Gartner 2018 Hype Cycle for IT in GCC Identifies Six Technologies That Will Reach Mainstream Adoption in 5 to 10 Years

This year’s Gartner, Inc. “Hype Cycle for IT in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council]” identifies Blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), City operations centers, Smart city frameworks, Digital twins and Smart contracts as being among the technologies that will achieve mainstream business adoption in the next five to 10 years.

Of the 29 technologies on this year’s Hype Cycle, eight are entering the Slope of Enlightenment and climbing toward the Plateau of Productivity. “This shows that the GCC region is entering an important stage and growing in maturity,” said Santhosh Rao, senior research director at Gartner. “However, technologies fuelling digital transformation in the region are taking longer to reach mainstream adoption. Local organizations are cautious about adopting new technologies. At the same time, system integrators are not fully equipped to handle complex digital projects due to a shortage of skills.”

“Of the six technologies, enterprises should focus on blockchain, the IoT and digital twins, as these are growing rapidly,” said Mr. Rao. “In addition, local organizations know that these technologies will help create competitive differentiation and enhance service delivery.” 

Although blockchain technology maintains high visibility, Gartner does not expect blockchain architectures to be suitable for many enterprise activities, especially taking account of issues of decentralization, risk and governance. However, startups may continue to seek disruptive opportunities using the original block and chain concept, and Gartner recommends that business executives undertake scenario planning accordingly.

“In GCC, blockchain technology has received significant interest from the governments and financial institutions, due to the increase in the number of digitalization projects currently underway,” said Mr. Rao. “Organizations should consider proof-of-concept experimentation, but remain aware that the general public may not readily accept nonintermediated information management and transaction execution models and decentralized governance.”

CIOs considering implementing blockchain technology should use clear language and definitions in internal discussions about the nature of this technology. They should also identify the points of integration with their existing infrastructures (such as digital wallets and core systems of record) to help determine future investment plans.

IoT has a business transformation and evolutionary impact on most organizations as it can be used as a key enabler to deliver services and create new business opportunities. IoT projects will impact most organizations’ competitive position, product development strategy and internal operations, as connected things will help generate revenue and lower costs.

“While respondents of our global CIO survey  said that 12 percent of their organizations have deployed IoT, and 24 percent are actively experimenting it, businesses in the Middle East face increasing costs, complexity and scaling challenges when they implement IoT solutions that actually deliver value,” said Mr. Rao. “We place IoT at the Peak of Inflated Expectations as we believe it will take up to 10 years to achieve mainstream adoption by local businesses.”

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real object that is designed to optimize the operation of assets such as aircraft, power plants and buildings. The primary short-term use is to lower maintenance costs and increase asset uptime. In GCC, Gartner analysts expect oil and gas and manufacturing companies to combine digital twins and IoT solutions for asset performance management and streamlining processes.

“Digital twins enable businesses to optimize or transform their business model and will become the dominant design pattern for solutions in the next decade,” said Mr. Rao. “The challenge for organizations will be to change their thinking from a hardware-centric to a hardware-plus-software-centric perspective in order to fully integrate digital twins internally.”

Organizations considering the use of digital twins should focus on identifying a portfolio of digital twin initiatives that provide short (within one year) and midrange (within five years) paybacks. Simultaneously, they need to conduct a threat and opportunity analysis of their current business ecosystem, incorporating digital twin developments by competitors or partners.

More detailed analysis is available to Gartner clients in  “Hype Cycle for IT in GCC, 2018.”