Eighteen lecturers from various universities in the Kingdom underwent a program course dubbed “Train the trainer” in Riyadh last week.

Joseph Kambourakis, lead data, science instructor at EMC, conducted the program.

The participants were from universities such as King Fahd University of Petroleum, Ummul Qura, Taibah, Qassim, King Saud University and King Abdulaziz.

EMC is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver information technology as a service (ItaaS). EMC’s global network of business partners and alliances helps customers maximize the value of their information at the lowest cost.

Speaking to Arab News, Kambourakis said, “This is an academic alliance to target universities globally and the focus on Saudi Arabia mainly is related to business decisions. We are also keen on EMC’s market share in Saudi Arabia and strong governmental business relations. Our objective is to create a talented pool of engineers aware of these open technology curriculums.” He added that EMC introduced the cloud infrastructure course last year and this is the sconce course.

“Global demand for big data jobs is currently in the millions worldwide. McKisnsey has released figures that show a demand of 1-1.5M in the US alone,” he said.

Educational institutions can benefit by getting a prebuilt and modern curriculum, he explained, adding that they can adjust and use this material to aid current courses or teach the course by itself as a standalone module. On the other hand, he added that professors get training in the subject matter, as well as access to the material.

“The students get a modern curriculum that is very different from any other course. It teaches material not available in textbooks and with a current lab environment.”

Speaking about the science of big data, he said enterprises from all over the region are considering big data technologies in all their conversations with vendors these days.

“Part of the Saudi e-government vision is to digitize and automate all governmental transactions and correspondence across all ministries and governmental institutions. This is predicted to generate more and more data as we go, which creates a bigger room for adopting big data technologies in the near future. For example, many Saudi municipalities have been discussing how to analyze the data that’s being generated by different sources and one of them is social media to improve citizens lifestyle by taking faster actions.”

He indicated that data analytics is somewhat a novelty to the region, which means finding the right expertise and references is rare.

“Lack of use-cases in the Middle East can be considered a challenge in a way big data is not a technology that can be easily bought and adopted; it’s a full concept that needs long time of evaluation and planning before implementation.”

Big data is going to change everything in the future, he said. “From how we provide health care to how products are marketed. We will have more specific ads tailored on our own preferences. Life sciences will be able to discover and analyze things never before attempted.”

“The curriculum was only developed in the past three years. The course developers and I have regularly scheduled meetings to maintain the material and keep it up to date. We all do research on current methods and tools to ensure that the material is fresh. We will continue to make course updates available to the professors in our course,” he concluded.