Naif Albuty, CEO, Esri Saudi Arabia • Interview

Esri’s services extend far beyond traditional mapping and include the collection, processing, and geo-representation of data. Its services have been crucial for the government during the pandemic.

Can you provide an overview of your key lines of business and clients in Saudi Arabia?

We have been extremely successful in harnessing the power of Esri’s geospatial services platform for Saudi clients. Our services extend far beyond traditional mapping and include the collection, processing, and geo-representation of data. Data-based decision-making has become extremely critical to policy in the Kingdom, so this is an important moment for us. Esri Saudi Arabia addresses the entire industry of geospatial services, which covers maps, licenses, services, professional services, and building platforms for analytics. We have around 170 products available in our catalog, all related to this core mission of making sense out of data and gathering information. From a legacy perspective, we used to only provide the ArcGIS base map, but it has evolved over time. Now, geospatial services and various platforms are combined under one hub called an atlas. It is not only one service, system, or dataset but a combination of many elements. It can be defined as the hub of hubs or platform of platforms, as we combine all this under the umbrella of the geospatial atlas, known as the Industrial Esri Atlas. We work across industries including health, education, industry, oil and gas, central government, and national security. One of the core global businesses for Esri has always been central government with security and defense. In the last five years, we leveraged education, health, and oil and gas. These trends also apply in Saudi Arabia.

Esri’s solution has been essential for the Ministry of Health and the wider government during the pandemic. What was the process of setting up this solution, and what makes it useful in this context?

We started in February 2020 at the time when COVID-19 reported cases were surging in the Kingdom with the Ministry

of Health trying to work on a tool of representation in order to calculate and identify the future impact of the pandemic. We used one of our solutions, which can be adapted to different industries and tweaked it to be applicable to the COVID-19 situation. We adapted a solution that John Hopkins University with the help of Esri have implemented and used to track the pandemic, which has been shared widely on social media platforms and replicated the dashboard for the Saudi Arabian context. This has been a key public tool for the ministry in the effort to manage the pandemic across the Kingdom. You are able to view for every city what the historic and current data for the pandemic is. We launched this in May when the pandemic was at its peak, and this was one of the major assets that helped the authorities have a full overview of the situation. We would call this as the command and control for the pandemic since all hospitals and 90,000 governmental health centers around the Kingdom are connected to one platform with live data. You can see the data in each city for Covid 19 test results in real time, all reflected immediately. Every day, the Ministry of Health presented this data during its daily spokesmen briefings, and it is the only official result of COVID-19 within Saudi Arabia. All other government agencies also take their data from this. We are also working on the back end with predictive analysis to understand where we are heading. There is a global second wave of COVID-19 where the numbers in Europe and the US have surged significantly, but in Saudi the numbers are still contained at a much lower level. This is one of the advantages that our solution provides: a predictive analysis of where things will happen within the coming period of three months, six months, a year, or five years. It gives the Ministry of Health an understanding of where we are going and is the reason why Saudi Arabia did not lock down again. This gives us a roadmap vision as the important element for every atlas to build on is predictive analysis.✖