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Singapore: Home to Social Media Innovation

Results from IDC's ongoing survey reveal that 59.1 percent of Singapore CIOs are increasing their investments in new business applications based on Web 2.0 technologies (Portals, Mashups).

An amazing 59.1 percent are also actively revamping social media networking and collaboration services for employees in 2009.

"We are at an interesting juncture", says Dr. Patrick Chan, Chief Technology Advisor for IDC's Asia-Pacific Emerging Technology Council. "As a result of the financial downturn, corporations are under mounting pressure to invest only in IT technology 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. To date, 71 Singapore CIOs have responded to the survey which is ongoing.

The current market study findings include:

- In 2009, 62.1 percent of the Singapore CIOs surveyed are investing on Business Intelligence (BI) tools. 59.1 percent of the enterprises are also more active in data center server virtualization projects with 42.4 percent also spending in client/desktop virtualization initiatives.

- 45.5 percent of the Singapore CIOs interviewed are currently deploying an IT refresh strategy that focuses on service-oriented architecture (SOA). 42.6 percent of them plan to move major applications to flexible, on-demand web-services SOA environment.

- 37 percent of these CIOs are trying out new IT financing strategies. These companies are shifting from IT leasing to subscription of IT software and hardware rental over a period of 36 months.

- 66.7 percent of the Singapore CIOs surveyed are preparing to outsource and interestingly, 37 percent of them are willing to host their IT infrastructure and business data in a third-party environment. This indicates that Singapore CIOs are open to newer IT business operating models like cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

- 53 percent of the respondents in Singapore say that their key focus areas are to reduce costs and improve profit margins through IT. As majority of these CIOs saw a decline in their IT budget, high priority has now been placed on optimizing their existing IT infrastructure, and reviewing IT service and cost alignment with business in response to the existing economic crisis.

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