Ahmed Ali Ashadawi, CEO and President of Al-Falak Electronic Equipment and Supplies Company. Saudi Arabia is required to encourage the country's private sector to train more Saudis in the field of information technology (IT), an area that lacks trained professionals, said a high-ranking official of Riyadh-based IT company. Ahmed Ali Ashadawi, CEO and President of Al-Falak Electronic Equipment and Supplies Company said that Saudi IT companies should either be encouraged to establish technical colleges or support the existing ones for training programs that suit the job market. Al-Falak provides technology-based end-to-end solutions in Saudi Arabia and Middle East. Amidst increasing demand in the job market, the Kingdom is still short of trained IT professionals, Ashadawi said. “Finding trained Saudi IT professionals is a problem that companies have been facing in Saudi Arabia,” he added. “We believe that the Kingdom would benefit more economically from investing in the training of its people in technical institutions. which can provide talented IT personnel with the necessary skills required in the local job market.” The Saudization scenario at Al-Falak is totally different, he said. The company has been investing in its HRD program and as a result, has already achieved 50 percent Saudization in all its IT jobs. “In fact, over 50 percent of our workforce are Saudi nationals, far exceeding the country's condition of mandatory 30 percent Saudization,” he said. “One of our key priorities is to invest in our people, which is why we have set up an innovation committee with a mandate to leverage the expertise and ideas of our employees to further expand the company and improve our operations. He added that the company benefits from its access to a very talented pool of internationally certified Saudi technical practitioners that were trained by Al-Falak's sister company Alkhaleej Training and Education, which has branches across the Kingdom. Developing trained local manpower is in the mutual interest of both public and private sectors as the Kingdom's IT market is expected to grow at a rate of 10 percent through 2013, he said. Saudi Arabia has been investing heavily in its IT infrastructure by installing more fiber optic line. “The figure could go up further once planned broadband projects go online. Around 65,000 kilometers of additional fiber optic cables are projected to be installed in 2011, as compared to around 11,000 last year,” he added. Ashadawi said that for some time now, Saudi Arabia has been working to implement e-commerce and to achieve efficiency in e-governance. One bottleneck that has arised is limited broadband capacity, which he believes the extra fiber optic cables can solve in the coming months. He said that the country's IT sector has been engaged in large-scale lump-sum projects over the past few years in order to keep pace with elevated IT demand from the government and private sectors for the services such as system solutions and consulting; system integration and networking; IPTV solutions; analytical and business intelligence and data warehousing. “Al-Falak has been growing with the country's IT sector and has been adding new business lines such as general contracting and manpower outsourcing to meet the evolving needs of our clients,” Ashadawi explained. “We have been in the business for three decades, during which we have been a local technology partner for some of the world's top IT names such as SAS, HP, Oracle, Symantec and Microsoft.” Al-Falak's other strategies would be to reinforce their market share through expansion practices of retail and distribution channels and acquisition of companies that compliment the company's activities and goals. “Al-Falak has been able to tap its infrastructure and know-how to broaden its regional reach, which now covers Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Sudan on a project-to-project basis. We have also invested in partnerships with international companies based in the US and Canada,” he said. “Local companies have to compete with their international counterparts. Saudi IT players should understand that they have to constantly enhance their product and service portfolios, as people will not only use the services offered by local companies,” he explained. “We want to do more business with Microsoft and our other allies by expanding what we offer from their existing portfolios of products and services and even launching new joint ventures with them,” he said. Al-Falak is the winner of three major Microsoft Awards for 2010, including Saudi Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), Distributor of the Year, and Microsoft Saudi Specialized Devices and Applications (SDA) Distributor of the Year. Al-Falak's Distribution and Microsoft Product Manager, Anthony Fernandes, also received the Best Microsoft Product Manager award.
