By Tim Ferguson, 17 December 2008 15:24
NEWS
Businesses are putting off technology upgrades as they look to save money during the economic downturn.
As IT budgets are being scaled back, infrastructure upgrades and software refresh projects are being delayed according to research by the National Computing Centre (NCC).
Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of businesses surveyed by the NCC's Evaluation Centre said they will be postponing hardware upgrades, with the same proportion saying the same for software.
Meanwhile, almost a third (30 per cent) of respondents said they're looking to delay IT infrastructure upgrades.
Steve Fox, MD of the NCC Evaluation Centre, said the results of the survey confirm a trend of IT budgets coming under severe pressure, causing projects seen as non-essential or only affecting back office operations to be viewed as less of a priority.
Fox added that businesses are looking more at software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing as a result.
The research found SaaS is becoming popular with 30 per cent of companies saying they see it as important or very important.
Infrastructure services provided online - or cloud computing - are also stirring interest with 22 per cent of companies seeing it as important or very important for their future plans.
The survey took in responses from more than 100 companies across various sectors with turnover of between £5m and £5bn.
Comments
There is 1 comment. Join the discussion
1. Jeremy Payne
So, businesses are delaying technology upgrades in response to the credit crunch.
No great revelation perhaps at the findings of the latest NCC survey. Yet it does beg a more fundamental question: is necessity proving to be the mother of invention here as companies look to struggle on with legacy applications, or is it simply something they should all have been doing anyway?
Business Process Management offers a case in point. An intuitive rules-based BPM engine linked to a common servicing backbone is designed to sit over the existing infrastructure and extend the use and life of existing applications. And as an investment, it will not break the bank in delivering real lasting change.
Equally importantly, it provides a new level of business agility, in two ways. First, it will enable the organisation to start small and quickly roll out to other parts of the business, using common processes and lessons learned. Second, it is no longer the exclusive preserve of the IT department: by involving the business from the start in delivering change, decision-makers can respond fast to whatever their customers and the financial markets can throw at them.
And with the market responding positively to the benefits of Software-as-a-Service, all of this can be achieved with a risk-free BPM Platform-as-a-Service model which offers a unique level of integration, security, visibility and reliability.
So maybe it’s RIP to rip and replace. If so, perhaps the lessons learned may be one small plus to emerge from the current commercial turmoil.