Etisalat demonstrated its end to end managed telecom and ICT capabilities to showcase how ICT can deliver the impetus oil and energy sectors need to create lasting business value at a forum in Abu Dhabi.

Etisalat ICT forum for Government, Oil and Energy was held today (February 4) at the InterContinental Hotel.

“The government, oil and energy sectors are leading the way in the economic recovery and renewed economic activity in the UAE,” said Abdulla Hashim, senior VP, business solutions, Etisalat.

“ICT can play a critical role in this transformation process to facilitate growth by allowing organizations to move away from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model,” he added.

“With our end to end Managed telecom and ICT expertise and state of the art infrastructure, Etisalat can provide a very strong value proposition to drive productivity and optimize efficiencies across the value chain.”

Peter Hall, principal analyst at Ovum, an international market research company, said: “There are common ICT drivers across business sectors such as oil & energy and government. These include the need to rationalise and optimise networks, IT platforms and systems that have often grown in number and complexity to the point where they are now difficult to manage.”

“In addition, the global recession has highlighted the role of managed services which reduce the need for capital investment and can be tailored to meet the changing needs of the enterprise or organisation. The choice of suppliers for managed ICT services is now growing, especially with telcos like Etisalat bringing a broader range of managed service offerings to market.”

In the broader marketplace, telecom providers are already providing a range of infrastructure services and are in strong position to offer value for money services in managed services and other support services.

UAE based enterprises are also increasingly adopting or thinking hard about using the cloud to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. Scalability, agility, automation, and resource sharing are some of the key benefits for businesses. This development is however not just restricted to the private sector.

NG Beng Lim, consultant, NCS Singtel, said: “In today’s environment, governments around the world are actively leveraging on ICT and looking into cloud computing to increase efficiencies and reduce costs.  With cloud computing, upfront capital expenditures are eliminated and IT administrative burden is dramatically reduced.

“With strategic planning to leverage on a hybrid cloud platform, Governments can enjoy both security and flexibility to scale the capacity. Most importantly, it provides a “one-stop” e-Government solution to help increase intra-government, business-to-government and citizens-to-government communications access anytime, anywhere. This enables a seamless, efficient and cost effective Government.”

At the forum, Etisalat also talked about its strategy to aggressively rollout its fibre infrastructure to businesses across the UAE. For businesses, one of the biggest benefits is that the fibre infrastructure will allow the convergence of voice and data through a single connection.

This convergence will reduce the overhead of having different connections for voice and data and will also provide a better level of service to customers through the availability of higher bandwidth and improved reliability.

The management and support of the next generation infrastructure can prove to be complex for organisations that don’t have the skills to support this new technology.

Etisalat, as an ICT solution provider, can provide fully managed solutions for customers, allowing customers to focus on their core business while Etisalat delivers and supports the ICT infrastructure.

In terms of business solutions, Etisalat today is engaged in delivering a comprehensive range of services encompassing business connectivity, managed ICT, business mobility and eBusiness services. – TradeArabia News Service