Launched under the banner “ICT Insights”, the forum provided a pertinent platform for intellectual conversation and had a distinguished panel participation with ICT thought leaders from Etisalat customer and partner organizations, such as EmiratesNBD, Jumeirah Group, Emirates Airlines, Dubai Airport Free Zone Authority (DAFZA), Nokia, Flagship and industry analysts Frost & Sullivan, who shared holistic insights on the topic “Mobility driving business transformation.”
The panel discussion focused on mobility as a key business transformation tool and its application to respective business environments. The panel offered strategic insights on the significance of creating mobility centric solutions and applications for diverse industry segments such as banks, airlines, hospitality industry and Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs).
Opening the discussion, Lindsey McDonlad, ICT consultant with Frost & Sullivan, said enterprise have very specific demands around the need to communicate, collaborate in a secure manner.
“Going forward, we expect applications such as mobile office and workforce management to have a huge demand because more and more businesses are allowing their workforce to work remotely. Mobile sales force management and next-gen fleet management are some of the other areas where we see a huge demand and the market is ripe for operators such as Etisalat to offer these kind of services,” she said.
Commenting on the subject matter, Abdulla Hashim, Senior Vice President, Business Solutions at Etisalat said: “The physical realities that used to be an important aspect of doing business, are paving way for virtual readiness, where businesses can be conducted from anywhere, anytime, on any device and at a faster speed, with complete flexibility and security. Mobility has clearly emerged as a business transformation tool and Etisalat is all set to be at the driving seat to deliver value to customers with its range of innovative services.”
Etisalat also provided strategic direction on how enterprise Mobility solutions can deliver the required impetus for businesses by creating tangible and long lasting business value. Etisalat is already engaged in helping organizations to leverage productivity gains across teams and operations with solutions such as BlackBerry service and mobile business data service. Beside Mobile data solutions for variety of needs, Etisalat has also developed industry specific innovative applications such as iPhone application for Ministry of Health (MOH) and Dubai Airport Freezone Authority (DAFZA), m-trading solution for brokerages, m-health application for healthcare industry and USSD technology based application for banks such as EmiratesNBD.
“Mobility solutions have created a paradigm shift in the way businesses are conducted in the UAE. While on one hand, proliferation of mobile devices are helping to liberate the workforce by creating on the move avenues for easy access to e-mail and business applications; on the other, the same proliferation and growing reliance on mobility is creating higher stress for the CIOs who have an additional task of integrating and controlling mobility to obtain optimum workforce efficiency. This is where organizations need to collaborate with solution partners such as Etisalat who understand every component of the mobility ecosystem.” Hashim added.
