07/10-03   -   Pressemeldinger

New IT and Telecom Investment Patterns Set the Nordic Agenda for 2004, IDC research reveals

The focus in the IT market today is quite often the historic low growth rates of IT investments. This focus totally overlooks the fact, that major changes are happening in the way IT investments are decided and managed - changes that are even more important to understanding the market than just the growth rates.

A new Nordic corporate user survey from IDC identifies four major trends in IT investments. Understanding these will be key for vendors in order to establish successful market strategies moving into 2004.

The four new market forces are:

Increasingly the budgets for IT and telecom projects are no longer just funded in the IT or infrastructure departments of user organisations. Increasingly, money for projects will come from both IT departments as well as the business units of the companies. This is the result of three distinct trends: IT is becoming more and more strategic and thus involves more parts of the company, IT budgets are sparse and funding has to be pooled and finally that decisions today require business function ownership and involvement. This poses even more requirements to vendors in terms of business understanding.

IT and telecom budgets are merging: Increasing vendors within both IT and telecom are fighting for the same budgets in user organisations. In 2003, only one in five companies had separate budgets for IT and telecom, and the share of companies making direct priorities between IT and Telecom funding increased to 30%. Effectively, this means increased competition directly between IT vendors and telecom vendors for the same dollars. At the same time there is a direct correlation between increasing spending in IT and increasing spending on telecom - if a company is spending more in one of the areas they will also spend more in the other area. This leads directly into cross-selling.

Budgets are not spent. We have been used to IT and telecom budgets being fully used - and even expanded over the course of a financial year. However, this is no longer the situation. More and more we find that technology budgets are either not fully used or are cut back during the financial year. The reasons for this includes the fact that technology budgets are increasingly seen as traditional cost lines rather than revenues generating investments.

Strategies guide investments. Asking users for key drivers of technology investments, the typical answers no longer are new areas. New technologies no longer are key drivers for investments. Instead the investments are taken either because they have to (capacity upgrades, for instance) or because it is part of a technology strategy already defined. For vendors this means that selling on technology functionality becomes very difficult and instead vendors must be able to sell business solutions fitting the strategy of the company.

"Technology users are changing colours these years. Instead of being driven by technology changes, investments in technologies are going to be based on an entirely new business framework and decision processes, which are key to understand to create success in the market", according to Per Andersen, managing director of IDC Nordic.

The survey, Nordic Enterprise Survey 2003: IT and Telecom Spending – The market is picking up! , is available to purchase from your local IDC office or on www.idc.com.

For more information contact:
Per Andersen
+45 39 16 22 22
pandersen@idc.com

For more information on this or other IDC research, please contact IDC Nordic Sales or your local IDC representative:

Tel:
Denmark: Susanne Arildsen +45 39 16 22 43
Norway: Åke Lunden +46 8 751 0415
Sweden: Pelle Hallberg +46 8 751 0415
Finland: Pipsa Ylä-Mononen +358 9 8770 4654
Nordic: Pelle Hallberg +46 8 751 0415

About IDC
IDC is the premier global market intelligence and advisory firm in the information technology and telecommunications industries. We analyze and predict technology trends so that our clients can make strategic, fact-based decisions on IT purchases and business strategy. Over 700 IDC analysts in 50 countries provide local expertise and insights on technology markets. Business executives and IT managers have relied for 40 years on our advice to make decisions that contribute to the success of their organizations.

IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world’s leading technology media, research, and events company. Additional information can be found at www.idc.com

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