IBM SOA conference held in Riyadh

The IBM SOA Executive Summit was a cornerstone event that saw over one hundred and twenty top executives from major Saudi enterprise companies attending.

"The SOA Executive Summit aimed to build a platform for the sharing of information, approaches and innovations to the development of best practice business information systems," said Takreem El-Tohamy, general manager, IBM Middle East Egypt and Pakistan.

"Service Oriented Architecture is revolutionising the way that both public and private sector organisations approach the development of business technologies that are truly transformational and we were delighted to share new approaches and developments in this important area with our partners and customers."

Speakers at the summit included Tom Rosamilia, general manager of application and integration middleware worldwide for IBM Software Group; Patrick Reynolds, global technology services director; David Locke, director of offerings marketing for IBM Software Group and Dr. Ahmed Tantawy, the technical director of IBM's Cairo Technology Development Center.

"I was delighted to be able to be part of the team that addressed the SOA Executive Summit in Riyadh, which I believe combined global and local innovation leaders from IBM with some of the most important enterprise companies that are defining the future of business information in the Kingdom," said Dr.Tantawy.

"As head of IBM's TDC, Tantawy leads a team of over 500 software developers based in Cairo which is part of the IBM's globally integrated development centres, and has been developing advanced Arabic language technologies and specialized software solutions. "SOA is a critical part of our thinking in the region today and is truly core to the way we are approaching innovation," he added.

In its latest survey, IBM's Institute for Business Values Study stated that 92% of IBM SOA customers found that cost reduction was the initial justification for initiating an SOA project and that, on average, customers realized 51 percent revenue growth as a result of an SOA strategy. The study came on the side of the launch of the largest ever lineup of new software and services for building and expanding a service oriented architecture (SOA). Leading edge organisations across the Middle East are starting to embrace the new approaches inherent in SOA and are already finding major benefits from the architecture.

"SOA is a major shift in technology that has the potential to make a huge impact on Saudi businesses. As today's competitive climate requires companies to adapt immediately to changing market conditions and be more agile to meet the continuously growing demands of businesses, IBM leads the way in this transformation. The Executive Summit allowed us to share IBM's clear global and regional vision of SOA strategies and solutions," added El-Tohamy.