CAIRO - With the wrapping of 2010, The Egyptian Gazette caught up with Amr Farouk, the Managing Director of MCS to discuss the company's achievements over the past year and to highlight its strategy to enhance its position in the local market with the beginning of 2011. MCS is the sole authorised certified trainer for Juniper Networks, how is it going with Juniper's training so far? So far we have trained 250 trainees; we are now officially certified to give 17 courses out of Juniper's full portfolio of courses. By next year we are planning to offer the full portfolio of Juniper's certified courses, to cover the region in a more efficient way.
Is there any plan to extend such training to college students at least in the major universities as Cairo University, Ain Shams University, the AUC or any others? Of course! Our plan is to set a specialised programme for undergraduates by mid next year. This programme will by financially sponsored by MCS, McAfee and Juniper Networks. We are currently searching for an organisatioal sponsor to assure that only highly qualified candidates join this programme. We will mainly target engineering and computer science final year students to convey to them information security as a concept and also train them on the latest security products. The MCIT has recently inaugurated the excellence and innovation centre in the smart village, are you planning to have any kind of cooperation with that centre? We have already met the centre's executives to discuss the possible means of mutual cooperation. However, the discussions are still in a very early phase but we will definitely cooperate with that centre in one way or another.
If we talk about McAfee, has anything changed for you after Intel's acquisition of McAfee? Intel's acquisition of McAfee is what experts call 'a friendly acquisition' meaning that a company would acquire another one to increase its portfolio of software or hardware products. Hence, this acquisition would never affect neither us nor any of the involved parties in a negative way. On the contrary, it is expected to widen and enhance the company's position, locally, regionally and globally. How many revenues are you generating from the IT sector? As a matter of fact, 40 per cent of our revenues are generated from our work with our IT partners, namely Juniper Networks and McAfee. If we move to talk about your work in the automation field, how many companies or compounds are you working with so far? We are currently working with nine compounds for four major companies including Emaar, ICG, Iwan as well as Al Baron group.
What is your market share in this field? With all the projects we are working on, we are responsible for 4500 fully automated units in all the compounds we are working on. Although there are no official statistics issued by any authority to measure the market share, yet, if we take a close look on the number of projects/units we are working on we can openly say that our market share is around 60 per cent of the local market. How many revenues do you generate out of it? Almost 60 per cent of our revenues come from this segment. Rumors have it that you have developed a new mobile application to remotely control one's home automated facilities. Would you give us more details about it? This is very true. We have developed a new software mobile application to control all your home automated facilities from your iphone or ipad. This software works as a remote controlling system allowing the user to remotely control and extend all the remote controlling facilities through his mobile.
When do we expect to have this application officially introduced to the market? Very soon; by the beginning of January 2011 we will start implementing this new application in our projects.
What is the nature of your work with the Egyptian Tourism Authority? We are responsible for developing the security of the authority's portal and infrastructure based on McAfee's and Juniper Networks' solutions. We are about to start a new fiscal year, 2011, what is your strategy to enhance your presence in the local market during 2011? Honestly speaking, 2010 was what we can call a transformation year for MCS. During this year, we managed to transform the company from a mid sized company to one of the big companies operating in the Egyptian IT market. For the coming year, we have a number of directions that will guard our business plan. Through 2011, we will focus on maintaining the position we have acquired through enhancing our clients' satisfaction and introducing new services. For instance, we are about to inaugurate a brand new call centre to serve our clients' daily requests within the first quarter of 2011. Through this call centre, our customers can dial a toll free number that would allow them to contact our agents 24/7. Moreover, we will focus on developing our channel partnerships. In this respect, we have hired a highly qualified expert in this field with more than 20 years experience to develop and enhance our channel partnerships.
