Enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region will pay more heed to developments in the consumer technology market as its innovations are increasingly adopted in the business sector, says research firm Gartner.
That would follow a global trend Gartner refers to as the 'consumerisation of IT'.
Dion Wiggins, vice-president and Hong Kong-based research director at Gartner, said the consumerisation of IT described the impact that products and services adopted by consumers, or designed for consumer use, had on the IT sector's developers, suppliers and enterprise customers. 'This trend is being driven faster and further in the Asia-Pacific, which is both the major producer of consumer information technology and home to some of the world's most tech-savvy markets,' Mr Wiggins said.
'We expect to see increasingly innovative design and business models emerge in Asia as we move along the trend line of 'sold in Asia' to 'made in Asia' to 'designed in Asia' to 'dreamt up in Asia'.'
According to Gartner, most technology vendors at present fall neatly into either the enterprise or the consumer camp. It forecast that technology suppliers with experience in, and understanding of, both markets would have greater opportunities as the IT industry shifted to consumers in the next 10 years.
Large industry players such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have experience in both markets, while the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAP are focused on the enterprise segment.
Technologies such as Wi-fi, smartphones, instant messaging, personal electronic devices and the internet, and consumer software like Google Desktop and Skype have steadily infiltrated enterprises through their technophile employees.
