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Meet Ammar Al Malik ceo of Dubai Internet City (DIC) a haven for companies offering more than just a work environment.
See more at https://gulfnews.com/videos
Meet Ammar Al Malik ceo of Dubai Internet City (DIC) a haven for companies offering more than just a work environment.
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00:00Dubai Internet City was announced in 1999 by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed.
00:06At that time, the internet was still growing around the world. There was no technology
00:15ecosystem in this region, and His Highness announced the first area dedicated to technology
00:21in the whole region as Dubai Internet City in the year 1999, with a very strict deadline to
00:26be running and operational by one year. So in the year 2000, the four buildings that you see here,
00:33the glass buildings around the lake here, is actually completed in the year 2000.
00:41Companies were operational at that time, and Dubai Internet City officially started operations
00:48and started the story of success and technology in the whole region.
00:53After that, Dubai Internet City started attracting large corporations, so we had Microsoft, Cisco,
01:00and most of the big companies that you know around the lake here, like for example Oracle, IBM,
01:06they were all part of the initial growth of Dubai Internet City. In other words, Dubai Internet City
01:14as it started was extremely successful. The four buildings that we had done were already
01:20high occupancy, and we've seen a lot of demand of technology companies to be located in Dubai
01:24to make Dubai a technology hub in the whole Middle East and Africa region. After that,
01:31we started seeing companies, smaller companies, setting up in Dubai Internet City. And then over
01:37time, these smaller companies became really big. So if you've heard sometime back about the
01:43Yahoo! Maktoub deal, which was the first major announcement for this region, and then we started
01:49with more recently Souq.com and Amazon, and then just very recently the Kareem and Uber deal. So
01:57all of these success stories came from Dubai Internet City. And the more regional companies
02:02that you may have heard of, such as Dubai Zil, such as Property Finder, and Angami, are also
02:09located in this location. I'm giving you these names because these are the ones that may click
02:14with you, but there are much more of these startups and the success stories in Dubai Internet City.
02:21And therefore, by being part of a community, and that's what we emphasize on the word community,
02:26we look after this word very, very carefully. The word community is extremely important. If you can
02:34in this area, you can work from a startup, talk to a larger corporation, go to an event and learn
02:39coding, and go to another event related to networking, then this community that is focused
02:44on technology, and you have the other regulations designed for this ecosystem, then you will have a
02:52proper area, which is an ecosystem Dubai Internet City that is successful over these years. If one
02:58of these items is missing, if we only focus on just giving certain types of benefits and not
03:04others, then we're not going to be where we are today, basically. So we established ourselves
03:09as a technology-free zone, and a lot of these companies, such as MasterCard or Visa, may look
03:14at themselves as a technology company, actually, not a finance, although they are financially based,
03:20but they might look at it as a technology company themselves. For us, as Dubai Internet City,
03:27if a company wants to be located here, it's their choice, but we purely focus on technology.
03:32If you are a freelancer, then you should have an area that takes care of this part of the technology.
03:41If you're a coder, you're a single coder, that large or small medium enterprises might utilize
03:46your services, then you should be part of this ecosystem. So you talk about the freelancers,
03:51you talk about N5 as being part of this area in which we support startups significantly to
03:59be incorporated, subsidized, and actually grow from this location. And then you have
04:05our normal products and services that we offer to all our companies, whether you're a large
04:10corporation or a smaller one. So this provides the area with regulations, with options, if you
04:18are a startup, if you are a single person, if you are a large corporation coming from abroad to be
04:22operating from Dubai, for us to be able to give them all what is required for them to be established
04:28in Dubai and make Dubai Internet City their technology hub. The industry requires the best
04:35health activities for their staff, wellness activities for their staff, high quality
04:42buildings, facilities, good retail options. These kind of requirements is what drives the demand.
04:52So we have to make sure as a location, as an area, that anybody working in Dubai Internet City,
04:58being part of this community, has access to nice areas like this around the lake so that they can
05:04have good lunch or good breakfast when they come down. They can have areas where they can meet
05:09casually, they have areas where they can. So we have yoga actually here, one of the largest yoga
05:16festivals in Dubai, and you might ask why are you doing yoga in Dubai Internet City, but it is
05:21something that the community loves to have every year, looks forward to it. We have thousands of
05:28people actually coming to Dubai Internet City Lake to conduct yoga, to be part of the yoga festival.
05:35So everything that the ecosystem and the industry requires we have to be able to provide,
05:41otherwise you will not have a complete area to provide the full services to make sure that Dubai
05:46Internet City stays the largest technology hub and Dubai stays the largest technology hub in all of
05:52the MENA region. I see more companies coming up from Dubai Internet City, I see more innovations
05:56coming from Dubai Internet City actually. We have I think over 11 or 12 innovation centres
06:02being established by larger corporations in this community, which takes us through the life cycle
06:11and the value chain in which companies are actually starting to create areas in which
06:16they're not just sales and marketing anymore, where actually innovation happens in these centres and
06:21offices in Dubai Internet City. Some of them are the first globally, so Oracle's AI lab for example
06:30we have more of this going to be announced in this year, but Dubai Internet City is being
06:37transformed actually and literally into an innovation centre for the Middle East
06:42and this is the way I see it going in the next five to ten years. So we have approximately 24,000
06:47professionals working in technology alone in this area, we are expecting that to be increased by
06:54another 15,000 with our project under the name of Innovation Hub, that will make a jump
07:00to approximately 40,000 people in the next five years and we really need to focus on talent because
07:07if we want to be the centre of innovation in the region, then talent is an extremely important part
07:14that we have to focus on and this is something we look at very carefully. Rules, regulations, we're
07:19very happy to hear about the visa regulations changing about this, so this is an extremely
07:26important ingredient in this area. So you see the story started in the year 1999 to attract and
07:33operate these larger corporations, but what has happened is that Dubai Internet City has transformed
07:38Dubai into a technology hub of all of the Middle East, so most of the companies that are located
07:45here are well known, very well established and successful and a lot of the companies that are
07:50successful and you hear about them are located in this area that we are in here.