DOHA: Company targets a 50% increase in ICT spending expected from companies in the Middle Eastern nation as cloud becomes of paramount relevance to businesses across the board.
Continuing a wave of data centre openings, software giant SAP has announced it will launch a private cloud data centre in Qatar.
The plans were unveiled by the company at QITCOM 2017 hosted in the Qatar this week. Once functional, customers in and around Qatar will gain access to SAP Hana, a relational database management system and one of the provider’s flagship products.
Gergi Abboud (pictured), Managing Director of the Gulf, North Africa, Pakistan, Levant for SAP, said: “Real-time information management is the foundation for Qatar’s organisations to drive Qatar National Vision 2030 digital transformation and economic competitiveness goals.
“Using cutting-edge cloud solutions, Qatar’s organisations can cut costs and drive efficiency, become more responsive to citizens and customers needs, and deliver innovative new business models.” According to the Ministry of Transport and Communications of Qatar, the country’s commercial sector is expected to boost ICT spending by 50% by 2019.
This will see investments increase from $2bn in 2015 to $3bn by the end of this decade. Edwin Kolen, Senior Vice President – Europe, Middle East, Africa of Cloud4C, an SAP partner in Qatar, said: “Qatar’s government, banking and finance, and oil and gas sectors will be among the biggest beneficiaries of the [SAP] private cloud data centre.”
SAP’s Qatar data centre announcement comes days after the company announced it has expanded its cloud platform as a service (PaaS) to Japan and China with the opening of data centres in Shanghai and Tokyo.
Overall, the company operates 23 data centres around the globe for its solutions. The hubs, some still under construction, sit mostly in the US. Brazil, Canada, Japan, Australia and France are just some of the other locations.
