Press Release Summary = If ever you had a doubt, Egyptian consumers have proven it once and for all: They are, like almost everyone else across the globe, tech junkies.
Press Release Body = Satyam, an outsourcing giant from India, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Egyptian government last month to open a 300-seat facility in the Smart Village. The facility will serve as a technical-development and software-support facility for the company’s Middle East customer base. Adel Danish, CEO of Egypt’s largest call center, Xceed, welcomes Satyam’s arrival, but says the company might come across a few hurdles. “They will have many issues to resolve with the [Ministry of Communication and Information Technology], such as the percentage of Indian employees (limited by law to 10%), and they want to have a majority of Indians during the first 2–3 years,” he says. “We don’t see [foreign investors] as a threat at all or as competition. The pie is so huge. If you look at the size of the pie outside the country, I mean the outsourcing business, the offshore outsourcing business is huge so we don’t see them as competition.” Danish is probably right. The arrival of a company from India, where IT outsourcing first became the rage, shows confidence in the local industry. Satyam’s investment could lead to more Indian investment, perhaps on the scale of the 2,000-seat operation Satyam will open in Malaysia in 2007. For Danish, this is consistent with the same message he’s been delivering all along: What’s good for the industry and country overall outweighs any single company. Danish is no shameless self-promoter. In fact, when he makes business trips he rarely touts Xceed’s top position in his market, but often rattles the names of competitors including Convergence, Workpro and Infosys as examples of the opportunities here. Last year, Xceed was granted certification by the Customer Operations Performance Center (COPC) Inc., the first in the region and in near-record time. COPC, a leading provider of contact-center accreditation, also elected Danish to its standards committee. He downplays his role on the COPC standards committee, even though his company shares the distinction with some of the biggest call-center operations, including those run by Microsoft, IBM and Accenture.
Xceed was also recently granted a contract with Microsoft to provide 150 seats of technical support in English, French, Italian and Spanish for their Xbox 360 video-game console. Microsoft asked Xceed to get their operation up by the Christmas season, the biggest consumer sales period for the US-based technology giant. Xceed will open a 2,400-seat center in Maadi and a another in the Smart Village of about 300 seats early this year, as its current 1,200-seat home has filled to capacity. A number of other call centers are growing as well, and Raya, for example, is applying for COPC certification. As Egypt’s IT reputation spreads, Xceed and others will begin to take on more sophisticated outsourcing projects. Two of the areas Danish says will open up in the near future are insurance claims and business processes. So far, some of the services have been rather simple, and some — like product activation (when you buy a product and then call a phone number to get a code that allows you to turn it on) — can be computerized. Business processes take more time and coordination. Order processing, for example, involves tracking shipments through several locations. Large companies often have regional distribution centers all around the world. Outsourcing centers can evaluate the entire distribution process, potentially making it more efficient.
2012
