Software AG operates across various industry verticals, such as government, banking and oil and gas.
At this year’s GITEX it exhibited under the theme of ‘Experience Your Smart Connected World’ highlighting the enormous potential of Digital Transformation in the coming decade.
In line with the Smart Dubai 2021 vision, Software AG has formed a strategic partnership with Smart Dubai.
The partnership is leveraging innovation technology to launch a multi-function iPaaS webMethods (Integration Platform as a Service) technology powered platform.
The new offering will interconnect Dubai wide government entities and key private sector systems and processes to deliver the city’s commitment to boost the UAE’s economy.
Here Rami Kichli, Vice-President, Gulf and Levant at Software AG, tells us more about the company’s activities.
Can you tell us about your project with Smart Dubai?
We’ve been engaged with Smart Dubai for a period of around 18 months now. Earlier this year we officially went into a couple of projects with them, one of which was unveiled at GITEX at the Smart Dubai booth. Working with our partner Palmira, this project will have a serious impact on the look of the IT landscape in Dubai.
In terms of Software AG what have you got planned for the next 12 months?
By the end of 2019, we should have just marked our fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth in the region. So that’s the kind of mode we are in as an organisation. There are many reasons for the growth.
We look at continuing this momentum. We see tremendous demand for what we do and we expect to continue this into 2020 and beyond that. GITEX was a big driving force in terms of pipeline, in terms of acceleration of what we’re doing with many customers. So we are very upbeat about 2020.
2020 is the year of the expo so that’s also an interesting angle from the perspective of a technology multinational such as ourselves. Another thing happening in 2020 is we’re expanding our offices. So, we continue to invest in hiring and expanding our offices.
This is a private place where we can showcase things in the privacy of our own office to customers and partners alike.
Can you tell us anything about your involvement in the Expo 2020 exhibition?
We are in discussions at the moment with the German Pavilion. Germany is, if I remember correctly, in the top three of the global participants in Expo 2020. We are very well connected within the German business community here and supported in a big way, also from the German Council and the German Embassy in the UAE.
We proactively and actively engage with them in looking at fostering the collaboration between Germany and the UAE. At the moment, Germany is working on the final touches of its pavilion for Expo 2020. We are involved in these discussions and that will form part of our participation in Expo 2020.
One of the things I mentioned is around continuous growth. The overall technology spend in the region is not growing as much as previously. We believe it’s growing between the three to five percentage mark year on year – at present we are growing at a much faster pace than that.
Are there any new major products that you’ve introduced to the market?
The nature of IT budgets is changing, year on year we see that very clearly. What does that mean? We see a lot of the traditional IT spend being shifted into spend that’s more associated with innovation with transformation, with digitalisation.
Infrastructure spend or spend on applications into these new areas have been coming to the forefront in the past five years and this is exactly the area we play in.
So it’s this dynamic of shifting IT budgets, which is actually driving our business forward and naturally in order to do that we continue to innovate on where we started from. Where we started from was what we call the world’s first digital business platform over a decade ago. So we unveiled to the world what was at that time a very cutting edge topic with the world’s first digital business platform.
That was the starting point and not the endpoint. There have been a lot of innovations in expanding the platform innovating deep and wide within that same platform but in essence, what we do is still the same. We help organisations transform themselves by adopting a technology-based platform. We help them make more value of the data because that comes part and parcel with adopting such a platform.
We have also launched Alfabet which is our business and technology transformation platform. We have launched an Alfabet accelerator globally. The Alfabet accelerator allows organisations to adopt a powerful technology service in a matter of days and weeks, rather than months and years as ithas been the case because it is built with Artificial Intelligence with wizard based technology that allows organisations through a series of answering questions to actually build the model that they need to use Alfabet. This is a major innovation from a product perspective.
We have also launched two cloud solutions. One is the Alfabet FastLane which is our IT portfolio management in the cloud environment and the other one is the webMethods.io integration to connect your SaaS applications. Alfabet FastLane allows organisations to generate dashboards and reports quickly even in the most complex IT architectures without configuration and implementation time.
Also over the past 12 months we’ve globally announced a series of major partnerships, and I’ll mention three of them. We’ve announced a partnership with Microsoft which will help all Microsoft customers around the world to migrate to cloud on the benefits of Microsoft Azure. That’s a very big and hopefully impactful partnership. We’ve also announced a partnership with Adobe and a partnership around using IoT on the Edge with Dell EMC.
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