Building Strong Partnerships

Increasing marketing technology investments are demanding more involvement from IT leaders to enable marketing to achieve full business value from its investments. This year, IT leaders supporting marketing will need to build a stronger partnership with marketing and help to evaluate solutions (architecture, functionality, scalability, performance and security), source data, manage and consolidate the application portfolio, and integrate solutions, says Gartner.

Data Visibility is Key to Security

Middle East organizations should devote more time and effort to gathering and using cybercrime intelligence, as it will give a good return on investment and assist in the establishment and review of IT security strategies and the creation of eCrime investigative measures.

The most important and obvious question surrounding this point is “how do you get that type of specialized intelligence?” The answer is companies and organisations should ensure they have a 360-degree view of their data, which includes data in motion, static data and volatile data.

IT Spending to Total $3.8 Trillion

Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.8 trillion in 2015, a 2.4 percent increase from 2014, according to Gartner. However, this growth rate is down from earlier projections of 3.9 percent. The slower outlook for 2015 is largely attributed to the rising U.S. dollar, as well as a modest reduction in growth expectations for devices, IT services and telecom services. "The change in forecast is less dramatic than it might at first seem. The rising U.S. dollar is chiefly responsible for the change — in constant currency terms the downward revision is only 0.1 percent," says John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. "Stripping out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.7 percent, which compares with 3.8 percent in the previous quarter's forecast."

Internet of Things Opportunities

The Internet plays an increasingly central role in the modern world, not only at the level of infrastructure, but also in culture, society and business. The Internet of Things extends that role to encompass an increasingly diverse range of devices and communications streams, many of which will be essentially machine-to-machine communications, rather than involving a person at either endpoint, according to Gartner. The analyst firm defines the Internet of Things as the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and interact with their internal states or the external environment.

Engaging with Customers

Weak mobile customer service is harming customer engagement, according to Gartner. No rallying principle in the enterprise matters more than the creation of superior customer engagement and IT leaders will need to innovate in engaging customers on all channels and have the metrics to choose the right projects."Marketing may fill the sales funnel, and the sales department can close a deal, yet it is the overall impression of the enterprise generated by the quality of customer service that differentiates one enterprise from another," says Michael Maoz, vice president at Gartner. 

Managing IT and Innovation

Technology executives and CIOs must realize that innovation needs to go well beyond the technology used to manage big data, says analyst firm Gartner. To get maximum value, enterprises will need to seek and embrace innovation in the way business problems are analyzed with big data.

"Big data requires an enterprise to embrace innovation on two levels," says Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner. "First, the technology itself is innovative. Second, enterprises must be willing to innovate in the way they perform decision support and analytics. This second reason is not a technology challenge, but rather a process and change management challenge,” says LeHong.

ICT Products Boom for 2015

Spending on ICT products and services in the Middle East and Africa will cross the $270 billion mark in 2015 and the IT market expected to grow 9% year on year in 2015, according to IDC. This makes MEA the second-fastest growing market with the SaaS segment set to perform particularly strongly, expanding 29% year on year to total. Converged systems will be another key area of growth as more organizations look to leverage the agility, productivity, flexibility, and cost-saving benefits presented by such solutions.

Offshore Providers Need Cloud Plan

While the increased use of industrialized services will reduce the volume of traditional and customized services, the impact on offshore providers will be counterbalanced by new revenue from investments in cloud-based services, says Gartner. However, service providers that are slow, unable or unwilling to invest in the shift to the cloud will risk hampering offshore services revenue growth. The analyst firm predicts continued strong growth in public cloud services, with end-user spending on public cloud services expected to grow 18 percent in 2013 to total $131 billion. By 2015, the public cloud services market is predicted to exceed $180 billion. "The initial resistance to public cloud has begun to subside and customers are beginning to realize its efficiencies as the solutions mature," says Ian Marriott, research vice president at Gartner.