Saudi Arabia Shows High Levels of Container and GenAI Adoption
Nutanix study reveals that GenAI is changing organizations’ priorities, with security and privacy being a primary concern
Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today 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 respondents in the Kingdom agree that their organization benefits from adopting cloud-native applications/ containers, and the vast majority are already taking advantage of containerization and related technology (e.g., orchestration platforms).
When it comes to workload deployment, databases are cited as the most-containerized application by Saudi Arabia respondents, followed by Generative AI applications and Dev/Test apps
Regarding challenges Saudi organizations face when it comes to application containerization and container management, the results indicate challenges associated with IT infrastructure modernization, application development, and skilling.
- Saudi Arabia shows high levels of implementation of GenAI strategy but has a pessimistic outlook regarding long-term ROI
This year’s survey results show that 100% of Saudi Arabia organizations already have a GenAI strategy in place, although the level of implementation of that strategy varies: 60% say they are actively in the implementation phase, which is higher than both the global and EMEA averages.
Respondents in Saudi Arabia cited increased productivity, innovation, automation, and efficiency as the top business-related goals and strategies supported by GenAI.
Saudi Arabia has a pessimistic long-term outlook when it comes to ROI of GenAI projects. 26% expect to break even or make a loss on GenAI projects over the next year. 35% expect to break even or make a loss on GenAI projects over the next 1-3 years. This will be a key challenge for IT decision-makers in Saudi Arabia to address.
- Almost 80% of Saudi Arabia respondents believe GenAI adoption will be a challenge for their organization, driven primarily by gaps in skills/ experience
Almost all respondents (98%) face challenges when it comes to scaling GenAI workloads from development to production. The #1 challenge organizations in Saudi Arabia face when scaling GenAI workloads from development into production is lack of skills needed to deploy and operate AI.
Further complicating this skills gap is the fact that 34% of Saudi Arabia respondents ranked complexity and lack of experience building GenAI environments from scratch as a leading GenAI-related challenge. This lack of GenAI experience and skillsets are likely key contributors to the fact that 78% of respondents in Saudi Arabia believe that GenAI adoption is a challenge for their organization.
Organizations in Saudi Arabia seem aware of this skills gap, and the need to address these challenges, with 62% of respondents reporting their organizations need to invest in IT training to support GenAI applications/workloads over the next 1-3 years
- Performance & Scalability take a slight edge over data privacy and security when it comes to GenAI implementation
In addition to the skills-related challenges that come with GenAI workload implementation, GenAI applications themselves present unique challenges associated with data processing, model development, training, and maintenance. Saudi Arabia ranked privacy and security concerns associated with using LLMs with sensitive company data as their top challenge associated with GenAI workloads.
98% of Saudi Arabia respondents say their organization could be doing more to secure its GenAI models and applications. We should expect this shift towards data security and privacy to continue influencing Saudi Arabia decision-makers over the next several years, with 92% of Saudi Arabia respondents agreeing that GenAI is changing priorities for their organization, with security and privacy becoming higher priorities.
“As highlighted by the survey results, the adoption of GenAI presents both significant opportunities and challenges for organizations in Saudi Arabia,” says Talal Alsaif, Sales Director, Central Gulf & North Africa at Nutanix. “While there is a clear eagerness to harness GenAI for improved productivity, automation, and innovation, companies must first address critical gaps in data security, skill sets, and IT infrastructure.
To ensure success in GenAI implementation, we recommend immediate action to close these skill gaps, either through direct hiring or collaboration with service providers. Additionally, it’s essential to evaluate the business value of GenAI projects with a long-term view, focusing on sustained ROI rather than short-term payback. Finally, IT modernization should be prioritized to facilitate smoother application containerization and GenAI deployment.
By eliminating manual IT tasks, organizations can free up resources, enabling IT teams to build the necessary skills and reallocate budgets to the specialized tools and services that will drive the success of GenAI initiatives.”
For the seventh consecutive year, Nutanix commissioned a global research study to learn about the state of global enterprise cloud deployments, application containerization trends, and GenAI application adoption. In the Fall of 2024, U.K. researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world.
The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies, including North and South America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region.
