Gartner says Middle East IT spending to reach $192.9bn in 2013

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research at Gartner, provided the latest outlook for the IT industry here today to an audience of more than 500 CIOs and IT leaders at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through March 7.

The Gartner ME IT spending forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services and telecom markets. For more than a decade, global IT and business executives have been using these highly anticipated quarterly reports to recognize market opportunities and challenges, and base their critical business decisions on proven methodologies rather than guesswork.

ME devices spending is forecast to reach $29.6bn in 2013, up 7.7% from 2012. "Devices are represented by mobile phones, media tablets, PCs, and printers, with mobile phones excelling with more than 14% spending growth in 2013. Mobile phone sales between 2013 and 2016 are forecast to increase 64%, reaching $32.7bn," said Mr. Sondergaard.

"IT demand is quite selective in large ME organizations. We expect strong IT demand from vertical industries like banking and government in 2013. As the Gulf economies continues to develop the non-oil GDP part of the economies, increased reliance on information technology will happen to spur this growth. A detailed understanding of vendor offerings and user needs are critical to fulfilling business needs," added Mr. Sondergaard.

"The growing young population in the gulf region will drive the need for technologies around the Nexus," said Mr. Sondergaard.

"The Nexus of Focus, the intersection of cloud, mobile, social and information, changes the approach to IT. Across the region every budget will become an IT budget."

In 2013, ME software spending is forecast to grow 7.1% over 2012. This segment will be driven by key markets such as security, storage management and customer relationship management; however, beginning in 2014, markets aligned to big data and other information management initiatives, such as enterprise content management, data integration tools, and data quality tools will begin to see increased levels of investment.

The ME telecom services market continues to be the largest spending market, representing 77% of total IT spending in the region in 2013. Gartner analysts predict that its growth will exceed 5% in 2013, with mobile voice services reaching $88.5bn and mobile data services at $23.2bn.

Gartner's IT spending forecast methodology relies heavily on rigorous analysis of the sales by thousands of vendors across the entire range of IT product and services.

Gartner uses primary research techniques, complemented by secondary research sources, to build a comprehensive database of market size data upon which to base its forecast.

The Gartner quarterly IT spending forecast delivers a unique perspective on IT spending across hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications segments. These reports help Gartner clients understand market opportunities and challenges.