"Africa is rapidly becoming a key player on the global investment landscape," says Jyoti Lalchandani, vice president and regional managing director for IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. "As some of the more mature markets in the West are beginning to slow, the world's leading vendors are increasing their focus on Africa, and it is proving critical for them to maintain a strong and visible presence in the region by participating in cutting-edge industry events such as the IDC CIO Summit."
Despite an expected return to double-digit growth figures for the wider Middle East and Africa IT market in 2011, an air of caution continues to pervade most of the region's organisations. CIOs are no longer tasked with simply enabling growth and innovation; they must now combine these goals with the necessities of driving efficiency, optimisation, and cost reduction. This situation has led to growing interest in emerging trends such as virtualisation, data-centre efficiency, managed services, cloud computing, data and storage management, security, regulatory compliance, and IT consolidation, and such concepts will feature prominently at the IDC's Africa CIO Summit 2010.
As well as in-depth presentations from senior global representatives of ICT vendors such as IBM, Symantec, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, the IDC Africa CIO Summit 2010 will showcase actual implementations of technologies in real-life organisations, highlighting the TCO and ROI benefits that can be derived as a result. It will also feature panel discussions, interactive question and answer sessions, and networking opportunities.
The Africa CIO Summit 2010 has partnered with IBM and Symantec, while the gold partners are Oracle and Sun Microsystems, and the silver partners are Infosys and Commvault. ITNewsAfrica is the event's official media partner and Dubai Internet City is the ICT partner.
For more information, go to www.idc-cema.com/events/ciosou2010 or contact Ronita Bhattacharjee, associate vice president for conferences at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey, on +971 4 391 2747 or at .
