During GITEX 2024, Telecom Review conducted an exclusive interview with Maan Al-Shakarchi Regional Director, META, Extreme Networks, to gain insight into the company’s latest innovations in the META region.
Can you give us an overview of Extreme Networks' footprint in the META region?
Extreme Networks is a leading provider of networking solutions, with a cloud-managed platform. We focus a lot on the fabric networking infrastructure that enables organizations to deploy applications like IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) on top of our infrastructure.
We've been in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) region for quite some time, and we're very lucky to be associated with some of the largest brands in the region.
One of them that we are most proud of is where we are right now, the Dubai World Trade Center.
The Dubai World Trade Center has been an Extreme Networks customer in terms of networking infrastructure for eight years now. This is the eighth time we are realizing GITEX alongside the Dubai World Trade Center, and we are really pleased to support an exhibition of this magnitude and this complexity, because building something of this magnitude is quite a feat.
We recently also collaborated with the Dubai World Trade Center to connect the Dubai Exhibition Center, which is going to be the events venue of the future and will be located at the Expo City.
Some of our other recent wins include the BAPS Hindu Mandir in Abu Dhabi, which is a monumental temple that was opened up in February this year, and our collaboration with customers such as Ethara, which runs the Formula One race at the Yas Marina circuit.
We've also announced a recent agreement with the Amman Stock Exchange to solidify our financial backbone as well as the Central Bank of Jordan.
Overall, we have a lot of regional customers, and we use GITEX as a platform to launch our latest solutions from Dubai to the rest of the region.
How do you ensure that your customers experience simplicity, automation, and security?
Automation is key, because the number of devices on networks increases very rapidly, and managing that network, device by device, is just no longer sustainable.
GITEX, for example, is a huge exhibition that has so many network elements that have to be configured. Our ‘Fabric’ networking technology automates all the configuration at an event like GITEX and cuts down the manual configuration by around a factor of 10, making it much easier to automate the rollouts.
At the same time, we boast a cloud management platform, which allows you to centrally leverage visibility to configure and deploy services in a point-and-click interface across the entire network. That is key in terms of simplicity and automation.
In terms of security, our fabric allows us to segment the network into different zones. There is a zone for CCTV, a zone for exhibitors, a zone for guests, and a zone for each of the exhibitors (which is completely isolated). That segmentation adds a layer of security that would not be there if using traditional networking.
What is your focal point during GITEX 2024? Which products are you highlighting at the show?
We're really proud of our partnership with Liverpool Football Club. Liverpool has deployed our Wi-Fi solutions at their Anfield stadium—this year was the launch of that solution. We're very excited about it because the solution enables Liverpool to not only offer Wi-Fi services to its visitors, but also revolutionizes the entire fan engagement and experience.
As a fan, when you go there, you can now utilize services such as mobile ticketing, touchless interactions, closer concession stands, and 360° analytics.
We have a business analytics tool that collects the location data of the people, such as how they're moving around the game, what kinds of applications they are using, and how those applications are evolving as the match goes on. This intelligence provides a lot of valuable data, which organizations like Liverpool can utilize to analyze their customer experience and improve it accordingly.
The second aspect is AI; we cannot be at GITEX without talking about AI. We recently demonstrated a new tool called ‘Extreme AI Expert,’ which allows you to talk to your network in a GPT-like fashion. It's a generative AI (GenAI) tool which you can use to ask your network questions like: ‘What are the top applications?,’ ‘How is the health of the network today? Are there any issues?,’ and ‘I want to do this kind of configuration. Can you help me out?’
This helps network managers to automate and simplify a lot of the tasks and receive data from the network. Here at GITEX, it is currently in the tech preview stage and not generally available yet.
From your perspective, which trends in the META region will continue to dominate in 2025, and how will Extreme Networks support this?
Obviously, the AI trend is the key trend. We spoke about tools such as the ‘Extreme AI Expert’ that allows people to simplify their network.
Cloud networking is also a key trend that we are seeing, and organizations want to keep their cloud data centers close to them, both for security and data sovereignty reasons.
Last year, we launched our regional data center in the UAE. It's been very successful and we have more than 400 customers hosting their management on the platform right now across the region, with more than 16,000 devices being managed from that cloud platform.
Cloud management allows us to collect the big data, analyze it, and run AI and ML on top of it to simplify and automate future processes. Security is absolutely key as well.
Hence, we'd like to think of ourselves at the intersection of AI, security, and cloud networking.
Also Read:
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