Sunday, March 7, from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. at InterContinental Hotel, Jeddah, IT professionals and business executives are invited to attend the first event of the series ‘Lotusphere Comes To You’ (LCTY) roadshow. The events are free and will be held in three cities in Saudi Arabia: Jeddah, Riyadh and Khobar.
Hosted by Saudi Business Machines (SBM), IBM’s sole General Marketing and Services representative in Saudi Arabia, LCTY is the annual flagship event for the enterprise collaboration community. It's all about helping achieve better busi-ness results through collaborative software and solutions. LCTY attendees are not exclusively Lotus Software customers and partners, they are IT leaders, business executives, developers, architects and system engineers who follow and want the latest on the future vision for enterprise collaboration.
“IBM will continue to invest in Saudi Arabia and grow its business with the market to provide unparalleled sales, service and support to all size organizations within the Kingdom”, said Byron Lawson, Director of Lotus IBM CEMEEA.
“As organizations in Saudi grow through business expansion or acquisition their IT infrastructures are becoming more complex to manage, IBM and Lotus are uniquely positioned to work with Saudi customers as part of our Smarter Planet initiative to make sense of complex scenarios by utilizing our broad portfolio of solutions, an extensive business partner network and industry leading services capabilities” Mr. Lawson said, “Lotus knows how to do business in Saudi Arabia and through the IBM Client for Smart Work initiative we are providing customers alternatives to proprietary desktop solutions”.
IBM and Canonical's popular cloud-and Linux-based desktop package, is de-signed to help companies do more with less and lower desktop computing costs by up to 50 percent.
According to Byron, CIO's, IT directors and IT architects from all types of organi-zations in Saudi can now gain immediate access to collaboration capabilities to help them work smarter, with the simple download of the IBM Client for Smart Work onto various thin clients, such as netbooks and other devices.
With a broad set of strategic partners IBM is proving that it is possible to take something seemingly complex, like IT for SMBs, and transform it into something that is affordable, easy to deploy and manage. With the latest partner integra-tions, IBM is extending Lotus Foundations' automated configuration, self-healing and self-managing capabilities to create complete communications and collaboration solutions designed specifically with SMBs in mind. This is an ideal solution for SMB customers in the Kingdom who are looking to collaborate with tools including email; office applications for creating documents, presentations and spreadsheets; file sharing and back up and recovery for data protection.
With Lotus Foundations, SMBs have access to all of the tools needed to run a business and quickly establish a reliable IT infrastructure. The solution is com-pletely autonomic so that installation, set-up, monitoring and problem resolution are all done without human intervention.
“Over the past few years across MENA we have witnessed the evolution of social software in business” advises Byron, “Businesses are now seeing the value that collaboration brings to the enterprise by connecting people and information. With the next releases of Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections, we will deliver expanded functionality and improved performance to help simplify collaboration and increase efficiency”
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Leading research firms report that IBM's deep industry expertise is unmatched by any competitor. Each industry has unique roles and work patterns that are encumbered by established norms and the inability to find the right expert, information, or tool to get the job done quickly. Companies in Saudi Arabia are asking how they can make the greatest impact by freeing people from the hard-wired organizational barriers that hinder their business results. Recognizing these business challenges, IBM is delivering a series of consultative workshops that provide tested tools, best practices and industry experts to help clients define a collaboration roadmap and strategy. The objective of these workshops is to help organizations realize tangible business value by connecting people, experts and information in the right context, minimizing the daily churn to get work done.
