Three leading universities in the Kingdom recently joined the EMC Corporation in a bid to cultivate a new generation of IT professionals in the country.

Speaking at a press conference in Riyadh, Adrian McDonald, EMEA president at the EMC Corporation, said the program was part of its international cooperation undertaken with people in host countries. The universities in the Kingdom include Prince Sultan University, Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University and the University of Hail.

McDonald said that under the program, young graduates will learn IT skills, in addition to their respective academic degrees. “EMC also has a initiative to absorb some of these trained graduates into its cadres,” he added.

The academic alliance program offers unique “open” curriculum-based education on technology topics including cloud computing, big data analysis, information storage and management and data protection.

The “open” curriculum focuses on technology concepts and principles applicable to any vendor environment, thus enabling students to develop highly marketable knowledge and skills demanded by the evolving IT industry.

The EMC also released the findings of a survey that had 976 IT decision-makers in Saudi Arabia as respondents and who gave their perspective on the challenges and opportunities that big data and IT transformation can present to their companies.

The Saudi results will be added to the 36 country-level survey results being collected through EMC forum events taking place around the world between June and Dec. 2013.

According to the findings, big data was giving rise to significantly improved decision-making and was already having a significant impact on companies’ competitive differentiation and ability to avert risk in the country.

Around 88 percent of the respondents in Saudi Arabia reported that decisions in their organization could be improved with better use of data and 72 percent agreed that their senior teams trust big data insights to make truly transformative business decisions.

About 57 percent had achieved competitive advantage as a result of big data analysis technology and 70 percent believe that industries that succeed will be the same ones using such tools.







However, the report said that in the Kingdom, 22 percent of companies surveyed had no current plans to implement big data technology.