PTCL Group enters into strategic agreements at Gitex Global

Inayat-ur-Rahman, Gulf Today

PTCL Group, a subsidiary of e& (formerly known as Etisalat Group), engaged IBM for Business Transformation through RISE with SAP on Amazon Web Services and partnered with Nokia to explore innovative ICT solutions for government, cities, industries, and businesses.

The announcements were made at two signing ceremonies held at Gitex Global 2022 in Dubai, UAE, where senior executives from collaborating organisations participated including PTCL & Ufone, SAP, IBM, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nokia.

PTCL & Ufone kicked off their corporate business transformation leveraging RISE with SAP at the core of their organization with the goal to drive efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation. RISE with SAP embeds SAP S/4HANA, a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) application providing optimization of resource allocation, real-time data insights, streamlining business processes, and bridging organizational information silos. The SAP offering will be implemented by IBM with AWS being the Cloud platform of choice. PTCL & Ufone will be the first telecommunications provider in Pakistan to benefit from a combination of leading offerings for SAP implementation services with IBM, Hyperscaler Cloud services with AWS, and an ERP solution with SAP.

The business transformation project aims to enable PTCL & Ufone to offer Cloud services, modernize business processes, and gain better business insights. With S/4HANA and its underlying HANA database, PTCL & Ufone can access data on demand and share it with relevant departments in near real-time to significantly improve business operations, collaborate more effectively with partners, and serve their customers better. Companies adopting RISE with SAP can accelerate their digital transformation and innovation objectives and access new business models and markets faster. The reduction of duplication of efforts through improved business insight, while ensuring increased transparency, help organizations gain necessary competitiveness and in the information age. This will be the largest business transformation project on RISE with S/4HANA in the corporate sector in Pakistan, to-date.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between PTCL and Nokia is to collaborate and tap into the potential of the ICT market and catalyze the digital transformation of enterprises across Pakistan. Under this MoU, PTCL and Nokia will engage in discussions to strategize and build a go-to-market plan to address industry needs selling PTCL solutions with Nokia products and services including Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC), a high-performance, end-to-end private wireless networking and edge computing platform.

“On the strategic engagement with SAP, IBM & AWS, Hatem Bamatraf, President and Group CEO, PTCL & Ufone said, “We are excited to migrate PTCL and Ufone towards a new operational journey as the first mover in the region, which will ultimately become the footprint for advancement in the operations of Pakistan’s Telecom sector. He further added on the MoU signed with Nokia that PTCL is playing a pivotal role in driving digital transformation throughout Pakistan, meeting the need of collaboration in the ICT segment. This will create synergies to revolutionize various sectors such as healthcare, education, automotive, retail, energy & utilities, cities and agriculture as well as other industrial segments across Pakistan, enabling all geographical areas with modern ICT technologies and a better future.” 

“Pakistan is one of the fastest growing markets for SAP’s enterprise and corporate solutions and the Telecommunication sector is swift to take the lead in embracing new ERP systems and adopting digital innovations through the Cloud,” said Saquib Ahmad, Country Managing Director, SAP Pakistan.

Elaborating on the same, Asif Ahmad, Country Sales Head, IBM Pakistan, said “Adoption of RISE with SAP will empower PTCL and Ufone to embrace new models of business, design internal and external resources and use the accuracy of AI for informed decision-making.”

Imran Durrani, Head of Customer Team for PTCL Group at Nokia, said, “Nokia has deployed mission-critical networks to more than 2,200 leading enterprise customers in the transport, energy, large enterprise, manufacturing, webscale, and public sector segments around the globe. We have also extended our expertise to more than 485 large private wireless customers worldwide across an array of sectors. This MoU with PTCL is yet another testimony to further strengthening the long-term relationship between us. At Nokia we will leverage our industry-leading private wireless products and services including Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) to empower PTCL to cost-effectively offer digital solutions to their enterprise customers across a wide spectrum of segments”.

PTCL & Ufone decided to have the SAP S/4HANA landscape hosted on AWS, a leading global Cloud services provider. With over one million customers globally today, AWS is providing over 200 Cloud services to host an array of applications, including SAP, reliably, securely, resiliently, and highly performant.  PTCL Group endeavors to offer its customers enhanced service quality, faster speeds and enable a simplified network architecture that increases operational efficiencies.