SAO PAULO, March 9 /PRNewswire/ -- For large IT companies that have global operations, 2009 was a rough year. Fortunately for Latin America, the negative effects of the global economic crisis were more subtle when compared to other regions such as western Europe and the United States.

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Undoubtedly, 2010 is dealt with great optimism amongst IT vendors, service providers, strategic partners, and end users. A high percentage of negotiations were delayed or completely halted in 2009, due to the unstable currency rates and overall unpredictable economic conditions. Hence, a positive first semester in 2010 is expected in terms of IT investments, particularly in the mid-market and enterprise segments.

Some of the major IT trends that are expected to be demanded in Latin America during 2010 are the following:

Cloud Computing

Now that companies have the possibility of benefiting from full virtualization and the power to process, store, and distribute high amounts of data through networks, IT service providers are working on on-demand and highly scalable services.

"The main tasks that can be successfully performed in the 'cloud' in the short-term include application development and testing, back-up capabilities, disaster recovery and business continuity, and virtual desktops," explains Fernando Belfort, ICT research analyst. "Moreover, there is a clear growth opportunity for a range of companies, the most important ones being: SMB segment, enterprises as well as service providers."

Verticalization of IT solutions

Over the past three years, IT companies' efforts have customized solutions according to business. In Latin America, this is clear in software companies such as CRM, ERP, and BI solutions and services. The main verticals that already have packaged solutions are financial, telecommunications, and government. An increasing interest in retail, education, and healthcare is expected in the short term. "The new 'core' for IT companies is to fully understand end-users' businesses in the Latin American IT software and services markets," adds Belfort.

Full Virtualization

The three most active virtualization software participants, VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft, are all extremely optimistic about the levels of adoption in 2010. A trend to be observed in the short-term is likely to be a "full virtualization," including servers, storage, networks, and desktops.

The virtual desktop or universal desktop trend is expected to be implemented in 2010. This refers to having access to a user's desktop environment with all of its applications wherever a user is located (any desktop, laptop, or smartphone), in an extremely secure and agile manner, as applications can be delivered on-demand.

Managed Security Services

The managed security services (MSS) market has presented significant growth in 2009. This is mainly leveraged by the compliance to regulations such as PCI DSS and SOX and the perceived advantages of outsourcing network security needs as well as the rapid increase of attacks, frauds, and SPAM over the past years. Buying network security hardware and software licenses and constantly managing networks in-house has proven to be financially disadvantageous and this practice is currently only limited to the financial vertical.

Green IT

Technologies such as virtualization are likely to drive the Green IT market in Latin America. Besides, hardware vendors have been investing in R&D to design recycling initiatives and maximize the efficiency of their products and therefore decrease energy consumption and carbon emissions. IT services providers have focused on the concept of having more efficient datacenter operations, largely reducing the electrical usage. This is expected to occur more intensely throughout 2010.

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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan

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