Technology
Nokia plans to acquire Withings to accelerate entry into Digital Health
Nokia has announced plans to acquire Withings S.A., a pioneer and leader in the connected health revolution with a family of award-winning digital health products and services to help people all over the world lead healthier, happier and more productive lives. Withings will be part of our Nokia Technologies business.
“We have said consistently that digital health was an area of strategic interest to Nokia, and we are now taking concrete action to tap the opportunity in this large and important market,” said Rajeev Suri, president & CEO of Nokia. “With this acquisition, Nokia is strengthening its position in the Internet of Things in a way that leverages the power of our trusted brand, fits with our company purpose of expanding the human possibilities of the connected world, and puts us at the heart of a very large addressable market where we can make a meaningful difference in peoples’ lives.”
World Health Organization figures show cardiovascular disease as today’s number one cause of death, with more than a billion adults around the world living with uncontrolled hypertension. Diabetes now affects more than one in twelve adults worldwide, a four-fold increase since 1980. Healthcare is expected to be one of the largest vertical markets in the Internet of Things, with analysts forecasting that mobile health, with a CAGR of 37%, will be the fastest growing health care segment from 2015-2020.
“Withings shares our vision for the future of digital health and their products are smart, well designed and already helping people live healthier lives,” said Ramzi Haidamus, president of Nokia Technologies. “Combining their award-winning products and talented people with the world-class expertise and innovation of Nokia Technologies uniquely positions us to lead the next wave of innovation in digital health.”
The combination of innovative products from Withings and the Digital Health business will also ensure the ongoing renewal of Nokia Technologies’ world class IPR portfolio.
Withings was founded by Chairman Eric Carreel and CEO Cedric Hutchings in 2008 and is headquartered in France, with approximately 200 employees across its locations in Paris, France, Cambridge, US and Hong Kong. Withings’ portfolio of regulated and unregulated products includes activity trackers, weighing scales, thermometers, blood pressure monitors, home and baby monitors and more, and is built on a sophisticated digital health platform, providing insights to empower people to make smarter decisions about the health and wellbeing of themselves and their families. Withings’ own products are complemented by an ecosystem of more than a hundred compatible apps.
“Since we started Withings, our passion has been in empowering people to track their lifestyle and improve their health and wellbeing,” said Cédric Hutchings, CEO of Withings. “We’re excited to join Nokia to help bring our vision of connected health to more people around the world.”
The Nokia brand continues to be recognized, valued and trusted by consumers, built on a heritage of beautifully designed, innovative and reliable technology in the service of people around the world to help real human needs.
The planned transaction values Withings at EUR 170 million and would be settled in cash and is expected to close in early Q3, 2016 subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Tech News
PNY Strengthens its Global Commercial Presence with Strategic New Hires in Maghreb, India, and Saudi Arabia

PNY Technologies is pleased to announce the addition of three new members to its sales team, reinforcing its commitment to international growth and enhanced customer support across key strategic regions: Maghreb, India, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Joining the team are Gader Muhsen, Sumedh Mohite, and Saqer Alanazi – experienced professionals who bring valuable local expertise and will play a central role in supporting PNY’s continued expansion in these markets.
In their new roles, they will represent the entire PNY ecosystem, covering both consumer and professional solutions. This includes a comprehensive range of components such as NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, SSDs, and memory modules for the consumer market. On the professional side, they will promote PNY’s full range of NVIDIA RTX professional GPUs, as well as advanced AI solutions encompassing servers, datacenter infrastructure, Edge AI technologies, software, and services – delivering end-to-end support from design through to deployment.
Gader Muhsen, who will be responsible for the Maghreb region, brings a strong background in business development across the region and joins as Key Account Manager.
Sumedh Mohite joins as Key Account Manager for West India, bringing extensive experience in new business development and sales across diverse industries.
Saqer Alanazi, appointed Key Account Manager for Saudi Arabia, has several years of account management experience with both Saudi and international firms.
“These strategic appointments reflect our commitment to deepening our local presence and delivering even more personalized support to our clients,” said Jérôme Bélan, CEO at PNY. “We are very happy to have Gader, Sumedh, and Saqer on board as we continue to grow in these high-potential regions.”
Tech Interviews
RedHat Summit Connect 2025: A discussion with Ed Hoppitt and Adrian Pickering

Exclusive Interview with Ed Hoppitt, EMEA Director – Value Strategy, App and Cloud Platforms at Red Hat & Adrian Pickering, Regional General Manager, MENA & Enterprise Segment Lead for CEMEA at Red Hat
Having worked in global telecom and advised some of the world’s largest enterprises, how have these experiences shaped your approach to developing IT solutions?
Ed: I believe that designing and running operational IT over many years gives one a deep understanding of what truly matters to a customer, especially those partnering with Red Hat. This background enables me to connect with our customers on a level where they feel understood regarding their pain points. Today’s biggest challenge for enterprise IT is building systems that are predictable, replicable, and standardized—yet able to scale effectively.
When you look at what Red Hat offers and how we help enterprises build these solutions, our focus is rooted in leveraging the open source community. We invest in projects that we know will create tremendous value for our enterprise customers, taking those projects upstream, incorporating them into the Red Hat portfolio, and industrializing them into platforms such as OpenShift. Customers choose platforms like OpenShift because they represent best-of-breed choices, delivering stability, reliability, predictability, and scalability. With my operational IT background, I appreciate just how crucial these outcomes are for every customer I speak with.
This year’s Red Hat Summit focuses on curiosity and turning acquired knowledge into practical application. It’s about transforming acquired knowledge into practical applications. Through this, what key message are you hoping to leave with the audience this year?
Adrian: I view curiosity as the foundation for working with our customers to truly understand their vision—where they want to be 18, 24, 30, or even 36 months down the line. It’s about gaining a clear grasp of the business challenges they face or the new markets they wish to serve in the future. We then align our best capabilities to support them along that journey, keeping cost efficiency in mind. This might involve modernizing infrastructure, existing applications, or even building new applications that open doors to entirely new customer segments or solutions.
A great example of this is our work with the Dubai Health Authority, who were on stage at Summit Connect Dubai. When we engaged with them, we took the time to deeply understand the challenges they were trying to address for the citizens and then brought not only our technical products but also our expertise in project management, implementation, training, and knowledge transfer. I’m very proud of our achievements over the years, and I believe that in doing so, we add significant value for our customers.
Ed: To add another perspective, the most compelling conversations I have with customers often begin with discussions that don’t initially center on technology. They start with, “I want to imagine a world where things are different—where you can help me achieve something extraordinary.” For instance, with Red Hat OpenShift AI, we collaborated with the US Department of Veterans Affairs to build a platform that effectively reduced self-harm and suicide rates. By harnessing a platform that could analyze how people called in for assistance—assessing tone and how they described their situations—we helped the teams prioritize who needed immediate care versus who could wait a while for some support.
It’s when someone presents you with such a profound challenge that you really see the immense opportunity we have as an organization. These technology platforms do more than enable business; they help vulnerable people receive the care they need and, ultimately, save lives.
You mentioned that for Red Hat it’s relatively easy to work on new technologies because of the robust support provided by partners and customers alike. Can you elaborate on just how important those relationships are for your team?
Adrian: The point is that, while we are proud of the solutions we deliver through Red Hat, many integrated solutions require components from multiple software vendors. Our partners and integrators are essential because they bring together the various components needed to deliver, implement, and support these complex solutions. In many regions, especially where we serve multiple countries, these partners offer additional scale and reach, often accessing markets where Red Hat might not have a direct footprint. This collaboration is a critical part of why we work so closely with our partners.
Ed: Another significant benefit of having partners is that it allows Red Hat to concentrate on what we do best. We aren’t trying to solve every aspect of the IT enterprise supply chain. Instead, we work with best-of-breed partners who focus on their own areas of expertise. This means that Adrian’s teams and others in our region can focus on delivering core value to our customers. As we saw on stage, one of the Middle East’s largest banking group was very ahead of the curve in its approach to virtualisation and modernisation. These partners enable us to help customers execute at scale and with credibility. My background in operational IT tells me that although the journey is rarely smooth, having a trusted team and partners makes all the difference.
In today’s enterprise technology landscape, where hybrid and multi-cloud environments are the norm, how is Red Hat helping customers unlock the potential of open source technologies?
Ed: For me, the hybrid and multi-cloud narrative is essentially about providing customers with standardization. Some customers might say that they’re on a path toward data center consolidation, or are committed to a single hypervisor, or even a multi-cloud strategy. But once they embrace a hybrid approach, the underlying message is that they require a globally consistent management and operational platform—one that spans multiple cloud providers, private data centers, or even edge environments.
How do we achieve this consistency in an open source manner? When you’re a proprietary company, control is tight. With our strategy, we offer customers open choice—where to run their platform and which workloads to deploy on top of it. In essence, our approach empowers customers by eliminating the risks of siloed, locked-in solutions. This freedom enables businesses to continuously ask, “What should I run, and where and how should I run it?” They consider the portfolio of applications, evaluate whether low-latency edge deployment is needed—as is common for a supermarket loyalty system—or whether a core data center or public cloud deployment makes sense. The operational “how” is addressed by determining whether to run on a container platform, a virtual machine platform, or an alternative setup. Finally, the “why” ties back to ensuring the overall solution aligns with the customer’s cost and business objectives.
Ultimately, our focus is on answering one simple question for the customer: “What should I run, and where, how, and why should I run it?” This encapsulates our commitment to providing both choice and clarity in today’s complex IT environment.
Adrian: I find it quite interesting how that perspective plays out regionally. While we enable customers to run applications on our platforms, major players like Google are also part of the ecosystem. Particularly in Europe, where there is current uncertainty, many governments are questioning whether their sovereign data should reside on a cloud service originating from the U.S. Without diving too deeply into politics, this debate is prompting customers to consider alternative cloud options. For example, when running OpenShift on-premises or on a cloud provided by a specific country, it becomes easier to migrate to a new provider if necessary. This is an evolving discussion, especially in Europe, and it’s something that might expand beyond political cycles in the future.
Ed: Exactly. In Europe, the focus remains on providing choice. With open source technology, we sidestep many political concerns because of the transparency it offers. Customers can inspect the code to see that there are no hidden backdoors or data issues. Consequently, building a sovereign solution using Red Hat technology has gained significant traction. Both governments and organizations are increasingly interested in retaining full control over their data.
It seems that customers also desire a degree of freedom with their platforms; they want to ensure that no external party completely controls their systems. How does Red Hat provide this assurance of complete control?
Ed: Customers can deploy our platform in either of two ways. If they run it in their own data center, on-premises. In this case, they obtain full access—they have the code, the platform, all the necessary certificates, and they manage it themselves. In contrast, if they decide to run the platform on one of the hyperscalers, while the underlying compute infrastructure is provided by the hyperscaler, the platform—the layer where the data sits and the applications operate—remains in the open source domain. Therefore, even in these cases, customers retain the ability to influence, control, and understand what happens with their data and applications. And when it comes down to it, every country and organization will make its own decisions, but our consistent message remains: our focus is on choice. Whether a company decides to run its workloads privately, on the public cloud, or at the edge, we ensure that they have the consistent tools and platforms to do so efficiently.
Adrian: That’s exactly right. We have long maintained a commitment to enabling customers to choose the open hybrid cloud. Whether a customer opts for a sovereign cloud, a hyperscaler, or their own private cloud, our core mission is to grant them the freedom to choose and to operate in a simple, consistent, and controlled manner.
Where do you see the enterprise technology landscape heading in the next three to five years?
Ed: I believe that over the next three to five years, we will witness an increasingly consolidated effort to eliminate complexity within IT organizations. Over the last decade, IT has excelled in building silos—if anything, it’s been very effective at doing so. However, with the advent of AI, these separate silos of infrastructure and data are becoming even more problematic. When your data resides in multiple unconnected silos, it becomes extremely challenging to aggregate and leverage it for AI-based insights.
In a recent discussion with a financial services industry leader, the focus was increasingly on ensuring access to all their data, democratizing it internally, and enabling AI-driven querying. This represents a paradigm shift, as data today typically lives within isolated applications. In an AI-integrated world, breaking down these silos is critical. I foresee that one of the most significant developments in the near future—driven by AI—will be the democratization of data access across organizations.
Adrian: I concur. From a regional perspective, we might be a couple of years behind more developed markets like Europe or the U.S. For instance, we are still in the earlier stages of transitioning to the cloud. In the UAE and other regions, sovereign cloud providers are just beginning to expand their offerings. Financial institutions, aviation companies, and others are now starting to embrace the cloud more aggressively than they have in the past four or five years.
Ed: Another nuance here involves what we’re exploring with Granite and small language models. Often, to help Adrian’s customers manage support tickets, you don’t need a language model that knows Shakespeare by heart. Large language models typically contain vast amounts of data, much of which isn’t directly relevant to a given enterprise. Our focus has thus shifted to a choice: do we help organizations harness AI by asking questions of data they couldn’t access before, or do we tailor solutions with smaller language models designed to address specific enterprise challenges?
One notable example was how we applied a tailored small language model within Red Hat to support our own teams in resolving support tickets. This initiative not only saved millions of dollars but also significantly enhanced customer experience and sped up response times. Over time, while large language models have captured much of the buzz, I suspect we will see rapid adoption of small, specialized language models tailored for specific functions.
Tech News
Tally Solutions Transforms Banking for SMEs with the Launch of TallyPrime 6.0

In a significant move to empower SMEs with smarter financial management, Tally Solutions has announced the launch of TallyPrime 6.0. This latest unveiling introduces advanced banking integration, transforming how businesses handle bank reconciliation and automated accounting. By bridging the gap between banking and accounting, TallyPrime 6.0 ensures seamless automation that enhances accuracy at every step, helping SMEs streamline operations and focus on growth.
With this new launch, Tally Solutions enables businesses to reconcile bank transactions effortlessly through intelligent automation and minimizing errors. This latest update employs smart matching algorithms to identify unreconciled transactions, ensuring faster bookkeeping and real-time financial clarity. In addition to these features, SMEs can now streamline the creation of payment and receipt vouchers by importing bank statements directly into TallyPrime. These enhancements significantly improve financial efficiency, allowing businesses to make informed strategic decisions with confidence.
Commenting on the launch, Vikas Panchal, General Manager – MENA, Tally Solutions, said, “At Tally, we have always worked towards creating technology that can ease business operations for SMEs. The launch of TallyPrime 6.0 represents a major leap forward in simplifying financial operations for the small and medium business community. By integrating banking functions directly into our platform, we are eliminating redundant workflows and enhancing financial management. Our commitment remains focused on providing innovative solutions that align with the UAE government’s vision for a thriving and digitally empowered SME sector.”
Furthermore, the new release introduces action-driven financial reports, providing deep insights into transaction histories, cash flow, and reconciliation status. With bilingual invoice printing, businesses operating in markets like Kuwait and Qatar can now generate invoices in both English and Arabic on a single document, reducing printing costs and ensuring compliance with local regulations.
A comprehensive business management software, TallyPrime also offers seamless professional communication via WhatsApp, intuitive report dashboards, and enhanced document-sharing capabilities, ensuring that customers, accountants, and everyone within the business network stay connected at every stage. Complementing these features, Tally Solutions’ local data centers in the UAE enable TallyPrime Cloud Access, allowing organizations to securely access their key financial data from any location at any time for greater flexibility and efficiency.
With TallyPrime 6.0, Tally Solutions continues to redefine business management for SMEs, offering a seamless bridge between banking and accounting. By simplifying financial operations and enhancing automation, TallyPrime 6.0 empowers businesses to operate with greater accuracy and control. As a trusted partner for SMEs, Tally remains committed to innovation, ensuring businesses across the GCC can navigate financial complexities with ease and confidence.
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