Published on the 08/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Australia will spend $77.2 billion on technology in 2014 – the nation will spend less on mobile devices, but ramp up software investment. For CIOs these statistics paint an interesting digital picture…
Mark Twain disdained; “Lies, damned lies and statistics” – but for an enterprise chief executive officer statistics are the modern equivalent of goat entrails, providing early clues as to emerging technology trends which may impact the competitive landscape, and also give clues as to consumer intent and expectation.
Analyst Gartner’s recently released IT spending outlook for Asia Pacific and Australia for example suggests that, to keep pace with the general Australian market, organisations will need to lift their IT investment by 2.3 percent. They should also expect to spend most of their budget on IT services and telecommunications. Software spending will grow fastest however with the overall Australian market forecast to grow by 7.8 percent to more than $7.6 billion in 2014 – so the spending yardstick is that $1 out of every $10 is being spent on software.
CIOs probably need to be looking at their budgets to see if they align loosely with the general trends – and if not, question whether the reasons for taking a different tack stack up.
This is the case also for hardware investment.
Investment on mobile devices is tipped by Gartner to drop back from more than $4 billion this year to $3.7 billion in 2014. Even so the analyst forecasts that by 2017 smartphones, tablets and super light PCs will account for $4 out of every $5 spent on hardware.
For CIOs that’s a clue that enterprise cloud computing will gather steam as all those mobile devices will need to hook into enterprise systems somehow and clearly there won’t be much hardware budget left over to buy enterprise servers. It also points to the need for organisations to continue to develop robust BYOD policies and applications that will allow both employees and customers to connect anywhere anytime.
Shifting spending trends also presage a possible change in the vendor landscape according to Gartner’s global head of research Peter Sondergaard who warned that today’s leading vendors such as Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft “may not be leaders in the digital industrial economy”. Again this is an important consideration for CIOs when they are deciding which technology bandwagon to hitch up to.
