Convergence, consolidation, and realignment across the information and communications industries continue unabated. As we look forward, there will be an additional force accelerating this pressure on the industry-the empowered user.

Starting with buying patterns at the individual level, IDC predicts that a proliferation of content and service bundles will spur spending growth by 30% as users demonstrate a willingness to pay for the right content. For example, the Skype acquisition by eBay changes more than long distance phone call habits. The increased convergence at the device end is expected to produce better online experiences and users are prepared to test these disruptive business models out. Nowhere will this be felt more acutely than in APEJ, the most populous region in the world.

As these elevated online expectations are taken into the enterprise, CIOs will face greater pressure to respond in a balanced fashion and provide corporate IT that is both dynamic as well as resilient. We expect simplification at the enterprise infrastructure end, investments in business intelligence as well as identity and access management (IAM).

Changes in enterprise buyer behavior will accelerate the realignment that has already begun in the vendor community. IDC predicts new models of partnering in the region as vendors vie to expand their technology footprint cost effectively, open source continues to gain traction in specific markets, and service delivery models continue to morph as offshoring and utility options enable new possibilities.

Who is an e-Empowered Employee?
Much has been written about the employee being empowered to be more productive in a highly competitive and fast-changing world. Organizations today are continuously evolving to stay ahead of the game; enhancing their products, building efficiencies in business processes, searching for alternative distribution methods, and interacting with their customers.

The need for timely and relevant information will continue to Accelerate, without a doubt. Employees are expected to respond and make decisions faster than ever. Work happens anywhere, anytime, anyplace. It is moving out of the traditional workstation into homes, hotels, airport lounges, and taxis. The employee is no longer tied to an office location and is in effect, in a workplace that is boundary-less. Forget the 9 to 5 work environment, it is heading towards 24x7.

As we stand on the brin k of an always-connected, knowledge-worker-driven, and rapidly shrinking global economic society, the basis of competition will now be based on the creative productivity of individuals contributing to the value chain to which the organization belongs. The EEE has arrived.

Where Will He Spend?
The e-empowered employee will stretch across all income brackets and age groups. Fuelled by consumer-led experiences, e-empowerment will become the basis by which employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and citizens view what they expect from ICT at the workplace.

Wireless Content Packages Keep Consumer Spending on the Boil: The combined wireless content industry encompassing games, music, ring tones, video, and TV will grow by 30% from $9 bn in 2005 to $12 bn in 2006.

Service providers have a huge role to play to further advance this market. By getting the user base thrilled over the future of entertainment or offering cost-saving services bundled with broadband access, service providers can generate additional revenue streams.

The Skype Factor and Consumer VoIP: The consumer VoIP market showed healthy growth in 2005, and the move to VoIP is expected to continue into 2006. In the voice market, we are seeing further moves by non-traditional operators going into the consumer VoIP space. For example, 2005 saw eBay purchase Skype for $2.6 bn. An additional $1.5 bn was promised if certain financial targets are met by 2008. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft also purchased VoIP service providers in 2005 (Microsoft purchased Telco in August and Yahoo! purchased Dialpad in June), with plans to integrate the technology into their current infrastructures. Google has also launched its own VoIP software, GoogleTalk, which is integrated into its instant messaging (IM) application.

Increased Convergence Leads to Even More Consumer Choice: Users are becoming more tech-savvy, not only with their experience in other areas such as the emerging Digital Home, but also in mobile areas, where phones are getting “smarter and smarter” by the day. Processing power is increasingly becoming a factor in mobile phone design in order to incorporate/include features such as music and high resolution as well as the ability to multi-task. High-speed infrastructure to support this is also becoming increasingly available. IDC predicts that across APEJ, the number of converged devices to be shipped in 2006 will be 15 million, enjoying a growth of 24% over the 2005 shipments.

Granted, most of this is a supply-side push but consumers are becoming more educated in the process, and they will come to expect such functionality in more and more of their devices.

Even enterprise-targeted devices will need to be able to do double-duty in the multimedia department as mobile users will need to be entertained from time to time (just as DVD players are often included in notebooks).

Based upon such a supply-side push, IDC projects a positive outlook for converged mobile devices. While the market is not at its inflection point yet, IDC believes that the region will encroach closer to that “tipping point” in 2006. This is not isolated to the mature markets only , even developing markets such as India and Indonesia are showing signs of a high-end niche with an affinity for the most expensive and sexy device as it helps make a fashion statement. Either way, the phone as we know it is getting smarter . and users will come to demand more of those features as they become accustomed to sophisticated functionality.

How will Enterprises Respond? 
Since its inception, the ICT industry has been characterized by enterprise-led decisions of adoption and management. Today's challenge is to keep abreast with an adoption pace set by employees, a daunting task for most CIOs.

IT Consolidation Will Drive New Enterprise Infrastructure Acquisition and Management Patterns: The challenge facing CIOs is to deliver higher IT service-level performance to meet diverse business needs while lowering the costs of infrastructure, a tough balance to strike.

On one hand, we are seeing a trend towards simplification through better consolidation/integration, software automation (management and virtualization), and standardization. The users have realized their IT infrastructure has become quite complex over a period of time since they have continued to add different types of servers, storage, and software. Furthermore, the computing capacity offered by individual servers is frequently under-utilized by the applications that they host. Meanwhile, the organization is expected to dynamically allocate resources to meet unpredictable demands. Managing this infrastructure has become an arduous and costly exercise.

The rise in commoditization will lead to a proliferation of devices that will amount to increasing managerial costs and growing sluggishness. IT consolidation is the discipline that will help organizations meet the business goals of flexibility, speed, and cost saving. It will help simplify the existing complexity, leading to greater efficiencies within the organization. This will also help pave the way for implementing an SOA in future.

The two main trends we will see going forward are: The end users will continue to leverage the benefits of commoditization, but will be keen on having a more consolidated infrastructure. Total cost of ownership (TCO) will drive businesses to spend more on software that helps better manage their information and infrastructure. The vendors will ensure that they are able to provide more holistic management tools to the end users in order for them to derive greater efficiencies from the infrastructure. This will lead to more partnering and acquisitions between the infrastructure hardware suppliers and software companies.

Business Intelligence Graduates to Prime Time: Though the business intelligence (BI) tools markets in both North America and Western Europe are mature, the overall market in APEJ is still relatively immature.

IDC expects the EEE to be a significant influence in driving demand within enterprises for better decision-making support. The grassroots movement has begun, and this market is predicted to grow by 10% in 2006 to $315 mn revenue from licenses in the APEJ region.

In 2006, we should expect: Vendors' product development will continue to increase the degree of integration between BI tools software to Microsoft's office applications, in particular, with Microsoft Excel. Such integration will give BI tools a more familiar face to end users. Besides that, vendors will also incorporate more “user-friendly” interfaces based on the latest data visualization techniques. Such product development would increase the adoption of BI tools software in this region as the end-user population increases beyond the traditional users in the coming years.

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