Sajjad Ahmad, Deputy Business Editor

To drive the UAE Digital Transformation agenda, Gitex Global 2021 is playing a big role as local and global companies are launching new technologies to accelerate growth in various verticals. Various organisations have launched new solutions and products during the event.

NCM new supercomputer: The National Center of Meteorology (NCM) announced the launch of a new supercomputer built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise to advance weather forecasting and overall climate research.

Named ‘Atmosphere’, NCM’s new supercomputer is built using the HPE Cray EX system, an end-to-end high performance computing (HPC) liquid-cooled platform that has been customised to deliver advanced performance spanning compute, accelerated compute, software, storage and networking. The combined technologies help NCM’s researchers improve modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence and deep learning capabilities to process complex data, increase accuracy, and predict weather events faster.

Dr Abdulla Al Mandous, Director General of NCM and President of the Regional Association II (Asia) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said: “At the National Center of Meteorology (NCM), we are dedicated to providing the UAE with operational weather forecasting to provide real-time forecasts and alerts that inform local entities and citizens, and most importantly, help ensure safety. We are also committed to gaining a deeper understanding of the climate and its complex patterns, and to developing innovative technologies that can increase sustainability,”

Bill Mannel, Vice President and General Manager, High Performance Compu-ting, at HPE said: “HPE-powered supercomputers support the majority of the world’s weather forecasting needs, whether it is to improve predictability of a hurricane’s landfall or to anticipate the spread and impact of wildfires.”

He added: “We are honored to have been selected by NCM to build its Atmosphere super-computer, customized with powerful, end-to-end high performance computing (HPC) solutions, to further its mission in making breakthroughs in weather and climate intelligence and provide real-time analysis for the UAE.”

Ahmad Alkhallafi, Managing Director at HPE UAE, said,”We are proud to collaborate with the National Center for Meteorology (NCM) to build its Atmosphere supercomputer.”

He said, “ With our latest development with NCM, HPE furthers its commitment to the UAE and its people by delivering an innovative yet sustainable system that supports NCM with weather forecasting faster than ever.”

About this year HPE Gitex participation,  Alkhallafi said,”Our participation at Gitex this year is prevalent towards delivering our vision that is the future of technology is edge-to-cloud and we were in a very unique position six years ago when we predicted that the technology landscape is going to revolve around.”

He added, “We are providing service over the last few years across multiple verticals from entertainment to retail to transport to many others.”

He said, “The biggest showcase for us at Gitex is our cutting-edge technology i.e. exact model of the first supercomputer that went to space- HPE Space-borne Supercomputer-2 that was built for NASA. With our participation at Gitex, we are delivering the message that HPE is committed to the UAE market and we are working to-wards bringing the best technology from the world to the UAE.”

Invisible Customs initiative: The General Administration of Abu Dhabi Customs has launched, in cooperation with the Government Services Platform “Tamm”, the “Invisible Customs” initiative through the smart “Digital Customs Dashboard” to request and track customs transactions, during GITEX Technology Week 2021.

The launch of the initiative is in line with the directives of the wise leadership and the efforts of the Government of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi to govern digital transformation in government services and a complete transition towards the digital future. It is a step towards enhancing the effectiveness of procedures, reducing time, enhancing trade movement and achieving sustainable economic growth.

The initiative contributes to the digital implementation of Customs services and transactions through a unified interactive platform. It enhances the experience of customers, traders, investors and suppliers in the emirate.

The new and innovative “Digital Customs Dashboard” platform is part of the same initiative in line with the ambitious strategy towards the comprehensive digital transformation, representing a new customs achievement that keeps pace with the UAE’s coming 50 years projects.

The digital dashboard allows customers from agents and companies involved in customs clearance to track the stages of customs transactions and requests digitally from their sites without visiting customer happiness centres. It reduces the time for completing self-decision procedures and transactions.

The dashboard enables customers to apply for all customs services available on the “Tamm Platform” without having to go to any other pages or links, in addition to viewing some interactive graphs of some operational statistics related to the periodic and daily work of companies involved in customs clearance.

The platform supports the needs of partners and dealers in the supply chains, primarily e-commerce, by completing customs transactions through a unified digital platform that enhances Abu Dhabi Customs’ leading position in the world and achieves sustainable development in various sectors.

The dashboard provides flexible features that enable customers of all categories to continuously track the status of transactions and requests.

The dashboard also provides “follow-up and monitor transactions”, which includes checking and monitoring drafts, opening and completing submitted transactions, accessing related statistics and reports, and “following up on the status of violations and transaction documents”, including receiving updates on violations (violations and fines) and downloading final output documents.

Hybrid workplace solutions: Zoho Corporation has announced on Tuesday that its all-in-one business management suite — Zoho One — has grown by 116 per cent in terms of revenue in UAE, its third largest market. The company said this while unveiling five new apps, three new services and five major platform enhancements in the operating system for businesses at the GITEX Technology Week 2021.   “Zoho One suite is the top-most selling product for Zoho in the Middle East and Africa. The business operating system is used by over 40,000 organisations as their operating system. Since last year, Zoho One’s customer growth was 60 per cent year-on-year globally,” said Hyther Nizam, President MEA at Zoho.

“The new cutting-edge apps and services were introduced to provide more integrated tech solutions and seamless experiences that meet today’s hybrid work-place needs and provide added value to businesses. The new services and apps are enabled by latest technology including Augmented Reality (AR), machine learning and data technology,” he added.

The new apps included in Zoho One include Zoho Learn, Zoho Lens, TeamInbox , Zoho DataPrep and Zoho Commerce. Another new service added to Zoho One is back-end service Work Graph. With remote work now persistent, Zoho One now includes enterprise-grade Mobile App Management capabilities..

Zoho One now also features embedded and conversational analytics by providing 1,500+ pre-built analytics reports and dashboards to make critical business de-cisions with greater precision and speed.

Other services added to the Suite include Enterprise Search, Zoho’s actionable, organization-wide search; Unified Console, Dashboards, and Smart-Stack UI; Customizable Dashboard with Pre-Built Widgets; Integration with Telephony Providers.

Cloud migration: BitTitan, a global leader in Cloud migrations and managed services automation to enable the modern workplace, sees great growth opportunities as digital transformation fuels IT spending in the Middle East and Africa.

According to Gartner, the Middle East and North Africa data centre market, which includes cloud services, will see spending reach $5.4 billion in 2022, driven by digital transformation initiatives across the region as well as growth in internet penetration. In addition, technology experts believe that projected investment growth in data centre projects is influenced by a growing demand for higher-performance networks, increased management efficiency and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have seen a growing trend in mergers and divestments as a result of the changing business dynamics brought about by the pandemic. Our data on migration project types in Americas and Europe have shown that this leads to increased activity and the trend is only growing.

This will be a regular scenario soon in the Middle East as migrations do not stop after clients have been moved to the cloud,” said Antti Ålander, Channel Manager - EMEA, BitTitan. “When corporations, non-profit organisations and government entities merge or divest, migrations happen between cloud tenants. In addition, as Microsoft 365 adoption in Middle East increases constantly, the cloud tenant-to-tenant migrations increase inevitably.”

Companies migrating to cloud will have an easier, faster and more automated experience, starting from scoping the current environment to configuring end-users after the data migration. According to Antti, most of the migration to cloud activity will not just involve email and OneDrive for businesses, but SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams will need to be migrated as well.

Leveraging the potential increase in cloud migration activity, BitTitan is participating in GITEX Technology Week in Dubai this week, through its regional distribution partner Logicom, to showcase its flagship solutions aimed at making the lives of providers and system integrators of modern workplace-focused services easier.

MigrationWiz is one of two products BitTitan will be showcasing at the event. The industry-leading SaaS solution for mailbox, document, public-folder and Microsoft Teams migrations can help users improve their Microsoft 365 onboarding experience by providing fully automated data migration from all common source systems, such as configuring and completing the migrations faster, much easier while increasing control and visibility.

To help prepare for a new business environment where divestitures, acquisitions and mergers require Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations, BitTitan will be introducing its other product Voleer, a solution that centralizes and automates IT tasks, helping empower IT service professionals to streamline daily operations and eliminate redundancies. “Utilizing one of the automated solutions powered by Voleer partners can scope and quote the projects without ever entering to the client tenant as an administrator. Even the client IT can do it themselves if partner is not granted access in the quoting phase,” explained Antti.