The UAE\u2019s Smart Cities initiative should become a service provider to the government, to improve the adoption of cloud and hosted services, according to Ian Evans, Managing Director and Vice President EMEA at mobility management firm AirWatch.<\/p>\n
Evans said there was a \u201cbarrier\u201d for many organisations adopting AirWatch that wouldn\u2019t be solved by a more direct presence to eliminate any international cloud usage: \u201cEven if I opened a datacentre here, it wouldn\u2019t change. The companies that are ready to adopt have adopted, or are adopting. This is the really strange dynamic of the UAE \u2013 the government doesn\u2019t really want to be in the cloud, but it has the smart city initiative, which is really all cloud. We see this day-to-day.\u201d<\/p>\n
He believes the answer lies within the Smart Cities initiative itself: \u201cWhat we really need is a government agency to be a service provider to the rest of the government in the UAE, like an application service provider partner \u2013 but actually part of the government. We are working with the Smart City teams to say, why don\u2019t you be a provider to the rest of the government, because that makes more sense to consolidate the management and maintenance of these systems \u2013 and I think that\u2019s a strong way forward for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Evans said Airwatch is currently very active in the Middle East, with a presence at eight or nine trade shows a year in the UAE alone. The firm is now in the process of opening local offices, he added, which will sit within Airwatch parent company VMware\u2019s regional offices.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll be opening an office inside the VMware office this year \u2013 hopefully all finished, deployed, and opening by 4 January. We\u2019re going to hire locally, and implant a couple of people from the Milton Keynes headquarters. I\u2019m looking at the UAE as four staff, Saudi Arabia as two, and then look at Qatar as the next country,\u201d said Evans. \t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UAE\u2019s Smart Cities initiative should become a service provider to the government, to improve the adoption of cloud and hosted services, according to Ian Evans, Managing Director and Vice President EMEA at mobility management firm AirWatch. Evans said there was a \u201cbarrier\u201d for many organisations adopting AirWatch that wouldn\u2019t be solved by a more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":3704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,809,185],"tags":[945,22,20,76,244,184],"class_list":["post-3703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud","category-more-news","category-uae","tag-airwatch","tag-cloud","tag-gitex","tag-mobility","tag-smart-cities","tag-uae"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}