Bangalore: As sales of mobile gadgets soar and companies are investing highly on storage systems for the growing data, spending on information technology is the Middle East has increased drastically which if far more than the IT spending in developed countries comparatively.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), a technology research firm reveals that a total of about US$21.5 billion (Dh78.97bn) is forecasted to be spent on IT hardware, software and services - excluding the sales of mobile phones ) in the Middle East this year, this accounts to be 11 percent rise compared to last year.  IT spending in the region rose 7 to 8 per cent last year, and just 2 to 3 per cent in developed markets as per a report in the national.com

"The opportunities in the future are really in emerging markets," said Kirk Campbell, the president and chief executive of IDC.

Many of the It industry experts predict that millions of dollars will be invested on the cloud computing sector and various other data-storage services, particularly because every company wants to stay ahead and keep in pace considering the fact of consumers and other businesses that are increasingly using internet data via smartphones, tablets and notebook computers. "This is not about wheeling in a new shiny piece of infrastructure and saying you're now cloud-enabled," said Dave Brooke, the general manager for Dell in the Middle East and Turkey. "This is about millions and millions worth of infrastructure, and how do you utilize it as a pool of infrastructure?"

The UAE would be the second largest-IT market following Saudi Arabia with the IT spending expected to hit $ 5.18 billion this year. In Saudi Arabia the revenue is expected to be around $ 7 billion this year according to IDC.

"The challenge that exists today is how can we deploy cloud technology into our environment and see the return on investment," said Eyad Shihabi, the managing director for HP Middle East. "How can cloud services benefit the business and deliver some key, tangible deliverables that the business can benefit from?"

A recent Survey by IDC in which 66 percent of CIO respondents said that their biggest challenge of CIOs this year is staff recruitment, development and retention. The second challenge the CIOs faced was how to measure a return on investment on spending for cloud storage as well as other forms of IT spending.