Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 30 March 2001

Al-Futtaim Trading, one of the diverse business houses in the lower Gulf region, has recently selected Comtrust to host their corporate websites. The Group has over 32 independent, interactive sites on-line and more that 15 others currently under production.

The company joins a growing list of Middle East-based organisations that are opting to transfer hosting of their web-sites from the 'traditional' North American and European bases to UAE-based companies like Comtrust.

"We are delighted that Al-Futtaim has chosen our dedicated e-Commerce Hosting Service for its web sites," said Comtrust's General Manager Omran Al Owais. "Their requirements demanded the utmost in flexibility, reliability, availability, scalability, performance and, last but not the least, security. Our solution provides all of these attributes along with the IT resources and infrastructure that the company needs to create a high-performance web presence that can support a range of mission critical web enabled applications."

Mr RV. Huisman, Al-Futtaim Trading's Chief Executive Office says that there were many sound business factors that prompted Al-Futtaim to transfer hosting from the USA to Comtrust's dedicated e-Commerce hosting service. "For us the provision of dedicated high-performance servers and a physical environment with multiple layers of reliability, security and core system redundancy were factors that assisted our decisions."

Dr Saeed Al - Barwani, Al-Futtaim Trading's e-business Manager added: "Al-Futtaim has selected Comtrust's Premium service, which has been tailored in accordance to Al-Futtaim's business model."

Arun Tewary, General Manager - System Technologies and Services for Al-Futtaim Trading added: "The Comtrust Data Centre features high levels of physical and logical security, high speed internet access and allows us to remotely manage the server."

Omran Al Owais added that there are many other advantages to Comtrust's e-Commerce Hosting, which are helping to attract new customers on a regular basis "These include highly skilled personnel; state-of-the-art e-commerce infrastructure to enable organizations to take advantage of the full fledged e-commerce solutions; faster deployment by being in the same time window; scalability; 24X7 administration and support as well as high physical and logical security," he said.

"We are confident that as a result of this comprehensive offering there will be many other blue chip names like Al-Futtaim Trading joining our ranks very soon."

(Left - Right) Farooq Hasan, Comtrust's Marketing Manager; Dr Saeed Al Barwani, Al Futtaim Trading's e-business Manager; Omran Sultan Al Owais, Comtrust's General Manager and Arun Tewary, General Manager - System Technologies and Services for Al Futtaim Trading displaying the website which is being hosted by Comtrust.