Interview
Leading the way Miguel Khouri, General Manager, Abu Dhabi & Yemen, GBM, says the future is bright for the Middle East as government leaders continue to encourage innovation in areas such as dynamic infrastructure, converged IT and smart cities.
How fast and well are governments in the region transitioning to a dynamic infrastructure? Today we see a lot of government sectors adopting consolidation, virtualisation and cloud. Basically, it’s all about having one infrastructure which is dynamic and can cater to the needs of the market and the customers accordingly in order to have a faster implementation. GBM today is helping customers with offerings of IBM, using a cloud-based infrastructure so that it can meet the customers’ requirement, and also customise solutions that will cater for the workloads and specific services around it. The cloud-in-a-box solutions and customisations of cloud offerings, such as storage, servers and workloads, fit customer needs today. In addition to that, we are leveraging the cloud to speed time-to-market and improve efficiency, and we are also unlocking the power of Big Data to deliver more to the customers’ needs and intelligences, as well as providing the security to protect the critical information for our customers.
How have Middle East governments so far embraced the paradigm of converged infrastructure, and to what extent is it the future of government IT? Converged infrastructure is moving steadily into all enterprises and governments. We are seeing this evolving, and leveraging this converged infrastructure with customers and governments is becoming a necessity and a business requirement. The idea is to plan and roll computing, storage and networking into a self-provisioning tool, and utilise resources that can be preconfigured to drop into the data centre. As a result, it is up and running in just hours or days rather than weeks or months. This is certainly going to continue — more government sectors and entities will have to adopt this converged infrastructure.
Miguel Khouri, General Manager, Abu Dhabi & Yemen, GBM 8
Industry Focus
Issue 03
What are the key technology trends affecting Middle East governments right now and in the coming years? E-services, security, mobility, cloud, and business analytics are the main