IT investment across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) would bring a promising start to growth this year, growing 2.8 percent to $77.5 billion, after contracting 4.9 percent in 2020.
As more than 1,000 senior executives from the region’s most prominent technology suppliers, telecommunications companies, and IT service providers gathered online last week for the first ever virtual edition of IDC Directions Middle East, Turkey & Africa, according to the latest predictions revealed by International Data Corporation (IDC).
The annual event is a strong symbol on the calendar of the ICT industry and based on the theme of ‘Resetting for the Next Normal: Strategies to Activate the Future Digital Enterprise’ this year. Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director of the organization, explained at the opening of the day’s proceedings that spending on digital transformation (DX) is expected to accelerate even more in the post-pandemic period, rising from 25 percent of total IT spending in 2020 to 37 percent in 2024.
“The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic fallout has accelerated digital transformation across the region, spurring unprecedented demand for contactless services, cloud solutions, and collaboration applications,” Lalchandani said.
“Most economists predict a return to economic growth this year as vaccines become more widely available, and we expect that by 2022, 70 percent of organizations worldwide will have increased their use of digital technologies, transforming existing business processes to drive new levels of customer engagement, employee productivity, and business resiliency.”
Lalchandani’s other predictions for the META region’s dynamic ICT markets in 2021 included the following:
• Overall ICT spending (telecom services and IT) will grow 1.9% to surpass $209.5 billion.
• Spending on public cloud services will grow 26.7% to top $3.7 billion.
• Spending on SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS will grow 24.5%, 30.6%, and 30.7%, respectively.
• Spending on professional cloud services will grow rapidly to total $1.6 billion.
• Spending on AI software will grow 23% to top $540 million.
• Spending on security (hardware, software, and services) will grow 7.1% to reach $3.3 billion.
Crawford Del Prete, IDC’s global president, delivered the keynote address of the event, describing the long-term vision of IDC and explaining how many of the improvements implemented over the last 12 months would lead to a permanent shift in the behavior of IT customers.
“COVID-19 has brought about huge changes in IT demand across almost every segment of the market,” Del Prete said. The dichotomy between DX investment and non-DX investment is a strong example of this, with the former expected to rise at a global CAGR of 15.5 percent between 2020 and 2023, while the latter will contract at -1.4 percent over the same period.”
By 2022, we expect 65% of the world’s GDP to be digitalized, with direct DX investments totalling $6.8 trillion between 2020 and 2023 globally.