IBM is building a cloud ecosystem to provide cloud computing expertise to 100 Egyptian software companies to help drive innovation and new cloud development skills.

As part of its collaborative agreement with the Egyptian Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), IBM will offer its expertise to independent software vendors (ISVs) with the aim of boosting Egypt’s effort to become a center of cloud computing excellence in the region.

According to the Independent Data Corporation current spending on public cloud services in the country is lower than its regional peers.

IDC said Egypt represents the fastest growing market across the MEA, with 67% growth expected for 2014.

The agreement is in line with ITIDA’s strategy to provide support for small and medium IT companies to be able to expand their offerings to new markets and help grow the Egyptian economy based on the proliferation of technology trends such as big data.

IBM announced the first 20 companies to benefit from the collaboration at a ceremony in Cairo last week.

IBM Cloud-enabled access will help the companies develop their IT solutions by enabling the creating and testing of cloud solutions in a faster and more cost-effective way.

The ISVs will provide their solutions on the cloud, reaching a wider audience of clients and users with minimal CAPEX.

The ITIDA will choose the remaining ISVs in groups of 20, every three months.

IBM will educated and train the participating software developers on how to develop and port their solutions to different IBM cloud computing platforms such as SoftLayer infrastructure and Bluemix as part of the agreement.

It said with the ability to easily combine a variety of services and application programming interfaces from across the industry to compose, test and scale custom applications, developers will be able to cut deployment time from months to minutes.

The company also announced a US$100 million investment to bring Watson and other cognitive systems to Africa to fuel development across the continent in a 10 year project.

IBM Egypt’s country general manager Amr Talaat said the project will enable companies taking part to grow without large CAPEX.

“This is a real bonus for Egypt’s fast-growing entrepreneurial clusters, which often lack funding or physical IT infrastructure,” Talaat said.