Posted by Amanda McVitty on 16 February 2010 | 0 Comments
After all the battening down of collective hatches over the last year or so, we’re now being told that here in the Australasian region at least, the ICT sector is creeping back into recovery mode. CIO magazine recently reported on an Ovum study that predicts the ANZ IT services market will grow by $14 billion by 2013, with recovery to pre-recession growth levels by next year. Forrester seems to agree with this assessment on a global scale, claiming the tech downturn is now officially over with global IT spending increasing by 8.1 percent in 2010.
Meanwhile, last week the Dominion Post reported on the BNZ's first confidence survey for 2010, which found that “a net 37 percent of respondents expected the economy to improve in the coming year”. Sure, this is down a bit from 43 percent in the December 2009 survey, but could things really be moving in the right direction?
There are those eternal optimists who can always find a silver lining, and that seems to be as true of IT as of any other concern. Canny CIOs and IT managers are saying that the shock of recession-induced budget cuts has been the spur to make permanent changes to the ways they do things - changes that will reap long-term benefits regardless of which way the economic dial turns in future.
One of these changes has been a permanent shift towards outsourcing ICT services, which businesses now recognise delivers cost and efficiency benefits regardless of the economic climate. Virtualisation, business intelligence and analytics are also high on the list as IT managers look for ways to do more with less and provide more tangible value to the business.
What do you think? Can we really expect to experience recovery this year or is this just media hype? And what do you see as the key strategies and technologies to increase productivity and effectiveness, regardless of whether IT budgets go up, down or stay the same in the new financial year?
Tags:
industry analysis,
economy
