An increasing number of organisations in the UAE are seeking out specialised IT services providers to manage their IT infrastructure, according to the latest insights from International Data Corporation (IDC).
According to the recent IDC report titled ‘United Arab Emirates Cloud hosted Managed and Outsourced Services Market 2013 Analysis and 2014-2018 Forecast’, the market for managed and data centre services markets in the UAE expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.8% between 2013 and 2018 to reach a total of $971.8 million by 2018.
In order to drive IT innovation and agility and simultaneously increase operational efficiency to achieve better results, end business customers in the UAE are rapidly adopting network and desktop management services as well as managed application outsourcing services. Data centre services are also gaining a lot of interest, especially hosting infrastructure services, which include colocation, dedicated server hosting, and shared Web hosting.
“CIOs are under constant pressure to drive IT innovation and achieve higher agility,” says Saurabh Verma, research manager for IT services at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. “As the availability of skills remains a major challenge and as up to 70% of IT teams spend their time on processes related to ‘keeping the lights on’, CIOs and IT managers are under constant pressure to create incremental capacity for strategic IT projects. Given the flexible engagement models of managed services, smart CIOs are discretely identifying workloads that can be outsourced. Additionally, the service provider landscape from a maturity, availability, and service-level agreement (SLA) commitment point of view has also improved over the years. Altogether, these factors are playing a pivotal role in increasing adoption of managed and datacenter services in the UAE.”
Organisations are being pushed to simultaneously reduce their operating expenses and increase their operational efficiency; moreover, intensifying competition and increasingly demanding customers are driving organisations to put more energy and focus into their core businesses.
“Cloud services as well have gained greater momentum over the last few years, and both public and private cloud models have seen increased levels of adoption,” continues Verma. “Even though numerous organizations have reservations about the security aspects of cloud services, they are slowly testing the waters to see what can be gained from their use. Private clouds have seen some investments from government organizations, which have either managed such deployments internally or outsourced their management processes. Public clouds meanwhile have seen strong growth, especially the software as a service (SaaS) pillar.”
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