Last week, a few of our MontyCloud team members were able to take part in the excitement of GITEX Global 2022 in Dubai! GITEX is the largest tech and start up event of the year with over 3500 exhibitors from 140 countries. It is THE place to be to experience the whirlwind of top innovations and high value solutions in all areas, including: Cloud, AI, 5G, Cybersecurity, Healthtech, FinTech, RetailTech, EduTech, Blockchain, Public Sector, Robotics, and everything in between.
Key takeaways
With GITEX winding down late last week, our team has had a chance to expound upon some of the key take aways they have from the event.
- The MENA region is accelerating innovation rapidly, investing heavily in leveraging latest technologies like Cloud, AI/ML, and motivating their people to advance the economy with deep technology bets – with high priority.
- Rapid adoption of public cloud is in progress across the Middle East region.
- Government and private sector are partnering with a clear mission of driving innovation that’s powered by the cloud.
- The MENA region is going to grow 10x in the next couple of years in terms of cloud consumption.
- Every customer/partner/public sector agency in the region is exhibiting strong demand for cloud powered digital transformation.
- Cloud Adoption & Cloud Operations are key needs from IT teams that are transforming their business.
- Most companies have become a “-tech” company (Edu-Tech, Retail-Tech, Health-Tech, Fin-Tech; for example).
Our learnings from speaking with prospective customers
Our vision at MontyCloud is to transform teams into cloud powerhouses. Anytime we can get some face time with our customers and prospective customers, it’s exciting because we always come away with new ideas to add to our platform to further assist our users with their needs and wants. At GITEX, we had some great conversations with multiple prospective customers, from large banks and retail companies to SMEs in health care, education, construction sectors, to startups.
We learned that they are increasingly embracing the public cloud with a mission to transform rapidly and overcome some of their biggest challenges, like cloud cost management and cost optimization, lack of cloud skills and maturity in cloud operating models, cloud governance (including ensuring teams consume cloud within their region), and the need for automation to reduce the mounting operations burden. Customers and prospective customers are realizing that “lifting and shifting” into the public cloud will immediately reduce CAPEX of on-premises hardware and services, that application modernization will help them leverage the public cloud properly, and that data analytics, AI/ML driven innovations are a key focus.
With end users prioritizing a shift into the public cloud, they are exhibiting a much stronger demand for rapid upskilling of IT teams to embrace the cloud, automation oriented modern Cloud Management solutions, and also no-code Autonomous CloudOPs to close the skills gap and reduce the growing day 2 operational burden.
What we learned from distributors and resellers
In addition to prospective customers, we also had a chance to chat with some value-added distributors and resellers, like: FVC and Redington Gulf. We learned that multiple SI/consulting partners are beginning to look at participating in the CloudOps market.
The public cloud and the OPEX model it delivers is a huge shift in business models for everyone in the industry. Consumption-based economics are disrupting traditional models. Value added distributors like FVC are embracing this change with both hands and are investing into helping their customers better consume the cloud, thus creating newer business streams for themselves.
Many countries across the Middle East region, from the UAE to Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, as well as several others have embraced cloud and innovation from the top down. This rapid transformation is so apparent from the demonstration by country pavilions at GITEX, and the support each country offered to their companies, their people and all the visiting innovators.
Thank you for a wonderful experience
Our sincerest thank you to Washington State Department of Commerce and Julie Monahan, who chose MontyCloud as one of their Top Innovators and invited us to be exhibitors at the conference. Also, thank you to the UAE & GITEX Global organizers for hosting the MontyCloud team, and the US Consulate in UAE for all the support and encouragement.
We will continue to put our customers and partners first
The entire team at MontyCloud is dedicated to empowering every customer and their IT departments to rapidly transform and leverage the public cloud to reap all the benefits from it. In addition to the platform we provide for our customers, we are also focused on enabling our partners to create new revenue streams with cloud and CloudOps, as well has helping SI/Consulting companies to scale up their business and offer more value to cloud customers.
Until next time, GITEX Global!
