​Getting ready for a digital future: Zain Technology Conference focused on innovation and opportunities

​​Zain management and technology partners align to make Zain more agile and ready to capture significant market share from the digital space

Over 600 attendees, 65 exhibitors and 92 breakout technical sessions pack a successful three-day event; ZTC widely covered on social media channels

Istanbul, Manama – 25 November, 2014

Zain Group, a leading telecom innovator in eight markets across the Middle East and Africa, announces the successful completion of its fourth annual Zain Technology Conference (ZTC) that took place in Istanbul, Turkey between November 17–19, 2014.

The theme of this year's conference was, 'Towards an Inspiring Digital Lifestyle Experience', and the company took the opportunity to describe how it planned to achieve this ambition through a series of presentations from Zain Group senior management, discussions with technology partners including main sponsors Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, and 92 dedicated break-out technical sessions.

The three-day event which was Zain's largest to date, attracted over 600 attendees and more than 65 technology partner exhibitors saw keynote addresses and a Q&A session by Zain Group CEO Scott Gegenheimer, Zain Group Chief Technical Officer Hisham Allam and Zain Group Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer Emre Gurkan. 

The key message from Zain executive management was that the company is on a path to transform itself into a digital lifestyle operator, and shall look to achieve this by expanding its operations in the areas of innovation, digital services provision, and services for enterprises. Zain will also continue to actively defend its market leading positions and existing voice and SMS businesses, and optimize its network operations and deployments, all in the aim of being a more agile, relevant digital communications provider.

Scott Gegenheimer said, "This has been the largest ZTC yet, and shows the excitement Zain continues to generate in the regional telecom market. The exchange of ideas and perspectives with our technology partners will help Zain's leadership to benchmark where our operations are and align them with our vision. It's a collaborative approach to get us ready for a digital future."

Furthermore Gegenheimer indicated, "Zain can capture significant market-share from the Smart City and Enterprise business opportunities in the Middle East region, among many other innovative digital related areas, which we shall be actively exploring and looking to play a major role in the coming years."

Hisham Allam commented, "Our aim is to future proof our network in order to become more successful at what we do over the coming years. Zain's transformation efforts incorporate convergence as a transformation driver; network transformation; virtualization; analytics and Big Data; as well as considering organizational implications. We have the tools to achieve a successful transformation, and the partners to help us implement such, so we have every confidence in the future."

On his part, Emre Gurkan said, "ZTC gives us the opportunity to express our digital futuristic vision within the Group, and receive feedback from staff and technology partners alike, which is vital for a successful execution of the strategy. With what we are proposing, we are making a new 'Zain from Zain', and we have the belief to do so. We are ready to meet our full potential as an organization, and it is our intention to be bold and innovate in the things we do."

Leading technology providers from across the globe gave a series of presenting during ZTC2014 across a myriad of topics, with presentations entitled 'Effective Path to 5G', 'Expanding new Businesses from Big Data for Telecom',  'Transforming Schools with Technology', and 'Public and Private Cloud Solutions and Services', among many other topics on the wide-ranging agenda. 

A high level panel discussion was also part of the proceedings at the conference, where Zain representatives were joined by technology partner representatives to discuss the topic, 'Transforming Zain to serve a new Digital Lifestyle Experience'. A key theme that all panelists rose to was the requirement to believe in the future vision and efforts to create a digital services lifestyle for Zain's customers.

In addition to formal meetings, numerous team-building activities were undertaken in which Zain personnel from across all its operations were actively involved in, with the Zain booth being a central point for many social and brainstorming events.  

The importance Zain places in ZTC 2014 saw the company provide intensive social media coverage on all its channels namely Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn as well as providing daily live blogs from the main conference events and keynote sessions that are all available on the corporate website www.zain.com/blogs. Turkish TV and print media were also present reflecting the local huge interest Zain generates across the region and afar.

In appreciation of the support and interest it had received, Zain with the support of its main technology partners, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia ended ZTC2014 with an awards ceremony that recognized the best efforts of both Zain personnel and technology partners alike during the course of the three days. ​​