This IDC study presents a five-year 2004?2008 spending forecast of the Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) CRM solutions market, broken down by 12 countries, 20 vertical market sectors, and 3 business size categories. Further, a macro perspective of CRM solutions spending split by software, services, telecommunications services, hardware, and networking equipment components is provided.

The Asia/Pacific CRM solutions market is still very small, accounting for only 2% of the region's overall IT market value. Hence, there is much room for growth. While specific vertical markets such as banking, communications and government have been avid CRM adopters, IDC expects organizations in the transportation, utilities and education to follow suite over the next few years.

"Expansion of the CRM solutions market is largely dependent on the unstoppable momentum of the consumer to dictate market dynamics," said Robin Giang, research manager, IT Investment and Strategy Research. "Therefore, driving CRM investments and strategies in the years to come will be the demand for and supply of cost-effective multi-channel customer centers as well as on demand sales force automation and marketing tools that generate customer intelligence and deliver marketing support flexibly and instantaneously," she added.