The year will likely see continued consolidation of the major trends that have been holding the industry’s interest for the past few years including Big Data analytics, cloud, SDN, IoT, and BYOD

It looks certain that 2015 will see continued consolidation of the major trends that have been holding the industry’s interest for the past few years. IoT (Internet of Things), SDN, Managed services, Big Data analytics, cloud, Mobility and BYOD are among trends that are in varying degrees shaping the changing face of the industry. The fact that when many of these Technologies come together as enablers, there is likely to be a snowball effect and this is precisely the kind of future we are heading towards with these trends in tandem.

Rabih Dabboussi, General Manager, Cisco UAE says, “By 2022, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. By some estimates, even this is a conservative outlook. Technology has advanced and has become smaller in size, is more flexible and adaptable to different applications and has also gone down in terms of costs. This has driven a tremendous adoption and appetite in introducing connectivity and intelligence to almost everything around us. Businesses will strive to leverage this connectivity and intelligence to differentiate.”

The IoT opportunity is likely to emerge into the limelight over the next couple of years in terms of deployments. From integration to securing the infrastructure that will enable IoT to work, there is potentially a lot of opportunities that the channel will be likely to unearth.

Sabbahuddin Khan, Regional Manager at Allied Telesis Middle East says, “The IoT trend will dramatically increase the number of network-connected entities.  Devices that contain sensors, control, or intelligence will increasingly become network connected.  IPv6 will gain wider adoption, as will management technologies that are required to manage network-connected nodes.  The IoT will deliver benefits for everyone, from enterprises to municipal councils, but it is the value of information and knowledge that will see new players introduced and new business models emerge during 2015.”

As IoT initiatives get off ground, in fact many of the larger projects could be spearheaded by government entities as they enable more public e-services for the public.

Rabih adds, “The next few years are thus likely to be of IoT gaining ground. We got some economists to gauge the value of the IoT economy. The value at stake of the IoT between now and 2022 is $ 19 Trillion. The potential is immense. We took that model and applied to Dubai and the report was about the value at stake between now and 2019 for Dubai’s smart city initiative. It is about 5 Billion dollars.”

Mobility & software drive the future

Mobile device penetration as well as mobile data traffic growth rate in the region are among the fastest in the world. MEA is set to post the world’s highest-growth rate of IPv6-capable smartphones and tablets according to a Cisco forecast. These trends will encourage even wider adoption of wireless access and Mobile Device management as well.

Sabbahuddin says, “The unprecedented adoption rate of mobile devices in the enterprise landscape means that wireless access is now more important than ever, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.  The technological innovations that the 802.11ac standard is enabling will lead to continuing growth in demand for wireless access products, and will ensure that wireless access has a critical role in unified enterprise network infrastructure.  Users will demand pervasive and reliable wireless coverage and seamless mobility. This wireless expansion drives the need for tightly integrated management platforms.”

In addition, the rising prevalence of Mobile workforces will also mean that workers would need better access remotely. That is driving the demand for hyper-converged systems that help manage virtualized infrastructures. Hyper-convergence infrastructure have a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies.

Ahmad Qadri, Regional Director for Middle East at Nutanix says, “Mobility has meant that large teams of people have been freed from their offices and are able to work offsite, either beside their customers or from home to increase productivity, customer satisfaction and personnel retention. But the distributed systems needed to support these work environments are driving the uptake of hyper-converged infrastructure at such a pace that even traditional storage area network (SAN) players are reducing SAN production and redirecting IT spend into hyper-converged technology. And it will become even more prevalent in 2015 as businesses look to the IT department to support this new working environment while still keeping equipment and maintenance costs low.”

Therefore he believes that hyper-converged will transition from the ‘early adopter’ phase to mainstream production environment; from test and development to Tier 1 applications.

Nutanix is partnering with Dell globally and have extended that into the region. The Dell XC-series appliance integrates Dell’s x86 server platform (PowerEdge R720xd) and Nutanix web-scale software to provide a solution with enterprise class performance, scalability, availability and data management features.

Basil said, “Web-scale IT is making huge inroads compared to traditional DAS, NAS and SAN architectures. The demand for software defined storage is going through the roof- over delivering on promise. Cost-wise, it is cheaper and performance wise, it is better. Customers are liking it and software defined storage has seen quick adoption unlike SDN.”

What happened in the case of server virtualization is now unfolding with storage and networks. SDN is still in the initial phase of rollout with Telcos testing it.

Basil adds, “It is only now that SDN is beginning to see traction. Telcos are taking the lead. They are testing and that gives confidence to the enterprise segment to take it up. We are therefore now seeing a lot of interest around SDN.”

Legacy network architectures cannot provide the scale that SDN can potentially bring in to the infrastructure which is required especially as organizations move more workloads to the cloud and the workforce become more mobile.

Sabbahuddin adds, “The flexibility in user location and device usage that is becoming the norm in Enterprise IT, as the BYOD concept has taken hold, will drive requirements for more dynamic operation of Enterprise communication systems. Organizations needing solutions to these requirements will increasingly look to SDN as the source of such solutions. The efficiencies to be gained by integration between business rules, user information, and network infrastructure will benefit network administrators and users alike.”

The cloud’s next phase

According to Rabih, the next phase of cloud computing is about optimizing data centres. That will mean moving some of the actual application processing to the edge, i.e., what is being referred to as ‘fog-computing’. The terms Fog Computing, coined by CISCO, refers to computing on the edge wherein data processing and decisions are happening closer to the event location, leaving only more critical decision making to the central cloud locations.

He adds, “We believe the next phase of cloud computing especially when it comes to smart city initiatives and IoT is in fog computing – taking some of the data centre responsibilities and some of the application processes and distributing it to the edge. So instead of centralizing it in the cloud, you do it in the fog which is closer to the user.”

Rabih claims that Fog computing alongside cloud computing will see more adoption in 2015 in tandem with IoT growth.

Elaborating further, he says, “For example, when you are in the parking lot, the access point covering the parking lot needs to cover your location and the density of cars in the parking lot. That access point needs to tell the lights to turn on or off, brighten up or dim down based on number of people. These decisions need not go to the cloud as they can be taken at the edge. You will see processing and many applications taking place at the edge in places like the parking lot, in a street, a mall, a theatre etc. But you will also see more centralizing applications in the cloud as well.”

There is also likely to be great consolidation in the cloud services market. Ahmad believes that the larger players in the cloud service market will get bigger and there will be a scramble for the rest of the market opportunities.

He says, “If it isn’t already, hybrid cloud will become the ‘new normal’ infrastructure solution as more and more organizations realize the benefits of balancing hardware control and software scalability. Over the next five years, we’ll see the big cloud services providers (CSPs) hold a vast majority of the hardware market. Meanwhile, the smaller businesses fighting for the remaining market share will be forced to pick between building their own open source-based infrastructure solutions or purchasing turnkey products.”

Bigger picture

Quite obviously IoT will also be a driving factor for Big Data analytics to become more prevalent in terms of deployments. There is going to be a growing demand for such solutions for instantaneously fetching results for specific queries. Therefore, the compute infrastructure in the background is going to consume a lot of processing power.

Rabih says, “If you think of Mobility and IoT together, there is going to be a lot of data going to be generated. In order to link to link people, devices, process, things together, there has to be a tremendous amount of processing power that needs to be enabled behind this. The amount of time it takes to search through text is much less than it takes through for a video file or a voice conversation or facial recognition etc. The level of complexity and consumption of computing that is going to be needed in the future is entirely different level than in the past. Hence, the notion of Big Data, which is about taking zettabytes of data in a distributed way across multiple servers and multiple processors so that you gain your result much quicker such as in the case of a crime scenario investigation. It could be so many other different scenarios. In future, the ability to do Big Data crunching will be at our fingertips.”

Cisco’s Rabih also concedes that we are already onto an era when a single company’s solutions will not do and there is likely to be a lot of collaboration that will help enable all required solutions and services.

He adds, “No single company is going to have the answer to all these requirements. We have been developing Technologies both on the analytics side and also on the networking side to enable the Big Data model. We are now integrating Hadoop which is the platform for enabling distributed processing across a compute environment into our systems. We are building the services delivery platform or the orchestration platform that allows to include multiple vendors and allows to do the analytics for you.

Dell strengthened its portfolio in information management solutions with the acquisition of StatSoft last year. StatSoft is a provider of analytics solutions that deliver data mining, predictive analytics and data visualization capabilities.

Basil says, “We now have software portfolio for predictive analytics, an area where we were lacking prior to the StatSoft acquisition. We are in a position now to provide our customers access to proven and affordable advanced analytics solution that delivers the predictive and prescriptive analysis capabilities that their businesses need in order to make faster, more accurate decisions.”

Security, a prime time focus

With more devices connected, it would akin to a mouth-watering prospect for would be attackers as they seek network vulnerabilities to attack. Therefore, security needs to stay competent to tackle malicious attacks.

Rabih says, “Security is becoming a great concern. There will more focus on that and more technologies introduced that will allows us to adopt all the trends that I mentioned. This has to be much more robust than what is there currently. As we go towards the predicted 50 billion devices, the actual attack surface area would have increased tremendously.”

Security solutions will become more heavily integrated to guarantee the security of data and the privacy of users across the entire infrastructure. More organizations in the Middle East today recognize the need for efficient network security systems to secure their Businesses.

Sabbahuddin says, “The increasingly flexible policies of network access and the growing number of threats will escalate the demand for newer network protection technologies.  The escalating likelihood of attack and the resulting loss of productivity and damage to reputations will ensure that security is a high priority for executive management—particularly given the number of high-profile attacks during 2014.  Likewise, Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) technology, integrating application control capability, will play a leading role in the security space.”

Upbeat outlook

The region continues to be adopt new technologies. Large initiatives are being spearheaded by Government initiatives including the smart city projects.

Rabih says, “We are seeing a determined effort to invest in Technology as a way to enable the transformation of the nation, across the GCC. The vision of the leadership in the region is taking the lead in Technology adoption and we have been engaging with the governments in shaping those strategies and deploying the infrastructures in enabling all of those objectives. IT is now at the forefront of the government’s fiscal budgets. There is an increase in allocation. IT is not an afterthought. Although IT I not a solution to all issues, yet it is an element of all solutions for all problems.”

Sectors including Education BFSI, Education, Hospitality, Healthcare etc are all in process of upgrading their capabilities to compete and provide best services. Technology will remain a key enabler behind those efforts.

Basil says, “Oftentimes, the Middle East or any emerging markets would follow the trends going on globally. Customers see the opportunity because they are not tied down by legacy. The large enterprises see the opportunity to leapfrog other regions in terms of infrastructures and implement modern solutions. The small and medium size enterprises find it cheaper to implement as they can start taking advantage of enterprise grade solutions that are available at affordable costs.”

It has been a tricky era for the partners. They are challenged to embrace the disruptive technologies in their go to market models but most are keeping pace.

Rabih says, “Partner ecosystems have been evolving alongside. We are seeing a big appetite from our partners to sharpen their expertise and tools that helps them to deliver these new Technologies.”

While telcos delivering ICT services as part of their Managed services portfolio will increase, there will a lot more of opportunities emerging in the era that is on the cusp of pervasive connectivity and intelligence. The opportunities for integrators is only bound to rise.