The Middle East will see Microsoft"s Technical Competency Center (TCC) drive the company"s thrust to build greater Public-Private Partnership (PPP) across the countries in the region. According to the company"s VP EMEA for the Public Sector Jan Muehlfeit, government representatives attending the ongoing second Government Leaders Forum Arabia, were keen to drive technology usage that would facilitate a greater interplay between human resources, processes and the IT infrastructure itself.

Microsoft"s Technical Center, located in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is among four such centers run by Microsoft globally and is expected to serve the entire region including the Middle East and right up to Russia.

The government and broader public sector industry will be a big focus for the solutions and proof of concept deployments showcased in the center. This region is also emerging to be a potential hub for the company, specifically to act as a bridge between the West and Asia Pacific, both of which have significant operations of Microsoft.

"At GLF Arabia we have seen that governments in the Middle East region are particularly keen to understand how they can build a bridge between the younger tech savvy work force and the older experienced employees, using technology. For Microsoft, the Middle East shows similar patterns like other emerging countries in Europe and building replicable models for furthering education, capacity building and driving leadership will be the thrust," says Muehlfeit.

Education continues to be the dominating topic of discussion and Microsoft plans to target this space with a number of initiatives aimed at both basic computer literacy and building a larger local development and ISV community.

"Our plans clearly are to encourage the build out of an ecosystem for facilitating technology aided education. We also see this region being conducive to the build out of global best practices in this field as language uniformity makes successful models easily replicable," adds Muehlfeit.

Interestingly, the Middle East has among the highest percentages of young population involved in education of some sort. "The Middle East has a large proportion of young people and in some cases we have found that over 35 percent of the people are involved in some education process or the other," says Microsoft Mark East, Senior Director for Education.

"The thrust really is on digital inclusion and we see this as the driving proposition. Starting from there, each region and country can then have an education model that will work for them," says East. According to the company"s CEO for EMEA Jean Phillippe Courtois, the availability of education and technology to aid its build-out appears as one among the top economic drivers for emerging countries

The company"s CEO Steve Ballmer also unveiled three new educational programs -- The Learning Gateway for Higher Education, ICT Digital Curriculum through its partnership with the Jordanian Government and the Innovative Teachers Network. All these initiatives will be Arabised for the region.

While the Learning Gateway will offer an enhanced portal for delivering e-learning solutions under a fully managed environment, the other two programs will focus on building a virtual community and resource platform for the teaching community in the region besides offering relevant technology skills training to teachers. The company"s Partners in Learning Program, which has achieved significant success in Jordan is expected to see the model being recreated across other countries in the Middle East.

In addition to this Microsoft has announced that seven organizations in Bahrain Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia will receive the Unlimited Potential (UP) grants that will support technology aided education. Since May 2003, the company has awarded a total of US$118m in grants of cash and software to programs in 89 countries.

The company"s goal is to deliver technology aided teaching and learning skills to over 250 million people by 2010. In Tunisia, Microsoft will collaborate with UNESCO to establish a sub-regional technology center that will provide the North African youth with access to ICT and technology skills development.