IT spending in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is expected to grow by 9.3% this year as companies look to invest more in new technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud analytics and IoT, according to market research by IDC. At the same time, 2nd Platform technologies, including non-mobile, on-premise, and those that lack specific functionalities associated with other new technologies, were either constant or declining.
“Use of various new technologies across organisations have taken centre stage to improve operational resilience and provide innovative offerings. The future of organisations now heavily depends on technology investments made within the last year to either sustain or evolve as a company,” says Mario Allen Clement, senior market analyst at IDC IT Spending Guides, Customer Insights & Analysis.
Decision-makers who had invested with a siloed short-term approach realised comprehensive benefits with a strategic and transformative long-term investment plan. Another IDC survey that track organisations’ journey to recovery, revealed that 40% of enterprise IT budget is now allocated to new initiatives or shifted from existing projects to address Covid-19 induced business changes.
Most of these new initiatives are born on cloud and leverage analytics with other innovation accelerator technologies. Their composition in the overall spend mix will increase rapidly during the forecast period.
“IDC’s research reveals that customer satisfaction, employee productivity, operational efficiency, and innovation are some of the highest beneficiaries of increased digital investments,” says Vinay Gupta, research director at IDC IT Spending Guides, Customer Insights & Analysis. “Powering these use cases are investments in new emerging categories of technologies which must be a focus of ICT suppliers and buyers,” he added.
According to IDC, Investments in IoT, including hardware, software, and services, are expected to grow by 10.0% in 2021 and reach $441.9 billion by the end of the forecast period. Investments in AI show the fastest growth of 30.1% in 2021 to reach $25.0 billion by 2025. These investments are mainly classified under customer satisfaction use cases such as automated customer service agents and sales process recommendation and automation.
