Global ICT solutions provider Huawei has kicked off its annual nationwide ICT Road Show collaborating with representatives from the government and private sector to showcase how organisations in Qatar can benefit through new advancements in IT “cloud” technology in the coming years.
The Huawei Qatar IT Road Show is running from 10th to the 12th January 2016. Under the theme “Open Roads to Cloud,” Huawei experts will offer guidance on how its new cloud-based IT portfolio, which includes both the Huawei Disaster Recovery solution and its Oceanstor Intelligent Storage solution, can be applied in various vertical sector enterprise environments. These include the fields of oil and gas, healthcare, education, and banking and finance.
“Societies across the globe are entering into a new era of in-depth integration of the digital and physical worlds, changing the way that organisations deliver on-demand services to the public,” said Huawei Qatar CEO Zong Yan.
Yan added, “In building a better connected Qatar and in line with the Qatar National Vision 2030, it is Huawei’s aim to help make IT simple and business more agile. We are also committed to making more contributions to Qatar’s 2022 FIFA World Cup efforts with our complete end-to-end IT products and solutions.”
Due to its popularity at last year’s roadshow, the Huawei demo truck will also be returning for a second year to give visitors the opportunity to experience firsthand Huawei’s latest innovations in data centre solutions, virtual servers and desktops, plus a wide range of vertical industry solutions.
The demo truck includes access to a fully-functional Huawei data centre container operating in a live environment and provides an interactive demonstration platform to showcase its full IT solution portfolio.
Huawei is one of the leading pioneers within Qatar’s technology sector, providing the most comprehensive IT portfolio in the industry to customers in the telecom, enterprise, and consumer space.
The ICT vendor develops tailored solutions that enable IT systems to talk to each other through a converged approach. According to Huawei, this allows for increased flexibility and open systems that are easier to manage, more reliable, and more cost effective to operate.
Analysts at IDC have noted that the combined IT services market of some of the countries in the region, including Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, are expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5% over the coming years to total $1.82bn in 2018.  
According to IDC, Qatar presents the strongest growth in the region and is expected to lead in IT services spending, fuelled by large-scale, infrastructure-driven, and government-led projects in the transportation, healthcare, and education sectors.
The cloud market in particular is expected to continue to perform strongly in 2016, spurred by the growing maturity of the Qatari ICT market and the increase in the number of companies using cloud services.
During the road show, Huawei will be showcasing its Oceanstor V3 storage solution, which was recently unveiled in the Middle East. The Oceanstor V3 is the industry’s first converged storage platform, which combines a cloud-oriented architecture with a powerful new hardware and intelligent management software.