Overall spending on information and communications technology (ICT) across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) will top $229 billion this year, an increase of 2.7% over 2021, said a study.
The study by International Data Corporation (IDC) revealed that it expects telecommunications spending to increase 3.2% year on year (YoY) to $137 billion in 2022, with IT spending set to grow 2% YoY to reach $92 billion.
Intriguingly, IDC expects enterprise IT spending to see strong YoY growth of 7% in 2022 to cross the $40.2 billion mark – and spending on digital transformation (DX) initiatives in the post-pandemic period is forecast to grow as a share of enterprise IT spending from 26% in 2020 to 38% in 2024.
IDC's predictions for 2022 highlighted that spending on security (hardware, software, and services) will grow 7% to top $3.76 billion.
Meanwhile, spending on public cloud services will grow 27.3% to surpass $6.8 billion. SaaS apps will account for 41% of public cloud software spending, followed by IaaS at 29%, systems infrastructure SaaS at 18%, and PaaS at 12%.
"ICT spending across the META region has been largely resilient and mostly running counter to the economic situation throughout the pandemic," says Jyoti Lalchandani, IDC's group vice president and managing director for the META region.
"Organisations are now realising the benefits and impact of this digital acceleration. Indeed, our research shows that nearly 60% of medium-sized to large organisations in the META region have seen an increase in cost efficiencies through digitalisation, while 47% have introduced new digitally augmented products and services and 46% have realised increased value from their data through new insights and enhanced decision making – in some cases, generating new revenue streams. The impact of accelerated digital transformation is here to stay," he added.
