ALKHOBAR, 6 January — Every year I hear people moaning in the Eastern Province about how we cannot compete with the revelries across the Causeway during the holiday season. That’s why I was very interested in the ideas promoted at First Night International (firstnightintl.org).
First Night was founded in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts. The themes of the organization are to "recapture the symbolic significance of the passage from the old year to the new; to unite the community through a shared cultural celebration; and to deepen and broaden the public’s appreciation of the visual and performing arts" — all without the inclusion of alcoholic beverages.
The organization has grown to encompass celebrations in 190 cities throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. For some cities, First Night is the start of yearlong activities, which serve to enrich both the communities and their members. The entertainment and activities vary, depending on what can be made available. The one thing all the celebrations have in common is that they are hugely popular. In Boston, 60,000 people turned out for the First Night celebration in 1976. Now the number is nearly a million. It would be extremely easy to adapt many of the First Night ideas to our own holiday seasons here in the Kingdom — if only we could find the will to do so.
On a second note about the holidays, I was very disappointed to receive many, many Dead Tree cards from IT companies. Dead Tree cards are those greeting cards that serve no useful purpose except to say "Hi." I always expect IT companies to be trailblazers, showing the new paths for others to take. There are many organizations, like UNICEF and the Al-Noor Foundation (alnooruae.org) that sell greeting cards to help fund their activities. If a company wants to send paper cards then selecting those that will benefit a charity is a good choice. An even better choice would be for an IT company to send out electronic greeting cards instead and state on the cards that the funds which were previously spent on the company’s annual greeting card mailing, including the cards, postage and labor, have been donated to a specified charity. Such a move would demonstrate exceptional management of resources through the creative use of technology in this new age.
Now, we continue with the forecasts for 2002 given to Arab News by leaders in the IT Industry.
Gilbert Lacroix, General Manager, Intel MENA: "During 2001, and despite the global recession, Intel has continued to enjoy healthy growth in every part of this region: The Gulf, North Africa and the Levant. We are planning aggressively for continued growth in 2002 and accordingly, we will continue to increase our presence in the region with increased focus on North African and Levant nations."
Habib Zaatar, CEO, Zorona.com: "The IT industry will continue to experience slowdown as companies limit their IT spending to necessary upgrades only. Most companies will focus their spending in two areas, PC hardware and software upgrades. This means that companies such as Dell, Compaq, Microsoft and Computer Associates should benefit. Infrastructure and network companies will continue to struggle in 2002."
Hisham El-Amili, Sales and Marketing Director, Middle East & Africa, Mitel Networks: "Mitel Networks predicts the following for 2002: Deployment of voice over IP (Lan telephony) in the SME market at a speedy rate. More implementation of voice recognition applications particularly for the security market. More deployment of Blue Tooth technology with the introduction of 3G. IP/broadband video and imaging applications particularly for the security and banking sectors. Biotechnology commercial deployment for the security sector and early adoption of nanotechnology in the military sectors."
Abdul Aziz Al-Salloum, Managing Director, Computer Associates Middle East: "Coming off a very strong 2001 in the Kingdom, the entire team at Computer Associates Middle East is looking forward to aggressively building on our successes of this past year. CA’s recently announced corporate product realignment strategy will enable our Saudi customers to understand even more clearly what solutions we have for them in the security, storage, and enterprise management areas, as well as those of application lifecycle management, portals and business intelligence, and data management and application development.
"CA Middle East’s one big wish for 2002 would be that senior decisionmakers at the very highest levels continue to appreciate and understand that IT developments are advancements that affect the long-term effectiveness of business processes, not just short-term conveniences in office automation. By being more open to the deployment of new technologies in the workplace, Saudi managers can become regional leaders in the business community."
Amar Wadjih, General Manager, Saudi Arabia & Kuwait, Sun Microsystems: "There’s no such thing as personal identity on the Internet. What we have today is an illusion. We may be greeted by name at a site, but these sites don’t recognize individuals; they recognize web browsers. That’s why, even though I may see ‘Welcome, Mr. XYZ!’ at the top of a page, I’m also presented with ‘If you’re not Mr. XYZ, click here.’ At first glance, that may not seem like such a big deal, but it may well represent the defining issue of online commerce. Telephone carriers across the Middle East — indeed, around the world — seamlessly transfer callers between their various networks and share profits equitably. Given the volume of calls, both land and mobile, this can be an exceedingly complex undertaking. But no comparable billing system exists on the Net. There is no standard way to simply connect and be billed for services the way mobile phone users are automatically billed. Until we get this right, the next wave of Internet business will be severely handicapped, held back by inconvenience, incompatibility and mistrust.
"This is why Sun Microsystems is a founding member of the Liberty Alliance Project, an organization formed to create an open, federated, single sign-on identity solution for the digital economy. Other founding members include: American Express, AOL Time Warner, Bell Canada, France Telecom, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard Company, Mastercard International, Nokia, RealNetworks, Sony Corporation, United Airlines and Vodafone. The combined customers of these companies represent over a billion people! Passports for international travel are issued and honored by many different countries, not by a single entity. The same should be true when traveling the World Wide Web!"
Khaled Nassar, Manager, E-Business Division, Al-Faisaliah Advanced Systems Technology: "From an e-business prospective, I believe that the Saudi market has been going through two main phases after the Y2K pause. The year 2000 was the educational and awareness phase and the year 2001 was the evaluation and qualification phase. For 2002, real projects will start taking off through leading organizations and others will act as followers. In the New Year, it appears that the sell-side of B2B e-commerce and e-security solutions will have the highest ranking among different IT spending priorities."
Basel Tutunji, Sales Director, Intershop Middle East and North Africa: "2002 should be a strong year for Intershop, because the level of awareness about and comfort with e-commerce projects in the Middle East is improving on a regular basis. In 2001 and earlier years, we may have had to explain the concept and benefits of e-commerce to our potential customer base in the region. For 2002, we’re seeing regional companies create their own online initiatives in partnership with Intershop."
Mahesh Rao, Head, Marketing, Middle East, i-Flex Solutions Limited: "We foresee that financial institutions in the Middle East will focus more on the "customer" with a single customer view across all applications and provide a uniform experience across multiple delivery channels like ATMs, Internet, call centers and mobile phones. Also, we expect that financial institutions will invest more in customer analytics to build on business intelligence from transactional systems."
Badr Al-Badr, CEO, Al-Alamiah Internet and Communications Co: "In 2002, the IT and communications field in the Kingdom should anticipate the following developments: In the telecom field, STC is expected to further reduce the charges for both voice and data services to make them more in line with international prices in preparation for competition in the telecom field. This should be more explicit in the mobile telephone field, which is expected to be the first area to be open for competition with the government starting a bid for a second license.
"In the area of e-commerce, the new Saudi e-commerce law is expected. Further, electronic payment systems are expected to emerge simplifying e-commerce transactions. Also a few new companies in B2B e-commerce are expected to start operations learning from the failures of the dotcoms and concentrating on business models that are local in nature.
"In the consumer Internet arena, more penetration for Internet usage is expected, increasing the user base from an estimated 2-3 percent to 4-5 percent of the population. This should be helped by the price reduction of PCs, which is expected to continue in 2002. More schools will start accepting the Internet after a period of a wait-and-see for how to best control its usage.
"In the corporate Internet arena, we should see more business applications over the Net. In addition to the leading banks that have already launched Internet-banking services, the rest of the banks are expected to launch similar services for consumers and corporates. More government applications are expected after the initial success of the Ministry of Haj’s Umra ASP initiative, which reduced the processing for Umra visas by using Internet communications. The Ministry of Commerce and the municipalities are expected to be among the first to start offering e-government types of services.
"For ISPs, consolidation is the keyword. We should see some alliances and mergers between the larger ISPs while more of the smaller to medium ISPs will join the few others that quietly closed operations in 2001."
Bilal Sununu, Country Manager, Microsoft Arabia: "The Saudi IT sector will have a very good 2002. This is mainly due to the new government spending on IT projects especially in the education sector and the fact that many IT tenders and projects which started in 2001, will mature in 2002.
"At Microsoft, we are expecting our customers’ attention to center on the security and manageability of their infrastructure. We also expect to see a focus by large organizations on middleware technologies, Business Intelligence solutions, and workflow and portal solutions. Microsoft Arabia will be focusing on the above corporate priorities through the .Net platform components like: Windows 2000, SQL 2000 Server, Exchange 2000 Server, BizTalk Server, and Visual Studio .Net. Along with that, we expect 2002 to be the year of Active Directory deployment to address manageability and security.
"On the desktop side, Microsoft will continue to empower organizations with great experiences through Windows XP and Office XP. Both products are already showing excellent momentum in the corporate environment. Microsoft will forge ahead in addressing customers’ security and privacy concerns, developing local partners, empowering young Saudis by providing knowledge on the latest technologies, and carrying on with investment in the Arabization of our leading products."
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