17 September 2012

Saudia wins IT Innovation Award

Saudia’s Information Technology Unit, represented by Infrastructure Development and Support (IDS), has been adjudged by the Network Middle East, an ITP business publication, as the winner of “Best Fixed Networking Implementation 2012.

Network Middle East celebrated innovative and transformative networking projects in the Middle East and the vendors behind them on June 19, 2012.

 

The Network Middle East Innovation Awards 2012 recognized innovation on more than 20 categories of the IT industry.

 

With most organizations re-evaluating their priorities when it comes to implementing IT projects, the Network Middle East Innovation Awards 2012 judging committee was looking for projects that used technology to improve performance, enhance business efficiency and contributed to the real IT values.

 

IDS has nominated Infrastructure projects in 2 Categories: Best Fixed Networking Implementation and Best Wireless Implementation.

 

Eng. Sadagah Najjar, SV IT Project Manager and Tamkeen Project Director, was nominated for Networking Professional of the Year. “We were short listed in all above 3 categories; and on 19th Jun 2012 Saudia IT was announced as the winner of “Best Fixed Networking Implementation,” said an official statement issued by the department.

 

As Saudia has more than 375 sites around the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Information Technology aims towards providing its services to all Saudia core business units, and Strategic Business Units (SBU’s), associated with quality, efficiency, continuity, and high availability.

 

“This was achieved by establishing a state-of-the-art fixed data network based on the multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) technology provided by STC and Mobily,” said Abdullah S. Alsaggaf, GM Infrastructure Development & Support.

 

A virtual private network (SV VPN) was created for Saudia within STC and Mobily cloud networks. “This type of network allows IT to provide its services to any new additional offices using different technologies such as dialup, Internet, satellite, and DSL,” Alsaggaf said.

 

As Saudia’s main data center (eNucleus) is located in Jeddah and hosting most of its applications or connections to other hosted applications such as Amadeus and Sabre are passing through this data center, IT ensured that clouds and main connections going out of the data center have different routes to avoid any cable cuts and outages. In addition to this, redundancy connections were established to most of these sites, Alsaggaf said.