Dubai’s Tech Debt Crisis and the Change That is Needed: Investing in Local Talent
Dubai is one of the safest cities with a progressive governance structure that fosters rapid infrastructure development and socioeconomic stability. This fostered the creation of one of the best-funded tech hubs outside the United States.
Their growth has been a hallmark of the global business landscape in Dubai, earning the city the title “The Gulf Tiger” for its economic strength, power, and speed. In a recent interview on the state of Dubai’s business ecosystem, Yashin Manraj, CEO of Pvotal Technologies, said that the city continues to show the type of future-focused attitude needed to support modern investment and growth.
“Dubai has leapfrogged ahead of modern nations and economies in a short time,” Manraj told MSN. “Its judicious support of new technologies, reduced friction from governmental overregulation, and consistent capital injections are modernizing its infrastructure and operations at an unprecedented rate.”
But Manraj, whose background gives him a unique perspective informed by both academic understanding and business acumen, also believes the officials building Dubai are making some poor decisions regarding the country’s informational technology infrastructure. He feels the city’s business ecosystem, which officials say is designed to “create an agile foundation for every industry,” has embraced a technology strategy that puts its long-term reliability at risk.
“The government agencies building the business ecosystem in Dubai have invested heavily in new technology,” Manraj told MSN. “But they have failed to safeguard against a fundamental flaw in their execution: the ‘foreign’ technical debt their industries are accumulating at an unprecedented rate.”
How dependence on foreign talent is weakening the Gulf Tiger
The technical debt that Manraj calls out emerges in any situation where developers adopt and integrate technology solutions to put short-term gains ahead of long-term effectiveness. Suboptimal architecture, such as one not designed to support future requirements, is a common example of tech debt. Companies saddled with suboptimal architecture typically find it challenging to scale for growth or integrate emerging technology features, which robs them of operational efficiency and productivity gains.
“The expat consultancy community has created an unfortunate cycle that drives UAE funds towards foreign products that are not competitive enough to be in US or European markets,” Manraj says after being called in to fix digital transformation efforts that failed or experienced a data breach using these products.
He added, “I have seen [Dubai] companies signing 7- or 10-year agreements with Cloud providers for products or Dx promises that are already antiquated, not competitive, or just camouflaged as ‘AI’ when they are in fact being outsourced to firms in Eastern Europe, India, or Pakistan.”
While tech debt can be leveraged to solve an immediate problem efficiently, it essentially creates a ticking time bomb. At some point, though it is often difficult to know precisely when, tech debt will result in efficiency, security, and reliability issues. Manraj believes that “these just add to the tech debt that the largest companies in Dubai are accumulating right now and will have to pay to the piper in the next decade.”
Manraj’s concerns about tech debt in Dubai stem from his feelings that the business sector adopted a technology strategy dependent on global technology resources. By adopting services and tools — including cloud technologies and SaaS — provided by international companies, Dubai took on a heavy “foreign” tech debt. This left the country reliant on foreign companies for enhancements and forced it to pay higher fees as global market movements led to higher technology costs.
“And rising costs are just a part of the problem,” Manraj explained to MSN. “The IT supply chains impacting Dubai have been infected by inefficient, insecure, and aging vendors that stunt growth and are responsible for significant global crises. A service misconfiguration halfway across the world at a cloud-edge technology company impacted local businesses across Dubai and the rest of the United Arab Emirates through no fault of any local company.”
The solution Manraj envisions involves leveraging local skills to insulate Dubai from the problems caused by foreign reliance. To get there, however, Dubai’s government and business community must invest in growing the local tech sector into an ecosystem that can provide reliable tech expertise.
“Dubai needs to be wary of relying on archaic international expertise to drive their digital transformation when the local Emirati talent is burgeoning and has so much potential to thrive,” Manraj argues. “If Dubai fails to foster a talented and highly skilled workforce to bring truly innovative products to local markets, it will find itself locked into obtuse legal contracts with lengthy service periods, inflating costs over time, and limiting innovation.”
Building infrastructure on off-the-shelf solutions is another practice that is becoming commonplace in Dubai and can lead to tech debt. Vendor lock-in, which can hamper a company from achieving better operational efficiency, is one of the biggest issues that can arise from this type of debt.
“With nearly a billion dollars invested locally in tech startups, Dubai should be able to start exporting tech products globally and compete with the US and Europe rather than foster international companies and products,” Manraj says.
Off-the-shelf solutions can also create data silos, which limit the quality of decision-making. By bringing together all of a company’s data under one platform, companies can more easily tap into the type of intel that drives productivity gains.
“Despite the innovative drive, a slew of foreign consultants and experts have shifted the implementation of the tech vision in Dubai into an aggregator and integrator of international tools, exposing the local business ecosystem to the same vulnerabilities at a premium,” Manraj says.
How to build a debt-free tech future in Dubai
Pvotal provides companies with the type of customized infrastructure needed to build sophisticated enterprises with no limits. It leverages tech tools that empower rapid change, seamless communication, top-notch security, and scalability to infinity.
Infrastream, Pvotal’s latest Platform Engineering solution, reshapes the development process by providing a framework for scalable applications that doesn’t rely on third-party services. It is one of many Pvotal solutions that give companies total control over their technology systems, their business operations, and their future.
“At Pvotal, we help companies foster an innovative culture by eliminating the technical debt of old-school digital transformation houses,” Manraj explains. “Rather than committing resources to expensive and outdated technology contracts, they can focus their OpEx on innovation and growth.”
