FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
for the final results. “It becomes natural
for us to see teams from our side that are
experts in retail, experts in education,
dedicated teams for financial services and
banking, which is a very strong segment
that we have.” GBM has also restructured
its business units, creating new business
units in some cases and consolidating in
other cases.
The challenge in this process of
transformation is the long timeline of
IT teams working with IT organisations
within end-user organisations. They now
need to engage with business decision
makers along a completely different set of
success indicators and different skill sets.
“I think the challenge is to take people
out of their comfort zone. Bringing our
people out of their comfort zone to be able
to understand the language that we are
now trying to bring to some verticalised
industry solutions, that our people have
to digest and understand, so that when
Two years
from now, Help
AG will look
completely
different from
what it is at
present.
Stephan Berner, CEO
at Help AG.
transformation initiatives such as UAE
Vision 2021 and Dubai Smart City, and
mega-events such as Expo 2020 Dubai, are
major drivers for information management.
“Among the fastest-growing adopters
of information management solutions
Increasing regional adoption of
digital technologies is also driving the
awareness of the importance of customer
experience. This is bringing into the
mainstream system integrators like IST,
which describes itself to be customer
experience technology specialists. “Over
the last few years, between geopolitical
tensions in the region and economic
conditions, organisations are focusing
their IT investments in areas that will help
them drive down costs. At the same time,
they are under pressure to embrace the
wave of digitisation and offer customers
a seamless, connected and pleasant
customer experience,” remarks Sherif
Fahmy, Marketing Manager at IST.
Among its solutions are cloud-based
digital customer engagement, sentiment
analysis, chat bots and speech to text
engines. For its solutions, IST primarily
leverages technologies from Cisco
and Genesys, as well as from vendors
Backbase, Entersekt, NovelVox, Nuance,
Teleopti and Verint. IST is focused on
the finance and banking vertical market
segments. “IST’s knowledge when it
comes to customer experience within
these sectors has been a key to its success.
Customers of a bank and the customers
of telecom operators are very different,”
says Fahmy.
Bullish on digital transformation
The Middle East is rapidly moving up the innovation curve, and is increasingly becoming home to
early adopters of the latest technology innovations.
they go and talk to customers they are
able to relate to their businesses and
understand our customers’ end users,”
elaborates Nofal.
According to Andrew Calthorpe, CEO
at Condo Protego, “The Middle East is
rapidly moving up the innovation curve,
and is increasingly becoming home to
early adopters of the latest technology
innovations. Government-led digital
24
is the government and public sector,
especially to support nationwide digital
transformation agendas. In the digital
economy, digital transformation and how
organisations manage their data is critical,
regardless of industry vertical.” Systems
integrator Condo Protego primarily uses
vendor products from Dell EMC, Veritas,
VMware and RSA to deliver information
management consultancy.
STME, a regional system integrator since
1982, chose to redefine itself in 2012,
which it describes as its triple S mission.
The three S’s now include its traditional
forte of storage and data management
whether on-premises or in the cloud;
security solutions for data and datacentres;
and system integration for traditional
IT infrastructure, software applications
and the transformation of technologies,
including IoT and smart cities among
others. “The third S, which is the ultimate
objective of STME, is system integration,”
says Ayman Al Bayaa, CEO of STME. For
STME, its key vendor partners include
Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, Symantec,
IBM, Cisco and VMware among others.
Bayaa points out that the traditional
model of system integrators dealing with IT
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