Credit crisis engulfs IT companies

With the global credit crisis spreading to the technology sector, Siemens says borrowing costs for ICT outfits are now the highest outside of financial services, says Contractor UK.

Not only were ICT businesses hit by tightening credit conditions, but clients in the sectors to which they sell are delaying buying ICT because of their own financial worries.

British businesses will cut investment in machinery and ICT software, hardware, training, telecoms and management systems by £1.5 billion before 2009.

Sri Lankan experts say advances in ICT management could help companies, especially medium-sized ones, to improve and gain competitive advantage, reports LBO.

Ruvan Weerasinghe and Shiromi Arunatileka of the University of Colombo School of Computing told the LBR-LBO ICT Forum in a presentation on leveraging IT for better business results that enterprises are increasingly realising that ICT enablement is vital for growth in today's globally competitive environment.

The forum sought to educate senior management on the potential of ICT to change the way business is done, especially covering medium-sized corporate organisations that are yet to harness the total benefits of ICT.

Insight Research has valued green offerings within the telecommunications sector by tying a price to the abated carbon emissions, which amounted to $1.2 trillion over the next five years, states Climate Change Corp.

In terms of emissions abated and energy-related cost savings to all other sectors, the World Wildlife Fund has put the value of green ICT at $946.5 billion.

Market leaders like HP, IBM and Microsoft are ahead of the game in offering carbon-crunching ICT solutions, such as supply chain modellers that enable companies to visually manage and model energy data, server consolidation, virtualisation and grid management technologies.