ITWorx grows Gulf presence to support education projects

Egyptian software services company ITWorx new Dubai office will be used to support a major project with the UAE Ministry of Education, the company says. The new office will house technical staff and support staff to work with the Ministry of Education on the deployment of Microsoft Learning Gateway to 50 schools in the country.

ITWorx announced plans for offices in the UAE and Qatar during Gitex, with the Dubai office due to open in October. The company's core development team will still be based in Egypt, while the Gulf offices provide a closer presence with key customers.

The Doha office will also support ITWorx activities in Qatar, which include projects with ICT Qatar and a number of independent schools.

Wael Amin, president of ITWorx said: "The idea of the new offices is to be closer to our customers, partners and local system integrators. We have the project with Microsoft for the Ministry of Education, so we want to have feet on the street for that, and we have a number of other large projects and customers, including Du, in the region."

Amin also said that the company sees a lot of potential for centrally hosted online learning services for schools, with multiple schools using the same data centre. Schools could access tailored learning content from centralized service provider, meaning that school would not need to host the data itself, and could also benefit from the cost saving of not having to develop all of its own content.

"The next big trend will be the hosted learning model, a multi-tenant model with lots of private schools hosted out of one data centre. We are seeing a lot of schools in the region using identical or very similar learning content, although not in a fully hosted model, so we definitely see this happening, once there has been some investment in products to manage the hosting requirements," Amin said.