Du to offer cloud and sovereign AI services from July

Dubai telecoms operator du will start offering its sovereign cloud and artificial intelligence services in the UAE in July, tapping into the growing demand for the technologies locally.

“We are targeting to on-board clients with the time of the announcement,” Jasim Al Awadi, du's chief ICT officer, told The National at the Oracle CloudWorld event on Wednesday.

The telecoms operator had announced in June last year that it would use Oracle Alloy to offer hyperscale cloud and sovereign AI services for government and public sector entities, focusing on Dubai and the Northern Emirates.

“We are targeting the UAE market. Our infrastructure is there to fulfil the market of UAE,” Mr Al Awadi said.

Du is using Oracle Alloy, a cloud infrastructure platform, becoming “the first local hyperscale cloud provider to offer a comprehensive set of cloud services branded under its portfolio”, according to the company. A hyper-scaler is a cloud provider that operates a large-scale data centre network to offer computing, storage and other technology services.

It will also be competing with companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google in the UAE market.

“The market is open. We are competing with everyone fairly. We are building our value proposition with other features that we have, and the client is there to choose. Having an open market and competition is good for everyone,” Mr Al Awadi said.

Last year, du executives said that the company’s services would be more affordable for the local market.

“We understand the client requirements because on our level, as a service provider, we are with the clients on a day-to-day basis. So … you put forward the right value proposition with the right price, it's a combination of everything. We are not targeting only price, we are targeting quality, price, evolution of technology and backing you up with the right operational skill set,” Mr Al Awadi said.

There is growing demand for sovereign cloud providers amid the shift towards national security and data privacy. The $37 billion sovereign cloud infrastructure as a service market is forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 36 per cent to reach $169 billion in 2028, Gartner said in a report last year.

Market growth will be led by rising regulatory demand for data sovereignty, as well as stronger requirements for operational independence and technological autonomy, it said.

“Each and every client here regulates his own needs,” Mr Al Awadi said. He added that companies assess whether the needs of the workloads are critical and if so, they need sovereign services. If non-critical, the workloads can go to the public cloud.

Nick Redshaw, Oracle’s senior vice president for technology cloud and UAE country leader, also said it's not necessarily individual clients.

“There are regulations in the UAE with respect to different types of data. So some data can be put on the public cloud. Some data has incremental regulations applied to incremental security that, by definition, require a level of sovereignty,” he said.