Arun ShankarOrganisations around the world are embracing the latest technologies around cloud, artificial intelligence, application development and APIs, interconnected code and data communities, and leveraging the network edge. Investments in cloud platforms are also growing supporting the focus on business continuity planning. All these platforms have gained importance and are part of organisational digital transformation programmes.
While companies are digitalising every aspect of their operations, Middle East is not far behind. 50% of regional CIOs in the region would like to accelerate their existing digital transformation efforts, targeting new customers and meeting the business requirements of operational agility.
Business models are changing, and organisations are looking for new go-to-market strategies to explore new business opportunities. This requires moving IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud environment in order to dominate across the digital economy.
Regional cloud journey
Regional governments are also accelerating their usage of cloud with shared hosted data, mobile government services, and web-based services, leading in priority and visibility. Regional governments are also attracting investments from global technology and IT leaders to invest across the region and accelerate the adoption of digital transformation.
Regional nations UAE, Bahrain, Qatar are leading the adoption of cloud in the Middle East. Communications and Information Technology Commission, CITC, the regulatory authority in Saudi Arabia, recently announced a dedicated cloud policy, as a first in the region. CITC has been modernising its policies to boost cloud adoption in Saudi Arabia.
The UAE government, through its Smart Dubai and Smart Abu Dhabi initiatives, is also investing significantly in cloud technology. Bahrain’s cloud first policy, has put the country on the fast track to cloud adoption and plans to migrate 90% public services to AWS cloud. In Qatar, the Ministry of Transport and Communications has eased regulations to support the use of in-country hosted public cloud services. This initiative is expected to drive adoption of public cloud services.
To drive superior experience around cloud platforms, cloud services providers are investing in setting up points of presence, PoPs. Hyperscale cloud players are continuously investing in global and regional PoPs, driving and improving the delivery of in-country services, hosting of application and service platforms, edge services and applications, while boosting the adherence to data sovereignty regulations.
Atos vision
At Atos, the mission is clear. The company is focused on designing, building and managing world-class digital infrastructures. When managing a customer’s critical project, Atos delivers an immersive data-driven employee experience built on next-generation collaboration. With the most recent emphasis on sustainability and decarbonisation, Atos helps customers reduce their carbon footprint with green IT solutions.
For advisory and expertise, end-to-end local and remote professional services, hybrid infrastructure integration and maintenance services, the Atos portfolio offers a host of trusted technology.
Atos was the lead integrator for the International Olympic and Paralympic Committees, orchestrating, securing, transforming, the enabling digital technologies.
Atos Cloud
The four key regional trends evident in cloud adoption include cloud ubiquity, cloud ecosystems, sustainability and carbon-intelligent cloud, cloud infrastructure and platform service providers CIPS, automated programmable infrastructure.
A key strength of Atos Cloud is the ability to deliver services efficiently over the network at low costs, which is also a driver for rising cloud adoption. 70%+ companies accelerated their digital transformation plans by at least a year, with cloud being a key driver of this.
On the flip side, CIOs face multiple barriers during their adoption of cloud platforms. These include lack of skills, legacy infrastructure, management of multi-cloud, lack of skilled cloud solution partners and absence of a regulatory environment.
Atos and decarbonisation
Businesses today face a dual challenge of digital transformation, while at the same time measuring, managing, compensating and reducing their carbon footprint. Moving forward from now, digitalisation and decarbonisation need to grow hand-in-hand leading to a net-zero future.
The Atos vision is to offer customers both secured digital services and decarbonised operations. Atos has developed an end-to-end portfolio for both technology and nature-based solutions to support this critical transformation. Artificial intelligence ad machine language can reduce energy usage by analysing patterns in data through algorithms.
Recent Atos initiatives
In November, Atos hosted its Tech for Climate Summit, alongside COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh. Hosted with Atos ecosystem partners, the summit welcomed government officials, industry experts and global and regional customers to discuss the collective role in global transition to net zero and how to enable organizations to take action reduce their carbon emissions.
A session from Commercial International Bank Egypt around IT for Sustainability and Sustainability for IT explored how their in-house platform assesses carbon emissions within their branches and lowers carbon footprints. Atos discussed how together with technology partners it is developing a unique proof of concept for a sustainable and smart city in downtown Cairo. EcoAct, an Atos company, launched its Climate Risk Platform, which assesses organizations’ vulnerability to climate risks. The platform models both classical climate risks such as floods and heat waves, as well as less common risks, such as glacial lake outburst floods, salinization of coastal water tables and the impact of ocean acidification. The need for businesses to identify, mitigate and adapt to vulnerabilities as a result of climate change is becoming increasingly important.
With the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International Atos hosted a panel around the Future of Agriculture in Africa, around how to improve the entire agriculture ecosystem in Africa using a smart agriculture platform.
In December, Atos opened its Global Delivery Centre in Cairo and a formal signing ceremony with the Egyptian Prime Minister, Mostafa Kamal Madbouly, and Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Dr Amr Talaat. With this centre, Atos reinforces its presence in Africa and commitment to regional and global customers. The centre will boost the offshore delivery capability of Atos.
Egypt produces 100,000 IT graduates every year. Over 80% of its young working population are fluent in Arabic, English, French and German.
Leveraging Egypt’s diverse workforce and with strong support from the Ministry of Communications and IT, Atos aims to provide digital services to its clients across the globe. It will offer services around the digital workplace, application development, automated testing, project management, analytics and database, mainframe, server and infrastructure support to its clients with competitive pricing.
Atos offerings
To help CIOs and IT decision makers Atos is expanding its offerings. This includes:
- Technology consulting: Provides C-level insights and expertise to climb the customer value chain.
- Competence Centres: This will complement Atos professional services through local and dedicated centres.
In conclusion, Atos is committed to offer its customers 360-degree services which includes technology consulting, professional services, competence centres, regional innovation labs, integration and VAR services, maintenance and support services.
