Information technology multinational IBM has launched a Client Engineering business unit for the Middle East and Africa territories.

The unit will consult and then work with clients to develop innovative, relevant solutions, while helping them to develop the skills needed to create direct, immediate business value and digitally transform their businesses.

“IBM is focused on helping clients transform across industries, and the [IBM Client Engineering] team will support clients that are making investments around hybrid and multi-cloud, data and [artificial intelligence] across the region,” IBM Middle East and Africa GM and business leader Saad Toma said at a launch event on March 16.

The IBM Client Engineering unit is a significant investment to support clients' journeys through strong technical capabilities, he added.

The past two years has led to the acceleration of digital transformation, which requires lots of skills and talent. Therefore, IBM Client Engineering will work with clients to solve real business problems by providing skills and industry-specific knowledge and experience to ensure client success on the road to transformation, said IBM Middle East and Africa CTO and technical community lead Sabine Holl.

“New skills are required by all businesses to drive innovation and build new applications that will succeed in building the business. Our global technical community is focused on client-centric approaches and the various IBM business teams, such as the technical sales and customer success teams, will partner with our clients and the ecosystem in the region,” she explained.

The teams will focus on fostering innovation in the region and enhancing customer experience by working with customers and partners to co-create and build new solutions.

“This requires technical preeminence and speed of execution. We will also accelerate our clients' success by using the IBM method to deliver innovation for the start-up to enterprise scale,” said Hall.

The unit will work with any industry, although it is primarily focused on the banking, insurance, public sector and oil and gas sectors.

The primary focus of the two IBM Research Laboratories in Africa is on water and sustainability, and IBM Client Engineering will want to drive innovative research programmes arising from engagements with clients.

“IBM has a strong global corporate social responsibility and environmental, social and governance mandate, and has launched its sustainability acceleration programme, which provides a set of tools to enable governments and companies to monitor and improve sustainability efforts, especially around farming,” said Toma.

Further, the company has various successes in the use of technologies to support agriculture, including the Internet of Things and blockchain solution developed to manage wheat and wheat silos in Egypt, he said.

Meanwhile, the multidisciplinary teams will focus on, firstly, understanding and defining what is required by a client, including which people are meant to benefit from the application and convert this into a proposal that can be solved using technology. The teams, along with the client, will then build a minimum viable product that the client can test to determine the use case of the solution that is targeted to a specific business need, Hall said.

“The engineering team will work with clients to build out their digital transformation journeys with them and working with them to ensure the client has a plan moving forward. We focus on business outcomes and solving business problems. We work urgently in short sprints and use new ways of working including agile working in which the teams learn, adapt and iterate to build the solutions clients need to succeed,” said Hall.

The Client Engineering business unit has digital transformation consultants to frame industry- and business-specific challenges to define innovative and disruptive business models that will improve client outcomes. The designers then do focused workshops with clients to detail the business case and challenges, as well as develop prototypes for the clients to visualise and experience the potential solution, said IBM Middle East and Africa Client Engineering unit manager Mohamed Behiry.

Further, solution architects develop the end-to-end architecture and cloud engineers help clients to accelerate and progress their cloud adoption journey to build cloud-native, as well as to support workload modernisation projects, he said.

Data scientists then build models to uncover hidden insights contained in client data, as well as to develop machine learning and AI applications to improve the client's business outcomes, said Behiry.

Meanwhile, business automation specialists help clients to improve and automate their business process, and to infuse AI into existing process through the use of robotic process automation. Security engineers address clients' infrastructure, data and application security on premise or in the cloud.

“The prototyping for clients' minimum viable products are to showcase emerging technologies that can address business challenges, as well as to introduce innovations to improve client business outcomes,” he said.

“We will meet clients wherever they are in their journey to improve and accelerate their strategic journeys. [IBM Client Engineering] will also leverage the global expertise and proven solutions in the Americas and Asia Pacific that we will bring to the Middle East and Africa.”

Across the region, IBM Client Engineering will leverage access to the Global Industry Solution Centres and their expertise and solutions to advise clients across industries on solving their most critical business challenges at speed, including those clients in some of the most highly-regulated industries.

“As it becomes more critical than ever to innovate with technology, organisations across the Middle East and Africa are looking for new approaches to doing business which enable them to deliver digital transformation to address fast-changing consumer needs despite the disruption.

“With Client Engineering’s focus on co-creation and co-execution, these teams will ensure organisations across Middle East and Africa overcome obstacles to modernise and transform; ultimately fast-tracking innovation and helping clients drive lasting, meaningful outcomes,” said Toma.