Celebrating its 50th year of delivering leadership in global IT advisory services, IDC today launched the 4th edition of its hugely influential Saudi Arabia CIO Summit, held under the patronage of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Hosted at Riyadh’s Four Seasons Hotel, the annual event represents the largest social network of CIOs, IT thought leaders, and vendors in the Kingdom and is focused firmly on exploring the pivotal role of the CIO in the new business world of technology transformation.
The Saudi ICT market is currently a hotbed of activity, particularly in the government, finance, and oil and gas sectors, where unprecedented budgets are combining with the emergence of exciting new technologies and a desire from many organizations to leapfrog previous generations. But this dynamism is not just restricted to these three sectors, with businesses all across the vertical spectrum gearing up to push themselves on to the next level. While some organizations are still building their infrastructures, others are surging forward, implanting cutting-edge technologies that disrupt traditional business and work models while creating opportunities in lines of business and in the optimization of workflow.
“Saudi Arabia’s public sector was allocated its largest ever budget in 2014, and with a focus on improving egovernment maturity, the coming years will be a fascinating period for the development of the Kingdom’s ICT market,” says Abdulaziz Al-Helayyil, regional director for IDC Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. “Meanwhile, the emergence of new channels is transforming the Saudi banking sector, with investments in Internet and mobile banking, mobile apps, and ‘omnichannel’ banking spurring extremely strong IT spending growth. And the rise of real-time analytics and the ‘Resilient Oilfield’ is driving a similar performance in the oil and gas sector, while the increasingly complex threat landscape in the region is uniting all three of these major verticals in their promotion of IT security as a major priority.”
Sitting at the heart of all these developments is the emerging 3rd Platform — or what IDC refers to as the four pillars of technology: enterprise mobility, Big Data and analytics, cloud computing, and social networks. With this in mind, the CIO Summit’s agenda explored strategies for enhancing public safety though the use of smart technologies, implementing new approaches to information security, and embracing the evolving IT delivery and service provider ecosystem. Underpinning all of these were discussions on effectively managing the transformation to the 3rd Platform, with Steven Frantzen, IDC’s managing director for CEMA, explaining the transformative power of these technologies, for both businesses and customers alike, and outlining his vision of what this new IT landscape will look like in 2020.
The delegates in attendance represented a broad range of industry sectors, including banking and financial services, government, oil and gas, construction and real estate, utilities, and healthcare. As a consequence of this remarkably broad vertical representation, IDC customized the learning experience by introducing a series of industry-specific sessions that deal with the unique challenges faced by CIOs operating in these individual sectors. IDC also enabled a more formal structure for the unrivalled networking opportunities available at the Summit, facilitating CIO-to-vendor meetings, CIO-to-analyst meetings, and CIO-to-CIO meetings across both days.
IDC is committed to ensuring the very latest technology developments were covered at the Saudi Arabia CIO Summit 2014. In addition to the Ministry of Communications and Information’s participation as Strategic Partner, IDC secured partnerships with some of the world’s foremost ICT vendors, including EMC, Awal, IBM, and Software AG as Summit Partners; Awal as IT Services Partner; VMware as Cloud Partner; F5 and HP/Intel as Datacenter Partners; Schneider Electric as Smart City Partner; Cognizant, BlackBerry, CA Technologies, Informatica, and Fortinet as Gold Partners; Innovative Solutions as Silver Partner; Cyberoam and iDashboards as Exhibition Partners; Centrify, Seclore, and CSC as Lunch Partners; and Future Systems as Gala Dinner Partners.