INDUSTRY WATCH
Regional ICT industry to show modest growth
IDC has presented its early assessment of what lies ahead in 2017 across traditional IT segments, vertical market segments, IoT, innovation accelerators, smart city projects and CIO challenges.
ICT spending in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa is forecast to total $ 243 billion in 2017, according to the latest insights presented today by International Data Corporation. IDC expects the region’ s ICT market to grow 3.6 % YoY in 2017. While this is down on previous forecasts, it still represents a considerable improvement on the 1.6 % YoY growth that is anticipated for the current year.
“ There is no doubt that 2016 has been a particularly challenging year, characterised by currency volatility, weak oil and commodity prices, and a subsequent softening of government spend,” says Jyoti Lalchandani, IDC’ s Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director for META.
“ And while these issues will continue to linger, we expect organisations to start pushing ahead with their planned technology investments as the wait-and-watch period draws to a close. Digital transformation initiatives will top the CIO agenda in 2017, as emerging technologies are increasingly leveraged in an effort to drive desired business outcomes. Innovation will be key in this regard, and we expect to see considerable disruption of the traditional ICT mix as a result.”
Complementing that disruption will be an acceleration in the shift towards software and services in the region’ s IT market. Indeed, IDC expects spending on software and IT services to grow at respective CAGRs of 7.0 % and
Jyoti Lalchandani is Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director for IDC Africa, Middle East and Turkey
8.6 % over the 2015-2020 period, far outstripping the 1.7 % rate of growth anticipated for hardware.
Communications, finance, and government will be META’ s biggestspending verticals in 2017, but healthcare, transportation, and utilities are expected to be the fastest growing over the five-year forecast period.
IDC expects the markets of South Africa $ 10.5 billion, Saudi Arabia $ 7.5 billion, UAE $ 6.2 billion, and Turkey $ 5.6 billion to once again lead the way in terms of IT spending in 2017 as Third Platform technologies like cloud, big data, social, and mobility become investment imperatives and dominate the ICT decision-making agenda.
The emergence and increasing traction of so-called innovation accelerators such as the Internet of Things, robotics, cognitive systems, virtual reality, next-gen security, and 3D printing will both disrupt and boost this spending on the Third Platform.
IDC outlined five overarching trends that it expects to shape the region’ s investment landscape over the coming 12 months and beyond.
1The first of those was that cloud will accelerate to a new level of adoption in 2017, with increased competition among cloud providers set to drive aggressive pricing, bundling, and customer service, as well as a growing focus on securing SME accounts.
The second major trend identified
2 by IDC was that big data analytics will become increasingly more predictive than descriptive in nature, driving new use cases around exploration and discovery, performance management, and operational intelligence.
3IDC’ s third major trend for 2017 builds on the idea that the emergence of innovation accelerators will usher in a new wave of IT disruption as early adoption gathers pace. In particular, IDC expects the transformational impact of IoT to become more evident over the course of the next 12 months, with the most
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