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Massive Chasm In Asia's Public Sector IT Spending
IT_Sleep_Bag writes "A recent study by Springboard Research shows a massive chasm between countries in the APAC region, with countries like New Zealand and Australia investing up to USD 200 per capita on IT, while India and China spend a dismal USD 1. SDA Asia speaks to Dane Anderson of Springboard Research to explore the reasons for the wide gulf and why he believes India and China will grow the fastest in this regard."
(!!??) Look at the math: India has 1.2 billion, many of which are at subsistence level; Australia, a "developed" country, has 20 million fattening middle class aspirants. A 200:1 ratio reflects that reality.
And of the $200 spent per head in lazy republics, 90% of it goes down the drain (FBI's Keystone Cops IT fiasco; name-your-favourite-boondoggle; even Russia caught quickly on to the overspend-and-underdeliver game, it's a great way to embezzle). Raising indigent populations to Western standards of waste is not really helpful, is it.
Anyway, if you didn't get Carr's memo: IT's a commodity now. The industry's shrinkage can't be blamed on nine-whatever or the "War on Common Sense"; the gold rush days are OVER. Spend less and spend better (hint: not on *cough* MS junk; hint: don't reinvent - unless it's to take business from MS :)
you had me at #!
So basically that means that China is spending over one billion USD -- $1,306,313,812 according to Google. Whereas Australia is spending $4,018,087,400 (assuming 20,090,437 people again, according to Google). And this means that New Zealand, with 4,035,461 people is spending $807,092,800. Lastly, India with 1,080,264,388 people (thanks Jeeves... um, I mean ASK.com) is spending just over one billion as well.
To summarize:
China: $1,306,313,812
India: $1,080,264,388
Australia: $4,018,087,400
New Zealand: $807,092,800
The actual numbers are more helpful.
Sure, it looks like Australia is outspending China nearly 4:1. My guess is that looking at per capita is irrelevant.
Richer countries have more to spend?
Where do I pick up my Nobel?
I mean, really... come ON. This is NOT the kind of thing that should make you go "hmmmm..."
The countries that spend the least in IT and have the most to gain will see the greatest increase in IT spending in the near future.
What the hecks? Australia and NZ are completely western and the only way we can be considered part of Asia is by some vague geographical classification. We certainly associate ourselves much more closely with the US and UK than any country in Asia.
This is like saying "massive chasm in public sector IT spending between the US and Mexico!!" - well... yeah, what do you expect?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
How's Japan, Korea, Taiwan looking?
Also, $10 in India/China goes what would have take $100 in the U.S.
My guess is that looking at per capita is irrelevant.
Oh, but it's quite relevant to who is going to make the largest percentage of growth:
To double it's expenditures Australia will have to up the ante to $400 per capita; China $2.
Predicting China and India to have the largest growth is a bit of no-brainer, slight of spreadsheet.
KFG
From TFA:
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article doesn't mention whether costs are calculated at Purchasing Power Parity or not.. $1 in India goes a lot further (e.g., labour costs) than in Australia or New Zealand. I think (look up the CIA world factbook to verify) that Real US $1 = about $6 at PPP in India. Also IT systems have very low marginal costs to usage - e.g., it costs a little more to serve 1 billion people than to serve 20 million - the relationship is not linear. Here's an example of what your IT dollars will bring you in Australia - my company accepts customer applications online - what actually happens is that your form gets emailed to a person on the fifth floor whose job it is to fill an aplication form using the details in the email and then put it through the normal fulfillment process. We spent tens of thousands of dollars on that 'system'.
"he believes India and China will grow the fastest in this regard."
Well, if they are spending $1 per person this year and next year they increase that to $1.50, that is a whopping 50% increase.
It's still just a buck fifty though.
I couldnt see the link to the actual report, just this interview. Does anyone have the actual report? Otherwise we are just guessing.
Having recently had a broadband internet connection in China and having one currently in Australia I can say that the Chinese clearly get a lot more from their dollar than Australians do from their 200. In an industry barely 10 years old Australia is already about 5 years behind in the technology generally available.
"why he believes India and China will grow the fastest in this regard."
Ummm... It's not that hard to see why people at the start of an adoption curve (china) will have faster growth than people who've plateaued (Australia). Given that if you spend $1 more per capita, in China that's 100% growth, and in Australia 0.5% growth...
OK, I read the result. The first thing I thought of was that Telstra pulled out of a massive deal to upgrade all the main backbones. This would've brought us in line with places like Sweden.
their excuse? They wont see any money from it. The ACCC is forcing them to share, so they are spitting the dummy.
All I can hope for now is the other telcos step up and brush Telstra aside.
In India there's a big chasm when it comes to public sector spending in general. So IT really isn't high priority - regardless of what the perception maybe. Most of the IT spending in India is private, because the government lags far behind when it comes to creating an environment of progress.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
What are these statistics supposed to mean? Why is it so significant that India and China aren't spending much money on IT? How do we know that they don't secretly have a huge OSS software base or pirate it all? (Which I tend to recall there being quite a stink about.)
All this tells us is that China and India are not good consumer sheeple. This information is only useful to marketters. Feck off.
You have a good point, these scandalous high prices for commodity products like a desktop OS and a spreadsheet for a bookkeeper are as high as the computer price. No wonder America has no more jobs for its college grads and other citizens
I think all of us American IT professionals can agree this is "on budget" compared to here. There is no reason IT should cost as much as it does in America. It is disgustingly wasteful.
from the springboard research website, the actual tally is:
Country Per Capital Public Sector IT Spending
New Zealand $198.78
Australia $193.82
Singapore $152.89
Hong Kong $67.22
Korea $52.96
Taiwan $45.22
Malaysia $21.92
Thailand $7.41
China $3.67
Philippines $2.94
India $1.29
Indonesia $1.10
china spends $3.67 and not $1. there is a big difference given their huge population.
all in all
Country Total Spending
China 4,794,171,690.04
Australia 3,893,928,499.34
Korea 2,515,600,000.00
India 1,413,004,073.55
Taiwan 1,035,284,044.48
New Zealand 802,168,937.58
Singapore 676,648,330.80
Malaysia 534,538,007.36
Thailand 478,920,118.95
Hong Kong 463,729,672.92
Indonesia 269,998,012.90
Philippines 258,300,970.62
* population figures from google and cia.
from springboard research: "A key focus of this report was to dive deeper into the Public Sector in each country to measure the Sub-Vertical Industries within the Public Sector such as Defence, Healthcare, Social Services, Taxation/Finance, etc... and to provide granular data on each of these Sub-Verticals." i don't think that you should spend a lot for it in those areas as the money will be better used for doctors, nurses, medical equipment, medicine, equipment and other stuff.
this does not include private it spending that may also complement some items as what the public sector is spending.
* sorry, i don't know much of html and don't want to spend time learning how to format the tables properly as i redid this comment and calculations for a couple of times.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I'm continually stunned with the ignorance of history and economics that people are capable of suffering. Tax and spend plans are not going to solve any problems. You cannot get out of a hole by digging deeper. Politicians and their flunkies are always looking for a magic pill that will improve their nation's standing on some issue or another, and history has shown that every time they do, they just retard the progress and rate of growth in their own countries. Dirigisme doesn't work. You want to improve a nation's level of technological achievement, get out of the way. Of course, that doesn't get votes for responding to clueless demands to "do something." China will beat up New Zealand not because it has more spending in aggregate, but because each citizen is being gouged for less dollar value per person, and as China's economy flies past New Zealand in the next 10-20 years (assuming trends don't change), this will mean less and less wealth stolen from each citizen subjectively (assuming it remains ~1USD), so they will be more able to use their savings as capital in the marketplace.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
IT Spending cannot be directly related to the spread of IT and it's benefits. Let's take the case of the Indian Railways (the biggest employer in the World) and the Indian Insurance business (a mammoth organisation).
e nter solution for the same performance. IBM's efforts to sell multi-purpose thin-clients and migrate to DB2 on AIX have failed. (The online reservation system allegedly runs .Net and Flash, and is quite slow and clumsy though).
The ticket reservation system in Indian Railways uses a dumb-terminal front end attached to dot-matrix printers, with Unix systems in the backend... I'm not sure about the databse and the progrmming language though. Now, IT spending-wise, the Railways probably spends about 1% (no kidding) of the money that would've been needed for a Windows-Citirx-thinclient-IBM consulting-broadband-interconnect-firewall-data-c
The Life Insurance Corporation of India recently decided to shut down Windows on all their systems and networks (they were fed up with the ServicePack Oriented Architecture) and tied up with RedHat for thousands of PCs. A ten-fold savings on licensing costs (and IT spending) ensued.
So basically, I would reckon the study methodology and criteria were flawed. Asia has a much bigger ratio of Linux and Unix systems (and Lotus Notes as well, surprisingly) compared to the rest of the World. The much higher GDP and purchasing power distorts the study method.
For instance, a licensed version of MS Office Professional would easily be 3-months wages of a middle-class Indian. This is NOT the right way to compare IT penetration and usage.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Maybe it would help if we relocated NZ off the coast of Ireland so people wouldn't get confused so much ;-)
Europe + Polynesia + random extra bits = New Zealand.
You can probably get 200 Indian programmers for the price of one Australian programmer.
Comparing raw dollars (especially dollars per capita) just isn't very informative.
say no more.
Parent was right, also you have to consider the buying power. It Costs approx 15,000 rupees to get a PC in India which translates to less than $500 USD. In Australia I Believe it's approx $1500 USD.
bet that difference doesn't mean all that much now does it?
I notice that Japan isn't included in these figures. Odd that Australia and New Zealand have been shoved in with Asia, yet one of the major countries in the consumer technology sector is absent. Their tally should be reasonably high, I'd imagine.
Even the numbers don't necessarily tell you much. For example, if one country is spending it's money on MSFT licenses and over-paid admin while another is running it's IT infrastructure on open source enterprise software with averagely paid admin .. that could explain a disparity in cost and potentially allow the cheaper country to come out of it with a better system.
IT spending should be about getting as much as possible for your money, it's not simply about spending as much as possible.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
1) There are a lot more people in India and China. 2) Australia and New Zealand are more developed country.
By the way, despite the critisims you have gotten, I totally agree with you about MS software. I use MS stuff a fair bit and I am almost always dissapointed. At my school we have 15 labs, 11 run Linux and are always running well, 3 run windows and work intermittantly. Sometimes they just loose their connection to the internet, or to the file server, or to the domain login server, or some library required for a specific application goes missing for no apparent reason, or the system freezes. The school IT department is gradually converting those labs to Linux + VMWare which works really well because they can keep a read-only image so the system is fresh each time you log on. People who wine about zealotry are either naive Linux users who have never had to use windows for something other than a game or naive windows users who can't figure linux out and who's pride stops them trying OSX. Use both for a living and you get to know the difference pretty quick.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
New Zealand and Australia investing up to USD 200 per capita on IT, while India and China spend a dismal USD 1
The important thing here is not so much how much they invest in IT, but how they invest it. I mean, seeing how the public sector wasts billions of GBP here in UK on badly designed, badly executed mammoth projects that invariably miss all deadlines, go over budget by several orders of magnitude and then fail, I would rather have them not spend the money at all.
One big factor in why these projects always fail is that IT jobs in the public sector are underpaid, compared to the private sector, so they mostly get the people who couldn't cut in the private sector. And those people make one stupid decision after another. I'd rather see the public IT salaries top those of the private sector; that way at least there would be a chance that our tax money isn't just wasted by incompetents.
Compared to cost of living, $1 in china probably buys you the same as $200 in Australia, so maybe they are spending the same in actual effort.
"Fix it"
Spending less and transferring entire enterprises to new platforms are mutually exclusive. Face it: retraining 10,000 employees on alternative operating systems won't be nearly as cost effective as maintaining the existing Windows installs, so the desktops will remain Windows for the foreseeable future. You keep AD, but you can roll in Exchange and SQL Server alternatives, perhaps Office alternatives for specific departments where interacting with the outside world isn't necessarily a requirement.
Remember: it's a company, not a religion. Being anti-MS may be popular on slashdot, but it's not always the smartest (or cheapest) in real business.
For what it is worth AD is not a WIndows only feature, it is an MS implementation of LDAP directory services which has also been implemented for LINUX/UNIX/OS.X. You can have the same admin control that AD gives for Windows over an entire enterprise of LINUX/UNIX/OS.X desktop boxen and servers and you can even sync MS AS and another LDAP implementation if you want. For some reason LDAP simply isn't used all that much in many businesses LINUX/UNIX/OS.X environments, even where AD is happily used for the Windows half of the company IT infrastructure. The problem with corporations is usually not the lack of administration options for LINUX/UNIX/OS.X but rather that the people administering the LINUX/UNIX/OS.X are MCSE ninjas with little or no formal education who have no idea of how to manage anything that doesn't have an MS logo stamped on it and think that the *NIX world is still stuck in the days of local user management over telnet. Some 70% of the sysadmins I have met would have benefitted from reading a couple of "IT-Administration Best Practices" books one for Windows and one for *NIX. I included Windows in that last statement because even with an MCSE certificate a fair proportion of MCSE Ninjas still don't seem to know what MS AD is for.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
There is prob a big spending difference because the asian outsource firms (like Infosys) leverage Western company IT infrastructures they contract for. All they need is a sweet internet connection. As long as somebody is spending money... meh...
Face it: retraining 10,000 employees on alternative operating systems won't be nearly as cost effective as maintaining the existing Windows installs, so the desktops will remain Windows for the foreseeable future.
Most applications I see nowadays in my office are Web based. Some people may need to use very complicated documents. They can keep their Windows machines if that is the right tool for the job, but all the other people that write a report once in a while can do perfectly with ay application available in other OSes.
Most employees do not have to deal with the OS at all. The skills that most people need is know how to click, double-click, drag and drop, etc. All modern desktop OSes proveide for that. I would expect that any differences regarding these basic competences can be explained in a very small booklet.
Finally you refer to training like if it would be a sudden, almost unforseen ocurrence. Training is (or should be) a permanent ongoing concern, but under the situation described above I don't se what vast amounts of training would be needed for any person migrating in thath hypotetical company of yours.
Just to finish. I have seen it done. I read so many naysayers trying to paint the situation like completely unsorumontable.
I am left with the distinctive feeling that they are either astroturfers or completely unqualified to opinionate regarding the matter of migrations away from Windows.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
and simply do more with less. The difference between writing documents on WordPerfect and on MS Office 2007 Vista EyeCandy edition(TM). More productive, spend less time f*cking about with fonts and layout and more time actually writing stuff but on 286 hardware which they got for free.
Actually, does anyone know of a word processor which doesn't use WYSIWYG mode by default?
Deleted
http://www.iqpe.com/
Does it go on forever?
Also think of the manpower you can buy with that money. Because a lot of that money goes not just into hardware, but also admins, training, support staff, programmers, etc.
In China an average salary is IIRC around 1000$ per year. In Australia, a quick googling says that in 2000-2001 it was $34,745. It's probably risen quite a bit more since then, but let's say a very conservative estimate of $35,000 a year.
I don't know how much more than the average computer-related jobs in both countries are paid, but let's assume the proportion is the same. (I.e., that if a job was paid $70,000 a year in Australia, the equivalent job would be paid $2000 in China.)
I.e., here's the kick: for the same money, China can hire 35 times more people than Australia. Or conversely, doing the same custom software project in China will cost 35 times less than in Australia.
Let's say your custom government database program needs X programmers, Y managers, Z DBAs, and assorted other personel. The thing is, assuming equally educated people are available to both, then the same number of people will be needed in Australia or in China. But in China those will cost 35 times less. If the whole project costs 35 million dollars in Australia, it will cost only 1 million in China.
I.e., what I'm getting at is that even while China "only" spends 1.3 billion compared to Australias 4 billion, China may well be able to get _more_ stuff for its money than Australia does.
Sometimes comparing everything in pure dollars, or worse yet in dollars-per-capita, can miss the whole point. The point isn't to be at the top of some Top 10 Spenders list, the point is to get some job done. No more, no less. If China can get the same job done cheaper, anything else is plain old irrelevant.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am not sure but somewhere in per-Capita comes the picture of population.
:-)
while India and China spend a dismal USD 1
India and China both have a Billion plus population. LOL. Not sure about China but 80% of Indian popultion is still in the villages.
Anyway, just today I covered on my blog how Telecom MNCs have benefited from globalization and how Indian companies are using their technology and services
The $1 per capita is the amount of money being spent on a small percentage of "Elite" people who actually benefit from this spending. If the percentage is as small as say 10% ( made up percentage for example ) then that would mean they are spending $10 for each of the "Elite" class. Large population numbers dilute these measurements to a meaningless point.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Being anti-MS may be popular on slashdot, but it's not always the smartest (or cheapest) in real business.
I'm bone-tired of fanatical pragmatists throwing themselves in front of the ox-cart of Revolution. Call me back when MS is down to a reasonable 40% market share.
But I cannot deny those parting remarks were partly playing to the crowd.
you had me at #!