Software Business in the Middle East

After I came to Dubai, it took me just a few weeks to see that you cannot earn here on IT consulting. There are too many cheap Indian programmers who are ready to work for very little money. The past June showed I was wrong.

An interesting thing happened. One of the local government healthcare organizations started to implement electronic data exchange between healthcare providers and health insurance companies. The initiative is great. Also, the implementation was supposed to be pretty simple. At least the specification with all the requirements for data exchange is very easy to read. The main idea of such data exchange is that all organizations would convert their data to XML in a special format that is very close to HL7.

We started to develop our own product that could convert data to HL7, but the work was not very active as we didn’t know how difficult it would be for organizations to make their own converters and so how many potential customers we might get.

Back in June we helped our first customer to submit data electronically in a proper format. They started to develop their own converter in December 2007, but nothing really worked until June 2008. They got all kind of issues in their converter — either data were wrong, or format was invalid, or anything else.

Customer called as on Thursday saying they got deadline to submit data on Sunday — so we got three days to get our tool working. If customer would not be able to send the first portion of data by Sunday, they might get fined by the official authorities.

The rest of Thursday we spent learning more about XML, XSD, etc — thanks to W3Schools. Friday and Saturday was spent on very fast code writing with a lot of hardcoded stuff, workarounds, quick fixes and shortcuts – but anyway the code worked. On Sunday we spent some more time making fine-tuning to work with the customer’s database, and finally generated and submitted data. The customer avoided unnecessary expenses on fines, and we earned enough for the company to pay our bills for the next couple of months.

Of course, we could say we are very smart guys who were able to do the job for three days while the customer’s IT department sucked for six month without any success. But the point is that this kind of job would be done for three days if you work very hard in a kind of emergency, or seven to ten days if you do this job during normal working hours. The cheap IT force seems to cost more than getting smart and more expensive developers. The problem is not that all guys in the customer’s IT department are stupid – the problem is that I guess for their level of salary there is no way you can find somebody really smart.

This situation is for sure very good for us as we get a chance to earn pretty much money on the consulting. But for the customers it costs a lot to hire cheap programmers.

Another conclusion from all this — it is amazing how much people will never spend enough time reading the specs, although it is required for your data submission to the government and, as result, you might get fined by government or even loose your license if data aren’t sent correctly. So this is something you can make money on too.

Finally, this consulting work has forced our development for the converter to the format required for data exchange — it turned out that there is much more than one customer who got the same issues with data submission.

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I studied Computer Science in the University. The majority of experience about how to promote and sell comes from my own mistakes. I guess that some kind of business education might help in my work, but I don’t have it (yet).

Thinking about how education might be helpful, I wonder if it is really necessary for successful career and business. I will not take a well known example of Bill Gates; instead, I’ll talk about one example from my personal life.

It was summer 1996 when my friend and I started to work as programmers in one of the insurance companies. We just finished our third year in the University, so we could work full time during that summer, and part time during the next year. Our manager was a brilliant man. I think he was one of the best managers I ever had – dispite the fact that he had no education at all. After the school he worked in Electronic Workshop fixing TV sets. Then he started working in insurance, and at the time we came in he was Insurance Director.

I guess I had the same brilliant manage one time more afterwards. That guy also had ordinary Bachelor degree he got in a college in Boras.

All other managers I had were good enough, and some of them were really stupid guys. The education is good, but it cannot replace the common sense.

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It happened during my last trip to Saudi Arabia. I was sitting in the hotel lobby using free Wi-Fi Internet very late at night. It was about 1 am. The only thing I wanted was to go to bed, but I had to finish couple e-mails first. Suddenly, a guy in Arab cloth sat down next to me on the sofa. People in Arabic countries are normally very social; it is very different from frozen Scandinavia

The guy asked me something about where I came from, what I did in Saudi Arabia and thousands of other questions. I was answering trying to smile and showing I was really busy and wouldn’t want to continue talking as I had some urgent stuff to do.

When he asked me about what I did for living, I told him a little bit about our drug database. And you know what? That guy was a pharmacist. Even more, he was a chief pharmacist in Ministry of Social Affairs! He asked me for a demo CD and we exchanged business cards.

Yesterday we got a purchase order from Ministry of Social Affairs for five-year license. By the way, it is our first customer that has purchased a license for such a long period of time. And I was very close to clearly tell this guy that I was sorry, but I needed to make my job done…

The conclusion is that you would always have a demo CD or booklets with you. You never know where you might get a new customer. Probably, business card with a web address of your product works also fine, but folk here in the Middle Eats prefer to get something they could touch.

And the main thing - always talk to the people. It is probably the easiest and cheapest way to market your product.

Have you ever had an unusual situation when a new customer just came out from nowhere when least expected? Tell your story in the comments.

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