As globalization spreads the world, a new region is blooming as ripe for outsourcing: the Middle East. In a suburb of Egypt’s Capital City, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, and Ericsson have all set up shop within Smart Village Cairo, to tap Egypt’s “lower income and good-quality manpower.” Egypt graduates a lot of software engineers, many of whom speak English and French, and the area primarily serves Europe. “Someday soon, there will be a book that chronicles the mad search by corporations for the very last place on earth where they can find cheap labor — a comedy or drama, I’m not sure,” Ephraim Schwartz writes in Outsourcing to the Middle East. Technology Industry