EXPERT OPINION
What kind of challenges are your
customers looking to overcome
before they come to you?
There’s a buzzword called ‘Digital
Transformation’ and that means something
to everyone. For us it’s about structuring
what it means for the client and then
outlining which part is optimisation and
which part is new business.
It’s very complex – you look at the existing
structure and imagine a new digital
business. Sometimes the ideas come
from the outside so it’s us creating that
ecosystem of capabilities that can be
joined in. And then the problem – whether
a business problem, social problem or an
environment problem – can be solved by
putting these capabilities together.
We’re talking about SMEs, vertical experts,
business consultants. We have a process
that says we innovate, we incubate and
then we commercialise. So that’s one of
the approaches that we have and we have
partners that help us do that.
We are in a very innovative
part of the world – how are
organisations responding to the
Digital Transformation challenges
they’re facing?
There’s still a struggle – I think it’s going
to take time before people really grasp
what Digital Transformation means to
them. And it’s all about having the courage
to take that step. What Injazat does is
eliminate that fear by investing on its own.
So, Malaffi was an investment from us.
The revenue share comes later for the
government, so they don’t take a lot of
risk. This approach helped us a lot. We’re
going to do more of that.
How important are your
partnerships and channel strategy?
It is crucial. I think there’s a study that’s
been done by Gartner which states that
90% of businesses that are not part of an
ecosystem will ultimately fail. Especially in
the digital world, you can’t work alone.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
Are you able to talk a little bit
more about the Malaffi project?
It’s a health information exchange. These
kinds of programmes usually have a high
failure rate but we’ve been successful
because we put the right people in place
and we got the best consultants in the
world to really get a proper programme
set up, ensuring the best service to the
end user.
Malaffi is something we’re very proud of
and we want to repeat – a lot. It’s going to
impact the lives of citizens directly.
If you think about it, if you need to be
taken to the emergency room and you’re
not conscious, you can’t tell the doctor if
you’re allergic to something or not.
Malaffi consolidates all the health
records into one, giving it to the patient
themselves and to the doctor so that the
best medical treatment can be given. So
this is Digital Transformation in action.
What is the market demand for
cloud in this region?
We’ve launched our cloud recently. Our
cloud strategy is a hybrid multi-cloud
approach. So clients still have on prem
workloads and then we have our cloud,
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
WE WANT TO BE
ON THE LIST OF
TOP INNOVATIVE
COMPANIES, SO
WE’VE INVESTED A
LOT IN EMERGING
TECHNOLOGY.
Mohamed Al Qubaisi, Chief Technology
Officer at Injazat Data Systems
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
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