10.17.08
Should IT have the Recession Blues?
Anybody looking for the tea leaves in how the IT industry is facing an uncertain economy that has now finally been given the R word will be disappointed by scanning the latest quarterlies from IT giants. While Oracle and IBM reported 20% gains, SAP was down.
A simplistic answer is that the winners – if one can actually use that term in a period officially termed a recession – may be services that help customers improve their elasticity in changing cycles, as opposed to software providers, where the bounds of a project are more firmly determined by the scope of the software. You just partially implement an SAP upgrade. But according to Forrester analyst Jim Kobielus, tough times favor application of business intelligence, and of course, few customers are likely to pull their maintenance contracts.
Of course, all this blurs the contribution of open source, the emergence of SaaS and, as independent consultant David Linthicum points to, the cloud, and surprisingly, after all the negative hype, the SOAS market.
This was all part of a broader discussion convened last week by Dana Gardner on the impacts of the recession on IT. Click here for a transcript, and here to download the MP3.