Top 2010 ICT trends the industry isn’t talking about in the global SMB markets were released today by AMI-Partners.

Much attention has been given to 2010 trends such as the increasing adoption of SaaS, managed services, virtualization and mobile applications. Although AMI acknowledges most of these are well documented predictions, its team of go-to-market analysts have identified the following six (6) trends that the industry hasn’t fully explored.

Read the rest here:

Figure 1:

This is interesting for me as many of these markets, except perhaps for the city-state of Singapore, are very large geographically and have complex business and cultural subtleties unknown to the outside observer. Given that there are varying ICT maturity levels across various cities in each country, targeting SMBs in a random manner across the whole countries will not be very effective, especially if vendors with limited resources and budget want high-impact results within a compressed timeline.

ASEAN, home to more than 7 million SMBs, is hot. The region is experiencing relatively fast growth in terms of ICT adoption and spending compared with other regions around the world. It is definitely a market that ICT vendors should not neglect in their global growth and expansion plans, especially since there is tremendous pressure now to achieve revenue targets in the midst of the global slowdown. Even though the ASEAN region is expected to experience lower growth in 2009 compared with previous years, well-informed vendors can still grow by leveraging on intelligence and insights from deep research and analyses to craft a focused go-to-market approach targeting key city markets.

With the crisis in full play, ICT vendors will need a realistic geo-expansion strategy and laser-sharp decision-making in order to effectively enhance their footprint in the ASEAN markets. This is certainly one way to ward off any lingering effects of the global crisis in 2010 and beyond.