Johannesburg, 18 Nov 2008
The precarious global economy will impact the IT software market, just as any other, but good applications will sell.
Symantec is one IT vendor that has already made moves to reduce the impact of the downturn by suggesting layoffs in the new year - it employs 18 000 people.
Publications reaching the IT industry are posting stories on how to relieve the financial pressure. However, Robert Half International, a US-based specialised staffing firm, conducted research that suggests that IT professionals with key skills could find themselves in great demand in 2009 and earn more as a result.
People in demand will be those who maximise cost efficiency and the use of technology. This approach makes sense in tough economic times when it is also expected that certain IT vendors will be able to tap the profits of a slew of expected new regulations.
Open source data integration; data quality; and extraction, transformation and loading applications will flourish in these conditions because they are less costly to obtain and are widely supported and constantly updated. While the number of projects will diminish, there will still be projects as companies undertake their transformation to meet the new demands of their financial and reporting systems.
We do expect companies will reduce their acquisition of IT hardware and software to support these projects. The hardware market is highly competitive and suffering the same strains as every other business, and will undoubtedly take a beating from CIOs with slashed budgets. But the software component of BI projects will continue to surge as companies realise they need BI in good times and bad.
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