Dubai World spends more than $20m to overhaul infrastructure

Dubai: In Francis Veldeman's eyes, Dubai World just accomplished the impossible.

Overhauling the company's legacy IT infrastructure, said Veldeman, Dubai World's chief information officer, was like "changing a car from the 1970s, while you are driving, into a Ferrari."

To accomplish the feat, Dubai World has spent over $20 million on its strategic partners Oracle, HP, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft, all in the span of a year.

Veldeman, speaking at a press conference announcing Oracle's completion of his company's DubaiTrade.ae portal, said it all began 15 months ago when he joined the company and told its top executives Dubai World needed to modernise its IT systems.

Without a change Veldeman warned the company wouldn't be able to cope with its expansion plans in real estate and in the ports industry, which has been growing at 22 per cent per year, and would also create inefficiencies, redundancies and diversionary activities.

The company responded and gave Veldeman a "multi-million dollar envelope," worth more than $20 million, which he says he promptly spent in one year.

He tapped Oracle for its portal and databases, HP for its hardware needs, Cisco for its network infrastructure, including a worldwide area network, and Microsoft for software.

The partnership with Oracle saw the introduction of a new portal which integrates electronic services for Dubai Ports, Customers and Freezone Corp with Oracle's latest database products.

Wassim Hamwi, chief technology officer of Dubai World, said the package will help the company offer "a highly available, scalable and secure online experience, shifting more transactions to the web and thereby reducing transactions to the counter."

The overhaul was overdue, Veldeman said, for a company which designed its management systems when it was handling 300,000 TEU's (twenty-foot equivalent unit), and now handles containers in the millions.

The ports industry operates under massive economies of scale, and slowdowns at a port can have serious consequences. Delaying the port by one minute means some 180 containers cannot be processed.