Dell for Entrepreneurs Egypt: reflecting on a successful year

Four events, thirteen startups, and a team of more than twenty volunteers: as 2019 comes to a close, we look back at the success of the Dell for Entrepreneurs Egypt program and our aspirations for next year.

2019 was a year full of activities. In terms of events, we support all the major entrepreneurship and technology events in Egypt including Vested Summit, Startups Without Borders, and Tech Fuse, the most prominent startups’ event in the Middle East and Africa. Even Cairo ICT, the biggest Information Technology conference in Egypt, saw some startup actions. This past year was also unique because Dell Technologies launched its first startups pitch competition in Egypt, in partnership with the Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurs Center (TEIC).

A recurring theme in all our engagements was Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Cybersecurity. We also saw a rise in the need for technical mentorship and guidance in DevOps, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), and an increase in the number of startups talking about modern application architectures. These are all excellent indicators of the technical progression of Egypt’s startups.

Improving the technical capabilities of local startups is essential to enhancing human progress using technology. Dell Technologies has a legacy of supporting startups and entrepreneurs. Once a startup itself, we at Dell Technologies always seek to promote entrepreneurial as well as intrapreneurial activities. Since the early days of Dell’s founding, to the company’s privatization, and the acquisition of EMC, Dell Technologies has evolved and transformed with the agility and flexibility of a nimble startup. Although Dell Technologies is now one of the biggest IT companies in the world, you can still walk into a room full of executives and pitch a business or a technical idea.

Egypt’s site is one of the most active Dell Technologies sites globally in terms of innovation. In 2014, the site generated the highest number of ideas. And the site continues to be regarded as one of the most engaged and innovative sites across the company. The center of excellence houses nearly 1,500 employees, with technical experts spanning all business units from RSA’s security experts to VMware’s cloud engineers. The site is uniquely positioned to support the ecosystem locally in all technical aspects. The local engineering team’s expertise in federated analytics, machine learning, modern application development, and their exposure to the latest and greatest in technology help bridge knowledge gaps across different technical realms.

We consider entrepreneurship to be one of the most critical drivers in any economy, and we know that our success relies on the economic wellbeing and success of our customers. That is the reason we firmly believe that enabling startups with the right technology is critical to our success. Today more than ever, our expanding portfolio puts us in a unique position to be the technology partner of choice for all startups. The VMware experience in infrastructure software, private, hybrid, and public cloud management, alongside Pivotal’s expertise in developing modern cloud-native software, and Dell EMC’s legacy of infrastructure products enables us to help startups accelerate their business using technology. Our partnerships across the globe and in different sectors and technology areas allow us to provide technical guidance to any tech-enabled startup regardless of what vendor or technology they decide to use in their IT environment.

We are planning an even bigger engagement next year, adding more workshops to early-stage startups and increasing the intake for our one on one technical mentorship program. For more information, see the details and requirements below:

Local Mentorship Program

As an enrolled startup, you get one-on-one mentorship time, based on the needs of your startup in one of the areas listed below

  • Process Automation
  • Enterprise readiness
  • Infrastructure scalability
  • Applications scalability
  • DevOps
  • Infrastructure, virtualization, backup, and recovery
  • Software development methodology
  • Artificial intelligence (AI)
  • Internet of Things
  • Cybersecurity 
  • Blockchain

To apply, please send your pitch presentation to dell.sudo@emc.com

Local Sessions

You also have access to attend any of our workshops that are designed for startups early in their technical journey and are looking for more information in one of the topics below

  • Machine Learning and Deep Learning 
  • DevOps 
  • Microservices 
  • IoT and Federated Analytics 
  • Agile/Extreme programming 
  • Infrastructure Management
  • Cloud-Native Applications

To apply, please send your request presentation to dell.sudo@emc.com

Egypt Pitch Competition

Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) in partnership with and Dell Technologies are developing new startups competitions and mentorship opportunities to support the Startups Eco-System in Egypt.

Our focus for this year is using ABCD Technologies (AI, Blockchain, Cloud, and Data Science and Analysis) to solving one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Top startups get business and technical mentorship, and the winner will get the opportunity to visit Dell Technologies World May 2020 in Las Vegas.

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

  • Registered Egyptian startup.
  • Startups have an innovative product with one or two clients.
  • Startups have been working for more than one year.
  • Startups must serve at least one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Last day of registration: February 18, 2020

About the Author: Mahmoud Hamouda

Mahmoud Hamouda is a business strategist in the edge strategy team at Dell Technologies. For over 15 years, Hamouda has been helping Dell Technologies' leadership make informed data-driven decisions. He started his career at Orange Business Services. He moved up the career ladder, adding diverse experience in both technology and business. Hamouda actively supported startups across different industries like strategy, software development, customer acquisition strategies, growth marketing to UX design, and business model innovation.