India, China lead Asia's IT rebound

SINGAPORE: IT expenditure in Asia is set to grow 8.8 per cent in 2010, an increase from 6.4 per cent in 2009, predicts Springboard Research, an IT Market Research firm.

According to Springboard’s executive brief “Asia Pacific IT Market Predictions 2010” released today, Asia has fared better than the rest of the world, fueled by a continued growth in China, India, and other markets.

Asia has not seen the carnage that the Western economies have experienced and while Asia has taken its lumps, it is emerging much quicker and this is reflected in IT spending throughout the region.

Springboard brief said that organizations were expected to continue to focus on extracting greater value from existing IT investments versus significant, new capital expenditure. Additionally, they will continue to focus on reducing operational expenditure from both business and IT perspectives. Data center transformations, IT manageability advancements and virtualization investments are finally helping “move the needle” downward on the traditionally high and stubborn costs to simply ‘keep the lights on’.

According to Springboard Research, the top 10 trends that will shape enterprise IT in the Asia Pacific region in 2010 are 1- Analytics and the evolution towards ‘Intelligent Solutions’ More Broadly, 2 - The convergence of computing platforms, 3 - Cloud computing, 4 - Virtualization, 5 - Mobile devices and applications, 6 – Collaboration, 7 - A wave of innovative new payment technologies, 8 - Online developer platforms and communities, 9 - Social networking will be as accessible and commercialized as the Internet itself, 10 - IT Abstraction.

The Springboard brief also disclosed that in spite of the generally optimistic position of Asia, there are indeed risks and challenges facing the market in 2010. IT buyers and prospects are returning to a more ‘normal’ state of IT investments, but they remain cautious and increasingly skeptical of vendor guidance. IT solution providers can expect sales cycles and the quality of prospects to improve over 2009, but to remain more challenging than before the crisis, the report said.

Springboard said that the economic crisis, while being destructive, has also helped drive actions and decisions that have positioned organizations in Asia for a year of growth in 2010. The crisis has helped Asian companies become leaner and more productive, it added.