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Inshore in Nazareth By Galya Yemini Tags: Israel News, Nazareth With his semi-European, mildly American accent, blue eyes, glasses and tailored jacket, Inas Said - the first Arab-Israeli CEO of an Israeli high-tech company - resembles an old-school European gentleman. However, he was born in the village of Nahaf near Karmiel, and spent years abroad advancing his career before recently returning to Israel. In December 2007, Said, who is today 43, was appointed CEO of Galil Software, located in Nazareth not far from the Church of the Annunciation. The company, whose investors and founders are Israeli, employs 35 engineers, most of them Arab, and develops software, providing outsourcing for high-tech companies in the country's center. Both of Said's parents were high-school teachers with university degrees. One of five siblings, he attended a Christian-Orthodox high school in Haifa and then studied electrical engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology there. Said studied in Berlin for a year and then transferred to Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, near Hannover, where he received a master's degree in electrical engineering and electronics. His expertise is in optical electronics, a field primarily associated with the communications industry. He found a job with a Sony-Ericsson subsidiary, then worked a few years as head of development at Nokia-Germany; after 11 years in Germany, he went to the United States. Advertisement Nokia was setting up a new research and development center in Boston back then, and Said worked there for three and a half years as a senior team manager. In 2001 he moved to Stratus Technologies - a spin-off of the communications corporation Alcatel-Lucent - where he was senior R&D manager until 2005. His two older daughters were born in the United States, the third in Israel. His wife, Hanadi, an accountant, comes from an Arab-Israeli family that left the country back in 1948. She was born in Lebanon and spent her childhood in the Gulf states, before moving to Canada. She met Inas there and together they went to Boston, where she worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Since their return to Israel, she has been employed at the Haifa branch of Deloitte, as head of a bank-regulation division. "She found a job faster than I did when we returned," Said recalls with a smile. The decision to return to Israel was not easy. "I had just been accepted to an MBA program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it was hard to decide what to do," his wife explains. Said found a job in marketing and sales with ECI in Petah Tikva, and 18 months later was approached by the Galil Software entrepreneurs. "I realized that this was the most interesting thing I would do in my career," he says, referring apparently not only to the personal challenges of his work, but also to his desire to help fulfill the needs of the greater Arab-Israeli community. How do you see life here now, compared to life abroad? Said: "Life abroad was easier, I didn't feel that I had to struggle in to pave my way. Everything worked out for me quickly. I never had to think, 'Wait, if I were American, maybe I would have traveled a different road.' I had managers of all kinds: American, Indian, German. The origin did not matter. "When you return to Israel, the question pops up: 'Could I have been the CEO of a start-up company in Herzliya Pituah?' In the U.S. promotion came quickly - a more senior position every two years. When I returned here, I wasn't sure I would find a job. I entered the Kellogg-Recanati executive MBA program at Tel Aviv University at my own expense, to increase my chances of finding work. "The manager who hired me for the job at ECI was an American Jew, who understood the importance of my experience in Boston, so it was easier. It was definitely a challenge and a compromise to come back. On the other hand, it's a beautiful country. Here, we have a warm family, all the help and support - it's wonderful. In the U.S. you are anonymous. But not everyone makes their way back, as I did. There's an organization of Technion graduates in Boston, and when they found out I had studied there, they started inviting me to their events. People there also struggle with the question of whether to return or not." Problem of networking Galil Software is backed by some of the country's top high-tech investors: It was founded by Jimmy Levy, formerly a division head at Comverse, and the investors include former Comverse president Itsik Danziger; former Comverse CEO Zeev Bregman, who is now (among other things) chairman of the board at Galil Software; Adi Pundak-Mintz, general partner in the venture capital fund Gemini Israel Funds; Oren Zeev, a senior partner at Apax Partners; Adam Parnes, general manager of Israeli operations at Oscar Gruss & Son Inc.; and Shai Reshef, former head of the Kidum Group. They were joined by Elias Tannous, co-owner of the BST Development and Construction Company, one of the largest Arab-Israeli companies in the country. This distinguished group decided to channel its energies and funding into the Israeli Arab sector, via what it saw as a good business opportunity. Moreover, the Industry and Trade Ministry has recently been offering incentives to high-tech employers to hire Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish employees. The ministry funds 20 percent of these employees' salaries, which is why high-tech firms such as Matrix, for example, have opened centers at Modi'in Ilit and Beit Shemesh, where Haredi women work in software development. The idea is to enable companies to develop software at lower costs than in central Israel, to forestall a move "offshore" - meaning, to keep such companies from outsourcing their software development to cheap places such as India and Eastern Europe - and instead to encourage them to keep their business "inshore." In Said's words: "This is development, an 80-minute drive away from the center." Things are progressing more slowly within the Arab sector than among the Haredi population. There are, at the moment, only two nonprofit groups prepared to train Arab university graduates in high-tech professions. One is the Tsofen organization, headed by Smadar Nehab, which recently opened a center that is beginning to train Arab workers. The second organization, the Arab-Israeli Center for Technology and High-Tech, is headed by former treasury accountant-general Yaron Zelekha. In addition, a similar business model for Galil Software has been developed by the MIT Group, a subsidiary of Manpower. Said is pained by the problems Arab university graduates face in local high-tech professions. "In the last five years, some 2,500 Arab-Israelis have graduated in the scientific fields, but only about 300 have found high-tech jobs locally," he says in frustration. "Most of them are teachers or they work the phones at Call Center [an Israeli company that trains salespeople]. It is hard for people from this community to join the Israeli high-tech industry, even though they are graduates of Israeli universities." Why? Said: "First of all, there are the investors. There are no venture capital funds from Haifa northward. Plus the idea of a fund investing in start-ups in the Arab sector did not exist before, and people in the sector have not been exposed to the idea that they can start such a company. Besides, Israeli high-tech employers encounter certain obstacles: The majority of employment in this realm is based on people bringing in people they know, and Arabs are not part of this network. Arabs don't have any trouble finding jobs with [textile manufacturer] Delta, because there, too, people bring in their friends. "Besides, high-tech human resources departments don't have the kind of multicultural awareness you encounter abroad, and sometimes cultural differences can wreck a job interview. Nokia, for example, considers itself an international company, and there are multiculturalism workshops for executives. You don't reject a person simply because he speaks bad English or has a Chinese accent. It's an obstacle that needs to be surpassed. "I met quite a few job candidates at Galil Software who are excellent engineers, graduated from the Technion with high grades, but had no idea how to interview, how to write a resume. And Arabs who do get hired by high-tech companies don't advance to management positions, are not awarded more responsibility or become involved in marketing." Says Bregman: "As an employer at Comverse, I saw that out of 3,000 employees in Israel, only 10 were Arab. It's embarrassing. At our development centers in Philadelphia and Paris, the number of employees of Arab descent was much larger. The surprising thing we saw was that Arab employees excelled at their jobs. I saw this at the ceremonies marking employee achievements. "As I see it, there are three obstacles. First is a geographic one - the industry is located in the center of the country, while the population is up north. There is also the networking obstacle, which allows an employer to put the prospective worker in front of him in a social category. A Jew, for example, can immediately tell which part of Israeli society a job applicant is from; someone foreign is harder to place. And finally, Arabs already have a lack of trust in the system. They'll send off two resumes and say: There's no chance. They are less assertive, and their failure threshold is lower." Bregman and other leading high-tech investors have put up a total of $1.5 million for Galil Software; he himself comes to the company headquarters once a week. Today, Bregman and his partners believe the project stands a high chance of success. "Israel's high-tech industry has a shortage of skilled employees, and in my estimate some 10,000 jobs have already moved to India and Eastern Europe," he says. "We offer an alternative here in Israel: software development services by employees who trained at Israeli universities, at an attractive cost compared to both outsourcing abroad and similar services in the center of the country. We can save clients 30-40 percent of a deal's costs." The attractive costs at Galil Software, Said notes, derive from the fact that employee salaries are about 15 percent lower than in central Israel; overhead, such as rent and electricity, is also lower; and the Industry and Trade Ministry provides financial support. Only the beginning Of the engineers in the light-blue Galil Software offices, one is a woman. "She was a teacher before," explains Said, adding that "most of our employees have no prior experience in high-tech." Since the company began operations in April last year, five high-tech companies have chosen to entrust it with their software development: Mobixell, Voltaire, ECI Telecom, JumpTap and GE Healthcare. The building's renovated lower floor is now filled with high-tech cubicles, and the freshly painted rooms are waiting to receive some new employees. The goal is to reach a workforce of at least 100. "Without a doubt, the economic crisis has caused us to slow down a bit, but on the whole we are headed for growth," says Said. Meanwile, Bregman and his friends are trying to find potential clients: "Of 100 companies we approached, we received only three negative replies for security reasons," he says. "That's very little. On the whole the attitude is very positive. The client has full control over the project here. There are no long trips, no language or time barriers, and he speaks to engineers who graduated from the same school as he did." Said talks excitedly about his engineers: "Telling someone who has not worked in his profession for four years that he can be an engineer - that is a real mission. When the employees received their first paycheck, there was such joy that they ran to show it to their friends. Here, they had a paycheck from a high-tech company. I tried to explain to them that in high-tech, you don't show other people your pay stub; each person is on an individual contract, but they were so happy that it was hard to stop them." Said and Bregman emphasize that the company is open to hiring Jewish engineers as well, and three are already on the payroll. When the interview is over, they go out together for hummus, and on the way, they show us the company's list of vacation days, which marks the holidays of all three religions; each employee can choose his days off accordingly. They know that they cannot rest on their laurels: The MIT group is starting an "inshore" project of its own in Nazareth. "Competition is a good thing," they say, smiling. "Time will tell." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Ivrit in Iraq Iraqi professor asks Israel for shipment of Hebrew books. Racist reality show Reality show contestant calls his shoe 'Mohammed', angering Israel's Arabs.   1.   Sounds like a successful life.... 23:48  |  Bill Pearlman 21/02/09   2.   Salaries for Arab SW workers 15% lower 07:17  |  Average Joe 22/02/09

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