Africa’s IT infrastructure spend to reach $3.5b in 2014, Gartner says

Information Technology (IT) infrastructure spending, which includes storage, server and enterprise networking equipment has been forecasted to reach $3.47 billion across Middle East and Africa by 2014.

The projection was made by Gartner, a US-based technology research company which reckon that the 2014 forecast is a 4.1 per cent increase over $3.33 in 2013.

A breakdown of the figure reveals that storage infrastructure will gulp $543. Server, enterprise Local Area Network (LAN) and enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN) will gulp $1389, $893 and $646 respectively.

Mary Mesaglio, research vice president at Gartner says “CIOs in the Gulf are beginning to prepare their enterprises to stay relevant in the digital business era, and they will continue to invest in technologies such as mobility, cloud, social and analytics. In 2014, we expect a lot of digital business and innovation to be driven by the convergence of these forces in the Gulf.”

IT infrastructure spending in this region will be driven by data centre modernization efforts, coupled with new data centre build out by local and international companies.

Naveen Mishra, research director at Gartner says that “private cloud, security and mobility are key drivers for the infrastructure spending in the Gulf region. The mid-market in the Gulf is expected to fuel infrastructure spending, primarily by focusing on virtualization and the public cloud.”

“Security continues to be a key barrier for enterprises while many consider mainstream cloud adoption. Desktop virtualization, managing storage growth, and integrated systems are other key priorities that will influence infrastructure spending in this region during 2014,” Mishra adds.