How Qatar’s Digital Revolution is Changing Lives
Qatar’s transition to a knowledge economy – built on a cloud foundation
By 2025, residents of and visitors to Qatar will be able to manage most day-to-day tasks through the TASMU Mobile Application.
This single app is a portal for residents to do everything from paying bills and navigating public transport to accessing government services, booking exercise classes, making hospital appointments, and managing smart homes and offices – an end-to-end smart city experience.
The developed app, which is based on Microsoft Azure and Internet of Things (IoT), will be the citizen-facing frontend to the country’s smart infrastructure. And it may well signal Qatar’s arrival as the world’s first smart nation.
TASMU Central Platform
To encourage the innovation required to achieve this, the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC) – the government department managing Smart Qatar – is building the TASMU Central Platform.
The mobile app will provide members of the public access to TASMU Central Platform – the backbone of the Smart Qatar (TASMU) program. This is a bold digital initiative launched in 2017 to achieve the goals of Vision 2030: transitioning Qatar into a sustainable, knowledge-based economy.
The Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC) enlisted nine industry partners to build the platform, led by major telecoms provider Ooredoo. It runs off a Microsoft Azure-based cloud platform – which provides the processing power a project of this size needs – and harnesses Microsoft’s local data centers and best-in-class data security services.
The Central Platform performs two functions. First, it enables data sharing and cross-collaboration. Second, the Marketplace Portal it hosts provides access to advanced technology solutions such as analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) which partners can utilize in the creation of smart city solutions.
The Innovation Lab
Digital industries capable of making the most of the new smart infrastructure, tend to flourish around clusters of skills and experience.
That’s why MOTC founded the Innovation Lab, to provide support and guidance to businesses at all levels. Young people can learn how to start a business. Entrepreneurs can attend courses and access mentors to lay the foundations of their organizations. Small businesses can enter incubators to accelerate their growth.
The Innovation Lab operates by offering a combination of knowledge, funding, and connections. Participants are introduced academic and industry partners such as Ooredoo and Microsoft, which are on-hand to provide the tools and experts needed to commercialize research, develop prototypes, or simply support start-ups in reaching the scale they need to deliver Smart Qatar projects.
Once a project is ready to go live, it will find its place on the Central Platform for access by other partners in the ecosystem, or by the public through the TASMU Mobile App.
21st Century Revolution
Smart Qatar is an insightful development program. It recognizes that previous industrial revolutions were built on two things: Infrastructure and ideas. Together, the Central Platform and the Innovation Lab create an ingenious ecosystem for fostering innovation.
Once railways were proclaimed as the arteries of nations, on which national industries were grown. Now the cloud promises to do the same for Qatar, providing the foundation for perhaps the world’s first truly smart nation.
