Information Technology Outlook for 2010 and beyond

Over the last 18 months IT budgets, investments and priorities have undergone a sea of change globally. To understand the changes in IT strategy among organizations, TNS’s Technology research team launched a series of discussions with IT decision makers across Six markets in Asia Pacific. Following are some key insights from the discussions:

Key Insights

• IT investments in India and China continued though at a slightly slower pace in the past 18 months. Infrastructure expansion especially in the second and third tier cities continued to drive growth.
• Mature economies in Asia (Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore) saw big ticket projects put on the back burner. Hardware replacement and application upgrades have definitely slowed down.
• Cloud computing is making clear inroads but internet infrastructure will be the key bottleneck in most developing countries (especially beyond top cities).
• Spending is hot in areas where BI applications overlap CRM solutions and Knowledge Management solutions including churn management, up-selling, cross-selling and customer share-of-wallet type applications.
• Productivity solutions such as (but not limited to) unified communications, workgroups and remote access management have taken off driven by cost considerations rather than pro-active technology deployment. Justifying long term ROI in these solutions as well as tackling cultural and privacy bottlenecks will be key.
• Developing infrastructure to manage the sheer volume of interaction (among millions of individuals) through e-Government projects continues to drive government and public sector growth in China and India.

Some of the insights were published in the recent Enterprise Innovation (December/January issue), a magazine focused on Technology issues. Please click here to download the cover story as published in the magazine.

Methodology

The research included over 65 IT decision makers from 6 countries in Asia Pacific namely India, China, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The first interaction took place in Jan-Feb 09 and was followed by another round of discussion in Sep-Oct 09. The discussions addressed overall IT investment strategy across the organizations as well as explored the changes in the past 18 months and future outlook in the next 18 months. The research covered four broad buckets of business verticals: Manufacturing/Logistics/Supply Chain; Banking/Finance/Insurance and allied; IT/Telecom/Communications and allied; and Public sector/Government.

Besides engaging in in-depth interaction with IT decision makers, TNS also leveraged its IT Decision Maker panel 'MybizInsights' for extended discussions with IT decision makers over a period of one week. Since the insights are based on the qualitative discussions therefore the findings are directional indicators rather than quantifiable statistics.