CAIRO: The International Data Corporation (IDC) will be hosting a forum on Aug. 2 in Cairo to demonstrate how IT buyers can make shrewd business decisions in the next 18 months in the context of the ongoing financial crisis. The “IDC IT Managers Forum 2010: The Smart IT Buyer” event is regarded as timely by the IDC that cites the negative impact of the global economic downturn — from as far back as 2008 — on the IT sector's spending. To counter diminishing spending, the ICT industry has to look for strategies that adapt to the new economic reality by learning how to further protect the bottom line, maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, and a build competitive advantage in increasingly turbulent economic conditions. Thus, the forum will cover important issues such as information management and IT outsourcing through business intelligence, virtualization, and green IT, VoIP, unified communications, and IT consolidation. The event will also seek to explain how ICT technologies can play a critical role in providing a solution to the current economic woes. The event's speakers will also provide analysis of the emerging trends that will be critical in drawing the outlines of the future of the sector, such as cloud computing, collaboration, web 2.0, social computing and managed print services. Margret Rose Adams, research director, MEA region for IDC Middle East, Africa and Turkey, will kick off the first of a series of sessions. Entitled, “The New Normality for Technology Buyers”, her session will focus on the impact of the global economic crisis on the ICT industry and how this has shaped ICT spending patterns, reshaping ICT user requirements, and transforming vendor business models. Other speakers include Matt Watts, EMEA strategic advisor from NetApps, who will lead a session entitled, “Beating the IT Budget Crunch, the Need for Change and How to Fund It”; Ayman Esmat, principle IT security consultant and project team leader at IBM, who will head a session called, ‘Enterprise GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) Chromosome”; and Ragy Raouf, territory manager for APC by Schneider Electric-Egypt, who will present a session entitled, “Data centers for the next decade”. The event organizer, IDC, provides services in market intelligence, advisory services, events for the ITC and consumer technology markets, and has more than 1,000 analysts in over 110 countries. In the Middle East, Africa and Turkey region, IDC has 70 analysts, consultants and conference associates.
