Sakhr Software chairman receives e-Visionary of the Year award

The award, presented by HH General Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Defence Minister at Dubai Internet City, on the sidelines of GITEX Dubai 2002, recognized Al Sharekh's role as the leader of Arabic software.

The awards honored winners from around the Middle East's business and technology community, offering the Arabic and universal technical prize to Mohammed Al Sharekh, for his initiative that produced the Idrissi Search Engine. Idrissi is the outcome of Sakhr's ongoing research in the fields of Arabic Natural Language Processing and search and retrieval technologies. Al Sharekh also received the award for his dedication to the research and development of these tools that formed the cornerstone of all future Sakhr products and Internet solutions, including automatic speech recognition, machine translation and electronic publishing solutions.

"I am incredibly honored to receive this prestigious award," said Al Sharekh. "Sakhr has overcome great challenges and obstacles in the past years. However, this award highlights our vision and commitment to provide the best of Arabic solutions. It will greatly inspire our team to work harder toward it," he added.

Sakhr has established itself since the early eighties as the pioneering software development company in the Middle East. In the last decade, it has capitalized on its extensive potential and built on its long experience in this field to become the foremost Arabic Software solutions company in the Middle East.

"We have directed our every effort over the past 20 years towards enlisting computer and communication technologies to serve the unique needs of the Arabic language;" said Al Sharekh. "Our development cycle is controlled by a set of advanced and sound procedures for different development phases, beginning from analysis, specifications, design, and testing, to finally revision and quality control."

Al Sharekh recently embarked on a major initiative to develop Arabic solutions that utilize XML and 64-bit microprocessor technologies. Amongst the most significant recent contribution has been Sakhr's Arabic software using translation technologies that take into account the intricasies of the language. This technology is helping to overcome the lack of Arabic content on the Internet.