There must be some awfully corrupt shenanigans selling stuff out there so. No wonder the Chinese telcos run all Dubai's backbone infra, those guys are old hands at liberally distributing "incentives" to patriarchal organizations to get their way.
The key is in the top part of the statement - prestige. Your local partner wants to be seen as investing/using the latest and biggest technologies, whether it's AI, Salesforce (even for 100 person companies), AWS/Azure (even for tiny use cases that could be done via Office automation), Workday, Oracle and SAP, etc. The locals want to be affiliated to those technologies as it's a matter of prestige for them, even if they won't even be touching that tech with a long pole in reality. You make money in Dubai selling solutions, not SaaS, selling association and media presence.
As for Dubai's data infrastructure, government mostly works with Azure and uses the Indian WITCH companies as their implementation architects.
EDIT:- sometimes it gets so hard trying to convince the local partners and company execs why they don't need to use the "name brand" Salesforce CRM or the " hotshot" Oracle database, but huge caveat - if the top leadership of the company is young (think millennial scion of the founder), there's a huge chance they too will see it as futile and agree with you to swap to something more modern. Younger middle management locals are still the same - they care about the prestige factor more than actual results.
That's the biggest joke for everyone who has ever dealt a tiny bit with the tech market over there. If China is me-too of US tech companies, South East Asia is me-too of Chinese companies and the Middle East is me-too of South East Asian companies.
Think Uber -> Didi -> Grab -> Careem
there is nothing 'genuinely unique' or 'exclusive' by having the same product and business idea implemented four times over. Yes each one has added significant local touch and flavour to it but... unique? Exclusive?
Ever heard of the term “hawala?” Originates from this region.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161228041941/https://www.treas...
Anyway, when she flew in, there were a couple of Chinese guys in arrivals who were pointing a camera her direction and seemingly taking her photo. No biggie, she thought, and just thought it some weird coincidence.
However, the next morning she left her room early to use the hotel gym, but doubled back upon forgetting her headphones and spotted the same Chinese guys outside her hotel room door trying to jam something in the lock.
As for telcos using Chinese equipment, nearly every country outside the US, CANZUK, Japan,SK, India and EU use Chinese equipment.