IT Spending in MENA Region to hit $155 billion in 2018

IT spending in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is projected to boom to $155 billion in 2018, growing 3.4 % from last year, US consultancy Gartner Inc. said.

The consultancy said at its annual three-day Symposium ITXPO that spending on software is expected to grow 12.7% in 2018, compared to 10.9% growth in 2017.

“The growth has been driven by companies pursuing new functionalities in major back-office systems like supply chain management, enterprise resource planning and customer service,” said Gartner.

Yet Gartner noted that some IT areas will remain outside this growth momentum citing notably Cloud spending.

“Cloud spending in the region is among the lowest in the world when measured as a percentage of total IT spending,” stated Gartner.

“There are insufficient local hyper-scale and large-scale data centers to support cloud systems, which cause local organizations to derive cloud offering from abroad,” said Peter Sondergaard, executive vice president and global head of research at Gartner.