CIO 50 event: Top CIOs brought together to honour their IT progress

The CIO 50 Awards and Forum commenced this morning at the Address Hotel in Dubai Marina.

The event, organised by CNME and CPI, has brought together the 50 leading CIOs in the region to honour their innovate use of IT to progress and aid their organisation’s goals.

Sathya Mithra Ashok, senior editor of CNME, introduced the show, before passing over to the first speaker, Mohamed Roushdy, CIO at Siraj Finance.

Roushdy spoke of the rising opportunities in cloud computing, mobility and social media. “Your customers could be your best sales agent or your worst enemy. Social media feedback has shaped the way we do business,” he said.

Next up was Ajwad Adeel, IT strategist at Dubai Customs. He said their B2G declaration is 400% faster than online and reduced client declaration submission costs by 65%.

Basil Ayass, enterprise product manager at Dell ME, completed the morning session by discussing the new generation of IT. He said the solution to adapting to this new generation is not to buy new hardware, but to always keep TCO in mind. “The solution is to decrease spending on maintaining legacy IT and increase IT strategic spending, in order words virtualise,” he said.

The afternoon session will involve a panel made up of top industry names discussing CIO investment priorities in 2012, followed by the CIO 50 Awards ceremony.

You can follow live updates from the CIO Awards and Forum 2012 at www.twitter.com/computernewsme. Use #CIO50 to track posts from the event.