Cloud Computing made the Top Five list of technology issues among Asian CXOs for the first time, according to new research from Telstra. It joins business process optimization, business intelligence, integrating existing systems and processes, and business continuity planning as the five most important issues facing business in 2011. Cloud Computing knocked cost management of the prior year's list.

The survey was conducted among 300 senior executives in seven Asian nations, with CIOs constituting 85% of respondents. Annual IT budgets were only in the $100K to $500K range for the largest group of respondents, reflecting the nature of several developing economies (eg, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia) in the survey. Executives from Hong Kong and Singapore also responded. About 11% did control budgets in excess of $5 million, and 4% above $50 million.

The top five application areas being addressed by IT were accounting and finance, HR, customer service, inventory management, and sales. The top five perceived benefits of IT were cost efficiency (which should drive ever more business to Cloud Computing), enabling growth, maintaining competitive advantage (eg, "It matters"), driving innovation (sure, sure), and improving customer service.

Survey respondents listed several big challenges to their effectiveness: cost-management pressure (no surprise), lack of key technical sets (a worldwide problem), difficulty proving the value of IT (slaps forehead, recommends summary execution for ancient mandarins), shortage of time for strategic thinking (yep), and a lack of alignment between business goals and IT (in continued search of the Holy Grail).

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