Middle East and North Africa cloud market revenues are projected to hit US$462 million this year, representing a 24.5 percent increase from 2012, according to a new report by technology researcher Gartner.
According to Gartner, Africans have realised the advantages of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) in cloud computing, all of which are expected to experience the greatest growth this year.
“Cloud services spending continues to outpace other parts of the IT marketplace. Worldwide, spending on cloud services will grow 17.7 percent through 2016,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner.
“In the Middle East and North Africa region, growth is expected to be even higher, around 20.2 percent. Although there are some variations between cloud services segments, overall the outlook is very positive.”
Cloud advertising is also picking up in Africa with revenues expected to grow from US$56.6 billion in 2012 to US$192 billion by 2016, Google being the main player in the segment.
Garter said that with many startups springing up on the continent, other segments set to experience high growth are the cloud-based office suites and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions owing to the cheap set up costs associated with them.
Gartner is a worldwide information technology research and consultancy firm with over 5,000 associates, 1,280 research analysts and clients in 85 countries across the globe.
