COUNTRY FOCUS: SAUDI ARABIA
The Data Centre can
be a critical part of IT
development in the
Middle East region as
it is a key component
in attracting local and
global investment
value-added partners. There was broad
agreement that the economy as a whole
will benefit if end-user organisations start
to work more closely with international
partners, but that there also needs to
be complete alignment between these
vendors and the local businesses they
serve – both on a financial and strategic
level. In fact, the overriding message
from the day’s discussions was that
high levels of collaboration between the
vendor and end-user communities are
critical if the Kingdom is to maintain a
sustainable IT market.
In keeping with this spirit of increased
collaboration, there were also
suggestions that the Kingdom would
benefit from the establishment of more
public–private partnerships (PPPs) as
the current level of investment in smart
initiatives within the country remains
rather immature. The consensus from
the discussions was that Saudi Arabia
should learn from established global
best practices in the PPP arena to
ultimately build an environment where
private entities are able to invest in the
government to the benefit of both the
businesses themselves and the economy
as a whole.
“While the discussions undertaken by this
panel happened before the announcement
of the Saudi government’s budget, the
majority of their pronouncements aligned
neatly with the budget’s direction,” says
Abdulaziz Al-Helayyil, IDC’s regional
director for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and
Bahrain. “IT will be one of the main drivers
of government transformation, although
more business justification will be required
before additional IT spending is approved
and the shift to OPEX spending models
gathers pace. Such justifications may
include price benchmarking, best practices,
ROI calculations, or transformation
plans with services benchmarking, and I
expect there to be some lag in the launch
new initiatives while these business
justifications are provided.”
The rise of data centre
infrastructure
The Data Centre can be a critical part of
IT development in the Middle East region
as it is a key component in attracting
local and global investment from the IP,
telecoms, hosting, integrator, BPO and
IT outsourcing sectors. New investment
taking place from all of these sectors are
seen as being a key part of modernising
and diversifying the economies of those
countries. However, the investment
in data centre facilities for third party
use also needs to be suppo