Telecom leader Zain has selected SAP to deliver Big Data and analytics solutions designed to enhance its mobile services across the Middle East, the group announced at GSMA Mobile World Congress 2015in Barcelona, Spain.

Global smartphone connections are set to triple by 2020, when six billion of the world’s nine billion mobile connections will be made via smartphone, according to GSMA Intelligence. In 2020, 80 per cent of global smartphone connections will come from developing regions, where smartphone connections will grow from one third of all connections in 2014 to 70 per cent in 2020.

In the Middle East and Africa, mobile subscriptions will grow by 55 per cent between 2014 and 2020, while mobile broadband 3G and 4G networks will increase from 20 per cent of the total share in 2014 to 85 per cent in 2020, according to the most recent Ericsson Mobility Report.

Zain Group will deploy Big Data and analytics solutions from SAP across Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.

"Mobile devices continue to transform people’s lives across the Middle East and around the world,” said Bill McDermott, CEO, SAP.

“The more mobile people become, the greater their demand for personalized, context-aware, real-time solutions to stay connected. In collaborating with SAP, Zain Group will use advanced analytics to help them Run Simple and provide the next generation of mobile services for millions of customers in fast-growth markets.”

As part of the collaboration, Zain Group will deploy the SAP HANA platform – based on innovative, real-time analytics software and in-memory computing technology – as well as data mining, social networking, customer and business intelligence and predictive software solutions.

Scott Gegenheimer, CEO, Zain Group, said: “In our drive to become an integrated digital lifestyle operator, Zain needs to reduce complexity in its current IT setup, enhance its overall customer experience through an actionable real-time analytical platform and gain better market insight to open new revenue streams. This tie-up with SAP intends to support our ambitions.”

Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan are all labelled as “fast growth” markets according to GSMA Intelligence, with a combined 20.3 million mobile connections. Mobile broadband penetration is strong in all three, including 74 percent in Kuwait, 49 percent in Bahrain and 42 percent in Jordan.

Among Arab countries, Bahrain ranks third, Jordan sixth and Kuwait seventh in the World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness Index 2014, which measures the performance of information and communications technology in economies.

Worldwide, telecom solutions from SAP enable 17 million people to work from any location on any mobile device, while mobile services from SAP deliver 1.8 billion text messages every day. – TradeArabia News Service