According to research firm Gartner, the Middle East and Africa IT infrastructure market is set to reach $3.9 billion in 2013, marking a four percent increase from 2012.
The market is up made up of servers, storage and networking equipment, Gartner said.
“IT leaders in the Gulf are focused on business solutions and improving workforce productivity,” said Mary Mesaglio, Research Vice President, Gartner. “As the Nexus of Forces –mobility, social, information and cloud – start becoming reality in the Middle East, this region will see a fundamental shift in the way IT service is created, delivered and managed.”
IT infrastructure growth in the region will be driven by data centre consolidation coupled with new data centre build-outs, Gartner said. The research firm added that servers are the largest segment of the market, with revenue projected to reach $1.54 billion in 2013, and $1.69 billion by 2016.
“Increased acceptance of virtualisation is one of the key factors for this modest server growth,” said Naveen Mishra, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner. “IT leaders in the Middle East will extend their virtualisation investments to create private clouds, especially banks, government and telecom organisations.
“Security is one of the biggest barriers for the adoption of public cloud. However, this market has a huge universe of small and mid-size enterprises who are experimenting with some of the public cloud offerings.”
The data centre market in the region is fuelled by the increased construction of Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centres, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Gartner said. This is driven by multinational corporations as well as regional collocation and hosting service providers.
Gartner expects the external controller-based storage segment in the Middle East and Africa is to grow from $648 million in 2012 to $760 million by 2016. The storage hardware market is still underpenetrated overall, the firm said, with many organisations not having the insight or education required to assess the correct storage infrastructure for their application and service requirements.
However, de-duplication, thin provisioning and flash storage are slowly gaining traction in this market, Gartner said.
