Investments in Information technology (IT) in Nigeria will top $5.3 billion in 2016, a report from technology research and consulting services firm, International Data Corporation (IDC) has stated.
This will be because organisations are increasingly embracing digital transformation initiatives in order to streamline their costs and bolster flexibility, the report says.
IDC forecasts that ICT investments and spending in Africa’s most populous country would grow 6.5 per cent year- on- year in 2016, with mobile devices responsible for much of the increase.
“Some combinations of the technologies of the 3rd Platform – namely mobility, cloud, Big Data analytics, and social business – sit at the heart of most digital transformation efforts across Nigeria,”
Mark Walker, IDC’s associate vice president for Sub-Saharan Africa recently said during an event to announce a series of ‘IDC FutureScape Predictions’ for the year ahead in Lagos.
According to him, Smart City initiatives, whether greenfield or brownfield, are driving greater adoption of 3rd Platform technologies as well as a deeper paradigm shift on the part of governments, technology users, and vendors.
“Indeed, the success of Smart City initiatives will play a role in Nigeria’s digital transformation journey in 2016,”
he said.
According to IDC, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is another aspect of digital transformation revolution which is starting to take place in Nigeria.
IoT applications in the government, retail, transportation, manufacturing, and utilities verticals would offer the greatest growth opportunity for vendors operating in Nigeria, while security is expected to form a key component of any robust digital transformation strategy.
“The adoption of IoT will accelerate the rate of digital transformation in Nigeria as organisations and stakeholders seek actionable insights from the high volumes of data that will inevitably be generated by the proliferation of connected ‘things’ such as mobile devices, wearables, and sensors,”
said Oluwole Abegunde, a telecommunications research analyst at IDC West Africa.
He said cost-optimisation efforts and a lack of skills would drive demand for security services in the years ahead, while the proliferation of IoT technologies would push concerns around privacy and physical security to the top of the ICT agenda.