Middle East has been a good market for Frappe, so this time the team had decided to have a stall at the biggest IT fairs in the region, GITEX. With Frappeverse just completed, I was soon packing my bags for my first trip to the Arab world.
Dubai had always been a mythical place for me. From childhood, we knew that the underworld dons of Mumbai lived in Dubai, often seen flamboyantly with Bollywood stars in Sharjah cricket matches. Dubai was also known as the Mecca of shopping. In the 90s when international brands were not available in India, people used to get them (smuggled) from Dubai. All that has changed now. All brands are now available in India and Dubai has become a legitimate travel destination for many rich Indians. Several of my friends and family have been to Dubai and some of them live there as well. Dubai hit international consciousness when they built the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa, with Tom Cruise flying off the top in his hit franchise Mission Impossible. It seems in the 21st century, you can’t miss Dubai.
Before going to any place, I like to learn the history of the place, so that I can understand its present and maybe its future. There is only one definitive book for travellers on Dubai (by British academic, Jim Krane), that I purchased for my Kindle, the night before so that I could cram at least some understanding of the city while I was there. We started early morning from Mumbai and after a short flight, we were at Dubai airport. My first impression was that Dubai was very much like Texas. Dry, hot and sunny, with big roads and bigger cars with mild petroleum smell in the air, with tall skyscrapers lining our way to the hotel.
Until the 1900s, Dubai was just a small pit-stop on the trade route from Britain to India, run by the British and setup by the East India Company. Before that it was a small fishing village along a creek of a few thousand souls. The pearl trade of the early 1900s helped grow its population for a while before the great depression (and cheaper pearls) took away that trade. Dubai has been a huge beneficiary of Iran’s follies over the years. In the late 1800s when Iran raised taxes, Dubai lowered them making all the Iran trade flow through Dubai. When Iran shut out British oil, in the 1950s they came exploring it in the Emirates. Right through the mid 1900s, oil exploration was happening in the region. The Sheikhs of Dubai had the foresight to build a port and a dry dock just while the shipping industry exploded in the region, while the nearby Emirates were bathed in oil (Abu Dhabi) or unable to get their act in place (Sharjah).
Since Dubai did not have major oil reserves, they focused on building a trade hub. Other than expanding ports, the rulers of Dubai built trade centers and financial institutes. The oil money made by its Emirati cousins was invested in Dubai. It was almost like Aladdin rubbed his lamp, and the genie made a sprawling Manhattan rise in the desert. To fill it up, the locals invited migrant workers from South Asia and Philippines and rich people from Europe and America. For a city full of economic migrants it seems surprisingly spotless and clean. There are tough laws and people seem very well mannered. There is no graffiti on the walls, there are no beggars on the street, people don’t even jay-walk. Come here to make money, don’t bring your politics, is what Dubai seems to be telling its inhabitants. It feels like a transient city, where 90% of people are just passing by, with no culture or spirit to hold them back other than making money (immigrants) or enjoying the shopping, beaches and night life (tourists).
On the first evening, we were hosted by Vivek and his team at QCS as we got some understanding of the UAE market for Frappe. Later they took us on a tour of old Dubai (the erstwhile fishing village along the creek) that is now a gentrified tourist trap. The short boat ride along the creek still feels original with the old markets (souks) dotting the banks of the creek. The old market has stalls run by Indian, Pakistani and Afghani traders selling everything from spices to gold. We had dinner at a local restaurant (run by a Malayali) near our hotel which had cuisines from all over the world.
Walking around old Dubai
On the second day, we went to a tour of the Al Shindagha museums in the old city (they were recommended by my sister) and were joined by around 20 local partners. Many of them had spent decades in the city, but had never seen these museums. The old quarters of the Sheikhs along the creek have been converted to museum galleries. These talked about the history of the city, some new archaeological finds, and the culture of the locals. The museums showcased a growing sophistication among the Emiratis in having a deeper intellectual understanding of their country - and were in sharp contrast to the newer (crass) neighbourhoods mimicking American culture. I enjoyed the perfuming room and the light Arabic music playing in the background.
To the museums with our partners
Later we had business discussions sitting in an Arabic style cafe - we called it “Frappe Majlis” (Majlis - sitting room). The topic of the discussion was if partners are profitable. Frappe and ERPNext have been growing in the market and many partners have setup businesses around it with dozens of employees. My worry is that in the pursuit of “growth” many partners lose their focus on “profits”. Most of the partners shared that they are not happy with the kind of profits they are having. We discussed how we can work around that, the simple solution being more “vanilla implementations” rather than going on long customisation cycles. Later in the evening I met a friend for dinner at his home in another US-style suburban development in the northern part of the city, near Jabal Ali (another mega-port). Neji from Craft was kind enough to drive us through the glittering Sheikh Zayed road towards Jabal Ali.
Frappe Majlis
Day 3 was at GITEX. It seemed that all roads in Dubai were leading to GITEX. Even though we came early, there was already a long queue of people waiting to get in. Most people were dressed in business suits, clearly not the Frappeverse vibe we just came from. We had to walk almost half a kilometre through exhibition halls full of multi-storeyed booths and blazing LED displays to reach our stall at one corner of the expo. Our stall had a simple banner “100% Real Open Source” in contrast to the attention grabbing displays around us.
While people were streaming in, I took the opportunity to walk around and see the displays of other companies. GITEX claims to be the biggest IT expo in the world with more than 100,000 visitors and most of the large companies in the world were present. The ERP companies were mostly absent though, SAP, Dynamics, Intuit seemed had no traction in the market. Oracle had a huge presence and several smaller players like Zoho, Odoo, Freshworks had put up a good show as well. Google and Microsoft were present showcasing their cloud along with Alibaba, Cloudflare and others. The biggest stalls belonged to the telecom, data-center and hardware players. While Etisalat was glitzy, Huawei put-up the most impressive full stack display. Their presentations were slick and they had solutions that encompassed computing, networking and software.
The buzz in the show was all about “AI”. It has been two years since ChatGPT was released and people still seem to be lapping it up. Everything that was not “AI”, like machine vision, character recognition (OCR), classification, is now branded as AI. I had chats with several sales / technical architects asking them about their AI play. Most companies just want to be “seen” as AI first, rebranding a lot of their products as AI. HP had an AI workstation that had GPUs. Salesforce had chatbots that are now “AI”. Zooming out of all the displays, it seems that people are still trying to figure out the right paradigm. The problem large enterprises and governments seem to have is the millions of devices that they control and they are looking at AI to now control and drive these devices, with AI acting as some kind of a “glue” connecting all of them.
Huawei showcasing a converged view of a construction site
Over the next two days, there was a constant stream of visitors at the Frappe stall, with several of them already knowing ERPNext. The feedback from users and the ecosystem was overwhelmingly positive. Many people wanted to meet and thank me personally for creating the Framework and ERPNext and click pictures. While it feels nice to meet people, I am always more interested in having “real” conversations. I tried to ask them about critical feedback and what they expect from us and was able to get at least some insights. There is clearly a lot of traction in the region and open source has been a key driver for Frappe. People love the product and our offerings, and the clear challenge now is to grow our business via partnerships.
One interesting observation was that our stall was always packed, even when the show was winding down and the halls were empty. Our stall was well supported by our partners QCS (Vivek and Sharon), Wahni IT (Shejeer and Rasool) and Lavaloon (Khaled), as well as self proclaimed Frappe evangelist Mina Botros and his colleague Nour from Axentor and many others. The entire show was managed by Priyanka from our team - who did a brilliant job in planning and execution.
Frappe at GITEX
On one of the evenings, we went to the famous Burj Khalifa around Dubai Mall, with the fountain and light show. This is were Dubai is visible in its full glitz and glamour. There is an artificial lake that is surrounded by thousands of tourists, giving it an almost religious feel (much like the maha-aarti on the ghats of the Ganges). Standing there, Dubai clearly feels like a miracle - an oasis of epic proportions in the middle of the desert. The world tallest tower was glowering right above us, making everyone feel very small. If anything, the religion of the place seems to be trade. Dubai has always been “trade fundamentalist” and its favourable geographic location meant that it has benefitted from every global crisis. In a way it seems very simple, there is no politics, there is no ideology, there is no sense of history. The Emiratis took big bets when no one believed in them and now they are reaping the benefit.
With Frappe team at the Burj Khalifa
If there is anything we learn from the Emiratis is that sometimes big bets pay off. What bets should we be taking at Frappe?
