Qatar calling

Qtel (Qatar Telecom) provides coverage to over 560 million people in 17 countries and has 57.5 million subscribers. BMME meets head of IT Salman Al Mannai to find out how technology will help the company to reach its aim of becoming one of the world’s top 20 technology companies by 2020.

“In terms of storage we started with megabytes then gigabytes and today we're talking about terabytes. I'm not sure what comes next”
-Salman Al Mannai, Head of IT, Qatar Telecom (Qtel)

BM. How is IT helping Qtel to meet its business objectives – particularly the expansion of its operations in the Middle East, North Africa and South East Asia?
Salman Al Mannai. There is no doubt that the major acquisitions, which have taken place over the past few years have enriched our IT experience. This is evident in the way IT is directed today verses the way IT was used to do business four years ago. There is a paradigm shift in IT operations and IT approach towards addressing the various needs of both internal customers and external customers.  Because the telecoms market in the region is opening up Qtel IT has gained new insights and experience through its interaction with other Qtel subsidiaries operating in these markets. At the same time, IT is contributing to the advancement of IT operations in other Qtel subsidiaries through the many Centres of Excellence (CoEs) established within the group.
 
BM. How high a priority is IT given by the management of the organisation?
SAB. IT is right at the heart of Qtel’s main operations, hence it is always given a high priority at all times. From an organisational structure point view IT maintains a strong relationship with the core business units at all levels. When I first joined the organisation in 1989 the IT structure was very simple and there was just four of us working in the department. At that time it was described as Data Processing and it was actually part of the finance department. Today we are very much linked to the business.  Previously, if we went to the management and said we needed to spend some money on an IT project they asked a thousand questions.  At that time people didn’t understand the business value of spending money on IT. Nowadays it’s the other way around. They come to us with the money and tell us to spend it. Our aim is to become more of an innovation centre, which suggests ways that IT can be used to improve the way we do business, and not just to develop modules for projects.

BM. What new technologies is Qtel now planning to introduce to its customers and which do you foresee will be the most successful?
SAB. At the moment the biggest project we are working on is putting our services for our customers online and developing the self-service concept. This would mean customers would no longer have to visit out stores to receive these services. They could just access them easily online. My anticipation that this will be our most successful project yet. As well as improving services for our customers is another reason why we are doing this is to prepare ourselves for more competition in the market. This will come not just from Vodafone operations in Qatar but from Zain, Orascom and Etisalat. Their target is the same – to capture customers online. My anticipation is that our online services will be the most successful. We are trying to come up with different idea. We don’t want to copy what everybody else is doing we want to be more innovative and capture the customers from the heart. My anticipation is that going online will be our most successful project. We have also set up an Oracle CRM system. We had some basic CRM systems in the past but today, in view of the competition, we find its more challenging to maintain customers with the systems that we have today.  We are trying to develop a complete framework when it comes to CRM.

BM. What new technology is Qtel planning to deploy to improve the efficiency of the organisation?
SAB. We are currently working on server consolidation and virtualisation. The more services you add from a business side, the more the complexity of the IT side increases. Because of this we have had to think about getting our house in order otherwise IT becomes messier, more complex to deal with and causes services to deteriorate.

In order to do this we are trying to improve on our processes so that things won’t be delayed and to unify our IT systems so that they are common to all business operations. We are trying to come up with some standardised applications for standardised IT services across the group. But I don’t think we are going to see something tangible in the next two years. When you talk about consolidating IT systems, there a cultural side to it. People do things differently in some markets where people operate. You find certain projects are very dominant in that country. If you impose a change situations things delicately. One of the most successful technology deployments we have had was the deployment of a Service Orientated Network architecture from Cisco.
 
BM. How much is being invested to improve Qtel’s IT systems?
SAB. On the technical side IT makes up 20% of Qtel’s total domestic capital expenditure budget. This is substantial compared to 20 years ago when we used to spend peanuts. Today we spend almost 2000 percent what we used to spend in the past.

BM. What systems does Qtel have in place to successfully and securely store the large quantities of customer data it holds?
SAB. Just like any other telecom operator, the magnitude of information we are required to process and maintain is very large, hence we have applied the proper technologies that can assist us in achieving our goals for maintaining the information. The challenge does not stop here however, as the business is growing exponentially. Despite the economical recession, we always find ourselves demanding more. We deployed SAN (Storage Area Network) five years ago along with the right quantity of processing power required. We are currently moving towards consolidation and virtualisation of the servers to minimise the systems management effort. Shoveling such a large amount of data requires the right network architecture which is why we adopted the SONA (Service Oriented Network Architecture) whereby, the IT infrastructure is segmented in such way that the right service is deployed within the right domain to the right user segment at the right bandwidth. We are still pursuing new technologies in that regard in order to maintain an edge over the competition. It is an ongoing challenge. In terms of storage we started with megabytes then gigabytes and today we’re talking about terabytes. I’m not sure what comes next. Another challenge is that things change very rapidly. Coping with these changes is becoming more challenging than adding storage.

BM. How big an issue is IT security for Qtel and how is it combating this?
SAB. Confidentiality of information is not just an IT matter, it is engraved in Qtel’s policies. Gaining customers’ confidence implies that all information pertaining to customers must be maintained with a great deal of confidentiality. We also worry about how solid our systems are when it comes to performing against any malicious attempts, and hence a reasonable degree of protection has been applied, that we review this regularly. We have also recently awarded the ISO27001 certification that we are planning to maintain and enhance for long time.

BM. What business continuity challenges does the company face?
SAB. The main challenge we face is that the business is so dynamic. Things change so quickly and this always posses pressure on the IT resource to meet these ever changing demands. Often as the business changes, projects are no longer available and new projects come on board in their place. These projects span multiple systems and some of those systems are not part of our disaster recovery plan (DRP). This is going to be our weakest link so we ensure that we regularly revisit our DRP and make the necessary changes to it to include those new projects and systems. We also have to ensure that the people working in other parts of the organisation are aware of the importance of the DRP and that that this has to be addressed as new projects come on board.