Samar Yahya Saudi Gazette RIYADH — International Data Corporation (IDC) Tuesday said it expects ICT spending in Saudi Arabia to top the $36 billion mark this year, as organizations gear up for a whole new era of enterprise computing by ramping up their investments in emerging technologies such as cloud, mobility, big data analytics, and the Internet of Things. These pronouncements were made as the research and consulting firm hosted the latest edition of its Saudi Arabia CIO Summit under the theme “Where IT Meets Business” at the Four Seasons Hotel in Riyadh. Held over two days, the event was hosted under the patronage of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and attracted over 150 of Saudi Arabia's most influential CIOs, technology decision makers, and government advisors from across the Kingdom's entire vertical spectrum. Summit discussed the importance of closely aligning IT and business functions at a time when organizations across the region are facing up to the challenge of implementing emerging products and services while simultaneously trying to improve operational efficiency. "While warnings of impending change have been heard for as long as the IT industry itself has existed, the realities facing today's businesses represent a whole new ballgame," said Jyoti Lalchandani, IDC's group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. "Users are having to wrestle with a rate of change that has never been seen before. With this, the focus of CIOs across the region is beginning to shift to the new wave of disruptive technologies that are heading their way, with unprecedented opportunities to drive innovation and value creation across all facets of the organization. This will not only require a new breed of CIO leadership, but also a whole new era of collaboration right across the CIO value chain." With the event representing the largest gathering of CIOs in Saudi Arabia, a host of global ICT giants joined forces with influential local players to present their unique insights into the latest trends shaping technology adoption across the wider region, while a variety of senior line-of-business executives were also on hand to offer that all-important non-IT perspective. For the first time, the event also included a series of vertical-focused tracks, with the spotlight focusing on the Kingdom's government, banking and finance, and energy sectors, as well as on the need for organizations of all kinds to embrace the digital revolution before they get left behind. "As the world changes beyond all previous recognition, we are increasingly becoming a community of digital citizens living in a global network that is always connected," said Abdulaziz Al-Helayyil, IDC's regional director for Saudi Arabia. "We engage online more than ever before, and with the world's information at our fingertips we have become significant contributors to a vast and growing information ecosystem. Businesses need to keep pace with this change by redefining themselves and adopting a digital mindset. That starts with digitizing their business models and re-engineering the customer experiences they deliver, so that they can leverage both the information they own and the information that is created by their customers." EMC Tuesday announced its participation at the latest edition of the IDC CIO Summit that brings together over 200 of the most prominent CIOs and IT leaders from across the Kingdom, to exchange insights and best practices on the application of third platform technologies to transform business. EMC's participation at the event aims to help IT leaders deliver the agility and performance to support the ever changing and growing needs of their customers in an era of hyper connectivity and digitization. The announcement comes as a recent study reported that 62% of respondents in the UAE and Saudi Arabia believe that the surging adoption of mobile, social, cloud and big data technologies is changing customer behavior and driving the need for organizations to adapt in order to stay competitive. Conducted by the Institute for the Future and Vanson Bourne on behalf of EMC, the study titled The Information Generation: Transforming The Future, also reported that while 63% of respondents in the UAE and Saudi Arabia believed that having access to relevant information and insights would improve decision making, 33% of respondents reported to be drowning in information overload. — SG
