NATIONAL SURVEY
followed by retail/wholesale “Competition remains strong as IT departments seek to maximise the
companies, who have loosened value of their budgets,” says Andrew O’Kelly (page 21), managing director LAN
the purse strings after several Communications. “However, customer criteria for what constitutes value when
prudent years. Government it comes to business critical projects are mature. So the competition is now
spending is expected to be flat around which potential integration partner is best in terms of knowledge and
this year. experience, the ability to deliver at every stage of the lifecycle and proven
Report author and IDC relationships with key vendors and other solution experts.”
consultant John Gilsenan says, He referred to significant investment programmes in the area of
“This is the second year in a convergence and unified communications, with related contact centre
row where we have seen the integration with corporate directories and applications. “Demand for managed
outlook for IT expenditure by services remains strong and we are seeing solid year on year growth in our
Irish organisations to be more focus areas of converged IP solutions and security.” These developments
positive than the previous one. enabled the company to achieve turnover of €50m last year.
The finance sector is leading the Willie O’Connell (above left), director solutions division Kedington group,
way, with over two-thirds of organisations expecting their spend to be up this says larger organisations are increasingly looking for a single supplier to meet all
year. They seem to get the message that IT expenditure can help bring them their networking requirements and expects this trend to flow down into the
competitive advantage better than most.” SMB space during 2008/9.
As The Economist’s latest global survey points out the euro zone, of which “The systems integration market has without doubt become more
Ireland is a part, will not be immune from the US financial crisis, although the competitive. The first signs of economic tightening started to appear mid-way
through last year and we anticipate this will continue into the coming months.
“Competition remains strong as IT departments However, we still experienced robust growth of about 10% in 2007 with
seek to maximise the value of their budgets.” resulting revenue of over €17m.”
Anne Fitzsimons (below), country manager for integration technology
Andrew O’Kelly, LAN Communications
services at IBM Ireland, sees more LAN/WAN networking and IP-based
impact will not be uniform throughout the area. For instance, Spain and Ireland technology projects.
will both see sharp corrections in their property markets. “Custom
The Irish property market, which over the past decade has seen the software
strongest house price gains (by 240% since 1997) of any industrialised country, development is
has already started a downturn that is likely to lead to protracted declines becoming less
in residential construction. A sharper than forecast appreciation of the euro important, due to
against the US dollar, combined with a more abrupt deterioration of the US greater sharing of
economy (a distinct possibility in the current environment), would substantially projects between
reduce growth in the euro area. in-house IT and
In this context is not surprising that those in the industry are wary of service providers.
talking themselves into a recession. The consensus in the Irish systems Clients are using
integrator market is that while customers are more conscious of value for more open source
money when making IT investments, they are prepared to spend where the software in projects,
return justifies it. accepting enterprise
29 FEB 2008 19
It0804 - 18-21_ent_ireland.indd 19 27/02/2008 10:26:01
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32