SER's experts spent three days having intense discussions at the Gartner Symposium in Dubai. The event provided many opportunities to talk with visitors from companies and government institutions of the region and to learn more about the status of their digitalization strategies. The opening speech from Her Excellency Dr. Aisha Bin Bishr, Director General of the Smart Dubai Office, focused on the government initiative "Smart Dubai". An important component of the initiative is the "Dubai Paperless Strategy", the goal of which is to establish paper-free administration in Dubai. By 2021, no administration employee and no citizen should have to print out documents on paper. This initiative is supposed to save more than one billion pages of paper per year.

Digitalization at companies and organizations in the Middle East is still primarily in the early phases. The financial sector is no exception either, as SER found out earlier this year at the 7th Annual Conference on Electronic Banking and Payment Systems, which took place in Tehran, Iran. Even large financial institutions and ministries of the region are still operating today almost completely paper-based. At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Dubai, numerous representatives of banks and financial authorities from neighboring countries informed SER of their plans to push forward even faster with digitalization in their organizations.

Expanding the partner network: Emirates Computers

The Gartner event in Dubai presented opportunities not only to talk with our regional partners, but also to make a new IPPS (International Partner Program of SER) partnership official with Emirates Computers, which is a system integrator, value-added reseller (VAR) and software reseller in the Middle East.