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 the adoption of new technologies to accelerate digital transformation.
Annette Geuther said, “What we are doing is that we are currently analysing use cases for private 5G network deployments, and we look at AI as an enabler to enhance the performance of our own network, to increase user experience but also to collect a lot of data, how do we move to collecting data to analysing and then monetizing data? As an operator, data will be our currency in the future.”
Omar Akar said, “We currently deliver AI application scenarios on top of our cloud for many industries and we use cloud to enable the deployment of those scenarios.”
George Jaber commented, “The question is about the network, it's very crucial, so this is driving the demand for international connectivity.”
Hatem Bamatraf commented, “The network functionality has a lot of information that touches the customer, the location of the customer, the address, a lot of information that in number of countries they don't allow you to host this information in the public cloud.”
Haithem Al Faraj said, “People think that there is one school of thought that thinks that open-source cloud architecture will provide much better cybersecurity and there are others that look into cloud as a risk.”
