Traditional industries shifting towards cloud

dubai - Public cloud services market in Mena reached almost $1 billion in 2016

Traditional industries are increasingly shifting towards cloud in order to be more competitive and serve customers better, industry players said.
“If you just look at the traditional marketplace, there is a real shift happening where customers are looking towards to be more competitive and agile. They are looking for service offering rather than just investing in historical architecture of compute, storage and networking,” said Chris Cooper, Data Center Group (DCG) Director, Lenovo Middle East and Africa.
“In this region, I see shift from traditional three-tier approach towards the cloud and service provision model,” he added.
The public cloud services market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region reached almost $1 billion in 2016. The forecast for 2017 is projected to grow 22.2 percent to over $1.2 billion, up from $956 million in 2016, and is poised to reach $1.42 billion by 2019, according to figures released by consultancy firm Gartner.
Dubai has been attracting some major data players global players, looking to strengthen their presence in the region.
In November, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group, launched first full-fledged public cloud in the region in Dubai that will be operated by Yvolv, a joint venture between Alibaba Cloud and Meraas Holdings.
“With the Dubai data centre, our global cloud network will be able to meet enterprises which are going global," Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, had said at the launch of the data centre.
Cooper said that given local legislations certain data cannot be transferred over the country boundaries, therefore in order for some businesses to provide cloud service, data centre needs to be located within country boundaries.
“But what is happening now is that those data centres are being built up, they are scaling up and scaling out and they are attracting customers but within that local environment,” he said, adding that be it public, hybrid or private industries, they are witnessing definite growth.
Firas Alfanney, Data Center Group Sales Director, METAR, said the farming industry is also adopting the technology to increase the production of the food in land by using satellite images, drones and IoT sensors which analyse field data to increase produced while keeping the same size of the field.
“The UAE is really leading the region in terms of technology innovations and cloud and we have seen a lot of announcements like the usage of drones by fire fighters and deploying equipments to their desired destinations,” he noted.
- waheedabbas@khaleejtimes.com