Software Business in the Middle East

I always assumed that I needed only a few features in my mobile phone: calls, SMS and alarm-clock. Using my old Nokia 6230 it seemed to be all right. Then my heavily used Nokia broke last year, and it happened that I got free and brand new Samsung SGH-C170. That phone seemed to be exactly what I needed - it could only call, SMS and it had an alarm clock.

First week of using Samsung showed I was very wrong in my assumtions that I needed a “simply calling phone”. Below are just a few examples of the features that made my experience using Samsung not very good:

• Time of calls – sometimes I call back using the time of the missed or received call. Samsung simply does store the time of calls. Sometimes it’s not clear if that’s another missed call, or the same from yesterday.
• Repeating Alarm Clock – bad thing is that Samsung’s alarm clock rings only once. If you didn’t wake up, the phone will not repeat the alarm again. It’s very easy for me to oversleep, especially if I went to the bad late at night.
• Saving sent SMS in the Sent folder - nice feature, missed it a lot.
• SMS Editor – such features like starting a new sentence from a capital letter makes life easier. It seems to be a standard now in all phones, but not in my Samsung.

All above are not a big deal, really. But as soon as you get used to such small nice things, it is difficult to live without them. Nowadays I travel a lot and I need to have access to my e-mails from any place, so I got BlackBerry Curve 8900 to see if this device helps in my daily work.

I thought it’s only software industry has issues with how much to charge for a product. But it seems accounting has the same issue.

To move our company to another Free Zone, we would close first our old company in Dubai Internet City. One of the condition for company closure is to get audit letter that we do not have debts and other issues that might prevent company to be closed.

I asked one accounting firm to send us a quote about how much the auditing would cost. They said $2,000. I replied it’s too much. They said $1,800. After several e-mail exchange the price went down to $800 the same day.

How those guys set their prices?

We started our company in Dubai Internet City (DIC) back in January 2006. Since then we’ve been waiting for a proper office to rent. Even with the hyper increase in the office space rent we were still promised to get an office inside Dubai Internet City for about 140 dirham per sq. ft.. The office size we expected to get was about 700 sq. ft.

Normally, companies are not allowed to get office space outside such Free Zones like DIC. But in August 2008 we got a call from Dubai Internet City that we would get an office outside the Free Zone, because it would take another 3 years in the waiting list otherwise. For the office outside we would pay 300 dirham per sq. ft. having minimum 1,000 sq. ft. That’s kind of four times more expensive than promised. Oh, and having one nice condition - payment would be done one year upfront - 300,000 dirham as one payment before we sign lease agreement.

It’s nice business for the guys selling office space (well, it was nice business until the recession), but it was no way we would pay such huge amount of cash upfront. So the question was where to move the company to because otherwise we would not get our license renewed.

First we considered Ras Al Khaima Free Zone. It’s kind of 100 km from Dubai, but since they got a nice business center in Dubai, who cares where we got our license from.

RAK Free Zone has an excellent sales staff - they answered all our questions in details, they advised what to do in what order and how to make sure that company operations are moved smoothly. If you have no special reason to have your license issued by one of the Free Zones in Dubai, I would recommend to look at the option to get licensed in RAK Free Zone.

Then it just happened that I heard about Dubai Biotechnology and Research Park (Dubiotech). It’s another Free Zone in Dubai intended to hold companies working in medical and healthcare domains. They didn’t have any description if they could hold companies working with IT healthcare, but their sales team said it’s OK. So we decided to go for Dubiotech instead of RAK FZ.

Dubiotech has simply amazing team. Many things were solved by phone, or simply sending them e-mails stating that I agree to some points and they could go ahead with them. Even my visa was transfered from DIC to Dubiotech during 19 hours only - this is something I almost didn’t hope for thinking I got to postpone my trip.

Finally, now we hold a license issued by Dubiotech. They got plenty of brand new office spaces, and all of them have furniture. The facilities in their business center are excellent and I just hope they won’t increase their rent prices in the near future.