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Dubai / Emirates Business
Middle East and North Africa (MENA) IT spending is projected to reach $155 billion in 2018, a 3.4 percent increase from 2017, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.
Gartner analysts are discussing key IT and business issues that are driving the evolution of digital business during the Gartner ymposium/ITxpo in Dubai. In 2018, the MENA region will exhibit its highest IT spending increase in the last three years. Spending in communication services (mobile voice and data primarily), mostly by consumers, is the segment that will largely contribute to rise in IT spending in MENA this year.
Software is projected to exhibit the strongest growth in 2018, with a 12.7 percent increase year over year. Software spending has also been growing at a double-digit rate the last two years. The growth has been driven by companies pursuing new functionalities in major back-office systems like supply chain management, enterprise resource planning and customer service.
Cloud spending in the region is among the lowest in the world when measured as a percentage of total IT spending.
“There are insufficient local hyper-scale and large-scale data centers to support cloud systems, which cause local organizations to derive cloud offering from abroad,†said Peter Sondergaard, executive vice president and global head of research at Gartner.