Saeed Al Khotani Saudi Gazette RIYADH — The Middle East (ME) IT spending is projected to total $192.9 billion in 2013, a 5.5 percent increase from 2012, according to Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. And, the Middle Eastern and North African public cloud services market will see strong growth in 2013 with spending for the overall market forecast to increase by approximately 24.5 per cent from 2012, also according to Gartner. This was revealed at VMware Forum, held Tuesday at the Four Season Hotel here, which was attended by over 400 local customers in its inaugural year. The VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, US, announced at the forum a significant growth in the Middle East and North Africa region, with a 50% increase to its local workforce and a new office, strategically located in Dubai Internet City, the largest ICT business park in the Middle East. VMware's expansion in the region has followed the increased public and private sector demand for cloud computing and virtualization solutions, as the local banking, government and telecom industries look to these technologies to control costs and deliver business growth. The region has seen significant interest from these sectors looking to extend their virtualization investments to create private clouds. And the VMware's growth in the MENA region have been further supported by a 42% increase in its number of local partners as they take advantage of the expanding cloud computing market. In 2012 alone, more than 550 individuals were certified as VMware sales professionals and VMware technical sales professionals for infrastructure virtualization, management and end user computing, demonstrating that the local VMware-specific skill-set continues to grow beyond core virtualization capabilities. “A significant shift is taking place in the way enterprises in the Middle East and North Africa function, and improving business agility is now one of their top concerns. VMware's operations in the MENA region continue to perform well and we expect growth to continue throughout 2013 as more customers begin to understand the financial and organizational advantages that virtualization and cloud computing bring,” Sam Tayan, regional director, VMware Middle East and North Africa, told Saudi Gazette. “Also, because of the very importance of the Saudi market to us in light of the very well growth of virtualization and cloud computing, we organized this event here. Though we are here for only three years, we found good work last year and this year, and we expect this to continue and is increasingly having very good market here. Basically users especially our customer looking for more flexible way to deliver IT services and they have higher expectations that we can meet,” he added. Bank AlBilad, one of Saudi Arabia's leading Shariah-based financial services providers, has recently completed the third phase of a major datacenter transformation project using the latest virtualization solutions from VMware. VMware is now the primary virtualization provider for the bank with plans to deploy VMware vCloud solutions to deliver even greater automation and efficiencies. “Before deploying VMware solutions, Bank AlBilad was running 250 physical servers across two sites and the main data center occupancy had reached its capacity. We now have 750 virtual servers and 60% occupancy, which is a remarkable change, allowing us to be much more efficient as a business,” said Rashed Al Othman, the Director General of Information Technology Sector at Bank Al Bilad. “Crucially, we now have access to a much more flexible and secure virtualized platform that provides us with room to expand without compromising our future storage infrastructure requirements,” he added.
