IT firms still upbeat on next year

The managing director of Hewlett-Packard Thailand, Alan Sedghi, said HP would expand in two directions: increasing the whole market and taking market share from competitors.

He believes the Thai IT market is still growing in the midst of an economic downturn. HP has positioned itself as a technology partner to help Thai business - from large to small organisations - accelerate their growth, lower costs and mitigate risks.

"We expect significant growth in Thailand in 2009. The economy is predicted to slow down but we believe that in any challenging times there are always opportunities," said Sedghi.

He said that due to the company's portfolio strength in servers and storage, services and software, it can provide customers with total solutions - from adaptive infrastructure called next-generation data centres, to business technology optimisation for IT management, and business information optimisation for information management.

"Our key strategy is to provide a wide range of 'innovative solutions' to serve different requirements of customers instead of moving 'boxes'," said Sedghi.

Moreover the acquisition of EDS, the large outsourcing service firm, will help strengthen HP's portfolio, especially its service business, application service and business-process outsourcing.

In Thailand, the compound average growth rate of IT spending is expected to be positive during 2008 to 2011, especially in the public sector, finance and banking, telecoms and industrial, as well as communication, media and the entertainment industry.

"We are committed to growth even through the economic downturn in Thailand," said Sedghi.

3Com (Thailand) also announced a successful performance with a 37-per-cent growth rate in its fiscal year to June 30. For the first quarter of its fiscal year 2009, 3Com's revenue grew at 103 per cent.

Country manager Chingchai Maketiphachai said that even though the economy will slow through next year, 3Com expects growth to be at least the same as the previous year.

"There are still demands in across-market segments including education, healthcare, banking and financial, and government. They require different kinds of solutions. For example, in financial and banking next year IT investment will be more concerned with security," said Chingchai.

Revenue growth is a result of its business direction shifting from focusing on medium to larger enterprises and corporations, as well as from its infrastructure solutions built for serving today's secure converged networks, consisting of products for small and medium-sized businesses through to enterprise switching, routing, wireless switches, IP telephony, and network management systems.

"A key success factor is that we have a wide range of products. This year, we provided network access control solutions to the new government office area on Chaeng Wattana road with 40,000 users. Government projects to which we've signed mean that even though the economy is slowing our work will go on," said Chingchai.

Moreover, the company next year plans to concentrate more on new applications to the secure converged network. Two technologies to be introduced will be Ethernet Passive Optical Network and IP intelligent video surveillance.

"This is to open more market opportunities for us. Medium and large corporations will still invest in network technologies in different areas," said Chingchai.

However, Thailand's IT market in 2009 has been adjusted down by US$217 million (Bt7.7 billion) to reach $6.5 billion and the market growth reduced from 10.2 per cent to 6.7 per cent, said Gary Koch, associate vice president of IDC's Asia Pacific IT Spending Research.

This is because the unstable political climate along with the global economic crisis will continue to have a negative impact on the economy and IT spending next year. Business investments will be postponed as long as the political climate remains uncertain, coupled with a negative impact on tourism.

Koch said that despite the new realities of IT budgeting that Asia-Pacific organisations face in the current economic backdrop, IDC had noted historically that when a turnaround begins, these organisations traditionally are quick to ramp up IT expenditure to alleviate pent-up technology requirements.

"Strategic investment in IT will remain critical in achieving further efficiency and productivity gains and driving longer-term growth of business," he added.