The UAE’s Smart Cities initiative should become a service provider to the government, to improve the adoption of cloud and hosted services, according to Ian Evans, Managing Director and Vice President EMEA at mobility management firm AirWatch.
Evans said there was a “barrier” for many organisations adopting AirWatch that wouldn’t be solved by a more direct presence to eliminate any international cloud usage: “Even if I opened a datacentre here, it wouldn’t change. The companies that are ready to adopt have adopted, or are adopting. This is the really strange dynamic of the UAE – the government doesn’t really want to be in the cloud, but it has the smart city initiative, which is really all cloud. We see this day-to-day.”
He believes the answer lies within the Smart Cities initiative itself: “What we really need is a government agency to be a service provider to the rest of the government in the UAE, like an application service provider partner – but actually part of the government. We are working with the Smart City teams to say, why don’t you be a provider to the rest of the government, because that makes more sense to consolidate the management and maintenance of these systems – and I think that’s a strong way forward for them.”
Evans said Airwatch is currently very active in the Middle East, with a presence at eight or nine trade shows a year in the UAE alone. The firm is now in the process of opening local offices, he added, which will sit within Airwatch parent company VMware’s regional offices.
“We’ll be opening an office inside the VMware office this year – hopefully all finished, deployed, and opening by 4 January. We’re going to hire locally, and implant a couple of people from the Milton Keynes headquarters. I’m looking at the UAE as four staff, Saudi Arabia as two, and then look at Qatar as the next country,” said Evans.
