ICT sector in Saudi Arabia: investments, challenges and opportunities

Mohammed A. Alabbadi, General Manager of Cisco talks about the ICT sector in Saudi Arabia.

What is your general outlook for the ICT sector in Saudi Arabia?

We are very optimistic about the Saudi market. The outlook for ICT services is positive. Cisco sponsors a general ICT readiness report and Saudi is one of the top forty countries and where we expect it to remain there. Also if you look at some of the consumer trends that usually drive behaviours, there is a very young population with over 70% of the population under 25, and they are very tech savvy in IT usage from a consumer perspective. These factors are driving even more trends toward corporate services and government services.

What do you think are the major investment opportunities in the ICT sector?

Because of this drive into what we call digitization, i.e. everything being digital, there is still huge demand for connectivity. There will be massive investment when it comes to broadband, whether that is fixed wired broadband or even mobile broadband. There is just going to be continued demand for faster networks. Cisco believes that with certain specialised industries, we are going to see trends towards how we can improve education services, health services and defence.

The country recently launched an initiative to have a specific commission to help develop the small and medium enterprise sector. For a lot of these companies ICT is not core, it is context; so we believe that this is going to drive a lot of cloud behaviour where they can offset CapEx expenditure into getting ICT services and using OPEX as a model. This is going to drive a very underdeveloped market here which is cloud. We are going to see a lot of service providers offering new and improved cloud services especially for the small and medium enterprises.

At the same time you are in agreement with the major telecom operator to build 3 data centers.

Exactly. Now how does this map into technology? With connectivity everywhere there is going to be a massive surge in mobility. People are expecting that they can get the same level of services whether they are using a wired or wireless network. There are a lot of trends for using mobile phones and having easy access to your apps and services. We are going to see continued growth when it comes to mobility services. At the same time, datacentres and cloud computing will grow. Along with the cloud trend, there will be a massive focus on cyber security.  These are the three technology areas we are seeing really massive growth in especially over the last 18 months and we project to continue seeing this over the next two to three years.