STME, the Middle East’s leading storage solution integration specialist, Monday announced that its data management business has grown by up to 50 percent in the first half of 2004 compared to the first six months last year. The company attributed the year-on-year increase to market share gains in the financial services sector, as well as the introduction to the regional market of new enterprise and mid-range storage solutions. Since January, STME’s greatest advances were made in the Saudi, Egypt, and UAE markets, followed by new customer wins in Qatar, and Levant markets such as Jordan.
“We witnessed a more robust and faster buying cycle in the financial services sector in the first half of 2004, as compared to 2003, when more revenue was generated by our telecoms customers. This demand was complemented by growth in industries such as property development, oil and gas, insurance, retail, and the government,” commented Andrew Calthorpe, Senior Corporate Vice President, STME.
In terms of overall spending in the first half of 2004, STME has seen the Middle East mirror global trends, which indicate that enterprise spending on storage is outpacing investment in processors. Similarly, storage administration costs are growing faster than the expenditure on managing processors. Calthorpe noted that a number of enterprises in the Middle East are already investing more on storage than on processing.
“Because businesses in the Middle East, regardless of size, often have storage equipment from a variety of different vendors, the largest trend we expect for the remainder of 2004 will be in deploying software to manage all of those diverse storage hardware platforms. Companies in the region want to manage their data centrally, and reap the cost and operational benefits of doing so,” STME’s Calthorpe added. (menareport.com)
© 2004 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
