More than 70 leading information technology users, ranging from banks, corporates and government departments, took part in a major seminar in Bahrain on cloud computing and discussed the future development of the technology.

The event was hosted by Bahrain-based Hilal Computers along with EMC, a global leader in enabling businesses and services providers, and Riverbed Technology on Tuesday at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

The seminar examined the way forward for IT as the amount of data that has to be processed by organisations expands exponentially.

'We have in our midst distinguished professionals from a cross section of industry and businesses, government departments and ministries and although the areas of business activity may be widely divergent, interestingly what brings us together is the fact that Hilal Computers has had the privilege of serving you in your area of IT requirements over the years,' said Jubran A Abdulrahman, Al Hilal Group's director.

'We are here today to get a better understanding of what two of Hilal Computers principal partners, EMC and Riverbed Technology, have to present by way of innovative new technology which can further accelerate the operational efficiency of your organisations,' he added.

EMC sales district manager for the Northern Gulf Wael Mustafa said, 'The volume of information to be processed is increasing across all industry sectors and efficient and effective storage and management of this data necessitates sourcing innovative and highly efficient methods and tools.'

'Earlier, technology offered limited storage capacity and used terabytes whereas today we have progressed to petabytes.'

EMC channel sales manager for Northern Gulf Dany El Khoury said that the company has the capability to offer a platform that can grow consistent with increase in demand using cloud technology developed more than 11 years back.

'Today we need a different type of solution because using old methods to back up data would not work as it would take forever,' El Khoury noted.

'We have been working with Hilal Computers in Bahrain for over six years and have developed a lot of cloud computing initiatives for organisations both in the public and private sector, moving organisations from traditional platforms in both closed and public cloud formations which have made us the market leaders,' he said.

'This event has been a major success both in terms of dealing with existing clients and potential new clients,' he added.

Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset - information - in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.

'Riverbed Technology is an IT infrastructure performance company,' said channel sales manager for the Middle East region Brian Perrins.

'The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimisation solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation and providing faster, less expensive and more responsive IT infrastructure.

'We also specialise in disaster recovery optimisation for the industry and work closely with EMC and Hilal Computers in Bahrain. This has been an excellent opportunity to update customers on the latest developments in IT,' he added.

'This has been an excellent event and the discussions from experts have been very well received by an audience representing some of the leading organisations in Bahrain who are at the forefront of developing their information technology capability to meet the challenges of the future to serve their clients,' said Hilal Computers general manager Hardy Koshy.-TradeArabia News Service