Johannesburg, 06 Oct 2005
More money is being spent on IT infrastructure maintenance than on new IT, amid static or declining IT budgets.
So said Michael Thatcher, Microsoft MEA regional technology officer, speaking at the e-government forum, which is part of the seventh annual African Computing and Telecommunications Summit, in Sandton this week.
Current enterprise management technology is not suited to cutting these costs, he said.
Discussing enterprise management challenges in Africa, Thatcher highlighted a recent report by management consulting firm Accenture, that showed enterprises spend 30% of their IT spend on new technology systems and 70% on IT maintenance.
Some of the problems faced by business today include increasing the value of existing IT resources, such as people, applications and platforms; reducing costs and the complexity of managing systems; and enabling IT to respond rapidly to business requirements, Thatcher said. He said legacy systems in particular were expensive to maintain.
"In Africa there are opportunities to leapfrog to the latest technology advances such as WiFi and soon WiMax, to implement new infrastructure and avoid high costs of legacy systems, as they are difficult to maintain."
Today`s enterprise management solutions have not been designed to reduce overall costs, he said. "Instead, as solution providers` costs increase in the long run, the customers` costs increase and expert knowledge through professional services is not easily available."
Regarding diversity, he said: "To create a management solution, enterprises should look for a common denominator and work with open standards that will in turn provide the best possible interoperable solutions."
Share