Cloud computing will gain momentum as both vendor offerings and buyer expectations mature, but government buyers will firm their resolve to keep data within the control of their respective legal and regulatory jurisdictions. Domestic telcos across the region will start to position as the dominant providers of enterprise-grade cloud computing services - differentiating on the basis of keeping data within country, their operational scale and their ability to manage end-to-end quality of service.
"Asian governments will continue to invest in local cloud computing capabilities to boost the competitiveness of their ICT industries in the region while Australia stays asleep at the wheel on the need to link the government procurement and industry development agendas", said Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director. "The Government needs to wake up to the fact that cloud computing will offshore Australian ICT jobs if we are too slow off the mark in stimulating the growth of competitive cloud facilities downunder".
On vendor side, there is increasing investment and traction in cloud-aligned IT services and the solutions and value-add services associated with the expanding cloud adoption.
The momentum for application-based shared services (such as HR, payroll and finance apps) will slow in government, while momentum for more commodity-like ICT infrastructure-based shared services (networks, application hosting and office computing) will grow strongly - drawing on the broader momentum of the utility-like services demonstrated by cloud computing.
Other trends Ovum predicts are Government 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. The Citizen-facing Government 2.0 will have a brief flurry of activity but start to wane unless initiatives are integrated explicitly as part of the service delivery and ICT strategies of departments and agencies. "It is quite likely that government 2.0 will turn out to be a blip on the radar if CIOs are not in the loop because it will just create an unmanageable mess of apps, data of questionable veracity and fragmented online channels", adds Hodgkinson.
Enterprise 2.0 initiatives - within the public sector - will gain momentum in agencies that take the change management dimensions seriously, and whither in agencies that assume that web 2.0 technologies can inspire collaboration in the absence of collaborative behaviours on the part of agency executives.
IT Services in 2011 across AP are becoming expansionary on the back of positive budget directions across the majority of industries. Much of this is being driven by the ongoing investment and expansion into data centre space and the associated supporting services and ecosystem. "This is very much aligned with the anticipated growth cloud demand, increasing energy prices and drive for more sustainable computing", said Jens Butler, Principal Analyst. In addition, Butler believes that Enterprise Applications (especially in the operations, product lifecycle and supply chain areas) and Business Intelligence (in performance management and customer intelligence) investment will expand substantially throughout AP.
Hodgkinson also regards desktop virtualization as a key trend to watch in 2011. "The technology is maturing, we are seeing some big enterprise implementations coming to fruition, and the iPad is turning out to be a useful catalyst for executives to insist on the ability to access the corporate SOE from any device."
