Issue 1 2017

6 LATIN AMERICA NEWS / Issue 1 2017 , Latin American IT Industry Shifts Investments To leverage growth opportunities, vendors must align their plans with customer priorities, finds Frost & Sullivan’s digital transformation team. The information technology (IT) industry in Latin America is growing fast as companies leverage digital transformation for efficiency and expansion. Demand is strengthening across market segments, including big data and analytics (BDA), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), data centre services, Internet of Things (IoT), managed security services (MSS) and mobile device management (MDM). While investment focus in 2016 was on cybersecurity and technologies that support cost reduction, by 2018, this will shift to technologies that enable competitive advantages, such as unified communication and collaboration (UCC) and enterprise mobility management (EMM). “Since IT solutions are no longer exclusive to the IT sector or department, solution providers need to be as consultative as possible to provide solutions that best fit the client’s strategic objectives,” said digital transformation programme manager, Renato Rosa. “Integration between cloud computing, IoT and analytics will drive significant business value and vendors must make plans aligned with their clients’ specific business needs and priorities.” Latin America Outlook of the Information Technology Industry, 2017, a part of Frost & Sullivan’s IT Services & Applications Growth Partnership Service programme, finds that IT industry revenues in Latin America will grow by 20.3% from 2016 to 2017. “As business becomes more digital, security becomes more critical for operations, driving growth in markets such as MSS and analytics applied to security,” observed Rosa. “However, user concerns regarding security and transparency, inadequate connectivity infrastructure and scarcity of tech experts still hinder investments in IT outsourcing, especially cloud computing.” Nevertheless, opportunities abound in the market: • The Latin American IaaS market is growing as vendors provide cloud services in public, private and hybrid models; • The data centrE services market in the region is reaching maturity and user confidence in outsourcing infrastructure to a third party is increasing with the steady realisation of its benefits; • The industrial IoT market is evolving, especially in the manufacturing and automotive verticals and; • BDA is emerging as a mainstream technology across industry verticals that are seeking to harness the power of data from a variety of sources. BDA providers should focus on educating the market, clarifying the benefits, risks and returns on investments. “Data is becoming the most asset for any company and the growth of IoT will generate even more data to be tracked by companies daily,” added Rosa. “In this context, it is expected that investments in cloud computing to process and store this data; big data analytics to extract the data value; and security to protect the data, will steadily rise.” ww2.frost.com