(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Telecom services continues to be the largest segment accounting for 74 per cent of ME IT spending in 2015.
Dubai: Middle East IT spending is projected to grow 5.2 per cent from last year to reach $214.7 billion this year and telecom services spend will contribute more than 74 per cent Gartner revealed on Tuesday.
Telecommunications companies along with oil and gas companies will spend heavily in IT in the region Gartner senior vice-president and global head of research Peter Sondergaard told Khaleej Times on the sidelines of the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Dubai.
Gartner predicted that IT spending in the region will increase by 23 per cent to $251.55 billion compared to $204.04 billion in 2014. Surprisingly ‘data centre systems’ will grow only 7.88 per cent to $4.19 billion during the five-year period. But devices will record the highest growth of 68 per cent and reached $52.38 billion compared to $31.15 billion in 2014.
“Business intelligence and analytics infrastructure and data centre and cloud are the top three CIO technology priorities in the Middle East region” Sondergaard said.
“Sensor/Internet of Things (IoT) are on the radar with no action planned and/or is in the medium to long term planning. Robotics and 3D printing are not priorities in the Middle East in 2015” he added.
Middle East spending on devices is forecast to reach $36 billion in 2015 up 16 per cent from 2014. Devices are represented by mobile phones media tablets PCs and printers. Telecom services continues to be the largest segment accounting for 74 per cent of ME IT spending in 2015.
“The impact that the digital business economy is having on the IT industry is dramatic. Since 2013 650 million new physical objects have come online. 3D printers became a billion dollar market; 10 per cent of automobiles became connected; and the number of Chief Data Officers and Chief Digital Officer positions have doubled. In 2015 all of these things will double again” he informed.
Gartner defines digital business as new business designs that blend the virtual world and the physical worlds changing how processes and industries work through the Internet of Things.
“This year enterprises will spend over $40 billion designing implementing and operating the Internet of Things.Every piece of equipment anything of value will have embedded sensors. This means leading asset-intensive enterprises will have over half a million IP addressable objects in 2020” he said.
Sondergaard said there is a shift of demand and control away from IT and toward digital business units closer to the customer.
“Thirty-eight per cent of the total IT spend is outside of IT already with a disproportionate amount in digital. By 2017 it will be over 50 per cent” he said adding: “Digital startups sit inside your own organization in your marketing department in HR in logistics and in sales. Your business units are acting as technology startups.”
Gartner estimates that 50 per cent of all technology sales people are actively selling direct to business units not IT departments. Millions of sales people and hundreds of thousands of resellers and channel partners are looking for new money flows in the fluid digital world and they are finding eager buyers.
He mentioned that bimodal IT fills the digital divide between what IT provides and what the enterprise really needs.
He used the example of smart machines to highlight the disruption caused in digital business. Smart machines are an emerging “super class” of technologies that perform a wide variety of work of both the physical and the intellectual kind. For example school computers have been grading multiple tests for many years and now they are grading essays unstructured tests that require analysis.
“Not is the grading more accurate but students actually worked harder on their essays when they are graded by a smart machine” Sondergaard said. “Other professional tasks won’t be far behind: financial analysts medical diagnostics and data analytics jobs will be impacted. Knowledge work will be automated. Smart robots will appear not just on the manufacturing floor where they do physical work but in the workplace and even in the home. Smart machines will automate decision making. Therefore they will not only affect jobs based on physical labor but they will also impact jobs based on complex knowledge worker tasks.”
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