VMware continues expansion in Middle East and North Africa

The news coincides with VMware Forum event at the Grand Hyatt in Dubai, which has attracted more than 400 local customers and 200 partners in its second year.

VMware's expansion in the region follows increased public and private sector demand for cloud computing and virtualization solutions, as the local banking, government and telecom industries look to these technologies to control costs and deliver business growth. The region has seen significant interest from these sectors looking to extend their virtualization investments to create private clouds. In addition, according to Gartner, the Middle Eastern and North African public cloud services market will see strong growth in 2013 with spending for the overall market forecast to increase by approximately 24.5% from 2012.

VMware's growth in the MENA region have been further supported by a 42% increase in its number of local partners as they take advantage of the expanding cloud computing market. In 2012 alone, more than 550 individuals were certified as VMware sales professionals and VMware technical sales professionals for infrastructure virtualization, management and end user computing, demonstrating that the local VMware-specific skillset continues to grow beyond core virtualization capabilities.

"A significant shift is taking place in the way enterprises in the Middle East and North Africa function, and improving business agility is now one of their top concerns," said Sam Tayan, regional director, VMware Middle East and North Africa. "VMware's operations in the MENA region continue to perform well and we expect growth to continue throughout 2013 as more customers begin to understand the financial and organizational advantages that virtualization and cloud computing bring."

There is acknowledgement that the opportunity this region presents is a significant one. According to Gartner, Middle East (ME) IT spending is projected to total $192.9bn in 2013, a 5.5% increase from 2012.

Bank AlBilad, one of Saudi Arabia's leading Shariah-based financial services providers, has recently completed the third phase of a major data center transformation project using the latest virtualization solutions from VMware. VMware is now the primary virtualization provider for the bank with plans to deploy VMware vCloud solutions to deliver even greater automation and efficiencies.

"Before deploying VMware solutions, Bank AlBilad was running 250 physical servers across two sites and the main data center occupancy had reached its capacity. We now have 750 virtual servers and 60% occupancy, which is a remarkable change, allowing us to be much more efficient as a business. Crucially, we now have access to a much more flexible and secure virtualized platform that provides us with room to expand without compromising our future storage infrastructure requirements," said Mr. Rashed AlOthman, CIO, Bank AlBilad.