Telecom Review, the world’s leading telecoms news platform, held a virtual panel, entitled “Role of cloud in accelerating businesses’ digital transformation” on December 14th.
The panel was attended by participants and some of the industry’s most esteemed professionals from across the world.
Telecom Review’s CEO and founder, Toni Eid moderated the panel of industry leaders which consisted of: Omar Akar, Vice President and Managing Director of Cloud and AI Business Group in the Middle East, Huawei; Haithem Al Faraj, Senior Vice President of Technology and Operations, stc; Hatem Bamatraf, CTO, Etisalat; Annette Geuther, Vice President Market Development, Colt Technology Services; and George Jaber, Vice President, Wholesale Business Development and Bid Management, Integrated Telecom Company (ITC) KSA.
The panellists addressed several issues and trends concerning the role of cloud in businesses, as well as other emerging technologies like AI and 5G.
George Jaber said, “The most important technology is the rollout of 5G and cloud computing. As operators, we are investing more and more in cloud computing capabilities.”
Hatem Bamatraf said, “We are now witnessing a new industrial revolution due to a number of technologies. we believe that the role of telecoms is to be an enabler and accelerator towards industry 4.0.”
Omar Akar explained, “The priority here is to accelerate digital transformation. For service providers, digital transformation resembles the human body. The peripherals are the intelligent edge and intelligent devices while the connectivity, the arms and legs, are 5G, wifi 6 and other technologies. The core of the body is the cloud and the brain is AI and analytics.”
Annette Geuther offered an insight on customer experience, “Our customers don’t care about underlying technology, they care about their problems being solved. At the end of the day, we will only differentiate in the eyes of the customer by how well we address their problems.”
Haithem Al Faraj said, “When we look at what 5G is promising in the future, there are a lot of potential use cases. We have to deal with 5G differently, there will be much more collaboration with the customers and there's no predefined services we can estimate in the future.”
