By Pete Hall, Regional Managing Director, Ciena Middle East & Africa

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is advancing at a rapid pace in the region, driving innovation across various industries. The GCC now stands at a pivotal moment, with AI transitioning from a hyperscaler-centric phenomenon to a ubiquitous force shaping enterprise and consumer networks alike.

Globally, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA have stepped in to manage large-scale computing and data processing needs. Unlike traditional data centers, they are built to meet evolving workloads without major infrastructure changes.

The rapid expansion of data centres to meet soaring demand is also evident in the UAE, where du announced a deal with Microsoft to set up a data centre in the country to revolutionize the digital ecosystem. Next door, Saudi Arabia has been expanding its investments in data centres to drive its wider ambitions to become a regional AI leader and global tech hub.

While much of the AI optics boom has so far been confined to data center interconnects, growth is now shifting from AI model training to AI inferencing, where AI models can make accurate predictions based on new data. However, it takes data-intensive AI training to make this a reality.

As new AI applications such as AI-powered analytics, immersive media, and automation are expected to surge through 2030, the next wave will demand robust, low-latency, high-capacity optical transport across metro and long-haul networks.

In particular, GCC markets are primed to experience rapid uptake due to national AI agendas and smart city initiatives. A 2025 survey shows AI traffic could account for 30–50% of metro and long-haul capacity within three years. It is interesting to note that enterprises, not hyperscalers, are expected to drive the most network traffic growth over this period.

As the AI traffic boom moves beyond the data centre, low latency, high capacity, and resilient optical links will be the key differentiators for AI-driven workloads. This is precisely where regional telcos can take the lead. The market for capacity is already evolving quite rapidly.

Earlier this year, e& UAE became the first in the Middle East and Africa to deploy Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme, achieving ultra-high-speed 1.6 Tb/s per wavelength connectivity. This advancement supports 10 Gb home services and wholesale and domestic business customer traffic with 100G and 400G requirement.

The GCC’s investment in high-capacity optical networks, powered by new innovations such as WaveLogic 6, provides a competitive advantage in meeting the increasing AI traffic demands. If they are to take this to the next level, GCC telcos must capitalize on their relatively greenfield networks to deploy future-proof optical infrastructures faster than more mature markets constrained by legacy systems.

GCC operators are charting a new course as AI enablers, leveraging managed optical fiber networks and AI-optimized SLAs to deliver greater value and innovation beyond traditional bandwidth services.

To accelerate this journey and speed time to market, operators are also taking steps to address capex constraints, skill gaps, and organizational alignment. By positioning themselves as AI ecosystem leaders, they can unlock long-term revenue and resilience.

There is a real window of opportunity for GCC operators to capitalise on the AI optical wave. Thanks to national AI strategies, sovereign cloud initiatives, and hyperscaler partnerships, they already have a head start. By continuing to invest in future-proof, high-capacity, low-latency optical networks they can ensure network readiness for AI’s exponential traffic growth. The next three years will determine whether GCC operators shape the AI economy or chase it.

Rqeem for Smart Solutions, the digital arm of Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu (RCJY), has signed an MoU with Torry Harris Business Solutions, to launch an AI-powered digital marketplace that will accelerate industrial transformation and attract new investment to Saudi Arabia.

Announced at the “Industrial Transformation of Saudi Arabia” event in Riyadh on December 2, 2025, the agreement positions Rqeem as RCJY’s innovative IT enabler creating a government-backed platform that connects SMEs, major industrial players, and global investors through a single digital ecosystem.

Bader Abduallah Alanazi, Sales and Marketing Director at Rqeem for Smart Solutions said in their Linked In post “ Through this partnership, we look forward to exploring new opportunities for collaboration in Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence, and to further supporting digital transformation across the industrial sector.”

Under the MoU, Torry Harris becomes Rqeem’s digital transformation partner, delivering a configurable, white-label marketplace that uses AI and API-driven integration to match supply and demand in real time across industrial sectors. The platform democratizes access to advanced digital tools once limited to large enterprises, directly supporting the Ministry of Industry’s Vision 2030 objectives.

“This partnership is about closing the technology gap between big enterprises and SMEs. We’re giving smaller industrial firms access to the same AI-driven insights, real-time intelligence, and seamless integration capabilities that global players rely on – so they can compete, innovate, and grow in today’s digital economy,” said Shivdayal Charan, Director, Torry Harris Middle East.

At the event, Rqeem highlighted its role as RCJY’s digital arm – delivering smart, scalable solutions aligned with Saudi Arabia’s national digital transformation agenda, positioning the marketplace around three priorities: closing the SME technology gap, building AI-driven network-effect ecosystems, and creating a 24/7 digital gateway for global investment into Saudi industrial clusters.

The AI-powered marketplace is structured to serve as a 24/7 global portal where investors can search, filter, and be algorithmically matched with qualified Saudi partners for joint ventures, technology collaboration, or specialised industrial services. Furthermore, investors can access a single recommendation engine that surfaces local companies by niche, capacity, and readiness, from anywhere in the world. Additionally, for SMEs and local industrial players, it provides a government-backed space to showcase capabilities and connect with larger manufacturers. As participation grows, network effects strengthen the matching quality and enhance the overall competitiveness of Saudi industrial clusters.

The platform is also configurable and white label, where similar solutions can be deployed across sectors such as logistics, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, smart cities, and technology services. In this model, a marketplace becomes the single digital front door for vetted SMEs, strengthening national competitiveness and entrepreneurial growth.

The Riyadh MoU emphasizes how a government-linked entity, partnering with a specialist integrator like Torry Harris, can transform the ecosystem where global capital, local innovation, and industrial policy mutually reinforce each other.

This innovative partnership template between Rqeem Smart Solutions and Torry Harris – can realize digital goals with 24/7 operational platforms that benefit investors, SMEs, and the wider economy.

By Johan Paulsson, Chief Technology Officer at Axis Communications; Matt Thulin, Director of AI & Analytics Solutions at Axis Communications; and Thomas Ekdahl, Engineering Manager – Technologies at Axis Communications

It came as a surprise that this is the 10th time that we’ve looked at the technology trends that we think will affect the security sector in the coming year. It feels like only yesterday that we sat down to write the first – a reminder of how quickly time passes, and how fast technological progress continues to move.

Something that’s also become clear is that a completely new set of trends doesn’t appear year-on-year. Rather, we see an evolution of trends and technological developments, and that’s very much the case as we look towards 2026. Technological innovations regularly arrive, which impact our sector. Artificial intelligence, advancements in imaging, greater processing capabilities within devices, enhanced communications technologies…these and more have impacted our industry.

Even technologies which still seem a distance away, such as quantum computing, may have some potential implications in the near-term in preparing for the future. While we focus here on tech trends, it’s worth highlighting a shift that we’ve seen in recent years: the increasing involvement and influence of the IT department over decisions related to security and safety technology. The physical security and IT departments now work in close collaboration, with IT heavily involved in physical security purchasing decisions.

That influence, we feel, is central to the first of our trends for 2026…

1. “Ecosystem-first” becomes an important part of decision making

At a fundamental level, the greater influence of the IT department is changing the perspective regarding security technology purchasing decisions. We call this an “ecosystem-first” approach, and it influences almost every subsequent decision. Today, however, we start to see a trend that the first decision is increasingly defined by the solution ecosystem to which the customer wants to commit. In many ways, it’s analogous to how IT has always worked: decide on an operating system, and then select compatible hardware and software.

The ecosystem-first approach makes a lot of sense. With today’s solutions including a greater variety of devices, sensors, and analytics than ever before, seamless integration, configuration, management, and scalability is essential. In addition, product lifecycle management, including, critically, ongoing software support, becomes more achievable within a single ecosystem.

Committing to a single ecosystem – one offering breadth and depth in hardware and software from both the principal vendor alongside a vibrant ecosystem of partners – is the primary decision.

2. The ongoing evolution of hybrid architectures

A hybrid architecture as the preferred choice isn’t new. In fact, it’s something we’ve highlighted in previous technology trends posts. But it continues to evolve. Sometimes evolution can seem quite subtle. In reality, we’re seeing some fundamental shifts.

We’ve always described hybrid as a mix of edge computing within cameras, cloud resources, and on-premise servers. While that’s still the same today, what’s changing is the balance of resources, as capabilities are enhanced and new use cases emerge. Edge and cloud are becoming much more significant, with the need for on-premise server computing resources reduced.

This is largely a result of enhanced computing power and capabilities within both cameras and the cloud. More powerful edge AI-enabled surveillance cameras can, put simply, handle more than ever before. Improved image quality, the ability to more accurately analyze scenes and create valuable metadata have seen cameras take on tasks previously handled on the server.

Similarly, with such a wealth of data being created, cloud-based resources have the analytical power required to surface business intelligence and insights to enhance operational effectiveness.

There can still be legitimate reasons to retain some on-premise resources, such as network video recorders, but the true value is increasingly coming from edge devices and cloud resources. Ultimately, it’s a trend that meets both the IT department’s drive for efficiency, the security team’s desire for solution quality and effectiveness, and the data integrity and security needs of both.

But, even if hybrid architectures are a trend, we must not forget that a vast majority of all solutions are still very much on-prem solutions, and this will be the case for a long time.

3. The increased importance of edge computing

In many sectors, like the automotive industry, the need and potential for edge computing has only been recognized relatively recently. As regular readers will know, however, the value of increased computing resources within devices at the edge of the network has been a feature of our technology trends predictions for several years. Enhanced capabilities mark the beginning of a new era of edge.

In many ways, the increased importance of edge computing is directly related to the evolution of hybrid architectures described in the previous trend. When hybrid solutions have included edge, cloud, and server technologies, the full potential of edge AI hasn’t always been fully realized. With on-premise servers able to support some tasks, there has been less motivation to move these to the edge.

This is already changing and will accelerate over the coming year. This is in part due to the enhanced AI available to the edge, within devices themselves. The discussion and decisions about where to deploy AI across surveillance solutions – using the strengths of edge AI in devices and the power of cloud-based analytics – has brought focus to the capabilities of cameras and the increasing variety of edge AI-enabled sensors. These bring benefits in both effectiveness and efficiency.

Edge processing generates both business data — actionable insights derived directly from the scene — and metadata, which describes the objects and scenes within it.  This information has become the basis for efficient scaling of system functionality, such as smart video searches, and for generating system wide insights. Edge processing enables a much smoother scaling of system compute performance, as the system performance grows with each added edge device.

The arguments against moving more to the edge, such as cybersecurity challenges, have diminished. With the strong cybersecurity capabilities of edge devices, such as secure boot and signed OS, they now have become a strong part of the overall system security solution.

4. Mobile surveillance on the rise

Mobile surveillance solutions, like mobile trailers, aren’t a trend in themselves. For numerous reasons – commercial and technological – mobile surveillance has already seen significant growth and is set to explode over the next year.

From a technological perspective, improved connectivity has helped unlock the ability to employ more advanced, higher-quality surveillance cameras in mobile solutions. Remote access and edge AI has further enhanced the capabilities of mobile surveillance solutions. This immediately makes them an attractive option in a greater variety of situations, from public safety to construction sites to festivals and sporting events.

Power management within surveillance cameras has also advanced, resulting in lower power utilization without a compromise in quality. This is particularly important where mobile surveillance solutions are making use of battery power and renewable energy. A mobile surveillance solution can also be more straightforward to approve than a permanent installation.

Ultimately, these factors mean that security and safety can be ensured in places where it is difficult or undesirable to place physical security personnel.

5. Technology autonomy: Easier said than done!

Less a new trend, and more a reflection on one of our trends from last year where we highlighted how companies across many sectors were looking to gain more control over key technologies essential to their products. Automotive companies looking to design their own semiconductors to mitigate against supply chain disruption was an example.

As many of those organizations are finding, however, extending an organization’s focus from its traditional business (e.g. making cars) to a fundamentally different and potentially highly complex area (e.g. designing semiconductors) is easier said than done. Attempts also highlight how interconnected global supply chains are, and that true autonomy is impossible to achieve.

As we have done for many years here at Axis, focus for technological autonomy should be on the areas of a business that make a fundamental difference to the offering. Designing our own system-on-chip (SoC), ARTPEC, which Axis started doing more than 25 years ago, has given us ultimate control over our product functionality.

An example of the benefit of this has been our ability to be the first surveillance equipment vendor to provide AV1 video encoding to our customers and partners, in addition to H.264 and H.265. It also allows us to prepare for future technologies that will bring opportunities and risks, even those that still seem many years in the future.

While we always enjoy putting together our thoughts on the trends that will define the industry over the coming year, our perspective stretches much further into the future. This is what gives us the ability to plan for and develop the innovations that continue to meet the evolving needs of customers, and opportunities to improve safety, security, operational efficiency and business intelligence.

Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation, however. The best ideas emerge through collaboration, by listening to our customers and understanding their challenges, by maintaining close relationships with our partners, and by exploring solutions together. These partnerships are what will continue to drive progress as we move into 2026 and beyond, whichever way the technological winds may blow.