Hey, big spenders

IT spend in South Africa is set to reach $26.4 billion (about R392.85 billion) this year, up 2.5% on 2019, predicts the International Data Corporation (IDC).

 

Associate vice president for South Africa, Mark Walker, announced at its IDC Directions 2020 event in Sandton in January that spending on software and IT services will reach $8.2 billion (around R121.94 billion) in 2020, an increase of 4.2% year-on-year.

 

He said that infrastructure spending in the country (including servers, storage, and enterprise-level networks) will grow 3.3% to $880 million (about R13 billion), while Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) investments will reach $204 million (about R3 billion), having grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% over the last five years.

 

Most of the spend can be attributed to financial services. Other big spenders include communications, government, retail and wholesale, professional and personal services and manufacturing.

 

“South Africa is getting government use of technology right. Things are happening, even though they are not working as smoothly as we’d like… this tells us that help is needed,” he said.

 

It also looked at the rate of adoption of that most nebulous of terms: digital transformation. Over half (56%) of the 320 respondents interviewed in Sub-Saharan Africa said they were busy with this, and a quarter said they were ‘about to start’. The rest were either planning to (in the next two years) or had no plans.

 

Asked in which IT areas they’ll be concentrating investments to support digital transformation programmes in 2019 and this year, most (61%) said infrastructure, including datacentres, storage, networking and computing. The next most popular area is mobility, including mobile apps, devices and endpoints, followed by apps themselves (40%), including custom applications. Thirty-three percent were focussed on security, followed by 28% on processes, organisation and skills. Only 16% said they’d be investing in cloud.