Banks have long been the GCC’s digital pioneers. In the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, financial institutions were among the first to embrace mobile banking apps, roll out contactless payments at scale and introduce AI-powered chatbots to handle customer queries in Arabic and English. More often than not, banks set the pace and other sectors followed.

Given this decades-long precedent, you would expect the same pattern to be playing out with artificial intelligence. After all, AI is already embedded in the daily lives of Gulf consumers. Ride-hailing, e-commerce, government, and a plethora of other services across the region have increasingly integrated AI into their systems, to effectively personalise experiences and streamline transactions.

And yet, when we look inside banks themselves, the story is more complicated. According to the latest Riverbed Global Survey, only 40% of organizations in the financial sector consider themselves ready to operationalize AI. Just 12% of AI initiatives are fully deployed enterprise-wide, while 62% remain stuck in pilot or development phases. In a sector known for digital ambition, there is a striking gap between intent and execution.

Stuck in Pilot Purgatory

In most industries, pilots fail because the idea simply does not resonate. Testing reveals a weak product-market fit, limited customer appetite, or unclear commercial value.

That is not what we are seeing in banking AI. Regional banks have successfully piloted AI models that detect fraud in real-time, reduce false positives in anti-money laundering checks, predict liquidity requirements, and power conversational assistants capable of resolving complex service requests. Relationship managers have used AI tools to surface next-best-product recommendations based on behavioral data. And operations teams have leveraged machine learning to optimize payment routing and reduce processing delays.

In controlled environments, these pilots often deliver impressive results. And yet, few ever make it past this stage. The initiative remains confined to a sandbox. Expansion is delayed. Integration becomes “phase two.” Eventually, attention shifts to the next promising experiment. So, if the feature works and the value is clear, what is holding banks back?

AI that Fails to Scale

In my experience working with CIOs across the region, two obstacles repeatedly stand in the way of AI moving from proof of concept to production. The first is operational complexity. Most financial institutions operate in highly fragmented environments. Core banking platforms run alongside decades-old legacy systems, with critical workloads split across on-premise data centers, private clouds, and multiple public cloud providers. Third-party fintech integrations also adds further layers of interdependency.

Deploying AI into this landscape is not as simple as plugging in a model. AI workloads are data-hungry and latency-sensitive. They require reliable pipelines, consistent telemetry, and predictable performance across every layer of the stack. In a hybrid, multi-cloud architecture, even minor configuration mismatches can trigger cascading issues.

The second obstacle is limited visibility. Without a unified view of applications, infrastructure, networks, and user experience, AI-driven services can behave unpredictably. A model may be performing perfectly, but a network bottleneck slows response times. An upstream data source may degrade in quality, subtly skewing outputs, and an infrastructure change in one environment may impact inference speeds elsewhere.

When visibility is fragmented, issues take longer to diagnose and resolve, and Mean Time to resolution increases. Operational risk rises, particularly when customer-facing or revenue-critical services are affected. In a heavily regulated market such as the UAE or Saudi Arabia, that risk has compliance implications as well as reputational ones.

Left unaddressed, this kind of live digital environment leaves very little room for innovation. AI cannot become the transformational force many claim it to be if it is constantly constrained by hidden friction.

Conquering Complexity

Moving AI smoothly from pilot to production requires banks to create as frictionless an operating environment as possible. One of the most effective starting points is unified observability. By consolidating telemetry from applications, infrastructure, networks and end-user devices into a single, real-time view, banks can eliminate blind spots, and decision-makers can gain clarity over performance, dependencies and risk across the entire digital estate.

With this foundation in place, AIOps capabilities can correlate signals, reduce alert noise and automate root cause analysis. Instead of firefighting incidents after customers notice them, IT teams can proactively identify performance degradation and resolve issues before they impact revenue or service continuity.

Standardising on frameworks such as OpenTelemetry can further simplify instrumentation across heterogeneous environments, ensuring consistent data collection and analysis. At the same time, investing in data quality, governance and compliance processes ensures that AI models are trained and operated within regulatory boundaries.

In practical terms, this means rethinking infrastructure as an enabler of AI rather than an afterthought. It may involve accelerating data movement between environments, modernising integration layers or rationalising overlapping monitoring tools. The goal is not perfection, but coherence: a shared, real-time understanding of how systems behave and how AI performs under real-world conditions.

From Optimism to Optimisation

The debate about whether AI belongs in banking is effectively over. Across the Middle East, regulators are publishing AI guidelines, governments are investing heavily in digital transformation, and consumers increasingly expect intelligent, seamless services.

Institutions that continue to treat AI as a series of isolated pilots risk remaining in perpetual experimentation. However, those who address operational complexity head-on will move beyond optimism to optimisation.

“I’m extremely proud of what our team has built at Riverbed the last 16 years, growing from a start-up to a billion-dollar company serving 30,000 customers and every Forbes Global 100 company,” said Kennelly.  “Riverbed is experiencing significant market momentum in today’s digital world, and I’ve never been more confident about the future of our company and opportunities ahead. After 40+ years in the tech industry, and with Riverbed in a strong position, the time is right for me to retire and hand the reins over to a proven leader in Paul Mountford.  Paul has the experience, leadership capabilities, customer-focus, and passion to lead Riverbed through the next phase of growth while continuing to surpass our customers’ expectations.”

“On behalf of the Board of Directors, I want to thank Jerry for his leadership, numerous accomplishments, and dedication over the past 16 years, as well as for setting the foundation and culture at Riverbed for a bright future,” said Orlando Bravo, Riverbed board member and a managing partner at Thoma Bravo. “The Board is also very pleased to welcome Paul as Riverbed’s next CEO. Paul is moving into the role of CEO at a significant time; when businesses of all types are seeking to digitize, thereby requiring the next-gen IT architecture that Riverbed is uniquely positioned to provide.  Paul is a strong leader with 30 years of experience running large organizations in the technology and infrastructure markets. He has demonstrated the ability to drive strategy and vision, inspire high-performing teams and deliver impactful results that benefit customers, partners and shareholders.”

“Riverbed is an incredible company with a history of driving disruptive innovation in the market, and I’m honored to lead this team as the next CEO,” said Paul Mountford, CEO, Riverbed Technology. “We have an extraordinary opportunity in front of us to lead businesses forward as they modernize their IT architecture to take full advantage of cloud and mobile technologies and accelerate their digital strategies. Jerry has created a fantastic culture at Riverbed built on collaboration, customer-centricity, innovation, and community, and I look forward to further building on this culture with the thousands of employees and partners we have around the world.”

Prior to Riverbed, Mountford was CEO of Sentillian, a New York-based web intelligence startup focused on monitoring publicly shared content. Mountford also spent 16 years at Cisco in senior leadership roles, including running Cisco’s $34 billion Enterprise line of business, initiating and leading the company’s Emerging Markets division, and rebuilding and running Cisco’s market leading channel partner program from 2001 to 2006.

Mountford was appointed as Riverbed CEO following an internal and external search by the Riverbed Board of Directors. Mountford will assume the position of CEO immediately, and Kennelly will serve in an advisory role in April, supporting Paul and Riverbed during this leadership transition.

The changes to the Riverbed partner program are aligned to Riverbed’s new sales strategy, works more closely with partners to acquire new customers, and drive account penetration with new technologies and flexible consumption models. To support this new sales strategy, Riverbed will work with partners to focus on Riverbed’s new and existing enterprise and public sector sales accounts.

To lead these changes, Riverbed recently welcomed Bridget Bisnette as Vice President, Global Channels and Commercial Sales. Bisnette is responsible for global channel strategy and synchronizing Riverbed’s efforts through the channel, managing the partner program, focusing on enablement to drive partner productivity and integrating them into the commercial sales motions. For over 30 years, Bisnette has held a wide range of global roles in the IT industry, at companies such as Cisco Systems, Standard Micro Systems, and AST Computers. At Cisco Systems, she held leadership roles in areas such as Enterprise Vertical Partnerships, Commercial Alliances, Channels Marketing Programs and Channel Certification.

“I am pleased to join Riverbed at such an exciting time in the industry and in the history of the company. It’s been a very exciting six months as we solidified the commercial expansion and evolved Riverbed’s channel strategy and partner experience,” said. “The transformation in the IT industry is being affected by changing customer expectations. Business models, sales processes and certification models, among many other things, are being impacted. This is going to be a very good thing for our industry because it shifts the focus to customer success and customer lifetime value. With the launch of Riverbed Rise and other key enhancements to our partner experience, Riverbed is poised to lead this change and deliver mutual success with partners.”

Bisnette and the Riverbed channel organization has focused on delivering a new partner experience in 2018 with the launch of Riverbed Rise that includes the new program, a new partner portal, more robust marketing tools with dedicated partner social channels, revamped programs and simplified discounting schedules.

Riverbed Rise is built on simplicity, flexibility and profitability for partners. It simplifies how partners achieve and continue to maintain their status. The program uniquely adapts to multiple business models and partners’ needs. More importantly, it rewards achievement across key strategic activities and joint sales priorities. Partners began earning benefits effective January 2, and will remain at their current program level until the end of July, with the full implementation of Riverbed Rise beginning in August.

This year Riverbed partners will convene at the Riverbed Partner Summit in Huntington Beach, California beginning April 30, 2018 to discuss opportunities to drive more business and accelerate customer success in a cloud and digital world.

Riverbed is delivering solutions to help companies transition from legacy hardware to a new software-defined and cloud-centric approach to networking, and improve end user experience, allowing enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives to reach their full potential. Riverbed’s integrated platform delivers the agility, visibility, and performance businesses need to be successful in a cloud and digital world. By leveraging Riverbed’s solutions, organizations can deliver apps, data, and services from any public, private, or hybrid cloud across any network to any end-point. These solutions include Riverbed SteelConnect,SteelCentral, SteelHead and SteelFusion.

SteelConnect is an SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) solution that provides unified connectivity and policy-based orchestration spanning the entire network – LAN/WLAN (including cloud-based Riverbed Xirrus Wi-Fi), WAN, data center and the cloud, with one-click connectivity and optimization into Microsoft Azure and AWS, managed centrally from a cloud console.

Riverbed SteelCentral is a complete performance management platform and control suite that uniquely provides unified visibility spanning all aspects of user experience, application, and network performance.

Riverbed SteelHead is a solution for accelerated delivery of applications across the hybrid WAN, speeds the performance of cloud applications by overcoming the combined challenges of bandwidth limitations and latency on the WAN. This improves the experience for end users – regardless of their location.

Finally,Riverbed SteelFusion is the first and only branch and remote office infrastructure solution designed to enable a software-defined edge and centralizing 100% of branch data and services into data centers and the cloud without compromising local performance or availability for workers at the edge.

At its recent Partner Summit, Riverbed showcased its solutions in three key areas and how partners can leverage them to accelerate partners’ cloud and digital strategies and solutions with end customers: Cloud Networking (with marketing-leading SD-WAN solution SteelConnect), End-to-End Visibility and a Service Delivery Platform (for delivery of –as-a-service offerings). Riverbed also shared its vision for addressing customers’ “Cloud First” environments and the emerging SD-WAN market by sharing use cases and mapping Riverbed solutions to the broader market and partner opportunity.

With the enhancement of it Partner Program, Riverbed unveiled more partner incentives that build on the existing program benefits of joint engagement, embedded solution and services and selling across the Riverbed solution portfolio with accelerators to drive growth for partners. In addition, Riverbed is investing in building a full suite of services that partners can leverage to develop their services portfolio- including SD-WAN-as-a-service, Visibility-as-a-Service, Network-as-a-Service and Branch-as-a-Service—needed to support their customers implementing and operating cloud-first strategies.

These announcements further Riverbed’s efforts to help drive mutual growth opportunities with partners. In the past year Riverbed launched programs to enable its channel to build Embedded & Managed Services, including subscription licensing and pricing sold via the channel to meet the evolving buying needs of customers. The vendor also launched a Riverbed Consulting Partner track to enable key partners to better support customers by delivering Riverbed franchise professional services. Riverbed Reach, an end-to-end customizable channel marketing program designed to help partners generate pipeline was expanded.

According to the company, partners are a key component of Riverbed’s go-to-market strategy with more than 95% of Riverbed’s business flowing through the channel.

“As customers continue to go digital and cloud-first, it opens up significant growth potential for our partners with Riverbed’s disruptive SD-WAN, visibility and software-defined edge solutions, along with our continued leadership in WAN optimization. Earlier this year, we also launched the Riverbed Service Delivery Platform for service providers and partners to enable their network-as-a-service strategy,” said Karl Meulema, senior vice president Global Channels at Riverbed. “Our platform approach makes us the ideal go-to-market partner in this dynamic industry. It is not only about what we can do better than others, it’s about what we can do that other vendors simply can’t.”

The Riverbed channel ecosystem is composed of a network of focused, dedicated and invested partners across the globe; including technology resellers, solution providers, value added distributors, system integrators and outsourcers and service providers. Working together, Riverbed and its channel ecosystem are providing solutions that improve the performance, operational efficiency, agility, and economics of applications, services, networks, and remote and branch offices.

“Xirrus is a strategic acquisition for Riverbed, providing us with a leading enterprise-grade Wi-Fi solution, and enhancing SteelConnect to deliver an unmatched SD-WAN offering that will help further fuel our growth in this hot market,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “In today’s digital, cloud, and mobile world, enterprise networks are more complex and unpredictable than ever before and IT is struggling to manage all of this. A fundamental rethink to networking is required and with this acquisition, Riverbed and our partners are uniquely positioned to provide CIOs and businesses with a software-defined networking approach that delivers unified connectivity and orchestration across the entire network.”

Riverbed SteelConnect is a highly differentiated SD-WAN solution offering: unparalleled simplicity and improved agility with centralized and unified management spanning the entire network fabric with policy-based orchestration and one-click connectivity to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure; superior performance with integrated WAN optimization and visibility; network and application intelligence with business intent-based policies and user experience driven control. By adding Xirrus, the power of policy-based orchestration by SteelConnect will be further extended to the wireless edge.

“Legacy approaches to network management have become completely untenable. IT must move beyond the days of managing individual network devices using arcane CLI commands and scripts and instead move to software-defined approaches that are based on global policies, automation and orchestration,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President of the Riverbed SteelConnect, SteelHead and SteelFusion Business Unit. “The SteelConnect offering is unique in that it is the first SD-WAN solution that has extended the power of policy-based orchestration out to the broader reaches of the distributed network. By combining the advanced Wi-Fi capabilities of Xirrus and SteelConnect’s intuitive and powerful orchestration, we’re taking a bold step to bring the power of policy-based network management out to the wireless edge.”

Xirrus’ proven technology performs under the most demanding circumstances, offering consistent “wired-like” performance with superior coverage and security. The Xirrus suite of Wi-Fi solutions – high density access points, access points and cloud services – provide seamless connectivity and unified management across the network. Xirrus is recognized by Gartner in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for the most recent Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure report. With solutions deployed on tens of thousands of networks and hundreds of thousands of cloud instances, Xirrus customers include some of the best known global companies and recognized brand names, including Microsoft, University of Mississippi, Liverpool Football Club and Paul Hastings Law Firm.

“Together with Riverbed, we embrace a tremendous opportunity to create the world’s first SD-WAN solution that covers the core to the edge of the network,” said Shane Buckley, CEO of Xirrus. “The integration of our solutions combines best-of-breed federated identity and application control with differentiated SD-WAN technology, addressing the stringent requirements of today’s cloud, mobile and digital world. We are thrilled to be part of the Riverbed family and continue to thrive in this fast-growing, critical market.”

“A key facet of network transformation is convergence at the enterprise branch as IT/network managers look to unify network operations and management across wired and wireless LANs and WANs, all within the context of a cloud-enabled architecture,” said Rohit Mehra, Research Vice President, Network Infrastructure, IDC. “With this acquisition, Riverbed is well positioned to address this shift, adding an enterprise-grade WLAN solution to a broader enterprise branch offering with SD-WAN that also integrates industry-leading WAN optimization and visibility.”

Today’s news continues Riverbed’s SteelConnect momentum in the market the past year. In January 2016, Riverbed acquired Ocedo Networks, a leading SD-WAN provider to accelerate the delivery of Riverbed’s next-gen networking solutions, and launched SteelConnect as an early access offering in April 2016, which included “one-click” connectivity to AWS. In September 2016, Riverbed announced general availability of SteelConnect 2.0 with many new features, including integrated visibility with Riverbed SteelCentral.

In early 2017, Riverbed added “one-click” secure connectivity to Microsoft Azure, integration with the market-leading WAN Optimization solution (Riverbed SteelHead SD), and a new offering for large-scale data center deployments; and in March 2017 Orange Business Services announced it will leverage SteelConnect to deliver a managed SD-WAN service. Today, Riverbed’s over 300 SD-WAN customers span across a wide range of industries globally, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, finance, technology, and more.

Riverbed plans to offer Xirrus solutions through its robust partner ecosystem. The acquisition of Thousand Oaks, California-based Xirrus is expected to close in April 2017. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Reporting directly to Diego Arrabal, Middle East and Africa VP, F5 Networks, El Khayat will lead a team comprising of salespeople, channel staff, and system engineers focused on consolidating F5’s position as the region’s leading application delivery company. In particular, there will be a strong emphasis on security and multi-cloud projects.

“Taj is a fantastic addition to the team at a crucial moment in our evolution,” said Arrabal.

“He will be instrumental in driving our application-centric strategy, helping businesses and organizations unlock new levels of innovation and profit through better security, access, and identity management.”

El Khayat brings with him over 17-years’ industry experience, having played a major role in driving profit and market-share for a range of top IT players.

He joins F5 from Riverbed, where he was the Regional Vice President for Middle East, Turkey and Africa, helping the company establish their leadership in the region as one of the leading application performance platform technology providers, while driving consistent growth and increasing market footprint.

Prior to this, El Khayat held several senior positions at top ICT vendors like Juniper Networks, and Microsoft. He has had notable success in building strategies to enter new markets, assembling high-performance teams, as well as spearheading customer surround and satisfaction initiatives. He also has an extensive track-record in creating channel programs and initiatives catering to partners across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region.

“I am honored to join F5 Networks, and be part of a successful and striving region at a time where the market is rapidly embracing cloud and implementing their digital transformation strategies,” said El Khayat.

“We already have a fantastic team in place, and I look forward to partnering with them to empower businesses and our F5 channel to expand in new and dynamic ways, delivering the applications that matter – anywhere, at any time, on any device.”