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Al Madina

OMAN - Telecoms & IT

Sheila H. Jamal

CEO, Al Madina Group

Bio

Sheila H. Jamal took over Al Madina in 2004 with the goal of creating the most innovative IT and security documents organization in Oman. As a result of her educational background in industrial engineering, she has emerged as one of the most successful businesswomen in the Sultanate of Oman. She is globally recognized in the field of documents security in addition to recognition from the Al Mara Women in Excellence Awards.

"In Al Madina, we always look at hiring nationals and building the technical competencies."
Al Madina is poised to provide world-class custom software development services and innovative product solutions across the Sultanate.
Could you provide an overview of the main activities of Al Madina Group over the past year?

In Al Madina, we focused in the past year on balancing between modernizing our products toward digital transformation and fulfilling our obligations toward our customers. Additionally, we strategically increased our presence and partners network worldwide. We continuously strive to improve and modernize our portfolio of products and services. We are gradually moving into shorter release cycles in our products, and rearchitecting most of them into micro services, and utilizing as much as possible the different cloud services Azure and AWS. We are increasingly moving into DevOps culture. We also added more services to our portfolio of government security documents line of business.

What distinguishes Al Madina from other ICT companies in terms of services?

We always strive to build long-term partnership with our customers. We do not only sell our solutions to our customers but, rather, consider ourselves as enabler to their growth and success. We advise on best practices and identify pain points before we move into automation. It is our transparency and engagement model that give us an advantage over others.

Which areas of the economy are most in need of further digitalization and thus have the highest potential for your services?

With the blessing of His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik, all government sectors are improving and working together to provide quality services to citizens. As technology advances, there is always room for improvement. For example, developing nationwide digital identity and digital signature would allow citizens of the Sultanate to log into any government portal or app using their digital identity. Also, with digital identity and public key infrastructure (PKI), citizens can sign digital documents.

How will the digital revolution change the market in Oman?

Digital transformation is revolutionizing every aspect in our lives. Chatbots are increasingly replacing the traditional customer service in many areas. Even with retailers, self-checkouts are widely used. Online shopping is also an example of digital transformation that is shaking up the traditional retail market. The aim of these technologies is to increase efficiencies and reduce costs, and we need to direct the labor market and young Omanis toward these high-end technology sectors.

How are you focusing on developing human resources?

In Al Madina, we always look at hiring nationals and building the technical competencies. The technology sector worldwide has gone through dramatic changes in the past few years as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown. Working remotely has become accepted. And many platforms have brought together knowledge workers with employers with the freelance/part-time model. We can all strategically build a generation of young nationals that are technology skilled and ready for remote work with international companies’ all over the world. Such initiative can increase the GDP of Oman and fill a gap in the international market.

What are your current projects and specialization within the cybersecurity sphere?

In a world where almost everything is connected, security has become integral part in our solutions. We prioritize security of our products and services. We use the Privileged Access Management (PAM) technique, which aligns with the best practices in the industry to ensure that we deliver the best cybersecurity services for our customers. Our strategy is based on the understanding that privilege misuse remains one of the top cybersecurity priorities that cripple businesses resulting in catastrophic losses. We provide our customers with the best cyber security measures to build up business expertise and guarantee the protection of intelligence. Our clients can create a central console that enables them to interconnect the various parts of their IT management systems for better correlations of quick remedies, facilitating meaningful inferences, overall network data, and privileged access data. For this reason, our PAM strategy ensures that all secret pathways to the client’s mission-critical assets are unmonitored, unmanaged, or unknown.

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