[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By Magued Mahmoud, Vice President & General Manager, Dell Technologies Center of Excellence in Egypt
New technologies will transform businesses in ways we have never seen. The way software can be built and deployed is rapidly becoming an integral and critical advantage for all businesses. The movement to modernize and simplify infrastructure is giving organizations huge efficiencies and extraordinary, new strategic revenue opportunities.
The ability to inspire and empower your workforce, all while securing your most critical assets is unprecedented. Making business transformation happen, that’s what Dell Technologies is all about, one partner, purpose-built to help organizations handle anything.
Our Story
Egypt Center of Excellence (COE) is a Dell Technologies organization that empowers its different business units to operate efficiently and nimbly to deliver Quality, Innovative Solutions, and Support Services to Dell Technologies and its customers globally. Egypt COE is one of four global Dell Technologies’ Centers globally located in Egypt, Ireland, China and India.
Egypt was and continues to be an optimum choice to host our COE, where we can find the value in the Abundant & Multi-lingual Talent Supply, Competitive Cost, Government Support, Agility, Innovation, Continuous Process Enhancements, as well as the Quality and Scalable Infrastructure.
It all started when Egypt COE was inaugurated in 2009. Our operations began by hosting only two business units as part of the pre-sales and the professional services organizations. We continued to grow organically throughout the past 10 years to reach up to 18 different business units that span across Services, Engineering and Sales organizations.
In 2009, we had only 83 team members, and throughout the past ten years, our business grew steadily that we reached a total of more than 1,400 team members in Cairo, 47% of which are females.
This year is a special year for Dell Technologies as it achieved a record full year revenue of $91.3 billion, up 14 percent from previous year. Additionally, 2019 marks a very special year for us in Egypt, as we celebrate our 10th year anniversary since the establishment of our Egypt Center of Excellence.
Our Secret Ingredient is Our People
At Dell Technologies we consider our team members as the essential elements for our success, and they are always encouraged not only to drive the success of the business but also help building our culture.
Accordingly, Dell Technologies founded the Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), where each one of these ERGs is dedicated to support a certain cause using their own knowledge, manpower and our technologies. All ERGs were designed to encourage ownership, boost employee morale & engagement, give back to our community, promote diversity & inclusion, and also create a culture that cultivates innovation.
Every team member is encouraged to stretch beyond his/her role to join one or more ERG where they can drive initiatives that support green environment, provide help for the differently enabled, empower women in technology, spread awareness about our diversity and the power of being inclusive, and organize large-scale CSR activities. Moreover, they can contribute to organizing internal and public social, fun and engaging events.
Empowered by Our Partnerships
To sustain a consistent track-record of success, and maintain our ability to scale up our operations, we had to collaborate with top universities in Egypt. Our COE has signed agreements with more than 50 universities and academic institutes across Egypt under the University Relations program to enable students to be exposed to latest technology trends while develop relevant and highly marketable knowledge and skills.
Our University Relations program enables us to extend our reach to more than 3,000 students annually to prepare them with the necessary technical knowledge and soft skills, using our academic curriculum and several other programs such as our Technologies Bootcamps, Internships, Hackathons, and Summer Academy.
Additionally, the COE is keen on keeping an eye on the future by investing in research. We have successfully established partnerships with some Universities and customers to collaborate jointly on applied research in emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Internet of Things and Big Data.
We are very proud to collaborate also with the Egyptian government on several initiatives to invest in developing future talents and using our technologies to empower the future pioneers in the tech industry. This is done through our diverse programs of trainings where the curriculum is designed by experts from the COE team.
Our Future Starts Now
A crucial component of our success is our continuous focus on innovation and investing in learning, working with, and spreading cutting-edge technologies such as Internet of Things, Cloud Infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Security and Blockchain.
To lead the way in some of these technologies, Egypt COE built its engineering arm which includes currently four different teams of Software Engineers as well as Data Scientists who are working on developing some of Dell Technologies’ future solutions.
And while we Innovate and build more skills on these new technologies, we recognize that we have a role to play in our community by share knowledge and engaging actively through public Meetups, Hackathons, Tech-Talks and publishing Patents globally.
Looking Ahead
Egypt COE has become a platform for quality, knowledge, and innovation. Our track-record of creating value, providing quality services, and delivering achievements is a result of a 10 years-long exciting journey of giving full of challenges and learnings.
We have a very high potential for more growth in the coming years and to write more chapters in our success story. With our young dedicated and talented professionals, we will continue to achieve our goals, create value, and unleash the real outstanding potential of the next generation in Egypt.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”6186″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]About the Author: Magued Mahmoud is Vice President and General Manager, Egypt Center of Excellence (COE) at Dell Technologies, and joined the company to establish the center since 2009, and to provide strategic and operational leadership for the Center of Excellence in Egypt.
His responsibilities include creating a world class services organization with Dell Technologies culture and values, positioning the Egypt COE within Dell Technologies and selling its services/capabilities to enable its growth, in addition to building, leading and managing 1,400+ FTE organizations.
Magued has more than 30 years of experience in the IT sector. He previously served as the head of Oracle’s Solution Services International Consulting Center, where he was responsible for the delivery of consulting services to global customers. As part of his services delivery responsibility, he was a member of steering committees for many large and strategic IT projects in the Middle East and Africa region.
Before his 11 year-stint at Oracle Corporation, Magued was with IBM for ten years where he held various IT roles catering to the Middle East markets. Over the course of his career, Magued has developed expertise in sales, support and consulting services, delivering business IT solutions in various verticals such as manufacturing, telecom, energy, public sector and financial services.
Magued earned a degree in engineering studies from Ain Shams University in Cairo and a diploma in ‘Managing IT Software and Services Strategically’ from the Scandinavian International Management Institute in Copenhagen.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
