DUBAI, 18 September 2007 — Although GITEX is held in Dubai, one of the primary purposes of the trade show is to serve the interests of the Saudi market. Yes, there is a GITEX show held in Riyadh each year, but it simply can’t compare to the Dubai edition of the exhibition.
This year it was not only the number of visitors from Saudi Arabia that were reduced, but some exhibitors chose to stay away as well. Saudi Telecom, which for the past two years has had one of the largest stands at GITEX, decided not to participate in last week’s exhibition. That move saved them at least SR500,000.
While it is clear that the timing of this year’s show was poor, it should be understood that some Saudi enterprises, which in the past sent up to 100 employees to GITEX, have decided that they will no longer subsidize such travel. One IT manager explained this new point of view.
“Even when vendors pay the travel and hotel expenses of our employees to come to GITEX, we still lose their services for a week. We find that our employees go to GITEX and spend most of their time socializing instead of investigating technology. No reports are produced on what our staff saw at the show and none of them will be decision-makers when it comes to the selection of technology. Even worse, some of them will be biased against certain vendors just because one vendor provided them with a free trip. This can cause difficulties in terms of acceptance of our choice of technologies,” said the Saudi CTO, who wished to remain anonymous. “We see most of our new technologies live at facilities in Europe and then ask for trial installations to be done at our facilities in the Kingdom, so GITEX has no relevance in terms of technology selection. At GITEX we usually see only vendors who already have a relationship with us and we discuss any issues we may have with them.”
The Saudi companies who did choose to take floor space at GITEX this year did so because they have locally developed products and solutions that they wanted to present to a wider audience and they had hoped that GITEX would be a means for that.
Riyadh-based Advanced Electronics Company (AEC) was demonstrating several different technologies. Madar (www.madar.com.sa) is its total fleet management and tracking system, which combines GPS, GIS and communications technologies to provide vehicles location and information. With such information, from any location the fleet operator can better manage the vehicles under his control. EMS (www.aecl.com) is a plug-and-play system that enables the monitoring of the environmental condition of a facility at a distance.
AEC has also been able to create world-class telecommunication capabilities with a focus on the regional market. AEC’s Telecom Value Added Services (VAS) provide a highly efficient and tailored VAS that are customized to the local market. AEC offers a wide variety of VAS that include Location Services, Multimedia Services, Text Messaging Services and other revenue generating applications.
“Being headquartered in Riyadh, we know it’s up to us to reach out to our potential market because it might not be easy for them to meet us in the first instance,” said Nawaf Al-Hoshan, Program Manager, AEC. “We did get some business leads at this show but unfortunately it wasn’t as good as last year. The show seemed to lack energy. Fortunately, GITEX is not our only marketing opportunity annually. It’s just part of an overall marketing plan. We do have excellent products and many well established customers, plus our new initiatives with HCL Technologies are under way, so I believe the future will be a continuing success for us.”
Another Saudi company at GITEX was Electronia (www.electronia.com), which is headquartered in the Kingdom’s Eastern Province. Electronia is involved in R&D, engineering, manufacturing, installation, operation and maintenance, training, software design and consultancy services in the areas of wired/wireless broadband communications, international data highways, switching networks, VSAT systems, vehicle tracking systems, office automation systems and smart card applications.
Tariq Husain, VP Business for Electronia, was manning the company’s GITEX stand and he was particularly proud to show off Electronia’s smart card solutions which are all designed and manufactured in Saudi Arabia. Electronia’s smart card terminal is the first in the world to make use of a nano chip. The company has also developed the first license plate recognition system that reads Arabic and English, and can distinguish color.
“I also want to highlight our indigenously developed Ballot Box which uses smart card and biometric technology plus legacy printout,” said Husain. “It has a GPS engine which will only allow the box to work at a specific location on a specific time and date. This is a way to help eliminate fraud in any voting system.”
Husain found the turnout at this year’s GITEX to be less than expected, but Electronia exhibits at CABSAT and also in Singapore, so he was quite optimistic that year ahead would still bring strong rewards.
