EMC has announced the successful opening of the EMC Redefine IT Tour aimed at driving IT transformation across five key cities in Saudi Arabia with the first edition of the event being hosted in Alkhobar and Jubail.

The announcement comes as the Kingdom continues to drive an aggressive focus on driving industrial output from petrochemicals, plastics, metal, construction materials and electrical appliance manufacturing in a bid to drive economic goals. The series of one day events is designed to help enterprises in the rapidly growing industrial regions of the Kingdom leverage third platform technologies like cloud, social, mobile and big data to cope with the aggressive demands for increased production, efficiency and competitive growth. According to a recent IDC report, IT spending in the Saudi manufacturing sector is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5 percent over the 2013-2018 period. Backed against this context, EMC is working through these events to be closer to both new and existing customers in the region.

The tour features a series of presentations and workshops from EMC executives such as Mohammad Abul-Houf, manager, Eastern Province at EMC to help IT professionals create the "agile" infrastructure needed to succeed in their business transformation goals for the future. The event lays a special emphasis on technologies like EMC ViPR software defined storage and EMC XtremeIO all flash arrays in addition to the VCE converged infrastructure enterprise to help organizations super charge their IT environment and fuel scalability for aggressive growth.

The first of its kind road show brought together 166 senior IT executives and professionals at the events hosted in Alkhobar and Jubail, and will continue in Makkah, Abha, Hail and other cities in coming months.