Solaiemes visited Gartner IT Expo

From 3rd to 7th of November Solaiemes attended the Gartner ITxpo symposium at Cannes, where CIOs and IT people from very diverse industries put in common their experiences and thoughts.

The symposium is a week full of conferences and workshops around key points that helps to better understand the IT industry. Trends for next year are analyzed and more important, how the crisis will affect them.

It is quite a new experience for us, more used to telco events, where participants are from the IT industry and IT is the core business. In any case it is a fresh new view that comes from real IT customers with real necessities.

Most relevant findings this week, directly from analyst and industry leaders:

• The industry must avoid the panic. It’s too late for that anyway.
• The IT budgets in 2009 will be more or less (small % up or down) as 2008.
  
• Great people – the REAL leaders – will recognize that this is no time to turn-off the creative tap, this will offer new opportunities and revenue streams or increase productivity.
• It is time to identify the items of the portfolio not really profitable and discontinue them.
• Stop less important projects and reasign excedent budget to the top priority ones.
• Ian livingston, BT CEO, said cio's must be enablers and leaders of change in business

For us it is important messages as the creativity should not be stopped during crisis times, the point is focusing in less projects, not freezing whole budgets :-) and CIO's should be empowered in their roles.

Javier