IBM has a focused strategy for the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region this year, which is around driving digital transformation across industries.
This is according to Saad Toma, GM for IBM in MEA, speaking at yesterday’s virtual announcement of the computing giant’s first Client Engineering unit for the region.
This strategy, he explained, focuses on helping the company’s clients transform on one side, while the other side is around the software platforms underpinned by Red Hat and IBM’s hardware strategic platforms in support of clients.
As a result, IBM has put together a Client Engineering team/unit that will foster growth opportunities around hybrid cloud, data and artificial intelligence across the region, he stated.
“There will be a significant IBM Client Engineering investment to support our clients in their journeys, and this is a very strong technical capability.”
To establish the Client Engineering unit, IBM selected South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and United Arab Emirates as locations for the team.
The multi-disciplinary team brings together designers, solution architects, data scientists, cloud engineers, security experts and business transformation consultants.
Technologies such as cloud, data, automation and security will be used to deliver solutions that address business use-cases and challenges in industries such as government, financial services, telecommunications, travel and transportation.
Sabine Holl, IBM CTO for MEA, said the Client Engineering team will join IBM clients on their hybrid multi-cloud journey. “We have observed in the past two years in the global pandemic that digital transformation has accelerated, and what has been planned for years has basically come down to a year’s journey.”
The result of the accelerated digital transformation requires a lot of new skills and talent, to drive innovation and build new applications that help the business succeed, noted Holl.
“We are here to work together with our clients to solve real business problems by providing these deep technical skills and industry knowledge to help broaden clients’ success.”
Holl added that through the Client Engineering unit, IBM is growing its technical community that is focused on being client-centric. “IBM Client Engineering is joining our technical sales team and the customer success managers to closely partner with our clients and our ecosystem in the region.
“By establishing this new team in Middle East and Africa, we are investing in talent, deep technical skills and diversity.”
According to Holl, IBM Client Engineering will foster innovation across the MEA region and enhance customer experience, noting the company will work together with its customers and partners to co-create.
In government, Client Engineering will help address the growing need for the public sector to be able to work with agility and speed to harness new capabilities, reduce costs and improve the effectiveness of citizen services.
For financial service providers, co-creating and co-executing with Client Engineering will enable them to meet the needs of digital customers, while addressing regulatory and resiliency issues and enhancing mobile and digital platforms for future operations, it states.
IBM Client Engineering will also offer expertise to address the large-scale issues in the telecoms sector, with providers increasingly looking to drive value from their data, improve fraud detection and implement cost-effective analytic processing on their networks.
Mohamed Behiry, IBM MEA Client Engineering manager, commented: “Our clients have been greatly challenged by the unprecedented disruption of COVID, which increased demand, expectations, complexity and constraints. To truly come out stronger and resilient, organisations must invest in end-to-end transformation.
“The time has come for a different approach that leverages the latest open technologies in hybrid cloud and AI, combined with agile methods, which help organisations to test market fit quickly and expand solutions using real-time data – this is what IBM Client Engineering is set to do for businesses in MEA.”
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