Mubadala acquisition means more jobs for Emiratis at Injazat

Ibrahim Lari, the chief executive of Injazat. Sammy Dallal / The National

Injazat Data Systems, a cloud services provider, plans to create more jobs for Emiratis in the fast-growing IT sector, its chief executive said.

“Now [that] we are an Abu Dhabi arm it will help us bring Emiratis into the workforce, which was our mandate,” said Ibrahim Lari, the chief executive of Injazat. “We were doing that anyway but now we will get more support from Mubadala to bring in Emiratis.”

Last week the Abu Dhabi strategic investor Mubadala bought out Hewlett-Packard’s 40 per cent stake in the company.

Increasing the number of Emiratis working in the technology space is an important part of Abu Dhabi’s efforts to diversify the economy away from its dependence on the oil sector.

“Our plan is to increase the amount of Emiratis working at Injazat, at least to a double-digit percentage on a yearly basis. We are now at least 17 per cent of nearly 800 people. We have been hiring 3 to 5 per cent locals per year but I want to make that 15 per cent, to about 120 candidates per year. We want the talented, dedicated, committed nationals. In five years I want 50 to 60 per cent Emiratis,” said Mr Lari.

He said the firm was sponsoring Emiratis at colleges and its Injazat Institute was offering vocational skills training.

“We have internships so we can minimise the amount of years or months of training. It used to take two years to take a fresh graduate to a reliable service deliverer, maybe five years back. Now that has improved dramatically,” Mr Lari said.

Mubadala, which has stakes in General Electric and the private equity firm Carlyle, now owns 100 per cent of Injazat, which provides information technology outsourcing, and cloud and data centre managed services.

According to the technology consultancy IDC, the IT services market this year reached US$1.9billion in the UAE and $5.6bn in the GCC. The industry is expected to grow to $3.3bn in the UAE and $9.5bn in the GCC by 2018. Demand for mobile data services is expected to help fuel the sector’s expansion.

Mr Lari said that Injazat “wants to grow in Abu Dhabi and beyond”.

“We are on a growth curve working with the Abu Dhabi government and UAE government. We employ over 700 people now, but that will grow,” said Mr Lari. “Mubadala is always looking abroad for acquisitions. Injazat could be an international company very soon supporting Mubadala. We are working to set up a base in Qatar to support our clients there and in other GCC countries. Within the next six months to a year we will change dramatically, moving into mobility, big data and security. We are still concentrating on the low-hanging fruit in the GCC countries before we move elsewhere, most probably through partnerships rather than acquisitions.”

Injazat built the region’s first tier-4 data centre – designed to the highest possible security and environmental standards.

“Injazat has been very successful as a strong, local IT services provider in the UAE, especially in the government sector, particularly in Abu Dhabi,” said Ranjit Rajan, the associate vice president at IDC Consulting in the Middle East and Africa. “This change in ownership will enable the company to invest further, expand their services portfolio and delivery capabilities, tap into new industry verticals and grow their business across the UAE. Also importantly, it will help drive their expansion strategies – especially in the rest of the GCC, where there are significant market opportunities for the company to compete effectively by leveraging current capabilities.”

On Tuesday, the telecoms company du said it had chosen Cisco’s network technology for a high-speed data centre that will provide cloud-based hosting services and data, voice and video services for its customers.

Du said that the “rapid growth and ever-increasing demand for faster network … places new requirements on data centre network infrastructure”.

The IT research firm Gartner said yesterday that it expected $5.5bn to be spent on cloud services in the region between this year and 2018. The public cloud services market in the Middle East and North Africa is on track to record 21 per cent growth this year to $747 million from $616m last year, it said.

Follow The National's Business section on Twitter