Business services • Forum

Providing innovative and relevant solutions and services and helping their clients to deliver results were the keys to success for these companies during the pandemic.

Rami Abu Alhiga COUNTRY MANAGER, WASEELA

OUR MAIN FOCUS IS TO HELP OPERATORS, governments, and telecom OEM vendors expand their services and develop existing networks to cope with emerging technologies. We launched Waseela 2.0 with an internal transformation to cope with the new market requirements coming. We now have three business units in Waseela. One is the smart building business unit focusing on hospitality, municipalities, ELV business, infrastructure, and construction. We created this business entity as a standalone so it can focus on the technology part and promote and educate its customers. There is also a paradigm shift in the way cities, hotels, and homes are being looked at. Having the word smart before everything pushed us to create a smart business unit to cope with that business. This has opened a major sector for such business with support from a telecom business unit, which I head. That focuses on legacy telecoms solutions and the IoT part that will serve the other business unit. As part of the transformation, we have created an entity called the smart building business unit, a service provider business unit, which is the telecom business unit, and an enterprise business unit. This is focused more on the cloud and enterprise solution when it comes to backup, storage, security, software, traceability, and so on.

Ahmed Hamdan, CEO, UNIFONIC

OVERALL, OUR REVENUE STREAM is diversified by design as our customers span several segments in near equal distribution. This risk mitigation strategy helped us sustain steady and healthy growth over the years, though we had to shift gears in the past year as a few industries, such as airlines and hospitality, saw customer communications ground to a halt. On the other hand, other industries like e-commerce and certain logistics experienced rapid growth, which led us to double down on growing use cases that suit our clients across the board, providing more value to most of our clients. On average, we experienced growth between 70 and 100% in winning categories, and overall the company reached over 60% growth YoY in 2020. Our first response in the early months of the pandemic was to focus on uptime and platform availability for existing customers to meet their sudden communications influx. It has been a great year for the company, and we have achieved stellar results; however, we need to adjust our future plans, as this is a long-term journey where we need to capture opportunities beyond our existing markets. We are planning to expand to better serve our client base and bring in fresh ideas and talents for our products and solutions to generate greater value for our customers.

Abdullah Ben Jebreen PARTNER & MANAGING DIRECTOR, ABANA ENTERPRISES GROUP CO.

WE PRIMARILY HAVE BUSINESS ENGAGEMENTS in three market verticals namely banking, telecoms, and retail sectors. We are also venturing into the healthcare, hospitality, government, and semi-government sectors to capitalize on their growth potential. We are also taking steps to bring our proven solutions and services to SMEs to support the country’s economic growth. Since our inception in 1977, we have invested heavily in our service infrastructure and technical capabilities in order to provide fast and reliable services across the country. This includes service centers strategically scattered throughout the Kingdom, over 700 technical support staff, a centralized command and control center, and implementation of systems and processes to automate and organize our large and complex operations. We have invested to comply with international standards and have received certifications for our Quality Management System (ISO 9001), Business Continuity Management System (ISO 22301), and IT Security Management System (ISO 27001). We have also invested in our software and IT professional services capabilities, as technology form part of our core offering to our clientele. Overall, our focus is to provide solutions by combining innovative and relevant solutions with fast and reliable services.

Loai Labani FOUNDER & CEO, INNOSOFT

OUR EXISTING SERVICES were the main drivers of revenue growth during 2020; in addition, we introduced new client services in the hardware and security segments, which were one of the main reasons for our revenue growth. We also introduced a product line and launched Innosoft’s first product, a full ERP solution. That solution even competes with large players in the market, such as Microsoft and Oracle. We are optimistic that 2021 will be an amazing year, and our expectation is to double the revenues of 2020 because we have huge plans this year. 2020 helped us to significantly review what we are doing and rethink everything in the business. We reviewed our entire governance structure and overhauled many of our policies. We have improved the way we do development and cut our development time by almost half. We have introduced a new product and business line. We have been working hard to improve our internal communication and invested heavily in our headquarters and the sales and marketing field. We can handle much bigger projects now, enter into bigger opportunities, and compete on a larger scale. The positive news is that in the first two months of 2021, we secured our target growth in terms of signed deals and POs.

Ahmed Al Zaini CEO, FOODICS

SINCE OUR BUSINESS IS DEPENDENT ON the retail sector, our growth numbers improved during the pandemic. Our strategy during the pandemic was to change our product and revise the business model toward life after COVID-19. We also invested in new products. Initially, we were supporting POS systems with a restaurant management platform, and now we are converting it into a fintech business. While other companies were hesitant to innovate and apply new ideas, our system, solutions, and products have been leading the market. We partnered with two cloud kitchen business models and are also their technology partners in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. We fully support online ordering and booking systems, which is why we have restructured our systems, bundling the function and feature together. In fact, we have come up with a product that supports this idea on a large scale. Even before the pandemic, we were experiencing strong growth in the Middle East, and at present we are expanding in North Africa and South Asia. The business model for restaurants will change around the world due to social distancing measures. Due to COVID-19, we expect a change in the behavior of restaurant owners, especially in Europe and the US. We are using this opportunity to promote our services and products.