CIOs in Singapore plan to increase investments on innovative IT tools through the course of 2009 as they prepare for the economic recovery, an ongoing IDC survey revealed.
Findings released Thursday of the research house's survey of 71 CIOs in Singapore, revealed that 59.1 percent of respondents will increase investments in building new business applications based on Web 2.0 technologies such as portals and mashups.
According to the report, 59.1 percent of the CIOs were revamping social networking and collaboration services for employees, while 66.7 percent were actively standardizing corporate business processes with emerging business management tools.
For 53 percent of respondents, their focus areas were to reduce costs and improve profit margins through technology.
Patrick Chan, chief technology adviser for IDC's Asia-Pacific emerging technology council, noted mounting pressure due to the downturn has forced corporations to invest in technologies that can help their businesses save costs and grow at the same time. "As a result, CIOs today have very challenging roles to play. They need to balance savings against IT investments in order to achieve optimal growth for their organizations."
Among those polled, 62.1 percent said they were investing on business intelligence tools.
Data center server virtualization projects kept 59.1 percent of the CIOs busy while 42.4 percent of respondents were spending on client or desktop virtualization initiatives.
The study found that 45.5 percent of the CIOs interviewed were deploying IT strategies focused on the service oriented architecture (SOA) and that 42.6 percent of them planned to move major applications to the on-demand Web services SOA environment.
Companies were also shifting from IT leasing to subscription of IT software and hardware rental, with 37 percent of the CIOs trying out new IT financing strategies.
The study also found the CIOs open to newer IT business operating models such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing.
Among respondents, 66.7 percent were prepared to outsource, and 37 percent were willing to host their IT infrastructure and business data in a third-party environment.
Based in Singapore, Konrad Foo is an intern with ZDNet Asia.
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