with the vendor which is: “We will come and speak to you when we know what it is we want. If you have something of interest to us that is different, by all means give us a call, but we’re not interested in technology for technology’s sake.

We’re a challenging customer which is very clear about what it needs. We generally don’t buy hype.

: Would you describe Standard Chartered Bank as an IT innovator or follower?

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INTERVIEW


In its 2009 Voice of the CIO report, IBM spoke to more than 2500 CIOs globally to get their views on the technology market. Peter Korsten, partner, vice president and global leader at the IBM Institute for Business Value, explains the technology giant’s findings.

FUTURE VOICE

: How did you approach the survey process? Peter Korsten (PK): The nice thing about IBM if we decide to do something, there is money and the organisation behind it to get going, so I think in terms of depth of industry knowledge, very few parties can rival us. I am not aware of any other company providing insights that systematically and predictably as IBM does. On every industry we have one to two coming out every year with full time researchers – they are not academic researchers, they are consultants that have been working in that industry for ten to 15 years. They then get a two to three year stint with no utilisation targets, they have no sales targets, they are allowed to do what they want, within the guidelines of the way we do our research. They get a budget, to buy research capacity, to do surveys and things like that, and that is the way we did the survey.

: Why has it taken you so long to conduct a CIO survey? How many responses did you receive?PK: We started with CEOs back in 2003, interviewing 300 of them. We didn’t want to start with the CIO – it was much too obvious. I also wanted to demonstrate to the market that we had access to the other board members. So it took us a full 6 years before we did our CIO study. With that maturity we thought we could get to a 1000 CIOs, because it was the first time we ever did it.

However, the uptake from the markets we have is typically a response rate of one in three. We don’t do mass mailings. If we go to a CEO, we typically have a reason to know those CEOs, or reason to think they would like to talk to us. With the CIOs however, we had an 80% hit rate so it was an unexpected 2,598 participants, which were all seen face to face for an hour. If you do a online survey, you don’t know who is

answering. Secondly, you look someone in the face, you know if their answers are said with certainty, you can probe a little bit, you can dive deep, and the answers eventually are taken by the IBMer, not tick-marked by the CIO. It is more difficult to generate the politically correct answer and it is filtered through some level of objectivity.

: What would you say were your main aims?PK: We wanted to find out what CIOs in better functioning organisations do differently from CIOs in not so successful organisations. We cannot obviously judge whether a CIO is good or bad – who are we to judge that – but we can with objective measures see whether the financial results of an organisation — over say three years — are better than peers in their industry.

We found six things, which are described [in the report] that structurally, fundamentally, across cultures, across industries, are always different and to a large extent, which is probably the biggest finding of all.

: What are these aspects?PK: We describe three characteristics of those CIOs – the first thing is they are all about innovation. Interestingly, they are not at all about IT, they are about innovation.

I went to the CIO of a large bank that survived very well in the crisis. In that organisation, they have a CIO and a CIO – a chief information officer, and a chief innovation officer. He was proud to have just been appointed as both. In a bank, where IT is so fundamentally important to what you are, it is very logical that these things come together.

So the typical successful CIO which we call ‘making innovation real’, doesn’t wait to be asked to the party,

Korsten: If your difference is how you implement your application, focus your energy on those areas.

BIG NUMBERS

2,598The number of

participants in IBM’s Voice of the CIO study.


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but invites himself to the party. Make yourself heard. Not everybody in an organisation thinks of the CIO as the centre piece for innovation. But make that impression, and that’s what these guys do, structurally, fundamentally much more often.

The second thing, is they raise the return of investment of IT. One CIO said to me: Peter you made a spelling mistake, he said it should be ROY of IT — return on yesterday. We have invested all the money already and we have to make sure that people use it. So these people are ‘savvy value creators’, they understand where the business creates the money.

They live the business and work with the business, so they have a deep feel for what the business is about. The other insight is that they are a relentless cost cutter. They are very frantic about it; probably even more so now, but our interviews were done in Q1 2009, so there was high alertness. The interesting thing here is there is no difference between the high performing and the low performing one – all spend about 50% of their time cutting costs.

Finally those successful CIOs are about expanding business impact, really making sure you work well with the business, be friends, be sociable and earn your seat at the table. They are seen as peers, and behave as peers, while at the same time they are an inspiring IT manager for their organisation. And how do you do all these things which are non-IT, if you are responsible for IT? The one secret to success, of those successful CIOs, is they create centres of excellence in their own CIO organisations. They don’t do things that don’t make a difference, they either outsource them or they shared service them; if for that organisation it is not relevant to have data warehouses or IT facilities, you might as well have somebody do it for you. If your difference is which application you deploy, or how you implement your application, make sure you focus your energy there, have a centre of excellence there, and get rid of the rest.

: Are there significant differences between MENA CIOs and their global counterparts? PK: Other than one aspect there is no difference between MENA CIOs and the rest of the world CIOs. The one difference is in application harmonisation. On innovation we

asked CIOs to tick the things they planned to implement over the next two years. We saw two things: high growth CIOs pick more things, so they are more ambitious, and the other thing is there is no difference in the first five priorities of high growth versus low growth CIOs. The number one thing for everybody was business intelligence and analytics. 86% of CIOs are planning to do something there. They say they have the databases; with a bit of extra intelligence we can squeeze more out of customer databases, or usage patterns, or cross references and things like that.

Number two was virtualisation – it’s very important for CIOs. Numberthree – risk management and compliance, clearly in the financial sector but also in other sectors, you need a better understanding of where the risks are, and constant monitoring of that.

: Your survey was conducted in Q1 09. Has there been any follow up or anecdotal feedback on whether cost cutting – or similar pressures – might now be a factor?PK: I would say the two new things is there is more urge centralisation. We are preparing for the next wave of research of CIOs and we hear that from preliminary interviews, plus we have done about 1500 feedback interviews, with participating CIOs.

So centralisation resonates very strongly; and there is the cloud, whether public or private, but that is still in the experimental phase, I think at this point in time, people are retracting, finding arguments to cut down costs, and concentrate and harmonise what they are doing – making things simpler. In the course of the year, ‘simpler’ has been a very big word.

: Are the respondents typically seeing budget cuts or under pressure to cut costs?PK: Cut costs, absolutely. Cutting budget for IT – not so much. The issue is much more that they don’t easily get money to do new investments, and the way to counteract that is to be more aggressive in squeezing the costs of the existing IT system to still be able to innovate.

: Have you found many good business CIOs here in the Middle East region?

The typical successful CIO which we call ‘making innovation real’, doesn’t wait to be asked to the party, but invites himself to the party. Make yourself heard. Not everybody in an organisation thinks of the chief information officer as the centre piece for innovation

PK: Yes. MENA compared to the full sample is more or less the same, apart from the fact that the MENA people are more pragmatic than their peers around the world, and that applies both to the low growth and the high growth organisations. In MENA, the low growth CIOs are not as good at cost cutting as the high growth CIOs.Here there is more catch up space.

: Can you identify the reasons behind those differences?PK: The pragmatic approach, I would imagine is strongly correlated with the size of their organisation. In America, Europe and Japan, the average size of the organisation is much bigger, so by definition here you have more practical thinking; if it breaks down you have to fix it.

I cannot explain why in low growth organisations they are not as aggressive on cost cutting as they would be in other organisations.

: When will you begin work on the next survey? PK: We will have another one coming out in 2011, which we start preparing in the summer of this year, setting themes and so on.

IBM’s survey involved more than 1400 employees worldwide.

IN DEPTH


INSPECTING GADGETSACN rounds up the latest and greatest executive gadgets, from the latest in BlackBerry clones to the most unobtrusive bluetooth headsets.

Nokia’s been at this for a while now – creating wide form factor devices that are designed around messaging, but also incorporate elements of their mainstream multimedia handsets. The E5 is the latest in a long and illustrious lineage which has actually proved surprisingly popular among enterprise users.

It’s probably not for the reasons that Apple thinks, however – the form factor is great for messaging, but is obviously ‘inspired’ by RIM. More importantly, this line has built a good reputation for reliability, build quality and functionality over the years – which make it very reminiscent of Nokia classics like the 6310i.

How does the new E5 hold up then? Well, in automotive terms it’s what I would describe as ‘fully loaded’ with a full complement of connectivity options including Wi-Fi, 3.5G data, quad-band GSM and GPS. That last point is certainly more useful now – the E5 comes with free navigation software so it really helps when you’re travelling in unfamiliar territory.

The camera hasn’t changed much from elder versions – it’s still a five-megapixel jobbie with flash, and like most camera phones it’s best used only in a pinch. To be honest, many of the new elements in the E5 are not entirely welcome such as the ‘one-touch’ access to social

networking sites. Do enterprises really want their workers wasting time on these sites – and do their employee seriously think that their usage of said websites would remain unmonitored?

That aside, there’s still plenty to like about the E5. Looks-wise it beats everything in the RIM lineup and the choice of materials used in its construction is both robust and pleasant to the touch. The big 1200mAh battery also ensures plenty of juice for those endless conference calls – 18.5 hours on GSM if you can believe the claims of the Finns. It’s another solid effort from the cellphone pioneer, but the question is: where will they go next?

We swear this isn’t a Blackberry


IN DEPTH

The Bold and the Blackberry

It feels weird to review a new Blackberry in the same month where I look at a Nokia E5 which is more or less a clone of this device style. But we can’t control release schedules, and so on to the new Bold 9700, the latest in enterprise message.

While it looks pretty different, it really just updates the well-received first gen Bold to modern specs. To whit, it’s now got OS 5, a slightly-better camera (3.2 megapixels versus two) and UMA support allowing you to use it as a VoIP phone. What it doesn’t have any more is a rollerball – yes, it’s been banished once and for all, in favour of a new touchpad that actually manages to replicate the motion fairly faithfully.

The rest does not stray significantly from the usual RIM rollcall, so you’ve

got your typically excellent Blackberry connectivity, access to the App World marketplace and a big 1500mAh battery to ensure plenty of talktime. What the Bold isn’t packing – and this isn’t really a criticism of the device but more of RIM in general – is anything especially new. In a world where the iPhone continues to sell in greater and greater numbers and Microsoft is poised to release its next-gen Windows Phone, RIM continues to furrow a singular – and it must be said, very successful path – as a phone designed specifically for business needs. But as Motorola learnt to its cost, no one can sell the same product indefinitely. We’re interested to learn what RIM might have up its sleeve – if it does, in fact have anything all there.

Fancy a hot stone massage?

Doesn’t look much like a Bluetooth headset, does it? Jabra’s Stone definitely aims to go against the headset grain.

Let’s start with that name. It’s clearly a callback to the looks, which – er – look like a stone. Admittedly, it resembles a smooth pebble from a beach quite a bit more than a jagged stone, but let’s not get into a semantics argument. Impressively, when the Stone is in its docking charger it’s very hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Unfortunately, it can also make it very difficult to fish it out of said charger in a hurry; I foresee much future fumbling from Stone owners.

Once you manage to pry it out of its home, it’s an incredibly-cool looking thing to behold. Forget your ancient Star Trek fantasies, this is right up to date in the age of Battlestar Galactica. It’s nothing like the clunky devices that handset vendors often put out – its curved body is almost organic to the touch, and in use, it’s considerably less easy to spot, reducing the natural embarrassment factor of wearing an BT headset in public.

There are no physical buttons on the Stone to spoil the looks, but it also means that you have to deal with ‘virtual’ buttons, which is a bit hard when you’re trying to feel something attached to the side of your head. Your first few days of Stone usage will convince most that your hearing aid is on the blink.

I’m being a bit harsh. The Stone is a fun attempt to marry both style and performance in a single device, but it has one crippling flaw preventing me from singing its praises. What’s that? It’s for right-handed people only. So close, but yet so far.


ANNOUNCEMENTS

PROJECT ROUNDUPWho’s doing what: ACN presents the latest project announcements and customer wins from across the Middle East.

Movenpick Hotel: Hospitality management (Saudi Arabia)The Movenpick Hotel, Riyadh, is turning to ABB and its Room Master solution to give its guests better control over thecomfort of the environment within their rooms.

The 447 room hotel, which will be the largest in Riyadh when it opens, is installing ABB’s Room Master system to

Unicorn Investment Bank: Data protection (Bahrain)Islamic financial services group Unicorn Investment Bank has expanded its use of Double Take systems to enhance protection of critical data.

The Bahrain-based group has deployed Double Take software to provide replication and back up of its key data assets, including core banking systems, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The software provides replication of data on critical servers, between the group’s two hosting sites, for high

allow guests to control functions inside their rooms including lighting, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, as well as room access and shading.

ABB Room Master technology integrates with the hotel’s electrical network, using KNX bus technology, and will enable the rapid deployment of additional guest services in future expansions.

availability, and also enables recovery over the WAN.

Antoine Tohme, head of information technology at Unicorn commented: “Our Windows servers are extremely critical to our business, due to the fact that they hold most of our clients’ deals and financial transactions, and therefore require a solid and reliable continuous system and data protection solution to be in place. We have implemented a solid strategy that is able to cope with any maintenance and disaster recovery scenario based on real-time data protection, high availability and recovery.

Double-Take Software has consistently provided us with the necessary degree of protection to safeguard our clients’ financial data.”

“An increasing number of organisations are aware of the disastrous consequences that downtime can have on their business,” said Wouter Vancoppenolle, senior sales and business development manager Middle East and Africa, at Double-Take Software. “It is vital for financial institutions to invest in business continuity and backup solutions as a way to ensure their clients’ financial data remains safe, as well as

providing more value back to the business. We have a long history in helping companies in this market to migrate, protect and recover their business systems and data, ensuring that they have best practices in place around their business continuity strategy.”

Dubai Municipality: Wi-Fi connectivity (UAE)Zabeel Park in Dubai will now offer free Wi-Fi to visitors as part of Dubai Municipality’s efforts to boost services.

Daily Al Khaleej quoted the director of Public Parks and Horticulture at Dubai Municipality Ahmed Abdul Karim as saying that the move is in line with the government’s goal of building a modern city.

Dubai Municipality have put final touches to the Wi-Fi infrastructure, with Karim revealing that the free internet service will be made available to the park’s visitors ‘soon’.

Zabeel Park, the first technology-based theme park in the Gulf, cost nearly AED 200 million to build and was opened to the public in November 2005.

Aside from a conventional garden park and jogging track, the park includes interactive displays grouped into three zones – alternative energy, communications and techno – as well as a space maze and 3D theatre. The edutainment centre Stargate, which is designed to resemble a spaceship, was opened to the public last year.

Sheraton Kuwait: Public telepresence (Kuwait) FASTtelco has announced the launch of the first public telepresence room running on Cisco technology in the region.

Paul Papanicolaou, general manager of Mövenpick Hotel Riyadh commented: “ABB’s smart room technology will provide our guests with even more comfort whilst allowing the Mövenpick Hotel Riyadh to be the first green hotel in the capital due to the significant energy savings that we will benefit from.”

The project, which is due to be completed by next year, is being carried out by ABB local partner Nassli.

“By implementing ABB’s smart room management system the Mövenpick Hotel Riyadh is not only reducing its power consumption by a double-digit percentage but it is also offering guests a unique service. Mövenpick guests will be able to enjoy one room control for all of their needs,” explained Ali Nazzal, senior sales and operation manager, Smart Home and Intelligent Building Controls, ABB Saudi.


ANNOUNCEMENTS

STARTED A NEW PROJECT? WON A CONTRACT?

E-mail the ACN team at [email protected] to let us know

Juma Al Majid: Centralised security (UAE)The UAE’s Juma Al Majid Group has chosen security specialist ESET’s Smart Security (ESS) suite of products to defend its network against a range of possible threats, including malware and viruses. The new centrally-managed system was chosen by the business conglomerate after evaluating a number of market products.

Muhammad Habib, senior network administrator at Juma Al Majid Group, said: “Our company has an exhaustive IT network in place to connect the group’s diversified businesses. Our systems were facing new virus attacks and threats daily, which were not getting cleaned up immediately.

“Hence, we began looking for an effective antivirus solution that would not only be easy to deploy and manage but would also be able to protect our IT infrastructure against any new forms of online threats. We tested ESET Smart Security for almost a month and found it to be a clear winner as it was able to detect virus, malware and other online threats proactively, which greatly reduced our administrative efforts of manually cleaning infected machines,” he added.

Habib says that Juma Al Majid implemented ESS in phases to ensure maximum workstation coverage. In addition to antivirus capability, ESS also offers firewall and antispyware

features, and can be remotely deployed as well. Juma Al Majid claims that virus infection rates “have almost reached zero levels” since the deployment was completed.

“We are happy Juma Al Majid Group chose ESET Smart Security for their security needs. ESET Smart Security offers industry leading performance and easy manageability that help companies secure their information exchange easily. We are confident that the Juma Al Majid Group will immediately experience the benefits of

The telepresence suite will be hosted at Kuwait’s Sheraton Hotel, to provide businesses and individuals access to telepresence communications without the need to set up their own facilities.

The suite will be available on a daily or hourly basis, with rates ranging from around $600 to $800 per room. Cisco says that with up to six participants on either side of a call, and calls possible to multiple telepresence centres worldwide, the service offers a cheaper

alternative to attendees traveling to global meetings.

“In today’s climate, individuals in Kuwait are looking to better ways to conduct business efficiently in order to keep a firm control on costs. FASTtelco is in the unique position of being the only company in Kuwait at present that has the infrastructure to offer Cisco TelePresence as a cost effective solution. The public Cisco TelePresence room will offer a state-of-the-art technology

solution and service to demonstrate that FASTtelco is leading the way in the telecommunications services business in Kuwait,” said Omar Kaaki, GM of FASTtelco.

The Cisco TelePresence System 3010 will be installed at the Sheraton Kuwait, with a connectivity provided via a dedicated MPLS line, supplied by Tata Communications. Tata, which has a preferred partner agreement with Starwood Hotels, operator of the Sheraton, will also provide an online concierge service,

whereby users can arrange meetings and book telepresence facilities through a portal.

Hani El-Kukhun, general manager, Cisco for Kuwait commented: “Our collaboration with FASTtelco, Sheraton and Tata Communications to launch the first public TelePresence solution in Kuwait marks yet another major landmark for Cisco in Kuwait and the Gulf region. We look forward to working with them to roll out this solution and in many more locations throughout Kuwait and the Middle East.”

Al Hamra Tower: consultation (Kuwait) Cisco has been appointed to provide ICT consultation for the Al Hamra Tower development.Al Hamra Real Estate company has selected Cisco to provide a range of services in strategy and design for the technology for the development, through Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities vision.

Cisco, along with gold partner, Kuwait Danish Computer Company, will provide a range of services including project management, market and service analysis, and feasibility analysis, to the project, to help create a connected, integrated and environmentally friendly infrastructure for the project.The Al Hamra Tower is under construction in Kuwait City, and is intended to be 414 metres tall, making it one of the tallest towers in the world.

Khalid Al Othman, vice chairman and CEO, Al Hamra Real Estate Company said: “Today’s end users demand more new experiences. The power of Web 2.0 and social media is giving users the capability to share a wide diversity of opinions and is keeping businesses competitive in order to offer a compelling experience to customers in the most efficient manner.”

installing ESET Smart Security including saving time and costs,” commented Neo Neophytou, managing director of the main distributor for Eset products in the region, ADAOX Middle East.

The Juma Al Majid group operates in a number of business verticals, including automotive through Hyundai, construction and travel. The ESS deployment was completed by channel partner NTS on behalf of ESET’s regional business development partner, ADAOX Middle East.


LETTERS

DEAR SIR,I read with interest Saji Oomen’s talk of a mobile CRM implementation in your interview with him last month. It is very good to hear that people are taking CRM out of the office PC and on the road where it should be. My next question is – why is he using tablet PCs?

I mean, don’t tablets date back to the earlier half of this decade? Most of them are still using Windows, which is a very cumbersome for text input on the go, at least in my opinion. Why does he not look at smartphones like RIM’s Blackberry? Or better yet, why doesn’t he consider the modern kinds of tablets like the iPad or HP’s new Slate?

There are so many options out there and yet he goes with the tech equivalent of the Lada Niva. Seems like a built-in formula for obsolence.Regards,Yasser,Egypt

Imthishan Giado replies:Well Yasser, Saji is actually a bit head of you – he’s already investigating iPad development strategies, although it’s still a year out at the very least and also depends on operators bringing the devices officially into the market.

The other reason why he went with Tablet PCs, I believe is their rugged nature. Boutique devices like the iPad and so on are still very much on the consumer side of toughness, whereas salesmen need dependable equipment that can survive the ubiquitous four-foot drop. When an iPad can take that kind of beating, I’m sure that he’ll be more than happy to sign up.This letter was received in response

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

HAVE YOUR SAY — Letters should be sent to The Editor, Arabian Computer News, P.O. Box 500024, Dubai, UAE. Or by e-mail to [email protected]. We reserve the right to alter the length of letters and edit any offensive content. ACN does not necessarily agree, nor can it be held responsible for, any of the views expressed in letters published.

MOBILE CRM IN THE CLOUDACN looks at the rise in mobile CRM applications, as enterprises put their sales force on the road. But finding the right tools of the job is far from easy for IT managers.

EDUCATION AND THE ENTERPRISEDuring the boom, universities spent heavily on upgrading infrastructureto meet student demand. Post recesssion, can they still keep it up to the old levels?

BANKING AND FINANCE IN IT The banking sector has taken a massive battering in recent years and technology budgets have suffered. We ask the region’s CIOs how they are coping with the situation.

ALIGNING BUSINESS AND IT STRATEGIES FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

THE MONTH AHEAD – JUNE

Published by and Copyright © 2010 ITP Technology Publishing Ltd. Registered in the B.V.I. under Company Registration number 1402846.

to the April news analysis of SAP’s latest Bahrain user meeeting, “Guiding Light”.

DEAR SIR,It is difficult for SAP to succeed in the Middle East. The old stories with SAP Arabia, the current lack of real management of MENA, the wrong views of SAP EMEA management, and the wrong approach of the market will not help SAP to win this market. They need a new SAP eco system with top class partners, new management in MENA, a new approach of the market and new products. They must see how to gain the small companies with SAP products. The EMEA management must change too.Regards,Schneider

Imthishan Giado replies:That’s some harsh words. But actually I must disagree, because many of the changes you suggest are already happening at SAP Arabia and the SMB to SME sector is one of the fastest stated growth areas of the ‘new’ SAP. If you still want a management change from a company that reportedly gains new customers every week, you might have a slightly different definition of failure than me!

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EXIT

056 May 2010 | www.itp.net

EXIT

SO AFTER A DISASTROUS BUT highly profitable two months in Malaysia, I’ve finally returned to my favoured Dubai stomping grounds. And everything’s – well, much the same really.

I opened my work Outlook to be greeted with a storm of angry e-mails about half-finished projects, disgruntled staff and late salary reviews. Fortunately, they were all from my old employer and addressed to the current CIO – I’d craftily set up a back door before I’d left allowing me to snoop on his activities. After I’d had a good chuckle, I turned my attention to more serious matters.

Or to be more precise, I was looking for some means of goofing off. It’s definitely not as easy as it used to be a few years ago – back then, we’d

think nothing of travelling thousands of miles to have a “vendor meeting” which invariably ended up in a karaoke bar and with many pictures that could never be published in any sort of family publication. Training was another good wheeze; fly out for a couple of weeks (at a bare minimum) to learn about some stuff that might be important someday (like perhaps in 20 years) but right now are as useful as a comb found at a hair-loss convention.

Today, things are a little bit more strict. What that means is that where previously the finance team could be be bribed with “unlimited” internet access, today they go through our expense claims with a fine tooth comb. As a result, it’s hard to justify any kind of outbound trip at all –

especially when they know that most vendors are happy to visit us.

But there is, my friends, a solution. And it’s known as the user group meeting. In different cultures, (much like the devil) it’s known by different names – some call it a summit, others deem it a conference. Whatever monicker you choose to bestow up on it, it’s an incredible opportunity to burn at least two days.

How it works is very simple. You receive an e-mail from an events company at least six months before which is generally quite cordial, asking you to attend for a nominal fee. If you are especially important, you may even be asked to be a speaker. This is a trap – do not say yes, because it will involve doing some actual work.

You then need to turn down the invite. Don’t worry, they will invite you again within a week. Turn down that as well. In fact, keep turning down these invites every week, no matter how shrill and desperate they may become.

In the last week, what inevitably happens is that someone will actually call you to offer a very special rate for the two days (again, it’s always a two day event). This is when you play your trump card: casually mention that you’d like to pay a single day rate – for everything. With accommodation. And flights.

They will feign shocked silence, perhaps even an accusatory croak of “that’s not possible, sir”. They’ll hang up, then call back and offer an even-more deeply-discounted rate. But stand firm. You’ll get it, even if you have to play chicken right up to the day before the event.

Then, all you have to is get an OK stamp from finance (easy, because you’re CIO) and then pack your bags for some exotic destination.

What about the actual event, you ask? You’ll have to wait till next month, because your humble guide is travelling to one right now. But I promise you’ll never look at events the same way again.

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