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ABU FARHA WINS IT HONOUR

Jawad Abu Farha, IT Director, Juma Al Majid Group, was selected as one of the top ten IT managers in the Middle East.

Juma Al Majid began its operations in 1950 and has experienced tremendous growth ever since. IT operating costs have steadily increased as the organisation expanded, and Abu Farha is constantly striving to find cost-effective ways of managing and deploying applications.

With over 60 branch offices and showrooms, and a diverse range of business interests, the Juma Al Majid Group has an extensive IT requirement and more than 1,600 computer users. For Abu Farha, the challenge has been to provide fast, reliable access to all the relevant business applications for its remote offices and showrooms.

Earlier this year, Abu Farha and his team completed the implementation of an access suite from Citrix, which includes solutions such as presentation server, access gateway, and password manager. Applications such as Microsoft Office and Outlook have also been deployed. The project saw Juma Al Majid move up from two Citrix servers to 14, with 460 concurrent licences.

"Now we are approximately 90 per cent automated in all the Juma Al Majid divisions. We have united the group with centralised IT systems and standardised everything across the 29 divisions,” said Abu Farha.

He explained that the users now work on Intel servers connected via frame relay local area networks (LANs), and leased lines at the head office. Through the solution, employees are able to access key localised desktop applications. The result has been fast, reliable access, which is building employee efficiency as well as saving Juma Al Majid money. Juma Al Majid's future projects will focus on business intelligence.