By Orlaith Finn
NXN, a major thought leader in smart cities and digital services, reveals that it has joined forces with Microsoft Asia. NXN’s digital platform, DNX, and all of its services will be ported on to Azure for Microsoft customers to enjoy. As an integral part of enabling technologies and driving the digital transformation in multiple industries, NXN has recently formed other partnerships in order to deliver the best solution to the market, namely in the health sector. Telecom Review managed to secure an exclusive interview with Ghazi Atallah, CEO, where he shared his excitement at the opportunity to scale NXN on a regional and international level.
You recently collaborated with du and Telus Health to provide world-class healthcare in the UAE. Tell us about this partnership.
Our relationship with Telus is a regional partnership. We are benefitting from the experience and knowledge that Telus has developed in digital health solutions across Canada and the world.
NXN is a digital service provider and healthcare is one of the key areas that we are working on to digitize in order to improve customer experience and through this partnership we will be leveraging Telus’ experience to implement various digital health solutions and services in the region. We have partnered with du to bring that level of capability to key customers in the UAE who are looking to digitize their health process, examine deficiencies in the health domain and improve customer experience, among other things.
Why has NXN chosen to optimize the health sector?
Healthcare is a basic human service. It’s an essential part of any smart city. When we look at domains in a city, health is one of the most important ones and this is why we want to focus on improving it. As we digitize the healthcare system, it certainly provides a huge impact on the lives of people. That is our priority when we look at the future of smart cities.
How is NXN helping telcos to embrace and implement advancing technologies?
With du, Zain and other telcos, we look at implementing technologies that will be easy to bring to market. We always like to integrate technologies on DNX, our digital platform, and package these technologies as a digital service that we can take to market with our partners. Therefore, our partnerships with du in the UAE and ZAIN across other countries are an important part of our Go To market plan.
In what other ways is NXN driving the digital transformation?
Digital transformation is our main mission. We believe that digital transformation and smart cities have the same meaning and similar objectives for cities and governments. We have architected a digital platform that integrates technologies leveraging our capabilities and expertise and takes care of the heavy lifting on behalf of our customers. We deliver digital services through our platform, DNX, complemented by our expertise. We have a strong data team, consulting team, technology architectural team and a development team. These are the most important capabilities required for successful digital transformation.
What challenges do you face in the process?
The challenges we face are mainly around data, technology and integration. We aim to provide the right set of analytics and data science capabilities in order to create a simple view for our customers. This is a challenge but that's what we are here for.
How important are partnerships in providing the best solution for customers?
We have a well architected and set-out digital platform with existing technology partners. However, we always believe in finding and developing further strategic partnerships. This allows us to accelerate our solutions and offerings to market. We have very specific criteria for partners; it is truly a digital service provider model whereby we integrate technology into our overall capabilities and our platform. We use those additional technologies to accelerate our ability to deliver solutions and services to our customers.
What can you tell us about your recent collaboration with Microsoft?
We are very excited about this partnership. We have been working on it for a while now so we are finally ready to announce it. We are going to be porting our digital platform DNX, onto Microsoft Azure. We will be able to implement all our services (including Energy and Facility Management, Security Management…) on an Azure cloud in a hybrid model.
We are very excited about this partnership as it brings the ‘digital transformation’ platform onto Azure and it allows us to be scalable across the region, and even across the world.