Digital transformation will drive technology spending growth of 4.9
percent
BEIJING--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 11, 2014--
Forrester
Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) unveils top ten technology predictions
for Asia Pacific in 2015, with expectations that mobile-powered customer
experiences will fuel digital transformation in the region.
“In a world of ever-increasing digital demands and shrinking budgets,
CIOs need to be smarter with where they place their bets” writes Dane
Anderson, Vice President, Research Director, Region Manager for Asia
Pacific, Forrester Research. “Successful CIOs in 2015 will improve
collaboration with business leaders to craft superior customer
experiences.”
For 2015, Forrester’s top ten predictions and their implications are:
1. Digital transformation will drive technology spending growth of
4.9 percent
79 percent of organizations consider improving the experience of
technology-empowered customers as a high or critical priority for their
business in 2015. While 57 percent of businesses across the region see
the rising expectations of customers as the number one reason to spend
more money on ICT purchases in 2015.
2. The majority of companies in Asia Pacific will be unprepared
for Digital Disruption
Although powerhouses in China like Alibaba and Haier Group are leading
the regional charge to digital business success, few local and regional
companies understand what it takes to build a digital business yet.
Regional organizational inertia will be the biggest hurdle to digital
transformation in 2015 and Forrester expects Asia Pacific organizations
to be complacent to the growing wave of global digital business houses
crashing in their backyards.
3. China will be the epicenter of Digital innovation
Fuelled by its massive digital population, a lack of legacy approaches
and well-funded digital behemoths, China is set to become the world's
largest eCommerce market by 2015, with market gains of $315.3 billion in
online sales (B2C and C2C).1 China’s social media arena is
also developing at lightning speed with 95 percent of metropolitan
Chinese online adults using social media today. 2
4. ‘Digital India’ will encounter stubborn roadblocks
The Indian government’s $17 billion ambitious Digital India program has
the potential to be a game changer for the country. While we applaud the
Indian government’s program to transform India to a digitally empowered
knowledge economy, Forrester predicts that the program will face key
ground-level challenges in terms of infrastructure operations and
standards as well as the lack of technology management involvement.
5. Mobile business will lag accelerated smartphone adoption
By the end of 2015, Forrester expects 36 percent of adults in Asia to
own a smartphone – ownership ranges from a high of 86 percent in
Singapore to 44 percent in China and a low of 23 percent in India.
However, few companies will be ready to serve these technology-empowered
customers on their smartphones in their moments of need. Mobile will
remain small in terms of spend – particularly advertising spend.
6. Organizations will move beyond rudimentary enterprise mobility
In 2015, Forrester expects to see a significant number of small, medium
and large businesses across Asia Pacific begin to embrace hybrid
tablet/laptop devices as a start of their enterprise mobility journey. A
growing proportion of forward-thinking businesses in Asia Pacific will
begin to examine their employee's mobile moments and those who succeed
will think customer mobility, not enterprise mobility.
7. Customer Experience – Bridge for CIO-CMO collaboration
In 2015, regional CMOs will become increasingly aware of their
technology limitations and the drag that the lack of proper planning on
integration, application management, security and compliance will place
on their marketing agility. At the same time, CIOs will shift focus from
back-end IT systems to customer-facing business technology. The meeting
point between these two forces will be customer experience initiatives.
8. Asia will turn to Mobile Messaging Apps for Customer Engagement
With more than one billion users combined on WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk,
Viber and WhatsApp, Forrester expects regional organizations to
increasingly turn to mobile messaging apps for customer engagement.
Forrester expects mobile messaging to begin siphoning ad spend away from
Facebook, especially for price-sensitive businesses in Asia Pacific that
increasingly question the platform’s effectiveness.
9. Apple Pay will dislodge Mobile Payments gridlock
In 2014, our prediction was that the mobile payments landscape in Asia
Pacific will remain riddled by fragmentation. This is expected to change
in 2015 as Apple Pay’s technology will accelerate payments and enable
new customer experiences. In particular, China and Australia will run
ahead with Apple Pay on mobile.
10. Customer insights and big data analytics will sprawl
2015 will be the year of increased fragmentation for big data as
reliance on analytics spreads within and across organizations. Spending
on analytics will increase by at least 10% across the region but a
shrinking proportion of this will be visible to the IT budget. Marketing
teams will take the lead to seek data-fueled improvements in customer
engagement.
For more insights on the Forrester Research’s Asia Pacific Technology
Predictions 2015 report, join Forrester’s complimentary webinar
on Wednesday, 26 November, 2014, 11:00AM SGT. Register at https://solutions.forrester.com/2015-apac-predictions
About Forrester Research
Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR) is a global research and advisory firm
serving professionals in 13 key roles across three distinct client
segments. Our clients face progressively complex business and technology
decisions every day. To help them understand, strategize, and act upon
opportunities brought by change, Forrester provides proprietary
research, consumer and business data, custom consulting, events and
online communities, and peer-to-peer executive programs. We guide
leaders in business technology, marketing and strategy, and the
technology industry through independent fact-based insight, ensuring
their business success today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester is a
trademark of Forrester Research, Inc.
1 For more on the growth of the online retail market, see the
May 7, 2012, "Forrester
Research Online Retail Forecast, 2011 To 2016 (Asia Pacific)" report.
2 See the March 18, 2013, "Winning
Social Media Marketing In China" report.
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Deborah Ng, +65 9731 7754
Public Relations, Asia Pacific
dng@forrester.com
