By Kirsten Wade
ICT spending in the Australian resources sector is set to reach $3 billion by 2015, according to IDC research.
The IDC report, ‘Resources ICT Market Forecast and Analysis 2011 to 2015’, highlights the importance of the sector utilising ICT to manage challenges of operational cost management and ongoing cost competitiveness associated with the resources boom.
“The Australian resources boom appears to be moderating and may have reached its peak,” said IDC research manager, Emilie Ditton. “The sector will be increasingly challenged by the requirement to manage costs within a global environment of moderating growth, and within a local context of high labor and energy costs in Australia.”
IDC expects growth in ICT spending in the sector to reach an average of 3.8 per cent by 2015, compared to the market average of 2.7 per cent.
“As the sector starts to experience moderate growth, it is very heavily focused on improving operational efficiency and improving productivity to drive up margins,” said Ditton. “IDC expects to see opportunities in technologies that deliver productivity improvements, organisational responsiveness and support maintaining a low cost base such as mobile applications, remote application delivery, business intelligence (BI), predictive analytics, and cloud computing.”
