E-biz still the top driver

Despite doom-mongering and a shaky end to the year in the American and British technology stock markets, e-business will still be a major economic driver in 2001, with spending and computer sales still increasing.

As e-business grows it will maintain healthy hardware, software and service sales across the Asia Pacific region. IDC believe the majority of this investment will follow the trend that began late in 2000 and come from brick-and-mortar business’ that are moving on-line.

“The reason is simple; the battle is already engaged. For every .com that competes with an established business, there are a dozen more brick-and-mortar companies with online operations to worry about now,” Piyush Singh, Vice President of IDC Asia Pacific said.

An increasing area of this growth will be the Intranet. IDC’s research indicates that Intranet development will become an end to end integrated part of any e-business solution. Their research claims the Intranet is a ‘logical’ step following the integration of enterprise applications and other e-commerce applications.

The research company predicts IT spending will reach a trillion dollars globally this year and that US$39 billion of it will be spent in the Asia Pacific region, without the help of the Japanese economy. There will also be 75 million PCs installed by next Christmas in the region.