Interview: Khalid Athar
Ahmed Al Sharif, Chief Technology & Digital Officer, stc Bahrain
Khalid Athar: What is your overall strategy towards strengthening Bahrain’s position as a leading ICT hub?
Ahmed Al Sharif: ICT is a pillar of growth for Bahrain, and we at stc Bahrain have been leading the way in strengthening Kingdom’s position as a regional leading ICT hub. With our market-leading position as a digital enabler in Bahrain, we continue to invest significantly in ICT projects by tapping into new business categories and evolving our network infrastructure. This has positively impacted the way we digitize service experiences and make them more relevant to the needs of today’s fast-moving, digital consumers.
KA: What kind of improvements are you making to the network and how are you approaching digital transformation?
AS: stc Bahrain has recently announced a significant expansion in network infrastructure to support digital transformation across the country, business sectors, and the broader community into becoming a more smart and sustainable society. This is on the infrastructure side.
I would also like to mention that we continue to build our resources and talent capabilities to elevate our people’s expertise. Enabling them to master new technologies and reinvent products and services, all in line with ever-evolving our customer needs and technological trends. This allows us to serve the whole industry in Bahrain.
I believe digital is the key to success for any telecom operator in the future, and we are aggressively targeting the digital era and the digital economy through digital operations. We are making everything digital from a customer interaction perspective, making it a fully digital-omni platform. We are also approaching the operation side with a digital vision where we adopt automation on most operational processes. Digital transformation is driving all our strategies and will remain a top priority.
KA: What benefits do you see by having this digital approach towards the network?
AS: Our focus is to move fast toward digital operation adoption, including all network domains – infrastructure, data centers, and application. At the same time, ensure all security measures and resilience operations are aligned. All these measures enable us to add efficiency to the network operations and provide a high-quality experience to the valuable customers at the heart of our business strategy. This added efficiency and digital approach will bring greater results to our network, such as self-healing with a zero-touch network operation. This is critical to maintaining good, reliable connectivity during peak load periods.
KA: Would you like to tell us a little bit about the partnership between stc and Huawei?
AS: stc Bahrain and Huawei have a very strong partnership. We are working together to build a strong infrastructure with a high focus on the latest technology of 5G – in fact, we were the first in our country to be credited with providing a 5G standalone network. Right now, we are building the whole infrastructure to support new services. The next step is to work side by side with Huawei to develop and provide new cases to serve different adjacencies and new use cases for other verticals. In addition to bringing more efficiency and improving the customer experience, we collectively work towards an intelligent network.
