Cisco urges regional organisations to embrace IoE era through digital transformation

Cisco calls on organisations in the Middle East to embrace the Internet of Everything (IoE) era by adopting strategies to become fully digitised.

According to Gartner, by 2020, 75% of businesses globally will be a digital business or will be preparing to become one. While many organisations have digital business transformation initiatives planned or underway, Gartner predicts that only 30% of these efforts will be successful due to lack of talent and technical expertise.

As countries, cities, industries and businesses become digital they will recognise the tremendous opportunity the next wave of the internet – the IoE – presents for new revenue streams, better customer and citizen experiences and new operational models to deliver value and Middle East organisations need to follow suit.

“As customers embrace the IoE, they must bring together the use of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) in the context of their vertical industry. In the Middle East, we see significant opportunities for the public sector, as governments seek to create new sources of revenue, better citizen experiences and create new jobs. Similarly, we see significant opportunities across retail, energy, financial services and healthcare to help customers transform to embrace the IoE,” believes Rabih Dabboussi, general manager for Cisco in the UAE.

“Most organisations are not realising the full value from their digital projects because they fail to recognise that their digital strategy and business strategy are becoming one and the same. Our Cisco Consulting team helps customers develop the right digital strategy to transform their business and win in their industry.”

Exploding devices, applications in MEA fuelling digital transformation

According to the recently launched Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast 2015, annual Internet Protocol (IP) traffic will triple between 2014 and 2019, when it will reach a record two zettabytes. The Middle East and Africa IP traffic is expected to grow 44% by 2019. Factors expected to drive traffic growth include global increases in internet users, personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, faster broadband speeds and the adoption of advanced video services.

According to the forecast in the Middle East and Africa, by 2019:

• There will be 218.3 million residential internet users with fixed access by 2019

• M2M will be the largest residential device/connection category with 93 million M2M

• Tablets will be the largest residential device category (excluding M2M) with 63.0 million tablets (up 25.8% CAGR)

• Social networking will be the most highly penetrated residential internet service with 176.0 million users (81% of residential internet users) – up 10.5% CAGR

• There will be 69.0 million digital television households

• There will be 4.1 million video on demand (VoD) users (6% of digital TV households)

• There will be 53.6 million business mobile users

• The average mobile business user will have 2.3 mobile devices/connections (including M2M)

• M2M was the largest business device/connection category with 145.0 million

• There will be 3.1 million desktop video conferencing users

“To be ready for this digital transformation, organisations need to transform their business strategy and IT, connect everything, embrace analytics and secure their technology and operations,” adds Shukri Eid, director – Middle East, Africa, Russia and CIS, Cisco Consulting Services. “Digitisation will also transform the way industries such as retail, oil & gas, banking, tourism and manufacturing, to name some, operate today. This in turn will create employment opportunities and contribute to economic growth through innovation.”