Looking back at 2002, the global slowdown in the economy has impacted IT more than any other industry. The meltdown was in no small measure driven by the loss of confidence in IT, caused by the dotcom crash and exacerbated by the events of September 11 in 2001. The hype surrounding the dotcom era inflated IT stocks to levels far exceeding common sense, and now, following the dotcom letdown, the industry has gone into freefall, again, to an extent that doesn`t make sense.
Because of this lack of confidence in IT, IT-spend now has to be thoroughly assessed by an accompanying business case and its associated return on investment. Generally the mood around IT-spend has become far more conservative and spending money for the sake of investment in technology simply doesn`t happen anymore.
The workflow and business process management (BPM) industry hasn`t been nearly as badly affected as their technology peers, since they are generally considered business tools rather than IT products, increasing business productivity and efficiency whilst reducing costs - the basics business cares about, no matter what the state of the economy.
They haven`t escaped the carnage though. Even with the obvious business benefits, companies are now performing thorough investigations, taking more time to build sturdy business cases that can stand up to in-depth analysis. This has resulted in the workflow and BPM market displaying a moderate decline in revenues while other IT markets have slipped far more dramatically. In these dark times, any IT company showing revenues similar to previous years and a profit, however small, is considered to be a shining light in the industry.
These changes in the market have affected BPM and workflow vendors in the sense that sales cycles are now far more strategic, with Board acceptance of the business case becoming paramount before any order can be placed. Simultaneously, companies are changing their focus from workflow to BPM, which is more of an enterprise solution incorporating an infrastructural change to their corporate architectures, where workflow was generally considered to be more of a departmental solution. This has resulted in a level of investigative activity over the last year that has increased exponentially.
Internationally, Staffware has been acknowledged by industry analyst, Aberdeen International, as one of the top three products in the BPM space after successfully releasing its iProcess Engine.
John O`Connell, Chairman & CEO of Staffware Plc, has said: "The Aberdeen Group has not only highlighted the huge potential of this market for leading vendors, but also the dangers buyers face in a fractured and immature sector. With the majority of vendors too small or unfocused to really prosper, buyers must select partners carefully to ensure they get products that deliver results from vendors that will be around in a year to support them. Aberdeen Group predicts a wave of consolidation in the market and it seems likely that the leaders will continue to prosper at the expense of the pack. Staffware is not only the one player completely focused on providing business process management tools, but also has an unmatched customer base of leading companies including Optus and ABN Amro seeing return on investment from its iProcess Engine, today."
Locally, 2002 has been good to Staffware South Africa, who has had successful deployments at Nedcor, PPS, Reserve Bank of Malawi (winning the GIGA "Excellence in Workflow" gold award for Middle East and Africa), First National Bank and the Department of Home Affairs, while also being selected by Telkom. This is the first BPM sale in South Africa that Staffware is aware of.
In the year ahead, organisations are extremely unlikely to go back to the carefree days of technology deployments, they are more likely to spend time and effort on understanding, automating, controlling, improving and monitoring their core business processes in order to gain competitive advantages in these trying economic times.
Staffware is perfectly positioned to be the key process element of the future, as it believes that its independent process layer within the corporate architecture delivers on its message of `Process is Power.`
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