Business needs drive Aussie software projects

IT research firm Gartner has found that Asia Pacific organisations had the highest software budget growth in 2010 in a recent survey of global IT directors.

Gartner surveyed 323 IT managers in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, China, India and Hong Kong, as part of a worldwide survey of 982 respondents, to help business and IT managers compare their enterprise IT spending with peer organisations.

The research group asked respondents whether they expected their 2010 IT budget to be below, the same or exceed their IT budget for 2009.

Yanna Dharmasthira, research director at Gartner, said when looking at the actual percentage of change, Australia - the most mature market - turned out to have one of the "most confident outlooks" with a positive average IT spending change at 3.1 percent.

Dharmasthira said respondents showed an increase in spending on software applications like customer relationship management (CRM), when looking at horizontal enterprise applications.

This is followed by respondents in office applications, collaboration and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software respectively.

Software as a service (SaaS) spending continued to be fragmented within Asia Pacific, with variation by country, vertical and software segments.

Former IT consultant Lee Curtis told CRN software implementations were being driven by business needs.

"The IT consultants who are experiencing the most rapid growth are employing a 'pay-per-use' model," he said.

Curtis said Microsoft's Services Provider Licence Agreement Reseller proved to be "very attractive",because of its SaaS model.

"Business intelligence is also huge right now because customers were looking to squeeze more efficiency out of their operations - and need facts to support their strategic decisions," said Curtis.

Nick Milan, managing director at Microsoft Gold Certified partner CyTrack told CRN that its partners in the CRM channel were involved in "some exciting projects in Australia, Singapore and Indonesia".

The Australian software developer felt there were big opportunities for software projects in countries like Vietnam.

"Businesses have recognised they're facing potentially tough financial times," said Milan. "It's an important time to address areas in customer service inbound and/or sales and marketing activities outbound, by use of applications like unified communications."

Milan said more importantly applications like business intelligence could help customers manage the data.