The Middle East enterprise infrastructure market is gradually maturing as an increasing number of organisations embrace more efficient, consolidated, manageable, and cloud-enabled infrastructures. Sitting at the heart of this shift is the implementation of digital transformation initiatives and the adoption of third platform technologies like cloud, mobility, social business, and Big Data analytics. Such developments are reshaping the data centre and driving organisations to reassess their associated architecture.

Indeed, as business demands intensify and the benefits of emerging technologies become clear, it is important that organisations look to evolve their overall IT strategies, including their approach to the data centre. In line with this, technology vendors are creating an enhanced set of offerings that are resonating well with organisations looking for the next level of infrastructure efficiency within their highly virtualiser environments.

Notable changes are seen within key data centre-related technology markets like servers, storage, and networking, as well as a gradual move to newer consolidated systems.

Investment in traditional IT hardware like servers, storage, and networking is on the decline across the Middle East, with political instability in parts of the region combining with low oil prices to create a challenging economic environment. But while such factors inevitably bring with them an air of investment caution, their arrival also signals the perfect opportunity for organisations to reassess their data centre strategies and change the dynamics of their overall infrastructure purchase patterns.

Foundations

Organisations that harbour true digital transformation aspirations should already be reassessing their data centre strategies and rationalising their infrastructure procurements. Irrespective of the industries in which they operate, they should be looking to consolidate and optimise their datacentres while laying the foundations for digital technologies, applications, and cloud.

This will inevitably lead to the emergence of more agile and efficient datacentres, while enabling the organisation to embrace innovative solutions that are more scalable and manageable.

A key technology fuelling this rapid transformation is converged infrastructure. One of the main benefits of converged systems is the efficiency improvements that can be achieved as a direct result of their deployment. Whether preconfigured or assembled on-site, these systems are ‘tuned-to-task’, meaning they align perfectly with the specific requirements of the organisation in question.

This ultimately helps to improve performance and ease management, as the IT capacity requirements can be dynamically controlled and monitored through a single platform that provides a complete view of system resources.

The region’s converged systems market — which includes certified reference systems, integrated infrastructure and platforms, and hyper-converged systems — is expected to see healthy growth over the next five years. And this growth will coincide with a commensurate decline in the region’s server, storage, and Ethernet switches markets.

Adoption of cloud

Globally, as much as 50 per cent of all compute, storage, and network resources and workloads to be running on converged systems by the end of 2016. And while the shift here in the Middle East hasn’t yet reached such proportions, there are indications that a lot of the region’s datacentres will be standardised on converged systems by the turn of the decade.

Another important technology trend speeding up the shift in compute architecture and technology resources is the adoption of cloud.

In the Middle East, the percentage of infrastructure dedicated to cloud buildouts has undergone a steady increase over the past couple of years, and it’s clear to see why. Organisations are utilising more and more of their infrastructure towards building clouds and this necessitates the procurement and utilisation of infrastructure that is converged, manageable, and cloud enabled.

With all this in mind, organisations across all vertical need to reassess their business processes and develop a clear picture of where they can leverage digital transformation. They need to create expectation-altering customer experiences and generate new revenue streams at the lowest possible operating expenses; together, cloud and converged systems can help deliver these objectives.

Operational complexities

In a digital economy, operating expenses are tied to the organisation’s IT infrastructure, so an agile and easily manageable infrastructure can help lower operating costs and facilitate a more rapid transition to the provision of digitally enabled products and services.

Converged systems are ideally suited for organisations looking to resolve operational complexities within their infrastructure environments, while simultaneously enabling cloud. To this end, even the region’s small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can benefit from the agility and manageability improvements that are inherent in converged systems. Indeed, SMBs can avail the computing benefits of a functional data centre through the deployment of a single converged system with plug-and-play capabilities.

The emergence of such technologies has signalled a shift in the dynamics of IT spending across the Middle East, with uncertainty in the region’s overall economic and political climate further fuelling the need for change.

The challenges are numerous, but so are the opportunities, and forward-thinking organisations should now be looking to utilise this inflection point in the IT market as a catalyst for rationalising their infrastructure procurements and embracing the myriad benefits offered by convergence and cloud.

The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC