Gulf Business Machines (GBM), the exclusive distributor for IBM products and services in the region, excluding Saudi Arabia, announced the appointment of Mr. Stefan Ekman as Managed Operations Manager for its Oman office as part of its ongoing commitment to satisfying the technology requirements of its clients' businesses.
As part of Gulf Business Machines (GBM) ongoing commitment to satisfying the technology requirements of its clients' businesses, Olivier Mouries, General Manager of GBM Oman, announced the appointment of Stefan Ekman to Managed Operations Manager. This move comes as a response to the increased demand from a number of large and complex projects requiring dedicated and specialised resources that will ensure efficient operations of customers' IT infrastructure and software. This entity is critical to ensuring the smooth transfer of the overall system and to providing an excellent platform for effective knowledge transfer to GBM's customers.
Ekman's appointment as Managed Operations Manager in GBM Oman marks the birth of a new department that was created exclusively to focus on customer requirements and further reinforce the company's position in the region.
"The Managed Operations department aims to further improve our service to the region," said Ekman. "The idea is to help our Customers manage their daily IT services and production. To help us achieve that goal, GBM has four different delivery models - Managed Operations, Out-tasking, Disaster Recovery and Managed Hosting."
Under the Managed Operations delivery model, GBM will manage customer systems and applications against agreed Service Levels. This is the most comprehensive service and includes a project to establish the environment, documenting processes, defining Service Levels and performing hand-over to the customer's staff over a span of three years.
The Out-tasking delivery model involves GBM providing a highly skilled individual to help Customers with the daily administrative and technical tasks required to maintain and develop their IT infrastructure. This is, typically, a shorter engagement compared to Managed Operations.
For the Disaster Recovery (DR) model, GBM provides full support involving DR - from initial design, to implementation, to managing DR tests.
"During the aftermath of Gonu, for example, a lot of work was done by GBM employees to help our customers recover as quickly and as completely as possible. GBM can help by ensuring a proper, well maintained DR solution is in place to create an easier, risk-free environment," said Ekman.
The fourth area that the new department will focus on will be Managed Hosting where GBM will host customer systems in machine rooms. This is useful for customers who want their systems off-site (for disaster recovery) or those who do not have the facilities to host the machines themselves.
With over 19 years of experience at IBM Sweden, Ekman, brings with him a wealth of technical and management experience. During his long career at IBM Sweden, Ekman's roles included Mainframe system programmer and application development and Mainframe Team Leader, before moving into project and management roles that included managing a round the clock operation, monitoring and managing hundreds of customers in the Nordic on all platforms - including Mainframe (zOS, VM), iSeries (OS/400), UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, Linux, SUN) as well as Windows systems and Network.
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© Press Release 2007
