Pure Storage has formally announced that Nama Shared Services, a leading IT service provider in Oman, has been leveraging their product portfolio to drive transformation across the country. 
Nama has leveraged the solutions provided by Pure Storage to improve the performance and enhance user experiences for the digital services it delivers to Nama Group companies and government entities.
Nama Shared Services, a subsidiary of Nama Holding, is the centralised IT services provider to all Nama Group companies, which oversee the supply and distribution of electricity and water, and the management of wastewater across Oman.
The company also provides additional IT services, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) to several government entities in Oman.
As demand for these services grew, Nama Shared Services knew it needed a modern all-flash solution to deliver better service levels and improved performance for its users. IT implemented Pure’s infrastructure as part of its commitment to maintaining world-class IT solutions.
“We immediately saw a 10x increase in storage performance, which translated to faster performance for every digital interaction. Previously it could take up to five minutes to generate an invoice for one of our services, but now customers wait less than 30 seconds,” said Alfadel Al Harthy, Acting Senior Manager IT-OT, Nama Shared Services. “Even our Group’s most remote branches have seen app performance improve up to 70%.”
Pure also exceeded Nama Shared Services’ data reduction expectations and backup time. “With an impressive 4:1 compression ratio, we significantly reduced our overall storage requirements,” said Al Harthy. “While it took over four hours to backup data with our legacy storage solution, it now takes less than 45 minutes.”
With Pure, Nama Shared Services’ whole team spends less than one hour per week on storage management tasks and can consequently focus on delivering innovation which will advance the digital transformation of the Group.
The performance, reliability, scalability, and ease of use of Pure’s solution enable Nama Shared Services to support the nation-wide rollout of an ambitious smart-grid solution, which when complete, will deliver unparalleled insights into the country’s energy consumption.
“We’re connecting 1.2 million smart meters to the government network. These gather vast amounts of real-time data and demand the highest read/write performance. Pure is critical to this initiative,” Al Harthy commented. “Enabling customers to have a clear understanding about their electricity usage can help them make more environmentally conscious decisions.”
“With Pure we know we can keep innovating and expanding our IT services offerings to even more government entities, thereby supporting the digital transformation of Oman,” added Al Harthy.
“Nama Shared Services is at the forefront of digital transformation in the public sector in Oman. We are proud to play a part in the organisation’s innovative digital transformation. The implementation expands the scale and performance of its IT services offerings to even more government entities in the Sultanate. The impact is faster performance for the organisation’s day to day activities, freeing up team members for more strategic tasks, providing peace of mind that data backup is quick and enabling future looking projects such as the smart-grid solution,” said Omar Akar, Regional Vice President, Middle East & Emerging Africa at Pure Storage.
