Digitalisation to drive Asia’s higher education IT spending to US$10.4bil

• Driving education transformation are cloud, mobility, social, BDA, etc.
• Opportunities in personalised learning, collaborative education, Smart Campus

IT (information technology) spending in the higher education sector in the Asia Pacific region excluding Japan (APeJ) will increase from US$8.7 billion in 2015 to US$10.4 billion in 2019, a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.2%, according to IDC.
 
The increased spending will be mainly driven by digital transformation efforts, according to IDC Government Insights’ recent published research Best Practices: Enabling Tomorrow’s Tertiary Institutions – Digital Transformations Through Personalized Curricula, Collaborative Ecosystems and Smart Campus Initiatives.
 
“Higher education institutions in mature economies display a more mature IT spending pattern, where IT spending is shifting focus from hardware to services and software spending components,” said IDC Government Insights market analyst Shreyashi Pal.
 
“This is because the APeJ tertiary education sector will be increasingly focused on addressing the urgent need to increase cybersecurity priorities of digital assets, reduce IT costs, improve business-IT alignment, and leverage cutting-edge technologies for IT consolidation and streamlining of scarce ICT resources,” she added.
 
IDC Government Insights’ research also highlights that the opportunities for higher education in the Asia Pacific region are rooted in personalised learning, collaborative education, and Smart Campus initiatives, the research and analyst firm said in a statement.
 
It believes that dynamic business and technology landscapes are bringing about rapid changes to traditional tertiary education demands and practices.
 
Achieving adaptive agility has been more critical than ever to tertiary educators and educational institutions globally as a result of ensuring long-term relevance and operational sustainability.
 
The benefits of ICT in education varies from enhancing the learning experience and equipping students with new sets of skills, to expanding the reach of education to people having no access, as well as to reduce the cost of education.
 
The success of these benefits, however, depends on the maturity of the ICT infrastructure in the tertiary education system and the willingness of education institutions to increase ICT investments, IDC Government Insights said.
 
All leading drivers of IT investments in higher education are related to bringing about better operational outcomes through cost reduction initiatives. These priorities are notably universal across both higher education institutions in mature and developing economies of the Asia Pacific region.
 
IDC Government Insights predicts that the Third Platform technologies driving the education industry transformation and bringing about this change are cloud or X-as-a-Service models, mobility, social engagement and collaboration, and big data and analytics.
 
Third Platform technologies are bringing about higher education digitisation and operations transformation. These new blended environments will offer seamless learning experiences, enhanced operational productivity to tertiary education users, open up new practices as well as operational excellence pursuits for the Asia Pacific higher education sector in the coming years.
 
A blended and collaborative ecosystem that enables the intelligent, instantaneous, and gainful exploitation of organisational knowledge is critical, IDC Government Insights said.
 
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