The North Africa region will push ahead with IT transformation initiatives throughout the course of 2015, spurred on by growing adoption of third platform technologies such as cloud, mobility and big data.
That’s according to International Data Corporation’s newly released predictions for the year ahead, with the global advisory services firm expecting IT decision makers across the region to make a bigger push to implement mobile business intelligence, predictive analytics, and metadata management solutions.
“Lines of business will drive the adoption of advanced analytics and big data solutions, particularly in the region’s burgeoning banking and telecommunications industries,” says Ouafa Kathir country manager for North and French-speaking Africa.
“A large proportion of these deployments will be conducted via the public cloud model because organisations will be unable to find the skilled staff to implement and run such analytics environments in their own private clouds. This will raise its own set of complexities as organisations become open to new vulnerability points, and will result in the focus across the region being not only on solutions deployment, but also on the implementation of advanced security policies.”
“Keeping with the third platform theme, the transition to mobility will continue to gather pace across North Africa’s commercial segment throughout 2015,” continues Kathir.
“The introduction of more appealing all-in-one computers will lead to an erosion of desktop share as vendors revisit their offerings and make them more compatible with the Windows 8 operating system and its touch capabilities. This cannibalisation will occur even more rapidly in the region’s consumer segment as all-in-one devices become increasingly attractive to home users.”
IDC’s top 10 ICT predictions for North Africa in 2015 are outlined in full below:
* The North African market will continue its IT transformation in 2015, with different levels of maturity and adoption across the region.
* The telecommunications, banking and finance, and government sectors will continue to top the region’s IT spending charts in 2015.
* Organisations will press ahead with investments in cloud infrastructure, but the offerings will continue to be hampered by a lack of adaptation to local market needs.
* Big data technology will start to attract serious interest from banking and telecommunications organisations
* Security will remain the biggest inhibitor for cloud and mobility adoption across the region.
* Telecom operators will struggle to change their role from voice providers to services providers.
* Print services and document solutions will offer interesting growth potential as the number of vendors and distributors operating in this space continues to rise.
* The proliferation of low-priced smartphones will see feature phones edge ever closer to extinction.
* All-in-one computers will cannibalise desktops in both the commercial and consumer segments of the market.
* Local brands will intensify their focus on launching new tablet devices across North Africa.
