Qtel calls on HP to help increase business agility and market competitiveness

The technology implementation road map has been designed to support Qtel's strategic objectives to enhance its position as the provider of world-class communication services in Qatar.

Qtel delivers landline, mobile, cable television, internet and data services to homes, businesses, corporate organizations and governmental customers and has a presence in 17 countries.

As the regional telecommunications sectors expands, more and more service providers are working hard to improve their customer satisfaction levels, IT operations administration and service desk productivity, while maintaining or reducing operational costs.

Adel Al Mutawa, Executive Director, Group Communications, Qtel said:

"Qtel continues to promote innovation across our operations, to ensure we are delivering the highest level of support to our employees and the highest standard of service to our customers. Technology provides an essential route to success in this process, which is why we are investing in greater automation and more effective IT Service Management."

The technology implementation with HP involves a three-year Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) strategy that will be implemented in four phases. The first phase, which was completed last month, covers Business Service Automation and ITSM, this will be followed by IT Services Portfolio Management, Quality Management and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) transformation in the later stages.

Qtel IT has successfully implemented a structured and standardized IT architecture in its datacenters that has supported the growth of Qtel business.

Over the past three years this environment has seamlessly grown as requirements have grown and has continued to deliver the performance and availability that the business has learnt to rely on. In order to deliver Server and Storage capacity as an IT Service, capable of adjusting real time to workloads chages, the Virtualization of Qtel's infrastructure is the next and necessary step currently being implemented in Doha and beyond. This evolution goes hand in hand with the development of the management capabilities that are being added following the Qtel BTO Roadmap.

HP has designed a complete infrastructure solution roadmap to provide:

•A standardized platform that will enable Qtel IT to respond to new business requirements in minutes rather than weeks.
•Better utilization of resources
•Performance and flexibility to address changing business requirements
•Scalability to meet future demand
•Mission-critical support services to keep the environment operating reliably

"Our IT strategy aims at turning the IT division into a business innovation centre by aligning IT with the business and automating key functions and processes, which will increase efficiency and enable business growth," comments Adel Boday, Manager, IT Infrastructure and Operations Management, Qtel.

With the completion of phase one deployment, Qtel has positive improvements in its business outcomes.

Automation upgrades has helped employee job error rate fall by 30 percent, server roll-out now takes place just under four hours rather than two weeks thereby releasing 99 per cent of the staff's time for more productive work. The Service Management Center solution has helped boost service availability, problem response times, service desk support, and increase customer satisfaction levels.

Commenting on this partnership, John Hoonhout, Managing Director for HP Middle East said, "As telecoms providers look to advance their IT infrastructure, our aim is to support our customers with easy and cost effective solutions. HP's end-to-end solution at Qtel provides better flexibility and scalability for future growth allowing them to capitalize on market opportunities faster than their competition. At HP, we continue to exceed expectations by delivering best-in-class components, that are scalable, cost and energy efficient and delivers better optimum business outcomes."

HP' Technology Solutions Group provides servers, storage, software and information technology services that enable enterprise and midmarket business customers to manage their IT infrastructure and transform them into a business enabler.