High tech at GITEX

If GITEX Dubai had a theme this year, it must have been Arabisation. Amira Ibrahim reports from the exhibition
After years of wading through English language content, the region's IT users have suddenly been treated to a cornucopia of tools designed to make computing in Arabic a whole lot easier. If the events and announcements of the region's most prestigious IT event, GITEX Dubai (14-16 October), are anything to go by, then Arabic content and Arabisation are definitely the region's current IT fashions.
At GITEX, international IT companies seeking to expand their coverage in the region found happy pickings among the wealth of Arab portals on display. The GITEX audience also witnessed the launch of an Arabic search engine, and IBM announced that Linux, its free operating system, would be fully Arabised by the second quarter of next year. Khaled Hassan, regional manager for IBM, also said that IBM has already committed itself to spending $1 billion over the next few years Arabising other IBM products.
Also at the show, MSNBC.com announced it had signed a content distribution agreement with the Egyptian Good News 4 Me portal, to provide select news and information, enhanced by streaming audio and video, throughout the Arab region.
The Arabisation of MSN products shows international confidence in the Arab market. Observers also hope that it will encourage other international companies to follow suit.
Regional companies have vaulted on to the Arabisation bandwagon, too. One name setting the pace is Sakhr Software.
Founded in Kuwait in 1982, Sakhr relocated to Cairo in 1990. Shortly after, Sakhr launched ArabDox, a sophisticated operating system for business, which provides information management to large companies.
Sakhr already has a strong pedigree in Arabisation products. Its ArabSite takes the user through all the steps needed to transform English content into Arabic. Sakhr's Ajeeb.com, a bilingual web portal, also has an online service that instantly translates Arabic web sites into English, as well as translating text, complementing the English-to-Arabic service it introduced last year.
That is not all. Fahd Al-Sharekh, Sakhr's Ajeeb.com chairman, said that automatic translation tools were also being developed. "Users of Ajeeb.com e-mail services will be able to read their letters in both Arabic and English," he explained.
At GITEX, Sakhr revealed another arrow in its quiver. It unveiled its new Arabic search engine, Juhaina. Juhaina monitors, collects and categorises information published on the Web, in both Arabic and English. It covers breaking news, politics, finance, science, sports or any other topic users want. Juhaina will be available on ajeeb.com.
Salah Malai'b, executive director of Sakhr's Cairo branch, explained how Juhaina works. "It detects any new articles, and updates and categorises them under major and minor topics," Malai'b said. On revenue streams he commented, "The service is free, but the full benefits are obtained through paid subscription. There are many options including adding new target sites for the search process, and receiving e-mail alerts," he added.
Sakhr's ambitions don't stop there. Al-Sharekh told Al- Ahram Weekly that negotiations are on between Sakhr and Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Egypt to supply a number of solutions to the respective e-government initiatives. "Each Arab e-government initiative will be supplied with different Arab solutions," he said.
More generally in the region, Al- Sharekh welcomes the launch of new Arabic specific portals like MSN Arabia. "We just hope the move by MSN Arabia will encourage other majors like Yahoo! to Arabise their portals," he said.
More than 613 exhibitors thronged Gitex Dubai 2001, representing over 1,500 companies from 35 countries. Alas, though, even the IT world has suffered the ill-winds of politics. Fallout from 11 September reduced numbers at GITEX. According to figures provided by the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC), the GITEX organiser, 50,684 trade visitors passed through the turnstiles compared to 73,000 for Gitex 2000. The new entry fee, charged for the first time, may also have deterred visitors.
But the general feeling was that politics was the main cause of reduced attendance. "There is a consensus that the industry has been affected by the events. People doubt whether they should invest in new products at this risky time," said an Egyptian exhibitor.
Politics intruded in other ways, too. Palestinians, who were contributing to the exhibition for the first time, found their attempts to do business beset by events back home. As other visitors and exhibitors were busy discussing deals, the Palestinians were frantically calling home to find out if their friends and colleagues were safe, as distressing news arrived that the Palestinian Information Technology Association office in Ramallah (PITA) had been occupied and closed by the Israelis. At the Palestinian pavilion, which housed seven companies, no IT talk could be heard, only discussions about the return journey and how the Palestinian IT sector could cope while the PITA offices were under occupation.
A lesser but still much discussed worry in Dubai was software piracy. Across town from GITEX, The Shopper, an IT retail event, was held at the Airport Expo Dubai. There, copyright was a big issue.
Organisers declared The Shopper piracy-free. But others were less sure. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) Middle East offered a reward for any information about the sale of pirated software at the show.
The BSA raided and closed a company for selling pirated software at The Shopper, while the UAE Ministry of Information closed another for the same reason.
The BSA announced the start of a 45-day anti-piracy awareness campaign in the Arab world during the holy month of Ramadan. The campaign will start with Kuwait and the UAE.
Despite these problems, IT in the region, and GITEX, appear set to continue to prosper. The DWTC and India's Andhra Pradesh state government signed a memorandum of understanding jointly to organise GITEX Hyderabad in January 2002.
Wahid Attala, general manager of DWTC, announced that 75 per cent of the space available for GITEX Saudi Arabia, slated for April, has already been booked.
The only sore point involved Egypt. GITEX Cairo was due to take place in April. But it is likely to be cancelled because of marketing problems. Attala offered some hope, though: "We see no reason why GITEX Cairo should not achieve similar success to other exhibitions...We are studying solutions and alternatives to maintain GITEX Cairo."
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