Interview: George Pawlyszyn, general manager – MEA at Rackspace Technology

How do you see the growth of cloud computing and data centres in the Middle East?
Hyperscalers have spearheaded growth in the region’s cloud space in recent years in response to digital transformation trends, which were also accelerated by the pandemic. Cloud providers such as AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, Alibaba, SAP and Google are boosting regional investments. The latest to announce in the Middle East region is AWS, which is adding an edge location in the UAE to add to its Bahrain cloud data centre infrastructure. It should be noted that cloud migration is a complex task and IT managers struggle to ensure availability and continuity during the migration process, which is further complicated by multicloud environments. Multicloud specialists can ease the process.

Meanwhile, data centres are the backbone of the internet and are increasingly important as internet usage surges. Research has revealed that the Middle East data centre market will likely grow at a CAGR of around 7 per cent between 2020 and 2026. Furthermore, Covid-19 underlined the vital role of data centres to ensure business continuing and support of remote work environments. We see an unprecedented data centre building spree to support these trends. While hyperscalers are leading this transformation, we see increased interest in edge data centres. These smaller facilities are located close to users, providing faster access to data for applications such as IoT and autonomous cars.

What role will Rackspace Technology play with three new data centre’s opening in the UAE?
Rackspace Technology is a premier partner for AWS globally and regionally. We were at the forefront of migrating customers of all sizes to AWS. We are primed to support customers wanting a local footprint in region and have skilled and experienced team to support, execute and complete assessments or migrations.

Meanwhile, we have migrated and supported a number of blue chip customers with high security and availability requirements such as BFC (Bahrain Finance Company) and Bank of Jordan as well as fintech clients in UAE and government and commercial clients in Saudi Arabia, including large enterprises.

Tell us about you growth trajectory and footprint in the Middle East.
We launched our Middle Eastern presence in 2020 with just three employees in UAE. Today, we have 140 employees across the Middle East and are continuing to grow. We have delivery leaders, architects, programme managers locally who deliver all aspects of the cloud journey from assessment, migration, security, data analytics, governance and optimisation. Globally, the region is also supported by a team of nearly 7,000.

How are you supporting the UAE in addressing the tech skills gap?
We continue to recruit skilled people in the UAE. We have an active internship programme that provides opportunities for graduates and are supporting the return to work for women that have taken time out of the workforce. We work closely with the cloud providers in transferring knowledge and skills to our customers as part of our migration to cloud to enable legacy staff embrace the new technologies and new agile ways of working.

We understand how the tech skills gap is affecting organisations across the world, which is why we launched Rackspace Elastic Engineering Plus. This is a way for customers to get on-demand access to a dedicated pod of cloud engineers who collaborate with organisations to shape successful outcomes. This means that our customers don’t have to worry about recruiting staff and as they lean on us for our experts.

George Pawlyszyn is the general manager – Middle East and Africa at Rackspace Technology

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