77%
annual
growth
in digital
data
Application
Economy relies
on connecting
services,
devices and
people to the
Internet
“IT organizations across the Middle East
need to prepare for the Internet of Every
-
thing, and what we are now seeing is the
emergence of an application economy
where the focus will no longer be simply
on the hardware, but also on supporting
a larger number of applications on all
connected devices,” said Tarek Ghoul,
general manager, Cisco Gulf, Levant and
Pakistan to mGov.
According to a recent report by the Inter-
national Data Corporation (IDC), the Mid
-
dle East will be among the largest world
consumers of the IoE. IDC analysts pre
-
dict the IT spending in the region to rise
during this year at a rate of 7.3% reach
-
ing a total of 118 billion dirham.
Ghoul explained that the Middle East in
general and the Gulf region in particular
largely spends on developing its IT infra-
structure and lately adopted the e-ser-
vices and smart services concept for the
government. The UAE is considered the
most prominent adopter of this trend. In
light of the transformation efforts, the IoE
concept is the key for these countries to
achieve what they want.
“For example, to apply the Dubai initia
-
tive to transform into a smart city in re-
ality, everything from people, processes,
data, and things must be connected to
the Internet. That is what the Internet of
Everything (IoE) means,” he added.
In the application economy described
by Ghoul, practically everything - roads,
jet-engine parts, shoes, refrigerators,
soil, and supermarket shelves - will have
cheap, tiny sensors that generate tera-
bytes of data that can be sifted for key
insights.
By 2022, Cisco predicts that person-to-
machine and person-to-person combined
connections will constitute 55% of the to
-
tal IoE value at stake, and machine-to-
machine connections will make up the
remaining 45%.
He explained that in order to cope with
the explosion of connections, technology
labs are now developing new Internet
architectures to replace the current IP-
based Internet. Named Data Networking
(NDN) has the most potential to disrupt,
and would allow information to be com-
municated by names rather than host
addresses. This represents a radical de-
parture from the way the Internet works
today.
“2014 and beyond will bring a hugely influ
-
ential and constructive technology explo-
sion throughout the Middle East region.
Driven by the online growth and conver
-
gence of processes, data and things, we
can now explore unprecedented opportu-
nities that benefit both business and soci
-
ety as a whole,” Ghoul concluded.
17
April
2014
