Mindware, the prominent Value Added Distributor in the Middle East and Africa, announced today the signing of a distribution agreement with Mitel®, a global leader in business communications. As per the agreement, Mindware will market, distribute and service the entire range of Mitel’s cloud and premises-based Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) solutions across the Gulf region.

Mitel’s cloud, enterprise and next-gen collaboration applications power more than two billion business connections globally. It is the undisputed leader in cloud communications. The company’s public, private and hybrid cloud solutions have made it the choice of nearly 4.7 million business users worldwide. Mitel is the only brand recognized across the Gartner Magic Quadrants for Contact Centre, Unified Communications and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).

Speaking about the partnership, Mr. Nicholas Argyrides, General Manager – Gulf at Mindware said, “Business communications is the lifeline of any organization today, particularly these (challenging) days, when an organization’s physical premises are typically not the preferred workplace for most of us. Recent research has shown that business professionals spend over half of each working day in communications activities. Needless to add, a company’s communications and collaboration practices and technology immensely affect its productivity. And this, in turn, impacts the organization’s bottom-line.”

“We have been looking forward to working with Mitel since such all-around product range nicely rounds off our portfolio as we add top-class UCC to our offerings. With the current anaemic trends in the market, productivity tools such as those offered by Mitel will inevitably become an integral part of organizations’ digital transformation plans.”

With Mitel looking to increase its footprint in the region, Mindware will provide its more than 2,000 Gulf partners access to the vendor’s solutions. The distributor will also actively seek to recruit new partners having strong capabilities in business software integration, unified communications, cloud computing, mobility, and virtualization. As part of the ramping up process, Mitel will extend full support and conduct training and enablement sessions for the Mindware team. In addition, Mindware will set up a Mitel ‘demo lab’ to enable partners to ‘test drive’ the solutions and get an in-depth understanding of the product technicalities.

With Mindware betting heavily on the Cloud this year, they see a tremendous potential opportunity for the regional adoption of Mitel’s cloud communications offerings. The VAD will be soon be listing Mitel’s cloud solutions on its newly launched cloud marketplace.

Feras Zeidan, Managing Director, Middle East & Africa at Mitel said, “Mitel MEA is honoured to build another growth milestone pillar and sign a regional GCC distribution agreement with Mindware. I am convinced that our new partnership with Mindware will fulfil the partners’ voice, video, UC & CX projects profitably and into the cloud. While working with Mindware’s in-country teams on enablement, fulfilment & post-sale support, our partners & customers will get local value addition, better design services, middleware integration, training and support. In partnering with a solid VAD like Mindware, technology partners will also gain faster fulfilments, fit-for-purpose solutions & roadmap entry into our software & services world.”

“The Mindware & Mitel partnership in the Middle East and Africa is extremely strategic in terms of executing our strategy for hospitality, healthcare, contact centre & SME/ mid-market. We are creating our go-to-market with Mindware, built around these segments to effectively communicate with partners. Channel enablement, trainings and PoCs will be very instrumental in building strong channel landscape with Mindware for Mitel business,” concluded Asif Khan, Channel Director, Middle East & Africa at Mitel.

To coincide with the occasion of Mother’s Day, taking place on the 21^st of March, AESG today announced the implementation of its new maternity policy aimed at fostering more equitable and gender-neutral career growth opportunities across its organisation. The policy generously extends on the UAE’s labour laws by offering 90-days paid leave, with an additional 90-days of optional unpaid leave, to its female staff in the UAE.

According to AESG, the policy is in line with its commitment to being an equal-opportunity employer which has organically resulted in its industry-leading gender ratio with women representing 46% of office staff and 42% of senior leadership positions. While the announcement will stand to make employment at AESG a more attractive proposition for aspiring female professionals in the construction industry, the company has cited its desire to empower its female employees to ‘thrive in both work and family life’ as the foremost reason for this decision.

“It’s all too common for women to have to place their careers on hold following their decision to have children. This is a contributing factor to why we see gender disparity, especially in senior management and leadership positions, in our sector,” explained Phillipa Grant, Director of Energy and Sustainable Development at AESG. “We are proud of the fact that women at AESG – by virtue of their merit and our company’s fairness policies – are already well represented in senior positions. With the implementation of these new provisions, we hope to ease the transition into motherhood while giving our female employees the confidence that the hard-work and progress they have made in their careers will be safeguarded.”

While making this announcement, AESG reiterated that it follows world-class project management workflows that incorporate industry best-practices which ensure that the quality of its services and progress of projects will remain unimpacted by the new policy. “We have always implemented a ‘soft-handover’ process with a sufficiently long duration. This has served to ensure that newly assigned team members have an in-depth understanding of the project and their responsibilities much before the actual transition takes place,” said Grant.

Following the global success of its solution, the company has now unveiled the Smart Platform in the region with purpose-built use cases for the energy, oil & gas, utilities, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and hospitality sectors

Dimension Data, a leading global systems integrator and managed services provider, today launched its Smart Platform in the Middle East. Having successfully expanded on its award-winning Smart City and Smart Sport solution – which has enhanced public safety, emergency response, situational awareness, and urban planning in modern cities – the company has now tailored the Platform for application in the energy, oil & gas, utilities, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and hospitality sectors.

At its core, Dimension Data’s Smart Platform is a big data analytics and machine learning engine that collates and analyses vast amounts of data to generate problem solving insights and predictions that enable organizations to meet business objectives such as data monetisation, user experience improvement, safety enhancement, marketing optimization, and client satisfaction and retention.

“To succeed in the data economy, businesses need to unlock the potential of their data. For this, they need enterprise-class tools that break down silos and transform the deluge of data into rich actionable analytics,” explained Redouane Gaouar, Director Go-to-Market Practices and Strategic Partner Alliances at Dimension Data Middle East. “We help clients to develop and execute their innovation agenda by using new and emerging technologies to disrupt existing business models and achieve business outcomes faster. Our Smart Platform is the result of our co-innovation with partners and clients. It has proven its ability to help governments and organisations use their data more effectively to make informed decisions.”

Dimension Data’s Smart Platform has been purpose-built to offer the utmost flexibility, scalability and agility, enabling organisations to integrate advanced technologies like IoT, connectivity, edge computing, security, storage, data processing, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) into the solution at the pace that is right for their business.

The system is based on a model that combines elements which perform recognition and detection at the network edge to analyse and predict trends using AI. It is a smart behaviour analytics platform that leverages machine learning for real-time processing, discovery, understanding, analysis the continuous time-serial data collection from agnostic sources. In this way, it enhances the predictive power of machine learning models, allowing clients to focus on deriving business insights and enhancing business decisions making.

The Smart Platform is interoperable with multiple technologies, facilitating its integration within different environments. It thus allows businesses to protect their existing IT investments, while utilising the Platform’s open architecture to design, implement, integrate and operate at the highest levels of automation and flexibility. As it is built from the ground up as a cloud-native application, with the utilization of micro-services and open APIs, the Smart Platform enables integration with any third party system for data extraction, normalization and application of AI, ML and Analytics functions for any use case. The Platform includes Dimension Data’s in-house developed multi-orchestrator which gives the ability to manage complex infrastructure environments and deploy the Smart Platform anywhere – on-premise in private data centres, on public clouds, or in hybrid cloud environments.

Dimension Data will extend full maintenance and support services for its Smart Platform. For customers that choose to act autonomously post-deployment, the company will offer a comprehensive training regimen that fully prepares in-house IT teams to independently support and maintain the system.

“We’re excited to offer businesses across a myriad of industry verticals a convenient and cost-effective path to realising the full value of their data. The tailored use cases we have designed for the urban planning and administration and the different industries greatly simplify roll-out of the platform while accelerating ROI and driving tangible business outcomes. The clients and partners that we have engaged with so far in the Middle East are acknowledging a lot of uniqueness in our Smart Platform value proposition. We put our society at the forefront of our consideration, and we are excited with the idea to bring value to our citizens, public and private organisations by leveraging such outcome-oriented proven solutions,” concluded Gaouar.

Aruba Air Pass roaming service, combined with Aruba Air Slice radio resource management, delivers seamless, secure mobility between cellular and enterprise networks with carrier-grade Quality of Service

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today announced the introduction of its new roaming service designed to enablecellular subscribers to securely and automatically roam onto participating Aruba enterprise Wi-Fi networks. The new service, called Aruba Air Pass, allows for a seamless hand-off between cellular and Wi-Fi networks, without sacrificing security or quality of service. When used in conjunction with Aruba Air Slice, an Aruba technology that improves radio performance, telcos can extend their 5G footprint into the enterpriseand enable seamless Wi-Fi calling and gigabit-class guaranteed performance.

Due to evolving building codes, energy efficient construction materials and low-emission glass, cellular signals are challenged when penetrating buildings, resulting in dramatically diminished performance. To solve this problem, Aruba customers can easily leverage their existing enterprise Wi-Fi infrastructure as a cost-effective alternative to deploying indoor small cells or distributed antenna systems (DAS). Because 5G standards support aggregation of both 3GPP and Wi-Fi radio access networks (RANs), global telcos can leverage Wi-Fi as an indoor onramp to 5G services to deliver new classes of enterprise services, such as network slicing. This helps enterprise IT teams accelerate their adoption of 5G with an economical and seamless solution that greatly improves performance and user experience inside the enterprise. 

One of the fundamental enabling technologies behind Aruba Air Pass is Passpoint, a standard created by the Wi-Fi Alliance to enable mobile devices to automatically authenticate on enterprise Wi-Fi networks using their cellular credentials. Passpoint is a broadly accepted standard, and is supported on nearly all mobile devices. By leveraging Aruba Air Pass, global telcos have the ability to vastly expand their footprint to potentially include the nearly 20 billion square feet served by Aruba Air Pass-ready infrastructure worldwide.  

Delivering Carrier-grade QoS and Optimized User Experiences with Wi-Fi 6

Based on the same OFDMA radio technology that powers the 4G LTE and 5G NR radios, Aruba Air Slice is a unique Wi-Fi 6 technology designed to optimize user and application experience by providing carrier-grade quality assurance. By dynamically allocating radio resources, such as time, frequency and spatial streams, Aruba Air Slice guarantees performance for latency-sensitive applications such as AR/VR, Zoom and Slack, mobile gaming and real-time IoT applications.

Using Aruba Air Pass and Aruba Air Slice, mobile network operators can benefit from a globally scalable coverage solution, maintain continuous visibility and contact with subscribers, and deliver future 5G services across the depth and breadth of Aruba’s global installed base of enterprise Wi-Fi customers.

“The combination of Aruba Air Pass with Aruba Air Slice gives telcos the ability to extend the reach of their 5G networks into the enterprise while economically improving the overall end user experience,” said Jeff Lipton, vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “Devices that associate with an enterprise network using Aruba Air Pass may then use their Wi-Fi connections to access applications and services, such as making and receiving calls and text messages, based on their roles and permissions.”