Turkey’s ICT market predictions
On April 29, the CEO of Index Group, Erol Bilecik, talked about his life and company at an event hosted by Patronlar Okulu.
It was a positive experience to hear him talk about his failures and successes. He confessed that when he saw a computer for the first time in 1980s, he thought that the technology back then was the best that mankind would ever achieve. He should be very happy that he was wrong, as his empire is built on delivering technological products throughout Turkey. Each new product, such as the new iPhone 6, makes him lots of money.
While listening to him, I thought about the whole Turkish Information and Communication Technology (ICT) market. There are major differences between Turkey’s ICT industry and that of more developed countries. The greatest difference is the amount of software and services in the market. In the developed world, the share of software and services equals the share of hardware sales. In Turkey, hardware sales are the major component of the ICT market. Below is a summary of the IDC 2015 forecast. I will get back to this in the coming weeks to talk about how we can change the structure of the market.
The total ICT spending in Turkey is set to cross the $27 billion mark in 2015, as Turkish organizations increasingly align themselves with the transformational technologies of Big Data, cloud, social business, and mobility. That’s according to International Data Corporation’s newly released predictions for the year ahead, with the global advisory services firm expecting overall market growth to decelerate to 3.1 percent year on year, primarily due to a slowdown in consumer spending on hardware.
“The commercial segment of the market will outperform the consumer space in 2015, with IT spending set to pick up noticeably following the general election in May,” says Nevin Cizmeciogullari, the country manager at IDC Turkey.
“Software and services will be the best-performing technology segments, growing at 7.1 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively, as delayed transformational projects are revitalized in the second half of 2015. Mobility will continue to be the number-one priority for Turkish CIOs as they increasingly mobilize existing business applications in a bid to drive workplace productivity and improve mobile workforce efficiency,” Cizmeciogullari adds.
“The proliferation of corporate mobile devices used by employees to access company data and applications remotely will continue to change the IT environment and encourage organizations to implement formal mobile policies that outline the governance, security, and privacy aspects of these services,” she says.
“We expect to see stronger adoption of mobile application, device security, and mobile device management [MDM] solutions as market awareness increases, with large-scale investments in MDM and mobile identity and access management [IAM] anticipated in select verticals, as part of a broader implementation of comprehensive mobility strategies,” Cizmeciogullari also says.
The IDC’s top 10 ICT predictions for Turkey in 2015 are outlined below:
1. Turkey’s ICT market spending growth will decelerate to 3.1 percent in 2015, mainly due to a slowdown in consumer hardware spending.
2. Further investments in datacenter space by service providers are on the horizon.
3. The first examples of 3rd Platform-enabled industries will draw attention and drive investment in this area.
4. Mobility in the consumer space will near saturation in terms of devices, while enterprises will move to the next level with their mobility strategies.
5. Broader Big Data implementations will be limited to some select use cases due to tight budgets and the lack of strong return on investment (ROI).
6. Telecommunication companies (Telcos) will stand out as the prominent providers in Smart City projects by announcing a number of new initiatives in this space.
7. Mission-critical hyper scale servers will be gamechangers in the Turkish server market from late 2015 into 2016.
8. The software-defined networking (SDN) market will grow, spurred on by datacenter and mobile network investments.
9. Some 70 percent of public cloud spending growth in Turkey will be driven by multinational providers in 2015.
10. Demand for next-generation threat-protection solutions will grow amid growing awareness in the public and private sectors.