Middle East IT spending booming

The Middle East region’s expenditure on Information Technology (IT) is projected to hit $192.9 billion in 2013, registering a 5.5 per cent increase from last year, according to a report. The software spending in the region is also likely to boom with a 7.1 per cent growth over 2012, said top IT research and advisory firm Gartner in its latest forecast. This segment will be driven by key markets such as security, storage management and customer relationship management; however, beginning in 2014, markets aligned to big data and other information management initiatives, such as enterprise content management, data integration tools, and data quality tools will begin to see increased levels of investment, explained Peter Sondergaard, senior VP and global head of research at Gartner. Sondergaard was providing the latest outlook for the IT industry before an audience of more than 500 CIOs and IT leaders at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Dubai today. He pointed out that the devices spending in the region was likely to reach $29.6 billion in 2013, up 7.7 per cent over last year. “Devices are represented by mobile phones, media tablets, PCs, and printers, with mobile phones excelling with more than 14 per cent spending growth in 2013. Mobile phone sales between 2013 and 2016 are forecast to increase 64 per cent, reaching $32.7 billion,” said Sondergaard. IT demand, he said, was quite selective in large ME organizations. "We expect strong IT demand from vertical industries like banking and government in 2013. As the Gulf economies continues to develop the non-oil GDP part of the economies, increased reliance on IT will happen to spur this growth," noted Sondergaard. "A detailed understanding of vendor offerings and user needs are critical to fulfilling business needs," he added. “The growing young population in the Gulf region will drive the need for technologies around the Nexus,” observed Sondergaard. “The nexus of focus, the intersection of cloud, mobile, social and information, changes the approach to IT. Across the region every budget will become an IT budget,” he said. According to him, the telecom services market continues to be the largest spending market, representing 77 per cent of total IT spending in the region in 2013. Gartner analysts also predict that its growth will exceed 5 per cent in 2013, with mobile voice services reaching $88.5 billion and mobile data services at $23.2 billion. Albawaba Business