CIO opinion
CIO OPINION
which is full of features – our Disaster
Recovery service and backup, etc.
We want to take care of the infrastructure
part to keep it away in terms of distracting
us from the business, so we want something
solid that runs. We have Azure, we have AWS
– we have all these capabilities that we can
innovate on.
Everybody's going towards that, because you
can't go with one architecture, you have got
to have a mixture of all those capabilities.
At the end of the day, we are a technology
hub – we are vendor agnostic – so we're not
pushing any of these cloud solutions.
They're an enabler for innovation and
Digital Transformation. And there is a lot of
demand, because of data sovereignty. We are
positioned best to provide those cloud services.
When you are contacted by CIOs and
potential customers, what kind of
best practice approach do you offer
when it comes to these strategies?
The biggest problem today is the operating
model. So how do we engage with a client
and an operating model that’s optimal.
And that usually needs the client to have
trust in us, managing SLAs, so we manage
the technology.
What I find is that the mixed and hybrid
approach sometimes doesn't work and
causes conflict.
So really, the conversations usually are
about the model and moving away
from the day to day operations on the
commodity level and really talking business
and helping IT managers or CIOs to give
value to their top management.
Are you able to offer insight into the
data centre market or any change in
approach in this region?
We're seeing high demand for high
density and high performance computing
requirements. Something is being done on
that insight and data analytics level that
generates that demand.
We see international companies demanding
space here in the UAE, for different reasons.
We see demand for the data centre, but
46
INTELLIGENTCIO
it's not the same, there are new features
requested and that's what we're working on
with our partners.
We have our own tier four data centre that's
been running for a very long time now
successfully with 100% availability. That is
in Abu Dhabi but we have a secondary data
centre in Dubai. And we are going to have
more, to make our cloud highly available.
How do you expect the data centre
to look in the next couple of years?
There's a lot of talk about containers and
I'm sure as technology continues to change
it will lead to changes in the data centre.
We're also seeing different approaches
being taken in terms of cooling. It’s going to
be very interesting.
My background though is really around
programming and data. I think that's where
Injazat will be really focusing. As a CTO,
it's about introducing new products and
innovative concepts.
You mentioned some of your work
with government and healthcare
organisations – are you able to talk
about a couple of other use cases for
your technology?
Our ambition is to grow beyond government
and to really launch Injazat as an
international company. And why not?
We have a very good anchor client in the
form of the government and we also serve a
“
WE’RE SEEING
HIGH DEMAND
FOR HIGH
DENSITY
AND HIGH
PERFORMANCE
COMPUTING
REQUIREMENTS.
couple of commercial centres, but we'd like
to do much more in that area.
The key is being competitive and having
a value proposition that appeals to the
commercial sector. We're really interested in
attacking that market very soon.
Why should commercial organisations
look to you for these services?
First of all, we would gain the trust locally – we
have a track record. We're investing heavily
in automation so that should really make our
price point competitive. And we really value
supporting the local economy. I'm hopeful
that we have a very solid value proposition.
We know the commercial competitors, we
know their offerings and I think we have
something very special that is very localised
and really customer centric and citizen centric
as well, because that's the final destination. n
www.intelligentcio.com