Mind your language

The press releases speak for themselves. Over the last four months, no less than four companies, including three major players, have announced Arabised IT products for the Middle East market. Adobe, Mindware, Avaya and Edutech have all released Arabised versions of products, often in partnership with regional enterprises.

While this may seem to be a recent trend, Microsoft has been Arabising software since producing an Arabic version of MS-DOS in 1987. This first recognition of the Middle East as a potentially huge consumer of IT has encouraged more and more global firms to look at localising their products for this market.

 

Although Avaya's launch in May claimed its Arabic-enabled IP telephony system as the first in the region, Cisco claims it was an earlier adopter of Arabisation, introducing its IP telephony systems supporting Arabic in October 2006.

Wael Abdulal, sales business development manager at Cisco, feels that Arabised products are not a bonus to be carried by international companies, but a necessity for the Middle East market.

"Does every customer want Arabic? The answer is no. Is it important? Absolutely yes. There are companies where if you don't have Arabic, you simply can't be listed," he says.

According to Internet World Statistics, 2.5% of the world's internet users speak Arabic, ranking the language as the tenth most used on the web. Arabic is also the fourth most spoken language with 256 million speakers around the world. Statistics like these should make Arabisation a no-brainer for any IT manufacturer with global ambition, but this is only part of the story.

It is well known that English is a common choice of second language. When 514 million people speak English as a first language and a large proportion adopts it as a second language, particularly those in business, the incentive to localise to specific markets seems to fade.

But Abdulal disagrees, "We say English is the communication language, that's everywhere, but still in the Middle East, Arabic is a communication language for lots of businesses and government offices."

Manish Goel, CEO at Boxsentry, feels that the prevalence of English as a second language is irrelevant when a company decides if they should Arabise their products or not.

"Just because people speak English doesn't mean they're comfortable speaking English - they're probably much more comfortable operating in their own language and when given a choice, they would prefer to operate in that language. I think as technology developers, as solution providers, it's our obligation to make sure that customers are actually able to interface with our technology in a way that they're comfortable with," he asserts.