On Tuesday, Sutherland Global, the Rochester, New York developer of digital transformation technologies, announced that it has signed an memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Saudi sovereign oil company Aramco to design, develop and implement digital infrastructure across Saudi Arabia. The program, conceived in alignment with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 program to diversify its economy away from oil dependency, aims to create more than 50,000 digital economy jobs in the next five years.
“We are excited for our collaboration with Sutherland through this MoU to localize smart city hyper automation as a service, which will play a role in the growth of the digital services ecosystem,” said Aramco’s Vice President of Digital Transformation, Nabil A. Al-Nuaim, in a formal statement on the MoU.
Under the agreement, Sutherland and Aramco will co-develop and implement hard and soft infrastructure aligned with localization initiatives of the Kingdom’s National Transformation Program. To promote local content development, provide numerous job opportunities for the growing Saudi population and stimulate the diversification of the Saudi economy, this collaboration will focus on the following areas:
- IoT-as-a-Service: IoT-as-a-Service will unify data from various sources to deliver measurable business outcomes (such as improved productivity, better efficiency, enhanced safety, and security and a stronger bottom-line) by integrating IoT and Operation Technology (OT) with other IT systems in a hyper-automation enabled, scalable, Saudi-local cloud-hosted, multi-tenanted National Platform. Sutherland and Aramco say these deployments will be available to organizations in the Kingdom, cutting across areas such as Smart Cities and Campuses, Manufacturing, Utilities, Supply Chain and Logistics, Healthcare, Retail, and Banking and Financial Services, among others. IoT-as-a-Service will be provided through a subscription-based model to organizations of all sizes, with a special focus on small and medium enterprises.
- Digital Business Services: Sutherland will work with Aramco to set up a locally relevant but globally consistent Digital Business Service (DBS) practice to offer its services to organizations across multiple industries. This strategic engagement will start with Aramco and Sutherland developing a localization plan of jobs that can be executed within the Kingdom, specifically creating more than 50,000 digital jobs in the next five years across functions such as IT, Data Analytics, and Cloud Management Services.
“For over 35 years we have deployed and leveraged leading-edge technologies that enable our clients across the globe to improve internal business processes, generate best-in-class customer experiences and unlock industry leading value,” Sutherland’s Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer Doug Gilbert said. “This partnership recognizes our digital transformation capabilities and our future-readiness. We are honored to work with Aramco to create groundbreaking technology and platforms that fuel growth in Saudi Arabia.”
Sutherland has an extensive track record in creating and implementing, highly successful first-of-its-kind digital business models that deliver non-linear growth for its clients across the globe.These digital business models are also responsible for developing incremental local digital business service (DBS) jobs around the globe in digital commerce, healthcare, retail, travel and logistics, supply chain management and financial services.
