ALKHOBAR, 10 April 2007 — It’s been a hot topic on the IT grapevine in the Kingdom and this week the new General Manager of Gulf Net Solutions (GNS), Bilal Sununu, confirmed that his company Business to IT Services (B2ITS) will become a shareholder in GNS. As GNS is the better known brand, it is the one that will be maintained moving forward. Sununu, the principal in B2ITS, in addition to becoming the GM of GNS will also sit on the company’s board. Sununu is a former GM of Microsoft Arabia.
“It makes sense for us to operate under the Gulf Net Solutions name as the company has been in the market for nearly a decade. The service delivery of Gulf Net Solutions has been perceived very well by their clients. GNS are authorized suppliers and are already established contractually with many organizations. So instead of establishing a new company and having to go through the process of formalizing contractual relationships with large clients, such as Saudi Telecom, which can take years of paperwork and formalities, we decided that it made more sense to operate under the existing Gulf Net Solutions name,” Sununu explained.
Over the past two weeks, the new GNS organization has gone through an extensive restructuring exercise. According to Sununu, in both organizations, due to a limited number of resources, there was no clear division between marketing, sales and technical teams. There will be no redundancies at this time, however all staff in GNS have been assigned to either marketing, sales or service delivery. In terms of products, with the joining of the two firms there is some minor product overlap and a business decision will be made regarding which products will remain in the GNS portfolio.
“Marketing will be the ones who own a few key concepts. One is the company’s strategy. This means our company strategy that happens on an annual basis will be owned by the GNS marketing manager. The monitoring of the execution of that plan will also be owned by the marketing manager. Of course, everyone contributes to that process but the ownership belongs to marketing. Pre-sales are owned by the marketing team as well as GNS’s relationship with the suppliers. The sales team will handle purely sales activities,” Sununu said. “Running a sales division and heading a marketing division are quite different. Running a sales division is like being the general overseeing a battle in a war.
In that situation there isn’t the luxury of sitting and watching and drawing up an overall plan. In sales you need to focus your efforts on that quarter, not long term strategy.”
Sununu believes that across the region, organizations need core competencies in building the alignment between business and IT to start with, and then in executing IT projects. There is huge demand for local companies to put forward such consultancies and service offerings but finding companies that have teams with the with required skill sets, plus strong local references is difficult.
“We clearly understand the market demand and both GNS and B2ITS wanted to grow in order to expand and enhance our service offerings,” Sununu commented. “The fact of the matter is though that recruiting talent is very difficult right now. So in the end, while putting the cultures of two companies together is not easy, joining forces was the better option, from a human resources standpoint.”
GNS has strategies to cope with the continuing shortage of Kingdom-based IT professionals.
“There are certain types of jobs that don’t require face-to-face customer interaction. We plan to set up a ladies office for the development back end. This has already been shown to be extremely successful in other organizations,” said Sununu. “For other types of resources we plan to create alliances outside Saudi Arabia where we source these resources based on need. GNS Saudi Arabia owns a good share in GNS Egypt and I believe that will be a good source for some IT resources, particularly in development. GNS Saudi Arabia also fully owns GNS Jordan. The Jordanian office will assist when needed in getting professionals with the required skills. They will also begin to expand GNS’ activities throughout the region.”
While GNS and B2ITS are a good fit from the human resource, customer and vendor relationship aspects, any company such as GNS that has been in the market for a decade, will have a certain number of areas in need of improvement. Sununu stated that he is up to the task of burnishing GNS’ image.
“I want to stress that this is a new organization and the market will see that immediately. Any legacy issues are being identified at the moment and it is our first priority to deal with those items,” the GNS GM asserted. “What’s the best way for me to assure people? Any bad references have to be corrected and once they are corrected, that news spreads quickly. I plan that all legacy issues will be put to rest by the end of the year.”
This week key clients of B2ITS will be contacted in regards to the GNS partnership. GNS has offices in Alkhobar, and in Riyadh and Jeddah the two companies will consolidate their brick and mortar presence to create just one office in each of those cities. On the solution side, Microsoft will continue to be a strategic partner for GNS. On the security front GNS has Websense and McAfee. For office automation there is GFI and Microsoft, data management solutions are represented by NetApp and Symantec. In regards to consulting services, the UK’s Fox IT will continue to be the provider of choice.