IBM completes pan-Saudi IT infrastructure installation

IBM Corp. has completed deployment of an infrastructure that will modernize Saudi Arabia’s delivery of government services.

The five-year project will create the core communications and security infrastructure of the $2 billion Yesser eGovernment Program, the kingdom’s long-term modernization program that will eventually provide everyone in Saudi Arabia with access to government services, IBM officials said in a statement.

The project, the largest of its kind for the kingdom, will support a staged rollout of nearly 1,000 government processes that are currently delivered manually, including employment and housing permits, citizen applications, drivers’ licenses, university registration and more, they said.

Over the next few years, those services will be transformed into the first system in the kingdom that supports online, voice and mobile-device access.

The solution includes key elements from the business portfolios of every IBM division, including software, hardware, services and research; also POWER System and System x servers, and DataPower devices hosting IBM service-oriented architecture middleware products at eight geographically distributed sites in the kingdom.

“Through our partnership with IBM, we have put in place the core infrastructure required to move the large majority of government processes in Saudi Arabia into the information society,” Engineer Ali S. Al Soma, director general of the Yesser eGovernment Program, said in the statement.

IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., ranks No. 18 on Washington Technology’s 2009 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.