Businesses are still hesitant to invest and any recovery could easily be disrupted by rises in interest rates or currencies. Added to that is the growing prowess of the BRICs. Brazil, Russia, India and China (specifically the latter two) are no-longer the sweat shops of the world – they are investing significant GDP in advanced technologies – specifically sectors such as pharmaceuticals, computing and defence. One only has to look at companies such as Huawei to see how China is becoming a first rate competitor. With that in mind, organisations need to look closely at what they can do to mitigate the effects that these economic challenges will have on them. In this article Tony Crowhurst, senior writer for FSN considers how cooperation and collaborative technologies can help us become more nimble.
Technology has always been seen as one of the ways of ensuring that we can grow without adding significantly to our cost base. In FSN we’ve covered the development of SAAS (software as a service) over the last few months and the growth in this space is ever upwards.
The fact that off-premise services initially driven by open source vendors are growing in popularity has not been lost on the bigger boys. It is becoming a significant spending priority amongst CIO’s and as Gartner’s Joanne Correia suggests: "...vendors offering software as a service (SaaS), IT asset management, virtualization capabilities and {those} that have a good open-source strategy will continue to benefit. We also see mobile-device support or applications, as well as cloud services driving new opportunities."
Put simply, we’re more likely to rent than buy and when we do we’ll look at providers that can offer end to end solutions that can flex as our business does.
This blurring of the boundaries between different technologies is significant. From telephony to accounting packages and stock systems we do not need to invest vast sums to gain the technological advantage that larger enterprises have enjoyed up to now. We can manage our entire customer experience from initial enquiry to fulfilment and beyond with one integrated system.
This coming together is no more surprising than how communication has merged into office functions in such a short period of time.
Driven by increasing broadband speeds and the requirement to be available all the time means that communications services such as those delivered by Cisco, Microsoft and similar offerings from IBM and Avaya will make a huge impact.
According to Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall, “In the next three years, we predict that Unified Communications (UC) will become the norm in business communications, more than half of VoIP calls at work will include more than just voice, and your communications client will enable unified communications with more than 1 billion people”.
Speaking to Vodaphone you can sense the opportunity that this technology provides.
Mark Deakin from the Vodaphone OCS team agrees that this technology is game changing: “Effective communication with customers is key in order to keep customers from moving to the competition. I believe that communication tools like Office Communications Server enable organisations to make decisions quicker and communicate over distances and times zones with little or no cost, ultimately delivering a better service to customers and keeping them from the competition, nothing is more important in a recession. While your competitor is leaving voicemails and emails with their subject matter experts, you can get the answer in seconds and win the business before your competitor even had a chance to reply.”
So there is no disputing the impact of technology on our dealings with prospects and customers but what is also apparent is how our relationship with our customers is becoming more entwined with technology. This brings us onto the second (and much related) factor.
R&D budgets are stretched and the opportunity to gobble up competitors is becoming more difficult – not only because there are fewer about but also because access to funding has become curtailed.
We need to share resources and even if that means working with our competitors. In modern parlance the term is “coorpetition” and you can see that in a number of areas. We should also revisit our operations to see whether they should be located locally looking at back office functions rather than customer facing operations. Countries such as India have “grown up” in terms of what they provide and they now realise that they have a valuable service to offer and Eastern Europe has a pool of highly skilled people in most engineering and technology disciplines.
Taking cooperation a step further...
Microsoft’s tie-up with SAP to sell BPC on top of SQL Server is a classic example of two technology giants coming together to collaborate in a way that benefits them both. Microsoft’s brief foray into planning and consolidation applications ended in disarray last year with the shelving of PerformancePoint as a distinct CPM offering. For their part, SAP needed to ensure that customers did not jump ship when SAP bought Business Objects hence an alliance was formed:
"We see a mutually beneficial opportunity for both Microsoft and SAP to offer customers a best-in-class solution," said Sanjay J. Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, Performance Optimization Applications, SAP. The announcement on the SAP web site also quotes Tom Casey from Microsoft saying “SAP provides a leading unified planning and consolidation solution that delivers value for customers on the Microsoft platform”.
So the opportunity is there to utilise technology in such a way that it gives us an advantage over our competitors – but where we face challenges from economies that have significantly lower cost bases we need to consider options that in the past may have been unpalatable.
