Intelligent Data Centres Issue 08 | Page 63

UNCOVERING THE LAYERS Enterprises across the region are moving to AWS to become more agile and innovate, and include Al Jouf Cement, Al Tayer Group, Arab Banking Corporation (Bank ABC), Aramex, Bahrain Bourse, Bank Al-Etihad, Batelco, Emirates NBD, Flydubai, Gulf News, Hassan Allam, Lulu International Exchange, MBC Group, OSN, Seera Group, Union Insurance and Virgin Middle East. Public sector organisations, including Bahrain government ministries, such as the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Information Affairs, Ministry of Labor and Social Development and Bahrain iGA, as well as other public sector organisations such as Bahrain Polytechnic, Communications and Information Technology Regulatory Authority of Kuwait (CITRA), Mumtalakat, Paris Sorbonne AD, Tamkeen and the University of Bahrain, are also using AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation and better serve the citizens of the region. Well established family businesses in the Middle East are also moving to AWS to become more agile and innovative. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Abdul Latif Jameel is one of the most respected www.intelligentdatacentres.com family-owned businesses across the Middle East and operates in over 30 countries worldwide, with diversified interests in major sectors including transportation, energy and environmental services, financial services, and land and real estate. Faisal Alsamannoudi, Vice Chairman, Abdul Latif Jameel Commercial Development Company Ltd, said: “We welcome the opening of the AWS Middle East Region and see it as a real opportunity to bring more efficiency and innovation to our business, in a secure way. We started our AWS journey with Abdul Latif Jameel Commercial Development Company, in Jeddah, by migrating critical HR management systems covering seven different companies – a process that took us less than one month and brought savings of up to 60%, compared to our previous solution. “With AWS, we are becoming more agile and able to innovate quickly across different lines of business.” Another regional enterprise moving to AWS is the Al Tayer Group, one of the largest privately held family-run conglomerates in the MENA region. Al Tayer Group has interests in automobile sales and services, luxury and lifestyle retail and hospitality. Headquartered in the UAE, the group operates in 12 countries in the Middle East and manages over 200 stores. Mohamed Al Fayed, Senior Vice President of OmniChannel, Al Tayer Retail, said: “This news from AWS is fantastic as we continue accelerating our cloud adoption. Using AWS, we were able to become more agile and reliably launched five e-commerce platforms, such as Mamas & Papas, Nisnass.com, and Ounass alongside Android and iOS apps, all within a year. “We rely on several AWS managed database services such as Amazon Aurora, where we were able to cut costs by 40%, while increasing performance by four times, compared with proprietary database technologies. We also leverage AWS spot instances to reduce operational cost by 79%. We see great potential to improve our business even further with the new AWS Middle East Region, which will enable us to serve our end customers with even lower latency.” Issue 08 63