In an increasingly digital world, business opportunities depend on a company’s ability to not only satisfy user demands for product or service innovation, but also to adapt their technologies to support market trends.

Therefore, it’s a requirement for modern businesses to ensure their IT infrastructure is able to handle massive digital information flow and support a variety of applications necessary for business processes to run smoothly.

From this perspective, it’s quite clear that the best opportunities in the digital market lie in IT innovation, which seems to be the priority for most global businesses. When it comes to Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), different surveys imply that this region might be the next leader of IT infrastructure innovation.

According to a recent Gartner report, APJ companies keep increasing their IT budgets to support business growth and ensure prosperous future.  As much as 35% of IT funding in APJ companies comes from outside conventional IT budget, most frequently though marketing, sales, operations and R&D centers.

Gartner’s vice president Andy Rowsell-Jones says this figure confirms that businesses in this region see IT innovation as the core of successful digital marketing strategies, which increasingly require advanced technology solutions to support mission-critical processes.

“APJ businesses expect IT to support growth and are increasing IT budgets accordingly.”

Australia among the leading cloud adopters

The survey also reveals that APJ businesses are among the top cloud adopters, with almost one-third of companies using public cloud services. According to Gartner, 31% of APJ CIOs reported that they significantly invested in cloud computing technologies in the past year. By comparison, global cloud investments are around 25%, which proves that APJ is one of the leaders in terms of strive for greater IT infrastructure agility.

The report also reveals the major areas of focus for IT investments based on data obtained from 2339 respondents, out of which 398 came from APJ. Globally, companies are primarily focused on firstly integrating BI/Analytics solutions, secondly reinventing infrastructure and datacenters, and thirdly mobile app development.

In Asia Pacific and Japan, the cloud is still the most important strategic area, whereas mobile development and BI/Analytics follow behind. Rowsell-Jones also notes that the fact mobile market is their second top focus is an unsurprising fact, considering the global growth of mobile market and the emergence of BYOD.

This year, global mobile spending is estimated to grow for about 37% from last year, reaching $18 billion. In another related report, Asia Pacific business intelligence market was found to flourish, with Australia being the region’s leader in the BI platform software market that is expected to reach A$372.9 million this year.

Insights

The data presented above illustrates the importance of IT innovation for business advancement and implies that Australian companies are well on the way to proliferate. Considering global IT trends that dictate business strategies, such as mass cloud adoption, mobile app development and BI innovation, Australia could definitely be regarded as one of the world’s most perspective regions.