1
Editor’ s Note
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Intelligent CIO Middle East. This month’ s cover story, which can be found on page 14, features Faraz Arshad, CTO of STARZPLAY. He tells us how the streaming platform is redefining digital entertainment across the Middle East through a cloud-native strategy powered by Huawei Cloud, ensuring seamless scalability, low latency and uninterrupted viewing for more than 3.2 million subscribers.
By leveraging Huawei Cloud’ s CDN and serverless CCI capabilities, STARZPLAY can rapidly scale during major live events such as the World Cup, efficiently managing millions of concurrent requests without compromising quality.
Arshad explains that a clear strategic vision, strong operational execution and a culture of problem-solving within his team have been central to sustaining innovation in a highly competitive OTT market.
Mark Bowen Editorial Director
The company continues to enhance engagement with real-time features, collaborative viewing tools and strategic partnerships with regional telcos to optimise billing, content syndication and localised caching.
Huawei’ s AI-enabled cloud services, combined with round-the-clock support, have strengthened operational resilience and boosted research and development efficiency. Together, this collaboration positions STARZPLAY to remain agile and competitive as it reshapes the region’ s fast-evolving digital entertainment landscape.
Elsewhere, we learn how as Jeddah University expands its digital learning capabilities in line with Saudi Vision 2030, it has prioritised scalable and costefficient infrastructure to support hybrid education.
Facing rising VDI costs, inconsistent performance and growing management complexity, the university standardised on Nutanix to deliver secure, highperformance virtual desktops.
The deployment exceeded expectations, reducing total cost of ownership by 40 % and cutting management overhead by more than 45 %. Provisioning times have fallen to under three minutes, ensuring seamless access to academic resources as student numbers grow.
With improved performance, stronger role-based access controls and ongoing innovation plans including GenAI, the university has strengthened both operational efficiency and the overall student experience.
You can read more starting on p24.
Don’ t forget, you can stay informed with daily news updates on our website, where we bring you the latest insights and developments from the world of business technology. I’ d like to wish you a productive and successful month ahead. Please enjoy this issue and take your time to explore the articles we have prepared for you. See you next time. www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO MIDDLE EAST
3