The Information Technology Authority (ITA) organized yesterday morning the 4.0 Digital Trends Forum at the Public Authority of Civil Aviation in Salalah, under the patronage of HE Eng. Ahmed bin Hassan Al Dheeb, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and Deputy Chairman of ITA Board of Directors with the presence of Omar Salim Al- Shanfari, ITA’s Deputy CEO for Operations, Along with a number of IT officials and professionals from government and private entities.

The forum was under the theme of “Internet of Things (IoT)”, aimed to explore the emerging technologies produced by the forth industrial revolution mainly IoT and encourage their adoption in different work sectors in the sultanate, as well as establishing a discussion platform for enthusiasts and IT professionals.

At the beginning of the event, Mr. Hassan Fida Al Lawati, director General of the Digital Society Development Division at ITA delivered a speech saying “IoT provides a powerful driver to digitalization, Connecting devices to the internet. It provides an enormous opportunity for innovation and transformation.”

“IoT growth is projected to grow rapidly over the years. Estimates of installed IoT devices worldwide vary widely. We can expect upward of 20 billion devices by 2020 to be installed globally,” he further added.

he then continued “Hence, we are putting digitalization as a core focus of our future strategy that is being worked on. We are proposing to enhance our national digital strategy to focus on developing the necessary digital skills for the future among certain sectors of the society and ICT professionals, gearing the ICT industry towards delivering digitalization services and mobility solutions and moving the government beyond eTransformation and towards digitalization of operations and cloud services propelled by IoT and analytics of big data. This will require that we continue to evolve our infrastructures toward being more intelligent and capable of supporting IoT as well as the real time massive and continuous flow of data generated from these smart infrastructures.”

He Added, “Governments are one of the biggest adopters of IoT solutions as it contributes to increase productivity, lower costs, and enhance the quality of citizens’ life.”

Speakers at the forum discussed different topics related to IoT. Jane Zavalishina, Co-founder of Mechanica AI and an International Speaker, presented a paper on IoT and governments’ role in using AI and other technologies to utilize the data in building smarter cities.

Salim Abid, Developer Ecosystem, Region Lead (Middle-East and North Africa) at Google, highlighted in his paper the future technology trends of AI and provided solutions for the challenges facing IoT.

In addition, Mohammed Al Yahyaee, General Manager Customer Services at Diam presented a paper on Diam’s experience in incorporating IoT for smart metering. He highlighted that IoT technology helped to serve more than 500 thousand customers of Diam and recommended that creating a policy to governorate IoT deployment is necessary.

It is worth to mention that 4.0 Digital Trends Forum aims to serve ITA’s efforts in implementing e.oman strategy to transform Oman into a knowledge based society and to promote the digital awareness culture in the community.