Page 40 - SAMENA Trends - March-April 2025

REGIONAL & MEMBERS UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

Saudi Arabia Shows High Levels of Container and GenAI adoption

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud
computing, announced the findings of its
seventh annual Enterprise Cloud Index
(ECI) survey and research report, which
measures global enterprise progress with
cloud adoption. This year's report sheds
light on Generative Artificial Intelligence
(GenAI) adoption, investment priorities,
and benefits along with key challenges
organizations face to meet the demands
of these emerging workloads. Key findings
from Saudi Arabia include: Application
containerization highly prevalent among
Saudi Arabia respondents 100% of
Saudi Arabia respondents in this year’s
ECI study say their organization is at
least in the process of containerizing
their applications. Simply put, 96% of as the top business-related goals and organization. Organizations in Saudi Arabia
respondents in the Kingdom agree that strategies supported by GenAI. Saudi seem aware of this skills gap, and the need
their organization benefits from adopting Arabia has a pessimistic long-term outlook to address these challenges, with 62% of
cloud-native applications/ containers, when it comes to ROI of GenAI projects. respondents reporting their organizations
and the vast majority are already taking 26% expect to break even or make a loss need to invest in IT training to support
advantage of containerization and related on GenAI projects over the next year. 35% GenAI applications/workloads over the next
technology (e.g., orchestration platforms). expect to break even or make a loss on 1-3 years Performance & Scalability take a
When it comes to workload deployment, GenAI projects over the next 1-3 years. slight edge over data privacy and security
databases are cited as the most- This will be a key challenge for IT decision- when it comes to GenAI implementation In
containerized application by Saudi Arabia makers in Saudi Arabia to address. Almost addition to the skills-related challenges that
respondents, followed by Generative AI 80% of Saudi Arabia respondents believe come with GenAI workload implementation,
applications and Dev/Test apps Regarding GenAI adoption will be a challenge for GenAI applications themselves present
challenges Saudi organizations face when their organization, driven primarily by unique challenges associated with data
it comes to application containerization gaps in skills/ experience Almost all processing, model development, training,
and container management, the results respondents (98%) face challenges when and maintenance. Saudi Arabia ranked
indicate challenges associated with IT it comes to scaling GenAI workloads privacy and security concerns associated
infrastructure modernization, application from development to production. The #1 with using LLMs with sensitive company
development, and skilling. Saudi Arabia challenge organizations in Saudi Arabia data as their top challenge associated
shows high levels of implementation face when scaling GenAI workloads from with GenAI workloads. 98% of Saudi Arabia
of GenAI strategy but has a pessimistic development into production is lack of respondents say their organization could
outlook regarding long-term ROI This year’s skills needed to deploy and operate AI. be doing more to secure its GenAI models
survey results show that 100% of Saudi Further complicating this skills gap is the and applications. We should expect this
Arabia organizations already have a GenAI fact that 34% of Saudi Arabia respondents shift towards data security and privacy to
strategy in place, although the level of ranked complexity and lack of experience continue influencing Saudi Arabia decision-
implementation of that strategy varies: 60% building GenAI environments from scratch makers over the next several years, with
say they are actively in the implementation as a leading GenAI-related challenge. This 92% of Saudi Arabia respondents agreeing
phase, which is higher than both the global lack of GenAI experience and skillsets are that GenAI is changing priorities for their
and EMEA averages. Respondents in likely key contributors to the fact that 78% organization, with security and privacy
Saudi Arabia cited increased productivity, of respondents in Saudi Arabia believe that becoming higher priorities.
innovation, automation, and efficiency GenAI adoption is a challenge for their

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