An exclusive interview with Kingston

We recently had the opportunity to interview Antoine Harb, Team Leader Middle East and North Africa at Kingston Technology.

GDGTME Team  •  July 04, 2021

An exclusive interview with Kingston

Q1. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your position at Kingston?

My name is Antoine Harb. With more than 25 years’ experience in IT companies in the region multichannel product distribution, product development and marketing involving both start-up and growing organizations.

Joined Kingston Technology in 2005 as a business development manager for Middle East & Africa few years later was promoted to be a Team Leader managing a group of people, delegate tasks while negotiating workloads, assessing performance and reporting on development and ensuring staff’ performance is of a high standard. Together with my team we manage to achieve our goals and positioned Kingston as one of the leading companies in IT industry in our region.

Q2. What are some trends we can look forward to in 2021?

First of all, we believe that working from home or at least a hybrid version of both working in the office and from home, will be here to stay. This is due to the fact, that during the pandemic employees have proven that most professions can be successfully practiced from the home office and that remote working allows for a better work/life balance for employees.

In terms of technology trends for 2021, we at Kingston Technoloy believe, the 5G network and its endless possibilities continue to create a buzz in a world that is steadily moving towards a future where mixed reality technologies are the norm. Smart cities and self-driving cars are two technologies seen to also dominate a world that will require 5G network as a standard.

Compared to today’s existing networks, the exponential 5G speeds are expected to be between 100 and 800 times faster. This will pave the way for a new age where systems, processes and devices are interconnected for rapid delivery of public services.

Arising from this 5G deployment is the creation of a chunk of data, far bigger than what we are witnessing today. This will require more spending on building modern data centers capable of storing and handling the expected data overflow while delivering the needed speed and flexibility with a lower risk of downtime and service interruption.

Q3. Can you tell us a little bit more about the “Kingston is With You” philosophy?

 Kingston Technology was created in 1987 by our founders John Tu and David Sun with only one single product and the mission to redefine industry memory standards for years to come.

Today we have grown to be a global leader in memory products and technology solutions but we have never lost sight of our business philosophy of valuing our employees, customers, and suppliers.  Our Kingston Is With You initiative places Kingston firmly in the hearts and lives of our customers and positions Kingston as a brand that can help and benefit many aspects of business and life. We are often in places you wouldn’t expect us to be!

Q4. With the pandemic and disruption in business, what is a key category of focus at the moment for Kingston?

Kingston has products for all environments, our storage and memory solutions are needed for Working from home or office, learning from home or schools, data centers and gamers.  Kingston is with you wherever you are. 

We have seen an increase in certain products.  Memory and storage help with smoother running of video calls whilst we have seen an increase in the demand for encrypted and USB and SSDs as people are out of their offices more.  

Q5. Can you tell us of your involvement with the e-sports and gaming community?

Building on the incredible success of the HyperX memory products, Kingston has rebranded its DRAM, flash and SSD gaming line into Kingston FURY, investing resources and knowledge from its core business to create the next generation of performance products.

The Kingston engineering expertise which is behind the numerous overclocking records and awards that the HyperX memory line has gathered since 2002 continues into the new era of high-performance DRAM and flash solutions. Behind the scenes, it has always been Kingston: Kingston engineering, Kingston manufacturing, Kingston testing and world-renowned Kingston customer service.

Q6. We are very interested in the newly launched hew High-Performance, Enthusiast & Gaming Brand “Kingston FURY”. What are some of the products we can expect to see soon?

Kingston will soon unveil its full line of Kingston FURY DDR4 and DDR3 offerings, and in Q4 will launch highly-anticipated DDR5 memory modules currently undergoing compatibility and qualification testing with motherboard vendors.

Kingston FURY will consist of the following product categories:

  • Kingston FURY Renegade: High-performance speeds and low latencies for insane performance. Top-of-the-line performance leader (in RGB and non-RGB) with DDR4 frequencies up to 5333MHz.
  • Kingston FURY Beast: Kingston’s popular enthusiast and gaming memory is the perfect high-performance, cost-effective upgrade (in DDR3 and DDR4 RGB and non-RGB), with speeds up to 3733MHz. 
  • Kingston FURY Impact: Powerful SO-DIMM performance boost for laptops, NUCs and other small form-factor PCs (in DDR3 and DDR4) with speeds up to 3200MHz. 

Q7. With the recent issues with chip supply shortages and an increase in demand for them, with people working from home and students learning from home, what are your thoughts on users upgrading to used hardware instead of purchasing new ones?

An ongoing global notebook shortage is prompting companies to prolong the lifespan of their laptop fleets and improve staff productivity by installing new SSD drives in their existing enterprise devices.

In addition, the simple upgrade of a laptops SSD or DRAM drive has helped many parents to somewhat recycle old family or work PCs and Laptops to enable their children to remote learn and study without having to invest into a brand-new module which after the pandemic might not be used very much.

Reusing an old currently unused Laptop or PC through adding only a few components comes also with environmental benefits as lees new Laptop, PC and tablet fleets could be produced reducing the electronic waste produced when a device enters its EOL date.

Q8. Service is a key aspect in a market like UAE. How focused is Kingston on providing quality after sale service in the region?

Kingston key message and key role in our region is the quality of our product we use ‘’Grade A components‘’ and the 24/7 sales support we offer to our clients along with Kingston’s known warrantee, which depends on the product line.


We would like to thank Antoine Harb for taking the time to answer our questions!

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