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MEEZA has announced plans to collaborate with Microsoft to introduce a sovereign private cloud offering in Qatar, enabling government entities, regulated industries and enterprises to deploy critical workloads within the country.
Built on Microsoft Azure Local, the proposed service will be delivered from MEEZA’ s Qatar-based data centres, combining locally hosted infrastructure with Microsoft’ s cloud technology and MEEZA’ s connectivity and managed services capabilities.
Under the arrangement, Microsoft will provide the underlying Azure Local technology, while MEEZA will manage the data centre infrastructure, hardware, connectivity, deployment and ongoing operations.
The offering is designed to address growing demand for data residency, security, regulatory compliance and operational control as organisations accelerate digital transformation and AI adoption.
It will also support hybrid cloud architectures, allowing customers to run selected sensitive workloads in locally hosted environments while connecting to Microsoft Azure public cloud services where appropriate.
MEEZA’ s high-capacity connectivity infrastructure is expected to enable hybrid cloud integration, business continuity and disaster recovery, including workload replication and recovery between Azure and MEEZA-hosted environments, depending on customer requirements.
The initiative is expected to provide Qatari organisations with greater flexibility in modernising enterprise applications while maintaining control over critical data and infrastructure.
QATAR
Mashreq is piloting IBM Bob, IBM’ s AI-powered software engineering platform, to accelerate application development, improve developer productivity and strengthen integration engineering across its digital banking operations.
The initiative builds on Mashreq’ s existing integration platform, which processes an average of 650 transactions per second across digital channels, payments and enterprise systems.
Early pilot results indicate a 60 – 70 % reduction in time spent on integration design and troubleshooting, with tasks previously requiring several hours completed within minutes.
Working with IBM and GBM, Mashreq is also modernising its integration infrastructure using IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native technologies to support secure connectivity and real-time data exchange.
The bank is deploying IBM Context Forge, based on the Model Context Protocol, to enable AI agents to securely access enterprise knowledge, API specifications and operational information. The platform currently manages approximately 4,000 requests monthly from AI agents.
Mohamed Abdel Razek, Group Head of Technology, Transformation and Information at Mashreq, said the initiative demonstrates how agentic AI can simplify complex engineering processes and accelerate software delivery.
Mashreq is also evaluating future on-premises deployment of IBM Bob for mission-critical applications requiring locally hosted AI models to meet data residency and regulatory requirements.
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