Qatar- ICT spending in Meta region expected to touch 260bn: IDC

By Mohammad Shoeb

DOHA: Total spending on ICT technologies is expected to reach $260bn in 2016 as digital transformation initiatives take hold across the Middle East Turkey and Africa (Meta) region said a senior official of an American market research and advisory firm here yesterday.

“The rapid urbanisation and changing nature of the population are the major driving forces behind the high demand for ‘smart cities’ and ICT technologies across the GCC countries” said Megha Kumar Senior Research Manager Software at IDC Middle East Africa and Turkey.

“The GCC region where about 80 percent of population live in cities is expected to achieve 100 percent urbanisation by 2050” she added.

“Qatar’s transformation agenda has leapfrogged in terms of ICT development and egovernance to achieve a ‘digitally-transformed’ country that is conducive to economic growth sustainability and efficiency. It with these initiatives in mind that IDC has created the Smart Cities maturity model. The model allows cities to assess where they stand in terms of their ICT readiness government processes coordination collaboration and data governance. While there are five distinct stages of maturity cities need to aim to reach the “optimised” stage of maturity where by a properly defined strategy allows a city to achieve its goals and provision higher quality of services for its citizens.”

Megha who was speaking with media here at a roundtable meeting on the sidelines of ‘EMC Xchange Day’ event noted that given the resource and budgetary constraints on the part of governments coupled with the changing nature of population and their socio-economic conditions governments taking leverage on technology to make things more open and transparent.

‘Xchange Day’ was the first of its kind event in Qatar where EMC Technology provided a platform to over 150 ICT leaders and professionals for a comprehensive knowledge exchange on its technologies for successful digital transformation.

These ICT leaders and experts shared ideas and insights on how IT organisations in Qatar can best tackle emerging challenges in this exciting era of smart cities and digital transformation.

Qatar was recently ranked among the top 10 countries when it came to the ‘Importance of ICT to Government Vision of the Future’ in the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Information Technology Report. Designed to be a comprehensive knowledge exchange platform at EMC Xchange Day Doha EMC and IDC shed detailed insights on a whitepaper designed to empower governments around the world and in the region to aid the transformation of their urban centers into smart cities.

In line with the government’s growing focus on ICT investments and initiatives directed towards the realisation of Vision 2030; experts presented detailed insights on the ICT building-blocks to create intelligent data driven communities .

The session extended an in depth presentation of the EMC Federation Smart City Platform an open agile software-defined and data analytics driven solution designed to deliver the speed performance and scalability needed for hyper-connected data-driven cities. Comprising three critical layers the platform brings together best-of-breed technologies from EMCII VMware VCE Pivotal RSA and Virtustream to host the applications of today and to enable the development of Cloud Native applications.

Speakers also presented essential guidance to all stakeholders within the smart city ecosystem outlining the benefits the key ICT building blocks of a smart city and the significant role of ICT innovation.

Habib Mahakian Vice President for Gulf and Pakistan at EMC Corporation said:“The time has come for businesses in the region to significantly reorient their thinking to help them stay ahead.”The Peninsula