Russian IT company ABBYY to open regional head office in Dubai

Local subsidiary to focus on business and partner development in Middle East

Russia-based ABBYY Group, a provider of optical character recognition, document recognition and data capture software solutions, has revealed that it's readying to open a regional head office to be based in Dubai, Channel Middle East has learnt.

The head office, expected to be operational later this month will address the vendor's business in the Middle East and Africa (MEA).

According to ABBYY, the motivation behind this move stems from the fact that the data capture market in the Middle East is still immature and many companies and organisations are still using manual data entry and keep massive archives of paper documents.

Igor Shkamratov, business development director, Middle East and Africa at ABBYY, confirmed the development to Channel Middle East in an interview and said in the initial stages, there will be a team of seven specialists operating from the Dubai office including onsite and outsourced professionals.

Shkamratov said the local team will focus on sales and marketing support to all existing channel partners and will work towards expanding the channel network, direct marketing and sales activities. "The main focus of the local office will be on business and partnership development in the GCC countries and direct processing of requests from the broader Middle East region," Shkamratov added.

He pointed out that currently ABBYY's main projects have been implemented in the UAE, KSA and Kuwait. "The company together with our local partners have worked together in the government sector, logistics, telecommunications and banking sphere. We have also implemented projects in the educational and sociocultural space together with our systems integrators and ISV partners," he said.

Shkamratov explained that having direct presence in Dubai will make it possible for ABBYY to ease and smoothen the rendering of technical support to channel partners and their clients across the region. He added that the Middle East office will literally become a channel between the market and R&D team based at the global headquarters in Russia.

Shkamratov said ABBYY's local presence will help existing and future channel partners to develop their expertise in optical character recognition (OCR) and data capture technologies. "In terms of marketing, we plan to strengthen our position through joint activities with all our channels. We believe that the local office will help us to deepen into specific markets in the region and in the future establish a channel programme that takes into account particular local needs," he said.