Samir Akel MANAGING DIRECTOR SAUDI ARABIA AND BAHRAIN, BMC

What are your main services in Saudi Arabia?

Since 1980, we have been delivering the software and services that now enable over 10,000 global customers, including the Forbes Global 100, to thrive in their ongoing evolution to an autonomous digital enterprise (ADE). We define an ADE as an organization that includes intelligent, interconnected, technology-enabled, value creating systems that operate with minimal human involvement across every facet of the organization and its ecosystem partners. We have a set of solutions to enable our clients to become an ADE and also have more than 550 patents. We help our customers run core operations and reinvent for the future through intelligent solutions that support adopting cloud technologies, applying pervasive automation, practicing enterprise DevOps, and using security solutions to protect data in the mainframe and cloud. From a SecOps, a DevOps, or an operations point of view, we have been leading the market for 40 years.

Can Saudi Arabia be a center of innovation or engineering?

Saudi Arabia is our biggest market in the region. Our customers in Saudi Arabia, whether intelligence, military, defense, oil and gas, or telecom, are our biggest customers in the region. Since we are a company that listens to its customers, the majority input to our R&D comes from a customer advisory board on which sit several leading Saudi Arabian enterprises. Our leadership team is constantly visiting the Kingdom and investing in Saudi talent. We have Arabic language support in all of our technologies and have grown our office in Riyadh three-fold in the past few years.