Chief information officers are looking forward to three main trends that will (and in several cases already are) challenging their own corporate strategies: consumerization, cloud computing, and mobile security and management. Pressured by chief financial officers to reduce the total cost of ownership and without a clear forecast of their long-term budget, CIOs know that they have to spend more time seeking for innovation and doing strategic projects than merely making sure the business is running.
Cloud, mobility security and consumerization are cited by consulting firm Frost & Sullivan as main trends through which CIOs may differentiate their IT departments. “In order to achieve their goals, CIOs will increase the hiring of the services of analysis, consulting and integration. This will create a market opportunities for outsourcing and integration, especially at the application layer, development, integration and management in the cloud,” Frost analyst Fernando Belfort said during a Hewlett-Packard news conference Nov. 28.
The trends are boosting Latin America’s IT services market, which may reach U.S. $22.7 billion this year, with Brazil accounting for 52% of the total. Frost expects an increase of 9.9% next year, with Brazil’s IT services market climbing to $12.9 billion.
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The region’s data center market is showing the same growth trend, Belfort said, with Brazil one of the most attractive countries. The Brazilian market is expected to reach $2.2 billion in 2016, whcih is a compound annual growth rate of 9.5% between 2010 and 2016. “Dedicated server hosting and disaster recovery are main potential oportunities in this segment,” he said.
Belfort also pointed to a decrease in the number of Brazilian companies providing data center services. He highlighted the increase of acquisitions of and foreign investments in local firms. “International enterprises looked to Brazil and saw this growth — that’s why they invested,” Belfort said.
The growth in the IT services market will also be driven by managed security services, which in Brazil are forecast to jump from $116.2 million this year to $234.2 million in 2016. Although the sector’s revenues are less than those of many IT segments, Belfort noted that the profitability of managed security services is very high, citing the potential growth driven by consumarization and the increase of smartphones, laptops and tablets.
“There’s huge challenge in the mobile security environment,” Belfort said. “For example, companies have to figure out how they are put aplications in the cloud so devices do not keep important data. However, cloud without a mobile access does not make sense.”
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