This year marks the 20th Gitex conference for Alexander McNabb, who first attended the Dubai event back in 1988, when it was still known as GITE. "Our idea of a cool laptop back then was a machine with an eight-line LCD display," said Mr McNabb, the group account director for the public relations firm Spot On. Over the years, he has seen everything from a show eclipsed by the First Gulf War, happening at the same time in nearby Kuwait, to another where a horde of journalists who had been sent by bus unnecessarily to a useless press event returned furious to the show, unleashing their scorn on anybody who would listen.
"It was like shaking up a glass jar of angry hornets and releasing them into the crowd," he remembers. Mr McNabb said the show, which begins on Sunday, had changed significantly since its early years. "The big technology show those days was a computer show in Riyadh, and I used to think that this little event in Dubai would never eclipse Saudi Computer." But with Gitex now the region's dominant industry event, its size means visitors need to plan ahead to avoid spending the week lost in the mammoth halls of the Dubai World Trade Centre, he said. "It's so big you can just spend days walking around the halls and still not see it all."
While many will be newcomers to the maze of booths and promotions, old hands say Gitex has changed, but will always be about the basic business of technology, bringing the region's buyers and sellers together. While the Gitex floor show itself will be fairly predictable - a dense forest of display booths, brochures and smooth-talking salesmen - the sentiment of the expected 100,000-plus crowd will be the real story of the week.
As the world economy heads towards a possible recession, how technology vendors and buyers are planning to approach the coming year will be a key economic barometer. Spending on technology is often one of the early areas to be hit by budget cuts, and so far the market has sent mixed signals. On Tuesday, Intel, the world's largest chip maker, released solid quarterly results, reporting the highest third quarter revenues in its history. With the company selling more than 80 per cent of the microprocessors that power computers in homes and businesses, its fortunes are closely tied to demand for new machines.
The company said its performance in the last quarter would usually lead it to make optimistic projections for the coming three months. But in an earnings call with analysts, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini was reluctant to make such statements, given the perilous state of the world economy. "We need to see the impact of what is roiling through the credit markets," he said. "We expect the corporate segment to continue to show some softness as IT spending gets rationalised in this macro environment."
As is the case in other industries, the technology sector in the Middle East has largely bucked the global trend so far. Consumer electronics companies continue to report double-digit sales growth in the region, while corporate service providers continue to do deals at a brisk pace. But symptoms of the world crisis are reaching the Gulf. Interest rates are rising, corporate bond yields are heading up, and businesses with international exposure are warning of slowing demand.
Regional technology businesses such as Al Futtaim Technologies - the technology wing of one of the region's largest business groups - and eSolutions, one of the country's largest systems integrators, will be the ones to watch. How they communicate their strategy and plans for the coming year will be well worth watching. Etisalat, the UAE's largest publicly traded company and one of its fastest-growing international businesses, is another company that regional and international visitors will be keen to get to know. It will sponsor a full day of another track of the event, the Gitex Global Conference, running a series of sessions on the company and its various businesses.
One of the world's most influential technology companies will be making its first appearance at Gitex this year. Google, which has grown from a Californian garage start-up to dominate the online search and advertising industries in just 10 years, will be at the show, led by Husni Khuffash, its UAE country manager. Jesper Frederiksen, the Europe, Middle East and Africa director for Google's Enterprise business, will also be at Gitex. How Google hopes to build its online advertising and corporate search businesses in the Middle East should be a good sign of its outlook for growth in the region.
But after all the heavy talk of budget cuts and enterprise strategy, visitors might be looking at a quick bite to eat. The experimental among them could head to the Xerox booth, which will be promoting the company's "solid ink" technology. As the name implies, these new office printers use sticks of solid, rather than liquid, ink, which are slowly melted by the printer as needed. The chief executive of the company that developed the solid-ink system once famously ate a stick of the ink to prove that the vegetable oil-based product was toxin-free and safe to handle. Xerox staff at the booth may be unlikely to hand out the sticks to hungry visitors - and the taste probably leaves a lot to be desired - but they will be happy to talk about imaging systems, one of the less exciting aspects of the technology industry.
And if a stick of solid ink fails to sate your hunger, forget about popping out to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Dubai's roads, slow and clogged at the best of times, will be overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of daily Gitex visitors. "I'd recommend buying a motorcycle," said Mr McNabb, "because gridlock is guaranteed." tgara@thenational.ae
