After spending the last 12 months forming partnerships across the region, and creating local technical and sales skills, Intershop is gearing up its assault on the Middle East market.
The e-commerce solutions company has ambitious plans to grow its number of end user sites from four to 55 in the coming months, and grow the number of commerce site licenses — the company’s main source of revenue — to 3500 within the region.
“We’ve formed the right partners in the region and we’ve been building the local knowledge base,” Basel Tutunji, international business consultant, Intershop Communications MENA, told Arabian Computer News.
“We’ve had training with 25 resources on the Infinity product and for IS4 [Intershop 4] we’ve completed training for around 70 plus resources.”
Skills Required
Although Intershop’s Infinity platform boasts drag & drop business mapping tools and componentised Web development, users and partners do have to learn HTML and Java Enterprise Bean development skills.
The company has already won several large accounts in the region, including Etisalat’s Internet infrastructure subsidiary, Comtrust, one of Saudi’s largest Internet service providers (ISPs) Atheer and several local e-commerce sites such as ourvillagemarket.com, lebvote.com, jarmall.com and yalla.com.
To supplement Intershop’s e-commerce platform, one of the company’s local partners has created ‘Arabic’ templates for Intershop e-commerce solution.
B2B market
Intershop, not content with setting up business to consumer trading platforms is also aiming to launch an aggressive assault on the regional B2B market.
In Europe the company has formed numerous agreements for online marketsites. “We’re looking into the marketsite area for the local region,” said Thomas Heise, director of marketing new markets, Intershop.
“We’re going to be working with our sales channel in this area… we’ll set up a business model in any [market] area and bring our own knowledge and experience to this area.”
