Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 04 | Page 6

NEWS UAE Middle East CIO Summit to advise CxOs on enabling digital transformation UAE’s Minister of Culture, Youth, and Community Development. Jyoti Lalchandani, IDC’s group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey, gave an insight into the challenges that the region’s organisations are facing as the emergence of digital transformation disrupts the customers, business models, and industries that they had previously taken for granted. International Data Corporation (IDC) has announced the key topics that will set the agenda of its upcoming Middle East CIO Summit 2016. Running under the theme ‘Leading Your Organisation’s Digital Transformation’, the event will be hosted at Abu Dhabi’s Jumeirah Etihad Towers on February 17–18 under the esteemed patronage of H.E. Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, the “The Middle East is increasingly being exposed to a new wave of disruptive technologies that present incredible opportunities to drive innovation and value creation across all facets of the organisation,” he said today. “At IDC we believe the single most important competency required to thrive in this new digital economy is the ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions within the ecosystem in which the organisation resides. The ultimate aim must be to deliver a compelling customer experience that seamlessly blends the digital and the physical worlds, but success in this regard will only come with a whole new level of enterprise-wide collaboration that encompasses the entire CIO value chain.” Against this backdrop, IDC announced that it will be hosting two dedicated CMO and CFO Workshops on the sidelines of this year’s Middle East CIO Summit, as well as three vertical-focused tracks that will present expert insights into the issues currently shaping ICT investment in the oil and gas, government, and BFSI industries. Joining them on the agenda will be two entirely new sessions that will explore the growing prominence of women leaders in IT and the rise of Smart City initiatives across the region. Oracle to open cloud data centre in Abu Dhabi, UAE To keep pace with growing customer demand for Oracle’s complete cloud portfolio, Oracle has announced its intent to open a new cloud data centre in Abu Dhabi. The new Abu Dhabi data centre will enable Oracle to better deliver high performance cloud computing services to customers throughout the UAE. Oracle also announced plans to continue increasing its sales resources throughout the region by hiring more than 250 sales professionals. The move comes as the company has more than doubled its workforce in the Middle East in the past three years. “As companies turn to cloud computing to modernise their business and drive innovation, we are seeing significant demand for Oracle Cloud – in the Middle East and around the world,” said Loic Le Guisquet, president, EMEA and APAC, Oracle. “We are investing in the infrastructure to support this demand 6 INTELLIGENTCIO by hiring new, top sales talent and by building new data centers. The Middle East is an important region for us and we will continue to invest here.” The state-of-the-art data centre in Abu Dhabi will allow Oracle to better manage the service level objectives and data governance for customers throughout the Middle East. The system environment at the data centre in the United Arab Emirates will be built using Oracle Engineered Systems to give customers high performance, and reliable and secure cloud services. www.intelligentcio.com