The majority of chief information officers (CIOs) in SA are prioritising spending more on enterprise mobility this year.
This was revealed by Mark Walker, IDC's associate VP for sub-Saharan Africa, MEA and Turkey, speaking at an event hosted by CommVault this week in Johannesburg.
Citing the IDC South African CIO Survey 2015, Walker said the majority (37%) of CIOs revealed they need to spend more on enterprise mobility, followed by advanced security solutions (36%), disaster recovery and business continuity (34%), analytics (34%), new data centre build (27%), desktop virtualisation (25%) and CRM (24%), among others.
According to Walker, these spending priorities show how the third platform is impacting on businesses today. IDC describes the third platform as IT that is built on mobile devices, cloud services, social networks and big data analytics.
The analyst firm believes third platform solutions will be the primary growth driver of the ICT industry over the next decade, responsible for 75% of the growth as worldwide industry spend moves from $3.2 trillion in 2013 to $5.3 trillion by 2020.
According to Walker, the technology-related challenges facing CIOs include maintaining security (60%), ensuring IT performance (42%), availability of systems and applications (37%), integrating disparate systems and technologies (34%), access to a growing mobile workforce (30%) and improving utilisation of IT assets (30%).
He noted significant amounts of ICT budgets are being channelled towards improving business agility, unlike in the past when the majority of companies mainly focused on "keeping the lights on".
On one of the third platform components - big data - Walker said the overall big data market will reach $125 billion worldwide this year, while spending on rich media analytics will at least triple, with the Internet of things also growing 30%.
"Data growth in unavoidable and managing the data will be as critical as protecting it. Compliance will impact processes, so organisations need to get ready for more storage capacity requirements. The third platform will only add to your challenges; so you have to deal with it."
He called on organisations to consider solutions that can automate their storage use and better manage their data.
Also speaking at the event, Sumash Singh, country manager at CommVault SA, concurred with Walker, saying the 'nexus of forces' - mobile, cloud, social and information - continue to drive change and create new opportunities for IT professionals.
"It's a challenging time for today's IT professionals but also one of opportunity for those who are up for the challenge," Singh said. "To succeed, you need to think of your data not as a challenge to overcome, but as your next strategic asset."
Meanwhile, Michiel von der Crone, CommVault's director field advisory services, said organisations today face myriad choices that will shape the future of IT.
"As data protection evolves, IT professionals will think in terms of data management rather than 'siloed' standalone tools," he pointed out.
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