Spending on ICT products and services in the Middle East and Africa will cross the $270 billion (€220 billion) mark in 2015 and the IT market is expected to grow 9 per cent year on year in 2015, according to forecasts from IDC. This makes MEA the second-fastest growing market worldwide, with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment set to perform particularly strongly, expanding 29 per cent year on year to total. Converged systems will be another key area of growth as more organisations look to leverage the agility, productivity, flexibility, and cost-saving benefits presented by such solutions. IDC expects SaaS uptake to be focused on non-critical workloads such as sales, marketing, CRM, and talent management, with public cloud adoption growing in the region. However, private cloud will continue to be used for critical apps and to provision shared services. Release