Technology & IT | Tuesday 1 December, 2015 2:02 pm |

As the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to invest in the development of its country-wide ICT infrastructure, Huawei—the global ICT solutions provider—showcased its latest advanced technologies that enhance big data and cloud computing capabilities, at its special event ‘Huawei Day’, which took place at the Four Seasons in Riyadh, KSA. 

The summit, which welcomed senior leaders and CIOS from Municipalities and Higher Education institutions, was hosted in conjunction with IDC (International Data Corporation), the premier provider of market intelligence and advisory services for the IT, telecommunications and consumer technology markets worldwide.

In recent years, the Government in Saudi Arabia has significantly increased investment, for the development of its ICT infrastructure, with a view of improving its municipal and education services across the country. According to IDC, the outsourcing, managed services, and datacenter services market in Saudi Arabia is expected to total $570.6 million in 2015, up 16.2 per cent year on year. The cloud market is expected to perform strongly, spurred by the growing maturity of the Saudi ICT market and the increase in the number of companies using cloud services. 

In particular, the Kingdom has recently also focused on enhancing its educational system by introducing new digital learning programs, research and development initiatives, and building numerous schools and universities. With the emergence of BYOD, connected learning, cloud services, software defined networking and big data the management of academic technology to support teaching and learning has become increasingly challenging.

To help address the requirements of a more digitally innovative KSA, Huawei showcased its OceanStor 18000 V3, a high-end storage product which is usually used for core applications data storage. Huawei also presented its eIMS platform, a convergent and open cloud communications solution.

“With these versatile, agile and secure innovative solutions Huawei will provide further proof of its enormous worth to the public sector and educational organizations within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This country is still in the throes of a massive technological shift and the ICT sector is constantly growing. Huawei is playing a vital role in ensuring this technology is safe and effective, and is helping many organizations implement virtual and cloud-based networking solutions,” says Ramadan Ding, CEO of Huawei KSA. 

Huawei Day was split into a morning open session and an afternoon summit both of which were moderated by experts from IDC. During the summit two sessions, targeting government and higher education, were hosted separately to cater to the fast growth of both sectors. ICT trends in the KSA market was discussed in detail on the day including topics such as ‘big data’ and the ‘convergence of unified platforms’ - areas in which Huawei offers unparalleled expertise.