APeJ ICT spend to show healthy growth - Mobility, IoT, Cloud & AI driving investments: IDC

APeJ ICT spending, including IT spending in addition to telecom services and new technologies such as AI, Robotics, Cloud, Analytics, and IoT, will increase by 9.3% in 2021 to reach USD 1.3 trillion, according to IDC. Organizations across APeJ have accelerated their investment in these new technologies to rapidly adapt and respond to business disruptions, thus driving this growth. At the same time, 2nd Platform technologies, including non-mobile, on-premises, and those that lack specific functionalities associated with other new technologies, were either constant or declining.

“Use of various new technologies across organizations have taken center stage to improve operational resilience and provide innovative offerings. The future of organizations now heavily depends on technology investments made within the last year to either sustain or evolve as a company,” says Mario Allen Clement, Senior Market Analyst at IDC IT Spending Guides, Customer Insights & Analysis.

Decision-makers who had invested with a siloed short-term approach realized comprehensive benefits with a strategic and transformative long-term investment plan. IDC's 2021 Future Enterprise Resiliency Survey, which track organizations' journey to recovery, revealed that 40% of enterprise IT budget is now allocated to new initiatives or shifted from existing projects to address COVID-19 induced business changes. Most of these new initiatives are born on cloud and leverage analytics with other innovation accelerator technologies. Their composition in the overall spend mix will increase rapidly during the forecast period.

Source: IDC Worldwide Black Book : 3rd Platform Edition, Aug 2021

"IDC's research reveals that customer satisfaction, employee productivity, operational efficiency, and innovation are some of the highest beneficiaries of increased digital investments," says Vinay Gupta, Research Director at IDC IT Spending Guides, Customer Insights & Analysis. "Powering these use cases are investments in new emerging categories of technologies which must be a focus of ICT suppliers and buyers," he adds.

Investments in IoT, including hardware, software, and services, are expected to grow by 10.0% in 2021 and reach USD 441.9 billion by the end of the forecast period. These technology investments will drive implementations to accelerate the operational efficiency via use cases such as autonomic operations, production asset management, smart grid, freight monitoring, and omni-channel operations. Investments in AI show the fastest growth of 30.1% in 2021 to reach USD 25.0 billion by 2025. These investments are mainly classified under customer satisfaction use cases such as automated customer service agents and sales process recommendation and automation.