Accenture serves as exclusive partner for Gitex 2016 event

At this year's Gitex conference event, held Oct. 16-20 in the Dubai World Trade Center, tech company Accenture played a major role.

Accenture was the "exclusive digital transformation partner" for Gitex for the second year in a row after signing a three-year agreement with conference leaders.

What does this entail? First, Accenture CEO Mike Sutcliff will headline the grand keynote session on opening day. Accenture will be involved in various presentations during the event, including a closed-door breakfast briefing on Oct. 18 featuring input from Uwe Kissmann, managing director of cyber security services in Europe, Africa and Latin America.

An Oct. 3 press release spells out this and other aspects of Accenture's participation in Gitex, a calendar landmark for technology innovation and international cooperation when it comes to developing the state-of-the-art technologies of the 21st century.

For more, Gulf News Journal spoke with Tony Karam, managing director of Accenture Digital in the Middle East and North Africa.

“We are very excited that Accenture is the exclusive digital transformation partner for Gitex for the second year,” Karam said. “Accenture aims to help set the region’s agenda in guiding the digitization processes and innovation agendas for organizations across all sizes and verticals. Under the agreement, Accenture has teamed with the event organizers, Dubai World Trade Center, on a broad mission to deliver compelling, industry-leading insights on how digital technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming businesses and governments in the region, as well as globally.”

Karam said Accenture will use a Technology Vision Research Program to help facilitate more discussion about new technology throughout the region.

“Through this commitment, our flexible approach and our value creation mindset, we aim to empower regional clients to become high-performance businesses,” Karam said.

Karam also talked about the “digital acceleration center” established by Accenture in the UAE.

“The center will play an important role in the region when it comes to digital innovation, as it aims to build a vibrant business ecosystem to enable conversations, foster connections, inspire new ideas and promote innovation at scale,” Karam said. “It is a unique ‘think-and-act tank’ equipped to support and expedite the complete digital transformation journey for clients.”

At the core of Accenture’s work, Karam said, is an effort to help organizations optimize performance and capability.

“We develop and implement technology solutions to improve our clients’ productivity and efficiency — and may run parts of their operations on their behalf,” he said.

These types of services, he said, are especially important in times of rapid change.

“We are in the midst of a major technology revolution, specifically a digital revolution,” Karam said. “Change, in fact, has become the new normal and many companies, already reeling from the impacts of technology and the changes they need to make in response, find themselves temporarily overwhelmed as they absorb the magnitude of the tasks ahead. They’ll need to start changing their products, their business models, and all of the processes that support them … This requires a different way of looking at all the business’s moving parts — and particularly its people. New ways of investing in their development, managing them and helping them adapt and embrace change are all foundational. The business is digital, so the organization, its people and its culture must now become digital too.”