During the conference session, panellists identified that operators had traditionally overlooked serving SMEs across the Middle East, but that increased confidence in cloud services is presenting an opportunity for growth.
Andrew Grenville, founder and CEO of network and cloud platform provider Orixcom, said onstage that carriers need to tailor their service offering in order to better support SMEs. “We need to put together services and packages that are easy and familiar for them to consume,” he said. “The telcos are potentially in a strong position as they will already have billing relationships with SMEs. There is an opportunity to bundle cloud and other value-added services along with communications.”
Radwan Moussalli, SVP of Middle East, Central Asia and Africa at Tata Communications, added that SMEs are looking to carriers to provide an end-to-end service: “It is a matter of scale. As the number of customers increases, it will justify a cloud platform going into a region,” he said.
The panel was moderated by Furqan Ahmed Hashmi, IT operations leader at Emirates Investment Authority (EIA) and also included Abdulsalam Abumelha, wholesale marketing GM at STC.
