Asia-Pacific Tech Spending Will Grow 3.4%This Year, Gartner Says

By Tech Wire Asia | 30 January, 2012

Amid an essentially flat global weighted average growth, a global survey made by research firm Gartner among 2,335 Chief Information Officers (CIO) across has found out that IT budgets will grow this year in the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, offsetting declines elsewhere due to economic slowdown, particularly in Europe and North America.

The strongest investment figures will be be evident in Latin America with an increase of 12.7%, followed by the Asia-Pacific region, where IT budgets will rise 3.4%. Meanwhile, investment in the sector will fall 0.6% in North America and 0.7% in Europe. “It looks pretty much correlated to the macro economy,” said Gartner Vice President and Research Fellow, Dave Aron.

Among other findings, larger organizations with IT budgets of more than US$500 million will be continuing to cut their expense and expenditure. Still, senior executives are optimistic that “technology will address their challenges by amplifying strategies and operations.”

The survey took into account information from 37 industries and 45 countries, which accounts for a total IT budget of US$321 billion.

Taking a look deeper into the data, the budgets in Germany will be dropping 5.6% due t large corporations that heavily rely on export activities. One country in the region with a notable IT budget increase is Spain with 2.9% rise. Top priorities of the investment list are analytics and business intelligence, mobile technologies and cloud computing.

Even though the technology’s role in the enterprise is increasing, it doesn’t correlate directly with the role of IT in the organization. As quoted from Mark McDonald, Group Vice President and Gartner Fellow, “CIOs are concentrating on IT as a force of operational automations; integration and control are losing ground to executives who see technology as a business amplifier and source of innovation. Effective leaders use technology, which includes IT, to strengthen the customer experience and eliminate costly internal distortions. They are using technology to ‘amplify’ the enterprise.”