Chinese enterprises pursuing IT

Gartner believes midsized Chinese businesses are properly utilising IT

The economic crisis is having a more limited impact on China’s IT hardware industry compared to other countries, according to a new survey by Gartner.

More than 70 percent of mid-size enterprises (with between 100-999 staff) surveyed in China have maintained their hardware budgets at the same level as prior to the downturn, or have even increased their hardware budget, compared to around 50 percent of large enterprises surveyed.

The Gartner survey found that despite the global economic downturn, mid-size Chinese enterprises still appear fairly confident of internal conditions and are prepared to continue investing in IT. The survey asked respondents to identify significant drivers of investment in their organisation for 2009-2010. The key drivers were in order of priority: developing new business and/or new products, creating a paperless environment and improving customer satisfaction.

“In general, mid-size enterprises, just like the younger generation, are more energetic and flexible than large enterprises, especially when it comes to reacting to market changes and allocation of capital investment. They grasp and invest in any business opportunity to make money, even when the risks are high,” said Gartner research vice president Jennifer Wu.

Wu said that mid-size enterprises in China expect to see an immediate pay-off on their IT investments.

“Today’s MSEs may be tomorrow’s large enterprises. On the road to success, today’s Chinese MSEs realize how important and necessary it is to increase and maintain customer satisfaction. This implies that increasingly, in addition to investment in IT hardware, businesses are keen to invest in software solutions such as customer relationship management as well as after sales IT services and so forth,” she said.

Green IT is gradually gaining attention within MSEs with 14 percent of respondents having already invested and 17 percent planning to invest in “green” IT in 2009. China’s CIOs have taken the simplest or fastest route to meet green IT objectives such as better PC life cycle management and reselling surplus PCs, reducing office paper consumption, improving storage utilisation and switching to more power-efficient servers.