Credit: Dreamstime
Spending on digital transformation is set to sky rocket across Asia Pacific in 2019, with hardware and services dominating customer investments.
According to IDC findings, of the $375.8 billion forecast to be invested by businesses at a regional level, hardware and services will account for more than 83.6 per cent of total spend.
Such projections place the channel at the centre of a transformation agenda in Asia, with services spending set to be led by connectivity services ($44.2 billion) and IT services ($17.6 billion).
Meanwhile, hardware spending will be spread across several categories, including enterprise hardware, personal devices, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) infrastructure.
The fastest growing technology categories will be system infrastructure software (49.9 per cent), IaaS (38.5 per cent) and applications (35.7 per cent).
“The pace of digital transformation has accelerated in the Asia Pacific region, and this will continue to drive significant investments in technologies in the next few years - from hardware and services to applications,” said Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, associate vice president of Digital Transformation at IDC.
“Organisations are becoming more mature and they are reshaping their digital vision and tactics to achieve measurable results.
“They are rethinking digital transformation to gain better clarity into what the Future Enterprise will look like and are increasing focus on applying digital technologies to address the future of work, customer engagement, intelligence, operations, and leadership.”
Of note to vertically focused partners, the two industries expected to invest the most in digital transformation in 2019 are discrete manufacturing ($83.9 billion) and process manufacturing ($46.8 billion).
For both industries, and according to IDC, the top digital spending priority is smart manufacturing followed by digital supply chain optimisation.
“Smart Manufacturing is supported by significant investments in autonomic operations, manufacturing operations, and quality,” an IDC report stated. “Government will be the next largest industry in 2019, followed closely by Transportation and Utilities.
“Each of these industries will be pursuing a different mix of strategic priorities from convenient access to healthcare for the government industry; digital supply chain optimisation in the transportation industry; and digital grid in utilities industry.”
Credit: IDC Delving deeper, the digital use cases that will see the largest investment across all industries in 2019 will be autonomic operations ($25.5 billion), robotic manufacturing ($25.2 billion), root cause ($16.5 billion) and freight management ($13.8 billion).
Furthermore, the use cases that will experience the greatest spending growth until 2022 virtualised labs (132 per cent, site survey-damage, risk and value assessment (78.5 per cent) and mining operations assistance (65.9 per cent).
More broadly speaking, Asia Pacific spending on the technologies and services that enable the digital transformation of business practices, products and organisations is estimated to total $375.8 billion in 2019.
According to IDC, digital transformation spending is expected to “steadily expand” until 2022, achieving a five-year compound annual growth rate of 17.4 per cent.
“The adoption of emerging technologies supporting digital transformation strategies in Asia Pacific is shaping up as its helping to reimagine their businesses, re-evaluate their value chain, reconnect with their customers, and rebuild their organisation into a digital native enterprise,” added Ashutosh Bisht, senior research manager at IDC.
“Government and enterprises in the region are understanding the value of what these new technologies bring to operational activities. It also harnesses the potential of a lot of initiatives being launched to make the workforce well versed. Up-skilling and future-proofing the workforce are on top of employers and the government’s agenda.”
