ANKARA (Turkey), September 25 (SeeNews) – Turkey’s health, transport and education sectors offer untapped opportunities for the absorption of advanced IT solutions as the country of 74 million makes strides towards its long-term goal of building a knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, the IBM Turkey country general manager said.

“In addition, with demand for electricity rising, we could also anticipate bigger business opportunities for IT and analytics solutions in the energy and utilities sector in Turkey where otherwise the financial services sector has long been the front-runner and key early adopter when it comes to IT spending,” Isabel Gomez Cagigas told SeeNews in an emailed interview.

Turkey has experienced one of the world’s highest development rates over the past decade and has set an ambitious goal of becoming one of the world's Top 10 largest economies by 2023. Along that path, the country aims to revamp research and development (R&D) both in the private and the public domains. The growing share of R&D spending in terms of GDP - projected to reach 3.0% by 2023, up from 0.84% in 2010, indicates Turkey's commitment to become an innovation-driven economy.

“I am a firm believer that the development of the ICT sector in Turkey can be a key engine towards the achievement of the nation's goals," the official said.

That would require investment in technology and communications and there are expectations that the ICT sector should be generating 8.0% of Turkey's GDP by 2023 - versus less than 1.0% as of today. |

”IBM can facilitate this process by helping companies and the government adopt smarter computing solutions that enable new cloud, mobile or analytics based services for business growth and better competitiveness,” Isabel Gomez Cagigas added.

MOBILE, SOCIAL MARKETS IN FOCUS

IBM, present in Turkey since 1938 and currently operating offices in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana and Bursa, sees the local mobile market as holding significant potential for business growth.

“The country's young and technologically engaged population is constantly raising Internet usage rates across a variety of platforms and over 30 million people in Turkey are likely to subscribe for broadband Internet services in the next couple of years. E-commerce and social business are thriving,” Cagigas said. 

In March, a Google-backed report estimated that Turkey's online business will grow 19% annually through 2017, as Turkish firms increasingly embrace web-based commerce.

Like in other IBM growth markets, in Turkey the company sees a clear demand for solutions that enable clients - public and private, big and small - to deliver a personalised value to end users and base their business decisions on predictive analytics and data, the official added.

CLOUD EYED FOR COMPETITIVE EDGE, LOWER COSTS

All types of companies in Turkey - telecoms, financial institutions, the healthcare sector and even the government, are considering cloud, Cagigas said.

Clients which operate with large data centers and companies, positioning IT as a competitive asset in their organisation, are looking for solutions around private clouds with flexibility, cost efficiency and security drivers, while small and medium businesses are looking for speed, simplicity and cost-effective solutions.

IBM cloud offerings include private cloud, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud consulting and the company - which has invested $6.0 billion in acquisitions worldwide in the last six years to enrich its cloud computing portfolio - has projects around all of them in Turkey as well.

As part of a project that is one of the biggest of its kind in Europe, a leading Turkish telecommunications company is using an IBM private cloud solution to design, test and market new services to its clients. IBM, which has over 9,000 private cloud engagements to date worldwide, has created an application test environment that cuts development time and avoids service interruptions, reducing costly errors associated with launching services without testing.

Having in mind that Turkey is among the world's leaders in social media use - for example, it is the fastest growing country in LinkedIn - cloud computing technologies hold a significant growth potential as they open up new opportunities for personalized engagement and service delivery, Cagigas said.