Salam launches B2B 2.0 to move from IT supplier to integrator

Etihad Salam Telecom Company launched Salam B2B 2.0 at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, a repositioning of its enterprise business from IT service provider towards what the operator describes as a digital transformation partner and integrated technology solutions architect. The launch sits alongside the connectivity, cloud and AI-enabled infrastructure showcase Salam brought to the event as a strategic sponsor, and it is the more strategically interesting of the two. A portfolio launch is a statement about where an operator thinks its revenue is going to come from. The problem Salam is responding to is one every telecoms operator in the region shares. Connectivity is a commodity with falling margins and rising capital requirements: the network costs more to build every cycle and earns less per bit. The enterprise services layered on top — cloud, managed security, systems integration, applications — carry better margins and stickier customers, but they put the operator into competition with global systems integrators and hyperscalers rather than with the two other companies that own Saudi spectrum. Moving from supplier to integrator is a genuine change in the business, not a marketing exercise. A supplier sells a circuit, a rack or a licence against a specification the customer wrote. An integrator takes responsibility for the outcome: it designs the architecture, chooses the components, connects them to systems that already exist, and answers for the result. The second is worth considerably more, and it demands consulting capability, delivery staff and technical depth that a network operator does not automatically have. Salam has been assembling the pieces publicly. It came to LEAP as a strategic sponsor and unveiled its AI-enabled Connectivity+ solutions at the show, and it has been signing partnerships that fill capability gaps rather than adding network capacity — including a memorandum of understanding with UnifyApps on agentic automation announced at the same event. Those are the moves of a company buying its way up the stack. The competitive picture is crowded. stc has been building enterprise capability for years and used this show to set out national capability layers through its specialized unit . Global vendors are localising hard, with Cisco bringing Saudi cloud data centres live and hyperscale regions from Microsoft and AWS arriving before the end of the year. An operator arguing it should be the integrator of record has to explain what it brings that a global integrator does not, and the honest answer is usually the network itself, local delivery staff, and a data-residency position that is easier to defend. Salam has not published the commercial detail that would let anyone size the ambition: no revenue target for the enterprise business, no headcount for the delivery organisation, and no breakdown of which services in the portfolio are built in-house versus resold. Nor has it named launch customers. The measure worth tracking is the split. If Salam's enterprise revenue in a year's time is still mostly connectivity with services attached, B2B 2.0 was a rebrand. If a meaningful share comes from work where Salam owned the design and the delivery, it was a repositioning. Salam's position in the market makes the move both necessary and difficult. It is the smallest of Saudi Arabia's licensed operators by subscriber base, which limits how far it can compete on consumer scale but also means enterprise revenue represents a larger share of its opportunity than it does for its rivals. A smaller operator has less to protect and more reason to move. The company has leaned into events as a route to visibility, taking a strategic sponsorship at LEAP rather than a stand, and framing its presence around the show's theme. That is a marketing decision, but it reflects a genuine problem: an operator arguing it should be trusted with an enterprise's architecture has to be known for something other than connectivity first. What would make the repositioning credible is the least visible part of it. Integration businesses are won on delivery reputation, and delivery reputation is built one difficult project at a time. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.