Examining macro industry trends in the Asia Pacific region, global ICT research and advisory firm XMG, announces their 2008 predictions for the Asia Pacific region.

1. Top management concerns of Asia Pacific CIOs:  Minimizing risks still top of mind of risk averse CIOs
   
   The top 10 management concerns and priorities of ICT executives heading into 2008 are as follows:
   1. Minimizing the risks of ICT investments to ensure that the return on risk is maximized.
   2. Measuring and tracing the efficiency and effectiveness of ICT investments to the corporate bottom-line.
   3. Enhancing the value proposition of IT through effective partnerships with end-users.
   4. Investing in workforce development and retention programs to retain top talent in a highly competitive global labor market.
   5. Instituting highly collaborative corporate governance to actively engage and syndicate end-users in the decision making process.
   6. Strengthening and ensuring service levels are market competitive to improve the overall return on value from external service providers.
   7. Improving the culture of IT departments to recognize the importance of enterprise architecture and portfolio management principles in strengthening program and project management practices.
   8. Developing a robust mobile security strategy and policies for an increasingly mobile workforce.
   9. Establishing well-defined risks, security and privacy metrics to drive higher levels of executive control and compliance to industry-standard practices.
   10. Understanding the Green IT revolution in anticipation of higher energy costs and the evolution of supporting vendor hardware and products.
2. ITIL to bridge operational maturity gap
   
   As the drive towards operations excellence continues, alignment with ITIL discipline will become a priority in 2008.  As compared to enterprises in North America and Europe, several Asia Pacific companies are still at the infancy stage in enhancing operational processes through process definitions, performance measurements and process refinement analysis.  XMG advises not to immediately expect considerable savings, but to look forward to improved service quality and performance consistency.
   
   
3. Global standards drives business process improvement
   
   Several emerging Asia Pacific countries (for example, governments and enterprises in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and China) are making their debut in adopting international standards and best practices to improve business process, integrate across borders and participate in the globalization of commerce.  As a result, process modeling and business process management will become a critical skill and discipline to automate the commerce chain and end-to-end business processes.
   
   
4. M-Commerce boosts mobile networking
   
   What was considered technically doubtful 5 years ago, M-commerce in Asia Pacific will see a steady 18.4% growth as self-service applications provide significant value to mobile and traveling users.  Media content and collaboration technologies, the growing social network applications, shopping and a variety of other services is complemented with location based wireless services providing improved productivity and mobility.  XMG believes that the high Asia Pacific adoption rate in the use of M-commerce over North America and Europe is more cultural rather than a technical difference in infrastructure.  Strong value for customers, the availability of services, simplicity and secure acceptance of payment are still the determinants of successful adoption.
   
   
5. Stronger growth in SMB spend
   
   SMB in Asia Pacific represent a vast emerging market with the potential to drive considerable economic growth. XMG estimates SMB IT spending in Asia Pacific to increase by 28% in 2008 or US$31.2B.   The regional drive is represented by countries such as India, Korea, Singapore and Vietnam that has a strong domestic market for IT consumption.
   
   
6. Linux as an enterprise solution surges forward
   
   While Linux will make major inroads into government, enterprise and the consumer market in Asia Pacific, Microsoft's dominance will wane as Vista continues to stagger towards wider adoption.  Moreover, with the cost of Microsoft Office products considered cost prohibitive compounded with the high prevalence of software piracy in the Asia Pacific countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, this further propels the search for alternatives in open source applications.  XMG also estimates more than 43% of large corporations in the region are seriously exploring the advantages of open source software.
   
   
7. Offshoring and outsourcing continue to shine brighter
   
   As sustained growth and the requirements for high quality low cost service delivery teams become drivers for outsourcing clients and captives, the market share for offshoring and outsourcing in Asia Pacific is expected to grow by 30.1%.  Excluding Japan, Asia Pacific is expected to garner 24.5% or US$86.8B of the global outsourcing revenue share by the end of 2008.  Of this, 70.3% or US$50.5 are offshore revenues generated by the top five offshoring Asia Pacific nations:  India, China, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam.
   
   
8. Effective in-house talent management practice will take center stage
   
   Globalization and the brisk movement of IT talent in the market will put the limelight on HR practitioners to meet the talent crunch.  Senior management will recognize the need to elevate the HR function from the traditional back office support function to a much more strategic role and more importantly, an enabling one - in order to meet the timeline requirements of the IT service delivery teams.  With the general unsatisfactory performance of several external recruitment firms in being able to effectively source the "right" talent, organizations will rely less on external search firms and focus on nurturing highly qualified and ICT-savvy in-house human resource practitioners for recruitment, retention and workforce development initiatives.
   
   
9. Revisiting business continuity plans among captive and service delivery centers
   
   As global service delivery centers for both captives and service providers rapidly establish their presence in several developing offshore countries like the Philippines and Vietnam, XMG has assessed that many have not thoroughly considered the business continuity aspect of these locations due to the scarcity of proper office facilities.  Early assessment has shown that several of these centers provide a critical service and may not have the facility to provide adequate safety for its large employee base, handle large losses, exposures, or disasters and let alone the disruption of service.  Based on XMG's Business Continuity Plan maturity assessment, XMG advises to pay closer attention to public congestion and accessibility in and out of these locations.
   
   
10. Software as a service offer renewed perspective in IT investments
    
    After a slowdown in the purchase of enterprise software applications for the past two years, Software as a Service (SaaS) will provide the impetus of renewed hope for the software development industry benefiting both buyers and sellers of technology.   As the business case development and procurement processes of several Asia Pacific enterprises mature, SaaS will also grow as a popular cost-saving alternative to buying software.  Asia Pacific adoption for SaaS is projected to grow 17% year on year initially driven primarily by the synergistic effects of SMB demand and provisioning of outsourcing-like services by vendors.  In 2005, XMG predicted SaaS as a viable outsourcing business model and the trend to continue thru 2010.  Complementing this trend further, XMG forecast key decision makers in large Asia Pacific corporations focusing on gathering tangible metrics on the demand for IT services, and in turn, will look for alternatives in transforming their ongoing IT expenditures from fix to variable spending.