Gitex Global 2023: The biggest tech show of the year is back!

The 43rd edition of Gitex Global, the UAE’s annual technology event, began on October 16 and will go on until October 20. This year, the event has expanded significantly across two massive venues: the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) and Dubai Harbour.

DWTC will host more than 6,000 exhibitors for the event. Meanwhile, Expand North Star, the startup tech event hosted by the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, kicked off its edition from October 15-18 at the Dubai Harbour venue, featuring 1,800 startups from over 100 countries.

Gitex Global’s comprehensive ecosystem comprises 10 co-located shows: Gitex Global, Ai Everything, Gitex Impact, Future Urbanism, Global Devslam, Superbridge Summit Dubai, Expand North Star, Fintech Surge, Future Blockchain Summit, and Marketing Mania.

It covers 41 exhibition halls, spanning 2.7 million square feet of exhibition space – a 35 per cent increase over the previous year, hosting leading technology giants and startups specialising in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, mobility, sustainable tech and more.

Over five days, attendees can look forward to a jam-packed schedule featuring conferences, live workshops, exclusive networking opportunities, and the chance to explore the latest technological innovations in action.

What’s new?

Gitex Cyber Valley 

The event will discuss how cybersecurity can mitigate rising cyber threats.  It will cover key components such as:

Gitex CISO Lounge: A platform where the top 150 chief information security officers from various industries will discuss, exchange industry insights, and address common challenges alongside their peers.

Cyber Workshops: The workshops will provide visitors with insights into proactive strategies for combatting modern cyber threats, offering an understanding of effective approaches to safeguarding organisations.

Collaborative Hackathons: It will also feature hackathons involving tech companies. With over 500 participants participating in five challenges, the objective will be to address global tech issues and find solutions to combat cyber threats.

Ai Everything

Led by the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and the Office for Digital Economy & Remote Work Applications in the UAE, the fifth edition of Ai Everything will serve as a global gathering, uniting the AI community, including major enterprises, public sector representatives, and AI professionals, as they navigate the intricate landscape of technology reshaping both business and society.

Global Devslam

Supported by Coders HQ, an initiative of the UAE government and endorsed by the Python Software Foundation, Global DevSlam grants exclusive access to C-level visionaries, government dignitaries, and a diverse international coding community. The event will continue to offer scholarships to support talented individuals from across the globe in coding and development. 

Gitex Impact

Gitex Impact will foster advancements in climate solutions, ESG investments, sustainable finance, and collaborative public-private ventures. Attendees can explore the globe’s most influential tech communities driving progress in Sustainability Tech, ESG Strategies, AI, robotics, HealthTech, DeepTech, EdTech, FinTech, Metaverse, Web3, coding, future mobility, and many other transformative domains.

Future Urbanism

Future Urbanism takes centre stage in propelling the urban revolution and shaping the cities of tomorrow. It assembles urban visionaries, developers of megacities, and sustainable technologies to create a global hub for sourcing solutions to construct intelligent, sustainable and resilient urban communities.

SuperBridge Summit Dubai

The SuperBridge Summit will establish connections and foster unity among leaders from the world’s most rapidly expanding economies. “As the UAE forges ahead with its visionary economic agenda via advanced collaborations and enduring strategic partnerships, the SuperBridge Dubai Summit will create new opportunities for innovation and co-creation in emerging global economies, said Helal Saeed Al Marri, director–general, Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism and DWTC. “

This powerful summit alongside Gitex Global and Expand North Star will be the new cornerstone of an international investment roadmap by accelerating entrepreneurial innovation across government, business, society, and culture,” he added.

Expand North Star

Across four days, Expand North Star will present some of the top startups from over 100 countries and welcome 1,000 VCs.

The event will deliver a content programme debating the big stories of 2023, including a flash storm of generative AI startups, and more than 70 unicorn founders on stage give their opinions. This platform allows startups to shine as well as grow through mentorship, product showcases, meetings, pitch competitions and conference sessions.

Fintech Surge

With a strong emphasis on embedded finance, enhancing customer experiences, and setting benchmarks for global fintech strategies, the Middle East and North Africa will host a gathering of international fintech leaders. This event promises to unveil the technological advancements in paytech, insurtech, regtech, wealth and asset management and digital banking, presented by more than 100 global financial services firms.

With over 100 thought-provoking discussions featuring global regulators, financial institutions, and unicorns, this summit will redefine fintech strategies within the region. Additionally, targeted meetings will involve over 1000 startups, tech buyers, and investors.

Future Blockchain Summit

The Future Blockchain Summit, the blockchain event, is relocating to Dubai Harbour and will take place from October 15-18, 2023. During the four-day event, industry leaders will have networking opportunities, access to valuable insights, the chance to compete for growth funding in the Supernova Challenge, participate in the Investors Program & Forum, enhance their expertise through Academic Masterclasses, and engage in a Web3 Gaming Showdown.

Marketing Mania

Marketing Mania is the sole marketing and creative technology trade exhibition in the MENA region that unites marketing experts seeking the latest technologies and strategies to elevate their marketing endeavours.

Quick showcase

Avaya

Avaya will showcase a range of vertical-specific use cases that highlight the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in delivering outstanding experiences across the customer journey. Throughout the week of the event, Avaya will demonstrate solutions that harness AI to reimagine the way customer and employee experiences are delivered.

The solutions on display will also show how organisations can chart their own path to delivering these AI-enhanced experiences without disrupting existing operations. “No two words capture the current business zeitgeist better than ‘artificial intelligence’. The capabilities being delivered by AI are super-charging organisations’ ability to innovate with their customer experiences,” said Nidal Abou-Ltaif, senior vice president – global head of sales, Avaya and president, of Avaya International.

Pure Storage

Pure Storage will demonstrate new additions to the portfolio such as FlashArray//E, the latest addition to the company’s flagship FlashArray family of products, which delivers the efficiency of flash for all file and block data repositories, from content libraries to backup sets to active archives. It will also showcase FlashBlade//E, a storage for unstructured data repositories. “Customers come to us for infrastructure which supports their business needs and frees up teams to focus on strategic tasks.

At Gitex Global, we will be showcasing solutions which are unique in helping customers to implement the most modern, simple storage delivered with a cloud operating model and via flexible consumption,” commented Omar Akar, regional vice president – Middle East and Emerging Africa, Pure Storage.

Cloud Box Technologies

Cloud Box Technologies will present its solutions portfolio that enables digital transformation among customers across various industries, including healthcare, banking and finance, retail, manufacturing and education. The company will highlight its specialised capabilities in on-premise digitisation, its NOC and its pre-emptive managed detection and service capabilities.

Ranjith Kaippada, managing director at Cloud Box Technologies, stated: “This year at Gitex Global, we will also showcase our complete cybersecurity solutions, including our latest addition – a security operations centre (SOC). We have set it up primarily as a watchful custodian of our customers’ digital assets. With our SOC, we can now support our customers in fortifying their cybersecurity defences and protecting against growing cyber threats in the fast-changing digital ecosystem.”

Liferay

Liferay’s platform facilitates organisations in building, launching and managing custom digital solutions. This approach propels data-driven tailored experiences across stakeholders – B2B, B2C, B2E, G2G or G2C – through digital channels. It offers the flexibility to streamline applications, and with Liferay Experience Cloud, organisations can create a broad range of custom solutions, including customer experiences, employee portals and solutions for suppliers, distributors and retailers.

Moussalam Dalati, general manager – Middle East and Africa, Liferay, highlighted, “We firmly believe in equipping businesses with the tools to build and deliver exceptional experiences while capitalising on existing skills, proficiencies and deep industry expertise. We focus on creating opportunities for organisations to craft their applications and systems on a robust platform, thereby eliminating the need for extensive investments.”

Sophos

Sophos will showcase its advanced cybersecurity solutions including its managed detection and response at Gitex Global. The company will also highlight its incident response retainer, which provides organisations with speedy access to its fixed-cost incident response services. Harish Chib, VP – MEA at Sophos said: “We recently released the Active Adversary Report for Tech Leaders 2023 which mentions that it took on average less than a day – approximately 16 hours – for attackers to reach active directory (AD).

It typically manages identity and access to resources across an organisation, meaning attackers can use AD to escalate their privileges on a system to log in and carry out a wide range of malicious activity. At Gitex, we look forward to sharing insights on the challenges faced when it comes to targeted, active attacks that are planned and carried out by human operators as adversaries are constantly modifying and evolving their toolkits to stay one step ahead of cybersecurity professionals.”

SolarWinds

SolarWinds will present its product portfolio at Gitex Global, alongside its value-added distribution partners in the region – CyberKnight and Spire Solutions. Among the products presented include its full-stack observability products, comprehensive database management portfolio IT service management solutions and AI-powered product innovations. “We help companies to manage increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments to accelerate digital transformation, drive automation, modernise applications and migrate to the cloud.

By enabling IT teams with increased visibility, intelligence and efficiency, we are making it easier for them to manage their environments faster, and they are better equipped to maximise the overall value IT provides to businesses. We invite visitors to join SolarWinds’ top executives and engage with our engineering, product and sales teams who will also be on hand to guide visitors through the live product demos at the boot,” said Abdul Rehman Tariq Butt, regional director – Middle East, SolarWinds.

SentinelOne

SentinelOne will highlight its solutions and demonstrate their effectiveness in combatting the increasing number of malware attacks in cloud environments that organisations around the world face.

The company will showcase cloud data security product lineup, including the recently launched, Threat Detection for Amazon S3 and Threat Detection for NetApp. These solutions are specifically designed to address the growing complexities of malware attacks in cloud ecosystems, providing robust protection to businesses operating in cloud spaces. During the event, the company will host live demonstrations of the advanced threat detection technology deployed in these products and their efficiency and effectiveness in automating malware scanning in NetApp and Amazon S3 storage environments.

“Our presence will underscore the pivotal role that SentinelOne plays in redefining cybersecurity and safeguarding businesses against emerging threats, and we are keen to share insights and best practices to help leading organisations prevent threats, reduce risk and keep their systems and data safe,” stated Meriam El Ouazzani, regional director – META at SentinelOne.

ManageEngine

ManageEngine will showcase its entire suite of IT solutions, which include a portfolio of over 60 products that address a variety of IT market segments such as IT service management, operations management, endpoint management and security, advanced analytics and more.

“Since 2005, ManageEngine has conducted business in the Middle East, which is now one of our most important global markets. We have participated in every edition of Gitex Global since 2007. The tech show has proven to be a terrific platform for us to expand our brand to a much wider audience in that region. Gitex Global is very important to us, and we expect that this year’s event will give us more opportunities to interact with our customers, partners and prospects which will enable us to better understand and meet their IT needs,” commented Sujoy Banerjee, associate director – Sales and Business Development – UAE, ManageEngine.

Minnapad

Backed by the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), Minnapad is set to make its mark at Gitex Global, where it will showcase its innovative solutions and demonstrate how blockchain can revolutionise the IP industry. In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, Minnapad, a blockchain company has garnered recognition for its commitment to utilising blockchain technology to benefit intellectual property creators from creation to monetisation and intellectual property protection.

Vesper Qin, co-founder at Minnapad stated: “The integration of blockchain technology into the intellectual property industry is a momentous game-changer, leading to unparalleled efficiency and transparency. At Minnapad, we wholeheartedly believe in empowering creators by harnessing innovation. With our unwavering commitment, we are determined to revolutionise the way creators exercise their rights, ensuring their intellectual property receives the recognition and protection it deserves.”

Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks will discuss data sovereignty and how being able to manage your network your way whether that’s through its regional data centre or public, private or hybrid cloud scenarios, will improve data transparency and transmission for customers in META.

The company also has an interactive experience planned for its stand featuring the Manchester United football club as it showcases how it has changed the fan experience at Old Trafford, using its wi-fi and cloud management solutions. The company will further demonstrate its ExtremeCloud IQ solution that includes explainable ML/AI to help reduce mean time to resolution, distinguish network anomalies and help IT and network administrators see, verify and trust proactive insights.

“We believe that Gitex Global 2023 will be the launchpad for innovations and discussions around AI and its integration across industry touchpoints and modern governments’ and enterprises’ operations. As a leader in the enterprise networking space, we see a significant advantage here, as the network is the foundation of all of these new tools and applications. We’re excited to show booth visitors just how powerful that can be when it comes to creating more operational efficiency across an entire organisation,” said Maan Al-Shakarchi, regional director – META at Extreme Networks.

Islamic Coin

The Sharia-compliant, ethics-first cryptocurrency Islamic Coin is set to make an appearance at this year’s Gitex Global. “It’s not the first time we’re attending Gitex, and we’re expecting something huge this year,” said Islamic Coin co-founder Mohammed AlKaff AlHashmi.

“Gitex provides the ideal stage to broadcast our message of financial ethics and inclusivity in line with Islamic law. We aim to spotlight Islamic Coin’s ethical and philanthropic features to align with the UAE’s entrepreneurial vision and regional economic goals, and demonstrate how our unique framework seeks global Muslim adoption and community giveback.”

With a dedicated booth and a hackathon at the Future Blockchain Summit, Islamic Coin aims to solidify its unique position in the market. By aligning blockchain’s disruptive potential with faith-based financial tenets, Islamic Coin is charting a course towards creating an ethical financial ecosystem that has the potential to redefine the crypto space.

Read: Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy launches App Olympics