GARTNER SAYS GOVERNMENTS IN MENA TO SPEND US $11.97 BILLION ON IT

Governments in the Middle East and North Africa will spend US $11.97 billion on IT products and services in 2015, an increase of 0.4 percent over 2014 spending of US $11.92 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. This forecast includes spending on internal services, software, IT services, data center, devices and telecom services. Government comprises local government and national government.

Telecom services, which include fixed and mobile telecom services, will be the largest overall spending category throughout the forecast period within the government sector. It is expected to be US $5.2 billion in 2015– led by growth in mobile network services.

The software segment includes enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise application software, infrastructure software and vertical specific software. Software spending will grow 6.7 percent over the 2014 spending, to reach US $1.2 billion. In 2015, software spending will be led by growth in the ERP, SCM, CRM and enterprise application software which includes office suites and content, communications and collaboration amongst others.

“Transition from one-way department centric eGovernment initiatives to a two-way interactive citizen centric digital government is driving spending in government IT in the region,” said Dr Anurag Gupta, research vice president at Gartner. “We expect further investments in building systems for sharing data across departments with a goal of simplifying government transaction for citizens and continued investments in mobile technologies to facilitate anytime anywhere access.”