Middle East businesses lead the in mobility trends in EMEA, such as bring your own device (BYOD), a report said, highlighting the readiness of their networks to support mobility solutions.

The study by Plus Four Market Research and commissioned by Avaya Inc, a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices, also showed a positive correlation between the flexibility of IT networks and employees’ productivity and retention, sales productivity and mobile security across EMEA.

“Social media, mobility and consumerization of IT have increased expectations from IT departments. Business decision makers as well as workers see technology today as an essential component for their day-to-day operations and an enabler for growth,” said Maan Al Shakarchi, a regional expert in network infrastructure, and Avaya’s leader for Networking in Global Growth Markets.

“This research confirms our view of the Middle East business environment as hosting some of the most innovative executives, especially in how they use technology to deliver business outcomes. Networking especially is a business enabler and should deliver effortless innovation opportunities to support the fast changing needs of the business.”

Plus Four Market Research’s study shows that many businesses spend more than nine months a year waiting for their IT teams to make the network changes necessary to deliver a new or improved business service.

The research also indicates that over 80 percent of companies still suffer outages from misconfiguration errors to the core network, each one of which can cost an average of $140,000.  The complexity of legacy networks has caused millions of dollars of revenue losses to EMEA businesses especially in Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia, the study revealed.

New technology, including the fabric networks of the coming generation of infrastructure, is already in place in businesses across the Middle East. These avoid the bottlenecks that slow the deployment of applications and services by using the Shortest Path Bridging standard, which creates secure and flexible networks, laying the foundation for software-defined networking (SDN).

These are an evolutionary leap forward, required for seamless integration into cloud-based infrastructure and the rapid deployment of improvements and new services. Forward-looking businesses are almost making the physical layout of their network irrelevant, as any logical infrastructure can be deployed on top of a fabric-defined architecture. This technology is doing to the network what virtualization did to the server landscape.

The conclusions reached by Plus Four Market Research identify how frequent changes, long wait times for service windows, and personnel errors have cost businesses revenue, employee productivity, and even jobs during the twelve months under which with the research was undertaken.

Al Shakarchi’s concluded that fabric networking is the foundation for today’s megatrends – especially cloud and mobile video –because it simplifies the network.

“Businesses with a fabric network infrastructure can keep up with new services and business requirements, while reducing operational costs, in part because network downtime and requisite wait times for service windows – identified in the research as huge business costs – are effectively eliminated,” he said.

Avaya deployed their Fabric Connect network at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia, where it supported up to 120,000 simultaneous devices with an excess of 40,000 of them BYOD – unconfigured prior to their arrival onsite. Its huge peaks and troughs of traffic could not be predicted in advance and came from a multitude of consumer devices – and it performed admirably. – TradeArabia News Service