In an interview with Finance Middle East, QBurst’s Middle East Regional Head, Shivkumar Subramaniam, discusses the company’s GCC growth strategy, regional AI priorities, and plans to strengthen its presence in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
What Is QBurst Prioritizing in the GCC?
QBurst is focused on two major shifts: the convergence of data and cloud, and the move toward AI-native operations. As enterprises increasingly connect cloud modernization, data platforms, governance, and AI, demand is also moving beyond generative AI toward intelligent and agentic systems.
The company is prioritizing government, retail, real estate, and travel and hospitality, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia as its key markets.
These priorities align with QBurst’s High AI-Q™ positioning, which combines deep technical expertise, strong client understanding, and AI infused across delivery. Its GPT lens—Growth, Productivity, and Transformation—is used to assess whether technology initiatives deliver measurable business outcomes.
What Is Holding Enterprise AI Back?
According to Shiv, the biggest challenge is moving from experimentation to enterprise-scale implementation. Fragmented data, weak governance, unclear ownership, and poorly defined business outcomes often prevent AI initiatives from reaching production.
Together, these issues create a significant gap between AI pilots and scalable business impact. Without strong data foundations, clear accountability, and well-defined outcomes, enterprises struggle to operationalize AI consistently across the organization.
How Is QBurst Positioning for Growth?
QBurst differentiates itself as a high-agility alternative to large global systems integrators, built around three Ps: Proximity, Pace, and Partnership.
With over a decade in the Middle East, the company is expanding its presence across data platforms, cloud modernization, governance, AI-led customer engagement, analytics, automation, and digital engineering, while gaining traction through ecosystems including Microsoft, Databricks, Salesforce, and Creatio.
QBurst is strengthening local leadership, business development, client partnership, and solution consulting in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, backed by its global engineering organization. By combining regional proximity, High AI-Q engineering, and agile execution, QBurst aims to establish itself as a serious Tier 2 technology services challenger in the Middle East.