Marie JonesIDC has announced what it expects will lead the ICT market in the Asia Pacific region excluding Japan next year, leading to sustainable growth and in some cases high growth. It also predicts the healthy economy will fuel the information and communications technology market, triggering it to go mainstream.
Topping the trend will be socialytic applications, which it says will transform the market by fusing traditional business applications with both social and collaboration software and analytics in 2011 and beyond.
“Competition in the region has intensified after the [global financial] crisis has passed and organic and inorganic market expansions are back on the agenda. Most companies across all sectors are now faced with increased competition for their products and services and IDC expects the trend to continue in the next few years.” says Claus Mortensen, Principal for Emerging Technology Research, Practice Group, IDC Asia/Pacific.
IDC expects the Asian market to enjoy another solid year of strong growth, with China , India, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines projected to generate the strongest IT spend in 2011.
The top 10 ICT predictions to impact the Asia Pacific region are:
1. Socialytic applications transforming the collaboration market where applications begin to be embedded with unified communications and social features.
2. Mobilution — where mobility takes a leap into IT. Tablets, media tablets like iPads and large-screen smartphones can now run almost fully functional versions of all enterprise software and services. With the move towards cloud computing, we are now seeing many of these IT systems being delivered in virtualised environments minimising the importance of device-based computing power.
3. Self-service customer portals spearheading low-cost customer centricity. As competition intensifies, many businesses will be tasked with finding competitive differentiation in the marketplace. IDC predicts that adapting products and services to match changing markets will become the single most important driver. Gen Y’s role in the corporate world will make self-service (via the web) more significant. There will be less spending on service delivery and customers will be less complex, leading to an easy to use customer-care environment.
4. More businesses entering into the region will improve decision-making and drive revenue growth. Business analytics is predicted to take center stage for CIOs in 2011 as the technology is increasingly viewed as an enabler for organisations to compete more effectively.
5. Apple’s iPad will catalyse interest in client virtualisation. Creating virtualised sessions would not only allow access to applications regardless of the operating system, but it could also provide the assurance that CIOs need in knowing that their corporate data is secure. It will likely take a number of years, but IDC expects widespread deployments of client virtualisation to eventually occur.
6. The take-up of private cloud technologies and services in medium- and large- enterprise will accelerate further in 2011 due to lingering concerns about security, reliability and performance of public cloud services. IDC foresees that the ability to integrate applications or services from the cloud with apps or services from an in-house IT environment or with services from another cloud service provider will be a key enabler or inhibitor for enterprise cloud adoption. Whether or not cloud will get the foothold that IDC predicts will depend on how well the cloud federation is managed.
7. Smart enterprises will adopt catalog-based IT. According to IDC’s Dynamic IT Benchmark Survey in early 2010, 49 percent of the 355 respondents across Asia indicated increased self-service IT for business users as the company’s IT strategies. As the regional economy picks up in 2011, IDC predicts that more than 50 percent of mid- to large-sized Asia-based enterprises will be building catalog-based ICT in 2011.
8. Business-as-a-Service is an offering that focuses on business processes rather than on technology replacement. It is expected to bring to light the need to marry IT and business to become “one entity” to compete aggressively in the “new normal” Asia/Pacific marketplace. Because of its ability to deliver business outcomes, CIOs will be able to align or integrate IT with business.
9. Telecom services providers will return to IT. IDC believes that the majority of organisations will migrate to a hybrid cloud model with many organisations preferring to ring-fence their critical workloads and applications within an on premise private cloud environment. This market is estimated to be worth close to US$752 million in 2011 and is expected to grow to US$1.8 billion in 2014.
10. Telecom service providers will look to cloud computing for operations. IDC believes there is a whole new sub-industry emerging which revolves around the software, hardware and services Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) serving telcos, and the transformation of their products/technologies and services into money-making cloud services. The type of cloud service offered is not the “one-to-many” model used so far because carriers typically are very hesitant to share the same servers with their competitors. Instead, hosted private clouds with logical separation of infrastructure between carriers, and a future roadmap of moving into virtually separated cloud infrastructure will become key.