Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 72 | Page 50

COUNTRY FOCUS : SAUDI ARABIA opened its first megastore at the end of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road in 1979 . The company expanded to hundreds of stores worldwide in the 1990s , but has lost a large number of stores in recent years , largely with the sale and eventual closing of the UK , US , Irish , Canadian , Australian , Italian , Spanish , French , Greek and Japanese stores . By 2015 , current operations are exclusively in the Middle East and in North Africa , consisting of approximately 40 stores .
IBM Cloud offers the most open and secure public cloud for business , a next-generation hybrid multicloud platform , advanced data and AI capabilities , and deep enterprise expertise across 20 industry verticals .
King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh
Saudi Arabia adaptable to the expanding needs of the company , while offering a more personalised and secured experience for shoppers ,” said Fahad Alanazi , General Manager , IBM Saudi Arabia . “ By working with Virgin Megastore KSA to accelerate its Digital Transformation , we are able to support the company ’ s business vision and fuel its growth .”
Virgin Megastore is a global entertainment retailer with over 40 stores in nine markets in the Middle East and North Africa ( MENA ). Virgin Megastore has set an unbounded target of expanding its regional presence . Since it opened its first store in Jeddah , Saudi Arabia in 2008 , Virgin Megastore continued to expand domestically presenting a one-stop shop for all entertainment needs , offering a wide range of lifestyle products across music , fashion , culture , technology , entertainment , beauty and other related services .
Enterprise resource planning ( ERP ) systems are core to many clients ’ operations . Without modernisation , they ’ re both costly , open to cyber resilience issues and an impediment to Digital Transformation . SAP ERP workloads are moving to the cloud at a rapid pace . Driven by SAP ’ s transition to S / 4 HANA , when a cloud is chosen for ERP , the workloads that surround it must also follow .
IBM offers a full range of services , solutions and technologies to manage , secure and optimise performance for your SAP application workloads on Amazon AWS , IBM Cloud , Microsoft Azure , and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure ( OCI ). p
As an international entertainment retailing chain founded in early 1976 by Sir Richard Branson as a record shop on London ’ s Oxford Street , Virgin Megastore
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