Dear Industry Colleagues,

As we find ourselves midway through 2013, it's a good time to review the highlights of the past six months and look forward to the landscape ahead.

From the start of this year, we have implemented several innovative managed services and private cloud projects for a number of regional enterprises. An example being Tejuri.com, a newly launched online mall which is using eHDF's private cloud services to offer an enhanced online shopping experience to its users. I am pleased to inform you that we continue to be the preferred hosting services provider for a number of other strategic customers such as Dubai Financial Market, Trinity Holdings, and Khaleej Times.

We have also seen a huge uptake of virtualization and cloud infrastructure services and a lot of customers are showing tremendous interest in our Private Cloud services. This offering provides users a fully managed Virtual Data Centre environment with a shared pool of compute capacity, storage and network. We have developed multiple options comprising of various configurations both for the Small to medium businesses as well as Large Enterprises. It is our endeavor to help even more businesses realize the potential of cloud computing to help reduce the total cost of ownership of their IT assets.

On the recognitions front, the first half of the year has been very fruitful with eHDF winning the 'Best Managed Service Provider of the Year' award at both the Network World Middle East Awards and the Integrator Awards - a huge pat on the back for everyone involved in making this possible.

Continuing our efforts towards analyzing the disaster recovery and business continuity management trends in the region, we have launched the third Business Continuity Management Survey across the Middle East, the results of which will be available in the coming months.

We continue to demonstrate our commitment to the industry by hosting and participating in leading industry forums that enable us to meet and interact directly with end users. A focused seminar themed 'Datacenters - the Managed Services Path' brought together IT professionals to discuss challenges and opportunities facing their businesses. We also participated in key industry events including the CIO 50 Awards and Forum 2013, Data Centre Tops, ACN Enterprise Computing Summit 2013 and Channel Middle East conference.

Recent trends indicate that a growing number of Middle East Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are hiring specialized service providers to manage their organization's IT infrastructure and day to day operational activities. Interestingly, people often ask me if this is the future of IT. It certainly appears to be so. CIOs are spending more time figuring out strategies to take advantage of mobility, social media, and big data, while beefing up security and business continuity. This is coupled with a focus on a new set of applications to enable smoother and more efficient business operations. And, if we are to consider this as our yardstick, the future indeed holds significant potential for growth for us at eHDF.

Finally, as we look forward to an even brighter year ahead, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your remarkable and invaluable support and for instilling your trust in us.

I wish you all the very best for the remaining year and the future.

Regards,

Yasser Zeineldin