RIYADH, 27 April — The Kingdom’s IT sector is registering 30 percent annual growth as a result of upgrades to the IT business infrastructure.
Ibrahim Abdullah Al-Moammar, vice president of Al-Moammar Information Systems Co. (MIS), says that the growth of his own company has been at the rate of over 55 percent, and believes that this testifies to the market boom.
Earlier, Tom Schlegal and Tony Fares, senior executives of Sun Microsystems in London and the UAE respectively, told Arab News that their company — which had successfully installed a state-of-the-art lifestyle portal in Dubai — was making a pitch for integrating the services offered by the government and private sectors in the Kingdom through their local agent, MIS.
Referring to the surge in the Kingdom’s IT market, Al-Moammar said one of the most important factors is that most of the IT companies here are still investing in their infrastructure development for using the Internet as a delivery channel.
“Not all the Saudi companies have the proper IT infrastructure. For e-government or e-commerce to succeed, you need to have the right hardware, middleware and software backed up by professional services. And unless you integrate them up-front in a cost-effective manner, you are not going to achieve anything. These issues need to be addressed before e-commerce could make headway in the Kingdom,” Al-Moammar said, adding that the high cost of Internet was another inhibiting factor.
He said the growth rate of Internet use was still low in the Kingdom with a population of 21 million. While the number of subscribers was around 500,000, that of the users stood at over one million — or just five percent of the population which is considerably low compared to many other countries.
