Middle Eastern appeal for 'resting' contractors

Plying your trade all over the world is a key attraction of IT contracting and one pocket of the planet worth keeping an eye on is the Middle East.

Over the last decade, the Middle East IT market has witnessed phenomenal growth fuelled by greater local investment from the key multinational players.

The region has grown in stature and importance within the IT world and a drive past Dubai's futuristic Internet City amounts to surveying a who's who of the IT world. It's a testament to how much has been achieved in the past ten years.

Dubai Internet City is the Middle East's biggest IT infrastructure to be built in a free trade zone in a region that extends to the Indian subcontinent, and Africa to the CIS countries, covering 1.6 billion people with a GDP of over $1trillion.

On top of this it rains only four days a year, earnings are tax-free and the sprawling city centre is one of the wealthiest places on earth, while costing less to live in than London.

Middle East governments, primarily the UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, created a catalyst for change in what was previously a technology-shy area when they identified a need to attract multinationals, and more specifically IT talent, into the region in order to stimulate growth in the IT industry.

By creating the right trading conditions, principally through tax incentives and liberal recruitment laws, it has been made possible for the industry to grow with increasing vigour.

The IT contracting landscape is still in its infancy within the region but a strong developer community and a bourgeoning IT training market are the two leading contracting areas.

In terms of location, Kuwait and Dubai offer the best opportunities for people looking for a slice of Arabic culture and tax-free living.

Haider Salloum, marketing manager for Microsoft South Gulf, recognises the achievements of the past decade, extolling the virtues of the Middle East governments.

"The recent focus on the Middle East reflects the visionary outlook from the governments and leaders in their mission to bring e-government tools and projects to the region," he said.

Of course, there are reasons why the Middle East has been traditionally something of an IT backwater.

For a start, there is market size. For most vendors the entire region will represent a fraction of their overall business; considerably behind the US, European or Asian markets.

For instance, customers in the Middle East buy only a fraction of the millions of PCs sold in mature markets like Europe.

Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are pegged at 135,000 PCs sold per year while Saudi Arabia sells 240,000 PCs per year.

But as Bob Dylan once crooned, "The times they are a changin'," and the majority of the big players are predicting a bright future for the Middle Eastern IT market.

"Looking at the larger market places in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the tendency is more towards early adopters in technology," says Gigliola Graziani, category and product manager for HP Middle East's Personal Systems Group.

Gilbert Lacroix at Intel's Gulf HQ echoes these sentiments. "We have over 300 million people who share a common language and culture, this creates great economies of scale, you can see the attraction for people," he said.

Small to medium-sized enterprises dominate the business landscape of the Arab world and this presents great opportunities for the IT industry.

Lacroix points to the "trader" rather than "industrialist" business culture that permeates throughout the Middle East, a trait that makes the market both competitive and fast-moving.

The technology-hungry Middle East market can yield healthy profits for manufacturers and contractors alike with International Data Center (IDC) reports showing the region's IT market has grown by a staggering 30 per cent in the past year alone, against a worldwide slump.

One aspect of the Middle East IT industry that is attracting significant investment is the Internet.

At present, Internet penetration in the region is low with Nielsen Net-Ratings research figures revealing only three per cent of the total Middle East's population is using the Internet, compared to 59 per cent of the US population.

Much of this can be attributed to the low PC penetration in the region. Despite this, most of the major manufacturers are confident the industry will go from strength-to-strength.

Among the leading Arabic IT solution providers is Sakhr Software.

Founded in 1982, Sakhr Software is now reaping the benefits of forging ahead with a new generation of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies at a time when international software developers were reluctant to sponsor any serious research into difficult native languages such as Arabic.

One of its more significant developments is the translation engine that it built for the popular Arabic translation site, ajeeb.com.

Sakhr Software works closely with Intel and Lacroix predicts a big future for Arabic content provision.

"If you can't provide rich local content, you will not increase Internet usage," Lacroix said.

He goes onto compare the Middle East region with his native France, where despite having a population in excess of 60 million, Internet usage is among the lowest in Europe.

The French were slow to pick up on the Internet, despite having developed Minitel, largely due to a lack of French content from the outset.

However, in the last two years a significant amount of local web content has become available and according to Nielson Net-Ratings research, usage has grown 88 per cent in the same period.

Content is key and contractors who take the leap to populate Middle Eastern IT trade parks like Dubai Internet City, while the West continues to drag its feet in the global marketplace, are likely to be received with open arms by a rapidly expanding local sector.