EMEA a (past) emerging market for ERP& related Enterprise products?

Trough a recent consultancy assignment in the Middle East (Gulf region), I've managed to obtain some useful insights into the ERP & Enterprise Solutions / IT Consultancy market of this region.

Regardless of cultural, social and economical differences, the business environment and the "business infrastructure" in the GCC (focusing on UAE and Saudi-Arabia) is fairly similar to western type environments.

Also, the headcount of western educated and highly qualified "Expats" (foreign citizens living as residents in the GCC ) increases the level of transferred knowledge, the "Know-How" is being transferred on a very accelerated path.

The emerging market:

Anyone will associate Middle East (from the economic development's perspective) with oil and OPEC. Being the worlds second largest Oil exporter, Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries develop their economy based on their income -mainly crude oil,
Saudi Arabia plans to invest over 400 bn USD in infrastructure development, in order to assure logistical communications and to optimize the movement of goods and services.

Dubai is a fair example for "How to manage when the oil runs out". Having major investments in infrastructure -highways, water, electricity, Dubai also started building the "Business center of the future" .
All the recently built 80-120 floor tall sky-scrapers are meant to replace the desert-view with a modern Metropolis. By becoming a major international business -hub (node), Dubai will increase his income and recover from the 2008-2009 crisis. Business and shopping tourism is also a considerable source for income for the Emirate of Dubai.

All this investments will require a strong technical support, an investment in the area of IT, in order to assure the proper management, controlling, reporting and maintainability for all the delivered investments.

Any infrastructure/logistics investment without the proper Monitoring system, without an ERP system, without an efficient project management tool will always carry a major risk of failure.

Most GCC country executives are aware of the necessity of the IT solutions, and for this reason,
major American market players like ORACLE, MICROSOFT are already present in the GCC region, having a multi-billion market share here.
Also ,major European players - German SAP is starting to brake trough successfully in this market.

As for the future (even if oil runs out in 20-30 years), if GCC countries will continue their present strategy of developing their business infrastructure, the business society and the organizational environment of 2030-2040 will reach his maturity, being able to offer an alternative for the "traditional" oil business

The content of this posting and the related comments are property of Mr. Racz Sandor

Casus belli economicae- The Greek precedence,

Greece is today on the brink of macroeconomic collapse.
The research compiled by the World Economic Forum, the World Bank and Transparency International present Greece as a nominally developed country with increasing problems. On the competitiveness scale, Greece ranks 71st, behind Hungary, Turkey, Colombia and Egypt-Switzerland, the United States and Singapore are first.
Greece lies currently in a very unstable fiscal environment, Greece rippled through global stock, bond and currency markets for weeks as investors worry about a new credit crisis based in Europe. Repeated promises by Greece to get its fiscal mess under control amid severe austerity measures have failed to win investors over, leading to the latest plan being considered by the wider EU.(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/eu-set-to-pull-greece-from-the-brink/article1462020/ )
Other former socialist economies in the South-East of of Europe evolved during the last 20 years into competitive restively healthy systems. This means, that the state -owned enterprises together with their assets were subsequently privatized, and eventually, restructured, into a profitable stream.
During the 2009 recession, major American and European private and state-owned companies tried to restructure their expenditures, trying to reduce their costs and improve the profitability. In some cases, even the financial survival of the company was at stake.
Pubic investments were also meant as a partial solution to the crisis. The "State" intended to finance the following types of investments:

1. Highways, Motorways, Interstate infrastructure investments (constructions)
   
2. Thermal rehabilitation of older buildings (constructions)
   
3. Construction of Water and gas pipes, residual waste systems for remote villages where this kind of utilities are currently missing.
4. Food damage prevention constructions on major rivers
   

This kind of investments had the primary role to absorb surplus labor and secondarily to generate some dynamics trough the involvement of the horizontal component.
Romania is no exception in the region. The country received recently a new loan from the IMF.
Hopefully, Romanian politicians will not drag the country into the recent Greek experience.

"The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today completed the second and third reviews of Romania’s economic performance under a program supported by a 24-month Stand-By Arrangement (SBA). The completion of the reviews enables the immediate disbursement of SDR 2.18 billion (about €2.45 billion or about US$3.32 billion), bringing total disbursements under the program to SDR 8.26 billion (about €9.32 billion or about US$12.60 billion).

In completing the reviews the Executive Board also approved Romania’s request for a waiver of non-observance of the end-December 2009 performance criterion pertaining to the ceiling on the accumulation of general government domestic arrears."