By Jo Best, 5 August 2009 17:21
NEWS
As the recession continues to hit the UK's high streets, retail IT directors are seeing their budgets shrinking dramatically.
IT budgets in the sector have fallen by around 20 per cent over the last year, according to research, and now equate to around 1.1 per cent of a retailer's sales, compared to 1.3 per cent last year.
Some 15 per cent of retailers are now making "large changes" in order to slash their budgets, the research found, with money spent on IT coming down by up to 50 per cent in some cases.
While the recession may be causing Britons to lose their fondness for shopping, retail CIOs are having to look closely at their technology purchases.
With internet sales seemingly faring better than their bricks and mortar equivalent, ecommerce and websites are being marked out as one of the most important areas for investment by retailers.
The research, carried out by consultancy Martec International for BT's retail arm Expedite, found that retailers aren't neglecting in-store tech, however.
Around one quarter of companies are intending to replace in-store systems and retail is seeing an increasing use of mobile technology both in-store - where it can be used for stock management or delivery scanning, for example - as well as in the supply chain.
Comments
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1. anonymous
As more and more retailers rely on centralized ERP systems with local portals for stock management, ordering and processing, this is a good time for them to be looking to open source for tools that can help them reduce their risks of IT and communications interruptions. Open source leaders like RiverMuse and Nagios are allowing CIOs to reduce their dependence upon IBM Tivoli Netcool and HP OpenView - which are really little more than professional services cash cows delivering little value to their customers.
These new open source players have designed from the ground up to enable a very low cost of administration, and the software is offered for free, and the customers can add components as they need them, without waiting for their lagardly vendors to support them...
RiverMuse was founded by the team that launched Micromuse and RiverSoft (bought by IBM) and funded by the original Silicon Valley investors behind Micromuse (Sierra Ventures) and Trinity Ventures.
When IT Service Management and ITIL represents a significant slab of our IT budget, slashing costs with robust, reliable alternatives that put the decision making in our hands (versus the vendor stranglehold) makes sense to me.