Mohammed AlShaibi

A government owned company specialized in providing quality IT services to its clients, Tamkeen Technologies focuses on deploying products and services in the government sector and providing solutions that help clients extract value from their data.

What role was Tamkeen able to play in the digitalization process of Saudi Arabia, and how did you deal with the new requirements from the pandemic?

Saudi Arabia in general, and the government sector, specifically, were highly advanced before the pandemic, so many government organizations were able to continue to deliver their services uninterrupted since they already had extensive digital services; however, the pandemic did expedite the digital transformation of some government sector entities that did not have solid digital foundations. Saudi Arabia has been recognized as a global leader in its adoption of online and mobile channels in both the public and private sectors. Likewise, prior to the pandemic, Tamkeen Technologies was fairly advanced in these areas and had previously built its own products that were used internally to enhance administration, communication, and collaboration. When we noticed the challenges faced by entities during the pandemic, we decided to commercialize these products and offer them to both the public and private sectors for free. To this day, many of these entities continue to use our products even though they are no longer free, which has had a positive impact for us. Prior to the pandemic, we had a call center solution that enables Saudi women to work from home, while providing magnificent support to some of our most important clients and government programs. During the pandemic, the operations of most traditional call centers where severely impacted by the lockdowns and pandemic restrictions, while our call center service continued to maintain high levels of service quality, which contributed to the doubling of the revenue of this service after the pandemic. We later launched our Smart Attendance mobile application that allowed employees to record their offsite, remote site, and onsite physical attendance using their biometric identities and leveraging the location-based services of their mobile devices. This application was also offered to interested entities for free during the pandemic. Tamkeen Technologies was one of the companies that was more prepared than most, which ignited our desire to help which caused us to offer our products to entities in need. I am happy to report that in 2021 we saw our revenue increase and approach pre-pandemic levels, and hopefully 2022 will be one of our best years yet.

There was an increase in expenditure on digital solutions during the pandemic. What has been driving that growth?

Since physical movement was highly restricted, digital solutions became even more critical to business execution. We are now seeing an even greater focus on digital with the recovery started in 2021, and now even more RFPs are being issued because a big push is being made to recover any lost time due to the pandemic.

Do you have any other new products in the pipeline?

We are looking to further solidify our existing products by enhancing them and looking at our product and services portfolio and looking for gaps in the market that we can provide solutions for. We are specifically looking at products that can be used by both the public and private sectors since we are not built to only target solutions specifically for the private sector. Tamkeen is designed to help the public sector and stimulate the national development of Saudi Arabia, so we will continue to look at products that are compelling. Also, rather than promoting proprietary commercial products, we want to promote the use of open-source products developed and maintained by Saudi citizens. Additionally, we have started to bundle our services for new start-up enterprise nonprofit entities and offer them to these organizations at significantly reduced prices. One of the most important aspects of the products that we develop is that all of them are hosted in country and offered as either on premise, in a client-selected local data center, or as a SaaS solution in our local Tamkeen data center, which makes us fully compliant with all national Saudi cybersecurity standards.