RIYADH: Moving ahead with the process to complete a major upgrade to the data-center infrastructure, Detecon Al-Saudia is working closely to further increase its capacity while maintaining the high quality standards of the services provided in the Kingdom.
In an interview with the Arab News, Dirk Doerrschuck, president and CEO of Detecon in Riyadh, said: “We are in the process of completing a major upgrade to our data-center infrastructure in order to further increase our capacity while maintaining the same high quality standards.”
He said that the expansion upgrade has been realized in cooperation with SBM and includes a large upgrade of our power infrastructure, both on the UPS and the gen-set side.
“We will have a significantly increased MWs power capacity and are currently prepping up for our German TUV IT data-center Trusted Site Infrastructure (TSI) Level 3.1 extended re-certification which will be completed by the end of
this year,” he said.
“On top of that we completed the third major upgrade to our cloud infrastructure in direct cooperation with Dell Secure Works. We are the first and so far the only cloud service provider who did this in Saudi Arabia and you could call it a version 3.0, but we call and branded it to Sahaba,” Doerrschuck said.
With Sahaba we are now able to cater full fledged enterprise cloud solutions to our clients, he added.
“We maintain our older Cloudex setup and brand for lower end SMB and public cloud services in the Kingdom,” he added.
“In parallel we are working together with SAP for achieving the SAP certified hosting infrastructure partner status and thus becoming the first SAP certified commercial data-center provider in the Kingdom,” he said.
When asked that with deep roots and excellent experience in telecommunications network management, consultancy and operation since 1982, where does you see your company today in the Kingdom, he replied saying this question triggers a famous quote from Stephen W. Hawkins, “real intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”.
Over the past 33 years our company has been constantly evolving and adapting to changing market requirements while continuously improving the quality of our service delivery, one of the main reasons to why we are still in business after more than three decades.
“Our company today still keeps adapting in order to provide first-class professional solutions for the growing digitization of enterprise business operations in the ICT infrastructure world
of telcos, banking, oil and gas as well as government projects in the Kingdom,” said the CEO.
Commenting on the local partnership from the Saudi side and how do they join forces together to serve the Saudi market and possible expansion, the Group CEO said: “We have a very long standing, in fact 33 years, trusted and successful partnership with FAL Holdings, which by the way is also the majority shareholder of our company Detecon Al Saudia (Detasad).”
He added: “We work closely with a strong focus on business growth in the Kingdom. Of course we are looking as well on the GCC region and are closely monitoring GCC market developments — however and for the time being we are satisfied with the opportunities the Saudi market has to offer.”
He also commented on the group’s close ties with the CITC in the Kingdom.
“Our relationship reaches back to the times of the Ministry of PTT. As a professional government organization CITC has released a public tender recently for which we intend to bid in close cooperation with both our German and French partners. Timelines are tight and competition is strong, however, we are looking forward to offer the best solution including the best technology and that of course for the most competitive price,” said Doerrschuck.
When asked that there was an announcement a couple of years ago about the establishment of a telecommunication academy in cooperation with Technical Trainers College (TTC), what is the current status of this project, he replied: “It is correct, this was in 2013, but unfortunately this telecommunication academy with the TTC did not happen because it fell victim to cost cutting from the related Saudi customer project.”
He added: “We are currently committed to the second approach to this initiative, which is supported by the German embassy, the German Foreign Chamber of Commerce (German-Saudi Liaison Office — GESALO) in cooperation with the TTC and the Saudi TVTC (Technical-Vocational-Training-Center), the latter two being the arm of the Ministry of Education, and this new initiative is scheduled to start in January/February 2016.”
In a reply on what is the total number of Saudis currently working in your company, he said: “I do not know the exact number right now, but I do know that we are fully compliant to our governmental Saudization requirements in regards to the Nitaqat policy and that we are rated green. We
currently providing in-house training to our Saudi staff with a dedicated teacher in both English and Arabic language.”
Answering another query on recruitment of more Saudi nationals, he said: “We are costantly looking for qualified Saudi staff and also have been recently hiring Saudi nationals who have studied and graduated from universities in Germany. We are very happy with these Saudi employees.”
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