Qtel and Cisco announced a signing a strategic memorandum of understanding to collaborate for deploying a range of wireline, mobile, managed services, virtual networks and data centre solutions tailored specifically to the needs of the businesses in Qatar.

Cisco and Qtel would explore opportunities to increase the range of managed services available to all government, corporate, and mega project customers in Qatar.

Bahrain (KFH Bahrain) Data Centre has been awarded the information security certification ISO 27001, making it the first Islamic bank in the Kingdom to achieve this.

The ISO certificate was presented to Abdulhakeem Alkhayyat, the Managing Director and CEO of KFH-Bahrain. The purpose-built and scalable dedicated Data Centre makes KFH-Bahrain the first bank in the Kingdom to have virtualisation technology which is capable of providing a fault tolerant, dependable and interruption-free operation

Iraq, cut off from decades of technological progress because of dictatorship, sanctions and wars, recently took a big step out of isolation and into the digital world when its telecommunications system was linked to a vast new undersea cable system serving the Gulf countries.

Business Connexion has announced an improvement in H1 earnings and forecast. The information communications technology group, reported a 43.5% rise in revenue for the six months ended February 2012. Revenue improved to R2.69 billion from R1.87 billion before, while operating profit increased from R40.2 million to R130.8 million.

Hewlett-Packard has announced that VIVA, Kuwait’s advanced mobile telecoms provider, is deploying a private cloud solution from HP to transform its customers’ communication, information and entertainment experiences. Hewlett-Packard CloudSystem Matrix will make VIVA’s IT services, applications, servers, storage, and networks flexible, dynamic, and available on-demand.