Dubai’s Kentech kicks off digital transformation drive

Energy and industrial support company Kentech is one of many Dubai-headquartered organisations to migrate to the cloud and, with most of the project done, it plans to switch over to the cloud in the first month of 2020.

Following the arrival of the first Oracle datacentre in the Middle East this year – in Abu Dhabi – Kentech chose to partner with the US software firm to execute its cloud ambitions.

Founded in 1994, Kentech offers engineering, construction and maintenance services and wanted to streamline its IT to support expansion. According to the firm’s newly appointed group IT director, Damian O’Gara, Kentech was “carrying a lot of technical and process debt” before he arrived in January this year.

“My role was created to help grow the company as we are expanding our business,” he said.

O’Gara has a track record of building and leading high-performance international IT departments, with experience in sectors such as healthcare, retail, defence and media. He joined Kentech from OSN, Dubai’s satellite TV network.

Kentech currently employs about 5,000 people and has projects and offices in several countries, including the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, the Netherlands, Australia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mexico and Russia.

In his first few months at Kentech, O’Gara set about assessing the firm’s global IT systems – including infrastructure and applications – and created a tech roadmap into the future. “We’re now on a digital transformation journey,” he said. “We’ve got a datacentre that’s old and hasn’t been refreshed, so we’re taking a digital leap and moving to the cloud.”

According to O’Gara, enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a critical part of the company’s modernisation programme and he is also keen to transform and update its financial and HR systems. “We wanted to get a cloud-based SaaS [software as a service] platform that is industry-recognised,” he said. “Kentech has suffered with poor IT adoption partnerships in the past, so we needed something that was world-class. We wanted something that our business would love and use.”

Kentech launched its tendering process early this year and by July it had selected Oracle as its cloud partner.

“During the tendering process, we found that our business was closely aligned to construction,” said O’Gara. “Some of our requirements were quite complex, especially when dealing with reimbursable and fixed-price work – they can chop and change on a daily basis. We found that Oracle could meet those complex requirements.

“For us, it was the ERP and budgeting models that were the differentiator. We’ve now started implementation and we’re going to go live at the end of this year with the first phase. We’re a project-based business, so we need to be able to scale up and down very quickly. The cloud model suits us perfectly as a business because we can be flexible, rather than going all out and saying ‘I need 10 more servers’.”