RIYADH — Mohammed Mushtaha, HPE Pointnext services country manager in KSA, advisory and professional services (A&PS) business lead in the MESA region recently talked to Saudi Gazette about recent announced initiatives by that (HPEFS) designating more than $2 billion in financing specifically to help customers with their financial challenges stemming from the COVID-19 crisis, including cash-flow or liquidity issues. The Initiatives also including a Payment Relief Program to help customers acquire new technology and alleviate some of the financial strain as they navigate this uncertain climate. Elaborating Mushtaha said: "While there will be no allocation to this financing program by country or customer, HPE is committed to helping communities, customers, and partners during this time of global uncertainty and is applying its time, talent, resources, and technology to address the new challenges and requirements that organizations face as a result of COVID-19." "Saudi Arabia is a strategic and important market for HPE. In addition to the announcements that HPE is releasing globally, HPE Saudi has developed a package of solutions and services that will help customers address the challenges resulting from COVID-19 timely and efficiently. These solutions include remote work solutions, Cloud Services, security, VDI-as-a-Service, VRG (Visual Remote Guidance) and many more" About how HPE helps Saudi customers in building data centers, Mushtaha commented: "Through HPE Pointnext, which is the technology services organization in HPE, we provide our customers in Saudi Arabia a comprehensive portfolio of advisory and professional services in the Hybrid IT, security, digital transformation, AI and analytics, and Data center services." "It is true that there is an increasing demand on building data centers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. With HPE's long, deep experience in this field, locally and globally, HPE helped many customers in Saudi to build data centers that are capable of addressing their business strategies for decades to come. Our services range from the early phase of defining the DC strategy and continues till the successful "run and operate" of the data center." On digital transformation in KSA, Mushtaha said: "With the strong focus on the Digital Transformation in Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, there is an increasing demand from the Saudi government and other customers towards this direction. HPE has supported many governmental entities and many other customers in Saudi Arabia in their digital transformation. "HPE has a wide experience in the digital transformation projects with more than 11,000 transformation project implemented globally every year. This is very much in line with HPE's purpose to advance how people work and live. In addition, HPE provides our customers in Saudi Arabia a set of Security services to ensure that their digital transformation journey is safe and risk free." On disaster recovery services, Mushtaha commented: "HPE is a leader in the Disaster Recovery services in Saudi Arabia. With our local and global expertise, HPE helped many governmental entities and other enterprises in Saudi Arabia to establish their business continuity and disaster recovery plans and environments. HPE's Business continuity and Disaster Recovery services are comprehensive set of services that ensures organizations' capability to respond to incidents in a planned and rehearsed manner. "These services cover Business Continuity (Process and Service Contingency), Business Impact Analysis (BIA), Risk Analysis, Crisis Management (Corporate Level), and Disaster Recovery (Technology Level). In addition, HPE provides the services required to establish the governance to maintain, operate, and ignite the DR plans."