"We are seeing a rapid shift in IT spend from traditional systems of record into complementary systems of engagement like interaction applications, adoption services and real-time analytics.

"This is largely being driven by customer's shift to cloud-based services, demand for deep customer insights and recognition that speed-to-market is their only remaining competitive advantage. The prolonged global financial crisis has slowed investment in core enterprise systems, but accelerated appetites to experiment new technologies and business models that will make customers compelling, relevant and required by their consumers.

"In our global customer base, we see significant opportunities in 2011 for our cloud-based mobile enterprise integration platform, integration with social software and increasing demand for enterprise scale computational intelligence like prediction, recommendation, pattern-matching and most importantly acting on these insights.

"From a business perspective we are seeing large purchase sales cycles in traditional core systems continue to extend and we expect no or minimal growth in 2011. In systems of engagement we are seeing sales cycles shorten dramatically with customers prepared to make modest investments to trial new applications or prototype new solutions where they have the potential to differentiate their customer's experience.

"From an IT skills and capability perspective, we expect the market for top talent to be tight as usual in New Zealand and Australia, but are seeing more developer resources available in our Northern Hemisphere markets.