Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 16 | Page 71

INDUSTRY WATCH C an you describe recent ICT initiatives at your company and how they have better served as a business purpose? Our ICT initiatives used technological innovation to positively transform Petroserv and our group of companies. Petroserv was established in 1978 and is wholly owned Qatari company that is an EPIC/main contractor in the State of Qatar. It has over 1,700 staff and operates in various sectors, including, Civil Infrastructure, Building, Oil & Gas, Facilities Management, MEP, Design & Fit-Out and Air filtration, and our group of companies line of business include Oil & Gas, Civil Infrastructure and Building projects. We are an EPIC/main contractor in the State of Qatar. Areas of focus for the ICT initiative were increasing profitability and controlling costs. Over a four-year period, IT Initiatives that have taken place include setting up a private cloud and public cloud environment. There was a greenfield rebuild of the entire Petroserv group IT Infrastructure and data centre by removing the old infrastructure hardware and software and rebuilding all aspects of the IT infrastructure, both hardware and software. www.intelligentcio.com THE NEW DATA CENTRE WAS EQUIPPED WITH AN ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING SYSTEM, CCTV, ACCESS CONTROL, FM200, REDUNDANCY IN POWER AND COOLING. THE DATA CENTRE IT INFRASTRUCTURE CONSISTED OF A NEW CORE AND 1G EDGE SWITCHES, DELL HARDWARE INCLUDING SAN STORAGE, BLADE SERVERS, HIGH AVAILABILITY FIREWALLS, VIRTUAL AND PHYSICAL BACKUP STORAGE A dynamic virtual infrastructure was setup which required a substantial investment in IT infrastructure, hardware and software and IT services. I engaged multiple suppliers across the IT industry to achieve this. The new data centre was equipped with an environmental monitoring system, CCTV, access control, FM200, redundancy in power and cooling. The data centre IT infrastructure consisted of a new core and 1G edge switches, Dell hardware including SAN storage, blade servers, high availability firewalls, virtual and physical backup storage. Microsoft environment, the active directory forest was rebuilt with new security and group policies, Exchange DAG cluster setup, SQL Server Cluster setup and ERP migration. Virtualisation of our servers with VMWare, virtualisation of applications and desktops with Citrix, rebuilds of our desktops and laptops and updating of software on the client machines. Deployment of Polycom video conference systems and Skype for Business. Setup of an IT Service Desk and practices based on ITIL. Migration of user accounts and data from old environment to new environment. Users were able to work utilising the new hosted services, technologies and IT practices. We also migrated group companies onto our new private cloud environment. All of the company software was replaced; this included complete rebuilds and upgrades of our A group company deployment of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 ERP and Sharepoint on Microsoft Azure INTELLIGENTCIO 71