Trade News | 10 Mar 2008 :
Microsoft: Neil Tanner
Few industry watchers will be surprised that software revenues continue to thrive. As organisations strive after ever greater competitive advantage, the software emphasis continues to shift toward more intelligent software products that can enable greater levels of business intelligence to be extracted that are in line with business objectives.
"Each year we have seen an improvement in the alignment of IT with business drivers, where investment decisions are taken over a longer time line, taken at a more strategic level, and have a more measurable impact on the overall business performance. Due to economic concerns, global IT research analysts such as IDC and Gartner are predicting a down turn. However we do not see a similar trend in Ireland in 2008." So said Oisin Byrne, MD of Irish market intelligence and research firm iReach, commenting on the findings of a recent survey of 250 business decision makers.
Similar views on the health of the Irish market have been voiced by many of the top software vendors, including Microsoft.
Last year for most players seems to have ended very strongly with "strong pipelines" going forward into 2008. Security and of course compliance are increasing. The main buzz word for 2008 seems to be "business intelligence", admittedly with a host of other titles. SAS is leading the charge but more significant are the number of BI (business intelligence) acquisitions that have taken place by firms that include Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM. Somewhat related to BI is the greatly increased emphasis on aligning IT spend with business objectives with Microsoft such as the IMI productivity Centre and Microsoft's envisioning Centre. Another important trend that emerged was the provision of software as a service, an area that will grow very strongly over the next few years
Microsoft
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