Just one year after its announcement, Egypt's expanded Suez Canal is open for business. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi led the inauguration ceremony, which was attended by several Middle Eastern and European world leaders. The publicly-funded expansion cost about $8.5bn.

Iran has traditionally been a high-volume automotive market, whose geographic advantage has endowed it the potential to serve as a production hub in the Middle East. The recent lifting of economic sanctions has burnished the country's reputation as a business hotbed, with the automotive market expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.4 per cent from 2014 to 2022. Unsurprisingly, global original equipment manufacturers, suppliers and other market participants are exhibiting unprecedented eagerness to be a part of the Iranian growth story.

A draft agreement, reached between Iran and the P5+1 countries - China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus Germany - which would see the former reduce its nuclear activities in return for the gradual ending of economic sanctions, would have a positive impact on the future of the Iranian automotive industry.

Prescriptive analytics is a bit of a unicorn - a thing of beauty, but rarely seen. That's about to change, with prescriptive analytics and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enjoying their teenage years together.

Many vital infrastructure projects struggle to progress beyond the concept stage because project preparation is such a costly, complex and risky undertaking. The difficulty is particularly acute in Africa, where projects encounter frequent challenges related to capabilities, the regulatory environment, project governance and financial resources.