Zain Group, the leading mobile telecom innovator in eight markets across the Middle East and Africa, has been named the region’s ‘Best Network Functions Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking (NFV/SDN) Solution Provider’ with Zain Saudi Arabia also being singled out as having the ‘Best IoT Application/Service’, at the 5G MENA Awards ceremony held in Dubai, organized by Informa, a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events group.
The annual 5G MENA Awards ceremony is aimed at recognizing the most innovative, secure, and leading solutions, companies and individuals making a difference in the areas of NFV/SDN, LTE, 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) in the MENA region.
Zain Group’s NFV/SDN solution has been implemented in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and is being rolled out to other key markets. It was judged to be the best among those from operators making a demonstrable impact in facilitating the development of NFV/SDN over the last year. Nominees for the category were required to showcase that they had devised an innovative NFV proof of concept or introduced a new service that would help revolutionize the market, lower barriers and help make technology virtualization a reality.
Additionally, Zain Saudi Arabia was also singled out as having the ‘Best IoT Application/Service’, in a category recognizing innovative IoT devices, products, applications, services, or solutions that address a specific challenge, or enable a specific outcome that was not previously achievable.
Commenting on the accolade at the 5G MENA Awards, Scott Gegenheimer, Zain Group CEO-Operations said, “Innovation in the quest to offer superior customer experience lies at the heart of what we do, and we are grateful to have our efforts recognized in this way. We shall continue in our endeavors to introduce cutting-edge technologies into the region, and leverage our networks to provide the highest quality customer service in the most efficient manner possible.”
Over the last two years, Zain has been working with leading global technology solutions provider in developing its NFV/SDN solution and IoT Application Service.
Early 2015, Zain undertook the Middle East’s first demonstration proof of concept for NFV with the objective to demonstrate cloud use cases that give Zain a faster time-to-market, offer high-quality user experiences and easily deploy ICT services such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE), Machine to Machine (M2M), Rich Communication Services (RCS) and enterprise solutions. Furthermore, Zain tested the utilization of power of virtualized network technologies to deliver more dynamic, flexible, and efficient mobile services to its customers, combining traditional telecommunications hardware with contemporary cloud-based and software-driven IT solutions.