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IDC Middle East CIO Summit 2023

Enabling the Digital Economy's Leaders

In 2023, we are going further, together!
Join us for the 16th Edition.

The digital economy continues to expand in scale and sophistication at an unprecedented rate, driving the transformation of citizen, customer, and employee experiences and the rise of digitally enabled services such as remote healthcare, distance learning, remote work, and mobile banking.

Overview
Digital-native firms, equipped with new business models and armed with substantial venture capital funding, have disrupted supply chains in numerous industries, fueling growth in areas such as ecommerce, direct-to-consumer services, digital payments, and cloud kitchens. With the metaverse and Web3 paradigms on the horizon, further disruption is expected to individual, enterprise, and industrial digital experiences.

As the share of the digital economy becomes increasingly significant, major governments around the world are beginning to develop dedicated strategies to enable its measurement and further development. Creating suitable regulatory environments and enriching the talent pool will be critical to the success of these strategies. Today, technology is playing an ever-increasing role in enabling, measuring, and reporting on sustainability initiatives and diversity and inclusion drives, and government and business leaders are moving these issues to the top of their digital agendas.

The IDC Middle East CIO Summit 2023 will bring together the region's foremost IT and telecom leaders, digital government pioneers, digital regulators and authorities, and industry thought leaders.

Hosting the Middle East's most prominent CTOs, and CIOs, the event will examine the current state of the digital economy, assess its ongoing impact on citizens, customers, employees, and operations, address the key challenges that need to be overcome, and outline proven best practices and strategies for driving future success.
Why Attend?
• Receive critical insights from leading industry experts
• Discover solutions to pressing business challenges
• Get hands on with the industry's latest innovations
• Interact with the brands and specialists on your short list
• Engage in workshop-based technology discussions
• Participate in dedicated one-to-one meetings
• Share knowledge and network with your peers
• Take part in a series of fun, exciting, and memorable activities

Delegate Journey

Don't miss out on an extraordinary and unparallel experience on both days of IDC Middle East CIO Summit 2023

Key Topics

Sustainable Strategies & Technologies

Talent Development & The Demand For New Skills

Four IT Improvements you can Implement Today

Venue

Atlantis, The Palm
Crescent Rd - The Palm Jumeirah - Dubai

IDC Middle East Advisory Council 2023

Wesam Lootah

CEO, Corporate Support Services Sector, Dubai Municipality (UAE)

Eng. Faisal Bakhashwain

Deputy Minister for Digital Transformation, Ministry of Human Resource and Social Development (KSA)

Dr. Ammar H. Al Husaini

Acting Director General, Central Agency for Information Technology (Kuwait)

Yazeed Al Otaibi

Assistant Deputy Minister for Planning and Digital Transformation, Ministry of Health (KSA)

Eng. Naif Sheshah

Assistant Deputy Governor for Planning and Development and Chief Digital Officer, Communications, Space & Technology Commission (CST) (KSA)

Sundah Alsehali

Chief Information Officer, Public Sector (KSA)

Jason Roos

Chief Information Officer, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KSA)

Yousef A. Alsuhaibani

Chief Information Officer, Mobily (KSA)

Abdulaziz Abanmi

Chief Operating Officer, Saudi Payments (KSA)

Saud Al Dhawyani

CTO, Emirates NBD (UAE)

Ayman Alharbi

Senior Director of Infrastructure & Operation, Red Sea Global (KSA)

Bandar Alshahrani

Head of Digital and Innovation, ARDARA (KSA)

Fuad Al Ansari

Former Vice President IT & Shared Services, ADNOC Group

Ahmad M. Almulla

Former EVP, Corporate Services, Emirates Global Aluminium (UAE)

Mai B AlOwaish

Chief Data & Innovation Officer, Gulf Bank (Kuwait)

Ghinwa Baradhi

Chief Operating Officer (MENAT), HSBC Bank (UAE)

Eng. Huda Ahmed Mohsen Show full profile linkedin

Eng. Huda Ahmed Mohsen

Chief of IT, Ministry of Information Affairs (Bahrain)

Ali Abdulla Hassan

Chief of IT, Ministry of Oil (Bahrain)

Ahmed Al Khayyat

Chief Technology Officer, Al Baraka Islamic Bank (Bahrain)

Sean Langton Show full profile linkedin

Sean Langton

Group Chief Information Officer, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) (UAE)

Eng. Ghada Albugami

CIO & President Advisor for DX, Princess Nourah Bint Abdul Rahman University (KSA)

Virgilio Viegas

Senior Vice President of IT Security, QNB Group (Qatar)

View all

2023 Event Highlights

Agenda

Filter Topics

8:00

Registration & Networking

8:30

Opening Act: Art of Music

8:35

IDC Welcome Address

8:45

IDC Opening Keynote: Strategies for the CIO and Enterprise Innovation

9:15

Harnessing Data and AI for Growth

9:35

Dealing with Economic Uncertainty in the Digital Age

9:55

The Digital Journey: Digital Agility, Transformation, and Digital Re-Invention

10:10

Special Address

10:30

Tea/Coffee & Networking Break

11:00

Summit Partner Tracks (Parallel Sessions)

12:10

Tea/Coffee & Networking Break

12:30

Transformation Zones (Parallel Sessions)

12:40

Platinum Partner Tracks (Parallel Sessions)

14:15

Lunch & Networking

14:40

Transformation Zones (Parallel Sessions)

14:50

For The CIO - By The CIO Tracks (Parallel Sessions)

15:35

Close of Day 1

Speakers

Jyoti Lalchandani

Group Vice President & Regional Managing Director (META), IDC

Crawford Del Prete

President, IDC Worldwide

Naim Yazbeck

General Manager, Microsoft UAE

Adrian Pickering

Regional General Manager MENA, Red Hat

Samer Kandalaft

Executive Vice President, QuanTech (Part of MDS System Integration)

Amna Al Saleh

Head of Technology Development, Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology (MoIAT)

Jason Roos

Chief Information Officer, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KSA)

Mai B AlOwaish

Chief Data & Innovation Officer, Gulf Bank (Kuwait)

Charbel Khneisser

Vice President, Solutions Engineering, EMEA, Riverbed Technology

Ali El Kontar

CEO, Zero&One

Mark Schwartz

Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist, AWS

Ashraf El Zarka

Vice President, Regional Managing Director MEA & Pakistan, UiPath

Alessio Bagnaresi

Director, AI & Advanced Analytics Practice, Google Cloud

Ravi Tank

Senior Vice President, Cloud4C

Pranish Kushare Show full profile linkedin

Pranish Kushare

Senior Principal Business Solutions Consultant, Infor

Mina Nagy

Regional Go-To-Market Director, Microsoft

Deepa Ahuja

Senior Conference Director, IDC

Ronita Bhattacharjee

Vice President Conferences (META), IDC

Yash Pal Dogra

Associate Conference Director, IDC

Alain Sanchez

EMEA CISO, Fortinet

Mohamed Zouari

General Manager, Snowflake

Arvind Srinivasan

SVP – Global Markets & Strategy, eMudhra

Milad Aslaner

Head of Technology Advisory Group, SentinelOne

Dr. Alexey Sidorov

Chief Data Evangelist MEA, Denodo

Jessica Constantinidis

Field Innovation Officer EMEA – Strategy Office, ServiceNow

Gordon Orr

Senior Director, Software Sales EMEA, F5

Georges Farah

Manager of Sales Engineering MEA, Micro Focus

Mark Phillips

VP Solution Architecture, EMEA & APAC, Human Security

Nour Fateen

Director, Sales Engineering, Recorded Future

Mike Kiersey

Director, Sales Engineering EMEA, Boomi

Ahmad Jaber Show full profile linkedin

Ahmad Jaber

Principle Security Consultant (MENA), Tenable

Aysar Yousef

Azure Data & AI Lead, Financial Services & Aviation, Microsoft

Taha Tkito

CIO, Americana Foods (UAE)

Thuraya Al-Harthi Show full profile linkedin

Thuraya Al-Harthi

Acting Director for the Government Digital Services Unified Portal, Ministry of Transport, Communication and Information Technology (MTCIT) (Oman)

Dr. Lt. Col. Hamad Khalifa AlNuaimi

Head of Telecommunications Division, Abu Dhabi Police (UAE)

Dr. Ammar H. Al Husaini

Acting Director General, Central Agency for Information Technology (Kuwait)

Marc Dowd

Vice President Research, CIO Advisory, IDC UK

Aus Akram Al Zubaidi

Director of IT & Media Management, MBC Group

Muhammad Aslam

Chief Technology Officer, Moro Hub (UAE)

Dr. Salim Al-Shuaili

Director, Artificial intelligence and Advanced Technology Unit, Ministry of Transport, Communication and Information Technology (MTCIT) (Oman)

Mohamed Adel Abu Hassan

Assistant Undersecretary of Resources & Information, Bahrain Ministry of Municipalities Affairs & Agriculture (Bahrain)

Amit Varma

Group Chief Platform Officer, Emirates NBD

Dr. Hoda Alkhzaimi

Director, Center of Cybersecurity, New York University Abu Dhabi

Fuad Al Ansari

Former Vice President IT & Shared Services, ADNOC Group

Sergej Berendsen

CEO, Metri

Ahmad M. Almulla

Former EVP, Corporate Services, Emirates Global Aluminium (UAE)

Ayman Alharbi

Senior Director of Infrastructure & Operation, Red Sea Global (KSA)

Faisal Ali

Group CIO, Gargash Group (UAE)

Saud Al Dhawyani

CTO, Emirates NBD (UAE)

Steven Frantzen

Senior Vice President & Regional Managing Director (EMEA), IDC

H.E. Dr. Mohamed Hamad Al Kuwaiti

Head of Cybersecurity Council for the UAE Government

Darran Rice

Tanzu Value Advisor, VMware

Garsen Naidu

Director, Specialist Sales and Architectures, Cisco

Ram Ramachandran

Senior Vice President & Head, Middle East & Africa, Tech Mahindra

Kalyan Kumar

Global Chief Technology Officer and Head of Ecosystems, HCLTech

Neil Harbisson

The World’s First Officially Recognized Human “Cyborg”

Ahlem Njah

Senior Technical Cloud Endpoint Specialist, Microsoft

Saqib Chaudhry

CIO, Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare (KSA)

Marc Dowd

Advisory Partner, IDC Executive Advisory

Moayad Hassan

Digital Transformation Specialist, Dubai Municipality

Vladimir Slinko

Senior Technology Advisor, KasperskyOS

Dr. Dani Abu Ghaida

Chief Digital Officer (MEA), Crayon

Islam Afifi

Regional Presales Manager, Veeam Software

Karim Y. Rizkallah

Regional Vice President of Solution Consulting, OpenText

Wajeeh AL Mesherky

CEO, Sahara Watira - RiCSOC

Denis Dincic Show full profile linkedin

Denis Dincic

Senior Global Solutions Architect, Equinix

Marouan Betaleb

Solutions Engineer, Hyland Software

Nidal Azba

Chief Technology Officer, Kyndryl

Karthik Ananda Rao

Chief Technical Evangelist, ManageEngine

Hafdi Salah

Vice President, Solutions & Customer Success, BBI

Maik de Wolf

Vice President, Middle East & South Africa, Mendix

Faisal Ameer Malik

Chief Technical Officer, Huawei Enterprise Business Group

John Doetch

Vice President, Global Sales Engineering, Swimlane

Samer Semaan

Channel and Alliances Manager, Pure Storage

Farid Najjar

Area Distribution Lead–EEMI (Eastern Europe, META, Iberia & LATAM), NetApp

Gunal Kannan

AVP, CTO Office (EMEA & APJ), BMC Software

View All Speakers

Partners

Supported by
Supported by
Supported by
Supported by
Host Partner
Strategic & Sustainability Partner
Smart ICT Partner
Digital Solutions Partner
Trailblazer Partner
Sustainability Partner
Innovation Partner
Digital Transformation Partner
Summit Partner
Summit Partner
Summit Partner
Summit Partner
Summit Partner
Summit Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Platinum Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Technology Focus Group Partner
Sustainability Transformation Zone Partner
Industry 4.0 Transformation Zone Partner
Exhibit Partner
Exhibit Partner
Exhibit Partner
Exhibit Partner
Exhibit Partner
Exhibit Partner
Exhibit Partner
Exhibit Partner
Associate Partner
Associate Partner
Associate Partner
Associate Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Media Partner
Health Partner
Health Partner

Awards

The IDC Middle East CIO Summit 2023 will also play host to the IDC Excellence Awards. The awards will recognize the efforts of the country's leading technology executives, based on their ability to drive innovation, strengthen resiliency, and shape rapid change. Securing a place on our list of finalists will be viewed as a genuine mark of enterprise excellence, so submit your nominations today!

CIO (Chief Information Officer) of the Year

CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) of the Year

Women in Technology & Business

Submit Nominations Today!

Photo Gallery

Knowledge Hub

Transformation Zone
Metaverse

The emerging metaverse paradigm will have a significant impact on the digital economy. The metaverse is a highly immersive future environment that blends the physical and digital to drive a shared sense of presence, interaction, and continuity across multiple spheres of work and life. This year's summit will examine the impact of the metaverse on digital economies and explore potential use cases for organizations to embrace.

Transformation Zone
Metaverse

The emerging metaverse paradigm will have a significant impact on the digital economy. The metaverse is a highly immersive future environment that blends the physical and digital to drive a shared sense of presence, interaction, and continuity across multiple spheres of work and life. This year's summit will examine the impact of the metaverse on digital economies and explore potential use cases for organizations to embrace.

Transformation Zone
Sustainability

Organizations around the world are increasingly implementing sustainability into their business life cycles, and they see environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors impacting their enterprise value. Technology is a key enabler of successful sustainable business transformation and corporate sustainability approaches that align a positive impact on people and the environment with the generation of financial profits. ESG integration has become a CEO-level topic for organizations worldwide, underlining the strategic importance that sustainability has attained over the last few years.

Transformation Zone
Sustainability

The key topics to be discussed in the Sustainability Zone will include:

• The role of tech in sustainable business strategies
• ESG reporting, governance, regulations, and compliance
• Sustainable cloud strategies
• The impact of sustainability on technology vendor selection processes
• Energy-efficient datacenter strategies
• Using tech tools to improve diversity and gender equity
• The impact of AI on sustainability and social welfare

Who should attend?

Heads, VPs, directors, and managers of:
• Sustainability
• Corporate Responsibility & Corporate Social Responsibility
• Environment, Health, and Safety
• Corporate Giving / Foundation
• Public Affairs / Government Affairs / Corporate Affairs
• Finance
• Legal
• Communications
• Human Resources
• Strategy
• Marketing
• Revenue
• Innovation
• Procurement
• Datacenters
• Facility Management

Transformation Zone
Industry 4.0

Factories, warehouses, and logistics firms also find themselves in the midst of transformation. The impact of the pandemic on supply and distribution, with effects that often rippled across the globe, forced the realization that lean and efficient supply chains can also be brittle and vulnerable to disruption. To address this, globalization strategies are being augmented with a new emphasis on self-reliance, partner ecosystems, cost management, and the minimization of disruption risk.

Transformation Zone
Industry 4.0

The key topics to be discussed in the Industry 4.0 zone will include:

• National industrial sector development strategies
• Future factories
• Digital twins
• Intelligent supply chains
• Additive manufacturing and 3D printing
• Smart warehousing
• Advanced logistics management, transportation, and delivery optimization

Who should attend?

• Managing Directors
• Senior Management
• Financial Directors
• Business Owners
• Heads of Technology Information Systems (CIOs, CTOs, ERP Managers, Digital Transformation Officers)
• Supply Chain Directors / Managers
• Heads of Manufacturing / Production / Engineering
• Heads of Processes / Control / Automation Engineering
• Heads of Operations / Logistics / Quality Assurance
• Heads of Factories / Plants / Works / Maintenance
• Commercial Directors / Managers
• Product Design / R&D

Analyst Spotlight
A New Approach to Security in the Post-Pandemic World

Frank Dickson,
Group Vice President, Security & Trust, IDC


As we enter 2023, we can finally, for the most part, put reactionary moves due to COVID-19 behind us as the disease moves from a pandemic to an endemic part of daily life. We have accepted that digital transformation moved at a feverish pace, transitioning our enterprises to digital first years before we anticipated. The possibilities of remote work gave way to the reality that hybrid work is here to stay. These are truths that we have accepted.

Analyst Spotlight
A New Approach to Security in the Post-Pandemic World

Frank Dickson,
Group Vice President, Security & Trust, IDC


As we enter 2023, we can finally, for the most part, put reactionary moves due to COVID-19 behind us as the disease moves from a pandemic to an endemic part of daily life. We have accepted that digital transformation moved at a feverish pace, transitioning our enterprises to digital first years before we anticipated. The possibilities of remote work gave way to the reality that hybrid work is here to stay. These are truths that we have accepted.

The economic headwinds we are experiencing have re-energized a trend that was muted by the pandemic. The C-suite appreciates the value and importance of security both now and into the future. C-level executives are actively planning continued investments in security to ensure the viability of their enterprises. However, C-level executives are growing tired of the continually growing financial appetite of security and are looking to reduce spending when and where possible. They are demanding accountability for the spend; in essence, they are looking for secure outcomes that are measurable and meaningful.

The result of this security confluence is a migration of approaches. The breach detection mindset of the past is giving way to a view that positions security as a way of improving an organization's cyber-risk posture, a posture that is tightly coupled with the goals of the organization and decreasing business risk. In its 2023 Future of Trust FutureScape, IDC predicted that by 2025, 45% of CEOs, fatigued by security spending without predictable ROI, will demand security metrics and results measurement to assess and validate investments made in their security program.

The IDC Middle East CIO Summit 2023 will look to address security in this new reality. We will help guide you in working with the CEO and boards of directors as we transition to delivering secure outcomes and a trusted organization to our executive constituencies.

Partner Spotlight
Modern Data Protection in the Age of Digital Transformation

Mohamad Rizk,
Regional Director (Middle East & CIS), Veeam Software


Over the past few years, we have witnessed an acceleration of digital transformation initiatives across regional enterprises in the Middle East. This has brought with it a multitude of challenges and complexities relating to multicloud/hybrid-cloud architectures and Kubernetes adoption.

Partner Spotlight
Modern Data Protection in the Age of Digital Transformation

Mohamad Rizk,
Regional Director (Middle East & CIS), Veeam Software


Over the past few years, we have witnessed an acceleration of digital transformation initiatives across regional enterprises in the Middle East. This has brought with it a multitude of challenges and complexities relating to multicloud/hybrid-cloud architectures and Kubernetes adoption.

The incidence of ransomware is also on the rise. As per the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023, 86% of organizations in the Middle East and Africa fell prey to ransomware attacks in 2022. Businesses cannot stand still, particularly in times of crisis.

IT and data protection teams have a big task ahead keeping up with ramping workloads and ensuring they close the gap between technology and how well it is backed up and protected. So, as budgets constrict, enterprises need to optimize every dollar and make sure the right workloads and applications are prioritized and protected.

They also need to ensure a simple, flexible, reliable, and powerful modern data protection solution is in place; one that protects all environments – cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS, and Kubernetes. Only then can enterprises ensure they're sufficiently protected and prepared for turbulent times ahead.

Partner Spotlight
The CISO: A Species in Permanent Mutation

Alain Sanchez,
CISO, Fortinet


Looking back a decade ago, those that today go by the title of CISO were humble creatures shyly asking the big boys and girls in the boardroom permission to update the antivirus. Today, the same fellows get their own seat in that same boardroom, a decent share of the bonus pie, and a cup of tea on a good day. And strange things happen as well: the CEO asks cybersecurity questions; the newly called CISO gets a budget and a team; sometimes even, the voice of the CISO prevails over execs long established in the upper floor.

Partner Spotlight
The CISO: A Species in Permanent Mutation

Alain Sanchez,
CISO, Fortinet


Looking back a decade ago, those that today go by the title of CISO were humble creatures shyly asking the big boys and girls in the boardroom permission to update the antivirus. Today, the same fellows get their own seat in that same boardroom, a decent share of the bonus pie, and a cup of tea on a good day. And strange things happen as well: the CEO asks cybersecurity questions; the newly called CISO gets a budget and a team; sometimes even, the voice of the CISO prevails over execs long established in the upper floor.

Ten years ago, the evolution was due to the sophistication of the threat landscape. The inflexion point happened as CISOs were asked to serve a digital transformation that was a survival condition.

Such evolution led the CISOs to sit at a large variety of meetings whose common denominator was to reshape the company, its value proposition, image, compliance, and profitability. Not exactly domains that initially were part of their cultural background.

The CISO's role has evolved from protecting data to inspiring innovation, and it will continue to mutate long into the future. Indeed, if a time machine would deliver us today the CISOs of 2050, they would not even be seen as IT people.

Analyst Spotlight
Thriving in the Digital-First Economy

Ranjit Rajan,
Vice President, Research (META), IDC


The pandemic-driven pivot to digital-first strategies by organizations across the Middle East continues well after the pandemic has subsided. Indeed, many leading organizations are now making the transition from enabling digital transformation to actually running a digital business.

Analyst Spotlight
Thriving in the Digital-First Economy

Ranjit Rajan,
Vice President, Research (META), IDC


The pandemic-driven pivot to digital-first strategies by organizations across the Middle East continues well after the pandemic has subsided. Indeed, many leading organizations are now making the transition from enabling digital transformation to actually running a digital business.

In line with this shift, they are increasingly focused on deriving a larger share of revenues from digital products, services, channels, and platforms, with 50% of the CIOs surveyed by IDC across the Middle East saying this is now a major priority for their organizations.

The same survey revealed that 70% of Middle East CIOs will be prioritizing the digitalization of operations (process automation, reengineering, and productivity improvements) over the next 12-18 months, while more than half will also be focused on delivering insights at scale across their organizations by building capabilities in data and enterprise intelligence.

The region will continue to face several headwinds throughout 2023, including volatile demand, high inflation, interest rate hikes, supply chain uncertainties, and currency fluctuations. In order to navigate these storms of disruption, organizations will need to invest in strengthening their digital resiliency so they are better positioned to not only survive but thrive in new market environments as conditions continue to change.

Giga/Mega projects that envision futuristic, highly digitalized cities and communities — such as NEOM in Saudi Arabia — will provide a blueprint for accelerated digitalization across the region in 2023 and beyond. Such projects will set the pace as they develop greenfield digital infrastructure and platforms, leveraging advanced technologies like AI/ML, IoT, edge, and 5G to create innovative tech-enabled use cases and customer experiences.

The rise of the digital economy and the emergence of digital-native firms in segments such as fintech, ecommerce, D2C (direct to consumer), aggrotech, and edtech, among others, have accelerated the disruption of supply chains in several industries, driving the development of new business models, digitally augmented customer experiences, and automated operations.

At the same time, governments across the Middle East have launched numerous strategies and policies to support the growth of the digital economy, with a focus on developing the infrastructure, innovation platforms, skills, and regulations required to support the expansion of digital businesses.

One such example is the UAE government's 'Digital Economy Strategy'. Launched in 2022, this initiative aims to double the contribution of the digital economy to the UAE's GDP from 9.7% to 19.4% over the next 10 years, and it is already bearing fruit.

Indeed, the number of digital companies operating in the country is expanding significantly, with the fintech, ecommerce, and D2C segments leading the charge. These companies are disrupting business models and value chains, driving incumbent players to develop new innovation models, engage in ecosystem partnerships, and launch or acquire digital spin-offs.

In order to thrive in this new world, a digital-first mindset is essential, coupled with a vision to build a data-driven organization that is ingrained with a culture of innovation. Leveraging cloud as a foundational platform, developing a data and intelligence plane powered by AI and advanced analytics, and enabling ubiquitous, consumption-based digital infrastructure will all become critical technology priorities.

Partner Spotlight
Activating the Digital in Your Transformation Through App and Infra Modernization

Prashanth Karanth,
Head of Pre-Sales, Huco


The cerebral core of any digital business, powered by IT, is for features to go live faster with secure controls and superior quality at economical costs. In a world that is grappling with many right solutions coupled with challenges related to collaboration and cultural changes, there is a pragmatic need to strategize programs to accelerate adoption and resolve the underlying challenges.

Partner Spotlight
Activating the Digital in Your Transformation Through App and Infra Modernization

Prashanth Karanth,
Head of Pre-Sales, Huco


The cerebral core of any digital business, powered by IT, is for features to go live faster with secure controls and superior quality at economical costs. In a world that is grappling with many right solutions coupled with challenges related to collaboration and cultural changes, there is a pragmatic need to strategize programs to accelerate adoption and resolve the underlying challenges.

This proactive approach will require a shift in culture, a change in the way of working, and the implementation of a gradual application modernization journey. It will also require organizations to have tightly coupled modern apps, modern infrastructure, and a cloud-native security road map.

So, how do we go about enacting these multi-fold moving target initiatives?

The key is to take a break from your current way of working and seriously assess your overall strategy and goals. The journey to one-click release orchestrated agile DevSecOps is a five-step process toward a precise and glorious end state:
1. Map your business vision with technology value streams centred around GTM, QoS, and costs.
2. Design a wire frame covering the future target operating model and assemble a transformation office (DevOps, SRE, EA)
3. Bring in a workable application modernization program covering assessment, cloud-native solution mapping, and adoption road map.
4. Re-design the architecture (application platform, modern infrastructure, multicloud platforms, DevSecOps)
5. Enable agile collaboration, seamless automation, continuous adoption, shift left in security.

With Huco's 4D and InnovApp framework, covering assessment, architecture, technology, and adoption, we look forward to continuing to modernize the application journey for our customers in 2023, providing an end-to-end guide for successful application modernization.

Partner Spotlight
Adapting Quickly and Imaginatively in an Increasingly Data-Driven World

Jessica Constantinidis,
Field Innovation Officer, ServiceNow


As thousands of travelers geared up for their holidays last year, one leading European airline took the unusual decision to cancel 10 to 20 flights per day to and from one of the EU’s largest airports from early July until late August. The airport was struggling with a shortage of staff, leading to passengers missing flights because it was taking too long to get through security. The airline also announced it would reserve 20 seats on each flight for those who couldn’t get through customs on time.

Partner Spotlight
Adapting Quickly and Imaginatively in an Increasingly Data-Driven World

Jessica Constantinidis,
Field Innovation Officer, ServiceNow


As thousands of travelers geared up for their holidays last year, one leading European airline took the unusual decision to cancel 10 to 20 flights per day to and from one of the EU’s largest airports from early July until late August. The airport was struggling with a shortage of staff, leading to passengers missing flights because it was taking too long to get through security. The airline also announced it would reserve 20 seats on each flight for those who couldn’t get through customs on time.

Imagine the cost of reducing flights and having open seats to accommodate those people. This airline was being proactive. It knew it was going to get frustrated travelers, frustrated staff, overbooked flights, and delayed departures. It also knew — via its company app — exactly who was traveling and how long it was taking someone to get through the airport to the gate. So it had run the numbers and worked out that the cost of all that would be higher than reducing the number of flights and having a certain number of seats available.

This is just one example of how companies can use data to adopt a more proactive mindset and respond in an agile manner to factors outside their control. According to research carried out by ServiceNow, 90% of CEOs across Europe see this kind of organizational agility as critical for driving business performance and growth — but only one in five organizations have fully embraced it.

The problem is that those businesses that lack adaptability may be left paralyzed when faced with changing markets and environments or stuck in a reactive state, frantically paddling to survive.

Analyst Spotlight
Cloud Overspend and the Role of CloudOps and FinOps

Matt Eastwood,
Senior Vice President, Worldwide Research, IDC


Over the past few years, IDC has seen investments in cloud grow rapidly as enterprises build their digital footprints. In many cases, this growth has occurred without the proper governance necessary to ensure resources are optimized appropriately. And the impact on budgets has been significant, with cloud now representing 35-40% of a typical IT budget. Additionally, the typical enterprise is reporting that their cloud overspend can be upwards of 25-35% today. Customers are clearly struggling to understand how to best optimize cloud spend for architectural and business benefit while also allocating cloud costs to the correct team.

Analyst Spotlight
Cloud Overspend and the Role of CloudOps and FinOps

Matt Eastwood,
Senior Vice President, Worldwide Research, IDC


Over the past few years, IDC has seen investments in cloud grow rapidly as enterprises build their digital footprints. In many cases, this growth has occurred without the proper governance necessary to ensure resources are optimized appropriately. And the impact on budgets has been significant, with cloud now representing 35-40% of a typical IT budget. Additionally, the typical enterprise is reporting that their cloud overspend can be upwards of 25-35% today. Customers are clearly struggling to understand how to best optimize cloud spend for architectural and business benefit while also allocating cloud costs to the correct team.

One of the ways that enterprise IT customers are tackling this challenge is through the implementation of CloudOps and FinOps. CloudOps is the practice of optimizing and managing the use of cloud resources, while FinOps is the practice of managing financial aspects of cloud operations. Together, these practices allow customers to better understand their cloud usage and costs, and to identify areas where they can reduce expenses effectively.

For example, by using CloudOps tools, customers can monitor and adjust their usage of resources such as storage and computing to ensure they are only paying for what they need. Additionally, FinOps techniques such as forecasting and budgeting can help customers plan and control their spending, preventing unexpected or unnecessary cloud charges.

As a result of these efforts, many enterprise IT customers are seeing significant reductions in their cloud expenditures and can more effectively allocate their IT budgets to other areas of the business. This can mean the difference between a project being viable or not. It also allows these users to have a better understanding of what they pay for and predict future costs, which can help them avoid financial surprises and make more informed decisions. And as many organizations deal with financial headwinds in the market, the time to implement or augment internal CloudOps and FinOps functions is now.

Partner Spotlight
The Role of AI in Revolutionizing Industries

Dr. Dani Abu Ghaida,
Chief Digital Officer (MEA), Crayon


Artificial intelligence has evolved to an extent that it can now enable real-time analytics, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance personalization. It can also be used for data insights, natural language processing, and computer vision.

Partner Spotlight
The Role of AI in Revolutionizing Industries

Dr. Dani Abu Ghaida,
Chief Digital Officer (MEA), Crayon


Artificial intelligence has evolved to an extent that it can now enable real-time analytics, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance personalization. It can also be used for data insights, natural language processing, and computer vision.

AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries, including finance, transportation, and healthcare. In fact, it has already started to do so. AI is fundamentally changing the way these industries operate; not only from a decision-making, efficiency, or optimization perspective, but also in terms of enabling the development of new products and services and the creation of new business models.

AI will become more and more integrated in these industries and will be the driving force behind future innovations. What is inevitable is that AI will lead to job displacement and changes in the workforce; this will require, not only new skills and trainings, but also new methods of collaboration between humans and machines.

This is where the ethical considerations, policy implications, and limitations of technology must be taken into account… The future of AI will leave humanity with lots to unfold!

CXO Spotlight
How to Improve Innovation in the Information Technology Field

Eng. Huda Ahmed Mohsen,
Chief of IT, Ministry of Information Affairs (Bahrain)


It's time for all organizations to start driving innovation within the information technology field. Businesses and industries are always looking for ways to enhance their development and potential growth, and the acceptance of innovative ideas will be critical to ensuring the survival of companies in the future.

CXO Spotlight
How to Improve Innovation in the Information Technology Field

Eng. Huda Ahmed Mohsen,
Chief of IT, Ministry of Information Affairs (Bahrain)


It's time for all organizations to start driving innovation within the information technology field. Businesses and industries are always looking for ways to enhance their development and potential growth, and the acceptance of innovative ideas will be critical to ensuring the survival of companies in the future.

However, while this philosophy may sound good in theory, the truth is that many companies are reluctant to implement new ideas because they fear that they will require a large investment of money and resources to implement new IT systems. In reality, however, implementing innovative IT solutions can be relatively easy and inexpensive. Here are a few tips for improving innovation in your company’s IT department:

1. Identify areas in your IT department that can be improved through the use of innovative technologies. Once you have identified these areas, create a plan for implementing these new technologies. This should include a detailed budget and a timeline for implementation.
2. Use analytics to identify areas where your IT department could be more efficient. Analytics tools allow you to measure the effectiveness of your IT systems in real time and identify areas where improvements could be made. By analyzing data in this way, you can develop an accurate picture of how your IT systems are being used and identify areas for improvement.
3. Keep an open mind when developing IT solutions. It is important to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things. This will help to ensure the development of creative solutions to your problems and enhance your overall productivity. If you develop a rigid approach to solving your IT issues, you are less likely to come up with innovative solutions to the problems at hand.
4. Encourage your employees to come up with ideas for how to improve the efficiency of the department.

Analyst Spotlight
The Three Core Pillars of Efficient Digital Infrastructure

Shahin Hashim,
Associate Research Director, IDC


Pandemic-induced transformation has enabled governments and enterprises across all industries to deliver their products and services through digital channels. The sheer pace of this transformation has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience worth living through. As we move forward into 2023, the digital world has become the norm for most industries and organizations.

Analyst Spotlight
The Three Core Pillars of Efficient Digital Infrastructure

Shahin Hashim,
Associate Research Director, IDC


Pandemic-induced transformation has enabled governments and enterprises across all industries to deliver their products and services through digital channels. The sheer pace of this transformation has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience worth living through. As we move forward into 2023, the digital world has become the norm for most industries and organizations. This requires them to constantly innovate and improve their digital offerings to meet changing customer expectations, making a digital-only approach the default strategy for many. Indeed, three out of five UAE organizations surveyed by IDC rank the need to digitalize their operations as their utmost digital priority.

The implementation of highly responsive, resilient, and agile infrastructure is the foundation for any digital-first/only organization. IDC defines this as digital infrastructure, and our Future of Digital Infrastructure Framework helps technology suppliers to position their infrastructure products and services. It also assists technology buyers in defining their road maps for infrastructure transformation, enabling them to attain their ultimate digital infrastructure goals.

The framework is built around three core pillars:

Cloud-Native Technologies: This refers to any modern network, compute, and storage infrastructure, as well as software solutions and technologies delivered at cloud scale and with cloud attributes. These technologies enable frictionless governance, data management and mobility, and security compliance for enterprise workloads across the edge, core, and cloud, thus proactively preparing enterprises to face the interconnected uncertainties of the new world order.

Autonomous Operations: This is a model that allows organizations to run their infrastructure services in a highly automated and self-sufficient manner. This enables more efficient and reliable operations, freeing up resources and enhancing the overall customer experience. To achieve the most advanced level of autonomous operations, organizations can use a combination of modern programmable infrastructure with an API-enabled automation control plane coupled with a suite of cloud-native tools such as full stack observability, intelligent monitoring, asset management, configuration management, application performance management, and end-user experience management. Such an API-driven control plane enables DevOps teams to increase their developer velocity. Additionally, the IT service management function can be enhanced by adopting a proactive approach using AIOps augmented with AI/ML models, helping to significantly reduce the time to detect, respond to, and resolve incidents.

Ubiquitous Consumption: This refers to the utilization of digital infrastructure building blocks based on business objectives, regardless of the location of consumption or the method of delivery. This can include the consumption of resources at the edge, core, or cloud, as well as whether they are shared or dedicated. Essentially, it is about being able to consume the necessary digital resources in a flexible and adaptable manner so that they can be used to achieve desired business outcomes.

The future of digital infrastructure is an exciting one, and it will be interesting to see how organizations continue to leverage these developments to drive their digital-only journeys.

Partner Spotlight
Identifying Cyber Risk to Combat the Threat of Cybercrime

Maher Jadallah,
Senior Director (MENA), Tenable


Over the last two years, we've seen wave after wave of ransomware attacks forcing organizations to make the unenviable choice between meeting the attackers' extortion demands or seeing their sensitive data made public or even wiped. We also saw a resurgence in DDoS attacks and phishing campaigns targeting organizations in 2022.

Partner Spotlight
Identifying Cyber Risk to Combat the Threat of Cybercrime

Maher Jadallah,
Senior Director (MENA), Tenable


Over the last two years, we've seen wave after wave of ransomware attacks forcing organizations to make the unenviable choice between meeting the attackers' extortion demands or seeing their sensitive data made public or even wiped. We also saw a resurgence in DDoS attacks and phishing campaigns targeting organizations in 2022.

In some instances, threat actors are unleashing a combination of all three leaving security teams fighting to fend off multiple attacks. The sad reality is that this is not expected to change any time soon as threat actors are far more virulent than ever before. Indeed, the organizations surveyed as part of the 2022 WEF Global Risks Report ranked “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” as one the top 10 most severe risks they expect to face over the next decade.

When threat actors evaluate a company's attack surface, they're not thinking in terms of organizational silos. They're probing for the right combination of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identity privileges. To reduce the threat, security teams must gain a view of all software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. They must identify who is using what systems and determine what level of access they have. And they must correlate all this together, regardless of whether it's happening on a laptop, a container, an application, or a programmable logic controller.

By observing the full breadth and depth of the organization’s cyber risk, security teams can take the actions needed to reduce threats through remediation and incident response workflows.

Partner Spotlight
Adding the Human Touch to Content Automation

Dr. John Bates,
CEO, SER


The trouble with best-of-breed business ecosystems (e.g., SAP, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft) is that they have created new silos. Meanwhile, a wealth of information remains hidden away in emails and other places that are hard to determine. Process automation can help highlight these locations. However, where it exists, it is only partial, and likely lacks content understanding and context.

Partner Spotlight
Adding the Human Touch to Content Automation

Dr. John Bates,
CEO, SER


The trouble with best-of-breed business ecosystems (e.g., SAP, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft) is that they have created new silos. Meanwhile, a wealth of information remains hidden away in emails and other places that are hard to determine. Process automation can help highlight these locations. However, where it exists, it is only partial, and likely lacks content understanding and context.

It is no wonder that many companies do not see the returns they expected despite investing heavily in the latest technology. Huge numbers of knowledge workers still have to manually consolidate information from a multitude of different systems to do their jobs.

This isn't the digital dream that anyone wanted. It does little to boost productivity, nor to delight customers, highlight new business opportunities, reduce risk, or improve process efficiency.

Fortunately, there is a better way. It involves bringing unstructured data into the light, and linking associated insights with existing structured data, to create a holistic and ever-evolving narrative that can form the basis for more context-aware process automation.

Bringing Context to Bear

Future platforms or systems will understand content. They will intelligently and automatically take the appropriate actions in a complex enterprise environment, relieving the pressure on overstretched teams.

They will employ more human-like understanding and contextual memory of what that information is, what it means, and how it adds to the story. And how this knowledge could be applied in smarter ways across different use cases, expedite the next courses of action, and deliver a broader range of business benefits.

Take the example of invoice and financial management. There is immense potential for the optimum combination of AI-enabled tools to read and make sense of incoming documents. The same tools can then intelligently trigger any next actions. All within the context of wider enterprise services like ERP, CRM, contract management, and so on.

For instance, pattern-matching AI, such as deep learning, is ideal for automatically ingesting and processing invoices to identify the document type and its constituent parts. In addition, a novel form of AI, known as contextual A, is about recording content in context. For example, recalling how documents of that class are usually handled – rather like a human's contextual memory.

But before companies can harness AI to full effect, they must be able to overcome content silos.

Overcoming System Silos

Where a company is using SAP for ERP, Salesforce for CRM, Workday for HR, ServiceNow for customer service, and the Microsoft suite for everything in between, teams are generally unable to fully understand and address a situation or opportunity, because they can't see the 360-degree picture across all systems.

Integration – not just at a data level, but at a content and process level – alleviates this problem. True integration can share entities such as customers and suppliers across different systems and can automate a process based on these entities.

Given the accelerating pace of change, few organizations can afford to develop their own custom apps on an enterprise content management system to enjoy tangible business outcomes. A more practical option is to snap together pre-built but configurable content apps – which are built with next-generation content management inside. Under the covers, these content apps can communicate and share wisdom based on contextual AI derived from their growing repository, accelerating workflow and business outcomes.

An example of this might be a healthcare application suite for onboarding patients. The suite will store information that can be readily linked to a purchase-to-pay suite for analyzing invoices in Finance and order confirmations in Purchasing. In turn, this also connects with the hospital SAP system for patient billing. Another might be a customer-centric solution suite that can link and share insights on customers with Sales, Customer Service, Project Management, Finance, Legal, etc.

This offers the organization the best of both worlds. Each specialist solution continues to do its given task well, while also contributing to the broader enterprise knowledge – enriching the 360-degree view of a customer, supplier, patient, or business opportunity.

More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Intelligent Content Automation

It's this vision – of delivering more tangible impact and timely ROI at a functional level, while contributing to a shared higher purpose – that is driving the convergence of several adjacent technology fields.

These include the following:

• ECM for managing content
• Robotic process automation (RPA) and business process management (BPM) for orchestrating processes
• Intelligent document processing for understanding incoming content
• Enterprise content integration for bridging content silos and content automation applications

These converging technologies all point toward intelligent content automation (ICA). This is the next, more intelligent generation of content and process automation. It combines content management, process automation, and AI-powered document understanding.

Intelligent content automation platforms will harness different forms of AI to enhance the overarching enterprise narrative about an account, or other scenario, over time. Better still, they will automatically link that knowledge to each business process in context.

Enterprises are becoming more ambitious in their process automation and content management plans. And as they look to drive next-level ROI from their latest tech investments and cross-enterprise knowledge integration, contextualization will become critical.

The use of composable, embedded, contextual AI will drive new and more ambitious waves of content-centric process automation. This technology will have enormous potential to transform the way organizations perform.

CXO Spotlight
Improving Visibility & Enhancing Threat Response: The Path to Strong Security

Virgilio Viegas,
Senior Vice President of IT Security, QNB Group (Qatar)


Constantly evolving security risks, an increasing number of threats, myriad systems to protect, and connections between both internal and external networks all require organizations to implement an increasingly complex range of security measures and simultaneously maintain full visibility of their assets while ensuring they are able to quickly detect and respond to security incidents.

CXO Spotlight
Improving Visibility & Enhancing Threat Response: The Path to Strong Security

Virgilio Viegas,
Senior Vice President of IT Security, QNB Group (Qatar)


Constantly evolving security risks, an increasing number of threats, myriad systems to protect, and connections between both internal and external networks all require organizations to implement an increasingly complex range of security measures and simultaneously maintain full visibility of their assets while ensuring they are able to quickly detect and respond to security incidents.

The first challenge of this permanently evolving environment is to guarantee full asset visibility through an effective asset management process that assures all assets have security agents installed and are integrated with a security information and event management (SIEM) platform.

Organizations must ensure the ability to process, correlate, and react to the massive amount of information generated by a wide variety of devices and platforms.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can play a fundamental facilitating role by analyzing large amounts of security data and, in addition to the defined use cases, identifying patterns and anomalies that may indicate a security threat.

AI algorithms can automate the process of detecting and responding to security incidents, reducing the time for security teams to respond to a threat and providing real-time recommendations for security personnel to take action.

By combining these two approaches, organizations can better understand their assets and related risks, allocate resources more effectively, and prevent security breaches from occurring.

CXO Spotlight
Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing the Way Humans Live

Jason E. Roos,
CIO, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology


As a CIO for a science and technology university, I realize that artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way humans live, work, and play, and the world is on the precipice of a new technological revolution as a result. AI is making it possible to automate repetitive tasks, streamline operations, and personalize services. The impact of AI on various industries is vast and has the potential to solve many of the world's most pressing problems.

CXO Spotlight
Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing the Way Humans Live

Jason E. Roos,
CIO, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology


As a CIO for a science and technology university, I realize that artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way humans live, work, and play, and the world is on the precipice of a new technological revolution as a result. AI is making it possible to automate repetitive tasks, streamline operations, and personalize services. The impact of AI on various industries is vast and has the potential to solve many of the world's most pressing problems.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is at the forefront of creating AI-powered experiences through its KAUST Smart Living Laboratory Program. The program aims to create a smart living environment that leverages the latest AI and smart technologies to enhance people's lives. This is done by creating smart homes, smart cities, and smart environments that are more sustainable, efficient, and convenient.

KAUST's Smart Living Laboratory Program is also focused on developing AI-powered solutions to real-world problems in fields such as energy, transportation, healthcare, and education. The program combines cutting-edge research with practical applications, making it possible to bring innovative AI solutions to market.

KAUST is also working with leading companies and universities to develop new AI technologies and applications, further establishing its position as a leader in the field. The program's focus is on developing AI solutions to real-world problems and its collaboration with leading companies and universities make it a driving force in the development of AI technologies and applications. KAUST is helping to shape the future of AI and its impact on society, making it a key player in the new technological revolution.

Partner Spotlight
Build the Cloud You Need

Kamel Al Tawil,
Managing Director (MENA), Equinix


Enterprises around the world are investing in digital transformation, empowering themselves to be more responsive to the demands of end users everywhere. One crucial factor driving this trend is the growth of digital ecosystems, where rapidly evolving cloud computing technology provides endless possibilities of what businesses can achieve with cloud services — as well as accelerating sustainable success for businesses and communities.

Partner Spotlight
Build the Cloud You Need

Kamel Al Tawil,
Managing Director (MENA), Equinix


Enterprises around the world are investing in digital transformation, empowering themselves to be more responsive to the demands of end users everywhere. One crucial factor driving this trend is the growth of digital ecosystems, where rapidly evolving cloud computing technology provides endless possibilities of what businesses can achieve with cloud services — as well as accelerating sustainable success for businesses and communities.

Digital services enable businesses across multiple industries to transform their networks and deploy digital-ready infrastructure at the edge with ease and to respond more quickly as the circumstances and their needs change — and we can be certain they always will. Data services also help customers deploy dedicated cloud in a more efficient, cloud-like manner, and at Equinix we are dedicated to helping our customers simplify complexity and get the most value possible from their digital services.

As emerging technologies and cloud adoption continue to accelerate at an unprecedented rate, it's evident that higher requirements are needed for sustainability — keeping us at Equinix motivated to fast-track our sustainable efforts, helping businesses set their sustainability agendas as they embark on their zero-carbon journey.

Partner Spotlight
Multifactor Authentication Isn't Enough

Nour Fateen,
Director, Sales Engineering, Recorded Future


It’s easy to rely on multifactor authentication (MFA) as the foundation of identity security for an organization. Once it's in place, anyone who wants to gain access to a system or platform needs to present more than one form of personal identification, whether that's a password, a fingerprint, or a numerical code sent to a phone. The extra layer of security is a step in the right direction for keeping employee and business information safe, but it is not a silver bullet solution.

Partner Spotlight
Multifactor Authentication Isn't Enough

Nour Fateen,
Director, Sales Engineering, Recorded Future


It’s easy to rely on multifactor authentication (MFA) as the foundation of identity security for an organization. Once it's in place, anyone who wants to gain access to a system or platform needs to present more than one form of personal identification, whether that's a password, a fingerprint, or a numerical code sent to a phone. The extra layer of security is a step in the right direction for keeping employee and business information safe, but it is not a silver bullet solution.

As infostealers and MFA bypass tactics – including 2FA SMS spoofing and pass-the-cookie attacks – become more and more common, managing the number of possible threats can be overwhelming for organizations. For effective identity and access management (IAM), organizations need to hone in on real-time, data-driven insights on identities.

Organizations require identity intelligence that collects and analyzes data from where it is compromised: the dark web. With this data, organizations can achieve unmatched visibility into the infostealer ecosystem, including leaked credentials before they're used and the session cookies collected by threat actors.

In identity security, the goal is to trust nothing and verify everything. If MFA can be hacked, spoofed, brute-forced, or bypassed with stolen cookies, then organizations need more. While MFA solutions are necessary for accessing business critical applications and do make infrastructure more secure, they aren't enough to ensure that employee identities aren't compromised. With identity intelligence, organizations can identify previously unknown identity compromises, for both employees and customers, and respond confidently — without any manual research.

Partner Spotlight
Tech Trends 2023

Kalyan Kumar (KK),
Global Chief Technology Officer and Head of Ecosystems, HCLTech


2022 has been a transformational year in the world of tech innovation. So, what does the future hold? Here is a sneak peek. From AI to metaverse and the future of work, take a look at ETO's 10 biggest tech trends shaping the future of enterprises today.

Partner Spotlight
Tech Trends 2023

Kalyan Kumar (KK),
Global Chief Technology Officer and Head of Ecosystems, HCLTech


2022 has been a transformational year in the world of tech innovation. So, what does the future hold? Here is a sneak peek. From AI to metaverse and the future of work, take a look at ETO's 10 biggest tech trends shaping the future of enterprises today.

AI: Traversing the AI journey from software to silicon. Global AI market to reach USD 1394.3 Bn in 2029 at 20.1% CAGR

5G: Pushing the boundaries of 5G applications, 5G network subscriptions to reach 4.4 Bn by 2027

House of Cloud has new entrants: Global cloud computing market to expand at 15.7% CAGR from 2022 to 2030

Experiencing the ‘verse’: Metaverse market opportunity to reach USD 800 Bn by 2024

Backing up cybersecurity with quantum-secure communications and quantum machine learning: Global quantum cryptography market to reach USD 476.83 Mn by 2030 at 18.67% CAGR

Sustainable practices seeping into grassroots: Global green technology & sustainability market to grow to USD 60.7 Bn by 2027

Blockchain at the center of the decentralized economy: Global Web 3.0 market size to reach USD 81 Bn by 2030 as branding & marketing needs increase.

Improved humanoid robot collaboration backed by computational empathy: Global humanoid robot market value to reach USD 17.32 Bn by 2028 at a 42.1% CAGR

Low-code, no-code platforms accelerating super-app development: Low-code development platform market to grow at 25.26% CAGR to reach USD 64.56 Bn by 2026

Redefining heuristics of employee experience via tech advancements: Global learning & development industry to touch USD 402 Bn by 2025.

Partner Spotlight
Ensuring End-to-End Visibility in the Hybrid Multicloud Era

Georges Farah,
Manager of Sales Engineering, MEA, Micro Focus


Today, we are undoubtedly living in the era of hybrid multicloud; actually, more cloud is what most organizations are adopting.

Partner Spotlight
Ensuring End-to-End Visibility in the Hybrid Multicloud Era

Georges Farah,
Manager of Sales Engineering, MEA, Micro Focus


Today, we are undoubtedly living in the era of hybrid multicloud; actually, more cloud is what most organizations are adopting.

While this adoption provides a considerable advantage in terms of agility and alignment with the dynamic business demands of a digital world, it also amplifies the complexity of managing such an ecosystem. Across the region, organizations are increasingly realizing the need to manage and simplify this overwhelming complexity while optimizing consumption in the most cost-effective way.

In order to achieve this, they must ensure that they always have up-to-date, end-to-end visibility of all their resources across this hybrid multicloud environment, while abstracting and automating the delivery of such resources via a streamlined process that embeds proper controls like catalogue management, multi-level approvals, budget and financial governance, and end-to-end orchestration.

Partner Spotlight
Four Reasons IT Modernization Falls Short

Nidal Azba,
Chief Technology Officer, Kyndryl


As the world continues to navigate the pandemic, companies are doubling down on digital-first solutions and systems to deliver better experiences, services, and outcomes for customers, employees, and partners. Globally, investments in digital transformation are forecast to reach $3.4 trillion in 2026.

Partner Spotlight
Four Reasons IT Modernization Falls Short

Nidal Azba,
Chief Technology Officer, Kyndryl


As the world continues to navigate the pandemic, companies are doubling down on digital-first solutions and systems to deliver better experiences, services, and outcomes for customers, employees, and partners. Globally, investments in digital transformation are forecast to reach $3.4 trillion in 2026.

To accelerate digital success, many firms are also aggressively pursuing IT modernization. But too often, both digital and IT modernization efforts are falling short of expectations. For many large enterprises, the transformation journey takes longer and costs much more than expected.

So, what’s standing in the way of successful IT modernization? While each company’s challenges are unique, there are some common themes and reasons why these efforts fall short.

Reason #1: Oversimplifying cloud

A more measured approach to cloud can deliver quick wins while setting you up for long-term success:

Think strategically to optimize security and efficiency. Not every workload belongs on the cloud. First consider what your organization actually needs to migrate, then build out a timeline that ensures all your necessary operations are functional when you need them — or are at least down for the shortest amount of time possible. The cost savings of cloud are best thought of as a long-term play — consider FinOps strategy to evaluate your financial benefits.

Be prepared to pivot when the unexpected occurs. When Carrefour Belgium’s on-premises servers overheated early in their Google Cloud Platform migration, they had to take emergency steps to ensure essential business services stayed online while they finished their timeline. They migrated at-risk systems to an interim cloud environment, preventing downtime and data loss, and were able to finish their cloud migration on schedule. Their interim environment was later migrated to their permanent platform as planned.

Simplify cloud management with a platform-based operating model. BRF Global operates dozens of companies in pursuit of its commitment to safely providing quality food to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. When it acquires new businesses, it has to integrate their operations into its own, leading to over 20,000 cloud assets needing to be managed. An integrated multicloud management platform allows BRF to see and address issues across all of them from one single point of control.

Give yourself room to grow. Compass Group Spain has always enjoyed autonomy within its regional market, but when the mandate to migrate to a shared digital infrastructure came down from corporate, they had to adapt. Thankfully, they had already switched to a private cloud internally, making their migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) much easier. Now, they still maintain their autonomy while gaining the capacity to grow and scale, both within AWS and their international parent, Compass Group PLC.

Reason #2: Changing too much

In our work with thousands of customers across industries, we’ve found that the average company can have up to 10 digital transformation initiatives running at once, often competing with each other for talent, attention, and resources. The ambition behind this is good but change without focus can lead to churn and burnout. If something goes wrong, it can take days to detect and diagnose it, leading to downtime or outages that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.

IT modernization requires discipline. Rather than attempting to change everything at once, optimize your efforts by prioritizing the projects most essential to business goals and build your timeline around those, ensuring your digital transformation is as intentional and effective as possible.

Partner Spotlight
The Best of Both Worlds? How Storage as a Service Strikes the Right Balance

Samer Semaan,
Channel and Alliances Manager, Pure Storage


The public cloud’s gravitational pull is immense, and we live in an age in which it drags data towards it and away from the customer datacenter. But while the lure of the cloud is undeniable, many of its attractions come at a cost. The cloud promises flexibility in capacity and performance, with the ability to scale up — and down, in theory — and with pay-as-you-go pricing options that make it an opex running cost rather than a capex spend.

Partner Spotlight
The Best of Both Worlds? How Storage as a Service Strikes the Right Balance

Samer Semaan,
Channel and Alliances Manager, Pure Storage


The public cloud’s gravitational pull is immense, and we live in an age in which it drags data towards it and away from the customer datacenter. But while the lure of the cloud is undeniable, many of its attractions come at a cost. The cloud promises flexibility in capacity and performance, with the ability to scale up — and down, in theory — and with pay-as-you-go pricing options that make it an opex running cost rather than a capex spend.

However, the reality can often prove less rosy. Costs can spiral out of control, SLAs have to be monitored in hawk-like fashion, and performance cannot be guaranteed as it can onsite. For these reasons, many prefer the predictability of their own datacenter, and the concept of cloud repatriation has entered the lexicon. Fortunately, another option has emerged, a potential best-of-both-worlds — storage-as-a-service (STaaS).

STaaS is a consumption model of storage procurement, which allows customers to deliver the capacity and performance they need, on-premises, in cloud or any other combination, and paid for on an as-a-service basis. Below, we look at the benefits of on-premises STaaS consumption models and the kind of services customers should look out for.

Benefits of StaaS

Consumption models of storage purchasing turn the procurement of onsite capacity in block, file, and object storage into a pay-as-you-go transaction. That’s in contrast to the traditional ways of on-premises hardware purchasing, where new products were bought on a three-year cycle to replace equipment bought during the preceding refresh three years before. And so on.

It was a purchase of goods. You owned the item outright and paid for a support contract alongside it. You could upgrade controller software, and add drives and shelves, but when it groaned under the weight of increased performance or capacity demands and reached end of life, it was time for the next refresh and a forklift upgrade.

Consumption models try to do away with that by turning storage procurement into a service-like experience. Customers usually commit to some kind of minimum capacity level, with agreement also to extra buffer capacity and the ability to scale beyond that. Some form of monitoring then allows the vendor to present a bill for storage used. Treating storage as a service has the big benefit of being potentially more flexible in terms of scalability and providing the ability to add more capacity or performance.

Meanwhile, being deployed in the customer datacenter means storage performance can be better than it would in the cloud and nowhere near as susceptible to suffering any degradation over the wide area network (WAN).

Also, compared to cloud storage, bills and usage are likely to be more predictable, especially without costly cloud peculiarities such as egress charges, which can mount up unnoticed and result in huge bills. Concerns about security that go with the cloud are also mitigated.

Having said that, if the storage vendor has cloud infrastructure or partnerships, hybrid cloud working may be available as part of the arrangement, and so the ability to burst to the cloud to take advantage of extra production capacity or stage less-frequently used data becomes a possibility.

And on top of all this, STaaS can be treated as an opex cost and so can be offset against tax.

So, to sum up, consumption models of storage procurement potentially offer flexible and scalable capacity and performance operated on-site but billed as if it were a service, with the potential to link to the cloud as an extension of the datacentre. And all treated as an Opex cost.

Key Features of Storage as a Service

So, what should customers look out for in STaaS offerings? Core to consumption model offerings is the ability to deploy storage capacity onsite and be billed for consumption.

Key to watch out for here, however, is that the service is being truly delivered as a service. In other words, levels of capacity and performance should be underwritten by SLAs, and when more hardware is required to meet those it should be delivered and deployed non-disruptively.

Most vendors offer something that's more like a leasing agreement, in which their products are deployed on a three- or five-year cycle with forklift upgrades at the end. By contrast, the best StaaS offerings work to guaranteed service levels with automated upgrades to meet performance and capacity guarantees without extra cost and which are triggered by AI-based monitoring and telemetry.

Customers should also check the storage supplier's ability to deploy file and block access storage as well as fast file and object storage in the same hardware, with tiers of performance defined by input-output speed, throughput, and capacity. That way, all workloads are covered, from rapid transactional block access, via unstructured file data, to the rapid throughput performance needed for analytics and restores from backup data.

Monitoring software should give the customer an easy-to-read view of capacity usage and performance across on-premises storage infrastructure and the cloud that shows how things are matching up to SLAs. It should also allow the ability to provision storage. AI-driven tools should enable prediction of future usage and be part of the process of triggering performance and capacity upgrades.

These are the key features of the most advanced storage consumption models on the market today, and can help your organization deliver cloud-like flexibility but with the peace of mind that only on-premises operations provide.

Partner Spotlight
Embracing a Twin Transition that Is Both Digital and Green

Mohannad Abuissa,
Chief Technology Officer (Gulf) & Systems Engineering Director, Cisco


The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges, with experts predicting that climate change could be irreversible by 2030 if we do not act now. Sustainability agendas have pivoted from being a "nice to have" to a business imperative.

Partner Spotlight
Embracing a Twin Transition that Is Both Digital and Green

Mohannad Abuissa,
Chief Technology Officer – Gulf Region, Systems Engineering Director, Cisco


The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges, with experts predicting that climate change could be irreversible by 2030 if we do not act now. Sustainability agendas have pivoted from being a "nice to have" to a business imperative.

It is becoming apparent that technology must play a central role in driving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) progress; businesses must invest in the right solutions to embrace the twin transition to a digital and green future. Setting a goal to reach net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across an organization’s entire value chain not only demonstrates commitment, but also sets a clear target for action.

Organizations must embrace solutions that perform at the highest level while minimizing environmental impact. For example, designing products with circularity in mind, leveraging modular designs for easier repair, reuse, and recycling.

76% of enterprises believe that emerging technologies can play a critical role in reducing their organization’s carbon emissions. In the development of smart spaces, solutions that leverage AI, observability, and automation are critical to helping analyze real-time data, optimize, and reduce energy consumption.

As businesses navigate the path to sustainability, it is crucial to embrace innovations that can help drive positive change. By leveraging the power of technology, organizations can work together to create a more sustainable future for all.

Partner Spotlight
Unified Observability Promotes Digital Agility & Resilience

Charbel Khneisser,
Vice President, Solutions Engineering, EMEA, Riverbed Technology


The role of the CIO in 2023 is being shaped by a constellation of new technologies and the burning need of organizations to use them to deliver innovation, adapt to changing market dynamics, and enhance the sustainability of their operations. As they incorporate an increasing number of these technologies, their IT environments are growing in scale and complexity, impairing agility and decreasing their ability to remain resilient in the face of constantly evolving market dynamics.

Partner Spotlight
Unified Observability Promotes Digital Agility & Resilience

Charbel Khneisser,
Vice President, Solutions Engineering, EMEA, Riverbed Technology


The role of the CIO in 2023 is being shaped by a constellation of new technologies and the burning need of organizations to use them to deliver innovation, adapt to changing market dynamics, and enhance the sustainability of their operations. As they incorporate an increasing number of these technologies, their IT environments are growing in scale and complexity, impairing agility and decreasing their ability to remain resilient in the face of constantly evolving market dynamics.

This is where unified observability steps in as a solution for the needs of the modern IT team. Rather than being drowned in a deluge of data from disparate tools, with unified observability, IT teams become empowered with actionable insights, gained by correlating information across disparate systems. These contextual insights paint the complete picture and enable IT to understand and rapidly act upon what is happening and what has happened while avoiding missing key events due to sampling.

Observability is the ultimate evolution of visibility tools, which was the cross-domain correlation of monitoring tools. Data is becoming abundant, which promotes the need for observability to drive actionable insights based on the telemetry data being captured from networks, apps, and users.

And for remediation/self-healing to become relevant and actionable, the use of ML/AI becomes crucial in the troubleshooting step so that baselines and behavior changes can be properly analyzed. By doing so, it can bring the most important issues to the surface faster and with precision, making the organization more resilient, even in the face of rapid and unpredictable change.

At this crucial point when CIOs and IT leaders are under immense pressure to use the latest technologies to drive competitive differentiation, unified observability will deliver the agility and resilience these initiatives need to thrive.

Partner Spotlight
Intelligent Automation Is Key to Future-Proofing Your Digital Strategy

Ashraf El Zarka,
Vice President, Regional Managing Director MEA & Pakistan, UiPath


With business landscapes becoming increasingly complex, leaders find themselves in a position where they are having to manage both internal shifts in priorities and ever-changing external macroeconomic conditions. This has a direct impact on the organization, as well as its network of customers and partners.

Partner Spotlight
Intelligent Automation Is Key to Future-Proofing Your Digital Strategy

Ashraf El Zarka,
Vice President, Regional Managing Director MEA & Pakistan, UiPath


With business landscapes becoming increasingly complex, leaders find themselves in a position where they are having to manage both internal shifts in priorities and ever-changing external macroeconomic conditions. This has a direct impact on the organization, as well as its network of customers and partners.

Over the last few years, and especially during the pandemic, intelligent automation has proven its role as a shock absorber by helping enterprises to become more resilient and enabling them to scale operations and power through backlogs. The benefits have been tremendous — both for their customers and overburdened staff, and in both the public and private sectors.

Due to its robust performance, fast deployment and short time to value, automation has earned its place in the CIO's first-response IT toolkit. However, every CIO knows that at their best, digital transformation strategies are those that future proof businesses by enabling them to weather challenges. That is why forward-looking CIOs and the overall digital C-suite now regard AI-enabled automation innovation as a major boardroom priority, as it acts as a key enabler for business growth.

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