IDC reveals positive outlook for African IT market

The International Data Corporation (IDC) expects the Sub-Saharan Africa IT market to continue its post-crisis recovery with impressive year-on-year growth rates in 2011. The IDC, a global market intelligence and advisory firm for the information technology and telecommunications industries, released it’s latest figures ahead of its upcoming Africa CIO Summit 2011 at Johannesburg’s Southern Sun Grayston hotel on March 28 and 29.

IDC forecasts spending on information technology in the region to rise 9.9% year on year in 2011 to cross the $23 billion mark, with software leading the drive on the back of strong double-digit growth. The market has witnessed a resurgence since posting a 0.6% decline back in 2009, and while these latest figures represent a slight slowdown on the 12.6% growth recorded last year, the outlook remains extremely positive, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.5% predicted for the coming four years.

In a survey recently conducted by IDC, CIOs from across the whole spectrum of verticals in Sub-Saharan Africa ranked the need to overcome staffing issues, improve the ROI of IT deployments, and ensure security across the organization as the top three challenges they currently face, while WAN optimization/unified communications/application acceleration, virtualization, and business intelligence/analytics/crystal computing were identified as the key technology investment areas for 2011. Such issues will be central to the agenda as IDC’s Africa CIO Summit 2011 returns to Johannesburg for the third consecutive year, bringing together more than 80 of the industry’s most prominent end users with global thought leaders from some of the world’s leading ICT suppliers.

“The IDC Africa CIO Summit 2011 aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the sharing of best practices among the end-user community, delivering invaluable insights into combating the issues that currently matter most,” says IDC’s Vice President and Regional Managing Director for the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey, Mr. Jyoti Lalchandani. “Our research shows that CIOs in Africa are looking to leverage the additional connectivity provided by undersea cables and manage internal technology infrastructure costs by using WAN optimization and unified communications technologies, while virtualization and consolidation are being employed to balance cost and footprint considerations. Cloud computing is another area of significant interest at this stage, although security and reliability concerns continue to hamper more widespread deployment.”

Radical new IT sourcing strategies, the forging of greater IT–business alignment, and pioneering developments in datacenter management will also feature high on the agenda as keynote addresses, high-impact presentations, plenary sessions, in-depth panel discussions, real-life case studies, interactive Q&A sessions, and unparalleled networking opportunities combine to provide groundbreaking solutions to the everyday business challenges currently hindering the continent’s CIOs.

IDC has partnered with a host of leading global vendors to ensure that the exclusive, invitation-only Africa CIO Summit 2011 covers all the very latest technology developments.

By Angela Meadon