Bex-DR™ achieves AWS Qualified Software status

Bexprt’s automated Disaster Recovery testing solution has been awarded this coveted status, as part of completing the cloud provider’s Foundational Technical Review program.

The AWS Qualified Software status confirms a company’s ability to create secure, innovative, and scalable software applications that take advantage of cloud capabilities. Completion of the cloud provider’s Foundational Technical Review program follows rigorous assessment and confirms the Partner has adopted AWS technical and security best practices specific to their software or solution.

The award of Qualified Software status for Bex-DR™ follows swiftly in the footsteps of achieving the AWS Resilience Services Competency and confirms Bexprt’s experience and expertise in this specialization.

The ability for cloud-based systems to resist or recover from disruptions, including those related to infrastructure, dependent services, misconfigurations, and transient network issues – known as ‘Cloud Resilience’ – plays a critical role in an organization’s broader business resilience strategy. The AWS Resilience Competency is awarded, after robust independent third-party assessment, to experienced AWS Partners with a proven level of technical capability in specialised Cloud Resilience and Disaster Recovery, an auditable track record of delivering successful commercial Resilience solutions to clients, and staff who have passed specialised professional AWS exams.

Thank you

With thanks to Karin James, AWS Partner Development Specialist, DR & Resilience Services, WW, Stuart Lupton, Senior Specialist Solutions Architect, Disaster Recovery, Andrew Parker, AWS Senior Customer Solutions Manager, and Alaa Eddin Kilani, AWS Senior Partner Management Solution Architect, and the AWS Partner team for their support and guidance.

LinkedIn 7th August 2024

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Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

Discover more about Bexprt’s automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

Bexprt honoured with a King’s Award for Enterprise

6th May 2024 ◦ Wokingham, The Royal County of Berkshire ◦ UK-based technology company Bexprt has been honoured with a King’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade.

The Awards are the most prestigious awards for UK businesses, recognising and celebrating business excellence across the UK. On the recommendation of the UK Prime Minister, and approved by His Majesty The King, they are awarded to businesses which have demonstrated outstanding success in their respective fields of innovation, international trade, sustainable development and promoting opportunity through social mobility.

“I am absolutely thrilled that Bexprt has been selected for this prestigious Award. We are a specialised, dedicated team, focused on using our expertise to deliver cloud-based solutions to solve our clients’ problems and digitally transform their businesses. To receive this accolade is a huge honour for any company, and I am truly astonished and humbled that we have achieved this together,” shared Mo Hamdy, Founder & CEO of Bexprt.

“I am grateful to the Bexprt team for believing in our mission, and thankful to our strategic partners for sharing the journey with us, and to our beloved customers who continue to show their trust in our capabilities and expertise.”

Founded in 2018, Bexprt is an independent, privately owned company, headquartered in Wokingham, UK, with a wholly owned subsidiary and regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The business delivers cloud services to clients across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North America, and today employs over 30 technology experts globally. Specialising in Advanced Analytics, Generative-AI, Resilience & Telco Cloud, Bexprt has been exporting since day one, and 90% of their revenues are from international trade – an exceptionally high proportion.

Photo. left to right: Ahmad Okasha, Director of Telecom Services, Gwen Edwards, CMO, and Mahmoud ElZayet, CTO, at Bexprt UK HQ in Winnersh Triangle Business Park.

The King’s Awards for Enterprise, previously known as The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise, were renamed last year to reflect His Majesty The King’s desire to continue the legacy of HM Queen Elizabeth II by recognising outstanding UK businesses. The Award programme, now in its 58th year, is the most prestigious business award in the country, with successful companies able to use the esteemed King’s Awards Emblem for the next five years.

This year, Bexprt is one of 252 organisations nationally to be recognised with a prestigious King’s Award for Enterprise, and one of just 161 UK companies to receive the award for International Trade. Specifically, Bexprt has received the The King’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade, for Outstanding Short Term Growth in Overseas Sales.

Discover more

  • Please get in touch if you would like to know more: hello@bexprt.com including media enquiries.
  • Applications for The King’s Awards for Enterprise 2025 open on His Majesty The King’s Coronation, 6th May 2024. For more information, visit https://www.gov.uk/kings-awards-for-enterprise.
  • Official announcements from The King’s Awards for Enterprise: UK Government Press Release, the full list of Awardees across the four categories can be found in the London Gazette Issue 64386, and steel also the official post on LinkedIn.
  • Background information about the selection and due diligence process. As Nichola Bruno, Head of The King’s Awards For Enterprise Office wrote on LinkedIn, 6 May 2024, “Congratulations to the 2024 recipients of The King’s Awards for Enterprise. It takes a lot to achieve this award. The recipients have not only demonstrated outstanding commercial performance but they are doing business the right way: looking after their workforce, community and the environment. The recipients have been assessed by experts, judged by senior leaders from industry, academia and the third sector. They have passed robust due diligence checks and have been approved by the PM and His Majesty The King. The recipients are some of the best UK businesses, enshrining the principles of quality and excellence.”
  • Press coverage of this Bexprt story: Zawya, Wokingham Today, The Business Magazine, My Wokingham.
  • 11th July 2024: Bexprt CEO Mo Hamdy attends Royal Reception at Windsor Castle for King’s Award for Enterprise Award recipients.

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner.

Bexprt & Symphonica: accelerating AI-driven no-code OSS deployment for telcos over the cloud

Bexprt and Symphonica confirm their partnership to accelerate the efficient delivery of the Symphonica AI-driven, no-code OSS platform to CSPs and MNOs seeking to optimize their digital transformation over the AWS cloud.

Symphonica enables forward-looking telecom companies to move their OSS to the cloud, and launch new services immediately, via their AI-driven no-code OSS, cloud-native orchestration, activation and provisioning platform.

Bexprt – an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and AWS Reseller – provides customised and efficient design, implementation, professional services and managed services options for Symphonica, as part of their AWS for Telecom capabilities, addressing clients’ specific use cases and ambitions.

The new collaboration and partnership between Symphonica and Bexprt, will extend the footprint of Symphonica across EMEA, leveraging Bexprt’s regional presence, and Day 1 / Day 2 services for the ISV application and AWS infrastructure.

Additionally, Bexprt’s telco cloud expertise, AWS Reseller status, plus Professional and Managed Services capabilities, ensures CSPs can benefit from Symphonica wherever they are in their cloud journey.

Symphonica, and Bexprt’s Professional Services for Symphonica, are available now via AWS Marketplace, or directly from the the partners.

More about Symphonica
Symphonica, an acclaimed award-winning Service Orchestration and Provisioning platform, is the pioneering truly cloud-native, AI-driven, end-to-end no-code OSS that is telco-grade proven. It uniquely automates the complete lifecycle of telecom services across diverse networks and technology domains.

Designed for those seeking to enhance agility through automation, modernize operations, reduce costs, and transition towards a fully autonomous network, Symphonica delivers a comprehensive, standards-based solution for next-generation telecom needs.

AWS and their partners: together transforming telecom

Telcos across the world are leveraging cloud to transform their networks, taking advantage of the cloud’s economics, scale, and agility. This allows them to focus on what’s most important — transforming telcos core networks, monetizing their investments, digitizing industries, reimagining the consumer experience, and increasing resilience and security. AWS are raising the bar on what’s possible for CSPs. Harnessing AWS’ robust, mature, proven platform, AWS and their partners are delivering innovative use cases that are digitizing industries, transforming telcos, and reimagining the consumer experience. With the power of AWS’ cloud infrastructure that’s architected to be flexible and secure, together we can take your business to the next level.

Discover more

Please get in touch if you would like to know more, or start an informal conversation,

About the companies

About Symphonica

Symphonica is the award-winning next-generation service orchestration and provisioning platform of choice for the forward-looking, AI-first, cloud-first telecom operators. It is the first truly cloud-native, AI-driven, end-to-end no-code OSS that is telco-grade proven. It uniquely automates the complete lifecycle of telecom services across diverse networks and technology domains. Designed for those seeking to enhance agility through automation, modernize operations, reduce costs, and transition towards a fully autonomous network, Symphonica delivers a comprehensive, standards-based solution for next-generation telecom needs. Learn more at Symphonica.com

About Bexprt

Bexprt enables clients to achieve their business goals and digital transformation ambitions, over the cloud. They specialize in Advanced Analytics, Resilience, Generative-AI and Telco Cloud. With an extensive background in the telecom sector, they apply their cloud expertise to address client use cases, across all business sectors, in EMEA and North America.

UK HQ & Regional Office in Riyadh ◦ UK Government Award for Digital Exports 2023

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

Discover more about Bexprt’s automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

AWS Summit London 2024: key takeaways

Bexprt Cloud Consultant, Nour Samir, shares his thoughts.

The AWS Summit in London is part of a series of global AWS events, that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Second only to AWS re:Invent in scale, this year the AWS Summit London hosted 16k people, free of charge, and delivered keynotes, technical breakout sessions, demonstrations, interactive workshops, labs, and team challenges, with an agenda running to 25+ pages, delivered by AWS leaders, experts, partners, and customers, plus a large exhibition of partners and AWS capabilities, food and drink for all, and space to play. The preceding day, the AWS Partner Summit provided background briefings and deep dives for AWS Partners.

Bexprt is sponsoring AWS Summit Dubai, 29th May 2024 – we hope to see you there!

“Last week I attended the AWS Partner Summit and the AWS Summit in London – a fantastic couple of days, learning about bringing the power of AI to businesses through AWS services such as AWS Bedrock and Amazon Q. The sessions were to the point, and left me inspired about the transformative power of AI in today’s business landscape. With AWS services and new features announced at the summit, this will accelerate go-to-market capabilities with GenAI features.”

“Good data = good AI”

“One of the key takeaways from the event was the importance of data strategy, which leads to AI strategy. The more quality data you have, and the better organized it is, the higher the performance you can achieve with AI. This insight highlighted the importance of starting strong, by using lots of organized and structured data before jumping into AI.

Throughout the AWS events, AWS customers – including Philip Belamant, Co-Founder and CEO of Zilch, Pieter Jordaan, CIO at Tui, and many more including Lonely Planet and Adobe – spoke and shared different use cases and described their customer success stories, across diverse industries and businesses. It was truly inspiring to witness customers taking to the stage and discussing how AWS services accelerated their growth and enabled them to scale. These stories demonstrated the real-world impact of integrating AI into business processes.

The integration of AI into businesses is no longer a distant dream. By selecting the right use case that aligns with your business goals, you can seamlessly integrate AI to facilitate growth and scalability. It is important not to rush to integrate, or jump straight to using Gen AI in your business – take your time to understand your specific use case and how this integration will benefit your business and customers/users.

AWS’ customer obsession and dedication to empower customers with the right resources and guidance was shown time and again at the AWS Summits. They offer a wealth of reference and training materials including blog posts, communities, channels and free resources to help customers kickstart their AI initiatives on the right track.”

Key announcements from Tanuja Randery, AWS Managing Director, EMEA, included the availability of,

“Let’s build what’s next”

“Moreover, the AWS Partner Summit and AWS Summit showed an environment of collaboration and knowledge-sharing. I enjoyed engaging in discussions with attendees from different backgrounds and industries about their businesses and their next steps to get started with Gen AI.

Also, if you are still not running your workload on AWS cloud, there were insightful sessions about best practices to migrate to AWS and how to build a highly secure, scalable and performant serverless application on AWS following the best practices and architectures.

With Gen AI and AWS services you can unlock the potential of businesses like never before! I believe, just like when the internet first came around, this Gen AI era is a game-changer.”

Nour Samir ◦ Cloud Consultant, Bexprt

Above, at the end of a long packed day at AWS Summit London, the Bexprt team with the AWS Resilience Leads. Left to right: Mo Hamdy Bexprt Founder & CEO, Gwen Edwards Bexprt CMO, Mahmoud ElZayet Bexprt CTO, Mohamed El-Kerdany Bexprt Head of Development, Karin James AWS Partner Development Specialist, DR & Resilience Services, WW, Ashutosh Misra AWS WW Head APN Resilience, Nour Samir Bexprt Cloud Consultant, and Andrew Parker AWS Senior Customer Solutions Manager for Marsh McLennan.

Please get in touch if you would like to know more, we would be very happy to arrange time for an informal conversation.

  • hello@bexprt.com
  • or call / Whats App Ghaith Hamza, Business Development Manager, in English or Arabic +966569986970

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

Generative AI: where do I start?

Bexprt CTO, Mahmoud ElZayet, shares insights and updates from the AWS Summit in London this week.

“During the last decade, as a cloud leader, AWS has successfully demonstrated and enabled cloud to become the new normal. Cloud adoption became a question of when, and how, not if.

If asked to share just one strong vibe from the wonderful AWS London Summit 2024: generative AI has already pushed its way to become the new normal. These are not AWS’ words, nor mine. It’s how all sessions, conversations and content were centred around what has been achieved with GenAI, how to prepare data for GenAI, and what is the art of possible in this domain.

AWS has already evolved over the years as a company sharply focused on solutions, industries, and delivering rapid business value. The approach with GenAI is no different. The customer success stories, business achievements and new service announcements made at the AWS Summit in London this week were a true demonstration of that.

But there’s one big side effect here! You can’t mistake the anxiety or the fear of missing out around the masses who still have not adopted or planned their use of GenAI. You can’t even miss some scepticism that this is just another overhyped technology.

Here at Bexprt, having worked with customers on the ground applying GenAI to their commercial use cases, and looking back at this insightful summit, these are the takeaway points and calls for action that I suggest to overcome any remaining fear or scepticism,

  1. GenAI success stories, and the ability to add business value are published and described publicly at conferences now, across different customer sizes and industries. Keep an eye on stories in relevant industries for use cases like yours.
  2. All GenAI success stories presented at the AWS Summit in London this week were based on clearly identifying the problems to be solved and weighing whether GenAI could help solve. Don’t start from the technology and it’s potential. Start with your problem statement and business goals. GenAI is not a standalone technology. It is increasingly integrated into applications, and is just another – albeit very powerful – capability to utilise to suggest solutions for your business needs.
  3. GenAI is not a silver bullet or an answer to all business problems and it will never be. Yet, it has proven it has a place in every department, profession, or industry even if partially or as an assistant. Start shaping your GenAI strategy, your data readiness, your team up-skilling, your AI policies (are there regulatory constraints your business must comply with?), and create a safe environment for your teams to start small and find areas for adding quick business value while building muscles in the domain.

And lastly, the Bexprt team are using GenAI in client projects, and for our own internal developments. We have a number of clients utilising GenAI commercially today – for example in the building management sector for data classification, and in the public sector using sentiment analysis of client’s online comments. Thanks to early access to AWS Bedrock, our own solution, Bextract, has utilised GenAI since launch.”

Mahmoud ElZayet, Bexprt CTO.

Please get in touch if you would like to know more, we would be very happy to arrange time for an informal conversation.

  • hello@bexprt.com
  • or call / Whats App Ghaith Hamza, Business Development Manager, in English or Arabic +966569986970

AWS ExecLeaders Summit 2024, London – Anthropic – “Customers who wait for new breakthroughs and capabilities may already be 4-8 months behind”

AWS Summit London 2024 – Tanuja Randery, VP & MD EMEA AWS sharing the latest GenAI and AI updates and announcements.

AWS Summit London 2024 – Francessca Vasquez, VP Professional Services & GenAI Innovation Centre, AWS shared inspiring client success stories.

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

Discover more about Bexprt’s automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

Bexprt CMO invited to become UK Export Champion

Congratulations to Bexprt CMO Gwen Edwards on being invited to become an Export Champion for Southern England, and join the Department for Business and Trade Export Champions programme, a key element of the UK Government’s Export Strategy.

“I’m humbled to have been nominated, and looking forward to helping other local businesses on their export journey, where I can, and excited to work with the Export Champion team to amplify the work of the DBT, and enhance UK exports. Bexprt has been exporting since Day 1, and 90% of our revenues are digital exports.”

From the Department of Business & Trade:DBT’s Export Champion programme recognises leading exporters, who are willing to share their expertise and support SMEs that are aspiring to begin trading overseas or enter new international markets – with the Champions experiences providing unique insights and peer-to-peer support that businesses are seeking.”
🌍 Take your business to the world https://www.great.gov.uk/

Discover more

Please get in touch if you would like to know more, or start an informal conversation,

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

Discover more about Bexprt’s automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

Discover more about migrating to AWS

What are the business drivers and benefits of migrating to the cloud?

Why should cloud resilience be one of your top goals in 2024?

Wherever you are in your cloud journey, we can help!

Discover more about migrating to AWS: download this free eBook for immediate background information,

Please get in touch if you would like to know more, we would be very happy to arrange time for an informal conversation,

  • hello@bexprt.com
  • or call / Whats App Ghaith Hamza, Business Development Manager, in English or Arabic +966569986970

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

Discover more about Bexprt’s automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

Has the public cloud failed to crack telecom?

Bexprt CEO and Founder Mo Hamdy responds to the recent Light Reading article by Iain Morris, and suggests a pathway for the big beasts in the tech jungle.

“The public cloud has failed to crack telecom” – a provocative article headline, that deserves a more nuanced response! Sharing some thoughts, and I welcome yours!

Having worked with CSPs across 90 countries over the past 20 years, and working now on the other side of the table with hyperscalers on Gen AI and resilience projects, my perception is that reality is some where in between.

CSPs and hyperscalers are two beasts in the same jungle, with different attitudes, tactics and motivations.

For CSPs the challenge is always trying to “differentiate” by being a very smart pipe and a “beyond connectivity provider”. Hyperscalers see the telco industry as a very appealing infrastructure-intense sector, with significant opportunity to move their infrastructure to the public cloud – assuming data solvency is not the issue now. As hyperscalers have their own telco experts, they often assume everything will be migrated smoothly and just work fine!

I firmly believe that adding the hyperscaler’s capabilities to that of the CSPs will bring both optimizing-synergy plus innovation, and will be a great mix that the world has yet to realise the value from. However, there is a journey in the jungle here that both beasts need to talk together, sharing the benefits and risk!

I boldly suggest,

📍CSPs: be open minded when considering cloud technologies! Hyper-scalers are not a passing trend or something for big doom-laden cumbersome projects, or limited to just a hosting platform for workloads. They are not a “project” to be passed to the IT department. For those CSPs taking the“DIY cloud” route: absolute control and security are tempting concepts, but the resources the hyperscalers have in that field will always be far greater, and that’s without mentioning the access to the billions of dollars on innovation all hyperscalers make; DIY is a cul-de-sac to step out of swiftly.

📍Hyperscalers: understand the business models of the CSPs, and appreciate that they are beautiful elephants with technical complexity, multiple-layers of legacy technical and commercial constraints, interwoven decision-making and financial and regulatory responsibility processes, and huge infrastructure costs. Focus on bringing value-driven use cases with a clear value proposition, and think about the quick wins to start small with an experimental mindset to help CSPs realise the value, and to build trust that they will have profitable projects!

I suggest that CSPs should start the journey with hyperscalers in phases: explore, build trust, commit.

  1. Exploration: as with any enterprise with complex supporting functions, start exploring opportunities in the supply chain, finance and accounting software, warehouses, and start migration projects for these domains. DO NOT TO TOUCH THE NETWORK!
  2. Building trust: Internal and external use cases* which assist the CSPs to achieve one of these five strategic goals: revenue generation, cost optimisation, operational efficiency, enhanced customer experience, and fast time to market, whilst again NOT TOUCHING THE NETWORK!
  3. Commitment: now trust has been established between the CSP and hyperscaler, and there is a solid understanding of the hyperscaler’s capabilities, and the two teams talk the same language, now they are ready to start moving some critical workloads like Core, Radio, OSS/BSS with confidence.

So has “the public cloud failed to crack telecom”? I suggest that more accurately, public cloud has yet to reveal its true potential with telecom. This journey, to reach the point of optimising the network together, will take months if not years of alignment and working together, but to be successful, it must start with a solid base.

Lastly, hyperscalers should never start their work with CSPs with shift and lift projects. Instead, focus on use cases, real issues, where data and advanced analytics can reveal nuanced and novel new approaches, for internal and external use. Demonstrate skill, value, impact on customer experience, build trust, and from there, the journey together will have far greater possibilities.

*I will write another blog soon about the practical use cases for the public cloud, internally and externally for CSPs.

This article was first published on LinkedIn, 23rd March 2024.

📧 hello@bexprt.com

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner

Specializing in Advanced Analytics, Generative-AI, Resilience & Telco Cloud.

image credit: Robert Bye

Want to discover more about AWS Outposts?

Updated 9th April 2024.

What is “AWS Outposts”?

AWS Outposts is a family of fully managed solutions that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, and migration of applications with local system interdependencies. Outposts can also help meet data residency requirements. Outposts is available in a variety of form factors, from 1U and 2U Outposts servers to 42U Outposts racks, and multiple rack deployments.

Use cases

The Bexprt team are ready to support you throughout your AWS Outposts journey, working with you to address the most relevant use cases for your business. Common AWS Outputs use cases include disaster recovery (DR), backup & restore, GPUs for LLM production, test & dev, hybrid cloud and more!

  • Low latency compute
    • Deliver high-quality gaming experiences for interactive applications, like real-time multiplayer games, to players all over the world. When the nearest public cloud servers are not close enough to meet single-digit millisecond latency requirements, AWS Outposts can help run business applications where you need them for manufacturing execution systems (MES), high-frequency trading, or medical diagnostics.
  • Data residency
    • Data sometimes needs to remain in a particular country, state, or municipality for regulatory, contractual, or information security reasons. This is often the case with financial services, healthcare, oil and gas, and other highly regulated industries. With AWS Outposts, you can control where your workloads run and where your data resides, with low-friction movement between cloud and edge locations to easily adapt to regulatory changes.
  • Migration & modernization
    • Legacy on-premises applications often have latency-sensitive system dependencies, making them difficult to migrate. AWS Outposts allows you to segment migrations into smaller pieces on premises, maintaining latency sensitive connectivity between application components until you are ready to migrate.
  • Local data processing
    • Process data locally for use cases such as data lakes and machine learning (ML) model training, or set up a consistent hybrid architecture to process local, difficult-to-migrate data sets with cost, size, or bandwidth constraints and move data to the cloud for long-term archival.

If Outposts is available in your country, you can use AWS services to run your workloads and data in country in your on-premises facilities and connect to your nearest AWS Region for management and operations.

Deep dive and discover more about the AWS Outposts family, and AWS Global Infrastructure.

AWS Outposts & Saudi Arabia

Two recent announcements from AWS mark the arrival of AWS Outposts to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

How can you utilize AWS Outposts?

Typically used by the Financial or Public Sectors, discover more about AWS Outposts and download this free eBook for immediate background information.

Want to know more about AWS Outposts?

Please get in touch if you would like to know more, or start an informal conversation,

  • hello@bexprt.com
  • or call / Whats App Ghaith Hamza, Business Development Manager, in English or Arabic +966569986970

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

Discover more about Bexprt’s automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

Bexprt achieves the specialized AWS Resilience Competency milestone

UK-headquartered technology company, Bexprt, announced today that it has joined a small group of global AWS Partners to have reached the high bar required for the AWS Resilience Competency.

The ability for cloud-based systems to resist or recover from disruptions, including those related to infrastructure, dependent services, misconfigurations, and transient network issues – known as ‘Cloud Resilience’ – plays a critical role in an organization’s broader business resilience strategy. The AWS Resilience Competency is awarded, after robust independent third-party assessment, to experienced AWS Partners with a proven level of technical capability in specialised Cloud Resilience and Disaster Recovery, an auditable track record of delivering successful commercial Resilience solutions to clients, and staff who have passed specialised professional AWS exams.

““The speed at which Bexprt has achieved the AWS Resilience Competency, and the quality of the commercial projects we have already delivered in this field for some of AWS’ largest clients globally is remarkable. AWS Resilience Competency Partners provide tailored guidance and solutions to achieve the highest system uptime needs, and we’re delighted to join the small group of AWS Partners to have achieved this prestigious AWS accolade,” Mo Hamdy, Bexprt Founder & CEO.

“To enhance the resilience capabilities we offer to AWS clients, focussing on clients’ needs, we have developed an automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR, which provides continuous reporting and compliance testing on the readiness of replicated servers for recovery. Commercially available, Bex-DR provides immediate benefits to AWS customers, and I am excited to see the new features the Bexprt development team will bring to market next.”

Mahmoud ElZayet, Bexprt Director of Cloud, “I’m thrilled that Bexprt’s Resilience capabilities, combined with our Bex-DR solution, have been formally recognised by AWS. Receiving the distinguished AWS Resilience Competency is real recognition of the technical prowess and specialized capabilities of the Bexprt team, and I’m proud of what we have achieved together”

From AWS: Achieving the AWS Resilience Competency differentiates Bexprt as an AWS Partner that has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success supporting customers’ resilience goals. Bexprt is equipped to handle resilience related application challenges, especially as expectations from customers shift towards an ‘always on, always available’ mindset. It’s important for organizations to expect and plan for system failures, and design workloads to recover from failure in a way that minimally impacts their end users. Additionally, when onboarding critical workloads to the cloud, such as in the finance sector for online banking, stock-trading, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) or online sales platforms, higher uptime requirements have become a minimal requirement. AWS Resilience Competency Partner Bexprt provides professional consulting and engineering services that are validated by AWS experts in the Resilience Services category. This standardized approach allows customers to achieve their resilience goals in the cloud with the expert assistance of AWS Resilience Competency Partners.

Bexprt opened its Regional Office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in December 2023, and in doing so, Bexprt took a decisive move into public cloud resilience and AI, and enhanced the local support for its existing telecom and enterprise clients in the region. With significant investment and dedication, the team has achieved many accolades in the last 12 months, including AWS Reseller in 8 countries for the Commercial and Public Sectors, AWS Advanced Partner Tier Status, as well as a UK Government Export Award.

Thank you

With thanks to Karin James, AWS Partner Development Specialist, DR & Resilience Services, WW, and the AWS Partner team for their support and guidance.

LinkedIn 21st March 2024.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider for the Public & Commercial Sectors in 8 countries* (AWS Reseller), an Amazon RDS Delivery Partner, and Resilience Services Competency Partner.

Find Bexprt’s AWS Professional Services on AWS Marketplace.

Discover more about Bexprt’s automated DR testing solution, Bex-DR.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

LEAP 2024 reflections

LEAP in Riyadh, “the world’s most attended tech event”, saw record-breaking numbers – 215k attendees, $13.4 billion investment announcements, and the AWS announcement of a new Saudi Arabia Infrastructure Region.

Bexprt CEO and Founder Mo Hamdy shares his reflections on LEAP 2024.

Looking back to LEAP 2023 when we started to execute towards our plan, taking a leap of faith and investing locally by opening Bexprt regional office in Saudi, hiring local talents to serve ME region.

One year forward, from LEAP-to-LEAP, Bexprt in Saudi is now a key market player in the Cloud Solutions and Services domain, serving tens of customers with our Gen-AI, IDP and automated DR testing solutions, Professional & Managed Services with AWS Reseller Service for 7 countries across both Commercial and Public Sectors, and with a strategic Collaboration Partnership with AWS resulting to strong market presence.

I would like to thank all our customers and partners who believed in our team, solutions, relationship, and the value we brought to the Kingdom. Also, the UK Government Department for Business and Trade who gave us a smooth landing to the Kingdom from Day 1, as well as the talented AWS team!

During LEAP24 this year we have made plenty of announcements, including new in-house product launches, customers’ award signing ceremonies, and strategic collaborations.

Having the AWS Local Region announcement during LEAP, and their $5.4 Mio investment, and offering AWS Outputs has set Bexprt in a unique position for growth over the next 12 months, supporting Public and Commercial Sectors with more Gen-AI driven and Resilience use cases, and helping our clients to generate more revenue, optimize costs, operate more efficiently and enhance customer experience!

I am sure we will come back for LEAP next year iA celebrating more projects with more market growth, contributing to the Saudi Vision 2030, and with even more customers who trust our capabilities and love working with us!

Above all, I would like to thank the lovely Bexprt local and regional teams who worked day and night to make such success happen!

We are here to stay, we are here to contribute, we are here to grow!

WE ARE BEXPRT!

Find more videos from the Bexprt team at LEAP24 on LinkedIn,

📧 hello@bexprt.com

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner

Specializing in Advanced Analytics, Generative-AI, Resilience & Telco Cloud.

Bexprt celebrates new AWS Saudi Arabia Region announcement

Bexprt celebrates the new AWS Saudi Arabia Region. What does that mean for the Saudi market? Mo Hamdy, Bexprt Founder & CEO shares his thoughts on this, and updates on Bexprt’s support for AWS Outposts.

At LEAP in Riyadh today Bexprt celebrated the AWS announcement of a new Saudi Arabia Region launch. In a very significant move for cloud capabilities in the region, AWS’ announcement today will deliver lower latency, higher throughput and data sovereignty for AWS customers, and is especially important for organizations handling very sensitive personal or financial data to comply with local residency regulations.

“This massive strategic investment from AWS will bring considerable benefits to both commercial and public sectors in the Kingdom, our clients, particularly to those in the telecom, financial services and Public Sectors. This bold move from AWS is strategically important to all organizations in the Kingdom using, or considering using AWS. I’m excited, that as the leading AWS Partner in Saudi Arabia, Bexprt will enable AWS customers to benefit from the new AWS Region when it goes live, and support AWS Outposts adoption before then.”

Mo Hamdy, Bexprt Founder & CEO

The new AWS Saudi Arabia Region – with a long-term investment by AWS of $5.3 billion dollar – will create hundreds of local jobs in Riyadh.

Before then, AWS Outposts (check out the AWS | Bexprt eBook to discover more) will enable clients to have AWS infrastructure and services on-premises, as an AWS fully managed service, for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Fully configurable to meet the client’s exacting capacity and security demands, AWS Outposts also supports migration to the AWS Region as soon as available.

The Bexprt team is exhibiting at LEAP for the second year running, with AWS in Hall 1A C60 and the UK Pavilion in Hall 2 G30.

How can Bexprt help you?

If your organization needs assistance to digitally transform your processes, or migrate to the cloud, please get in touch. We’re always happy to have an informal exploratory conversation.  hello@bexprt.com 

Bexprt Advisory Board Appointments

Announcing the appointment of Richard Lee and Carole Hewitson as new Non-Executive Members of the Bexprt Advisory Board.

Mo Hamdy, Bexprt Founder & CEO shares his thoughts.

“As we scale up to the next phase of our strategic expansion, I am delighted to share that Richard and Carole are appointed Non-Executive Members of the Bexprt Advisory Board.

Richard Lee is an accomplished and transformative business leader, with significant experience as a CEO, and broad foreign market experience in the public and private sectors; notably, he led Creativity Software through to successful acquisition in 2022. His expertise, wisdom and strategic insights will be invaluable to me and the leadership team here at Bexprt.

Carole Hewitson brings a wealth of experience and expertise in employee engagement, productivity enhancement, and guiding organizations from successful small enterprises to established medium-sized enterprises. Her strategic insights, specialist knowledge, and valuable advice will play a crucial role in steering Bexprt towards new heights, and enhancing our environment for innovation and excellence.

We’re looking forward to working together with Richard and Carole, to build a strong team and accelerate growth, to ensure we achieve our ambitions.”

Mo Hamdy, Bexprt Founder & CEO

How can Bexprt help you?

The Bexprt team will be attending MWC in Barcelona at the end of February, and LEAP in Riyadh, during the first week of March 2024. If you would like to arrange to meet with the Bexprt team there, please get in touch hello@bexprt.com

If you would like to know more about the “Ask Bexprt” informal, in-person roundtable events we hold, and other events we run, please get in touch or check out the Events page.

If your organization needs assistance to digitally transform your processes, or migrate to the cloud, please get in touch. We’re always happy to have an informal exploratory conversation.  hello@bexprt.com 

Why should cloud resilience be your top goal for 2024?

Bexprt Director of Cloud, Mahmoud ElZayet, shares insights and updates on cloud resilience, and why every organization should be considering it now.

Resilience and business continuity have always been critical goals for organizations. In Cloud Computing, AWS was one of the early advocates to design for failure: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has the famous quote: “Everything fails, all the time”. Last November, in a mark of how significant these professional skills are now, AWS added the Resilience Competency for Partners to its portfolio. So, why is cloud resilience still such a hot topic today, and why should it be a key focus for organizations in 2024? 

With remote and distributed teams, iterative development and growing data, businesses are prone to more disruptions in systems and applications. Add to this the new standard of everything being online, a few taps away, and just-in-time, consumers have a far higher level of expectations and are less tolerant of system unavailability. While resilience is mostly associated with highly available systems and readiness for disaster recovery, it has evolved as a mindset: it’s how systems are designed, built and managed.

In 2023, Bexprt has increasingly seen customers pro-actively seeking to leverage cloud resilience mechanisms, and this was the case whether their source or original systems were in AWS or on-premises.

Bexprt thrives to continue focusing and supporting customers through their resilience-building journey: Bexprt – Specialities – Resilience.

Whether you are seeking to enhance security, achieve compliance, cost optimization, or improve business continuity, cloud resilience is your way forward. The Bexprt team has a vast experience in this domain, and as an AWS Reseller, we can provide our clients with various AWS incentives, discounts and services – if you are interested in launching your resilience journey, reach out and let’s start a conversation.

Mahmoud El Zayet, Bexprt Director of Cloud BU

How can Bexprt help you?

The Bexprt team will be attending LEAP in Riyadh, during the first week of March 2024. If you would like to arrange to meet with the Bexprt team there, please get in touch hello@bexprt.com

If you would like to know more about the “Ask Bexprt” informal, in-person roundtable events we hold, and other events we run, please get in touch or check out the Events page.

If your organization needs assistance to digitally transform your processes, or migrate to the cloud, please get in touch. We’re always happy to have an informal exploratory conversation.  hello@bexprt.com 

Image credit: Joel Filipe

Case Study: Turning data into actionable insights for Tier 1 MNO in Gulf Region

Bexprt delivers customized, automated analysis for Saudi Arabian-based tier-one mobile network operator.

Executive summary

This Tier 1 mobile network operator in the Gulf Region was manually assessing trends in the huge amount of operational data generated by the Session Border Controller in their network, and could only access historical data for the previous seven days. This made the assessment of KPIs and trends very time-consuming, variable according to staff member, and impossible to assess seasonal or annual variations.

Utilizing Ribbon Analytics’ Data Capture Engine, SAP ASE (Sybase DB Adaptive Server Enterprise), and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence, Bexprt delivered a 300%+ increase in data available for analysis, increasing data availability from 7 days to 30, plus implemented a series of bespoke KPI automated dashboards aligned with the client’s needs.

About the client

Part of the largest mobile network group in the Gulf Region, this project was undertaken for their tier-one network in Saudi Arabia.

The challenge & opportunity

When assessing KPIs for the Session Border Controllers layer, the customer had limited analytics capability,

  • Unable to assess separate trends for each KPI
  • Could only manually detect and assess any abnormal changes
  • Only able to retain KPI data for 7 days, due to the size of the CDR (Call Detailed Records) files.

Below: example of the original “KPIs” available, for one day, before the project started.

The solution & services used

The Bexprt team worked closely with the customer to fully understand their pain points, use cases and future ambitions. We studied the key fields required from the CDRs, so that the data could be correctly parsed.

Having assessed and agreed the requirements with the client, the Bexprt team proposed an automated solution which,

The results & benefits

The proposed architecture was implemented, and enabled the team to,

  • Capture the CDRs and start the parsing process – and focus only on the required fields. This helped to minimize the size of the CDRs, and improve the data retention period by 328%, from 7 to 30 days.
  • Create a bespoke automated dashboard for each individual SIP response message. This simplified the process for the customer’s NOC teams, and ensured they could easily monitor and identify changes in trends.

Below: an example of an automated KPI dashboard delivered as part of the project.

How can Bexprt help you?

The Bexprt team will be attending GSMA Mobile World Congress 2024. If you would like to arrange to meet with Ahmad Okasha, Bexprt Director of Telecom Services, please get in touch hello@bexprt.com

If you would like to know more about the “Ask Bexprt” informal, in-person roundtable events we hold, and other events we run, please get in touch or check out the Events page.

If your organization needs assistance to digitally transform your processes, or migrate to the cloud, get in touch. We’re always happy to have an informal exploratory conversation.  hello@bexprt.com 

Cover image: Shutterstock, licensed

Bexprt achieves AWS UK & Ireland Public Sector Solution Provider Partner status

Bexprt is now an AWS Public Sector Solution Provider in the UK and Ireland, plus a further six countries in the Middle East Region. This is in addition to our existing Commercial Sector Solution Provider status.

This designation enables us to provide comprehensive services to the UK Public Sector, addressing all their needs, including consulting, professional services, billing and discount facilities for AWS cloud consumption.

“We’re delighted to be starting the new year with a new AWS achievement!,” Mohamed Hamdy, Bexprt Founder & CEO. “Thank you to the AWS team’s support and confidence in Bexprt as an EMEA Regional SI Partner.”

With thanks to Camila Szmalko EMEA Partner Development Manager, and Abdulaziz Al Meer Head of Public Sector Partners Saudi Arabia & Bahrain, at AWS for their support and guidance.

Bexprt is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Public Sector Solution Provider*, AWS Solution Provider (AWS Reseller*), and Amazon RDS Delivery Partner.

* for Bahrain, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and UK.

HQ in Wokingham, UK, and a regional office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

If your business would like to discover more about migrating to the cloud, or if you would like to receive more & spend less on AWS, please get in touch. 

Case Study: AWS Resilience Solution for Abdulrehman Algosaibi

Bexprt delivers AWS Disaster Recovery Solution for Abdulrehman Algosaibi, leading healthcare provider, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment supplier in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Executive summary

As part of their ISO 27001 project, Abdulrehman Algosaibi identified that they needed to implement a Disaster Recovery plan for thirteen on-premise servers. A secondary on-premise DR site was considered, but assessed as too costly and time-consuming to deploy, so the decision was made to use the cloud; AWS was selected and Bexprt engaged.

Bexprt proposed a number of options, with key features, advantages, and costs identified; AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery was selected, utilizing the AWS Pilot Light strategy.

Following a successful Proof of Concept, Abdulrehman Algosaibi decided to move ahead with the full DR project; the team was very satisfied with the results, ISO compliance, and on-target costs. Subsequently, further new projects have been initiated, including the migration of competitor cloud workloads to AWS.

About the client

Founded in 1944, Abdulrehman Algosaibi is the leading healthcare provider, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment supplier in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

They have a long history of supporting their partners, clients, and employees to meet their duties as a healthcare provider, ensuring that patients receive the best care possible.

The challenge & cloud opportunity

  • The team at Abdulrehman Algosaibi wanted to swiftly deploy a Disaster Recovery solution to ensure ISO 27001 compliance for on-premise servers, in a tight timescale.
  • This would be the first cloud project for Abdulrehman Algosaibi, a technical learning curve.

The solution & services used

  • Bexprt workshops: full ISO compliance requirements understood, as well as business expectations and anticipated future needs.
  • AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery was selected, utilizing the AWS Pilot Light strategy.
  • AWS DataSync used to replicate native backups taken for legacy servers

Optimized Disaster Recovery Solution

  • The four AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery strategies are illustrated below.
  • Abdulrehman Algosaibi selected AWS Pilot Light strategy: data is transferred from the primary on-premise servers to AWS continuously, but without running any servers on the AWS DR region.
  • AWS DataSync used to replicate native backups taken for legacy servers, to an AWS S3 Bucket.

The results & benefits

  • Disaster Recovery Solution successfully deployed in record time to achieve the clients’ ISO project timelines.
  • AWS Pilot Light configured to help achieve RTO and RPO of 10’s of minutes.
  • Very successful Disaster Recovery project and ISO 27001 compliance have given the client the experience and confidence to move forward with significant further cloud migrations.

Abdulrehman Algosaibi & Saudi Cloud Summit

In a Panel Discussion at the Saudi Cloud Summit 2023, Abdallah Ibrahim Amin, Abdulrehman Algosaibi Infrastructure Manager, joined Mohamed Laimon, AWS Senior Partner Development Manager for Saudi Arabia & Bahrain on stage with Ghaith Hamzah Bexprt Business Development Manager to discuss the project.  As well as describing the successful Disaster Recovery project, the team discussed other project benefits.

Often, Disaster Recovery solutions are the first experience a business has of migrating to the cloud. As Abdulrehman Algosaibi experienced, this first DR project was the start of a fruitful learning journey about the cloud, and new and more efficient ways of working. Further cloud projects are now underway at Abdulrehman Algosaibi with Bexprt and AWS, and substantial benefits are already being delivered.

“When we started this project the team at Abdulrehman Algosaibi had limited experience of cloud solutions. Working with Bexprt, we really benefitted from their expertise and knowledge; they guided us through the whole process, answering all our questions, and ensuring we understood the options, benefits and features of different solutions.
The Bexprt team took care to understand all of our current use cases, and ISO requirements, as well as to consider future needs.
The AWS Pilot Light strategy was successfully implemented, and the ISO compliance team are confident in the solution.
This first AWS cloud project has been so successful that, thanks to the Bexprt team, we are now moving ahead with further significant cloud migration projects.”

Abdallah Ibrahim Amin, Infrastructure Manager, Abdulrehman Algosaibi

How can Bexprt help you?

If you would like to know more about the Saudi Cloud Summit, and other events we run, please get in touch or check out the Events page.

If your organization needs assistance to digitally transform your processes, or migrate to the cloud, get in touch. We’re always happy to have an informal exploratory conversation.  hello@bexprt.com 

Bexprt celebrates one year in Riyadh, and looks ahead to 2024 plans

UK-headquartered technology company, Bexprt, opened its first international subsidiary and regional office in Riyadh one year ago. In doing so, Bexprt took a decisive move into public cloud services and AI, and enhanced the local support for its existing public and commercial clients in the region. With significant investment and dedication, the team has achieved many accolades in the last 12 months, including AWS Reseller in 6 countries for the Commercial and Public Sectors, AWS Advanced Partner Tier Status, Google Cloud Partner and Foundation Partner for the Saudi Arabia Region launch, as well as a UK Government Export Award.

Now, 1 year later, Bexprt CEO and Founder Mo Hamdy reflects on the Riyadh journey, celebrates team successes to date, and shares insights into what comes next.

How it started: why did Bexprt open a new company in Riyadh?

UK technology company, Bexprt, opened its first international subsidiary and regional office in Riyadh one year ago, in December 2022, and established a Bexprt team focused on public cloud services and AI technologies. Saudi Arabia is the UK’s largest trading partner in the Gulf Region, and the decision to open the first Bexprt overseas subsidiary there, Bexprt International Company for Information Technology LLC, was both bold and clear. Mo Hamdy, Bexprt CEO and Founder shares more.

Vision 2030 & the opportunity for UK international trade

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to deliver a vibrant society, a thriving economy, and an ambitious nation has unlocked significant opportunities for growth and investment. Saudi Arabia is a future-forward economy, and with the whole nation engaged in the national strategy, they are moving very swiftly. This creates considerable untapped potential and unique business opportunities. When assessing where to open our first subsidiary in the MEA region, as I said last year, it just had to be in Saudi.”

Source: UK Government Office for National Statistics (ONS) UK trade in services, service type by partner country, non-seasonally adjusted (1) (2)

Last updated: July 2023.

“In opening the new business in Riyadh, we confirmed our commitment to existing clients, partners, and staff in the Kingdom and across the region. Saudi is the UK’s largest trading partner in the Middle East, our intention and plan was to rapidly accelerate the number of clients we work with in the region and to deliver innovative, sustainable, and cost-optimized solutions.”

How it’s going: Bexprt’s first year in Saudi Arabia

After opening the office in December 2022, just 6 weeks later, Bexprt achieved AWS Select Tier Service Partner status, becoming the fastest regional partner to achieve this status. This key milestone enabled the local Bexprt team to accelerate AWS cloud projects with clients, and was the fast start the business needed ahead of LEAP in Riyadh, the Davos of the technology world.

Bexprt’s Riyadh & cloud-centric achievements over the last 12 months

Further accolades from both AWS and Google Cloud during the year, in addition to professional certificates for the staff in Riyadh, acknowledged the accelerated business growth and achievements in expertise, experience and professional recognition. In 2023, the first year of activity in Saudi Arabia, the Bexprt team delivered and completed 21 cloud projects in the Kingdom, and more across the Region, with a very significant number of local projects in the pipeline.

Phenomenal speed of digital transformation in Saudi Arabia

“It has been a very exciting year for the Bexprt team in Riyadh, and things have moved at a very fast pace. The market and hyperscalers are moving very fast locally, and the Bexprt team has really stepped up to the challenge. We’ve learned swiftly about the local market and dynamics, and our local staff have really demonstrated their deep understanding of the advanced nature of our clients’ needs. We now have a local team of 13 skilled, qualified and experienced staff. We are continuing to invest in the team, competence development and enhanced capabilities, and more recruitment is underway.”

“Vision 2030 is being applied with a very high priority by everyone we work with in Saudi. The fast pace at which businesses and organization are accelerating their digital transformation and business practices is phenomenal, and the appetite that people have for technological change is quite breathtaking.”

Above, top row: Bexprt offices in Riyadh Park. Bottom row: views across Riyadh city.

Market demand for AI-driven solutions

“Bexprt is focussed on working with hyper scalers AWS and Google Cloud in the market here. The clients we work with are really motivated by moving to the public cloud, and the ability to access and take advantage of not only “typical” cloud use cases, like resilience and disaster recovery for example, but we also have a lot of clients who come to us, motivated to migrate to the public cloud to gain access to the AI and Gen-AI capabilities this enables.”

“We are finding that, whilst some clients come to us wanting us to guide them from step 1 of applying AI, increasingly, our clients have already thought about how they might apply Gen-AI to help their organizations, and they initiate the conversation with us with a list of initial use cases they have identified that they want to address.”

LEAP 2023, clockwise from top left to right: Bexprt and AWS teams celebrate achieving Partner Select status with the UK Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Department for Business & Trade Team. Anver Vanker, AWS Manager, Solution Architect, Abdulrahman Alshaker, AWS Territory Manager, Ayman Eltohamy, AWS Head of SMBs MENA & Turkey, Mohammed Laimon, AWS Partner Development Manager KSA, Mohamed HamdyBexprt Founder & CEO, His Excellency UK Ambassador to KSA Neil Crompton, Kabir Rahman, COO & Head of Trade, British Embassy Riyadh, Gwen Edwards, Bexprt CMO. 

Bexprt team members Ayman ElBatawy, Ahmad Okasha, Gwen Edwards, Mo Hamdy represent Bexprt on the AWS exhibition stand. Ghaith Hamza gives out Bexprt cookies to mark Bexprt’s 5th birthday on the AWS stand at LEAP.

Bottom left: His Excellency UK Ambassador to KSA Neil Crompton and Kabir Rahman, COO & Head of Trade, British Embassy Riyadh, talk with Bexprt CEO Mo Hamdy. Find LEAP 2023 recap here.

Local, talented Bexprt team

“In the last year, we’ve recruited and developed a very smart local team in Riyadh, from scratch. This team is very motivated by the projects and technologies they have access to, and have the drive to be a part of delivering Vision 2030 for the Kingdom.”

“Investing time and effort in the team is reciprocal. We all have a lot to learn in this rapidly evolving tech-scape. For those willing to dive in, there are big, exciting projects to become involved with, working with massive brands, and established, highly reputable companies early on in their career. We’re recruiting currently, so if you’re interested in joining the Bexprt team, take a look at the Careers section of the website, and follow Bexprt on LinkedIn for future announcements.”

Showcasing local capabilities and success at the Saudi Cloud Summit

“This energy, passion, technological evolution, and market pace encouraged us to run the Saudi Cloud Summit in October. We felt this was the level of gathering senior Cx-level Executives, from key companies in the region here deserved. The event, run in partnership with AWS, enabled us to provide access to Senior AWS Executives and Global Experts, and to deliver a day of briefings focussed on the latest cloud and AI technologies and how they can be applied locally, and showcase local customers who are already using them.”

Above: images from Saudi Cloud Summit 2023, with Keynote Speaker, Yasser Hassan, Regional General Manager, AWS Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. Find more here.

New Bexprt AI solutions developed and deployed in Saudi in 2023

“As well as setting up the business in Riyadh, recruiting a strong young local team, achieving business accolades, and successfully deploying projects with major local businesses, we’ve also developed and launched new Bexprt solutions in 2023! We’ve delivered two new AI and automation solutions, developed in-house, addressing market needs in the Gen-AI and resilience space: Bextract™ and Bex-DR™. Both solutions are commercially deployed with Saudi, UK and Ireland clients, and we fully intend to continue the development of more AI-driven solutions like this, to address specific client use cases and market ambitions.”

“We work carefully to understand and fulfill tier 1 customer needs, clients who are not looking for shift and lift type, cut-and-paste solutions, but instead are seeking genuine solutions to address their very specific use cases. AI solutions are key to being able to rapidly develop and deploy tailored capability, and we’re investing significantly in the Bexprt R&D team to make it even stronger and extend its capability.”

Above: images from the Google Cloud Saudi Arabia Region Launch, 15th November 2023. Read more about Google Cloud & Bexprt, and see the Bexprt LinkedIn post from the event.

Clockwise, left to right: Mo with  Adly Amin, Google Cloud Senior Architect. Bexprt team Yousef, Ghaith and Abdulrhman, plus outside the Saraj with Gwen. Gwen, Mo and Ghaith with Bader Almadi, Google Cloud General Manager for Saudi Arabia. Mo with Lionel Touati, Google Cloud Head of Partner Engineering EMEA South. Mo with Mohamed Shaaban Google Cloud Partner Development Manager, and Ghassan Qobrosi, Google Cloud Customer Engineer, and Ghaith. Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO delivered the keynote in person – shown here with all regional partner logos, including Bexprt.

What next? Bexprt goals and ambitions for 2024 in Saudi Arabia

“2023 has been a very successful year for Bexprt. Thank you to all our clients, Partners and the Bexprt Team for the successes we have achieved together – curiosity, expertise and skill will enable us to grow and achieve even more together in 2024.”

“Looking ahead to the next 12 months, we intend to work even more closely with our partners and enable even greater access to advanced capabilities for our clients.”

“We’ll be deploying more and more projects with leverage Gen-AI, and increasing the local team with those specific skills locally, as well as expanding the expertise of the Cloud Team. Our local office in Riyadh is setup to enable significant business growth next year.”

“Now, we are celebrating our first anniversary of the Riyadh company, and one year in cloud, but we also celebrated our 5th year in business in March 2023. Our earlier business success was driven by our telco-cloud and cyber-security teams. Over the last few months, we have secured significant new telecom contracts in Saudi Arabia, and expanded existing telecom projects, and as a result, we are increasing the investment in our Saudi-based team.”

Above, from left, clockwise: Mo Hamdy, Gwen Edwards, Mahmoud El Zayet outside the UK HQ. Ask Bexprt event, Riyadh June 2023. Gwen participates in a panel discussion at GSMA MWC23 Barcelona with Deloitte, UK Government Department for Business & Trade, and Urban XR. Mo talks with UK Government Minister for Industry and Economic Security, Nusrat Ghani MP, and below with Gwen at the same UK Government Export event at Banqueting House, London. Gwen talks with Bexprt colleagues Mahmoud and Okasha in the UK office. Centre bottom row: part of the Bexprt team celebrates successful client milestones together, left to right, Ahmed Nassar, Waleed Magdy, Mahmoud El Kerdany, Zaky Fetoh, Mo Hamdy, Mohamed El-Kerdany, Nour El-Din Samir.

Commitment, energy, expertise and skill

“In 2024, Bexprt will invest and grow our teams in the Kingdom, and this demonstrates our clear commitment to the country, clients, and projects we undertake here. We are delighted that our skilled, expert team has achieved so much success over the last 12 months in Saudi Arabia, working with high energy, and closely with our partners locally to enhance our clients’ capabilities. As a UK-headquartered technology business, the market in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Region is a very exciting, energized place to be working.”

“We’re really excited about what we can achieve, for our public cloud and telco cloud clients in 2024 – which just leaves one key question…..

We’re ready to travel together, how can we help you?”

📧 hello@bexprt.com

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner

Specializing in Advanced Analytics, Generative-AI, Resilience & Telco Cloud.

Case Study: AWS Resilience Solution for Al Kurdi Trading & Contracting Company

Bexprt delivers AWS Disaster Recovery Solution for Saudi Arabian-based fire, safety, and security company, Al Kurdi Trading & Contracting Co.

Executive summary

Al Kurdi use an OpenSource ERP and CRM solution. After attending an “Ask Bexprt” event on AWS Resilience and Disaster Recovery, Al Kurdi requested support from Bexprt to implement an AWS Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. Bexprt proposed multiple DR options with costs for Al Kurdi to consider. The AWS Pilot Light strategy was selected and successfully implemented, following AWS Best Practices.

About the client

Al Kurdi Trading & Contracting Company provides fire, safety, room environment monitoring, uninterruptable power supplies and security solutions, with a complete range of services including design, supply, installation, testing & commissioning, and after-sales services.
Founded in 1979, Al Kurdi operates across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The challenge & cloud opportunity

Al Kurdi approached Bexprt seeking an AWS Disaster Recovery solution. At the start of the project, Bexprt identified, documented, and addressed a number of security enhancements. With no previous Disaster Recovery experience, automated alarms and documentation were a key part of the deliverables for the client.

The solution & services used

  • The AWS Pilot Light strategy was selected for Disaster Recovery, with Amazon Cloud Watch for automated alarms.
  • AWS Virtual Private Cloud and AWS Identity & Access Management form part of the security features.
  • A different AWS Region was utilized to optimize for business continuity and high availability.
  • DR process documentation, and operational instructions were provided.

Ensuring key business systems and data remains safe

Al Kurdi use an OpenSource ERP and CRM solution, and this forms a vital part of their business management systems, including CRM, project documentation, invoicing and support ticketing.

The Al Kurdi team attended an “Ask Bexprt” event in Riyadh, where they were able to hear experts from AWS and Bexprt provide updates about AWS Resilience and Disaster Recovery best practices, options and features. After the workshop, Al Kurdi requested a more detailed meeting with the Bexprt team, to privately discuss their requirements.

Bexprt proposed multiple AWS Disaster Recovery options, with costs for Al Kurdi to consider, and the AWS Pilot Light strategy was selected.

To optimize the Disaster Recovery architecture, a different AWS Region was utilized, thereby ensuring business continuity and high availability.

The results & benefits

The client now has a secure solution for their business-critical ERP and CRM solution, and an AWS Disaster Recovery solution that follows AWS Best Practices.

“The Bexprt team provided a very comprehensive assessment of our technology landscape, and implemented security enhancements before commencing the AWS Disaster Recovery work.

“Bexprt took the time to answer all the Disaster Recovery queries the Al Kurdi team had, and provided various options for us to consider. They have worked with care to understand our needs and use cases, and provided all the documentation we requested.

“We now have a very comprehensive DR solution in place, which is absolutely vital for such business-critical systems.
I’m very glad that we attended the Ask Bexprt event!”

Ayyad Alkurdi AlMilli, Chief Executive Officer at Al Kurdi Trading & Contracting Co.

How can Bexprt help you?

If you would like to know more about the “Ask Bexprt” informal, in-person roundtable events we hold, and other events we run, please get in touch or check out the Events page.

If your organization needs assistance to digitally transform your processes, or migrate to the cloud, get in touch. We’re always happy to have an informal exploratory conversation.  hello@bexprt.com 

Cloud migration & carbon footprint reduction

Curious to know more about how moving to the cloud can reduce your carbon footprint?

Sustainability was a key element of AWS CTO Dr Werner Vogels’ keynote at AWS re:Invent 2023 last week.

In describing his Frugal Architect approach, he proposed that cost and sustainability should be treated as non-functional requirements, alongside security, compliance and availability.

Further, that the resources used in cloud computing can be a good approximation for the carbon footprint of the solution, making it an essential factor in building sustainable architectures.

The Bexprt team can help you assess your technology landscape and identify optimizations.

And if you need hard data, online tools from our Cloud Partners will help you to,

📍Accurately measure your cloud-related carbon footprint

📍Share calculation methodology with reviewers

📍Track your emissions profile and progress

📍Assess changes and forecast future impact.

Want to know more? 📧 hello@bexprt.com

Bexprt ◦ Your cloud business partner

Specializing in Advanced Analytics, Generative-AI, Resilience & Telco Cloud.