Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 20 | Page 9

NEWS KSA Prince Sultan University in Saudi Joins Red Hat Academy The Prince Sultan University, based in Saudi Arabia, has joined forces with Red Hat to provide graduates with increased skills. The university is collaborating with Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, to create the King Salman Education for Employment Programme. The Red Hat Academy is an open source, web- deployed and web-managed education programme designed to provide turnkey curriculum materials to academic institutions to start and sustain an open source and Linux curriculum programme. The King Salman Education for Employment Programme at the university supports recent college graduates who need more practical training to compete in today’s job market. Last month HRH Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Abdulaziz, Governor of Riyadh, laid the cornerstone for the new King Salman Centre for Education for Employment building at Prince Sultan University. This centre is seen as an important national development project that contributes to building a generation capable of achieving the objectives of economic development in Saudi Arabia. The Red Hat Academy turns academic institutions into centres for enterprise-ready talent by supplying them with training. For more than a decade, the academy has supplied high schools and institutions of higher education worldwide that have required hands-on instruction, performance-based testing, and instructor support. The academy’s web-based curriculum helps create competencies through hands-on, performance-based learning and testing. IDB Wins Banker Middle East Award for Digital Transformation Using SAP Technology The Islamic Development Bank (IDB), a multilateral development financial institution with 57 member countries as shareholders, is now fully delivering on its mandate to foster socio-economic development among its member countries, thanks largely www.intelligentcio.com to the recent transformation of its core banking technology, using SAP. IDB supports the growing Islamic Finance, with a recent report by Dinar Standard predicting global Islamic banking assets will nearly double from USD 2 trillion in 2015 to USD 3.5 trillion by 2025. Banker Middle East Industry Awards 2017. Judges praised IDB for having recently launched USD 745 million in development projects across 56 member countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and aims to become a world-class development bank in the Muslim world by 2019. From project finance in the public and private sectors, to development assistance for poverty alleviation, IDB’s systems require absolute transparency for more optimised project financing, sustainable processes that foster accountability, and enriched data analytics for faster decision making. Ahmed Al-Faifi, Managing Director of SAP Saudi Arabia, said: “IDB has made a paradigm shift in the way that it approaches banking. The bank has gone from legacy systems to real-time in only a few years of working with SAP, and has saved tens of millions of Saudi Riyals in the process. From analytics technology and development banking operations to finance and human resources, IDB is now operating on par with the world’s very best banks.” Recognising IDB’s digital transformation success, IDB has won “Best Implementation” at the INTELLIGENTCIO 9