“We are a national hyperscale cloud provider”- du’s Jasim Al Awadi
du is deploying Oracle Alloy to offer cloud and sovereign AI services to UAE business, government, and public sector organizations. On the sidelines of Oracle CloudWorld, we spoke to Jasim Al Awadi, Chief ICT Officer, du, to find out more about how the telecom service provider is now all set to become a cloud provider.
Let’s talk about the Alloy deal, sovereign AI, and everything related to that. So, what does this mean in the UAE context, especially for public sector and government entities? Do you think this will help accelerate the adoption of AI in the government or public sector?
Alloy is a product that fits our purpose perfectly when it comes to providing sovereign infrastructure and positioning ourselves as a national hyperscale cloud provider. This was the main intention when we started the Alloy engagement. Later on, a lot of advancements happened in AI, and we realized that AI requires a high level of sovereignty, particularly in the public sector. There will come a point where you won’t be able to fully leverage AI’s capabilities in the public and government sectors due to regulatory requirements.
Alloy offers the perfect solution by providing a secure and sovereign infrastructure, along with a suite of GPUs that can be offered as a service to clients. This enables them to build their learning management systems (LMS) and meet all their requirements in a sovereign environment. That’s why we don’t regret moving forward with Alloy. I believe it was the right choice, and today, we can clearly see how Alloy has differentiated us in the market against our competitors.
So is the strategy now to transform from a telecom service provider into a hyperscale cloud service provider? Is that going to be a new business line for you?
Just to shed some light, du has been in the ICT business since 2016. As an organization, we have long recognized the need to grow beyond our core offerings. That’s why, a few months ago, we launched duPay, our FinTech service that goes beyond our traditional ICT department. As part of our strategy to expand beyond our core services, we now offer a broad service portfolio, including data center services, cloud security, advanced technology such as robotics and machine learning, and Blockchain services.
These are the services that go beyond the traditional ones we used to offer. And today, with Alloy, we are positioning ourselves as a national cloud provider. The traditional way of providing cloud services—focusing only on infrastructure and hardware—is no longer sustainable. You need to offer an entire ecosystem, including applications, on top of it. Alloy provides us with the capability to position ourselves as a hyperscale provider in the market.
When do you plan to start offering this sovereign AI services?
Our region will be live by Q2 next year. Once the region is live, we’ll begin offering these services to our clients. Currently, we are working closely with clients, alongside the Oracle team, and the plan is to first move them to the public cloud and then transition them to the sovereign cloud.
Are you leveraging Alloy to modernize your own internal IT systems and engineering systems?
Of course, today you cannot ask your clients to migrate to the cloud without doing it yourself. This is why part of our plan is to migrate our internal workloads as well. Currently, our CIO is personally working with me on this exercise, and we are planning to move all applicable workloads to the cloud.
Are there any specific verticals that will, other than the public sector, benefit from this combination of AI and cloud?
The banking and financial sector is one of the industries that will benefit the most from this, as they are heavily regulated and require strong sovereign capabilities. The healthcare sector as well, since it deals with highly sensitive client details and requires sovereignty. I believe these are the two main sectors that will benefit significantly from Alloy, in addition to the security sector, including organizations like Dubai Police, the armed forces, and other security entities.
