Software Business in the Middle East

I always knew that IT department and management have different opinions on the company Information System. But recently, meeting with a customer, I was really shocked from such opposite comments on Information System from their management and IT department.

There were two meetings – with IT Manager and General Manager. Loose translation.

Meeting with IT Manager

“We have cool system, everything is automated and online. We only print out receipts for our customers, as well as certain reports. I really have no idea, guys, how you could help us. We have no problems.”

Meeting with General Meeting

“What we have is a piece of shit – it was a mistake to develop Information System in-house. We have more problems than benefits. Ambitions of our IT department is a good thing, but we are not in software business. Frankly, we are ready to invest into the new Information System from the specialized provider.”

Without knowing they are both talking about the same system, you might easily assume they even work in different companies. The current Information System is of course a baby of the IT department, and I completely understand it – everything is done by them. But management in business organization has a final word.

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We made an experiment yesterday – my wife went for the whole day shopping (with a limit set on a shopping budget, of course ) My responsibility was to take care about our child, keeping smile on my face and the main thing – never say something like “let’s stop shopping and go home”.

Gentlemen, I can assure you that 16-hours working day is much easy to stand than 8-hours shopping.

My wife was also very tired from it. She said that full day shopping is not for her, and she would better buy stuff in passing. It is in fact very good news

Generally speaking, I get a headache after thirty minutes in the shop, so if I need to buy something, I want to buy it quickly. Is it only my reactions, or all men are the same?

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Together with my friends we started working as software developers when we were third-year students. Once we met discussing the idea of starting up our own business – that discussion was the first and the last as we couldn’t find a product we would develop and sell.

Now I feel that generation of the potential product ideas is one of the simplest tasks. Another thing is that you definitely should not implement all those product ideas, but it is different exercise.

We are getting new ideas simply developing our own product. I’ll give just a few examples that might end up as new software.

Connection to the database

It is not only us who got requirements to support different Database Management Systems like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MS Access as minimum requirements as well as ODBC connections to any database in addition. I’ve failed to find a good product that we could buy and build into our own software.

SQL Query Builder in your product

It is not only us who would like to have built-in SQL Query Builder in our product so that our users would be able to select tables and views in their database and build SQL statements visually, just like in MS Access. So far I’ve seen only Active Query Builder but that’s all.

Auto program updater

Couple years back when we started developing our product we made automatic program update ourselves. To be honest, it didn’t work very well, and it didn’t work for some of the customers. Finally, we understood that it’s easier to spend a few hundred dollars to buy a tool for auto updates rather than to spend time on non-core functionality for our software.

We played with many options and finally selected pretty simple auto update software AutoUpdate+. This program is nice, but some features are not very straightforward, and they might be implemented simpler way. It means there is room for a new auto update software.

There are other ideas for the new products we got, but we would rather leave them for ourselves for future implementation

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