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Abu Dhabi soon to be biggest IT spender in UAE
(Gulf News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Abu Dhabi: The UAE information technology (IT) market is expected to grow to over $2.2 billion in 2008, an IT company official said.
Feras Al Jabi, General Manager of ITQAN, the UAE-based IT system integrator, said the country's IT market was about $1.46 billion at the end of 2005.
"Surprisingly, Abu Dhabi is emerging as the biggest IT spender in the UAE with total IT spending in 2005 valued at $769 million or 46.89 per cent of the market," said Al Jabi.
He said that ITQAN was one of the first Microsoft partners to manage to implement new technology before it's launched officially.
He added that ITQAN had invested in the latest MS technologies prior to their availability in the market by qualifying its business consultants and technical team as well as its sales team to be ready at an early stage for the new solutions.
"Of the four IT sectors Software Products, IT services, Computer Equipment, and Data Communications IT services will be the fastest growing sector with a compound average growth rate of 11 percent," Al Jabi said.
He added that software products rank last among the four IT market sectors in terms of size. "Software product value is expected to rise to $345 million in 2008."
Al Jabi sees the region becoming more sophisticated very quickly driven by rising business and government demand to pace up the 'Digital Economy'.
He forecasts that the future of the IT industry in the UAE in the coming five years will be demanding.
"The growing complexity of the IT systems and the competition amongst companies which provide value added solution services and integrated solutions are the main reasons," he said.
Knowledge management
Al Jabi noted that Microsoft, as a market leader in delivering infrastructure solutions and information solutions has come up with platforms that customers use to design, develop, deploy and manage applications to run their businesses. He said that the global trend toward consolidation of companies will be beneficial to customers.
The IT sector must cope with many challenges such as technology change, security, competition, cost reduction, connectivity, business results, end-user productivity, keeping bus-inesses up and running and regulatory compliance, he added.
Al Jabi said the top market drivers in the knowledge management IT industry are increasing productivity, increasing efficiency, collaboration, business process automation, ease of connectivity, driving business growth and the pace of rapid innovations in the sector as well as deepening the relationships with costumers.
Al Jabi expects that services related to storage, security, e-government, archiving and document management, in addition to information technologies professional services, training, integrated systems and technical support, will witness massive growth in the near future.
Copyright 2006 Al Nisr Publishing LLC. Source: Financial Times Information Limited.
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