INDUSTRY WATCH prominent use cases to include freight monitoring, smart grid electricity, manufacturing operations, production asset management, and remote health monitoring.
Given these applications, it makes sense that the biggest spenders on IoT in 2017 are tipped to be the region’ s manufacturing, transportation, utilities, and healthcare verticals.
4The fourth major trend identified by IDC is the fact that maintaining security continues to be the numberone challenge facing the region’ s CIOs, with spending on security solutions by META organisations set to cross the $ 2 billion mark in 2017.
The contribution of IT software and services to the overall IT industry is expected to increase due to their faster growth rate over hardware.
IDC expects threat management, compliance remediation, security management, automatic malware removal, and mobile security solutions to be the top five investment priorities in this area.
5Finally, IDC anticipates a more pragmatic focus from the region’ s Smart City initiatives in 2017, with governments and their partners looking to enable innovative transportation, citizen engagement, and emergency response services that drive tangible improvements in the lives of their residents.
South Africa at $ 10.5 billion, Saudi Arabia at $ 7.5 billion, UAE at $ 6.2 billion, Turkey at $ 5.6 billion, remain the top four IT markets across Africa, Middle East and Turkey region.
The growth rate of the ICT Africa, Middle East, Turkey industry is expected to improve from 1.6 % in 2016 to 3.6 % in 2017 YoY.
Communications, finance, government, manufacturing, are the biggest spenders on vertical market applications. Healthcare, transportation, utilities are the fastest growing for spending on vertical market applications.
Slowdown in growth from 2015 to 2018 is across IT and telecom industry.
South Africa is the biggest market for spending on public cloud, followed by Turkey, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. www. intelligentcio. com INTELLIGENTCIO
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