Asia Pacific to increase software spending in 2010: Gartner

Customer relationship management, collaboration and ERP software popular

Planned 2010 spending on software by Asia Pacific enterprises is expected to increase by 4.4 percent--the highest of all global regions, according to new research by Gartner.

Hardware spending remains dominant, but the increased software spending will take place in an environment where overall IT budgets are expected to decline by 3.1 percent, on average.

Between April and May 2009, Gartner surveyed 323 IT managers in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, China, India and Hong Kong, as part of a worldwide survey.

In terms of the overall IT budget, the Gartner report 'User Survey Analysis: Software Base Budget, Asia/Pacific, 2009-2010' found that India is the most aggressive with a software budget allocation of 26.9 percent, followed by Singapore (25.8 percent), Malaysia (24.1 percent) and China (23.1 percent).

The report stated that "overall, Australia, Singapore, India and China have a more-positive software spending outlook in 2010. However, Malaysia and Hong Kong appear to be more pessimistic in their budget plan".

The software segment with the highest percentage of respondents indicating an increase in spending is customer relationship management (CRM), followed by office applications, collaboration and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software respectively.

For infrastructure software spending, security is the segment with the highest percentage of respondents indicating an increase, followed by storage, data integration and business intelligence.

Gartner said that "end-users in the region are increasingly aware of the importance of disaster recovery and backup technology, among others, due to a number of recent natural disasters".

"Software-as-a-service (SaaS) spending continues to be fragmented within the Asia-Pacific countries surveyed, varied by vertical and software segments," the report stated.

"However, in general, both mature as well as emerging countries contribute to the success of SaaS adoption. The plan for use of SaaS has been the highest for Hong Kong, India, Singapore and China--a good mix of both mature and developed countries."

According to the report from Gartner, software budgets are expected to increase although organisations in the Asia Pacific will continue to be conservative with their total IT budgets in 2010.