Despite the gap between North and South in digital uptake, or between businesses and the Public Administration, Italians are increasingly tech-savvy, as shown by data released by Assiform and Netconsulting.
GROWTH. The Italian ICT market is recovering after a period of deep crisis. Suffice it to say that turnover in 2015 amounted to €64.9 billion, with growth forecast for 2016 to €65.9 billion. (source: Il Sole 24 Ore)
This chart shows that there was a 2.4% drop in TLC network services turnover in 2015 compared with the previous year. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that cloud computing revenues rose by 28.7% in 2015 compared with 2014.
THE CLOUD. Cloud and Internet of Things therefore represent an important engine of growth and development. The Cloud, specifically, is increasingly becoming an opportunity for local businesses and Public Administrations, both to innovate internal processes and to offer new services to customers.
The Cloud market in Italy reached a value of €1.51 billion in 2015, up 25%. This estimate is driven above all by investment in Cloud Enabling Infrastructure, that is, investment used to upgrade the infrastructure and application assets already in place in companies, worth €1.05 billion in Italy and growing by 21%, and by investment in the Public Cloud, estimated at €460 million, up 35% year on year.
Also on the subject of Cloud Computing, a recent report drawn up by Rackone, the 100% made in Italy data centre, confirms the above: Italy is one of the countries where companies make the greatest use of Cloud services.
In Italy, 40% of companies purchase Cloud services, compared with a European average of 19%. Only Finnish companies do better than us (with 51%). The most widely used Cloud services include at least one of e-mail (35%), office software (16%), file storage (13%) and database hosting (11%). Lower, but still above the EU average, is the purchase of more advanced Cloud services such as finance and accounting software (13%), CRM (6%) and computing power to run business software (3%). (Rackone Report 2016)
THE LIMITS. There are, however, some grey areas. Despite the “massive” use of the cloud, our companies are the most distrustful. Specifically, 20% of Italian companies that adopt the Cloud cite the risk of security breaches and inadequate knowledge of Cloud services as limiting factors.
