Taking On Zoom
Reem Asaad, VP for the Middle East and Africa at Cisco, is finding opportunities to keep the region’s customers connected in an era of remote work, distance learning, and evolving technology.
Reem Asaad, VP for the Middle East and Africa at Cisco, is finding opportunities to keep the region’s customers connected in an era of remote work, distance learning, and evolving technology.
WITH remote working and distance learning now entrenched in everyday life and general online activity at an all-time high, technology companies in the Middle East are capitalizing on new opportunities, from telemedicine to e-commerce.
One key player in the region has proved to be Cisco Systems. The U.S. tech giant has long provided networking gear in the Middle East, from routers and switches to the phones dotting desks in office buildings from Dubai to Amman. But 2020 showed that the company, which has a market cap of roughly $190 billion, can still find new ways to keep customers connected.
“We have a great opportunity to accelerate digital agendas for governments and businesses and individuals,” says Reem Asaad, Cisco’s VP for the Middle East and Africa, who joined the company in January 2020. “There are so many untapped opportunities that we can leverage.”
She herself can be counted as one way the company is evolving. Her hiring just over a year ago signaled a new era in the region for Cisco. Not only was Asaad an outsider, who came over from Cairo-based business process outsourcing firm Raya Contact Center, she was also Cisco’s first regional boss actually from the region and the first woman in that role here.
Since she started, the pandemic has driven considerable growth in the region, in particular for Webex—Cisco’s videoconferencing and online collaboration platform aimed at enterprises. Although Zoom gets much of the hype, Webex is also enjoying robust usage, including significant growth in the Middle East and Africa last year, according to Asaad. More than 3,600 customers in the Middle East and Africa used Webex between March and June 2020, accounting for more than 204 million meeting minutes, according to Cisco. That included Webex hosting 1.8 million individual meetings in the region during that span. Globally, Reuters reported in April 2020 that Webex had registered a record 324 million attendees in March, with usage more than doubling in the Americas. By October, Webex globally had nearly 600 million monthly participants, almost double the number at the pandemic’s start.
Asaad points in particular to Webex’s potential in education. Over the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cisco reported that 538 educational institutions in the Middle East and Africa combined had spent 65 million minutes using Webex. In Saudi Arabia, Umm Al-Qura University has deployed Webex across its 36 colleges and 120,000 students, staff, faculty, and other participants. “The company’s products are supported by good customer service and meet our demand, particularly when our requirements and circumstances were changed,” says Khaled Almotairi, Umm Al-Qura’s dean of e-learning and distance education. Meanwhile, Asaad reports that 450 educational institutions and 22 million students are using Webex in Egypt, where Cisco is working with the ministry of education. “The whole concept of education has changed,” she says.
And with events and conferences getting canceled and shifted online, Cisco has offered up Webex as a solution. Expo 2020 has deployed the software for 2,000 members of its team, while meetings between global leaders at the G20 Summit hosted by Saudi Arabia were carried out on Webex.
Looking ahead, Asaad expects the platform to continue to play a bigger role in Cisco’s regional product playbook alongside networking, cybersecurity, and data centers. Of those areas, Asaad also singles out cybersecurity. “Security and cyber needs have totally changed because now we’re all out there in the virtual world,” she says.
The pandemic has certainly created opportunities for Webex, but its rising prominence also points to larger trends within Cisco globally, part of an ongoing evolution within the California-based company.
Under current CEO, Chuck Robbins, who took over from long-time leader John Chambers in 2015, Cisco has moved away from its roots as a hardware vendor and
embraced software and services. The move came as the pioneering IT firm faced disruptive new technology in the form of cloud computing and intensifying competition. “There’s a big shift into software and subscription models and payas-you-go models,” says Asaad.
Still, although Webex gained notable momentum in 2020, the pandemic brought its share of challenges for Cisco too. The company recorded $49.3 billion in global revenues in its 2020 financial year, down 5%. But it did achieve its target of bringing half its revenue from software and services last year. The company doesn’t break down results for the region specifically, but 26% of last year’s revenues came from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, which was down 3%.
Meanwhile, enterprise IT spending in the Middle East and North Africa took a hit last year, contracting 4% and losing $1.5 billion in value, according to Jyoti Lalchandani, IDC’s group VP and regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa. However, he expects the segment—which includes enterprise hardware, software, and IT services—to recover in 2021 and grow by 4.8% in the region.
Overall, IT spending per capita in several local countries is still relatively low compared to other regions, but growth in the evolving small and medium-sized business segment represents a longer-term growth opportunity for ICT players. The pandemic has also created key shifts that should shape the digital economy regionally and impact tech spending. Those range from companies reinventing business models for the digital economy to remote work, allowing employers to consider new workplace arrangements. “Offices will require redesign and digital enhancement as blended work becomes the norm,” says Lalchandani. “These trends will lead to a fundamental re-imagination of work.”
Of course, Cisco isn’t the only ICT player chasing opportunities in the Middle East. Chinese competitor Huawei is making moves in the region, including recently-announced plans to establish a flagship store in Riyadh, the largest such store outside China. Meanwhile, Dell Technologies signed an agreement in December 2020 to work with the digital arm of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority on workforce transformation solutions for customers. Simultaneously, Webex also has formidable competition, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Nevertheless, Asaad is bullish on Cisco’s prospects. “Growth is coming from the Middle East, despite all challenges that we’re navigating through,” she says. “There is an appetite for technology, and there is a real need for services and innovation.”
From her vantage point, Asaad reports that the areas she oversees are contributing to Cisco’s global business in unique ways. There’s notable growth coming from services regionally, she says, because there’s a big focus on cloud services, and countries here tend to leapfrog when it comes to technology.
Cisco is also involved in a number of mega projects in the region, including serving as the official digital network partner for Dubai’s Expo 2020 and playing a role in the upcoming World Cup set for Qatar in 2022. The company inked new deals locally last year, such as a multi-million-dollar advisory agreement announced in March 2020 to design a portfolio of customized smart services for The Red Sea Project, a luxury tourism development in Saudi Arabia. That will include Cisco delivering designs for services around mobility, utilities, administration and other elements of the project. In April 2020, U.A.E.based Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres unveiled videoconferencing health services for patients with help from Cisco.
Some of the biggest projects Cisco has done since Asaad joined have come from the Middle East, in areas such as oil and gas, operational technology and education. She points to work Cisco did last year with Saudi Arabia’s e-government program Yesser, which saw Webex deployed for over 70,000 employees, and reports that Egypt’s New Administrative Capital is using Cisco’s network and solutions. “You don’t have these megaprojects across Europe and the U.S. like you see in the Middle East,” says Asaad.
Although she’s a new hire for Cisco, Asaad is well acquainted with its business. Across a career spanning over 25 years, she has been both a Cisco client and partner. “They were not strangers,” she says.
Her roots in the tech industry stretch back to her teenage years in Egypt. Aged 16, she already aspired to study information technology, a path that led her to the University of Houston in the U.S., where she majored in computer science. “My aspiration was always to learn more about technology,” she says. “I think with technology we can really bridge the digital divide and really help our region.”
Still, she started her career in the U.S., joining AIG in Houston after graduating in 1993, serving as a programmer analyst, project manager and technical consultant. She worked in the U.S. until 2005, when she returned to Egypt. There she joined Raya Holding for Financial Investments, an investment management company, serving as its director of IT, investor relations, and corporate communications.
That was the first of many roles with the company, including taking over its data center operation in 2012, where she oversaw the launch of a public cloud platform for customers. Five years later, Asaad became CEO of Raya Contact Center, its business process outsourcing arm. The company had operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and counted multinationals as customers.
That included providing technical support to Cisco through Raya Contact Center’s Europe operations.
That relationship ended up being a precursor to a job offer after Cisco’s then VP for the region, David Meads, moved to another role in the company in 2019.
In announcing Asaad’s appointment in early 2020, Cisco said its new regional head would focus on strengthening collaborations with governments, customers, and partners and accelerating their digitization agendas. COVID-19’s arrival soon put those expectations to the test, with Webex set to play a starring role.
Her welcome to the company included a regional tour to get to know the team, which numbers 2,500 employees and contractors, but she had little time to get settled before the pandemic forced office closures. It helped that her team was already using online collaboration tools. “We have virtual teams across the theater,” says Asaad. The same couldn’t be said for customers.
Cisco had to adapt quickly to Webex hosting an unprecedented number of meetings, participants, and conferences. “The whole focus at the beginning was to scale Webex to be able to carry this bigger load,” says Asaad.
But Cisco also recognized an opportunity and worked to entice new users to Webex. That included a promotion in the U.A.E., offering a free 90-day business license and more features for free Webex accounts, such as removing time limits for calls. By June, Cisco had announced its largest ever deployment of Webex in the U.A.E. through its partnership with Expo 2020.
Meanwhile, Cisco rolled out a rash of new features for Webex, such as background noise cancellation, as well as integrations with applications including Dropbox, Salesforce, and Work by Facebook. More changes are coming too, including real-time Arabic translation during calls. “We’re reimagining the whole application and the new model for working remotely,” says Asaad.
In a year that changed how the Middle East stays connected, it appears Asaad has answered the call for Cisco.