IDC today hosted a one-of-a-kind roadshow that for the first time provided a holistic 360-degree view of the datacenter. The event, held at Grand Hyatt Doha, showcased the key aspects of datacenter technologies, covering overall adoption trends and dynamics, economics and cost optimization, management, capacity planning, business continuity, and key implementation strategies
IDC’s Datacenter 360 Roadshow featured a niche audience comprising key industry players and decision makers that play a major role in formulating IT-related strategy within their organizations. Senior representatives from some of Qatar’s leading organizations, including Qatar Islamic Bank, Qatar University, and Petroserv, gathered at the event to share their experiences, while datacenter-domain vendors were also present in order to provide a much-needed supply-side perspective.
The datacenter market in Qatar is poised for significant growth over the coming years, with IDC forecasting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20% between 2012 and 2017. Demand for business continuity and disaster recovery, together with growing computational and storage needs, is spurring this growth in datacenter services. At the same time, increasing customer interest in cloud services is also driving demand for datacenters.
The Qatari market offers sizeable opportunities for both datacenter services providers as well as IT services providers to work with customers in establishing their datacenter infrastructures. With this in mind, today’s event highlighted the current state of datacenter adoption in the country and took an in-depth look at what is in store for the future. The event also dissected all the major industry pain points currently challenging the country’s end-user organizations, and uncovered the key solutions required for developing a sustainable datacenter strategy.
A number of informative panel discussions were hosted throughout the course of the day, with a particular focus on emerging trends in datacenter adoption, next-generation datacenters in the cloud era, and global best practices for efficient datacenters. Commenting in one such session, Adriana Rangel, research director for systems and infrastructure solutions at IDC Middle East, Turkey, and Africa, explained how the datacenter services market has come a long way in recent years in terms of services maturity.
“There is a shift in mindset currently underway, with customers increasingly utilizing third-party datacenter providers for their hosting requirements in a bid to avoid making large capital investments,” said Rangel. “In order to capitalize on the increasing demand for hosting services, Qatar has seen a surge in investments in the datacenter space as providers aim to offer new and innovative services to their customers while maintaining high-quality and strong service delivery capabilities based on international standards.”
To ensure the very latest technology developments were covered at the event, IDC partnered with some of the world’s foremost ICT vendors, including Commvault as Gold Partner and Vision Solutions, Veeam Software, and Intel DCM as Silver Partners.
