Middle east and Kerala IT business

US and European markets are much matured and are driven by clear process and clean professionalism.

So it’s that easy to do business with them when compared to the markets like Middle East. And we are well aware of the fact that these markets provide the main chunk of earnings for any IT company in the long run. Middle East is one of the fastest growing and developing markets in the world economy today.

But we should not forget that the Middle East region is composed of high number of High Net-worth Individuals and a young upwardly mobile consumer market who are keen on leisure and consumer spending. But there is a clear lack of knowledge in the region about the importance of technology innovation. So if any company wants to tap the huge IT market in Middle East region it should clearly be by some special advantages over other players. But the dragging duration of the projects regardless how big/small the project is a always concern. So it often makes things difficult to execute assignments in a planned manner. This is a major dampening and the challenge is to overcome this. So it’s not just about great service we offer, there should also have a more consistent and innovative (I would want to say ‘smart’) approach to service their needs. So according to me the major advantages we ‘can’ have in this region are a little bit of innovation on how to execute part. This is comparatively easy for us since we are part of that Middle East culture for a long time and we definitely know what the matured markets follow as process on these aspects. We clearly have advantages over many other outside players in the region on time zone, cost, communication, logistics etc.

I would specially want to comment on the points made on trust for Indian companies in that region. One of our partner quoted saying the difference it made to the image of Indian professionals and companies when our Prime Minister made a visit to Saudi Arabia couple of months back. He reportedly had a good discussion about the value we can bring on the table in terms of the IT related business with Indian companies and highly skilled people. So the trust building and branding is always a collective effort of IT companies and the government at this point of time. We are very well aware that major chunk of the local IT crowd are not highly skilled in technologies amidst the call for localization. So this relationship building process at a highest level is necessary since more and more projects are to get outsourced.