Innovative business models built on solid financial and technology constructs

The world is innovating around us at a rapid pace, and nowhere is it more evident than in Dubai. Large, medium and small organisations are innovating to compete with an increasingly competitive environment, with technological advancements ranging from the Palm Island development to the latest customer feedback terminals installed within taxis.

Akshay Lamba is the head of strategic businesses and new initiatives at Al-Futtaim Technologies

Innovation is undoubtedly the key to success today. In the ICT arena, innovation is perhaps best presented in the words of P Evans and TS Wurster – A fundamental shift in the economics of information is under way – a shift that is less about any specific new technology than about the fact that a new behaviour is reaching critical mass. We believe this new behaviour is the demand from business leaders in the region to demystify technology and have it delivered based on sound financial and business reasoning rather than on purely technology-driven considerations.

Creating new paradigms of opportunity lies in an organisation’s ability to quickly adapt itself to its customers’ needs. In the technology arena, this largely remained at a technology and product capability level.

However, some technology organisations are now concentrating on adapting at a strategic relationship level with its customers. They are doing so by bringing in the necessary mix of technology, human capital, partners, financial and business models that are highly customised based on each individual customer’s needs.

As vendors flood the marketplace in a bid to grab a slice of the technology growth market, chief IT officers face the classic problem of choice. It becomes important for a CIO to choose products and services with incorporated capabilities that meet the current and expected demands of the business.

This creates a pressure for the CIOs to build scalable application and infrastructure blocks, rapidly, in order to sustain business demands. However, this very fact creates an issue for the CEO and CFOs of the world. It becomes very difficult for the decision makers to peg a number on IT and govern the application and infrastructure stack buildup in conjunction with expected business returns. In order to solve this dilemma, savvy technology companies play the role of a strategic partner to customers in order to deliver a single window for technology solutions, scaling their own capabilities within and through strategic partnerships.

In complex environments such as the above, technology companies need to look at large integrated projects across the region, in order to deliver long term sustainable competitive advantage to their customers based on fundamental long term financial planning for the technology buildup.

Moreover, given the rapid rate of change in the technology arena, technology companies need to strive to build solutions that are technology agnostic for customers in order to safeguard their long term investments.

In addition to being driven by a mandate to maximise customer delight, leading technology companies also need to walk the talk with their clients by managing the solutions and the returns from the deployed solutions in the long run.

There is a need to move away from traditional vendor-client relationships, with the development of innovative business models to offer clients the comfort they’re looking for from a key partner. With the advent of ubiquitous networks and intelligent application services, technology organisations are taking a leap in thought leadership by layering these cutting edge solutions with strong processes and financial modelling, truly bringing in next generation services and care into the marketplace.

An editorial by Akshay Lamba, head – strategic businesses and new initiatives at Al-Futtaim Technologies. Al-Futtaim Technologies has a bouquet of service offerings currently including networking solutions, IP telephony, infrastructure, contact centre solutions, business applications, and managed IT and telecommunications services. The company’s strategic capability buildup includes the recent acquisition of a leading local IT consulting company called Futech Technologies. We believe this marriage of thought leadership, strong implementation focus and business innovation will yield considerable benefits to our customers.