Monday, October 22, 2012

India IT Spending forecast 2016- Strong despite Inflation & Currency pressures


According to Gartner Inc., IT spending in India is expected to total USD 71.5 billion in 2013, a 7.7 per cent increase from the USD 66.4 billion forecasted for 2012 and expected to touch USD 95.9 billion in 2016.  Gartner forecasts the telecommunications market is the largest IT segment in India with spending forecast to reach USD 47.8 billion in 2013 and USD 59.5 billion in 2016 from USD 44.7 billion in 2012, growing at a CAGR of 3.6 per cent. The IT services market is poised to grow from USD 9.2 billion in 2012 to USD 10.3 billion in 2013 and then touch USD 16.1 billion in 2016. The Software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.4 per cent from USD 3.5 billion in 2012 to USD 6 billion in 2016. The hardware market in India, with CAGR of 7.5 per cent is estimated to grow from USD 9.1 billion in 2012 to USD 14.3 billion in 2016. “India like other emerging markets continues exercising strong momentum despite inflationary pressures and appreciation of local currencies, which are expected in rising economies,” Peter Sondergaard, senior vice-president and global head of research at Gartner said.

India IT spending is expected to grow as businesses are looking to IT to help support the challenges of improving customer support, supply chain management, provide their products and services online, optimize business processes and drive innovation in the business. Not only the businesses but government of India and state governments too are spending heavily on building and improving the IT infrastructure so that they can automate the various processes and provide services to citizens on line there by reducing waiting times, eliminating unnecessary paper works and making governance more transparent. Bids were called for some of the major projects by Governments at the center and state levels which were won by both Indian and Multi National players and work is going on a frantic pace. Indian IT industry is also expected to generate more than 4.5 million jobs and it is one of the critical parts of the Indian economy. There has been a major transformation where in IT is no longer a back office function but a front line function with significant business impact for both businesses and governments. 



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Saturday, September 22, 2012

India Data Center Market 2012 – Significant growth forecasted, Future Outlook 2017


India Data Center market is expected to see significant growth in the next five years as there has been increased adoption by Indian companies of the third party data center services and the government has also increased its cloud computing initiatives where it is directly setting up data centers and also using the services of the third party data center service providers. Reliance Communications has announced the multiple orders bagged from Central and State Government of India as the company has signed long term contract with The Department of Post, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (BMC), Madhya Pradesh Border Checkpost Development Company Limited along with Karnataka DISCOM and Chattisgarh DISCOM. McKinsey has estimated that the third party outsourced data centre market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32% to Rs 5,500 crore by the year 2017 with verticals such as banking and financial services, media and entertainment service, manufacturing, international telecom providers and retail accounting for 70% of this growth. TechNavio's analysts forecast the Data Center Equipment market in India to grow at a CAGR of 10.4% over the period 2011-2015.

The Indian IT infrastructure market comprising of servers, storage and networking equipment will reach US$2.05 billion in 2012, a 10.3% increase over 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. The IT infrastructure market is expected to reach $3.01 billion by 2016. Revenue growth will be primarily driven by ongoing data center modernization, as well as new data center build outs. Servers are the largest segment of the Indian IT infrastructure market, with revenue forecast to reach $754.5 million in 2012, and grow to $967.2 million in 2016. The external controller-based storage disk market in India is expected to grow from $439.4 million in end-user spending to $842 million in 2016. The enterprise network equipment market in India, which includes enterprise LAN and WAN equipment, is expected to grow from $861 million in 2012 to $1.2 billion in 2016. Gartner Analysts predict that Indian businesses are looking to focus on optimizing the IT Infrastructure and strategy by implementing virtualization and ongoing investment in large captive data centers mixed with the capacity growth initiated by the data center service providers are the key drivers for growth. Mobility, social media and cloud computing adoption will have significant influence on the way data centers are designed, operated and managed their by the data center services providers.

Dimension Data estimates data centre market in India is growing at a CAGR of 22% and will touch Rs 6,500 crore by 2016. BSNL offers managed co-location, managed hosting and cloud services through the Internet Data Centers (IDC), which have been built by Dimension Data for BSNL. This public-private initiative will leverage the strength of BSNL in telecom infrastructure and vacant buildings and that of Dimension Data in providing data center and cloud computing," Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal said while inaugurating BSNL IDC services. Dimension Data operates and manages IDC centers, which are located in Mumbai, Faridabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Ghaziabad. Each of these is run at a Tier III level and all make use of vacant space BSNL has at its telephone exchanges.According to Reji Thomas Cherian, VP, Telecom, Media & Entertainment, Capgemini India, the Cloud Computing market including PaaS, IaaS and SaaS was worth $400 mn for India alone. Data center services revenue is projected to touch $2.6bn in 2012. The managed security market in India was worth $321 mn in 2011 and is expected to see rapid growth. Moreover, managed third party data center services generated revenues to the tune of $662 mn in 2011 and this too is on a high growth trajectory.
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India Data Center Market 2012 – Cost Savings & Various Service Offerings


The Indian Data Center market is seeing significant growth in demand as there is not only significant increase in adoption by governments both at the center and state levels where they are aggressively building data centers to utilize cloud computing to store data and provide services to citizens more efficiently but also from the business organizations who have realized that there are significant benefits for them in terms of cost savings and increased focus on their core businesses as hosting a company’s IT infrastructure in a managed data center by a third party service provider and in a centralized rather than distributed manner, works out to be more cost-effective in the long run. In case of captive data centers, huge costs associated with real estate, IT infrastructure, and the manpower to manage it will have a direct impact on the company profitability. Data centers services providers invest hugely (in Crores of rupees) in power and cooling infrastructure such as chiller units, generators, batteries and UPS units, power distribution units (PDUs) and specialized computer room air conditioning units (CRAC) and businesses that are looking to use the data centers services providers can benefit from the economies of scale and shared services model. Data center providers are currently offering infrastructure services along with specialized services (over the cloud) such as security, digital video surveillance and storage and data centers are partnering with vendors and solution providers for offering such services.

Managed hosting services is another key driver of growth in India in which data center provider will lease an entire server to one customer who has full control over the leased server and administration (monitoring, updates, application management, etc.) are offered as add-on services. This is cheaper when compared to deploying a server in-house, as it is costly in terms of power and cooling costs and IT staff costs. Managed services, which include cloud computing solutions, managed ATM services and video conference solutions and Network leases are usually a 12-month contract renewed every year. But for managed service contracts, customers prefer a three or a five-year contract, as they want certainty. Collocation (colo or coloc) is a data center service in which customers can place their own server in a data center and use shared and redundant resources like power and HVAC which is very attractive for the customers as they need not have invest upfront  for such resources. Data centers also offer locked cages for customer servers, monitored by IP cameras at the customer’s end and customers can also visit the site and do server administration from a cubicle. The data center colocation and hosting market in India is estimated to reach $609.1 million in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. The market will experience consistent growth through 2016 when the market is forecast to total $1.3 billion.

Data center-in- Data center (DiD in which data centers host a major IT service provider like HP, IBM or Dell and the service provider will in turn host infrastructure for its own customers which helps  service provider to focus on its core expertise (applications and services) without making upfront and expensive investments in power and cooling. India players are already hosting some of the major IT service providers and are also opening data centers overseas and are actively looking to go global. Small and Medium businesses are also increasing the adoption and they have significant cost and resource savings by hosting their IT on third party data centers and which is further fuelling demand in India market. The various service offerings by the data centers services providers and the significant cost benefits and increased focus on core business processes are expected to fuel the data center market in India in the next five years and large players are investing heavily in setting up new data centers and increasing capacities. 
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Monday, September 3, 2012

Global Social Media Advertising Revenues 2012 – Forecast 2016, Strong growth expected


Social Media had impacted the business world where businesses across the world have been forced to improve their presence on the various social networking sites that had grown significantly in the recent few years by adding millions of users every year. There are more than billion social media users and most of the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. claim majority of their users to be active which forced businesses to invest in social media content, improve their presence on various social networking platforms and also increase their ad spends focusing on social networking advertising targeting their customers who are also active social media users. According to MDG Advertising, Social Networking sites including blogs is where online users spend most of their time (22.5%) and this is a significant change from earlier where most of the time was spent on email and games. According to research by Nielsen and NM Incite, Consumers utilize Social media to discover, research, and share information about brands and products and 60% of consumers learned about a specific brand or retailer through social networking sites. Most of the active social media users usually read product reviews online, and also 3 out of 5 create their own reviews of products and services which also highlight the fact that consumer-generated reviews and product ratings are the preferred sources of product information among social media users. NM Incite research also highlights that consumers actively use social networking sites to express their loyalty to their favorite brands and products, users are likely to trust the recommendations of their friends and family most and at least 41% say they share their brand experiences through social media to receive discounts.

eMarketer forecasts advertisers will spend $7.72 billion on social network advertising in 2012, including paid advertising on social sites and in social games and applicationswhich is 48.5% YoY growth compared to 2011. But the YoY growth is expected to fall from 2013 and by 2014 the market is expected to reach nearly $12 billion in annual revenues worldwide.United States contribute more than half of the revenues and advertisers are expected to spend $3.63 billion advertising on social networks in the US, up from $2.54 billion in 2011 and continuing to climb to $5.59 billion by 2014. Facebook is expected to garner most of these social network ad revenues, taking in around seven in 10 of all US social networking ad dollars throughout the forecast period. Twitter’s share, by comparison, will rise from 5% to 8% between 2011 and 2014. According a study into Facebook advertising by TBG Digital, in conjunction with the University of Cambridge that analyzed over 406 billion ad impressions in over 190 countries, the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of a Facebook advert has increased by 58% in the second quarter of this year. This rise was not consistent across the world however. America saw a rise of 25%, Canada saw a rise of 21%, but the UK saw ad prices go up by just 7%.
Gartner forecasts Global social media revenue which is in early stages in terms of revenue perspective to reach $16.9 billion in 2012, up 43.1% from 2011 revenue of $11.8 billion. Advertising is expected to continue being the largest contributor to overall social media revenue and is expected to total $8.8 billion in 2012. Social gaming revenue which saw significant growth recently and more than doubled in the last two years is expected to reach $6.2 billion in 2012, while revenue from subscriptions is expected to total $278 million in 2012. As social networking sites have a significant number of engaged users who spend considerable time on these sites — this increases the potential click-through rates (CTRs), most of the marketers are allocating a higher percentage of their advertising budget to social networking sites. Another crucial factor is that since social networking sites are reducing their dependence on the subscriptions and are focusing more on alternative sources of revenue predominantly advertising revenues. Social media advertising revenues in the United States will grow from $3.8 billion in 2011 to $9.8 billion in 2016 (CAGR 21%) and also forecast a $4.8 billion social media ad spend in 2012, according to BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. Local Media Forecast (2011-2016).
Gartner further predicts a moderate growth in the number of social media users as growth in developed countries has almost reached maturity levels and further growth in users will be more from emerging markets. With more users coming from emerging markets social networking sites have to customize the existing platforms and develop new forms of media and entertainment to attract new users and keep existing users engaged on their sites. Competition among social media players is also on the rise, as the key players are competing for consumers' leisure time and attention which will also lead to the development of new forms of social media (Web based and mobile). Also social networking sites should focus on developing innovative advertising options and formats for the marketers. They need to develop and deploy data analytic technologies and integrate them into their networks so that marketers have a more accurate picture of trends, consumers' needs, preferences and return on investment statistics. Gartner also highlights that through Social media sites marketers can target ads to discrete consumer segments by unlocking the interconnected data structures of users that include lists of friends, their comments and messages, photos and all their social connections, contact information and associated media. Most of the marketers particularly in the Fortune 500 companies are not convinced about the social network advertising and its impact on their revenues. They are still looking at social networking sites as brand promotion and customer influence tools but not as revenue generating tool. The data clearly highlights the fact that social networking advertising is going to see significant growth this year and coming couple of years and the businesses of all sizes should allocate significant portions of their advertising budgets to this and also has to engage experts and professional ad agencies who have the necessary expertise to generate the necessary content and also make effective ads for the various social networking sites targeting the customers on these sites. 
Please visit Social Media Crowd Analysis Blog for further reading articles on social media/networking:  http://socialmediacases.blogspot.com/

Please click on the links below:

Case Study: Morgan Stanley Smith Barney advisers allowed partial access to LinkedIn & Twitter

Case Study: Social Media presence of Goldman Sachs: Looking to improve presence

Social Media @ Intel – Planet Blue internal social network for Employees

Social Media @ Lenovo - Customer Service to improved presence on Social Media sites



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Sunday, August 26, 2012

Global BPaaS Market 2012- Future Outlook: Growth driver for Indian IT vendors

Everest Group defines Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) as a model in which buyers receive standardized business processes on a pay-as-you-go basis by accessing a shared set of resources – people, application, and infrastructure – from a single provider. Advantages of BPaaS model includes potential cost reductions, efficiency in operations, access to best expertise, processes and technologies, and also allows the businesses to focus on the core processes by outsourcing the support functions and this is particularly benefit for SMBs and also Large organizations. According to Everest Group research, BPaaS delivers 35-40% cost savings for small businesses, 25-30% cost savings for medium size businesses and 10% cost savings for large enterprises over the traditional IT+BPO model. Many times there is confusion between SaaS and BPaaS, Gartner clarifies SaaS is an offering that enables a business process and it delivers a fully managed application that client uses to deliver a business outcome whereas BPaaS is a cloud service that delivers a business process and it delivers the business outcome for the client. Forrester is predicting BPaaS will grow from $0.53 B in 2011 to $10.02 B in 2020.

According to Gartner report “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2010-2016, 2Q12 Update (ID:G00234814)”, Gartner predicted that BPaaS will grow from $84.1B in 2012 to $144.7B in 2016, generating a global CAGR of 15%. Of the eight subsegments Gartner is tracking in the BPaaS forecast, Cloud Payments (17.8%) Cloud Advertising (17.1%) and Industry Operations (15.1%) are expected to have the greatest CAGR in revenues generated by 2016. In terms of revenue generated, Cloud Advertising is projected to grow from $43.1B in 2011 to $95B in 2016, generating 17.1% CAGR in revenue growth through 2016. Cloud Payments are forecast to grow from $4.7B in 2011 to $10.6B in 2016, generating a CAGR of 17.8% worldwide. E-Commerce Enablement using BPaaS-based platforms is expected to grow from $4.7B in 2011 to $9B in 2016, generating a 13.6% CAGR in revenue globally. Gartner 2011 Annual Survey of 610 Organizations highlights the fact that organizations are currently using or planning to use business process utility (BPU) or BPaaS for BPO exceed 60%.

Most of the Indian IT Vendors including BPO Vendors have developed their own BPaaS offerings and are actively offering them to their clients as these offerings fall under the nonlinear revenue model category that will allow vendors to charge premium pricing leading to higher margins and also fueled by economic slowdown, manpower issues and changing client needs wherein they are looking at outsourcing vendors as business partners who will help them improve both Topline and bottom line. TCS, Infosys, Cognizant Technology, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Genpact, WNS, etc. are all offering BPaaS services or Platform BPO offerings. These services have been developed for the past ten years and Indian IT Vendors are branding these offerings and successfully offering them to their clients. Platform BPO is a win-win offering for both the clients and vendors as they improve their process and service delivery and they will earn more from their clients on outcome basis. There has been significant demand from the Small & Medium Business segment but slowly the large business organizations too are significantly increasing their adoption of the BPaaS.
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Sunday, August 12, 2012

Global IaaS Industry 2011& Forecast 2014-2016 – Slow adoption by large Enterprises


Infrastructure as a Service is a cloud computing model in which the service provider owns the equipment (Hardware like Storage, Servers, Networking Equipment, etc.  & Software) and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it and the client typically pays on a per-use basis.  Major players in the IaaS market include Leaders like Amazon Wen Services, Savvis, CSC, Terremark, Bluelock; Challengers like Navisite, Opsource, IBM, GoGrid; Visionaries like Rackspace, Joyent and Niche players like Hosting.com, Tier3, AT&T, Tata Communications, SoftLayer, iland, Carpathia Hosting, Datapipe and Virtacore Systems, according to Gartner Magic Quadrant December 2011. Gartner predicts IaaS is a fast growing market as players like Google & Microsoft entered this market and in future this market will be 1/3rd of the hosting market. Gartner also forecasts the IaaS market will generate $24.4B in revenue in 2016 from $5.6B in revenue in 2011 and IaaS is expected to grow by over $20B with a CAGR of 41.7% in the forecast period globally. The Compute sub segment is expected to see the greatest revenue growth globally, growing from $3.3B in 2011 to $20.2B in 2016, generating a 43.2% CAGR and other two sub segments CAGR growth - Storage (36.6%) and Print (16%).

Forrester predicts that IaaS market will initially grow for next few years but the market is expected to decline in the long term. Forrester’s report, “Sizing the Cloud”, highlights that IaaS is the second largest public cloud category with a $2.9 billion market size and “IaaS will reach a peak of $5.9 billion in global revenues in 2014 and will then enter a period of significant commoditization, price deterioration and margin pressure and between 2014 and 2020, as a result, the IaaS market will first stagnate and then decline, with total market revenues of $4.8 billion in 2020,” according to Forrester analysts Stefan Ried and Holger Kisker. Yankee Group analysts suggest IaaS might represent $2 billion to $3 billion, globally. IDC also estimates IaaS will decline to $15 billion in 2014 and most of the analysts believe the IaaS market will be larger than the PaaS market and IaaS is one of the most talked about in the cloud space, which saw several important improvements, such as changes in pricing strategies, the appearance of new smaller players, and the entrance of some technology heavyweights.

Enterprise Strategy Group survey published in January 2012 highlights that of more than 600 enterprise and mid-market companies globally; only 27% said they were using public cloud IaaS services. That's up 10% from a similar survey published in early 2011. But 28% of respondents said they have no immediate plans to jump into the cloud, and another 24% said they haven't pulled the trigger on a cloud deployment yet, but plan to at some point in 2012. SMBs are at the forefront of IaaS adoption totally for IT infrastructure needs but large enterprises are selective in adoption and using public IaaS primarily for these specific use cases: R&D projects, load testing, move non critical legacy applications from expensive on premise to off premise, build & deploy new apps and as part of SaaS or PaaS usage. With some of the large enterprises that selectively adopted IaaS couple of years back and who effectively utilized it are becoming test cases for more large enterprises to adopt IaaS within their organizations. There are also concerns that the pricing has not fallen for some time till now but with the entry of more players particularly Large IT players, businesses can expect more choice of offerings and reduction in prices.
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Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Global SaaS Market 2012 – Emerging Markets will drive growth till 2015


Software as a Service also known as on-demand software is a delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are accessed by users using a web browser. After more than a decade of use and vast improvements in the cloud computing technologies and many players like Amazon, Google, Saleforce.com, etc, major software vendors, developers and independent software vendors too invested significant resources both in terms of monetary, human and infrastructure to further develop the cloud computing. Initially IBM kick started the trend towards cloud computing with its On Demand computing initiative in 2003 and later in 2005 Amazon took the market forward with its cloud offerings like the Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2).  Even Indian IT Services Vendors and other small & medium players too are focused on cloud computing and particularly in Software as a Service offerings (SaaS). SaaS growth is an alternative to the on premises software and also Cloud-based licensing is different from traditional on-premises licensing and the market growth is only possible by cannibalizing the traditional software market. SaaS was expected to capture significant market share as its adoption benefits range from significant reduction in costs as buyers need not invest on the IT infrastructure on their premises, pay as you use model, easy to scale and upgrade, tighter IT budgets due to economic volatility in recent years and mobility i.e. access from anywhere and with any device.

According to Gartner, worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue is expected to reach US$ 22.1 billion by 2015 as many companies are investing in cloud technology and is expected to grow healthily by 17.9% to reach USD 14.5 billion in 2012 from USD 12.3 billion in 2011. North America revenue is forecast to be US$ 9.1 bn in 2012 compared to US$ 7.8 bn in 2011, Western Europe revenue 2012 forecast US$ 3,2 bn compared to US$ 2.7 bn (2011), Eastern Europe (2012) US$ 169.4 million compared to US$ 135.5 million (2011), Asia Pacific (2012) US$ 934.1 mn compared to US$ 730.9 mn (2011), Japan (2012) US$ 495.2 mn compared to US$ 427 mn (2011) and Latin America (2012) US$ 419.7mn compared to  US$ 331.1 mn (2011). According to IDC, SaaS market revenue which includes cloud applications, application development and deployment, and system infrastructure software sales will rise to $53.6 billion by 2015 at a CAGR of about 26%. IDC also asserts that SaaS will grow faster than traditional software and will comprise 80% of the software delivered by new ISVs. By 2015, nearly $1 of every $6 spent on packaged software, and $1 of every $5 spent on applications, will be consumed via the SaaS model. According to Forrester, the public cloud market for SaaS is the biggest and fastest-growing of all of the cloud markets ($33 billion in 2012, growing to $78 billion by the end of 2015). According to market research firm Global Industry Analysts, the global SaaS market will reach $26.5 billion by 2015, as more companies will seek low-cost enterprise software solutions to accommodate limited IT budget growth, which could slow due to the global economic recession.

SaaS market growth is different in different geographies and compared to mature North America market that contributes 2/3rd of the total SaaS market revenues is expected to grow by 16.7% and Western Europe the second best market expected to grow by 18.5% YoY, which is less when compared to 28% YoY growth for Asia Pacific excluding Japan, 27% growth for Latin America, 25% growth for Eastern Europe and Japan too is expected too see low YoY growth of 16% like in the other mature markets. Data highlights that SaaS market growth lies in the emerging markets as the countries in those markets are improving their IT infrastructure and looking to adopt SaaS technologies aggressively. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMBs) are driving the growth when compared to large enterprises that find it difficult to migrate to cloud computing from their existing on premise software and hardware systems as they have made significant investments in building these systems for years and due to other concerns like data security integrity, privacy, skilled man power, pricing and contracting issues, regulations, etc.  SaaS has become a common delivery model for most business applications, including accounting like expense management, financials, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), management information systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), content management (CM) and service desk management.

Asia Pacific is high growth market for SaaS and this is driven by increased adoption in India, China driven by adoption of financial applications like accounting. ERP functions like Expense management and Employee Performance management, along with office suites, email and CRM sales are the other applications that are being deployed by companies in this region. Mature economic countries in this region like Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are driving SaaS adoption as they have good IT infrastructure that encourages increased adoption. Emerging countries in this region like Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnamwhere IT infrastructure is developing fast are also expected to increase SaaS adoption. Japanwas affected by the 2011 earthquake and Tsunami but SaaS market is gaining traction as Japanese companies are looking at SaaS as a defense against future power outages and disasters but there are concerns in terms of security, costs, and integration. Despite Japaneconomic problems and tighter IT budgets the demand for SaaS solutions is increasing due to their lower implementation costs and faster deployment times. SMBs too are driving growth and according to AMI Partners, SMB focused market research firm, forecast that the SaaS market in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) will reach $1.5 billion by the end of 2012 and expects the market to more than double by 2015.

Expense management, financials, email and office suites are the business apps deployed through SaaS and Web conferencing is also highly used as most of the American companies have global operations situated across the world but the market is also facing problems in terms of limited flexibility of customization and limited integration to existing systems according to Gartner. Gartner analysts said in Western Europe, the most developed sub region, SaaS Market is rapidly increasing as North America-based SaaS vendors further penetrate the region and the number of local European SaaS vendors increases. In Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Africa, which are small and emerging markets overall, the potential opportunity for SaaS is more in the medium to long term due to ongoing infrastructure challenges that vendors need to overcome if they are to be successful in these regions. In Latin America, SaaS has been deployed in the areas of email, financial management (accounting), sales force automation and customer service, and expense management. While regional adoption will be positive, it is fully expected that Braziland Mexicowill drive a majority of adoption and revenue opportunities.
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