Adrian Pickering, Regional General Manager, MENA, Red Hat, talks about the rapid growth of open source and digital transformation in Qatar.
What is the state of the Qatar ICT market and the future outlook for technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Cloud computing and big data analytics?
ICT modernization is a central pillar of Qatar’s Vision 2030, since it lays the technology foundation needed to create high-paying jobs of the future, diversify the economy, and attract international companies. These principals are driving an upsurge in the adoption of cloud, big data and analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
Emerging technologies will play a major role in achieving key objectives of Qatar Digital Government strategy to increase government openness and generate economic and political value by collaborating with customers.
What is enterprise open source in a nutshell and how will it help business development in Qatar?
As Qatar activates its national digital transformation initiatives such as the Qatar Smart Nation Program to drive economic diversification, open source solutions will continue to gain momentum across the country.
Open source is becoming increasingly omnipresent across the IT stack, particularly as organizations look to drive innovation while maintaining operational and cost efficiencies. An agile, cost-effective and flexible alternative to proprietary software – there is no better way to achieve connectivity on a massive scale without relying on open source frameworks and platforms within digital infrastructures.
What are the key factors that will drive growth in enterprise open source in Qatar and in what industries will we see the most growth?
The increasing use of enterprise open source extends to important new emerging technology workloads, with 80% of IT leaders globally planning to increase their use of enterprise open source in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), according to the State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report.
The report, which explores why enterprise leaders are choosing the open source development model and technologies built with this model, found that 92% of IT leaders surveyed feel enterprise open source solutions are important to addressing their COVID-related challenges.
Across the Middle East including Qatar, sectors such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, education, and healthcare have been using open source to optimize and simplify operations, reduce costs, and facilitate their digital agendas. As digital transformation and cloud become mainstream, demand for open source solutions and skills will intensify.
Can you elaborate on some of the open source customers that you are working with in Qatar?
Red Hat has a number of public and private sector customers in Qatar using our open source solutions. These organization range from government ministries offering a variety of ‘citizen services’ to residents of the country, to private sector customers across banking, aviation, energy and other industries, who run their technology infrastructure on Red Hat technologies. Finally, telco service providers also use ReHat to deliver their telecoms solutions across the country.
What is your advice on companies looking to implement open source solutions to their organizations? What are the benefits to be realized?
As organizations in Qatar increasingly pursue digital transformation and innovation, open source adoption will have a pivotal role to play. They should consider working with established commercial open source solution providers and their channel ecosystems in order to secure the support and skills needed to adopt open source solutions.
When organizations build out their digital competencies to gain a competitive edge, improve customer engagement, and enhance their services, they are increasingly extending their infrastructure and applications to run on cloud. Cloud computing and always-on services built using the open source development model. A whopping 89% of respondents in the State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report believe that enterprise open source software is as secure or more secure than proprietary software.
The use of open source will continue to rise as organizations increasingly adopt agile development frameworks and tools to modernize existing applications and build new, cloud-native applications or services.
