COUNTRY FOCUS: KSA
With SAP investing heavily in the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the country’s
Digital Transformation is set on the road
to success. Intelligent CIO talks to Khaled
Alsaleh, Managing Director, SAP KSA,
about the importance of cloud, SAP’s
investment in a local data centre in KSA,
and the futuristic Smart City of NEOM.
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Progressing on the road
to Digital Transformation
I
Is cloud a driving force for the
expansion of the IT market in the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)?
According to studies, 66% of KSA IT decision
makers say that cloud supports the future
transition and digitisation happening in KSA
including our futuristic city of NEOM.
Absolutely. When we look at the cloud
landscape in KSA it's clearly the future and
the present at the same time and has been
in transition from the usual tradition and
way of doing business. That is one of the largest, if not the largest,
project as a futuristic Smart City on this
planet. At the same time 83% of Saudi CIOs
say cloud is the foundation for future tech.
We at SAP have realised that and we have
made considerable investment within KSA,
north of 285 million Saudi Riyal over four
years investment, in order to establish, create
and operate our own local cloud data centre
in KSA that was based on statistics around
the potential of the cloud. And that includes Machine Learning, the
Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence
and Blockchain. So truly cloud is the present
and the future and we are capitalising on
that to foster the intelligent enterprise
platform that we have created to push in
the same direction.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Are businesses in KSA up
to speed when it comes to
Digital Transformation?
We have, under the umbrella of the Ministry
of Communications and Information
Technology, a unit by the name NDU
(National Digitisation Unit) that has been
active for the past years and it's tasked with
a mission to drive Digital Transformation
under the umbrella of the overall socio-
economic reform.
We are going through and under the
umbrella of the National Transformation
Programme 2020 which is around the corner
and it has been revised in order to be more
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