MANAMA: Innovative financing has become imperative as information technology (IT) budget constraints in Bahrain are impeding technology adoption and business growth.

“Vendor and channel organisations will need to play key role in funding technology aspirations of Bahraini companies,” Brocade Communications’ Middle East and North Africa (Mena) territory channel manager Khaled Kamel said.

“IT is rapidly changing the nature of business in Bahrain.

“Organisations no longer deploy the latest solutions because they want to. Instead, they must do so because they need to!

“While there has been an uptick in regional markets over the past three years with both government spending and increasing investment in the region driving growth, businesses in Bahrain are faced with a peculiar dilemma.

“In the race to adopt the latest and best technologies, organisations have overlooked their critical network infrastructure.

“Ageing network backbones are under tremendous strain from the exponential growth in data traffic,” Mr Kamel said.

“As the cost of operating and maintaining these legacy networks continually rises, IT departments now find that they can neither afford to invest in IT, nor can they afford not to invest in IT.

“With financial assistance from banking institutions becoming more difficult to attain, businesses hoping to upgrade their IT infrastructure are now beginning to look to the channel.

And here, Mr Kamel believes, lies a great opportunity for value added resellers and system integrators to remedy the situation.

With profits and revenues being squeezed ever harder, where the money comes from to pay for critical IT investment is becoming an increasingly urgent issue. Already, almost 70 per cent of organisations now select IT vendors based on the availability to offer leasing/financing solutions.