1. How have you faired in 2011? What is your outlook for the IT sector for 2012?

The year that went by marked a number of milestones, achievements and successes for eHosting DataFort (eHDF) setting the company firmly on the path to achieving its long-term goals.

The year 2011 has been an excellent year in terms of new customer acquisitions. eHDF was associated with a record number of prestigious new clients across all industry verticals and added several new customers to the fully managed hosting and co-location service portfolio.

Some of these new customers were Dubai Airport Free Zone, Dubai World Trade Centre, FVC, Security Lab, Hilal Bank, Forbes ME and many more.

The other key highlights for eHDF in 2011 were as below:

Launch of new services:

• Launch of Managed Exchange integrated with Microsoft Lync which provides enhanced communication and collaboration by providing new functionalities such as video conferencing, etc.
• Launch of Remote Managed Security Services which enables enterprises to manage complex security issues in a more efficient manner.
• Cloud Infrastructure Services

Industry recognition:

• Winning ‘Best Managed Services Provider of the year’ at the Network Middle East (NME) Innovation Awards 2011. eHDF is constantly striving to surpass industry benchmarks and deliver the best services to our valued customers. The NME Innovation Award comes as a well-deserved validation of this achievement.
• eHDF have been awarded for the fourth year in a row, the ACN ‘IT service provider of the year’ for 2011. eHDF has consistently been recognized for its service excellence, customer focus and contributions to the region. eHDF won the award as they demonstrated the ability to deliver and manage a variety of solutions that address real business needs of clients.
• eHDF has also won numerous accolades at the ‘Data Centre Strategies Middle East Awards 2011’, including, ‘Best New Data Centre’, ‘Best Colocation Provider’ and ‘CEO of the Year’.

Global Certification:

• eHDF is also very proud of the fact that it has become the first managed IT service provider in the UAE to receive the BS25999 certification for Business Continuity Management (BCM). This accreditation generates a sense of confidence amongst clients and stakeholders, assuring uninterrupted business operations even under the most disruptive circumstances.

In terms of our outlook for the IT sector for 2012, we envision organisations of all sizes to increase IT investments in terms of business innovation and developing new applications to further align IT with business. We will see increased investments in Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions, higher virtualization adoption and interest in private cloud services as the preferred cloud model.

As external threats increase, we would also see more investments in information security solutions.

Some global industry cloud predictions are –

• According to Gartner, by 2016, all Global 2000 companies will use public cloud services.
• An IBM study (2011) of more than 3,000 global CIOs shows that 60% of organisations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving competitive advantage.
• Gartner said worldwide cloud services revenue (including public and private services) is forecast to reach $148.8 billion in 2014.
• IDC cloud research shows that worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, representing a CAGR of 27.4%.
• According to Gartner, by 2013, approximately 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized.
• IDC forecast that more than 23 per cent of all servers shipped in 2014 will be actively supporting virtual machine technology and more than 70 per cent of all server workloads installed on new shipments in 2014 will reside in a virtual machine.

2. Are you looking to expand your business in 2012? What are your main target markets in the UAE?

We have expansion plans on a number of fronts.
Geographically, eHDF’s primary business focus is in the UAE. As a service provider, our long term vision is to address IT service requirements of clients based out of UAE especially those who want to set up a business in the country and don’t want to make large scale IT infrastructure investments. Geographically, we are looking at expanding through alliances and partnerships outside the UAE.

In terms of size of business, eHDF believes growth will come from the small and medium enterprises which represent 90% of the businesses in the UAE. New start-ups especially will be quite hungry for IT services and not necessarily want to load the P&L and CAPEX with a lot of IT related cost because there is a level of uncertainty while starting a business. We are seeing many of these not wanting to invest in staff but still achieve a good reliable service on a ‘pay as you go’ model.

In terms of vertical sectors, the Government sector is one of our key target markets in the UAE. Also, public sector spending is supposed to grow with the government putting more focus on citizen related services and on healthcare and education related services.

3. How important is the issue of security?

Studies conducted in the region have highlighted the fact that organizations were more vulnerable towards attacks, especially in 2011. IT security companies called it the year of hacktivism, where many websites were brought down as a means of protest by groups of individuals.

This vulnerability to threats is likely to continue as the complexity of security breaches increase. Security of an organization’s internal data as well as customer data and information is extremely important.

The role of third party data center service providers therefore becomes essential as they have the necessary security infrastructure in place in terms of physical security as well as skilled and certified dedicated security personnel who continuously monitor the customer’s networks for any security issues.

4. Data centres are playing a more prominent role in the region’s IT sector- why is that?

Data Centres are evolving from a real estate business to becoming an essential part of IT service delivery.
The data centre market in the UAE and Middle East is growing at a rapid pace and third party data centre supply is expected to increase.

As per data available from Africa & Middle East Data Centre Market 2011 Report by Tariff Consultancy Ltd (TCL) which provides an overview of 15 of the most important Data centre markets across the two regions (7 in Africa & 8 in the Middle East including Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (KSA), South Africa, Tunisia & the UAE), Data Centre revenue is forecast to rise from $646 million USD per annum to $1,150 million USD per annum over 2010-2015 - a CAGR of 16%.

Raised floor space is forecast to rise to over 324,000 m2 by the end of 2015 - a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13% from 2010.

We expect enterprises to continue investing in data centre technologies and services but not on building their own infrastructure. There is a tangible and growing desire to increase efficiencies by looking at the lease option.

This is because the immediate noticeable trend in the region is the greater need for companies to cut down on capital expenses, make-do with existing resources and optimise on operational expenses.

Hence, more businesses especially in the current economic climate, are reassessing their business models and shifting from investing in upfront capital expenditure (CAPEX) to an operational expenditure (OPEX) model that allows companies to ‘pay as you go’ and reduce overall risks and scale when necessary. Also the expertise offered by a Service provider complements the in-house IT team.

Also, with the increased adoption of virtualization and wider acceptance of cloud computing, data centres are playing a more prominent role in the region’s IT sector and are becoming more and more an essential building block of IT service offerings.

5. What are your plans regarding cloud computing?

We are seeing a logical shift into the direction of cloud computing and are ourselves in the process of charting out our cloud roadmap.

We have conducted multiple internal assessments in understanding the market demand and evaluating the available models instead of directly investing on a public/private cloud platform as we believe it is more important to identify the businesses demands and the corresponding complementing cloud technologies which can fulfill these demands.

We already have a cloud ready infrastructure in our data center with Radix Technologies. We will be launching our own Managed Private cloud solutions for medium to large enterprises looking at enhanced & dynamic utilization of existing infrastructure / applications in terms of scalability, elasticity & faster time to market by the end of the year. Also we have plans to launch a Lite Public cloud version for companies operating in the SMB space.