IT Outsourcing and Managed IT Services in Egypt

Companies buy IT outsourcing for three things that are hard to arrange at home: engineers they cannot hire in their own labour market, a cost position they cannot reach with their own salary scales, and a way of getting both without becoming an employer in a second country. London Trade supplies all three from Egypt, carrying the engineers, service desk staff and field technicians on its own books and putting them on a single client’s work.

The work London Trade takes on in Egypt is wider than software development. Client teams here run first and second line service desk in Arabic and English, infrastructure and field engineering at sites around the country, functional and release testing, and the unglamorous application support that keeps a live system working long after the build project has closed. Any one of these can be bought as a standalone team, or all of them under one management line.

The difficult part of an offshore IT team is never the first engineer. It is employing, supervising, paying and replacing people month after month in a country the client does not operate in. London Trade has been doing that in Egypt since 2015 and today employs and manages more than 3,000 people on client accounts across more than 40 Egyptian locations, so an IT team assembled here starts from an employment and management structure that already exists rather than from a hiring promise.

An outsourced IT team works only when the division of labour is explicit. On a London Trade engagement in Egypt the client owns the backlog, the technical standards and the definition of done, while London Trade owns the contracts, the daily supervision, the attendance and the replacement of anyone who leaves. Keeping the line in that place is what stops an offshore team in Egypt turning into a second management problem for the client.

For a company in Europe or the Gulf, an offshore delivery team in Egypt is an argument about hours as much as about cost: the Egyptian working day overlaps the European and Gulf working day instead of running opposite to it, so a London Trade team in Egypt joins the client’s stand-ups, releases and incident calls while they are happening rather than answering them the next morning. London Trade works in Arabic and English, and a service desk in Egypt that answers in both is not something every offshore destination can staff.

For companies in Egypt the arithmetic is different. Most already have an internal IT team, and that team is fully occupied keeping laptops, networks, branches and line-of-business systems alive, so it never reaches the project list the business is waiting for. London Trade takes over the running side — first and second line service desk, infrastructure support and field engineering across its more than 40 locations in Egypt — which returns the client’s own IT staff to the work only they can do.

Anyone buying IT outsourcing in Egypt should ask who actually employs the people, who supervises them on a normal Tuesday, and what happens in the week after one of them resigns. London Trade answers those questions from operating experience rather than from a contract clause: it employs its people directly, runs them through its own management line, and already operates distributed teams to measured standards, including more than 40 stores it runs as a franchise partner of Vodafone Egypt. That record is the difference between an operator and a supplier that forwards CVs.