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Details Published on Tuesday, 18 September 2012 11:42 Saudi Arabia is on course for economic growth driven by rising demand for broadband Internet, smart devices, mobile financial services and sophisticated telecom services, says the country’s telecoms provider, Saudi Telecom Company (STC). Large emerging markets like Saudi Arabia are becoming the new global growth engines as their telecom industries drive economic growth, says industry analysts in the run-up to GITEX Technology Week 2012 taking place from October 14-18 at Dubai World Trade Centre. According to research firm RNCOS, overall IT spending in Saudi Arabia is expected to reach US $5.7 billion by the end of 2014, up from $3.5 billion in 2010. RNCOS has also identified growth potential in smartphones, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), WiMax and security software markets, as well as rapid growth in 3G and broadband over the next few years. This potential is demonstrated by the country’s total mobile phone pene...

Details Published on Saturday, 28 July 2012 07:21 Consumers will spend US$2.1 trillion worldwide on digital information and entertainment products and services in 2012. This amounts to a $114 billion global increase compared with 2011, and spending will continue to grow at a faster rate than in the past, at approximately $130 billion a year, to reach $2.7 trillion by the end of 2016, according to Gartner. The $2.1 trillion consists of what the consumers will spend on mobile phones, computing and entertainment, media and other smart devices, the services that are required to make these devices connected to the appropriate network, and software and media content that are consumed via these devices. "The three largest segments of the consumer technology market are, and will continue to be, mobile services, mobile phones and entertainment services," says Amanda Sabia, principal research analyst at Gartner. "There are two product classes, which in terms of absol...

Details Published on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 06:32 A nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities, according to Gartner. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. As such, the nexus of forces is the basis of the technology platform of the future. "Information is the context for delivering enhanced social and mobile experiences," says Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner. "Mobile devices are a platform for social networking and new ways of work. Social links people to their work and each other in new ways. Cloud enables delivery of information and functionality to users and systems. These forces of the nexus are intertwined to create a user-driven ecosystem of computing." Not that long ago, people...

Details Published on Tuesday, 18 September 2012 06:36 As CIOs in Asia continue their push for growth, a focus on cost structure, people and processes reflects their integral role in the business, according to Gartner. Speaking recently in Singapore, Gartner executive programs group vice president for Asia Pacific Linda Price said the priorities of CIOs were becoming closely aligned with those of their global counterparts.“This is the first time we’ve seen such an alignment and it shows Asia and the rest of the world are becoming one,” she said. “Globalization is having a huge impact on the global CIOs’ view of business.” Ten Business and Technology Priorities The business and technology priorities of Asian CIOs are strongly aligned with their global counterparts, with a few notable differences. Leading the technology priority list for Asian CIO’s this year are business intelligence and analytics, mobile technologies and cloud computing. Top 10 Business Priorities As...

Details Published on Tuesday, 11 September 2012 09:52 ‘Cost-cutting' has become a buzzword among corporates in the Middle East today. Security programs are not immune to these cost-cutting decisions and in many instances are among the first to be considered when making budget cuts. The scare tactics of emphasizing the fear, uncertainty and doubt of security risks are no longer seen as rational grounds for procuring security funding and this task is made even more difficult by the general mindset. Security is seen akin to insurance- no one wants to pay for it but everyone is glad to have it when something does occur.What this then leads to is an industry wide mentality wherein the ‘reactive’ approach to IT security is seen as the accepted norm. Since IT security or rather the lack of it does not provide a tangible, immediate threat to most organizations, it takes something of a worst case scenario to transform it from a secondary consideration to a burning issue. By ...

Details Published on Monday, 16 July 2012 06:13 While financial institutions seek to develop alternative channels as a means to drive business efficiency and a better customer experience, an increase in consumer mobility has presented an attractive opportunity to financial institutions. According to research and consulting firm IDC, the current penetration rate of banking services in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) is estimated at less than 35%. SMS usage is growing faster than Web-based and downloadable applications. While the overall trend may be minimal, it continues to drive home the fact that SMS messages are far more appealing, since they can be used by consumers without purchasing an expensive data plan. This is particularly true in the MEA region, where penetration of lower-end mobile phones is high. "Increased device capacity and faster Internet speeds have boosted the adoption of mobility among consumers, adding to the recent success of mobile banking initiati...

Details Published on Wednesday, 25 July 2012 08:29 The auction of spectrum for mobile services in the UK will be underway by the end of 2012, says British telecoms regulator Ofcom. The auction will offer the equivalent of three quarters of the mobile spectrum in use today – some 80% more than released in the 3G auction which took place in 2000. Mobile operators are expected to start rolling out 4G networks using the auctioned spectrum from the middle of 2013, and to start offering 4G services to consumers later that year. The plans should see mobile broadband rolled out to at least 98% of people in villages, towns and cities across the UK. This will be achieved through 4G. According to Ofcom, the initiative will see next-generation mobile broadband become available to nearly everyone in the UK. To ensure that consumers continue to benefit from a competitive market, Ofcom has also decided to reserve some of the available spectrum for a fourth national wholesaler other th...

Details Published on Thursday, 05 July 2012 09:08 People have quickly begun using media tablets for daily personal activities, according to a Gartner survey. The main activities moving from PCs to tablets are checking email (81 percent of respondents), reading the news (69 percent), checking the weather forecast (63 percent), social networking (62 percent) and gaming (60 percent). The survey was conducted in the United States, England and Australia.“The rapid adoption of media tablets is changing how consumers access, create and share content,” says Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. ”The survey found more than 50 percent of media tablet owners prefer to read news, magazines and books on screen, rather than on paper,” Milanesi adds. On average, one in three respondents used their media tablets to read a book, compared with 13 percent for mobile PCs and 7 percent for mobile phones. Currently, the shift from paper to screen-based consumption is not yet...

Details Published on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 07:09 Five years ago, network operators were hesitant to outsource operations and entrust their business to someone else. Today, almost every network operator depends on managed services for at least part of their operations and network managed services. The revenue from network managed services totaled US$12 billion in 2011. So, why the a sudden change in the business model? Managed services allow operators to carefully manage their Opex. In many emerging markets even though the organisation will have sufficient internal resources to manage the network, Mobile operators are risk averse. By outsourcing management to a third party which is bound by contractual service level agreements, the operator doesn't share the burden of responsibility for a service outage. “Outsourcing is a win-win situation,” says Jim Eller, principal analyst, wireless infrastructure. “Network operators can reduce OPEX, improve service quality and in...

Details Published on Monday, 05 March 2012 07:01 Technology spending by the government sector in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) should increase by 15.1% year on year in 2012 to reach $7.41 billion, according to market researcher IDC. "The MEA region is highly diverse, comprising countries of different sizes and economic diversity, at various stages of development, and with dissimilar political and regulatory structures,” says Mukesh Chulani, senior analyst at IDC Government Insights MEA. “Understandably, the IT spending maturity of countries within the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula varies greatly from that of developing African nations," Chulani adds. Irrespective of these differences, Chulani expects government CIOs across the region will seriously seek to evolve their approach toward IT investments in 2012 by emphasizing efficiency and cost-optimised capacity build out. "Tactically, this will mean a greater push by government IT decision makers to stan...

Details Published on Sunday, 12 August 2012 15:29 For the sake of potentially saving businesses millions of dollars and reducing traffic pollution, Australia is encouraging as many employers and employees to try teleworking on for size with the country's first National Telework Week, scheduled for November 12-16. Taking the lead from President Obama, who signed the Telework Enhancement Act in 2010 to boost telecommuting in the federal government, Australia has established a National Digital Economy Goal to double its total number of people who work remotely by 2020. According to Australia's Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy, hitting this target will take the country's teleworking rate from six percent to 12 percent, roughly equal to the amount of telework done in the United States. Fortunately for Oz, the deployment of the National Broadband Network (NBN) is underway, delivering high-speed broadband throughout Australia, and allowing...

Details Published on Thursday, 16 August 2012 06:34 Worldwide sales of mobile phones reached 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, a 2.3 percent decline from the second quarter of 2011, according to Gartner. Smartphone sales accounted for 36.7 percent of total mobile phone sales and grew 42.7 percent in the second quarter of 2012. "Demand slowed further in the second quarter of 2012," says Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. "The challenging economic environment and users postponing upgrades to take advantage of high-profile device launches and promotions available later in the year slowed demand across markets. Demand of feature phones continued to decline, weakening the overall mobile phone market. "High-profile smartphone launches from key manufacturers such as the anticipated Apple iPhone 5, along with Chinese manufacturers pushing 3G and preparing for major device launches in the second half of 2012, will drive the smartpho...

Details Published on Wednesday, 19 September 2012 05:11 The public cloud services market is forecast to grow 19.6 percent in 2012 to total US$109 billion worldwide. Business process services (also known as business process as a service or BPaaS) represent the largest segment, accounting for 77 percent of the total market. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market and is expected to grow 45.4 percent in 2012, according to Gartner. "The cloud services market is a high-growth sector," says Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. "The key to taking advantage will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity and then prioritizing investments in line with the opportunities." BPaaS is the largest segment primarily because of the inclusion of cloud advertising as a subsegment. BPaaS is forecast to grow to $84.2 billion in 2012, up from $72 billion in 2011. In 2011, cloud advertising represented abou...

Details Published on Monday, 10 September 2012 06:35 Customer care is constantly reinventing itself as a result of advances in technology. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology and directed dialogue applications are becoming increasingly popular, but, in some cases, are doing far more harm than good to corporate brand reputation. Advanced technology in the customer contact centre environment can be a double-edged sword, with the increasing ability to automate proving problematic for some customers, especially in the Middle East market. Customer care, irrespective of the technology used to implement it, should aim to serve  end-users and address their needs as expeditiously as possible. Thousands of kilometers of copper cabling and circuit switched digital exchanges make maintaining the network increasingly expensive. Most operators upgraded the back haul infrastructure to fibre some years ago, but the last mile is still copper for many of us, and still using o...

Details Published on Monday, 09 July 2012 10:33   Worldwide IT spending is on pace to reach US$3.6 trillion in 2012, a 3 percent increase from 2011 spending of $3.5 trillion, according to Gartner. “While the challenges facing global economic growth persist — the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China — the outlook has at least stabilized," says Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner. "There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending." However, there are some bright spots for IT providers. In contrast to the rather lackluster growth outlook for overall IT spending, the analyst firm expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012. By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207 billion. "Business process as a s...

Details Published on Wednesday, 11 July 2012 15:56   Asia Pacific is on the cusp of an opportunity to unlock US$1 trillion in GDP growth by 2020 through the harmonised adoption of the 700MHz spectrum band for mobile services, according to the GSMA.      As part of this economic growth, there is the potential to create 2.7 million new jobs, support 1.4 million new businesses and increase government revenues by $171 billion. “To realise this potential, it is imperative the region works together to swiftly implement the harmonised 700MHz band plan for mobile services,” says Chris Perera, senior director, spectrum policy & regulatory affairs, GSMA.   “Rapid adoption and alignment would generate huge cost efficiencies in both network technology and devices and ultimately make mobile services more accessible and affordable for consumers.”Since the plan was implemented in September 2010 by the Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT), a number of ...

Details Published on Wednesday, 25 July 2012 07:25 Board directors are prioritizing customers, core competencies and competitive advantage, according to Gartner-Forbes 2012  survey. They are willing to invest in IT as a means to change the rules of competition. Also, they have IT as the highest priority for investment in 2012, tied with investments in sales. "Board directors clearly have a top priority to invest in IT and leverage IT for competitive advantage," says Jorge Lopez, vice president at Gartner. "These forward-looking attitudes are being made although more than half of the survey respondents replied they are preparing for a market recession. It underlines the fact that investments they plan to make are essential to growth and even survival, and they are willing to throw the investment gauntlet down now, rather than later." The priorities of the board directors are directly centered on customers, building better ways to drive the business forwa...

Details Published on Monday, 24 September 2012 05:02 Telecoms retail revenue in the emerging Asia–Pacific (APAC) region is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7% between 2011 and 2016, according to Analysys Mason. The revenue will grow by 29% from US$229.7 billion in 2011 to $323.7 billion by 2016. The key trends driving growth in this sector and the number of connections in the next five years will be: the rollout of 3G and 4G services, which will account for 46% of mobile connections in the region by 2016; the growing demand for Internet access, leading to widespread take-up of smartphones and mobile broadband; and improved broadband coverage and connectivity, as a result of greater network coverage and higher international bandwidth. The emerging Asia-Pacific telecoms market: trends and forecasts 2011-2016 report provides detailed fixed and mobile subscriber and revenue forecasts for more than 60 KPIs relating to voice and data services. It includes...

Details Published on Sunday, 22 July 2012 16:19 ‘Connected’ consumers in emerging Asia–Pacific (APAC) spend 48% more time using telecoms and media services than those in Europe and the USA, according to an Analysys Mason report. On average, respondents with Internet connectivity in emerging APAC markets spent 13 hours per day using telecoms and media services, compared with 8.8 hours for connected consumers in Europe and the USA. On average, connected consumers’ total exposure to telecoms and media was highest in Malaysia (14.6 hours each day), followed by Indonesia (14.2), India (13.3) and China (9.9). The survey also found over-the-top (OTT) services have high penetration rates in these markets: 44% consumers in Malaysia use VoIP services, as do 38% in India. Skype leads for VoIP services, accounting for 69% of VoIP users. “Operators in emerging APAC need to develop a clear strategy to address the growing use of both fixed and mobile VoIP as well as other OTT communic...

Details Published on Thursday, 21 June 2012 15:43 The business impact from the growth of connected devices in China will increase six fold from US$116 billion in 2012 to US$707 billion in 2020, fostering the Connected Life, according to a GSMA report in partnership with Machina Research. Connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, consumer electronics and machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity, are driving innovation and advancement in key industries across Asia Pacific. China’s growth in this segment leads all other countries, as its economy continues to develop, backed by a growing technology industry. “China is not only the world’s largest mobile market, with more than one billion mobile connections, but is using this to its advantage by creating new applications, products and services that can advance its economy,” says Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer, GSMA. “China has positioned mobile technology at the centre of its expansion, from a booming car indu...

Details Published on Thursday, 30 August 2012 09:45 Apple’s litigation victory where an American Court has ordered Korean electronics giant Samsung to pay Apple US $1 billion in damages for patent infringement, may be a wake up call to any company that intends to innovate and compete in the high stakes technology arena. The way the American Patent Office issues patents, could have the potential to stifle innovation and technological development for years to come. This case is more about what constitutes original design or improvement on an existing design. The litigation brought by Apple has seen major corporations armour up, by buying thousands of patents from defunct corporations. Google acquired 24,500 patents when it acquired Motorola Mobility, in a move to protect and defend its Android operating system (OS). In the past, patent disputes were often settled out of court by means of licensing agreements between corporations, since a counterclaim is almost always incl...

Details Published on Friday, 27 July 2012 12:54 Social media revenue is forecast to reach US$16.9 billion in 2012, up 43.1 percent from 2011 revenue of $11.8 billion, according to Gartner. Advertising is, and will continue to be, the largest contributor to overall social media revenue and is projected to total $8.8 billion in 2012. Social gaming revenue more than doubled between 2010 and 2011 and is expected to reach $6.2 billion in 2012, while revenue from subscriptions is expected to total $278 million. "Usage of online social media has matured and more than one billion people will use social networks this year," says Neha Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner. "Although the number of social media users is large and mature in their usage patterns, the market is still in its early stages from a revenue perspective." Gartner expects the number of social media users will continue to increase at a moderate pace. New forms of media and entertainment ...

Details Published on Friday, 06 July 2012 16:39 There is a growing operator interest in public access small cells, according to an Informa Telecoms & Media report. The analyst firm says small cells will outnumber macrocells globally during Q4 2012 and femtocells will outnumber macrocells by Q1 2013. In the public access market, SK Telecom has started rolling out LTE small cell deployment, while AT&T, Sprint and China Mobile have all committed to rolling out 3G small cell services. AT&T and Sprint plan to launch later this year. Verizon Wireless plans to launch LTE public access small cells, while Sprint is planning to roll out its first LTE designs at the end of the year. These operators have chosen to proceed with public access services following their femtocell offerings. The femtocell market was recently buoyed by the news that Telefónica plans to deploy the technology across its European and South American territories, while China Mobile has begun its roll...