Over Fifty Per Cent of Companies Planning to Reduce Their IT Budget This Year
Czech IT company ANECT giving advice to other businesses how to save on IT in times of crisis

The Gartner Survey has found that about 55 per cent of companies are planning to reduce or freeze their investments in IT this year, or lower their costs in this area. The Czech company ANECT, however, warns against large-scale reductions in IT investments, and claims that in times of crisis such reductions can be harmful for your business. Investing wisely in some IT services will enable you to achieve considerably lower costs.

This year business has to cope with a situation that we have not witnessed for the last fifty years. None of today?s managers has ever dealt with similar problems before, at least not on such a massive scale, and everyone is trying to find a solution that would help their company to overcome the crisis of the world economy without fatal damages of their business activities,” said Michal Seidl, ANECT?s Technical Director.

If you use information technologies more effectively, it will – according to Seidl – prevent the adverse economic environment from affecting your business. Using suitable technologies and tools will lower your costs and improve your staff efficiency.

“According to the Business Technology Office of McKinsey & Company, we can, for example, increase staff productivity by using more appropriate communication technologies or we can improve customer satisfaction if we react to our customers? requirements more quickly, which we can do by using various types of networks and reliable connection,” said Michal Seidl.

Reacting to latest trends in economy, ANECT has developed new kinds of services that will help companies to achieve such goals within a short time. One of them is “The Optimization of IT Operating Expenses Service” which can be used to lower data links costs, to adjust regular payments for the support of delivered equipment or to optimize telephone fees without deteriorating the quality of services.

Other services provided by ANECT enable companies to reduce their travel expenses. These are primarily services related to audio, video and web conference systems deployment. But you can also save if you simplify your ICT infrastructure management or introduce virtualization and archive technologies.

Another specific area where companies can spend a lot less than they do is outsourcing of selected ICT areas. This is where ANECT?s expertise helps companies to assess the gains of each of the options they consider. “The slower the economic growth, the higher the demand for outsourcing services, since outsourcing services (as e.g. the IDC estimate shows) will be more resistant to various cuts in IT expenditure than services and products in other areas of ICT,” said Michal Seidl from ANECT a.s.

Since a large number of businesses intend to reduce their IT budget, ANECT also developed an analytical service for gains assessment, which will enable companies to compare expected gains and costs before they make any payments. “This will enable you to find out in advance how a particular project that you are thinking about would be reflected in the costs and gains that you expect. The implementation will then start only if these gains are positively assessed by a potential customer,” said Michal Seidl.