IDC's top 10 tech predictions: cloud and analytics

Unsurprisingly, cloud computing tops IDCs' 2010 technology predictions after a year where it was hyped and pushed and almost bludgeoned into the mindsets of IT professionals across the industry. While coming a close second was business analytics, which from the past few years is seemingly never far from the top one or two priorities of CIOs.

This year's predictions also saw IDC predict 2010 to bring a recovery in IT spending for Asia Pacific excluding Japan, with an expected 7.7% growth rate over 2009. This will be driven by India (11%) and China (8.5%) while the mature markets of Hong Kong and Singapore will see modest gains of 4.5% and 4.6% respectively.

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Unsurprisingly, cloud computing tops IDCs' 2010 technology predictions after a year where it was hyped and pushed and almost bludgeoned into the mindsets of IT professionals across the industry. While coming a close second was business analytics, which from the past few years is seemingly never far from the top one or two priorities of CIOs.

This year's predictions also saw IDC predict 2010 to bring a recovery in IT spending for Asia Pacific excluding Japan, with an expected 7.7% growth rate over 2009. This will be driven by India (11%) and China (8.5%) while the mature markets of Hong Kong and Singapore will see modest gains of 4.5% and 4.6% respectively.

Budgets will remain tight and the industry will have to get used to new buying patterns and likely slower growth than the past, said Simon Piff, Head of Asia/Pacific Predictions Committee for 2010.

While there will be a rebound, the overall levels of spending in 2010 will still be far below the levels seen pre-crisis, noted Piff, with a full recovery expected only in 2011.

As the lead analyst of IDC's Predictions Committee for 2010, Piff noted that two key trends influenced this year's top 10 technology predictions, these were transformation and recovery.

Piff noted that as part of the transformation process, cloud computing is garnering a lot of focus from CIOs. "[Cloud computing] will move from an amorphous buzzword to a more tactile reality as service providers come to grips with the challenges of providing public cloud and organizations realize the flexibility that implementing a cloud infrastructure internally can provide," he said.

He noted that the push for better service level agreements from users will really drive providers to improve their offering and support around cloud services.

One observation from Piff is that some see cloud computing as a major threat to traditional service providers, much like some saw the Internet as a threat, but for the bold and strategic providers cloud computing should be a huge opportunity to improve their offering.

Piff expects business continuity and disaster recovery services to be cloud's "killer app" for next year as businesses seek better protection and security for their data which many struggle to manage and maintain in-house.

BI and analytics again is one of the top priorities and Piff believes that the need for better data and information is greater than ever on the back of the financial crisis.

"In the past analytics provided a nice dashboard of data for businesses but lacked real actionable information," he said. "The crisis really exposed information gaps within businesses and today leaders are asking: if the data is really available? Is it accessible and easily retrieved? And is it sufficient to turn into action items?"

A third interesting trend is the and the evolution of software as a service (SaaS) to knowledge as a service (KaaS). Kaas extends the SaaS delivery model by its addition of intellectual property (IP) related to a particular horizontal process or industry to the standard SaaS offering, according to Piff. This new level of cloud services will enable SaaS and BPO vendors to form partnerships for the delivery of KaaS solutions with industry- and/or process-specific IP embedded within them.