Middle East IT Monitor Silicon Graphics Inc. lays added emphasis on oil and gas sector
GCC IT market estimated to reach US$ 7.9 billion in 2005
Vertscapeaims to drastically increase market share
April 19, 2003
Dubai - Vertscape, a leading provider of enterprise eBusiness solutions based on .Net, has displayed great optimism about increasing its market share in the business solution market, following recent market research findings which project a massive growth for the region's IT industry.A recent study has projected that the GCC IT market will grow at a compound rate of 9.4 per cent for the next three years to reach US$ 7.9 billion in 2005, against the 2002 figure of US$ 6 billion.
"The optimistic projections for the IT growth in the region puts us in a strong position to leverage our expertise to provide advanced vertical business solutions to enterprises," said Chirag Patel, Partner and Director of Products and Strategy, Vertscape. "Several recent developments and IT initiatives launched in the region indicate that the IT market is heading for a boom, with both Governments and private businesses accelerating their IT drive in a bid to catch up with the rest of the world."
Madar Research Group, which conducts regular research on IT in the region, has projected a growth of over 9 per cent for business software products, to push the total value of the software industry to US$ 1.8 million. Software products form the key component of the IT market, and in 2002 software comprised 23.7 per cent of the total IT market spend.
According to research, the GCC market is seeing increased sophistication in clients' needs. More total solution and value-added service providers are replacing pure box movers. The study forecasts that the high-growth IT product areas over the next three years will be storage, security, CRM and ERP markets.
"As a provider of highly acclaimed enterprise solutions based on Microsoft's .Net web services technology, Vertscape has developed industry-leading solutions to address the specific needs of businesses. We were the first commercial providers of Web Services and solutions based on .Net technologies in the Middle East. As the region gets set to take a leap in IT, Vertscape is positioning itself as the one of the most accomplished E-Business solution providers with proven expertise and maintenance support," Patel said.
Market research findings indicate that Saudi Arabia has the largest GCC IT market with a spending level of US$ 3.7 billion, which corresponds to 60.7 per cent of total spending in the GCC. The UAE market comes second with spending estimated at US$ 1.2 billion.
"The IT market has picked up further acceleration due to the efforts by several GCC countries to form e-Governments and to provide a new impetus to e-commerce," said Patel. "Further, businesses are putting their acts together to migrate to Net-based automated systems that enhance productivity, efficiency and communication, leading to overall performance of a company. These developments signify that the demand for innovative software solutions based on proven technology will shoot up."
Vertscape has developed robust technologies to provide the appropriate e-business infrastructure to allow enterprises to integrate with customers, suppliers, partners and distributors and employees through various solutions such as CRM, ERM and SRM. "We are continuously developing newer specialized vertical solutions that will help the region's enterprises move over to. Net-based technologies and bridge the gap between the developed world as a faster pace," Patel added.
Vertscape, Inc. is one of the world's pioneers in innovative eBusiness Solutions using .Net Web Services technologies for public and private sector organizations. Vertscape is a fast growing company with offices in the U.S, India, Europe and the Middle East. A winner of the Middle East IT Excellence appreciation award in 2002 from the honorable Al Gore and Dubai Internet City's Ebusiness Award in 2000, Vertscape uses leading technologies to enable organizations to deploy their existing business processes onto the Internet, and provides an e-business infrastructure to seamlessly integrate the extended enterprise with customers, suppliers, partners, distributors and employees. -keralamonitor.com
Silicon Graphics Inc. lays added emphasis on oil and gas sector
From-left-to-right: Dr. Igor Zacharov, SGI, Mr. Guy
Gueritz, SGI and Mr. Gilbert Soufan, SGI
Altix offers Linux environments capable of scaling hundreds of processors with global shared memory
April 19, 2003
DUBAI - Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), the world's leader in high-performance computing, visualisation and management of complex data, is targeting the regional oil and gas companies, for its recently introduced Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters that deliver industry-leading performance at every level of scalability.
The breakthrough performance highlights of SGI's Altix 3000 range were presented to oil and gas industry representatives by officials from SGI and Emirates Computers, distributors for SGI products in the UAE, at a recent 'SGI Technology Day Seminar' held in Abu Dhabi.
"Abu Dhabi is indeed a very strategic market for the oil and gas industry in the country. Hence we felt that it was crucial to formally introduce the product in the city, in a bid to further develop our presence. The new SGI Altix 3000 range of servers and superclusters represent a remarkable achievement over existing competing systems, with a performance proven to be higher by several times. For the first time, it allows users to utilize a single Linux image to scale across 64 processors, against the standard 8 processors in most systems," said Gilbert Soufan, Territory Manager Middle East, SGI. "The capability is achieved through SGI's NUMAflex supercomputing architecture, Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processors and the open source operating system."
"As part of our new strategic plan for the Middle East, we are bringing the revolutionary Altix products to the region, offering the high-end market leading edge tools that can dramatically enhance performance and scalability," added Soufan. "These systems are ideally suited for sectors like oil and gas. An oil company wishing to simulate huge reservoir models, which are commonplace in the Middle East, will directly benefit from the efficient scalability of the Altix. Unlike the clusters of PCs, the Altix performance can scale to a much higher number of processors than a cluster of PCs," concluded Soufan.
"The Altix range of servers and superclusters triggers breakthrough performance with open source computing, representing a dramatic advance for technical users such as oil technocrats and scientists," said Soufan. "Altix superclusters aims to dramatically reduce the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared memory space. The combination of the NUMAflex architecture and Intel's highly advanced microprocessors leads to powerful price/performance breakthroughs in every measurable category."
Tony Abou Jawad, Technical Computing Manager, Emirates Computers, said that the availability of Altix 3000 systems in the Middle East would empower several organizations to go in for a technological upgrade in the interest of the company's overall performance and bottom-line.
"At a time when periodic technology upgrade has become crucial, Altix 3000 servers provide an opportunity to acquire next generation systems that are several times more powerful and versatile than most other systems," said Abou Jawad. "SGI has been a leader in providing industry-leading solutions to technical and specialist professionals. The supercomputing architecture incorporated in Altix 3000 systems brings to the region cutting technology designed to make a real difference in performance and scalability."
"Emirates Computers is pleased to offer SGI's breakthrough technology to top-end users in the region," added Abou Jawad. "As a pioneering technology company, we feel proud to be associated with the launch of such a prestigious product as Altix. We are confident that the region's oil sector in particular will be keen to draw benefit from the new systems."
SGI (NYSE: SGI), also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's leader in high-performance computing, visualization and the management of complex data. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. SGI was named on FORTUNE magazine's 2003 list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For."Emirates Computers (EC) is a leading technology company based in the United Arab Emirates. Since its inception in 1978, EC has been helping customers benefit from technology by providing cost-effective quality solutions and professional services that match the highest international standards. These services, range from mobile communication devices to advanced supercomputers; from small LANs to integrated, multimedia WANs; and from internally developed bilingual applications to enterprise-wide management and decision support systems.
Kuwait records highest Web penetration rate
Kuwait recorded the highest Internet penetration rate - at 38 per cent - among GCC markets last year, with the UAE - 31 per cent - and Bahrain - 26 per cent - following in its wake. Internet penetration in other Gulf countries are, Saudi Arabia (26 per cent), Qatar (10 per cent) and Oman (9 per cent). According to Mohsen Malaki, senior analyst with the telecommunications group at IDC, the total number of Internet access connections was 1.32 million, achieved through a 33 per cent growth over 2001 numbers.
The total Internet access services market in the Gulf states amounted to 489.21 million.Between now and 2007, compounded annual growth for Internet access points across the GCC is expected to swell to 2.6 million by 2007 for a combined revenue of $1.1 billion.The UAE and Bahrain enjoy high site penetration rates due to the high presence of Internet-dependent businesses and expat community, as well as the monopoly ISPs' efficient operations and marketing," said Malaki.
"Saudi Arabia, which has a competitive ISP market, has failed to increase site penetration rates. We believe this is a direct result of structural problems with the market, rather than with the competition among ISPs.
"Structural problems include the fact that international bandwidth and dial-up ports are all monopolies of Saudi Telecom.
"STC's monopoly of the infrastructure needed for better Internet service provisioning by the ISPs has resulted in a heavy reliance of the ISPs on STC for quality of service and pricing of the service to end-users.
"Furthermore, the role of KACST as an intermediary in international bandwidth provisioning to the ISPs creates an unnecessary layer of costs that add further to the pricing for end-users, while STC's high local call rates for Internet access is a major cost factor as well."
Another key factor has been access charges, which are still rated as high.
"We have already witnessed a price decrease in bandwidth-intensive connection types during 2002, primarily as a result of several telecommunications operators in the region being able to negotiate lower international bandwidth prices from global carriers.
"Any further price reductions will be hinged on the ability of operators to further negotiate international bandwidth prices down, as well as the ISPs' willingness to pass on these savings to the end-user.
"The near-term entry of competition in some countries, namely Bahrain, will be a major driver of lower tariffs as well."
