High Growth Forecast In It-Services Market

[george]

High growth forecast in IT-services market

By The Nation

BANGKOK: -- The overall IT-services market in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan region will continue its growth momentum next year after a strong recovery in 2010, according to global market research firm IDC.

IDC forecasts in the latest issue of its Asia Pacific Semiannual IT-Services Tracker that the market will grow by 9.4 per cent, year on year, in 2011, largely driven by outsourcing and project-oriented services, as well as growing use of cloud services.

"New technologies and service models are changing the IT landscape. IT-as-a-service and pay-as-you-go have prompted the market to explore alternatives to traditional outsourcing models. This has resulted in increasing interest in hosted application management as a transition to a public cloud, along with data-centre consolidation and virtualisation projects," said the senior research manager of IDC's Asia Pacific Services Research Group, Natalie Wan.

Key findings from IDC's study include:

• Consultancy-led and business-transformation projects, especially cloud-related initiatives, are picking up fast to enable enterprises to capture opportunities in the recovered economic environment.

• Server, storage and desktop virtualisation, along with transition to next-generation data centres, continue to fuel the growth of network consulting and integration services.

• Business-analytics solutions are growing fast as more enterprises are demanding predictive capabilities to capitalise on the value of information and enhance competitiveness and time-to-market.

• Enterprises are looking for end-to-end managed services. Extending the partner ecosystem will be critical to addressing growing requirements for compliance and disaster recovery.

• Given the increasing use of mobile technology, cloud computing, social networks and Web 2.0, security and risk-assessment services remain high on the agenda. They are helping enterprises to evaluate their security posture prior to deploying new technologies and to build stronger information governance for managing corporate information in the cloud.

"Transforming IT infrastructure, modernising applications and streamlining business processes are key drivers for enterprises' IT investment. But the pressure on reducing capital expanditure remains. This will continue to fuel innovation in outsourcing services over the next 12 months, as governance and IT-service management take centre stage in their value proposition," said the associate director of IDC's Asia Pacific Services Research Group, Linus Lai.

-- The Nation 2010-12-22