Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, is on a mission to become a leading global hub for business, trade, and investment. Building on its strategic position at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, Dubai has taken significant steps to foster an environment that is favorable and efficient for today’s aspiring business leaders.
Yashin Manraj, CEO of Pvotal Technologies, believes Dubai’s commitment to digital transformation, especially artificial intelligence, energy independence, and quantum computing, is refreshing and inviting to entrepreneurs.
“The UAE’s judicious support of new technologies, reduced friction from governmental overregulation, and consistent capital injections are modernizing its infrastructure and operations at an unprecedented rate. It has leapfrogged ahead of modern nations and economies in a short time period,” Manraj says.
However, Manraj also believes that despite a sound business leadership plan, technological leaders have neglected one key issue that may threaten to undermine its extensive work in fostering a healthy business ecosystem.
“The UAE government embraced an innovative culture, invested heavily in new technologies, and fostered governmental efficiency to optimize economic diversification,” Manraj adds. “Despite this unwavering commitment, they have been unable to safeguard against a fundamental flaw in their execution: the ‘foreign’ technical debt their businesses and industries are accumulating at an unprecedented rate.”
Technical Debt in Dubai
Technical debt occurs when organizations adopt and integrate technologies in pursuit of short-term gains rather than long-term effectiveness. It has become common in a world where development velocity or brand name recognition is prioritized over reliability. When the technical debt is ignored over time, efficiency, security, and profitability all suffer.
In Dubai, the “foreign” technical debt refers to the sheer amount of technical services, tools, and products that rely on international companies. Instead of investing the same amount in building independence from the global tech scene, the UAE economic boon is becoming increasingly tied to foreign tech companies.
As American and European markets face unprecedented economic times, inflationary periods, and rising wages, the increasing costs these companies face are being passed to consumers in Dubai through all the SaaS, PaaS, and other cloud technologies that local businesses are intricately dependent on.
“In addition to the rising costs, the UAE IT supply chains have been infected by inefficient, insecure, and aging vendors that stunt growth and are responsible for significant global crises,” Manraj says. “A service misconfiguration halfway across the world at cloud edge technology company impacted local businesses across the UAE through no fault of any local company.”
Technical debt issues also surface when organizations rely on off-the-shelf software solutions rather than investing in systems that address their specific needs or provide them immunity from a vendor breach.
“Despite the innovative drive, a slew of foreign consultants and experts have shifted the implementation of the tech vision into an aggregator and integrator of international tools, exposing the UAE ecosystem to the same vulnerabilities at a premium,” Manraj notes.
The recent Crowdstrike failure, which impacted air travel in and out of Dubai, illustrates the dangers of solely relying on off-the-shelf solutions. By investing in customized solutions, local organizations can more easily audit systems, uncover vulnerabilities, and address them, insulating themselves from global tech meltdowns like the one caused by Crowdstrike and Microsoft.
The UAE’s long-term growth is also threatened by technical debt resulting from a lack of local, reliable expertise in the tech space.
“The UAE needs to be wary of relying on archaic international expertise to drive their digital transformation when the local Emirati talent is burgeoning and has so much potential to thrive,” Manraj warns. “If it fails to foster a talented and highly skilled workforce to bring truly innovative products to local markets, it will find itself locked into obtuse legal contracts with lengthy service periods, inflating costs over time and limiting innovation.”
Manraj also questions the progress Dubai has made toward developing effective exportable technologies. “Despite making investments on par with Silicon Valley, Dubai has yet been able to create globally recognized technology brands that are exporting their services to other Western markets,” he says.
Laying the groundwork for development without tech debt
Manraj brings a unique perspective to the business arena that draws upon a blend of academic insights and professional acumen. He has been a computational chemist in academia and an engineer working on novel challenges at the nanoscale and secure systems at the world’s best engineering firms. With deep technical knowledge from product development, design, business insights, and coding, he has a unique nexus to identify and solve gaps in the product pipeline.
Manraj launched Pvotal with a mission to empower businesses to achieve infrastructure independence and avoid the technical debt that the UAE is now facing. Pvotal’s platform is grounded on the best LowOps platform — a hybrid of DevOps, DevSecOps, and CloudOps technological philosophies — to help businesses have a fully automated software development lifecycle. Pvotal’s solutions are grounded in the best CNCF projects, tooling, technologies, and end-to-end encryption exceeding NIST standards.
“At Pvotal, we are working with companies to embrace an innovative culture by eliminating the technical debt of old-school digital transformation houses,” Manraj explains. “We remove their dependencies on third-party vendors across their supply chains and do away with expensive vendor-lock-ins. Instead of companies being tied with expensive and outdated technology contracts, they can focus their OpEx on innovation and growth.”
Infrastream, Pvotal’s latest Platform Engineering solution, redefines the development process by allowing developers, engineers, and businesses to develop scalable applications without relying on an array of third-party services that charge per use, contract, or SaaS services.
Pvotal's innovative solutions make it the type of execution partner that can help the UAE transform into an exporter of innovative technologies rather than an importer of solutions.
“As Dubai looks towards catalyzing development in Africa, Asia, and the rest of the Middle East, it is important for them to start with the right foundations and become a creator of technologies rather than an integrator and user of tech developed by others,” Manraj says.
Having attended GISEC and GITEC regularly, Manraj says, “While [these events] highlight Dubai’s impressive commitment to drawing in international experts and companies, it would be more impressive to see Emirati companies at CES, SXSW, or RSA. The UAE government needs to flip the script soon, or they will not be able to break from the Western tech hegemony.”
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