DUBAI: The 28th edition of the Middle East’s largest IT exhibition, GITEX, booted up on Sunday. This year, more than ever before, the show is all about business. That’s apparent in the tone on the show floor and the manner in which staff on the stands are working to attract GITEX visitors. There are far fewer “presenters” than in the past. It appears that vendors have eschewed fripperies and frills. Instead they have employees on their stands putting on demos and running down business leads. Unlike the slumping economies of most other geographies, Gulf economies are still buoyant and that has made the region hugely attractive to GITEX exhibitors.
Taking place at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Center (DICEC) through Oct. 23, GITEX Technology Week is aiming to attract more than 130,000 visitors. Organized by Dubai World Trade Center and considered to be one of the top three IT exhibitions in the world, the event was inaugurated Sunday by UAE Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum.
GITEX Technology Week includes the Global Conference, the exhibition made up of GITEX Business Solutions, GULFCOMMS and Consumer Electronics, and Shopper@GITEX. Except for the shopper, GITEX is generally open only to trade visitors. However, in a change which reflects the requirements of some of the largest exhibitors at the event, the Consumer Electronics portion of the exhibition will be open on Thursday, with free admission for the general public.
One of the highlights of the event’s first day was the keynote address at the GITEX Global Conference from the chairman of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNeally.
“GITEX Technology Week spotlights technology innovations and trends in one of the most important markets in the world, the Middle East. With the volatility in the financial markets today, companies of all shapes and sizes are coming together to discuss the benefits of open standards and open source technology, which give companies more security and control over their own data, as well as lower licensing costs,” said McNealy.
Sun is just one of dozens of large US-based companies participating at GITEX. Ford Motor Company has become the first automobile manufacturer to establish a presence at GITEX. The company is demonstrating Ford Sync powered by Microsoft Auto software, a factory-installed, fully integrated voice-activated in-car communications and entertainment system for mobile phones and digital music players. Intel is giving GITEX visitors a glimpse of the work ongoing at its Labs. Jason Howard, a component design engineer from Intel’s Circuit Research Lab is at Intel’s stand demonstrating to visitors the computing possibilities of the world’s first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip.
The “Teraflop research chip” aims to offer Teraflops — or trillions of calculations per second — performance for future PCs and servers. With such a chip artificial intelligence, instant video communication, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition could become everyday realities.
Asian companies are not neglecting GITEX. Consumer Electronics giants Samsung and Panasonic have two of the largest displays at the exhibition. Panasonic’s 1000 square meter stand is dominated by its new 150-inch plasma display (PDP) which delivers overwhelming image quality with an 8.84 million pixel resolution (2,160 x 4,096) — more than four times the 1080p HD specification (1,080 x 1,920). The prototype has a screen size equivalent to nine 50-inch PDPs with an effective viewing area of 3.31 m (W) x 1.87 m (H) making it 46 percent larger than its nearest rival. Panasonic Marketing Middle East, General Manager System Solutions Yasuo Yamasaki, said that the company’s 103-inch PDP was enthusiastically welcomed by industry for use in commercial and public facilities and by consumers for family entertainment. He expects the 150-inch plasma to generate new demand from various fields.
It’s not a surprise to find ICT vendors coming from far corners of the world to GITEX. The event is a good chance for new brands to gain regional exposure, find distributors and explore market opportunities.
But Arab News was shocked to find a Saudi Internet Service Provider (ISP) participating at the exhibition. After all, Saudi ISPs are by their very nature local operations whose business rarely spans national borders.
“About 20,000 ICT professionals and decision makers come to GITEX from Saudi Arabia,” said Kais Abdulhameed Al-Essa, Operations and Technical Services Manager for Sahara Net. “Yes, Sahara Net is a Saudi ISP but we want to reach out to those executives from Saudi Arabia and so far I would have to say that it has been worth the investment. We also hope to investigate and perhaps establish some international partnerships while we’re here as well. Sahara Net has participated in several exhibitions in Saudi Arabia and we’ve never felt the same response as here at GITEX.”
Sahara Net is not only an ISP but is also the largest hosting provider in the Kingdom. Established in 1989 as a small hobby Bulletin Board Service (BBS), in 1994 Sahara was the first company in Saudi Arabia to offer Internet and e-mail service to the public.
“We’ve been supporting the Kingdom’s businesses and consumers with data communication resources since the earliest days,” said Al-Essa, “Now, we are promoting our latest service, ‘Sahara MPLS,’ which is receiving positive feedback from Saudi enterprise customers who have been testing it for the last six months. Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) allows the establishment of secure wide area communications between branches of an organization. MPLS also enables the mixed use of multiple applications such as Voice over IP and Video Conferencing, in addition to other office applications without jeopardizing quality of these services.”
So there you have it. If you’re looking to sell ICT products, services or solutions to Middle East businesses, this week GITEX is the only place to be.
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