A recent survey conducted by eHDF in partnership with Dubai-based ITP Publishing Group clearly outlines the emerging trends prevalent in the industry based on responses from over 370 regional CIOs, IT managers and IT executives across 11 countries in the region.

Majority of the respondents were from the UAE (46 per cent) and Saudi Arabia (24 per cent).

The respondents belong to diverse industry sectors including IT (35 per cent), government/public sector (10 per cent), construction (7.0 per cent), oil and gas (8.0 per cent), trading and distribution (6.0 per cent), banking and financial services (4.0 per cent), shipping and logistics (2.0 per cent) as well as aviation (1.0 per cent).

Some of the key findings were as follows:

• The key areas of investments identified by organisations include PC hardware (48 per cent), network and security (46 per cent), servers (46 per cent) and backup and storage (43 per cent).

• Organisations considered business productivity, infrastructure improvements and cost reduction as the three most important strategic priorities for 2010

• The survey indicated that 29 per cent of the organisations were considering using an external service provider Data Centre. This has been highlighted mainly to reduce capital investments (35 per cent), achieve better control of operational costs through fixed monthly subscription fees (35 per cent) and an ability to scale or shrink dynamically (30 per cent).

• Surprisingly, despite analysts and experts expecting IT budgets to make a slow revival in 2010, the survey has shown otherwise. According to the survey, more than 56 per cent of organisations allocated higher IT budgets during 2010.

Q: Will your organisations overall IT spending in 2010?

• Virtualisation has also emerged as one of the key focus areas of growth and the survey has revealed that 23 per cent of organisations have already implemented virtualisation while 36 per cent plan to virtualise their infrastructure in one to two years.

Q: Are you planning to implement Virtualisation in 2010?

• The most common outages experienced by most organisations have been identified as hardware/software failures (34 per cent), power disruptions (29 per cent) and application infrastructure failures (16 per cent). The survey results have shown an increased shift towards Disaster Recovery (DR) services as 32 per cent of organisations plan to invest in a secondary DR site in the coming one to two years.