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SOFTWARE MAKERS KEY INTO ARABIC MARKET
BY RASHAD MAHMOOD
Key clicks reverberating through sleepy desert
hamlets attest to an unprecedented boom in computing throughout
the Arab world. According to the World Bank’s World Development
Indicators database, there were 14.4 million PC owners in the Middle
East North Africa (MENA) region in 2004, up from 7.5 million in
2000. One of the reasons for this boom is the proliferation of Arabic
software and content, which is making personal computing and the
Internet more accessible than ever to Arabs unable to speak English.
“The spread of Arabization is one of the biggest drivers of
increased computer and Internet use,” says Ahmed Kandeel,
technical director at Imaginet Software, a Cairo-based software
firm that specializes in Arabic software for portable devices. He
says new Arabic tools are encouraging more people to purchase computers
and utilize the Internet.
But it’s been a long road, as Amr Abdel Salam, regional sales
manager at Sakhr Software can attest. It was not until the late
1980s that PC ownership among Arabic speakers surpassed the critical
mass for specialized software development. “When personal
computers began to be introduced to the Middle East, most products
and websites were developed exclusively for an English-language
market,” he recalls. “If an Arabic version was ever
created, it only came out long after the original English product.”
Sakhr, a Kuwaiti software developer that relocated to Cairo in 1992,
has changed its business paradigm in response to the market’s
shift over the last two decades. The company originally carved a
niche in the market by producing some of the first commercial Arabic
software, including Arabized Microsoft operating systems, word processors
and machine translation tools. But as PC use grew in the Middle
East during the 1990s, multinational software houses saw profit
in developing Arabic-language versions of their most popular software.
And as these giants entered the market, Sakhr quickly realized it
could not compete.
“Sakhr moved away from the Arabic PC business in the early
1990s when Microsoft decided to release its own version of Arabic
Windows,” recalls Abdel Salam. “It’s too difficult
to compete with a huge multinational company like Microsoft, so
now we focus on value-added services and contracts with other companies
to assist with the Arabization of their products.”
Yet the entry of multinationals has, if anything, created more work
for local software companies. Microsoft Egypt alone employs over
100 local workers directly, and thousands more indirectly through
its network of 2,000 local partners. “Our partners range in
size from multinationals like IBM to small, family-owned computer
shops,” says Hassan El-Moussalamy, Microsoft Egypt’s
business and marketing officer. “If we assume that each of
our 2,000 partners has 10 employees, and that one-third of their
work is related to Microsoft products, Microsoft could theoretically
be helping to employ around 7,000 people. And that’s not including
the freelance community of application developers and technical
support, whose numbers are anyone’s guess.”
Lost in translation
Despite the huge potential for Arabization, companies face several
hurdles in adapting western software for Arabic users, says Maged
Makram, localization project manager at Microsoft Egypt. “Arabization
is much more challenging than converting to another western language.
For example, if converting to French, a company simply has to replace
the English text with French text, then do a quick check on the
interfaces, and then they’re done. For Arabic, it is completely
different. All screens need to be mirrored (switched to read right
to left), icons and arrows need to be flipped, and menus need to
be reversed.”
Another difficulty is the lack of agreement over PC-related terminology.
“Some companies use one Arabic word, while others use another,”
Makram says. For example, some software companies translate the
word “disk drive” as “sawaq al-aqras,” literally
“driver of the disk.” Microsoft, however, prefers “muharrik
al-aqras,” literally “disk engine,” which is closer
to the original English meaning. Such discrepancies can confuse
users when switching between programs, especially those unfamiliar
with computers.
But one company’s headaches is another’s bread and butter.
Local firms have capitalized on the demand for homegrown talent,
carving out a niche in the market by providing Arabization of both
existing and customized software. “Everyone in the Middle
East is aware of the difficulties of Arabization so it makes sense
for international companies to use native Arabic programmers,”
Makram explains.
Cairo has emerged as a regional leader in Arabization and Arabic
software, hosting some of the largest companies in the sector. Software
houses Sakhr, Arabize, Harf and ITWorx have responded to what a
2006 AT Kearney report described as Egypt’s “great promise
and potential” in Arabization and Arabic content.
That potential is being realized at Imaginet Software, which has
grown from a tiny startup with just five employees in 2001 to become
one of the country’s most dynamic software houses. Its products
– which range from Arabic versions of Windows CE for pocket
PCs to proprietary translation software and Arabic optical character
recognition (OCR) for mobile devices – demonstrate the versatility
and ingenuity of local engineers. “Investors don’t trust
Egyptian engineers,” says Kandeel, “but we can invent
anything as well as anyone else.”
Investors, however, remain unconvinced and have been hesitant to
risk capital on the region’s upstart software firms. Kandeel
believes that with more venture capital, Egypt’s software
industry will follow the path of its biggest competitor, India.
“They initially focused on outsourcing, offshoring and providing
tech services. Now they’re moving towards more innovation
and original software development.”
Yet he questions the direction many local software firms are taking.
“[Egypt] should capitalize on hi-tech, not low price,”
he insists. “We have the human resources, just not the financial
ones.”
An expanding web
In the past, there was little incentive for companies to Arabize
their products as most computer users in MENA countries were upper-class
English speakers. However, as the cost of computers has come down
across the region, technology is becoming more affordable and available
to the masses. And as more people adopt it, economies of scale push
prices down even further.
Price considerations aside, the biggest factor increasing computer
use is the Internet, which has created both a need and a tool for
millions of Arabic speakers worldwide. According to Dubai-based
Madar Research Group, the number of Internet users in the MENA region
topped 22 million in 2005 and is expected to grow 33 percent per
annum and reach 53 million by 2009.
Recognizing this growing market, international Internet companies
trying to establish a foothold in the region are adapting their
services to the local market. Web companies such as Yahoo! and Google
have opened Middle East divisions in Dubai and Cairo respectively.
“When you look at the Middle East’s projected 50 million
Internet users by 2009, that starts to compare favorably to large
markets such as the US or European countries,” notes Sherif
Iskandar, Google’s regional manager for the MENA region.
Google recently launched a number of Arabic products including an
Arabic-language news portal, an Arabic version of Gmail, the company’s
popular web-based e-mail program, and an online English-Arabic translation
tool. “These tools will draw an increasing number of Arabic
users online and make the Internet more accessible and useful for
them,” says Iskandar.
And that translates into higher profits for Google. While the company
offers its web services freely to all, it derives profits from advertising
on its web pages. More users means more traffic, which makes its
web pages more appealing to local advertisers.
But getting Arabs to use these tools will take time, as studies
show most use the Internet primarily for chat. Iskandar argues that
as the quality and prevalence of Arabic-language web content improves,
usage patterns should change as well. “In most Middle East
countries, chat is the most popular use of the Internet, whereas
developed countries show much higher rates of web browsing, e-mail
and other functions,” he says. “As Arabic content expands,
we will begin to see usage patterns move towards those of developed
countries and towards content-based activities.”
The final domain
Perhaps the last major barrier to a fully Arabic Internet is the
domain name system – traditionally the realm of English characters.
As it stands, at least a basic familiarity with English characters
is necessary to browse websites. However, the latest versions of
web browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 beta and Firefox 1.5 make
it possible to type in website addresses in non-English scripts
including Arabic, Cyrillic and Chinese. These browsers have a built-in
conversion tool that changes the non-English characters of so-called
internationalized domain names (IDNs) into Punycode, an encoding
system that lets browsers visually represent domain names in multilingual
script.
One problem with IDNs is that top-level domains such as .com, .net
and .org, or country codes such .us, .eg and .ae, must still be
rendered in English characters. Several solutions have been proposed.
The Arabic Domain Names Pilot Project, a collaboration between Arab
League countries, has suggested Arabic equivalents of English domains,
with .com and .net rendered as .shirka and .shabaka respectively,
though in Arabic script. Another suggestion was to use single Arabic
letters to designate top-level domains.
As the IDN system catches on, it seems likely that the domain-name
buying frenzy that gripped the US in the late 1990s will migrate
to the region. Already, there are signs of an impending bidding
war over Arabic IDNs, as companies seek to secure coveted domain
names. Domain name specialty sites such as idnforums.com and namepros.com
buzz with offers to purchase or sell Arabic IDNs, though prices
are nowhere near the level of their English counterparts, many of
which fetch over $100,000.
One reason is the lower level of traffic Arabic IDNs attract, though
this could soon change. “Once Internet Explorer 7.0 is released
later this year, more people will have the capability to enter IDNs
in their browsers and the revenue from parked sites will start increasing
dramatically,” says David Wrixon, one of the world’s
biggest international domain name speculators, whose London-based
company, Chinese Domains Ltd., owns 4,000 IDNs including 500 Arabic-language
domain names.
Wrixon explains that speculators target domain names with high advertising
or resale potential. “People who speculate on domain names
look for general terms that will drive up search results, or that
future content-driven sites will want to purchase,” he says.
Already, Wrixon’s portfolio includes the .com and .net addresses
of 24 of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as the Arabic
numerals 1-10 and many common Arabic words. “Short, easily
rememberable domain names like these are brandable,” he explains.
“They’re easy to remember and type in, and can be applicable
to any industry or product.”
While he admits there is little demand for these domain names right
now, that should change as the Arabic Internet matures. “Sites
need to be developed to get the full benefit of these [IDNs], but
will [eventually] be worth millions,” he says.
Growth initiatives
Until now, most of the growth in computer ownership and Internet
use has been confined to the upper class. Various Arab governments,
however, having recognized the correlation between the cost of computing
and the general public’s IT proficiency, have begun subsidizing
IT usage.
In Egypt, for instance, MCIT has launched several initiatives aimed
at lowering the costs of PC ownership and promoting Internet use.
Among its most successful are the PC in Every Home initiative, which
allows people to purchase low-cost computers in installments, and
its IT Club program, a network of 640 IT clubs nationwide that offer
Internet access for a nominal fee. More impressive is MCIT’s
Free Internet model, which has helped increase the number of Internet
users in Egypt fivefold since its introduction in 2002.
MCIT has also taken a leading role in increasing Arabic web content,
working with companies including IBM, Microsoft and ITWorx to create
searchable text databases of Arabic books. Its biggest initiative
to date is a public-private partnership with the National Library
and Archives of Egypt (Dar Al Kutub) and prominent book publisher
Dar Al-Ma’aref to digitize Arabic books and make them available
online for a fee. “Our e-content initiatives will help develop
the private sector infrastructure for online content,” explains
Hoda Barakat, adviser to the minister of communications and information
technology. “It will also benefit people all over the world,
who will have increased access to Arabic books and other materials.”
The goal, says Barakat, is to make computers and the Internet accessible
to all. Given the speed at which technology is evolving, that may
happen sooner rather than later.
BILINGUAL CHAT
Arabish, short for Arabic-English, is a system for transliterating
colloquial Arabic into English characters. Created by Arab
youth for use in chat, e-mails and mobile phone text messaging,
the system is a way or representing Arabic characters using
Latin script, thereby allowing Arab users to send messages
using standard English fonts and keyboards.
Most Arabic letters have an approximate equivalent in English
and can easily be rendered using the Latin script. For those
Arabic letters that do not have an approximate equivalent
in English, Arabish uses numerals and other characters to
represent them. For instance, the number “3” is
used in place of the Arabic letter ‘Ayn, which has no
English equivalent.
While technology is becoming increasingly Arabic-friendly,
the popular appeal of Arabish means it may well continue as
the principal form of informal text-based communication among
Middle East youth for many years to come.
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