Thursday, Aug 20, 2015
Dubai: The governments in the Gulf states should nurture local talent as it will be cheap and help them depend less on external vendors and external technologies, an industry expert said.
Biswajeet Mahapatra, research director at Gartner, said that despite Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia traditionally spending a lot on innovation, the region does not have local vendors born and brought up in the region.
So, he said the region is forced to depend totally on a lot of external vendors like HP, Cisco, SAP, IBM, etc and external technologies like cloud, data analytics and social networking from outside the region.
“External vendors have their own geographical priorities based on the revenues which they earn and based on the products which they want to sell,” he said.
To grow the local expertise, he said the governments’ need to promote them to grow into a multinational firm. The UAE is playing a “key role” but it is not a small journey and it will take time to flourish.
As per the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2014-15, Qatar is ranked number one, UAE is ranked second and Saudi Arabia is ranked seventh in the world ranking of government procurement of advanced technology products.
However, he said that their capacities for innovation are quite behind (Qatar ranked 12, UAE at 25 and Saudi Arabia at 55).
This clearly shows the lack of “required skills, processes and methods” to harness the power of tools and technologies in this region. Capacity for talent is high for this region, leading to more skilled workers coming from around the world to this region (UAE is No 3; Bahrain at 1, Saudi Arabia at 17 and Oman at 22).
On the positive side, he said the region has the option of recruiting the best talent from anywhere in the world and giving it to the local industries. “The region needs to have a strong R&D platform to depend less on external vendors and technologies. There is also a risk involved in the adoption of data centres, where it [data centre] is going to be placed and can it be applied to any verticals,” he said.
In the past couple of years, he said the GCC market has seen the construction of many new data centres. Although cloud adoption has proved to be an enigma for many in this region, it has still shown positive growth, especially in private cloud and software as a service (SaaS).
“Many organisations are hitting refresh cycles and rethinking data centre strategies to ensure they can scale up and out to support the growth and performance associated with business intelligence (BI) and the internet of Things (IoT),” he said.
Even though the regional governments focus on and push adoption of newer technologies, including smart technologies, mobility and e-governance, he said the region is overdependent on oil exports and on skilled and non-skilled workers.
That is why, he said that China wants to have its own home-grown technologies and help its domestic talent and industry catch up with imported systems such as Microsoft, Google and Apple and reduce the ongoing international internet intelligence conflicts.
Both the US and China have been accusing each other of spying on their emails and cyber espionage operations for the past couple of years.
He urged IT professionals and chief information officers to consider upcoming technologies like mobility, cloud and big data when developing strategies and road maps for the future.
He said that the actual selection and deployment of any of these technologies should be augmented with input from other technology and industry sectors, relevant research and communication with analysts who have in-depth knowledge of the products and vendors to identify which is ideally suited (for example, right sized, good enough, cost-effective) for their environment.
Smart City initiatives have been a “priority for many governments” in his region. For example, there are smart city initiatives in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Key pillars of smart cities are communications, transportation, electricity, urban planning and economic services.
Technologies like WiFi are integrated in all modes of transport, including taxis, metro trains and buses, and enabling services such as smart parking, automatic traffic regulation and an integrated transportation network.
“The immediate impact of smart cities is expected to be in governance, transportation, R&D, retail, security, energy and utilities,” Mahapatra said.
As the adoption of IT has been late in the region, he said the tendency has been to leapfrog many technologies and to quickly adopt newer technologies.
By Naushad K Cherrayil Staff Reporter
Gulf News 2015. All rights reserved.
