INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
At a glance…
Make Smart Cities
a government cloud
provider, says Airwatch
The UAE’s Smart Cities initiative should become a service
provider to the government, to improve the adoption of
cloud and hosted services, according to Ian Evans, Managing
Director and Vice President EMEA at mobility management
firm AirWatch.
strategic and that the priorities must be
clearly understood by all members of the
management team. A common understanding
of all possibilities, opportunities, risks, costs
and management challenges of the various
available options will go a long way in helping
enterprises make the right decision, though I
will be the first to admit that this is Utopian for
most organisations!
Most organisations choose to take the
‘safe bet’ and call in “experts” to make the
assessment and help get an RFP out. This is
a good approach but in an era where there’s
limited patience for long RFP creation and
evaluation cycles, it is actually turning out to
be an exercise in futility. More often than not,
we end up with Paralysis by Analysis where
fewer of the bold have moved forward to be the
innovators in adoption and a larger percentage
have decided to stay laggards.
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Evans said there was a “barrier” for many organisations
adopting AirWatch that wouldn’t be solved by a more direct
presence to eliminate any international cloud usage: “Even if I
opened a datacentre here, it wouldn’t change. The companies
that are ready to adopt have adopted, or are adopting. This
is the really strange dynamic of the UAE – the government
doesn’t really want to be in the cloud, but it has the smart city
initiative, which is really all cloud. We see this day-to-day.”
He believes the answer lies within the Smart Cities initiative
itself: “What we really need is a government agency to be
a service provider to the rest of the government in the UAE,
like an application service provider partner – but actually
part of the government. We are working with the Smart City
teams to say, why don’t you be a provider to the rest of the
government, because that makes more sense to consolidate
the management and maintenance of these systems – and I
think that’s a strong way forward for them.”
Evans said Airwatch is currently very active in the Middle
East, with a presence at eight or nine trade shows a year in
the UAE alone. The firm is now in the process of opening
local offices, he added, which will sit within Airwatch parent
company VMware’s regional offices.
“We’ll be opening an office inside the VMware office this year
– hopefully all finished, deployed, and opening by 4 January.
We’re going to hire locally, and implant a couple of people
from the Milton Keynes headquarters. I’m looking at the UAE
as four staff, Saudi Arabia as two, and then look at Qatar as
the next country,” said Evans.
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