The UAE datacenter market is set for significant growth over the coming five years, with International Data Corporation forecasting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3% for the 2013–2018 period. Increasing demand for business continuity and disaster recovery, together with growing computational and storage needs, is spurring this growth in datacenter services revenue. At the same time, increasing customer interest in cloud services is also ratcheting up demand for datacenter space and associated services.
Such issues sat at the heart of the agenda today as IDC hosted its Datacenter 360 Roadshow at the Sofitel Abu Dhabi Corniche. Attended by the emirate’s most influential IT executives and datacenter managers, the event showcased the very latest in datacenter technologies, covering overall adoption trends and dynamics and addressing the issues of economics and cost optimization, management, capacity planning, business continuity, and key implementation strategies.
“The UAE market offers sizeable opportunities for both datacenter services providers and IT services providers to work with customers in establishing their datacenter infrastructures,” says Adriana Rangel, research director for systems and infrastructure solutions at IDC Middle East, Turkey, and Africa. “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. There was also considerable dialogue on how the UAE’s datacenter services market has come a long way in recent years in terms of services maturity.
“The UAE datacenter technology market is at a crossroads,” continues Rangel. “On one hand, there is a strong push toward investments in infrastructure projects and application modernization initiatives across various industry sectors. On the other, customers are aiming to curb their IT spending and are constantly evaluating new technology models to help them improve the way they function while keeping their overheads down. Among these models, datacenter-delivered services have become quite popular as customers are increasingly utilizing third-party datacenters for their hosting requirements. Customers are also increasingly hosting their disaster recovery sites with third-party datacenter providers, with stringent SLAs in place to ensure the high availability, redundancy, and quality of the services delivered.”
To ensure the very latest technology developments were covered at the event, IDC partnered with some of the world’s foremost ICT vendors, including Juniper and Commvault as Gold Partners, Global Knowledge and Vision Solutions as Silver Partners, and Automic as Exhibit Partner.
