Organisations are expected to increase their IT budgets next year, but only a few have indicated some will be spent on cloud computing services, according to an analyst firm.
Gartner has released the findings of its global survey in a report titled User Survey Analysis: Enterprise Applications Versus the Cloud, 2010, which indicates about 44 per cent of organisations across the Asia-Pacific intend to increase their IT budgets next year.
Out of this, 63 per cent indicated they had not budgeted for any type of cloud service in 2010 and only 34 per cent have allocated some spending on cloud computing as a key initiative for their organisation. But those that are investing in cloud are planning a high growth in spending in 2011.
Gartner principal research analyst, Derry Finkeldey, said IT budgets would only increase modestly in 2011, but there would be a keen focus on where the money was spent.
In the Australian market, 29 per cent of organisations plan to increase IT spending.
“That’s due to the maturity of the Australian market,” Finkeldey said. “Globally, in the UK, Europe, US and Australia, IT departments are doing more with less and focus on getting more out of their systems and a greater return on investment.
"It does make technologies like business processing and cloud computing more attractive to them.”
She indicated there was a growing interest in cloud computing and most organisations are still learning about cloud service initiatives.
“There’s much hype about it and an enormous interest in it, but there’s still a level of immaturity of taking cloud services on,” Finkeldey said.
Enterprise software implementations and upgrades are receiving the greatest investment focus in Asia-Pacific, with 85 per cent of organisations allocating budget to implementations.
The survey also indicated that all respondents in Asia-Pacific were currently investing in datacentre consolidation or expansion initiatives.
“Datacentre initiatives such as virtualisation is currently higher on the priority list than cloud, but these initiatives are the necessary precursors to a move towards cloud computing. We are seeing that the money is now shifting from traditional IT budget categories to new types of spending,” she said.
Gartner conducted a survey covering 1500 IT leaders in 40 countries to understand general IT spending trends and key initiatives involving cloud computing, business process improvement, datacentre expansion or consolidation, enterprise software implementation or upgrade, outsourcing, risk, security and compliance.
