REGIONAL CHANNELS
(Left to right) Abdullah Aldhafr, Cloud Business Development Manager at
STC Cloud with Mohammed Al-Moneer, Regional Director MENA for A10
Networks at the partnership signing ceremony
SAP-certified infrastructure will provide SAB Holding with the
agility and speed the company needs to keep pace with business
demands, while helping accelerate its business processes and fully
leveraging its business data for better decision-making.
SAB Holding’s construction services subsidiary RCC was at a
disadvantage for operating finance, payroll and inventory across
multiple different systems. Time played a critical role for SAB
Holding because the implementation needed to be completed
within a tight timeframe for a major project.
To quickly solve this challenge and enable integrated
operations, SAB Holding launched Enterprise Resource Planning
applications from SAP S/4HANA to support finance, supply chain
management, HR and payroll, project system and enterprise
content management, delivered via the IBM Cloud. Handled
and delivered by SAB Holding’s technology subsidiary SAB
Innovation, the IBM Cloud environment was implemented and
ready for use within seven days with zero downtime.
With the new solution, SAB Holding benefits from a highly
available IBM Cloud infrastructure that is fully-managed by a
team of experts at IBM’s cloud data center in Germany and backed
by IBM’s global network spanning 19 countries and six continents.
By hosting its workloads on the IBM Cloud, SAB Holding not only
enjoys a highly secure environment but can scale instantaneously
to accommodate the growth of its data.
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology
deploys Veeam cloud backup
The Internet Services Unit of King Abdulaziz City for Science and
Technology, a government entity that coordinates and promotes
scientific and technological research in Saudi Arabia, has deployed
Veeam Availability Suite from Veeam Software. This is in order
to provide the science community in Saudi Arabia with 24.7.365
access to critical data for research that fosters innovation and
promotes a knowledge-based society.
By integrating with VMware, VRealize Suite the Availability
Suite from Veeam, automates Backup as a Service delivered
by Internet Services Unit, so that organisations in the science
community can manage their own backup operations, including
adding and removing virtual machines from backup jobs and
restoring to a specific point in time
Internet Services Unit provides hosted services and cloud
computing to approximately 30 organisations in the science
community, including universities, research centers, laboratories
and government agencies. Each organisation works toward a
common goal: to transform Saudi Arabia into a leader in science
and technology. They have strict service level agreement with
Internet Services Unit so they can maintain business continuity.
Internet Services Unit’s IT infrastructure is large, modern
and virtualised on VMware sphere, VMware NSX and VMware
vRealize Suite. The IT infrastructure is a powerhouse, but backup
and recovery were not. Legacy backup could not integrate with
VMware vRealize Suite to provide fully automated backup as a
service to the science community. And, backup and recovery were
slow and unreliable.
Mobile application preferred banking channel
Banking customers in Saudi Arabia are increasingly using digital
channels to conduct their transactions, with mobile banking
leading the way, according to a new survey from Avaya. The
findings reveal that Saudi customers’ most-preferred channel for
accessing banking services is via a mobile application, while 40%
of respondents said it was a priority to have everything on their
mobile device, the highest out of nine countries surveyed.
The Customer Experience in Banking Survey, conducted with
YouGov, queried more than 10,000 banking customers in two
waves – the first covering the UK, UAE, India and Australia, and
the second France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
Almost a quarter 24% of respondents in both the UAE and Saudi
Arabia said a mobile application was their preferred channel,
behind only India and South Africa, and much higher compared to
just 8% in Germany and 10% in France.
When asked to assess what was important to them in
interacting with their bank, the top requirements were wanting to
have the same level of experience and service across all channels,
and for their problems to be resolved on the first point of contact,
all regardless of which contact channel they used.
While more robust digital channels are one way for banks to
improve the customer experience, almost a quarter of those in
Saudi Arabia would still prefer to visit their bank’s branch and
speak with a relationship officer for services. Virtual Financial
Advisors – representatives from the bank who engage customers
through virtual means and service them remotely with online tools
– seem to be an ideal solution based on the preferences of Saudi
Arabia respondents.
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