Why is the nation of Bahrain overhauling its information technology infrastructure? It’s not merely trend-hopping along with the rest of the world embracing cloud computing. It is so that businesses and government organizations in the region can bring the country and its people into a new digital era.

Bahrain’s partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. is promising no less to Bahrainis. Along with a full slate of ecosystem partners, AWS is changing the way businesses think about what IT can do for operations, regional economics and life. This is why both cloud and on-premise architectures are part of the solution, as well as tools that operate on data wherever it lives, according to Mathew Joseph (pictured, left), business head ME, data analytics and artificial intelligence at Wipro Limited.

“What you’re looking at is, ‘how do I really change the way the business works?’” he said. “We’ve done a lot of investments around how to really make this transformation from a design-thinking point of view.”

Wipro shares an interest in design-thinking with fellow partners in Bahrain’s IT transformation initiative, AWS and Informatica LLC.

Joseph and Emilio Valdes (pictured, right), vice president, EMEA South and Latin America at Informatica, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit event in Bahrain. They discussed the various technologies needed for businesses in Bahrain to digitally transform. (* Disclosure below.)

Designing a digital Bahrain

Design thinking is a process that combines free-wheeling experimentation and rapid iteration to come up with creative solutions. It’s used across many domains including IT. This is how diverse hardware and software components are pooled to produce desired business outcomes. “I feel AWS, out in the region, is doing great work on that. And that’s the simple reason why all of us are together with that,” Joseph said. 

A common data platform that spans hybrid environments enables versatile use cases so users aren’t shackled to one location, Valdes furthered.

“At the end of the day, end users will need to use data, and they don’t care where this data is stored. It could be in the cloud, it could on-premise, it could be in a big data application, it doesn’t really matter.” 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Bahrain event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit Bahrain 2018. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc. and the Bahrain Economic Development Board, the event sponsors, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE