Convergence 2017

Sponsors

Viva Kuwait

VIVA is the fastest-growing telecom operator in Kuwait. Launched in December 2008, VIVA makes things “More” for its customers by transforming communication, information and entertainment experiences. The company has rapidly established an unrivalled position in the market through its customer centric approach. VIVA's quest is to be the mobile brand of choice in Kuwait by being transparent, engaging, energetic and fulfilling. VIVA continues to take a considerable share of the market by offering an innovative range of best value products, services and content propositions; a state of the art, nationwide network and world-class service. VIVA offers internet speeds of more than 100 Mbps, due to the implementation of the most advanced fourth generation (4G LTE) network in Kuwait resulting in superior coverage, performance and reliability.

Kuwait Telecommunications Co, with the Brand name “VIVA Kuwait” was established as the third GSM Operator in Kuwait with Saudi Telecom (STC) as its Strategic Partner holding 51.8% stake in its capital.

Zain

Zain is a leading mobile telecommunications provider in the Middle East and North Africa. We began life in 1983 in Kuwait, as Mobile Telecommunications Company (MTC), the region’s first mobile operator, and commencing with the initiation of our expansion strategy in 2003, we grew rapidly in both the Middle East and Africa through the acquisition of several mobile operators across the region.

In September 2007, MTC rebranded to Zain in order to better reflect our growing status as a leading multi-national mobile service provider with global aspirations. Zain was thus adopted as the Group’s corporate master brand.

The Zain brand is at the heart of everything we do. It is a promise to our customers, it defines our vision and drives our focus within the company. Our brand was valued at over $2.3 billion by the Brand Finance Middle East Top 50 Brands annual report for 2017 that also ranked Zain as the second most powerful home-grown brand in the region with a brand rating of AA+.

We operate as Zain in Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, South Sudan; and in Lebanon as ‘touch’ (under a management contract). In Morocco, Zain has a 15.5% stake in ‘INWI’, through a joint venture. Today over 6,000 employees provide a comprehensive range of market-leading mobile voice and data services to a base of over 45.3 million active customers as of Sept 30, 2017.

Our strategy and vision is building a sustainable and innovative digital communications company serving consumers and enterprises with a rich and simple mobile experience. We are passionate about customer experience, operational effectiveness, business growth and the development of our people as well as human development everywhere.

Zain’s strategy is based on six transformational initiatives: Customer Experience; Operational Effectiveness; Value Management; B2B; Digital Frontier and Innovation, and Talent Development.

Listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange, there are no restrictions on Zain shares as the company’s capital is 100% free float and publicly traded. The largest shareholder is the Kuwait Investment Authority with a 24.6% stake as of June 30, 2017.

Huawei

Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Our aim is to enrich life and improve efficiency through a better connected world, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, innovative enabler for the information society, and collaborative contributor to the industry. Driven by customer-centric innovation and open partnerships, Huawei has established an end-to-end ICT solutions portfolio that gives customers competitive advantages in telecom and enterprise networks, devices and cloud computing. Huawei’s 170,000 employees worldwide are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers. Our innovative ICT solutions, products and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world’s population. Founded in 1987, Huawei is a private company fully owned by its employees.

Cisco

Cisco is a global leader in technologies reshaping the way people connect, communicate and collaborate through intelligent networks and integrated product, services and software architectures. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Josè (Cal), Cisco has about 75,000 employees worldwide and in FY 2014 (ended July 26th, 2014) announced revenues of 47,1 billion dollars.

Cisco has been driving networking technologies evolution since their beginning: from the era of connectivity to the wave of Networked Economy, to the present era of Immersive Experiences, dominated by rich and multiple relations experienced through social media, online collaboration and widespread mobility and access to our digital world on a variety of devices.

Cisco success is based on key factors as: the ability to spot and anticipate new technology scenarios and market transition building innovative solutions, with a strong investment on highly specialized talented people and a constant R&D effort; a very articulate acquisition strategy; the dialogue with customers and with its global partner ecosystem, comprised of more than 70.000 companies all over the world.

This way Cisco became a leader in its core business – networking solutions – and in advanced technologies for online collaboration – from voice to data to video and TelePresence  - security, mobility, data center and virtualization, application and storage networking.

Its history and its strengths make Cisco the ideal partner for companies, Governments, organizations and people while a new scenario emerges, driven by a mix of technology evolution, changing digital habits and networks: the Internet of Everything. It is a scenario where the connection between people, processes, data and things that we are already experiencing will grow at unprecedented levels, allowing unprecedented innovation opportunities in our business models and processes, in the communities we live in, in education, in the way we confront with the current economic, social and environmental challenges; all this will be possible thanks to smarter, open Networks that will manage the complexity of the interconnection while ensuring the highest security, flexibility and availability.

Event Coverage & Discussions

Held in Kuwait City in continuation of SAMENA Council's regional digital transformation-centric public and private-sector conferences, the Convergence to Kuwait conference engaged telecom operators, regulators, and technology providers to delve into issues that form the crux of what needs to be done within the digital communications industry to create a new future of ICT policy-making and regulation, to build a sustainable digital economy, and to foster sustainability of the complex, evolving digital ecosystem.

Under the global theme of "Creating New Advantages for Industry Stakeholders", Convergence to Kuwait 2017 was especially relevant to Kuwait's future ICT development plans, and thus was provided with patronage from the State of Kuwait’s Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA), with leading regional telecom operators, including STC, VIVA Kuwait, ZAIN Group, and renowned global technology companies, including CISCO and HUAWEI, taking active part in the discussions. The panel discussions focused on Regulatory Transformation for Fulfilling the Digital Agenda; Data Regulation in View of Emerging Cross-Border Technologies  & Pan-National Communications; Stakeholder Preparation for the 5G World - Harmonizing Efforts in Terrestrial, Satellite, and Regulatory Co-operation; and Public Policy Considerations for OTTs as the key areas that will define the industry's focus for 2018 and beyond.

Convergence to Kuwait successfully built on to SAMENA Council's capacity-building and sector-development endeavors in collaboration with regional regulatory bodies. Convergence to Kuwait was also important to SAMENA Council's member operators, specifically VIVA Kuwait and Zain Kuwait, as both market leaders define a new digital future for the Kuwaiti market, and for the new regulatory body, CITRA, as it prepares to set new regulatory regimes more suited to Kuwait's digital ecosystem.

SAMENA Council's leadership has been very expressive about developing a regulatory environment for the telecommunication sector to cope with the revolution witnessed by the sector in light of digitization trends, and the need to approach the evolving digital future with fresh perspectives. As expressed by the Chairman of SAMENA Council's Board of Directors, Dr. Khaled Biyari, innovation in communications ecosystem is required, which, in significant parts, requires investment for new broadband infrastructure development.

Current legacy sector-specific regulatory regimes are no longer effective in the face of new, continuously evolving industry dynamics. To achieve governments’ digital visions and agendas of creating inclusive smart economies and societies, it is critical for Regulators and Operators to work together, to address issues such as cross-border data flows, which can have direct impact on the speed and realization of potential of digitization. Addressing cross-border data flows by introducing cross-border data protection- and cyber-security frameworks can dramatically impact digital transformation in the region.

It also remains a fact within the industry that there is less clarity and consensus between regulators and the industry on the concrete and relevant 5G future use-cases and the related enablers that need to be in place to achieve the delivery and deployment of 5G services and technologies. Alongside the identification and definition of relevant 5G use cases, key enablers such as data regulation and harmonizing 5G developmental issues (among others) have to be openly discussed and debated.

Another significant realization within the industry has been the growing understanding of a disconnect between global cross-border OTT activities and national regulatory and economic frameworks and commercial activities. This is especially applicable when considering that OTTs want to remain ungoverned whereas operators and (some) governments would like to see the creation of a level-playing field, which requires all digital economy stakeholders to  adhere to the “same rules for the same services”, to ensure that communication services are secure and safe to use, and that data generated is protected and that consumers have a say in the way that their data is used, and that OTT players make direct contributions in the shape of direct investments in building local economies similar to how to telecom operators do.

With the above perspectives, necessary for creating new advantages for the stakeholders, specific discussion points raised by the speakers included following:

• The ICT sector in any given economy is no longer a vertical. All other sectors are dependent on the ICT sector, given ICT remains at the heart of all socio-economic transformational endeavors throughout the regional economies. As a whole, the industry needs to address four core areas: Digital Services and Digital Transformation, Data Regulation, Spectrum Management, and reduction in Taxation and Industry Fees.
• The new digital economy would have a volume of US$ 60 trillion in the next ten years, and this will have an impact on telecom operators, which are redefining their value propositions, rethinking their portfolios, remodeling their core business, and venturing into new growth business. All of these aspects are important to the digital transformation and the operators' central role in driving it.
• Stability and collaboration are critical requirements for the industry, which can be easily impacted with frequent executive replacements at regulators, changes in governments, and other institutional changes that create a sense of uncertainty. Thus for digital progress to continue, a sense of predictability must prevail.
• Disruptive businesses and approaches are taking stakeholders out of our comfort-zone. From the policy, regulatory and business perspectives, they need to be understood as they could be wake-up calls for us to do something different. We are moving to the asymmetrical business models and asymmetrical competition frameworks. Failing to address the ICT sector's requirements on time and without including all relevant stakeholders will impact future planning and the speed and sustainability of investment efforts.
• The digital ecosystem is demanding inclusion of all players and requires management through harmonization of endeavors across all fronts and areas. Maximizing efficiency from all stakeholders to solve digital-economy problems is central to future progress. This essentially means making progress on issues on prompt basis.
• Inter-sector coordination is required among various regulators of a country such as transportation ministry, Health care and other government entities.
• Operators to focus on defining all the use cases for 5G applications before deploying the 5G network. The region's spectrum needs should be understood better and the duration of licenses to operate on a spectrum should be made longer than 15 years for a good return of investment. In the world of data, spectrum requirements merit prioritized collaboration and common positions by operators as well as favorable consideration by regulators.
• Although we should keep the dialogue open at international level about policies around OTT, most of the effective debate can only happen at a national level. New business rules need to be written, including those relating to the regulation of global services that use national telecom networks.
• An important part of setting level playing fields with OTT is to reduce the regulatory burden on telecom operators. However, operators must continue their digital transformation and internal optimization, and should be more innovative in terms of their commercial strategies and define new collaboration efforts with OTT and better monetize big data. Regional national visions, including the New Kuwait vision, require new types of digital services, which will require collaborative innovation.
• Cyber security is already a big challenge, but will become ever more so given our entry into the realms of IoT and AI. There is much need for adopting globalized solutions and practices to counter this challenge as nations are now interdependent.

Speakers of Convergence to Kuwait included

Panel 1:

Strategy& - Chady Smayra – Partner,
SAMENA Council - Dr. Khalid Biyari – Chairman,
CITRA - Waleed Al Qallaf,
"Zain - Scott Gegenheimer - Group CEO – Operations,
GSMA - Ammar Hamadien - Head of Strategic Engagement,
SAMENA Council - Bocar BA – CEO

Panel 2:

AT Kearney  Riyadh Derouiche - Senior Manager
Zain - Dr. Andrew Arowojolu - CRO – Zain
Huawei - Sami Nashwan -Vice President Strategy
STC - Nowaf Almutiri - GM Corporate Analytics & Data Governance
CITRA - Mohammad Altura Chief, Information Technology Sector

Panel 3:

ADL - Andrea Faggiano – Partner
Huawei - Dr. Mohamed Madkour - VP Wireless Network Marketing & Head of Global Demand Generation
Ericsson - Ali Cheema - Government & Industry Relations
Etisalat - Dr. Abdulhadi AbouAlmal - Director / Technology Standardization & Spectrum Mgt
Viva Kuwait - Eng. Zarrar Khan – CTO
Qualcomm - Fabien Migneret -Head of Government Affairs MEA & North Africa 

Panel 4:

Analysys Mason - Johann Adjovi - Principal and Head
CISCO - Mohamed Bakry - Senior Systems Engineering Manager
Numbase - Ayman Jomaa – CEO
TRA Bahrain - Adel Darwish - Head of International Relations
Orange - Atef Helmy - Senior Advisor MEA & Africa

Convergence to Kuwait reiterated the need for preparedness and prompt actions for progressing forward in the new digital ecosystem, which must be made sustainable, and all stakeholders, including governments, regulators, ICT service providers, academia, research community, consumers and the civil society, should coordinate and collaborate together to create new advantages for each other, and for the end-user.

In the case of Kuwait, which has a new regulatory body, CEO of SAMENA Council, Mr. Bocar BA, believes there exists a great opportunity to lead the frontier of new regulatory paradigms by making forward-looking and flexible regulations that are designed from the ground up and which focus on local value-creation, and take a holistic approach across different economic sectors and digital stakeholders. SAMENA Council looks forward to working closely with CITRA and to supporting ICT visions across the GCC region in all ways possible, while representing the needs and issues of telecom operators and relevant industry stakeholders.