Premier Nazif Inaugurates New Buildings at Smart Village

Prime Minister Dr. Ahmed Nazif inaugurated today at the Smart Village a number of newly established buildings of local and international entities, which had begun operating in January 2008. Together with Minister of Communications and Information Technology Dr. Tarek Kamel, Premier Nazif toured and reviewed other under construction buildings of local and international companies located in Egypt.

During the inaugural ceremony, Telecom Egypt (TE) Chairman and CEO Eng. Aqil Beshir gave a detailed presentation of the new TE building sections, built according to the latest international architectural styles. The 9,000 square-meter building have a capacity for 1200 employees.

Premier Nazif also commenced the National Telecommunication Institute (NTI) 7,000 square-meter premises, which are composed of two buildings connected to each other through a glassy corridor.

Each NTI building consists of four storey's comprising the administration office, the computer center, distance learning center and that of e-content development, conference rooms, research and training labs.

The NTI buildings also include labs for wireless networks and computers built in cooperation with international companies like the American Intel Corp., Juniper Networks, Hewett-Packard and the Canadian SR Telecom. The buildings contain class rooms and a scientific library for serving students and researchers and host the Intentional Telecommunication Union (ITU) Arab Regional Office, the research and development (R&D) center of the French Orange Telecom company and the US Telcordia Technologies.

Separately, Dr. Nazif commenced the ENPO four square-meter building at the Smart Village, which has a capacity for 300 employees.

The new premises includes a control center for mail distribution over about 3600 post offices and 2000 public ones nationwide. The ENPO new premises include a museum and a lecture room.

Meanwhile, Dr. Nazif visited the building of Oracle Corp., which encompasses 400 Egyptian engineers and employees working on exporting oracle software products to Europe and the Arab World.

Minister Kamel pointed out that the completion of the Smart Village premises as an integrated technology hub had begun in 2002with an LE 100-million investments. At that time, he added, only 1000 employees worked there.

Now a total of 13,000 workers are currently operating in the Egyptian technology hub, according to Dr. Kamel.

The investment volume in the Smart Village is expected to reach LE 6 bn by 2011 with the finalization of the Smart Village phases over 700 acres to include 30,000 employees.

The project, Dr. Kamel said, has been totally conducted by Egyptians on the levels of design, implementation and management.