With the possibility of a new financial crisis hitting the world economy in the foreseeable future, companies in Asia Pacific are likely to adopt a cautious and discerning approach to their investments in IT in the coming year. As we saw back in 2008 and 2009, IDC expects customer centricity to move to the top of the business agenda together with a focus on technologies that help companies increase customer focus, customer engagement and increase the knowledge of which customers contribute the most to the business.

At the same time, customers are fickle and disloyal.  As the Internet has become the new business and delivery platform for all kinds of goods and services, consumers and business customers alike have become spoiled for choice, and in today's economy they can hardly be blamed for 'jumping ship' whenever the opportunity arises. One bad customer experience is often reason enough for a customer to change vendor, and in today's viral society this can create ripple effects beyond just the one customer.

This is creating a need to redefine how companies address and care for their customers. Enterprises are becoming "social" in the way they do business, relying on social media and social networking to identify and engage customers, but true customer centricity is about much more than that. It is about gaining a holistic customer perspective in order to obtain real insight into the value and life cycle of each customer.

To address this need, the market today is seeing a change in the fundamental structure of business applications – especially as these applications are being offered via the cloud. Real-time analytics can be embedded into almost every system and virtually every area of the business. Business units are not only capable of using social media, web-based communications and mobile services as a direct way of collaborating with customers, they are also able to analyze in real-time what the customer needs and when they need it.

IDC's Customer-Centric IT breakfast briefing will showcase how IT, service providers and cloud-based solutions that can help companies to get closer to and more involved with their customers. It will demonstrate how cloud services can be used as a platform to communicate, collaborate and engage with customers. It will show how new solutions allow companies to integrate the services that customers already use - from Facebook to Twitter to Skype - into their existing IT systems and how data from all these can be used to increase their knowledge, their focus and their rules of engagement with their customers.