Software Business in the Middle East

Finally, I got all the official papers that allowed me to run the company. Now it’s a good time to summarize what ideas we had in mind about what to do.

Consulting

This is definitely a way, at least to get money to keep company running and pay our bills for a while. We thought we could develop custom systems for our customers, or help them with their own development.

It took me a few weeks to figure out that consultancy for us has very little opportunity. One of the reasons is a large competition from Indian developers who work for a very small amount of money. It is probably good money comparing to what they could get back in India, but it is not enough to keep company running the way we wanted. There was a way to employ a number of developers from the subcontinent, but in this case we would treat them as very cheap workers without taking care about how they live and what they eat, so it was not something we wanted to do.

There are definitely exclusions from these pretty pessimistic outlook at IT consultancy. For example, I met a guy from Germany who had been working in Dubai for pretty long time. Suddenly, he got several companies from Germany asking him to help them with their projects here in Dubai. This guy quit his job and started to work with those German companies charging them normal rates per hour as he would work for them in Germany. This is the excellent way of working but unfortunately it happens pretty rare here. In our case it means we would try working with Swedish companies to get this kind of consulting job.

Consulting for Healthcare

It is basically consultancy too, but since some of us had been working with software for Healthcare in different companies for the last several years, we separated this kind of consultancy into the separate option. Healthcare is booming now in UAE, and that sounds like a good opportunity for us. Just as an example, one of the largest projects started in Dubai is Dubai Healthcare City – a special area in the city that would have around 12 hospitals and 300 clinics by year 2010. At this moment they have opened around 24 clinics already. Also, they work closely with Ministry of Health, and it sounds like they are going to have a lot of development in the near future.

Develop Our Own Product

Just before I left Sweden, we thought we could develop our own product while I was running around in Dubai trying to get some work for us. In the middle of 2005 we started to use Agile with Scrum at my last employer, but we had hard time to find out any existing software to be used for project management using this methodology. So, together with my partners we agreed on the requirements that we would implement for the first version, and we also agreed that until I get some work in Dubai to keep all of us busy, they would work on this product. Basically, it was assumed to be the classic product start-up when people work on evenings and week-ends before the product brings enough money to quit their jobs – all three of them would stay employed by their employers until we can pay their relocation to UAE.

My partners made a prototype that demonstrates how User Interface would look like, but that was unfortunately all they were able to develop. For some reasons they never got time to finish even the first version. That was pity because I still think it was a good idea. By now we would have probably got good sales on this product, or at least we would get a very valuable experience on how to promote and sell our own product.

Drug Database for United Arab Emirates

At Siemens I was working a lot with the Drug Database for United States. When we discussed different options of what we could do in Dubai, the idea to develop Drug Database for the local market popped up in our minds. We spent a lot of time searching in the Internet to learn if there was anything similar already existing in UAE, and we did not find anything. The only list of available drugs was found on the web site of Ministry of Health, but it was just a pure list of drugs with their prices without any detailed information. By beginning of March 2006, when it was clear that nothing else would work as we thought, we felt that Drug Database is the only thing that might make sense for us.

From this point we concentrated ourselves only on Drug Database – and this is the product we sell and develop further at the moment. At the same time I spent pretty much time to keep learning about software development and entire business environment in UAE – although we already decided what we’re going to do, it is never wrong to keep your eyes opened to catch the right opportunity.