Organizations in KSA Eager to Benefit from Innovations in Datacenter Technology

With local IT spending on the rise, business & government leaders preview how new “cloud” solutions could change the face of Kingdom’s infrastructure

Mobilk - As entities across Saudi Arabia continue to invest heavily in advancing the Kingdom’s IT infrastructure, public & private sector decision makers recently came together in Riyadh to evaluate new strategies for sustainable business growth that leverage recent innovations in cloud datacenter technology now available in the local market.

During the Huawei Cloud Datacenter Forum, Huawei—a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider—teamed up with research firm IDC and technology pioneers Intel to welcome delegates to this year’s program. The forum included keynotes hosted by top executives including speakers such as Davis Fu, Vice President of IT Solutions at Huawei’s Enterprise Business, Global Markets, Hamza Naqshbandi, IDC Senior Research Analyst - IT Services in Saudi Arabia, and Abdul Aziz Al Noghaither, General Manager of Intel Saudi Arabia.

Today organizations dependent on legacy IT infrastructure in Saudi Arabia are being challenged to handle real-time operations, and companies with exponential growth of digital assets are eager to look at ways to efficiently share and protect that data via cloud management solutions. Much of this year’s forum focused particularly on new technology applications for the local government, oil & gas, and banking & finance sectors.

“Although there is a steady growth of organizations in KSA deploying their understanding of the cloud, many have yet to fully maximize its potential and what it can do to positively impact not just IT systems but more importantly, the bottom line,” said Mr. Ding Ailong, COO of Huawei KSA. “Over the past year Saudi IT decision makers have understood the need for a more robust datacenter environment to guarantee a reliable and secure service demanded by their customers. As pioneers of this evolution, Huawei and our local partners are committed to stepping up our efforts to build the public’s confidence in data security in the cloud, and how such frameworks can allow businesses to analyze vast amounts of data that—until now—largely existed in silos." 

The fuller features of cloud computing can also allow organizations greater business flexibility and compelling benefits from an economic standpoint. Taking cloud virtualization to the next level means organizations will need fewer servers to do the same amount of work with better adaptability. By supporting growing trends like bring-your-own-device (BYOD), a company’s workforce can also be more flexible as they have access to company resources through their mobile devices around the clock. 

Adding to this year’s forum discussions were senior public figures such as Dr. Talal H Maghrabi, General Director of IT Infrastructure at the Ministry of Education, Abdulrahman Alonaizan, Head of Business Continuity Management at Arab National Bank, and Hazem Awni Jarrar, Chief Technology Officer at King Faisal Foundation. 

Huawei’s latest forum underscores Saudi Arabia’s strategic position as one of the largest ICT markets in the Middle East today. IDC has predicted that IT investment in the region will reach $32 billion in 2013, with one of the largest market being Saudi Arabia. Earlier IDC research shared at the forum also noted that public and private clouds were ranked as key issues amongst CIOs in the Middle East, with 57% of CIOs rating cloud among their top IT priorities .  

During this year’s event, Huawei experts from its Enterprise Business also previewed the company’s next generation datacenter architecture “DC²” which is designed to support the cloud era through the integration of resources, unified services, and intelligent management.

Huawei has been an active innovator in the data center field for more than a decade. Some of the company’s most recent endeavors have included a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with forum partner Intel to develop collaborative offerings for server, storage data centers and cloud computing. By Q1 2013, Huawei helped global customers build more than 260 data centers, 35 of which are cloud data centers.