Study: 51% of Organizations in UAE and Saudi Arabia to Deploy Flash Storage by 2017

EMC Middle East today announced the findings of a survey that reveals the strategic outlook of IT leaders in regards to their role and the importance of IT storage to help organizations enhance performance, reliability and deliver rich data services. The survey indicates growing importance of IT to meet business needs in an era of hyper digitization. 

• 50% of respondents reported  that business demands from IT are steadily increasing 
• In light of the same, 46% of the respondents reported a marginal increase in IT budgets to help the business fuel competitive differentiation, meet the demand for cost and resource optimization to power new “digital” enterprises

IT leaders in UAE and Saudi Arabia continue to emphasize concerns for IT as data growth continues to trace an upward trajectory 

• Over 60% of respondents said they are witnessing a significant surge in data 
• 26% of respondents predict data volumes across the organization to grow by over 30% in 2017, while 39% believe data volumes would increase by at least 20% in the year ahead and 35% believe their organization would report data growth of at least 10% in the year ahead

With CIOs emphasizing the need for the right storage foundation for effective IT and business transformation, the survey gauged key criteria for organizations when considering a storage technology vendor

• 67% cited a focus on enterprise integration and architecture flexibility as being a key consideration
• 18% cited industry expertise as being a decisive factor 
• 15% cited the vendor’s technology roadmap and expertise as being the most important element

According to the survey, CIOs are stated to be concerned about the ability of the existing storage environment to support and meet business needs of the future.

• 35% of respondents said that high data redundancy and duplication is placing significant pressure on the environment

• 32% reported that the current environment was not ready to manage data heavy applications and 25% said the environment was not suited to real time operations or analytics
• 20% of respondents reported that their current storage environment lacked scale and was not enabled for Big Data, while an additional 20% confirm that the storage environment is unable to deliver the performance needed to meet business expectations

Mindful of these challenges and the ever changing needs of business, the survey indicates that IT leaders are already working a storage transformation strategy powered by Flash technologies to create a strong foundation for business advantage

• 55% of respondents reported an overall increase in IT storage spending in a bid to cope with growing data volumes 
• 49% said that  their organization was already working towards a Big Data strategy to enable better management and faster analysis of data
• 63% of respondents indicated interest in Flash technology, with 20% said to have already invested and 31% reported to have plans to invest in 2017

Carried out by Dun and Bradstreet (commissioned by EMC) and based on interviews with 220 senior IT decision makers from across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the survey highlights significant performance benefits for organizations that have already deployed Flash storage 

• 30% of respondents reported improved workload distribution and storage administration with Flash storage 
• 27% indicated enhanced scale and flexibility, citing the deployment as resulting in the organization being “Big Data enabled”
• 25% reported enhanced cost to performance ratio and significantly improved throughput
• 18% said to most benefit from lower storage administration and lower risk of downtime

The announcement comes close behind the recent launch of EMC’s flagship VMAX® All Flash® enterprise data services platform and EMC® DSSD™ D5™ Rack-Scale Flash solution to match customers increased demand for Flash Storage Technology. 

According to IDC,  EMC is the market share leader in all-flash storage solutions at 39%, more than the next three competitors combined and is also the market share leader in enterprise storage solutions that include both all-flash and hybrid flash storage arrays.

EXECUTIVE QUOTE

Habib Mahakian, Vice President, Gulf and Pakistan at EMC Corporation

“Across the dynamic Middle East region, we are witnessing a remarkable transformation as both public and private sector organizations work to extend premium, targeted products and services to customers. While IT stands at the center of this transformation, this survey highlights just how important the right storage foundation is to the creation of an agile digital enterprise.  The good 

news is that our customers also understand that and as the first vendor to offer Solid State Drives (SSDs) in enterprise storage arrays in 2008, EMC has continuously innovated and evolved its storage portfolio to deliver products that address customer needs for performance, reliability. With the introduction of VMAX All Flash and DSSD D5, we are well on our way to enable our customers enable their business with modern data centers powered on solutions that deliver agility, efficiency and speed for now and the future.”

METHODOLOGY

The survey was carried out by Dun and Bradstreet (commissioned by EMC) in March 2016.  Respondents were IT decision makers from a variety of industries including telecommunications, government, banking and finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, IT and more. 220 IT leaders from the UAE and Saudi Arabia were asked specific questions relating to the role of IT in an ever changing business environment and the overall importance of the right storage technology to support business needs via a series of Computer Aided Telephone Interviews to arrive at the findings.