Business & Money | Wednesday 30 January, 2019 2:52 pm |

Saudi Arabia's most influential technology vendors, telecommunications operators, and IT service providers are set to gather at The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh next week (Tuesday, February 5) as International Data Corporation (IDC) hosts 'IDC Directions 2019', an event specially tailored for the Kingdom's leading ICT players to garner insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie in wait for the coming 12 months.

Running under the theme 'Multiplied Innovation: Scaling a Technology Revolution in Saudi Arabia', the event will provide an exclusive platform for senior executives from the region’s pre-eminent technology firms to engage with experienced local and regional IDC analysts on their predictions for the Saudi ICT landscape and evaluate the industries and technologies where opportunities for future growth lie.

Hamza Naqshbandi, IDC's country manager for Saudi Arabia, will open the event, presenting his outlook for the local ICT industry and examining the role that multiplied innovation will play in furthering the development of the Kingdom's digital economy.

"Saudi Arabia is undergoing unprecedented transformation, with digitalization sitting at the heart of national-level initiatives being undertaken to meet the objectives of Vision 2030," says Naqshbandi. "The new imperative is to keep pace with the unparalleled rate of business change while increasing the speed of business operations, the speed at which changes are delivered, and the speed and scale of innovation. The forces of multiplied innovation are powering up across our region, and we are seeing an explosion in digital innovation platforms and ecosystems to facilitate this transformation."

IDC's group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa, Jyoti Lalchandani, will chair a panel of senior Saudi ICT leaders as they explore and contextualize the proliferation of technology-led innovation across the Kingdom. This executive session will examine the emerging priorities shaping the CxO growth agenda of tomorrow, with a focus on the struggle that many organizations will face in trying to balance traditional systems and next-generation technologies.

"Developing an effective digital transformation platform that can sustain, advance, and scale business operations may be the most important task facing the region's decision makers over the next few years," says Lalchandani. "Many future applications will be developed by AIs without human supervision, and the future workplace will undoubtedly become far more collaborative. However, while new technologies are transforming key aspects of the modern business, legacy systems are holding others back, limiting innovation, opportunity, and engagement."