How are Service Providers perceived in Lebanon? What does the market for Cloud Services look like?
Data Consult conducted a survey during October 2014 in order to evaluate the Lebanese IT professionals’ perception of their Service Providers (ISPs, DSPs and Mobile Operators) and assess the market for Cloud Services.
The survey was sent to 3,459 IT business professionals in all industries: Retail, Hospitality, Banking, Insurance, Media, Education, Services…
The first part addressed the end-users’ evaluation of their Service Provider offering. In its second part, the survey tackled the market view of cloud services and its opportunity in Lebanon.
The survey answers revealed the following findings:
Perception of Service Providers (SP):
While most respondents were satisfied with the network landscape of their SP, they tended to wish for a better connection speed, more competitive pricing, and more cloud/value-added services:
- 93% of respondents were satisfied with the current network coverage;
- 91% felt that the speed of network connection was not outstanding;
- Technical support was deemed reliable in less than half of the answers;
- About two thirds believed that their SP did not offer any competitive pricing, and showed very little creativity in its offering;
- More than half of the answers judged that value-added and cloud services were below their expectations.
The feedback revealed that a quarter of the respondents expressed willingness to switch from their existing SP if the alternative offered more creative services . Several remarks mentioned the absence of real competition in the Lebanese SP landscape.
The opportunities for cloud services showed much diversity, but the considerable need was shown for backup and disaster recovery, “as-a-service”.
The slideset for the full survey results can be found below:
Concluding from the results, we can see a prospect for cloud services in Lebanon. Despite the discouraging perception of IT professionals towards their Service Providers, the need is there, customers are requiring services. A considerable potential opportunity goes to global cloud services every year, regardless of the mediocre quality of internet in Lebanon (according to www.netindex.com at least!). Although we know that most of the service providers in Lebanon have included cloud in their strategy and some of them have already started experimenting with it.
Businesses that currently make use of global cloud services are willing to consider local providers if constraints were resolved.
A graphic summary of all findings can be found below:
