UAE firms ride on the cloud to scale up

Cloud holds the future for growth, irrespective of which sector a company operates in. Firms in the UAE and the wider region are capitalising on the cloud to drive business growth, a senior Amazon executive said on Sunday.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer, Amazon.com, said companies in Dubai are scaling up their business using the cloud after realising the importance and role the technology can play in their growth.

“Anghami is one of the most successful music streaming service providers in the Middle East. The cloud is an ideal solution to scale its business needs. Careem is also one of the biggest success stories here. It has been growing 10x each year. Fetchr is also moving fast because it uses the cloud and big data analytics to optimise delivery to customers. Dubizzle also makes use of the cloud to deliver new features. All these companies are using the cloud to build their business,” he said.

“Cloud has made things easier for small and big enterprises. Everyone has a level playing field and the same data to grow their business,” he said during the Gitex Technology Week conference.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, inaugurated the Gitex Technology Week on Sunday. More than 4,100 firms are participating in the exhibition, with companies from Finland, Georgia, Guatemala, Luxembourg and Syria exhibiting for the first time.

The exhibition also houses a dedicated section for startups under the banner of Gitex Future Stars where young entrepreneurs can share their technologies and approach different companies and government entities for financial support and take their ideas to the next stage of growth.

“We have a large set of customers in virtual reality too who have built products on the cloud successfully,” Vogels added.

He advised startups to ensure customers’ protection and keep costs in mind. “Security should be everyone’s priority. We are investing in the operational side and need to stay ahead. We are also investing in artificial intelligence. It’s a whole set of activities for customers that they will never find on premise but on the cloud,” he said while giving the keynote speech on the first day of Gitex Technology Week.

“The cloud can minimise costs for startups. It allows you to make mistakes, try out different things and be more experimental,” he said.

“A lot of companies are moving to the cloud to grow faster. Cloud provides security, privacy, data centre consolidation, workforce productivity, operational resilience and reduces overall infrastructure costs,” he noted.

— waheedabbas@khaleejtimes.com

cloud has made things easier for small and big enterprises Werner Vogels, chief technology officer, Amazon.com