The Gazette has caught up with Khaled el-Amrawi, the regional enterprise solutions director for Intel in the Middle East Turkey and Africa for an open disccusion on a wide array of issues relevant to the information technology industry and its business in the region. Within the Middle East, Intel only has one factory in Israel, why haven't you considered Egypt to establish that factory? Intel is a unique company in the sense that we mainly look for talents no matter what nationalities they are. We look for talents and people who are capable of developing intellectual properties (IP) since the whole game is about IP. When we talk about the semiconductors industry we need really special talents. I graduated from Alexandria University, the faculty of engineering and I can assure you that in Egypt we do not teach the curricula that teach engineers how to develop semiconductor business. Developing semiconductors require people who have very strong background on physics and chemistry, chemical engineering, material science and electronics engineering. We have a big gap between what we teach in the universities here and what the market needs. Egypt has a number of characteristics that distinguishes it from many other countries, but we have to think very carefully on what verticals in the industry we need to focus on and penetrate. The Government in general is doing very good work to attract foreign investments, but the next step should be to develop intellectual property. If this is the case here, then it is the role of the international companies operating here to develop students' skills in their areas of specialisation. What is the role that Intel plays to develop students' skills in the semiconductors business? Intel is a hardware manufacturer, that is true but we also develop software applications in order for our processors to be compatible with the different parts of PCs or laptops. We developed a programme to train university students across the Arab world and we are using Egyptian engineers to train those students on how to use the latest technologies in the software and hardware industry. Another example is what we do in the telecom space. We have a centre here that focuses on WiMAX in the Arab world and other wireless broadband technologies. For us, it is extremely important to increase affordable broadband penetration which would definitely mean that there would be an increase in PC penetration. As a matter of fact, we co-operate with all the governments across the Arab world to increase broadband penetration. Would you give us more details about your co-operation with the governments across the ME to increase broadband penetration? Let me give a model. We have an Egyptian team that is currently working in Saudi Arabia. They actually did an amazing pilot during pilgrimage. What they did is that they connected Mecca and the surrounding areas with WiMaX and they used one of Intel's devices that has an RF ID and each Hajj had a unique RF ID that was put around his wrist. This ID has all the Hajj's data: name, age, nationality and even medical record. Simply, if anything happened, the authorities there only needed to scan the ID around the Hajj's wrist to get all his data. This of course made the pilgrimage process much easier and safer.
