About

I was thirteen. Nobody taught me — there was no one around to ask, so I read what I could find and typed until things worked. Two years later I won Best Application at the Cairo Governorate Schools Championship. The award mattered less than what it settled, which was that this wasn’t a phase. I went to Al Shorouk Academy for computer science in 2001 and graduated in 2005, though the useful part had already happened by then. School mostly gave me vocabulary for things I’d been doing badly for seven years.

I joined Mobinil — now Orange Egypt — in 2006 and left in 2011. I didn’t start in engineering. I started in customer service, then moved to workforce management, then transport analysis, then OSS administration.

That order matters more than any single job in it. I met the operation from the outside in. First the customer complaining. Then the schedule that caused the complaint, then the logistics that broke the schedule, and only at the end the systems sitting underneath all of it. By the time I was administering those systems I already knew what they were failing to describe.

Most people in this industry arrive from the opposite direction — platform first, business second. It shows in what they build.

From 2013 I ran WANAS CNC, a manufacturing business — real machines, real materials, real payroll to meet every month. Wanas Wood Carving ran alongside it. In 2016 I co-founded Nest Color, an advertising agency in the UAE, and stayed until 2021.

For eight years I wasn’t the person selling software. I was the person buying it, and being disappointed by it. I sat in the demos. I signed the contracts. I watched my own team quietly build a spreadsheet next to the expensive system, because the expensive system couldn’t describe what we actually did. Then I paid for that spreadsheet in errors, for years.

Nothing I’ve learned since has been as useful as that. When a client tells me a platform “does everything except one small thing,” I know exactly what the next two years look like. I lived them.

Most software fails not because the code is wrong but because it encodes assumptions the business never made. I design systems that reflect how a business actually runs, then let the tooling follow. Success is measured by whether a client’s team can operate without me, not by whether a deal closed.

In practice the first weeks of a project aren’t about Zoho at all. They’re about the step somebody does on a phone call, the approval that exists but is written nowhere, the report the finance team rebuilds by hand every month and has stopped mentioning. Map that first. Choose the tooling second. Bend it to the map, never the reverse.

I founded Wanas Apps in 2020 and became a Zoho partner the same year. The work is Zoho implementation, Deluge automation, Catalyst applications, and the compliance machinery this region actually runs on — Egyptian ETA e-invoicing, Egyptian payroll and its statutory tiers, UAE corporate tax. None of that is an edge case here. It’s the job.

Arab businesses deserve enterprise-grade software from implementers who understand the region they operate in. Not translated software — understood software. That’s why Wanas Apps exists.