Information technology (IT) spending and growth in Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) will reach US$184 billion in 2010 with a 7.7% growth over this year, a report from IDC said.

The lion's share to come from India and China, although all countries are expected to experience varying degrees of growth on the back of a dismal 2009, IDC further said.

"Whilst budgets are still tight, and the buying patterns may have changed irrevocably from what the ICT industry has been accustomed to, the fact remains that there is cautious optimism in the market with some interesting pockets of surprising growth," said Simon Piff, Head of Asia/Pacific Predictions Committee for 2010.

The executive said "the net result of the economic slow down has been an overarching change in how and why companies make new technology investments.”

“Most notably, the key areas of focus going forward will be in customer care, client retention and wallet-share growth enabling technologies. Additionally, IDC foresees projects that generate immediate ROI and tangible improvements in managerial and operational efficiencies will continue to be the projects that garner quick corporate ‘buy-in’," Piff added.

At the same time, the areas that IDC believes will be key enabling technologies for 2010 are not necessarily new technologies as much as they are a more mature and robust implementation of technologies that have been available for a while already.

Cloud Computing, last year’s focus area, will move from being an amorphous buzz word to a more tactile reality as service providers come to grips with the challenges of providing public cloud and organizations realize the flexibility that implementing a cloud infrastructure internally can provide.

IDC meanwhile said aside from cloud computing other trends to look out for next year will include business analytics, the inevitable adoption of social media in enterprises, the evolving data center, and the increasing maturity and acceptance of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings will combine with decreasing profit margins in the business process outsourcing (BPO) market and will add another layer to the cloud services stack.

IDC also said smart phones will continue rising in emerging economies as well as dedicated, preconfigured hardware and storage for specific applications and workloads, also called the enterprise appliance.