KATHMANDU, NEPAL: Praveen Sengar, sr. manager, Software & Services and Industry Verticals Research, IDC (India) Ltd, said: "Let us accept the reality that slowdown is here. However, it is a world of services today. There are converging concepts for extracting value." Sengar was addressing a gathering at C-Change 2009.

Market Forecasts:
The way IT is being looked at has since moved toward services. Today there are shared services, Web services, SOA, service oriented management, SaaS, BPO, etc. Growth will come when you start leveraging your existing infrastructure and bring in incremental value.

We have now moved on to product-as-a-service. The IT infrastructure usage has also changed. We will get to see cloud architecture, BI/data warehousing tools, SaaS, on demand business, virtualisation and BCDR, IP/VoIP/UC, and outsourcing. We will move on to an environment that is more and more dynamic.

In India, slowdown has seen only a medium impact. Levels of impact across some verticals are given below:
Low: Pharma, healthcare;
Medium: Education, power;
High: Private banks, real estate, automobiles, hospitality, travel and tourism, IT/ITeS.

Almost 38 percent firms indicated in a survey that there will be no change in their budgets. However, 10-20 percent said there will be budget cuts.

Who wants what?
CIOs: Technology optimisation, optimal utilisation, operational efficiencies, and incremental value creations
CFOs: Predictable costs; free capital; investment redirection; and reduce cost.
CEOs: Cost rationalisation; competitive advantage; core business focus, and customer service.

CEO key expectations from IT
* Increase more visibility of business.
* Faster project turnaround.

IT adoption priorities
* Adopting open source technologies.
* Reducing number of on-site staff.
* Outsourcing to third party.
* Invest in technologies like unified communications, IM, etc.
* Adopting SaaS solutions

Future investments in IT infrastructure: Virtualisation, SaaS, SOA, BI, content management, information management, etc.

Recommendations
* Align, leverage, innovate
* Manage cost Don't cut it!
* Greater need for business and IT alignment.
* Don't shy off from outsourcing and new technologies.
* See the brighter side: slowdown as an opportunity to weed out inefficiency.
* Change.