STME, the Middle East's leading IT solutions provider and systems integrator (SI), headquartered in Dubai is increasingly collaborating with organizations operating in the non-oil sector in the UAE, where in 2015, the contribution of this sector to national GDP reached around 70%. The IMF forecasts the non-oil sector to grow by 4.4% in 2015. Global tumbled oil price doesn't necessarily mean plunging economies. Ayman Al Bayaa, CEO of STME, said "our business operations are now less correlated to oil prices. In this context the UAE government's plans to increase the non-oil sector's contribution to 80% of the GDP in the coming years is good news in the long run." In the meantime, low oil prices have resulted in budgetary realignment in companies as well as governments. "Demand for SI products and services has shifted to new practices such as virtualization and cloud computing, with an emphasis on efficient and cost effective technologies," said Ayman speaking on the effect of smaller budgets. Aside from the effects of the macroeconomic environment, SIs are facing other challenges originating from technological innovations like bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own application (BYOA), which are mostly cloud dependent. "Transition from on premise products to cloud hosted services, from workstations to vitalization, and from hosting the full IT span to outsourcing are only a few examples on the dominance of the cloud in the new era of computing. Clearly cloud computing has become a pivotal game changer that is no longer limited to software applications but has gone beyond that to networking, security and hardware aspects in pursuit of value creation by accentuating spending effectiveness and collective resources pooling,'' said Mohannad Amr, PMO IT Director, STME. STME was among the first system integrators who observed the recent IT evolutions and deployed innovative strategies to manage the tidal wave of emerging technologies. In order to tackle these changes and challenges, STME crafted well-thought through strategies fixated on training and certification of technical teams, knowledge management within the organization, and human resources retention to maintain and develop its intellectual capabilities, and hence competitiveness. One of STME's most successful strategies is forging carefully picked partnerships with the right partners and technology vendors who themselves are trendsetters. "We have nurtured long lasting strategic relationships with major technology vendors, which enables us to predict technology trends in the region and then devote adequate resources and mobilize teams ahead of time," Amr further said. Speaking on improving competitiveness, Amr said "STME boosts its effectiveness by maintaining enterprise IT infrastructure that facilitates the management, communication, storage and retrieval of information at all levels. Without such environment, system integrators would fail to meet the strategic challenges of customers, and would lose their ability to compete." Although the added pressure of smaller budgets tempted some organizations to be money-driven and search for cost effective solutions, cost cutting in SIs solutions is not the answer. SIs should realize that competitiveness and cheap prices are not always synonyms. Instead, focusing on training and building of technical acumen while riding the wave of innovative IT practices is the new recipe for both survival and flourishing in contemporary system integration. — SG
