"Customers are asking for technologies that lower their TCO," said Philip Chua, managing director for Hong Kong, Atos Origin, "such as remote infrastructure management (LANs, SANs, Servers) application outsourcing, managed security and information lifecycle management."

"Companies need to do more with less," explained Chua. "Enterprises are desperately trying to lower their IT costs: people, hardware (infrastructure), housing... and are re-visiting previous outsource/offshore plans-seeking the benefits of TCO reduction."

"Corporations are automating more and more business processes and functions than ever before, which increases activity within the datacenter," said Yau. "The datacenter is now so important that a CIO/IT manager has to get it right every time, which is complicated because business unit managers and the executive team are also now IT-literate and less forgiving."

Yau added that his firm saw a 20 percent increase in spending compared to last year, which he said was "primarily due to the need for virtualized and eco-friendly products," the latter including blade servers.

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