These are the most important IT trends in Southeast Europe

According to the latest IDC research conducted among end users who attended this year’s IDC SEE Forum in Dubrovnik, IT directors (CIOs) have emphasized a shift away from their traditional operational tasks within companies towards a leading role in the digital transformation of companies.

– Among the most significant strategic priorities, IT directors highlighted goals that will strongly impact the future business success of their organizations, such as improving and redesigning business processes, increasing competitiveness, enhancing end-user experience, while reducing IT costs, ensuring operational continuity, and raising cost efficiency will not represent their primary focus, claims Zoltan Komaromi, Associate Vice President, Co-Head of Research, IDC CEE.

IT directors see Big Data analytics, cybersecurity, mobile applications, and private cloud as the most important upcoming trends in the Southeast Europe (SEE) region. Current essential operations that ensure the regular functioning of business within companies are enterprise asset management, social collaboration, and smart operations. On the other hand, IT directors consider public cloud to be somewhat of a threat, and to a much greater extent, cognitive systems, virtual reality, and 3D printing as potential threats to the IT security of their companies.

IT security has been recognized as the most important area for investment in 2016, recording a strong jump from fourth position to first, compared to 2015.

– The main trends that will affect the European IT security market, besides digital transformation, are dynamic changes in legal regulations. A significant increase in malware on the market demonstrates the ineffectiveness of previous traditional approaches. The introduction of legal regulations for IT security of online services and data protection represents additional requirements for security operations, adds Komaromi.

Recent research conducted among IT directors of the largest companies revealed that databases and data storage ranked high in second place this year, compared to seventh position in 2015, while data center infrastructure remained among the top three most important categories in 2016. Responses suggest that investments are shifting from once very popular ERP software and other back-office solutions towards front-end solutions such as CRM and sales force applications.

IDC research has shown that one in three IT directors in the Southeast Europe region plans to increase the use of outsourcing services or replace their existing outsourcing provider. Services provided in the public cloud (PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS) have become widely used as models for external provision of important IT functions. According to available studies, one in five companies plans to increase the use of services provided in the public cloud in at least one of the mentioned categories.

A strong emphasis has been placed on the automation of processes related to transactional documents. Mobile and cloud integration and processing large amounts of data are also considered very important, according to CIOs.

Business improvement and sales processes are rated as primary business functions that will directly benefit from IT investments in 2016. Supply chain management, marketing, and product and service innovations are not considered the most important business tasks at this time, emphasize IT directors.

IT budgets in 2016 will be larger than in 2015, reveals 44% of surveyed companies. As many as 13% of IT directors announced an increase in IT budgets of more than 20% compared to last year. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that more than 60% of CIOs identified themselves as owners or managers of IT budgets and projects.