2010 is going to be a year of transformation and recovery for the technology sector, said Simon Piff of IDC, and this is expected to be led by higher adoption of smartphones in China and India.
Piff said he expected a return to growth in China's tech space due to the government's stimulus spending, especially in mobile telecommunications.
"There's a lot of activity around the mobile sector (that) is going to drive IT investment in a number of different areas," Piff said on CNBC's Cash Flow.
"Smartphones are going to be a high point," he added, as he expects to see strong demand for more intelligent features in the mobile devices.
More features means there will be more requirement for greater infrastructure, and that will in turn drive spending, Piff noted, though he said China's telco growth would not hit levels seen in 2008.
India, on the other hand, is a challenging country because of its size and geographical challenges, he continued.
But like China, Piff sees the adoption of feature-rich phones driving growth in the sector.
"Smartphones are going to be...a low cost PC alternative to people in the rural areas. So we'll see that the mobile networks are going to be providing a range of services that perhaps in the past were supposed to come from traditional PCs," Piff explained.
Telemedicine, mobile banking, can be delivered through smartphones, he said.