THE 4TH ANNUAL SMART DATA SUMMIT GETS UNDERWAY

The fourth edition of the Smart Data Summit, held with the support of Smart Dubai Office and Dubai Data Establishment as Official Government Partners and organized by global conference producers, Expotrade started today. The summit commenced with a welcome address delivered by Anthony Butler, Cloud CTO, Middle East and Africa, IBM followed by a keynote address by Younus Al Nasser, Assistant Director General, Smart Dubai Office and CEO, Dubai Data Establishment.

Commenting on the role of data in smart cities, Younus Al Nasser, Assistant Director General, Smart Dubai Office and Chief Executive Officer, Dubai Data Establishment said, "As the fuel of our smart city transformation, Dubai’s data holds the key to unlock scores of benefits for our city. In fact, delivering benefits from data to the city is the driving purpose of the Dubai Data initiative. We are not motivated by collecting the biggest data sets, or publishing the most open data. Rather, our goal is to unlock the benefits of data to help the city become more insightful, decisive and open in order to increase efficiency and create new opportunities for all sectors."

The summit witnessed regional and international industry experts, including Daniel Tapiador, Director, Big Data Monetisation, Du; Hesham Herzalla, Director - Digital Transformation and Technology Innovation, Etisalat; Steve Plimsoll, Chief Digital & Data Officer, PwC Middle East; Safdar Hussain, Senior Manager – Operational Excellence & Analytics, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank deliver sessions on mobile data for improving mobility; enabling sustainable smarter city and adding value; exploiting the digital exhaust; using big data to uncover inefficiencies within business processes and operations respectively.

The topic of Empowering a ‘Data-Driven Government’ saw Abdulla Al Madani, ‎CEO - Corporate Technology Support Services Sector, RTA and Yousuf Al Shaiba, Director of Smart Services Development Department, Ajman Municipality & Planning Department participate in a panel discussion with other industry experts.

Ravi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer, Denodo, presenting on proven lesson in modernizing data architecture, commented, “The accessibility of vast amounts of multi-structured data, together with competitive pressure to obtain actionable insights from data in real-time, is driving enterprises to seek big data fabric platforms to fuel their big data initiatives. Data virtualization in support of big data fabric deployments allows for seamless integration across a multitude of data sources.

Our goal at Denodo, is to provide our customers with the best-fit solutions for their modern data architectures and big data challenges. We hope to demonstrate this here, at the Smart Data Summit 2017 Dubai, via our customer case studies.”  

Plenary discussion on the power of web and social media data for profitable customer decisioning saw experts Ulugbek Yuldashev, Founder & CEO, AWOK.com, Wolfgang Weidinger, Data Scientist & Senior Analytics Consultant, Experian EMEA, Wido Dijkstra, Director Analytics & Business Relationship Management - New Business & Innovation, Du and Venkatesh Kallur, Group Chief Risk Officer, Finance House discuss key questions and challenges facing the industry.

Brad Hariharan, Regional Director, Expotrade Middle East, organizers of the Smart Data Summit said, “With growing dependency on IT technologies, there is an underlying need for big data analytics to simplify business, innovate and attain new growth opportunities. The Smart Data Summit promises to be a compelling and stimulating event with leading international and regional experts highlighting the importance and examining the opportunities of big data and analytics in the region.”

In its fourth year, the summit has proved to become the leading big data and analytics event in the Middle East region, featuring participation from IBM, Huawei, Intel, Denodo, Qlik, Tableau and Mindtree to name a few. The solution providers will showcase their marquee offerings to over 300 senior IT, marketing and business intelligence specialists from across the GCC region.

Day 2 of the summit will include sessions on MOHAP looks to real-time data analytics for hospital performance insights, are airlines fully harnessing the power of smart data and the importance∂ of data driven innovation followed by presentations from Dubai Municipality, Zee Entertainment, Finance House and many others.