Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 11 | Page 20

REGIONAL CHANNELS Saudi enterprises are increasingly looking at digital technologies to manage capex, increase productivity, manage life cycles. King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. Cost optimisation key driver for digital transformation in Saudi Arabia S audi Arabia being amongst the largest IT markets in the Middle East continues to present its share of opportunities and challenges for the community of channel partners. According to a recent report by IDC authored by Senior Research Analyst Uzair Mujtaba, IDC Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia continues to present significant opportunities for IT services delivery and consumption. End users will initiate digital transformation efforts in order to drive down capex and enable enhanced accessibility to ICT skills, all while improving the productivity and life cycles of existing ICT investments by engaging increasingly with managed and outsourcing service providers. In other words, channel partners will need to look for opportunities in fourth generation technologies, digital adoption, and business process improvement and optimisation. All these areas remain 20 relatively very new entry points for existing regional channel players creating an opportunity for the entry of new players. There have been a number of high profile vendor and channel activities in the country and some of these are listed below. STC Cloud hosts A10 Networks vThunder Virtual Appliance A10 Networks announced its vThunder Virtual Appliance is now available via the STC Cloud. According to the terms of the agreement, STC Cloud will sell A10 vThunder Cloud offerings as a service for public use environments. STC Cloud represented by Khalid Al-Ashaikh, Director Cloud Commercials at STC Cloud has signed the first agreement for Application Delivery Controller as a Service in Saudi Arabia. The A10 vThunder-Bluvalt is purpose- built for high performance, flexibility, and easy-to-deploy application delivery and server load balancer solutions within STC Cloud Marketplace deployments. A10 vThunder combined with the STC Cloud platforms enables customers to rapidly scale and optimise cloud environments, increasing performance on demand. A10 Networks’ vThunder solution will enable customers to quickly migrate workloads and configurations from private data centers to the STC public cloud. For fast deployments or major infrastructure upgrades, the solution will combine the power of STC public cloud services with proven application delivery features to deploy cost-effective business continuity and disaster recovery environments. SAB Holding migrates SAP to IBM Cloud SAB Holding, an industrial conglomerate based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has selected IBM Cloud to host its mission- critical SAP applications. IBM Cloud’s Issue 11 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS