Samer Hanna is both a pioneer in Lebanon’s online economy and a leader in his niche, which, in simplistic terms, is the provision of outsourced information technology (IT). Hanna is chairman of two companies: Dubai-based Capital Banking Solutions (CBS), a banking software provider, and a holding that owns Beirut-based Capital Outsourcing (C-O), a specialist provider of IT and business-process outsourcing services. C-O, which started in Beirut as a five-employee application service provider in 2000, today employs more than 75 people and hosts more than 800 active websites and applications on 200 servers in its datacenter. According to Hanna, “over 25,000 users access applications and websites in our cloud environment from different locations including, but not limited to, Lebanon, France, Qatar, Iraq, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Jordan, United States, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates.” From outsourcing and consulting activities alone, not accounting for the revenue of CBS, the group generated “over
