"The Data Center is there to support our students, teaching and research," said Sadiq M. Sait, KFUPM's CIO and director of the ITC. "What you see now in our Data Center is quite changed from what you'd have seen just a few years ago, when we depended on a mainframe computer. The demands on our servers are different at various times of the year. Using virtualization, we are better able to balance our requirements, providing more power to various applications as needed. Virtualization has enabled us to stop buying more and more hardware and still provide better services to our users, since no one server is assigned to a specific application."

The excellence of KFUPM's data center was recently recognized at the Data Center Strategies Middle East Conference, with a special award for Innovation and Education in the Data Center Sector. The event received a high number of entries from companies and individuals from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Egypt. From Saudi Arabia, KFUPM was the only organization honored at the awards which highlighted Data Center achievement and leadership. KFUPM was cited for implementing a range of IT solutions targeting systems and services that serve as the key differentiators for a Data Center in a Higher Education domain with the focus on areas such as Learning Management, Registration, Faculty Development, Research, ERP implementation and Student Facilitation.

On the institution's recognition, Khaled Al-Sultan, Rector of KFUPM noted that, "It is indeed an important recognition for KFUPM that the institution has been chosen for the award from amongst an illustrious list of organizations. KFUPM's IT Data Center has been recognized as the best in class service provider for education and research (in the region). It has always been the focus of KFUPM to encourage and advance technology initiatives for providing impetus to education and research."

Sait added, "This award is an acknowledgement of the emphasis that was made in making IT an integral element of learning and research at KFUPM. The 'Campus of the Future' direction of the Rector provided a foundation for the present digital campus in terms of infrastructure, skilled IT manpower and enterprise applications, the results of which are seen now."

SunGuard a provider of applications that have supported KFUPM's goal of creating the Campus of the Future, commended the University for its ICT innovations.

"KFUPM has an essential mission in educating and empowering its students to lead in social, economic and technical development in the region," said Mathew Boice, VP, EMEA & India, SunGuard Higher Education. "In support of this mission, in 2006 KFUPM pioneered a strategic initiative in Saudi higher education, Project Raed, designed to transform the process of teaching and learning, enhance performance management capabilities and integrate all applications and services in a single sign-on digital environment. KFUPM has led the way in showing how to use cutting-edge technology solutions to transform an institution into a world class learning environment. Other institutions in the Kingdom are now adopting this approach."

Where does KFUPM (www.kfupm.edu.sa) go from here? The ITC will be completing its virtualization and disaster recovery projects in coming months with Unified Communications and IP Telephony as the next areas of focus.

KFUPM has always been an innovator and leader among universities within the region. When the focus of the public shifted to university website rankings, KFUPM met the challenge. The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (), based on web indicators designed and published by the Spanish National Research Council, is discussed annually with great interest. The ranking classifies universities worldwide by taking into account the global volume of academic contents available from the organization's web domain, the number of publications and scientific papers published on the Web, and the international visibility of this knowledge.

The new world rankings for July 2010 have just been released and KFUPM's world ranking jumped ahead 226 places, to 178 in the world. Over 20,000 Higher Education Institutions were analyzed. This is a considerable move up from the university's ranking of 1,681 in July 2006.

"KFUPM is the most research and teaching intensive university in the country. The Information Technology Center (ITC) aligned its efforts with the goals set by the Rector Khaled S. Al-Sultan to contribute to the Open Access Initiative (OAI) by sharing teaching material and research publications, thereby making them more visible via the World Wide Web," said Sadiq M. Sait, director of the ITC at KFUPM upon being asked about the reasons for such a high jump in rank in a short period of time.

The Webometrics ranking is designed specifically to measure the web presence of a university in terms of volume, content and web visibility. The Internet presence and online publication of universities is of considerable importance and contributes tremendously to enhancing the academic and scholarly content on the web. Sait emphasized that bringing research and teaching material online is important in reducing the digital divide between the Higher Education institutions of the developed countries as compared to the rest of the world.