Companies do more with less

The economic crisis is having a serious effect on the IT industry, according to Microsoft SA CEO, Mteto Nyati, at the ITWeb IT Confidence Conference, held at The Campus in Bryanston

Even the global software giant has not been saved from financial pain, as Microsoft's had to slash 4 000 jobs worldwide to save revenue.

The IT Confidence Conference held panel discussions with IT leaders on the issue of the financial crisis - what it means for the IT industry and emerging technology trends.

“We are facing one of the biggest global challenges yet, but we are also seeing a huge amount of opportunity. Risk today has become a big topic and people are looking for IT tools to do more with less to be much more productive,” says Nyati. Organisations are looking to boost business efficiency and cut costs, he adds. “We [Microsoft] decided to take an approach to look at the worst case scenario and run an organisation that is leaner, but we are confident that we can ride out this economic storm.”

Nyati says one of Microsoft's recent strategies was to choose to extend its partners' payments to give them cost relief, in an effort to maintain strong partner relationships in the channel. In addition, Microsoft is building data centres around the world to support its software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy.

Nyati adds: “The area that we perceive where a company can have a huge amount of savings - is through new technologies such as virtualisation and SaaS. In this space, Microsoft is moving very aggressively and is driven to help its clients drive down costs and give them products that are affordable.”

Simon Carpenter, director for strategic initiatives at SAP, predicts that governance, risk and compliance will experience the greatest pressure. This stems from the global credit crunch, as tighter legislation will clamp down on companies. He says even though companies are tightening their belts and looking to cut jobs, they should still innovate in research and development.

He adds: “In these tough times, this is the time where companies have to retain their customers and top talent, more than ever, while protecting and growing their brand.”

Graham Mansfield, CRM director for sales for Oracle in the Middle East and Africa, says poor broadband capacity and high telecommunications costs are an inhibitor for companies investing in SaaS and Web-based CRM solutions. “There is a lot of pent-up demand in SA and across Africa for broadband. 50% of our (Oracle's) CRM software came from on-demand in Western Europe, and we expect we will see strong growth in the African market once improved broadband capacity comes in.”

However, he says once the Seacom bandwidth comes to South African shores on 17 June, the IT market in SA will see a higher adoption of these solutions, as Internet connectivity becomes cheaper: “The key application focus area for this year is SaaS, governance, risk and compliance, master data management, business intelligence (BI) and shared services. Through software implementations such as BI, we can bring together best practices and given early risk warnings around financials and business activities.”