Egypt: Land of Pyramids, the Sphinx…and Outsourcing?

Courtesy: http://blogs.wsj.com/

India’s tech boom has inspired other developing nations to promote themselves as outsourcing destinations. The latest to try to cash in: Egypt.

Egypt seems like an unlikely place for Western companies to send tech work and open call centers, but Tarek El-Sadany, a government official in charge of helping to grow the country’s information-technology industry, says that the country is well positioned to do these tasks—literally. Egypt is only two hours off of Greenwich Mean Time, so daytime there corresponds nicely with the European workday. For US companies committed to outsourcing, Egypt can be a hop between the US and India.

Another benefit, according to El-Sadany, is that the weekend in Egypt is observed on Thursday and Friday. People typically work on Saturday and Sunday so companies won’t have to pay extra for those shifts—or get stuck with second class workers—as they might in other countries.

El-Sadany spent more than 20 years working in the US tech sector before returning to Egypt last year, most recently as the chief technology officer at Iris Financial Services. In 2005, while a vice president at Oracle, he opened a technical support center in Egypt.

In December, Egypt for the first time cracked the tech research company Gartner’s list of the 30 top countries for outsourcing. (The countries on the list aren’t ranked.) The list takes into account criteria such as the size of the talent pool, how proficient a country’s workforce is in other languages, and how committed the government is to its tech sector.

Egypt graduates more than 30,000 engineering students a year, and thousands more fluent in English, French and German. “Egypt from a cultural view is in the center of the world,” says El-Sadany.

But it’s the commitment to fostering a tech industry that sets Egypt apart, says El-Sadany. Egypt’s prime minister was formerly the minister of information technology and a professor of engineering before that. “When a country is in a military crisis, leaders come from the military,” says El-Sadany. The same holds true for IT: When a country is trying to boost its IT capabilities, it turns to leaders from that sector, he says.

One sign the strategy is paying off: In December, Intel said it would open a production center in Egypt.