Doing more with less and doing it more quickly were the key process issues among South African survey respondents in a Meta Group SA survey on South African company's strategic IT issues and priorities for 2003/2004.
Alex Steyn, Managing Director of CommerceQuest SA, local integration specialists, comments: "South African companies that over the last year have had to freeze IT budgets substantially are still faced with a real dilemma: how to get the most out of their current systems without incurring the high costs of ripping out and replacing them with new world applications."
CommerceQuest SA will examine the issue of legacy integration and reuse at a free half-day seminar on Wednesday, 10 March, at the Hilton Sandton.
According to Steyn, realities for local companies are that to be competitive they must extend their systems as well as integrate with legacy applications.
"The Meta Group survey, which was conducted at Meta's flagship conference Metamorphosis in 2003, couldn't be more accurate. We are finding that local companies' priorities are to streamline their existing processes to increase leverage and reduce costs of IT - 82% of SA organisations saw this as a priority for 2003/2004," she says.
"In addition, it was also a priority to enable business innovation and create new competitive advantage for their companies."
The survey was conducted with IT decision-makers from a wide range of industries: education/media/entertainment, government/defence, IT services/computing and telecommunications, transportation, retail/wholesale/logistics, healthcare, energy and utilities, mining, manufacturing, financial services, banking and insurance.
According to Eion Gibson, senior research analyst at Meta Group SA: "When organisations consider platform transformations, as well as changes to existing applications or infrastructure, the primary goals for survey respondents was reducing risk and increased agility. 77% of those surveyed said that consolidating past investments and further customisation/extension, addition of new modules were a priority for 2003/2004."
"67% said that enhancing integration capabilities with Web services would also be a priority."
The good news is that CommerceQuest SA has teamed up with Jacada, leading provider of legacy integration and presentation solutions, to bring Jacada's expertise and solutions into the local market.
By attending the CommerceQuest SA and Jacada afternoon seminar, IT decision-makers will get to hear first hand from the CEO of Jacada, Gideon Hollander, and from Meta Group research analyst Eion Gibson about the challenges and future of legacy integration.
For more information, contact Gamieda Allie on (011) 447-4701, or e-mail gamieda.allie@commercequest.co.za.
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