Gone are the days when the top priority of IT heads in companies used to be topics like ‘virtualization,’ ‘business analytics’ etc.. This year in Asia, they are worried about — yes, Cloud, and of course, mobile, according to the results of Gartner’s ‘Executive Program Agenda Survey.’
Interestingly, Asian CIOs (IT heads) are also reporting an average 10% rise in their budgets, while IT budgets remain flat for their counterparts elsewhere, reflecting a higher optimism in Asia compared to other places.
The optimism was also seen in the 53% of the CIOs who said they expected their IT budgets to rise this year, compared to just 39% for the globe as a whole. While reducing cost was the number three priorities for the CIOs worldwide, in Asia it failed to even make it into the top ten.
The emergence of Cloud computing as the top technological focus, both in Asia and elsewhere, indicates that some regions like Asia may go directly into a distributed model instead of the traditional client-server model of IT backbone.
“Consumer-oriented IT, information access by external partners, plus cloud and software-as-a-service will require new IT architectures and reshape the IT industry,” said Terick Chiu, executive partner, Gartner Executive Programs.