Cheaper, faster, greener

In the business sector, bandwidth hungry applications that are more established in developed markets, but have not been feasible in this region are starting to gain some traction. Next generation videoconferencing is gaining interest from corporates, while software-as-a-service, where end users pay to access business applications from a central service provider is also getting serious attention.

In the consumer segment, more bandwidth is helping to drive converged services on the web, for mobile and fixed users. Mobile TV is undergoing tests - during Ramadan, du made a US$2m deal with Middle East Broadcasting Company (MBC) to provide MBC content to du mobile subscribers, and Middle East websites are starting to offer rich multimedia content and integrated services using applications such as Google maps.

Major web players are also showing an interest in the region. Google launched its offices here in November - Mohammad Gawdat, Google's managing director for emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa commented: "It is just starting here, the awareness both of Google and the awareness of online. You have early adopters who are really doing well and understand the opportunities, but the majority today are not online - from a marketing point of view - and in the case of many small businesses here, not online at all. Internet take-up was slow here early on, but with government support and lots of changes over the past two or three years, you can now see the penetration numbers doubling and trebling. This is driving the next wave, which is utilising the internet for business."

ICT goes green

Alongside the wide ranging impact of competition in the telecoms sector, the next most talked about trend for IT has to be ‘green' computing.

Of course, with no manufacturing of PCs or components in the region as such, the concerns of environmental groups about toxic or non-sustainable materials being used in IT manufacturing are not going to have any real impact on the industry locally, although disposal of end-of-life machines continues to be a difficult issue for ethical consumers.

Likewise, while the EU/US Energy Star 4.0 standard, which governs energy consumption in consumer electronics and IT hardware, is becoming increasingly prevalent in products in the region, and while it may be a factor in some purchasing decisions, it is not going to have an impact on buying cycles, even among corporate buyers who are looking form more efficient hardware.

What is likely to make an impact in the large scale IT environments is the move towards ‘green' data centres. Hand-in-hand with a growth in online services is a massive growth in data, which has to be stored and managed in power-hungry, large scale data centres.

Not only do data centres require a lot of power to run the computers, but they also need even more power to provide cooling to keep systems running. The sheer amount of energy consumed by data centres is a growing concern - research sponsored by processor manufacturer AMD, released this year, showed that data centre power consumption doubled in the US between 2000, to account for 1.2% of total electricity use nationwide. According to the report, that growth was driven by increased demand for online content and data storage, a situation that is likely to be mirrored in other parts of the world as internet access and IT roll out ramps up.

At a time of unprecedented concern over energy prices, it is no surprise that over 70% of Global 2000 businesses are considering green data centre initiatives, according to security and storage software company Symantec, and also unsurprisingly, it is commercial concerns that are driving the green trend.

Omar Dajani, Manager of Systems Engineering, Symantec MENA commented: "When we talk to CIOs running large enterprises and large data centres in the region, whether they are in Kuwait, or Riyadh or Cairo, they have developed a sense of environmental responsibility in varying degrees.

"Most customers are not yet thinking about adopting [green] strategies because of environmental responsibility, but because they have responsibilities and SLAs they have to meet, so Green Data Centre initiatives build on their current cost saving and ROI focus.

"The reality is that data centres in the region will keep expanding. The Middle East is booming and the sheer amount of data is growing globally. In cities like Dubai, where [power company] DEWA has already sounded the alarm over capacity, and there is still a lot of construction going on, if data centre managers and CIOs really do their share to improve energy efficiency, then they can save money and work toward sustaining growth for all," he added.

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