Yasser Zeineldin, CEO at eHosting DataFort spoke to Technical Review about his outlook for the IT sector and the growing importance of cloud for the industry.
Zeineldin stated that 2011: "marked a number of milestones, achievements and successes for eHosting DataFort (eHDF) setting the company firmly on the path to achieving its long-term goals."
Business focus
eHDF's primary business focus is in the UAE. "As a service provider, our long term vision is to address IT service requirements of clients based out of UAE especially those who want to set up a business in the country and don't want to make large scale IT infrastructure investments. Geographically, we are looking at expanding through alliances and partnerships outside the UAE," added Zeineldin.
In terms of size of business, eHDF believes growth will come from the small and medium enterprises which represent 90 per cent of the businesses in the UAE. Zeineldin believes: "new start-ups especially will be quite hungry for IT services and not necessarily want to load the P&L and CAPEX with a lot of IT related cost because there is a level of uncertainty while starting a business."
Increased investments
Zeineldin observed that in terms of vertical sectors: "the Government sector is one of our key target markets in the UAE. Also public sector spending is supposed to grow around 14 per cent this year with the government putting more focus on citizen related services and on healthcare and education related services."
Zeineldin discussed eHDF's outlook for the IT sector for the next year, stating: "we envision organisations of all sizes to increase IT investments in terms of business innovation and developing new applications to further align IT with business. We will see increased investments in Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions, higher virtualization adoption and interest in private cloud services as the preferred cloud model. As external threats increase, we would also see more investments in information security solutions. "
Cloud computing
Cloud computing will have an increasingly important role to play in the IT sector in the region. "We are seeing a logical shift into the direction of cloud computing and are ourselves in the process of charting out our cloud roadmap," said Zeineldin.
Zeineldin added that the company already have a cloud ready infrastructure in their data centre with Radix Technologies. "We will be launching our own Managed Private cloud solutions for medium to large enterprises looking at enhanced & dynamic utilisation of existing infrastructure / applications in terms of scalability, elasticity & faster time to market by the end of the year," he said.
