JEDDAH – The Middle East & African (MEA) IT infrastructure market, comprising of servers, storage and networking equipment, is forecast to reach $3.9 billion in 2013, a 4 percent increase from 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. “IT leaders in the Gulf region are focused on business solutions and improving workforce productivity,” said Mary Mesaglio, research vice president at 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 Middle East will be driven by data center consolidation coupled with new data centre build outs. Servers are the largest segment of the IT infrastructure market with revenue reaching $1.54 billion in 2013, and it will grow to $1.69 billion in 2016. “Increased acceptance of virtualization is one of the key factors for this modest server growth,” said Naveen Mishra, principal research analyst at Gartner. “IT leaders in the Middle East will extend their virtualization investments to create private clouds, especially banks, government and telecom organizations. Security is one the biggest barriers for the adoption of public cloud. However, this market has a huge universe of small and midsize enterprises who are experimenting with some of the public cloud offerings.” The data center market in the Middle East is fuelled by increased construction of Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centers, especially in Saudi Arabia and UAE, primarily driven by multinational corporations (MNC) as well as regional collocation and hosting service providers. – SG
