CRN Network, November 18, 2009, 1200 hrs
At Gartner Symposium/ITxpo held in Sydney, analysts have predicted that the IT industry is exiting its worst year ever. In Asia-Pacific, IT spending is expected to grow by 5 percent to reach $515.6 billion in 2010. The worldwide IT spending will also return to growth in 2010; IT spending forecast is total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009.
Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President at Gartner and Global Head of Research said that this represented a fast V-shaped recovery for IT spending in the region.
“Emerging regions will resume strong growth,” said Sondergaard. “By 2012, the accelerated IT spending and culturally different approach to IT in Asia will directly influence product features, service structures and the overall IT industry. Silicon Valley will not be in the driver’s seat anymore.”
However, growth varies considerably by country, vertical market and IT sector. Sondergaard said that while software would post the strongest growth in Asia Pacific, telecommunications still represented the largest area of IT investment.
While IT spending will increase next year, Gartner cautioned IT leaders not to be overly optimistic. “Year 2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.”
Sondergaard said that the three most-searched terms by Gartner clients on gartner.com provide some clues as to the priorities of IT leaders around the world. Cost remained the most-search term during 2009, although it peaked in May, followed by cloud computing.
“Next year will be the year when cloud computing moves from the discovery phase to small pilots, as part of organizations’ desire to move from owned to shared IT,” he said.
The third most-searched terms on gartner.com were business applications such as ERP and CRM. “We believe that 2010 will see increased focus on optimization of business processes linked to software applications, what we call application overhaul. That is what will drive growth in the software segment.”
According to Sondergaard, three additional topics that were important in 2009—Business Intelligence, Virtualization and Social Media—will continue to dominate IT leaders’ agendas in 2010. Also, three themes that will become important over the next few years include: Context-Aware Computing, Operational Technology (OT) and Pattern-Based Strategy. |