Best in Business - by Business Today
Tariq Voted Oman’s Best DotCom Idea, and his most associated Portals,
Ohitariq.net and Omanaccess.com voted Oman’s number One and Two by SIMPA
through the Most popular Executives local Magazine, BusinessToday.
Tariq Oman’s Best dot.com idea
Oman’s Number One Portal ohitariq.net (score 288)
The first IT portal in Oman, this site is managed by OHI Telecommunications
Company LLC. The popular site features IT news, product reviews, career advice
and information on the IT community in Oman.
Ohitariq.net started life as tariq.net, the IT portal created by Oman’s
Internet whiz-kid. Tariq al Barwani. When still at college, Barwani was hired
as an IT-consultant by United Media Services (UMS). Eyes had been on Barwani
ever since he created his personal Web site while still at high school.
Barwani’s programming talents were noticed when he created a vaccine for the
Happy99 virus and also when he wrote a program to painlessly change Internet
users’ computer settings when the then GTO changed all e-mail addresses.
Barwani left UMS when he hit upon the idea of creating his own IT portal
According to him. “The portal became one of Oman’s leading Web sites within a
month of its launch.
Three months after the launch of the portal, OHI Telecommunications made a bid
to acquire it. Barwani accepted and in March 2000, OHI took over the site,
renaming it ohitariq.net. The portal is maintained by a team of designers,
developers, content writers and sales representatives who work under the
supervision of Barwani, now OHI’s Internet services manager.
The portal offers off-line e-commerce in the form of a shopping mall. No
on-line payment is involved at this stage, but as Barwani puts it. “We are all
ready and set for it. As soon as the country goes E, we’ll be there.”
Some of the other services that the site offers include Internet domain name
registration and Web hosting, e-mail hosting, Web design, intranet
development, Internet security and multimedia design. The company also offers
Web consultancy and training as well as Arabic/English Web site translations.
Oman Number Two Portal Omanaccess.com (score 161)
The portal a venture of United Media Services was launched on June 30, 1999.
The site is dedicated to news views entertainment contest and various
Oman-related user conveniences. (Tariq worked with UMS Internet team from 7th
January 1998).
Oman Number Three Portal Cityshow.com (score 111).
The site has been created by cityshow; the international division of national
information technology company SAOC (NITC), the company specializes in a
feasibility studies, strategy and system studies, software development, wide
applications and turnkey project management.
Who is SIMPA.
SIMPA Marketing and Management Consultancy, whose marketing research division,
SIMPA-mr, one of the leading agencies of its kind in the Gulf, has launched a
new division, SIMPA-pr.
SIMPA has been offering a variety of marketing research and support services
to its clients in the Gulf for the last six years. So it is only natural to
move to the public relations side of marketing communications.
The strong marketing research division also gives us an edge over others as
research is always the start of the PR process, said Tausuf Malik who will be
managing the new SIMPA division in Oman and the UAE.
SIMPA-pr will be Oman's first full fledged public relations agency offering an
array of communications services to its clients.
This service offered has always been in demand in the past by our clients and
now this has become a reality and we are able to cover not only pan-Gulf but
also other countries.
SIMPA-pr will announce an international affiliation very soon to cover most
active regions globally, Malik concluded.
Tausif Malik, who will head the new PR division, had been previously working
with major communication agencies in India and the UAE interacting with
clients like Sharp, Kinetic Honda, Verotas Software and Infosys Technologies.
The Methodology:
Businesstoday compiled a shortlist of 100 business leaders in Oman and
contracted Simpa Marketing & Research Company (SIMPA) to conduct a
quantitative survey for determining companies, individuals and ideas
considered the Best in Business by the Omani business community.
The respondents for this study were top level executives from private sector
companies. Care was taken to ensure that respondents from different sectors of
the economy participated in the survey. Nationality and job function quotas
were also maintained to ensure a proper representation in the sample.
SIMPA’s representatives conducted personal interviews with the respondents. In
a few cases, as the questionnaire was self explanatory, mailed or faxed
responses were also used.
A structured questionnaire was used to collect the information from the
respondents. The questionnaire was 11 sections; each section captured one
category of the ‘Best in Business’ categories presented in this report. Each
respondent had to give three names for every category in order of his or her
preference.
The responses were all open-ended and no re-assigned choice was given to the
different answers emerged. All these answers were then weighted.
The following weights were assigned to the three preferences:
The first preference name 10 points
The second preference name 5 points
And the third preference name 3 points
This was done to get a weighted sum score for each name under a category. The
name getting top-weighted sum score in each category was the winner in that
category.
BusinessToday would like to thank Simpa Marketing & Research Company.